Crop Circle Orgies Reviisited - Homeopathy

In an earlier post, we noted exceptions to the Internet's Rule 34.  IE, things exist that there is not porn of.  Well, it turns out that in at least one case - crop circle erotica - we were wrong.  There is this:  http://forums.plentyoffish.com/datingPosts3107226.aspx.  It's not good crop circle erotica - indeed, the crop circle motif doesn't enter until the last lines - but it exists.

If you want to find something, it helps to look for it.  I'm writing this post because I mentioned the earlier one in a Gawker.com comment, and someone sent me a link.  Why didn't I find it myself?  Unclear - perhaps it's new.  Or perhaps because I equated "porn" with pictures, not text; preconceptions are a kind of blindness.

Corollary:  it's difficult to find something you're not looking for.  Especially if you're not looking for it because you don't know it exists.  Carbon nanotubes, the wonder material of tomorrow, were first created in a lab in the 1950s, but owing to cold war secrecy, they weren't widely investigated in the West until the '90s.  Their story is fascinating, but we want to discuss them in the context of a much earlier "wonder material" - Damascus steel.

The technique for making Damascus steel was thought to be lost for centuries, until it's rediscovery .  But that's not the only unusual thing about it; part of it's legendary efficacy as sword/knife material comes from a very high tech feature: Damascus steel contains carbon nanotubes.

What does this have to do with Homeopathy?  Homeopathic medicines involve diluting the "active" ingredient to the point where no molecules of the original substance are present in the Homeopathic one; it is believed, however, that the Homeopathic fluid contains a "memory" of the active ingredient.

To science (circa 2014), this is quackery. We do not disagree - at least not yet. Perhaps Homeopaths should go to engineering school.  There, they could study memristors.

Since electronics was developed, engineers have made circuits using combinations of three basic elements - resistors, capacitors and inductors.  But in 1971, a young circuit designer called Leon Chua at the University of California, Berkeley, realised something was missing. He was toying with the non-linear mathematics that describes how the four variables in a circuit - voltage, current, charge and flux - behave in the three basic elements. The three building blocks each relate two of the four electronic properties of circuits, creating a chain linking charge to flux via voltage and current. But his calculations showed there should be a fourth device to directly link flux and charge.
Chua showed that his predicted device could remember the last voltage applied to it, and how long it had been applied. He dubbed the property "memristance" but the memristor was quietly forgotten because it was unclear how it could ever be built.

Only, they have since been observed - in the titanium dioxide molecules used in sunscreen:

Williams' team has now done just that, using nanoscale circuits including molecules of the active ingredient of sunscreen - titanium dioxide.
Such circuits are used to try and use small clumps of molecules to store the binary 0s and 1s of charge to work as computer memory.
However, these efforts have been dogged by bizarre electronic effects, says Williams, who has now worked out the reason. His titanium dioxide works as a memoristor - the mythical device has been found.

Does this mean it's time to do that Internet Tutorial on Homeopathy?  Probably not.  But we now have proof that "memory" effects are possible in nature, and that's a start.  And no, Googling (and Image searching) "nude homeopaths" does not return homeopath-related porn.

Human Nature - Maybe Not So Universal?

We all agree: cultures may differ, but people are the same everywhere.  Only that may not be true.  Scientists believe there are five universal human traits - or they did, until the discovered a culture that only has two.

In recent years, psychologists have zeroed in on five big personality traits that appear to be universal.No matter what culture people come from, a number of studies have suggested, everyone incorporates some degree of openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism.But after considering the indigenous and mostly illiterate Tsimane forager–horticulturalists of Bolivia, researchers are challenging the idea of the "Big Five." Instead, they argue that the Tsimane have just two main personality traits: socially beneficial behavior and industriousness.The findings call into question the universality of human personality traits. Instead, the specific demands of various societies may affect which quirks of character become most significant to different groups of people.

Another way humans might differ is in varying degrees of bicamerality, as proposed by Julian Jaynes in "The Evolution of Consciousness In The Breakdown Of The Bicameral Mind:"

The bicameral mentality would be non-conscious in its inability to reason and articulate about mental contents through meta-reflection, reacting without explicitly realizing and without the meta-reflective ability to give an account of why one did so. The bicameral mind would thus be a "zombie mind" lacking metaconsciousness, autobiographical memory and the capacity for executive "ego functions" such as deliberate mind-wandering and conscious introspection of mental content. When bicamerality as a method of social control was no longer adaptive in complex civilizations, this mental model was replaced by the conscious mode of thought which, Jaynes argued, is grounded in the acquisition of metaphorical language learned by exposure to narrative practice.

We're mentioning this because we want to invent a new word, and we want this invention documented and time-stamped.  We predict that science will discover large variations in how "humans" experience - or don't experience - consciousness.  They will then observe the Contemporary Western Model spreading via internet, mass-media, etc, and bemoan the loss of those other forms.  We really need a word for this - a word for different (or absent?) models of human  consciousness.  Both "psychodiversity" and "noodiversity" already exist, but it's not clear their accepted meanings quite match what we propose.

So...this is left as an exercise for the student.

Are We Living In "The Matrix?" It Might Be Testable

First, apologies.  I've been neglecting "Bug Reports" in favor of writing that actually pays money: contributing to www.cracked.com.  (If you've come here from there, hello and welcome, BTW).  I'm also working on a screenplay for an indy-style movie; the working title is "Jesus Versus The Mushrooms."  It's envisioned as a stoner-style comedy in the Harold and Kumar tradition, albeit with heavily Gnostic and Fortean overtones.

But now, back to Bug Reports.  One of our staples here is experiments which might prove that we're actually living in "The Matrix."  We dealt with it in our very first post.    And followed up here.

Of course, proving the universe isn't a hologram (or else a really fine-grained one) doesn't mean we're not living in a computer simulation.  This article in Technology Review explains how we might test for such a scenario.  Describing how a supercomputer would simulate a small part of the universe, they write:

Today, we get an answer of sorts from Silas Beane, at the University of Bonn in Germany, and a few pals....
They examine, in particular, high energy processes, which probe smaller regions of space as they get more energetic What they find is interesting. They say that the lattice spacing imposes a fundamental limit on the energy that particles can have. That’s because nothing can exist that is smaller than the lattice itself. So if our cosmos is merely a simulation, there ought to be a cut off in the spectrum of high energy particles...
Beane and co calculate that the lattice spacing imposes some additional features on the spectrum. “The most striking feature…is that the angular distribution of the highest energy components would exhibit cubic symmetry in the rest frame of the lattice, deviating significantly from isotropy,” they say.In other words, the cosmic rays would travel preferentially along the axes of the lattice, so we wouldn’t see them equally in all directions. That’s a measurement we could do now with current technology....
But the calculations by Beane and co are not without some important caveats. One problem is that the computer lattice may be constructed in an entirely different way to the one envisaged by these guys.  Another is that this effect is only measurable if the lattice cut off is the same as the GZK cut off. This occurs when the lattice spacing is about 10^-12 femtometers. If the spacing is significantly smaller than that, we’ll see nothing.

In other words, if we don't find what they predict, we're not out of the woods - we could still be a computer program, just a different kind.  (And that's assuming we're not something really different, such as an analog computer)

But if they DO find it?  Would it strongly suggest the universe is the result of intelligent design?  Not the Judeo-Christian God, necessarily, but a Demiurge of some sort?  One would think so.  Of course one can think of objections: if the universe is infinite, for example, than such "computer" simulations would arise by chance.

Still, the last couple of centuries have not been kind  to religious faith.  First, Galileo's telescope showed the universe wasn't a perfect Aristotelian mechanism. Then we had Darwin,  geographers discovering the world was more than 6000 years old, and Higher Criticism telling us Scriptures weren't written by the people (Moses, etc) who we'd always thought had written them.  It's hardly been worth getting out of bed on Sunday morning.

Scientific proof that we were created by an intelligence greater than ourselves would turn society upside down.  Part of me wants to see it for the sheer David and Goliath aspect.  But the cautious part of me knows that in David and Goliath contests, it's always smart to bet on Goliath.

Sex Magic, Your Data, And You

Marshal McLuhan said "the medium is the message."  One hears this as "the medium is the message."  http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/HomePage  is a detailed list of the "tropes" that put the TV in TVness. It's a Golden Bough for post-moderns, a collection of mass-media Jungian Archetypes.

What if McLuhan meant "the medium is the message?" 

Did we mention that much of what's in human DNA is thought to be junk?  What if the purpose of some - or all - life forms is to carry secret messages? The idea of using DNA for steganography has actually been around for awhile. 

DNA can also be used as a computer.   And ... the "data" for the DNA computer is, apparently ...  more DNA! 

Is this why all mainstream religions take a dim view of sex magic?  Because of the potential data corruption issues?

Omniscient? No Need For Checkers, then

The game of checkers has been "solved,"  according to this abstract at the Science magazine website:

The game of checkers has roughly 500 billion billion possible positions (5 × 10²⁰). The task of solving the game, determining the final result in a game with no mistakes made by either player, is daunting. Since 1989, almost continuously, dozens of computers have been working on solving checkers, applying state-of-the-art artificial intelligence techniques to the proving process. This paper announces that checkers is now solved: Perfect play by both sides leads to a draw. This is the most challenging popular game to be solved to date, roughly one million times as complex as Connect Four. Artificial intelligence technology has been used to generate strong heuristic-based game-playing programs, such as Deep Blue for chess. Solving a game takes this to the next level by replacing the heuristics with perfection.

If you're a supercomputer, there's no reason to play checkers anymore; the game will always end in a draw.  The abstract's part about "no mistakes made by either player" suggests a Captain Kirk-like "illogical" move could still work, but reading the whole paper dashes that hope.  If you're a supercomputer, stick to Go, or Solitaire.

Similarly, an omniscient God has no need to create us; our lives are a question he already knows the answer to.  So why are we here?

Human Nature: It's (almost) Fixable

A recent article in Popular Science, if it comes true, will make all religions and  secular metaphysics obsolete.  It's about scientists   working on artificial nerves, the better to make prosthetic limbs with:

Previously, scientists surgically connected electrodes to the nervous system, but they seemed to harm the body’s tissues, making the implant fail within months. In 2005, scientists discovered that they could stimulate a neuron to send a message by shining infrared light on it. Last September, DARPA, the Pentagon’s R&D branch, awarded $4 million to a project led by Southern Methodist University engineers to attempt to connect nerves to artificial limbs using fiber optics.

The team suspects that flexible glass or polymer fiber optics will be more flesh-friendly than rigid electrodes. In addition, optical fibers transmit several signals at once, carrying 10 times as much data as their electrical counterparts. “Our goal is to do for neural interfaces what fiber optics did for the telecom industry,” says electrical engineer Marc Christensen, who is leading the SMU group. Transmitting more information faster should give bionic limbs more lifelike movements.

This month, the team will implant optical fibers to stimulate a rat’s rear leg. If it works, Christensen says, in about a decade, robotic arms could be as graceful as Steve Austin’s six-million-dollar one.

Popular Science loves these gee-whiz announcements.  The claim that this technology will be available "in about a decade" may be made, straight-faced, twenty years from now.  Someday, though, they will get it right.  It will be great for paralytics and amputees.  But the real payoff will be finally "curing" human  nature.

Our predicament is simple: we experience reality as an isolated island of self-referential consciousness trapped in a meat bag.  We are selfish because we're wired that way. But this technology, coupled with ubiquitous networking, can make each of us feel what everybody feels.  If one of us suffers, we will all suffer.  If one of us laughs, we all laugh.  We will be pan-humans.  None of us will be happy unless all of us are happy.

Utopian?  Yes.  Feasible?  Eventually.  And there will be unintended consequences, no doubt about it.

How To Train Your Physics

Imagine a "Sims" game produced in the far, far future.  The "people" in the game are produced by sophisticated AI; they're almost human.  You want them to do science; figure out how their world works.

Also, you want the game to last a long time.

One problem is obvious: make the "world" they live in too simple they'll figure it out quickly.  But the other extreme may discourage them so much they give up.  (A third problem is that they may invent something totally unforeseen; if the Sim doesn't have robust error-handling, it'll crash.)

What to do?

Suppose I give the Sim's physics engine AI of its own; an AI slightly more powerful than the Sims'.  As the Sim's subject the Physics Engine to more sophisticated inquiries, it evolves more sophisticated responses.  When the Sims discover the "black body" problem, the Physics Engine invents quantum mechanics.

The physics engine can't contradict itself; if gravity makes things fall down,  it can't start making things fall up.  Apparent contradictions are allowed.  And the Physics Engine, being intelligent, will game the rules, even cheat, if it can.

Intelligence makes mistakes.  Find something wrong, and you've found intelligence.