tjackson2112

The first if pretty eerie. If I ever find the time, I'll go find one of their footnoted books. Sound Demo 1

Strange, Yes, that's precisely what it's calculating. But I think the geometry can be cast into another domain of reasoning (i.e. a computational challenge). And of course a stone falling from the Leaning Tower is indeed calculating Newton's laws of motion. I'd say - good example. And the Earth's gravitational influence upon the moon with its known mass and distance and current velocity and direction of motion is doing a calculation of both Newton's laws and offering a proof of Kepler's and nature is can give us a precise mass measurement of the Earth if the motion of the moon can observed with precision for a little while. And it's effectively doing the calculation in nature's way - instantaneously, innately, precisely, without error. Rather like the way the photon takes every possible path. But in terms of the interference pattern and its distributed optima of photon intensity, I think quantum scientists are considering those as being the possible right answers of varying degrees of rightness in the solution to a computational problem with multiple solutions, rather like the vector relationship I mentioned. A question of how you look at it. And the geometry a computational program of sorts. I'm still seeking clarity myself. No, that is a proof (as I read it) that quantum computing can be considered able to tackle a superset of what traditional computing can. Not an example of a problem that can be tackled by a quantum computer. Swansont, I was hoping that if you (or Strange) know something of the subject that you could illustrate one of those few special problems and show how rudimentary quantum computing can compute it. The double slit has a classical solution that as I understand it is a subset of the quantum superset. There are those possibilities among all possible paths that include but one photon passing through but one slit without interference from the other are there not? That's a classical subset of the quantum superset.

I'm trying to use an understanding of why an interference pattern is produced in that experiment to extend that understanding to how other geometries can solve other computational problems. Can you state in words what computation the double slit is effectively computing with its familiar interference pattern? At least as I understand it, it verifies that there are a bunch of answers to 1+1=2, which in that case is a vector relationship, i.e. the magnitude of a unit vector aX+bY is always 1? As I understand it, the single photon verifies the theoretical question that a photon can interfere with itself when traveling through two closely spaced slits for any given photon or electron passing through. The jillion is a response in a stochiastic domain and the single in a quantum domain? I understand your second paragraph. Your third, I think I understand, in that classical physics could be considered a subset of quantum physics. Your forth begins to lose me and becomes a matter of the observer being intimately involved with the observed. At that point, Einstein keeps running and I trip over my shoe laces. Swansont, could you illustrate one of those other few special problems in terms of geometries other than the double slit and explain what rudimentary computation is performed thereby? I submitted the traveling salesman problem, only because that was offered up in a recent NOVA (I think) as a problem which quantum computing might someday be able to compute more effectively than traditional means.

Maybe asking what pain is IS simply to ask what the others are. I guess when I pose such questions, I'm just hoping someone will jog me into that mental state where you suddenly go, "Aha...!" like that first time you suddenly saw the duality between the drop and pool and particle/wave of quantum physics or began to understand why calculus works. You know, when you learn something new. I approach things from an intuitive perspective. Forgive me. But keep up the rhyme.

Would anyone like to walk with me down the yellow brick road of 'The Talk', as I try to understand quantum computing myself? http://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/the-talk-3 I arrive at the frame that begins "In Quantum Computing, the whole idea..." So you don't need a jillion photons to paint an entire interference pattern to do useful quantum computing? You just wait for a single photon paint stroke to arrive representing a single 'right answer' to have a useful computation for whatever supra-double-slit geometry you're investigating? And, if necessary you wait for a sufficiently long time to satisfy yourself that no right answer is findable if the 'projection screen remains dark'? Or you wait for a jillion photons to find the multiple possible solutions (the distribution - if any) corresponding to your geometry? But don't you just confirm what you already knew, that the constructively reinforced paths are right answers and the destructive ones wrong? Don't you just verify that your geometry is as you constructed it? How is that useful for computation? What am I missing? How is that useful for, say, solving the traveling salesman problem? Or two plus two equals four for that matter. Unfortunately that comic strip ends just before the moment of mathematical orgasm and just crawls back into the (admittedly hilarious) sex talk metaphor and doesn't seem to answer how useful quantum computation is actually done. The end, though, is classic. "Quantum computing and consciousness are both weird and therefore equivalent." That smells so much like my little sister's shelves full of new age spiritualism pornos. Where can I get a copy of 'Futurologism' or 'X-Treme Tek'? Those sound hot. Are they still in print?

Are you aware of any attempt to associate in a concerted way, linguistic intonation with the innate human perception of music? Why a minor scale sound sad and a major key happy? And other scales/chords evocative of more complex emotions somewhere in between?

Uh oh, Phi is back to Game me again. But alas, he's right. Time to go. Enjoyed it.

Try this one. http://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/the-talk-3 It can evidently be done sometimes, but not by tiny minds like my own, which can't seem to inflate itself to the volume necessary for 'The Talk'... The Chinese are, after all, making practical use of quantum communications. And quantum computers would appear to be on the horizon. Personally, I have trouble getting past the notion of quantum bits. I can consider the way that quantum particles in essence take every possible path through the double slit and interfere with themselves along the way through both paths, and wonder how other geometries could represent computational dualities to take advantage of nature's odd 'every possible path at once in a probabilistic sense' for fast computation. And then I pass out with a headache. Ugh.... Art. And in that way of 'The Game' is regularly and formulaically used to communicate that which polite society normally refuses to put into words otherwise. Speaking of fireflies, they seem to be slowly rising from their grave of relative extinction in and about Atlanta and becoming more numerous again. Maybe there's hope for the world. But not with Trump in office! Ha. Give me a little Vermeer. He captures the life of his subjects and brings their souls to the viewer. And the way that the Dutch of Leeuwenhoek's time were a bit like Americans of a previous age, before we got so fat with success and started to devolve back into an idiocracy again, with 'The Game' busying itself at deniably devouring the rougher edges. I doubt you know what I'm talking about, as I continue to digress from my own question. As far as wisdom teeth go, I tolerated their occasional painful rumbling, until they finally shattered themselves with nowhere else to go, now just well behaved ragged tree stumps that cause no further pain. American medicine. Started out as a good idea that has slowly devoured itself in greed, even as the rest of rich and well to do America does the same and continues to march towards sharpening that edge between rich and poor. Avoid them at great cost as it were! But where were we? Ah yes, pain.

And our brains usually seem to bring us to an equilibrium when they can (not too much pain, not too much pleasure - the same reason recreational drugs are generally a bad idea), since one experiencing too much of either is ultimately not a fit critter (or species). I love Dawkins by the way. The Selfish Gene is one of those books that reads like the poetry of truth to me. Do atoms scream in agony in the bellies of suns? Probably not, since the essence of awareness would seem (to me at least) to ultimately be a function of the flow of information from place to place and its (temporary) persistence. And ever greater levels of organization/cooperation the destiny of life. Quarks to atoms to molecules to cells to multicellular to big beasts to thinking minds to civilizations to thinking machines. Energy (of motion as opposed to its 'imaginary' twin - potential energy) is an emergent phenomenon that rides for a while within whatever apparatus it temporarily infests, but is not the apparatus itself, from pendulums to elliptical planetary orbits, until parasitics slowly nibble it back out and share it back to the void usually as heat (with a perfect accounting - i.e. the conservation of energy law) and the relentless march of increasing entropy continues. A drop of water falling into a pool is a good model of the particle/wave duality of high energy physics (let the drop fall far enough and the waves the particle induces upon entering the pool might generate enough counter energy to cause another particle to pop back up into the air for a moment before falling back down to produce yet more waves). Fling the protons fast enough at each other and you might get enough energy in the collision to find the momentary Higgs boson you're hoping to find. A flock of birds is a blob with a will of its own shifting here and there constituted by an organized apparatus of individual birds. Maybe sensation/awareness might someday be understood with similar comprehensible though imperfect models. But I only add to the ramble. I think, therefore I feel pain might be as far as we can get in that understanding. Philosophy. I see what you mean about 'qualia', Strange Quark. You throw so many words at it that you loose what you were looking for in the process. Like some of those highly contrived contraptions seeking the perpetual motion machine. At some point you realize... it just can't be done.

Certainly pain makes for a good standard of comparison to measure happiness with. Like Empathy... and Survival of both the individual and the species too. Survival... as endless generations of critters goaded by pain stay alive as long as they can to create new generations of fitter food for fiercer beasts. At least we humans know we're caught in that amazing though cruel natural system of life (and fortunately climbed to the pinnacle of the food chain). I think if we ever do understand what pain really is, we will have by then understood what consciousness and awareness are too. Thanks, Strange (are you a type of quark?), that's a term of the trade that I was looking for. Endless Google searches on 'what is pain', 'what creates pain', etc only come up with the answers I'm not looking for. I wonder if the study of it might bring us closer to the answer to my question - to the core of what it actually is, the kernel of the operating system code as it were.

Thanks for that iNow, but all that I already know and that's really not what I was looking for at all. I know that science has not answered that question either. I was just looking for ideas and seeking to provoke a discussion, so your response is welcome too.

I've long been curious about what pain actually is. Yea, I know physical pain is caused by nerves sending pain signals to the brain in response to tissue damage, etc. But once it gets to the brain, what is it? In other words, how does animate matter manage to torture itself such that the being that is the emergent phenomenon created by the magic loom feel agony (for a good purpose)? Maybe I should take this to the philosophy section. Any ideas?

One way to test the theory would be to take a number of the ancestors on different branches of the tree closer to the trunk and compare their brain sizes to their more modern descendants and see if there were any general increase in average brain size, including branches not leading to humans. Has that sort of research been done? That might help determine what environmental and concurrent adaptive variables (like opposable thumbs or whatever) lead to greater selection pressure for increasing brain size. Of course, as was noted, for many bird species to see greater brain size would involve a large cost in other factors necessary for flight. In the whale example, that constraint would be much reduced.

"Up in this case... " Yes. Of course. Nowadays a woman doesn't need a man at all, except to provide sperm, which can come from a refrigerator. It's called a metaphor, a metaphor for the point I've been making. The rapidly evolving plastic (that means ability to adapt in this context and not literally polypropylene, Phi) brain and all the blossoming human power stemming directly from its incredible general applicability and versatility have mastered the survival game, and artificial selection is by now in serious competition with natural selection and the entire evolutionary paradigm shifting and a woman now has many options of course, other adaptations being dwarfed by its versatility and general applicability in so many realms, both currently and in the ancient past. But she didn't have so many options through the bulk of pre-human evolution, since nature started down the path towards endowing the human female with less muscle, speed, aggression, etc, and a bit more fat, more nurturing instincts, intuitive and argumentative skills and other characteristics complementing her role as default child bearer, feeder, rearer and ultimate mate selector, many of them functions of the plasticity of the rapidly evolving brain. Brain in general of course from the first primitive ganglia all the way up to the advanced human brain. Why compare? You've forgotten my original point.

Good point, Phi. And here's another anachronistic over-similification borrowing terms from the ancient past. Branches on the tree may extend this way and that, but the direction of the tree is always up. Can you tell me of a specific symbiotic relationship like that of the beak and flower that has lasted as long as the progression of the evolving brain through the eons of evolutionary history? Being a little smarter almost invariably does have a little benefit, though perhaps too little to benefit the quite stable shark species appreciably. And the environment is changing both because life changes the environment AND because of other factors having nothing whatsoever to do with life, which can and do radically alter delicate symbiotic relationships, perhaps putting an end to both the bird and the flower here and there. Of course I am aware the flower is evolving too. And true, you support my point with the shark example - smarter is not inevitable in some or many cases, but far from all. And when I said 'goal', I was using shorthand of course, just as a 'goal' of human evolution is to find the fittest female(s) to mate with and the fittest male to hopefully stay around and protect, defend and help provide for both the childbearer and the offspring, at least during the current round of baby-making. And a long-term 'goal' is that chicks stay in a general way beautiful to our male eyes (a visual measure of their fitness in terms of facial balance and other beauty characteristics relating to fitness, which we males have counter=evolved to be attracted to in that way of sexual symbiosis - there are all kinds of ways to look unfit, relatively few to look optimally fit). And the sea squirt a rarity indeed. Whales once occupied the land, then went back into the sea, exploiting very different food resources after the transition. But unless I'm mistaken, I believe their brains increased in size all the while.

Hi Phi, I'd say that bigger brains IS a goal of the process. My point is really just that brain has a general long-term applicability to survival that opposable thumbs or longer beaks or wings that fly aren't necessarily going to have in the long run. A slightly larger brain might outweigh vagina diameter in terms of survival benefit such that the vagina would have to give way a bit to accommodate that bigger brain and could probably do so. As far as birds go, we know that some make rudimentary use of tools. There's more potential benefit right there. Body size and design even of birds could always accomodate, if the net benefit made sense. And birds could always come back down to the ground like ostriches and penguins. There is nothing in a Darwinian sense that says they HAVE to fly, if being more intelligent made more survival sense. Speaking of human development, seems to me brains developed hand in hand with tool use, agriculture, and mainly social developement including everything from the brain's ability to understand spoken language to reading the nuances of facial expression. As far as spending a 'long' time on the subject, my profession has or had nothing to do with biology. I brought up the subject merely out of personal curiosity. All kinds of Hi Swansont. I think you're taking my point too far out of context. Whether a shark occupies a local optimum that is difficult to get out of in order to reach an even greater point of optimum is my point. On your second comment, a flower that a longer beak can exploit will soon be obsolete in an ever changing environment, whereas brains in a sense is much more enduring and eternal in the genome. And who says there's no immediate payoff? I admit that I'm no expert on biology, so you... titans of the subject have me at a bit of a disadvantage. Please excuse my presumption.

I should have added that by the time a species possibly reaches a point at which even larger brains are increasingly less of a survival benefit, that species is probably well within the realm of understanding their own brains on an intellectual level and well within the realm of designing their brains too, so I guess that conjectured point of diminishing returns is actually more open-ended than it might seem and Darwin factor by then insignificant.

Hi. I've long had a personal theory on evolution that, given time, it is inevitable that evolution builds larger brains and higher levels of intelligence, perhaps to some limiting factor beyond which there is perhaps some increasing cost in terms of fitness that ultimately levels out that progression, which we as a species probably haven't reached yet. It does so, because a bit more brains have a net survival benefit to many species that, for example, a longer beak to exploit a (relatively) new resource recently appearing within an ever changing environment does not have in the long run, a resource that will soon be gone again. Yes, examples of static species (like sharks) are often cited. But I think those can be explained by the supposition that a shark is not a social animal and has everything it needs to exploit the more or less static food resources available to it such that a bit more brains isn't going to afford it an appreciably greater survival benefit, so the progression toward bigger brain is balanced by the greater fitness cost in building the bigger shark brain, leading to a local optima that is somewhat difficult for the shark to get past over the eons. Much more so than a social land animal like ourselves and our forebears and other social species. Does anyone have some ideas on that subject?

Thanks, Strange. That's fascinating reading. Have you ever studied intonation?

I'm curious about word inflections. I think that's the term. Have you heard the KraftWerk line, "When I press a special key, it plays a little melody." (I guess you'd call it a line rather than a lyric, since it's spoken and not sung). The first part goes up in tonal frequency, and the second part continues further on up the scale before the last word which is way back down the low tonal scale. It's like the first part sets one up for 'a surprise', the second continues on up towards a tonal climax, and the 'little novel' ends with a tonal 'crash' or anticlimax. A sentence like, "When I go to the store, I usually find what I need." follows a similar but different model (wiggling around on the word 'store', 'usually' bounces up again, goes through a tonal dip and ends up again tonally. I'm sure it can be inflected in different ways, but you get the idea. Can anyone tell me what field of presumably natural language science studies those sorts of inflections on words and their use in language? Thanks, Ted

And the melt begin, I should have added. How else could you dump billions of gallons of water in a controlled way onto a dry world like Mars where moisture is needed in any process of terraforming? I've never seen any science documentary entertain the theory. If you have, please point me to it. Thanks, Ted

There's surely a minimum size below which a typical ice ball would necessarily be evaporated away before getting to the ground from orbit. Assume a simple circular orbit, although eccentric orbits might be interesting too. Wonder what that minimum is, as a function of a starting orbital velocity and a height above ground with an atmospheric density sufficient to cause some small friction and begin the slow fall to Earth (or Mars maybe).

Hi, Would it be possible to steer a potentially large (kilometers in diameter) icy body into orbit such that a small amount of atmospheric friction continuously bleeds its outer layer away a little at a time while slowing its orbit a little at a time until it finally evaporates away entirely, there never having been any catastrophic impact? Or does frictious orbital decay always occur faster than mass loss (leading to inevitable catastrophic impact)?