mindlace

For those following along at home, I’m very interested in the Cosmic Microwave Background because it is currently the best available evidence we have about large-scale structures in the universe, particularly the intriguing question of whether the universe is larger than we can possibly see.

I’d noticed that a gentleman had uncovered that some of the microwave radiation seemed to be coming from our solar system. He evidently has refined his analysis, and now it appears that almost all the low notes come from our solar system.

What does this have to do with the shape of the universe? You can imagine the big bang as if it were someone striking a big drum, and the CMB is the remnant of the “sound” it made. All instruments produce sound waves that are various fractions of their maximum amplitude; an upright bass produces lower notes than a violin because the vibrating string is longer. Thus, the presence of certain amplitudes allows us to infer that the universe is at least “so” big.

If the low notes are locally generated, that suggests that the universe is just about as big as we can possibly see – that is, it’s about as big as a light cone with an origin at ~13bn years ago. An extraordinarily large volume, but still a finite one.

I have a bit of a fetish for shows that feature some sort of non-human vision. I even like the cheesy computer overlay of Terminator-vision and the pseudo IR of Predator-vision, but what I really like are attempts to show how things look to different animals, like how bees see color (they can see ultraviolet) and shape.

Coral reefs and their inhabitants look like a riot of colour to human eyes, but how do they look to the organisms that actually live there? A recent new scientist article argues that what to us looks like vibrant contrast may be camouflage. The article also explores some of the other reasons for fish coloration.

I enjoy anything that helps me get my head around the experiential life of the non-human world. Differences in colour perception seem like a minor thing, but its amazing the difference it makes in what is noticed.

A soon to be published paper argues that there are many big bangs, and that some of them have inverse time. Most importantly, it suggests “In this never-ending cycle, [of big bangs] the universe never achieves equilibrium. If it did achieve equilibrium, nothing would ever happen. There would be no arrow of time.” I will update this with a link to the actual paper, whenever it appears.

Frank Close:

“It is as if they are in an ideal prison, where the prisoners are completely free but can never escape.”

I’m sure this is only of interest to cryptographers, some scientists, and those that have a vaguely theological interest in ‘pure randomness’. Which really makes it no less general interest than most of my posts

I got blogged by boingboing today, for my little pedantic feedback on true random number generation. The point, which I should have expanded upon, is that hotbits uses the decay of Krypton-85 to generate its random numbers. This is a perfectly unpredictable event and as such, just as random as the photon shot through half-mirrored glass technique that random numbers uses.

However, hotbits measures four individual quantum events, divides them into pairs, and if the interval between the first pair is less than the interval between the second, generates a 1; otherwise a 0. This, I was told by someone more math-zen than I, reduces their statistical independence, though if it does it does so only very subtly.

This may very well not reduce their randomness; on the other hand, sufficient knowledge of the initial conditions could give you some predictability of output. The half-silvered mirror approach that appears to be used by randomnumbers.info means that every quantum event generates a bit, no analysis added.

Plus, you can have as many random numbers as you want as fast as the refractory period of the photo detectors allows; much faster than the 30 bits per second of hotbits.

One of the things that is difficult to grasp about the many worlds interpretation is that it seems to belie our unitary experience of history and a largely integrated experience in the moment. The many worlds interpretation is the prevailing interpretation of quantum physics; I assume it to be valid in this article. A common way of discussing our experience in the many worlds hypothesis is to talk about how we’re in “just one” of the many worlds, or universes. This is not true, as it is observations of interference from adjacent worlds that has brought about the many worlds hypothesis. Therefore it is not the case that we are in one universe; we are somehow in many universes at once. It seems like, if there are an infinity of presents, that we should somehow feel multiplicitous, that we should be aware of the branching and recombination of all of these possible worlds. The solution to this seeming contradiction lies in understanding that we experience only great aggregates of phenomena.

Our phenomenal experience is truly a phenomenal quantity; teeming masses of interrelating entities on six orders of magnitude in scale. In order for you to hear your friend talking to you a meter away, 2.69×10^22 molecules interact to bring that signal to your ears, where about 4025 innervated hairs in your cochlea pick up the signal, and transfer it to your brain, where some significant fraction of the 10 billion neurons in your brain take 200 msec to form a synchronous pattern of activity that is your recognition of the event. That brain is ensconced inside a skull perching on a hundred trillion cells.

An interesting characteristic of these scalars is that they also come with what you might call “abstraction layers”; It is irrelevant to the atom which subatomic particles constitute it, much as a water molecule can be made up of any hydrogen and oxygen atoms and still be a water molecule, and as living things care not which specific molecules they are made of as long as they’re the right sort. In the above example, it could be any set of molecules in the air participating in the propagation of your friend’s voice and you would still recognise it; your body itself is a shifting mass of molecules, whose distribution and frequency can and do shift constantly over time, but you remain essentially whole. This fungibility shows that even from a classical perspective, many different circumstances in time could lead to similar phenomenal experiences.

So if many different circumstances are happening in this moment, we’re left to wonder how they’ve managed to conspire to make such improbable events extremely likely; that is, of all of the things that could possibly be happening now with the atoms that make up your body, why are they in you and reading this article? This becomes clear when you see that each layer “exposes” to the next a small fraction of its combinatorial repertoire: the space of molecular recombination possibilities that living things work within is a small but unlikely corner of it. This has the effect of concentrating patterns of expression in spacetime as well as in adjacent universes. This happens at every scale: only 4% of the universe is comprised of energy and matter; of the countless molecules atoms can make, all of life is comprised of only twenty different molecules, of the sextillion living beings on this earth only six billion are human – that’s one per trillion.

One of the consequences of being built on top of successive layers of finite combinatorial possibilities is that increasingly improbable events become probable in the reduced space. If you ran across someone reading a website floating about in the early universe’s quark-gluon plasma you’d be very surprised; on this earth there are a goodly number of website readers. Since we are ultimately only related by causality, our phenomenal space will therefore be those events that occur in proximate causal relation.

Imagine being in the chair at an eye exam, looking into the light. That light source is putting off light in all of its possible directions, but only those universes where photons fell on enough adjacent cones are causally proximate to your experience. In order for us to see, at least ninety photons have to have had a similar history. A cone or rod in the eye converts a photon into a moving wave of potential down to one of many dendrites of a nerve cell. That nerve cell only gets excited enough when several cones get stimulated; it then conveys the signal on. So for light to be sensed it has to be extremely probable; that is, present in a large number of adjacent universes.

Our mechanism of memory seems to involve the persistent shape of certain proteins that convert others like them over time. This creates long-lived patterns that persist even when some of the proteins change shape or degrade. Again, in most of the local universes there exist a quorum of proteins-in-neurons such that a memory persists.

So it is because the vast majority of the multiverses that you are in all have similar possibilities, and the differences are swamped both by the layer abstraction methods and by evolved adaptations to randomness that you have a phenomenal experience of unity in a dizzying multiplicity of worlds.

What causes the past to be indeterminable is the reflection of the future.

The farther you go into the past, the less you can know about the prevailing conditions until finally you get back to the CMB, a massively blown-up shot of a small number of quantum states sticking their collective asses on the BigBang photocopier that you get to fondle like some sort of phrenologist to find all the little fiddly bits that went in to what’s happening now.

Evidence rapidly degrades as you go into the future, extrapolating from state that you’ve collected from the past (when it was the present). No matter how good you get, you’ll never collect all the present evidence because no present contains all the pasts: when you look at the present of anything you’re looking at a fragment of its pasts’ futures.

This, coupled with an upper bound on the rate of relating, means there’s no way of telling the difference between a deterministic and indeterministic universe.

When I was young, I believed I was the me that lived in the moment: that “I” was synonymous with the brain activity that is causing these words to be written. What transpired, however, is that the I that I am now is remarkably variable and incoherent, and I repeatedly found myself in painful emotional and physical experiences.

One of the more painful experiences was when I decided to commit suicide by eating a box of sleeping pills. While I was under the influence of the pills, I felt my heart slow and stop. What followed was a moment of preternatural lucidity, where I felt like I’d stepped aside from my body and could see where I had been, and where I could be; where the whole of my life seemed my I. I called this self the “ur” self.

This new concept of self was tremendously liberating; I needed not to play so heavily in the moment, as I was more than just now, and if I stayed open and aware I could learn the will of and act in accordance with the whole of my life.

As part of my quest to figure out what was real, I started first to find a way to tell things apart. This eventually lead to a view that processes are more fundamental than objects; In [the distance of difference][a] this heuristic is used to discuss time; In [incarnate and discarnate][b] I talk about the phenomenal experience of difference, and how it relates to what is and isn’t. You could consider it a kind of weak platonism, perhaps.

[a]: http://mindlace.net/index.php?p=6
[b]: http://mindlace.net/index.php?p=8

Applying this perceptual framework to my notion of an ur self has led me to the understanding that the patterns that make up my life to some degree have greater commonality with other, similar patterns being enacted than they do to my life itself, and that inasmuch as they *do not*, those patterns will cease to be when my life ends.

So when I behave archetypicaly, I shed the bonds of this mortality and become unified with all it has been and will be. This is not some high-falutin’, heavy ritual notion of ‘archetype’; anything that recurs has some sort of archetype, so you can be One With The Teeth Brushing.

That being said, there are certainly more or less interesting archetypes to bring your body into participation with.

Taking this step makes me feel like I’m taking a step out of solitude and into an inviolate community whose effects echo throughout the ages; we are The Lover, The Magi, The Cook. Everyone who shares these things with your temporary body is a reflection of yourn multiplicity.

Because those patterns are also expressed by others, it shows that they are more degenerate patterns than those expressed only by you. The consequence of this degeneracy is existence in more multiverses than the youse who behaved in a pattern that was more specific to the particular circumstances of a body.

It also meant for me that I could finally be joyful about my eventual death; I am enthusiastic about the future of my participatory patterns with or without this body locus.

Thus, selflessness is the logical behaviour for any individual sufficiently selfish as to want to live forever by not dying.

Caveat lector; the next obvious behaviour is to encourage selflessness in others.

The curious thing about this notion of [incarnate and discarnate][a] and [distance of difference][b] is the question of *why* do processes retain integrity when so many of their constituents change over time?

[a]: http://mindlace.net/index.php?p=8
[b]: http://mindlace.net/index.php?p=6

On the one hand, it appears that all the cards are stacked against you, in the quest for processes that persist over time. You’ve got to build things out of constituents that don’t even have the good graces of being in one place at one time, much less persist over time.

Nonetheless, out of this probablistic stew of elemental particles, somehow atoms arose. Even once you had atoms – and the requisite quantity of fusion to get things a bit more interesting than hydrogen – you’re left with this total mess, a veritable cauldron of brownian motion.

And yet somehow, life has emerged from this mess. One deep reason for this is degeneracy.

Degeneracy is the ability or tendency for biological systems to produce the same or functionally similar output using different processs, as illustrated in [Degeneracy and complexity in biological systems].

My suspicion is that this concept of degeneracy can be taken further than biological systems- indeed, can be taken back to the molecules, atoms, and finally particles of which our multiverse is comprised.

For if the many worlds hypothesis holds water, the only way for persistence itself to have meaning is for a certain set of outcomes to occur in more universes than it did not.

Another way of putting it is that [climbing mount improbable][d] is an inevitable consequence of causality; there must be more than one past that led up to this present.

: http://www.klab.caltech.edu/~ma/cclub/edelmangally.pdf
[d]: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0393316823/mindlace-20

What does it mean to say that time is the distance of difference?

First it is extending an epistemological observation to an ontological hypothesis. The observation is that the only way an entity can be known is through the apprehension of qualities, and quality can only be apprehended through relation. The ontological hypothesis is the relation of qualities is the only way entities can share causality.

(This has the interesting side effect of implying that knowing is a special form of this sort of causality.)

The experimental evidence I would expect to support this would be a quantum of change, and indeed there does seem to be that- a quantum of energy, time, and space – as described by Planck, or at least as I understand his descriptions by reading third parties.

I understand that there is still some controversy over these matters, but it seems like the evidence is pointing strongly in the direction and favour of nature being fundamentally quantized.

What is slightly less controversial than space quantization is energy quantization; elements of energy, like electrons, relate to each other via photons.

What this means is we can “slice up” the universe on these planck boundaries and get something like constituent “points” of existence – an “energy occuring over time in a space”.

Now let’s say I have taken a universe much like our own, chopped it into these little points, handed you these points unordered and asked you to put them back together. It’s like the chinese room experiment except you’re being asked to put these pieces back in an order such that it recreates some plausible set, with extra credit if you make it like a set (your experience) you already have.

For lack of a better way of putting it, you get a lego set where the pieces only connect to each other in discrete ways, like the way that electrons only interact with each other via photons, and the assembled set is a universe. It’s OK, you have all the time you need.

One of the things that you’ll probably find is that most of your pieces are near-identical; in fact I’d bet that many of them are identical, on the inductive basis that most of the “pieces” we find in our universe – like atoms, molecules, and so on – are identical across many types of measurement; a molecule of H₂O at a given temperature and pressure behaves precisely like another molecule of H₂O.

As a thought experiment, imagine we have a litre of pure H₂O at STP, and a marvelous device that allows us to record what occurs in the volume at plank-volume resolution.

Within a few minutes, we would know pretty near all of the states that the H2O is ever going to occupy.  That’s not to say that each portion of the liter occupied all of its possible states, but if you chop the liter up into plank-volume “cubes” the set of relations that any one of the molecules could have with the others has been had by some other molecule in the same volume.

Now even if you don’t, for the moment, believe in the many worlds hypothesis, you can perhaps see how the scenario I’ve just described paints a picture of a bunch of points strung together in this crazy interwoven tapestry, but that the set of points is far smaller than the qualitative set an experiencer in that universe would observe.

So you complete your task, and have a reasonable facsimile of your experiential universe. Does the universe you’re holding have an isomorph in your past? Is there more than one way you can put a universe together that results in one that is indistinguishable from the other?

I think you can put them together many different ways and still achieve universes sufficiently like our own as to be indistinguishable.

There are some joinings that the elements in question cannot engage in until some other, prior joining has taken place; we were once a stew of baryons, in all of our possible histories. This is the source of the “arrow” of time.