Saturday, May 05, 2012

Experimental philosophy

Experimental philosophy is an emerging field of philosophical inquiry[1][2][3][4][5] that makes use of empirical data—often gathered through surveys which probe the intuitions of ordinary people—in order to inform research on philosophical questions.[6][7] This use of empirical data is widely seen as opposed to a philosophical methodology that relies mainly on a priori justification, sometimes called "armchair" philosophy by experimental philosophers.[8][9][10] Experimental philosophy initially began by focusing on philosophical questions related to intentional action, the putative conflict between free will and determinism, and causal vs. descriptive theories of linguistic reference.[11] However, experimental philosophy has continued to expand to new areas of research.

Disagreement about what experimental philosophy can accomplish is widespread. One claim is that the empirical data gathered by experimental philosophers can have an indirect effect on philosophical questions by allowing for a better understanding of the underlying psychological processes which lead to philosophical intuitions.[12] Others claim that experimental philosophers are engaged in conceptual analysis, but taking advantage of the rigor of quantitative research to aid in that project.[13][14] Finally, some work in experimental philosophy can be seen as undercutting the traditional methods and presuppositions of analytic philosophy.[15] Several philosophers have offered criticisms of experimental philosophy.

Contents

 

 

History

 

Though in early modern philosophy, natural philosophy was sometimes referred to as "experimental philosophy",[16] the field associated with the current sense of the term dates its origins around 2000 when a small number of students experimented with the idea of fusing philosophy to the experimental rigor of psychology.
While the philosophical movement Experimental Philosophy began around 2000, the use of empirical methods in philosophy far predates the emergence of the recent academic field. Current experimental philosophers claim that the movement is actually a return to the methodology used by many ancient philosophers.[10][12] Further, other philosophers like David Hume, René Descartes and John Locke are often held up as early models of philosophers who appealed to empirical methodology.[5][16]

Areas of Research

 

Consciousness

 

The questions of what consciousness is, and what conditions are necessary for conscious thought have been the topic of a long-standing philosophical debate. Experimental philosophers have approached this question by trying to get a better grasp on how exactly people ordinarily understand consciousness. For instance, work by Joshua Knobe and Jesse Prinz (2008) suggests that people may have two different ways of understanding minds generally, and Justin Sytsma and Edouard Machery (2009) have written about the proper methodology for studying folk intuitions about consciousness. Bryce Huebner, Michael Bruno, and Hagop Sarkissian (2010)[17] have further argued that the way Westerners understand consciousness differs systematically from the way that East Asians understand consciousness, while Adam Arico (2010)[18] has offered some evidence for thinking that ordinary ascriptions of consciousness are sensitive to framing effects (such as the presence or absence of contextual information). Some of this work has been featured in the Online Consciousness Conference.

Other experimental philosophers have approached the topic of consciousness by trying to uncover the cognitive processes that guide everyday attributions of conscious states. Adam Arico, Brian Fiala, Rob Goldberg, and Shaun Nichols,[19] for instance, propose a cognitive model of mental state attribution (the AGENCY model), whereby an entity's displaying certain relatively simple features (e.g., eyes, distinctive motions, interactive behavior) triggers a disposition to attribute conscious states to that entity. Additionally, Bryce Huebner[20] has argued that ascriptions of mental states rely on two divergent strategies: one sensitive to considerations of an entity's behavior being goal-directed; the other sensitive to considerations of personhood.

Cultural diversity

 

Following the work of Richard Nisbett, which showed that there were differences in a wide range of cognitive tasks between Westerners and East Asians, Jonathan Weinberg, Shaun Nichols and Stephen Stich (2001) compared epistemic intuitions of Western college students and East Asian college students. The students were presented with a number of cases, including some Gettier cases, and asked to judge whether a person in the case really knew some fact or merely believed it. They found that the East Asian subjects were more likely to judge that the subjects really knew.[21] Later Edouard Machery, Ron Mallon, Nichols and Stich performed a similar experiment concerning intuitions about the reference of proper names, using cases from Saul Kripke's Naming and Necessity (1980). Again, they found significant cultural differences. Each group of authors argued that these cultural variances undermined the philosophical project of using intuitions to create theories of knowledge or reference.[22] However, subsequent studies were unable to replicate Weinberg et al.'s (2001) results for other Gettier cases, with cross-cultural difference appearing only when the Gettier case involved different models of American cars.[23]

Determinism and moral responsibility

 

One area of philosophical inquiry has been concerned with whether or not a person can be morally responsible if their actions are entirely determined, e.g., by the laws of Newtonian physics. One side of the debate, the proponents of which are called ‘incompatibilists,’ argue that there is no way for people to be morally responsible for immoral acts if they could not have done otherwise. The other side of the debate argues instead that people can be morally responsible for their immoral actions even when they could not have done otherwise. People who hold this view are often referred to as ‘compatibilists.’ It was generally claimed that non-philosophers were naturally incompatibilist,[24] that is they think that if you couldn’t have done anything else, then you are not morally responsible for your action. Experimental philosophers have addressed this question by presenting people with hypothetical situations in which it is clear that a person’s actions are completely determined. Then the person does something morally wrong, and people are asked if that person is morally responsible for what she or he did. Using this technique Nichols and Knobe (2007) found that "people's responses to questions about moral responsibility can vary dramatically depending on the way in which the question is formulated"[25] and argue that "people tend to have compatiblist intuitions when they think about the problem in a more concrete, emotional way but that they tend to have incompatiblist intuitions when they think about the problem in a more abstract, cognitive way".[26]

Epistemology

 

Recent work in experimental epistemology has tested the apparently empirical claims of various epistemological views. For example, research on epistemic contextualism has proceeded by conducting experiments in which ordinary people are presented with vignettes that involve a knowledge ascription.[27][28][29] Participants are then asked to report on the status of that knowledge ascription. The studies address contextualism by varying the context of the knowledge ascription (for example, how important it is that the agent in the vignette has accurate knowledge). Data gathered thus far show no support for what contextualism says about ordinary use of the term "knows".[27][28][29] Other work in experimental epistemology includes, among other things, the examination of moral valence on knowledge attributions (the so-called "epistemic side-effect effect")[30] and judgments about so-called "know-how" as opposed to propositional knowledge.[31]

Intentional action

 

A prominent topic in experimental philosophy is intentional action. Work by Joshua Knobe has especially been influential.[citation needed] "The Knobe Effect", as it is often called, concerns an asymmetry in our judgments of whether an agent intentionally performed an action. Knobe (2003a) asked people to suppose that the CEO of a corporation is presented with a proposal that would, as a side effect, affect the environment. In one version of the scenario, the effect on the environment will be negative (it will "harm" it), while in another version the effect on the environment will be positive (it will "help" it). In both cases, the CEO opts to pursue the policy and the effect does occur (the environment is harmed or helped by the policy). However, the CEO only adopts the program because he wants to raise profits; he does not care about the effect that the action will have on the environment. Although all features of the scenarios are held constant—except for whether the side effect on the environment will be positive or negative—a majority of people judge that the CEO intentionally hurt the environment in the one case, but did not intentionally help it in the other.[citation needed] Knobe ultimately argues that the effect is a reflection of a feature of the speakers' underlying concept of intentional action: broadly moral considerations affect whether we judge that an action is performed intentionally. However, his exact views have changed in response to further research.[citation needed]

Criticisms

 

Antti Kauppinen (2007) has argued that intuitions will not reflect the content of folk concepts unless they are intuitions of competent concept users who reflect in ideal circumstances and whose judgments reflect the semantics of their concepts rather than pragmatic considerations.[citation needed] Experimental philosophers are aware of these concerns,[32] and have in some cases explicitly argued against pragmatic explanations of the phenomena they study.[citation needed] In turn, Kauppinen has argued[citation needed] that any satisfactory way of ensuring his three conditions are met would involve dialogue with the subject that would be engaging in traditional philosophy.
Timothy Williamson (2008) has argued that we should not construe philosophical evidence as consisting of intuitions, and that such a conception rests on the "dialectical conception of evidence".[citation needed]

References and further reading

 

  • Bengson, J., Moffett, M., & Wright, J.C. (2009). "The Folk on Knowing How". Philosophical Studies, 142(3): 387-401. (link)
  • Buckwalter, W. (2010). "Knowledge Isn’t Closed on Saturday: A Study in Ordinary Language", Review of Philosophy and Psychology (formerly European Review of Philosophy), special issue on Psychology and Experimental Philosophy ed. by Edouard Machery, Tania Lombrozo, & Joshua Knobe, 1 (3):395-406. (link)
  • Feltz, A. & Zarpentine, C. (2010). "Do You Know More When It Matters Less?" Philosophical Psychology, 23 (5):683–706. (link)
  • Kauppinen, A. (2007). "The Rise and Fall of Experimental Philosophy", Philosophical Explorations 10 (2), pp. 95–118. (link)
  • Knobe, J. (2003a). "Intentional action and side effects in ordinary language", Analysis 63, pp. 190–193. (link)
  • Knobe, J. (2003b). "Intentional action in folk psychology: An experimental investigation", Philosophical Psychology 16, pp. 309–324. (link)
  • Knobe, J. (2004a). "Intention, Intentional Action and Moral Considerations", Analysis 64, pp. 181–187.
  • Knobe, J. (2004b). "What is Experimental Philosophy?" The Philosophers' Magazine, 28. (link)
  • Knobe, J. (2007). "Experimental Philosophy and Philosophical Significance", Philosophical Explorations, 10: 119-122. (link)
  • Joshua Michael Knobe; Shaun Nichols (2008). Experimental philosophy. Oxford University Press, USA. ISBN 978-0-19-532326-9.
  • Knobe, J. and Jesse Prinz. (2008). "Intuitions about Consciousness: Experimental Studies". Phenomenology and Cognitive Science.(link)
  • Kripke, S. (1980). Naming and Necessity. Harvard University Press.
  • Machery, E., Mallon, R., Nichols, S., & Stich, S. (2004). "Semantics, Cross-Cultural Style". Cognition 92, pp. B1-B12.
  • May, J., Sinnott-Armstrong, W., Hull, J.G. & Zimmerman, A. (2010). "Practical Interests, Relevant Alternatives, and Knowledge Attributions: An Empirical Study", Review of Philosophy and Psychology (formerly European Review of Philosophy), special issue on Psychology and Experimental Philosophy ed. by Edouard Machery, Tania Lombrozo, & Joshua Knobe, Vol. 1, No. 2, pp. 265–273. (link)
  • Nichols, S. (2002). "How Psychopaths Threaten Moral Rationalism: Is It Irrational to Be Amoral?" The Monist 85, pp. 285–304.
  • Nichols, S. (2004). "After Objectivity: An Empirical Study of Moral Judgment". Philosophical Psychology 17, pp. 5–28.
  • Nichols, S. and Folds-Bennett, T. (2003). "Are Children Moral Objectivists? Children's Judgments about Moral and Response-Dependent Properties". Cognition 90, pp. B23-32.
  • Nichols, S. & Knobe, J. (2007). Moral Responsibility and Determinism: The Cognitive Science of Folk Intuitions. Nous, 41, 663-685. (link)
  • Sandis, C. (2010). "The Experimental Turn and Ordinary Language". Essays in Philosophy Vol. 11: Iss. 2, 181-196. (link)
  • Schaffer, J. & Knobe, J. (forthcoming). "Contrastive Knowledge Surveyed". Nous. (link)
  • Sytsma, J. & Machery, E. (2009). "How to Study Folk Intuitions about Consciousness". Philosophical Psychology. (link)
  • Weinberg, J., Nichols, S., & Stich, S. (2001). "Normativity and Epistemic Intuitions". Philosophical Topics 29, pp. 429–460.
  • Williamson, T. (2008). The Philosophy of Philosophy. Wiley-Blackwell.
  • Spicer, F. (2009). "The X-philes: Review of Experimental Philosophy, edited by Knobe and Nichols". The Philosophers' Magazine (44): 107. Retrieved 2009-01-08. (link)

References

 

  1. ^ Lackman, Jon. The X-Philes Philosophy meets the real world, Slate, March 2, 2006.
  2. ^ Appiah, Anthony. The New New Philosophy, New York Times, December 9, 2007.
  3. ^ Appiah, Anthony. The 'Next Big Thing' in Ideas, National Public Radio, January 3, 2008.
  4. ^ Shea, Christopher. Against Intuition, Chronicle of Higher Education, October 3, 2008.
  5. ^ a b Edmonds, David and Warburton, Nigel. Philosophy’s great experiment, Prospect, March 1, 2009
  6. ^ The Experimental Philosophy Page.
  7. ^ Prinz, J. Experimental Philosophy, YouTube September 17, 2007.
  8. ^ Knobe, Joshua. What is Experimental Philosophy?. The Philosophers' Magazine, (28) 2004.
  9. ^ Knobe, Joshua. Experimental Philosophy, Philosophy Compass (2) 2007.
  10. ^ a b Knobe, Joshua. Experimental Philosophy and Philosophical Significance, Philosophical Explorations (10) 2007.
  11. ^ Knobe, Joshua. What is Experimental Philosophy? The Philosophers' Magazine (28) 2004.
  12. ^ a b Knobe, Joshua and Nichols, Shaun. An Experimental Philosophy Manifesto, in Knobe & Nichols (eds.) Experimental Philosophy, §2.1. 2008.
  13. ^ Lutz, Sebastian. Ideal Language Philosophy and Experiments on Intuitions. Studia Philosophica Estonica 2.2. Special issue: S. Häggqvist and D. Cohnitz (eds.), The Role of Intuitions in Philosophical Methodology, pp. 117–139. 2009
  14. ^ Sytsma, Justin. The proper province of philosophy: Conceptual analysis and empirical investigation. Review of Philosophy and Psychology 1(3). Special issue: E. Machery, T. Lombrozo, and J. Knobe (eds.), Psychology and Experimental Philosophy (Part II), pp. 427–445. 2010.
  15. ^ Machery, Edouard. What are Experimental Philosophers Doing?. Experimental Philosophy (blog), July 30, 2007.
  16. ^ a b Peter Anstey, "Is x-phi old hat?", Early Modern Experimental Philosophy Blog, 30 August 2010.
  17. ^ Huebner, B., Bruno, M., and Sarkissian, H. 2010. "What Does the Nation of China Think about Phenomenal States?", Review of Philosophy and Psychology, 1(2): 225-243.
  18. ^ Arico, A. 2010. "Folk Psychology, Consciousness, and Context Effects", Review of Philosophy and Psychology, 1(3): 371-393.
  19. ^ Arico, A., Fiala, B., Goldberg, R., and Nichols, S. forthcoming. Mind & Language.
  20. ^ Huebner, B. 2010. "Commonsense Concepts of Phenomenal Consciousness: Does Anyone Care about Functional Zombies?" Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 9 (1): 133-155.
  21. ^ Weinberg, J., Nichols, S., & Stich, S. (2001). Normativity and Epistemic Intuitions. Philosophical Topics 29, pp. 429–460.
  22. ^ Machery, E., Mallon, R., Nichols, S., & Stich, S. (2004). Semantics, Cross-Cultural Style. Cognition 92, pp. B1-B12.
  23. ^ Nagel, J. (forthcoming). "Intuitions and Experiments: A Defense of the Case Method in Epistemology". Philosophy and Phenomenological Research.
  24. ^ Nahmias,E., Morris, S., Nadelhoffer, T. & Turner, J. Surveying Freedom: Folk Intuitions about Free Will and Moral Responsibility. Philosophical Psychology (18) 2005 p.563
  25. ^ Nichols, Shaun; Knobe, Joshua (2007). "Moral Responsibility and Determinism: The Cognitive Science of Folk Intuitions". Noûs 41 (4): 663–685. (PDF p.2)
  26. ^ Phillips, Jonathan, ed. (15 August 2010). "X-Phi Page". Yale. (§Papers on Experimental Philosophy and Metaphilosophy)
  27. ^ a b Phelan,M. Evidence that Stakes Don't Matter for Evidence
  28. ^ a b Feltz, A. & Zarpentine, C. Do You Know More When It Matters Less? Philosophical Psychology.
  29. ^ a b May, J., Sinnott-Armstrong, W., Hull, J. & Zimmerman, A. (2010) Practical Interests, Relevant Alternatives, and Knowledge Attributions: An Empirical Study. Review of Philosophy and Psychology[dead link]
  30. ^ Beebe, J. & Buckwalter,W. The Epistemic Side-Effect Effect Mind & Language.
  31. ^ Bengson, J., Moffett, M., & Wright, J.C. The Folk on Knowing How, Philosophical Studies, 142(3): 387-401.
  32. ^ Sinnott-Armstrong, W. Abstract + Concrete = Paradox, 'in Knobe & Nichols (eds.) Experimental Philosophy, (209-230), 2008.

External links

 

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Friday, May 04, 2012

Being Able to See

How does one turn on the internal vision when we use our eyes to look at the day to day happenings with eyes wide open?

What made this interesting for me was the fact that sensory examination could have been used physically by people by no fault of their own under the auspice ofSynesthesia.. This is an examination where the internal wiring causes overlaps in sensory perceptions. So anyway the idea here is that we look at what intentionality means here in the progress toward science and examination of what we can gain in understanding a way in being able to see differently.


Experimental research

In recent years, there has been a large amount of work done on the concept of intentional action in experimental philosophy.[1] This work has aimed at illuminating and understanding the factors which influence people's judgments of whether an action was done intentionally. For instance, research has shown that unintended side effects are often considered to be done intentionally if the side effect is considered bad and the person acting knew the side effect would occur before acting. Yet when the side effect is considered good, people generally don't think it was done intentionally, even if the person knew it would occur before acting. The most well-known example involves a chairman who implements a new business program for the sole purpose to make money but ends up affecting the environment in the process. If he implements his business plan and in the process he ends up helping the environment, then people generally say he unintentionally helped the environment; if he implements his business plan and in the process he ends up harming the environment, then people generally say he intentionally harmed the environment. The important point is that in both cases his only goal was to make money.[2] While there have been many explanations proposed for why the "side-effect effect" occurs, researchers on this topic have not yet reached a consensus.

So we understand that there is a physiological effect to how perception can be altered by understanding the effect of  Synesthesia? Such alteration can be given to the idea that if we change the way we see experimental processes as in sound application what comparative analogy can be safe? Can we say that it would be acceptable to science?

For example, in 1704 Sir Isaac Newton struggled to devise mathematical formulas to equate the vibrational frequency of sound waves with a corresponding wavelength of light. He failed to find his hoped-for translation algorithm, but the idea of correspondence took root, and the first practical application of it appears to be the clavecin oculaire, an instrument that played sound and light simultaneously. It was invented in 1725. Charles Darwin’s grandfather, Erasmus, achieved the same effect with a harpsichord and lanterns in 1790, although many others were built in the intervening years, on the same principle, where by a keyboard controlled mechanical shutters from behind which colored lights shne. By 1810 even Goethe was expounding correspondences between color and other senses in his book, Theory of Color. Pg 53, The Man Who Tasted Shapes, by Richard E. Cytowic, M.D.

 What if you caused intentional blindness in the sense that you isolate the sensory effect of allowing eyes to be deprived of light. Force the condition to effect internalize vision to take place?  So, what happens in isolation? Does the mind then rely on the world constructs that we had had during our lifetimes to say that the whole internal world is then the effect of what we had gained in experience through seeing. How do you the separate the effect of or emotive states from the understanding that our perceptions colored the world of experience and then forced it toward a memory induced fabrication of what we had experienced?

Now you say, how did that happen? Such a fast shift from what is apparent in the looking at the world is to see that we had lost control of the visual capabilities of see reality as it is?  There is this understanding that without intentionality  a ruthless world of our emotive states can take over quite easily as we say that all of reality is clean and perfect without the recognition of what science is to mean.

5 types of ATLAS event shape data
The data is first processed using the vast and all-powerful ATLAS software framework. This allows raw data (streams of ones and zeroes) to be converted step-by-step into ‘objects’ such as silicon detector hits and energy deposits. We can reconstruct particles using these objects. The next step is to convert the information into a file containing two or three columns of numbers known as a "breakpoint file". It can also be used as a "note list". This kind of file can be read by compositional software such as the Composers Desktop Project (CDP) and Csound software used for this project. See: How is Data Converted into Sounds


So while you do experiments it is important to have "intentionality" in regard to your experiments? If this is so then what you had done is prepare for the excursion to what you want to find out? You already had some idea? You want to put controls in the environment?



 How do you separate consciousness from the clean lines of experimentation and reality seeking? You can't? Because without it you were not able to put the controls in that you need too,  in order to find something out. You are part of the vibrations.
 
The very fact that all of the environment is based on the factors of sound would have you believe then that such conversions are possible and that all sounds are envisioned within the context of the world of sound controlled?

I want to force you to be able to see differently. I want to convert the reality of existence of seeing in a vibrational mode. How does this translate then into consciousness and experimentation? What will we be able to find out if we change the constraints on or examinations of reality if we force the mind to see so?


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Thursday, May 03, 2012

The Ganzfeld effect




The  Ganzfeld effect (from German for “complete field”) is a phenomenon of visual perception caused by staring at an undifferentiated and uniform field of color. The effect is described as the loss of vision as the brain cuts off the unchanging signal from the eyes. The result is "seeing black"[1] - apparent blindness.

History 

 

In the 1930s, research by psychologist Wolfgang Metzger established that when subjects gazed into a featureless field of vision they consistently hallucinated and their electroencephalograms changed.

The Ganzfeld effect is the result of the brain amplifying neural noise in order to look for the missing visual signals. The noise is interpreted in the higher visual cortex, and gives rise to hallucinations. This is similar to dream production because of the brain's state of sensory deprivation during sleep.

The Ganzfeld effect has been reported since ancient times. The adepts of Pythagoras retreated to pitch black caves to receive wisdom through their visions[2], known as the prisoner's cinema. Miners trapped by accidents in mines frequently reported hallucinations, visions and seeing ghosts when they were in the pitch dark for days. Arctic explorers seeing nothing but featureless landscape of white snow for a long time also reported hallucinations and an altered state of mind.

The effect is a component of a Ganzfeld experiment, a technique used in the field of parapsychology.
The artist James Turrell (partly inspired by clear blue skies) has created many such "Ganzfelds" throughout his oeuvre.

See also

 

References

  1. ^ Ramesh B. Ganzfeld Effect.
  2. ^ Ustinova, Yulia.Caves and the Ancient Greek Mind: Descending Underground in the Search for Ultimate Truth, Oxford University Press US, 2009. ISBN 0199548560
  • Wolfgang Metzger, "Optische Untersuchungen am Ganzfeld." Psychologische Forschung 13 (1930) : 6-29. (the first psychophysiological study with regard to Ganzfelds)







 EGG: Did you reach this conclusion through more traditional media, like painting or sculpture?

JT: I haven't had anything to do with either sculpture or painting. I have done works that look painted or works that have form and look like sculpture. I make these spaces that apprehend light for your perception. In a way, it's like Plato's cave, where we are sitting in the cave looking at the reflection of reality with our backs to reality. I make these spaces where the spaces themselves are perceivers or in some way pre-form perception. It's a little bit like what the eye does. I mean, I look at the eye as the most exposed part of the brain, as something that is already forming perception. I make these rooms that are these camera-like spaces that in some way form light, apprehend it to be something that's physically present.

EGG: What happens when you use space this way?

JT: This results in an art that is not about my seeing, it's about your direct perception of the work. I'm interested in having a light that inhabits space, so that you feel light to be physically present. I mean, light is a substance that is, in fact, a thing, but we don't attribute thing-ness to it. We use light to illuminate other things, something we read, sculpture, paintings. And it gladly does this. But the most interesting thing to find is that light is aware that we are looking at it, so that it behaves differently when we are watching it and when we're not, which imbues it with consciousness. Often people say that they want to touch some of the work I do. Well, that feeling is actually coming from the fact that the eyes are touching, the eyes are feeling. And this happens because the eyes are quite sensitive only in low light, for which we were made. We're actually made for this light of Plato's cave, the light of twilight. See: Interview with James Turrell


psychomanteums
The room is set up to optimize psychological effects such as trance. Its key features are low light or near-darkness, flickering light, and a mirror. The dimness represents a form of visual sensory deprivation, a condition helpful to trance induction, the undifferentiated colour without horizon producing the Ganzfeld effect[4], a state of apparent "blindness". The Ganzfeld experiment replicates the conditions of a psychomanteum where a state of trance may be induced by a uniform field of vision. In the way of strobe or flashing light, stimulus is provided by indirect, moving light in the psychomanteum. Flickering candles or lamps are sometimes recommended to induce hallucination. It is supposed the indeterminate depth of the mirror’s darkness allows the eyes to relax and become unfocused, a state that reduces alertness.[2]

Dr. Raymond Moody, author of the 1981 book about near death experiences, Life After Life, included the psychomanteum in his research trialling 300 subjects which he recorded in his 1993 book, Reunions. Moody viewed the room as a therapeutic tool to heal grief and bring insight.[2]
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Monday, April 30, 2012

A Superset Universe?

How would you draw a Universe with all theories as being part of,  as a subset?





Pictorial representations can be very useful in presenting information or assisting reasoning. Venn diagram is an example. Venn diagrams are used to represent classes of objects, and they can also assist us in reasoning about the relations between these classes. They are named after the English mathematician John Venn (1834 - 1923), who was a fellow at Cambridge University.


A few may have taken in the link supplied to a lecture given by Thomas Campbell with regard to his MBT book he had written. Now, I was drawn to the idea of a Venn diagram presented in his lecture and the idea of how one might have use this diagram as a question about the universe and it's subsets? How would you draw it?







I give a current posting by Sean Carroll with regards to his opinion on a book written by Lawrence Krauss. So there all these theories about the nature of the universe and some scientists of course have their opinions.

............Or not, of course. We should be good empiricists and be open to the possibility that what we think of as the universe really does exist within some larger context. But then we could presumably re-define that as the universe, and be stuck with the same questions. As long as you admit that there is more than one conceivable way for the universe to be (and I don’t see how one could not), there will always be some end of the line for explanations. I could be wrong about that, but an insistence that “the universe must explain itself” or some such thing seems like a completely unsupportable a priori assumption. (Not that anyone in this particular brouhaha seems to be taking such a stance.) SEE:A Universe from Nothing?







Physicists have proposed several theories to explain why Λ is so small. One of the most popular -- the "anthropic principle" -- states that Λ is randomly set and has very different values in different parts of the universe (figure 1). We happen to live in a rare region, or "bubble", where Λ has the value we observe. This value has allowed stars, planets and therefore life to develop. However, this theory is also unsatisfactory for many scientists because it would be better to be able to calculate Λ from first principles.



See also:
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Friday, April 27, 2012

Particle Constructs

Several large experimental groups are hot on the trail of this elusive subatomic particle which is thought to explain the origins of particle mass.  Higgs Update Today

What use the Higg's Mechanism?

Just as one might look at GRB examples of motivation that come to us in natural cosmic particle collisions, by looking back in time is it not to strange to wonder how such compositions are given to the contacts  and explorations of where any beginnings may materialize. So we are given clues?

The structure is being detail as if in association to identifying the elements in between Mendeleev's elemental table components? Seaborg's octaves? It is an analogy in comparison as you might track LHC components of particle expressions?


this increases his resistance to movement, in other words, he acquires mass, just like a particle moving through the Higgs field

Latest research can pinpoint what I am saying yet it is through such expressions we might ask how is it an Einstein crossing the room can gather so many minds and ideas to it? Can we say then that consciousness is much the same, yet, it isn't the idea of a heat death that such notions are not palatable with what happens in the brain but the idea that new ideas can enter. You see?



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Thursday, April 26, 2012

Infographics: Magnifying the Universe

I thought this kind of neat and wondered.....maybe a scientist could correct if any misrepresentation is evident in the following demonstration.



The Universe made possible by Number Sleuth
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Wednesday, April 25, 2012

Brian Greene: Why is our universe fine-tuned for life?




At the heart of modern cosmology is a mystery: Why does our universe appear so exquisitely tuned to create the conditions necessary for life? In this tour de force tour of some of science's biggest new discoveries, Brian Greene shows how the mind-boggling idea of a multiverse may hold the answer to the riddle.

Brian Greene is perhaps the best-known proponent of superstring theory, the idea that minuscule strands of energy vibrating in a higher dimensional space-time create every particle and force in the universe.



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Do Gamma rays hint at dark matter?




Using a new statistical technique to analyse publicly available data from NASA's Fermi Space Telescope, an astrophysicist in Germany says he may have spotted a tell-tale sign of exotic particles annihilating within the Milky Way. If proved to be real, this "gamma-ray line" would, he claims, be a "smoking-gun signature" of dark matter.

There is a wide body of indirect observational evidence that an invisible substance accounts for some 80% of the matter in the universe. Although physicists can measure the effects that this dark matter has on the visible universe, they have very little understanding of what this mysterious stuff actually is. As well as looking for direct evidence of dark matter by detecting it – or even producing it – here on Earth, researchers are also scouring the skies for signs of the particles that dark matter might produce when self-annihilating. An excess of high-energy positrons (anti-electrons) observed by the Italian-led PAMELA spacecraft in 2008, and confirmed by Fermi last year, might be such a signature. However, it is possible that these positrons are produced by processes unrelated to dark matter. See:Gamma rays hint at dark matter
Also a Physics World see: Has Fermi glimpsed dark matter?
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Tuesday, April 24, 2012

What Does the Higgs Jet Energy Sound Like?

Top quark and anti top quark pair decaying into jets, visible as collimated collections of particle tracks, and other fermions in the CDF detector at Tevatron.
HiggsJetEnergyProfileCrotale  and HiggsJetEnergyProfilePiano use only the energy of the cells in the jet to modulate the pitch, volume, duration and spatial position of each note. The sounds being modulated in these examples are crotales (baby cymbals) and a piano string struck with a soft beater, then shifted up in pitch by 1000 Hz and `dovetailed'.

In HiggsJetRythSig we are simply travelling steadily along the axis of the jet of particles and hearing a ping of crotales for each point at which there is a significant energy deposit somewhere in the jet.

HiggsJetEnergyGate  uses just the energy deposited in the jet's cells. At each time point (defined by the distance from the point of collision) the energy is used to define the number of channels used from the piano sound file. So high energy can be heard as thick, burbly sound whilst low energy has a thinner sound. See: Listen to the decay of a god particle
LHCsound (LHCsound) / CC BY 3.0


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Monday, April 23, 2012

Songs of the Stars: the Real Music of the Spheres


With the discovery of sound waves in the CMB, we have entered a new era of precision cosmology in which we can begin to talk with certainty about the origin of structure and the content of matter and energy in the universe.-Wayne Hu



The Pythagoreans 2500 years ago believed in a celestial "music of the spheres", an idea that reverberated down the millennia in Western music, literature, art and science. Now, through asteroseismology (the study of the internal structure of pulsating stars), we know that there is a real music of the spheres. The stars have sounds in them that we use to see right to their very cores. This multi-media lecture looks at the relationship of music to stellar sounds. You will hear the real sounds of the stars and you will hear musical compositions where every member of the orchestra is a real (astronomical) star! You will also learn about some of the latest discoveries from the Kepler Space Mission that lets us "hear" the stars 100 times better than with telescopes on the ground See:Don Kurtz, University of Central Lancashire-Wednesday, May 2, 2012 at 7:00 pm


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Near-Future Photon-Collider Setups

In the search for a quantum theory of gravity it is crucial to find experimental access to quantum gravitational effects. Since these are expected to be very small at observationally accessible scales it is advantageous to consider processes with no tree-level contribution in the Standard Model, such as photon-photon scattering. We examine the implications of asymptotically safe quantum gravity in a setting with extra dimensions for this case, and point out that various near-future photon-collider setups, employing either electron or muon colliders, or even a purely laser-based setup, could provide a first observational window into the quantum gravity regime. Can we see quantum gravity? Photons in the asymptotic-safety scenario






Experimental Search for Quantum Gravity: the hard facts 


October 22-25, 2012
Perimeter Institute
Scientific area: quantum gravity

 Quantum Gravity tries to answer some of the most fundamental questions about the quantum nature of spacetime. To make progress in this area it is mandatory to establish a contact to observations and experiments and to learn what the "hard facts" on quantum gravity are, that nature provides us with.

Quantum Gravity is a field where several approaches, based on different principles and assumptions, develop in parallel. At present it is not clear whether and how some of the approaches are compatible, and might share common properties. This meeting will draw on a diverse set of physicists who come to make proposals for quantum gravity phenomenology from a broad range of perspectives, including path-integral-inspired as well as canonical, and discrete as well as continuum-based approaches, providing a platform to exchange ideas with researchers working on theoretical and experimental aspects of different proposals.

This will be the third in a series of meetings, the first of which was held at PI (2007), the second at NORDITA (2010).

This meeting looks to the future and has two primary goals: 1) to assess the status of different proposals for QG phenomenology in the light of recent experimental results from Fermi, Auger, LHC etc. and 2) to discuss and stimulate new ideas and proposals, coming from a diverse set of viewpoints about quantum spacetime.

In order to allow for a fruitful exchange of ideas across different approaches, and between experimental and theoretical researchers, the workshop will lay a main focus on structured discussion sessions with short (15 min.) presentations. These are mainly intended for an exchange of ideas, and a discussion and development of new possibilities, thus participants are strongly encouraged to present new ideas and work in progress.



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Sunday, April 22, 2012

A Musical Score on Particles?

Schema created by Vicinanza with an example bubble chamber particle track, which has been converted into a melody and then orchestrated as music. Image courtesy Domenico Vicinanza.
Positrons – antiparticles of electrons, a trillionth of a meter in size – make no sound. But with a little help from the grid, music composer Domenico Vicinanza is giving positrons a voice to lift in song.

Vicinanza, a network engineer at DANTE (Delivery of Advanced Network Technology to Europe), is an old hand at using GILDA (Grid INFN virtual Laboratory for Dissemination Activities) e-infrastructure, which is part of the European Grid Infrastructure, to blend science with music. In the past, he has derived music from volcanic seismograms with the City Dance Ensemble, and re-created 2,000-year-old Greek music with his troupe, the the Lost Sounds Orchestra.The smallest music in the universe


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Saturday, April 21, 2012

Lagrangian Worlds


Diagram of the Lagrange Point gravitational forces associated with the Sun-Earth system.

In a certain sense a perfect fluid is a generalization of a point particle. This leads to the question as to what is the corresponding generalization for extended objects. Here the lagrangian formulation of a perfect fluid is much generalized by replacing the product of the co-moving vector which is a first fundamental form by higher dimensional first fundamental forms; this has as a particular example a fluid which is a classical generalization of a membrane; however there is as yet no indication of any relationship between their quantum theories.A Fluid Generalization of Membranes.


Perfect fluid



The energy-momentum tensor of a perfect fluid contains only the diagonal components.
In physics, a perfect fluid is a fluid that can be completely characterized by its rest frame energy density ρ and isotropic pressure p.
Real fluids are "sticky" and contain (and conduct) heat. Perfect fluids are idealized models in which these possibilities are neglected. Specifically, perfect fluids have no shear stresses, viscosity, or heat conduction.
In tensor notation, the energy-momentum tensor of a perfect fluid can be written in the form
T^{\mu\nu} = (\rho + p) \, U^\mu U^\nu + p \, \eta^{\mu\nu}\,
where U is the velocity vector field of the fluid and where \eta_{\mu \nu} is the metric tensor of Minkowski spacetime.
Perfect fluids admit a Lagrangian formulation, which allows the techniques used in field theory to be applied to fluids. In particular, this enables us to quantize perfect fluid models. This Lagrangian formulation can be generalized, but unfortunately, heat conduction and anisotropic stresses cannot be treated in these generalized formulations.

Perfect fluids are often used in general relativity to model idealized distributions of matter, such as in the interior of a star.

 See also

 References

 External links



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In summary, experiments at RHIC have shown that a very dense QCD medium is formed in high-energy heavy-ion collisions. Other measurements, namely elliptic flow and baryon-to-meson ratios, indicate that this medium is characterized by partonic degrees offreedom and that its expansion and cooling is well described by hydrodynamical models with high viscosity. Thus, this medium is more similar to a liquid than to a gas of gluons and quarks.Review on Heavy-Ion Physics

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A Blue Flash in Ice

Little is known about the ultra high-energy cosmic rays that regularly penetrate the atmosphere. Recent IceCube research rules out the leading theory that they come from gamma ray bursts. (Credit: NSF/J. Yang)

Future directions 

The lack of observation of neutrinos in coincidence with GRBs implies, at face value, that the theoretical models need to be revisited. “Calculations embracing the concept that cosmic ray protons are the decay products of neutrons that escaped the magnetic confinement of the GRB fireball are supported by the research community and have been convincingly excluded by the present data,” says Francis Halzen, IceCube principle investigator and a professor of physics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. "IceCube will continue to collect more data with a final, better calibrated and better understood detector in the coming years." Since April 2011, IceCube has collected neutrino data using the full detector array. With the larger detector, researchers can see more neutrinos, providing a “higher resolution” picture of the neutrino sky. See: Cosmic Rays: 100 years of mystery

See Also: IceCube Neutrino Observatory Explores Origin of Cosmic Rays




IceCube’s 5,160 digital optical modules are suspended from 86 strings reaching a mile and a half below the surface at the South Pole. Each sphere contains a photomultiplier tube and electronics to capture the faint flashes of muons speeding through the ice, their direction and energy – and thus that of the neutrinos that created them – tracked by multiple detections. At lower left is the processed signal of an energetic muon moving upward through the array, created by a neutrino that traveled all the way through the Earth.


“This result represents a coming-of-age of neutrino astronomy,” says Nathan Whitehorn from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who led the recent GRB research with Peter Redl of the University of Maryland. “IceCube, while still under construction, was able to rule out 15 years of predictions and has begun to challenge one of only two major possibilities for the origin of the highest-energy cosmic rays, namely gamma-ray bursts and active galactic nuclei.”


Redl says, “While not finding a neutrino signal originating from GRBs was disappointing, this is the first neutrino astronomy result that is able to strongly constrain extra-galactic astrophysics models, and therefore marks the beginning of an exciting new era of neutrino astronomy.” The IceCube Collaboration’s report on the search appears in the April 19, 2012, issue of the journal Nature. See: Where Do the Highest-Energy Cosmic Rays Come From? Probably Not from Gamma-Ray Bursts
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Thursday, April 19, 2012

A Message from the Past?

The ATLAS Experiment offers the exciting possibility to study them in the lab (if they exist). The simulated collision event shown is viewed along the beampipe. The event is one in which a microscopic-black-hole was produced in the collision of two protons (not shown). The microscopic-black-hole decayed immediately into many particles. The colors of the tracks show different types of particles emerging from the collision (at the center).
Photo #: black-hole-event-wide


I was looking for something in the cosmos that would reveal what is also being revealed in the LHC. We are looking at "interaction points" that are a determinate for the collision point while information which has come from what existed "before" and is being expressed today?



 If such "a point on a line" recognizes that the lines extends "before" the universes birth then where did this information come from? Is it really a void?

Brookhaven National Laboratory
HOT A computer rendition of 4-trillion-degree Celsius quark-gluon plasma created in a demonstration of what scientists suspect shaped cosmic history.

If super fluids can exist in nature then in what circumstances can such information be transferred through that interaction point? Cosmologically this looks real while such comparative natures would say how could such microscopic conditions allow for cosmic particle decays? Chernenko in the ice transmitted through to these detectors as information containing the subject of the particle which collided and came from the cosmos and helped with the new creation of particle determinants?


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Model Building in Life

"...underwriting the form languages of ever more domains of mathematics is a set of deep patterns which not only offer access to a kind of ideality that Plato claimed to see the universe as created with in the Timaeus; more than this, the realm of Platonic forms is itself subsumed in this new set of design elements-- and their most general instances are not the regular solids, but crystallographic reflection groups. You know, those things the non-professionals call . . . kaleidoscopes! * (In the next exciting episode, we'll see how Derrida claims mathematics is the key to freeing us from 'logocentrism'-- then ask him why, then, he jettisoned the deepest structures of mathematical patterning just to make his name...)

* H. S. M. Coxeter, Regular Polytopes (New York: Dover, 1973) is the great classic text by a great creative force in this beautiful area of geometry (A polytope is an n-dimensional analog of a polygon or polyhedron. Chapter V of this book is entitled 'The Kaleidoscope'....)"


I just wanted to show you what has been physically reproduced in cultures. This in order to highlight some of the things that were part of our own make up,  so you get that what has transpired in our societies has been part of something hidden within our own selves.

As I have said before it has become something of an effort for me to cataloged knowledge on some of  the things I learn.  The ways in which to keep the information together. I am not saying everyone will do this in there own way but it seems to me that as if some judgement about our selves is hidden in the way we had gathered information about our own lives then it may have been put together like some kaleidoscope.


Online Etymology Dictionary-1817, lit. "observer of beautiful forms," coined by its inventor, Sir David Brewster (1781-1868), from Gk. kalos "beautiful" + eidos "shape" (see -oid) + -scope, on model of telescope, etc. Figurative meaning "constantly changing pattern" is first attested 1819 in Lord Byron, whose publisher had sent him one.

So to say then past accomplishments were part of the designs, what had we gained about our own lives then?  What page in the book of Mandalas can you have said that any one belonged to you? It was that way for me in that I saw the choices. These I thought I had built on my own, as some inclination of a method and way to deliver meaning into my own life. Then through exploration it seem to contain the energy of all that I had been before as to say that in this life now, that energy could unfold?




Scan of painting 19th century Tibetan Buddhist thangka painting
Maṇḍala (मण्डल) is a Sanskrit word meaning "circle." In the Buddhist and Hindu religious traditions their sacred art often takes a mandala form. The basic form of most Hindu and Buddhist mandalas is a square with four gates containing a circle with a center point. Each gate is in the shape of a T.[1][2] Mandalas often exhibit radial balance.[3]


These mandalas, concentric diagrams, have spiritual and ritual significance in both Buddhism and Hinduism.[4][5] The term is of Hindu origin and appears in the Rig Veda as the name of the sections of the work, but is also used in other Indian religions, particularly Buddhism. In the Tibetan branch of Vajrayana Buddhism, mandalas have been developed into sandpainting. They are also a key part of anuttarayoga tantra meditation practices.


In various spiritual traditions, mandalas may be employed for focusing attention of aspirants and adepts, as a spiritual teaching tool, for establishing a sacred space, and as an aid to meditation and trance induction. According to the psychologist David Fontana, its symbolic nature can help one "to access progressively deeper levels of the unconscious, ultimately assisting the meditator to experience a mystical sense of oneness with the ultimate unity from which the cosmos in all its manifold forms arises."[6] The psychoanalyst Carl Jung saw the mandala as "a representation of the unconscious self,"[citation needed] and believed his paintings of mandalas enabled him to identify emotional disorders and work towards wholeness in personality.[7]


In common use, mandala has become a generic term for any plan, chart or geometric pattern that represents the cosmos metaphysically or symbolically, a microcosm of the Universe from the human perspective.[citation needed]


So what does this mean then that you see indeed some subjects that are allocated toward design of to say that it may be an art of a larger universal understanding that hidden in our natures the will to provide for something schematically inherent? Our nature,  as to the way in which we see the world. The way in which we see science. What cosmic plan then to say the universe would unfold this way, or  to seek the inner structure and explanations as to the way the universe began. The way we emerged into consciousness of who you are?

 The kaleidoscope was perfected by Sir David Brewster, a Scottish scientist, in 1816. This technological invention, whose function is literally the production of beauty, or rather its observation, was etymologically a typical aesthetic form of the nineteenth century - one bound up with disinterested contemplation. (The etymology of the word is formed from kalos (beautiful), eidos (form) and scopos (watcher) - "watcher of beautiful shapes".) The invention is enjoying a second life today - as the model for many contemporary abstract works. In Olafur Eliasson's Kaleidoscope (2001), the viewer takes the place of the pieces of glass, producing a myriad of images. In an inversion of the situation involved in the classic kaleidoscope, the watcher becomes the watched. In Jim Drain's Kaleidoscope (2003), the viewer is also plunged physically inside the myriad of abstract forms, and his image becomes a part of the environment. Spin My Wheel (2003), by Lori Hersberger, also forms a painting that is developed in space, spilling beyond the frame of the picture, its projected image constantly changing, dissolving the surrounding world with an infinite play of reflections in fragments of broken mirror. The viewer becomes one of the subjects of the piece. (Not the subject, as in Eliasson's work, but one of its subjects.)
See: The End of Perspective-Vincent Pécoil.

Would there be then some algorithmic style to the code written in your life as to have all the things you are as some pattern as to the way in which you will live your life? I ask then what would seem so strange that you might not paint a picture of it? Not encode your life in some mathematical principle as to say that life emerge for you in this way?


Although Aristotle in general had a more empirical and experimental attitude than Plato, modern science did not come into its own until Plato's Pythagorean confidence in the mathematical nature of the world returned with Kepler, Galileo, and Newton. For instance, Aristotle, relying on a theory of opposites that is now only of historical interest, rejected Plato's attempt to match the Platonic Solids with the elements -- while Plato's expectations are realized in mineralogy and crystallography, where the Platonic Solids occur naturally.Plato and Aristotle, Up and Down-Kelley L. Ross, Ph.D.



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