Saturday, August 20, 2011

The Science of Consciousness: Consciousness as a Phase Shift?

Ya okay...all these opinions....it still begs the question of "What makes you you?"

Cells are just the building blocks of our body, like the bricks of a house, but who is the architect, who coordinates the building of this house. When someone has died, only mortal remains are left: only matter. But where is the director of the body?What about our consciousness when we die? Is someone his body, or do we “have” a body? About the Continuity of Our Consciousness

Even though there is a logical explanation for any argument saying "death is death" it can run to the contrary unless consciousness is understood?

See:Science of Consciousness
An interview with David Chalmers discussing his theory of consciousness, the hard problem, and the explanatory gap.

So David offers the point of view of recognizing all the constraints of communication as being eliminated except for what results as the book, listed here from Amazon, is written from the perspective of a "blink of the eye."

What was the next step? But to recognize that consciousness may or could be communicated in some way beyond the blink of that eye? So we recognize a departure point needed for ways in which such communications may be attempted if all these means of expression had been removed. How could you communicate if someone was in a coma/ mentally expressive, is still consciously living and viable according to the measures given to the brain measure when activated but still having no way physical way with which to communicate?

Freedom Box

FreedomBox v Facebook - Eben Moglen from Nick B-T on Vimeo.

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Freedom Box Project

Inspired by Eben Moglen's vision of a small, cheap and simple computer that serves freedom in the home. We are building a Debian based platform for distributed applications.

Freedom Box is about:
privacy

control

ease of use

dehierarchicalization

Vision Statement
We live in a world where our use of the network is mediated by organizations that often do not have our best interests at heart. By building software that does not rely on a central service, we can regain control and privacy. By keeping our data in our homes, we gain useful legal protections over it. By giving back power to the users over their networks and machines, we are returning the Internet to its intended peer-to-peer architecture.

In order to bring about the new network order, it is paramount that it is easy to convert to it. The hardware it runs on must be cheap. The software it runs on must be easy to install and administrate by anybody. It must be easy to transition from existing services.
There are a number of projects working to realize a future of distributed services; we aim to bring them all together in a convenient package.
See: FreedomBox

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FreedomBox

TalksAndPresentations

Contents

Talks and presentations

Tuesday, August 16, 2011

Another Kind of Sideways

I wanted to expand on where the title,"Another Kind of Sideways." This blog posting came from an interview with Clifford of Asymptotia by PBS. He had a posting of his own entitled Multiverse Musings about a Nova series on PBS in the Fall related to Brian Greene's book, The Fabric of the Cosmos.

Where would these other universes be in relation to ours? Is there a way to envision it?
Well, we live in three spatial dimensions: We move back and forth, up and down, left to right. And then there's time, so that's our four-dimensional universe. Another universe might be essentially right next to ours by going in another direction that's not one of those four. We might call it "another kind of sideways." See: Riddles of the Multiverse

The whole context of the idea of the Multiverse could have in my layman view be classified as speaking about and argued as the basis of "existing outside of time." I just wanted to say that mathematically this definition of the Multiverse can actually exist in that framework, yet had to be extrapolated to the real universe we live in and how other universes may apply.

SOCRATES: But if he always possessed this knowledge he would always have known; or if he has acquired the knowledge he could not have acquired it in this life, unless he has been taught geometry; for he may be made to do the same with all geometry and every other branch of knowledge. Now, has any one ever taught him all this? You must know about him, if, as you say, he was born and bred in your house.SEE:Meno by Plato

I am always interested in the way a correlation is struck, from a scientist's mind when looking at the world and the comparisons they may find in the real world. I mean, to stand on top of a mountain as I did, you get this sense of the terrain, and how the landscape appears. How from an idealist position, a mathematical position is described and how the universe can be described?

LEE SMOLIN- Physicist, Perimeter Institute; Author, The Trouble With Physics

Thinking In Time Versus Thinking Outside Of Time

One very old and pervasive habit of thought is to imagine that the true answer to whatever question we are wondering about lies out there in some eternal domain of "timeless truths." The aim of re-search is then to "discover" the answer or solution in that already existing timeless domain. For example, physicists often speak as if the final theory of everything already exists in a vast timeless Platonic space of mathematical objects. This is thinking outside of time. See:A "scientific concept" may come from philosophy, logic, economics, jurisprudence, or other analytic enterprises, as long as it is a rigorous conceptual tool that may be summed up succinctly (or "in a phrase") but has broad application to understanding the world.

I find it hard sometimes to try and explain something that is "not outside of time." That such description of reality while confounding to those like me less able to understand the mathematical world of such truths that contrary to Lee Smolin's opinion such schematics can be found to exist "within each of us." How we build our world from the inside, and how we contain it.

Is the mathematical description of polytopes any less real as a mathematical basis?

If one is to believe that a mountain top represents some "perfect symmetry" then what said all those places in the valleys can exist and would not represent some genus figure? What are we saying about the possible universes, locations within the universe, and the creation of?

That a pencil standing on point, could fall one way or another, or a description of a false vacuum to a true could represent something leading away from such symmetry? Why the problem with such mathematical and schematize attributes? Would you as a scientist turn your back on such mathematical interpretations of the world?

Saturday, August 13, 2011

How Time Ages the Pyramids

Chanticleer - A Pleasure Garden

Believing that something must be true about the world because you can’t imagine otherwise is, five hundred years into the Age of Science, not a recommended strategy for acquiring reliable knowledge. It goes back to the classic conflict of rationalism vs. empiricism. “Rationalism” sounds good — who doesn’t want to be rational? But the idea behind it is that we can reach true conclusions about the world by reason alone. We don’t ever have to leave the comfort of our living room; we can just sit around, sharing some single-malt Scotch and fine cigars, thinking really hard about the universe, and thereby achieve some real understanding. Empiricism, on the other hand, says that we should try to imagine all possible ways the world should be, and then actually go out and look at it to decide which way it really is. Rationalism is traditionally associated with Descartes, Leibniz, and Spinoza, while empiricism is associated with Locke, Berkeley, and Hume — but of course these categories never quite fit perfectly well.SEE:What Can We Know About The World Without Looking At It?

I had been able to isolate Lee's Smolin's method of approach as to whether something can exist within, or, exists outside of time. Thoughts about Meno come to mind and Plato's Problem and Meno: How Accurately Portrayed?

The idea that truth is timeless and resides outside the universe was the essence of Plato's philosophy, exemplified in the parable of the slave boy that was meant to argue that discovery is merely remembering. Lee Smolin

Of course this article of yours Sean has lead to interesting thoughts. His talk with Memories Arise Out of a Equilibrium David Albert.....how does one logically proceed with inquiry. Why is the past so different, in so many ways, from the future? (12:20)

Sean Carroll

This raises all sorts of questions, the most basic of which are: “What counts as `looking’ vs. `not looking’?” and “Do we really need a separate law of physics to describe the evolution of systems that are being looked at?”

See:Quantum Diavlog

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When you are told that carrots have human rights because they share half our genes -- but not how gene percentages confer rights -- wizard. When someone announces that the nature-nurture debate has been settled because there is evidence that a given percentage of our political opinions are genetically inherited, but they don't explain how genes cause opinions, they've settled nothing. They are saying that our opinions are caused by wizards, and presumably so are their own. That the truth consists of hard to vary assertions about reality is the most important fact about the physical world David Deutsch: A new way to explain explanation

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Of course thanks to Lubos for link on Rationalism vs empiricism You can find his thoughts there and more information around his heading below.

The dispute between rationalism and empiricism concerns the extent to which we are dependent upon sense experience in our effort to gain knowledge. Rationalists claim that there are significant ways in which our concepts and knowledge are gained independently of sense experience. Empiricists claim that sense experience is the ultimate source of all our concepts and knowledge.

Rationalists generally develop their view in two ways. First, they argue that there are cases where the content of our concepts or knowledge outstrips the information that sense experience can provide. Second, they constuct accounts of how reason in some form or other provides that additional information about the world. Empiricists present complementary lines of thought. First, they develop accounts of how experience provides the information that rationalists cite, insofar as we have it in the first place. (Empiricists will at times opt for skepticism as an alternative to rationalism: if experience cannot provide the concepts or knowledge the rationalists cite, then we don't have them.) Second, empiricists attack the rationalists' accounts of how reason is a source of concepts or knowledge.See: Rationalism vs. Empiricism

The Pyramid(as an expression of Liberal Arts Encapsulated) is a combination of the Trivium , and the Quadrivium

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The Socratic Method.....and Plato's Ideas, is Replaced by Google?

Friday, August 12, 2011

David Deutsch: A new way to explain explanation

When you are told that carrots have human rights because they share half our genes -- but not how gene percentages confer rights -- wizard. When someone announces that the nature-nurture debate has been settled because there is evidence that a given percentage of our political opinions are genetically inherited, but they don't explain how genes cause opinions, they've settled nothing. They are saying that our opinions are caused by wizards, and presumably so are their own. That the truth consists of hard to vary assertions about reality is the most important fact about the physical world. It's a fact that is, itself,

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See Also:

Apart from universes - David Deutsch from Philosophy of Physics on Vimeo.

Thursday, August 11, 2011

The Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer Experiment )02

Credit: NASA/JSC, NASA

During the 14-day mission, Endeavour delivered the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS) and spare parts including two S-band communications antennas, a high-pressure gas tank and additional spare parts for Dextre. This was the 36th shuttle mission to the International Space Station. STS-134 Mission Information

See:

HOW LONG – THE STORY OF AMS-02
July 31st, 2011
In this video 16 years of preparation of AMS-02 become few blinks. The construction of AMS-02 is the result of a worldwide effort undertaken by scientists from 16 different countries who now started analyzing the wealth of data downlinked from the ISS, looking for new, unexpected phenomena.

For me, following the story "on land" by our own innovators to understanding the energy valuations outputs and the many tree designs as Feynman pathways of particulate expressions has been very interesting. The pathways are designated motivation-ally and expressively, to see and reveal the level of experimental verification needed in looking at the results for confirm hypothesis and theoretical expectations. Proposals on what we might find. In AMS case and in Fermi, we are counting these motivations from not only our sun , but from deep space as well.

See: BaBar: evidence for a charged Higgs boson

So in a sense should one also collaborate with what one can evaluate out in space with what one is evaluating on the ground with regard to Babar and LHC?

Any thoughts or opinions on that?

Sunday, August 07, 2011

Subcarrier-Index Modulation OFDM

Do you know that we have 1.4 million cellular radio masts deployed worldwide? And these are base stations. And we also have more than five billion of these devices here. These are cellular mobile phones. And with these mobile phones, we transmit more than 600 terabytes of data every month. This is a 6 with 14 zeroes -- a very large number. And wireless communications has become a utility like electricity and water. We use it everyday. We use it in our everyday lives now -- in our private lives, in our business lives. And we even have to be asked sometimes, very kindly, to switch off the mobile phone at events like this for good reasons. And it's this importance why I decided to look into the issues that this technology has, because it's so fundamental to our lives.

Subcarrier-Index Modulation OFDM

Abstract—A new transmission approach, referred to as subcarrier-index modulation (SIM) is proposed to be integrated with the orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) systems. More specifically, it relates to adding an additional dimension to the conventional two-dimensional (2-D) amplitude/phase modulation (APM) techniques, i.e. amplitude shift keying (ASK) and quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM). The key idea of SIM is to employ the subcarrier-index to convey information to the receiver. Furthermore, a closed-form analytical bit error ratio (BER) of SIM OFDM in Rayleigh channel is derived. Analytical and simulation results show error probability performance gain of 4 dB over 4-QAM OFDM systems for both coded and uncoded data without power saving policy. Alternatively, power saving policy retains an average gain of 1 dB while using 3 dB less transmit power per OFDM symbol. See: Subcarrier-Index Modulation OFDMRami Abu-alhiga and Harald Haas