Cosmology

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Originally Posted by desiresjab

Let me state for the nth time I consider myself an agnostic. That's okay, it probably seems hard to believe at times. I can lean both ways, which gives me the flexibility to play devil's advocate in either direction. If you were not advocating some of these ideas I would have to be doing it myself. I think they are great ideas.

What I want out of this is sight. Such a journey is made almost entirely alone in the company of others. I want a picture to believe in. Strangely, people find such pictures for themselves all the time. The mind can make almost anything it wants. I don't ask for much--I just want the picture. I view much lovely art, but I do not think I have seen the picture yet.

We can go far without the right picture. I do not actually need to find the right picture, I only need to be allowed to search for it forever.

If we knew these things that drive our curiosity we would no longer be curious.

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I will assume you are agnostic rather than atheistic. I don't have the picture either and what I understand now will likely change.

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Originally Posted by desiresjab

To say electrons have consciousness "of a type," is a lot of wobble room.

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Yes. It is very vague. I don't know what consciousness is. An electron is not conscious or aware the way I am.

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Originally Posted by desiresjab

I go back to my mosquito friend. It may be conscious but it is not self conscious. What is consciousness without self consciousness but a bunch of programmable instincts entered as parameters which determine behavior? We could easily model that, and I believe the machine would be every bit as conscious as the mosquito, if not a little more. The mosquito, always starting anew, has no concept of yesterday or time past, but the computer does.

Our machines already have primitive consciousness, what they lack are actual emotions we would construe as genuine. Concepts like willfulness and awareness are pretty abstract and vague anyway, not to mention consciousness itself. Words we used forever without bothering to define them precisely. What is consciousness to you?

I doubt that the mosquito is even conscious. It has an on and off state. It reacts, it tries to preserve itself--but does it need consciousness for that? It does not think of itself, it does not reflect on its thoughts. I do not believe the mosquito is making willful choices, but following its programming, so of course I find reason to doubt the electron too. Making a choice really is a matter of definition.

Some people do not find it appealing that consciousness could arise from lump matter. I find it immensely appealing that so much could be enfolded that would never be suspected.

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I don't know how the words "consciousness", "self-consciousness", "willfulness" and "awareness" serve to differentiate something. I can only experience my own awareness, willfulness, consciousness and self-consciousness and they are all filtered through my being a member of the human species.

Every species has its own set of constraints on how it can interact with the world. We have different constraints than a mosquito but that doesn't mean the mosquito is any less able to make a choice within its own species constraints. All individuals within species, including humans, have dispositions to act in certain ways, but that doesn't mean there is no choice available. I choose between chocolate or vanilla ice cream perhaps disposed today to pick chocolate 60% of the time. The wave function for that choice would imply those probabilities today if one bothered creating it. But I still make a choice. The mosquito is disposed to move in multiple directions when my hand approaches. I have no reason to claim it has no choice in the matter except to support a metaphysical belief that it can be reduced to a machine.

However, I don't think a machine has any choice. And I can say that with more certainty than I can say anything about the mosquito because I can trace back the machine's programming to a real programmer. I disagree with using this programming metaphor when talking about reality that someone has not actually programmed. Programming implies the existence of a programmer or an "intelligent designer". If I cannot identify a programmer through some historical records, there is no justification to say something was programmed.

I know some theists like how the programming metaphor implies the existence of an intelligent designer, but I think accepting that metaphor comes at too great a cost. I am not a 19th century Christian apologist facing a scientific view that is totally deterministic with an underlying reduction to unconscious matter. That scientific view changed within science almost a hundred years ago. With determinism undermined there is no need to continue with intelligent design. Whatever God is real, He or She is far more interesting.

The mosquito weighed the options carefully, then went right instead of left.

I do not see water charging from a dam's gateway into a divided sluice-way having any more choice about where it goes than it had on its own composition. But give me all the weights, angles and forces involved, and I will give you back a probability wave for a particular molecule's likely "choice" of sluices.

What constitutes a choice and what constitutes consciousness appear to be mere definitions, when one peers behind Oz's curtain.

If it is left up to me, then, I will make the line of demarcation at self consciousness--the ability to reflect on what one is thinking about. Anything else would be defined as pre-consciousness. The worm and the mosquito are pre-conscious, but other life forms have varying degrees of consciousness. Saying just which ones, though, turns out to be difficult.

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Originally Posted by desiresjab

I do not see water charging from a dam's gateway into a divided sluice-way having any more choice about where it goes than it had on its own composition. But give me all the weights, angles and forces involved, and I will give you back a probability wave for a particular molecule's likely "choice" of sluices.

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Probability is useful in two different contexts. One is where we do not have all the information we theoretically could have and so make a prediction based on what we do know. That is the kind associated with the water example you mentioned above.

The other is the kind where there is no additional information to obtain, no hidden variable is left to consider. We have all the information and the results are still indeterminate. That is the kind associated with quantum uncertainty. Some say this is "random", but that is a misleading metaphor. The distributions also are not uniform such as the flip of a coin. This makes it difficult to work with the uncertainty and why speculations such as many worlds have a hard time establishing themselves as consistent. That is, they could be modeled as choices and not reduced to mere chance.

At the quantum level it is easy to know that we have all the information. At the level of our species or any other species it is not clear whether a choice was made (inherent indeterminacy) or whether additional information could have predicted the results accurately. I assume any living organism can make a choice within the constraints set up by its species. Others don't make that assumption. I think the assumption is justified based on the fact that at an even lower level, quantum indeterminacy exists.

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Originally Posted by desiresjab

What constitutes a choice and what constitutes consciousness appear to be mere definitions, when one peers behind Oz's curtain.

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I agree.

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Originally Posted by desiresjab

If it is left up to me, then, I will make the line of demarcation at self consciousness--the ability to reflect on what one is thinking about. Anything else would be defined as pre-consciousness. The worm and the mosquito are pre-conscious, but other life forms have varying degrees of consciousness. Saying just which ones, though, turns out to be difficult.

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I think that might be too restrictive.

Some changes do not involve consciousness. I grant that. The changes that a machine or computer make are not conscious. We really don't want our machines making independent choices. They can be explained by their design or programming. As Nagel would put it when he asked what is it like to be a bat, it would be like nothing to be a computer. That means the computer is not conscious. What this goes against is a behaviorism which tries to reduce consciousness to objective forms of behavior. Consciousness is subjective, not objective.

Rather than behavior, I would place the line of demarcation at the ability to make a choice. I will define a choice as a behavioral change for which indeterminacy has to be accepted. A choice is something that cannot be completely determined given all the information. The most we can construct is a probability distribution. This would exclude the flow of water through the dam's gateway. It would exclude a computer passing the Turing test. It would exclude weather patterns. However, it would include any living creature until we get more information to prove that they can be reduced to machines. It would also include quantum reality.

I think Descartes put the demarcation where you would like to put it, but I can't remember exactly.

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Originally Posted by YesNo

Probability is useful in two different contexts. One is where we do not have all the information we theoretically could have and so make a prediction based on what we do know. That is the kind associated with the water example you mentioned above.

The other is the kind where there is no additional information to obtain, no hidden variable is left to consider. We have all the information and the results are still indeterminate. That is the kind associated with quantum uncertainty. Some say this is "random", but that is a misleading metaphor. The distributions also are not uniform such as the flip of a coin. This makes it difficult to work with the uncertainty and why speculations such as many worlds have a hard time establishing themselves as consistent. That is, they could be modeled as choices and not reduced to mere chance.

At the quantum level it is easy to know that we have all the information. At the level of our species or any other species it is not clear whether a choice was made (inherent indeterminacy) or whether additional information could have predicted the results accurately. I assume any living organism can make a choice within the constraints set up by its species. Others don't make that assumption. I think the assumption is justified based on the fact that at an even lower level, quantum indeterminacy exists.



I agree.



I think that might be too restrictive.

Some changes do not involve consciousness. I grant that. The changes that a machine or computer make are not conscious. We really don't want our machines making independent choices. They can be explained by their design or programming. As Nagel would put it when he asked what is it like to be a bat, it would be like nothing to be a computer. That means the computer is not conscious. What this goes against is a behaviorism which tries to reduce consciousness to objective forms of behavior. Consciousness is subjective, not objective.

Rather than behavior, I would place the line of demarcation at the ability to make a choice. I will define a choice as a behavioral change for which indeterminacy has to be accepted. A choice is something that cannot be completely determined given all the information. The most we can construct is a probability distribution. This would exclude the flow of water through the dam's gateway. It would exclude a computer passing the Turing test. It would exclude weather patterns. However, it would include any living creature until we get more information to prove that they can be reduced to machines. It would also include quantum reality.

I think Descartes put the demarcation where you would like to put it, but I can't remember exactly.

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If something cannot recognize it is making a choice, I don't think it did. I do not accept gobbledy-gook language such as "it makes a choice within the constraints of its species."

A choice is something that cannot be completely determined given all the information, is another one, that bothers me. Which information? All information? I don't have to accept that behavior is indeterminate at all, just very complex.

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Originally Posted by desiresjab

If something cannot recognize it is making a choice, I don't think it did. I do not accept gobbledy-gook language such as "it makes a choice within the constraints of its species."

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By constraints of a species I am just pointing out that we are limited by the species we belong to. We can't hear, for example, all the sounds that members of other species can hear, nor see the same range of the electromagnetic spectrum as members of other species. Those are constraints that are specific to a species. Bats for instance hang by their feet and fly. We don't.

So the choices we can make are limited by these constraints.

That is all I am trying to say.

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Originally Posted by desiresjab

A choice is something that cannot be completely determined given all the information, is another one, that bothers me. Which information? All information? I don't have to accept that behavior is indeterminate at all, just very complex.

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This goes back to uncertainty in quantum physics. It depends on having all the information that is available to us and still we cannot determine what the quantum particle will do exactly. In other words, we can't repeat the experiment expecting to confirm the result. We can only assign a probability to what might happen. For example, measure the position of an electron. Then measure the momentum. Then go back and measure the position. That second measurement of position cannot be predicted exactly.

I define situations like that as having enough freedom to make a choice. It is just a definition based on my ability to determine the outcome of a measurement. I don't know if the electron has a subjective state, but based on this definition of choice, I will then assume the electron has a subjective state. Having a subjective state based on Nagel's "What is it like to be a bat?" is just the claim that it is like something to be an electron, but I don't know if that is the case or not. It is only what I could derive logically from the definition of choice and assumption of subjectivity. If I keep deriving statements hopefully I will be able to come up with a statement that I can test empirically. At that point I could claim that this budding theory is falsifiable.

If I thought for sure there was a God, I would be mighty angry at that entity for leaving me so ignorant, for expecting me to believe garbage like the Koran on faith.

God owes me an explanation, and not the phony one in holy books. C'mon, almighty, you can do a little better than that, or are you just a two-bit, limited God who gets your jollies torturing those you call your children? Explain yourself, rat!

The rat God, that is who we worship. The rat God who expects more than is reasonable. It seems to me the devil and God are the same entity.

God is so wicked that those old books that try to put a good face on him fail miserabley. He still comes out Joseph Stalin. It is time for God to declare himself openly or GTFO of our universe.

Oh, I must be very angry today.

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Originally Posted by desiresjab

Oh, I must be very angry today.

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Walks and slow breathing sometimes help.



Regarding cosmology, I recently found out that black holes might not exist.

On the one hand there are theoretical objections to their existence.

Here is one claiming that Hawking does not believe in them around January, 2014: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/n...ace-astronomy/

In September, 2014, there was also a report from Mersini-Houghton that they cannot exist: http://phys.org/news/2014-09-black-holes.html

On the other hand there is one failed prediction assuming the radio source at the center of our galaxy, Sgr A*, is a black hole:

In early 2014 a cloud called G2 was supposed to head into Sgr A* and calculations based on black hole theory claimed the black hole would absorb the cloud. Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sagitt...cretion_course) described the event and reports that the gas cloud survived the encounter. Of course, Sgr A* may still be a black hole and the theory or calculations used in the prediction just need some modifications.

But all of this makes me wonder if Sgr A* is really a black hole and whether black holes are even possible.

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Originally Posted by YesNo

Walks and slow breathing sometimes help.



Regarding cosmology, I recently found out that black holes might not exist.

On the one hand there are theoretical objections to their existence.

Here is one claiming that Hawking does not believe in them around January, 2014: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/n...ace-astronomy/

In September, 2014, there was also a report from Mersini-Houghton that they cannot exist: http://phys.org/news/2014-09-black-holes.html

On the other hand there is one failed prediction assuming the radio source at the center of our galaxy, Sgr A*, is a black hole:

In early 2014 a cloud called G2 was supposed to head into Sgr A* and calculations based on black hole theory claimed the black hole would absorb the cloud. Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sagitt...cretion_course) described the event and reports that the gas cloud survived the encounter. Of course, Sgr A* may still be a black hole and the theory or calculations used in the prediction just need some modifications.

But all of this makes me wonder if Sgr A* is really a black hole and whether black holes are even possible.

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I will have to get back to you after I have read the links. (I actually do read them). I have very similar doubts about black holes. They were a possibility found in the field equations for the first time by Billy Sidis, I believe, when he was a fourteen year old at Harvard.

As we know, the mathematical existence of something does not prove something physically exists.

After all, infinite mass at a singularity is a mathematical convenience or extrapolation. No one can really believe in infinite mass, but maybe in something we say mathematically approaches it.

Black holes are one of our most beloved cultural icons by now. Let's see how easily we can shake them.

When one author says he has proven mathematically the impossibility of black holes, that was under a particular model under a particular system of constraints. I truly doubt it is as final as a universal proof yet.

The abstracts below some of the papers point out the tools they are using. No surprise that all the tools were named after great mathematicians. Because that is the only way we make progress, after all the talking. Hamilton quaternions, Hilbert spaces and Abelian groups and matrices in a framework of Lie algebra. It does not get more clear than that what the tools are.

Science will take an awful public flogging when it needs to change its paradigm again. Many powerful people believe cosmological research is a waste of time and money anyway. They would like strictly practical research with no long range vision. Do we really care about better and better cellphones if we cannot search for our origins?

You have to admit, this subject is more interesting than social philosophy, which is now PC from top to bottom. I sure hope there are not too many suicides by marginalized people unable to cross the George Washington Bridge one more time. You know, them danged monuments is going to have to come down too.

I took a recent peer at Einstein's field equations. They are not as daunting as some mathematics I have looked at. I see partial differential equations. Anyone familiar with differential equations and what the variables stood for would basically understand the mechanics of the math. Of course understanding those variables well would require a lot of advanced physics. There are powerful ideas relating to many fields of mathematics and physics embedded in those innocent looking equations. Somewhere within the manipulations all the tools I mentioned in the last post are likely to come into play along with many more. Unfamiliarity with any of these individual elements dooms deep understanding of the subject. That is why almost all of us will remain railbirds to the real action, including myself, of course...

One doesn't have to understand these equations at more than a superficial level. As I see them they are just maps of some objective part of reality.

I'm looking through a few books to try to understand the link between black holes, dark matter and the singularity at the big bang. My suspicion at the moment is that there is only circumstantial evidence for black holes and the encounter of G2 with Sag A* would have been the only direct evidence regarding them so far. Also I think dark matter comes from missing matter assumed to be there from the big bang, but does not seem to be needed for gravitation within our own galaxy. What I am trying to find out is how much of all of this is speculation and how much is based on real observations.

Some links from EarthSky.com on all this about black holes, dark matter and the big bang. The last is about a nearby Dark Matter Galaxy: go figure.
http://earthsky.org/space/dark-matte...c77b-394044013
http://earthsky.org/space/the-cheshi...p-of-galaxies?
http://earthsky.org/space/a-nearby-d...c77b-394044013

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Originally Posted by Dreamwoven

Some links from EarthSky.com on all this about black holes, dark matter and the big bang. The last is about a nearby Dark Matter Galaxy: go figure.
http://earthsky.org/space/dark-matte...c77b-394044013
http://earthsky.org/space/the-cheshi...p-of-galaxies?
http://earthsky.org/space/a-nearby-d...c77b-394044013

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With so many results in hand and people pushing different models, the real job is in sifting through what we already have and running the appropriate experiments where possible.

Filaments of dark matter emerging from the earth might be a testable idea, since the highest concentration of the hair roots lies only 600,000 miles out in space from us.

As I understand it, one of the difficulties of finding dark matter, which I doubt exists, is that although there is more of it than regular matter it is more smoothly distributed through space. It doesn't collect since it can't stick together not reacting to electromagnetic forces. Without those forces, it goes through everything. So it is diffuse, but the Sun which is relatively close to us is locally so massive the amount of dark matter is too small compared to it to be picked up by our measurements. However, I think that should be still the case at the galactic level.

It occurred to me that dark matter is like a field. One should be able to replace it with a variable G value and not have to worry about supposing there is a form of matter out there.