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...declares hereby that the theorem here described is completed correct...actually the HS "simple" principle or imprinciple is related with the simple properties of the gaussian function that we all know from school.

In any case... I think that the beatiful metaphor or tale that explains this wonderful principle is the one of the bee and the baseball balls.

The reason why you can not know a lot of things is because you just can not measure...(and maybe the measure is the existence... do you recall me mumbling about that the only thing that exists is the interaction....??? think it again...or look it up in a book)...in any case... you need measure...

And how are you going to measure the movement of a bee if the only thing you have to measure is a baseball bat and some balls?

As you may well know there is no problem in measuring the positon and speed of the JFK aircarrier by throwing baseball balls...you just throw  them knowing the speed ,let them rebound...repeat it at different position and time and you can perfectly triangulate position and also get the velocity with the time dealys from the rebounds..

Unfortunetaly if you throw a basebal ball to a bee.... well besides probably killing the bee (not necesarilly) you just afect his trajectory so much...that actually you can not know the position and the velocity he/she had before..

When you are dealing with very small things..well you have to throw things- uber small things...the more precission you want.. the smaller the ball you must throw at them ...but gee...you can not get smaller and smaller ad infinitum because you have a minimum package (in Sven phrase of the hour)

So..if QM is only knowing about knowing that things go in packages.... you have certainly to know all THE THINGS IT IMPLIES.

A pleasure

I therefore claim to show, not how men think in myths, but how myths operate in men's minds without their being aware of the fact. Levi-Strauss, Claude

by kcurie on Sat May 27th, 2006 at 04:50:17 PM EST
[ Parent ]
The problem we cannot get our heads around is non-discreteness. We are born with 100 billion mostly unconnected neurons. The only contact we have with the world outside ourselves is via the sense interface. At birth, all input is noise. There is no signal. There are no senses, since they are all a single noise too.

But, little by little, by a combination of repetition (gateway neuron firing patterns) and hormonal, semi-hormonal and neurotransmitter production (or so called meta-programming which hardwires active connections) and cellular specialization caused by the RNA protein factories, the brain starts to self-organize.

Patterns of input are reinforced by negative and positive feedback. Neural networks emerge in sets and subsets, and subsets of subsets and eventually become 'mind objects' ie discrete. Discrete mind objects are a benefit and a curse. Mind objects often replace actual patterned sensory input - such that, if we walk through a forest, what we experience is largely forestness, not the actual forest. We sense what we have learned to sense.

Stimulii produce largely predictable response = learned behaviour. If the stimulii are 'expected' then the mind object tends to replace the actual incoming data. Except when novelty intrudes. Novelty (ahaa!) activates chemical metaprograms which in turn tweak the mind object. And of course the kernel chemical gradient metaprograms in the lizard brain that regulate sleep, hunger, threat, sex etc intrude also.

So mind objects are constantly 'improving', but at the same time deepening behavioural response and reducing the incidence of novelty.

Wonderful to be a child when everything is novel. Harder to be an adult full of Learned Behaviour Disorders and tired old mind objects.

I come here for the novelty ;-)

You can't be me, I'm taken

by Sven Triloqvist on Sat May 27th, 2006 at 05:44:43 PM EST
[ Parent ]
I have a theory (nothing scientific) that time (as we experience it, which may be the only way it exists) is a function of this process of brain development, of the hard-wiring of "mind objects".

Not only because of the way the brain organizes time-perception (a baby has little sense of time, a small child learns morning-afternoon-evening-night and to organize memories of "this morning" or "last night", and so on as we grow), but because we live and experience more and more by means of learned behaviours until, as you say, we walk through a forest experiencing our foresty mind object, or we don't see an apple but we experience "I am looking at an apple". And this is what I think explains the speeding-up of "time" during human life, the oft-described way the vast deserts of time we seemed to have as children become the fast-disappearing days, months, years we perceive as ageing adults.

This may simply be a function of the proportion of adult experience that is lived by means of learned behaviours (seen as running over and over the same sub-routines), or an effect of the physical process of development, the neurotransmitters, the hard-wiring of synapses. As this work is accomplished (childhood and adolescence) "time" moves slowly, though it accelerates; once it is mostly done, the rate of acceleration increases.

by afew (afew(a in a circle)eurotrib_dot_com) on Sun May 28th, 2006 at 06:01:25 AM EST
[ Parent ]
As a brain researcher colleague says 'Life is Learned Behaviour Disorder'!

You are absolutely right. Time is yet another sense/signal that we pick out of all the noise, and our perception of time is learned (read 'imposed'). The artificial logistic rhythms of daily life are out of synch with our physiological circadian rhythms, and all the other artificial divisions of time (the working day, meal times, monthly salary etc etc) are in conflict with biological rhythms such as the internal biochemical gradients which influence what might be crudely called moods.

You can't be me, I'm taken

by Sven Triloqvist on Sun May 28th, 2006 at 06:31:16 AM EST
[ Parent ]
"You are absolutely right."

Isn't he only relatively right?

 Warning: trained physicists and other experts in Quantum mechanics are likely to find the following "trite"--not to mention erroneous.  Proceed with caution!

 Correct me if I'm wrong, won't you?

 Though I agree that "time" as we experience it and use it in language, is a human-construct, it is, nonetheless a construct which references reality.

  Perhaps that, for some, is all that needs to be said to make the point.  But, as I'm the way I am, I'll go on a bit with this.

  Motion and time have a relative quality,  as I vaguely understand it, but not one which excludes an absolute quality to time sequence.   There is, it seems to me, an indisputable absolute quality to the sequence of discrete events; for example: your parents' birth preceded your own; and in no other conceivable construct is something different possible since your existence presupposes that of your parents.

  I think that, unless everything we sense and experience is purely illusory, the figment of an imagination which subsumes all existence within it, then we have very strong grounds to believe that if anything is "objectively" "real", the universe beyond us, apart from us, is also no less real than are we.  Further, if all is illusory, what is it that is experiencing the illusion of reality?

  Thus, "time" is a construct which references a feature of reality--discrete sequential physical phenomena in motions which are relative only to various sets of points of view but not relative when observed from other sets of points of view.

  Or, time and motion can be observed to be seen in a manner that is relative to the observer's point of view.  But that does not mean, as I understand it, that all motion is then merely and only relative in nature and wholly lacking in any sense which can be called absolute.

  Isn't that correct?

  Oh, yes, by the way, I'm skeptical of the idea that for infants--whether pre-natal or post-partum-- "everything is noise", "no signal" at some initial point, unless that point is one which is prior to the development of what I can only describe crudely as a developing brain's "critical mass" of cells, at which point, I'd agree: there's no conscious being at that point in development.  But I suspect that as soon as there is a conscious being, there is something which is more than purely "noise" in sense data--one and probably more "signals", however slight and crude in "content".

"In such an environment it is not surprising that the ills of technology should seem curable only through the application of more technology..." John W Aldridge

by proximity1 on Sun May 28th, 2006 at 11:13:44 AM EST
[ Parent ]
Just to blow your mind.

"Noise" comes in 4 designer colors: white, pink, brown, and black.  Depending on the context each of these can either increase, have no affect, or decrease information in a message.

She believed in nothing; only her skepticism kept her from being an atheist. -- Jean-Paul Sartre

by ATinNM on Sun May 28th, 2006 at 02:29:27 PM EST
[ Parent ]
in and of itself is also a message, otherwise it would not be possible to categorize them.

Synapses fire apparently randomly, where no upstream dendritic input appears. Maybe they are just test firing. Clearing their throats. One of the most powerful neural actions is the choir. In a choir, a singer slightly off key is not noticed if there are enough other singers.

The choir effect makes it possible, for instance, to throw a ball accurately where the time window for release is only several milliseconds.

You can't be me, I'm taken

by Sven Triloqvist on Sun May 28th, 2006 at 03:43:20 PM EST
[ Parent ]
My theory about time is (also non-scientific) that time is an aspect of consciousness. When we change consciousness time-perception changes. In meditation time perception changes, most of the time it tends to slow down like in childhood or even vanish all-together. It becomes a state of being, which I used to have as a child without having to meditate.
by Fran on Sun May 28th, 2006 at 11:19:00 AM EST
[ Parent ]
You reason along the same lines as Hawking, who has three "arrows of time":
  • one in quantum physics (which is somewhat reversible in the limit of the CPT symmetries, and so not entirely an "arrow" in the sense of time passing for humans, quantum physics only implies that the time dimension has no cycles, or other topological absurdities - it may still have ends),
  • one in entropy for large systems (which is the one lagerly irreversible on the timescale of "short lived" phenomena like human lifetime),
  • and one in the mind of man, which aligns in direction with the former because the mind is an "Entropy Pump", pumping entropy out of us, and information in, as long as we live.

This explanation is the one that has made the most sense to me.

Pierre
by Pierre on Mon May 29th, 2006 at 06:49:02 AM EST
[ Parent ]
Not to dis Hawking pactually, yes ;-P ], but a more definitive work on the arrow of time is Zeh's The Physical Basis of The Direction of Time.

A society committed to the notion that government is always bad will have bad government. And it doesn't have to be that way. — Paul Krugman
by Carrie (migeru at eurotrib dot com) on Tue May 30th, 2006 at 04:50:01 AM EST
[ Parent ]

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