Quanta & Consciousness

A New Phase

2012-01-18T11:12:00.000-06:00

Herewith the text of a recent paper.

Truth is ever to be found in the simplicity, and

not in the multiplicity and confusion of things.

Sir Isaac Newton

Introduction

A recent item in Nature suggests that coherent quantum processes may be common in biological systems, contrary to what was generally supposed.

On the face of it, quantum effects and living organisms seem to occupy utterly different realms. The former are usually observed only on the nanometer scale, surrounded by hard vacuum, ultra-low temperatures and a tightly controlled laboratory environment. The latter inhabit a macroscopic world that is warm, messy and anything but controlled. A quantum phenomenon such as 'coherence', in which the wave patterns of every part of a system stay in step, wouldn't last a microsecond in the tumultuous realm of the cell.

Or so everyone thought. But discoveries in recent years suggest that nature knows a few tricks that physicists don't: coherent quantum processes may well be ubiquitous in the natural world.

Why is quantum coherence in the brain surprising for so many? I expect it may be partly due to the persistence of the old classical/quantum distinction, dating back to Bohr. The modern viewpoint has been admirably expressed by Dyson some time ago in his classic article in Scientific American on “Field Theory,” where he writes: “There is nothing else except these [quantum] fields: the whole of the material universe is built of them.”

I have often quoted Dyson’s wonderfully lucid remarks, but lest the point be lost, let me do so again:

Physicists talk about two kinds of fields: classical fields and quantum fields. Actually, we believe that all fields in nature are quantum fields. A classical field is just a special large-scale manifestation of a quantum field.

I believe another difficulty may be a matter of gestalt. Macroscopic systems are composed of myriad quanta—which nonetheless clearly “cohere” into crystals, rocks, plants and animals. It seems to me that, given the basic property of superposition in quantum systems, that we would fully expect a disturbance in one part of the system to propagate throughout. So I expect it is merely a case of people thinking that quantum theory somehow only applies in the microscopic realm. Yet one need not delve deeply into the subject in order to correct this impression, thanks to Richard Feynman:

I would like to again impress you with the vast range of phenomena that the theory of quantum electrodynamics describes: It's easier to say it backwards: the theory describes all the phenomena of the physical world except the gravitational effect [...] In fact, biologists are trying to interpret as much as they can about life in terms of chemistry, and as I already explained, the theory behind chemistry is quantum electrodynamics.

To drive the point home in regard to the brain, let us briefly revisit Umezawa:

When we recall that almost all of the macroscopic ordered states are the result of quantum field theory, it seems natural to assume that macroscopic ordered states in biological systems are also created by a similar mechanism.

Well, yes, of course, it all seems pretty simple when one puts it like that, but then the clarity exemplified by these authors is all too rare.

Another exciting experimental finding may help us form a better picture of what’s going on in the brain. In Schrödinger’s formulation, quantum systems are described by wave-functions [psi]. If the brain just is a quantum field, we might expect this wave behavior to manifest itself on a large scale, and there is now evidence to support this expectation, thanks to the good people at the Max Planck Institute.

Up to now, scientists had assumed that the early stages of information processing in the brain took place gradually, that is that one stimulus was processed after another in a conveyor-belt-like sequence. This idea must now be revised. As Danko Nikolic from the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research and his Austrian colleagues Wolfgang Maass and Stefan Häusler have shown, the activity in early brain areas depends on stimuli that arose some time ago. "The brain functions like a jug of water into which stones are thrown and, as a result, generate waves," explains Nikolic.’ The waves overlap but the information as to how many stones were thrown into the jug and when they were thrown in is retained in the resulting complex activity patterns of the fluid.’
The brain is clearly able to render this information usable and, for example, to superimpose images seen in succession. The duration and intensity of the continuing effect of images that have just been seen corresponds to a very detailed visual memory also known as iconic memory. If you see an image and close your eyes immediately afterwards it remains visible for a short while. It may be located in the primary visual cortex.

These neural waves bring music to my ears. I have often argued that our perceptual images result from the superposition of photons. Pointing to the synchrony observed in neural firings, I have suggested that this behavior would go a long way toward preserving the phase relations among incident photons, without which a faithful representation of the world could not be achieved. That sounds a little technical, but one only has to consider the effect on a symphony if the musicians were to be out of step with one another. Similar considerations apply to photography, of course. We all understand these days that the analogy between eye and camera must not be pressed too hard, but then we must not lose sight of the telling similarities, either.

[Continued]

Caltech creates first artificial neural network from DNA

2012-01-06T10:41:00.000-06:00

One of the things that our brains excel at is the ability to recognize what things are, even when presented with an incomplete set of data. If we know only that an animal is sold in pet stores and stuffs food in its cheeks, for instance, we can be pretty certain that the animal in question is a hamster. Now, for the first time ever, researchers at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) have created a DNA-based artificial neural network that can do the same thing ... albeit on a very basic level. They believe that it could have huge implications for the development of true artificial intelligence.
The neural network is made up of just four artificial neurons, as opposed to the human brain's 100 billion real ones.

More evidence found for quantum physics in photosynthesis

2011-12-08T09:30:00.000-06:00

By Brandon Keim, wired.com | Published a day ago

Physicists have found the strongest evidence yet of quantum effects fueling photosynthesis.
Multiple experiments in recent years have suggested as much, but it's been hard to be sure. Quantum effects were clearly present in the light-harvesting antenna proteins of plant cells, but their precise role in processing incoming photons remained unclear.
In an experiment published Dec. 6 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a connection between coherence—far-flung molecules interacting as one, separated by space but not time—and energy flow is established.
"There was a smoking gun before," said study co-author Greg Engel of the University of Chicago. "Here we can watch the relationship between coherence and energy transfer. This is the first paper showing that coherence affects the probability of transport. It really does change the chemical dynamics."
The new findings are the latest in a series that have, piece by piece, promised to expand scientific understanding of photosynthesis, one of life's fundamental processes. Until a few years ago, it seemed a straightforward piece of chemistry.
Then came observations of coherence in antenna-protein chlorophylls from green sulfur bacteria. They lasted far longer than anyone expected, long enough to hint at a functional role. Those observations were, however, made at unrealistically ultracold temperatures; then they were made at room temperatures, and in antenna proteins found in plants everywhere.
Confronted with this unexpected coherence, researchers hypothesized a role in enabling ultra-efficient energy transfer. Energy from incoming photons could simultaneously explore every possible chlorophyll route from a protein's surface to the reaction center at its core, then settle on the shortest path.

_______________________

Generalizing to the 'quantum mind' program seems hazardous, at best, as we would need to establish that our brains are at least as complex as vegetable matter, for example.

Creating Artificial Intelligence Based on the Real Thing

2011-12-06T09:46:00.000-06:00

by Steve Lohr

Ever since the early days of modern computing in the 1940s, the biological metaphor has been irresistible. The first computers — room-size behemoths — were referred to as “giant brains” or “electronic brains,” in headlines and everyday speech. As computers improved and became capable of some tasks familiar to humans, like playing chess, the term used was “artificial intelligence.” DNA, it is said, is the original software.
For the most part, the biological metaphor has long been just that — a simplifying analogy rather than a blueprint for how to do computing. Engineering, not biology, guided the pursuit of artificial intelligence. As Frederick Jelinek, a pioneer in speech recognition, put it, “airplanes don’t flap their wings.”
Yet the principles of biology are gaining ground as a tool in computing. The shift in thinking results from advances in neuroscience and computer science, and from the prod of necessity.
[...]
Several biologically inspired paths are being explored by computer scientists in universities and corporate laboratories worldwide. But researchers from I.B.M. and four universities — Cornell, Columbia, the University of Wisconsin, and the University of California, Merced — are engaged in a project that seems particularly intriguing.

NYTimes

Entangling Diamonds at Room Temperature

2011-12-03T10:42:00.000-06:00

Abstract

Quantum entanglement in the motion of macroscopic solid bodies has implications both for quantum technologies and foundational studies of the boundary between the quantum and classical worlds. Entanglement is usually fragile in room-temperature solids, owing to strong interactions both internally and with the noisy environment. We generated motional entanglement between vibrational states of two spatially separated, millimeter-sized diamonds at room temperature. By measuring strong nonclassical correlations between Raman-scattered photons, we showed that the quantum state of the diamonds has positive concurrence with 98% probability. Our results show that entanglement can persist in the classical context of moving macroscopic solids in ambient conditions.

_______________

In the spirit of the season, let me say, "Ho, ho, ho!"

Is Quantum Wavefunction a Real Physical Object?

2011-11-19T09:28:00.004-06:00

Quantum theorem shakes foundations

The wavefunction is a real physical object after all, says researcher.

Eugenie Samuel Reich

17 November 2011

At the heart of the weirdness for which the field of quantum mechanics is famous is the wavefunction, a powerful but mysterious entity that is used to determine the probabilities that quantum particles will have certain properties. Now, a preprint posted online on 14 November¹ reopens the question of what the wavefunction represents — with an answer that could rock quantum theory to its core. Whereas many physicists have generally interpreted the wavefunction as a statistical tool that reflects our ignorance of the particles being measured, the authors of the latest paper argue that, instead, it is physically real.

“I don't like to sound hyperbolic, but I think the word 'seismic' is likely to apply to this paper,” says Antony Valentini, a theoretical physicist specializing in quantum foundations at Clemson University in South Carolina.

_______________________

Max Born introduced Heisenberg to matrix mechanics. He also gave us the statistical interpretation of the wave function.

Here's what Born said at the time: "Anyone dissatisfied with these ideas may feel free to assume that there are additional parameters not yet introduced into the theory which determine the individual event."

Try finding that little quip in the standard textbooks. Today we call these additional parameters "hidden variables." They are also known as the missing "elements of reality" postulated by EPR.

For those just now joining the discussion, my mild suggestion comes down to this: The so-called secondary qualities of observation just are these variables and are only "hidden" in plain view.

Notice that this move addresses another minor issue:

What we see depends on light entering the eye. Furthermore we do not even perceive what enters the eye. The things transmitted are waves or—as Newton thought—minute particles, and the things seen are colors. Locke met this difficulty by a theory of primary and secondary qualities. Namely, there are some attributes of the matter which we do perceive. These are the primary qualities, and there are other things which we perceive, such as colors, which are not attributes of matter, but are perceived by us as if they were such attributes. These are the secondary qualities of matter.
Why should we perceive secondary qualities? It seems an unfortunate arrangement that we should perceive a lot of things that are not there. Yet this is what the theory of secondary qualities in fact comes to. There is now reigning in philosophy and in science an apathetic acquiescence in the conclusion that no coherent account can be given of nature as it is disclosed to us in sense-awareness, without dragging in its relation to mind.

~Whitehead, The Concept of Nature

Shocker: Physics and chemistry unscientific

2011-09-02T08:59:00.005-05:00

I was reading a piece in Wired recently when I came across a remark that stopped me cold:

"No serious researcher I know believes in an electromagnetic theory of consciousness," Bernard Baars wrote in an e-mail. Baars is a neurobiologist and co-editor of Consciousness & Cognition, another scientific journal in the field. "It's not really worth talking about scientifically."

Well, this is a damning indictment, as is. One need not delve deeply into quantum theory to learn that the brain's chemistry is all about electromagnetic fields:

I would like to again impress you with the vast range of phenomena that the theory of quantum electrodynamics describes: It's easier to say it backwards: the theory describes all the phenomena of the physical world except the gravitational effect [...] and radioactive phenomena, which involve nuclei shifting in their energy levels. So if we leave out gravity and radioactivity (more properly, nuclear physics) what have we got left? Gasoline burning in automobiles, foam and bubbles, the hardness of salt or copper, the stiffness of steel. In fact, biologists are trying to interpret as much as they can about life in terms of chemistry, and as I already explained, the theory behind chemistry is quantum electrodynamics.

Feynman, QED: the strange theory of light and matter

It gets better. Freeman Dyson, in a classic article in Scientific American, tells us pretty clearly that "There is nothing else except these [quantum] fields: the whole of the material universe is built of them."

The brain is presumably a material thing and therefore just is a collection of fields. EM fields are clearly the only real contender among those fields if we are looking for a physical locus for consciousness.

Abdua Salam shared a Nobel for his work on the Standard Model and said: "[All] chemical binding is electromagnetic in origin, and so are all phenomena of nerve impulses."

Which seems clear enough.

In recent news, there's this: Magnetic Fields Spook the Brain, which provides another nice basis in reality.

I suppose Baars and his terribly serious colleagues are free to fabricate a physics that is more to their liking, but feel compelled to advise them that they have picked a hard row to hoe.

I used to worry, back when I was a young man pursuing these matters, that I was missing some essential point. Surely some wiser head had considered the path I was treading and rejected it for reasons I was too dim to discern.

Only to discover that the vast majority of researchers were (and are) nearly clueless as to the basic physics and chemistry underlying neuroscience.

I'm going to go pull my hair out, now.

Physics of life: The dawn of quantum biology

2011-06-19T18:24:00.000-05:00

On the face of it, quantum effects and living organisms seem to occupy utterly different realms. The former are usually observed only on the nanometre scale, surrounded by hard vacuum, ultra-low temperatures and a tightly controlled laboratory environment. The latter inhabit a macroscopic world that is warm, messy and anything but controlled. A quantum phenomenon such as 'coherence', in which the wave patterns of every part of a system stay in step, wouldn't last a microsecond in the tumultuous realm of the cell.

Or so everyone thought.* But discoveries in recent years suggest that nature knows a few tricks that physicists don't: coherent quantum processes may well be ubiquitous in the natural world.

___________________

*I assume they mean "everyone who is anyone."

Quantum: Einstein, Bohr & the Great Debate

2010-10-18T10:20:00.002-05:00

Manjit Kumar is a born storyteller and one of a precious few who are at home in both physics and in the broader philosophical tradition.

His great achievement in this terrific new book consists in having set the record straight about the Einstein/Bohr debate. The vast majority of writers, less astute than he, have generally fallen in line with the Copenhagen doctrine without giving the matter much thought.

It's an expensive scandal. Consider that lasers and transistors are essentially quantum devices -- gizmos which underpin our high tech civilization. What happens when the foundations of quantum theory shift, then? Precisely.

So the big 411 comes near the end of the book, where we find evidence of a dramatic sea-change under way:

A theory that yields "maybe" as an answer should be recognized as an inaccurate theory.

~Gerard 't Hooft

Can it really be true that Einstein, in any significant sense, was as profoundly "wrong" as the followers of Bohr maintain? I do not believe so. I would, myself, side strongly with Einstein in his belief in a submiscroscopic reality, and with his conviction that present-day quantum mechanics is fundamentally incomplete.

~Roger Penrose

Golden ratio discovered in a quantum world

2010-01-26T11:50:00.001-06:00

I would like to draw attention to a few major points:

When applying a magnetic field at right angles to an aligned spin the magnetic chain will transform into a new state called quantum critical, which can be thought of as a quantum version of a fractal pattern.

Fractals are characterized by self-similarity across temporal-spatial scales. I have often argued that it makes a kind of sense to suppose that “neural form follows quantum function,” in this wise:

If Paul Churchland is correct about the neural implementation of matrix-valued operators, then that is rather interesting, since that is precisely the sort of mathematics we find at work at the quantum level of neural function. Which would seem to make a kind of sense, if, as we suggest, the form of neural networks follows the underlying function of those quantum processes which mediate neural activity. Given that that the dendritic forms of neurons are aptly captured by the mathematics of fractals, we might expect this kind of self-similarity across scales.

(from: Are Perceptual Fields Quantum Fields?)

I did not know how far down the scale we could go, however — did not know how to ground fractal behavior in the quantum realm. So this is welcome news.

By a curious coincidence, a young scholar recently sent me a rather old piece by Hofstadter, where already we see fractal patterns emerging at the quantum level.

Another point of interest in the article on the golden ratio:

“Such discoveries are leading physicists to speculate that the quantum, atomic scale world may have its own underlying order. Similar surprises may await researchers in other materials in the quantum critical state.”

Well, this kind of “underlying order” suggests “hidden variables,” and in this connection I would like to draw attention to another fascinating development:

’Loopy’ Photons Test Hidden-Variable Predictions

Again, this is welcome news to me in view of the following:

Let us attend to the simplicity of colors. For colors are so simple, we might think of them as elemental, and so perhaps count them among the proper elements of an EPR-complete quantum theory. What does this mean? Let’s remind ourselves of what Einstein & Co., said in their seminal work on the (in)completeness of QM:

In attempting to judge the success of a physical theory, we may ask ourselves two questions: (1) “Is the theory correct?” and (2) “Is the description given by the theory complete?” It is only in the case in which positive answers may be given to both of these questions, that the concepts of the theory may be said to be satisfactory. The correctness of the theory is judged by the degree of agreement between the conclusions of the theory and human experience…

Whatever the meaning assigned to the term complete, the following requirement for a complete theory seems to be a necessary one: every element of the physical reality must have a counterpart in the physical theory.

We see that our investigation naturally leads us to the question: Are the secondary properties among the “hidden variables” of QM?

I would like to begin an attempt to tie all this together in respect of spectral theory and, in particular, spectral triples.

Colors and sounds come to us in the spectra of rainbows and the notes of the scale. The explanation of atomic spectra provided the first big win for QM.

Here is what Connes writes about the explanatory power of spectral triples in a very nice collection of essays edited by Majid, On Space & Time .

The new paradigm of spectral triples passes a number of tests to qualify as a replacement of Riemannian geometry in the noncommutative world:

It contains the Riemannian paradigm as a special case.
It does not require the commutativity of coordinates.
It covers the spaces of leaves of foliations.
It covers spaces of fractal, complex or infinite dimension.
It applies to the analogue of symmetry groups (compact quantum groups).
It provides a way of expressing the full Standard Model coupled to Einstein gravity as pure gravity on a modified spacetime geometry.
It allows for quantum corrections to the geometry.

This all seems quite suggestive to me, as this approach looks like a natural geometry for bringing these various developments under one roof, as it were.

Thus, e.g., in one of his papers, Connes writes: “The physical action only depends on [the spectrum] Σ.”

Well, of course, the action is now known to be determined by the symmtries of nature (Weinberg, e.g.), and so we have a direct route to the Lagrangian and very nearly all of classical & quantum mechanics:

Roughly speaking, force is the space derivative of energy and the time derivative of momentum. You can take one more step up the ladder: energy and momentum are both derivatives of action: energy is its time derivative, momentum its space derivative. (Wilczek)

Finally, we see instances of field behavior influenced by number — in the transcendental golden ratio and in Hofstadter’s rational and irrational numbers. I earlier alluded to the well-known relations between musical tones and numerical ratios — and here again it seems as though Nature is hinting at wonderful things remaining to be discovered.

Now, the foregoing is obviously all very rough and preliminary, but it seems like a promising avenue for further exploration.

Researchers crack part of the neuronal code

2009-12-22T11:19:00.001-06:00

Together with colleagues from the Graz University of Technology, scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research in Frankfurt have succeeded in taking a step towards achieving this. They have shown that early processing stages in the brain gather information over an extended period.

How does the brain store detailed information from sensory stimuli? How much can researchers read from the activity of certain regions of the brain? Current findings confirm a new theory. Up to now, scientists had assumed that the early stages of information processing in the brain took place gradually, that is that one stimulus was processed after another in a conveyor-belt-like sequence. This idea must now be revised. As Danko Nikolic from the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research and his Austrian colleagues Wolfgang Maass and Stefan Häusler have shown, the activity in early brain areas depends on stimuli that arose some time ago. "The brain functions like a jug of water into which stones are thrown and, as a result, generate waves," explains Nikolic. "The waves overlap but the information as to how many stones were thrown into the jug and when they were thrown in is retained in the resulting complex activity patterns of the fluid."

The brain is clearly able to render this information usable and, for example, to superimpose images seen in succession. The duration and intensity of the continuing effect of images that have just been seen corresponds to a very detailed visual memory also known as iconic memory. If you see an image and close your eyes immediately afterwards it remains visible for a short while. It may be located in the primary visual cortex.

http://www.physorg.com/news180694657.html

__________________________________

At the risk of belaboring the obvious, the foregoing is in clear accord with my own views regarding perception, consciousness & superposition, where the waves being superposed just are photonic waves/state vectors:

http://wordassociation1.net/FieldWork.html

Rewiring Neuroscience

2009-12-17T11:32:00.002-06:00

by John Harris

PREVIEW OF THE BOOK

In the early 1990s, our long accepted (cc 1926) understanding of how a nerve encodes and conveys information was unexpectedly overturned by experiments on fast flying bats and insects. Around 1995, we began to realize we no longer knew what neurons actually do.

In the fourteen years since, many competing hypotheses have been advanced, suggesting various alternate neural encoding schemes. But the question of how a nerve communicates remains unanswered. It is a huge, gaping hole, at the most basic level, in our understanding of how the nervous system works.

This book is about what would happen if, as a thought experiment, we were to rewire the human nervous system using a multichannel neuron. It explores the impact of this hypothetical "smarter" neuron on vision, memory and the brain.

The theoretical payoff is enormous. Suddenly the brain, which operates on impulses moving at velocities barely better than highway speeds – becomes in theory a dazzlingly fast and competent thinking machine. Which is, of course, exactly what the brain is in real life.

Woo-hoo! Now, if they can get the physics right...

2009-12-09T08:33:00.002-06:00

MIT Plans to Rebuild Artificial Intelligence from the Ground Up

By Clay DillowPosted 12.07.2009

After 50 years and countless dead ends, incremental progress, and modest breakthroughs, artificial intelligence researchers are asking for a do-over. The $5 million Mind Machine Project (MMP), a patchwork team of two dozen academics, students and researchers, intends to go back to the discipline's beginnings, rebuilding the field from the ground up. With 20/20 hindsight, a few generations worth of experience, and better, faster technology, this time researchers in AI -- an ambiguous field to begin with -- plan to get things right.

The study of AI is a half a century old, beginning with lofty expectations at a 1956 conference but quickly fragmenting into different specializations and sub-fields. The MMP wants to roll back the clock, fixing early assumptions that are now foundations of the field and redefining what the objectives of AI research should be.

The fundamental problem, it seems, is that the mind, memory and body function both together and separately to solve any number of problems, and the way they work together (and alone) varies from problem to problem. The human mind alone applies various systems and functions to any given problem. Many AI solutions have attempted to solve all the problems with one system or function rather than multiple systems working together as in the human mind, a "silver bullet" approach that hinders real progress.
_________________

Of special interest is the following teaser:

MMP researchers also intend to bring computer science and physiology together, forcing computers to work within the confines of physical space and time just like the body does.

High-Speed Robot Hand

2009-11-18T10:38:00.006-06:00

Demonstrates Dexterity and Skillful Manipulation

by Travis Deyle

A few blogs are passing around videos of the Ishikawa Komuro Lab's high-speed robot hand performing impressive acts of dexterity and skillful manipulation. However, the video being passed around is slight on details. Meanwhile, their video presentation at ICRA 2009 (which took place in May in Kobe, Japan) has an informative narration and demonstrates additional capabilities. I have included this video below, which shows the manipulator dribbling a ping-pong ball, spinning a pen, throwing a ball, tying knots, grasping a grain of rice with tweezers, and tossing / re-grasping a cellphone!

Scientists create the first programmable quantum processor

2009-11-18T10:35:00.000-06:00

A new system uses an entangled two-qubit quantum gate alongside a single-qubit gate to create a quantum computer that can perform virtually any operation.

By Casey Johnston | Last updated November 18, 2009 9:46 AM CT

Scientists have developed a number of quantum computing systems that use ions or electrons as bits of data; mathematical "operations" can be performed on them with beams of light or electrical pulses. Until recently, however, these systems could only perform the specific tasks they were designed to do. But a group of NIST scientists have published a description of a quantum processor that can receive virtually any set of instructions and perform them on a set of inputs—in short, they've made the first programmable quantum processor.

In order to do general calculations, a computer must be able to perform an arbitrary number of unitary transformations, operations that change the state while preserving the structure of the system. Unlike a regular computer, a quantum computer stores information in "qubits," or quantum bits. A regular bit may hold only one piece of data (0 or 1), but a qubit can hold a superposition of 0 and 1; it only adopts a definite value when measured.

NY Times: Color is energy! No, wavelength! No ...!

2009-10-29T14:37:00.007-05:00

In yesterday's edition we read:

Astronomers said the gamma-ray race was one of the most stringent tests yet of a bedrock principle of modern physics: Einstein’s proclamation in his 1905 theory of relativity that the speed of light is constant and independent of its color, or energy; its direction; or how you yourself are moving.

Why does our paper of record simply state "We really don't know what the fark we're talking about here."? Well, because that would be undignified.

As I never, ever tire of repeating, color per se is not represented in physics as traditionally formulated. Don't believe me? Here's Erwin Schrödinger to back me up.

If you ask a physicist what is his idea of yellow light, he will tell you that it is transversal electromagnetic waves of wavelength in the neighborhood of 590 millimicrons. If you ask him: But where does yellow come in? he will say: In my picture not at all, but these kinds of vibrations, when they hit the retina of a healthy eye, give the person whose eye it is the sensation of yellow.

When not dabbling in quantum theory, Schrödinger was, in his day, the foremost authority on what is called color science. Other dilettantes who have turned their attention to this topic include Maxwell, Weyl, Feynman and Einstein -- but what did they know?

If only colors would just go away! But there they are, right in front of us, every waking moment, seemingly a major feature of the real world. Ooh! I know! Why not say that they're all illusory?! Don't laugh -- cry, rather -- for it's been done.

Oh, but then we have all these illusory measurements to explain.

Whatever are we to do? Why not begin at the beginning?

Newton worked out the spectrum...

Awakening Paralyzed Limbs

2009-10-24T11:38:00.001-05:00

Brain signals can drive arm movement in a monkey with a paralyzed arm.

By Emily Singer

A monkey with a paralyzed arm can still grasp a ball, thanks to a novel system designed to translate brain signals into complex muscle movements in real time. The research, presented at the Society for Neuroscience conference in Chicago this week, could one day allow people with spinal cord injury to control their own limbs.

"This is a big leap forward--they show the monkey using the ability to artificially contract his hand to actually pick up a ball," says Krishna Shenoy, a neuroscientist at Stanford University. "I think it's the first demonstration of a cortically controlled electrical stimulation system performing a task that would ultimately be useful for a human patient."

While spinal cord injury keeps the brain's electrical signals from reaching muscles, people paralyzed by these injuries often have intact nerves and muscles in their limbs. A technique called functional electrical stimulation (FES), in which implanted electrodes deliver electrical current to trigger muscle contractions, provides a way to reconnect this loop.

Notes & Neurons

2009-10-22T09:02:00.002-05:00

This is thought-provoking panel discussion. One of the participants mindlessly repeats the dogma regarding primary & secondary qualities -- i.e., sound only happens in our brains -- but it's fun nonetheless.

Notes & Neurons

Penrose Kind o' Gets It

2009-10-19T11:29:00.002-05:00

Erwin Schrödinger, who created that equation, was considered a genius. Surely he appreciated that conflict.
Schrödinger was as aware of this as anybody. He talks about his hypothetical cat and says, more or less, “Okay, if you believe what my equation says, you must believe that this cat is dead and alive at the same time.” He says, “That’s obviously nonsense, because it’s not like that. Therefore, my equation can’t be right for a cat. So there must be some other factor involved.”

When you accept the weirdness of quantum mechanics, you have to give up the idea of space-time as we know it from Einstein. You come up with something that just isn’t right.

So Schrödinger himself never believed that the cat analogy reflected the nature of reality?
Oh yes, I think he was pointing this out. I mean, look at three of the biggest figures in quantum mechanics, Schrödinger, Einstein, and Paul Dirac. They were all quantum skeptics in a sense. Dirac is the one whom people find most surprising, because he set up the whole foundation, the general framework of quantum mechanics. People think of him as this hard-liner, but he was very cautious in what he said. When he was asked, “What’s the answer to the measurement problem?” his response was, “Quantum mechanics is a provisional theory. Why should I look for an answer in quantum mechanics?” He didn’t believe that it was true. But he didn’t say this out loud much.

Discover

DIY Image Recognition With NNs

2009-10-13T09:05:00.003-05:00

Look familiar?

easyNeurons provides environment for creating and training neural networks, which can be saved as ready-to-use java components. Also it provides specialised image recognition tool to train neural networks for image recognition. Creating and training neural network for image recognition consists of the following steps:

1. Choose images to recognize and create training set
2. Create neural network
3. Train neural network
4. Test neural network
5. Save & deploy neural network

You can use the online demo and test images provided here to try this tool.

Duh: What Happened To Theoretical AI?

2009-07-01T07:58:00.004-05:00

by David Gelernter, 06.22.09, 06:00 PM EDT, Forbes

The two major mystery-boxes of mind-science (each decorated with an intriguing question mark) are "consciousness" and "thought." Both mysteries are notoriously hard to unravel, but computing ought to help us understand thought, which is (on one level) a process or series of actions--like computing itself. Consciousness, on the other hand, is a state of being--and, despite the best efforts of theoretical AI, there is no reason to believe that a computer will ever achieve this state, or that software can bring it about.

As far as we know, consciousness can only be created by a mind, and a mind can only be realized by a human's (or some other advanced creature's) brain and body working together. If, in the near future, a grinning robot should walk up to you at a party and say, "Hi, my name is Bob; pleased to meet you," you'd be apt to cut it some slack and assume that it really is--on some level and in some way--"pleased." But in fact there's no reason to believe that any robot is pleased to meet you or ever will be, has ever been pleased to meet anybody, or has ever experienced the state of mind we call "pleasure" under any circumstances at all. So far as we know, software cannot re-create the sort of inner mental world human beings inhabit.

___________

Unbelievably, Gelernter is on the right track, up to the point where he writes "there's no reason to believe that any robot is pleased to meet you or ever will be, has ever been pleased."

Why is there "no reason"? What makes this proposition -- and many others like it -- so high a wall?

Well, because it's the highest wall of that box everybody's trying to think outside of -- where science is concerned, at any rate. It is the single greatest unexamined premise of our traditional worldview or paradigm (to use a word now out of fashion, a victim of its own success).

That wall is the dusty barrier between primary and secondary qualities, bequeathed to us by Democritus and the other atomists of Greek antiquity. Reinforced by Galileo, Newton and several of their most famous philosophical contemporaries, this division is so much a part of our thinking that we are typically unconscious of it.

Locke gets the credit for having named the distinction:

These I call original or primary qualities of the body, which I think we may observe to produce simple ideas in us, viz., solidity, extension, figure, motion or rest, and number.

Secondly, such qualities which in truth are nothing in the objects themselves, but powers to produce various sensations in us by their primary qualities, i.e. by the bulk, figure, texture, and motion of their insensible parts, as colour, sounds, tastes, etc., these I call secondary qualities.

And yet colors behave like vectors and so do the photons which bring them to us: SPECTRA

But I have gone into all that at length on too many occasions and I am not eager to rehearse my ideas here, but will be content to point the way.

History teaches us

Quanta & Consciousness

Field Effect Technologies

Spooky computers closer to reality

2009-06-29T09:23:00.001-05:00

Solid-state quantum processing demonstrated.

Katharine Sanderson

The computers of tomorrow could be quantum not classical, using the quantum world's strange properties to vastly increase memory and speed up information processing. But making quantum computing parts from standard kit has proved difficult so far.

Now physicist Leonardo DiCarlo of Yale University, New Haven, and his colleagues have made the first solid-state quantum processor, using similar techniques to the silicon chip industry. The processor has used programs called quantum algorithms to solve two different problems. The work is published in Nature¹.

Reverse-Engineering the Quantum Compass of Birds

2009-06-24T10:46:00.001-05:00

"Still, no quantum mind connection," say most idiots.

Scientists are coming ever closer to understanding the cellular navigation tools that guide birds in their unerring, globe-spanning migrations.

The latest piece of the puzzle is superoxide, an oxygen molecule that may combine with light-sensitive proteins to form an in-eye compass, allowing birds to see Earth’s magnetic field.

“It connects from the subatomic world to a whole bird flying,” said Michael Edidin, an editor of Biphysical Journal, which published the study last week. “That’s exciting!”

The superoxide theory is proposed by Biophysicist Klaus Schulten of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, lead author of the study and a pioneer in avian magnetoreception. Schulten first hypothesized in 1978 that some sort of biochemical reaction took place in birds’ eyes, most likely producing electrons whose spin was affected by subtle magnetic gradients.

Wired Science

Visual system that detects movement, colors & textures created

2009-06-08T09:31:00.001-05:00

Mimicking the way in which a retina works is a hard as it sounds. Scientists from Stanford University, in the United States, have spent the past two years working on imitating the way in which information is processed in biological systems, in other words through the transmission of events in specifically connected networks (where information is captured and transmitted at the same time).

Now a research team from the UGR has evaluated the degree of precision of different models in estimating movement, and have combined the responses of four movement detection cells, two of which are static (on and off), and two transitory (decrease and increase). "One of our developments is a multimodal attention operator, which can detect movement in objects of different colours and textures", Fran Barranco, one of the researchers involved in this project, tells SINC.

The objective of this study, which has been published in the latest issue of the journal IEEE Transactions on Systems. Man and Cybernetics, was to combine movement and attention based on information provided by the artificial retina, a visual system capable of selectively capturing moving objects in real time.

The use of an event-driven model, which makes it possible to focus only on areas of activity, has been fundamental, both in the movement processing model as well as in the multimodal selective attention model created in Granada.

Synchronized Brain Waves Focus Our Attention

2009-05-28T17:12:00.002-05:00

Weird Science

Separate brain regions firing in unison may be what keeps us focused on important things while we ignore distractions.

A deluge of visual information hits our eyes every second, yet we’re able to focus on the minuscule fraction that’s relevant to our goals. When we try to find our way through an unfamiliar area of town, for example, we manage to ignore the foliage, litter and strolling pedestrians, and focus our attention on the street signs.

Now, researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have discovered that the brain’s control center syncs up to its visual center with high-frequency brain waves, directing attention to select features of the visual world.

“It’s been known that the prefrontal cortex plays an important role in focusing our attention, but the mystery was how,” said neuroscientist Robert Desimone, who led the study, published in Science Friday. “Now we have some insight into how it has that focusing role — through this synchrony with our sensory systems.”

_______________________

Let me just point out that I've been arguing for years that this kind of synchrony would be essential to preserving the phase relations of incident waves/vectors -- and necessary for building up conscious representations of the environment, as is most easily 'seen' in vision.

Quantum Theory May Explain Wishful Thinking

2009-04-16T11:17:00.000-05:00

Slashdot.org

"Humans don't always make the most rational decisions. As studies have shown, even when logic and reasoning point in one direction, sometimes we chose the opposite route, motivated by personal bias or simply 'wishful thinking.' This paradoxical human behavior has resisted explanation by classical decision theory for over a decade. But now, scientists have shown that a quantum probability model can provide a simple explanation for human decision-making — and may eventually help explain the success of human cognition overall."

Robots begin to evolve

2009-02-05T07:57:00.002-06:00

New Scientist

04 February 2009

by Paul Marks

LIVING creatures took millions of years to evolve from amphibians to four-legged mammals - with larger, more complex brains to match. Now an evolving robot has performed a similar trick in hours, thanks to a software "brain" that automatically grows in size and complexity as its physical body develops.

Existing robots cannot usually cope with physical changes - the addition of a sensor or new type of limb, say - without a complete redesign of their control software, which can be time-consuming and expensive.

So artificial intelligence engineer Christopher MacLeod and his colleagues at the Robert Gordon University in Aberdeen, UK, created a robot that adapts to such changes by mimicking biological evolution. "If we want to make really complex humanoid robots with ever more sensors and more complex behaviours, it is critical that they are able to grow in complexity over time - just like biological creatures did," he says.

As animals evolved, additions of small groups of neurons on top of existing neural structures are thought to have allowed their brain complexity to increase steadily, he says, keeping pace with the development of new limbs and senses. In the same way, Macleod's robot's brain assigns new clusters of "neurons" to adapt to new additions to its body.

The robot is controlled by a neural network - software that mimics the brain's learning process. This comprises a set of interconnected processing nodes which can be trained to produce desired actions. For example, if the goal is to remain balanced and the robot receives inputs from sensors that it is tipping over, it will move its limbs in an attempt to right itself. Such actions are shaped by adjusting the importance, or weighting, of the input signals to each node. Certain combinations of these sensor inputs cause the node to fire a signal - to drive a motor, for example. If this action works, the combination is kept. If it fails, and the robot falls over, the robot will make adjustments and try something different next time.

Finding the best combinations is not easy - so roboticists often use an evolutionary algorithm to "evolve" the optimal control system. The EA randomly creates large numbers of control "genomes" for the robot. These behaviour patterns are tested in training sessions, and the most successful genomes are "bred" together to create still better versions - until the best control system is arrived at.

HoloGenomics on Google Tech Talks

2008-11-03T12:55:00.003-06:00

I'm delighted to report that Dr. Andras Pellionisz has recently been recognized for his far-sighted work in genetics.

Pellionisz inspired a generation of neuroscientists -- including me -- with his "tensor network theory" a generation ago.

Now, his insights into the recursive nature of genetic programming have been borne out by exciting new discoveries in the emerging field of epigenetics.

Beyond its great inherent scientific interest -- turning a major axiom of Darwinism on its head -- epigenetics promises an entire raft of novel therapies for all sorts of medical disorders.

As Pellionisz explained recently on Google Tech Talks, HoloGenomics brings together genetics, epigenetics, genomics and IT under one roof.

In a more recent installment of Nova, I was happy to learn that our cell phones use fractal antennas to pull in many more signals than would otherwise be practical.

These antennas are obviously quite small -- in the way the coastline of England is "small" -- and that got me thinking again about the fractal arborizations of dendritic trees which characterize our neurons.

Does this feature allow them to model the many fractal objects in our natural environment?

To pull in signals that more traditional kinds of artificial sensors would miss?

New Q-Computer Component

2008-08-27T10:04:00.002-05:00

ANN ARBOR, Mich.—The fastest quantum computer bit that exploits the main advantage of the qubit over the conventional bit has been demonstrated by researchers at University of Michigan, U.S. Naval Research Laboratory and the University of California at San Diego.

The scientists used lasers to create an initialized quantum state of this solid-state qubit at rates of about a gigahertz, or a billion times per second. They can also use lasers to achieve fundamental steps toward programming it.

A conventional bit can be a 0 or a 1. A quantum bit, or qubit, can be both at the same time. Until now, scientists couldn't stabilize that duality.

Physics professor Duncan Steel, doctoral student Xiaodong Xu and their colleagues used lasers to coherently, or stably, trap the spin of one electron confined in a single semiconductor quantum dot. A quantum dot is like a transistor in a conventional computer.

The scientists trapped the spin in a dark state in which they can arbitrarily adjust the amount of 0 and 1 the qubit represents. They call this state "dark" because it does not absorb light. Therefore, light does not cause loss of coherence between the two states. In other words, the light does not destabilize the qubit. A paper on these findings will be published in Nature Physics and is available early in the online edition.

Bionic Man

2008-06-10T10:23:00.002-05:00

World's first commercial bionic hand

By Roger Highfield, Science Editor

Last Updated: 12:01am BST 10/06/2008

The world's first commercial bionic hand has grabbed Britain's top engineering prize.

Gripping stuff - the bionic hand

Revolutionary bionic arm unveiled

Computer operated by power of thought

For years, the best doctors could do was equip disabled people with a
glorified claw, a pincer-like device that mimics the opening and closing of a thumb and forefinger.

That has all changed thanks to a more realistic bionic hand unveiled by the Scottish company Touch Bionics, called the i-LIMB Hand, the culmination of decades of research.

The Livingston based company has now won the 2008 Royal Academy of Engineering MacRobert Award for its i-LIMB Hand, a prosthetic device that looks and acts like a real human hand with five individually powered digits.

Ray Edwards, 53, who had all four limbs amputated in 1987 after developing blood poisoning (septicaemia) in the wake of cancer treatment, had the i-LIMB hand fitted a month ago.

"When I heard about this hand that looked like a human hand I had to get one. I'm right-handed and have got used to a carbon-fibre hook worked by a cord on that arm. So I asked Touch Bionics to put the i-LIMB hand on my left arm instead.

"When I first looked down and saw the i-LIMB hand I just cried - i-LIMB has helped me more psychologically than physically. That was the first time in 21 years that I had seen a hand opening there - it made me feel I was just Ray again. You can do so much with technology but it's got to make the user happy - and i-LIMB does."

Bread Crumbs

2008-06-05T13:38:00.005-05:00

The physical action only depends upon [the spectrum sigma]. (Connes)

In an old fairy tale ("Hansel and Gretel"), one of the children left a trail of bread crumbs as they made their way through a dark forest, so that they could find their way home again by following the crumbs. (It didn't work out, but never mind.)

I'm in a similar situation -- trying to follow a number of clues (below). This is another in a series I think of as "arguably best kept to myself, but making a record anyway in case I get hit by a truck."

Here are the clues:

1) Color & sound vectors

2) Hilbert space vectors

3) Operator theory

4) Spectral theory (pdf)

5) Matrix theory

6) M-theory

7) Dirichlet membranes

8) Harmonic relations

9) Projection operators

I've recently learned that they are, in fact, all related -- which gives me further confidence in my nose in re: sniffing out relations -- except that, in the case of #1, no one seems to have carried out the obvious analysis of the fact that we know that vibrating strings & membranes give us characteristic (eigen!) sounds and colors. This is no doubt due, again, to the "apathetic acquiescence" noted by Whitehead:

What we see depends on light entering the eye. Furthermore we do not even perceive what enters the eye. The things transmitted are waves or–as Newton thought–minute particles, and the things seen are colors. Locke met this difficulty by a theory of primary and secondary qualities. Namely, there are some attributes of the matter which we do perceive. These are the primary qualities, and there are other things which we perceive, such as colors, which are not attributes of matter, but are perceived by us as if they were such attributes. These are the secondary qualities of matter.

Why should we perceive secondary qualities? It seems an unfortunate arrangement that we should perceive a lot of things that are not there. Yet this is what the theory of secondary qualities in fact comes to. There is now reigning in philosophy and in science an apathetic acquiescence in the conclusion that no coherent account can be given of nature as it is disclosed to us in sense-awareness, without dragging in its relation to mind.

Update!

I’m delighted to report that the illustrious Alain Connes is all over this business regarding action, symmetry, spectral theory, operator theory, projective geometry—and his own great bailiwick, noncommutative geometry, which looks as though it flows from Heisenberg’s matrices.

Moreover, his writing is wonderfully clear—in the great French tradition of Pascal, Montaigne, Descartes and Voltaire.

There is, of course, quite another tendency among certain French intellectuals—but the less said about that, the better.

Update 2

I continue to delve into spectral theory & related topics and, while my efforts are still quite preliminary, I now feel quite confident in a wonderful generality that flows, in my mind, from the following observation from Helmholtz, which has the simplicity of genius:

"Similar light produces, under like conditions, a like sensation of color."

OK:

Substitute "same state vector (psi)" for "similar light."

Now substitute "same operator or sequence of operators" for "like conditions."

We now have a simple, natural way to recover a vast data set from everyday experience in the standard formalism of quantum theory, to wit:

The same things, under the same conditions, look, sound, feel, taste and smell the same -- i.e., exhibit the same spectra of secondary properties.

We therefore answer the problem addressed by North Whitehead, e.g., where he wrote:

"Why should we perceive secondary qualities? It seems an unfortunate arrangement that we should perceive a lot of things that are not there. Yet this is what the theory of secondary qualities in fact comes to. There is now reigning in philosophy and in science an apathetic acquiescence in the conclusion that no coherent account can be given of nature as it is disclosed to us in sense-awareness, without dragging in its relation to mind."

I've also found a few terrific resources on spectral theory:

"Highlights in the History of Spectral Theory," (Steen)

American Mathematical Monthly 80 (1973) 359-381.

"What Does the Spectral Theorem Say?" (Halmos)

Amer. Math. Monthly 70 (1963), 241–247

Finite-dimensional vector spaces (Halmos)

Fractal Genetics

2008-05-13T12:44:00.002-05:00

One of the biggest thrills of my life came one day when I got an email from Dr. Andras Pellionisz, whose work with Llinas on 'tensor network theory' inspired a generation of neuroscientists, including the Churchlands.

He wrote to tell me how delighted he was with my paper, "Are Perceptual Fields Quantum Fields?"

Pellionisz drew attention early on to the fractal character of dendritic trees.

He then moved on to genetics, where he argued that gene expression is not, as was dogmatically asserted, a one-way street from DNA --> organism, but rather a recursive process akin to the generation of fractals.

This latter work has recently found vindication in the recent discoveries that go under the rubric of 'epigenetics.' I am, of course, very happy for Andras, who has since become a friend and collaborator and who is now Director of Genome Informatics at Mitrionics in Silicon Valley.

Now, we learn of yet more recent work on 'nanotrees,' which result from crystalline 'defects' in nanowires and which exhibit both fractal characteristics and, in some cases, a spiral shape which suggests a kinship with the helical structure of DNA -- an aperiodic crystal.

I wish I knew what all this means, but ... It seems clear enough that we have here a direct path from the symmetries of quantum theory thru fractal crystals thru DNA and on up the ladder to fractal neurons -- thus lending further plausibility to my thesis that 'neural form follows quantum function.'

What's also clear is that these developments open entire new vistas for R&D on medical applications by way of genetic therapies. (Kuh-ching!)

Iron Man

2008-05-10T10:11:00.005-05:00

The prospect of slipping into a robotic exoskeleton that could enhance strength, keep the body active while recovering from an injury or even serve as a prosthetic limb has great appeal. Unlike the svelt body armor donned by Iron Man, however, most exoskeletons to date have looked more like clunky spare parts cobbled together.

Japan's CYBERDYNE, Inc. is hoping to change that with a sleek, white exoskeleton now in the works that it says can augment the body's own strength or do the work of ailing (or missing) limbs. The company is confident enough in its new technology to have started construction on a new lab expected to mass-produce up to 500 robotic power suits (think Star Wars storm trooper without the helmet) annually, beginning in October, according to Japan's Kyodo News Web site.
SciAm

Cracks in the Wall

2008-05-09T16:31:00.007-05:00

One of the biggest sources of encouragement I've had over the years derives from the fact that the greatest geniuses of all time agree with me. Here, for example, is Weyl:

It seems useful to me to develop a little more precisely the "geometry" valid in the two-dimensional manifold of perceived colors. For one can do mathematics also in the domain of these colors. The fundamental operation which can be performed upon them is mixing: one lets colored lights combine with one another in space ...

Well, certain remarks from another luminous figure have recently come to my attention:

What we see depends on light entering the eye. Furthermore we do not even perceive what enters the eye. The things transmitted are waves or–as Newton thought–minute particles, and the things seen are colors. Locke met this difficulty by a theory of primary and secondary qualities. Namely, there are some attributes of the matter which we do perceive. These are the primary qualities, and there are other things which we perceive, such as colors, which are not attributes of matter, but are perceived by us as if they were such attributes. These are the secondary qualities of matter.

Why should we perceive secondary qualities? It seems an unfortunate arrangement that we should perceive a lot of things that are not there. Yet this is what the theory of secondary qualities in fact comes to. There is now reigning in philosophy and in science an apathetic acquiescence in the conclusion that no coherent account can be given of nature as it is disclosed to us in sense-awareness, without dragging in its relation to mind.

Whitehead, The Concept of Nature

I reflect on such passages when I am tempted to despair over the epic stupidity of our species regarding this issue, made evident in the widespread "apathetic acquiescence" of the scientific and philosophical communities.

Reading Weyl & Co. comforts me, for then I feel as though I belong among the ranks of the happy few, whose names include Newton, Young, Helmholtz, Maxwell, Grassmann, Weyl, Schrodinger, Einstein and Feynman.

The edifice of officially sanctioned buffoonery seems to be crumbling, though, and that is also heartening. In case you missed them, here are a few recent developments:

How birds use the Earth’s magnetic field to navigate has puzzled researchers for decades. In recent years, a growing body of evidence has pointed to the possibility that a weak magnetic field can influence the outcome of a certain type of chemical reaction involving the recombination of pairs of ions in bird retinas. The trouble is that the ion recombination is known to happen too quickly for the Earth’s weak magnetic field to have any effect. Now it looks as if the quantum Zeno effect explains all, says one researcher (abstract). This is the watched-pot-never-boils effect in which the act of observing a quantum system maintains it for longer than expected. That’s extraordinary news because it means a quantum sensor is determining the macroscopic behavior of living birds.
physics arXiv blog

Were one inclined to be a bit snarky, one might point out that eyes regularly capture photons, which would seem to qualify those organs as “quantum sensors.”

Early quantum theorists treated the quantum–classical transition almost as a kind of sleight of hand, something that had to be imposed on quantum mechanics to recover the familiar world. Now, however, there are strong signs that the transition can be understood as something that emerges quite naturally and inevitably from quantum theory. If that’s so, it implies that ‘classicality’ is at root simply another quantum phenomenon. “There’s good reason to believe that we are just as much part of the quantum world as are the tiny atoms and electrons that sparked quantum theory in the first place,” says quantum theorist Maximilian Schlosshauer of the University of Melbourne in Australia.
Testing the new description of the quantum–classical transition involves experiments on systems ranging from photons to superconductors to microscopic vibrating beams. These efforts pose an extreme challenge to experimentalists, as they involve looking for very small effects on comparatively big things — rather like trying to detect the sag when a fly lands on San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge. The effects very quickly get so small that many physicists believe it is absurd to try to see them. “One crowd says: ‘Of course it will work — quantum mechanics says so’,” says Schwab. “The other says: ‘There’s no way it will work — these guys are nuts’."

Nature

Again, one might point out that Dyson addressed this topic over 50 years ago:

Physicists talk about two kinds of fields: classical fields and quantum fields. Actually, we believe that all fields in nature are quantum fields. A classical field is just a special large-scale manifestation of a quantum field.

There is nothing else except these fields: the whole of the material universe is built of them.

Dyson, Freeman J., “Field Theory”, pp. 58-60, Scientific American, 188: 1953.

Splash

2008-04-29T09:35:00.003-05:00

I'm happy to report that my stuff seems to be progressing further toward science fact and receding from fiction.

In the last few months, my Q&C site has been logging visitors from numerous, famously wealthy neighborhoods around the world, as well as most of the major universities, tech & medical centers.

What to do? I've decided to move more of my resources toward the business end of things and have put together a new entity, which I call Field Effect Technologies.

I'm also leveraging the power of web 2.0, by way of the following excellent outfits:

Ning

Kluster

Mother Lode

2007-11-25T15:58:00.000-06:00

I've been debating whether to share this next item with everyone; I decided it would be selfish to keep it to myself. (Remember the mindless seagulls in Finding Nemo? "Mine!")

Over the years, I've wondered about the wisdom of choosing color to illustrate my ideas re: secondary qualities & the foundations of quantum theory. I continue to believe that it was the best choice to start out with, given how easy it is for us to "see" the main ideas and how most of us are highly visual in our orientation to the world.

On the other hand, sounds have a certain appeal, given that there are well-known harmonic relations, already known to Pythagoras, between what we hear and the numbers associated with the media producing those sounds. And then, there are the fascinating correspondences between the vibrating strings (and membranes!) we hear and the strings of string/M-theory theory.

Well, it turns out there are all sorts of wonderful relations (rather obvious, in retrospect*) between harmonic analysis, operator theory, spectral theory, group theory, number theory, Calabi-Yau theory & Kac-Moody algebras -- far too many for me to adequately explore in my lifetime.

The math mirrors what I've been on about regarding color all this time. I couldn't be happier -- especially so in view of the fact that one could lob a stone in any direction on a college campus and, chances are, you'd bean someone with more native mathematical ability than I'll ever have.

So ... now is the way plain. But I thought I'd better leave a trail of bread crumbs for those who come after, in case I get hit by a truck tomorrow. (Heaven forfend!)

UCLA

Fields Institute

Project Euclid

Mathphyz

Oxford (PDF)

___________

Although I am only beginning to understand harmonic relations, the parallels with the mathematics of color seem clear enough. He wrote confidently.

I feel a bit foolish, looking back, wishing I'd looked into this business better years ago, but ...

I remember a desire to narrow my focus to one (relatively) simple phenomenon -- color vision -- and then see what sorts of math & physics might model the facts on hand ... and, as it were, before our eyes.

I always knew that, if I should be able to get those facts right regarding vision, the math ought to fall out naturally and apply, mutatis mutandis, to audition, olfaction, and so forth.

Lately, I'm beginning to think I wasn't wholly mistaken.

Catch a Wave

2007-10-29T10:15:00.000-05:00

I have exciting news. I recently wrote about the AAAI’s Quantum Interaction 2008 symposium, to be held in Oxford. As with last year’s gathering in Stanford, I expect the forthcoming show will have more political impact than intellectual interest. I.e., the simple fact that the event is associated with Oxford lends an air of credibility to a field once dismissed as the province of crackpots and “quantum mystics.”

Well, the truly exciting news also comes from the UK, by way of the British Computer Society which really does appear to be getting it.

Consider the following:

This is “Can quantum information processing explain how brains work?” For, as Perus, for example, has shown, the neural net and the quantum systems formalisms are epistemologically identical, except they concern mathematically real and complex quantities respectively. These formalisms therefore differ only in the fact that quantum theory explicitly concerns complex amplitudes defining a wave mechanics capable, in principle, of describing the holographic physical informational encoding/decoding of the dimensional geometry of real objects.

Compare this with an earlier publication in Information & Cognition:

If Paul Churchland is correct about the neural implementation of matrix-valued operators, then that is rather interesting, since that is precisely the sort of mathematics we find at work at the quantum level of neural function. Which would seem to make a kind of sense, if, as we suggest, the form of neural networks follows the underlying function of those quantum processes, which mediate neural activity.

Here is another excerpt from the BCS:

It is therefore on this biological frontier of information processing, that the Group is now concentrating its investigations and programme, the success of which is regularly reported in its homepages.

These investigations show

(a) that while qubit computing research concentrates on the discrete/particle observable properties of quantum mechanical systems, usually taken to concern the eigenvalues of quantum mechanical operators, (b) that(i) quantum (rather than thermodynamically) optimally controlled chemistry [...] likely appropriate to the brain/organism’s chemically based computation, and (ii) quantum mechanical neural information processing in brains are both much more likely to involve observable gauge invariant phases of the quantum state vector.

Now compare this with the text from Information & Cognition:

So why have the secondary properties not been put forward heretofore to occupy these “hidden” variables and extra dimensions? Part of the answer must lie in the fact that colors and sounds have historically been excluded from the physical world, even though they demonstrably co-vary with other physical parameters. Another part of the answer is contained in an observation from Wittgenstein, where he writes that “the things that are most important for us are hidden from us by their simplicity and familiarity.” And then, of course, the dimensions of color and sound and so forth are different from the dimensions of traditional spacetime; they are more like the “internal” dimensions of gauge theory or the compactified (very small) dimensions of string/M-theory — and like these more traditional physical dimensions, the dimensions of color and sound are tangent to the points of spacetime, suggesting that colors and sounds might be amenable to the mathematics of fiber bundles.

Or the following:

Such questions raise many another in their wake — just what is color space, e.g.? Note that we can make a natural mapping from the spectral colors to a color sphere, where Newton’s color wheel runs around the circumference, with black and white at the poles. Or such a mapping could be made with red, green and blue for the axes of a unit sphere in Hilbert space. We could then easily map those color vectors to the photonic vectors with which they are associated, remembering that these “physical” vectors recapitulate the mathematics of colors under vector addition and multiplication. Then, any operation upon the photonic vector would naturally correspond to a rotation of the color vector, in a direct analogy with the mathematics of gauge theory and quantum theory generally.

Further on, the BCS article brings up the De Broglie wave as a plausible hypothesis. This is quite exciting, since it’s a short, logical hop from there to Bohm’s work on hidden variables (HVs), which, as is also argued in the Information & Cognition piece, are just what we need to incorporate secondary qualities into the formalism of quantum theory.

So it seems to me that we are now finally beginning to get somewhere. (Though it’s possible I may be biased.)

Bozos in high places

2007-10-11T10:18:00.000-05:00

I was perusing Gerard 't Hooft's web site the other day and clicked on 'How to be a bad physicist.'

Among the suggestions listed was, 'associate yourself with discussions of consciousness.'

I considered that for a moment and concluded, 'what a dumb ass.'

Now, of course, 't Hooft isn't a complete dummy. He got a well-deserved Nobel for his work on gauge theory, e.g.

On the other hand, he doesn't belong among the ranks of Einstein, Weyl, Schrodinger, Heisenberg, Bohr, Pauli, Von Neumann, Maxwell, Mach, Young, Helmholtz, Leibniz and Newton -- all of whom did address the subject of consciousness. Which 't Hooft might have known. Were he a more educated physicist.

He then went on to castigate those who draw favorables comparison between themselves and (say) Newton.*

Well, I have not done so, though one kind soul did, arguing that my identification of secondary qualities with hidden variables was akin to Newton's identification of the force pulling an apple to the ground with the force holding the moon in orbit.

Reflecting on the issue, I remembered the thinkers of the Renaissance, many of whom openly declared their work to be more advanced than that of their predecessors in antiquity.

Were they wrong? No, they were not. Were they guilty of transgressing middle-brow manners? Yes. And good for them. As GB Shaw (who compared himself quite favorably, if inaccurately, with Shakespeare) wrote, there are some people one should want to offend.

Academics who value their reputations do not wish to be associated with foolish, ignorant and lazy individuals -- who, in the sciences, often come complete with delusions of grandeur.

This is quite understandable and well-known territory, as witness, e.g., the famous "crackpot index" of John Baez.

On the other hand, there is Mark Twain: "Every inventor is a crackpot until his idea succeeds."

And Freeman Dyson: "For any speculation which does not at first glance look crazy, there is no hope."

There exists an essential tension between creative types and their more conventional counterparts.

Creatives regard conformists as pedantic, unimaginative and boring. Einstein, e.g., was more at home among his bohemian friends than his academic... uh, peers.

The plodders returns the compliment, regarding their wilder colleagues as flaky, undisciplined and weird. They like to make fun of those who don't genuflect before group-think, and congratulate themselves for having the middling wit to do so. (To give them their due such persons may do brilliant work, though they will never set the world on fire.)

The larger truth is that both groups have their excesses and that each of us embodies the tendencies of both to some degree.

The trick, of course, is to search out a profitable flight path between the heights above and the mundane below.

_______________

*He apparently thinks it's OK to make repeated references to his glittering prize, however.

Quantum Interaction 2008

2007-10-05T13:08:00.000-05:00

Well, I'm happy to see Oxford getting on board. Or, I should be happy, but I'm not. The odious toads in charge of the event made a point of stating that travel funds are not available to such as I.

Last year, they told me that I was behind several grad students for consideration. So, not only did they not honor me for my groundbreaking and ongoing efforts in a field whereof I am one of the founding fathers, they arrogate to themselves the power to determine my stature in their stuffy little world -- these clueless buffoons who are only now beginning to dimly comprehend what I knew 30 years ago.

Well! I feel much better.

Reverse Casimir Effect

2007-09-11T16:43:00.000-05:00

Off-topic again, but pretty darn cool!

At the risk of sounding like 20/20 hindsight, I suspected something of the sort might be possible.

Let me now venture to say that I believe this new technology might well have... extraordinary implications for space flight, and quite possibly FTL travel.

OK, so that's as far out on a limb as I go, these days.

Superfractals

2007-08-28T08:56:00.000-05:00

And just in case you still think I'm out of my gourd...

I've just now picked up a fascinating new book: Superfractals, by mathematician Michael F. Barnsley. It is all to do with fractals, chaos theory, iterated function sets (IFS), topology, code space and probability.

In the beginning (pg. 4), he writes: "I think that just over the horizon, in the direction in which this book points, there is an unambiguous, new branch of geometry that combines colour and space."

I Can See It, Now

2007-08-22T14:16:00.000-05:00

A bit off-topic, but... What will computing look like in the future?

Project Looking Glass

I found this while learning about a wonderful new work from James Burke:

Knowledge Web

Where I also learned about this wicked cool technology:

PersoanlBrain

All thanks to those nice people at IPTV.

Runbot, run!

2007-07-12T12:38:00.000-05:00

O, man, I am so geeked!

This is a major, major advance.

OK, so for now it looks like toy, but tomorrow -- the Terminator!

Mindful Universe

2007-06-28T10:20:00.000-05:00

Henry Stapp's work in this field is among the best and most advanced. I'm pleased to see that he has a new book out and that it's actually getting a thoughtful review -- along with the usual, predictable reactions from the uninformed.

Stapp writes very well and his views are grounded in a thorough understanding of both classical and quantum physics. Although I differ with him on a few basic points, his ideas regarding perceptual states and quantum states will, I firmly believe, prove to stand the test of time. Lockwood and I arrived at the same set of conclusions -- all of us independently of one another.

I am also quite intrigued by his ideas regarding the Quantum Zeno Effect (QZE) in relation to William James' thoughts on the selective role of attention.

Herewith an excerpt from the review:

Henry Stapp is well known for his complex theoretical discourses on the nature of the mind and brain. A distinguished quantum physicist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Stapp has been exploring these topics for over 50 years. The Mindful Universe represents the latest effort in his ongoing crusade to convince the cognitive and neurosciences that the transition away from classical physics and towards quantum theory is long overdue. Stapp’s core argument is that cognitive and brain scientists are stuck in a paradigm of classical physics which is outdated and inaccurate. The text is carefully crafted to make his point from several complimentary directions, as well as to briefly refute other contemporary theorists who advocate alternative positions. While Stapp considers this a book for the lay reader, it is definitely not mass market material. There are far fewer equations than in many of his other writings, but any serious reader will find a basic understanding of contemporary consciousness and quantum theory helpful before picking up this text. The book opens with chapters presenting the core tenets from the Copenhagen and von Neumann interpretations of quantum theory, often in the words of their founders along with commentary from Stapp. His wider view of quantum theory is summed up well by the following passage:

The original form of quantum theory is subjective, in the sense that it is forthrightly about relationships among conscious human experiences, and it expressly recommends to scientists that they resist the temptation to try to understand the reality responsible for the correlations between our experiences that the theory correctly describes. (p. 11)

In these opening chapters he diligently works to establish the case that most of these powerful thinkers strongly believed in a causal gap within quantum theory that makes it an open system into which free choice can enter. Citing the fact that “purposeful action by a human agent has two aspects” (p. 23) he draws heavily on theories involving “…the interplay between the psychologically and physically described components of mind-brain dynamics, as it is understood within the orthodox (von Neumann-Heisenberg) quantum framework” (p. 15).

From Science & Consciousness Review

News Flash

2007-06-27T08:45:00.000-05:00

OK, I'm back! The sites are up again and my new web host (StartLogic) is terrific. More work to be done (isn't there always), but so far, so good, I think. Suggestions welcome!

Here's an exciting item; at the risk of being immodest, I'd just like to point out that I have long argued for a similar mechanism in the brain, wherein regular wave fronts ought to do the trick that lasers perform here.

Light shines in quantum-computing arena

Peter Weiss

For a few years, scientists have been predicting that computers exploiting the quantum properties of matter will carry out computations billions of times faster than today's supercomputers. Yet the technical challenges are so daunting that such quantum computers may not be feasible for decades.

Now, researchers have developed a new, yet less exotic computing method that may be as good as quantum computing for certain tasks, such as searching databases. The method relies entirely on classical physics, say Ian Walmsley and his colleagues of the University of Rochester in New York. To convert their ideas into hardware, the Rochester scientists have built an optical device and successfully demonstrated the method.

The group reported its results at the Lasers and Electro-Optics/ Quantum Electronics and Laser Science conference in Baltimore last week.

Researchers expect quantum processors to work incredibly fast thanks in part to particles' wavelike interactions, including interference. The processors would take advantage of another, stranger effect known as entanglement, in which two or more particles share one quantum state (SN: 8/21/00, p. 132).

Walmsley and his colleagues suspected that classical interference such as that between intersecting light waves, could lead to a computation method analogous to the interference aspect of quantum computing. Optical computers already exist, but their calculations take advantage of different intensities of light. Says Walmsley: "They don't exploit the fact that waves interfere."

I'm Out o' Here

2007-05-31T13:43:00.000-05:00

Good bye!

Visitors to my web sites will discover that I am no longer there.*

Despair not! I will be setting up in my new digs beginning tomorrow, 6/1/07.

Recent guests will have seen that there are already extensive and long-overdue renovations under way.

Stay tuned!

___________________

*For the record, I suspended the account, having found a better deal elsewhere.

Respect our authority

2007-04-25T14:17:00.000-05:00

Respect our authority: Wikipedia

The quantum mind theory is founded on the premise that quantum theory is necessary to fully understand the mind and brain, particularly concerning an explanation of consciousness. This is considered a minority opinion in science.

(Of course, the bulk of academia is traditionally a generation behind the real innovators. Given the safety to be found in numbers, we momentarily lapse into the colloquial to advise the dedicated pedant and dutiful careerist to make (as it were) like a lemming.)

We are accustomed to regarding as real those sense perceptions which are common to different individuals, and which therefore are, in a measure, impersonal. The natural sciences, and in particular, the most fundamental of them, physics, deal with such sense perception. (Einstein)

Indoctrination

A key argument underlying the quantum mind thesis is that classical mechanics cannot fully explain consciousness. Proponents have suggested that quantum mechanical phenomena, such as quantum entanglement and superposition, may play an important part in the brain's function, and could form the basis of an explanation of consciousness.

(Quite a gasper, as the learned reader will readily acknowledge.)

There is nothing else except these [quantum] fields: the whole of the material universe is built of them. (Dyson)

The quantum mind thesis does not as yet have any evidence to confirm its validity, but some role of quantum processes in consciousness has not been completely ruled out.

(Of course, given that the brain just is a set of quanta, it would seem to follow that consciousness just might have something to do with those quanta, but for the moment a select committee of gibbering idiots would seem to serve as arbiters of majority opinion.)

Sufficient understanding of the operation of the brain could prove the proposition false.

(Ya think?)

Ongoing Debacle

The main argument against the quantum mind proposition is that the structures of the brain are much too large for quantum effects to be important.

(Gosh, aren't black holes pretty darn big?)

The incorrect perception that the quantum system has only microscopic manifestations considerably confused this subject. As we have seen in preceding sections, manifestation of ordered states is of quantum origin. When we recall that almost all of the macroscopic ordered states are the result of quantum field theory, it seems natural to assume that macroscopic ordered states in biological systems are also created by a similar mechanism. (Umezawa)

It is impossible for coherent quantum states to form for very long in the brain and impossible for them to exist at scales on the order of the size of neurons.

Any physical system is completely described by a normalized vector (the state vector or wave function) in Hilbert space. All possible information about the system can be derived from this state vector by rules ... (Byron & Fuller)

(On the other hand, plant cells use quantum coherence and superposition on a daily basis, but our brain cells are clearly not quite so sophisticated as those found in your average eggplant.)

This does not imply that classical mechanics can explain consciousness, but that quantum effects including superposition and entanglement are insignificant.

To monochromatic light corresponds in the acoustic domain the simple tone. Out of different kinds of monochromatic light composite light may be mixed, just as tones combine to a composite sound. This takes place by superposing simple oscillations of different frequency with definite intensities. (Weyl)

When a state is formed by the superposition of two other states, it will have properties that are in some vague way intermediate between those of the original states and that approach more or less closely to those of either of them according to the greater or less 'weight' attached to this state in the superposition process.

The new state is completely defined by the two original states when their relative weights in the superposition process are known, together with a certain phase difference, the exact meaning of weights and phases being provided in the general case by the mathematical theory. (Dirac)

The second principle of color mixing of lights is this: any color at all can be made from three different colors, in our case, red, green, and blue lights. By suitably mixing the three together we can make anything at all, as we demonstrated ...

Further, these laws are very interesting mathematically. For those who are interested in the mathematics of the thing, it turns out as follows. Suppose that we take our three colors, which were red, green, and blue, but label them A, B, and C, and call them our primary colors. Then any color could be made by certain amounts of these three: say an amount a of color A, an amount b of color B, and an amount c of color C makes X:

X = aA + bB + cC.

Now suppose another color Y is made from the same three colors:

Y = a'A + b'B + c'C.

Then it turns out that the mixture of the two lights (it is one of the consequences of the laws that we have already mentioned) is obtained by taking the sum of the components of X and Y:

Z = X + Y = (a + a')A + (b + b')B + (c + c')C.

It is just like the mathematics of the addition of vectors, where (a, b, c ) are the components of one vector, and (a', b', c' ) are those of another vector, and the new light Z is then the "sum" of the vectors. This subject has always appealed to physicists and mathematicians. In fact: Schrödinger wrote a wonderful paper on color vision in which he developed this theory of vector analysis as applied to the mixing of colors. (Feynman)

This looks vaguely familiar...

Thus the colors with their various qualities and intensities fulfill the axioms of vector geometry if addition is interpreted as mixing; consequently, projective geometry applies to the color qualities. (Weyl)

A speck in the visual field, though it need not be red must have some color; it is, so to speak, surrounded by color-space. Notes must have some pitch, objects of the sense of touch some degree of hardness, and so on. (Wittgenstein)

Probably just a coincidence...

Calabi-Yau space, from Elegant Universe

Quantum chemistry is required to understand the actions of neurotransmitters, for example.

(Now, as any half-learned buffoon can tell you, quantum chemistry reduces to quantum physics, but we seem to be in short supply of same and so it might seem as though we must make do with the distinguished assembly of slobbering imbeciles already cited. Happily, however, we have a deeply learned buffoon standing by in case of just such an emergency.)

In fact, biologists are trying to interpret as much as they can about life in terms of chemistry, and as I already explained, the theory behind chemistry is quantum electrodynamics. (Feynman)

However, this does not preclude the possible existence of mechanisms by which quantum effects could influence the state of larger structures.

A Quantum Neural Network Computes Entanglement

(Since those larger structures also consist of quanta, this would seem a safe bet.)

... all chemical binding is electromagnetic in origin, and so are all phenomena of nerve impulses. (Salam)

Fractals are self-similar under changes of spatio-temporal scales.

Does neural form follow quantum function?

The text of this volume claims that the mathematical formulations that have been developed for quantum mechanics and quantum field theory can go a long way toward describing neural processes due to the functional organization of the cerebral cortex. (Pribram)

One well-known critic of the quantum mind is Max Tegmark. Based on his calculations, Tegmark concluded that quantum systems in the brain decohere quickly and cannot control brain function, "This conclusion disagrees with suggestions by Penrose and others that the brain acts as a quantum computer, and that quantum coherence is related to consciousness in a fundamental way."

(On the other hand, Pauli believed that quantum mechanics would inform a future theory of mind & brain. Whom to believe -- Tegmark, or one of the founders of quantum theory? Hmm, that is a puzzler. I wonder what would happen if we opened a book and looked up what those other guys thought?)

Bohr suggests that thought involves such small amounts of energy that quantum- theoretical limitations play an essential role in determining its character. (Bohm)

I believe that the first step in the setting of a "real external world" is the formation of the concept of bodily objects and of bodily objects of various kinds. Out of the multitude of our sense experiences we take, mentally and arbitrarily, certain repeatedly occurring complexes of sense impression (partly in conjunction with sense impressions which are interpreted as signs for sense experiences of others), and we attribute to them a meaning -- the meaning of the bodily object. Considered logically this concept is not identical with the totality of sense impressions referred to; but it is an arbitrary creation of the human (or animal) mind. On the other hand, the concept owes its meaning and its justification exclusively to the totality of the sense impressions which we associate with it. (Einstein)

The immediately experienced is subjective but absolute; no matter how cloudy it may be, in this cloudiness it is something given thus and not otherwise. To the contrary, the objective world which we continually take into account in our practical life and which science tries to crystallize into clarity is necessarily relative; to be represented by some definite thing (numbers or other symbols) only after a system of coordinates has been arbitrarily introduced into the world. We said at an earlier place, that every difference in experience must be founded on a difference of the objective conditions; we can now add: in such a difference of the objective conditions as is invariant with regard to coordinate transformations, a difference that cannot be made to vanish by a mere change of the coordinate system used ... (Weyl)

In attempting to judge the success of a physical theory, we may ask ourselves two questions: (1) “Is the theory correct?” and (2) “Is the description given by the theory complete?” It is only in the case in which positive answers may be given to both of these questions, that the concepts of the theory may be said to be satisfactory. The correctness of the theory is judged by the degree of agreement between the conclusions of the theory and human experience...

Whatever the meaning assigned to the term complete, the following requirement for a complete theory seems to be a necessary one: every element of the physical reality must have a counterpart in the physical theory. (EPR)

Anyone dissatisfied with these ideas may feel free to assume that there are additional parameters not yet introduced into the theory which determine the individual event. (Born)

If you ask a physicist what is his idea of yellow light, he will tell you that it is transversal electromagnetic waves of wavelength in the neighborhood of 590 millimicrons. If you ask him: But where does yellow comes in? he will say: In my picture not at all, but these kinds of vibrations, when they hit the retina of a healthy eye, give the person whose eye it is the sensation of yellow. (Schrödinger)

Thus, the task is, not so much to see what no one has yet seen; but to think what nobody has yet thought, about that which everybody sees. (Schrödinger)

Since matter clearly influences the content of our consciousness, it is natural to assume that the opposite influence also exists, thus demanding the modification of the presently accepted laws of nature which disregard this influence. (Wigner)

Harvard, huh?

2007-01-22T12:40:00.000-06:00

Steven Pinker has been explaining how the mind works. Heaven help us.

In an article for Time, he writes:

Some mavericks, like the mathematician Roger Penrose, suggest the answer might someday be found in quantum mechanics. But to my ear, this amounts to the feeling that quantum mechanics sure is weird, and consciousness sure is weird, so maybe quantum mechanics can explain consciousness.

Maybe if Prof. Pinker were to actually learn something about quantum theory, his impressions of it might cease to be so weird.

OK, once again, kids: The brain just is a collection of quantum fields. See Dyson's article in Scientific American, where he states, with the simplicity of genius, that:

There is nothing else except these [quantum] fields: the whole of the material universe is built of them.

So, if the mind is connected to the brain, as would seem plausible, how could it not be related to quantum theory? Is the brain not a part of the material universe? Does Prof. Pinker have an alternative physics to propose?

Another thing:

The Hard Problem, on the other hand, is why it feels like something to have a conscious process going on in one's head--why there is first-person, subjective experience. Not only does a green thing look different from a red thing, remind us of other green things and inspire us to say, "That's green" (the Easy Problem), but it also actually looks green: it produces an experience of sheer greenness that isn't reducible to anything else.

I encountered the Hard Problem many years ago, before Chalmers gave it that name. Stymied by the hardness of the "hard problem," I eventually took a radical step, of revolutionary implications: I did some research.

Come to find out, everyone from Democritus to Galileo to Newton to Helmholtz to Riemann, Maxwell,* Einstein, Schrodinger and Weyl wrote about color.

So did Russell and Whitehead, in their monumental work on the logical foundations of mathematics, Principia Mathematica. They wrote: "Thus 'this is red,' 'this is earlier than that,' are atomic propositions."

Well, all right: If colors are truly elemental, why not quit trying to reduce them to simpler entities? Why not take nature at her word and regard colors (along with the other secondary qualities) as elemental?

Are there other mathematical aspects to color? Indeed there are. My radical departure from tradition soon revealed that Grassmann, Maxwell, Weyl and Feynman all tell us that colors behave like vectors, whereas wavelengths, being lengths, are scalars.

Weyl goes further and tells us that the laws of projective vector geometry apply to color.

And that's kind of interesting, in light of what Wittgenstein had to say:

A speck in the visual field, though it need not be red must have some colour; it is, so to speak, surrounded by colour-space. Notes must have some pitch, objects of the sense of touch some degree of hardness, and so on.

Why is this interesting? Well, because every speck in the visual field must be some color and it may be a different color from any of its neighbors. So what?

Well, in order to provide a mechanical model of this fact of experience, we are moved along a natural path toward fiber bundle theory, where to each point in space we associate a tangent space, like so, where the individual spheres look like this.

But where else do we find projective vector spaces fibering over space-time? Precisely in the Calabi-Yau spaces of M-theory. Moreover, the symmetries and phase relations of colors lead us along an easy path to gauge theory.

Finally, once one accepts that colors and sounds and so forth are elemental physical entities, they begin to look like EPR's missing "elements of reality," or, "hidden variables."

So we kill multiple birds with one stone. Needless to add, perhaps, the ideas on view above really do come down to a radical departure from tradition and no doubt the old guard will kick and scream on their way out the door. So there's another bit of fun to add to the mix.

________________

*Then, too, if Dr. Dennett had consulted Maxwell, he might have learned that his objection was answered by Maxwell's color plates. For, given that all experience of the world is subjective, how is objective science possible? The most instructive reply comes by way of Einstein's clocks and measuring rods -- objective standards upon which we can all agree. Notice that, in order to compare two color vectors, we must "parallel transport" one to the other. If one vector encounters a gravitational field along the way, it will be Dopplered, undergoing a kind of phase shift.

Smells Like Success

2006-12-30T10:24:00.000-06:00

A recent article in Scientific American cites a paper accepted for publication in Physical Review Letters, positing a quantum basis for the olfactory sense:

The question: What property of an odor molecule (or odorant) do the receptors in our noses pick up? The reigning but still unproved explanation of smell supposes that the shape is the thing, with receptors fitting like a lock into the molecule's key. But the shape theory doesn't explain why some nearly identically shaped molecules smell vastly different, such as ethanol, which smells like vodka, and ethane thiol (rotten eggs).
Turin's more controversial theory, put forth in 1996 and now the subject of two popular books, holds instead that odorant receptors sense the way a molecule's atoms jiggle. The shape of the molecule still comes into play, Turin says, because it determines the odorant's overall vibrational frequency. But he didn't know how all the details fit together.
Physicist Marshall Stoneham and his colleagues at University College London report they have constructed a specific mechanism based on the properties of so-called G-protein coupled receptors, which project from olfactory cells inside the nose.
The researchers imagined that the odorant fits into a spot between a site that donates an electron and one that receives the electron. In this model, the receptor switches on when an electron hops from donor to acceptor. The group calculated that an electron could "tunnel" through the barrier imposed by the odorant, an effect made possible by quantum mechanics, they wrote in a preprint accepted for publication in Physical Review Letters.

I have not yet read the paper, but predict that some such mechanism will be established and that the "odorant's overall vibrational frequency" will be replaced by a vector in an EPR-complete Hilbert space, where by "EPR -complete" I mean a theory wherein all "elements of reality" are represented.

As I have long argued, QM is prima facie incomplete in that it does not explicitly represent the secondary properties or qualities, as Schrödinger tell us in the case of color:

If you ask a physicist what is his idea of yellow light, he will tell you that it is transversal electromagnetic waves of wavelength in the neighborhood of 590 millimicrons. If you ask him: But where does yellow come in? he will say: In my picture not at all, but these kinds of vibrations, when they hit the retina of a healthy eye, give the person whose eye it is the sensation of yellow.

Clark makes the more general case in his admirable book on Sensory Qualities:

The world as described by natural science has no obvious place for colors, tastes, or smells. Problems with sensory qualities have been philosophically and scientifically troublesome since ancient times, and in modern form at least since Galileo in 1623 identified some sensory qualities as characterizing nothing real in the objects themselves...

The qualities of size, figure (or shape), number, and motion are for Galileo the only real properties of objects. All other qualities revealed in sense perception — colors, tastes, odors, sounds, and so on — exist only in the sensitive body, and do not qualify anything in the objects themselves. They are the effects of the primary qualities of things on the senses. Without the living animal sensing such things, these 'secondary' qualities (to use the term introduced by Locke) would not exist.

Much of modern philosophy has devolved from this fateful distinction. While it was undoubtedly helpful to the physical sciences to make the mind into a sort of dustbin into which one could sweep the troublesome sensory qualities, this stratagem created difficulties for later attempts to arrive at some scientific understanding of the mind. In particular, the strategy cannot be reapplied when one goes on to explain sensation and perception. If physics cannot explain secondary qualities, then it seems that any science that can explain secondary qualities must appeal to explanatory principles distinct from those of physics. Thus are born various dualisms.

I wrote above that QM does not explicitly represent colors and so forth. Yet physicists often speak of such things as monochromatic light, red giants, white dwarfs and so on.

Mendeleev, in composing the periodic table, was guided by the secondary properties reliably exhibited by the chemical elements.

Feynman, In his terrific little book on QED, speaks of "blue photons." And we all know what he means — until we start to think about it.

If pressed, scientists have traditionally fallen back on the dogma received from Galileo and Newton, who had it in turn from Democritus and the Greek atomists, that the secondary properties are produced in the mind... er, somehow or other. Yet the mind is yoked to the brain, a physical thing, and mental states are dependent on physical states.

The essence of the solution I have put forward flows from Mach, who wrote in his landmark work on Contributions to the Analysis of Sensations:

The traditional gulf between physical and psychological research... exist only for the habitual stereotyped method of observation. A color is a physical object so long as we consider its dependence upon its luminous source, upon other colors, upon heat, upon space and so forth. regarding, however, its dependence upon the retina... it becomes a psychological object, a sensation. Not the subject, but the direction of our investigation, is different in the two domains.

Mach's views are wholly compatible with mind/brain identity theory, as expressed in Chalmers:

The abstract notion of information, as put forward by Claude E. Shannon of MIT, is that of a set of separate states with a basic structure of similarities and differences between them. We can think of a 10-bit binary code as an information state, for example. Such information can be embodied in the physical world. This happens whenever they correspond to physical states (voltages, say); the differences between them can be transmitted along some pathway, such as a telephone line.

We can also find information embodied in conscious experience. The pattern of color patches in a visual field, for example, can be seen as analogous to that of pixels covering a display screen. Intriguingly, it turns out that we find the same information states embodied in conscious experience and in underlying physical processes in the brain. The three-dimensional encoding of color spaces, for example, suggests that the information state in a color experience correspond directly to an information state in the brain. We might even regard the two states as distinct aspects of a single information state, which is simultaneously embodied in both physical processing and conscious experience.

And before him by Feigl:

The solution that appears most plausible to me, and that is consistent with a thoroughgoing naturalism, is an identity theory of the mental and the physical, as follows: Certain neurophysiological terms denote (refer to) the very same events that are also denoted (referred to) by certain phenomenal terms. The identification of the objects of this twofold reference is of course logically contingent, although it constitutes a very fundamental feature of our world as we have come to conceive it in the modern scientific outlook. Using Frege's distinction between Sinn ('meaning', 'sense', 'intension'), and Bedeutung ('referent', 'denotatum', 'extension'), we may say that neurophysiological terms and the corresponding phenomenal terms, though widely differing in sense... do have identical referents. I take these referents to be the immediately experienced qualities, or their configurations in the various phenomenal fields.

I am pleased to announce that my recent paper on "The Unification of Mind & Matter," which treats these points in greater detail, has been accepted by a journal for a series on Men Who Made a New Science. I will supply a link at the appropriate time.

The Big Time

2006-11-21T11:05:00.000-06:00

Thirty-six years ago, I became fascinated by the mind/body problem, the ancient question of how our thoughts, ideas, dreams and perceptions get hooked up to the gray matter inside our noggins.

A few years later, it came to me that, since the matter of our brains lives at the quantum level, then maybe that was a good place to look for mind. It was the luckiest hunch of my life. Now, this notion wasn't even on the lunatic fringe at the time -- it was nowhere near the radar.

Fast forward to Spring, 2007, when the American Association for Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) and Stanford University will host a symposium on the subject.

They seem to think this worth mentioning at Cambridge.

Well! This puts a different complexion on things, doesn't it? I have been pursuing R&D on the subject for all this while, with emphasis on the "R." I have some smarts and a healthy ego, but would never want anyone to take my word for all this "quantum mind" stuff -- should anyone be so foolish as to do so -- that is not what science is about & not what I'm about.

So I've been doing my research, thinking my thoughts and airing my views -- but mostly off-Broadway, not wishing to make a bigger fool of myself.

At one time, I co-moderated the q-mind forum under Stuart Hameroff, of the Penrose-Hameroff model. I have sharp disagreements with their approach, but Sir Roger, thanks to his prestige, put us on the map.

Ironically, it may be Hameroff's emphasis on microtubules which stands the test of time. On the other hand, their ideas about the importance of quantum gravity have never held any appeal for me; vastly more important, in my view, is quantum electrodynamics (QED).

Quanta & Consciousness

Are Perceptual Fields Quantum Fields?

Quantum Exchanges

Now, however... the AAAI and Stanford are august bodies -- rightfully conservative, protective of their reputations and not given to supporting wild speculations. They have a lot of real-world clout.

I believe the tide has turned.

Contrary to Nature

2006-04-21T11:43:00.000-05:00

Bohr suggests that thought involves such small
amounts of energy that quantum-theoretical
limitations play an essential role in
determining its character.

Bohm

Thanks to Nature for publishing "Quantum Mechanics in the Brain," by Koch and Hepp. As one who has pursued this topic for 35 years, I feel confident that this article will come to be seen as a watershed in the evolution of the debate.

I must report that the authors (along with most of their peers) are thoroughly mistaken. They ask whether there is room for quantum computation in the brain. One might well reply, "Is there room for anything else?"

Thus, in his article on "Field Theory," Freeman Dyson tells us pretty plainly that "There is nothing else except these [quantum] fields: the whole of the material universe is built of them." [1] The brain is presumably part of the material universe; it seems to follow that the brain just is a collection of quantum fields—and, particularly, electromagnetic (EM) fields. Abdus Salam writes: "all chemical binding is electromagnetic in origin, and so are all phenomena of nerve impulses." [2] If conscious processes are phenomena of nerve impulses, then it would seem to follow that those processes are EM in origin.

Dyson informs us further: "A classical field is just a special large-scale manifestation of a quantum field." So, how might classical information survive, absent quantum information, as Koch and Hepp assert? How on earth do they suppose chemical interactions in the brain can happen, without photons—paradigmatically QM objects—to mediate those interactions? How do they suppose our eyes capture those photons?

The authors appear to have bought into the decoherence approach to the measurement problem, along with the notion that some form of coherence is necessary to the larger quantum-mind thesis. (Well, some people think along these lines, but I do not. Together with JS Bell and David Bohm, I have advocated a "hidden variables"* approach to this problem. Happily, a handful of our most prominent physicists have lately come around to this view.) If the decoherence view had an any merit, how might it explain nonlocal quantum computation? Or, why does the sea of virtual particles present in the vacuum not bring about decoherence?

Koch and Hepp write:

The power of quantum mechanics is often invoked for problems that brains solve efficiently. Computational neuroscience is a young field and theories of complex neural systems, with all the variability of living matter, will never reach the precision of physical laws of well-isolated simple systems.

Well, our planet hosts quite a lot of living matter and yet Koch's former co-author, Francis Crick, helped find a physical mechanism beneath it all. And then, quantum computation is a younger field still, but the authors have already determined that it holds no hope for us in understanding the brain's computations—even though they seem to get that those computations must ultimately be carried out at the quantum level of neural activity. So there appears to be at least one source of incoherence.

They continue:

It has already been demonstrated, however, that many previously mysterious aspects of perception and action are explainable in terms of conventional neuronal processing.

One might well ask, "Demonstrated to the satisfaction of... whom, exactly?" Their peers in neuroscience, whose knowledge of QM is also largely scant?

The heart of light

Here we come to the nub of the matter:

Two examples are models for the rapid recognition of objects (for example, animals or faces) in natural scenes, with performance approaching that of human observers, and the attentional selection of objects in cluttered images. The necessary mathematical operations — such as changes in synaptic weights, evaluating the inner product between presynaptic activity and synaptic weight, multiplication and stationary nonlinearities — are available to neurons.

These "necessary mathematical operations" would seem to point toward operator theory, Heisenberg's matrix formulation of QM and tensor calculus—which just happen to be found not far away, doing just what we might expect them to be doing.

Indeed, there is an embarras de richesse of computational primitives implemented by synapses, dendrites and neurons. That is not to suggest that we understand how brains compute. But so far, there seems to be no need for quantum skyhooks.

So... we don't understand how brains compute, but we can safely ignore the underlying physics? And then, their literary accomplishments notwithstanding, it seems a trifle odd, writing about computational primitives and then, in the same breath, dismissing any need for the physical primitives embodied in the mathematics of quantum theory. It is only in physics that we meet up with variables of comparable simplicity to the elements of perception. Thus, we regularly observe objects extended in space and enduring in time—sensory qualities represented in the metric of general relativity and so, presumably, in quantum field theory (QFT), which has been described by Shwinger, among others, as just being relativistic QM.

They inquire:

Why should evolution have turned to quantum computation, so fickle and capricious, if classical neural-network computations are evidently entirely sufficient to deal with the problems encountered by nervous systems?

This borders on silliness. The evidence of our senses tells us that the world is full of color and sound—secondary qualities banished from the physical realm long ago by Democritus and, later, by Galileo, Newton and a handful of their contemporaries. These sensory qualities have found no representation in either classical physics or its quantum successor—much less contemporary neuroscience. (Paul Churchland thinks otherwise, but don't get me started.)

Are colors and sounds, perhaps, EPR's missing "elements of reality"?

Mention the notion to most learned heads living today and they will dismiss the idea out of hand. Press the point and they will tell you you're way off base, "not even wrong." Ask how, exactly, is this not thinkable and they will get quite irritated with you. Hands will wave, tempers will fly. (Try it!) Why do these gray eminences behave in this fashion? For the perfectly scientific reason that they haven't a clue. The existence of these properties (which we observe every waking moment), their exclusion from physics—this is the great invisible wall which contains them in an intellectual box, even as they brim with a smug certainty deriving from what "everybody knows," and even though Newton, Young, Helmholtz, Maxwell, Weyl, Schrodinger and Einstein all devoted serious thought to the problem.

The real deal

Umezawa, in a highly readable text on Advanced Field Theory, writes:

Among the many biological objects a particularly interesting one is the brain. For any theory to be able to claim itself as a brain theory, it should be able to explain the origin of such fascinating properties as the mechanism for creation and recollection of memories and consciousness.

For many years it was believed that brain function is controlled solely by the classical neuron system which provides the pathway for neural impulses. This is frequently called the neuron doctrine. The most essential one among many facts is the nonlocality of memory function discovered by Pribram [...]

There have been many models based on quantum theories, but many of them are rather philosophically oriented. The article by Burns [...] provides a detailed list of papers on the subject of consciousness, including quantum models. The incorrect perception that the quantum system has only microscopic manifestations considerably confused this subject. As we have seen in preceding sections, manifestation of ordered states is of quantum origin. When we recall that almost all of the macroscopic ordered states are the result of quantum field theory, it seems natural to assume that macroscopic ordered states in biological systems are also created by a similar mechanism. (My emphasis)

Koch and Hepp write that physicists are ignorant of neurobiologists' work, and conversely. An important exception must be Karl Pribram, who writes in a classic modern work that "the mathematical formulations that have been developed for quantum mechanics and quantum field theory can go a long way toward describing neural processes." [3] In this wise it is intriguing to note a passage from Lockwood's Mind, Brain & Quantum:

Consciousness, in other words, provides us with a kind of ‘window’ on to our brains, making possible a transparent grasp of a tiny corner of a material reality that is in general opaque to us, knowable only at one remove. The qualities of which we are immediately aware, in consciousness, precisely are some at least of the intrinsic qualities of the states and processes that go to make up the material world — more specifically, states and processes within our own brains.

The psychologist Pribram [...] has made an interesting attempt to revive an idea originally put forward around the turn of the century by the Gestalt psychologists: namely that it is certain fields, in the physicist’s sense, within the cerebral hemispheres, that may be the immediate objects of introspective awareness [...] What it would amount to, in terms of the present proposal, is that we have a ‘special’ or ‘privileged’ access, via some of our own brain activity, to the intrinsic character of, say, electromagnetism. Put like that, the idea sounds pretty fanciful. But make no mistake about it: whether about electromagnetism or about other such phenomena, that is just what the Russellian view ostensibly commits one to saying.

There are, however, two things that must now be emphasized. In the first place, it is a clear implication of the Russellian view that the material world, or more specifically, that part of it that lies within the skull, cannot possess less diversity than is exhibited amongst the phenomenal qualities that we encounter within consciousness. I am inclined to doubt whether the stock of fundamental attributes countenanced within contemporary physical science is, in principle, adequate to the task of accounting for the qualitative diversity that introspection reveals. The current trend, within physics, is towards ever greater unification of the fundamental forces.

This is, I think, just right. Lockwood and I arrived at this conclusion independently of one another, though by similar paths (private communication). More to the point, quantum theory easily accommodates this "qualitative diversity that introspection reveals," as Stapp and I have also argued at length.

I have taken the further step of pointing out, following Riemann, Maxwell and Weyl, that colors define a projective vector manifold. I may have been the first to call attention to the fact that the visual field can be described by assuming color space "fibers over" (sits over) the "points" of that field. This fact (readily open to inspection), taken together with the symmetries and phase relations of colors leads one by a direct path into gauge theory, Kaluza-Klein theory and, perhaps, M-theory, where "M" sometimes means "matrix."

Needless to add, I may well be dead before the general run of mankind comes around to accepting these notions. I recently attempted to make clear the fact that, given the vector character of color, we need a matrix to "rotate" one color vector into another — just as we do when engineering color TVs and computer monitors — in a manner demonstrably predictable, reliable and really quite quantifiable. Given the all-important symmetries of color, that matrix must be a tensor.

Here be dragons

So we have a tensor calculus, already in hand, whereby we can compute the appearance of color. And this is, I argue, of fundamental, foundational importance — because, although color is quite arguably an "element of reality" in the sense of EPR, it has yet to find suitable representation within the structure of physics, as Schrödinger tells us:

If you ask a physicist what is his idea of yellow light, he will tell you that it is transversal electromagnetic waves of wavelength in the neighborhood of 590 millimicrons. If you ask him: But where does yellow come in? he will say: In my picture not at all, but these kinds of vibrations, when they hit the retina of a healthy eye, give the person whose eye it is the sensation of yellow.

Having attempted to clarify the situation, I have been told by persons not wholly bereft of learning that it's probably all a coincidence, this predictive, mathematical correspondence between the model and the reality.

OK, now imagine that Albert Einstein has just explained that gravitational interactions can be modelled via a space-time curvature tensor. Only to be told that it's a coincidence. And so one takes comfort in despairing over the human race. Unhappily, there's not much future in futility.

On the other hand, I am heartened to see the debate breaking into the pages of Nature, even if most of the physics on view there thus far seems to have been gleaned from introductory texts. It is as it was with the publication of The Emperor's New Mind — it's not so much a matter of what Penrose had to say, but with the brute force of the fact that it was Penrose who was saying it. (Having said that, it strikes one as a tad ridiculous, when Nature compares the Encyclopedia Britannica to Wikipedia; a previous article by Crick and Koch contained a number of howlers, also—but then, the authors are Big Names, which surely counts for more in questions of science.)

Koch and Hepp rightly suggest that questions remain as to how brains compute. (They nonetheless feel confident that QM can't help us.) In this connection it is intriguing to note that the Churchlands argue for the tensor network theory of Pellionisz and Llinas. [4, 5] How are those tensors realized in the physics of the brain? Again, the operator formalism of quantum theory would seem to fit the bill admirably.

Given the fractal character of neural nets, we might expect to find this kind of self-similarity across spatio-temporal scales.

Koch and Hepp repeat the dogma that quantum mechanics (QM) is fundamentally indeterministic—a view nearly unquestioned, until recently. [6] Later, they note that the problem of qualia remains. Max Born, who fathered the statistical interpretation of QM, wrote at the time that "Anyone dissatisfied with these ideas may feel free to assume that there are additional parameters not yet introduced into the theory which determine the individual event." [7] Nowadays these parameters are called "hidden variables" and have lately been revived by such luminaries as 't Hooft, among others—a development of the highest importance, given that those qualia known as secondary qualities are not yet incorporated into the body of science and are only "hidden" in plain view.

A far more informed view of mind and matter comes from Wolfgang Pauli, who arguably knew something about QM, who also advocated a unitary description of mind and matter — and who also emphasised the centrality of symmetry in our understanding of nature:

For the invisible reality, of which we have small pieces of evidence in both quantum physics and the psychology of the unconscious, a symbolic, psychophysical unitary language must ultimately be adequate, and this is the far goal which I actually aspire. I am quite confident that the final objective is the same, independent of whether one starts from the psyche (ideas) or from physis (matter). Therefore, I consider the old distinction between materialism and idealism as obsolete. (My emphasis)

Then there is Eugene Wigner [8], whom Feynman called the most gifted physicist he ever met:

let us now turn to the assumption opposite to the 'first alternative' considered so far: that the laws of physics will have to be modified drastically if they are to account for the phenomena of life. Actually, I believe that this second assumption is the correct one.

Can arguments be adduced to show the need for modification? There seem to be two such arguments. The first is that, if one entity is influenced by another entity, in all known cases the latter one is also influenced by the former. The most striking and originally the least expected example for this is the influence of light on matter, most obviously in the form of light pressure. That matter influences light is an obvious fact — if it were not so, we could not see objects. The influence of light on matter is, however, a more subtle effect and is virtually unobservable under the conditions which surround us [...] Since matter clearly influences the content of our consciousness, it is natural to assume that the opposite influence also exists,
thus demanding the modification of the presently accepted laws of nature which disregard this influence.

Although I do not subscribe to Wigner's idea that consciousness causes collapse of the wave function, I believe his argument above will eventually persuade the world—the oracles at Nature notwithstanding.

Finally, why the (now familiar) rush to shut down this line of inquiry? Who can say, before the fact, what discoveries await us? Koch and Hepp appear to say that the staus quo works just fine and will continue to do so—trust us. Rather than explore the possibilities, they seem to have decided at the outset that we need not bother with QM... and then constructed an argument (of sorts) to bear out their preconceptions. Well, this is not science. It is wishful thinking.

__________________________

* I am indebted to the SPIE for flying me out to Cambridge, MA to deliver this paper, if only because it allows me to establish my priority in these matters. Although the Penrose-Hameroff approach is the best known take on QM and the brain, it was not the first, nor is it, in my estimation, by any means the most plausible.

__________________________

[1] Dyson, Freeman J., "Field Theory," pp. 58-60, Scientific American, 188: 1953.

[2] Salam, Abdus, Unification of Fundamental Forces. Cambridge, 1990.

[3] Pribram, Karl. Brain and Perception. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1991.

[4] Churchland, P. M. A Neurocomputational Perspective. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989.

[5] Churchland, P. S. Neurophilosophy : Toward a Unified Understanding of the Mind-Brain. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986.

[6] Wheeler & Tegmark, "100 Years of Quantum Mysteries," Scientific American, 2/2001.

[7] Holland, Peter R. The Quantum Theory of Motion. Cambridge University Press, 1993.

[8] Wigner, “Physics and the Explanation of Life,” in Foundations of Physics, vol. 1, 1970, pp. 34-45.

Before the Revolution

2006-04-06T12:44:00.000-05:00

Einstein and Bohr Had a Debate

The aspects of things that are most important for us
are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity.

Wittgenstein

Pity poor Einstein. O, he did good work in his youth, but could never fully embrace quantum theory--and history passed him by.

Thus, the conventional wisdom. Einstein and Bohr had a big debate. Bohr, the father of quantum theory, opined that cause-and-effect breaks down at the ground floor of the world: When a radioactive particle splits, it does so for no special reason--it's a flip of the coin.

Einstein said, "God does not play dice with the universe."

Bohr replied, "You're not him."

Einstein, Podolsky and Rosen wrote a landmark paper, known everywhere as EPR, where they argued that quantum mechanics was logically consistent but incomplete, meaning not every "element of reality" is represented in the theory. The missing elements, were they incorporated into the body of physical theory, would give us a better-than-statistical picture of reality.

And there matters remained. For 60 years. David Bohm tried to fill in the missing pieces--those mysterious (and surely nonexistent) hidden variables--but no one paid him any mind. Everyone who was anyone agreed on the main points.*

Little did we know

Except they didn't. Legendary physicists Schrödinger, Dirac, De Broglie and even Born all demurred from the status quo of quantum theory at one time or another. (Try finding that little item in the textbooks.) Schrödinger authored the eponymous equation governing the quantum realm. His well known remark about "those damn quantum jumps", referring to the sudden, almost mysterious process by which particles change energy levels, shows his frustration with the holes in quantum theory.

Dirac sired quantum field theory (QFT), the ongoing effort to meld relativity and quantum mechanics into one coherent theory. Dirac said: "It seems clear that the present quantum mechanics is not in its final form [...] I think it very likely, or at any rate quite possible, that in the long run Einstein will turn out to be correct." So maybe God really doesn't play dice.

De Broglie gave us wave-particle duality: Photons, electrons, protons--all elementary particles, everywhere--have aspects of both waves and particles. He also hit upon an alternative, "pilot wave" picture of quantum mechanics that Bohm later revived. De Broglie wrote: "The history of science shows that the progress of science has constantly been hampered by the tyrannical influence of certain conceptions that finally came to be considered as dogma." He suggests that the statistical interpretation is one such dogma, perhaps obscuring the truth at the most fundamental levels of Quantum Theory.

Max Born was Heisenberg's teacher. Born initially provided the statistical interpretation of Schrödinger's equation--one of the central pillars of the Copenhagen Interpretation, the body of theory that seemed to bring order to the bewildering quantum phenomena ruling the atomic world. Yet Born said at the time that "Anyone dissatisfied with these ideas may feel free to assume that there are additional parameters not yet introduced into the theory which determine the individual event."

What might Born's additional parameters be? Just EPR's missing "elements of reality," or, hidden variables. But that's all old hat and of no interest to anyone, aside from a few crackpots. Right?

Not precisely, no. In the last few years a curious rumbling has been heard on the horizon. Unknown to the public, a handful of the most respected voices in contemporary physics have recently published papers in serious journals on (wait for it) hidden variables. Including Gerard 't Hooft, James Hartle (who co-authors stuff with Hawking) and Lee Smolin, author of Three Roads to Quantum Gravity.

The stakes could scarcely be higher, the issue more fundamental: Einstein said that it was upon the resolution of this question, of whether or not God played dice, that the future history of physics would turn. The last time a shift this dramatic happened, we got nuclear power, lasers and transistors--the foundations of modern technology and with it the world economy. So that's kind of cool.

Where are the variables hiding?

If hidden variables exist, why don't we see them? This question is a very common one in contemporary physics, albeit from a different conversation. Thanks to Ed Witten at Princeton, the five different versions of string theory that once gave theorists fits are now known to be variations on a theme: M-theory.

M-theory's proponents are proud of its many achievements, most notably the fact that relativity naturally falls out of the equations--i.e., gravity doesn't have to be forced in by hand. (The theory's detractors hasten to point out that the theory makes no contact with observation.)

One of the fascinating things about M-theory is that it needs extra spatial dimensions for the numbers to come out right. If extra dimensions exist, though, why don't we see them? Are they related to hidden variables? Are they, perhaps, the same?

Now wrap your head around this one: General relativity tells us that gravity is the curvature of four-dimensional space-time. Einstein built directly upon the non-Euclidean geometry of Riemann, who, in his famous habilitation lecture, said this:

So few and far between are the occasions for forming notions whose specializations make up a continuous manifold, that the only simple notions whose specializations form a multiply extended manifold are the positions of perceived objects and colors.

Odd... you never hear about Riemann's remarks on color. But color is just the wavelength of light, right?

Vision and revision

No. Not according to bad boys Maxwell, Schrödinger and Feynman, who tell us that color is a vector, whereas a wavelength, being a length, is a scalar, needing only one number to specify it.

Hermann Weyl, a friend and colleague of Einstein's, gave us gauge theory, a vast subject dealing with the all-important symmetries of the universe. These symmetries are so fundamental that Steven Weinberg, another Nobel laureate, wrote that "it is pretty clear that the symmetries of nature are the deepest things we understand about nature today."

Scalars and vectors are kindergarten tensors, and all these mathematical beasties are useful to us in the main because they have the symmetries we want.

Weyl also thought about color:

Epistemologically it is not without interest that in addition to ordinary space there exists quite another domain of intuitively given entities, namely the colors, which forms a continuum capable of geometric treatment.

Weyl writes in another place that colors obey the laws of projective vector geometry. And this is curious, because the extra dimensions of M-theory are thought to obey those laws, too.

Then again, colors only exist in the mind, right?

Not according to Mach, whom Einstein regarded as one of his main influences. In his work on The Analysis of Sensations, Mach wrote:

A color is a physical object a soon as we consider its dependence, for instance, upon its luminous source, upon temperatures, and so forth. When we consider, however, its dependence upon the retina [...] it is a psychological object, a sensation.

So which is it? Are colors mental or physical? Are the mental and the physical perhaps akin to Bohr's complementary properties? Like wave and particle, two faces of the same thing? This is what Bohm thought: "One may then ask what is the relationship between the physical and the mental processes? The answer that we propose here is that there are not two processes. Rather, it is being suggested that both are essentially the same."

History teaches us

How did we come to think otherwise? It all goes back to the time when the foundations of modern science were being laid, by Galileo and Newton. Although they famously swept aside Greek ideas about motion, they kept an ancient division between the observed properties of nature, as Schrödinger relates:

I wish to demonstrate in a little more detail the very strange state of affairs already noticed in a famous fragment of Democritus of Abdera the strange fact that on the one hand all our knowledge of the world around us, both that gained in everyday life and that revealed by the most painstaking laboratory experiments, rests entirely on immediate sense perception, while on the other hand this knowledge fails to reveal the relations of the sense perceptions to the outside world, so that in the picture or model that we form of the outside world, guided by our scientific discoveries, all sensual qualities are absent.

Galileo took up the cry: "Hence I think that these tastes, odors, colors, etc., on the side of the object in which they seem to exist, are nothing else than mere names, but hold their residence solely in the sensitive body..."

Newton, who wrote that "the science of colors becomes a speculation as truly mathematical as any other part of physics," nonetheless acquiesced in this hoary dogma:

For the Rays (of light) to speak properly are not colored. In them there is nothing else than a certain Power and Disposition to stir up a Sensation of this or that Color [...] in the Rays they are nothing but their Dispositions to propagate this or that Motion into the Sensorium, and in the Sensorium they are Sensations of those Motions under the form of Colors.

How do the rays of light stir up color, exactly? Newton did not know. We do not know, today. And so with tastes, odors, sounds and so forth. Are these properties possibly the hidden variables of quantum theory?

The chasm yawning in the sub-cellar of physical theory has traditionally been papered over by a tissue of rationalizations of the sort a bright young philosophy student could readily puncture. Why? It worked. Splendidly so.

David Hume, that bright angel of reason, saw the problem right away.

Thus there is a direct and total opposition betwixt our reason and senses ... When we reason from cause and effect, we conclude, that neither color, sound, taste, nor smell have a continued and independent existence. When we exclude these sensible qualities there remains nothing in the universe, which has such an existence.

Still, it worked! Besides, if there did exist so fundamental a flaw in physics (our most precise science... if only because its objects are so simple), why then does it work so well? An excellent question, one our civilization has encountered before, in mathematics.

You see, Sherman, for Pythagoras and his disciples, number held sway above the flux of appearances. They thought the universe governed by the natural numbers (1, 2, 3...) and by simple fractions (½, 1/3, ¼). When they discovered that the square root of 2 could not be expressed by a simple fraction, a scandal ensued. (Everyone was talking. No one was saying.)

The process repeated itself when complex numbers were discovered, numbers involving the square root of -1, or i, though nowadays i holds a central place in quantum theory.

The natural numbers work in perfect precision--so long as everything comes in whole numbers.

Symmetry, symmetry

Traditional physics also works very well indeed--so long as we stick with silent, colorless entities in 4D space-time. The world we observe, however, is neither colorless nor silent--and yet colors and sounds appear to respect the fundamental symmetries of nature. That's why things look pretty much the same, day in, day out... even as our Earth, Solar System, Milky Way and Local Cluster fly through the interstellar regions, spinning merrily as they go.

Or, colors and sounds are symmetric under translations and rotations. Well, yes, obviously, so what? So relativity flows from the wellspring of this very kind of symmetry.

Colors and sounds are so simple, so elemental, it's hard to get a handle on them, even though--or perhaps just because--we observe or perceive them every day. And it is the business of science to make sense of what we observe. So says Uncle Albert:

Out of the multitude of our sense experiences we take, mentally and arbitrarily, certain repeatedly occurring complexes of sense impression... we attribute to them a meaning--the meaning of the bodily object. Considered logically this concept is not identical with the totality of sense impressions referred to; but it is an arbitrary creation of the human (or animal) mind. On the other hand, the concept owes its meaning and its justification exclusively to the totality of the sense impressions which we associate with it. (The first and last bits carry my emphasis.)

Where do we go from here? Freeman Dyson, another Nobelist, framed the worldview of contemporary physicists with stunning simplicity and clarity. In an article on "Field Theory" for Scientific American, he wrote: "There is nothing else except these fields: the whole of the material universe is built of them."

Quantum field theory (QFT) holds that all particles can best be described in much the same way that Maxwell described electromagnetism. His electromagnetic field inspired Einstein's work on the gravitational field. In QFT, the photon is the quantum of the electromagnetic field and so with the graviton and the gravitational field. QFT extends this picture to all particles, everywhere.

It is quite curious, then, that we commonly speak of the visual field. If, as Bohm and others have suggested, the mental and the physical are essentially the same, is the visual field then a quantum field? Are mind and body unified at the foundations of the world? Are the additional dimensions of M-theory only "hidden" in plain sight?

Is color invisible to science because of its simplicity and familiarity?

A speck in the visual field, though it need not be red must have some color;
it is, so to speak, surrounded by color-space. Notes must have some pitch,
objects of the sense of touch some degree of hardness, and so on.

Wittgenstein

--------------------------

* J.S. Bell at CERN had demonstrated by a simple proof that all "local" hidden variables have to respect certain conditions. Experiments by Aspect and others appeared to settle the matter. Unless, of course, the missing variables were nonlocal, but nobody much believed in that possibility. (OK, I did, but who cares?)