Communal Intelligence: A Talk By Seth Lloyd

By Dmitry Rozhkov - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, Link

We haven't talked about the socialization of intelligence very much. We talked a lot about intelligence as being individual human things, yet the thing that distinguishes humans from other animals is our possession of human language, which allows us both to think and communicate in ways that other animals don’t appear to be able to. This gives us a cooperative power as a global organism, which is causing lots of trouble. If I were another species, I’d be pretty damn pissed off right now. What makes human beings effective is not their individual intelligences, though there are many very intelligent people in this room, but their communal intelligence.See: Communal Intelligence

"To arrive at the edge of the world's knowledge, seek out the most complex and sophisticated minds, put them in a room together, and have them ask each other the questions they are asking themselves."See: Edge Cast

Also See: The Edge.org

Embodied Cognition and iCub

An iCub robot mounted on a supporting frame. The robot is 104 cm high and weighs around 22 kg

An iCub is a 1 metre high humanoid robot testbed for research into human cognition and artificial intelligence.

Systems that perceive, understand and act

It was designed by the RobotCub Consortium, of several European universities and is now supported by other projects such as ITALK.^[1] The robot is open-source, with the hardware design, software and documentation all released under the GPL license. The name is a partial acronym, cub standing for Cognitive Universal Body.^[2] Initial funding for the project was €8.5 million from Unit E5 – Cognitive Systems and Robotics – of the European Commission's Seventh Framework Programme, and this ran for six years from 1 September 2004 until 1 September 2010.^[2]

The motivation behind the strongly humanoid design is the embodied cognition hypothesis, that human-like manipulation plays a vital role in the development of human cognition. A baby learns many cognitive skills by interacting with its environment and other humans using its limbs and senses, and consequently its internal model of the world is largely determined by the form of the human body. The robot was designed to test this hypothesis by allowing cognitive learning scenarios to be acted out by an accurate reproduction of the perceptual system and articulation of a small child so that it could interact with the world in the same way that such a child does.^[3]

 See Also: RoboCub

In philosophy, the embodied mind thesis holds that the nature of the human mind is largely determined by the form of the human body. Philosophers, psychologists, cognitive scientists and artificial intelligence researchers who study embodied cognition and the embodied mind argue that all aspects of cognition are shaped by aspects of the body. The aspects of cognition include high level mental constructs (such as concepts and categories) and human performance on various cognitive tasks (such as reasoning or judgement). The aspects of the body include the motor system, the perceptual system, the body's interactions with the environment (situatedness) and the ontological assumptions about the world that are built into the body and the brain.

The embodied mind thesis is opposed to other theories of cognition such as cognitivism, computationalism and Cartesian dualism.^[1] The idea has roots in Kant and 20th century continental philosophy (such as Merleau-Ponty). The modern version depends on insights drawn from recent research in psychology, linguistics, cognitive science, artificial intelligence, robotics and neurobiology.

Embodied cognition is a topic of research in social and cognitive psychology, covering issues such as social interaction and decision-making.^[2] Embodied cognition reflects the argument that the motor system influences our cognition, just as the mind influences bodily actions. For example, when participants hold a pencil in their teeth engaging the muscles of a smile, they comprehend pleasant sentences faster than unpleasant ones.^[3] And it works in reverse: holding a pencil in their teeth to engage the muscles of a frown increases the time it takes to comprehend pleasant sentences.^[3]

George Lakoff (a cognitive scientist and linguist) and his collaborators (including Mark Johnson, Mark Turner, and Rafael E. Núñez) have written a series of books promoting and expanding the thesis based on discoveries in cognitive science, such as conceptual metaphor and image schema.^[4]

Robotics researchers such as Rodney Brooks, Hans Moravec and Rolf Pfeifer have argued that true artificial intelligence can only be achieved by machines that have sensory and motor skills and are connected to the world through a body.^[5] The insights of these robotics researchers have in turn inspired philosophers like Andy Clark and Horst Hendriks-Jansen.^[6]

Neuroscientists Gerald Edelman, António Damásio and others have outlined the connection between the body, individual structures in the brain and aspects of the mind such as consciousness, emotion, self-awareness and will.^[7] Biology has also inspired Gregory Bateson, Humberto Maturana, Francisco Varela, Eleanor Rosch and Evan Thompson to develop a closely related version of the idea, which they call enactivism.^[8] The motor theory of speech perception proposed by Alvin Liberman and colleagues at the Haskins Laboratories argues that the identification of words is embodied in perception of the bodily movements by which spoken words are made.^{[9][10][11][12][13]}

The mind-body problem is a philosophical problem arising in the fields of metaphysics and philosophy of mind.^[2] The problem arises because mental phenomena arguably differ, qualitatively or substantially, from the physical body on which they apparently depend. There are a few major theories on the resolution of the problem. Dualism is the theory that the mind and body are two distinct substances,^[2] and monism is the theory that they are, in reality, just one substance. Monist materialists (also called physicalists) take the view that they are both matter, and monist idealists take the view that they are both in the mind. Neutral monists take the view that both are reducible to a third, neutral substance.

The problem was identified by René Descartes in the sense known by the modern Western world, although the issue was also addressed by pre-Aristotelian philosophers,^[3] in Avicennian philosophy,^[4] and in earlier Asian traditions.

A dualist view of reality may lead one to consider the corporeal as little valued^[3] and trivial. The rejection of the mind–body dichotomy is found in French Structuralism, and is a position that generally characterized post-war French philosophy.^[5] The absence of an empirically identifiable meeting point between the non-physical mind and its physical extension has proven problematic to dualism and many modern philosophers of mind maintain that the mind is not something separate from the body.^[6] These approaches have been particularly influential in the sciences, particularly in the fields of sociobiology, computer science, evolutionary psychology and the various neurosciences.^{[7][8][9][10]}

WHAT IS YOUR FAVORITE DEEP, ELEGANT, OR BEAUTIFUL EXPLANATION?

Scientists' greatest pleasure comes from theories that derive the solution to some deep puzzle from a small set of simple principles in a surprising way. These explanations are called "beautiful" or "elegant". Historical examples are Kepler's explanation of complex planetary motions as simple ellipses, Bohr's explanation of the periodic table of the elements in terms of electron shells, and Watson and Crick's double helix. Einstein famously said that he did not need experimental confirmation of his general theory of relativity because it "was so beautiful it had to be true." See:2012 : WHAT IS YOUR FAVORITE DEEP, ELEGANT, OR BEAUTIFUL EXPLANATION?

See which comments resonate with you. Some of my picks as I go through was by :

Raphael Bousso
Professor of Theoretical Physics, Berkeley

My Favorite Annoying Elegant Explanation: Quantum Theory .......General Relativity, in turn, is only a classical theory. It rests on a demonstrably false premise: that position and momentum can be known simultaneously. This may a good approximation for apples, planets, and galaxies: large objects, for which gravitational interactions tend to be much more important than for the tiny particles of the quantum world. But as a matter of principle, the theory is wrong. The seed is there. General Relativity cannot be the final word; it can only be an approximation to a more general Quantum Theory of Gravity.

But what about Quantum Mechanics itself? Where is its seed of destruction? Amazingly, it is not obvious that there is one. The very name of the great quest of theoretical physics—"quantizing General Relativity"—betrays an expectation that quantum theory will remain untouched by the unification we seek. String theory—in my view, by far the most successful, if incomplete, result of this quest—is strictly quantum mechanical, with no modifications whatsoever to the framework that was completed by Heisenberg, Schrödinger, and Dirac. In fact, the mathematical rigidity of Quantum Mechanics makes it difficult to conceive of any modifications, whether or not they are called for by observation.

Yet, there are subtle hints that Quantum Mechanics, too, will suffer the fate of its predecessors. The most intriguing, in my mind, is the role of time. In Quantum Mechanics, time is an essential evolution parameter. But in General Relativity, time is just one aspect of spacetime, a concept that we know breaks down at singularities deep inside black holes. Where time no longer makes sense, it is hard to see how Quantum Mechanics could still reign. As Quantum Mechanics surely spells trouble for General Relativity, the existence of singularities suggests that General Relativity may also spell trouble for Quantum Mechanics. It will be fascinating to watch this battle play out.

Martin Rees 

President, The Royal Society; Professor of Cosmology & Astrophysics; Master, Trinity...

Physical Reality Could Be Hugely More Extensive Than the Patch of Space and Time Traditionally Called 'The Universe' .....As an analogy (which I owe to Paul Davies) consider the form of snowflakes. Their ubiquitous six-fold symmetry is a direct consequence of the properties and shape of water molecules. But snowflakes display an immense variety of patterns because each is molded by its distinctive history and micro-environment: how each flake grows is sensitive to the fortuitous temperature and humidity changes during its growth.

If physicists achieved a fundamental theory, it would tell us which aspects of nature were direct consequences of the bedrock theory (just as the symmetrical template of snowflakes is due to the basic structure of a water molecule) and which cosmic numbers are (like the distinctive pattern of a particular snowflake) the outcome of environmental contingencies. .

Antony Garrett Lisi 

Theoretical physicist

An Explanation of Fundamental Particle Physics That Doesn't Exist Yet.....What is tetrahedral symmetry doing in the masses of neutrinos?! Nobody knows. But you can bet there will be a good explanation. It is likely that this explanation will come from mathematicians and physicists working closely with Lie groups. The most important lesson from the great success of Einstein's theory of General Relativity is that our universe is fundamentally geometric, and this idea has extended to the geometric description of known forces and particles using group theory. It seems natural that a complete explanation of the Standard Model, including why there are three generations of fermions and why they have the masses they do, will come from the geometry of group theory. This explanation does not yet exist, but when it does it will be deep, elegant, and beautiful—and it will be my favorite.

Shing-tung Yau 

Mathematician, Harvard; Co-author, The Shape of Inner Space

A Sphere....Most scientific facts are based on things that we cannot see with the naked eye or hear by our ears or feel by our hands. Many of them are described and guided by mathematical theory. In the end, it becomes difficult to distinguish a mathematical object from objects in nature.

One example is the concept of a sphere. Is the sphere part of nature or it is a mathematical artifact? That is difficult for a mathematician to say. Perhaps the abstract mathematical concept is actually a part of nature. And it is not surprising that this abstract concept actually describes nature quite accurately.

Steve Giddings

theoretical physicist; Professor, Department of Physics, University of California,...

 Gravity Is Curvature Of Spacetime … Or Is It?......We do not yet know the full shape of the quantum theory providing a complete accounting for gravity. We do have many clues, from studying the early quantum phase of cosmology, and ultrahigh energy collisions that produce black holes and their subsequent disintegrations into more elementary particles. We have hints that the theory draws on powerful principles of quantum information theory. And, we expect that in the end it has a simple beauty, mirroring the explanation of gravity-as-curvature, from an even more profound depth.

Paul Steinhardt

Albert Einstein Professor in Science, Departments of Physics and Astrophysical...

Quasi-elegance....As a young student first reading Weyl's book, crystallography seemed like the "ideal" of what one should be aiming for in science: elegant mathematics that provides a complete understanding of all physical possibilities. Ironically, many years later, I played a role in showing that my "ideal" was seriously flawed. In 1984, Dan Shechtman, Ilan Blech, Denis Gratias and John Cahn reported the discovery of a puzzling manmade alloy of aluminumand manganese with icosahedral symmetry. Icosahedral symmetry, with its six five-fold symmetry axes, is the most famous forbidden crystal symmetry. As luck would have it, Dov Levine (Technion) and I had been developing a hypothetical idea of a new form of solid that we dubbed quasicrystals, short for quasiperiodic crystals. (A quasiperiodic atomic arrangement means the atomic positions can be described by a sum of oscillatory functions whose frequencies have an irrational ratio.) We were inspired by a two-dimensional tiling invented by Sir Roger Penrose known as the Penrose tiling, comprised of two tiles arranged in a five-fold symmetric pattern. We showed that quasicrystals could exist in three dimensions and were not subject to the rules of crystallography. In fact, they could have any of the symmetries forbidden to crystals. Furthermore, we showed that the diffraction patterns predicted for icosahedral quasicrystals matched the Shechtman et al. observations. Since 1984, quasicrystals with other forbidden symmetries have been synthesized in the laboratory. The 2011 Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to Dan Shechtman for his experimental breakthrough that changed our thinking about possible forms of matter. More recently, colleagues and I have found evidence that quasicrystals may have been among the first minerals to have formed in the solar system.

The crystallography I first encountered in Weyl's book, thought to be complete and immutable, turned out to be woefully incomplete, missing literally an uncountable number of possible symmetries for matter. Perhaps there is a lesson to be learned: While elegance and simplicity are often useful criteria for judging theories, they can sometimes mislead us into thinking we are right, when we are actually infinitely wrong.

Lisa Randall

Physicist, Harvard University; Author, Warped Passages; Knocking On Heaven's Door

The Higgs Mechanism......Fortunately that time has now come for the Higgs mechanism, or at least the simplest implementation which involves a particle called the Higgs boson. The Large Hadron Collider at CERN near Geneva should have a definitive result on whether this particle exists within this coming year. The Higgs boson is one possible (and many think the most likely) consequence of the Higgs mechanism. Evidence last December pointed to a possible discovery, though more data is needed to know for sure. If confirmed, it will demonstrate that the Higgs mechanism is correct and furthermore tell us what is the underlying structure responsible for spontaneous symmetry breaking and spreading "charge" throughout the vacuum. The Higgs boson would furthermore be a new type of particle (a fundamental boson for those versed in physics terminology) and would be in some sense a new type of force. Admittedly, this is all pretty subtle and esoteric. Yet I (and much of the theoretical physics community) find it beautiful, deep, and elegant.

Symmetry is great. But so is symmetry breaking. Over the years many aspects of particle physics were first considered ugly and then considered elegant. Subjectivity in science goes beyond communities to individual scientists. And even those scientists change their minds over time. That's why experiments are critical. As difficult as they are, results are much easier to pin down than the nature of beauty. A discovery of the Higgs boson will tell us how that is done when particles acquire their masses.

Seth Lloyd

Professor of Quantum Mechanical Engineering, MIT; Author, Programming the Universe

 The True Rotational Symmetry of Space.....Although this excercise might seem no more than some fancy and painful basketball move, the fact that the true symmetry of space is rotation not once but twice has profound consequences for the nature of the physical world at its most microscopic level. It implies that 'balls' such as electrons, attached to a distant point by a flexible and deformable 'strings,' such as magnetic field lines, must be rotated around twice to return to their original configuration. Digging deeper, the two-fold rotational nature of spherical symmetry implies that two electrons, both spinning in the same direction, cannot be placed in the same place at the same time. This exclusion principle in turn underlies the stability of matter. If the true symmetry of space were rotating around only once, then all the atoms of your body would collapse into nothingness in a tiny fraction of a second. Fortunately, however, the true symmetry of space consists of rotating around twice, and your atoms are stable, a fact that should console you as you ice your shoulder.

Remember even though I pick some of these explanations does not mean I discount all others. It's just that some are picked for what they are saying in highlighted quotations. Lisi's statement on string theory is of course in my opinion far from the truth, yet,  he captures a geometrical truth that I feel exists.:) You sort of get the jest of where I am coming from in the summation of Paul Steinhardt

Quantum suicide and immortality

But for the first time, quantum physicist Seth Lloyd of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology suggests that memories of entanglement can survive its destruction. He compares the effect to Emily Brontë’s novel Wuthering Heights: “the spectral Catherine communicates with her quantum Heathcliff as a flash of light from beyond the grave.”Where Susskind leaves off, Seth Lloyd begins

In Max' Tegmark's assessment of Quantum Immortality, "Although quantum immortality is motivated by the quantum suicide thought experiment, Max Tegmark has stated that he does not believe that quantum immortality is a consequence of his work,"I thought to trace some perspective about what happened with the thought experiment of Susskind's versus the telling tale of what happens inside the blackhole based on the idea of something that is left outside the blackhole for consideration.

***

The consequence of sound in analogy serves to help us not only orientate causal action from direct contact, but the realization that such contact has consequences. It is befitting such thought experiments or analogies can help push the mind toward accepting the world in a different light so it understands that there is more to the world in which we see as observers, but also of what we meet through such contact as a manifestation through experiences.

Savas Dimopoulos

Here’s an analogy to understand this: imagine that our universe is a two-dimensional pool table, which you look down on from the third spatial dimension. When the billiard balls collide on the table, they scatter into new trajectories across the surface. But we also hear the click of sound as they impact: that’s collision energy being radiated into a third dimension above and beyond the surface. In this picture, the billiard balls are like protons and neutrons, and the sound wave behaves like the graviton.See Also: The Sound Of Billiard Balls

***

How Quantum Suicide Works

by Josh Clark

***

In quantum mechanics, quantum suicide is a thought experiment. It was originally published independently by Hans Moravec in 1987 and Bruno Marchal in 1988 and was further developed by Max Tegmark in 1998.^[1] It attempts to distinguish between the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics and the Everett many-worlds interpretation by means of a variation of the Schrödinger's cat thought experiment. The experiment involves looking at the Schrödinger's cat experiment from the point of view of the cat.

Quantum immortality is a metaphysical speculation derived from the quantum suicide thought experiment. It states that the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics implies that conscious beings are immortal.^[2] Hugh Everett is reported to have believed in quantum immortality, although he never published on either quantum suicide or quantum immortality.^[3]

Contents 1 The quantum suicide thought experiment 2 Quantum immortality 3 Surviving the quantum thought experiment 4 Required assumptions 5 Arguments against quantum immortality 5.1 Max Tegmark's work 5.2 David Lewis's work 5.3 Derek Parfit's work 6 Other criticism and controversy 7 In fiction 8 See also 9 References 10 External links

The quantum suicide thought experiment

Unlike Schrödinger's cat-in-a-box thought experiment which used poison gas and a radioactive decay trigger, this human version involves some sort of lethal weapon and a machine which measures the spin value of a photon. Every 10 seconds, the spin value of a randomly passing photon is measured. Depending on the orientation of the spin, either the weapon is deployed and the man is killed, or it is not and he lives.

With each run of the experiment there is a 50-50 chance that the weapon will be triggered and the experimenter will die. According to the Copenhagen interpretation, the weapon will (in all likelihood) eventually be triggered and the experimenter will die. If the many-worlds interpretation is correct then at each run of the experiment, the experimenter will be split into several worlds in which he dies and a few worlds in which he survives. In the worlds where the experimenter dies, he will cease to be a conscious entity.

However, from the point of view of the non-dead copies of the experimenter, the experiment will continue running without his ceasing to exist, because at each branch, he will only be able to observe the result in the world in which he survives, and if many-worlds is correct, the surviving copies of the experimenter will notice that he never seems to die, therefore "proving" himself to be invulnerable to the killing mechanism in question, from his own point of view.

If the many-worlds interpretation is true, the measure (given in the many-worlds interpretation by the squared norm of the wavefunction) of the surviving copies of the experimenter will decrease by 50% with each run of the experiment, but will remain non-zero. So, if the surviving copies become experimenters, those copies will either die during their first attempt, or survive creating duplicates of themselves (copies of copies, that will survive finitely or die).

 Quantum immortality

The idea behind quantum immortality is that, in running the quantum thought experiment, the experimenter may remain alive and, thus, be able to experience at least one of the universes in this set (even though these universes form a tiny subset of all possible universes). Over time, the experimenter would therefore never perceive his or her own death.

Surviving the quantum thought experiment

The small-probability remaining branches are in effect, though unlikely to be experienced by most of the copies of the experimenter that started out. Most of the observer-moments in the universe will not be in such low-measure situations because measure is proportional to the number of copies and therefore the number of that type of observer-moment.

However, the rareness of an observer moment has no relation to presence or absence of experience; if the many-worlds interpretation is true, all non-zero observer moments are experienced, even rare ones. Believers in quantum suicide think it gives a recipe for entering into rare observer moments. The experimenter indeed knows that this type of observer moment is rare, which is why it would be unlikely to occur in interpretations of quantum physics that don't have many worlds.

In the branching worlds, the observer has one of two possibilities, live or die. If he is alive, then presumably he does not recall the death. In the other reality, he is dead (and ceases to exist in that reality). If the experiment is repeated over and over, there will always be a reality where the observer never dies. This reality will finally convince the observer that it is impossible to die.

Required assumptions

Proponents of the quantum immortality point out that, although it is highly speculative, the theory does not violate any known laws of physics—but only if certain controversial assumptions are made:

1. That the many-worlds interpretation is the correct interpretation of quantum mechanics, as opposed to the Copenhagen interpretation, the latter of which does not involve the existence of parallel universes. Note, though, that parallel universes may be possible through other mechanisms in the Copenhagen interpretation.
2. Not dying some finite number of times (perhaps in parallel universes) constitutes immortality.
3. Permanent cessation of the consciousness, along with the ability to observe, occurs at physical destruction (death).

Arguments against quantum immortality

David Papineau argues against the quantum suicide argument thus: "If one outcome is valuable because it contains my future experiences, surely an alternative outcome which lacks those experiences is of lesser value, simply by comparison with the first outcome. Since expected utility calculations hinge on relative utility values rather than absolute ones, I should be concerned about death as long as the outcome where I die is given less utility than the one where I survive, whatever the absolute value."^[4]

Jacques Mallah expands on this "utility" argument,^[5] suggesting that quantum suicide cannot give a recipe for "entering into" rare or "low measure" observer moments. This is because the amount of consciousness or "measure" of these rare observer moments is exactly as much as it would have been without the quantum suicide; in that case quantum suicide merely removes the other observer-moments. This is equivalent, in Mallah's view, to a single-world situation in which one starts off with many copies of the experimenter, and the number of surviving copies is decreased by 50% with each run. Therefore, according to this argument, the quantum nature of the experiment provides no benefit to the experimenter; in terms of his/her subjective life expectancy or rational decision making, or even in terms of his/her trying to decide whether the many-worlds interpretation is correct, the many-worlds interpretation gives results that are the same as that of a single-world interpretation.^[5]
Mallah also gives a "general argument against immortality" which argues that if people are immortal, then it is vanishingly unlikely to find oneself to be of a normal age rather than abnormally old.

It has been countered that in a many-worlds interpretation, the amplitude of being the living experimenter can be halved repeatedly without ever reaching zero. However, this point is not disputed by opponents of quantum suicide; rather, they claim that it is not the issue, while Mallah claims that the decrease in measure is the issue.

Max Tegmark's work

Using logic similar to that of Greg Egan's Dust Theory, Max Tegmark argues that under any sort of normal conditions, before someone dies they undergo a period of diminishment of consciousness, a non-quantum decline (which can be anywhere from seconds to minutes to years), and hence there is no way of establishing a continuous existence in this world to an alternate one in which the person ceases to exist.^[6] Although quantum immortality is motivated by the quantum suicide thought experiment, Max Tegmark has stated that he does not believe that quantum immortality is a consequence of his work^.

David Lewis's work

The philosopher David Lewis, in "How Many Lives Has Schrödinger's Cat?", remarked that in the vast majority of the worlds in which an immortal observer might find himself (i.e. the subset of quantum-possible worlds in which the observer does not die), he will survive, but will be terribly maimed. This is because in each of the scenarios typically given in thought experiments (nuclear bombing, Russian roulette, etc.), for every world in which the observer survives unscathed, there are likely to be far more worlds in which the observer survives terribly disfigured, badly disabled, and so on. It is for this reason, Lewis concludes, that we ought to hope that the many-worlds interpretation is false.^[7]

Derek Parfit's work

In Reasons and Persons Derek Parfit used thought experiments ranging from teleportation to gradual changes to your psychology to argue that personal identity isn't a deep fact about the world. After quantum suicide there would be worlds with persons that shared your memories and there would be worlds without such persons. There is no Cartesian ego which does or doesn't survive.

Other criticism and controversy

Critics^[who?] contend quantum suicide fails as a thought experiment to achieve its intended purpose. Nonetheless, there are arguments^[specify] involving anthropic considerations among entire universes which do provide evidence^[specify] for the many-worlds interpretation.^[8]
Quantum suicide and quantum immortality remain controversial because a number of thinkers^[who?] disagree on its success or failure and, particularly, its relevance to life expectancy and decision making.

In fiction

Main article: Quantum suicide and quantum immortality in fiction

Authors^[who?] of science fiction have used themes involving both quantum suicide and quantum immortality. The idea that authors exploit is that a person who dies in one world may survive in another world or parallel universe.

Quantum suicide

Quantum suicide themes have been explored in the following works:

• Larry Niven's short story "All the Myriad Ways", collected in a collection of the same name (1971)
• Dan Simmons's novel The Hollow Man (1992). Simmons also describes a quantum execution mechanism in his Hyperion Cantos series.
• Greg Egan's novel Quarantine (1992)
• Greg Egan's novel Permutation City (1994), in which one character repeatedly had his mind uploaded and his copy eventually terminated, but found out that he always "ended up" in another world, where his survival was explained by increasingly improbable circumstances.
• Robert Charles Wilson's short story Divided by Infinity (1998)
• Denis Johnson's novel Already Dead (A California Gothic) (1998)
• Jason Shiga's book Meanwhile (2004)
• Greg Bear's short Story "Schrodinger's Plague" found in his book Tangents deals with a doomsday version of this experiment in which instead of a single scientist dying, a deadly virus is released into the populace.

Quantum immortality

Quantum immortality themes have been explored in several works:

Books

• The Greg Egan novel Quarantine explores topics related to quantum immortality.
• In the Greg Egan short story The Infinite Assassin, the title character explicitly defines himself this way: "'I' am those who survive, and succeed. The rest are someone else."
• Other science fiction stories exploring these and related ideas include All the Myriad Ways by Larry Niven, and Divided by Infinity by Robert Charles Wilson.
• Terry Pratchett's short story Death and What Comes Next has a philosopher arguing the principle with Death, who has come for him.
• Steven Hall's novel The Raw Shark Texts contains references to Max Tegmark and the Quantum Machine Gun (an alternate name for the quantum suicide thought experiment) suggesting a possible quantum immortality -related reading of the story.
• In Neal Stephenson's 2008 novel Anathem, the concept of quantum immortality factors significantly, if under different names.

See also

• Final anthropic principle
• Multiverse
• Quantum mind
• Quantum mysticism

References

1. ^ Tegmark, Max The Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics: Many Worlds or Many Words?, 1998
2. ^ Goertzel, Ben; Bugaj, Stephan Vladimir (2006). The path to posthumanity: 21st century technology and its radical implications for mind, society and reality. Academica Press, LLC. p. 343. 
3. ^ See Keith Lynch's recollections in Eugene Shikhovtsev's Biography of Everett [1]
4. ^ Papineau, David "Why you don’t want to get in the box with Schrödinger's cat" Analysis 63: 51–58. 2003
5. ^ ^{a b} Mallah, Jacques Many-Worlds Interpretations Can Not Imply 'Quantum Immortality', 2009
6. ^ Tegmark, Max Quantum immortality, November 1998
7. ^ David Lewis. How Many Lives Has Schrödinger's Cat? The Jack Smart Lecture, Canberra, 27 June 2001. Australasian Journal of Philosophy. Vol. 82, No. 1, pp. 3–22; March 2004, pp. 21.
8. ^ Observational Consequences of Many-Worlds Quantum Theory, 1999.

External links

• "Does the 'many-worlds' interpretation of quantum mechanics imply immortality?" by James Higgo
• The 'Everything' mailing list (and archives), A "discussion of the idea that all possible universes exist".
• How Quantum Suicide Works
• Dying to know

Where Susskind leaves off, Seth Lloyd begins

A picture, a photograph, or a painting is not the real world that it depicts. It's flat, not full with three dimensional depth like the real thing. Look at it from the side-almost edge on. It doesn't look anything like the real scene view from a angle. In short it's two dimensional while the world is three dimensional. The artist, using perceptual sleight of hand, has conned you into producing a three dimensional image in your brain, but in fact the information just isn't there to form a three dimensional model of the scene. There is no way to tell if that figure is a distant giant or a close midget There is no way to tell if the figure is made of plaster or if it's filled with blood or guts. The brain is providing information that is not really present in the painted strokes on the canvas or the darken grains of silver on the photographic surface. The Cosmic Landscape by Leonard Susskind, page 337 and 338

 

See:The elephant and the event horizon 26 October 2006 by Amanda Gefter at New Scientist.

So while we design our methods of picturing how the universe looks, it is by design of the experimental procedures that we have pushed perspective toward the "depth of imaging"  that we design our views of what we propose is happening . So this then is a method based on the Gedankin that allows "an alternate view of the reality" of  what is happening inside the blackhole that was "thought of"  before we master  putting the perspective of what actually happens outside.

Gedanken Experiments Involving Black Holes

ABSTRACT

Analysis of several gedanken experiments indicates that black hole complementarity cannot be ruled out on the basis of known physical principles. Experiments designed by outside observers to disprove the existence of a quantum-mechanical stretched horizon require knowledge of Planck-scale effects for their analysis. Observers who fall through the event horizon after sampling the Hawking radiation cannot discover duplicate information inside the black hole before hitting the singularity. Experiments by outside observers to detect baryon number violation will yield significant effects well outside the stretched horizon.

 

***

 At 11:20 AM, September 13, 2009,  Bee said-The Schwarzschild radius depends on the mass, it thus doesn't define a fixed length. If one ties the Schwarzchild radius to the Compton wavelength via the uncertainty principle, one obtains a length and a mass, which is exactly the Planck length and Planck mass

While entertaining the issues put forward by "The Minimal Length in Quantum Gravity: An Outside View" some issues came to mind for pushing forward proposals that are current in science toward identification of how we can look at the inside of a blackhole with information postulated by illumination "outside."

Seth Lloyd is a professor of mechanical engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He refers to himself as a "quantum mechanic".

While one recognizes the relationship Susskind had pointed out by doing thought experiments in relation to what processes allow us to search "inside the blackhole" it is information that is "not lost"  that allows us to understand what is actually happening with time that moves within the blackhole's internal direction . This then is an "outside perspective" of what is held in contention to Planck's length that we might ask what the heck actually exist inside that we are all speculating about?

Quantum Entanglement Benefits Exist after Links Are Broken

By Charles Q. Choi

“Spooky action at a distance” is how Albert Einstein famously derided the concept of quantum entanglement—where objects can become linked and instantaneously influence one another regardless of distance. Now researchers suggest that this spooky action in a way might work even beyond the grave, with its effects felt after the link between objects is broken.

In experiments with quantum entanglement, which is an essential basis for quantum computing and cryptography, physicists rely on pairs of photons. Measuring one of an entangled pair immediately affects its counterpart, no matter how far apart they are theoretically. The current record distance is 144 kilometers, from La Palma to Tenerife in the Canary Islands.

In practice, entanglement is an extremely delicate condition. Background disturbances readily destroy the state—a bane for quantum computing in particular, because calculations are done only as long as the entanglement lasts. But for the first time, quantum physicist Seth Lloyd of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology suggests that memories of entanglement can survive its destruction. He compares the effect to Emily Brontë’s novel Wuthering Heights: “the spectral Catherine communicates with her quantum Heathcliff as a flash of light from beyond the grave.”

The insight came when Lloyd investigated what happened if entangled photons were used for illumination. One might suppose they could help take better pictures. For instance, flash photography shines light out and creates images from photons that are reflected back from the object to be imaged, but stray photons from other objects could get mistaken for the returning signals, fuzzing up snapshots. If the flash emitted entangled photons instead, it would presumably be easier to filter out noise signals by matching up returning photons to linked counterparts kept as references.

Still, given how fragile entanglement is, Lloyd did not expect quantum illumination to ever work. But “I was desperate,” he recalls, keen on winning funding from a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s sensor program for imaging in noisy environments. Surprisingly, when Lloyd calculated how well quantum illumination might perform, it apparently not only worked, but “to gain the full enhancement of quantum illumination, all entanglement must be destroyed,” he explains.

Lloyd admits this finding is baffling—and not just to him. Prem Kumar, a quantum physicist at Northwestern University, was skeptical of any benefits from quantum illumination until he saw Lloyd’s math. “Everyone’s trying to get their heads around this. It’s posing more questions than answers,” Kumar states. “If entanglement does not survive, but you can seem to accrue benefits from it, it may now be up to theorists to see if entanglement is playing a role in these advantages or if there is some other factor involved.”

As a possible explanation, Lloyd suggests that although entanglement between the photons might technically be completely lost, some hint of it may remain intact after a measurement. “You can think of photons as a mixture of states. While most of these states are no longer entangled, one or a few remain entangled, and it is this little bit in the mixture that is responsible for this effect,” he remarks.

If quantum illumination works, Lloyd suggests it could boost the sensitivity of radar and x-ray systems as well as optical telecommunications and microscopy by a millionfold or more. It could also lead to stealthier military scanners because they could work even when using weaker signals, making them easier to conceal from adversaries. Lloyd and his colleagues detailed a proposal for practical implementation of quantum illumination in a paper submitted in 2008 to Physical Review Letters building off theoretical work presented in the September 12 Science. See: more here

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Myths about the minimal length by Lubos Motl

Images of Super-Kamiokande events from tscan

The Navier-Stokes equations are also of great interest in a purely mathematical sense. Somewhat surprisingly, given their wide range of practical uses, mathematicians have yet to prove that in three dimensions solutions always exist (existence), or that if they do exist they do not contain any infinities, singularities or discontinuities (smoothness). These are called the Navier-Stokes existence and smoothness problems. The Clay Mathematics Institute has called this one of the seven most important open problems in mathematics, and offered a $1,000,000 prize for a solution or a counter-example.

SETH LLOYD — HOW FAST, HOW SMALL, AND HOW POWERFUL?: MOORE'S LAW AND THE ULTIMATE LAPTOP

His stunning conclusion?

"The amount of information that can be stored by the ultimate laptop, 10 to the 31st bits, is much higher than the 10 to the 10th bits stored on current laptops. This is because conventional laptops use many degrees of freedom to store a bit whereas the ultimate laptop uses just one. There are considerable advantages to using many degrees of freedom to store information, stability and controllability being perhaps the most important. Indeed, as the above calculation indicates, to take full advantage of the memory space available, the ultimate laptop must turn all its matter into energy. A typical state of the ultimate laptop's memory looks like a plasma at a billion degrees Kelvin — like a thermonuclear explosion or a little piece of the Big Bang! Clearly, packaging issues alone make it unlikely that this limit can be obtained, even setting aside the difficulties of stability and control."

Ask Lloyd why he is interested in building quantum computers and you will get a two part answer. The first, and obvious one, he says, is "because we can, and because it's a cool thing to do." The second concerns some interesting scientific implications. "First," he says, "there are implications in pure mathematics, which are really quite surprising, that is that you can use quantum mechanics to solve problems in pure math that are simply intractable on ordinary computers." The second scientific implication is a use for quantum computers was first suggested by Richard Feynman in 1982, that one quantum system could simulate another quantum system. Lloyd points out that "if you've ever tried to calculate Feynman diagrams and do quantum dynamics, simulating quantum systems is hard. It's hard for a good reason, which is that classical computers aren't good at simulating quantum systems."

Bold emphasis added by me.

The issue of computer language would have been to reveal the deeper implications of the cosmos, while we entertain the "phase changes the universe will go through." While we may think of the blackhole used as a weapon on April fools day, what use the Ipod in Mission Impossible III if it were to melt into a superfluid and bring forth all the ills of the past? It 's in the supefluid state that all of the information of the past makes it's way again into this universe, and supplies the dark energy for the current state of the Universe?

Plato said:

Hey I got one for you. You remember mission impossible. Well in this case, your only able to use the ipod once, then it turns into a super liquid.

While we consider newer technologies what use to "see the sun in a different way" now that we understand the range of "the window of the universe" now incorporates gamma ray detection, it forces upon us the end result of Tscan compiled data?

The Tip of the Pyramid and Quantum Gravity

Michio Kaku:

I like to compare it to wandering in the desert, and stumbling over a tiny pebble. When we push away the sand, we find that this "pebble" is actually the tip of a gargantuan pyramid. After years of excavation, we find wondrous hieroglyphics, strange tunnels and secret passageways. Every time we think we are at the bottom stage, we find a stage below it. Finally, we think we are at the very bottom, and can see the doorway.

One day, some bright, enterprising physicist, perhaps inspired by this article, will complete the theory, open the doorway, and use the power of pure thought to determine if string theory is a theory of everything, anything, or nothing.

Only time will tell if Einstein was correct when he said, "But the creative principle resides in mathematics. In a certain sense, therefore, I hold it true that pure thought can grasp reality, as the ancients dreamed."

Tscan

Tscan ("Trivial Scanner") is an event display, traditionally called a scanner, which I developed. It is a program that shows events graphically on the computer screen.

It was designed to be simple ("trivial") internally, and to have a simple user interface. A lot of importance was given to giving the user a large choice of options to display events in many different ways.

Tscan proved to be a very useful tool for the development of fitters. A particularly useful feature is the ability to show custom data for every photpmultiplier tube (PMT). Instead of the usual time and charge, it can show expected charge, scattered light, likelihood, chi-squared difference, patches, and any other data that can be prepared in a text format.

See:Trivial Scanner

Credit: Super-Kamiokande/Tomasz Barszczak Three (or more?) Cerenkov rings

Multiple rings of Cerenkov light brighten up this display of an event found in the Super-Kamiokande - neutrino detector in Japan. The pattern of rings - produced when electrically charged particles travel faster through the water in the detector than light does - is similar to the result if a proton had decayed into a positron and a neutral pion. The pion would decay immediately to two gamma-ray photons that would produce fuzzy rings, while the positron would shoot off in the opposite direction to produce a clearer ring. Such kinds of decay have been predicted by "grand unified theories" that link three of nature's fundamental forces - the strong, weak and electromagnetic forces. However, there is so far no evidence for such decays; this event, for example, did not stand up to closer scrutiny.

See:Picture of the Week