Month: October 2005

Quantum Information & More

I continue to be fascinated by the developments at the British Computer Society Cybernetic Machine Specialist Group (BCS Cybernetics Group or BCSCMSG for short) despite the dense specialist jargon making proceedings all but unintelligible to any lay reader like myself. Here is the synopsis of papers presented at the BCSCMSG Symposium 10 as part of CASYS’05 (Computing Anticipatory Systems 2005 Conference) in Liege in August earlier this year.

My principle fascination, and reason for following proceedings over several years (and blogging many previous references), has been the apparent fundamental nature of information underlying reality itself, as part of my specific interest in modelling and communicating information about reality, at least in so far as humans can know and communicate reality.

Paraphrasing … the BCSCMSG current mission is to establish the Evolutionary ‘Anthropic’ Semantic Principle, by which the fundamental physical foundations of computing as used in brains, can be realized. The human brain is a universal computational semantic machine and [the Diaz-Rowlands re-write of the Nilpotent Dirac Equation of] quantum physics provides a natural model and modes by which human natural language is realized to allow the human race to comprehend the evolutionary cosmos. No less.

The philosophy of mind and mind-matter angles, of what can be known about reality (epistemology), the processes of knowing of it (consciousness et al), and what any independent reality might be (ontology), is clearly relevant to the modelling of information about reality. Suspending disbelief it is also possible to accept that quanta (as the smallest significant differences that can exist between anything) are probably the most fundamental building blocks of information as well as the building blocks of “matter”.

Despite also accepting mind (consciousness) as emergent from brain physiology (matter & processes) what is mind blowing is the idea that the emergence (clearly complex and multi-layered) can have a causal and direct reductionist explanation that is also based on quantum mechanics. (Why not ? says Josephson. Yes, “microtubules” say Hammeroff and Penrose. No, “that’s mere pixie-dust” say the Churchlands, Blackmore and Dennett. Sceptical says Deutsch. Who needs reductionism and causality say Deutsch and Chalmers.) Quantum mechanical effects in brain-mind processes, not to mention in the wider DNA-life processes themselves – how weird can this get ?

OK, so holographic universe (Talbot); multiple interfering universes (Everett / Wheeler / Deutsch); are believable at the quantum scale, universes or states with small differences, small departures from coherence. OK too, non-locality, action-at-a-distance, anticipation, future actions travelling ahead faster than light, can also be credible at similar quantum scales and near coherence maybe ? (Even the practicioners working with these “models” struggle to accept these as everyday “paradigmatic” world-views.)

It’s all there to be read about. Quantum mechanics based mathematics behind everything from seemingly abstract things like fundamental number theory and mathematics itself and theories of computation, through physics naturally, to large-scale coherence in processes in brains and macro-cosmological feedback loops in the cosmos itself.

And if that’s not weird enough, it even comes with a bootstrapping mechanism to create something (ie everything) from nothing.

The nothing that is, that is.

Watch that space.
Hope these people also turn up at Tucson2006.

ZMM Best Seller in October 2005

Thanks to Matt Poot on MoQ-Discuss for picking up this Toronto Globe and Mail best seller list from Sunday 9th October.

Well, well, well. Robert Pirsig’s ZMM is a non-fiction best seller in October 2005, sharing the list with James Frey, Jared Diamond, Bill Bryson and Malcolm Gladwell. (Dan Brown is top of the fiction list fortunately, or unfortunately, depending how you look at it.)

(Interesting, searching for Pirsig / best-seller I find the Wikipedia page is well linked with current Pirsig material, including my own.)

(This June 2005 page from the American Association of Booksellers also has ZMM in their best seller list – perrenial they say – though it’s under travel books !)

(And an interesting current reading list from Zug, a “comedy” site (!) includes Douglas Adams, Aldous Huxley and Scott Peck as well as both ZMM and Lila – dense with ideas they says – Comedy ?)

Starting a New Week

After a week away, I’m back in the UK, and heard BBC’s Start The Week for the first time in ages; Andrew Marr introducing Robert Fisk, Bjorn Lomborg, Simon Winchester and Clare Carolin. An excellent edition.

Ostensibly focussing on natural disasters like the current Pakistan earthquake, and the place of humans in the grip of nature, in fact Robert Fisk started on about his new book “The Great War for Civilisation”. Specific interest for me, apart from Fisk’s own insights including three interviews with Bin Laden, is his view of Balfour and Sykes-Picot and the history of Middle East conflict. Understanding background to the Balfour Agreement is the reason I’m reading Barbara Tuchman’s Bible and the Sword, and of course Sykes-Picot is a main thread in my obsession with hero T E Lawrence.

Much maligned Lomborg is focussing on priorities in the way we address global natural and economic issues, in obtaining “value” for our efforts, rather than diving headlong into a too negative reaction to “global warming”. 40,000 dead in one telegenic earthquake is just two days worth of curable, communicable diseases in East Asia, for example.

Winchester’s book “A Crack in the Edge of the World” concerns persistent human occupation of dangerous natural locations, and the long learning curve before peoples abandon untenable locations like New Orleans, Beirut and San Francisco, and on the contrary the pull of these locations whose beauty stems from being close to the edge. (Another angle is the religious / political response to handling natural disasters – blaming theistic wrath vs employing pragmatic management … Lisbon, Christians and Voltaire, Krakatoa and Moslems, San Francisco and Rationality included … interesting.)

Spookily I was flying over central Pakistan and Afghanistan local time Saturday morning. Anyway, lots of grist to the connectedness of values applied to both nature and culture. Which is the main contribution to the loss of 40,000 in Pakistan – the natural earthquake or the cheap construction of public schools – and how much of the latter is corrupt conspiracy or ignorant cock-up ? Twas ever thus.

BTW – Travel is Torture – etymology of travel, travail (hard work), trapalium (instrument of torture)
(Exhibitions bring the world to people, so they don’t have to travel the world.)