"Integrative Science”: The Death-Knell of Scientific Materialism?

various ^ | various | vanity with much help

[Doctor Stochastic]

Planck's original idea was that black-body radiation was emitted in discrete chunks. The scale parameter for these chunks in Planck's constant. (You may wish to check the Net for a description.) The classical limit is that black-body radiation is emitted continuously. The classical computation does not agree with experiment.

Other things use Planck's constant. Angular of an electron in an atom is in units of h/(2 pi) as is the intrinsic spin of the electron.

While Planck's constant is really a fundamental constant of the universe, we can ask the question of what would be the physics if it were changed. If Planck's constant were to be much smaller (zero in the limit) then classical mechanics is recovered.

[Doctor Stochastic]

It was easy to detect chaotic beahvior in classical systems; it was very hard to find it in quantum systems.

Some treatise that I read last year (I don't remember which one) claimed a proof that QM cannot be chaotic. QM is a linear system and chaos only arises from non-linear systems. The randomness in QM is of a different nature than the (pseudo) randomness of chaos.

[gore3000]

We create laws as concepts to form concepts of matter, but atoms may or may not know of laws and they certainly don't act according to laws.

That is just plain false. Matter does behave according to scientific laws. There are tons of them out there explaining the behavior of material things and the reason why we can be typoing to each other accross who knows how many miles is because those laws have enabled us to make the things which allow this communication. These laws are tested on a daily basis and they have been found to be true in numerous wasy. To say what you are saying is to say that science and all that has been built upon its fruits is just a hallucination.

I don't think you will convince many with such a viewpoint.

[js1138]

Name one scientific law that is complete and correct over the entire possible range of values possible in its domain.

[unspun]

The rocks don't have much to say, but they make up for it in enthusiasm.

Don't tell that to a geologist! They ascertain they speak very highly of them. (I'll leave it up to you to decide which "they" and "them" are which.)

[Hank Kerchief]

Yep, it's "all my fault," Hank.

This is the only thing in my post you found worthy of responding to. Interesting.

Unfortunately, I think I basically get the gist of "what you mean." It looks like nihilism to me.

So my argument that existence is primary, because there must be some being that is conscious and something for that being to be conscious of before consciousness is possible is "nihilistic" in your view.

Well, I quote you, "I think I basically get the gist of 'what you mean.'" I will not bother to tell you what it, "looks like," to me. You know what you are and what your true intentions are, and now you know I know.

I admit that some of your responses, your evasions, your apparent shrillness baffled me. I could not imagine why some of my most innocuous responses elicited such strong reactions. It is apparent now.

But you needn't worry or be upset by my posts. Others are not going to be influenced by me. You have the winning hand. Most people would much prefer your position to mine. It is much easier to have your truth "revealed" and not be responsible for what you believe.

Hank

[gore3000]

Name one scientific law that is complete and correct over the entire possible range of values possible in its domain.

Who cares about such a rhetorical question. Point is that scientific laws work, work reliably and many are the basis of further laws which have been found to work reliably. They are very good and for you or others to dismiss them is to dismiss all of science and indeed all of modern society. You must destroy all that civilization has accomplished in order to deny the laws science has discovered.

It is a strange philosophy you adhere to which to be 'real' must destroy most of the reality around you.

[unspun]

I get paid a lot of money for my writing, because I make difficult concepts easy to understand.

Al Gore
Hillary Clinton
O-k... you won't say who you are, but what kind of person(s) pay you?

Somehow, it doesn't seem that the answer to this is the consumer. A false economy, then?

[Right Wing Professor]

I think you give me too much credit. I'm not gracious; I use this forum to a large extent as a mechanism to think out loud and get some useful feedback. Maybe we all do that.

Tnanks to some insomnia, I did write some more about consciousness. I have no idea if its of any use.

This is going to sound a bit like Buber or Tillich. While it's not consciously based on either's thought, I did read some of Buber's writings in my younger days, without a great deal of comprehension, true, but it's possible the ideas have been percolating around. And I read gobs of Tillich plagiarized in MLK' s thesis. MLK was pretty faithful to his original sources :-/

OK, what do we mean by consciousness? I would argue it's the feeling of personhood, of the 'I', that we have, which transcends thought or perception or volition. If you've ever been extremely drunk, or delirious due to disease, or under the influence of other psychotropic agents, you've undoubtedly experienced conscious states where thought or perception or volition were severely compromized. Nothelessless, there's always a feeling of 'I' ness in there, something in the center that knows you're drunk or deranged and is basically unaffected. And when you dream, although even ordinary logic is twisted, there's an 'I' there. That's what I would call consciousness.

We don't have any direct experience of anyone else's consciousness, but we mostly make the suppostion that someone else who looks and acts like us also has this kernel of consciousness. I say mostly because i understand sociopaths don't do this. I would argue that when we're very close to someone, we can in effect use part of our own consciousness to form a mental model of theirs; if our model is a good one; if it's based on observation of the other rather than our own ego, then to some extent it's detached from us, and it gives us a feeling of empathy, or agape, or whatever - a selfless and direct perception of the other within ourselves.

While none of this is scientific, I'd argue it's the best we can do to overcome the problem of solipsism; that we each on our own have a very limited sampling of 'consciousness' - our own - and without empathy have nothing to compare it with, so the usual means we use to figure out what something is are almost useless.

OK, where I'm going is this? If we're going to study consciousness; clearly it has to start with the brain, because that seems to be where it resides. And, to be crude, some of the best experimental data we have on brain function comes from brain damage. A lot of this is very basic - Luria, the great Soviet neurosurgeon, had a massive database of brain-injured Russian soldiers, and was able to correlate various forms of dysfunction with particular injuries. Trouble is, I don't think he had the inclination or the freedom to go asking metaphysical questions, though he may have reported phenomena which might be useful to you in some of his voluminous writings.

I don't know if you've ever had to deal with someone very close to you who developed dementia. I've unfortunately had to do this twice. One of the more horrible things about it is when the dementia has progressed significantly, and the loved one's motor control, cognition, memory and awareness of the world around them seems to be mostly gone, occasionally there are flashes where they seem to realize who they are, but can't figure out what's happening to them, and are scared. I think one has got to be close to the person to see this, but I'd argue it's real, and not merely an illusion. When someone is far gone, there's a natural tendency to look for hopeful signs the person we love is still 'in there', and that's likely to be misleading; but no one goes looking for horror in a loved one's eyes. No one has to my knowledge been able to write what it's like to be in severe Alzheimers, and so we can't easily tell if there's consciousness at that level of brain injury, but I'm sure from my own experience (or empathy, though with the caveat my wife tells me I'm the least empathetic person she's ever met) that the person retains personhood or consciousness into fairly severe brain damage.

So where does this lead? If consciousness can survive some fairly major brain damage, it's no delicate interplay of thousands of neural signals. I don't know, and haven't researched, whether there are regions of the brain whose loss seems to diminish a persons' humanity or consciousness, but I wouldn't be at all surprised if there were clues buried in dry clinical language in the medical literature. On the other hand, maybe it's a function of the entirity and not of one of the parts. But I am sure, if you want to find it, the brain is where you have to go looking.

[Phaedrus]

...please 'splainittome why it is that people claim such a wild thing as the universal... phenomological... principle of "the problem of the observer"...

At the microscopic level, before an event or "observation" or measurement takes place, only a probabilistic description can be given as the momentum and position of the particles involved. This description is mathematically quite rigorous and deterministic and is the basis for "electronic revolution"; i.e. it has been very very economically productive so there is no doubt as to the quality of the math. Microscopic affects all of the macroscopic, i.e. microscopic becomes macroscopic, and the "hitch" is that probabilities routinely become hard reality but nobody has a clue as to how or why this happens because there is nothing is the math or reason that requires resolution in any particilar way. Yet it happens an infinite number of times daily in our reality. The physicists have only succeeded so far in glossing over the problem. If there is any one significant unresolved 21st Century scientific issue, this is my candidate for "it".

[Diamond]

Do you have a reading comprehension problem?

It depends on what I'm reading. Perhaps you missed my point about historical anachronism.

You stated that there is not one verse of Scripture that says a person "ought to be a Christian". That statement is true, but it's a little like saying that there is not one verse of Scripture that says a person ought to drive a Mercedes.

Anyway, I hope you will pardon me if I praise God that I bear that name.

Cordially,

[<1/1,000,000th%]

Sorry. I'm just catching up. Did somebody run you through the Bohr atom/Copenhagen interpretation QM diva story? I'll catch up with the thread later tonight.

[unspun]

With bb being busy today, it gives many of us an opportunity to catch up with many words, figures, concepts, and even much reality. Thank you for your comments, please make more until I understand better, at least. ;-)

[js1138]

Who cares about such a rhetorical question. Point is that scientific laws work, work reliably and many are the basis of further laws which have been found to work reliably.

There is , I think, a difference between saying matter behaves according to scientific laws, and saying scientific laws describe the behavior of matter. The descriptions are never complete and sufficient, although they are obviously sufficient to support technology and industry.

[Phaedrus]

At least one significant aspect of my earlier post is that there is nothing, no thing, tangible that has been identified as responsible for the transition from probability to actuality and lots of effort over almost a century has been expended toward identifying some such. The Materialists therefore do not have the answer, try as they might to splain the problem away. And the door is thus wide open for consciousness, intent and/or Free Will to supplant the euphemistic "observer".

[Right Wing Professor]

At the microscopic level, before an event or "observation" or measurement takes place, only a probabilistic description can be given as the momentum and position of the particles involved. This description is mathematically quite rigorous and deterministic and is the basis for "electronic revolution"; i.e. it has been very very economically productive so there is no doubt as to the quality of the math. Microscopic affects all of the macroscopic, i.e. microscopic becomes macroscopic, and the "hitch" is that probabilities routinely become hard reality but nobody has a clue as to how or why this happens because there is nothing is the math or reason that requires resolution in any particilar way.

This is rather specious.

Let's take a specific example; the crossed Stern Gerlach apparatus you'll fined in Feynman's lectures, and many other places. (It's a thought experiment, and for various reasons I'm convinced that if you tried to do it you would have difficulty getting the same result, but my objections are unrelated to the basic point, so let's ignore them).

OK, a Stern-Gerlach experiment is designed to measure the component of angular momentum of a particle along one axis. The easiest case is a so called 'spin 1/2' particle; its angular momentum can have only two measured values along any axis, +1/2 and -1/2. So you take a thermalized beam of spin 1/ 2 particles, put them through the apparatus, and separate the particles according to their angular momentum along the z axis (L_z). Half the particles (approximately) are in the +1/2 beam, and half in the -1/2 beam. You then take the +1/2 particles, and put them through a SG apparatus along x. What you find for any single particle is that it has a 50% probability that it will have L_x = +1/2 and a 50% probability that it will have L_x = -1/2. QM says this is because L_x and L_z don't commute - that is, they obey an uncertainty relationship - and that therefore a measurement of L_z will make the value of L_x completely indefinite. Your point is presumably that something else could influence the result of the L_x measurement - a hidden variable that would be window for free will or whatever to get in. Trouble is, the L_x/L_z uncertainty principle maps 1:1 onto the x/p uncertainty principle, and the latter is not merely a theorem of measurement; it accounts for the very structure of matter. The second problem is no hidden variable has ever been found, and not for want of looking. Finally, entangement experiments, where one measures L_z of one particle and it scrambles the L_x of a second entangled one, place some very severe restrictions on your hidden variable. It shows it's not merely a matter that we haven't figured out to measure the L_x of the second particle; the first measurement puts the L_x of the second particle in a completely undefined state.

Most physicists as I understand it simply reject that such a variable exists. It's not glossing over the problem; it's realizing that the uncertainty principle is a central component of the physics, and not merely an inadequacy of measurement.

Gerry, writing from Copenhagen.

[Phaedrus]

This is rather specious.

No it is not, RWP, appeals to authority notwithstanding.

[tortoise]

Hypothesizing analog computing solves some sticky problems about the brain: the fact that it can do pattern matching very quickly despite having a slow clock rate, the fact that it is generally bad at formal logic, and the fact that it jumps to conclusions and sees patterns in ambiguous data, and the fact that it manages to "instantly" integrate zillions of simultaneous processes.

"Analog computing" doesn't really mean much in theory. Computation is computation, though different computers are optimized for different kinds of information transforms. "Analog" is actually an information encoding format, and can be converted into equivalent digital forms.

The general properties, relative capabilities, and structure of the brain map very closely to a theoretical model of computation that most people are not familiar with but which has been having much gray matter thrown at it lately. There is a difficult problem in computer science related to this computational model that, once solved, will allow us to build software systems that exhibit the same basic computational properties and capabilities of the human brain. The math has been solved (it is an interesting area of algorithmic information theory) but the implementation and architecture of a tractable design is something else entirely.

For those interested, it was proven a couple years ago that solving this problem is equivalent to solving the general problem of AI. I won't go into the how or why of it since that requires much grokking, but most mathematicians and computer scientists who don't take a mystical view of AI acknowledge that it is a very sound formulation of the fundamental problem -- it has survived a couple years of rigorous criticism.

[tortoise]

At least recently, QM has generally been shown to be implementable as a simple finite state process. The problems largely stem from our inability to inductively infer state at that level. A very good analogy would be attempting to reverse engineering the internal state of the RC4 psuedo-random number generator by sampling its output. Even though the best we can do is statistically analyze the output of the RC4 PRNG for patterns and not even come close to guessing the internal state, the actual internal state only amounts to a couple hundred bytes.

The problem is that this is a fundamental limitation of finite systems; there are many classes of function, even simple ones, that cannot be practically reverse engineered with effectively finite systems. QM falls under that umbrella even though we can prove that simple finite state functions can generate what we see as QM.

[unspun]

Another brief contribution of the librarian kind:
http://christianity.about.com/cs/godandscience/index.htm