Category: Physics

Be Persistent and Evolve

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If we think about the evolution of living things we generally start from the idea that evolution requires replicators, variation, and selection. But what if we loosened that up to the more everyday semantics of the word “evolution” when we talk about the evolution of galaxies or of societies or of crystals? Each changes, grows, contracts, and has some kind of persistence that is mediated by a range of internal and external forces. For crystals, the availability of heat and access to the necessary chemicals is key. For galaxies, elements and gravity and nuclear forces are paramount. In societies, technological invention and social revolution overlay the human replicators and their biological evolution. Should we make a leap and just declare that there is some kind of impetus or law to the universe such that when there are composable subsystems and composition constraints, there will be an exploration of the allowed state space for composition? Does this add to our understanding of the universe?

Wong, et. al. say exactly that in “On the roles of function and selection in evolving systems” in PNAS. The paper reminds me of the various efforts to explain genetic information growth given raw conceptions of entropy and, indeed, some of those papers appear in the cites. It was once considered an intriguing problem how organisms become increasingly complex in the face of, well, the grinding dissolution of entropy. It wasn’t really that hard for most scientists: Earth receives an enormous load of solar energy that supports the push of informational systems towards negentropy. But, to the earlier point about composability and constraints, the energy is in a proportion that supports the persistence of systems that are complex.… Read the rest

Contrasts and Failures, Hope and Awe

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Russell Moore writes in the Atlantic that American evangelicalism is in crisis. There is a Faustian pact of unholy MAGA politics, conspiracy theories, and religious feelings that can only be remedied with a revival of the faith itself, laser-focused on Moore’s conceptions of what Christianity should strive to become. He acknowledges that there is a dark history to America’s evangelical movement through the 20th century. It was always political in close focus, with the maintenance of racism and exclusion at its core well before abortion was even a talking point. Anti-Catholicism and antisemitism were equally bundled up with the evangelical mindset. Beyond the moral failings that sloshed into politics, there was the structural marketing of the faith by televangelists and traveling ministries that turned the hoped-for internal conversion into a more cynical plot:

In the end, a market-driven religion gives rise to a market-driven approach to truth, and this development ultimately eviscerated conservative Christianity in the US and left it the possession of hypocrites and hucksters.

I’m not at all surprised. As information has become unlocked from the vaults of academic pursuits by modern technologies, the ripples of uncertainty about faith claims have spread and clashed with the desire to totalize the political, personal, pragmatic, and moral dimensions of evangelical beliefs. If a thing is so unquestionably right and good, it must infiltrate and own the mind, the body, the soul, the community, and the nation. So why is the world drifting away, seemingly inexorably?

But even those who leave their faith communities feel adrift, clinging to vague spirituality or buffet gorging across traditions in search of something that is satisfactory but different. But that is only in the best of moments, when a song triggers nostalgia or late after eggnog on Christmas Eve.… Read the rest

Oh, the Humanities!

Mark Davis1 Comment

I often laugh out loud at Ross Douthat’s New York Times columns that worry over strange spiritualisms taking over America, or try to unravel cultural knots that he always suggests might best be resolved by Catholicism (or even one of those lesser faiths), but I did enjoy his take today on the perishing of the humanities in America’s universities and colleges. I routinely read into the 18th and 19th centuries as an exploration of how language was once used. I read analytically, that is. Plots are picked apart. Characterization is considered. Clausal embedding is almost always more ornate than contemporary writing where such elaborations are pretentious or, at least, overwrought. I also (try to) read original versions of Balzac or Flaubert as an exercise in improving my French. What is less interesting to me are the class conflicts, racism, and gender roles from those bygone days. People are rotten enough today; I hardly need a reminder that we were always rotten and had reinforcing institutions and traditions overlaying that malaise.

But is there a threat to a decline in the participation in the humanities and a shift to STEM fields among university students? The argument is that it impacts our understanding of history and the drivers that got us here today. Perhaps it also diminishes our knowledge of logic and reason when philosophy is subtracted from the curriculum. Or just that the student never learns to articulate complex ideas and arguments.

An alternative to Douthat’s calls for monastic recitation and memorization as a grounding for the transmission of ideas is to make it more relevant to the STEM fields that have money and mindshare. In other words, inveigle the humanities into STEM; don’t fight, infiltrate.… Read the rest

Entanglements: Collected Short Works

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Now available in Kindle, softcover, and hardcover versions, Entanglements assembles a decade of short works by author, scientist, entrepreneur, and inventor Mark William Davis.

The fiction includes an intimate experimental triptych on the evolution of sexual identities. A genre-defying poetic meditation on creativity and environmental holocaust competes with conventional science fiction about quantum consciousness and virtual worlds. A postmodern interrogation of the intersection of storytelling and film rounds out the collected works as a counterpoint to an introductory dive into the ethics of altruism.

The nonfiction is divided into topics ranging from literary theory to philosophical concerns of religion, science, and artificial intelligence. Legal theories are magnified to examine the meaning of liberty and autonomy. A qualitative mathematics of free will is developed over the course of two essays and contextualized as part of the algorithm of evolution. What meaning really amounts to is always a central concern, whether discussing politics, culture, or ideas.

The works show the author’s own evolution in his thinking of our entanglement with reality as driven by underlying metaphors that transect science, reason, and society. For Davis, metaphors and the constellations of words that help frame them are the raw materials of thought, and their evolution and refinement is the central narrative of our growth as individuals in a webwork of societies and systems.

Entanglements is for readers who are in love with ideas and the networks of language that support and enervate them. It is a metalinguistic swim along a polychromatic reef of thought where fiction and nonfictional analysis coexist like coral and fish in a greater ecosystem.

Mark William Davis is the author of three dozen scientific papers and patents in cognitive science, search, machine translation, and even the structure of art.… Read the rest

Sentience is Physical

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Sentience is all the rage these days. With large language models (LLMs) based on deep learning neural networks, question-answering behavior of these systems takes on curious approximations to talking with a smart person. Recently a member of Google’s AI team was fired after declaring one of their systems sentient. His offense? Violating public disclosure rules. I and many others who have a firm understanding of how these systems work—by predicting next words from previous productions crossed with the question token stream—are quick to dismiss the claims of sentience. But what does sentience really amount to and how can we determine if a machine becomes sentient?

Note that there are those who differentiate sentience (able to have feelings), from sapience (able to have thoughts), and consciousness (some private, subjective phenomenal sense of self). I am willing to blend them together a bit since the topic here isn’t narrowly trying to address the ethics of animal treatment, for example, where the distinction can be useful.

First we have the “imitation game” Turing test-style approach to the question of how we might ever determine if a machine becomes sentient. If a remote machine can fool a human into believing it is a person, it must be as intelligent as a person and therefore sentient like we presume of people. But this is a limited goal line. If the interaction is only over a limited domain like solving your cable internet installation problems, we don’t think of that as a sentient machine. Even against a larger domain of open-ended question and answering, if the human doesn’t hit upon a revealing kind of error that a machine might make that a human would not, we remain unconvinced that the target is sentient.… Read the rest

Kalam the Incorrigible as a Moral Good

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I’ve previously complained that the Kalam Cosmological Argument is drivel, but a recent video reminded me that intellectual sophistication can arise from confronting drivel, because it helps expose more people to the tenuous, changing, and incomplete journey of modern science and philosophical interpretation/translation. I knew I was largely in alignment with modern science when I wrote that particular post (and others), but the video, considering the figures involved, provides additional compelling insights to push the viewer into thinking more carefully about the challenges and limits of our collective understanding of who we are, where we came from, and what it means to be here now.

I highly recommend it:

And what I think is most worth emphasizing and that may not be understood by laypeople and religious supplicants, or may not be internalized as deeply as it should be, includes:

  1. Our everyday experience and intuitions about similarly-sized matter are simply not applicable to quantum and relativistic scales, or to the implications of cosmological theories. “Causality” is one of those concepts. We see this in everything from the simple case of radioactive decay to contra-causal quantum experiments, and ultimately in the question of causation as applied to the universe itself.
  2. Science operates by applying metaphors, finding the limitations of those metaphors, filtering by empirical results, and then using the refined science as a new metaphor. Most of those metaphors are incompatible with everyday experience. If they weren’t they wouldn’t be so vexingly difficult to understand.
  3. Many philosophical worries about logical inconsistency are abstractly derived from everyday reasoning and may not apply to modern understandings of causality, space, and time.
  4. Humility about what we don’t know and effort to unravel it remains the best approach to our mysterious selves and the world.
… Read the rest

Time at Work

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Time is a strange concept according to several strains of science and related philosophical concerns. We have this everyday medium-macroscopic set of ideas about how there is an undiscovered country of the future, a now we are experiencing, and a past that we remember or model based on accumulated historical facts. When we venture into extensions of conceptual ideas like an infinite past or sequenced events we deploy reasoning about what their properties might be by excluding contradictory compositions of properties and using other kinds of limiting semantics to constrain a mental model of those concepts.

But that isn’t the weirder stuff. The weirder stuff is the result of a collision of measurement and scientific theory.

Take, for instance, the oft-described reversibility of Newtonian physics. We have an equation for an object’s motion that can be run backward in time. But entropy in large ensembles of things in motion is not reversible because of some odd property of energy dissipation into the environment that arises because of micro-interactions. Some say this creates an “arrow of time” in the face of these reversible equations.

But this is an odd way of characterizing mathematical statements that represent the uniformity of physical interactions. The idea of “reversibility” is just a matter of a computational representation of processes that do always flow forward in time. Running t from 0 to -∞ in an equation has no real relationship to any physical phenomena. So the reversibility of mathematical forms is just an interesting fact.

We can bind up space and time, as well, which also provokes feelings of incongruity when we start to talk about gravitational effects on relative elapsed time, or relative speed effects.… Read the rest

A Learning Smorgasbord

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Compliments of a discovery by Futurism, the paper The Autodidactic Universe by a smorgasbord of contemporary science and technology thinkers caught my attention for several reasons. First was Jaron Lanier as a co-author. I knew Jaron’s dad, Ellery, when I was a researcher at NMSU’s now defunct Computing Research Laboratory. Ellery had returned to school to get his psychology PhD during retirement. In an odd coincidence, my brother had also rented a trailer next to the geodesic dome Jaron helped design and Ellery lived after my brother became emancipated in his teens. Ellery may have been his landlord, but I am not certain of that.

The paper is an odd piece of kit that I read over two days in fits and spurts with intervening power lifting interludes (I recently maxed out my Bowflex and am considering next steps!). It initially has the feel of physicists trying to reach into machine learning as if the domain specialists clearly missed something that the hardcore physical scientists have known all along. But that concern dissipated fairly quickly and the paper settled into showing isomorphisms between various physical theories and the state evolution of neural networks. OK, no big deal. Perhaps they were taken by the realization that the mathematics of tensors was a useful way to describe network matrices and gradient descent learning. They then riffed on that and looked at the broader similarities between the temporal evolution of learning and quantum field theory, approaches to quantum gravity, and cosmological ideas.

The paper, being a smorgasbord, then investigates the time evolution of graphs using a lens of graph theory. The core realization, as I gleaned it, is that there are more complex graphs (visually as well as based on the diversity of connectivity within the graph) and pointlessly uniform or empty ones.… Read the rest

A Pause in Attention

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I routinely take a pause in what I am doing to reflect on my goals and what I’ve learned. I’m sure you do too. I had been listening to the recorded works of Jean Sibelius and Carl Nielsen, but am now on to Sir Edward Elgar and Josef Suk. Billie Eilish and Vampire Weekend didn’t last long. I gave up on my deep learning startup to pursue another, less abstract technology. I revamped this site. I put trail running on pause and have been lifting weights more. I shifted writing efforts to a new series centered on manipulating animal physiologies for war and espionage.

These pauses feel like taking an expansive stretch after sitting still for a long period; a reset of the mental apparatus that repositions the mind for a new phase. For me, one take away from recent events, up to and including the great pause of the coronavirus pandemic, is a reconsideration of the amount of silly and pointless content we absorb. Just a few examples: The drama of Twitter feuds among the glitterati and the political class, cancel culture, and shaming. The endless technology, photography, audiophile, fashion, and food reporting and communal commenting that serves to channel our engagement with products and services. Even the lightweight philosophizing that goes with critiques of tradition or society has the same basic set of drivers.

What’s shared among them is the desire for attention, an intellectual posturing to attract and maintain the gaze of others. But it does have a counterpoint, I believe, in a grounding in facts, reason, and a careful attention to novelty. The latter may be a bit hard to pin down, though. It is easy to mistake randomness or chaos for novelty.… Read the rest

Deep Learning with Quantum Decoherence

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Getting back to metaphors in science, Wojciech Zurek’s so-called Quantum Darwinism is in the news due to a series of experimental tests. In Quantum Darwinism (QD), the collapse of the wave function (more properly the “extinction” of states) is a result of decoherence from environmental entanglement. There is a kind of replication in QD, where pointer states are multiplied, and then a kind of environmental selection as well. There is no variation per se, however, though some might argue that the pointer states imprinted by the environment are variants of the originals. Still, it makes the metaphor a bit thin at the edges, but it is close enough for the core idea to fit most of the floor-plan of Darwinism. Indeed, some champion it as part of a more general model for everything. Even selection among viable multiverse bubbles has a similar feel to it: some survive while others perish.

I’ve been simultaneously studying quantum computing and complexity theories that are getting impressively well developed. Richard Cleve’s An Introduction to Quantum Complexity Theory and John Watrous’s Quantum Computational Complexity are notable in their bridging from traditional computational complexity to this newer world of quantum computing using qubits, wave functions, and even decoherence gates.

Decoherence sucks for quantum computing in general, but there may be a way to make use of it. For instance, an artificial neural network (ANN) also has some interesting Darwinian-like properties to it. The initial weight distribution in an ANN is typically a random real value. This is designed to simulate the relative strength of neural connections. Real neural connections are much more complex than this, doing interesting cyclic behavior, saturating and suppressing based on neurotransmitter availability, and so forth, but assuming just a straightforward pattern of connectivity has allowed for significant progress.… Read the rest