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.

How To Fly in One (Impossible) Lesson

Post-Modernists tell us there are no facts, only competing narratives.  But no one lives that way; we all behave as though some things are unambiguously "true."  A critic asks "What happens if you jump off the George Washington bridge thinking you can fly?"

A real Post-Modernist  answers: "Gravity is a narrative.  It doesn't work if you don't believe in it."

But some conditions apply:

First, you must really believe gravity doesn't apply to you.  Any doubt at all and you'll plummet.  Belief is part of a feedback loop in which consciousness plays a part, but not the biggest part.  Try it.  Decide, as an act of will, to adapt a new belief; one that's wholly out of character for you. 

Not so easy, is it?  No wonder there are Calvinists (who believe it's predestination, not faith, that saves us).

Second, even when you succeed in changing your belief about gravity, no one else will know about it.  You can levitate around your neighborhood as easily as Peter Pan - but you will be invisible.  Your neighbors won't see you flying, because they don't believe you can.

The great "reform" movements of the 20th century were totalitarian because they had to be.  Unfortunately for them, brainwashing takes tremendous effort, and even then it rarely works - obedience can be coerced, but not Faith.

If post-modernists are right, the question of whether you can learn to fly like Peter Pan depends on the answer to the question "is something like self-brainwashing possible?"  And if it is, how does one do it?

Merry Christmas, Everyone!

The Universe: Probably Not A Hologram

Our very first blog post was about an experiment showing the universe is "pixellated" - what you'd expect if we are, in fact, living in a giant hologram.  But:

[A] European satellite that should be able to measure these small scales hasn't found any quantum fuzziness at all, contradicting the interpretation of the GEO600 results and indicating that the pixellation of spacetime, if it exists, is considerably smaller than predicted.

By examining the polarisation of gamma-ray bursts as they reach Earth, we should be able to detect this graininess, as the polarisation of the photons that arrive here is affected by the spacetime that they travel through. The grains should twist them, changing the direction in which they oscillate so that they arrive with the same polarisation. Also, higher energy gamma rays should be twisted more than lower ones.

However, the satellite detected no such twisting -- there were no differences in the polarisation between different energies found to the accuracy limits of the data, which are 10,000 times better than any previous readings. That means that any quantum grains that exist would have to measure 10^-48 metresor smaller.

So if the universe IS a hologram, it's a fine-grained one. Assuming, of course, that nature doesn't lie to us.

What Did You Predict In The War, Daddy?

People - more than one person - wants to know exactly how "America will win World War III and not even get a scratch."  So, with a caveat, here it goes:

1. Our nukes go "boom."
2. Their nukes go "pfft."

How would we arrange this happy (?) state of affairs?  Easy.  Since 1996, none of the great powers has tested a nuclear weapon by actually setting it off.  No - it's all done with simulations, running on supercomputers.  If we could trick our advasaries into making mistakes with their simulations, we could neuter them.

It's a risky plan, but it has precedent - the US did something similar with pipeline control software back in the 80s.

Another weird aspect of this theory is that the only countries, besides us, who would have working nukes, are the Pakistanis and the North Koreans - who never signed the Test Ban treaty, and actually DO set off H-bombs once in awhile.

I've had grave misgivings about this post.  I have NO access to classified information of any kind - this is the ranting of a disturbed mind.   But predictions - even wacky ones - can sometimes come true.  England's last "Witch Trial" happened during World War II; the "witch," Helen Duncan, had "prophesied" the sinking of the British battleship Barham - which had actually already happened! 

One of the best books about the experience of studying Fortean phenomena is "The Mothman Prophecies," by John Keel.  Keel's message is clear: when you think about weird stuff, weird stuff thinks about you.

Food Of The Gods?

Does God want to eat us?  We recently commented on Charles Fort's theory that ""The Earth is a farm. We are someone else's property."

Perhaps he got the idea the Bible, where the 23rd Psalm begins "the Lord is my shepherd."  But the Psalmist doesn't take this imagery to it's logical conclusion; the Psalmist isn't shorn, then killed and eaten.

Still, Christians, especially Catholics, are often accused of cannibalism because of the imagery of the Last Supper.  "This is my body," says Jesus.  "Eat this in remembrance of me."

Reading Scripture with an open mind is hard.  We only see what we expect to see.  In GK Chesterton's Father Brown mystery "The Invisible Man"  everyone swears no one entered the building where the murder occured.  The killer became "invisible" by becoming ubiquitous - he disguised himself as a mailman.

Christian imagery depicts "the good shepherd," but is blind to its implications.  Raising us - for wool or any other purpose - is an action consistent with a flawed, limited creator - a Demiurge, not a Messiah.

Beyond The Bomb

The "kaboom" part of a nuclear weapon is called the "physics package,"  presumably because it uses the one law of physics everyone knows: E = mC^2. 

Surprisingly, H-bombs are not efficient; only a few percent of the plutonium mass is converted to energy.  An anti-matter bomb, like the one in the Dan Brown novel, could theoretically operate at 100% efficiency.

But really epic kabooms can't be made by using the laws of physics; they're made by exploiting the laws of physics. 

A BB gun normally transmits energy using the law E=MV^2; change the laws of physics in  its vicinity such that E=M^1,000,000V^1,000,000 and you raise its destructive power to a whole 'nother level.

Science seeks to discover natural laws.  If Gnostic claims are true, and the universe was created by a finite, fallible creator, physicists may well discover not just natural laws, but the means by which those natural laws are implemented.  Future bombs won't have a "physics package" - they'll have a meta-physics package!