In-Sight Publishing

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Terry Murray

Publication (Outlet/Website): Conatus News/Uncommon Ground Media Inc.

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2016/11/06

On October 25, 2016 Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon addressed the United Nations Security Council, in an open debate entitled Women, Peace and Security, reaffirmed the urgent need to have women in the security and peace-building operations on the ‘international stage’.

A key goal is equal representation and women’s participation in UN peace processes. “Women have a vital role to play in preventing conflict and building and maintaining peace,” Mr Ban said, “…this is now widely recognised, far too often, women are prevented from full participation in peacemaking and peace-building.”

There is a consistent history of underrepresentation of women and girls in peace and security building operations. The Executive Director of the United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women noted the previous Resolution 1325 appeal for women’s inclusion in the peacebuilding process which dates back a full sixteen years from Ki-moon’s address. This shows how little progress has been made on past resolutions and prompted UN women chief Ms. Mlambo-Ngcuka to reiterate that commitments to the further cooperation with women in peace processes should not be on the books alone, but should be incorporated into practice within countries stricken by conflict.

As well, Executive Director of EVE Organization for Women Development, Rita Lopidia, speaking for non-government organisations devoted to the Working Group on Women, Peace and Security reaffirmed women’s role within “prevention and resolution of conflicts, peace negotiations, peace-building, peacekeeping, humanitarian response and in post-conflict reconstruction.” She further emphasised the need to prioritise the protection of girls and women in conflict situations where existing gender injustices are aggravated.

According to Mr. Ki-moon, at the start of the National Action Plans on Women, Peace and Security, there were only four countries involved in total, which is simply miniscule and rather piddling. However, over time that number has grown to the present point where there are now sixty-three. That is a remarkable achievement that has allowed the largest marginalised population in the world to be incorporated into the framework, as they should have been from its inception. Many women and girls are affected, their worlds shattered by conflict, which means sexual violence in both conflict and post-conflict contexts. Violent extremist groups such as Boko Haram or ISIL target women and girls in areas activated by conflict. Often their bodies become the battleground on which the most barbaric acts of aggression are expressed.

In addition, justice requires a global response to the gender deficit in peace-building because of the ethical obligation that women and girls be accounted for and protected in areas of conflict. This is an ongoing problem for which practical tactics and solutions are needed.

The Vatican responded with ostensibly positive rhetoric emphasising the need to give girls access to education, this playing a vital role in their poverty reduction and civic participation.

However, girls and women must also have leadership and decision-making roles in determining the content of education, or else improving their access to ‘education’ will do little to redress socio-political gender inequalities or the second-class social status given to women and girls.

Women must be involved in setting the education agenda and curricula, not just in delivering it or learning.  Moreover, emphasis on women’s special roles in ‘reconciliation’ and ‘healing’ in post-war situations should not be prioritised over their participation in law and justice, strategy and political conflict prevention. Otherwise their ‘participation’ will resemble little more than complacent forgiveness and permanent victimhood. Responses must be as effective as they are diplomatic.  

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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 Angelos Sofocleous

Publication (Outlet/Website): Conatus News/Uncommon Ground Media Inc.

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/01/03

International rights stipulations provide the basis for fundamental human rights. As Ban Ki-Moon has said, “We are all different from one another, but we all have the same human rights. I am proud to stand for the equality of all people – including those whose are lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender.”

Numerous resolutions, from both the Human Rights Council and the General Assembly, make human rights inclusive of LGBT peoples, and LGBT rights distinct and important too. These are not some distant considerations, but immediate, impacting people’s lives, and violated on a consistent basis – hour-by-hour. One recent national event, from Chad, came from a distressing ratio of votes – 111 to 1 – and reiterated this perennial truism

Last month, Chad’s National Assembly voted for a new penal code which criminalises homosexuality with 111 MPs voting for it, 1 against and 4 abstaining. This made Chad the 77th country internationally, and was the 37th country in Africa to criminalise homosexuality. Under the new law, people engaging in homosexual acts can be heavily fined (£60-£600) or serve a 20-year prison sentence.

In fact, according to a legal report by the US Library of Congress all African states, with the exception of South Africa, recognises and permits same-sex marriage. More specifically, in Nigeria, Sudan and Mauritania, homosexuality is punishable by death. This action of Chad’s National Assembly comes after Gambia passed a bill imposing life imprisonment for homosexual acts.

The fact that the vast majority – only 1 exception and 4 abstentions – of Chad’s National Assembly supported the new penal code is worrying. This bill was also supported by the country’s former Prime Minister, Delwa Kassiré Coumakoye, who mentioned that “homosexuality is condemned by all religions. We do not have to forgive something that God himself rejects because Westerners have said this or that”.

There are two issues we need to discuss here: First, the fact that religion plays a role in determining what is legal and what is not. Second, the fact that the former Prime Minister considers that it is a strong point of the new penal code that it does not conform to “Western” styles and principles.

In an era that nations fight for secularism, supporting the complete separation of church and state, some African nations, including Chad, make decisions solely on religious grounds. What is more, Chad’s cabinet mentioned that the new penal code intends to “protect the family and to comply with Chadian society”. It is indeed a worrying fact how nations, like Chad, commit the argumentum ad antiquitatem (appeal to tradition) fallacy and base a whole penal code on tradition, family values and religion.

There is no reason or logic involved in supporting the new penal code apart from subjective statements of this nature. And it is scary to think that because of subjective
statements people are going to end up in prison or get heavily fined. The former PM even called the bill a “fair balance”. This leaves us wondering, however, what may ever be “fair” about the bill when it criminalises basic human rights.

Furthermore, there is every reason to argue that anti-Westernisation is not considered a valid reason for supporting the country’s new penal code. In fact, it shows quite the
opposite – its weaknesses. First of all, the issue is not even about what Western countries do. It’s what humans do. As the great journalist and religious critic Christopher Hitchens has said: “I say that homosexuality is not just a form of sex, it’s a form of love — and it commands our respect for that reason”.

Granting homosexuals the right to engage in relationships, sexual acts or marry is itself the same right we are talking about when talking about heterosexuals. No difference is or should be made. In fact, criminalising homosexuality is itself an act that does not serve to protect people of any society or tradition as it on its very basis does not take into consideration that a respected part of the population is attracted to people of the same sex, or even to people of both sexes. Any appeal to religion or tradition fails to provide us with a logical basis on which to support the claims that supporters of Chad’s new penal code which punishes homosexuality make.

Indeed, this “form of love” can be outlawed, and made extraordinarily risky and even lethal in its practice because of cultural and legal factors. Take, for example, the case of Tanzania suspending the outreach programmes for HIV. Why would there be a suspension for outreach programmes for HIV? The reason: homosexuality is outlawed within Tanzania and, therefore, within the logic of the system, seen as not worth considering for appropriate, and needed, outreach for HIV.

And it is not like there aren’t campaigns devoted to the implementation of the international rights via international movements – the UN Free & Equal is one such campaign, and “is an unprecedented United Nations global public education campaign for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) equality” (OHCHR, 2016b). These are old prejudices, and they keep cropping up. Again, why? It is easier to hate than to love, at least in the short-term.

Which leads back to the international Moral-Educator-in-Chief, Ban Ki-Moon, who said, “It is an outrage that in our modern world so many countries continue to criminalise people simply for loving another human being of the same sex…Laws rooted in 19th century prejudices are fuelling 21st century hate.”

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): 2018/12/22

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: We are not separate from the universe in the sense of the cat in the experiment of Schrodinger.
Rick Rosner: Let’s assume the universe is a huge informationation processing entity, which may imply consciousness, it might not be. But there are things the universe knows and doesn’t know. The micro-structure of what the universe knows and doesn’t know is in its quantum mechanics.

It is in its physics of incomplete information, where particles exist incompletely. They have imprecisely defined energies and momentums. They are only defined as much as the universe can interact with them to define each aspect of the universe.

The universe has a vast but finite amount of information. That information is and the lack of complete information is expressed in quantum mechanical physics. Things that exist as complicated information processors.

If we can mathematically represent the information processing in consciousness in us – that is, we have information spaces reflecting the state of our information from moment to moment, then that information space would also be governed by quantum mechanical physics.

It would reflect the state of our knowledge from moment to moment. There would be quantum mechanical entities within this information space. But from the point of view of the universe, the quantum mechanical entities that would comprise our information spaces aren’t made of the quantum mechanical particles that comprise the universe.

It is a separate space with separate entities. These entities reflect a different separate of information that we have knowledge and lack of knowledge about, which is reflective of the universe or indicative what we have learned about the universe.

But it is a physical space or information space. That the larger universe would not even be aware of. It is a quantum mechanical universe. It exists in a different space and is on a smaller scale. It has the same basic principles of the larger universe.

It is another level of superimposed order on the physical processes of the universe. But that relationship isn’t clear, yet.

[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): 2018/12/15

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: In a universe bound to a digital physics, to a perspective of the universe as constructed via information, what will the net information of the universe tend towards as the arrow of time progresses in its apparent forward direction?
Rick Rosner: Under IC, the tendency of a universe is to increase in order, given the right conditions. The conditions being that there’s an armature or a support structure in place that facilitates the increase of information within a universe.

With this increase in information, it is reflected in an increase in ease in order of the universe. Although, we still don’t know how to measure that, and we know that the increase in order is embodied in the macro. The large-scale distribution of matter, the clumping of matter, into stars, galaxies, superclusters, and massive filaments that traverse much of the universe.

We know even less about how micro order, localized order, like on a planet that has evolved life and the life that it has evolved. That local increase in order, its effects on the overall order in the universe. There are two extremes as to what the effects could be.

One could be that micro order as close to zero effect on the large-scale order or information content of the universe. That all these evolved beings or the things that they at a certain point, say with technology, they order into something.

They are confined to their planets or little areas of their galaxies. They really have no practical effect on the ordering or the overall ordering of the universe. That is at one extreme. The other extreme is that those evolved beings and those things that they create, given enough time, end up having a significant effect on the ordering of the universe.

That you give a civilization enough time; it will go out and traverse its galaxy perhaps heading to the center, where there is a lot more manipulatable matter. The matter that is down a blackish hole with a million, ten million, or fifty million year civilization, with sufficient technology, would have time to get to a center of a galaxy even with the speed of light being an absolute speed limit.

Because galaxies are on the scales of hundreds of thousands of lightyears across. So, a sufficiently old civilization would have the time, perhaps patience and impetus, to interfere with a galaxy. By getting to the center – I haven’t thought about this stuff in a long time, if galaxies go through periods of dormancy or collapse, of being turned back on, this process would tend to obliterate planet-based civilization that didn’t take measures to protect itself.

So, a persistent civilization that persists across millions of years might travel to the center of a galaxy and might find sanctuary in or around the central blackish hole. There is actually some science fiction in the 70s.

It could be more than one science fiction author has suggested that civilizations can hide out in stasis fields that, basically, have some of the principles that might be associated with blackish holes. If you have an ancient civilization that has the power to traverse its own galaxy, and, perhaps, mess with some of the processes, it could be that highly ordered and local entities might have a lot to do with the overall ordering of the universe.

They might be able to manipulate how large-scale structures behave. They might be able to mess with the business of a galaxy. That is a bigger deal than colonizing a solar system. You were pointing to the quantum mathematicization of individual entities versus the overall quantum mechanical structure of the universe.

[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): 2018/12/08

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: So, from a long time ago, you used a phrase. You said, “Agents of the universe.” In the first example of Schrodinger’s Cat, you spoke to a human being as an observer and a cat in a box as an observer.

What does “an observer” mean in an IC context? How does this work with “agents of the universe”?

Rick Rosner: It is easy to get confused because the universe observes itself. You can use “agents of observation” to apply to observing apparatuses within the universe, observing-and-information-transmitting apparatuses.

Those apparatuses can be something as simple as photons that record the state of something as they are emitted and then spread that information out. An agent of observation can be something as complicated as a conscious being plus some technology that transmits information.

Human beings that build broadcast apparatuses. All those are part of the universe and all of those can be part of how the universe observes itself or fails to observe itself. The universe transmits information about local conditions across time and space.

The sum of all these transmissions defines the universe. There is so much information that a finite universe can transmit about itself. So, the universe is only finitely defined. Things are blurry at the quantum level.

All information transmitting interaction is part of how the universe defines itself. Yes, we, humans, with our information-transmitting activities are part of the way the universe transmits information. But our significance is very local.

Although, we can imagine more advanced civilizations have more information transmitting significance across greater distances. You can imagine a Star Wars galaxy where that civilization transmits information across what we could consider vast distances.

They set up a network that transmits information across a big chunk of their galaxy, which kind of requires breaking the laws of physics in the Star Wars model; in that, you can’t break the speed of light. It is possible that there is a civilization that has figured out how to conduct business across the distances between stars.

That would be part of the informational business of the universe. But it is still pretty limited, especially if some civilization learned how to live long enough and to do business across an entire galaxy. That is still only one out of a hundred billion galaxies of the universe.

So, the significance of even a galaxy-wide civilization in terms of the overall information business of the universe may still be trivial. But the issues of how trivial this stuff needs to wait on an overall model of an information-based universe.

Where the macro affairs of evolved civilizations of the universe may have almost nothing to do with how information is perceived and processed within the consciousness of the universe itself, which may be more based on the overall or macro distribution and dynamics of matter in the universe if the universe is itself a conscious information processor or even if it is an unconscious information processor.

Jacobsen: If the universe is a conscious information processor rather than an unconscious information processor, how does this change the Schrodinger’s Cat experiment, as this adds a global third observer?

Rosner: It doesn’t. It doesn’t. The nature of the business of the universe isn’t changed, which is the sharing of information.

Jacobsen: How can this be misinterpreted in an IC context?

Rosner: We don’t have a good model yet. Nobody has a good model of the universe as an information processor. That means that you’re subject to nothing but a misunderstanding. But one thing is clear, according to the laws of quantum mechanics, the situation doesn’t change, regardless of the overall nature of the universe with regard to the information that is confined in the box with the cat.

It doesn’t matter if the universe is conscious or not. It can’t get to the information inside of the box because the universe, including us, set it up that way. You can’t get the information in the box regardless of the overall state of the universe.

Jacobsen: Why doesn’t box count as an observer?

Rosner: Because the box is the wall. When I say the universe is transactional, I mean things that happen in the universe don’t matter, as if they didn’t happen at all, if they are not communicated to the wider universe; it is an “as if” universe.

If information about what happened someplace is not recorded in the wider universe, it is as if that did not happen. There are subtleties to that, where it matters to us locally. You can build a whole planet inside of a Schrodinger Box. You could build a whole Schrodinger Box over the whole Earth with the entire probability of everyone on Earth dying or not being 50/50.

It is the analogy between the fate of humanity and the fate of the cat. But if you set up a shield between the Earth and the rest of the universe, it is as if the events happening in the rest of the shield never happened, because they never got information out.

Things signify locally if the information is conveyed or signaled locally. They only are signified wider if their information is signified to the wider universe. It is similar to consciousness. Some of your consciousness can be aware of some events that other parts of your consciousness are not aware of.

In the most brutally mechanistic way, there are people who have been subject to split-brain surgery. Some people with epilepsy have their corpus callosum severed where there is no direct way for each side of the brain to share information with the other side.

These people still have a complete consciousness. In that, they still find a way for the brain to be exposed to roughly the same information. You have two eyes feeding each half of the brain and so on. Those people function relatively normally, even though they have split-brain.

But you can sow with specialized experiments that they have two consciousnesses in that brain, where each awareness has a slightly different experience base and analysis base than the other. It is perfectly possible for parts of consciousness to aware of things that other parts of that same overall consciousness is not aware of.

It is all part of the transactional deal. Things only signify to the extent that they can share information with other parts of the universe. Then you can get into the wider argument that there is no permanent existence.

In that, if you wipe out the information in the universe, so there is no absolute existence of anything Because information can be obliterated.

[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): 2018/12/01

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: How does metaphysics jive with naturalism in some fundamental way, e.g. Laws of Logic and such?

Rick Rosner: If you want metaphysics to be a useful term: we were talking off-tape that if metaphysics is something applying to principles beyond the natural world, and if everything you discover about the principles of existence can be part of the natural world, then there is nothing for metaphysics.

It becomes a useless term. The way to make metaphysics a useful term is to say that metaphysics applies to the principles of existence that are reflected in the laws of the natural world. You have to divide someplace between physics and metaphysics.

Depending on how each is defined, you can have the set of things confined within metaphysics as zero things. Or you can say metaphysics applies to general principles that help determine the laws of physics. The natural principles like the principles of non-contradiction and self-consistency.

Except when you look at quantum stuff, for macro stuff to exist such as an apple, that apple has to have a non-contradictory set of attributes. It has to exist at a certain place, a certain time. It has to exist in a certain number. A non-contradictory apple can’t be both one apple and two apples at the same time.

Unless you set up some kind of experimental apparatus that really makes the indeterminacy explicit. When you’re talking about that, you might as well talk about Schrodinger’s Cat, which is the canonical indeterminate, macro experimental setup.

Jacobsen: Does this change with one observer outside or several billion observers outside in terms of the level of indeterminacy of the cat as dead or alive?

Rosner: The Schrodinger cat is set up to make the indeterminate state as explicit and macro as possible. To explain for people who may not be familiar, Schrodinger’s Cat is a cat in a box with a vial of poison that is attached to a detector of a radioactive particle; that has a 50% chance of decaying within a given time period, triggering the poison.

In the experiment, you run it for a half-life of this radioactive particle. You turn off the apparatus. After five minutes, there is a 50% chance that the cat is alive in the box and a 50% chance that the cat has been poisoned and is dead.

You cannot see into the box. The only way to check the status of the cat is to open the box. For right now, the box is yet to be opened. So, the cat exists as either alive with 50% probability or dead with 50% probability. That state can be characterized by a quantum mechanical waveform.

You can apply all the math of quantum physics that deals with indeterminate states to the state of the cat, which is unusual because the math of indeterminacy is typically applied to micro phenomenon like a radioactive particle or to the position of an electron or something small. This has been set up explicitly to be large.

Whether one or a billion observers through the internet of a live feed of the box, it does not change what is inside of the box; so, it has been set up that way. The box is closed off informationally from the rest of the world in order to preserve the indeterminate state of the cat.

Of course, PETA would hate this experiment. Over the last couple of days, they have argued if a responsible person then you will use certain terms, or if you are a good person then you will stop using stop terms: “Kill two birds with one stone” to “feed two birds with one scone.”

There are a lot of idiots in PETA. But, maybe, they aren’t that dumb with the good publicity for the idiocy of their stance here.

Jacobsen: Let’s take two examples, I will start with the first one. One, does the probability change if the cat has some level of self-awareness and all the internal walls of the box are mirrors?

Rosner: Nope, nope, it doesn’t change it. Everything is set up so that everything inside the box is different than what is outside of the box. The deal is, you set a part of the universe closed from the rest of the universe.

Things only have significance in the universe if that information can be communicated and you’ve set a special apparatus to keep the contents of the box closed off. Just because the box is a part of the universe does not mean the rest of the universe knows what’s going on inside of the box.

The universe defines itself via its interactions that include us setting up experiments. We, as part of the universe, have set up an experiment where part of the universe, in the box, has been shielded informationally from the rest of the universe.

So, in practical terms, if that box is never opened, if you take the box and throw it into a crematorium without checking the status of the cat, you can make a situation in which the universe and the people in it never know what the state of the cat was before you threw the box containing the cat into the crematorium.

If you obliterate the information before it has the chance to escape via observation, that will remain forever indeterminate.

Jacobsen: What does this mean for black-ish holes?

Rosner: People have been debating the information state of black holes since they have been a thing. The principle is the same. If the information does not get out, and if the information is shielded from the rest of the universe, the effect it has on the rest of the universe is nil.

A black-ish hole is a hole that is more favorable for the transmission of information than a purely black hole. A black-ish hole can transfer information.

Jacobsen: Can you measure this rate of information exchange from a cat in the box to the black-ish holes?

Rosner: In theory, it would be part of an overall framework or some theory of black-ish holes.

Jacobsen: What would this imply? For example, the black-ish hole would presumably, be very close to the shape of a sphere.

Rosner: You would use some measure like bits per second or bits per square centimeter of event horizon per second. You would have the overall information transmission rate. You would have a transmission rate per unit area of the surface of either the black-ish hole itself or of space around the black-ish hole.

You can talk about stuff like black-ish holes but with event horizons; these come with black holes. Unless, I am confusing myself, and that is likely. That the math of the event horizon is such that nothing gets out. Although, that is not entirely true because event horizons radiate via the production of particles outside of the event horizon and the strain on space.

The strain on space is so charged with gravitational potential around the event horizon that there is enough strain there that the particles can be spontaneously created. Particles can always be spontaneously created via the rules of quantum mechanics.

Even more so in space that is under such tension from gravitation, that you’re going to see more matter pop into existence around an event horizon than you would see in less stressed space. In that case, you have particle creation; two oppositely created particles to serve everything that is created.

In an event horizon, one particle goes into the black hole and one escapes. You have one particle escape the black hole in this scenario. Where, before, it is just the black hole. Now, it is the black hole plus the particle escaping the black hole.

Even a black hole with an event horizon, it emits information. A black-ish hole that is more permissive of the flow of particles and radiation in and out of it; it is going to have a higher rate of information exchange with the rest of the universe.

We have talked about the universe being an as-if thing. Everything is transactional in the universe. Things didn’t happen if the wider universe does not have a way of knowing about it. Or if the part of the universe that you’re concerned with – because the rest of the universe does not care if you have an alive or a dead cat in a box, it is only the people on Earth who care about a dead cat in the box.

There is a rate of information exchange with the cat in the box and the universe beyond our solar system. Even if you open the box, the odds that the state of the cat is going to have a significant impact on the universe beyond our local solar system – the odds are pretty low.

Because people like to say that other civilizations on other planets might be monitoring the transmissions of our TV broadcasts and radio broadcasts. They might come and see us because they intercepted signals from radio and TV, which might pique their interest.

But the odds are certainly larger than if you did an experiment with the cat; that that information would be intercepted. Is it really likely that other civilizations have been able to capture our broadcasts? Because they would be super attenuated and noisy. You would have to decode them to make them understandable.

Even that is a fairly unlikely thing, the odds that if you actually did the Schrodinger’s Cat thing. That some alien civilization would be surveilling Earth to see the state of the cat. That is even more minuscule.

At some point, we get into larger issues of an information-based universe. Do the micro events in each corner of the universe do anything or pertain at all to the larger business of the universe? The answer is mostly, “No”; unless, the events in the corner of the universe lead to a civilization that explicitly spreads itself across greater and greater distances.

That is just a wild guess. The events on Earth do not have much to do with the overall story of the universe and the overall information transactions of the universe unless we become the civilization that develops a network that shares our trivia explicitly with the rest of the galaxy.

But, at this point, I have pretty much confused myself.

[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): 2018/11/22

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What is the idea of cognitive hierarchies as applied to ideas like television?

Rick Rosner: The new season for broadcast TV is on. It has blurred out with the new channels now since there are a gazillion channels. For ABC, NBC, CBS, they roll out some new shows in September. Carole and I have been checking out a couple of shows.

One of them is called Manifest. It is the list of passengers on a passenger jet. The concept of the show is a plane takes off and then lands 5.5 years later Now, all these mysteries unfold: why did this happen? Some people appear to have destinies and abilities.

It follows a dozen characters or so. What’s interesting and also annoying is that since it is broadcast as opposed to cable, the characters are all pretty straightforward, they are all really easy to read. Any quirks that they might have may mean that it will likely be pertinent to plot twists at some point.

There is a certain lack of complicatedness and sophistication. It is an NBC show, I think. This calculation has been done by CBS for a long time, as it has the oldest demographics. Old people watch CBS.

They have a bunch of murder shows, genius shows, and so on. Every show is forensic detectives solving a murder. All the CSIs and NSIS, and Scorpion and half of a dozen others. What these shows have in common is clarity of execution for old people and people who do not want to think too hard, and also a little bit of flattery: “We will show you a show about geniuses. You will understand it. You will feel a little bit like a genius. Same with the mystery shows.”

It seems similar to some of these other cables shows. They are making shows for people who are comfortable not thinking too hard. It seems like an overall cultural phenomenon in America. Fox News is predicated on enjoying it without thinking too hard.

The majority of their programming is bright and simple. It is based on the idea of making a shit ton of money by catering to people who don’t want smart information or entertainment. So, you could argue that in America; there is a formation. Maybe, it has always been there.

But it is becoming more explicit: a stratification in thought styles. You could call this a cognitive hierarchy or cognitive layering, where there are plenty of resources for entertainment, for lifestyle, for people who are not comfortable being cognitively challenged.

There is clear and straightforward non-intellectually demanding information and entertainment. Not being challenged mentally. Those people who are at home with unsophisticated stuff, with a lack of ambiguity. 

With straightforward and clear plotting and no grey areas, and this works for people who are older in their 60s and beyond and may not have the mental flexibility, there is a hint of mentally challenged for some of that demographic, e.g., a chunk of old people — not everyone but it is a part of the experience of growing old for a lot of people.

I assume that you could set up a ladder of how demanding various forms of news and entertainment are, and then separate out three or four different layers of complexity. If you like stuff that is tricky and springs surprises on you and takes a long time to play out, it is different. 

Better Call Saul gets a lot of prestige and rave reviews from high falutin’ quarters, so does the show Black Mirror. These are shows that have a lot of ambiguity. Some stuff that takes many episodes to resolve if ever. The greatest unresolved show in history is The Sopranos and went to black.

Several years later, people are arguing about what it means when it cut to black. Does it mean Tony Soprano was assassinated or simply that it went to black to end the series? People have loved to argue about it for many years now.

Jacobsen: We talked before about the functionally illiterate population in America. There are 32 million American adults who are illiterate. 14% of the entire adult population cannot read.

Rosner: Functionally illiterate means, I assume, that you can get along in life. 1/3rd of the population just doesn’t really read or may have difficulties with more than casual reading. I assume that’s what you mean. That reading is not a large part. 

These people can read labels, traffic signs, and the headline on a news channel. They don’t read books, newspapers, or magazines. Reading is simply not a big part of their life if at all.

Jacobsen: It is the impact of modern media on people’s ability to consume information.

Rosner: Another 40% of that 1/3rd absolutely cannot read. They know enough words to go to the grocery store and can get what they need. They know what traffic signs mean. If given a slug of copy, they could not read it. If presented with a newspaper article and asked to read aloud, they would fail to read it.

Jacobsen: Given developmental psychology, you would find more boys and men in those categories. Girls and women speak and read earlier and maintain that advantage throughout life.

Carole Rosner: That’s true. A study just came out about that…

Jacobsen: Go ahead, Carole.

Rick Rosner: Go ahead, Carole!

Carole Rosner: I just heard on standardized tests that girls perform so much higher in all those categories.

Jacobsen: That’s right. It was about equal some time ago. But since that time, we have been seeing more disparities. It is not that the disparity is girls doing that much better. They are doing better. But the boys are doing much worse. They are declining. 

Rosner: It used to be that girls underperformed because they got the messages. There was a Barbie saying, “Math is hard.” Maybe, now, girls are getting messages or are messaging themselves to work hard while guys are bros now who are working harder at the gym than anywhere else — or at the gym.

Jacobsen: Even there, they don’t. If a draft, the majority of men would not meet the minimal standards.

Rosner: Men are lazy and undisciplined now. To bring this back to cognitive layering, there has probably been a population that has been functionally illiterate or comfortably dumb. But it is only in the last 40 years that dumb or the lazy have been mobilized and catered to. 

Fox News, “We are going to go after the dumbs and we are going t make them our own. We are going to lead them around and turn them into a force, a political force.” We are dealing with the consequences of that now. 

It is the day before the Kavanaugh vote. If you follow the news, there is so much stuff about how Kavanaugh is the least popular nominee in history, how the National Council of Churches (covers 100,000 churches with 45,000,000 members) has come out against Kavanaugh, how John Paul Stevens — a retired Supreme Court Justice — has come out against him, how there is a list of 1,800 law professors who have come out against him, how there are 100 civil rights organizations. Nobody wants him demographically.

No one with this level of disapproval has ever gone through, but he will probably go through because has a strong Republican base who can live their lives without seeing this information; it will be about how Kavanaugh is this put upon and a wrongly accused guy; it is a brutalization against America, against liberty. 

They will be able to confirm him, the Republicans, because their base doesn’t adequately consume news. 

Jacobsen: What about the conservative women in disagreement with him?

Rosner: I think there are enough of them still in play and sticking with the Republican side. Here is the deal: Kavanaugh is a terrible deal for the country because he is 53 and could easily be on the court for another 30 years. He is obviously biased.

He is being put on the court to do the dirty work for conservatives. The damage of Kavanaugh on the court will be decades. Him not getting on the court will lead to Democrats not winning the House, which would be its own disaster. It would be another 2 years of unbridled Trump and entirely Republican domination: Republican House, Republican Senate, Republican Supreme Court, and Republican President. 

It is a toss-up of Kavanaugh being confirmed and doing 30 years of damage versus Kavanaugh getting confirmed — and the thinking being born out via polls — and the Republicans going from moderately apathetic to being more active and then becoming more active. 

The thinking is that if Kavanaugh is elected then Republicans will be calming down. It is bad if Kavanaugh gets confirmed but it also might be bad if he doesn’t get confirmed. At this point, I almost undecided at the outcome. 

I want him to not be confirmed and the Democrats to take the House. If either, I am undecided. But I am a guy. The harm to me with Kavanaugh would be less than for women.

Jacobsen: There are one risk and two follow-ups or silver linings with that particular line of reasoning. If he gets in, Roe v Wade will be part of the scrap heap of history, especially with the endorsement of people like Pence and all the people and organizations that are the undergirding of them.

Two other things come to mind. One is that more women are politically active now than at any other time in history. That’s silver lining one. Two is that Trump or Republicans are at the lowest approval rating of women probably ever at 27% or lower.

So, it is a very tight cadre of women who would need to be very, very highly active, where we’re talking 3-to-1 in terms of pushing weight to truly combat the centrist or even far-left-leaning sides. 

Rosner: Except if the Democrats don’t take back the House, then the Republicans have another two years of owning the government, which, every day, is a fresh outrage. The EPA deals that have been going on that most people do not even realize had been going on, such as repealing safety ratings of radiation and environmental toxins. There is so much going on; that the Republicans are accomplishing not only all these objectives.

[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): 2018/11/15

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What is statistically likely to happen in the next two years with Kavanaugh passing into the Supreme Court only a couple of days ago?
Rick Rosner: If you want the most accurate predictions, you can go to 538.com. I like RealClearPolitics as well. But I like 538. Right now, they weight all the polls based on how accurate and reliable they are.

Right now, they are giving Democrats roughly a 74% chance of taking back the House and only 22% of taking back the Senate, and with the only 22% based on specific races may be too optimistic. Unless the Democrats make everybody surprised and show up in the mid-term. 

It may happen with widespread rage.

Jacobsen: Who’s rage?
Rosner: Most women, though probably most Republican women are still behind him, Republicans only represent 1/3rd of the adult population and possibly less than that. So, everybody else. 

Most women, about 2/3rds or 70%, and if you want to be even more accurate, then probably 28% of women support Kavanaugh. 20% don’t and 20% don’t have a clue. Republicans probably take back the House and then start a series of investigations into whatever they can investigate mostly Trump-related stuff. 

Maybe, they can look into Kavanaugh. Kavanaugh has done a lot of stuff in a less partisan, Republican-dominated world would have been disqualifying and was actually perjury. If the Democrats take over the House, they start a lot of investigations.

These will have the effect of making Trump unreelectable in 2020. But he was thought to be unelectable in 2016 and got elected. Given that his popularity has remained at roughly 40% and that only bad stuff will come out about him if the Democrats take over the House, I don’t see him getting enough of a bump in approval to be elected to a second term. 

Although, the Democrats have to come up with a person that they can get Independents to vote for. Kavanaugh on the court does not immediately lead to the rollback of a bunch of human rights stuff including the right to abortion.

Because all that stuff takes a while to get to the Supreme Court. You cannot simply go to the Supreme Court and then say, “We want a case on this.” It has to go to the lower courts first. Cases around abortion are designed to provide a pretext to throw out Roe v Wade are probably peppered throughout amenable courts, lower courts throughout the land. 

It will probably take a year or a year and a half for those cases to make it to the Supreme Court. If Roe v Wade is overturned. It almost certainly will be given the composition of the court. Abortion could become illegal in a majority of the states.

Jacobsen: What will happen to the wellbeing of women?
Rosner: Well, all this stuff will take time to play out. If people are lucky, the fully playing out of the end of Roe v Wade will take until after the beginning of 2021 when there will be a Democrat, very likely, in the White House. 

It is conceivable Trump could quit and then Pence would run for president while being president. It is possible Pence could be more electable than Trump. I’d give it at least a 60% chance of there being a Democrat winning the next presidential election. 

In terms of the actual implications for women in roughly half of the country, you have half of the population – women – who will be in states where abortion will remain illegal because it will be up to the states.

Jacobsen: In the Handmaid’s Tale, New York was a holdout.
Rosner: Did they have to invade New York?

Jacobsen: I do not recall exactly.
Rosner: Since they changed the names of everything, we don’t know if that is taking place in Michigan or elsewhere. Everybody is trying to get to Canada. I assume they were trying to get out of New York and then to the border.

Anyway, half of the population will still be able to get abortions fairly easily. The other half may have to drive for hundreds of miles for the nearest state where abortion is illegal. Although, some states could make it illegal for you to drive out of state to get an abortion.

I do not know if that would be enforceable. I do not know how they would enforce it. Half of the population would face the end of reasonable abortion. Although, there is a historical trend. The rate at which people get abortions has been steadily dropping thanks to liberal policies of sex education and making contraception available.

The purpose of Planned Parenthood is not to give abortions. It is to give all sorts of health services that help people. Nobody wants the abortion rate to not decline. Liberal policies tend to help reduce it. The teaching of sexual education, non-abstinence sexual education, is helpful. 

Liberal policies, which have been a force for decades, have been helping to steadily reduce the rate of people getting abortions. It isn’t to say that the situation won’t be dire for a lot of people but things will be much less fucked up than right before 1973 when Roe vs Wade made abortion legal for everyone.

What people have been missing, given that all the news has been Kavanaugh for the past four weeks or more, Trump has been rolling back all sorts of completely reasonable environmental regulations. For example, the insane rolling back of limits on radiation and other dangerous toxins. 

As long as he remains president, he will probably make it through his term. It is just crazy, against all logic rollbacks of common sense policy, and widely agreed upon health and safety regulations. Who the fuck in the world was going to the government saying, “We need to make it so that there is more radiation in the atmosphere”?

No one, it was simply Trump and his ideologues. That will go on for 2 years. His people have realized that there is so much news that they can do whatever they want, and what they do will be lost in the avalanche of awfulness.

The huge story about the Trump family avoiding paying taxes through fraud for the most part on a billion dollars. Instead of paying the $550 million, they are paying $50 million. They, basically, defrauded the US government out of $500 million.

It makes them one of the biggest financial crime families in US history. But probably if you took a poll, and people should, most followers would say, “Yes! Fuck the government, it shows you’re smart.” 

So, this stuff will keep going on. But the Democrats will slow down on stuff that can’t be done by presidential decree or whatever. The stuff that actually takes the House to okay it. The stuff it takes to slow down or stop. 

Trump’s approval may be eroding a little bit from 41% to 35% approval over the next 18 months. As the investigations of the House of Representatives rollout, we are still looking for Mueller to drop all of his biggest shoes. 

If that is given the most likely outcome of the mid-terms that Democrats take over the House; but if the 26% of the Republicans being in control, then you are looking at not an actual slide into a dystopia in terms of how day-to-day life is lived. 

But a bunch of dominoes will get knocked over that set up a shitload of stuff that will need to clean up the next time Democrats have control of some branch of government, and it may be that the Republicans will use the next two years to figure out how to hold on to government even longer against the disapproval of the majority of American.

For one thing, the next census, which happens in 2020, may contain the question, “Are you a US citizen?” There is no better way to get undocumented aliens to not fill out census forms than to ask about citizenship. 

The deal is, the census is based on everyone living in America, whether they are living in America or not. You have to understand the composition of the nation, regardless of the immigration status of some of its citizens. 

It is one more way to fuck over the blue states because the blue states tend to have more undocumented immigrants. I am not positive about that, but I am pretty sure about that. There will be more voter suppression. 

It is conceivable that if the Democrats don’t take back the House then the Republicans will continue to manipulate the system to continue to have majorities in the House and the Senate, and may even be able to get another Republican elected or Trump re-elected. 

Even though, substantial and growing majorities of Americans do not want any of that. But likely, the most likely thing is the Democrats get the House and slow down some of the Republicans. One more thing, that 74% likelihood of the Democrats taking back the House.

Some caveats on that: a) polls can be inaccurate and improbable stuff can happen, b) the anger at Kavanaugh being confirmed hasn’t yet hit the polls so I would guess that the likelihood of the Democrats taking back the House will rise into as high as 80% in the next week or so with 3 weeks to go. 

Everything always tightens up. It might to 80 or 82. It has been as high as 82 or 83 before the Republicans got all motivated because of Kavanaugh. It might get up there again for a week or two. But then races always tighten up in the last week or two. It may peak at 80 or 82 and then go back down to the 74 we’re seeing now.

It may be nervous-making until November 6. Election day is November 6. But the new Congress doesn’t come in until the first week in January, so it is conceivable that in the lame duck session – the two months between the election and the Republicans losing the majority – the Republicans could pull some crazy shit.

I do not know exactly what they could pull. But in the recent past, they pulled stuff that nobody ever believed they could pull. Given that they have nothing left to lose, and everyone already hates them, and if they lost their majority, there is no telling what they would do. 

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): 2018/11/08

[Beginning of recorded material]

Rick Rosner: Causality and the forward-flow of time are both concomitant or go along with the all of the universes that we’re talking about. They’re either something that works or something that allows us to talk about what works.

As things collapse, as things clump up, over time, matter coalesces and clumps. The driving force for this is, at least, apparently gravity. Gravity is the apparent culprit in most of the, if not all of the, aggregation of matter in the universe.

Not exactly, though, the electromagnetic attraction between positively and negatively charged particles also help with the aggregation. Over time, matter coalesces from chaotic soup in the Big Bang universe to where everything is ionized.

There are no electrons attached to any protons. The universe expands enough that the free radiative energy declines to the point electrons and protons can come together. You also get what is clouds of individual atoms clumping up and eventually forming galaxies, planets, and stars. 

As they do so, as all this clumping happens, radiative energy is released: photons. Every time there is a clumping or combining event, an electron falls into orbit around a proton, then a photon is emitted. A bunch of atoms come together to form a celestial object, a planet or a star, then they bang into each other and they exchange kinetic energy in the form of photons.

These photons eventually make it to the surface of this body and then go zipping across the universe. Then you have fusion where protons come together and more or less fuse with each other, an electron, and emit a positron, and also a neutrino. 

The neutrinos go zipping across the universe. As these long-distance particles, photons, and neutrinos, go zipping across the universe, they lose energy to the curvature or expansion of space. I would say a nice beginning claim to IC is energy lost via long-distance particles to the curvature or expansion of space is proportional to the rate of expansion of space, subject to all sorts of mathematical corrections.

The average density of long-distance particles passing through each unit volume of space and the number of particles, protons, etc., in space that you have to divide by – and then taking 3 dimensions into account.

But roughly, the energy lost to space by long-distance particles is proportionate and – not exactly the driving thing but – the same thing as the expansion of space, which also happens to be decelerative. In a big bang universe, everything starts hauling ass.

From T=0, the central point explodes into the surface of a 4-dimensional sphere. That point becomes all of space. The universe doesn’t expand into anything. It is that the space that is the universe gets bigger and bigger. That expansion has been generally thought to be decelerative. 

The same way if you throw a ball into the air then it gets fast, slower and slower, and then V goes to zero at a peak and the ball falls the other way. Similarly, the universe is this point that expands into all of space but the mutual gravitational attraction of all the matter in all of the space starts to slow it down.

It starts to slow down the expansion. You can look at it under IC as that what happens when long-distance particles lose energy is sharing information. It is like a game. When an event happens that releases energy, it is an informational event.

As long as the particle created or released by that event keeps releasing energy across billions of light years and billions of years of time, that information is being shared with the structure of space. As soon as that photon gets captured, that is equivalent or could be looked at as the creation of the particle as answering a question, “What happened?”, and then, “This happened!”

When it gets captured, it is like asking the question. The capture of a particle is not, in terms of the amount of information in the universe, the amount of information in the universe stops. But as long as particles are losing energy to the curvature of space, information is being shared and that is leading to a more complex universe that is actually increasing the amount of information that it contains.

It is decelerative. Which seems perverse, in that like all long-distance particles, they have momentum. You have seen someone get hit by a bullet in the movies and they fly backward. A system or an atom that absorbs a photon will acquire that photon’s momentum. It is a push in the direction in which it is going.

[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): 2018/11/01

[Beginning of recorded material]

Rick Rosner: We are aware of three things we’ve been talking about. The math of consciousness, which we do not have a good enough math to do yet. Consciousness itself and the material world that supports consciousness on an everyday basis. 

We are aware that we think. We are aware of the material world. We are not aware of any mathematical framing of the information in consciousness. Under IC, we experience the material world.

Under IC, the material world is the mathematical framing of information, probably within some vast consciousness. We don’t experience that vast consciousness. We certainly don’t expect some external framework that supports the information structure that is the universe.

We experience the material-seeming aspects of this informational map that we claim can exist. It is not the clearest thing. But IC claims the universe is made of information. That information is part of something part of a self-consistent information processing apparatus or consciousness (possibly). 

In that, under IC, any sufficiently large and complicated information-processing system is generally the self-knowledge that it would experience itself in a way that is consciousness. 

Jacobsen: I want to make a buffer point here too. Creationism is the dominant belief among most people. It’s wrong. The right theory is not the most accepted theory, which is unguided evolution.

Rosner: By creationism, you mean directed development of the universe and the beings in it. By creationism, you mean somebody is in charge. Some external and powerful being is running the show to some extent. 

Jacobsen: I would confine creationism or directed evolution, and unguided evolution, within biology as an analogy to make with IC. IC comes from digital physics. Digital physics is a minority view within physics in a similar way string theory is a minority view within the physics community.
But it is one among several competing theories. IC would amount to a branch of digital physics. It would be considered a branch of an established physics, which simply needs further development because it is a newer take on a more established branch of physics. 

Does that seem fair?

Rosner: Yes. Let’s take a detour. Creationism implies a creator. The absence of creationism implies unguided evolution. Evolution itself includes the idea that it is not guided. But the 20th century and the standard understanding of evolution is that it is this random thing.

Because if you do not have a creator, or intelligent design, or any of the things that religious people try to sneak into evolution, then what you’re left with, naively at least, is pure randomness. But! That’s not exactly the deal either.

Because evolution is nothing if not opportunistic. The systems of the world are opportunistic. In that, they take advantage of self-consistencies that work. That you don’t have people sproting tentacles randomly from their foreheads.

You do not have planets randomly exploding. The universe is not chaos. It is not directed. But the processes of the universe take advantage of things that work. It is an interplay randomness and the persistence of structures that are good at perpetuating their own existence. Right?

Jacobsen: Yes, it is based on the broader principle of persistence, of order.

Rosner: Order is a part of evolution. It is not imposed externally by some creator. But things that are good at existing continue to exist. It is an interplay between things that work.

Jacobsen: It leads to rhetorical questions too: How old are atoms? How old is DNA? How old are cells? How old are multicellular organisms? How old are individual species? There are structures that last shorter than their precursors but allow more complicated things to exist and do not last as long.
But they, if you get into a field like biology, have a tendency to live longer.

Rosner: Yes, both an IC universe and a Big Bang universe embody causality. A causal framework is an efficient way of encompassing information. But let’s get off of that before I talk myself into a really tough cul-de-sac with 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): 2018/10/22

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What about the review of IC by others?

Rick Rosner: You could do a Star Trek transporter to duplicate the brain, as with our brain, that has a mind. You could have a model of somebody’s mind by having their brain. We do not know how the mind is in there. 

But here is their brain, the brain is the copy of their brain which also contains their mind, so do what you will with it. That’s a terrible model of the mind, because you have not done any digging as to how the mind comes out of the brain or results from the brain – and what that model might be.

At the very least, you can model via duplication of a brain. A better model would be to come up with a mathematical system that shows how the information in the mind is expressing that information, contains the information in an understandable and analyzable way. 

You can also take the brain, the duplicate brain so you don’t kill the person and then scan the brain slice by slice in 3D. You can take inventory of the synapses and dendritic connections to say, “Now, I have a huge document that has an exhaustive linking of which synapses are linked to what other ones and, somewhere, in there is the mind.”

Again, it is a crappy model. Because it provides no analysis or insight into what the mind actually contains. Eventually, as we develop a more sophisticated understanding of consciousness and information, we will be able to come up with a model of an informational map of each instance of consciousness.

It would at a minimum be possible to do it. It would allow us to look in the consciousness and understand what that consciousness is experiencing. You have three things. You have the brain. It is the hardware. You have the mind.

It isn’t exactly the software, but it is a manifestation or an experiential manifestation of what is going on in the hardware. You have this third thing. It would be an informational map of consciousness that allows third parties to understand what is being experienced in consciousness based on the information contained within consciousness.

Independent of the hardware and supported by the hardware; you don’t need to take the hardware expressly into account to understand the contents of consciousness. You could argue that this kind of two or three part deal is also what is going on with the universe. 

That in everyday life we are aware two of three parts we’ve talked about. We are aware of what is in our minds. That our brains exist in a material world. That we would not have the material world to support our minds now.

20 years ago, people were either religious or more Cartesian. Either there is this magic stuff supported by God, or is this stuff in a magical realm. Now, 200 years later, people think our consciousness lives in and is entirely supported by our brains.

There is no magical extra thing. Consciousness is a pure product of the material world. 

[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): 2018/10/15

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What is the shape of the future? How does evolution provide an insight into this?

Rick Rosner: The deal is, certain things show up again and again throughout evolutionary history. Eyes have evolved a gazillion times. I bet you an evolutionary biologist who understands the whole history of evolution can show a half of a dozen different times eyes have evolved. 

Eyes did not evolve from only one organism. They keep evolving because eyes are helpful and every step up the way to fully developed eyes is also helpful, which is a nice helpful ladder. It is spotted on the surface of an organism that can detect differences in light intensity. No images but moving away from hot and cold light levels.

Then you get lenses and so on. Eyes pop up again and again because every step towards a fully developed eye gives you an advantage. Also, every step is evolvable. That it is something that can be accomplished via evolution as opposed to laser beam eyes or an internal gasoline powered engine. 

It is less likely that some organism has evolved a gas-powered engine within itself. In that, it might be helpful but there aren’t steps towards that in evolution. How would you evolve pistons or a means for drilling for petroleum products? 

Gas-powered engines are a product of technology and not of biological evolution. 

Jacobsen: According to the Utah of University, 550 million years have passed since the oldest found eyes. It has evolved independently 1,500 times.

Rosner: Wow! If you leave organisms to their own evolutionary devices, whatever optical stuff they have will continue to evolve towards fully developed eyes, either from nothing or from eyespots, or brightness detecting spots.

Eyes are easily evolved.

Jacobsen: It starts with a flat light-sensitive patch and then has over 1,800 tiny improvements until you have a complex image-forming capable lens. Then there is improving that image too. 

Rosner: It keeps happening again and again. There is a bias in existence. Given eyes have evolved on our planet 1,000 times, you can expect, wherever we go to populate the galaxy and run into alien life, that it is super likely for there to be aliens with eyes because they are super common and evolvable. 

I assume there are historical steps that are so helpful and so doable that they are unavoidable given the right circumstance. You are not going to have creatures evolve eyes in a cave. If you put creatures in consistently dark environments, they continually lose eyes. 

With no light, it is a waste to have eyes. But given some reasonable circumstances, brains will evolve. I think brains are highly evolvable. That will show up again and again. They are doable and super helpful in evolution.

Jacobsen: The complication comes in having those light-sensitive patches and having those evolving in unison with a basic information processing unit.

Rosner: Yes, given the right circumstances, once technology starts, it will keep going. The right circumstances might be a non-aquatic environment. It is difficult to form technology underwater. Dolphins and whales do not have much in the way of technology.

They have a highly sophisticated culture. But they do not have machines because it is hard to build machines underwater. You need surface creatures existing in an environment of air or of a gas rather than of a liquid. 

Maybe, some liquids are conducive but, really. Given the right circumstances, technology will arise. It is apparent that once technology arises then you’re going to have an information processing revolution. 

That in the future, we are going to be transformed. Eventually, the information processing technology is going to outstrip evolved biological abilities. That’s coming. We are right on the cusp of our technology outstripping our biology.

It will transform to the extent that more and more people and entities will acquire more and more non-biological powers.

Jacobsen: In that way, there will be a drive to more rounded consciousness.

Rosner: Yes, information processing will transform consciousness.

Jacobsen: Because one argument in sophisticated theological thought and social commentary is technology improvements not improving moral behaviour, but, in fact, if you can design it then you can redesign the fundamental substructure of people’s ethics, in a way, so that they’re not only more rounded in their capacities but the world around them and how they act in it, potentially.

Rosner: This transformation is going to happen. Nobody has ever been able to hold it back. It may some countries, as you’ve discussed. Some countries may keep its nation living at a 12th century level of technology with political suppression.

Jacobsen: Or knowledge, if you take Turkey with Erdogan, he banned evolution in schools.

Rosner: Nice. 

Jacobsen: He wants a poor population for, at least, the next decade.

Rosner: That’s horrible, but only in one country. This is a kind of unstoppable wave. 100 or 150 years from now, what’s going on currently and politically in America, it will not matter. It will just be a blip.

The tide of history will move, regardless of the local political conditions. It is mostly good because the tide of history tends towards the good. There is the Martin Luther King quote about the arc of moral history.

That is largely true, I believe. The tragedy: if America cannot get it shit together, the tragedy is local and limited to America. 150 years from now, the people of that time will look back with only a limited amount of empathy if America falls apart.

They will be part of a big world. The tragedy will be for us now. We will be, because of dysfunctional politics, more shut out and have less of a chance of participating in the future because our country is now run by corrupt idiots. 

But that tragedy will be limited to us because the tide of history will move on and flow around us and beyond us. We will be a bunch of assholes from 150 years ago. 

Jacobsen: You make a strong case. Add to that, America is only 5% of the global population. So, it’s only 5% of the population jumping off the ship. If we take the Turkey example with the banning or removal of evolution, it affects a generation if kept on for a generation.
It impacts biological sciences and medical sciences. Evolution is the fundamental idea in biology. 

Rosner: The Soviet Union, it was an official requirement to believe in Lysenkoism. It is a bad view of evolution. It is a view of evolution that does not work.

Jacobsen: You characterized some people in America as social darwinists who do not believe in Darwin.

Rosner: Darwin himself was not a social darwinist. I think he lived long enough to be appalled at what was being done with evolution to justify vicious business practices.

Lysenkoism, for those who do not know, is the belief that somehow organism are able to pass on traits based on what those organisms experienced in their lives with the stadnard example being if a giraffe spends its life having to reach for higher and higher elaves, then the giraffe will give birth to a generation that has longer necks. 

It is not how evolution works. Evolution says, “Among a population of giraffes that use this strategy of giong for the higher leaves; giraffes that go for the higher leaves and can reaclh them wil be genetically favored, but there is no switch within giraffes that says that reaching for leaves will leave offspring with longer necks.”

It is not entirely true because there is epigenetics, which allows for a certain limited amount of that. But the Sviety Union had, in the 1940s and 1950s, under penalty of death – because Stalin liked killing people – you had to believe in this other thoery of evolution, which is largely untrue. 

It hampered their agriculture for decades. It led to famine and other horrible things.

Jacobsen: In the United States, it does not have to be instituted and legalized as in Turkey with Erdogan or in the Soviet Union with Stalin. So, in America, the sociocultural context is 35% in 2017 numbers believe in aliteral creation of Man from dust and Woman from rib. 
It is the image of the world.

Rosner: History’s fruit will flow out and around those people. They will be little blips in the historical record. The beings of 150 years from now will look back on them and us the way we look back on people in the Civil War era. Those who were struggling to make sense of the world trapped in political an economic systems that make our lives limited and miserable.

They were trapped in history. We are trapped in and trampled by history.  Okay, I am talked out…

[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): 2018/10/08

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What is the Doomsday Argument? Why have you been thinking about it?

Rick Rosner: I often ask myself, “Isn’t it weird to be living at the end of human history or unaugmented human history?” It seems to me, possibly you, and a lot of people that with the changes in technology and medicine in the next 100-200 years will upend human society.

Not every human will live in weirdness. But the way humans have lived for the past 5,000-10,000 years, many of the components of what we consider normal human life. You live in a building that offers shelter. You wear clothes.

You couple up with people. You reproduce. You eat. You poop. You breathe. You consume goods. You buy stuff. You work. You create stuff. Tech is going to mess with all that stuff. It is hard to find an area of life that super high technology will not turn inside out. 

If you look at the timeline of human history, you can argue that humans go back at least 100,000 years and, maybe, 1,000,000 years. For most of that timeline, humans struggled like every other, most other, or a lot of other species. 

There weren’t many humans. It was us versus the natural conditions. We had skills. But our culture was just beginning to develop. We were probably, over time, getting better at passing on our skills. But you have many tens of thousands of years where there may have been  30,000 humans on the planet total. 

It may have dipped to 3,000 during tough times. But the population didn’t start exploding until we had a lot of the components of human culture in place, staying put in some place and building settlements with shelter.

That we either modified to suit ourselves like caves or we learned how to put up structures – first by stacking big old leaves or who knows what. We got better at it. By the year zero, by the time of Jesus, there were roughly a quarter billion humans. 250,000,000 humans are approximately the population of the US today. It is about 4% of the world population today.

We were doing okay by then. We sputtered along at the same pace. We only doubled that population after 1,500 years with the Rennaissance to get to 500,000,000. In the last 500 years, the population has increased 15-fold. 

There are 7.5 billion humans more than have ever lived before. Yet, we find ourselves at the end of this 10,000-5,000-year run of humans living more or less comfortably in the world via agriculture and industry, being able to make and grow our own stuff with specialization.

Where people do different specific jobs rather than everybody doing everything, so, there’s a mathematical argument to be made, which is called the Doomsday Argument but with different titles and guises.

It argues that if you are living at a time when there are a whole bunch of other fellow humans alive. Then you’re probably living next to the end of humanity. Because if you take the hockey stick exponential curve of increasing population, and if you add the further assumption that there will be a catastrophic end to, in this case, humanity, it makes a certain sense that we live at the far end of the hockey stick. 

The end of the hockey stick that has gone crazy. Say the planet blew up tomorrow, tomorrow would be the day that the most humans were ever alive. This mathematical Doomsday Argument says that if the population is going to go crazy and then drop to nothing.

It makes a probabilistic sense that most humans are living rather than when 30,000 humans were out on the Savannah in Northern Africa. This can be extended into the future if you look into the Wikipedia argument or article with the argument.

If you assume that there will be an end to humanity, we can argue probabilistically that it will be sooner rather than later. It is some time between now and when I peeked at the article prior to starting this session.

It will be now and the time the total human population reaches 1.2 trillion. That’s many more humans than we have now by a factor of 1,000. But given exponential growth, it is not that far in the future. It is not the strongest mathematical argument.

But I will make a different commonsensical argument that makes the same point. It is simply this. The reason that we have the largest living human population of 7.5 billion humans out of the 107.5 billion humans ever is that we have technological dominion.

I am misusing the word but not entirely. There are Dominionists who are these a-holes, Bible-based assholes who say that the Bible gives us the right to dominate and exploit the resources the planet offers. Scott Pruitt, a-hole of the EPA, appointed by Trump belongs to a church that says we are religiously obligated to burn oil and coal.

It is a Dominionist argument that it is our right and obligation to go out and hunt. That God in giving us the Earth is not going to let us completely screw it up. It is like the old Doritos commercial, “We’ll make more.”

Jacobsen: [Laughing].
Rosner: We have more technical skill than ever before. Technology helps make life easier and makes it easier for there to be a lot of humans because we are good at providing stuff for ourselves. But it also leads to the end of humans in a really commonsensical way.

As I said, our extreme technology will soon turn human civilization inside out. There are a bunch of people who call what to come and what will become of humanity for the most part “Post-Humanity.” As we move into the future, not even generation to generation because the generation thing doesn’t keep happening because if people live to 700 or 800 years, instead of creating new generations what people will become will keep going as themselves rather than die off; as we move into the future, we will become more and more tech-augmented post-human in the words of these tech-looker adders.

Most people who use the term post-human welcome future changes because we’ll have much more control over our lives and the world. We will live as long as we want. We will combine ourselves with other thinking entities. We will live in artificial environments.

We will be closer and closer to lords and ladies with dominion over all space and time, at least simulated. We could make ourselves into superheroes. We can do that. But we won’t want to do that for long because we will get too smart for that to be too fun. 

We will find other exciting and fund stuff having vastly expanded powers especially information processing powers. At some arbitrary point depending on who is keeping score, what many entities will be will no longer be traditionally human, it means we will see the end of normal humanity in the next couple centuries. 

It is not the total end of humanity because there will be people thousands of years into the future; there will be people who want to live a normal human life as we know it into the future. But those entities will be overwhelmed by the new beings who live wildly different post-human lives. 

100 years from now, you may have 12 billion humans living more or less traditionally and, maybe, 1.5 billion augmented entities living in weird and new ways. 20- years from now, you have 3.5 billion humans living traditionally and 100 billion – with the number fluctuating microsecond by microsecond – post-human entities doing stuff.

They come together to work on computational tasks, some AI and some partly biological, which will be a flowering or explosion of different ways to exist. 300 years from now, you’ve got 1 trillion conscious beings that have little resemblance to humanity and still a couple billion humans living traditionally for whatever reason, which will look kind of like the end of humanity. 

It is not a horrible end. The Earth will not die screaming as it is burned to a nuclear cinder. But the forefront or the leading edge or the demographic explosion will be in post-human entities. 

[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): 2018/10/01

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What is the current status of IC in terms of development?

Rick Rosner: The reason that a straight Big Bang universe can’t be a model for thought is that if the universe as experienced in a given moment – a given long moment with a moment of the universe being many hundreds of millions of years long – for that analogy with thought to apply then there would have to be some steadiness in the size and scale of the universe.

Because, by analogy with our brain, our minds process a limited range of information from moment-to-moment; that is, the amount of information in our brains at 10 o’clock is not different than at 1 o’clock or 3 o’clock – unless asleep – and so are humming along and dealing with the same amount of information dealing with different sorts of things.

If the universe is an information processing apparatus, you would expect provisions for steadiness within the operations of the universe; whereas, a Big Bang universe is unhomogenous over time. Science like homogeneity, similarity. 

It is related, in some way, to Occam’s Razor. That you don’t want to set up special conditions to explain what is going on at any one time or any one space. The history of science has been getting away from specialness. That we started off as the center of the universe.

Then the Copernican system moved the Sun to the center, then further developments move us to an absolutely average galaxy to 10^11th galaxies in an unexceptional space. In that, all space that comes from a Big Bang is pretty much the same as any other place in space. 

The Big Bang includes absolute spatial homogeneity. Space is the same every place, except in some places, have galaxies and some don’t. But the distribution of galaxies is homogenous. Things are the same through space.

The price you pay for spatial homogeneity is temporal complete specialness. Every moment is a time of the Big Bang is a unique point because the universe is always changing in size. But if the universe is an information processing apparatus, you would expect that there would be some steadiness from moment to moment in the universe.

That the universe can be the same size a billion years from now and a billion years ago, as it is now. For that to be true, you can’t have a strict Big Bang. We’re also assuming or guessing that the universe is much older than the apparent Big Bang age. 

That means that there have to be ways to keep the universe lit. That is, you have to recycle galaxies or create new galaxies. There are some possibilities. You have to create new galaxies that will light up, burn out, and fall away – to be replaced by newer new galaxies.

Or you have to have a way for old galaxies to be relit, and/or you have to have a way for some galaxies to stay lit indefinitely for many, many hundreds of millions of years. By analogy with what happens in our brains or our minds, you would expect both. 

You would expect some galaxies to stay lit. If galaxies are some information processing units, you would expect things like a language or perspective processing unit. You would expect that to be on whenever the universe is away or we’re awake. 

We are always processing words. We are always looking at our surroundings through a perspective processing apparatus. We always orient ourselves in space via the part of our brains that turns what we see into 3-dimensional space.

We never, unless we’re doing acid or screw up these processes, see the structure space break down around us, so we never understand 3-dimensionality. There are other galaxies or other information processing units, memories, or whatever; that we would expect to cycle in and out as needed.

We need some physics that relights old galaxies, keeps some galaxies lit and lets you bring in new galaxies. That points at neutrino action in parts of the universe that have an extreme amount of gravitational curvature. That would be at the apparent beginning of the universe at T=0, and around blackish holes.

That something should happen around the parts of the universe with the greatest gravitational strain on space. That pulls fused matter apart. By fused matter, I mean neutron star stuff. I mean matter that has been fused into heavier and heavier elements.

There should be processes that rip this stuff apart back into more raw protons and electrons and lighter elements, which implies neutrino abosroption. Where a neutron gets hit or sucks a neutrino and then comes apart – I always get confused by neutrinos and anti-neutrinos, you need to have most processes in the non-extremely curved parts of the universe are fusion processes. 

Lighter elements fuse together into heavier elements, turning protons plus electrons into neutrons. You need places in the universe where the reverse happens. Those places should be extremely curved places, as around blackish holes.

Hawking even talked about the matter being able to escape fully black holes because the strain on space adds enough energy to space around the event horizon that matter can be spontaneously created at the event horizon with matter duals popping out.

Like a piece of matter and its anti-matter counterpart spontaneously popping out of space right near the event horizon, one particle falls into the black hole and the other can struggle out of it. That is how black hole evaporation happens.

In IC, you do not have fully black holes. But you should be able to have similar stuff happen in, and around, the vicinity of black holes, where the matter gets torn apart and some stripped matter, some torn apart matter, that is not yet fused becomes available again to the, I would assume, rest of the galaxy. 

Other processes include the strain on space allows for the tearing apart of matter that can allow for anti-neutrinos that are wiped out when a neutron is torn apart into a proton plus an electron. I would also assume those same parts of space are less transparent or more opaque, better able to absorb neutrinos, than less curved parts of space. 

That neutrino fluxes, that pretty much every galaxy is a neutrino generator as normal matter fuses and as protons and electrons come together into neutrons releasing neutrinos; you would each galaxy to be a huge net producer of neutrinos because it is tough for normal matter to absorb them. I would guess that you’ve got these large filament structures in the galaxy.

Which, I assume, maintain relationships among longstanding structures in the universe of, specifically, galaxies and, perhaps, the filaments that they are a part of that stay lit for much longer than you’d expect a galaxy to stay lit, I would expect that you would have stable spatial relationships along these filaments with all the matter lined up along these filaments – to some extent focusing neutrino flux and keeping the galaxies lit and helping to maintain the spatial relationships, or the network or the filaments, longer than you would expect them to be maintained.

Jacobsen: That makes sense in two senses. One is the principle that larger structures tend to last long past a certain point. Similarly, two, small structures tend to last longer at a certain point.

Rosner: I agree with that. There is also the possibility that curved structures – the places where space is massively curved – as with the huge 1 million to a billion weight blackish holes at the center of galaxies. Those might act in a certain way like tent pegs or nails into the overall structure of the universe or the distribution of matter in the universe, where those are harder to move.

Those are more resistant to being pushed around gravitationally than smaller structures or less curvy/pointy structures because a gravitationally curved area is like a point or as a nail in a 4th gravitational dimension. 

Those nails may hold the universe to a more set structure.

[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): 2018/09/22

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What is the current status of IC in terms of development?

Rick Rosner: This is a review. IC stands for Informational Cosmology, which is the idea or principle that the universe is made of information. It is an information map of itself; the universe is built from the relationships among its constituent particles. 

The relationships among the particles determine the shape and dynamic of space and the flow of time. These relationships are informational. They are pretty much brought down. One thing about information is that it is the most stripped down characteristic that you can have of an object.

For example, there is something called the Leibnitzian Monad. It was Leibnitz’s attempt to have the most stripped down thing, besides nothingness. Nothingness is no help. What is one step up? It is the Monad, which is something with one thing.

It is similar to a piece of information in one of two states. It is binary, which everyone is familiar with now. It is the most stripped down element. It doesn’t have hubcaps or fenders. It is stripped down as either 1 or 0. 

There is evidence the universe is stripped down elements. Quantum mechanics is filthy with informational qualities. That quantum mechanics is like a crime scene with all evidence pointing to information as the structuring factor.

The principles of existence tend to be emergent and determinative; they are opportunistic. Whatever works, works, binary works because it is simple. You can probably find things in existence that are non-binary. 

But there are a lot of things that, in physics, have a binary quality to them, e.g., an electron is either linked to a proton or it isn’t. That is-isn’t thing is a binary thing. You can argue quantum mechanics isn’t purely binary in the way I just said an electron is either linked to a proton or it isn’t. 

That isn’t true quantum mechanically. In that, there are many things that are indeterminate in quantum mechanics. You don’t have enough information to decide something is or isn’t. There is a rough framework of binary, but the states in the framework are not as neatly defined compared to a classical system that does not have the fuzzy states.

Fuzzy is ad hoc, fuzzy, and whatever works then works. Under Informational Cosmology, we highly suspect the Big Bang universe isn’t purely Big Bang, but, rather, has Big Bang looking aspects because these aspects have informational implications; that an efficient map of information in a closed or nearly closed informational structure which is also a conscious structure would have a Big Bang structure because it is an efficient way of embodying all the different forms of information existent among all the different particles.

That implies Big Bang physics or Big Bang cosmology, which is basically a set of solutions for the entire universe based on the equations of General Relativity, allows for expanding universes and contracting universes.

I would argue an expanding universe looks redshifted, where the farther a galaxy is from you, an observer, the faster it looks like it is moving away from you, which is a redshifted universe. A blue shifted universe is a collapsing universe, which is allowed under the equations of General Relativity. 

That’s where the farther away a galaxy is from you, then the faster it is moving towards you. It is blue shifted. It is as if there was an explosion, but the explosion lost oomph over time – and all the stuff that was flying away from you is now being pulled back towards you by mutual gravitational attraction with the ultimate result being everything being brought down to a point.

Under IC, you never see a blue shifted universe because it doesn’t make sense informationally. The stuff most relevant to you also most distant from you. You could see an IC universe that looks like it is getting younger but that’s a heating up and a melting away of the universe.

It still has forward causality but that universe, a universe that looks like it is getting younger, has lost the ability to hold as much information as it once did. You still have forward causality, but the amount of information it holds decreased with time and it looks like a younger, hotter universe but without the blue shifting. 

It looks like a big bangy universe but a smaller Big Bang expanding universe; although, you can certainly have local regions that collapse gravitationally. You can have a galaxy that runs out of juice, which runs out of fusible material and collapses, not entirely; it has this cinder-like stuff, old burned-out stuff, e.g., brown dwarfs, neutron stars, black-ish holes, and so on.

Under our vague understanding of IC, that universe gets pushed to a hotter, apparently younger, part of our universe. Anyway, all that is general and hand-wavey.

Jacobsen: This framework exists within a Big Bang-like theorization of the universe, of the physics of the universe, but that physics of the universe equates to a physics of mind and that implies an armature. What is the armature? Why is the armature necessary?
Rosner: The easiest argument is from the minds to the brains. We live in our minds. Our minds model our external and internal reality. Our minds tell us where we are within the physical world in which we live. 

Also, they tell us what we are thinking about that world and whatever else we’re thinking about. The only way we currently have of communicating what is in our minds to other people is to tell them about, “I am thinking this. I had this dream. I saw you yesterday.”

Or it is to generate imagery. You make a movie based on thoughts that you’ve had or make a painting. We can only use our standard information inputs and outputs to share what is in our minds among each other, among ourselves. 

But it is possible to imagine that there would be a mathematical description of a mind. That you could specify in terms of hardware, if you wanted, without having a mathematical system for understanding what the mind contains. 

[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): 2018/09/15

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Filaments are large-scale objects in the universe. They are comprised of galaxies.

Rick Rosner: They are strings of galaxies, basically. It turns out if you map the universe. I guess, most galaxies lie along these strings and planes that are enormous. Generally, more than 100 million lightyears in lengths. 

If the structure of the universe incorporates memory, then you’re going to be able to activate galaxies associationally. I don’t know what other models you would use for memory except that if you think of enough things associated with a memory then the memory will light up, via association.

Jacobsen: In your mind, certain networks activate. Other ones de-activate. So, it amounts to a selective activation dependent upon activity.

Rosner: But it is associational.

Jacobsen: But it is not willy-nilly associational. It is associational based on more established structures as people get older.

Rosner: If you can trigger a memory through a string of words like “second-grade teacher,” you will remember her/him once you remember what that word is. Same with a smell and other sensory triggers. A memory pops up once there are enough associational triggers.

The time frame in your brain is generally less than a second. Unless you are struggling to find the memory. You root around and try to find out what you’re trying to remember via association. For instance, sometimes, I have trouble remembering something, particularly if the name of the thing starts with a “b” or a “w.”

I can narrow down to starting with a “b” or a “w.” If I think about it for a while, the thing may pop up. Or I may have to give up and try again in a few minutes, once I have cleared the clutter I created trying to dredge up the memory. It is generally associational and happens in less than a second.

We don’t know. But if the universe is an information processor, that associational thing is on a scale of many billions of years. Pulling up a galaxy or a string that incorporates the memory, that thing would take, at least, a good chunk of the time of the apparent age of the universe.

But the mechanics of it, I have to read more on the filaments. But I would assume this much mass tends to gravitationally focus radiation. There’s gravitational lensing. Where if you have a massive body between you and a star, or a galaxy, that massive object will bend more light from that star or galaxy towards you, than you would get otherwise.

In a perfect lens situation, you would see a ring in the sky centered on the massive object with that ring being bent light from the distant star or galaxy. I assume if you have a whole string of galaxies, then those would tend to focus radiation.

It would mean neutrinos and photons for the most part. As they travel close to the string over a length or across 100 million lightyears or more, that string of massive galaxies would tend to act like not just one lens but a whole string of lenses that would tend to pull more and more radiation in, and focus it on various different points on that filament. 

If you have that going on, I saw a picture or a map of the filaments along the Milky Way. There are 4, 5, or more. If you have lit up filaments, 2, 3, or more of those feeding into a galaxy. I would assume that would be enough to light up an old galaxy.

By feeding into, I mean, you have a bunch of galaxies along these filaments. Due to gravitational lensing, though it should be called something else because it is a string of them, you could call it gravitational filamenting, but that is terrible. Anyway!

All those areas would tend to be focused on a non-lit up galaxy and, maybe, would light it up again. The question then becomes, “Why isn’t everything lighting up all the time?” My guess, the filaments are linked by what was lit up when that galaxy was first precipitated into existence, associationally.

That is, as the universe progresses, we have talked about how the universe is both expansive and decelerative if energy lost from photons is adding to the information in the universe, where the universe gets apparently bigger and bigger but related galaxies, while growing somewhat more distant from each other, grow closer to each other in terms of the Hubble Shift. 

As the galaxies cluster in terms of the Hubble Shift, that leaves room at high Hubble velocities, or apparent velocities, for the new matter to be pulled in at the edge of the universe around T=0. It is not pulled in willy-nilly. It is pulled in response to which galaxies or parts of the universe are lit up and doing the jobs of expanding space and expanding information at the time. 

New matter precipitates out of the mess, at the beginning of time.

Jacobsen: If you look at the decelerative nature of the universe as well as its expansion, if you were to look at it in the Big Bang structure, you would see a slow, steady formation of new types of large-scale objects, very large-scale objects, over time.

That could amount to certain types of information processing coming online. It matches the story in development of minds. More systems begin to interact, come online, and produce novelty with prior similarity.

Rosner: I mostly agree with that. That is a fractal kind of phenomenon.

Jacobsen: There would be repetition but more distinct novelty, though.

Rosner: As you have room for larger and larger clusters or spatially associated structures to form, you will form, as you said, bigger and bigger ones. A universe with 2 atoms can’t form any clusters, really, because there is not enough stuff.

A universe with 20 atoms might be able to form a couple level 1 clusters. Those with 2,000 atoms might be able to have level 2 clustering. But when we get into larger levels, in our universe, there are various levels of clusters. You have solar systems, galaxies, superclusters, and filaments. 

I don’t know if there is stuff in-between.

Jacobsen: There are.

Rosner: So, there are different levels, which are associational clusters and relate to what is active in the universe at the time the new matter is pulled from the edge of the universe. It means not everything is connected to everything else. Instead, you have a loose weave.

Jacobsen: I notice different processes relevant to different types of information processing at different time scales. Small things happen at shorter time scales. Large things happen at longer time scales.

Rosner: At the largest scales with these filaments, I would guess there would be various, multiple braided but not strongly interactive filament structures.

Jacobsen: They could act as anchors. I see them as noodles in molasses.

Rosner: There is this deal. When you have a bunch of liquid polymers, and you dip a pencil in, you can pull out a bunch of gunk because the filaments line up as you pull this snotty stuff out of your liquid. But I would guess that it is not all one filament. 

There are sets of filaments strongly connected to each other, interwoven among other sets of filaments that are strongly connected to each other with only weak filamentary connections among various sets of very strongly filaments.

With that, I got to break. 

[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): 2018/09/08

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: If this science fiction future produces superbeings, how much will these entities care about us, relative to their capabilities?

Rick Rosner: The superbeings of the future may not even give 1% of a crap of the feelings of cows. There are a lot of ways this stuff could go.

Jacobsen: This could be something like the distance cognitively between ants and cows, which could be the distance between the superbeings of the future and us. Why would a cow even care about a whole colony of ants?
Rosner: Yes, it will be about the degree to which the Golden Rule is operative in the dominant technologies and societies of the future. The Golden Rule, we do not have a lot of respect for ants. We do not think about them much. 

Whatever their level of awareness, they do not seem able to be conscious of that much suffering. Although the colony as a whole may experience misery, that seems unlikely. I do not know if we will ever have a lot of respect for ants. 

I do not know what will be the manifestation of the Golden Rule in the future when you have these beings or melded consciousnesses that are 1,500 times more powerful than regular human conscious, according to some scale of consciousness in the future.

Jacobsen: It may be a cognitive horizon too. Someone much smarter than another is not extraordinarily smarter, if given that kind of 1,500-times-more-powerful scale.
Rosner: I do not even know how that scale would work. The IQ scale is a crappy scale. It is a thing in which somebody would have an IQ of 150,000, which is a senseless idea. Although, there is a science fiction book from the 50s called Brain Wave by Poul Anderson.

It is about the Earth passing out of a region of the galaxy that is effectively dampening the brain functions. All of the sudden. Everyone has 5 times the IQ they had before. Everyone has an IQ between 500 and 800/900. I liked it when I was a kid. It is probably unreadable now.

We do not know what form vast information processing will take and how much room it will have for us. 

Jacobsen: I want to take the idea of cognitive horizon seriously. If human beings can imagine some level of consciousness for ants but can only extrapolate similarly upwards in terms of what superbeings look like vis-a-vis science fiction, something super smarter than us may have a similar ability to have a wider range of consideration. 
So, it may have a more fine-tuned sense of an ant life and its worth. 
Rosner: Yes, they could be like hyper-decent, hyper-moral. Or it could be that it becomes so cheap to be moral that people go ahead and be moral because “Why not?” It becomes cheaper to make Fermat’s Wager for everybody. 

Just give everybody an afterlife because, maybe, it is ethically good to do that if it only costs $1.50 per person.

Jacobsen: Even now, there is very sufficient evidence to say being moral is much cheaper than being immoral. Mark Twain had that quote about if you tell the truth then you do not have to remember anything.
Rosner: Yes.

Jacobsen: In a similar way, if you are moral, you do not have to look behind your back. You can continue on in life in the comfort that you did the best you could with the resources you had at the time. 
I think our reiteration with slight modification and expansion of the Golden Rule, especially with rich interconnected information-processing, is a re-envisioning in a greater robustness of it. It is a reaffirmation in modern terminology.

[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): 2018/09/01

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What is needed for good mathematical training?

Rick Rosner: To be a real quantum physics guy, you probably need 2 or 3 semesters undergraduate plus 3 or 4 semesters of graduate school, but I never went to graduate school. There is this thing called the Boundary Condition(s).

You have to set up a logically consistent structure. The first exercise in QM is the Potential Well. The well is this abstract well, which you have this quantum particle in. You have to set up the mathematics of the well so that it reasonably contains this mathematical simulation of a quantum particle. 

I suspect the T=O conditions found at the edge of the universe, which you find somewhat in black-ish holes, exist more as boundary conditions than as necessary conditions for the matter in the universe. Rather, it is a logical requirement that this is what you find if you journeyed there, but most matter does not journey there – back to T=0 or T=10^24th of a second after the Big Bang or after time started.

There is no information there. Everything is so hot and messy. You may or may not pull information from it. Information may pass through it. But you are not going to get any actual observable information from that super early hot mess.

It is simply logically required to be assumed to be there. 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): 2018/05/08

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: So, this will be our Jerry Seinfeld show, which is about nothing.

Rick Rosner: [Laughing] Okay and to put that in context, I have got this YouTube thing where I argue with a conservative, my buddy Lance, and he wanted to talk about Christian apologetics, even though we are both Jews but apologetics in general, which is the field of established religious metaphysical explanations for religious principles.

Why the world exists from a religious philosophical point of view, you cannot say the world exists because of God. That leads to more complicated metaphysical issues and often these metaphysical issues have been thought about by religious philosophers.

There is sophisticated philosophical reasoning behind things that attempt to be proofs of the necessity of God. That God created the world. So, anyway, one of the topics Lance brought up was the idea of from nothing comes nothing and this is an idea that is pervasive not only in religion but also in scientific thinking.

It is the principle that unless there is some motivating or creative force that the default state of existence is nothingness. That without something to push things along, without a creator or some physical impetus a loaded vacuum.

A vacuum that is packed with energy for instance in physics, without that the default state of being is no being, is nothing. I increasingly have a problem with this and it has led me to think about the idea which we’ve talked about.

For one thing, we’ve talked about the set of all possible worlds. These would be the worlds, the universes, not prohibited by the principles of existence. If you have a complete set of the principles of existence, I do not know if that is even possible, but say you’ve got a fairly exhaustive set.

All the reasons and rules that the universe can exist, then we know because we exist. That is not a null set. That the set of possible worlds that we and by not too tough extrapolation all the past moments of our world and a bunch of future moments – all those are possible worlds.

So, it is reasonable to assume that the set of all possible worlds if it can be enclosed in a set or encompassed by a set contains perhaps an infinitude of possible worlds, which you would think could be of various sizes because we live in a universe that is huge with something 10 to the 85th protons and then a bunch of other associated particles, a bunch of bunch of protons.  

A bunch of particles with 10 to the 11^th galaxies each with roughly 10 to the 11^th stars with each star consisting of roughly 10 to the 58^th or more particles protons and neutrons; so, a big-ass universe.

Then it is possible for us to imagine a null universe and a number small universes and by extrapolation you can imagine universes of any size in between. That to me suggests a possible principle that is that there may be no upper limit to the size of a possible universe.

That there is no bias against any size universe under the rules of existence, the principles of existence. Universes of any finite size can exist. That doesn’t mean that any arbitrarily structured topsy-turvy universe of any size can exist, but under the principles of existence there may be no principle of existence that sets an upper limit for the size of the universe, which seems a richness of existence especially when compared to from nothing comes nothing.

From nothing comes nothing means that unless you do some special trick of creation, you cannot have something because the default state of things is nothing, so you have to do some magic or some special physics to have existence come out of nothingness, which is the default state of things.

This bias, it is a crazy bias; it is a special bias; that exists both in religion and in science that everybody is subject to this bias in favor of nothingness being the default state. I do not know how many other beliefs there are that are cross over beliefs between religion and science.

So, it is pervasive. It is persuasive. But we know it is not a prohibitive rule because we exist. Something happened or there is something about the principles of existence that doesn’t stand in the way of existence.

That the “from nothing comes nothing” rule doesn’t rule because there is something-ness and if nothingness ruled then there would not be. So, we already have proof that it is possible to have something-ness. 

[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): 2018/05/01

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: We have been talking on and off tape about an information universe grounded in the decades and decades old field of digital physics, which amounts to a field with physics, statistical thermodynamics, information theory, and related fields.

Rosner: So, what we’re saying is that in an information-based informational cosmology universe, there is an implied zero information.

There is an implied history that contains, as you work your way back at some point, the amount of looking backwards information contained goes to zero. Your ranges may go up and down, but ranges all the way from 0 up to the present amount of information.

That means from nothing you can get something. That the conservation of matter; that is, the matter can neither be created nor destroyed. That rule is a more local rule and doesn’t apply to the entire expanse of existence of a universe.

That there are ways to bring in more matter, more information at the edges of the universe and also for information to evaporate at the edges of the universe.

That the principle that there are whole all sets of the third sets of processes that let you create what matter can be created and what matter can disappear and that the principle from nothing comes nothing and the related principle from the current amount of matter comes every future amount of matter in a given universe: those principles do not apply. 

[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): 2018/04/22

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: You were listening to PR and Brian Greene. We were talking about dark energy off-tape. Can you expand on this, please?

Rick Rosner: Alright. So, I was listening to NPR and they had on Brian Greene, who is a pretty famous physicist who has made part of his calling writing books for general audiences and trying to explain physics to the public – particularly cutting-edge physics, cosmology, string theory, and stuff like that.

He was talking about dark energy, which is according to observations made in the last 15 years or so. The expansion of the universe seems to be accelerating instead of slowing down, which is what you’d expect.

If the death star blew up a planet but they did not give enough of a push to the planet so that the pieces of the planet did not have mutual escape velocity, the planet would fly apart but more and more slowly and then eventually collapse back into itself.

That is basically one possibility of a general relativistic dynamic of the universe that it either is a Big Bang and the universe flies apart but it doesn’t have enough energy to overcome the mutual attraction of all the matter and it falls back into itself or maybe it does and it keeps going.

But in either case, the pieces after the initial explosion, the initial push, should not fly apart from each other faster and faster. With the gravity pulling on the universe, with a mutual attraction among all the matter in the universe the things should accelerate as they fly away from each other.

That mutual attraction should slow things down at least a little bit, but recent observations indicate that is not the case. Now under IC, we’re skeptical that these observations measure velocity as opposed to maybe something that is more informational, or it could be a mix, or it is purely velocital but the velocity is generated not by an initial Big Bang but is generated by the scale of the universe getting tighter as the universe incorporates more information into itself.

So, to get back to Brian Greene, he mentions that this acceleration can be mathematically characterized as a cosmological constant, which is an added factor that Einstein put into general relativity and then felt bad about because it contradicted some observational stuff and it was less mathematically elegant than the rest of the theory.

However, the cosmological constant can be set wherever you want to conform to experimental observational evidence and what it is; it is a dial for overall gravity whether on a universal scale gravity works the way we think it does based on local observations or whether on a universal scale there is a push outward that would account for the acceleration.

You can also dial it the other way and if there were experimental observations says the universe is slowing down faster than you’d expect. That is another position on the dial. But according to the observational evidence, there is a push.

A counter instead of gravitation on a universal scale pulling everything together is pushing everything apart. I have been skeptical of dark energy, but Brian Greene mentions this number. This tiny number that would be sufficient in terms of a push to account for the observed acceleration in the recessional velocity of the universe.

That makes me wonder if there is some mathematical parallel or equivalence that can be drawn between at least the apparent expansion of the universe and the amount of matter that is lost per unit time by photons being red shifted because the red shifting is a loss of energy due to the curvature of space.

So, there should be a direct equivalence between photons losing energy and the apparent size of the universe increasing or that is at least a possibility that as the universe gets more information from localized information being shed by individual photons and that information being spread out to the rest of the universe through the red shift.

You should see a gradual change in scale of the universe as the information leaking out of the photons more sharply defines all the particles in the universe which is equivalent to the universe being apparently larger.

Tighter looking particles, it is the same thing as the same sized particles in a larger universe. So, anyway, maybe, there is some math to be done to establish equivalence between the energy that is always being lost by a gazillion photons and what is happening with the apparent expansion of the universe. 

[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): 2018/04/15

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: In an IC universe, as a theory or framework for explanation, the default seems like existence rather than non-existence, which implies different considerations on the nature of nothing, nothingness and its types, and the universe as we know it.

Rick Rosner: Alright. So, we live in a world that is super existent; it is existent to the tune of 10 to the 85th protons or so, which is a hundred billion galaxies each with roughly a hundred billion stars with each star consisting of almost ten to the 60th particles; it is a big universe.

Now, implied in the existence of our universe is a point of nothingness. The universe has an apparent age of 13.8 billion years and if you believe in the Big Bang; which more people do now than do not if you took a survey of the entire planet.

If you trace the Big Bang, the further away you look, the more and more distant objects you observe using telescopes of various types and of increasing power now that we can use computational techniques to pulse weak signals from far away and far away means closer and closer to the time that the universe, according to the Big Bang, came into existence because the farther away you look, you are looking at stuff where light took longer and longer to get to us to cross these vast distances, and so it is from an earlier time.

We have some observational techniques that can get close to what looks like the apparent or beginning of the universe under the Big Bang. We have the background radiation from the first photons that escaped the processes of the early universe that are said to be from only about 300,000 years after the Big Bang, when the universe became transparent for a while.

Before 300,000 years after the Big Bang, the universe was such a hot soup that photons couldn’t get out of there. Then at 300,000 years, that was the end of the first ionization era where electrons got together with protons, which made it possible for photons to be emitted as electrons locked into orbit around protons.

Then you have the earliest photons; that was the deal. However, anyway, the Big Bang universe has an implied history that if there was a Big Bang then there was a point where in space and time, more in time than in space because the Big Bang encompasses all of space. There is no point in currently existing space where the Big Bang started because all of space, since space started at roughly a point that blew up to huge proportions after 14 billion years.

Anyway, there is a point in time where things started and then it becomes a philosophical point whether you can even talk about what happened before that which you cannot, but you can talk about what initiated the process.

You can call it a God moment or you can call it an unstable vacuum moment, but there is still this initial point when the universe pops into existence and it is philosophically and scientifically sloppy to talk about the universe popping into existence out of nothing because there wasn’t even any nothing that the universe popped into existence from.

There is no from; there is the universe popping into existence. So, there is this implied beginning and not implied but a beginning with all sorts of observational evidence for the universe popping into existence though in terms of the Big Bang Theory.

It is not that all this matter came into existence because there was nothing for it to come into existence from because there was no time before the Big Bang. So, as long as there has been time, there has been the amount of matter/energy in the universe that there is now.

So, nothing was created or destroyed; the universe popped into existence with the amount of matter/energy that it has now, it was in a tight hot little volume that blew out, that expanded crazily to the huge size it is now.

So, you could argue that this doesn’t violate the principle that matter can neither be created nor destroyed because as long as there is been time there is been the amount of matter that our universe contains.

However, if that is not super satisfying because still “why this amount of matter?” and “how did we get this amount of matter?”; it is still not satisfying because we have this deep bias against non-nothingness.

We think nothingness should be the thing and that anything else needs a super-duper explanation. But we have this big-ass universe and it may be that the rules of existence permit any size universe, any finite size universe from zero to almost infinitely bigger.

You cannot say almost infinitely because there is no such thing. It is either infinitely or not, but still you get the idea that there could be universes that are so damn big they almost feel infinitely bigger than ours to us.

Then universes that feel almost infinitely bigger to the people in that super big ass universe and so on out to infinity; inconceivably huge yet finite universes because there may be no bias against any possible finite size of the universe.

Now, you might be able to make probabilistic arguments or statistical arguments about the relative, if you had a set of all possible universes within this set the ratios of the various sizes of possible universes or you may not.

This may be an entirely terrible way to try to do statistics but for the sake of arguing maybe there is only one null universe according to the rules of principles of existence. Something that contains no space, no time, no information; there may only be one of those because if there were a bunch of different flavors, say eight different flavors of a null universe, then that universe isn’t a null universe because it contains at least the information about which of the eight different null universes it is; which flavor, which color, whatever you want to call it.

Which of the eight? Oh, this is possible universe number five. Well, that five is information so there must be a simpler null universe that doesn’t even contain that one characterizing piece of information.

So, there should be one simplest most information-less universe I guess. Then as you get more complicated universes, there should be a greater variety of these. Then as you get out to the huge universes, there should be a huge possible variety of these or maybe that argument for some reason doesn’t hold up.

Maybe since we can only exist in one universe at a time and cannot even set rules for the probabilities of other universes. I do not know; nobody knows yet because this is a form of thinking that hasn’t been done yet.

[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): 2018/04/08

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: You have OCD and obsessions in math and health. These may have played a role in the mathematics aspects of being “born to do math.” What have been your obsessions in the past?

Rick Rosner: Yes, I have got OCD fairly. Unless, you watch me closely. You would not necessarily notice it. I am not as OCD-d out as the worst people, but I am probably 40% of the way there. Then you might make the argument that high IQ people might have a tendency to get to pursue odd interests way too far.

If I can list the stuff that I have been obsessed with over the course of my life, let’s start with age six where I obsessively turned in clockwise circles and chanted to God. Around age ten, I became obsessed with figuring out how the universe worked and started taking all sorts of notes on little scraps of paper.

In junior high, I briefly became highly interested in solving one of those math problems that everybody wants to solve, but nobody in the world has been able to solve for decades or centuries. So, I pursued trying to prove the four-color theorem or trisect an angle or Fermat’s Last Theorem. There were periods of going after that stuff.

Then in high school, I became obsessed with transforming myself into someone who could get a girlfriend which included changing the way I talked, I went from somebody who got a doctor’s note to get out of PE to somebody who did 6,000 push-ups a day.

So, that was the beginning of an exercise obsession, beginning 17. The obsession with being a guy who could get laid.

I rolled over into my early 20s, where I became a bouncer and a stripper and then developed obsessions around how many bars I could work in or how many jobs I could hold simultaneously. After a bad breakup, every time I felt bad I would go out and get another job to the point where I had eight jobs simultaneously.

All of them five hours a week or no more than ten hours a week each while I was going to college. But among the sub-obsessions to having a bunch of jobs or “how many bars could I be stripping in?” and “how many bars could I be bouncing in?”, I became obsessed with catching the most fake IDs of anybody, becoming the most accurate fake ID catcher at the doors of bars ever.

I developed a model, a probabilistic schema for catching IDs to help me decide the hard cases. I would to think that there were periods in my bouncing history for months at a time. I was close to 99% accurate at nailing fake IDs and close to a 100% accurate at not turning away anybody who was of age when most bouncers will maybe catch about a third of the fake IDs that come past.

We’re talking during the fake ID era, say 60’s through the 90’s when you wanted to have a fake ID to go to bars to try to hook up. That era’s over because now we have the Internet for hooking up.

At various times, I have been obsessed with getting my body fat down to under 5%. Right now, it is around 4.8 to 5 something percent depending on what I have been eating for the past few days, whether the diuretics are working.

Right before I turned 21, I became obsessed again with trying to figure out how the universe worked and that has lasted for the last thirty-six and a half years. I am more obsessed with it sometimes than at other times, but it is a long-term interest, sometimes obsessive.

In 2000, I was on ‘Who Wants to Be a Millionaire’ and got a flawed question that led to me basically losing the game and became obsessed with studying millionaire questions to prove that they screwed up.

I ended up analyzing about a hundred and ten thousand millionaire questions from close to 20 different countries. So, that required me to be able to start… this was before Google Translate, I had to become my own Google Translate and learn how to decode millionaire questions in a bunch of different languages.

I got hired to be a writer for Jimmy Kimmel Live! and became obsessed with getting stuff on the air and cranking out a huge amount of material. For my first two years there, I did not allow myself to go home until I generated at least 10 pages of material per day, which is nuts and also was annoying to Jimmy.

But while I was there I wrote close to a hundred thousand jokes. Right now, I have got this YouTube series with my conservative buddy Lance where I posed shirtless for a painting he is been working on for almost a year and we argue about politics and given my anxiety about the current political situation and maybe a little anxiety because my dad is not well.

When my stepdad became seriously ill, I started taking huge numbers of vitamins and supplements; about 70 a day, which I continued to do. But seeing my stepdads mortality made me obsessed with becoming as healthy as possible at least in terms of filling myself with pills.

Now, that my real dad is having health issues plus the anxiety about Trump world and being shirtless in this YouTube series. I have been working out even more obsessively than I have in the past. I celebrated my 27th anniversary of not missing a day at the gym since 1991.

For the past four years, I have gone to the gym at least five times a day except for four days out of those four years where I fell asleep before my fifth workout. For the past year, I have done at least a hundred sets of weights a day and for the past 43 days I have done at least 200 sets a day.

So does that cover? Oh! I have written the longest book in the form of a tweet thread that is ever been written. It’s half of a sample from a book I am trying to get a book deal for and it rolled into being a bloggie thing when I felt I couldn’t give away too much more of the book for free. Its two thousand tweets long. That probably covers most of my obsessions.

[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): 2018/04/01

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What about the apparent age of the universe?

Rick Rosner: So, I mean the deal is that if you have stuff in the universe that’s older than the universe, then the universe can’t be the age that way you say it is.

And that may be the case with a bunch of super massive celestial objects found in what should be the young early universe which seems weird because the Big Bang seems thoroughly established as what has to be the shape and the mechanics of the universe. 

It’s what the universe looks like but the Big Bang as a theory has only been the leading theory of the universe for 50 years and we’ve had a complete picture of the distribution of matter in the universe for only a hundred years or less; make it 80.

It wasn’t until a hundred years ago or less that we even knew that there were other galaxies besides our own. And it was only within the past 80 or 90 years that we found out that the farther away a galaxy is the larger it’s apparent velocity away from us; the Hubble constant.

And it was only in 1964 and ’65 that we discovered the old early photons, the tired old photons from the first possible moment that the universe was transparent to photons.

Before about 300,000 years after the Big Bang, the universe was so filled with ionized matter that too much stuff was crammed too close together that there was no way for photons to travel through the mess and get free.

Then at 300,000 years the universe becomes big enough that the ambient energy held by all the matter comes down and protons and electrons start combining into hydrogen and helium atoms and at that point it’s like the fog clears and photons can escape.

And some of the escaped photons just kept going from that point in time for us to intercept them 13 and a half billion years later. So it seems as if there are a zillion reasons; observational and theoretical reasons why we live in a Big Bang universe.

But a lot of those reasons can also be applied to an information-based universe with a big bang looking universe being the optimal forum for information to take.

And one thing to consider is that we live among the most normal-looking of the forms that Big Bang universes can take. Well, one of the issues in Big Bang cosmology is whether the universe is open or closed which also involves the term flat.

A flat universe according to general relativity is the universe that has just enough kinetic energy among its parts to keep on expanding forever, to keep on overcoming its mutual gravitational attraction; the gravitational attraction that every galaxy has for every other galaxy and for the universe to keep growing forever, but just barely.

The other possible Big Bang universes include a closed universe which doesn’t have enough energy to overcome galaxies mutual attraction which is like a hundred thousand people standing on the surface of the earth, all throwing a ball up into the air at the same time; the ball goes 30 feet into the air runs out of energy and all heads back down together to collapse together.

So imagine that except minus the earth with everybody throwing the ball. Everybody throws the ball up, the attraction among the balls pull them all back together because they don’t have enough oomph or enough kinetic energy to get away from each other.

Then there’s the open universe where the balls, the galaxies have way more energy than they need to never fall back into each other. And the Big Bang universe; the universe we live in; our particular universe seems to have exactly as much energy as it needs to overcome mutual gravitational attraction.

But then there are some additional… as theories get older they acquire additional refinement and often additional, say corrections to account for anomalous observational experimental data.

So, the Big Bang universe being 80 or 50 or however many years old, has accumulated various corrections for inflation and for hyper-expansion; good inflation is hyper-expansion but dark matter effects accelerated expansion if you look back at the apparent expansion of the universe. It looks like the universe is actually expanding faster over time.

It says if you threw a ball up in the air and it started traveling upwards slowly and then just gained more and more velocity as it rushes up in the air away from you, which is consistent with final some theories of what dark energy but also can be taken as serious quibbles with Big Bang Theory.

Kuhn, about 50 years ago, wrote a book called The Structure of Scientific Revolution. He said that theories are formed are resisted by established science but eventually win because they account better for experimental for observations than the previous theory but as the theories age they accumulate more and more quibbles, more and more things that appear to be wrong with them until those theories are often in their own turn overthrown by the next theory.

And it’s not unreasonable to think that the Big Bang which is our first successful comprehensive theory of the overall structure and dynamics of the universe will eventually be overthrown or severely modified.

Perhaps the greatest theory in the history of physics, Newtonian universal gravitation, reigned for two and a half centuries until it was severely modified by general relativity and was overthrown in part, the parts being theoretical basis in that Newton described universal gravitation which says that the attraction between any two objects is the product of their masses divided by the square of their distance.

But it didn’t really say why while general relativity says that the why is because matter curves space. Matter helps to determine the shape of space.

You can continue to use Newtonian gravitation as long as you’re dealing with relatively small masses at relatively large distances but when you get into super compact masses or big masses you’re going to have to correct for general relativistic effects.

The first one to be verified was a precession in the orbit of mercury around the Sun where planetary orbits are ellipses and the ellipses don’t stay in the same place in space over long periods of time.

They kind of drift, so they’re not exact ellipses; they’re loops that don’t quite loop back around exactly in the same place, the loops travel in a circle around the sun, kind of like spirograph pattern if you’re old enough to remember those.

They instead of an ellipse forming around the Sun you get a flower pattern of largely overlapping loops, so eventually orbits revolves all the way around the Sun and comes back on it’s own.

In the first great victory for general relativity, the rate at which the ellipse formed by Mercury’s orbit was shown to process at double the rate it would under Newtonian gravitation.

So, Newton’s theory of universal gravitation was overthrown by general relativity but still survives because it’s still what you use in any kind of normal situation; situation where you want to figure out, say how far a baseball might travel on earth coming off a bat under normal circumstance like that.

And it’s not unreasonable to think that the Big Bang will be subject to at least a partial revolution especially if physicists or astronomers keep discovering more and more objects that can’t reasonably be shown to have been able to be formed in the time that’s elapsed since the Big Bang. 

[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): 2018/03/22

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: We were talking off-tape on IQ and a World Economic Forum article on the diminishing returns of intelligence on leadership. It seems interesting, where beyond 128 the leadership can be worse. Can you expound on our points a bit?

Interviewee: Yes, for one, you have to preface anything that involves IQ by saying IQ is a sucky measure of intelligence. Though, there isn’t a better one. Using reasonable assumptions, 111 is in the neighborhood of the average high school graduate. It is not that high.

Also, the average IQ for people walking around is also about 100, 105, 106, because people with IQs at the low end are not walking around. They are in institutions, riding short buses. However, anyway, it is hard to tell exactly how they set up their 100.

There are points of comparison. In other words, what’s the phenomena, e.g. leadership? It is crazy how low that is. 128 isn’t even high enough to get into MENSA, and MENSA is the sluttiest, one of the sluttiest IQ groups.

Almost anybody, if they try can get into MENSA, the average leader who has risen to 128 and, thus, become less effective because leadership peaked at 120. The one who has already gone over the hill and down the other side still cannot get into MENSA.

However, I’ll start with saying my wife worked at a bunch of companies that were mid-level companies.  She worked for some big ass companies too. Until she had her current job at a school; she never had a job she liked, largely because a large percentage of the people around her were a-holes.

In fact, when you look at the stereotypical mid-level manager as presented in movies and sitcoms, there is always at least one jerk to propel the strife and the comedy. The Michael Scott character in The Office.

Everybody else in The Office was a sap in one way or other. That may reflect a certain reality that mid-levels of leadership, the people who end up in those positions maybe suck, maybe the organizations that they are leading suck.

Because they are made up of people who are them, then when you get to higher levels, where leadership skills are even worse at IQs at 128, it may be because people with IQs at 128 suck even more than people with IQs at 120.

Because I mean one they might be Aspergery or they might be conceited dickheads or over confident, pricks. Because you also said that these were mostly guys, too, right? Alright, so did this study do comparisons across gender?

They were on IQ is what you are saying. I have seen other studies that show that happiness and success and leadership, all that stuff does reach a peak, and then start declining before IQ reaches a limit.

The studies I have seen, it is more around 140. Or maybe I assumed that. There are plenty of reasons for that. The reasons we’ve mentioned—dickishness and overconfidence. However, there are also, as you get up above 140 and stuff, the smart people can be, or people who are good at IQ tests, which isn’t necessarily the same thing, can be distracted by the butterflies of weird intellectual pursuits.

It is easier for super smart people to chase off after their curiosity about the world, which may overwhelm or their ability to figure out stuff may overwhelm their ability to stay on track. That could be the one way that society.

[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): 2018/03/15

[Beginning of recorded material]

Rick Rosner: So, this is more like born to not do math in the case of our president who talks about how he went off to Wharton which makes you think if you’re an American that he got an MBA from Wharton. He actually doesn’t have an MBA; he doesn’t have an advanced degree in business, he went to Wharton as an undergrad. 

Wharton is a branch of the University of Pennsylvania and unless you’re trying to be deceptive you just say you went to UPenn, but he wants people to kind of think he’s an MBA. So, he says he went to Wharton, so the bullshit starts right there. 

And then his lack of business understanding doesn’t begin with this tariffs thing that we’re right in the middle of, it probably begins with him bankrupting three casinos. It’s really hard to bankrupt a business where people just come and they give you their money but he did it three times though he is clever enough to have sucked out a bunch of money for himself before the casinos went bankrupt and lost 99% of investor’s money.

Anyway, this tariff thing is a huge move that is going to according to anybody who’s knowledgeable about business and economics will harm us and possibly the rest of the world by setting up all sorts of trade barriers and possible trade wars. Gary Cohn who’s his economics adviser had threatened to quit months ago because Gary’s Jewish and Trump was kind of supporting white supremacists and Nazis but he was persuaded to stay. 

But now, Gary Cohn; one of the few people who knows what he’s doing in the White House is now quitting because he thinks the tariffs are so stupid as does just about everybody else and some numbers.  

Trump wants to impose a 10% tariff on foreign aluminum, 25% on foreign steel; he thinks this will revitalize domestic aluminum and steel industries. Everybody’s saying no but those industries changed forever especially in the way of going away 30  years ago and you’re not going to bring back industries that went away 30 years ago.

Currently, there are three hundred and one thousand steel and aluminum workers in America but the tariffs could raise prices for hundreds of millions of Americans and could lead to reduced sales, increased prices, and reduced business.

The last time in 2002 that we try to tariffs on I believe steel under George W Bush, it cost the U.S two hundred thousand jobs before people realized it was a terrible idea and rescinded the tariffs. This latest round of tariffs, if they go through, it’s estimated that they’ll cost America maybe around a hundred and eighty thousand jobs. 

So, there you go; born to not be able to really do math but to be able to demagogue in the case of our president. 

[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): 2018/03/08

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: I was watching a short Business Insider clip with Brian Greene from Columbia University and in it he was talking about renormalization.

Rick Rosner: Physics professor?

Jacobsen: A physics professor, specializes in string theory and some fundamental work alongside Witten and Kaku, who are some of the founders in string theory. Witten is known for being something akin to Einstein within that field, where he really blazes new trails to use that cliché.

And one of the points in that Business Insider clip that I was noting is his discussion of infinities. When he was talking about those infinities, he was looking into renormalization in quantum field theory.

I see there are a few types of infinities that are different than that. So, let’s cover two types of things first: one on how renormalization in quantum field theory deals with one type infinity, but how I see the other type infinities having different types and forms and consequences.

Rosner: I haven’t looked at the math of renormalization theory in a while, but basically the equations generate infinities at some points. You need to do tricks that aren’t precisely allowed by the rules of math to cancel out infinities.

And once you do that, you end up with numbers that really accurately predict the values, the things that are being described by the equations in the real world. The equations, once you’ve done these forbidden tricks to them, accurately describe real physics, but you don’t have to assume that this means that the universe itself is cancelling out infinities.

It’s a better way of thinking to think that it doesn’t quite have the right math; it’s good math, but it doesn’t quite encompass all the actual processes that are happening in the world down to the nth degree.

There are all sorts of things that have hidden infinities, but not the world itself. When we’ve talked one of the principles, we talk about that we live in a world that has vast numbers in it, but none of those numbers reach infinity.

And the world is approximated by things that include infinity, for instance, when an object goes from point A to point B in our geometric model, our mental model of traveling from point A to point B has it hitting every single infinite point.

We’ve been taught in school that a number line has an infinity of points along it and not just a countable infinity, but the trans-countable infinity; not just the rational numbers on a number line, but also the irrational numbers, which are uncountable.

There’s so many of them. You can’t even count them using the lowest level of infinity and so you think of things moving along a line and you think they’re hitting an infinite number of points. But we live in a quantum world where position in space isn’t precisely defined.

Things that are happening in a physical framework that’s established by quantum rules; you can’t pin down an object with such precision that you can say that it travels through an infinity of points to get from one point to another. Space isn’t defined that precisely.

There is another set of hidden infinities with counting numbers. The counting numbers seem as finite as you can get; 1, 2, 22, 104… those are finite numbers. But every one of those numbers has an infinite number of digits beyond the decimal place. 223.00000… and the zeros go out to infinity.

One is precisely one to an infinite degree; it’s precisely defined. We just deal with objects in the world as if they are infinitely precise in their unit-ness. If you have two eggs, you have two eggs. 2.000… all the way out to infinity and there are other hidden infinities just in counting numbers, where their infinite precision is actually defined by an infinite series of relationships among each other.

That the prime numbers are distributed along the number line in such a way that they determine the infinite precision of counting numbers. But the deal is those infinities in numbers don’t necessarily reflect actual infinities in the world.

You have one apple. You have 12 eggs. But the oneness of the apple and the twelve-ness of your dozen eggs don’t reflect an infinite precision in the number of things that you have. The world itself is defined by the relationships among the less than infinite particles in the world.

So, objects in the world are highly precisely defined, but not infinitely precisely defined and the oneness of one apple of the dozen-ness of a dozen eggs are abstract characteristics with hidden infinities assigned to the objects that are not infinitely precisely defined because they’re real and they’re in a finite world.

You mentioned off tape of the infinity the ratio of the circumference of a circle, or a wheel, or a tire to its diameter because pi just keeps going for an infinite number of random feeling digits. Its pie is infinitely precise, but when dealing with real objects you can’t infinitely precisely measure or define that ratio.

That ratio is an abstract thing you are assigning to this wheel or tire you’re dealing with; and the wheel or tire is made of atoms and molecules that are held together by Van der Waal’s forces and other electromagnetic intermolecular forces, plus their atoms are held together with nuclear forces and the more electromagnetic forces between the atom, the electrons, and the protons.

But all those particles are imprecisely defined in space. There are probability waves and because they’re imprecisely defined, your tire and the ratios that you’re assigning to it, the ratios can be infinitely precise, but they don’t reflect an infinite precision in the position in space and the shape of the tire and the relationships among its constituent particles.

Everything’s a little fuzzy and the fuzziness reflects a lack of infinity and a lack of infinite precision.

Jacobsen: And then I see that resolves the distinctions of some infinities. In the description of both, renormalizations in quantum field theory as well as infinities of things around infinite digit spans in numbers as well, but in the end that resolves an issue to deal with…

Rosner: We use the tools we have and our tools are symbols. Our mathematical systems are abstract. They contain all sorts of hidden infinities and they work really well when describing a world that is very well defined, but not infinitely precisely defined.

Our tools are not perfectly accurate, if you wanted to perfectly accurately define a tire in space you could do it using quantum mechanical description. For instance, there’s a well-known principle from the beginning physics of the De Broglie matter wave as a wavelength that is inversely proportional to its math.

So, an electron is not weighing much at all. It’s very fuzzy in space. You can’t really pin down an electron very well. 

You can pin it down, but only to a limit and the usual example that I’ve seen in physics textbooks is that you compare the matter wave of a baseball and the uncertainty in the space of a baseball to the uncertainty in space of an electron since a baseball weighs like 10 to the 28^th or 29^th, 10 to the 30^th times more than electron. A baseball is 10 to the 30^th times more well-defined in space. 

[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): 2018/03/01

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: There has been recent experimental evidence showing the earliest discovered stars formed as early as 180 million years after the Big Bang.

Rick Rosner: There is early light from 300,000 years after the Big Bang. Any earlier and the universe was opaque because there was too much stuff going on. There were various phases in the early universe.

You enough electrons and protons to be with each other for light to get through, enough electrons orbiting protons when you have a hot soup of that not happening – which is an Ionization Era. There is no way for light to get through.

The deal is, the matter in the universe went through certain phase changes as a whole. The modern universe is inhomogeneous in a lot of ways. You have huge expanses of almost nothing, a vacuum, and then you have blips of matter and stars.

But in the universe, as it is conceived as the Big Bang in the early universe, everything was a soup. This soup went through phase changes as a whole. One of them was going from ionized matter, which is separated electrons and protons, to electrons and protons combining into hydrogen atoms. 

Until that phase change happened, you can’t get light escaping from the soup because it is scattered by free electrons. You get hydrogen atoms forming at a little after 400,000 years the Big Bang. That is the earliest light that we can see.

The Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation, we detect that in the form of radio waves. There is a lot of it. There might be more of the ancient free photons than from later on, There are still a lot of them. They do not affect us so much because they are so redshifted, so weak, from being so old.

But in terms of absolute numbers, there are a bunch of them. You do not get certain amounts of light until lights start forming and shining. They found using some sophisticated radiometric techniques dips in background radiation that indicates this is the part at which you start getting stars.

This was 180 million years after the Big Bang. I do not know if that is sooner than they expected it to be. But they are talking about it being the earliest that you could possibly expect stars to form after the Big Bang. 

According to IC, we do not believe in one big bang. Though the universe looks very Big Bangy, if there have been any big bangs at all, it has been through a series of Big Bang-like events or just the universe rolling along in not necessarily a Big Bang way with the Big Bang appearance being a characteristic of information.

Under IC, the CMB would be noise that hasn’t been filtered out because the universe isn’t sufficiently defined. It doesn’t have an infinity of matter or an infinity of information. So, you will have noise that isn’t filtered out.

If information is arranged in a Bang Bangy way, the amount of information in the universe is proportional to the apparent age of the universe and the amount of matter in the universe and the scale of the universe – that is, the scale of a proton diameter to the diameter of the entire universe, then all of those things are consequences of the information the universe contains the apparent age of the universe being proportionate to information; you would expect the information to be arranged in a way that is temporal and causal as an apparent history with some of that history being actual history.

Some of it, though, as you get farther and farther away from the active center of the universe what looks like redshifted and younger galaxies and stuff has more and more to do with incomplete information.

The parts of the ‘beginning’ of the universe are where there is a lot of incompletely defined information relative to us and also relative to the other parts of what looks like the early universe. You could view the absence of complete information as at least allowing the existence of noise. 

In that, if you had a universe with infinite information, it would appear to be infinitely old and any information from the apparent beginning of the universe – any light from the apparent beginning – would be redshifted down to zero information and the noise level would be zero.

We are still confused about things. We think in IC the universe is a lot older than it appears to be with the apparent age being the amount of information it contains, but one of the areas of confusion is “Does this very, very old universe have Big Bang-like events?” The answer is “probably yeah.”

“What is the scale of those?” When a part of the universe becomes informationally active when it wasn’t before if you’re retrieving old frozen information and making it active, does that make a Big Bang looking event?

The answer is “probably yeah, but it would be incorporated into something like the apparent Big Bang, which is the way the universe appears.” One of these little bangs that meld into this apparent Big Bang.

“How big of an event is that?” Does it cover the entire visible universe? The deal is, under IC, we still need a framework that accounts for all of the apparent manifestations of a single Big Bang 14 billion years ago.

If IC is an actual thing, an information-based universe that functions a little bit like thought does, you have to have mechanisms that account for information processing over a super long period of time and also informationally do not contradict the observational evidence of the apparent Big Bang.

Every time that you get an experimental result like somebody found the light from the earliest possible stars 180 million years after the Big Bang. You have to figure out what is happening.

Somebody has to figure it out, how it works informationally. If it is not a Big Bang, then informationally, what is the deal with the first light from the first star – apparent first light from the apparent first star – showing up as some dip in radiometric observations showing up 180 million years after the Big Bang?

Based on how information is in our brains, we know there is a lot of stuff that information processing apps, modules, or modes are pretty much on whenever we are awake like spatial information processing, there is never a time unless you do LSD.

That the parts of your brain that process spatial information into a sense of 3D space around you. There is never a time when that is turned off and space is scrambled. Do not take LSD.

But if you happen to be exposed to LSD, you can really hamper a lot of those modules. When you are awake, there is never a time that those modules are not processing faces, so that a face looks like a face.

That it is readable as a human face with expressions and recognizable features, but if you happen to be on LSD then those modules get screwed up. You see incompletely processed faces, which look like CG effects.

That the faces haven’t been smoothed into rounded faces. You get these lizardy badly processed faces that look like wireframe faces. The kind of faces you may see in early video games. That haven’t to manage human-looking faces.

I supposed with enough LSD that you could turn off your spatial processing modules and have a really hard time navigating and figuring out where walls, routes, and doors are and their relationship to each other because the modules have been turned off.

Also, you dream in 3D and in faces. Even when you aren’t working, those modules are always on. Others are only turned on as needed, whatever modules you need to be a ski racer.

I assume there is a skill set and a set of perceptions that mostly you turn on when you are racing or practicing racing. In an IC universe, you would have some parts always on and processing information.

Then you would have modules that you could turn on. An IC universe needs to have always on stuff and stuff that gets turned on and then turned off as it gets used and is no longer useful.

It falls away to the cold and frozen outskirts that look like close to T=0 and has to fit into a structure that looks Big Bangy. So, that is what we are trying to resolve or would be trying to resolve if I weren’t so lazy.

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): 2017/09/08

[Beginning of recorded material]

Rick Rosner: But it is not like the quantum world phenomena necessarily reflects the operations explicit in the macro world. I think you can draw helpful analogies, like the idea that every driver is like a black box, which is basically defensive driving. That driver is, to some extent, unpredictable.

Then you can base this on your experience of drivers in similar cars. You can assign a probability cloud to what people will do. Where a 1988 Cadillac driven by an old person will have a different probability cloud then a 2007 Audi driven by a 28-year-old guy with his satellite radio.

One is more likely to—the Audi is more likely to pull a dick move on you, to pull into your lane because your lane has fewer people in it. Whereas the 1988 Cadillac is more likely to be going under the speed limit or drifting out of lanes because the person driving the car is more careful.

There is the idea that every person having a ‘probability cloud’ associated with them, which is a fine analogy. But another issue can be making probability clouds too tight, at least in LA, where people can pull a dick move at any time. 

[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): 2017/09/01

[Beginning of recorded material]

Jacobsen: [Laughing].

Rosner: You can come up with a zillion. In the 70s, there was something about chlorophyll, which is plants absorbing light. What does toothpaste have to do about absorbing light?

Jacobsen: [Laughing] One was from Newton being a phallic representation of the universe, and the Principia as a rape manual [Laughing].

Rosner: You try to apply the Uncertainty Principle all over the place. The Uncertainty Principle inevitably disturbs the—you never get an undisturbed situation, but that is a purely quantum situation. You can draw analogies about it. There are certainly ways to draw analogies to things in the macro world.[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): 2017/08/22

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Two things come to mind from that. One is an older discussion, which I am recalling around “buffers” of order preservation in the universe at various scales. Another one is the utility of using an IC framework in general.

If you’re using an IC framework, there are distinctions that you can make between fields that are sufficient, so that misuse of terms outside of their proper field then makes non-sense. So, you may use sociological terminology in physics.

Rick Rosner: Feynman lived in the early era of media. He was pissed at modern advertising, which was being pissed at the loose use of the word “energy.” He had a precise meaning in the context of physics. He hated its use in advertising because it never referenced actual physical energy.

It always referred to some young woman because she was heavy and jumping up and down.

[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): 2017/08/15

[Beginning of recorded material]

Rick Rosner: In an expanding universe, a moving photon is moving away from – the farther and longer it travels then the more it is moving into the neighbourhoods of galaxies that are receding from its point of origin, so the longer it travels the faster the galaxies or the average expansion velocity of space is relative to where it came from.

So, it is going to be wretched. But that loss of energy—I just read that there are many more photons than there are massive particles. Particles that have rest mass. In every cubic centimetre, there are roughly 400 photons leftover from the Big Bang.

I guess from the Cosmic Microwave Background. Where the average number of massive particles is one proton for every cubic metre, so that means like 400 million times as many Big Bang photons or Cosmic Microwave photons as there are protons.

That doesn’t even include all the photons that have emitted since. Another place to hide disorder might be black holes. Where depending on what the rules for black holes are, I mean, Stephen Hawking and people like him have spent their careers debating the informational rules and black holes with regards to information.

Whether information is lost when stuff falls into a black hole, whether it eventually comes back out, does it come back out with any amount of information that went in, in any way? Under IC, black holes aren’t entirely black and can, maybe, be possibly seen as semi-independent information processors.

So, not only do they, they might be sources of order rather than additional information and order – rather than relentless black holes of information, constantly destroying whatever gets close enough to fall into them. So, one narrative framework for IC is that it might be good for talking about the universe in the context of the universe being an order-generating system in contrast to the random doomed-to-have-zero-information of the 20^th century. 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): 2017/08/08

[Beginning of recorded material]

Rick Rosner: Then you have Big Crunch theories of the universe where everything collapses back in on itself, everything heats up because everything comes back together, but it is one other means of order eradicating everything. There isn’t any big time 20^th century Big Bang theories of the universe that support the growth or preservation of order throughout the universe indefinitely.

Which feels right to people because it basically says there’s no free lunch anywhere, and you can’t win, say that under IC, IC would be a good framework for talking about the negentropic universe. A universe in which order can increase.

Where the order in the universe does increase due to the gravitational clumping or the clustering of matter, and where waste heat and noise can be sequestered or absorbed, with the result being that you have a net increase in order, which means that the universe isn’t a closed thermodynamic system.

You have places where waste heat is either converted into something else or is hidden, so that it is not a thermodynamically disruptive and entropic deal, one way energy can be absorbed and turned into order is the loss of energy by long-distance photons.

With the absorption by space by photons that travel billions of light years, where it is the Hubble Shift, where the farther away a photon comes from, then the less energy it has, apparently, because it is climbing up a—

[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): 2017/08/01

[Beginning of recorded material]

Rick Rosner: You’ve got the heat death of the universe, which is a universe that keeps going and expanding. A heat death to the universe doesn’t mean that the universe ends up hottish. It means that there are no available sources of energy.

That the universe is at the same temperature, which is going to be low because it is going to be trillions of years in the future. All the sources of energy have been used or burned, and then expelled as waste heat to the point where everything is the same temperature and you can’t pull energy out of anything.

When everything is the same temperature, there’s nothing left to burn. Everything is lukewarm.[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): 2017/07/22

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: It is social reinforcement. It is not just that these physical characteristics are dramatically influenced by genetics. It is also that it is shaping our minds as well. So, our evaluative structures for what is attractive change over time in proportion to that physical structure change in our minds.

Rick Rosner: There are levels of explanation that are more useful or convenient depending on what you’re doing with the thing you’re analyzing and your explanations – if you’re writing a spec. sitcom script—your operative explanations are going to be different than if you’re doing a study on the neurochemistry of love.

Unless, you’re a great writer and can get jokes out of neurochemistry. With regards to IC and information cosmology, the most applicable set of explanations, if it is true, in one area that I’ll risk saying that it has a possibility of being true is whether the universe is entropic or not.

The Second law of Thermodynamics is the one that everyone talks about. It is the interesting one to the point that it is not interesting to talk about at all. It says in a closed system only disorder can increase. So, the energy you expend cleaning a messy room is greater – the heat you generate is a greater force of disorder at a thermodynamic level – than the energy you spent stacking up your crap.

You cannot win. You cannot ever increase the order of a closed system. That seems like the dominant idea of order in the universe. I’d say for most of the 20^th century. Where you have local outbreaks of order on Earth, where order and complexity increase, maybe throughout the universe, but the models of the universe have it winding down one way or another back into complete disorder and chaos, or just a complete lack of useable energy by the end of time.[End of recorded material]

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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): 2017/07/15

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: That seems to me like one half of the signification. If people are looking for the short-term partner, depending upon the reference there, which appears to be innate.

Rick Rosner: …People are just looking for easily understood because they are babies at knowing what they want.

Jacobsen: I think that is the same, functionally. It is based on innate hardware. Over time, men statistically do not change their preferences over time. Women do. Women look for different signifiers of status, resourcefulness, emotional stability, and so on, rather than the symmetries and signifiers of health that you were mentioning before.

I think there are various aspects of that. People like to say men and women; others like to say spectrum, but it is more a bimodal distribution along XX/XY.

Rosner: You can bring this back to sociobiology with eggs expensive and sperm cheap, and knocking somebody up is expensive. In high school, most people are not much into raising a family. They don’t take that into consideration.

Later, that may become, depending on how your society is structured, more important to women than to men. Also, men masturbate more than women. So, men are constantly going back to the things that help them have orgasms.

[End of recorded material]

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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): 2017/07/08

[Beginning of recorded material]

Rick Rosner: Then there is a principle behind that, which is that people whose features are easily decoded might be more beautiful. You can view these features as valuable. Asymmetry is often a symptom of lack of sexual or reproductive fitness.

If someone has a droopy face, for instance, or something on their body, people are analysing attractiveness, but if you’re writing a spec. sitcom among high school freshman. You don’t need to necessarily go into the various framings of things.

It is just hot-on-hot. People have been using the football player and cheerleader shorthand forever. Now, it is totally hack, but if you want to write about that stuff – then you might do the exact same deal. Except with cheerleader and football player, it could be the modern equivalent. What would be the modern equivalent?

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: A fit person with high status.

Rosner: Something equivalent to a fit person in 1980 with status then and now. It is somebody who is physically healthy and attractive. It is not necessarily anything beyond 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): 2017/07/01

[Beginning of recorded material]

Rick Rosner: Everyone, as they’re trying to feel out their place, has hot on hot as the safest bet. So, people don’t know what they’re doing yet. When people get older, you can call it “settling” or “becoming more sophisticated” or some combination plus some other stuff.

Where people learn to value other stuff than pure hotness or coolness, they learn the purely hot or cool may be nightmares. Also, there is also what makes being hot or being cool is something that needs to be taken back to a demonstration of reproductive health.

The more physical features that replicate reflect other features that represent reproductive fitness too. If you look at butts, and other things that look like them, then they can look like an amalgam monster of reproductive health.

There are fractal theories of patterns that are repeated in people, where those repetitions in shapes over and over on their body might be more beautiful than someone who doesn’t have that, which is semi-BS.

[End of recorded material]

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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): 2017/06/22

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: The frames can be mixed up too. There’s a biological anthropologist named Helen Fisher. She studies love. She studies long-term love with three separate concepts, but then ties this to different personalities and different dominant neural circuits, and the neurotransmitters, associated with it.

She has this nice scaling up. She applies this to statistical models. O believe she has been an advisor for Match.com. There are cool things that you can do. But I think it also helps separate the “wheat from the chaff.” You can differentiate that kind of anthropological work and biological work from pseudo-work like the Law of Attraction.

That appear to be popular in America and are bogus.

Rosner: You mean Oprah’s The Secret. You think positive thoughts and so on. Yea, that’s just bullshit. There are actual mechanisms for making it happen.There are all sorts of ways of talking about falling in love. You can talk abut evolutionary theory and sociobiology.

There is shorthand stuff, like for middle school or high school. Hot people will hook up with each other. IN 8^th grade and 9^th grade, the pioneers in hooking up are, for the most part, the very coolest kids. They have the highest demonstrated value.

[End of recorded material]

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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): 2017/06/15

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Do you remember when we were talking about Errol Morris a little while ago?

Rick Rosner: Yup.

Jacobsen: So, his idea of the framing of a photo. Usually, when talking about a universe of discourse, it is a well-defined set of parameters for discussion on a topic within traditionally well-defined fields. IC lenses are fuzzy lenses, it is continually keeping in mind what is outside of the frame in a fuzzy way.

If it is biology, you understand, at the end of the day, that this has an underlying root in physics. It is just that this is a more convenient way to talk about this scale of organization. So, you use these scales and these stories.

Rosner: Yea, you talk about couples falling in love with mating behaviours rather than the biology or chemistry of it with the release of serotonin. You could go farther with out serotonin and dopamine work to regulate synaptic whatever, and then you can take it further and further down into the constituent molecules, but at that point you’ve gone way too far.

You are way out of the context of couples forming for most discussions. Some people’s jobs are to talk about the chemistry and biology and feelings of falling in love, but you don’t need to go that far when you’re talking about falling in love – within a…

If you’re asking someone for help about how to write a romantic comedy, the chemistry and biology may not come 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): 2017/06/08

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: One thing from IC are narratives or stories that describes things relevant to your informational framework.

Rick Rosner: That may just be a general idea from philosophy. If you want to explain something, then you want to explain something that is most appropriate to the context, where people expect that all of biology and all of chemistry will eventually be able to be boiled down or eventually built up from physics.

That includes that we as natural humans do. So, physics would not only include the hard sciences but the soft sciences like psychology. You can run this back to how atoms behave. That kind of idea that everything would boil down to physics probably inspires some people to be fearful that biology and chemistry would go away.

That probably wouldn’t be the case. You mentioned – off-tape – a universe of discourse, which probably means everything gets its own context.

[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): 2017/06/01

[Beginning of recorded material]

Rick Rosner: If the universe – if particles  are made of – is made of information, then why? Why do we have to think that? Particles can be made of anything, at least in naive first glance. Why information?

Without going into some rock bottom foundation philosophical thinking, one why is particles must be made of information because that is what they appear to be made out of. That there are a lot of fundamental particles or elementary particles or subatomic particles.

That are nakedly just information. that don’t have any moving parts. That aren’t anything but the mathematical description of what they are: photons, electrons – don’t have, as far as we know or all evidence, smaller constituent elements.

Protons and neutrons have been found to be not fundamental. Protons and neutrons have been shown to consist of quarks plus the particles that hold the quarks together. So they are kind of complicated, but electrons appear to be just point-wise particles.

That exist in the form of probability clouds.

[End of recorded material]

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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): 2017/05/22

[Beginning of recorded material]

Rick Rosner: But that doesn’t mean that you have to see everything through the lens of multi-worlds theory. There are probably other theories that have a similar deal. String Theory may become a more powerful tool for describing the world, but, right now, it hasn’t delivered enough specific predictions to be very useful.

But at some point in the future, String Theory could be worked out so that it might be a framework that is helpful in certain instances. Feynman, there’s a Sum Over Histories principle that says particles take very possible path between point A and point B.

That is a helpful framework for doing certain quantum tasks. But it is not something—if you’re sufficiently trained in quantum mechanics, you may have this in the back of your mind, but you don’t need the Sum Over Histories principle to do quantum mechanics.

None of which gets to the question of why we exist rather than not, and the reason for the ways we exist. That is, 3 spatial dimensions, roughly with an asterisk and that asterisk being quantum effects at small scales, and the curvature of space at huge scales.

One temporal dimension too. 

[End of recorded material]

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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.