In-Sight Publishing

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2021/01/11

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: So, this is the ultimate frisbee of virtual realities. You go first, please.

Rick Rosner: Ok, so, from time to time, we’ve casually kind of discussed how it’s interesting/possibly important that the issue of whether the universe is real or a simulation. In pop culture you have The Matrix, which is a huge trilogy of movies. Blockbusters, that center around the universe being simulated and in pop culture in the future the issue’s going to be, I think, bigger and bigger because of video games. Maybe, other forms of entertainment will simulate reality with greater and greater verisimilitude.

Jacobsen: That’s right.

Rosner: The simulations will get better and better. But then I was thinking about it a little bit and realize that just saying casually say, “You can’t tell whether the universe is real or a simulation.” Or if you couldn’t tell did, what would you mean when you talk about simulation? It turns out to be. Well, I don’t know if it’s not simple, but it certainly needs pinning down. Because you have issues like, “Who is the simulation for? Is it for the video game? Is it for the consciousnesses in that world? Is it the whole universe or is it just a chunk of it?” And all those things have implications for reality. It is naturally arising, but exists in an artificial armature – well, not necessarily artificial.

That’s another issue, but our minds are supported by our brains. You’d call that a natural armature versus a consciousness that would be supported by an information processing device that’s been built by people who are built by individuals who learned how to create consciousness. And then, of course, you have the problem of the turtles all the way down thing. What’s supporting each of these worlds – the hardware world and all that stuff? And it probably leads to what you were talking about, which is you kind of like you said, ‘Who cares?” Simulated versus natural, because in the end, it was a stack of turtles. The whole thing may become moot at some point. Anyway, it doesn’t seem trivial or simple to me. What do you think?

Jacobsen: Yes, I don’t think it’s trivial. I do think it’s simple because you don’t have a lot of options. So, let’s say, you have a naturally rising universe. Okay, let’s say, you get a civilization. They perform various virtual reality simulations of their universe and other possible universes. So, there you have a virtual universe arising out of the universe. Let’s say, you have some kind of not quite existent, not quite nonexistent universe; that is very quantum mechanical, just extremely virtual in its existence, because it’s not fully manifested insofar as it can exist and cannot exist. It’s at that edge between kind of solidity and not. You have others start off natural and have an entire timeline, a world line of the entire universe. There’s no need for a simulation in the first place. So, in that case, okay, you have a natural universe running all the way through. And the first case, you have a natural universe running into a virtual simulation. You could also have this iterative effect where you have extraordinarily long-lived universes, where you start off natural or you start off kind of quantum mechanically virtual. Then it becomes natural, then that civilization in that natural universe that happens to evolve simulates a universe in which you have other little mini civilizations that then themselves do simulations and you have this kind of matryoshka doll situation of simulations.

Rosner: You have that even with the natural universe, because every armature needs to itself to be part of a material world that is made of information that’s being stored in, so the turtles all the way down. And also, there’s another issue which gets back to your point of “who cares?”; if the better a simulated universe is, the less it’s going to violate the rules of a natural universe.

Any decent similar universe? Go ahead.

Jacobsen: Or any simulation in our natural universe or another natural universe, the laws of physics that govern the computation of that computational device, doing the simulation will limit the type of simulations it can do.

Rosner: Yes, and also, the probability of discernible divergences from apparent naturalness in a decent simulation is low.

So, like, well, just doing naive math, there are eight billion people in the world and you find out. And one person is magic because it’s a simulation. The odds against that are one in eight billion. And of course, in practical and more realistic terms the odds that you see violations of natural physics revealing that you’re in a simulation are just super low because it’s just there are probability arguments to be made. For one thing, we live in a world where there’s no good evidence of the world; we live in now, being a simulation. The same way, there’s no evidence of there being time travelers visiting us, right? There have been no probabilistic arguments to be made. So, based on the evidence of our world and the history of the universe as we know it, it’s apparently highly probable that the rules of the universe are not being violated, right?

Jacobsen: Yes. I mean, for that simulation, for any simulation to exist, which is grounded on a natural universe, that simulation, the computation behind it must rely on that natural universe physics. You can’t get out of that.

Rosner: But it’s easy to imagine a series of 50 years in the future. One hundred and fifty years in the future. It’s easy to imagine video games that are convincing simulations. And you can enter into them. And it’s even possible to imagine that you can have your awareness abridged so that when you’re playing the video game, you think you’re actually living in the world, the simulated world. You can also imagine that this video game has characters like free guy that are conscious and not realizing that they’re in a video game.

Jacobsen: Absolutely. And to say, that it’s limited by the physics. That its computation is based on the virtual universe. It’s not to say it can’t have its own variables and kinds of laws. It’s just the computation behind it will limit what is possible there. And it may be such that when we talk about computers as universal computation machines, like a universal Turing machine or something; these are only limited by our experience of this kind of computation in our universe. I mean, so, “Yes.”

Rosner: Yes, it’s certainly easy to build from our physics.

Jacobsen: Yes. So, our computers might not be universal. They might be general in this context.

Rosner: Yes, but the deal is, it’s possible to imagine a future that has a whole bunch of video games that are convincing simulations. Where within the games, the rules, some of the rules of reality would be violated. You can imagine a convincing simulated world video game in which you can fly, for instance.

Jacobsen: Gravity is reversed.

Rosner: Or something, it’s easy to imagine that these kind of games will be pervasive in the future. So, yet, we live in a world. The world we live in now doesn’t have any of those violations of reality. So, what’s the deal, probabilistic? You find yourself being a conscious being in the world that you’re in. And what are the odds that it’s a natural world? We, apparently, are in or it’s a simulated world. That you’re part of a game that runs for three weeks or three hours. You become conscious. You’ve got backs in your awareness. You’ve got a history. All these issues need to be addressed scientifically and philosophically, ideally scientifically. Are there probabilistic arguments to be made about whether you’re more likely to find yourself in a natural world or a simulated world?

And, of course, the simulated world you assume is an offshoot of the natural world, and as we’ve been talking of a natural world; it’s that assumption of legitimation. We have talked about, “I think, therefore, I am.” Within the context, given the extreme complexity and self-consistency of the worlds of our minds or an individual’s mind with its memories and its ability to mentally simulate the world, given the extreme consistency in the amount of information involved, that’s a statistical argument for the existence of the possessor of that consciousness. So, analogously, are there probabilistic arguments to be built around natural versus simulated worlds? Also, the extent of the simulated world.

Jacobsen: They are, in some sense. Any evolved mind in a natural universe is running a simulation of it. And this is not digital. Like my own mind is running a simulation of my little environment here, in front of the laptop. Similarly, with you in front of your Skype machine, it’s just the way things are. So, you could say simulation is the dominant strain of quantity of computation. Although, natural is the dominant quality of it. I mean, we’re only in a finite volume. We have seven or eight billion people running all these simulations based on their own minds. But those are very small volumes in the entirety of the Universe, the natural universe. I think you make the same argument where in any other universe where they have these simulations, even massive galactic-scale simulations. Computational devices of that scale, they would themselves be limited in that natural universe, which is bigger.

So, there’s one split there. Maybe, in that argument, it’s not usually made, which is that natural universes are the ground state. They’re much bigger. So, there’s a lot more computation happening with regard to them. Any kind of simulation that’s happening within them, whether it’s what we call digital or evolved consciousness, either case evolved or constructed. They’re far more plentiful. Because once the natural universe is already set up, then you have a simpler setup to kind of run different simulations.

Rosner: Yes, so, I mean, there’s that argument that we think can be made, which is that it’s just much more likely that we’re in a natural universe.

Jacobsen: Yes. Even though, the number of “simulated universes,” are arguably much more plentiful.

Rosner: Yes, so, it’s a mess.

Jacobsen: I mean, just the human species is a hundred billion simulations at various kind of world lines.

Rosner: We intuitively think that it’s much more probable. We’re in a natural universe, but we don’t know the framework to do any kind of calculation.

Jacobsen: You can throw a ballpark even by saying one planet in one universe for one species amounts to one hundred billion simulations. So, 100 billion little tiny world lines within that one natural universe.

Rosner: At that point, I am still finding myself confused. There’s another level. There are plenty of issues around simulation. Another issue, though, is that if the universe is a vast information processing entity. It is not necessarily aware of structures such as ourselves and our planet that have originated, that are built out of the matter that is made of the information in that information process. That the information in the processor is manifest as matter and space. And the whole thing is as our universe, but that the information processor gets the information out of the process that we experience as the universe without necessarily any awareness that this universe exists. Without any specific idea:: If it’s a sufficiently sophisticated entity, if I see this is anything like true, then that entity will have a general idea that there’s a universe made of the information in processing without any specific knowledge of what happens in that universe.

Jacobsen: I mean, consider the consciousness of an ant. Who knows how many ants in the world? What I am calling simulations in a natural universe, I am including those. I am not just talking digital; I am talking evolved. And so the non-conscious, so to speak, like an ant.

Rosner: So, we’re talking about two different things. There’s another issue with simulation, which is intentional simulation for a video game, and a simulation you’re talking about, which is a mental picture of the world.

Jacobsen: So, an objective simulation and a subjective simulation. Subjective can have a lot more flavors.

Rosner: I mean, that’s another like framework that needs to be fairly well defined.

Jacobsen: Maybe, in an intrinsic simulation and extrinsic simulation? Something like that.

Rosner: Well, I mean, like the simulations I am talking about are meant to emulate a world.

Jacobsen: You mean the simulations where you have two black holes processed virtually in these massive supercomputers and trying to see what happens when two black holes collide?

Rosner: No, I am not. I am not talking about that. I am talking about simulations that lead somebody in the simulation to potentially ask the question whether they’re living in a natural world or a simulated world. So, I guess, to be more clear, I am talking about simulated worlds, simulations.

The simulation we have in our minds are not intentional. They’re not constructed worlds. I mean, just talking about it shows that there are issues that need to be pinned down.

Jacobsen: You’re talking at a high level of simulation in my mind.

Rosner: It’s not just high level. It’s something different. It’s like the simulation that makes free guy think he’s living in a natural world. But it’s just as the simulation in a video game.

Jacobsen: So it’s an as if natural universe.

Rosner: There’s external intention there. Somebody built that world with the intent of making it seem real for their own purposes. Simulations we have in our minds. I mean, we didn’t intentionally build them. They’re a product of our evolved minds. They’re not there. For nearly every organism on Earth, they are meant to simulate the real external world.

Jacobsen: So right there. So, you’re talking at three layers. You have a universe, a really sophisticated simulation. And then the subjective impression, the mental map that simulated being has in that simulated universe.

Rosner: Yes. And I want to bring up one more point. So, if the universe is a giant consciousness, it’s not aware of the specifics of the material manifestation of the information in its consciousness. You can still argue that a system that’s possibly aware of that universe that is contained within the information. And an external world, an armature could tweak the events. Within the information universe it contains, it seems unlikely. But maybe also not by that, the quantum of events in our universe, the outcomes of when an open quantum frame becomes closed. Because an event, a quantum event has happened, you would think that the outcome of that quantum event reflects something that happened. For that outcome contains information about the world that the information is about, and those things should be… anyway. I’ve done myself a whole lot of lack of clarity and would just be wasting more time to go further into it, but anyway. This discussion, at least in my mind, is that the simulated worlds and universes need a lot more clarity in pinning down what they’re about in order to discuss them effectively.

Jacobsen: And we can both agree the ground state has to be a natural universe.

Rosner: Yes, but no. I mean, the easiest universe to imagine is one that has a timeline where every quantum event that has a complete timeline representing an actual history, and that the events on that timeline… Although, all the gazillion quantum events are randomly operating, according to the rules of quantum mechanics in a natural way. That’s the easiest universe to imagine.

Jacobsen: Any simulation that comes out of that has to be based out of some processing unit grounded in that universe. I think those are two points. So, any kind of simulation coming out of that universe or any type of simulation, virtual reality, coming out of that universe will have to be grounded in the physics of that universe, which will have a particular kind of computation.

Rosner: Not necessarily video games now that have alternative physics.

Jacobsen: That’s not what I mean. I mean, the physics for the actual computation to take place. So, in our case, we have digital computers, so you can simulate any kind of physics, but that type of range of simulation is grounded in competition.

Rosner: Objects.

Jacobsen: Yes.

Rosner: Is actually generating the simulation, the computer’s operating in our world, which we naturally assume to be natural.

Jacobsen: Yes. So, in that sense, that’s a point of huge clarity, where the material object in our universe that is the computational unit is constrained by a particular physics. But the virtual reality that it creates can have all sorts of physics. But it’s constrained by that original physics.

Rosner: Yes, although, I don’t know if that’s a big deal.

Jacobsen: Well, I think it might clarify the difference with the armature in our universe. This sort of thing.

Rosner: So, in the armature, the whole idea of the armature and the turtles all the way down is itself a mess. In that, we’re assuming that you can have this implied infinity because it’s an infinity that is informationally moot.

Jacobsen: Yes.

Rosner: That, even though it’s implied, it’s so distant in terms of having any possible effect on our world that you can just kind of wave it away. It seems like a terrible way to reason, though they’re in like Feynman type physics. There is similar hand-waving to get rid of troublesome infinities.

Jacobsen: As far as I am aware, that’s common in physics to hide infinities in various places.

Rosner: Yes, and it’s mathematically ugly. It’s philosophically ugly.

Jacobsen: Which makes it unlikely to be true because typically the true is beautiful.

Rosner: No, I was just reading. Somebody was writing about that whole true as beautiful thing and was debunking it. When physicists like Einstein say that beautiful is true, that’s based on many years of work in physics. And so, that’s a very educated aesthetic if you want to call it an aesthetic. But it might be more legitimate to call it a scientific intuition that what Einstein would find beautiful isn’t what somebody who finds astrology, somebody who believes in astrology, would find beautiful.

Jacobsen: I see.

Rosner: So rather than call it beauty, call it educated intuition.

Jacobsen: Makes sense. Okay, that’s fair.

Rosner: So, I don’t know that any further discussion on this stuff will be productive.

Jacobsen: Well, I think a wrap up would be helpful.

Rosner: My wrap up is that there are lots of issues around what we mean when we talk about simulation and the different types of simulation we might talk about. And it would be helpful to get that stuff more pinned down before we talk about the implications of simulated vs. natural universes and worlds. Because there’s a difference between a simulated universe because you could set up a randomized quantum universe within a computer and let it play out; it would be very small and it could be a whole universe.

Jacobsen: We should make that distinction.

Rosner: What’s that?

Jacobsen: Maybe, we should make the distinction.

Rosner: Distinction between an entire simulated universe and a simulated part of the world?

Jacobsen: Yes.

Rosner: Matrix. Because The Matrix doesn’t simulate the entire universe.

Jacobsen: Yes, I mean, in a sense.

Rosner: It simulates like the surface of Earth for all the people who are imprisoned in the simulation. And it simulates the stars and the sky and everything. But it dispenses in the interest of efficiency in The Matrix simulation. Does not give a shit about what might be happening on planets and some other galaxy. The simulation, matrix simulation, you have the images of other galaxies. And they appear to behave as distant galaxies might. But beyond that level of simulation, the prison keepers aren’t going to go to the trouble. The computational trouble of fully simulating distant galaxies.

Jacobsen: Well, in that sense, I think it’d be very, very rare to come across a true universe simulation. I think in that sense. You can make a distinction. This is a placeholder. That when you’re speaking of universes; you’re speaking of natural universes and you’re speaking virtual universes. You’re talking about worlds because it’s very likely only to be part. It’s going to be very partial.

Rosner: Again, just for me to wrap up, is just to say that this whole area is something that needs pinning down.

Jacobsen: Yes, I don’t even know what the terminology would be properly set forth to limit when we’re talking about that simulation of a world versus that subjective simulation.

Rosner: And what’s kind of weird is that, probably, the people building the universe will become the accepted terminology for, at least, some of these ideas that are going to be video game makers.

Jacobsen: Also, there’s another part of this, which is, “Do we simulate agents without agency?” Like bad guys in video games, they don’t have any agency. They’re just sort of these 3D.

Rosner: Right now, in video games, the only characters with agency are the characters being played by actual people.

Jacobsen: Yes.

Rosner: There may be characters within video games that are sufficiently complicated. I don’t know, because I don’t play video games. They might have like a sub-ant like level of agency. Because it’s a question as to “How much agency?”

Jacobsen: Very little.

Rosner: OK. But even so, an ant probably has more agency because an ant brain, probably, has like a hundred thousand neurons, which is not much compared to humans, 80 billion neurons. But it’s still a shitload of neurons enough to generate some behavioral complexity. And I am sure there’s no engine that runs a bad guy in a video game that has even the complexity of an ant brain. But in the future, it’s easy to imagine video game characters with the agency of an ant.

Jacobsen: And it’s different in what we have with those videogame characters because it’s a coding around which they behave as a 3D figurine, but ants have built into them – with ants that’s built into their system. It’s unified. There’s a central processing unit in them. In the simulated characters we have now in video games, that’s not even close to what is the case.

Rosner: No, but you got me. I am sure, like some of the non-playable characters and video games have very complicated decision trees.

Jacobsen: Sure. But it’s built. It’s distributed into the whole system and then played out through that little 3D figurine. In the end, it’s intrinsic to it. It’s much more tightly closed off.

Rosner: Yes, I think one thing we can say, at least in terms of this discussion, is that agents to have agency: Yu need to have consciousness.

Jacobsen: Yes.

Rosner: I think that in general, that seems. Well, that’s right.

Jacobsen: Yes, and maybe, also, there’s that sense of agency that has to come with a certain closed offness to the rest of the universe, where the only channels of information are getting in from your own little sensory apparatuses – whatever it is.

Rosner: Alright, I am tired. My voice is raspy.

Jacobsen: Ok, yes.

[End of recorded material]

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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2020/12/09

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Any commentary from the individuals who would be husbands or the boyfriends or the partners of the women who would go out and sleep with Feynman or Feynman like people at that time?

Rick Rosner: I’ve read a couple of Feynman autobiographies. Of course, he’s not going to mention that he banged everybody in sight and those weren’t those autobiographies. It didn’t go into great detail and didn’t track down people.

So, no, there is no commentary. I’m sure it caused certain amount of pain and rancor that he was one of the top five physicists of his era. Not that you can necessarily rank physicists like that, but he was huge and people probably felt super lucky to work with him.

This is also an added time when he was banging his female grad students in advanced physics. I’m not sure that he ever had a female grad student, he might have, but just the demographics weighed against that.

But anyway, the guys who were cuckolded, maybe, just kind of – I don’t know – sucked it up as part of the price they pay. I don’t know.

Jacobsen: What’s the more objective analysis of that? Does it make Feynman partly a bad guy?

Rosner: Yes. He wasn’t considered a bad guy when he was alive, but he worked on the Manhattan Project.

Jacobsen: Famously, Einstein did not.

Rosner: Einstein didn’t work on the Manhattan Project. But Einstein set in motion the foundations for the Manhattan Project.

Jacobsen: He was, actually, outside that Szilard letter with them.

Rosner: Yes. So, Szilard goes to… some physicists are concerned that if Hitler gets the atomic bomb, that would lead to the Nazis owning the world, nobody could stop them. So, Szilard went to Einstein and said, “You’re the only…” – I’m probably getting parts of this wrong here. Correct me if I’m wrong because you know better than I – “…physicist that FDR will listen to. So, you should go to him and say this is a threat.”

So, Einstein wrote this letter to FDR saying that there is a weapon. I don’t know if he put it in exactly these terms, but just ‘one of these bombs could blow up a city. If Hitler gets it first, we’re fucked.’ Then I think Einstein went to meet with FDR and then based on their meeting, maybe, Szilard came along with FDR who authorized spending at least a billion bucks, which was a huge amount of money back then, probably many billions of dollars to do the Manhattan Project.

The Manhattan Project was not just a bunch of physicists fucking around with Plutonium spheres in Los Alamos, New Mexico. This was the thing that, it’s very hard to refine. For one thing, Plutonium doesn’t exist in the wild. It decays too fast.

You have to start with Uranium. You’ve got to pull out well less than one percent of the Uranium that’s easily fissionable. So, I don’t like Uranium has an atomic weight of like 238. But the stuff that’s unstable has an atomic weight of 235, I think.

You have to take a bunch of Uranium ore and spin it in centrifuges, which is what Iran keeps trying to do. Hundreds of centrifuges have to spin the stuff out to separate stuff that differs in density by only one percent. So, it takes just a lot of effort, a lot of refining. So, you had Oak Ridge, Tennessee, who was doing that. You have the Hanford nuclear plant, which I think was in Washington, not D.C., but Washington State.

A bunch of places you had the early experiments where they build a nuclear reactor at the University of Chicago. It was all secret. If you wrote a science fiction story or you talked about the possibility of an atomic bomb, the FBI might come and tell you to shut up about it, “Don’t write any more of those stories.”

It was a huge project that stretches from one side of the country to the other, all just based on Einstein writing a letter to the president. And, of course, people will argue about exactly what happened to the atomic bomb project under Hitler.

But I think the people pretty much agree they did not get close at all. They were working on doing stuff with heavy water, which is H2O atoms, where the Hydrogen atoms are Deuterium or Tritium.

They have normally a Hydrogen atom just as a proton or an electron, but you can hang one or two neutrons on the proton. So, they were working on this. They had a refining enterprise going on, I think, in Denmark maybe, maybe Sweden.

I don’t know. They just didn’t get very far. People will argue on behalf of who is in charge of it. Was it Schrodinger No that was the German effort. Oppenheimer was Manhattan. But German effort was a big theoretical guy who didn’t get the fuck out of Germany when it went Nazi, as a lot of scientists did.

They ended up being in charge of the nuclear bomb project. People will argue that he didn’t want to give this weapon to Hitler, so he fucked it up on purpose. Other people will argue, “No, they just didn’t have the resources to do it.” Either the huge number of scientists that you need or the raw materials or whatever.

But anyway, the Germans did not get close at all. But then, we went ahead and dropped two atomic bombs on cities full of people of a different ethnicity than us, which from the perspective of 75 years later, looks suspect because we blew up one city to shreds.

We started with Hiroshima and killed at least 120,000 people there. Although not right off the bat, maybe, instantly, half that number. Then the number doubled as people died of radiation sickness.

But it blew up the city to the radius of several kilometers. It was obviously a devastating weapon on August 6th, 1945. But then they didn’t surrender immediately. So, on August 9th, we dropped another atomic bomb on Nagasaki, the somewhat smaller town.

So, the death toll there was only about 80,000 when everybody got done dying. People argue, at the time, that Japan was not going to surrender easily and that we might have lost a million troops in trying to invade Japan because it would have had to be; we would have had to fight island by island.

But that argument, people don’t necessarily agree about that either. I don’t know what exactly the arguments are, but in all of World War Two, in two theaters of war, the European theater and the Asian theater, we only lost – it’s still a huge number – 4,600 Americans, American soldiers and related personnel.

So, the idea that we would have lost two and a half times that number of soldiers die to take Japan. I don’t know that seems like a number that was inflated to make us feel better about killing 200,000 Japanese.

Then the question is, could we have just let them know and said, “Be here at nine o’clock on this date and you’re going to see something you don’t want to see,” and just detonate a bomb, blow up a town of 10,000 or blow up just an industrial plant.

Why do you have to blow up an entire good sized city?

So the thinking has shifted to the extent that people think about it at all. A lot of people still argue that it saved the lives of hundreds of thousands of US soldiers because after the second atomic bomb, they immediately surrendered at a cost of zero American lives.

Still 75 years later, we are less battle hardened. o the extent that we think about World War Two at all, I think people are more naturally skeptical and, if not skeptical; they, at least, think about how guilty the atomic scientists must have felt after their atomic bombs were used in this way.

There is some evidence of that. Some of the scientists remain belligerently oblivious to criticism. But others of them felt like shit, one would have to think that somebody as human as Einstein would have felt pretty bad about how things played out.

Because not only did we blow up two cities, but this led a huge arms race where at the peak of the arms race between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, I think each side had about 6,500 nuclear weapons. Then we did arms control work.

I think we’ve dropped it down to where each side now only has about 1,600 nuclear weapons still enough to sterilize the Earth many times over.

The point of that was when this strategy was being developed, it was called mutually assured destruction to come up with weapons so devastating that each side was terrified to deploy them, to use them.

Because they knew that if they used them that both nations and the whole rest of the northern hemisphere and probably eventually the southern hemisphere, everybody would die. There was a famous novel and movie of the fifties called On the Beach.

Where it takes place among the last living people in Tasmania, in southern Australia, because they’re the last people who haven’t been poisoned by the spreading cloud of nuclear fallout after a big war, the crew of a sub, of a US sub, just hauls ass to the southern hemisphere, and it’s their last few months of life among the Tasmanians as the cloud draws near and they all die.

And there were plenty of books and movies. We have the Russian missile crisis, which was, maybe, the closest that, at least, we knew that we came to nuclear war in the early 60s. You had Dr. Strangelove, the movie which ends with a series of nuclear explosions.

You had freaking what’s the Fail Safe, it’s a movie with Henry Fonda, made from a novel in the 50s the crew of a nuclear bomber, my dad, my real dad, my stepdad, all my dad’s, my dad was a navigator bombardier in Strategic Air Command.

He flew a B-36, a huge plane with like 14 engines. I think it had like 6 prop engines and 8 jet engines. I think I’m exaggerating the number of engines, but just a monster of an airplane. they started off. He flew around with nukes for at least 3 years.

When he started, I think they started with A bombs. By the time he was done, I think they were flying H bombs around. An H bomb is like 100 times more powerful than an A bomb. H bomb uses an A bomb explosion to create fusion.

It started with fission in the A bomb and use that explosion to collapse a bunch of heavy Hydrogen to create fusion. You get a bomb that’s 100 times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb. Anyway, my dad was flying those around and my step dad was guarding them on a base, I think in Louisiana, maybe.

Then my father in law was doing nuclear bomb accounting. He was keeping an account of nuclear bombs. So, everybody was in the nuclear bomb business. Everybody was fucking terrified of being obliterated in a nuclear war.

There is a little bit of fear now that fucking Trump has six weeks to go. But we’re much less afraid than people in the 50s and 60s. And so, the Manhattan Project scientists probably felt like shit about bringing that world into existence.

They probably console themselves with the idea that the cat was going to get out of the bag eventually, anyway. That it was good that America democracy had a head start versus this fascist dictatorship, this repressive… these motherfuckers in Russia and the other motherfuckers in China.

But it would have been nice to, maybe, hold off the nuclear arms race for a few, maybe. we went from A bombs to H bombs faster than we needed to, if at all. Edward Teller, for some reason, Hungary turned out a bunch of genius physicists in the first half of the 20th century. like Norbert Wiener, I think probably came out of Hungary and Teller came out of Hungary and Teller was this huge, like proponent of the H bomb.

Without him pushing forward, we, maybe, wouldn’t have made it. Because what the fuck do you do if someone drops one of these on Chicago and kills 10 million people all at once? What’s the point of that weapon?

Anyway, if you want to learn about this stuff, there are good books by Richard Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb. I think he did a sequel, maybe he didn’t. It explains in great detail the science and the politics. We started talking about whether Feynman was a bad guy.

Feynman just gleefully liked to figure shit out. He would crack safes. He liked to figure out just by fiddling around with the dial, what was going inside the lock of one of these Manhattan Project safes.

So, he kept cracking them. Then he’d leave a note saying, “Hey, I was here, ha ha.” He played the bongo drums. He was a hipster, a beatnik. He was a good looking guy, which helped his project of getting laid a lot.

He was a very cheerful guy and a great teacher, a great popularizer of science and just a friendly, lively guy. So, I don’t know if he had moments of crisis, of conscience. I don’t know. I doubt it. He just seemed to barrel forward figuring shit out.

He’s the one who figured out why the space shuttle Challenger blew up, or at least he came up with the most effective presentation as to its demise. I don’t know. He’s like 72. He’s dying of stomach cancer. A lot of the atomic scientists died of cancer because they were fucking around with radiation like maniacs for years.

They had a ball of Plutonium and some guys have a sphere. You go to the office and say, “Hey, pick that up,” and you pick it up and it would be warm in your hand because nuclear fission was going on, nuclear decay was going on in the ball of metal. So, they just had that ball, the guy who had that in his office; I don’t know how long he lived.

There was another guy who got killed immediately. There was a thing called tickling the dragon, I think, where it would take two half spheres of Plutonium and bring them as close together as you safely could because you needed it.

While people were standing by with Geiger counters to measure the rate of nuclear decay, they needed these numbers to figure out how the bomb was going to perform. They’re bringing these half spheres together, using probably some like thumb screw arrangement from a safe distance.

But the fucking thumb screw slips and the two half spheres “tunck” together. This is bad because it’s a critical mass. In two seconds, they’re going to have, if not an explosion then, a huge meltdown that will render the whole fucking, probably the whole, base uninhabitable.

So, this guy runs in and knocks the spheres apart basically with his bare hands. Maybe he had a hammer or something. But you have a nuclear weapon that – I don’t know – if they were so critical, they would have exploded.

But they were pretty fucking close to critical mass. This guy runs up to it, knocks the spheres apart and saves everybody’s life except his own because he was cooked. He was dead within a week. Yes, fucking hero, probably buried in a lead coffin, literally.

So, the atomic bomb is pretty much the point where science went from a force of good to feeling like it was a little dirty. And America tried to forget about it, but we couldn’t because of the arms race. But the government tried to convince everybody that the atomic era was a good thing, atoms for peace.

I think about the project, where they tried to prospect for oil by setting off a bomb. They did nuclear fracking in the 60s or 70s. They set off like one or two nuclear weapons like two miles deep in the earth to fracture rock and free oil and natural gas, atoms for peace.

“Hey, here’s what we could do with that.”

It worked. They got a lot of oil, but it was radioactive. So, it freaked everybody out and it also caused earthquakes. Colorado, which isn’t a big earthquake country. So, anyway, did Feynman feel bad? I don’t think so.

Anyway, so, he’s 72, he’s dying. He goes and testifies in front of Congress about what cause Challenger to blow up. And the deal is that joints in the rocket where the rocket vibrates like crazy because it’s a fucking rocket.

So, sections of the rocket were gaskets, rubber gaskets between the sections to allow them to move around with the vibrations without cracking and also without breaking the seal. When Challenger launched, it was cold and the rubber was not sufficiently flexible.

So, fuel got out and was ignited outside the rocket and it blew up the challenger. Then Feynman sits in front of Congress with a glass of ice water. before he sits there and he goes, this is the O-ring material. He goes ‘It’s stretching.’

Then, he dips the O-ring in ice water and then he tries to stretch. It doesn’t stretch. like, even the idiots in Congress were like, ‘Oh, that’s fucking bad.’ That was his last heroic moment in his life. So, I think he like doing shit like that. No, I think he was a happy warrior.

The end.

[End of recorded material]

License

In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.

Copyright

© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2020/12/09

[Beginning of recorded material]

Rick Rosner: I grew up in Boulder, Colorado, home of the University of Colorado, where I eventually ended up attending after I had a nervous breakdown and failed to complete my application to any college.

I only wanted to go to Harvard and then I felt that I couldn’t even get a girlfriend in high school. Anyway, I ended up just going to my hometown school. This week, in a Covid devastated intercollegiate football season, my school and the school where I met my wife is for the first time in a while, they broke into the top twenty-five college football teams in the nation in a season, where nobody should be playing intercollegiate sports.

It’s just exploiting the kids. I’m sure all the players want to play, but it’s a sleazy proposition. But the schools make a shitload of money on school anyway. They would be late in the season. The season would be basically over by now because of Covid. They’ve played four games and won all of them.

So, they’re there nationally. So, I tweeted, “Congratulations.” Also, everybody’s stupid to be playing football. So, I thought I’d tweet another congratulation to my hometown school for having on its faculty back in the 60s, George Gamow, the guy who came up with the Big Bang Theory, which is the world’s the most important current theory in cosmology.

All cosmology stems from it and what’s interesting about Gamow, my dad, my stepdad, played poker with one of the chancellors of the university. The one who was in charge of cleaning up messes, and a faculty member did something. They wanted to make it go away back in the era when you could do that stuff.

So I don’t know if my dad knew this about Gamow. My dad owned a lady’s ready to wear school. So, he didn’t have a deep background in physics, but, somehow, he knew that Gamow was drinking and was prone to drive off the side of mountains because Boulder goes right for Boulder, up into the foothills, into the mountains.

So, I don’t know if my dad knew it because my dad knew everybody in town. He grew up there. He was a friendly guy. He was well-loved you, knew everybody and everything. I don’t know if he knew that Gamow was drunk because he knew everybody or because he knew the chancellor who was in charge of cleaning up messes.

Anyway, when I was going to tweet about it, but, before I did, I wanted to play. You can’t slander the dead, or is it libel? Libel as a print, I think, okay, you can’t libel the dead. You can say whatever you want about dead people in America, whether it’s true or not.

So I could go ahead and say he’s drunk and not get in trouble. But I didn’t want to do that without some verification. So, I Googled “George Gamow drunk” and like a gazillion references came up. It’s part of his standard biography.

He was a heavy drinker. He died at age 64, probably because of his heavy drinking, which amazed me that this is a well-known part of his biography. That one of the greatest the physicists with one of the greatest theories – Oh, right now. I don’t believe in an unadulterated Big BANG, but it’s still a great theory.

one of the greatest theories of the 20th century in physics and there it was. A party monster came up with it. He wasn’t a solitary, surly drunk. He was a gregarious fun drunk. So, what’s that? So, he likes going to and throwing parties and having a lot of cocktails.

There is a picture with a funny party hat on when he went drinking and Einstein showed up and all these great physicists. Those guys.

Jacobsen: Overdrinky?

Rosner: I don’t know how Drinky Einstein was, but he had a number of affairs. He banged like five women while he was married to other women. That’s the number I’m most comfortable with. I don’t think he went out of his way to do it.

But I think if women threw themselves at him or if he had a meeting of the minds to some extent, then he’d do it. So, Feynman was an unstoppable pussy hound. He would seduce anybody who got within 50 feet of it.

The wives of his grad students. Wives and girlfriends of his grad students in his later years. He’d go to teaching at Cal Tech, living in Pasadena, and he’d spend some of his afternoons in strip joints just scribbling physics on bar napkins.

So when people think of science, they don’t think of drunk people or of Feynman getting late into a science. We’ve talked about that. That’s one of the original pickup artists with developing principles for what would and wouldn’t work with women.

You might meet in a bar. Anyway, one of the greatest fucking theories of the 20th century in physics came from a party monster.

[End of recorded material]

License

In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.

Copyright

© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2020/12/09

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Okay, so, you, by alternative intelligence test standards, have one of the highest IQs in the world, repeatedly. So, it’s established, in a loose alternative sense.

Rick Rosner: What you’re saying is, I’ve taken a lot of these tests and done well.

Jacobsen: So, you would technically have the qualifications to join a lot of these alternative high-IQ societies. Are you offered to join a lot of them, or have you?

Rosner: Yes, I’m all offered by some. Some societies they just sign you up. They send you a thing and you’re in. That’s like, “Okay.” But I haven’t gone out of my way to join into these. I’ve tried to join the most exclusive ones. Ones that I could use for – I don’t know – publicity of some credential that might – I don’t know – get me interviewed somewhere, though barely ever happens.

As a younger man, I was mostly concerned about getting a girlfriend. I’ve told you this story before, but I joined Mensa because Playboy in the mid-80s did a photo series called the “Women of Mensa.”

It’s naked pictures of women who are in Mensa. My thinking wasn’t to join Mensa to meet these women. My thinking was that if Playboy did this, then Penthouse certainly was going to do the ‘Naked Men of Mensa.’

I was always lifting weights. I figured I had a good shot at getting into the ‘Men of Mensa’ photo, whatever, in Playgirl magazine. Then all these women would see me and somebody would want to be my girlfriend. This was stupid for a number of reasons.

Including that women generally didn’t read stuff like that, this was stupid because, even though the magazine is ostensibly for women, apparently, it is mostly for gay guys. Women don’t necessarily want to see naked guys with boners as much as guys want to see naked guys with boners.

I found that mostly true with stripping. If women want to see some fucking loser gyrate around naked, they can just go home and see their own personal loser. So, anyway, reason number two is Playgirl never did anything of the sort, but, anyway, join Mensa.

So, I had a year’s worth of membership, so I went up to a few things. There are no girls. I don’t know what the gender breakdown by sex in Mensa is, but it’s got to be like 90% guys. I don’t know if I wanted to hang out with blowhard guys. I can just hang out with myself.

Then I figured I worked in bars, so I could meet women. Everything I did, I did so, maybe, somebody would find me a reasonable would consider me an okay boyfriend.

Jacobsen: Someone you even met at the Jewish singles dance.

Rosner: I went to a Jewish singles dance, yes, but in 1986. I met a woman who’s now my wife. Even that wasn’t, that was just because I’d had a bad breakup a long time before, but I still felt bad about it. So, to get myself out of my rut, I challenged myself to do something stupid, and pointless once a week.

That week, it was go to the stupid Jewish singles dance. Anyway, I didn’t see the point of joining any of these other like high IQ clubs because they just didn’t seem to offer an angle on meeting women in a nutshell.

Jacobsen: Do you think you have the world’s highest IQ?

Rosner: I don’t know. I could make an argument that I do, but it’s a pretty nebulous thing. I’m definitely one of the best takers of high-end IQ test in the world, but it’s a pretty arbitrary set of skills. It’s like being the “World’s Strongest Man” if you’ve ever watched that on TV.

Jacobsen: It’s not something to take time before. If I happen to come across, then I’ll little watch it, but not usually. Because I don’t really own a television or watch much or any television.

Rosner: But you’ve seen the events. It’s deadlifting stuff, like picking up a car. How many times can you pick up one end of a car within 60 seconds? Can you lift these rocks that are these spheres made of stone that are like 30 inches in diameter?

How many of those can you lift to the top of pedestals in two minutes? How far can you tow a truck or a train? It’s events that people practice train for; certainly, these are among the strongest guys in the world.

Some of them go 360 pounds and six foot eight. It’s like 12 percent body fat or less. They’re super strong, but to determine who’s the strongest of them, you’ve got all these arbitrary events, and even powerlifting is arbitrary.

So, you have to be head and shoulders above every other super strong guy to be clearly hands down and just absolutely, the strongest guy in the world. That might happen occasionally, but, mostly, there is a little cluster of people who, due to natural ability or obsession or just lots of practice doggedness, do well on IQ tests.

I’d like to think that if I and everybody else who claims to be to have the world’s highest IQ were sat down or were assigned like three or four tests, given enough time to do a good job on all of them that I would prevail. But who knows.

Jacobsen: Was that the argument?

Rosner: Well, the argument is that I’ve taken – I don’t know – dozens of these high-end tests. I’ve gotten the highest score ever scored on like three quarters of the high-end test that I’ve taken.

Jacobsen: Were any of these tests normed on you?

Rosner: A lot of them were normed on me, where they look for people who’ve taken a lot of other high-end tests. They have you submit your scores and from your scores plus your performance on their test, they help determine the scoring scale for their test.

I’m sure none of them were exclusively normed on me, but I probably helped with a lot of them. Because I’ve got the most on other test scores to send people, that want them.

Jacobsen: When did you stop taking so many?  

Rosner: I don’t know. There is this one that I wanted to do so well on that I just never stop taking it. I quit working on it a long time ago.

Jacobsen: What is the score if you do well on it?

Rosner: Over 200 if you do well.

Jacobsen: SD 15?

Rosner: I think so. Then there is this other one that I’ve been working on recently. But I’ll submit in the next few days. If I could I have to submit it before, I don’t know the 20th, I believe is the deadline.

The guy who created the test is having a little competition that I’d like to be in. If I get to the point where I’m satisfied with my answers, then awesome. When I get to the point that I’m satisfied with it, enough of my answers, I’ll submit.

[End of recorded material]

License

In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.

Copyright

© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2020/12/02

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Ok, so, you have this idea about necessity, a lot of people do.

Rick Rosner: I just have thought that just came to me that freedom from necessity is an emergent quality.

Jacobsen: As in an increase in degrees of freedom?

Rosner: Well,  you don’t have choice until you can make choice and choice is generally associated with awareness. It doesn’t have to be like an amoeba, which can still reach some inflection point where it has to move one way or another.

And, of course, in an amoeba, it’s all chemistry, but you could argue that a choice has been made. You’d get people who would argue back that, no, it’s not a choice, it’s chemistry. But you don’t get a choice of where alternatives are weighed and decisions made until you get some level of awareness.

Jacobsen: So, the way I’m interpreting necessity is in its most general sense of unaffordability.

Rosner: Yes!

Jacobsen: Something is necessary.

Rosner: Da Vinci didn’t know the fundamental particles of physics, but I’d say it’s a minority of scientists, who spend much time thinking about how the fundamental particles could be any other way than the way they are.

Even most scientists do not specialize in questioning the particles we have and what they do, I would think that the underlying assumption in scientists and everybody else is that the universe had no choice in particles. You have to take a physics class or read some article on physics for the layman, for somebody to tell you that it’s an active question whether there was any where you could among possible universes, whether there is a choice of particles.

People, I think, assume that physics is the way it is by way of necessity, that I think you can find all sorts of examples of that, like the inverse square law for forces. How could it be otherwise? Because space itself spreads out by the square of the distance from the particle that’s exerting the force.

Jacobsen: Yes, I think you just take the common domains of knowledge, chemistry, particle physics, biology and fundamental questions about creation and annihilation in cosmology. Each of those layers, you can apply this principle of necessity.

Rosner: It brings up an area that where there is the wild boys, where: Can you imagine alternative worlds? And that is the history of evolution, where the species that survive and then the species that evolved from those species, there is a lot of luck arbitrariness.

We’ve had six waves of mass extinction where we had to rebuild after every wave. All that depends on a random meteor. So, earlier, I was arguing that the choice can’t exist without awareness, but their choice is just one thing and then random chance. What I’m saying is there is nothing necessary about the history of evolution, what’s necessary is that things would evolve.

Jacobsen: So, that’s a fundamental statement on necessity in biology. The fact that things evolve, the ways that things fundamentally evolve. Is this something like talking about primary and secondary necessities as you get the higher order complications?

Rosner: Is he talking about that or are we talking about that?

Jacobsen: He’s so cool, “Necessity is the mistress and guide of nature,” or, “Necessity is the theme and inventress of nature, her curb and her eternal law.” So, we’re talking about choice. It’s not that there has to be choice. That’s a secondary deal.

I think it’s fundamental. I think there is a similar process when you just have differentiation happening in a universe and choice between options of a conscious agent, of an operator.

But it’s the same process going on, but they’re fundamentally different and one simply differentiates and one has a certain recursive element to it. It’s reflective back onto itself and then making a choice, a differentiation relevant to its own nature.

But fundamentally, this is a bifurcation in either case. Self-consistency and principles of existence, but he’s using it. The way he says necessity sounds like the way we use principles of existence, that which cannot be; those which are necessary. In other words, that which can’t be the other.

Yes, and so, there is a certain unavoidability to existence in the same way there is a necessity for existence. In the same way, there are principles of existence and those principles of existence and that necessity is reflective of self-consistency.

So, the fact that things are unavoidably existent means that they are necessary, means that they are grounded in principles of existence. What those principles are, that’s another question, but essentially necessity is fundamental and is another way of framing in another century, in another philosophical paradigm of principles of existence, of self consistency, I think.

[End of recorded material]

License

In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.

Copyright

© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2020/11/27

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: If someone was to look out into the world, there appears to be objects. There appears to be subjects. You ask the question, “What is that object, or who is that to point out a subject?” How do those get slotted in thinking in an actual perception?

Rick Rosner: You’re talking about two different questions. One is how stuff is identified, and the second is how stuff is classified. You were pointing at this last night when talking about essentials.

I would argue with the essentials or at least things that you don’t know well or the things/the identifiers in your mind. I don’t know when you see a new person or when you see a car. For you to be able to remember that person or perceive the car, you have to do some classification work.

That’s largely a combination of conscious and less conscious. If the person’s got a broken nose, you’ll explicitly notice that. But there will be a bunch of other stuff about their face that you will note, but less consciously.

So, you’ll be able to identify him if you see him again in a half an hour. That means that for faces and for cars, we’ve got classification systems that we’re only like half aware of. We have a mental model and a subconscious or unconscious mental model of the different configurations the faces can take.

Then we see a new face, we map that person into that face in the face database. I don’t know if the face classification is as simple as all that, but probably so that you’ve got a number of different dimensions.

You find that person’s face along all these different dimensions, which is the same thing as finding a point in multidimensional face space. Except it’s not quite that easy because faces might have 30 or 50 potential dimensional characteristics, your average face won’t register along most of those dimensions.

You only plot that. You pick the dimensions that are appropriate for each face you classify. The broken nose might be an optional dimension of its own. It’s broken noses. There are interesting things like Brian Williams, the newscaster, has a nose that goes to one side, but he’s unconsciously learned to tilt it, to turn his head, just enough that his nose presents as less to the side than it would if he were perfectly squared up to the camera.

So, the broken nose is less noticeable. But anyway, you pick the dimensions, the face is distinctive along it, then you plot that in some face space. You do that with a lot of stuff. That you pick your dimensions.

And along with picking the dimensions, you pick along those dimensions the distinguishing characteristic, and then you contextualize the distinguishing characteristics; and that’s it. It’s not necessarily a dimension like somebody just mentioned, though.

We were watching a movie with Emma Stone from 10 years ago, where a character is described as six on the Kinsey sexuality scale, which is almost as gay as you can be. That’s a linear scale. I think it goes from one to seven or something.

We don’t necessarily rank like an eyebrow or a an ear along a bunch of dimensions. We contextualize the ear or the eyebrow or the busted nose with a comparison to other ones that we found notable.

Maybe, that does break down into classification along a bunch of linear dimensions. I don’t know. Maybe, that’s the most efficient way to classify information. But in any case, you can find the distinguishing characteristics and you contextualize, among other things, that have the same distinguishing characteristic, that aren’t the same tags. For that being a characteristic that’s notable, that’s it.

[End of recorded material]

License

In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.

Copyright

© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2020/11/27

[Beginning of recorded material]

Rick Rosner: This comes off of the idea that the actual worlds, the universes that could exist that are highly parallel to ours can’t be magically different. You can’t have a universe in which the South won the Civil War.

Unless, you can explain how that might happen through causal effects, you can’t magically have something happen. So, anyway, I was thinking about it. That’s also a principle of writing decent science fiction where I thought about these two productions that annoyed me.

One is called True Love, where several years in the future scientists have discovered how to find someone’s soul mate. No, I think the show’s called Soul Mates, that there is an actual thing. There is some soul that we have.

Scientists have figured out how to read the soul to find out which two souls actually belong together out of the whole world. And then the show is like 4, 5, 6 episodes, each telling its own story about the problems created by this deal.

I’m like, fuck the show because A, it’s not very good. B, this isn’t a thing that can reasonably exist. There is no soul that only matches up with one other soul on the planet. A, that’s dumb. B, the problems created by this thing that’s dumb don’t concern me because it doesn’t cast much light on actual things.

Decent science fiction examines things that are pertinent and important to people in the world. Some people would even argue that science fiction isn’t science fiction at all. It’s just an examination of the present dressing it up in science.

I don’t know. The Day The Earth Stood Still examined dangerous Cold War conflicts, the anxiety that everybody was feeling in the 1950s about like the potential for nuclear war. And this was examined through the perspective of an alien species that shares our same concern.

That we’re going to wipe ourselves out and sends a giant robot custodian, basically. Then there is this other this movie with Amanda Seyfried and Justin Timberlake called In Time. In the future, instead of money, you have time.

It’s built into a chip on your arm. If you’re rich, you’ve got like years of saved up years. If you’re poor, you’ve only got a few minutes of saved up time and you have to keep working to replenish the time you have.

If you run out of time, you just drop dead on the spot. It’s a whole movie about the problems and dangers that the system creates. I’m like, fuck this movie A, because it’s not very good. B, it’s like, I understand the point that the rich people have more resources than poor people.

But it’s a dumb way of arguing about that. It doesn’t offer any insight on any of this shit and it’s via a device that will never happen, compared to the semi-successful like Blade Runner. The Blade Runner movies, they look good.

But they’re frustrating because they’re not as good as they should be and they’re not as good as they look. Half of science fiction movies and TV shows have ripped off their look. The rainy streets, the dystopian Los Angeles, but the movies themselves are only semi-successful.

But even so, the reason for their whatever success they have besides how good they look, is that they try to examine what makes somebody human particularly in a world that verges on one we’re moving into more and more, where it has the potential for artificial intelligence.

It feels like there is relevance. You feel the relevance of points in the movie, like when Roy Batty is dying on the roof of the building. He’s arguing that he has as much right to existence as any non-engineered human based on what he has experienced in his life. Have you seen the movie?

Jacobsen: No.

Rosner: Well, anyway. The decent science fiction doesn’t just pull a bunch of futuristic shit out of its ass. It deals with issues that concern us. It’s believable. This isn’t an issue for a lot of science fiction fans. Believability isn’t that much of an issue like Star Trek. You’ve certainly seen Star Trek.

Jacobsen: Oh, yes. All right.

Rosner: All right. So, Star Trek is super antiseptic. The first series, the first three years of Star Trek with Captain Kirk and Spock and everybody is antiseptic, underimagined, and cheap, because it was in the early to mid-60s.

Their big deal was sliding doors that made a whooshing sound, and things that act like cell phones do now. But it was just cheap. If they wanted an alien, they’d slap some shit on their foreheads or they paint them blue. Humans were not modified.

It didn’t get modified humans until like the third series of Star Trek when you have the Borg. But you’re just like humans that are part robots with circuit boards glued to their faces. So, Star Trek gets points with people for having good writers.

They hired some of the best science fiction writers of the 50s to write scripts in the 60s. So, the issues were there, the philosophical issues. The world they built was just shit. There was no advertising in the world of Star Trek, where, 30 years later, when you’ve got Minority Report.

People realize that the future is driven by market forces and it has very annoying advertising. What I’m arguing is that, the best science fiction addresses issues we’re interested in, looks cool, and presents a pretty believable future, an awesome but believable future, either awesome in a good way or in a bad way or in both ways.

There is another show that pissed me off, which is Altered Carbon. In the future, you can move from body to body. You’ve pretty much got a little hockey puck that plugs into the back of your neck and that contains your accumulated experience, your consciousness, and all the information that comprises it.

And it looks pretty cool, that fucking show. But it’s a terrible show, again, because it’s under thought. It’s written probably by people who don’t have a deep grounding in science fiction. It’s set like 300 years in the future. Everybody, even 300 years in the future, the only thing people care about is looking hot and fucking.

That’s just not a reasonable future. We’re already seeing changes in sexual behavior. We’re barely in the future. 300 years from now, some people won’t worry about sex.

Others will want to have four percent body fat and amazing abs. There are always will be people who want to just do a lot of fucking. There will still be those people. But there will also be like 80 other kinds of conscious beings, none of whom are concerned with having abs and fucking. The end.

[End of recorded material]

License

In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.

Copyright

© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2020/11/27

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: So, I had some more thoughts. It’s not a different stream. Yes, there are different stream of thoughts. I think that is a stream of thought, which is more precise.

So, I think the vague notion that people who are in the non-religious communities or people who are in a Freudian state of mind. They see the Gods as projections of human limits. Okay, cool, I think that’s limited though, because it’s not very precise.

Rick Rosner: What projection of human limits?

Jacobsen: That human limitations or needs, those are the Gods, are projections of those.

Rosner: You mean, God is the creation of or is the solution for a human limitation. Is that what you’re saying?

Jacobsen: Yes. Not necessarily a solution for limitation, but a projection of that, of the fulfillment of that need. So, in some ways, it is a solution, yes. In other ways, it’s simply a manifestation of that lack.

Rosner: So, people feel fear because they suck, basically. They have limitations. So, they create the gods. Out of that fear, you have the creation of Gods.

Jacobsen: Yes. So, I think that’s like the whole notion with the anthropomorphization of the divine. But that’s redundant because the divine are characteristically anthropomorphic.

The polytheistic Hellenistic pantheon are all just human characters, but they have more capacity. So, they’re superhuman.

Rosner: They were the superheroes of their time.

Jacobsen: I think the Marvel DC Universe, same deal, the Hindu Gods, same deal. They have more arms or they have more sex or they have a longer lifespan or they have the power to do something like have control of nature; humans don’t.

Zeus’ control over lightning, things of this nature. So, there is this notion, but I don’t think it’s that precise because it’s just a one-step. Humans have a certain set of identities and we project that outwards.

Then we call those te Gods and then atheists, materialists come around and say – or skeptics come around and say, “Look how stupid these people are.” Neither conversation is very helpful.

Because I think you have to be precise about it and take it as an operation, not surgery. Unless, you’re taking it as a dissection analogy. But I think you can make an operation to how that happens.

Rosner: How the creation of gods happen?

Jacobsen: Yes. So, not in a historical sense, not in a cultural sense, but how you can operationally define how this reasonably could happen in most cases. So, the Abrahamic God is in modern terms omni-infinite.

So, omniscient, knows everything, omnipotent can do everything, with aseity, which is to say self-existent. It is contingent or dependent upon nothing, and it is eternal. So, it’s a-temporal. It’s imminent. It’s, in and of, reality while being outside of reality. It’s everywhere.

In other words, these sorts of things. So, it’s infinite in all these different capacities.

Rosner: Basically, what you’re saying is that, it’s a more sophisticated solution to the problem. If you’re going to design a God, you might as well make the God Superman in all ways.

Jacobsen: I think this isn’t more sophisticated necessarily. I think it’s the nth degree of what is normally happening. So, is that more sophisticated?

Rosner: Gods that are just like you, that have specific functions like the pantheon Gods that are you can imagine. They’re ad hoc.

Jacobsen: Yes. So, these other ones, you can take them as like superhuman finites, like a pluralism. But when it comes to these modern gods that are most dominant in the world. Typically, they’re taking them as a singular, infinite identity.

So, it’s not more sophisticated. It’s just “mash them all together” and then sayin, “You can’t measure it.” Is that more sophisticated?

Rosner: Really, it’s more efficient and harder to argue against. I’d say it’s more sophisticated. It feels the God who is all powerful, all knowing, the monotheistic God, feels simplistic. At the same time, that idea is more powerful.

I say it’s more powerful and sophisticated. If you look at it, half of the people on earth, at least nominally, subscribe to a religion with that one most powerful God. So, you can’t argue with success. Except for science, which is even more successful than that one God.

Jacobsen: So, I would take this then that you just take Christians and Muslims of all denominations. These become over half the population or near half the population of the planet. So, I agree with you. That is successful by the numbers.

But if you just take this process of just saying, “It’s anthropomorphizing with these polytheistic versions or these monotheisms, but these monotheisms with a limited God as opposed to these monotheisms with one infinite God, who is personal.”

I think they’re all about same category. Although, typically, they’re characterized as the former ones. They’re taken as anthropomorphic. They have human attributes. The latter ones taken as more objective and scientific.

That’s why its harder to refute in your words. However, I think, in either case, they’re all still anthropomorphic in different framings around that orb.

Rosner: Yes, they all exist to solve human problems and questions and all that. Yes, sure.

Jacobsen: So, here’s the process that I’m proposing: First, you can name a psychological lack. I’m not saying people that believe in these Gods are doing that now, explicitly. But you name a psychological lack.

You objectify it as a property, goodness, spatial limitation, temporal limitation, etc. Externalize it as out there in the universe. You make it infinite and personalize it once more. So, it becomes an omni-infinite personality based on that human lack. So, it’s in the new version, externalization.

Rosner: More simply you’re framing the universe in human terms and then buttressing your framework by claiming that the universe is explicitly framed that way.

Jacobsen: Yes. So, I characterize it this way. Internal made external, finite made infinite, personal psychology made “defined” psychology. I think that basically all the pantheons of limited gods would be a self-limiting formulation going through this process.

Rosner: It’s just like first attempts when people weren’t really or they hadn’t got down to the essentials of what their spiritual concerns were. Creating a whole bunch of little Gods, each in charge of some aspect of life for survival, speaks to people who are less dominant over their environment.

Appealing to the weather gods and hunting gods, there is still a bunch of stuff to work out, both theologically and in terms of building a civilization. They’re like almost preliminary Gods.

Jacobsen: So, in this sense, I think, and I wrote in this argument in an article, the end point, the end result of theology, which is grounded on these ideas, is simply to die out. Due to the fact that this is the process that’s ongoing, it’s just bound to unravel the more and more we understand about the world.

Rosner: I don’t know why the process that created these gods is the thing that guarantees they’re going to die off. They’re going to die off because they’re contravened by the more and more stuff we know about the world.

Jacobsen: Maybe, that’s a dual process. The fact of this inversion externalization is also happening alongside those findings about the actual world given by science, hypothetically activism, whatever you call it.

Rosner: I think you can make that argument if you also argue that the will towards science has a lot of things in common with the will to create gods.

Jacobsen: I like that phrasing. Question. Does teleology mean final purpose or end of something? Like the reason for it.

Rosner: I was thinking about this, but in different terms. Last night, we were spending a lot of time talking about possible worlds, how actual possible worlds; worlds that you could argue pretty much have to exist, because there is nothing about them that’s inconsistent with existence.

As an example, I was using worlds in which Abraham Lincoln survived being shot and how he can’t magically survive being shot. There has to be something within causality to explain how that might happen.

Anyway, I was thinking about that, not in terms of in a physics or philosophy or whatever, but in terms of what makes a decent science fiction story. I was thinking about two stories that I’ve seen recently that have annoyed me.

It’s a mark of bad science fiction, where you create like a future in which there is this thing that has been there. Something has been invented or something’s happened. Then your whole story is about all the problems that this thing has caused. I have two examples.

[End of recorded material]

License

In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.

Copyright

© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2020/11/26

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: So in metaphysical inversion, that’s the idea, continuing from last session, I was in correspondence with a Christian professor friend. He recommended reading “Letters on Humanism” by Heidegger.

As I read through some comments and the essay through the day, I wrote an article for the day. Yesterday, I posited something. I’ve had called it, something like universal metaphysical inversalization, because Heidegger in that article or the lengthy article, “Letters on Humanism” talks about the reverse of a metaphysical statement is still a metaphysical statement.

He is critiquing Sartre because Sartre is positing Existentialism as a form of Humanism, not only Humanism or the only Humanism, but a form of Humanism. I think it is wrong. So, I also think Heidegger is wrong because I think that you can basically have an operation, which, I think is probably novel.

Where, basically, universally, you can take a metaphysical statement now and make an inverse of it. So, basically, you evoke a stomach and then you just squeeze it out so that the innards of the stomach are on the outside now.

Basically, it’s like physicalizing what was seen as the metaphysical.

Rick Rosner: So, can you give an example?

Jacobsen: Yes, I checked titles of the stuff. It isn’t around. So, the idea would be something like… first as an analogy, I’ll give an example. So, the analogy, the infinities that were seen before, the majesty of God, the Heavens.

Those were infinite to more original people. I think it’s a fair statement. However, I think we what can say is that it turned out to be the case is that it’s an apparent infinity, which is a big finite.

Rosner: So hold on, because that brings up a question where, like the gods that we’re used to, the God we’re used to, the Christian, Jewish…

Jacobsen: God of Abraham and Isaac.

Rosner: Yes. That God is infinite in power.

Jacobsen: I would go even better than that. He has a series of attributes theologians give him. Omnibenevolence, omniscience, and, say, anything like this. He’s omni-infinite. He’s infinite in all relevant properties.

Rosner: Yes. Now, the Greek and Roman gods, they weren’t monotheist. No, there were a shitload of them and they include gods that were infinite in power or whatever else?

Jacobsen: They had ideas like the Fates. But I don’t think that was kind of…

Rosner: Is a God with infinite power… how common is that?

Jacobsen: Right now, right now, over half the world, easily.

Rosner: Right. But when you look at all the different religions, did anybody have a modest God who only had enough power to create the world? That wasn’t that much power.

Jacobsen: Yes. The Descartian gods, Spinoza and Einstein, the Pantheist god, or some of the Founding Fathers, the Hellenistic polytheistic pantheon, some of the Hindu gods, they do creation stuff. A lot of the Native American myths, they have capital C “Creator,” they call them.

There is the Vancouver School of Theology. They, basically, have some people who are Aboriginal or Indigenous, and they talk in the manner of the Christian God and Creator as the same, where there was God’s providence.

There is the hope. There was a purpose of bringing together a literate people, Europeans and oral people, First Nations. The way in which it happened was evil. But in “God’s providence,” it’s going to be right in the best of all possible worlds.

So, there is a lot of that around, “Yes,” Parochial gods, powerful but finite gods.

Rosner: Because we’re used to thinking of God as infinite.

Jacobsen: Infinite in all relevant attributes, I would say. It’s not just the beyond apex conceivable of all relevant traits. But, “We are like God.” So, they extend human attributes to that God.

So, knowing that’s a human attribute of being in a space, that’s a human attribute, being outside of time rather than in time, so infinite in temporality in a way by being outside of it. Self-existing, so, it’s better than him because every human being is contingent on so many different things, including each other, or God is non-contingent.

That’s just stealing from Aristotle arguing about Forms and having the final form as God, so it’s common, is prevalent. Even if there is an infinite God like a creator God, it might just be in that one attribute.

But it’s not in an omni-infinite way or it’s in all sorts of different things. So, I think the analogy there is with the idea that we have about what are claimed as infinities are really large finites in a real world, not in some imaginary world.

Also, you can then extend that to this operation. So, you just, basically, invert the guts of metaphysical statements, even by prominent people like Heidegger, who made a mix of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche into a formalized philosophy of being and time, and so on.

I think he’s wrong on a number of levels. So, an example that arose in the correspondence is the idea that, even if “A equals B” is a statement, “Yes,” the reversal of that is just a reversal in presentation: “B equals A.”

So, that’s just a reversal of metaphysical statements. So, yes, Heidegger might be correct. In that, on Humanism, to state both, Sartre’s reverse of a metaphysical statement. It’s just another metaphysical statement.

But if you have an inversion, in other words, make the innards or the guts, the outer shell, then you have a different situation. I named the operation “Universal Metaphysical Inversalization.”

It’s like a universal acid for metaphysical statements, which would mean that which appear to be metaphysical but are truly physical and putting ‘physical’ in air quotes to have more general applicability to natural or informational, to make it more relevant.

Rosner: Ok, that makes sense. But can you give me a sentence that works like that?

Jacobsen: Yes. So, I’m going to read out, and again; this would not be getting rid of the magic or the power of formerly metaphysical statements like “consciousness.” It’s not meant as a magic property, but has a certain — not powerful in the way other words are powerful to as claims of the world — power to us.

So, something that would be metaphysical will physicalize either absolutely or probabilistically to the point of asymptotic certainty. This’ll be something making us somewhat more scientific.

He (Heidegger) talks about Being as if there is a certain process, metaphysics as this undivided base, but it seems like two properties on the face as one. Then it’s reified into an infinite circular.

So, it’s both to exist or to be, and an existing being. So, there is both existence and time in existence. So, it’s not one concept, really. It’s two separate things as to be properly divided existence, as opposed to non-existence temporality — as opposed to atemporality or non-temporality.

So, by separating that, you can then throw that paint up against the canvas of what we know about existence and time. So, it’s not a reverse of these things. It’s inverting it so that you come to basically more concretized forms of ideas, so it’s not filled.

So, he has this idea of being in time and it’s like the everything is being, but then time is a severe concept alongside that. So, he’s talking like he thinks philosophy is metaphysics and metaphysics is philosophy.

So, characterized as philosophical being, philosophical time, when you’re deriving from this process is natural philosophical existence and natural philosophical temporality. The latter, natural philosophical temporality or scientific time, is, basically, built into the principles of existence, as we call them, or the laws of nature, where you see something like the second law of thermodynamics tied to the arrow of time as in an actual temporality.

That’s the physical whizzing out of the metaphysical.

And so by doing that, you both nullify the definitions of metaphysics and the physical in that way, the metaphysical and physical in that way, into an extended sense of what we mean by the physical, but by concretizing what we mean by the metaphysical.

Because you’re tying it to that which is; then if you’re going to define anything that it’s not, then you use that which we know about the reality via science, then you pass what we know about reality through those, and then you use the negation of those as the nothing of those as in an actual nothing as opposed to a no-content nothing.

Nothing that’s not defined with respect to that which is and isn’t. Yes, so, to get a proper nothing, you have to define what isn’t, to define what is, and what is given to us by nature, philosophy, or science.

So, Universal Metaphysical Inversalization would take metaphysical statements, invert them, concretize them, and then give you a proper framework for them. It can be done even down to psychology where you don’t get absolute truths about consciousness, but you do get an asymptote to certainty about the physical process of these metaphysical statements.

So, consciousness is not a magical property running around in a flesh and bone body. You get neural correlates of consciousness that give a very strong indication that the brain is the seat of what’s going on or running or processing through time.

So, that’s a way you get to that place and you can have no absolute knowledge of consciousness, but you get this asymptote to certainty that you can sit relatively comfortably where you’re not. It’s so you’re dealing with metaphysics when it comes to even consciousness or existence.

Rosner: Sounds like what you are saying is that a good durable metaphysical statement comes as close as possible to physical description of what’s going on.

Jacobsen: That would be the first step. Yes, basically, you can then extend what we even mean by physical, so that the whole question, “Is it metaphysical, or is it physical?”, or just even the questions; it’s beyond those questions.

So, for instance, we talk about the physical. It, by definition, is something connected to the body, of the senses.

Rosner: The metaphysics has to hew, has to stick closely like a coat of paint to the physics of the thing.

Jacobsen: Yes, it’s more general than physical as material. Because it’s a building off there, but objectifying things. Then beyond that, you have a natural, where you, basically, are saying there is no magic.

There is no divine figure coming in and helping you with your spelling bee because you prayed for it, or the informational. I think it’s a more modern view, which, again, we’re not claiming computers are doing metaphysical processes. Therefore, we cannot claim human beings are either.

So, it’s either something like a universal acid or an asymptotic acid where there might be some areas in which it doesn’t quite work in an inalienable way. But in general, I think this is a way in which the whole question about discipline, titles, and domains might not be appropriate.

So, it might not be metaphysics. It might be… I don’t know what the term would be because I don’t think when we’re talking about these things, we’re making much sense in a modern context because you’re talking about mentation.

You’re talking about just your senses coming in from the world. The brain is caged in the world and the processes, the objects that are in mind. They’re about the world, the relationships, about each other, about things.

They’re both the world. So, it’s not about anything else. There is no invocation of anything transcendent. So, that, by definition, isn’t metaphysical, but it’s thought to be. That’s the problem. That’s why I think this process of thinking, this preparation, helps clarify that and actually extends some thinking.

Rosner: Okay.

Jacobsen: So, there we go. So, theology is dead and what we think is metaphysics isn’t metaphysics. That’s a lot for one night.

Rosner: Ok. All right, tomorrow?

Jacobsen: Yes, please.

[End of recorded material]

License

In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.

Copyright

© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2020/11/16

[Beginning of recorded material]

Rick Rosner: So I think when we left off, it was somewhere around the idea that at least on our planet, the apex, the alpha information processors, the smartest beings dominate the planet with ethical behaviour towards each other, sometimes.

But the lack of ethical behaviour for animals that aren’t us, often we have pets, but the number of pets compared to the number of meat animals that we destroy and keep in terrible conditions is tens of billions of chickens slaughtered in just the US over a year.

So, if you extrapolate that to the future where augmented humans won’t be the smartest things, it seems to me a little frightening that we’ll stumble our way to new ethical frameworks that will probably leave us in the dust.

Given that we’ve got an ethical framework for humans that is supposed to provide us with some safety and stability of shitty things happening to people all the time, having a bunch of things running around that are smarter than we are, it won’t necessarily lead to more justice.

The justice we might find is if it turns out it is so cheap computationally to store human consciousnesses and, maybe, other animals’ consciousnesses that it’s just no big deal. It’s the floor mats that the dealer throws in for free. So, they’re never free. You always have to negotiate them out of that.

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: If you have an apex predator, how you convince it to be altruistic?

Rosner: There is altruism there, the failure of altruism or the failure of people to be altruistic; you see this in America with its apex predators, the very, very rich who have controlled the levers of government for the last decade or more and haven’t been persuaded to give up any meaningful portion of their wealth.

We have a minimum wage in the US that remains at $7.25 an hour and hasn’t gone up. I don’t think it’s gone up in the 21^st century. The deal is: You can’t be an apex predator if you’ve killed all the prey.

So, some of the financial strength in the US before Covid was the very rich people owned too much shit. There has to be a way for the rest of the population to experience some financial growth, so they can buy shit.

So, the very rich people can make more money, more legitimately than they’ve been making money, lately. The very rich people make money by controlling government and by harnessing all the increased productivity.

When some new step in automation comes along and a factory lays off 70% of its workforce, it’s not like the wages of the 30% remaining triple. The reduced costs only added profit. Profits almost all go to the to the owners, and it’s been bad just based on the tweets I read during Covid and that the fucking companies, particularly the big ones like Facebook, Amazon, I guess, Netflix and Google.

Facebook is, I would think, faltering a little because everybody fucking hates Facebook now, but Amazon, I think, Bezos’s wealth has increased by hundreds of billions of dollars during Covid because everybody has to shop online.

Yet, Bezos hasn’t improved wages or working conditions for the people who work for him. They have to do shit like piss in a bottle because they don’t have time to run to the bathroom. But only with the altruistic reasoning for apex predators to be generous with their prey is so as to not to fuck up the ecosystem.

But I don’t know what ecosystems we’re going to form with humans and augmented humans and then engineered consciousnesses of a lot of various degrees and types. But eventually some of this stuff will go to court, people of various degrees of still being alive or not being alive and being augmented, will go to court and argue that they deserve the rights that they formerly had when they were fully human.

We’ve talked about a lot of this stuff. All that shit’s going to lag. The deal is that government was always going to fall behind technology. It’s falling behind faster under Trump. Trump’s a fucking idiot and he hires fucking idiots and he’s put three conservatives at least two of them loathsome conservatives on the Supreme Court.

So, there is now a six, three conservative majority. they may take away governmental services or rights that most people want the right to – abortion, health insurance. Then people will have to set up extra governmental systems.

They’ve done it before. When 80 years ago, when abortion was mostly illegal, there were networks that helped people, mostly people with money get abortions, poor people get shitty abortions and maybe die or threw themselves down a flight of stairs or something else.

Anyway, I would hope that if Roe v. Wade goes away this time around; that social networks will do a better job of hooking people, who live in abortion prohibited states, up with services. But the general trend is, even if Trump had had the good fortune to fuck up, the Supreme Court government was always going to fall, start lagging behind what it needs to do as far as technology changes, as all technology changes everything.

There was always going to be a need for makers, for technologists, or social networks to figure out replacements or the government to figure out ways to do the things that people used to turn to the government for; I think that is the general trend. Until, you can’t predict a trend because it becomes increasingly unpredictable, where I can’t imagine that.

Well, at least in the near future, you don’t get much of a pause in technological improvements and do get increases in the power of A.I., in what A.I can do in every other field. But I don’t see any stable resting point being reached.

You can look at Moore’s Law. People for a decade or more have argued that Moore’s Law has to come to an end because you can make it smaller than atoms. I’m sure there are other limitations. But they’ve been predicting the end of Moore’s Law, which is the reduction of size of micro-circuitry, the number of microcircuits you can cram together.

There are various Moore’s Law, but they also say how long it takes for your chip to become the square root of two more powerful or smaller or whatever. And various Moore’s laws are always in the range of 18 months to two years.

Recently, some of the Moore’s laws have been hanging up on the limits of miniaturization. So, you can argue that there is a plateau there. The resting point, as well as the brute force miniaturization of circuitry, comes to a pause and then people have to figure out how to make chips more powerful, even when you can’t shrink them any further.

Which includes, I don’t know, going from two dimensions to three dimensions, stacking your circuitry. But I can’t see anything similar to that. Not that I know all that much about it or anybody knows all that much about the technological waves of the near future.

I can’t see a point where we’ll necessarily have a stable society, where the augmented humans are on top. There are the engineered eyes of various degrees of consciousness, depending on what you want them to do.

Then just regular people divided into nations and sex to some extent based on their attitudes towards technology. I just don’t see that mix being stable. Maybe, for a couple years, you’ll get some social, political, technological solution that works. But some new tech is always going to blow that up.

[End of recorded material]

License

In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.

Copyright

© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2020/11/16

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Ok, so, we’re talking about values now. Values in the universe.

Rick Rosner: We should talk about what things can feel well, which is in the realm of conscious beings. But maybe, there are some areas where things aren’t quite conscious, but still want stuff.  Some of it gets into semantics, like an amoeba doesn’t want stuff just because it moves toward stuff.

That’s more almost just chemistry. But the grasshopper has some awareness. You need to have awareness in order to want this part of the emotional repertoire, I guess.

Jacobsen: So, evolution is based on survival. So, things that live tend to have this inbuilt bias towards surviving.

Rosner: Yes, it’ll be interesting in the future as we build things that might have awareness that aren’t biased towards surviving or we can choose what they want. It’s not necessarily survival. All animals more or less commit suicide in order to reproduce.

So, they want to live up to a point and then they want to do other stuff. But just at a very basic level, you got to start with a consciousness of where things want things. Generally, you can imagine awareness of things that don’t want, but in our experience of where things want stuff.

Jacobsen: One of those things is things that help them continue existing.

Rosner: Right.

Jacobsen: Where their lineage continues.

Rosner: There is a bunch of stuff that is biased way towards order. There are some animals that thrive off of a certain chaos, but that’s still because they can control the chaos. So, we don’t have to pin everything down, but there are a bunch of things involved in what aware beings want.

It’s like agency control, stability. A lot of it just seems to me when we talk about how order is.  would we want that sound is not complicated enough. We want other stuff, but, at base, we want some stability. That’s why it’s the base from which we can build more complicated actions and wants.

Jacobsen: Yes. Given that existence is probabilistic at bottom, all the stuff is not going to be absolute. It’s like organisms are functioning on principles. So, they want a little. They want a suitable environment. They want to live longer. So, they want to preserve their own little order of their lives.

Rosner: When we look at it, the order that we want is so basic in a lot of ways that we don’t even realize we want it because it just seems like we don’t spend much time thinking about it. We want the Sun to come up every day.

We want to still have a planet. We want air and water. but also those things are so stable that we don’t spend much time thinking about them – except in special circumstances.

Jacobsen: So, if we look at like effects and a literal dictionary definition, which I looked at, one of the principles governing behavior more generally, just actions in the world. Things that are conscious act and live in the world.

So, their very act of existing as something conscious, I think, brings ethics into the universe. It’s an emergent property that comes with that, by definition. So, I take it this way. People will have – we have the phrase, “He’s a moral person.”

Whose image, we mean, in our terms, an order preserving person. But someone who’s destructive, they are enacting an ethic by that definition, too. So, it is to make a distinction between the people who are tending more towards disorder based ethics and those are more towards disorder based ethics.

Rosner: Yes, and we’ve talked about the Golden Rule when like when we talk about a mensch, it’s somebody who sees the Golden Rule, understands it, and then acts on it. It’s a mutuality that adds stability that people want a world in which that they won’t have to always be looking out for other people exploiting a momentary advantage.

So, it’s self-serving as well as others-serving. If we can look at other people and know that they’ll treat us decently, the bargain is that we treat them decently overall. It increases order for everybody. Then in America right now, we’ve been suffering through ordered systems not being prepared for the one-sided exploiter.

Jacobsen: And so, in that sense, the fact that you need order generation and maintenance for existence itself and for evolution to take place to make an agent. I think you can then make an argument.

Those facts come first and then second come the values, the values follow the contours of existence. Which to me, it’s following order. That bias in ethics is the same as the bias in existence.

It’s that which will assist in preserving order but similarly, what exists can wink out of existence. There is going to be outliers in very atrocious devastation-prone people, murderers, mass murderers, etc.

Rosner: So, order, the drive for order and for mutuality, which we could argue is a thing. The mutuality exists in areas of life where there are enough resources to support mutuality. When you look at where ethics stop, this is just off the top of my head.

But ethics stops when there isn’t the wherewithal to support, for instance, certain behaviours. With regard to meat animals, to some extent, society is built on exploiting, eating the flesh of animals.

Yes, and to a large extent, we don’t behave ethically towards animals. There are areas in which we do, but there are more areas just in terms of raw numbers of animals that are slaughtered. The ethics don’t apply or they apply, but only do it to the extent of what is kosher with regard to meat.

There are also kosher meals that have to conform to certain sanitary standards. But also, the animals have to be killed as well, with as little cruelty as possible, which is still plenty of cruelty given the technology that people have been working with. But the idea is that there are some limited ethics there.

Jacobsen: I always would fall back on the fact that we are surviving and are living. A lot more things are in many cases due to human guardianship in many ways, though human destruction as well. It goes back to not absolute ethics.

It’s the idea that these are principles or tendencies. These aren’t absolute. So, even people like Leonardo da Vinci who said centuries ago, viewing the future, people will view murder of animals as we do a murder of another human being.

That is a growing ethic of animal rights people. But we still have the ethic present. We have it growing, but it’s not absolute. Even if it becomes the norm rather than an outlier phenomenon, I think still older world people would be diehard meat-eaters.

Rosner: Yes. I’m sure that it may become more and more trumpy thing to be that defiant. “I defy your sensitivity to the suffering of animals.”

Jacobsen: And so, I was trying to think of a phrase for this. I think when I pitched with a philosophy of truism, so this is without the physics and without the numbers. It’s just a sensibility argument based on these tendencies.

It just one follows from the other. Then it’s a situation in which I took this phrase from you, which is “it can’t not be.” In fact, it’s overwhelmingly likely these kinds of things cannot be. They will be not absolute, but they’ll be bottom-up first.

Rosner: And then we’ve talked a lot about the creepy things that will happen when the full menagerie or a growing menagerie of different forms of constructed consciousness comes into the flower.

Jacobsen: Yes.

Rosner: Where all sorts of ethical calls will be made both institutionally and individually.

Jacobsen: I think even this ethics is applicable there too, easily.

Rosner: The idea will be the argument that you want to make to survive in that society is to convince the people who control your fate that you are deserving of equivalence. That your consciousness is as valuable as there, which is going to be a tough thing to argue.

Especially if there is a shortage of resources, so, if we’re lucky, there won’t be a shortage of resources. That in some cyber world of the future; there will be enough room for everybody.

Jacobsen: That’s also a tendency when you want intelligent behavior. It makes a world of abundance as opposed to not. There is one period we call the Agricultural Revolution, but there have been all sorts of mini-revolutions in food production making our lives easier.

To the sanitary conditions for living, you name it. Intelligence applied along that order tendency will create a world more livable and enjoyable and abundant.

Rosner: Yes, I just read a science fiction novel set four thousand years in the future and all the characters are still just basically human. They can copy their identities of consciousness and send them to other people to share and stuff. But basically, everybody there was unrealistic because 4,000 years from now.

It’s not going to look like that. Unless, you are part of a very specialized enclave, as we’ve talked about. So, we wish we could talk about how under IC ethics; ethics favors the apex information processors or the apex consciousnesses.

If there is a shortage of resources, we’ve talked about the risks of understanding consciousness mathematically because that can lead to the disfavor of inferior consciousness or the understanding of ending a consciousness within context.

Because, even though, we have ethics. The ethics stops where we become powerless over death. It’s crazy how beyond a certain point people are allowed to die because they’re just too sick. Even like the most powerful highly moral people like Nelson Mandela, we sit while he’s dying.

There is not a general freaking out. It’s like, “Yes, well, he’s old, at the end of his time.” So, it’s understandable because, a lot of times, you can’t do anything. Although, sometimes, once the death happens, like fuck ups on the way to death, like in America and probably a lot of other places medical errors are the third leading cause of death.

Yet, we don’t see doctors being hauled into court like every fucking day. And if the world becomes jam-packed with higher consciousness, there may be a callousness to inferior consciousness being allowed to pass away or understanding the struggles of consciousness or not the ultimate value of things.

For example, the way we let it be game over for billions of chickens every year. It’s like, “Sorry, we need the meat. You’re dead. It doesn’t matter. You don’t feel anything anymore.” It’s, again, as we’ve talked about before. A whole new set of ethical frameworks are going to need to be constructed or will be constructed with various degrees of fairness and horribleness.

But I think what you’re arguing, and I think I agree, is that an underlying driver for the frameworks is the preservation of order and stability where it can be reasonably preserved; that a mutuality among the beings that hold power in a society.

Jacobsen: You’ve got a situation in which the ethic lived out by an organism, by some multi-planetary civilization, is a disorder at some point there is obliteration eventually or instantaneously.

Rosner: Well, that’s the deal. Once you can do it, once you can master consciousness technologically, you can also engineer what you want. So, we will be making beings that don’t strive for individual survival with all their might.

They weren’t built that way. We could build ourselves that way. So, yes, it becomes possible. I would assume that if we eventually know more about extraterrestrial civilization, we will, probably. here will be cases where a civilization decided we don’t have to strive.

We could just extinguish ourselves and nobody will know because we’ll be dead. Nobody’s, keeping score, but that’s not accurate because the universe is in some ways keeping score. It’s processing information, but it’s likely conscious. It likely has drives. It’s not unlikely that the preservation of information and order are among the things that it wants.

Jacobsen: I would argue the philosophical point of view. It’s unavoidable. The fact of the matter of existence being here. All of this follows naturally from that. So, in other words, there is a stream of a strong bias towards all this being and inevitably so, in effect.

Rosner: Yes, but okay, the same way there is no inherent value of continuing consciousness versus deciding to end it. There is a similar thing. We don’t know. This thing about there is a chicken or egg deal, probably, where we can’t even decide between a naturally evolving universe and an engineered one.

Because of the infinite turtles problem. But you can set up an arena in which an information structure can naturally evolve, or you can probably set up a somewhat natural arena in which there is some natural evolution, but there is also some interference, external interference that is okay.

As long as it doesn’t mess with causality, it doesn’t. You can add stuff to an evolving system that you want to get in there as long as you put it in there in a way that doesn’t violate causality too badly and slide it in from the edges of the universe. So, it requires a mutual history, so you’ve got a naturally evolving universe.

It’s when we think of the universe; we think of a naturally evolving universe.

Jacobsen: The object.

Rosner: Yes. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Somewhere, there is intentionality. In that, somebody had to build the hardware in which the naturally evolving universe can evolve. Or the armature, we think of it.

In fact, we haven’t even discussed like a natural intervention. I haven’t even thought of it until now. Is there an armature that creates information preserving hardware that does come into existence without intentional creation?

It seems like, just by saying it, a possibility, but not very likely. So, basically, that whole discussion leads to the idea that you can’t say what’s natural or not because there is unnaturalness lurking behind every fucking armature. Does that seem reasonable?

Jacobsen: I think that’s okay. I think that’s more the physics side of it. Let’s go for more of an idea as to the boundaries required for setting it up in the first place.

Rosner: Ok, but of our minds, our brains have evolved, so that they naturally provide an armature. So, that gives you two worlds that are naturally evolved. We can argue.

Jacobsen: Yes, one’s bigger, one littler. Okay.

Rosner: Yes.

Jacobsen: So, the qualitative differences will be there, the functionality. But we can construct a model in which there is no necessary need for any teleology to make it functional.

Rosner: Yes, you can imagine and naturally all structures all the way. I’ve just done the slightly short of saying: Once you get a couple of generations in the armatures, you can’t discuss them at all because they’re remote enough that they don’t directly impinge on your world’s existence.

Jacobsen: Yes. Also, most of the old theories proposed some top-down interventionism, reincarnationism, some cyclical universe, that has got in its head a God, the creator, or the tortured design argument or some creationist argument.

We can knock those down as a whole if they’re considered completely true because of evolution by natural selection. That’s how life works. That’s how all that came to be. So, anything that’s not incorporating that into its framework just doesn’t work or anything that tries to make anything extra to make it work is just superfluous, basically, because it works with or without any guiding hand.

Rosner: Yes, although, you can argue that there is room for the guiding hand if the guiding hand is subtle.

Jacobsen: But then the question would be: What’s the evidence for it? And people, typically, go back to intelligent design or creationism, “Look how complex things are. It could not be except for the hand of a God,” where some lunatics, believing it, they claim that they themselves are the manifestation of God or whatever.

So, as I think, typically, those arguments fall down pretty quick. There is only a limited set, like pantheism, hold a place.

Rosner: There is not a probabilistic argument that we’re looking at a universe with apparent history of 40 billion years and the universe can’t survive that many interventions, magical type interventions. So, what are the odds of one out of 10 to the 22^nd planets in the universe in a year out of 14 billion experiencing such an interventionist event? It’s got to stay clean.

Jacobsen: Absolutely. So, it’s a common sense argument. It’s using reason and empiricism and then focusing on the principles. I think the failure of a lot of these older ideologies have been trying to force-fit partial knowledge into an absolute truth, or vice versa.

Rosner: Yes, you got to look at like the “San Junipero” thing that we know is going to happen. “San Junipero” is the episode of Black Mirror of this young woman who finds herself in this world. She’s looking around and, eventually, gets a girlfriend.

Over the course of the episode, it turns out that she’s in a human created after cyber stuff. After that, there is nothing inherently impossible in that we know that’s coming. So, that just like we said, that constructed world, there are prohibitions against it.

There are probabilistic arguments against our world being that. But I don’t know. Then you can you can have a world that’s clearly intervened, and it doesn’t make the world impossible.

Jacobsen: And so, that’s why I want to leave that out right there, which is it’s just extremely likely that existence exists, both existence and things that persist. The values follow quite naturally along the contours of existence itself.

Rosner: And a lot of the things we have trouble understanding or expressing will probably become much more clear once there is a mathematical framework. Once a hundred years pass or so, people can become adept at navigating the framework.

Same way that quantum mechanics weirded everybody out at first. But I feel, at least, in science for the layman, they like to talk about how weird quantum mechanics is, but I feel like people who work with quantum mechanics as their jobs are not particularly weirded out. They’re not going to work on rules.

Jacobsen: Yes. So, I think one thing we can add as a tack onto that is things are here existing and they have things that live in it. You can speak about, only in reasonable terms, a factual morality.

You have to use what are the facts of the matter, which is scientific to inform your values. Otherwise, your values aren’t worth very much because they’re not connected to the real world.

Rosner: Ok, that makes sense. It’s like sociobiology tries to explain everything in terms of eggs expensive, sperm cheap. When you’re arguing that, you need to look at the processes that underlie the world to get a base understanding how they mesh with what we experience as a force here.

Jacobsen: And I take ethics from the dictionary of actions in the world. They could be order or disorder ethics, or something neutral.

Rosner: But I think you can also argue that that approach that the physics of the world is so many generations removed from ethics that we’re just not used to doing that.

Jacobsen: Yes, and if ethics are actions in the world, the great part about that is the fact that there is… Agency in any universe means nihilism fails in the sense that nihilism means there are no values. But if you have agency, the full manifestation of a being in reality is itself ethics lived out through time for disorder or order. Nihilism completely fails.

Rosner: There is another argument that works against nihilism. If you assume that there is no limit to the size of the possible world, possible universe, which means that no matter how big there is a possible universe, that is, it’s always bigger than any you can imagine.

That that universe had to get to where it is through time. So, there are anti-extinguishing forces that allow things to get arbitrarily big to anything short of infinite.

Jacobsen: And so, in either case, you’re up to the fact this is the question fundamentally about ethics, “Is there an ethic?” It is not, “Are there values or not?” It’s, “What ethic?” Then you start just defining how that entity is living in the reality, how it’s an actually going about being.

Rosner: Is there a name for this? Is it physical ethics? Because it starts with the way the physics of the world perates.

Jacobsen: I would say all these are coming as a package. I think the tide I see in some deep ways with the math. I’m just calling them the Philosophy of Truism.

Rosner: So, you could also call it Informational Ethics because of truism. I don’t know if that’s the best term, because the truism is something that’s so obvious that it’s so simple, but it’s so obviously true.

Jacobsen: What do you think exists?

Rosner: Yes. So, I don’t know, if that’s what you’re going after and that there is a lot of stuff here that’s not obvious.

Jacobsen: Do you assume that you’re conscious?

Rosner: Yes.

Jacobsen: Yes. Like this data thing.

Rosner: But then you question it, then you have to bring it back, you have to make a statistic. Eventually, you have to make a statistical argument based on the likelihood of of how information works.

Jacobsen: So, honestly, I think these are probably five or six separate arguments. In the article, I wrote everything as statistical argument for existence, for temporality, reality. I give them capitalized names.

But, to me, when I tie them all together with conditionals, both the individual premises and the conditionals linking them all together for an overarching philosophical seemingly trivially true one.

They seem almost unassailable, not in absolute terms, but in probabilistic terms. I don’t think there are moral facts because I think morality is derivative from things existing first. So, you have the factual part, then you have the morality.

So, there have been some philosophers literally who talked about moral facts. I think that’s just backwards.

Rosner:  Seems like, what’s his name?

Jacobsen: Sam Harris, I think they’re wrong. You can only speak meaningfully in terms of your ethical premises having content, both facts and morality. There is one other point I wanted to make.

Yes, so, the fact that the total manifestation of something in reality comprising its ethics. It doesn’t have to be aware of the ethical. So, if you evolved a program, something that was not conscious of how it’s acting out in the world is ethical, or not, in terms of maintaining order or not; it’s still acting ethically.

Rosner: Yes, we’ve talked about how sex makes people make bad decisions and people don’t realize how much their decisions are warped by sex.

Jacobsen: Yes, so, all ethics is unavoidable once you get agency and then you have a bias towards order from there.

Rosner: Yes, there is actually free agency pseudo-ethics, where amoebas probably behave in a lot of ways that would preserve the species. Even though, they’ve got no agency.

Jacobsen: Yes. Something like, the baseline of survival as reflective of the facts of things developing order, having unconscious organisms, valuing order for their own survival. That if you value survival, you value your own order.

[End of recorded material]

License

In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.

Copyright

© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2020/11/16

[Beginning of recorded material]

Rick Rosner: So, the deal is: For the statistical arguments, I agree with you that. I think those can be made based on if you have a moment, then you’ve got a set of most likely next moments and then that ranges from most likely to least likely.

The most likely next moments have roughly, almost exactly, the same information content as the moment you’re starting. Those next possible moments of the universe. They’re very similar to the previous moment. But there is an overall, maybe, a probability.

There is certainly one around the null universe. The next possible moment is likely to be not known. Because if you look at the set of all possible next moments, because we’re assuming there is only one known universe and there is a range of next possible moments that have a little room.

So, the bias is moving towards the more information, especially in super low information universes, but still in the big universe.

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: If we want to add a hint or a really tiny sense of quantum mechanics into this, the only example, we have conscious agents in the universe or at the macro scale. So, there will be a directionality to time as well.

So, and even if someone says, “Well, what about a reverse universe or the backwards will seem as if forwards in that reverse universe, but it still has a direction in either case?” So, the arrow of time at a macro scale is there.

So, you have existence. You have time. You have directionality of time. You have agency. I think those are statistical arguments as well. That there is a persistence there. The fact that things are relatively the same from moment to moment and that permits a process like evolution.

That permits existence to continue existing. Like what you argue, in terms of a bias towards order rather than disorder, it’s not to say there is no disorder. There are things that are indelible to some order, but there is a bias or a tendency, statistically speaking, towards these things, including order. So, that’s the facts.

Rosner: So, if you look at it like a triangle with the null universe at the apex of the time, and then the number of possible states with increasing information, the more information you have for any given amount of information, you have a number of possible states that have that much information and the more information, the more possible states.

So, starting with the zero information, the next moment you could move to there is a bias to move to increasing information with the next move and that bias continues to exist. To get to the triangle as you move towards the base, an expanding base like a pyramid of the next level.

The next floor, as you move now is going to have more space than the floor above. So, if you’re moving at random in the pyramid, in a state of more information because there are more states off of your state that have more information as opposed to less.

[End of recorded material]

License

In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.

Copyright

© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2020/11/16

[Beginning of recorded material]

Rick Rosner: Along the world line, what is a set of reasonable next possible moments in that universe?

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: And so, that would be more building into the assumption of a second layer, that argument, which is you can have single moments, certainly. Which is a universe that doesn’t have a moment, non-existence, then some wide array of spatial arrangements that act. That have no temporal dimension. They are in some particular shape and cues here.

Rosner: I’m not sure you can have space without time. It’s all part of a package that I want to say is unitary, but that’s probably not the right word. For something to have space, it has to have matter. It has to have the history that it apparently created that space and the matter in it.

Jacobsen: Is it possible to have a universe of time as something that doesn’t function by Minkowskian space? It’s just this Cartesian system. There is no time. Or does it naturally have to have a history? Is that the only way to be changed?

Rosner: There is probably a math of this stuff. It’s very quantum mechanics savvy. There is room in the math to go from an apparently existent universe to the next moment of complete non-existence, just a very improbable statistical blip that ceases to exist in the next moment.

It’s just if you’re looking at the set of next possible moments for a universe that exists; it’s an unlikely next possible moment. Also, you can make the argument, as you’re saying in reverse. That the universe can blip up into, apparently, complex existence, having not existed, not existed before and not existed after that.

You just get a single moment or a couple of moments and then it disappears. There is a statistical argument against that. When you look at all the sets of all temporarily adjacent universes, the blip universe is the zero information; that as possible moment is unlikely compared to everything else.

Jacobsen: And that’s actually a cornerstone of the general idea, I think, which is persistence. Things that exist will likely persist, more than not. I think, and again, it’s just based on you taking the two sets together and things will likely persist as opposed to not.

Rosner: Any argument with probability is extended from quantum mechanics. Otherwise, these arguments are probably in trouble because we don’t know what we’re dealing with mathematically. Also, I don’t know if you can go from an existing universe to pure nothingness.

You probably can, or whether there have to be transformations to cover the loss of all that information. You’ve got a universe. The temperature of our universe is 2.7 degrees (Kelvin)? The temperature of the background radiation, microwave radiation.

It’s cool because it has had 14 billion years to cool down and to erase all the information you need to keep the universe up into pure chaos. Can you raise the temperature to the point where all information disappears in an instant? Probably so.

But there is the possibility that you need to propagate a wave of high temperature across the space that you have to erase it. I don’t know. It doesn’t matter in terms of the arguments you’re making.

Jacobsen: And so, take a step back.

Rosner: Similar to the argument, if it were in mind terms, you’ve got a mind with a picture of consciousness, the picture of reality. Say you’re on one of the planes in 9/11 hitting the World Trade Centers, if you do the math, those people were obliterated in some crazy fraction of a second. Just a horrible, horrible fraction of a second.

Jacobsen: A terrible example, a clear but tragic example.

Rosner: Yes. So, what happens to those people’s thoughts in that instance? Do they have a perceptible moment of the loss of all information?

Jacobsen: If you were to go nanosecond by nanosecond and the person was facing forward, you would see the mental landscape deteriorate.

Rosner: A terrible fraction of a second. I’ve thought about what that second would look like and it would be bad.

Jacobsen: Like the deterioration of the frontal lobes, followed by the temporal and parietal lobe followed by the occipital lobe, so, vision in terms of imagination would be the last thing to go strangely enough.

Rosner: So does that necessitate like a transitional moment or fraction of a moment or something that? I don’t know. Anyway, it’s a thing to look at.

Jacobsen: Yes. So, all in all, without the math of it, I don’t think that’s the focus here. In fact, we don’t have the math of it. Just in terms of the philosophy, the general philosophy of it, you do have a larger set of those; that which can exist.

You also have a set of universes where it’s still existing larger than not. So, this is both an existence argument there and a temporal argument. So, running the numbers, you have a statistical consideration of both existence and time.

Things will generally persist. Although, they can wink out or they can devolve into a null state. I think the only way in which we know agency comes to be in a natural universe is evolution.

So, you will need existence and you will need time to come to any form of agency. Even if they have simulated agency, you still have the evolved agency behind this.

Rosner: Because the deal with a simulated world is that it implies, it necessitates; unless, you’re doing that statistical argument. It just blipped into existence, which is unlikely. The odds are infinitesimal. So, a small simulated world implies a wider world, probably.

[End of recorded material]

License

In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.

Copyright

© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2020/11/16

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: So, I think one of the basic premises, that I see, would be the idea that the set of null universes is not bigger than the set of things that can exist. I think the set of universes that cannot exist is smaller than the set of universes that can.

Rick Rosner: What do you mean by that?

Jacobsen: By that, if you have a universe, basically, that which cannot exist, so a null universe, makes it not there, like can empty set.

Rosner: OK. That’s different from a universe that can’t exist.

Jacobsen: How so?

Rosner: A null universe is a universe with like no information, like the number of those is very small. A magical universe where things pop into without rhyme or reason. Certainly, , there is many more universes that can exist because you just take a universe that can exist and you do something stupid to it.

Jacobsen: Would it not make it like catastrophically inconsistent if you had this magical universe? If you had a universe where magic was literally possible, so you have a Hogwarts universe, but to the nth degree, wouldn’t that collapse in on itself, completely inconsistent?

Rosner: I don’t know. It would make no sense. Okay, you could argue. If we’re going to get into this stuff off the top of my head, there would be a whole bunch of different semi-possibilities. You could certainly have a universe that’s Hogwarts, but it would be a simulated universe.

That it would be something that was designed from outside the universe, like a video game universe was built to contain the elements that you want narratively in the scope of it. You can certainly have a Hogwarts universe or Call of Duty universe.

But that implies an external agent that makes it possible. You need an external agent, anyhow. But in a naturally occurring universe, there would be ongoing external jiggering around with it, I guess. But that’s a whole field we could talk about.

Obviously, we’re moving into an era, where it’s not an uncommon science fiction thought. That, in the future, video games will have characters who are conscious and they may or may not be aware that there is some video game.

But like a video game universe is a very abridged a Call of Duty universe is one planet or part of one planet. The action takes place over a few days, maybe.

Jacobsen: So then, okay, I’ll take it this way. What I’m trying to get at, since the whole thing just starting from the top, there was reporting originally. What I’m getting into then is the null universe, that which isn’t, as opposed to that which is or that which can be, probabilistically.

So, you take those sets. The one set of that which is or that which can be, which is vastly larger than that which isn’t or can’t be. So, that’s the first premise that existence is favored probabilistically or statistically over nonexistent.

So, it’s not providing a generative functional precise formula of how this is done. It’s providing what I call a statistical inevitable argument.

Rosner: Okay, so, I like it. There is probably a statistical problem with it. I’m not sure that you can apply probability to the set of all possible universes, including the null universe as the zero information element.

Jacobsen: How many know universes are there possible, like one?

Rosner: How many null universes?

Jacobsen: Yes.

Rosner: I would think one, but I don’t know quantum mechanics. So, that’s probably a question. How many forms of zero information are there? It seems like there has only been one. But I don’t know what the space, the possibilities would be for universes with just a hint of information, because that’s the whole thing.

If you start with a null universe, what are the states that it can move into? And I know there could be quite a few different states that would have the next minimum amount of information.

Jacobsen: If you’re talking about its moving into something, then you’re talking about a state transition. That, by definition, is in a way of speaking talking about information itself or existence itself rather than non-existence.

Rosner: Yes. So, that’s a universe that has moved from null to something other than null that has some existence.

Jacobsen: So, technically that then falls into the category of the existing universe. It’s not the nonexistent.

Rosner: Yes. But I don’t know if you’re looking at degenerate universes, universes that go the other way, go to zero from having a little bit of information. Maybe, there is more. Maybe, there is a small variety of the general universes that have ended up at zero from someplace else.

Maybe, I don’t know. I’d assume not, but it’s a possibility. Where, if you go from a universe that has some equivalent of an electron and a positron that cancel each other out or something like that and leave just energy, though, energy is exists.

But anyway, I don’t know how all that works, except that it’s safe to assume that the number room to generate universes or null universes is going to be small.

Jacobsen: And if you can orient, there is no information in different ways to get different types. Then you can also orient universes with one bit of information too, in different ways. If you just take that one bit, two bit, out to the nth degree, if you include the one to two to the nth degree bit universe with the inverse exclamation point as a set, I think just looking at it; it would appear far larger as a set than zero.

So, I think that to me seems almost unassailable. Unless, there is some way to do the math that flips the intuitive markers there. So, that’s why, I think, that’s a very base orientation point, as I see none in terms of the math, but in terms of the philosophy.

The set of possible universes is larger, possible existences is bigger, than the set of no existences. You just say, “Okay, therefore, existence is favored over nonexistent. That’s just a general statistical outcome based on looking at the ratio of those two sets.”

Rosner: I agree that numerically, the crazy infinity of possible existent universes is way larger than the number of null universes. But in terms of picking a universe out of that said, I’m not sure that you can do that probabilistically.

[End of recorded material]

License

In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.

Copyright

© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2020/11/15

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Ok, so, some new research.

Rick Rosner: This evening, an article on information in black holes.

Jacobsen: Here, this has been a confirmation of the finding or the calculation of Hawking. That information is not destroyed by black holes. It’s preserved. But obviously, the structure was so…

Rosner: Well, I mean, when you say, “Structure,” you mean how all the atoms have stuck together. Yes, anything that falls into a black hole will be ripped to pieces, is what you’re saying.

Jacobsen: Yes, so, intuitively it doesn’t make sense, however, if it’s true…

Rosner: Actually, hold on, because we’re talking about traditional black holes, we’re not talking about IC black holes. So now, I may be wrong, but it might be. No, I guess not. I think I’ve seen the math on this. I don’t think there are stable orbits within the event horizon of a black hole. The event horizon is the point where if you get so close to the black hole that you go beyond the event horizon, which is a sphere. An abstract sphere around the black hole, that’s the point beyond which you can’t get back out of the black hole. Now, you may not be in the black hole, yet, because the black hole is smaller than the event horizon. So there is a period in which you fall down. You’re still falling in and haven’t yet crashed into the black hole itself. You just are in a position where you can’t get out no matter what you do in a traditional black hole. It’s also known as the Schwartzchild radius. This is how if you’re this far away from a black hole, then you’re fucked. But I mean, you could probably design something small enough and strong enough that it would at least last for a little while or be torn apart by the tidal forces near the black hole. So, there are situations in which the structure is at least momentarily preserved. But you’re right, over any reasonable time period. Anything that falls in will be torn to bits. I don’t think either of us knows enough about the black hole theory to know exactly what they’re talking about when they talk about the information that is preserved.

Jacobsen: I would make a prediction – I know it’s dangerous because early in the game – that if you change the structure internal to the universe but can preserve the information, then the structure can disappear while preserving the information as external, which would match an IC structure of the universe and is consistent with the dynamics of the internal universe.

Rosner: We should talk a little bit more about, what this article talked about, which is that the article said that there’s some mathematical indication that information is preserved, but nobody knows how to present a complete picture of how that might work. It just suggests that as black holes get older and older, that they get no more forgiving, maybe, that you don’t get the information out immediately. But as black holes get older, I don’t know. I’m guessing here that they become more leaky of information. They leak more information. Is that pretty much what you get out of the article? But nobody really knows how that would work in. There are equations that indicate that something like that is going on now to us. We get happy, I think, because the black holes, and I see, are less severe.

Jacobsen: They are leaky.

Rosner: When they are leaky, and they don’t crush everything into oblivion because, we argue, that black holes create their own space and a space in which the gravitational force, which was created in conjunction with the world, the block is attenuated around the black hole. So normal business can be done in the vicinity of a black hole. You can have entire little mini universes within a black hole and that they’re not perfectly black. They’re much less perfectly black than a regular Stephen Hawking black hole, which is very, very close to perfectly black. The amount of energy is able to trickle out of Hawking black hole is minuscule one part ten to the – probably something like – twenty-fifth or something per year. But can I see a black hole super league, especially under certain conditions where sufficiently durable objects can get reasonably close? There’s no Schwarzschild radius there. A black hole is pretty fucking black, but never so black, in the sense, that you know what makes stuff unable to get out of a traditional black hole, which is that it would need to travel faster than the speed of light to get out of it. I see the speed you need to travel to get out of a black hole. You can never reach the speed of light. It can get really close. But the light itself and, a powerful enough rocket, I guess, could get out. Even under certain conditions, other matter besides the light, but, even I see black holes, given our current technology; unless, we were right up on it on a black hole, which would be bad because the black holes fucked things up. We would be able to see much radiation escaping from them. Even if you did see, I could get close enough to see a fairly leaky black hole. It would be easy enough to mistake a leaky black hole for something else, like maybe neutron stars, or neutron star is just a collapsed star that has just that last step away from collapsing into a black hole.

And it just doesn’t have mass enough to do it. It’s a neutron star. I think is stopped short of totally collapsing by Fermi pressure where the pressure that the particles have is insufficient. Two particles can’t occupy the same quantum state. I think that’s the only thing. It’s the last step before a full-on black hole of it. I see there’s never enough pressure to collapse anything beyond that last step of Fermi pressure. Maybe, you can have a fully collapsed. But generally, I see black holes are closer to the composition of neutron stars than they are to the totally collapsed shit in a black hole. Though, I may be wrong. Then you run into the problems of what I see black holes look like from the outside versus what they look like on the inside. Close to them, you’ve got a whole lot of extra space. Now, I haven’t thought about this. There’s all this extra space, so nothing can ever be collapse into the black hole. Anyway, that’s enough of that.

Jacobsen: The end.

Rosner: Yes.

[End of recorded material]

License

In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.

Copyright

© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2020/11/15

[Beginning of recorded material]

Jacobsen: Rick, what is the future of IQ?

Rosner: Like we’ve talked about this before.

Jacobsen: Or what is the future relevance of IQ and its diminishment?

Rosner: Well, IQ has only been around for a century, Binet came up with an idea of a five-point scale for testing kids to see what kind of educational resources they might need. Ones and twos need help for dumb kids. Four and five need help for smart kids. Terman took it over in the US. Put it on that, the hundred-point chronological ratio scale. You take your middle age divide by your calendar age times a hundred is your IQ. You’re going to kind of grow from there. It was fairly widely accepted, I believe. A lot of, I think, psychology, psychiatry was pretty widely accepted in the US from the 20s through the 60s and 70s, then people started questioning everything and including IQ and now IQ, I think is considered kind of quaint. People have tried to replace it with various other theories, indices, emotional IQ and multifactor models.

And the whole thing has also been hampered by it just not being that handy, I think. Like it is falsely precise, like somebody who says they have an IQ of 143 is not going to be any different from somebody who says they have an IQ of 138 or 147 or 130. It is as with the SAT it doesn’t add much. Adding some score on an IQ test to their academic or professional dossier doesn’t tell you much more than you could learn from the rest of the dossier and from talking with them for half an hour. It is, in a lot of instances, actually a minus. It is somebody who brings up their IQ. I think Hawking was quoted as saying anybody who needs to brag about their IQ is a loser. This is from a guy who’s melted into his wheelchair. So it is people who are culturally cognizant, kind of know that IQ has a stink of loserdom about it. Which doesn’t mean you cannot have fun with it. I have obsessively taken IQ tests off and on for most of my life, so I can brag in a sad way about my high scores. But it is mostly useless.

A couple times, maybe in my 20s, it may have help get me laid. Maybe, though, that’s a really small window to try to jump through, who you’re jumping on to if it is based on IQ, anyway. What replaces IQ, I feel will be measures of information processing power based on more sophisticated models of how information and processing and consciousness works, which will eventually get to in a pretty precise way. But we probably still have twenty years of not being there yet. You could consider the various measures of calculating capacity associated with computers as a type of measurement of machine intelligence. But really shitty measure, because for the most part, machines are at the very beginning of machine learning and really do not have that much intelligence at this point.

They still have a specific task oriented intelligence that you can set up a machine learning program that will in a short amount of time make a computer the best Go player in the world, except for other computers or the best video game player in the world. But it is still pretty specific. Computers still cannot pass the Turing test. So measures of computational power are pretty bad indices for machine intelligence. The number of floating point calculations per second doesn’t really tell you how smart a machine is. We understand what intelligence is, the mathematical models of consciousness should be decent indices originating from that. Regardless of the indices, we should see people for the most part not give a shit about becoming smarter in general.

Some people are like; how can I make myself smart? I get written; I get emails from people and I tell people the best thing you can do is just read your ass off and then engage in the types of exercises that are parts of IQ tests. Try to mathematicise things in your world, like try to mathematically analyze aspects of your world. But not many people are interested in doing that. In general, people are more interested in making themselves more competitive in whatever their specific endeavors are. The same way when I was writing jokes for late night, I was very interested in making myself a better joke writer because I’d often get told that my jokes sucked, so with everybody else. So I felt like I was getting told that more than other people.

Also, so, I’ve tried to increase my IQ, but in terms of my career; I was interested in making myself smarter and better. I think that applies to most. I think that people are and will increasingly begin to get the idea of strategically becoming really good and certain applications or certain A.I. aided technologies to make yourself effectively smarter in ways that pertain to your work. I think that will happen more and more. That will be a thing that can actually happen, that you can team up with A.I. to make yourself smarter in a specific field.

For instance, doctors are kind of notorious for once they’re done with their medical training, not every doctor, but some doctors for knowing what they know, but not really extending themselves to extend what they know. You can maybe learn stuff that said you get it. If you get a disease, you can go on the Internet and you can learn shit about your disease that your doctor may not know because your doctor is busy treating people with the disease and may or may not be keeping up perfectly well with everything that’s going on with the disease. Also, the doctor may be kind of snotty about what he considered or she considers information and may just poo-poo a lot of shit that you can learn from the Internet because it doesn’t come to them from a journal.

And also because there’s such a high ratio of bullshit garbage to legit stuff that comes to you via the Internet. But still, doctors or most doctors aren’t optimal at learning everything there is to learn in their field and certainly not everything there is to learn about medicine in general. But I could see a doctor, I could see apps arise. A.I. based apps that keep doctors better informed than they are now. the doctors who are become really good at using those apps might be better doctors. When I could see that happening in a lot of fields. The hard sciences all these fields, the amount of information in the world, what doubles every year or so now.

Jacobsen: Yes, super crazy.

Rosner: Yes. So apps that help plow through all the best stuff would make any. If they’re decent would make anybody better at their job if their job is involved, staying up to date. So I guess that’s what I think the future of intelligence where it lies is the human A.I. alliances and alliances is too lofty a word that initially humans just using getting really good at using A.I. A.I. getting better at being A.I. then in the beginning, it is a Google relationship. It is via a keyboard or it is via a thing you yell at like an Alexa, then in the future things get creepier and more intimate as people. The Alexa the future become more like robot butlers. They become more people like. on the one hand, and on the other hand, people can become more intimately linked with A.I.

If Google Glass didn’t work because it was too creepy, but there will certainly be some optical based interfaces coming. Smart contact lenses, smart glasses that do not piss people off as much as Google Glass did. More risk based stuff. Maybe, I always imagined some A.I. like being worn as like a little breastplate in this novel I’m working on. You’ve got what I call “bugs,” which are basically your handheld device, except they’ve got little legs and they just ride you. They sit on your shoulder or if you need them, they crawl down your arm and they’re like, “Hey, pal.” So there will be wearables. Anyway, it is increasingly pervasive and intimate partnerships with A.I. that’s where intelligence is going and that’s where it already is to some extent. It is hard to tell. I think I’ve said this a zillion times before, that our apps have made us so obviously into idiots that it is easy to miss where they’ve made us smarter. The example I always use being ways that nobody has to get lost driving anymore. Getting lost is a weird thing if you’re driving a car that was made after I do not know what, 2011 now or if you’ve got a fucking phone. You might be driving like an asshole because you’re dividing your attention between your driving app and your actual driving, but you’re not really getting lost. Might be driving past your turn and having to go two more extra miles to get to the next exit. But still that’s not lost, where something in your car knows where you are. So anyway, I guess that’s pretty much it. That’s where intelligence is going.

And it’ll get there probably before we have ways of measuring how good it is. People will get smarter in conjunction with A.I. Faster than we will have measurements of how much smarter working with A.I. might be making this. that might not be a big deal, because when you look at how helpful IQ is not and the new indices may not be that helpful either, the proof is in the pudding. Does it matter to Bill Gates who has 80 billion dollars, what his IQ is? No, fucking, does it matter? Did it matter to Steve Jobs? His IQ didn’t make him the saint of Apple, nor did it stop him from being proactive about treating his cancers. So the proof is in the fucking pudding and not in your score on a test.

Jacobsen: The end.

[End of recorded material]

License

In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.

Copyright

© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2020/11/08

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: How many IQ tests have you taken?

Rick Rosner: Probably 40 if you include the SAT and GRE, they can be converted to IQ scores. I have easily taken 40 IQ and IQ-type tests.

Jacobsen: Do you take more alternative tests or mainstream tests?

Rosner: I’m pushing 30 alternative tests. I’ve gotten the highest score ever recorded on more high-end IQ tests than anyone else.

Jacobsen: Is that why you’re legendary within that niche community?

Rosner: One reason I am legendary is there aren’t that many people in the community.

Jacobsen: I like the way Tim Roberts characterized it. He characterized the community as stamp collectors. You’re the one with the rarest and most stamps.

Rosner: It’s a sport nobody plays. It’s like the world’s strongest man, but with fewer competitors. It is really niche, because it is niche; people involved with it know each other. You said, “What about unmeasurable genius? The people who take all these tests.” [Ed. Before the recording.]

There is no person who maxes out the tests all the time. Nobody does that. The reason I have done that well myself on these tests; not because it is easy, but because I have put in the time and work. I worked hard on the tests. I did the research and the deduction, and, to a great extent, the profiling of the various authors of the tests.

Because when an author has written multiple tests like Ronald Hoeflin, like Paul Cooijmans, like out of Tasmania Jason Betts. It is really helpful to take multiple tests by the same person. Because you learn their habits of item construction.

It is easier for me to do well on the Titan Test. Maybe, Hoeflin’s toughest test, but I spent a lot of time on the Mega Test, probably Hoeflin’s second-toughest test. There was a show, Scorpion, which was a show about a real-life genius.

But it was turned into an adventure show about a squad of geniuses that didn’t have much to do with the actual guy’s life. I wrote to them a couple of times, “You should have me in for an interview to write for the show. This is right up my alley, because it is a show about geniuses.” There’s a big production show a mile away from where I live.

But nothing, I thought a good episode of that show would be to have a high-IQ guy, who doesn’t feel acknowledged by the world and starts sending bombs to people. Booby-traps that you have to be really smart to figure out the puzzles built into the bombs.

Jacobsen: Like the misnamed Unabomber?

Rosner: He didn’t want people to disarm bombs. He wanted his bombs to go off. This is for the purposes of the show. The world has not acknowledged his gifts, so he will get revenge on the world by sending these high-IQ booby-traps to people.

“If you think you’re so smart, if you’re as smart as me, you’ll be smart enough to solve this bomb puzzle.” That’d be a great plot for one of those shitty shows.

Jacobsen: Isn’t that setting a bad example in the media?

Rosner: I don’t think so because there are shows about serial killers. Do shows about serial killers make more serial killers? Maybe, I don’t know. But nobody is saying those shows have to be shut down because they are making people into serial killers.

I haven’t gone to a meeting and to present my idea. So, it’s not like that show is going to be made, except that it was kind of the third Die Hard as a series of riddles for Bruce Willis and Samuel T. Jackson to solve, Samuel Jackson. Does he have a middle initial? I don’t know.

What I am saying, a component of that show if turned into an actual episode, a component would be profiling the guy who is sending out these booby-traps. As much as solving the puzzles, you’re solving the person. That’s what is happening when you’re solving these tests.

Like Paul Cooijmans without giving too much away, some of the analogies are rooted in the culture he grew up in.

Jacobsen: What is your full range of scores here? Yes, bottom-bottom to top-top.

Rosner: When I was a kid, I scored a 135 on of the tests administered to every kid in the class. Then I was given an individual administered test to see if I was going to skip first or second grade. I scored high enough that they discussed skipping me.

But they saw me on the school ground and saw that I had no friends and thought that it would be a bad idea to make me even more socially awkward by skipping me a grade. On that test, I scored a 140. Those are toward the bottom of the recorded range.

There were a bunch of these tests. There might have even been a 128 on one of these group-administered tests when I was a little-little kid. The highest I ever scored on one of these group-administered tests was 151.

The reason I believe that I didn’t score higher is that is as high as it went, which was about 150. They don’t go higher. There’s not point, which we’ve discussed before. The bottom of the scale is about 130. The top of the scale is in the mid-190s.

Jacobsen: On S.D. 15 or S.D. 16?

Rosner: I don’t know. Maybe, 192 S.D. 15 and 198 S.D. 16, I believe, even 199.

Jacobsen: 199 on what?

Rosner: I think on a Cooijmans test.

Jacobsen: Who else has done 199 S.D. 16?

Rosner: I don’t know. Evangelos Katsioulis and some others who have scored in that range. There’s a little bit of luck involved, where you find a test that fits your abilities or you find a test where the scoring is, maybe, a little bit loose.

It’s tight enough for the scoring to be accepted for people who look at the scoring, but loose enough that it might be easier to score in the 190s on one test than it is to score that on another test because norming tests is an imprecise thing.

I was always looking for slutty tests. Tests where it was within my ability to score over 100. But I never got there on an adult test.

Jacobsen: Are you still working on them?

Rosner: There’s one where I did a lot of work on and thought I had a decent shot at, but I haven’t worked on it in years. This is not prime time for doing well on these tests. Maybe, it would take a pretty big time commitment to go through it again.

I could take a look at the tests that have come along since the last time I took a real push to take one of these tests… somebody is setting off firecrackers right now. It is spooky.  

Jacobsen: Jesus. Okay, then, if you were to take all those scores in a fair assessment, what do you think is the tight range of, maybe, plus or minus two points on either side?

Rosner: You’ve got applied IQ. Where, supposedly, IQ is some inherent thing that you have or born with, it is supposed to stay the same throughout your life. That’s bullshitty. How effective your IQ is, it is connected to how hard you are willing to work on problems.

I don’t know. Give everything, probably in the 180s, the 190s might be me working hard, especially harder than might be appropriate – putting in 120, 150, 170 hours on a test. That’s a lot of time. Most people would not waste 4 40-hour weeks that could be used productively in other ways to kick ass on a test.

Jacobsen: Are a lot of the highest scores test junkies? I know you’ve taken a lot. I know Evangelos has taken a lot.

Rosner: When people claim, and people claim, that they got above 45 out of 48 on the Titan Test or the Mega Test and did it in 8 hours. I know they’re full of shit, because it is impossible to do that. I would be surprised somebody got above 45 out of 48 on the Titan Test without spending, at least, 80 hours or working as part of a team.

I know people have tried that.

Jacobsen: Ron told me people tried that on the Mega Test.

Rosner: I tried that on one super hard, crazy hard, test. I didn’t want to put in 100 hours. I wanted to see by teaming up with somebody if that would make it possible to do really well without a time investment. So, each person, it was something that I wanted to try.

We turned in our test. We got a pretty high score. Although, some of the problems were just impossible. They required some specialized training in logic and paradoxes. It was highly specialized. I don’t think we could have solved any of those problems without the specialized background.

We turned it in under a pseudonym. The guy was excited. The test was so brutal. Some o these tests are so hard that one person or even anybody turns in a set of answers. That was the case for this one.

We were the only ones who turned in answers. Initially, he was excited. I said, “We were two people.” He felt violated. Our deal was not to deceive him. Our deal was to, at least, get a score to see how the combined effort worked and then tell the truth. The guy was a little bit Aspergery.

So, it took lots of apologizing on our part.

[End of recorded material]

License

In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.

Copyright

© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2020/11/01

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What is the future of the relevance of IQ, its diminishment?

Rick Rosner: IQ has only been around for a century. Binet came up with a 5-point scale for testing kids to see what educational resources they might need. 1s and 2s need help for dumb kids. 4s and 5s need help for smart kids.

Terman took it over and put it on the 100-point chronological ratio scale. You take your mental age divided by your calendar age times 100 is your IQ. Then it grew from there. It was fairly widely accepted. A lot of psychology, psychiatry, was pretty widely accepted in the U.S. from the ‘20s, and ‘60s/’70s.

Then everyone started questioning everything, including IQ. IQ, now, I think, is considered kind of quaint. People have tried to replace it with various other theories and indices, e.g., Emotional Quotient, multifactor models.

The whole thing has also been hampered by it just not being that handy a thing. Like, it’s falsely precise. Somebody who says they have a score of 143 isn’t going to be any different from someone who has an IQ of 138, 147 or 130.

As with the SAT, it doesn’t add. Adding somebody’s score on an IQ test to their academic or professional dossier doesn’t tell you much more than you could learn from the rest of the dossier or talking with them for half of an hour.

In a lot of instances, it is a minus. If someone who brings up their IQ, I think Hawking called people who bragging about their IQ is a loser. People who are culturally cognizant know that IQ has a stink of loser-dom about it.

It doesn’t mean that it is of zero value. Or you can’t have fun with it. I’ve obsessively taken IQ tests on and off for most of my life. So, I can brag in a sad way about my scores. But it is mostly useless. A couple of times, maybe, in my 20s, it helped get me laid.

But that is a really small window to try to jump through.

Jacobsen: [Laughing].

Rosner: And who you’re jumping onto, IQ is iffy. What replaces IQ, I feel, will be measures of information processing power based on more sophisticated models of how information processing in consciousness works, which we’ll, eventually, get to in a pretty precise way, we have 20 years of not being there, yet.

You could consider the various measures of calculating capacity associated with computers as a type of measurement of machine intelligence, but really shitty measures. Because, for the most part, machines are at the very beginning of machine learning and really don’t have that much intelligence.

They have specific task oriented intelligence. You could set up a machine learning program in a short amount of time make a computer the best Go player or the best video game player in the world. But it is still very specific.

Computers still can’t pass the Turing Test. So, measures of computational power are pretty bad indices for intelligence. Petaflops per second, the amount of floating point calculations per second doesn’t really tell you how smart a machine is.

But as we understand what intelligence is via mathematical models of consciousness, there should be original indices originating from that. Regardless of the indices, we should see people as – for the most part – not giving a shit about getting smarter in general.

I get emails from people about how to get smarter. I tell people. The best thing is read your ass off. Engage in the types of exercises that are parts of IQ tests, try to mathematicize things in your world, try to mathematically analyze aspects of your world. But not many people are interested in doing that in general.

People are more interested in making themselves more competitive in the specific endeavours for them. When I was writing jokes for late night, I was very interested in making myself a better joke writer because I was told that my jokes sucked. Others were, but I thought I was being told this more.

At various times, I’ve tried to increase my IQ. In my career I was more interested in becoming a better joke writer and maker. The idea of strategically becoming really good at certain applications or certain A.I. aided technologies to make yourself effectively smarter in ways that pertain to your work will happen more and more.

But that’ll be a thing that will happen. You could team up with A.I. to make yourself smarter in a specific field. For instance, doctors are notorious for, once they’re done with medical training, knowing what they know but not extending themselves to extend what they know.

If you get a disease, you can go on the internet, learn shit that your doctor may not know, because the doctor is treating people with the disease and may not be keeping up with what is being learned about people with the diseases.

Also, the doctor may be snotty about information and may poo-poo stuff you learn from the internet because it doesn’t come from a journal. Also, because there is such a high ratio of bullshit garbage to legitimate stuff that comes to you via the internet, most doctors still aren’t optimal about learning everything to learn in their field or, certainly, everything about medicine in general.

I could see apps arising, A.I.-based apps, that keep doctors better informed than they are now. The doctors who become really good at using those apps might be better doctors. I can see that happening in a lot of fields, e.g., the hard sciences.

The amount of information in the world doubles every year or so now. Apps that help plough through the best stuff would make anyone better at their job if their job involved staying up to date. That’s what I think the future of intelligence lies.

It is in human-A.I. alliances. Alliances is too lofty a word. Initially, humans just getting really good at using A.I. and A.I. getting better at being A.I. At first, it is a Google relationship, via a keyboard, via a thing that you yell at – like an Alexa.

In the future, things become creepier and more intimate. Alexa’s of the future become more like robot butlers. They become more people-like, on the one hand. On the other hand, people can become more intimately linked with A.I.

Google Glass didn’t work because it was too creepy. They would, certainly, be some optical-based interfaces coming, e.g., smart glasses that don’t piss people off as much as Google Glass, more wrist-based stuff.

I always imagine some A.I. being worn as a little breastplate. In this novel that I am working on, you’ve got what I call bubs. Your basic handheld device, but they ride you, e.g., on your shoulder. If you need them, they crawl down your shoulder and go, “Hey, pal.” Wearables; it is increasingly pervasive and intimate A.I.

That’s where intelligence is going. Where it already is to some extent, it is hard to tell. Our apps have made us so obviously into idiots. That it is easy to miss where they’ve made us smarter. With the example I always use being Waize, nobody has to get lost driving anymore.

Getting lost is a weird thing if you’re in a car made after 2011 now, or if you have a fucking phone, you may be driving like an asshole because you’re dividing attention between the driving app and driving.

You may have to drive an extra two miles if you get past a stop. But you’re not lost. It’ll get there, probably, before we have ways of measuring how good it is. People will get smarter in conjunction with A.I., then faster than how working with A.I. may be making us smarter.

That might not be a big deal. Because if you look at how helpful IQ isn’t, the new indices may not be that helpful either. The proof is in the pudding. Does it matter to Bill Gates’s $80 billion what his IQ is? No!

Steve Jobs’s IQ didn’t make him the Saint of Apple, nor did it stop him from being proactive about treating his cancer. The proof is in the fucking pudding and not in your score on a test.

[End of recorded material]

License

In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.

Copyright

© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2020/10/22

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: If at all, how conscious are Watson and Google Translate? Both of which are association engines.

Rick Rosner: The way Watson answers questions in Jeopardy, the question would be put into its system. The words it had learned and the word associations, e.g., word order, would bring up candidates for possible correct answers within Watson’s system.

I guess, Watson might, or eventually would, get a tally of possible answers with a probability of each answer being right. If some answer broke a threshold of 80%, 90%, Watson would ring in an answer.

Google Translate works somewhat the same way. Actually, I don’t know how it exactly works. Probably, Google Translate, you have to build each system, so, not that it knows stuff but, that there are words in each system.

Then you build the associations with each word. With Google Translate, they probably built in a lot of language-to-language dictionaries. That bread in English and French relate this or that way. They might have started with that.

Once it started running, it has access to all sorts of literature in each language that it is working with. It can reach conclusions about what word you’re looking for if it doesn’t have it in its system. Unless, it doesn’t have contextual clues in each language and statistical likelihoods.

In each case, a set of inputs brings up associations of varying strengths. Google Translate has gotten better and better. I used it yesterday. It is crazy good. I was looking for a word in French, not having the exact word I wanted in English.

I was poking around. I plugged in a word close in English. It translated it into French. When I translated it back into English, it gave me the word I was looking for in English. It did my thinking for me, in the language I was starting in based on context.

So, we can ask the question, “How conscious, if any, are these association engines?” It’s been said – and I haven’t read a paper on it or anything – that inside Google Translate; there’s a metalanguage that expresses relationships among words hat are common across all languages.

Somehow, Google Translate finds it. I don’t know if this is true or not. But this sounds plausible that Google Translate finds it efficient to catalogue the relationships among words in a meta way that isn’t dependent on any single language, but is really an outgrowth of all languages that it is working with.

It is a sophisticated associative net. So, to the extent that these engines are aware of anything, they are probably not aware, but there is something going on where they reliably bring up the right association, even when that wasn’t plugged in there by someone early on.

It is an association that has been developed via machine learning. So, it has the mechanics, the associational mechanics. It has the ability to associate things and to bring up things based on association the way consciousness does.

But it is missing so many other ingredients of consciousness; that it is unlikely to be what we’d consider conscious. Among the things that it is missing are, maybe, the biggest things like real-world correlations, e.g., Google Translate knows that there’s a relationship among the parts of a car and the word “car.”

It knows that it can group other words, e.g., it knows wheels are associated with tires and the word “rotate” and “grip the road” and “steering.” All these things associated with wheels and driving. But it probably lacks any kind of imagery library that explains in any way what rotate means and what steer means, even circular.

Although, you have to figure. With Google being a big science fictioney sinister company, and ditto for IBM, they have probably made attempts to associate visual imagery, plug it into the associative net.

We know Google Image search is pretty good at visual associations. So, it is possible that Google Translate might have visual imagery having been entered – pictures having been entered – into its system.

It may have increased its effectiveness at coming up with the right word. Who knows if Google would tell us about it? Because that would make people nervous. I don’t still don’t think it is multiplicitous enough, seen from enough different angles, that Google Translate could come up with any real understanding of how wheels work at this point.

Because I don’t think that the nodes, the words and, maybe, images in its system, are associated enough with what we would consider sensory input, say video; that it would have a well-developed enough associative net with aspects of the world, working as they do in the world; that it would have any real kind of understanding.

That is big thing one that it might be missing. Thing two is judging. I don’t this either system has any way of judging. First of all, neither system has an idea of itself. Neither system has any means of judging whether something is good for either itself or good for some kind of aesthetic or some multiplicitous set of values.

In each case, each system is looking for the optimal word or answer to a question. That’s a simple enough measure of relevance. It makes its best guesses, best calculation as to how relevant a word choice is or an answer is.

If it is high enough for Watson, Watson rings in and answers the question on Jeopardy. I think with Google Translate. It gives you its best stab at what it thinks you’re trying to say, even if it is a bad stab, I assume.

I don’t think the measure of relevance is tied into enough of an associative system that a supported judgment; that it can be truly said to judge or to experience things that it likes versus things that it doesn’t like.

I don’t think it has the experiential and associative net to do that. Beyond that, it doesn’t have emotions. At the very least, emotions are also an associative net.

[End of recorded material]

License

In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.

Copyright

© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2020/10/15

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: So, we’ve talked about the colour red and perception and a certain universality in the perception of red amongst everyone. Let’s re-open that a bit here.

Rick Rosner: There is an age-old philosophical question about talking about the colour red. How can what they picture as red in their mind is the same in each person’s mind? The argument that you can’t prove it: You can’t go in somebody else’s mind. I believe a very effective argument against that – and, since it’s good, many people have thought it, which comes from modern brain science – in addition to a predictor, your brain, which sets you up for the things to come. Brains are association engines. Consciousness throws stuff into the conscious arena. So, you can get the widest spectrum of potential associations. Things that might be helpful. Stuff that is semi- or un-conscious is stuff that doesn’t need a lot of analysis – walking, breathing.

But novel stuff as we have talked about a zillion times before needs to be analyzed. It is one of the more efficient ways, as proved by what conscious is, to analyze things is to see what associations it brings up. This isn’t a good example William Shatner who played Captain Kirk on Star Trek put a picture online of himself from the original series put through a girl filter, turned him into a woman. He said, “I’d do me.” This caused a lot of consternation on Twitter. A lot of people agreed lady Captain Kirk was highly doable. It went around a lot on Twitter. She looks fuckable, but looks like William Shatner. It is a weird thing capturing your attention, or actively enters consciousness. It is a weird thing, which you’ve never seen before. Unless, you’ve seen the app before.

Your consciousness thinks it needs your attention and generates a bunch of associations. So, the argument about why two people probably roughly picture the same thing when they talk about “red.” Both people come from the same age, a Western country, then their associations – the things that they have associated with “red” – have a big overlap, between each person’s associations with “red” – assuming each person’s perceptual apparatus are functional. Some might be unable to see “red.” Assuming each perceptual systems are at par, each person has the same background, and their mental ‘definition’ or “red” are the same, e.g., for an apple or a corvette (terrible example because they come in a number of colours, but people think of the Prince song), a zit, and blood, these will be associated with “red.”

They are not perfect. My wife wanted me to paint our doors red. They were painted red. They seemed too Chinese red or tomato-y. She didn’t like it. I went to paint it more. She made me repaint it. I painted it with 5 different colours with hints of blue and cranberry. She doesn’t think it is red, but some type of weird pinky thing. So, there is room for disagreement. Anyway, that’s my argument.

The other thing I want to talk about is the question of reversibility. In physics, there are these subjects for lay people in physics, but professionals are too busy looking at other stuff. Like Schrodinger’s Cat, it gets a lot of play among non-physicists, while physicists got over thinking about it a gazillion years ago. Another thing that used to come up, I haven’t seen it a lot lately. It is the problem of reversibility, where all the equations in physics – that I know of at least – are time invariant.

The equations and the physics that describe simple interactions can be run in reverse. There is no arrow to tell you which way things are going. To have an arrow, you need macro events. That is, the standard example is the tea cup falling off the table and shattering off the ground involving 10^25^th atoms. It is a lot of stuff happening and is irreversible. But the paradox is that any of the single or two or three atom interactions going into the 10 to the 20-something interactions that go into the breaking of the cup, and when you zoom into the little interactions of one atom with other atoms. You could turn back the clock and not violate the laws of physics.

Extend that to the entire cup, there’s nothing against the laws the simple physics of running the timeline of the cup backwards and have it form on the table. All these shows like Nova, and so on. The broken cup is probably shown a dozen times in different shows. The thing that makes the breaking of the cup irreversible is thermodynamic and statistical because it involves a lot of stuff. One thing I would argue, probably tautologically, is that reversible processes are reversible because they don’t contain any information. They don’t leave their mark on the universe.

We’ve talked about long-distance photons and neutrinos that travel for billions of lightyears. They escape their local solar system, which makes it extremely unlikely that they will run into anything as they traverse the universe, but, in traversing the universe, they lose energy to the curvature of space – which is the same thing to interacting with the universe for billions of years. A photon travelling across th universe for billions of lightyears has been interacting with the universe for billions of years.

Although, the photon travelling at the speed of light doesn’t perceive time passing at all because of the equations of relativity and the universe is relativistic. The universe perceives the photon for traversing for billions of years, but the photon not perceiving any time passing. That’s a good way to contain information. That is a good way for the information the photon contains to not decay. That photons that traverses for billions of years has become entangled in a big chunk of the universe. That’s not reversible. It means information has been generated. The information or the mass the photon lost is added to the universe in the form of information.

You could add the same argument for the broken cup. It is so complicated and so irreversible that information has been added to the universe because we know for sure. It is such a big set of interactions, the cup broke. You fire an electron at another electron. You say, “A bounce and then electron 1 went left and electron 2 went right.” Somebody could say, “Are you sure? Did they? You can’t tell the difference between those electrons.” In certain collisions, you can’t tell which electron is which after the interaction.

Oar maybe, they didn’t interact. They bounced off each other and changed trajectory. There is less discernible information there. It is less definitive. Look at photon interactions in the center of the Sun, where the energy released from two deuterium nuclei fusing into a helium nucleus, that releases energy in the form of a photon or, maybe, more than one. It is in the form of light. The light takes a long, long time to reach the surface of the Sun. That energy is in the form of who knows how many – more than 10^20^th photons, as that photon gets emitted by the fusing nuclei and gets absorbed by something and then emitted, again, within 10^1/100 trillionth of a second. This happens for 500 years. Until, that energy has slowly percolated up to the surface of the Sun, where it is emitted in the form of photons.

Most of which will go for billions of years. In the center of the Sun, you have these short lifetime photons. The idea that any one of those photon interactions being absorbed and emitted within 1/100 trillionth of a second would have durable information is completely unlikely. Each of those little interactions contributes very little information to the universe. The Sun shining, the information that it is contributing. We’ve talked about information a lot over 6 years. We still don’t have a clear idea about it. The universe is not a good enough book keeper to keep track permanently or for more than an instant of all those mini-interactions; that it takes macro-interactions, e.g., the Sun shining and generating events on Earth to generate information that is discernible to the information processing system that is the universe.

If we’re right, and if the universe is both material with time and space and matter & an information processing system, the systems have to be loose enough to permit each of those levels of existence to co-exist, which means the information involved with the universe perceiving and defining itself needs some looseness where, on a moment-to-moment basis, there is no durable record of the individual mini-interactions that take place within the center of the Sun. There is an aggregate picture of the processes, but the universe doesn’t have enough information to create a record of the interactions that are happening in the center of a star.

It’s Schrodinger’s Cat every billionth of an inch, of a centimetre, across the whole guts of the Sun. There are things that have to have happened. Fusion has to have happened. There’s no record or information impact of these gazillion individual interactions. There’s only information generated in the aggregate. Sometimes, it’s not even then. But there’s something there in the shaping of the universe. We know that in our information processing system. If we experience something, and then we never think of it again, we never remember it for the rest of our lives. We just never remember it.

It has very little impact on our overall consciousness and it’s pretty much as if it never happened. You can take that to the most grotesque extreme. Once we die, it is as if we never thought anything in terms of our experience of the world because we have been obliterated from the world. We left impacts on the world. But in terms of our thought patterns, it is as if it never happened.

Jacobsen: There is a lot of philosophizing about substrate independence with a carbon-based evolved consciousness and then a silicon constructed intelligence. In either case, you could change the substrate while having the same consciousness more or less. In other words, I think we have touched on a principle of existence with consciousnesses, but I think have another one now.

Rosner: We have talked about how consciousness is a little bit free. We have never talked much about the manipulation of consciousness. It feels as if our consciousness is free. We have talked a little bit about it. The manipulation of consciousness is the same as the simulation of consciousness. That kind of manipulation is via a substrate. We haven’t talked about that, but could at some point.

Jacobsen: Yes, so, the idea of substrate independence is a fundamental issue. In fact, I think it so fundamental as if to be a principle of existence. No matter the universe that you have or no matter the fundamental particles and table of elements that arise, if they arise, in that framework, you should have something like a principle of substrate independence in existence to the kind of consciousnesses that could evolve. I think a corollary to this is not something I have seen, which is structural dependence.

The idea that you can change a substrate while producing a similar consciousness is a reasonably premised idea. You should have structural dependence. No matter the architecture or armature that you have, if you have a similar architecture or structure that the armature represents, you should get a similar consciousness. That structural dependence is similar to substrate independence. It seems like structural dependence is related to substrate independence and vice versa.

Rosner: Computers are not conscious. People who are reasonable would argue the computers aren’t conscious because it’s a different architecture in the computer than people, which is that something in the architecture of the brain permits consciousness and is different in the computer to the point that computers don’t think and humans do. That’s a structure-based thing, which is what you’re saying. To the extent that you have substrate independence, you have information working according to the rules of information. Those rules are very close to, if not equivalent to, the rules of quantum mechanics.

So, if you set up an architecture that is sweet enough, capacious enough, to allow consciousness, then you’re going to see information within that consciousness interacting with all the other information in the consciousness appear frictionless, superconductory frictionless, independent of the substrate. So, what happens in a computer is super highly tied to the substrate; it’s all determinate. Everything is going to get executed. There’s not a lot of wobble in computer processes. Unless, it has been built it, but it is still deterministic wobble. A computer executing a program is deterministic. A substrate that allows for information to interact independent of the substrate is indeterministic in the same way that quantum mechanics is. That’s what I think what you’re talking about sits.

I want to talk about another thing, which we don’t like to talk about readily or apply to ourselves. But we readily this to animals. That we eat, or just in general. When we think about the lives of animals, which we don’t think go to heaven, that is, people who are soft on dogs and cats like to not think of cats and dogs not being snuffed out when they die. But sentimental people like to think of dogs and cats as having some transcendental existence. But when we think of chickens and cows, and pigs, maybe especially pigs, we think that when they get slaughtered it is game over. These smart animals having terrible lives doesn’t matter because their brains have been wiped. They’re dead. They have more thoughts. The misery they’ve experience has been wiped from the world.

There’s that. If you think that about the pig you’re thinking, then it is hard to sit down and then not think this about anything else with a brain.

Jacobsen: Yes.

[End of recorded material]

License

In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.

Copyright

© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2020/10/08

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: So, we were talking off-tape about the arrow of time and physics.

Rick Rosner: So, the physics that I know has always had a problem with the arrow of time. The physical interactions, e.g., particles smashing into each other, the stuff that contains few enough particles that you’re not dealing with statistical, thermodynamic phenomena. The stuff that is reversible. It is something that physics has dwelled on it. People who do physics have not paid much attention to it because they have their own physics to do. It is that the universe is not reversible. The stuff happening to us has a definite time arrow. The individual physical interactions as dictated by the rules of physics seem not to. You can run everything backwards.

If you could run a film of a cup running backwards exploding, there’d be nothing in the backward film breaking the laws of physics. It would regain its kinetic energy and use that energy to come back together and jump back onto the table and come together. Between the kinetic energy of the parts of the cup and the floor, nothing would be disallowed by running the film backwards. But we’ve talked. I think the arrow of time is determined by large-scale physical interactions.

That is, the photons that make it to the surface of the Sun, the vast majority, go for billions of lightyears and lose most of their energy to the curvature of space, which is, I believe, a tacit exchange of information. That large-scale transmission of energy across billions of lightyears is what propels the arrow of time. Because when you have a gazillion of photons and neutrinos sharing information that way, none of those long-distance photons are doing anything that can be time reversed. They are spreading their information across the skyn of relationships in the universe in an irreversible way.

That’s not a local thing. Like I said, if a photon gets out of the Sun, it’s not going to be local. I don’t know. I haven’t done the math. Somebody probably has; how many photons there are that travel a quadrillionth of a millimetre within the Sun before they get captured again? I guess the sheer number of photons that only travel a tiny distance would outnumber the photons that travel a huge distance.

If you consider each increment between each photon travelling from the center o the Sun to being captured, and if you consider that one interaction, then the number of those close interactions outnumbers the number of interactions with long-distance photons, maybe. It’s the long distance particles that shape the universe and determine the arrow of time. But there is another arrow of time under IC, and under quantum mechanics, which is, “What moments are allowed to follow each other?”

The deal is, under quantum mechanics, there is the universe – or whatever system you’re looking at – contains a lot of open interactions, open positions, where something is due to happen at some point in the future. That thing that can happen can have a number of different outcomes. There’s a reaction that sets a neutron loose. A free neutron lasts for 10 or 11 minutes before decaying on average. So, the decay of that free neutron is like an open proposition. You don’t know when.

Because there is no way under the rules of quantum mechanics to predict exactly when it is going to decay and when the various energies of the products of the decay… the amount of energy has to stay the same.  But how that energy is distributed among the particles that fly apart from a decayed neutron, those are all unpredictable things. There is a gazillion of these open issues in each moment of the universe. But your subsequent moments of your universe or system have to follow the open positions and be consistent with the closed positions too – to the extent that there are closed positions.

It is probably a philosophical-quantum mechanical issue. Anyway, each candidate for next possible moment of the universe is going to be a member of the set of possible moments that close some of these open issues. That some of your possible next moments of the universe are going to have that neutron decaying from one moment and the next. That, itself, is an ironclad arrow of time. Of course, it still has the same issue; super local or micro interactions appear to be time reversible under the laws of quantum mechanics.

Neutrons can undecay too. Shit can come together and form a neutron without violating the rules of quantum mechanics, but, still, it is a macro, large-scale system-wide thing. The moments follow from each other. The open issues are closed in a sequence that follows the arrow of time. Partly what I am saying is that the super local apparent reversibility of physics is, maybe, like free will or dwelling on the wrong question. I think what needs further analysis besides everything is how the sequencing based on determining previously indeterminate quantum questions.

That is, we know in a moment when the neutron has decayed. We know it has decayed. Before it decayed, we didn’t know when. So, that open question has been closed. There should be interesting things about linking the closing of open questions and the large-scale loss of energy of long-distance particles. Those need to work together to determine the arrow of time. That’s a place to look to see how they relate to each other in some very obvious and, probably, in some not very obvious ways.

Then you want to relate that to thermodynamic systems, which are all embroiled in the arrow of time, too. So, that’s mostly it.

One issue that seems to arise or one principle that seems to arise is that when you’re looking at super local interactions that don’t have an arrow of time according to the rules of physics. According to Newtonian and traditional physics, under the rules of quantum mechanics, nothing is entirely local in quantum mechanics. Everything is tied to everything else. There is always a non-zero probability that a particle showing up in one place can show up way the fuck away just due to chance. There is quantum tunneling.

A particle confined in the box can appear outside the box because there is no way to completely confine a particle’s probability wave. It spreads across all of space. Where it is next detected within its own probability wave, which is anyplace, it could be anywhere with varying degrees of probability. It is always possible an electron bouncing around in a lead box can appear outside the lead box. So, quantum mechanics, in that way, is non-localized.

The arrow of time stuff appears to be tied to the universe as a whole. It is a non-local thing. There is a sense of that in the thermodynamic arrow of time. Statistically, it is much more likely the cup falls off the counter and smashed on the floor than the cup unsmashing on the floor and coming together on the counter. The unlikelihood requires a lot of atoms, 10^23^rd or 10^25^th atoms on the floor. It is a non-super-local interaction. Even though, it only involves the table top, the floor, and the cup.

It still involves a shitload of particles and a shitload of things implied by statistical likelihoods and unlikelihoods. It is not super local in this sense. It is not just one electron repelling another electron. When you look at the other stuff that seems to have an arrow of time, super long distance particles and the universe having all of these open questions that get solved sequentially with an arrow of time. There’s the strong implication that arrow of time is tied into the entire system.

That the entire system is tied into the entire system via the rules of quantum mechanics. It means everything is tied to everything else. Maybe, worrying about the irreversibility, the complete apparent reversibility, of super local, super discrete interactions – a few particles in small scales – is worrying about the wrong issues, instead, you want to worry about, “How about does a system with all these discrete particles tied together work?”

Of course, many of the answers are contained in quantum mechanics. Quantum mechanics needs to be tied to cosmology to get the rest of the answers out of it.

[End of recorded material]

License

In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.

Copyright

© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2020/10/01

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: So, you had an equation mentioned in an interview with Errol Morris and in one of the really, really short ebooks. What is it?

Rick Rosner: In the equation, I said Planck’s Constant, which is basically a measure o the blurriness of matter or the lack of blurriness is dependent on the amount of matter within a region of space. It says that in areas with a local high concentration of matter. The scale is space is going to be smaller. You’ll have more space where there’s more matter. Let’s say you live in California where rent is too high, I think the average rent in Westwood has the highest average rent in the state, $4,900 or so per month for the average apartment if you want to live next to UCLA.

What you could do is if you had a device, you could rent a closet or a mailbox and live in that, if you have a device that can shrink you. There’s a Matt Damon movie from five years ago that permits people to do that. It can shrink you down and permit you to live like a millionaire on almost no money because it costs so much less to make a dollhouse than it is to make a mansion. If you’ve got a bunch of matter that’s gravitationally collapsing into itself, then the scale of space is smaller.

So, this is a limiting thing. As matter collapses into itself and pulls away from the rest of the universe gravitationally, then it will reach asymptotically an equilibrium where the closer the matter in a ball of matter gets to itself, the smaller the ball gets, the smaller space gets, so, at the asymptote, it looks like it stabilizes with the thing not being able to collapse at all because the more it collapses; the more space gets smaller, so it always looks the same size.

In general, looking at the entire universe, the principle is that how precisely the particles in a universe are defined is decided by the density of information-sharing particles flying around. In other words, if you had two people in a gun fight in a dark room, and let’s say the guns aren’t lethal, every time they get hit. They make a noise. Two people trying to figure out where the other person is in a dark room by shooting at each other and listening for the yelps would have a rough idea of where the other person is.

But if you had a hundred people in the room shooting at each other, the positions with the two people in the room would be blurry. Let’s say there’s a device tracking the yelps, which knows which yelp corresponds to which person, we call this the Universal Detector. If you had 100 people being registered on the detector – having a Universal Detector fucks things up a little bit, but let’s go with it, the locations each person would be much more narrowed down because each person would be getting hitting with 100x more bullets than in the room or 99x more bullets than in the room with only 2 people.

So, their positions would be much more defined. According to the rules of quantum mechanics, I say or claim – some might disagree – the exchanging of particles is what determines where particles are in terms of how they affect the rest of the universe, which is the only measure of where they are. There is not some secret measure of where they are and do not have access to the more perfect information.

If you had 1,000,000 people in the room, and say they’re small enough to not getting in each other’s way, everyone would be hit 1,000,000 times more bullets than the room with 2 people. You’d know where they are with 1,000,000 times more accuracy. That’s the whole deal. The more matter you have interacting with all of the other matter; the more precisely that matter is located in space, which equals the scale of space. Let’s say we’re talking about protons, a room with a million protons – let’s ignore it would blow apart because of the Coulomb Repulsion of all the protons, the protons would be so much more tightly located.

It means the protons would be so much more tiny in a room with a million of them than with just 2 of them. The tininess equals the scale of space, it would fill space. The scale of space would be smaller. In a room with two protons, the two protons would be blurry as shit and would occupy roughly half of the room. They would be fluffy enough that there wasn’t much of the room that wasn’t occupied by a significant proton cloud, probability cloud, for a possible location of the proton. It would be two blobby things semi-overlapping each other.

In a room with a million protons, the probability clouds would barely overlap each other. They would be more like blurry little pinpoints in space. The scale of space, the volume of space that you need to contain 90% of the protons’ probability cloud. That is, a space thrown up around where you think a proton is most likely compactly; there’s a 90% of the proton in this chunk of space. In the 2-proton world, the 90% spheres around the proton would affect most of the room. In a 1,000,000-proton world, those spheres would be tiny and leaving most of space not within one of those spheres.

In significant ways, you can define the scale of space by the size of those spheres. To make sure you’re not cheating by having some overall definition of space, you’re not measuring the extent of space itself against some other thing. Space is space. You have no way of measuring in size besides the stuff inside of it. It is comparing the size of the spheres containing 90% of the proton to the overall diameter of your space.

That’s the deal. The more matter you have in space interacting with all the other matter, the more tightly defined space is going to be. It applies to all matter in space as a whole and to tight clumps of matter, where you’re adding the extra interaction of the tight clump of matter with itself to the overall amount of interactions in the universe. To put it in gunfight terms, if you had a room with a billion protons all firing each other, then the protons would be pretty tightly defined. If you took a billion of those protons and packed them more tightly together, so all of the protons in the tight ball of protons are hit with twice as many bullets per second with half of the bullets coming from within the ball or tight of protons, then the protons in the clump would be twice as tightly defined as the protons not in the clump because the protons in the clump are getting hit with twice as many bullets.

That would have to be a super tight clump for just a million protons, for 1/1,000^th protons in the room to be providing half of the bullets hitting the protons in the clump. So, that’s the whole deal. It’s what the equation says.

One addendum, protons and electrons, charged particles, are exchanging photons, which help define space or the scale of space and the distribution of matter within space via gravitation. But protons are much tinier, much more massive, and neutrons, than electrons. I postulate that not only are protons and neutrons being defined by its electromagnetic interactions. It is also being defined by all its interactions, especially the long-distance interactions mediated by photons and neutrinos. I would suspect that the neutrino interactions make particles involved in neutrino interactions much tinier, much more tightly defined, within space because there is a huge amount of collapsed matter outside of the center of the universe, which helps define – via neutrinos – the matter (all matter as well as), the active matter in the center is a beneficiary of all this collapsed matter acting as tent poles holding open a tighter universe/a universe in which the scale of space is tighter for neutrino mediated particles.

Now, I’m realizing what I’ve said is a little garbage-y. When a neutrino is absorbed by a neutron, it doesn’t just emit a proton. It also emits an electron. You have to say electrons are, somehow, participants. Proton-electron pairs are kind of linked particles. In that, the universe probably has the same number of electrons as it does protons.

[End of recorded material]

License

In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.

Copyright

© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2020/09/22

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: So, we talked a little bit about spirituality. We talked bluntly, in the not too distant past, about traditional religions. What about these practices? Is there any efficacy of prayer?

Rick Rosner: In the current American landscape, everything has been turned to crap because every time a bunch of people get shot up. The only thing they can say, especially politicians who want to say they are for gun control, is that they offer thoughts and prayers. If you live on Twitter, as I do, somebody is like, “Fuck you! Do something concrete because thoughts and prayers don’t do anything.” So, the efficacy of thoughts and prayers in the current American landscape is zero. They don’t do anything. They don’t even get people to do anything concrete in terms of action, except getting pissed off about the “thoughts and prayers” people.

Jacobsen: In this IC model, does prayer work?

Rosner: …No. Although, there is the Oprah model, The Secret, that what you actively wish for will come to you, which is mostly bullshit except if, by actively wishing for something, it causes you to either take action – to get ready to go after this thing – or makes you more able to perceive opportunities to find this thing in the world. So, wishing for things doesn’t make them happen, except that it prepares you to notice and go after these things, there’s the saying, “Chance favours the prepared mind,” or, “The harder I work, the luckier I get.”

If you work at something, and if wishing helps you change perceptual settings, then, “Yes,” but wishing all by itself doesn’t send a signal out into the world for it to send things to you shit; that it otherwise wouldn’t send you.

Jacobsen: So, there is nothing there to which you are praying. Therefore, there is nothing to help you, outside of changing your own perceptual system.

Rosner: Right. But it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t pray. It doesn’t mean you should expect things to happen if you do pray. You could cynically use it. Republican politicians are corrupt and not willing to do anything, and cowardly. People who have been selected via the recent trends in politics have been shitheels.

The deal is, I could imagine heroically cynical politician, of which there aren’t any on the Republican side, going ahead and saying, “Thoughts and prayers,” all the time. This generates tremendous outrage, then something is done, but no one is doing that.

[End of recorded material]

License

In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.

Copyright

© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2020/09/15

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What is meant by mathematicization of consciousness in IC?

Rick Rosner: For a very persuasive theory of consciousness to exist, we would have to show what an information world looks like. We hypothesize it would have the physics of the world that we live in. We’d have to show the information in consciousness moment-to-moment and in memory, able to be brought up, how all that can be represented by a physical structure – call it a universe – with rules – call that physics, and how everything you know is part of it.

I have this clock radio and telephone in one in the home. It has rounded corners and a green LED display and has shading because it is sitting under a light. It looks like an actual thing in the world. A mathematical theory of consciousness would have to show how that information exists within a structure that incorporates my perception of this phone clock radio, and the rest of the room that I am in, and how it is embodied. Until recently, we were thinking information is more “holographic.” I don’t like it, the term – ugh.

Jacobsen: How about globally distributed and locally represented?

Rosner: Yes. I am not sure even know about that. It is globally distributed and able to be manipulated, so that it can be an object within my perception and imagination, or within my consciousness.

Jacobsen: It is like saying, “Everywhere and nowhere.” Does it really say anything? How can this be stated more precisely?

Rosner: Because you have to link the information and how this device, this phone deal, is represented in the information world, which probably includes the roughly global sharing of information via long-distance photons.

Jacobsen: There should numbers, symbols, and equations behind that.

Rosner: Yes, the whole deal.

Jacobsen: Then this would be the mathematicization of consciousness.

Rosner: Yes.

Jacobsen: We talked bluntly about traditional religion. What does this mean for spirituality?

Rosner: In the US, spirituality has been entirely fucked over by Evangelicals. As a liberal American offering any respect to religion at this point seems stupid because religion has been turned into this fantastically corrupt deal in America, this shouldn’t reflect on spirituality because this should be a different thing. Religion in America are real crap right now.

Jacobsen: How many people are part of these movements now?

Rosner: I don’t know. Maybe, it’s tens of millions.

Jacobsen: Okay.

Rosner: So, that’s thing one. My patience with religion, right now, is low. Thing two is, science is supplanting religion. Where I don’t think anybody expected this at the beginning of the scientific revolution, including scientists, the work of science to explain everything to every corner of the world. At this point, 500 years later, it looks like science can explain everything in the world. It is not to say we have explained everything or science can explain some metaphysical assumptions, such as the set of all possible worlds that have principles that can connect to ‘spiritual goods’ or properties that are good under ‘spirituality.’

From those things, you can extrapolate ethics. A sloppy half-assed understanding of the scientific world puts a premium on things happening without anyone in charge, but a more nuanced view of the scientific version of the world says, “It’s not random. Order emerges. Persistence persists. Under these principles, there is room for ethics and goodness, and a whole bunch of things, which are spiritually preferred. Even though, we are in a heartless and leaderless universe.”

Jacobsen: I like the phrase, “There are no governors anywhere.”

Rosner: I agree, but there are principles – not in charge – that describe what structures and entities persist and exist in the universe. Those entities are generated by order producing processes.

[End of recorded material]

License

In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.

Copyright

© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2020/09/08

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: We use a lot of terms consistently. Since we us them a lot, we should specify some more. What meant by technical consciousness rather than mystical consciousness?

Rick Rosner: I call consciousness a technical not a mystical phenomenon. It has been clear for decades, maybe a century, that when consciousness is figured out. It will be materialistic. That is, it will be generated by the same stuff that generate everything else in our world, the rules of physics and matter. That consciousness is made of stuff. Given that you can map consciousness into a separate space made of an abstract stuff, it doesn’t change the fact that consciousness is generated by matter doing regular things.

Jacobsen: Can I pause you there?

Rosner: Sure.

Jacobsen: If you look at the worldviews on offer, the major ones, the assumptions are non-materialistic origins of this stuff. It puts us as odds.

Rosner: As scientism has become more prevalent, it has become apparent consciousness isn’t magical. Even when we didn’t understand how it worked, it became increasingly obvious that it would be materialistic.

Jacobsen: You mean undeniably materialistic explanations.

Rosner: There is no extra fluid. There is no extra world consciousness exists subject to some mystical God-given or some hocus-y pocus-y separate set of phenomena. You can mathematicize consciousness and show the information within consciousness as existing within its own physics. Normal physics, but the physics of a separate space, we assume under IC. We assume consciousness can be mathematically represented in its own space. Just because we can’t do that now, it doesn’t mean consciousness can’t be represented via the processes in the brain, and the brain itself is built from physics.

Also, we have thought about consciousness under IC, as we have been working together for 5 years.

Jacobsen: It is more physics than metaphysics and more philosophy of physics too.

Rosner: As we built this out, I do not find this particularly hard to understand. Consciousness is the sharing of information among different sensory and processing subsystems, so that they all inform each other in a kind of shared arena. So, they generate a vivid, rapidly-changing, moment-to-moment picture of the environment and your thoughts of the environment and associated emotions with those inputs.

Jacobsen: In a way, you take among those who accept modern standards of science. You take premises most people would agree with and then come to conclusions only a minority of people agree with.

Rosner: If you sit people down and talk to them, here is what is feels like to have consciousness, what is consciousness, I think you’ve convince a significant number of people: Shared processed information generates the feeling of inhabiting a vivid reality.

Jacobsen: I don’t think it’s unreasonable. I do think it’s too optimistic. In North American culture, people would assume “immortal otherworldly stuff connects to me.”

Rosner: Take my wife, she doesn’t think a lot about science stuff. I get this a lot when I throw jokes at her. I will throw a decent one. He will say, “Anyone could have thought of that.” It doesn’t make it a bad joke.

Jacobsen: [Laughing].

Rosner: It means a lot of people could get the joke. I tried explaining IC to her. Similarly, it is obviously not obvious because we are sitting on thousands of years of thinking about consciousness, which we believe gets it wrong.

Jacobsen: What are the impediments to understand our view of consciousness? What have been the impediments?

Rosner: The impediments consisted of not existing in the right technological and scientific space in which we exist in a growing jungle of AI and apps, and increasingly CG and burgeoning brain science. We have the conceptual tools to think about consciousness as an information processing process. An emergent property, if you want to call it that; although, I’m not sure how emergent it is because it is right there.

Have a system that is getting multi-dimensional, that is, multi-faceted analyses of its current situation. All of the analysis that goes into fleshing out its world will produce what acts like and feels like consciousness. Obviously, that needs to be further mathematicized, as we have said a thousand times.

Jacobsen: [Laughing] That’s another one.

[End of recorded material]

License

In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.

Copyright

© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2020/09/01

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: So, it was turtles, turtles, all the way down. This is the infinite turtles ‘problem.’

Rick Rosner: In IC, we postulate the universe is made of information, which means a hardware containing the universe. It is not part of the universe, but contains the universe. The information space, we do not see it as information, but as space, matter, and the laws of physics. For that information to be able to exist needs to be stored and kept track of, and manipulated in some other physical environment, which implies another universe, it is made of information, which implies another hardware universe out to infinity.

Infinities are to be avoided in doing physics. We live in a universe that doesn’t have any infinities. It has a limited amount of information. It has a limited, though huge, number of particles. It has a limited, though huge, amount of space. It has a limited, though huge, duration of time. The manifestations of quantum physics are generally manifestations of the less than infinitely perfect defining of matter in space, and space itself, so there’s only a finite amount of information in the universe. So, quantum mechanics is the physics of non-infinite information.

We’re postulating this infinite chain, stack, Russian nesting dolls, of containing universes. Another principles of IC is that existence is dependent on non-contradiction and self-consistency. Requiring an infinity of universes seems to imply circumstances, that seem impossible to the point of “How can that fucking be?”, basically. It seems suspiciously like something that should preclude existence because existence should not require an infinity of universes. I was thinking about our actual, physical environment, and the larger universe containing our more local environment.

Our environment is specific and concrete. It comes with self-consistent history, a non-contradictory history. The universe seems to have played out, at the very least, over many billions of years. The events on Earth have played out for a few billion years for any kind of life and then less time for complicated life, and then you get to human history. It all plays out without any serious complications. It seems like stuff developed through evolution and the laws of physics without crazy contradictory stuff like time travellers, dragons, or stuff popping into the world for no reason or does not comport with the rules of physics as we know them.

Then you compare the specific non-contradictoriness of our world with the potential problematically infinite set of universes. Each bigger than the one it contains outward to infinity. That seems non-demonstrably, non-concretely abstract. It seems abstract. If it is so abstract, and if we only know the universe that we are in, and if we can look across billions of lightyears, our knowledge of the universe drops off dramatically. We only know about our immediate universe. We are perfectly abstract in that external universe. All we know is that we’re postulating that it should exist. Things get more abstract as we get further down the line of container universes out to infinity.

I would postulate that you can’t have inconsistency that serves to make existence impossible in stuff that we can’t know anything about. The stuff that is wildly abstract. You need specifics. We can have a concrete universe that exists in a non-contradictory way, as far as we know the universe, and as far as get to know the container universe. We may develop physics and analytical techniques so powerful; that we learn things about the hardware universe if it turns out that we are contained in another universe.

Still, that’s another island of specific and non-contradictory stuff. As long as you can keep sticking fingers out of exploration and continue to run into non-contradiction, you might be okay. You keep the infinities at bay. It reminds me of the stuff of Godel and the incompleteness theorems. I think it’s been proven that multiplication is never going to steer you wrong. Two pairs of numbers that don’t have prime factors in common will never be able to be multiplied together to make the same product. 7 and 9, and 6 and 10, an never be multiplied together to get the same number.

There is probably some theorem that says, “Multiplication will work that way we always expect it to work without blowing up,” but the overall consistency of mathematics can be proven within mathematics. You may be able to prove some arguments for math. But even that will be hinky because you will not able to prove that type of metaphysics to math, there may some hidden bombs within math that, once discovered, will show math as inconsistent. However, we know math works because we have been using it for thousands of years.

Math gets used quintillions of times a day without a problem. For practical purposes, math is self-consistent enough to exist, at least as a system for analyzing the world. Even though, it may not be infinitely consistent. Similarly, the world exists with enough concreteness and self-consistency that it apparently can exist. Even though, there may be troubling implied infinities that threaten to blow it up. But in practical terms, it is consistent enough. The threats to its consistency, the dangerous infinities, are sufficiently isolated via abstraction and not impinging on our finite world that they may turn out to be problematic. Our existence proves they would not be problematic, at least not making it impossible for anything to exist.

[End of recorded material]

License

In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.

Copyright

© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2020/08/22

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What’s going on with Noether’s Theorem?

Rick Rosner: I know of it. I know it is amazing. It was a theory discovered in 1918. Basically, as far as I know, it says that things not changing as you change position in space implies conservation laws.

Jacobsen: Angular momentum of the system is conserved as a consequence of the laws of motion. The part that is interesting to me. The system doesn’t have to be symmetric.

Rosner: It is a deep theory. Deeper than me. If you like that stuff, then you should probably follow John Baez. You guys (Canadians) say, “Zed.” He is a physics guy and a deep math guy at UC Riverside. He is good on Twitter. Today, he was talking about Noether’s Theorem. He also created the crackpot test. Because he is a physics guy in a densely populated state. If you are a physics guy in a densely populated state, lunatics will approach you with their own theories of the universe. Nobody who is crazy enough to have a theory of the universe would take the test, probably.

Jacobsen: Just pulled it up. Some examples of 1 point, 3 point, 5 point, 10 point, 20 point, and the 50 point.

Rosner: It is a 37-question questionnaire. If you are above a certain level, then you are a crackpot likely.

Jacobsen: “1 point for every statement that is widely agreed on to be false,” “2 points for every statement that is clearly vacuous,” “3 points for every statement that is logically inconsistent,” “5 points for each mention of “Einstien”, “Hawkins” or “Feynmann…” [Laughing].

Rosner: [Laughing].

Jacobsen: [Laughing] “5 points for using a thought experiment that contradicts the results of a widely accepted real experiment,” “5 points for each word in all capital letters (except for those with defective keyboards).”

Rosner: That should apply to Twitter. People who type in all caps on social media, including our fucking president.

Jacobsen: “10 points for each new term you invent and use without properly defining it,” “10 points for claiming that your work is on the cutting edge of a ‘paradigm shift,’“ “20 points for every use of science fiction works or myths as if they were fact,” “20 points for suggesting that you deserve a Nobel prize.” I suspect these are based on real emails.

Rosner: Yes, there’s a story my buddy Chris tells, who got his doctorate at CalTech. He watches into the faculty office of the physics department there. He’s behind a guy. The office secretary is blowing the guy off, “Professor so-and-so isn’t here.” My friend is like, “What is up with that? The guy is here. It is kind of rude to blow this person off.” The guy turns around to leave. His glasses are covered by tinfoil to block signals from space.

Jacobsen: [Laughing] “30 points for claiming that your theories were developed by an extraterrestrial civilization (without good evidence).”

Rosner: In 1984, I had a bad breakup.

Jacobsen: Is this the bouncer girlfriend?

Rosner: Yes.

Jacobsen: She was very attractive.

Rosner: She was cute. Before she was a bouncer, she was a dancer. But the thing that made her a good bouncer was this free floating anger. There was a certain amount abuse from here. It added spice and weird psychological underpinnings, which are hard to recover from.

Jacobsen: That doesn’t sound good to me.

Rosner: You know baby ducks imprint the first thing they see.

Jacobsen: So, you imprinted on very aggressive sexual experience.

Rosner: If you mix fear with everything else, then it makes a lasting impression.

Jacobsen: In 2020 terms, I am sorry for the emotional abuse that you went through.

Rosner: I am a big boy-ish. To get over it, I made a deal with myself that I would do something stupid every week. One time, I was walking across campus. I just dumped into a hole, not knowing what was in it or how deep it was. There wasn’t that much rebar in it.

Jacobsen: Back to the John Baez: “40 points for claiming that the “scientific establishment” is engaged in a “conspiracy” to prevent your work from gaining its well-deserved fame, or suchlike,” “50 points for claiming you have a revolutionary theory but giving no concrete testable predictions.” I can think of several people who fit those categories and function as crackpots.

Rosner: He may not have offered a cutoff. It would be like a physics guy to offer a probability cloud. Anyway, one of the stupid things I did. I met my wife at a Jewish singles’ dance. Before I went, I knew they were stupid. Nevertheless, I forced myself to go and it worked out. Another is writing to the National Inquirer. I scored well on an IQ test and was published in Omni. I wrongly considered myself famous, no.

Jacobsen: [Laughing].

Rosner: Omni was this science-y and science fiction-y publication for people who liked Penthouse. I wrote a letter to Penthouse Letters. It is someone writing in to talk about the great sex that they happened into. I wrote one tied to my Omni persona. I wrote one to the National Inquirer about how I got my high-IQ based on ‘being kidnapped by aliens.’

Jacobsen: [Laughing] They thought you were a little off.

Rosner: Because it was stupid. If I had any actually degree of fame, then they might have done something with it, but they don’t know anything about this.

Jacobsen: Knowing you personally, you are one of the funniest people I know.

Rosner: Thank you.

Jacobsen: You are the least pretentious high-IQ person I know.

Rosner: That’s my shtick. On the inside, I am.

Jacobsen: So, you would have substantive internal prudery with the perfect score on the Titan Test.

Rosner: I worked in bars for years. I just finished watching some movie about a high-functioning autistic guy who is training himself to have normal interactions. I think Temple Grandin did that. Working in bars, it was the equivalent of that because I met three-quarters of a million people.

Jacobsen: So, you know what the range of American citizenry are like.

Rosner: That’s not the point. The point is I was never fully Aspergery or autistic. I was that off, but I wasn’t great.

Jacobsen: I don’t think you have Asperger’s. I think you have lack of socialization earlier on.

Rosner: I don’t even know if that’s the right term now.

Jacobsen: That’s true. It’s a spectrum. If you look at these individuals, I have some experience.

Rosner: You don’t hear about autism much. I think one reason it has been abused is because people not in the field abused it. When a supermodel goes on a late night talk show and says, “I was so nerdy in junior high,” which they all say, they probably were. To be a supermodel, you need to not get any boobs until you are 19. Unless, your parents are each 6 feet tall. You will not get womanly curves until older because when you get the estrogen that goes with having boobs. It shuts down the bone growth. It is annoying when a supermodel says, “I was Skeletor and nerdy in 8^th grade.” It’s not necessarily not true because she probably was 5’9” in 8^th grade and 103 pounds because this would allow her to grow to supermodel proportions.

There were probably some supermodels who when she went on one of the late night Jimmys said that. It was one of the most self-diagnosed characteristics out there. If you felt awkward, then you might go on social media and claim having Asperger’s.

Jacobsen: Concluding statements on Noether’s Theorem: How does it relate to IC? How about that?

Rosner: The deal with physics or one of the main quests of physics is an attempt for a unified field theory. On single theory that explains everything. Elegant physics theorizes one thing, but that theory when pursued along a number of different lines generates a number of surprising results that are consistent with observations of the universe, e.g., General Relativity. There is some quote from Einstein where somebody asked him, ‘Is it really true of the universe?’ Einstein who liked to talk about ‘God,’ said, ‘If God did choose it as a thing that describes the universe, then he fucked up because it is a beautiful theory.’ It is something like that. What makes a theory beautiful in physics is that it is simple and does way more than you’d that it would do, it is unexpected. I know Noether’s Theorem does this big time without remembering or ever even knowing how.

[End of recorded material]

License

In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.

Copyright

© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2020/08/15

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Okay, so, we have these general distinctions between fields. We have physics. We have chemistry. We have biology. IC, as we conceive of it, deals with metaphysics and its relationship with physics.

Rick Rosner: Yes, but it’s mostly physics.

Jacobsen: Yes, it’s more spikey than gooey. There’s an armature connected to the ways in which we conceive of physics working.

Rosner: It is the reasons why.

Jacobsen: The reason for a universe structured as it is comes from the form of processing and the structure of the processor. That has a physical manifestation for us, but an informational manifestation. Yet, with those physics, chemistry, and biology, distinctions, we make those distinctions with diagrams, Latin language, equations.

Rosner: Those have emerged from their histories.

Jacobsen: But if there wasn’t a human operator to make those distinctions, those distinctions exist, but they don’t, fundamentally, exist. We conceive them of these distinctions, so they are apprehensible to an intelligent human being.

Rosner: Yes, but you can argue the three fields are distinguished by their internal order, where a living being has a high level of internal order – at least while it is alive and has all these feedback loops and governors, there’s all this stuff happening that sustains life. It is a whole system of stuff working together in a highly ordered way to make living things that behave with complexity, have life. This was always going to be in the history of stuff a field that arises naturally because life is so apparently different.

If you take it down to base levels, it may not be anything but physics, but, in terms of life, to somebody observing the world free of the history of everything: Life will look different from non-life. Physical processes are going to look even more simple than chemical processes because physical processes are at best mechanical, as you understand them mechanical. They are mechanically transformative. Something goes from standing up to falling down. Something goes from hot to cold. Something goes from not broken to broken.

The materials involved in physics when you are doing Galileo-type physics with cannonballs and ramps. You’re not transforming things. Then you get chemistry, or alchemy back then, where you’re trying to or turning stuff into other stuff. It boils down to physics. But nothing boils physics down except physics.

Jacobsen: How much of this is fundamentally an illusion? How much is this stuff simply quantum mechanical fields interacting? I am not taking this as a reductionist argument.

Rosner: A theory of the universe doesn’t have to account for everything, but it kind of should. There is an indication that in the whole increasing order of the universe over time. That increasing order will, often, include what you can call “hyper-order” or “life.” Life is order taken to a crazy degree. Living matter is super organized. I think a decent bonus of a unified theory of stuff would include the hyper-order arising. Maybe, not as a necessary consequence, but as something that is, certainly, part of the set of all things that can happen, the set of all things that are expected to happen. There might be roles for hyper-order in the overall operation of the universe.

So, I would guess that an overall theory of the universe contains multitudes. Quantum mechanics on its own, the way we think of quantum mechanics; you have to really reach to claim that it suggests that life will originate. Maybe, some combination of quantum mechanics and thermodynamics; you could make a stronger argument that those things could be combined to make life originate. It is a bit of a reach, but some kind of an overarching theory incorporating the principles of existence, quantum mechanics, and high-level information processing. All that stuff together; the theory that puts all that together would include consciousness and, as a consequence of efficient broadband, multi-nodal, self-consistent information processing.

[End of recorded material]

License

In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.

Copyright

© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2020/08/08

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: How can the universe lose information, part of it structure, internally, in other words?

Rick Rosner: Assuming: Let’s say one way to lose information that is uncommon is to find out everything you know to be true, isn’t true. That you get plunged into chaos because the world that you live in is chaos, but that’s not really what we’re talking about because you still have your memories. Even as fucked up as the world is now, it works on the 99.9999% rules. Democracy may not be working, but gravity works. We still live in three dimensions. The more common way to lose information, or the more devastating and pervasive way to lose information, is the hardware to break down – for your brain to lose the ability to lose information.

As you get older, you can get Alzheimer’s. Somebody with Alzheimer’s goes to retrieve the information that they have been retrieving all their lives, like words, and it’s not there; it doesn’t come up. You can get the same feeling without Alzheimer’s, e.g., being tired, or a simple glitch. Boogie Nights has been on a lot lately. The Red Head who plays Burt Reynolds’s wife has been on, but you can’t remember the name. “It’s Juliet something.” You can’t remember it. I had this happen a couple of weeks ago. It took time to remember Julianne Moore. Even though, she is a pretty big time actress. Although, in most circumstances, I would know her name.

It’s a combined hardware-software issue. You need the hardware. You need a functioning brain. Then you need enough experience with somebody, e.g., seeing Julianne Moore and knowing who she is, or having memorizing it. You could study Boogie Nights or The Red Head. I learned some things. Your hardware could get bad. What does a fuzzier mental landscape look like? If we’re positing, as we have been for years and years, that our information landscape looks like a physical landscape, then that universe with lesser information will be smaller and hotter. Hotter seems counterintuitive.

Because hotness seems like it should be information. All those thermal photons seems like they’re carrying information. We have background thermal noise in the universe. That is the Cosmic Background Radiation. It’s not very noisy. Because we live in a very information packed, very big, very apparently old, universe. These thermal photons are from what is apparently 300,000 years old. Now, we are at 13.8 billion years old. The photons using a naïve calculation that is probably wrong only have 1/46,000^th the energy they originally had. The background temperature of these old ass photons – the oldest photons in the universe – is only 2.7 degrees Kelvin. That’s not enough to disrupt much.

It is probably hard to even absorb these photons because they were first discovered in 1964 or something.  When some people at Bell Labs were building a big old radio telescope, the signals that they were getting, were noisy. They thought it was bird shit on it. You’ve seen what a radio telescope looks like. It is a giant bowl. It can be like 300 feet across or more. They had this big old thing. The birds were shitting on it. They realized that it was background radiation. They needed this big apparatus to discover the very long wavelength photons. Those old school TV antennas were 3 feet across to capture TV signals. Those would be anywhere big enough to capture CMB photons.

You need a wingspan to capture these long ass photons, spread out photons. So, anyway, they don’t do much interfering with stuff. In a low information universe or a universe losing information, a heating up universe, the universe might appear to be collapsing. As the universe pulls in on itself, the background radiation gets hotter and hotter. I don’t think the universe operates like an oscillating or Big Bang universe in which there is a falling back in. I think a universe that’s losing information shares some outward characteristics with an oscillating universe that is collapsing, but a Big Bang universe exploding outward and runs out of enough kinetic energy and then falls back in on itself has the same amount of matter in it or matter/energy.

So, we are under a Big Bang system if that were true; the universe that we have that has 10^11^th galaxies would have the same number of galaxies, roughly. Maybe, some of them would become less visible. Maybe, some stuff falls out; maybe, the horizon would get shorter and less of the universe would be less accessible. A universe losing information would have the size of the universe proportional to the amount of matter and energy, so information, in it. You’d see fewer and fewer outlying galaxies. Everything would get hotter and hotter, until everything boils away to nothing and all information is lost. Maybe, the math of a collapsing Big Bang universe has those same outward characteristics.

Less and less of it becomes or remains visible. I don’t know the math or come close to knowing the math. Information is lost at the edges of the universe. As the universe heats back up, stuff that was clearly defined – particles, positions space – become blurrier. So, there’s less information to exchange signals and bounce signals off. The massive amount of information is what keeps the particles in the universe nicely tightly defined. The less exchange between particles and everything gets blurrier and blurrier. Looking at it from a different point of view, the 80-year-old person’s brain cannot hold onto anything anymore, cannot reliably retrieve the information that helps structure consciousness.

[End of recorded material]

License

In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.

Copyright

© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2020/08/01

[Beginning of recorded material]

Rick Rosner: In the last couple of sessions, we have been pushing towards the idea of the universe as an association engine in which things cluster over time. Hydrogen atoms fuse into heavier elements. Hydrogen gas clusters into stars and galaxies. You start off, in a Big Bang sense, with a largely homogenous distribution of simple matter. Three-quarters Hydrogen, one-quarter Helium, with some anisotropy, some small irregularities leading to clusters forming over time. These clusters being galaxies and stars. In the stars, the stuff boils down further. Hydrogen into Helium into heavier elements. Everything gets tighter and tighter. These tighter things are, looked at informationally, information being made when things fuse. This thing connected to this thing. It releases a photon that, more or less, lets the entire universe lets this entire this happen. At the same time, the universe knows itself. There are precise things happening.

Jacobsen: There are imprecise things happening too.

Rosner: Yes, the universe knows what is going on in general about itself. Things are defined fairly precisely, locally, but the local information doesn’t make it to the rest of the universe. We were talking about how in a star. You’ve got 10^68^th ‘atoms’ or what would be atoms if not ionized, so nuclei. They are bouncing around fusing. It doesn’t really matter in terms of the overall structure of the star which Hydrogen atom fuses with which other Hydrogen atom. Specific events happen, but the record is not permanent. Stuff is bouncing around everywhere. It is fusing down, fusing down. There is probably not an exact history detectable where it is learnable for all these nuclei; these 10^68^th particles.

But you have a rough record, which says, “It’s a star. After 8,000,000,000 years, it has used 2/3rds of its Hydrogen.” That rough description is apparent to the rest of the galaxy and, to some extent, the universe. The universe is precise in its interactions, but not precise in its record-keeping and still manages to define itself, where the individual particles in the universe have a really tiny blur to them. They are precisely defined even if their histories are not precisely preserved. So, the universe defines itself and perceives the information it contains in a rough and flexible way, which is not unlike what happens in a computer.

All the calculations in a computer are precisely recorded. The computer can forget previous calculations. Maybe, there’s time machine in windows, where you can go back and find out what was happening at your computer at any given time. When you are playing a game, I don’t know if there is a precise recording of every game. I don’t know if that would have to be. Anyway, part of our precision is a preservation of every previous moment. The universe doesn’t work that way; it doesn’t have to work that way. It is part of the flexibility of the universe as an information processor and a place for us to live. If there was precise knowledge of everything all the time in the universe, I’m not sure there’d be enough flexibility for the two things to be happening at once: The universe processing information and being a material place in which stuff evolves.

Jacobsen: With the universe as an association engine, I want to take two views. One is the galaxy forming, stars and other materials are being sloughed off, all over the place, then being picked up by another galaxy or something. Other stuff is like higher-level elements being formed. There is a lot of waste in the formation of the elements. So, more energy goes into making them than is in them, as stuff is sloughed. What part there is less computer-like and more association-like? What is the appropriate, common way of representing this idea laid out?

Rosner: There’s a lot of information in the clustering and the way these determine the shape of space and the distribution of matter within space because, if the universe works the way our minds work, then you can pull up memories and other associations. You can throw stuff into a central awareness because this is efficient for finding new associations, which can be helpful for the mind figuring out what is going on and what to do next. So, the associative net needs to be able to efficiently pull up the best associations; the things that needs to understand stuff and know stuff to come to new conclusions, and not bad ones. The associative net must have a lot to do with the filaments, the large-scale structures, in the universe, which lets the universe pull strings and pull stuff back in when appropriate.

But that whole system has a lot of flexibility of sloppiness in it. In the way two people can have a similar of idea of what the colour “red” is, while having similar associative nets for the colour red based on culture, growing up, the century or decade, everyone has roughly the same idea – unless, they are colour blind – of what the colour “red” is. You can have a colour spectrum of the reddest reds. Everyone would cluster. It is the same more or less the same. But everyone’s association nets of the colour “red” are different. There is a difference with all leading to the same conclusion that this is the colour “red,” but having the same rough information content.

[End of recorded material]

License

In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.

Copyright

© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2020/07/22

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: So, outside of photons, based on the last session, what would be some other indivisible things, as in an extension of the atomists?

Rick Rosner: Neutrinos and anti-Neutrinos, electrons (kind of), while electrons are indivisible, they are interchangeable. There are the two different types of fundamental particles. The bosons that follow Bose-Einstein statistics and then the ones that do the other thing. There are two different type of particles depending on whether the particles are interchangeable in a certain way or not. Protons are semi-indivisible. In that, they contain three quarks, so do neutrons. But the quarks can’t be pulled apart. You can flip a proton into being a neutron. Protons can turn into neutrons and vice versa. However, the process involves emitting energy and electrons, and anti-neutrinos, or neutrinos, depending on which way you are going. So, they are divisible. Protons and neutrons can come apart into sets of particles. Or you can take several particles and crash them together. They have a low capture. Neutrinos have a low capture cross-section. So, any one event is unlikely. But in the aggregate, it happens. So, protons are divisible.

Jacobsen: What is the informational equivalent of division here? If you take various particles that can be divided, then they do get divided. What is the equivalence in informational terms there?

Rosner: I look at protons as being more open to the universe. Protons have a charge, an electrical charge. So, they interact electromagnetically with the stuff in their vicinity. Neutrons have zero charge. So, they don’t interact. I look at protons as being some open variable, where, in situations that we would consider normal – that is, situations on Earth with regard to most matter, the vast majority of protons have an electron associated with them. Most of the time, either a proton is part of an atomic nucleus, which has a cloud of electrons that has the same number as the number of protons or it’s a nucleus that’s slightly ionized. It is temporarily missing an electron, part of a molecule, etc.

For the most part, stuff forms that has little net charge. Anything that is normal matter, not a plasma and so a solid, liquid, or gas, has the same number of electrons as protons in a reasonably sized sample of this stuff. I see the proton-electron system as a system for information exchange; the way everything is a system of information exchange. When parts of the universe coalesce, and release energy by coalescing, you’ve created information. You’ve created a bunch of association and information when a bunch of hydrogen atoms forming a gas in space gravitationally collapse into each other and form a star. Before the star even starts burning through fusion, a bunch of energy is released – heat energy. Gravitational energy is released as photons because as the gas coalesces, falls into itself, from a big cloud of gas into a star or a pre-star.

All the fall in has turned potential energy into kinetic energy, which, eventually, gets released as photons. The photons contain the information that this stuff has coalesced. This mass of 10^68^th atoms has come together. So, I see protons plus electrons as association generators. With all these new associations formed, here is the information about them released to the rest of the universe, a neutron is not stable. Unless, it is locked into a nucleus. A free neutron has a half-life of like 11 minutes. It will break apart into a proton plus an electron plus a neutrino, or anti-neutrino, plus a photon. But a proton that gets locked into the nucleus with another neutron forming a deuterium nucleus – one proton plus one neutron – is again releasing a lot of energy. It, too, is – that energy – information about an association a linking that has been formed, which is shared with the rest of the universe.

The deal is, it happens a lot in stars, but stars have 10^68^th atoms. So, the odds that there will be two protons crashing into each other and fusing into a proton-neutron nucleus. The odds are low individually. But there are 10^68^th atoms smushed into each other, super smushed into the guts in the star, plus absorbing tremendous energy all of the time from the huge temperature at the centre of the Sun. Protons by the quadrillion per second fuse. These collisions that are unlikely as individual events; these potential fusings. So many of them happen, even though, they are super unlikely – a gazillion of them happen every second. It is a tight association that these two protons found themselves so close together with enough energy to overcome their mutual repulsion. That they formed into a stable nucleus. It has one net charge instead of two. You take two protons. It turns into a proton-neutron with one charge of a nucleus. If it weren’t ionized at the centre of a star, if you had a deuterium atom somewhere else, it would have one electron orbiting it.

That, to me, is an associative shorthand in the universe. It says, “You don’t need to worry where these two protons are because they are locked together. There’s only one variable here. That’s the one proton with its electron and the other proton has been locked down. We know what’s up with it. It’s so close. Its history let it become so close to this electron. Now, it’s locked down and very tightly linked with the electron. It is a tight association.” So, the universe is an association engine.

Jacobsen: What is another term for engine here, generator?

Rosner: Yes, as you move through time, the number of associations formed generally increases. Things don’t fall apart. They fall together.

Jacobsen: I see two-way association here too.

Rosner: We should talk about what IC says in terms of the cycle of things. Associations are formed. As galaxies run out of stuff to fuse, the galaxies go dark and are pushed aside by more active association engines. The burned out galaxies participate less and are frozen on the outskirts of the universe. Until association on a huge, cosmic scale pulls them back in, and also lights them back up again, strips them of some of their associations, or they accumulate new wads of gas, which can light the galaxy again.

[End of recorded material]

License

In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.

Copyright

© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.