Here's a bit of loose fiction-logic inspired by a fan discussion on The Guardian website (I do love a debate on the logic in a piece of fiction!) ...
http://www.guardian.co.uk/tv-and-radio/tvandradioblog/2012/jan/16/sherlock-how-fake-own-death?commentpage=1#comment-14167428
... and by Holmes' famous circumstantial certainties that follow the pattern, if not the spirit, of pure logic.
In the source material by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Sherlock Holmes faked his own death (as a retcon) and Moriarty died permanently. But we can't make any assumptions from that.
So here's my fiction-logic workings out.
In the TV show:
SH shown at length to be uncomfortable with gratitude and attention.
Conversation with JW - becoming too famous to be a private detective.
Hanging manikin seen - indicated unmentioned line of investigation.
JW dismissed manikin as unimportant, ignorant of its use.
Conclusion - SH already looking into faking his own death prior to Moriarty break-ins.
Mycroft – Very smart. Plans ahead. Exceptionally well informed and connected, distant from SH, but watches over.
Likelihood of involvement – certainty.
Role? Tidying up, hands off, non-direct.
Conversation with Molly evening before SH ‘death’.
“You. I need you.” SH is not romantic. Molly is a mortician.
Homeless network referenced as easy to bribe.
M previously referenced complex-seeming puzzle achieved simply by buying off well-placed people.
Two assassins remain alive with protection of SH their priority.
Conclusion – SH plans assisted by Mycroft, Molly, homeless network and (perhaps unwittingly) assassins.
Is Moriarty dead?
Yes.
Very hard to fake bullet to the brain at close range.
Plenty of time to check body.
Body not mentioned in headlines – removed? Who by?
Would Rich Brook’s death negate M’s ‘SH a fraud’ claims?
M body moved by SH agents, Mycroft agents or M agents?
M decided SH not ‘ordinary’, distinction between M and SH blurred or lost.
M has erased all records of himself to become Rich Brook, specifically created to ruin SH.
M’s ‘final problem’ is not specified.
In source material ‘Final Problem’ announced SH death, actual at time of writing (meaning of title = SH’s last case).
In TV show ‘final problem’ known only to M, spoken of in tones to suggest dreary, bothersome.
Conjecture – final problem what to do about SH? Two sides to a coin. M seeking unity?
Distinction between SH and M removed, nature of problem changed.
M = fearless, thorough, large ego, arrogant, assumes superiority, unusual sense of ‘self’.
M thanks and blesses SH, then removes himself.
Most expedient way to unite the two sides and hurt/disrupt SH. M’s death drive SH to jump? Symmetry in death?
M assuming he’s out-thought SH and left him no alternatives.
Conclusion – M killed himself confident SH would do same.
SH face, not voice, seemed to cause reaction in kidnapped girl.
Mask - too obvious? Where would SH find it if used in fake death? Alternatives - Look-alike/disguise? Video/photo?
Girl conditioned to show fear of SH. Double? Conditioning using photo and torture? (unlikely as no reference by police to torture)
Spy cams at 221B. Video made by M to scare kidnapped children?
Loose narrative thread to be tied up at later date.
Conclusion – someone or something used SH face.
Is SH dead?
No.
M can’t be impersonating SH if M dead.
SH ‘double’ unlikely to still be dressed as fugitive presumed dead.
SH creature of habit, likely to dress same as usual.
No reference so far to SH skill with disguises.
SH alone in St Bart’s had enough time to make necessary arrangements.
Meeting place chosen by SH.
SH squash ball in hospital - in armpit, trick used by mediums (nod to Conan Doyle) to stop pulse in wrist. Ball already in possession.
SH bouncing ball as if bored – suggests enough time to plan and organise, but without leaving hospital.
Several seconds shown of pulse being taken in wrist.
If SH mask not found/used SH must have fallen. Into what?
Truck only possibility shown.
Chance of truck in place at correct time and rubbish being soft, unlikely. Truck arranged by SH.
Conclusion – SH brought forward and amended existing plans to fake suicide.
Plot:
Moffat/Gatiss sophisticated writers, not amateurs.
Tendency to play ‘long game’.
Clues in other episodes?
Wholesale lifting of plot from other episodes (e.g. Baskerville hallucinogen) against narrative tradition, may incite calls of foul. Unlikely unless has small effect.
Introduction of character unseen to resolve plot – as above. Deus ex machina.
Plot resembles SH methods, so clues were hidden in plain sight. Referenced throughout series (e.g. Adler measurements, Moriarty code).
More to ‘IOU’ than so far revealed? Much effort made, increased from apple to graffiti in several places.
Who owes SH? Irene Adler.
When ACD’s SH explains to JW the answer always seems obvious once you know where to look.
Conclusion – Nothing new or overly complex will be introduced. Explanation will be simple. No Tesselator.
Coat:
Could have been cleaned.
SH could have more than one (behind the scenes: costume dept has 3).
If double used by M, could come from him.
E-bay.
Show is in fictional world where Belstaff did not discontinue it.
Conclusion – coat not relevant.
Summary:
Sherlock was already looking into faking his own death prior to the Moriarty break-ins.
He brought forward and amended them to beat Moriarty and save his friends’ lives.
The faked suicide was assisted by Mycroft, Molly, the homeless network and (unwittingly) the two remaining assassins.
Moriarty killed himself confident Sherlock would do the same.
Someone or something used Sherlock’s face, possibly a double but more likely a mask or video.
Nothing new or overly complex will be introduced as a deus ex machina, the explanation will be simple.
The coat’s appearance in the final scene is easily explained and not important to the plot.
And no Tesselator was used.
Wednesday, 18 January 2012
Monday, 16 January 2012
Twenty predictions from BBC.co.uk readers for life 100 years from now
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-16536598
The numbered predictions below are not mine. They were on the BBC website (link above) and I felt the need to engage with them and all of the comments are my own. The 'expert' opinions are omitted but can be found on the BBC page should you wish to read them. I have no affiliation with the BBC and I'm not a futurologist, any more than most people are.
In the tradition of futurology, I will be speaking here in certainties. No hedging bets. Actually that’s not quite true. I shall throughout be wandering between faux certainty and strong hunches vaguely hinted at. The future is a wave of time collapsing into the most probable forms through some version of quantum mechanics, so at this point a fuzzy, self-contradictory stance is entirely accurate.
I disagree with most of the predictions and with the experts’ opinions on a lot of them. The predictions say a lot about individual issues and interests, current national preoccupations and fantasies, but don’t seem to engage much with actual trends in culture and scientific progress. The ubiquitous ‘cyborg brain’ predictions are on the same level as ‘personal jet-packs’ and as unlikely in 100 years as they are now, unless there is a revolution in psychology leading to unprecedented progress in understanding how the brain works. Traditionally it’s been a very slow process. Psychology became a science around 5000 years after physics did, demonstrating how bad we are at noticing our thought patterns. Emotions weren’t even recognised as a part of decision-making until 1985 (this is still not accepted by science in general). Advances in psychology take around 150 years to filter out into the world of non-psychologists due to the massive resistance to most of the ideas (unless it’s bad news that fits with our prejudices, then it takes less time but is poorly understood and usually misquoted).
Freud still comes up a lot, many years after his ideas were refuted and any sliver of accuracy gleaned from them and used by other, for the most part unknown psychologists.
Bowlby’s post-war ‘delinquent mother’ notion was mentioned in parliament a couple of years ago despite the last 30 years of research arguing against it.
Even if the mysteries of the brain are solved, the population won’t want to know. Evidence so far is that the answers won’t be well received as they are, somewhat predictably, counter-intuitive.
In practical applications the advances in cybernetic technology will first be in the use of brain signals to switch things from one state to another, becoming more refined to allow us greater control. But don’t we already have fingers for that? Brain-controlled devices will mostly benefit the disabled and won’t get much government funding or will be too expensive to roll out to everyone who needs it. The tech already exists for brain and computer assisted prosthetics (see Simon Lewis’ TED Talk “Don’t take consciousness for granted”), but you won’t see it on anyone who isn’t wealthy.
Ok, to the predictions.
1. Oceans will be extensively farmed and not just for fish (Jim 300)
I expect much more land to be turned over to food production before they farm the seas for crops. Urban developments using the sides of skyscrapers will be quicker, easier and cheaper. Before anything is farmed in the sea (assuming the salt water issue is resolved) we’d have to figure out how to harvest it cheaply and how to keep the hag fish from eating it all. Life in the sea has had longer to evolve and to come up with winning strategies, so if we think pests on land are tricky we’ll be in for a shock on the ocean floor. I predict underwater farming will become successful and widespread only after we build stable large-scale under-sea environments and I doubt we’ll do that by 2112.
2. We will have the ability to communicate through thought transmission (Dev 2)
As PT says, this will be in electronic form, so not thought transmission at all. There’s confusion between using the ‘power of the mind’, i.e. the electricity that fluctuates as we think, and actually willing something to happen remotely. We can do this now so it’s not that big a deal. Driving a vehicle by thinking ‘left’ and ‘right’ is the same principal as thinking ‘tennis’ and ‘artichokes’. As long as there is a distinct difference in how the driver feels about those things. The subtle difference between thinking left and right is actually quite tricky for the devices to pick up, so the driver may have to be trained to think about Bjorn Borg when he/she wants to go left and about a giardiniera pizza to go right. The tech will become more sophisticated and sensitive, but essentially this will just replace getting up and doing it with your hands.
If people can learn to visualise their thoughts very clearly they might tap in to similar tech used in current speech recognition, but only if the thought patterns for each word are distinct. Devices will pick up on changes in the brain, not on thoughts. And as each person’s brain is different every device will have to be calibrated to an individual, with the equivalent of several sessions of physio to bond the machine with the user. If we ever invent telepathy the first thing we’ll discover is that each person has their very own unique thought-language.
3. Thanks to DNA and robotic engineering, we will have created incredibly intelligent humans who are immortal (game_over)
No. Well, maybe some very rich people or pseudo-people who could go on for centuries as long as their bodies are maintained by mortal technicians. They won’t be incredibly intelligent though. They might have some abilities that enable them to process numbers very quickly, either through access to a device that inputs to their brain, but this isn’t much different to a person trained to manually work an abacus. If we have a calculator plugged into our brain we still need to operate it and know what data to enter. If the implants do too much of the work it’s not you doing it, it’s a machine and you just see the results, exactly like reading a screen. You can’t know that the answer is right or how it was reached, you can only observe the results shown to you.
Brains are organs for ‘knowing’ and anything that simply presents information to a brain is by definition external. Augmenting the brain so it ‘knows’ something within the internal systems of cognitive functioning is still so far beyond us that we can’t even begin to imagine how we might do it. We can’t say how knowledge is acquired so that it becomes something we ‘know’, where or how it’s stored, or how we assign priorities to it. No cybernetic advances will go beyond some variation of visual/auditory input until cognition is better understood.
4. We will be able to control the weather (mariebee_)
No. Influence in some small way maybe, but with huge consequences that will make it too problematic to bother with. The weather is made up of interconnected systems that cover the whole planet, from the mountaintops to the deepest ocean floors. It’s too erratic to predict more than three days in advance so weather control will be a small affair, no doubt causing mayhem for neighbouring regions. The people with the money for weather control will spend it on buying up land in the areas that have the weather they want.
5. Antarctica will be "open for business" (Dev 2)
Yes, totally. Resources and the fortunes tied up with them are the irresistible force of human civilisation. Nothing is sacred if it’s needed to keep the machine going.
6. One single worldwide currency (from Kennys_Heroes)
No. Too many people care about remaining separate and too many eggs in one basket. A global economic collapse would be devastating with no one to bail us out.
On the other hand, a universal ‘virtual currency’ via online markets and agencies like PayPal is possible in some form, but why not just continue providing a hidden conversion from local currency as they do now? That would remove the need to work out what the exchange rate is between, say, pounds and online credits. The software does it for you and you just decide if the cost in local cash is acceptable. This is already happening.
7. We will all be wired to computers to make our brains work faster (Dev 2)
No. See above. Brains won’t work faster for being wired to machines, anymore than watching a TV or using a computer make us quicker. Yes watching David Attenborough in the Congo is quicker than going there myself, but it’s not the same thing. It hasn’t sped anything up, it’s replaced it with a simulation by proxy.
8. Nanorobots will flow around our body fixing cells, and will be able to record our memories (Alister Brown)
Ok, what are memories made of? Where are they? Are they permanent or do they change with time, mood and situation? (Answers: unknown, unknown, no, yes, yes and yes) Memories aren’t what most people think. They’re not little reference libraries we use to look up information about the past. I know you think that’s what they are, but that’s because your brain is programmed to feel that way. The evidence shows that different memories are accessed depending on context and mood, and that memories change a lot over the years in order to reinforce feelings we have in the here and now.
We don’t, on a conscious level, doubt and question ourselves. We construct certainties. If people could use faultless recording instruments (nanobots in our eyes and ears that play back information as it was received at the time) they would be so upsetting and challenging to us they’d be almost universally rejected. Scientists and artists would love them though.
Fixing cells, maybe. Curing cancer, maybe. Memories no.
9. We will have sussed nuclear fusion (Kennys_Heroes)
And have the power of a star inside a tiny, flimsy building less than one Astronomical Unit from a major residential area. Whoopee.
10. There will only be three languages in the world - English, Spanish and Mandarin (Bill Walker)
With a million local variations of each.
11. Eighty per cent of the world will have gay marriage (Paul)
Only if the swing towards right-wing fundamentalism is reversed or we come out the other side of it. Attitudes change on a sociological pendulum, they don’t occur along a straight line of ‘progress’.
12. California will lead the break-up of the US (Dev 2)
No. Too much money tied up in it.
13. Space elevators will make space travel cheap and easy (Ahdok)
No, but they might have made enough carbon nanotubes to make it possible to build one or two for the richest space-faring nations – China and India.
14. Women will be routinely impregnated by artificial insemination rather than by a man (krozier 93)
Only if the robot-brains we’re all using have failed to successfully assimilate sexual desire.
The psychology of procreation and parenting is usually tied up with the bonding and nurturing of people in love. The processes have evolved together and it’s only our modern contraceptualised society that separates sex and pregnancy. Couples often decide to have a family together. Women aren’t baby-making robots and child-bearing isn’t a mechanical process outside the social arena of relationships.
15. There will be museums for almost every aspect of nature, as so much of the world's natural habitat will have been destroyed (LowMaintenanceLifestyles)
I don’t think so. The emotional burden will be too unpleasant. Who would want to go to a museum displaying the enormity of human-based calamity? Exhibit after exhibit screaming at you that your awful species is guilty of wholesale destruction across the planet. Not a fun day out.
16. Deserts will become tropical forests (jim300)
Reverse that and then yes. Forests will disappear, soil will erode, deserts will expand and sea-levels will rise from all the water contained within the trees.
17. Marriage will be replaced by an annual contract (holierthanthou)
No. People are still romantics who live in social groups. Marriage is a celebration of this and will always have a place in one form or another. Church weddings will be rarer. Hilariously, in the UK poverty-stricken churches will offer non-denominational marriages in an attempt to get money from the increasing number of atheists. Immigration to the UK from the US will rise dramatically as America becomes increasingly extreme in its outlook.
18. Sovereign nation states will cease to exist and there will be one world government (krozier93)
Not a chance. Too many people want a slice of the pie. This would only happen if the major corporations were running everything and decided to construct a single puppet government for them to control more easily.
19. War by the West will be fought totally be remote control (LowMaintenanceLifestyles)
There’s a Flash Gordon novel about this.
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Flash-Gordon-War-Cybernauts-Alex-Raymond/dp/0352301546
I read it many years ago and I think the message was that if you fight wars where no one dies it has no purpose. It’s the tragedy that gives it meaning and makes us seek an end to it. An increase in tech will cause a increase in the urge to start wars (for those that get them) and a corresponding increase in ‘collateral damage’ (i.e. civilians). Tech wars will be opposed by populations and civil unrest will be rife, as soon as the ‘wow factor’ wears off and people tire of watching foreigners die on YouTube.
See also Star Trek (the original series) episode ‘A Taste of Armageddon’ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Taste_of_Armageddon
20. Britain will have had a revolution (holierthanthou)
A war is more likely. Some sort of economy/resources driven conflict thinly veiled with rhetoric about maintaining our values against a monstrous threat. Current trends suggest we’ll be at war with someone in the east or middle east and we’ll be on the side of the US. But in 100 years the US might well be an imperialist puritan dictatorship that we and the rest of a tattered Europe oppose in a bizarre ‘what if’ replay of World War 2 that finds us allied with Germany against the Americans.
Either way I predict a lot more riots in Europe and the US before the end of this decade.
More readers' predictions
• English will be spelled phonetically (jim300)
No. Too much opposition and too much confusion between homophones. People forget the importance of etymology in text-based communication. Phonetically written homophones can be misread to give very different meanings.
More likely the far eastern influence on pronunciation will have a big effect globally and text messaging and equivalents will provoke a codified form of recognised informal English. Forms will probably have to state that they must be filled out in pen and refraining from use of ‘txt-spk’.
• Growing your own vegetables will not be allowed (holierthanthou)
How will they stop you? How will this be policed?
• The justice system will be based purely on rehabilitation (Paul)
Only if humans come to terms with the evidence that retribution is counter-productive and we let go of the desire for revenge. A tenth of the money spent on punishing crime is spent on preventing it. American prisons make vast profits from prisoner workforces so prevention is very bad for business. Expect that model to be rolled out in the UK as soon as British consumers completely boycott sweat shops and Third World slave labour.
Politicians trade on the fact that criminals are seen to be punished, and unfortunately prevented crimes are invisible. No politician will claim the glory for something not happening without being challenged; someone will have evidence it happened by chance. The stats beloved of politicians everywhere due to the revulsion they cause in the average person will always be used to maintain a ‘crime & punishment’ approach until voters learn to grasp the basics and realise they’re being duped continuously by their leaders and by their own brains. I predict it will take more than 100 years to iron out all those wrinkles.
• Instead of receiving information from the media, people will download information directly into their brains (krozier93)
Maybe, if broadcast to be ‘read’ or ‘heard’ internally, but it will interfere with normal senses far more than headphones or texting while driving and cause a lot of death (unless we all end up in chairs like in Wall-E).
If the idea here is to receive news as thoughts, then no. See above. Several times.
Apart from the major issue with understanding how thoughts work, each brain would need unique information calibrated specifically for it. Not financially viable unless some kind of thought-news-filter is invented.
• Crops will be grown in sand (jim300)
They already are: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydroponics
No mention of humanity living under the Red Star of the Solar Federation by the year 2112 or of the ruling Priests of the Temples of Syrinx? How disappointing.
The numbered predictions below are not mine. They were on the BBC website (link above) and I felt the need to engage with them and all of the comments are my own. The 'expert' opinions are omitted but can be found on the BBC page should you wish to read them. I have no affiliation with the BBC and I'm not a futurologist, any more than most people are.
In the tradition of futurology, I will be speaking here in certainties. No hedging bets. Actually that’s not quite true. I shall throughout be wandering between faux certainty and strong hunches vaguely hinted at. The future is a wave of time collapsing into the most probable forms through some version of quantum mechanics, so at this point a fuzzy, self-contradictory stance is entirely accurate.
I disagree with most of the predictions and with the experts’ opinions on a lot of them. The predictions say a lot about individual issues and interests, current national preoccupations and fantasies, but don’t seem to engage much with actual trends in culture and scientific progress. The ubiquitous ‘cyborg brain’ predictions are on the same level as ‘personal jet-packs’ and as unlikely in 100 years as they are now, unless there is a revolution in psychology leading to unprecedented progress in understanding how the brain works. Traditionally it’s been a very slow process. Psychology became a science around 5000 years after physics did, demonstrating how bad we are at noticing our thought patterns. Emotions weren’t even recognised as a part of decision-making until 1985 (this is still not accepted by science in general). Advances in psychology take around 150 years to filter out into the world of non-psychologists due to the massive resistance to most of the ideas (unless it’s bad news that fits with our prejudices, then it takes less time but is poorly understood and usually misquoted).
Freud still comes up a lot, many years after his ideas were refuted and any sliver of accuracy gleaned from them and used by other, for the most part unknown psychologists.
Bowlby’s post-war ‘delinquent mother’ notion was mentioned in parliament a couple of years ago despite the last 30 years of research arguing against it.
Even if the mysteries of the brain are solved, the population won’t want to know. Evidence so far is that the answers won’t be well received as they are, somewhat predictably, counter-intuitive.
In practical applications the advances in cybernetic technology will first be in the use of brain signals to switch things from one state to another, becoming more refined to allow us greater control. But don’t we already have fingers for that? Brain-controlled devices will mostly benefit the disabled and won’t get much government funding or will be too expensive to roll out to everyone who needs it. The tech already exists for brain and computer assisted prosthetics (see Simon Lewis’ TED Talk “Don’t take consciousness for granted”), but you won’t see it on anyone who isn’t wealthy.
Ok, to the predictions.
1. Oceans will be extensively farmed and not just for fish (Jim 300)
I expect much more land to be turned over to food production before they farm the seas for crops. Urban developments using the sides of skyscrapers will be quicker, easier and cheaper. Before anything is farmed in the sea (assuming the salt water issue is resolved) we’d have to figure out how to harvest it cheaply and how to keep the hag fish from eating it all. Life in the sea has had longer to evolve and to come up with winning strategies, so if we think pests on land are tricky we’ll be in for a shock on the ocean floor. I predict underwater farming will become successful and widespread only after we build stable large-scale under-sea environments and I doubt we’ll do that by 2112.
2. We will have the ability to communicate through thought transmission (Dev 2)
As PT says, this will be in electronic form, so not thought transmission at all. There’s confusion between using the ‘power of the mind’, i.e. the electricity that fluctuates as we think, and actually willing something to happen remotely. We can do this now so it’s not that big a deal. Driving a vehicle by thinking ‘left’ and ‘right’ is the same principal as thinking ‘tennis’ and ‘artichokes’. As long as there is a distinct difference in how the driver feels about those things. The subtle difference between thinking left and right is actually quite tricky for the devices to pick up, so the driver may have to be trained to think about Bjorn Borg when he/she wants to go left and about a giardiniera pizza to go right. The tech will become more sophisticated and sensitive, but essentially this will just replace getting up and doing it with your hands.
If people can learn to visualise their thoughts very clearly they might tap in to similar tech used in current speech recognition, but only if the thought patterns for each word are distinct. Devices will pick up on changes in the brain, not on thoughts. And as each person’s brain is different every device will have to be calibrated to an individual, with the equivalent of several sessions of physio to bond the machine with the user. If we ever invent telepathy the first thing we’ll discover is that each person has their very own unique thought-language.
3. Thanks to DNA and robotic engineering, we will have created incredibly intelligent humans who are immortal (game_over)
No. Well, maybe some very rich people or pseudo-people who could go on for centuries as long as their bodies are maintained by mortal technicians. They won’t be incredibly intelligent though. They might have some abilities that enable them to process numbers very quickly, either through access to a device that inputs to their brain, but this isn’t much different to a person trained to manually work an abacus. If we have a calculator plugged into our brain we still need to operate it and know what data to enter. If the implants do too much of the work it’s not you doing it, it’s a machine and you just see the results, exactly like reading a screen. You can’t know that the answer is right or how it was reached, you can only observe the results shown to you.
Brains are organs for ‘knowing’ and anything that simply presents information to a brain is by definition external. Augmenting the brain so it ‘knows’ something within the internal systems of cognitive functioning is still so far beyond us that we can’t even begin to imagine how we might do it. We can’t say how knowledge is acquired so that it becomes something we ‘know’, where or how it’s stored, or how we assign priorities to it. No cybernetic advances will go beyond some variation of visual/auditory input until cognition is better understood.
4. We will be able to control the weather (mariebee_)
No. Influence in some small way maybe, but with huge consequences that will make it too problematic to bother with. The weather is made up of interconnected systems that cover the whole planet, from the mountaintops to the deepest ocean floors. It’s too erratic to predict more than three days in advance so weather control will be a small affair, no doubt causing mayhem for neighbouring regions. The people with the money for weather control will spend it on buying up land in the areas that have the weather they want.
5. Antarctica will be "open for business" (Dev 2)
Yes, totally. Resources and the fortunes tied up with them are the irresistible force of human civilisation. Nothing is sacred if it’s needed to keep the machine going.
6. One single worldwide currency (from Kennys_Heroes)
No. Too many people care about remaining separate and too many eggs in one basket. A global economic collapse would be devastating with no one to bail us out.
On the other hand, a universal ‘virtual currency’ via online markets and agencies like PayPal is possible in some form, but why not just continue providing a hidden conversion from local currency as they do now? That would remove the need to work out what the exchange rate is between, say, pounds and online credits. The software does it for you and you just decide if the cost in local cash is acceptable. This is already happening.
7. We will all be wired to computers to make our brains work faster (Dev 2)
No. See above. Brains won’t work faster for being wired to machines, anymore than watching a TV or using a computer make us quicker. Yes watching David Attenborough in the Congo is quicker than going there myself, but it’s not the same thing. It hasn’t sped anything up, it’s replaced it with a simulation by proxy.
8. Nanorobots will flow around our body fixing cells, and will be able to record our memories (Alister Brown)
Ok, what are memories made of? Where are they? Are they permanent or do they change with time, mood and situation? (Answers: unknown, unknown, no, yes, yes and yes) Memories aren’t what most people think. They’re not little reference libraries we use to look up information about the past. I know you think that’s what they are, but that’s because your brain is programmed to feel that way. The evidence shows that different memories are accessed depending on context and mood, and that memories change a lot over the years in order to reinforce feelings we have in the here and now.
We don’t, on a conscious level, doubt and question ourselves. We construct certainties. If people could use faultless recording instruments (nanobots in our eyes and ears that play back information as it was received at the time) they would be so upsetting and challenging to us they’d be almost universally rejected. Scientists and artists would love them though.
Fixing cells, maybe. Curing cancer, maybe. Memories no.
9. We will have sussed nuclear fusion (Kennys_Heroes)
And have the power of a star inside a tiny, flimsy building less than one Astronomical Unit from a major residential area. Whoopee.
10. There will only be three languages in the world - English, Spanish and Mandarin (Bill Walker)
With a million local variations of each.
11. Eighty per cent of the world will have gay marriage (Paul)
Only if the swing towards right-wing fundamentalism is reversed or we come out the other side of it. Attitudes change on a sociological pendulum, they don’t occur along a straight line of ‘progress’.
12. California will lead the break-up of the US (Dev 2)
No. Too much money tied up in it.
13. Space elevators will make space travel cheap and easy (Ahdok)
No, but they might have made enough carbon nanotubes to make it possible to build one or two for the richest space-faring nations – China and India.
14. Women will be routinely impregnated by artificial insemination rather than by a man (krozier 93)
Only if the robot-brains we’re all using have failed to successfully assimilate sexual desire.
The psychology of procreation and parenting is usually tied up with the bonding and nurturing of people in love. The processes have evolved together and it’s only our modern contraceptualised society that separates sex and pregnancy. Couples often decide to have a family together. Women aren’t baby-making robots and child-bearing isn’t a mechanical process outside the social arena of relationships.
15. There will be museums for almost every aspect of nature, as so much of the world's natural habitat will have been destroyed (LowMaintenanceLifestyles)
I don’t think so. The emotional burden will be too unpleasant. Who would want to go to a museum displaying the enormity of human-based calamity? Exhibit after exhibit screaming at you that your awful species is guilty of wholesale destruction across the planet. Not a fun day out.
16. Deserts will become tropical forests (jim300)
Reverse that and then yes. Forests will disappear, soil will erode, deserts will expand and sea-levels will rise from all the water contained within the trees.
17. Marriage will be replaced by an annual contract (holierthanthou)
No. People are still romantics who live in social groups. Marriage is a celebration of this and will always have a place in one form or another. Church weddings will be rarer. Hilariously, in the UK poverty-stricken churches will offer non-denominational marriages in an attempt to get money from the increasing number of atheists. Immigration to the UK from the US will rise dramatically as America becomes increasingly extreme in its outlook.
18. Sovereign nation states will cease to exist and there will be one world government (krozier93)
Not a chance. Too many people want a slice of the pie. This would only happen if the major corporations were running everything and decided to construct a single puppet government for them to control more easily.
19. War by the West will be fought totally be remote control (LowMaintenanceLifestyles)
There’s a Flash Gordon novel about this.
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Flash-Gordon-War-Cybernauts-Alex-Raymond/dp/0352301546
I read it many years ago and I think the message was that if you fight wars where no one dies it has no purpose. It’s the tragedy that gives it meaning and makes us seek an end to it. An increase in tech will cause a increase in the urge to start wars (for those that get them) and a corresponding increase in ‘collateral damage’ (i.e. civilians). Tech wars will be opposed by populations and civil unrest will be rife, as soon as the ‘wow factor’ wears off and people tire of watching foreigners die on YouTube.
See also Star Trek (the original series) episode ‘A Taste of Armageddon’ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Taste_of_Armageddon
20. Britain will have had a revolution (holierthanthou)
A war is more likely. Some sort of economy/resources driven conflict thinly veiled with rhetoric about maintaining our values against a monstrous threat. Current trends suggest we’ll be at war with someone in the east or middle east and we’ll be on the side of the US. But in 100 years the US might well be an imperialist puritan dictatorship that we and the rest of a tattered Europe oppose in a bizarre ‘what if’ replay of World War 2 that finds us allied with Germany against the Americans.
Either way I predict a lot more riots in Europe and the US before the end of this decade.
More readers' predictions
• English will be spelled phonetically (jim300)
No. Too much opposition and too much confusion between homophones. People forget the importance of etymology in text-based communication. Phonetically written homophones can be misread to give very different meanings.
More likely the far eastern influence on pronunciation will have a big effect globally and text messaging and equivalents will provoke a codified form of recognised informal English. Forms will probably have to state that they must be filled out in pen and refraining from use of ‘txt-spk’.
• Growing your own vegetables will not be allowed (holierthanthou)
How will they stop you? How will this be policed?
• The justice system will be based purely on rehabilitation (Paul)
Only if humans come to terms with the evidence that retribution is counter-productive and we let go of the desire for revenge. A tenth of the money spent on punishing crime is spent on preventing it. American prisons make vast profits from prisoner workforces so prevention is very bad for business. Expect that model to be rolled out in the UK as soon as British consumers completely boycott sweat shops and Third World slave labour.
Politicians trade on the fact that criminals are seen to be punished, and unfortunately prevented crimes are invisible. No politician will claim the glory for something not happening without being challenged; someone will have evidence it happened by chance. The stats beloved of politicians everywhere due to the revulsion they cause in the average person will always be used to maintain a ‘crime & punishment’ approach until voters learn to grasp the basics and realise they’re being duped continuously by their leaders and by their own brains. I predict it will take more than 100 years to iron out all those wrinkles.
• Instead of receiving information from the media, people will download information directly into their brains (krozier93)
Maybe, if broadcast to be ‘read’ or ‘heard’ internally, but it will interfere with normal senses far more than headphones or texting while driving and cause a lot of death (unless we all end up in chairs like in Wall-E).
If the idea here is to receive news as thoughts, then no. See above. Several times.
Apart from the major issue with understanding how thoughts work, each brain would need unique information calibrated specifically for it. Not financially viable unless some kind of thought-news-filter is invented.
• Crops will be grown in sand (jim300)
They already are: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydroponics
No mention of humanity living under the Red Star of the Solar Federation by the year 2112 or of the ruling Priests of the Temples of Syrinx? How disappointing.
Friday, 13 January 2012
Primus inter pares (first among equals)
1. People are biased.
2. People are alike.
Out of a million high school students surveyed just 2 percent said they were below average in their leadership ability (Gilovich 1991). Similar results show up every time a study like this is done. On average people claim to be above average.
Our ‘bias blind spot’ stops us recognising our own cognitive biases, so not only is it happening around us all the time influencing how we see ourselves and everyone else, we’re also programmed to ignore it!
The ‘halo effect’ is where we confuse a pretty face for someone we might get on with. It works backwards too, and with crowds. If we’re apalled by the huge number of people surrounding us we stop seeing them as other humans and they become unattractive and less interesting. Eventually they become obstacles to what we want to do. Next it’s road rage and shinning up the nearest drainpipe with a hunting rifle.
This is also the inspiration for all zombie films.
Contrary to convention, the heroes of zombie films aren’t tenacious survivors battling mounting odds, they’re people with no empathy who have started killing random strangers. The classic movie zombie is YOU seen through the eyes of a murderous sociopath.
That thing you like? Most people like that. That thing you do when no one else is around? We all do it. That song that really speaks to you? Us too.
The way to stand out from the crowd is to never go with your first or second ideas. Abandon them and go with the third, fourth or fifth idea, because everyone else at this point in their creative journey is thinking the same thing you are. It's the things we think of as we push on that make us individuals, nurturing our idiosyncracies and using them to influence our choices. Paradoxically, these ideas often resonate more effectively with others because they still speak of human experience, yet perhaps in a less frequently or even wholly original way.
The universe is trying to return to a unified state of sameness so it can end and start again. Fighting it takes effort. Differences between people are small but they build up over time. The more stuff you do the more it will stand out, the more you or your work will become defined. Originality is shaped by hard work and experience. We’re shaped from before we’re born and right through our lives to be the simplest thing we need to be to fit our surroundings, and right now at the beginning of the 21st Century that means being one of a crowd. And we hate it.
We’re fantastic at adapting to change, but we can bring about changes too. If we change the way we look at things, how we think about things, how we respond or react to things, we can change everything we do, see and feel.
No one is special. Everyone is special. Next time you meet a zombie bear in mind they’re meeting one too.
2. People are alike.
Out of a million high school students surveyed just 2 percent said they were below average in their leadership ability (Gilovich 1991). Similar results show up every time a study like this is done. On average people claim to be above average.
Our ‘bias blind spot’ stops us recognising our own cognitive biases, so not only is it happening around us all the time influencing how we see ourselves and everyone else, we’re also programmed to ignore it!
The ‘halo effect’ is where we confuse a pretty face for someone we might get on with. It works backwards too, and with crowds. If we’re apalled by the huge number of people surrounding us we stop seeing them as other humans and they become unattractive and less interesting. Eventually they become obstacles to what we want to do. Next it’s road rage and shinning up the nearest drainpipe with a hunting rifle.
This is also the inspiration for all zombie films.
Contrary to convention, the heroes of zombie films aren’t tenacious survivors battling mounting odds, they’re people with no empathy who have started killing random strangers. The classic movie zombie is YOU seen through the eyes of a murderous sociopath.
That thing you like? Most people like that. That thing you do when no one else is around? We all do it. That song that really speaks to you? Us too.
The way to stand out from the crowd is to never go with your first or second ideas. Abandon them and go with the third, fourth or fifth idea, because everyone else at this point in their creative journey is thinking the same thing you are. It's the things we think of as we push on that make us individuals, nurturing our idiosyncracies and using them to influence our choices. Paradoxically, these ideas often resonate more effectively with others because they still speak of human experience, yet perhaps in a less frequently or even wholly original way.
The universe is trying to return to a unified state of sameness so it can end and start again. Fighting it takes effort. Differences between people are small but they build up over time. The more stuff you do the more it will stand out, the more you or your work will become defined. Originality is shaped by hard work and experience. We’re shaped from before we’re born and right through our lives to be the simplest thing we need to be to fit our surroundings, and right now at the beginning of the 21st Century that means being one of a crowd. And we hate it.
We’re fantastic at adapting to change, but we can bring about changes too. If we change the way we look at things, how we think about things, how we respond or react to things, we can change everything we do, see and feel.
No one is special. Everyone is special. Next time you meet a zombie bear in mind they’re meeting one too.
Modern Consumerism and Buyer's Choice
With the introduction of the 'Boycott Sopa' app, information instantly available to consumers is set to change.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2012/jan/12/boycott-sopa-app-informed-consumer-citizen?INTCMP=SRCH
Knowledge is power. And for consumers that power comes from where they choose to spend their money.
If you want to update Marxism you might say that, as well as using workers as the means of production, consumers are used to convert produce into money. Workers control the means of production and consumers control the profit, so a boycott is a strike further along the chain.
Our culture still tends to see workers as possessions of employers, but that view is changing as more and more people start thinking about ‘work/life balance’. Even the term infers that your work no longer defines you (cf. Fight Club “You are not your job” and such reactionary institutions as HM Queen and the quiz show Fifteen to One that categorise people entirely on the basis of name and occupation).
On the surface consumers are celebrated for their independence, but companies use all manner of tricks to maintain ‘customer loyalty’. In reality ‘loyalty’ is mostly inertia. Evidence from the fossil record and from evolutionary psychology suggests humans have flourished because we excel at adapting to change, but it doesn’t follow that we crave it. We cope by being very good at re-establishing stability once it’s been lost. Marketing and sales people play on our instincts to manoeuvre us onto plateaus they create for us - farmed salmon in sea-cages thinking ours is the whole ocean to swim in.
By becoming aware of the nets we make them disappear. We must overcome our fear of the ocean and head out for the deep water of freedom.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2012/jan/12/boycott-sopa-app-informed-consumer-citizen?INTCMP=SRCH
Knowledge is power. And for consumers that power comes from where they choose to spend their money.
If you want to update Marxism you might say that, as well as using workers as the means of production, consumers are used to convert produce into money. Workers control the means of production and consumers control the profit, so a boycott is a strike further along the chain.
Our culture still tends to see workers as possessions of employers, but that view is changing as more and more people start thinking about ‘work/life balance’. Even the term infers that your work no longer defines you (cf. Fight Club “You are not your job” and such reactionary institutions as HM Queen and the quiz show Fifteen to One that categorise people entirely on the basis of name and occupation).
On the surface consumers are celebrated for their independence, but companies use all manner of tricks to maintain ‘customer loyalty’. In reality ‘loyalty’ is mostly inertia. Evidence from the fossil record and from evolutionary psychology suggests humans have flourished because we excel at adapting to change, but it doesn’t follow that we crave it. We cope by being very good at re-establishing stability once it’s been lost. Marketing and sales people play on our instincts to manoeuvre us onto plateaus they create for us - farmed salmon in sea-cages thinking ours is the whole ocean to swim in.
By becoming aware of the nets we make them disappear. We must overcome our fear of the ocean and head out for the deep water of freedom.
Wednesday, 3 August 2011
IE Users Told By World's Press That They're Stupid
Today The Guardian website posted this in Pass Notes:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/aug/02/are-internet-explorer-users-stupid
It relates to a study which claims to have found a relationship (although more likely at best a correlation) between IQ levels and which web browser people choose to use. The inflammatory and eye-catching ‘results’ seem to indicate Internet Explorer users are less intelligent.
They seem to have got the story from CBS and link to this:
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-501465_162-20086362-501465.html
CBS at least link to the website of the people who claim to have carried out the study:
http://www.aptiquant.com/news/is-internet-explorer-for-the-dumb-a-new-study-suggests-exactly-that/
Leaving aside the issues of sloppy journalism, reporters regurgitating each others’ work and a lack of validation of an issue which will be of interest to so many, not even especially engaging with the apparent shameless publicity stunt the study almost certainly is, there are things in the study itself which undermine any possibility of genuine and statistically significant results. I left a comment on the CBS website that read as follows:
I’m a little rusty, but I have a BSc (Hons) in Psychology and I have many concerns with this study.
This is from their own website:
“A Vancouver based Psychometric Consulting company, AptiQuant, has released a report on a trial it conducted to measure the effects of cognitive ability on the choice of web browser.”
They’re speaking as if reporting someone else’s findings and that seems quite odd.
They claim they’re studying the variable of cognitive ability against the variable of choice, but there is no establishment that the web browsers are chosen by participants, some of whom will potentially be accessing the test from work. Without establishing the factor of choice the results are confounded and unusable.
Next, I can’t find any numbers in the pdf report to indicate how many users there were per web browser. For this type of study that info is essential.
Let’s say, for sake of argument, out of 101,326 participants 101,306 use IE6-8 and the remaining 20 use IE9 or other web browsers. Now let’s say that just by chance half of the 20 have well above average IQs. That kind of slant is going to skew the data completely. The ‘population’ of the study (relating to the other web browsers) is too small and the data ‘not significant’. If the same thing happened at the other end, a handful of IE6 users with a few very low IQs mixed in, we have another set of skewed data and a ‘type 1 error’
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Type_I_and_type_II_errors). Averages are meaningless without the number of users.
There’s no indication in the report if the results were ‘significant’ – a term which indicates whether the results match the hypothesis, shown by a ‘P-value’. Where’s the P-value for this study? There are misleading uses of the word ‘significant’ in the Results section, e.g. “ranked significantly lower”, but this is not how genuine experiments use the word and it creates (presumably on purpose) confusion about the results by giving the impression they’re statistically significant when the author in fact means ‘pronounced’.
The Results section discusses the findings. That tips me off that this study either isn’t real or wasn’t done properly. It’s not for the Results section to convey the author’s opinion on the findings, that goes in the Discussion/Conclusion section(s). Students have it drummed into them not to talk about what they find until the correct part of the report. The Results section should be statements of bald facts and doing otherwise is either an amateurish mistake or deliberately misleading.
(Sorry for the lack of hyperlinks above. The script doesn't seem to be working today)
Edit later same day.
As suspected, it wasn't real:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-14389430
But the point remains that a few simple things gave this away and should have been spotted by the journalists or the journalists who borrowed from other journalists. Or the hoaxers could have done a better job of it. Clearly a lot of effort went into this (for reasons not yet known), but schoolboy errors tripped them up.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/aug/02/are-internet-explorer-users-stupid
It relates to a study which claims to have found a relationship (although more likely at best a correlation) between IQ levels and which web browser people choose to use. The inflammatory and eye-catching ‘results’ seem to indicate Internet Explorer users are less intelligent.
They seem to have got the story from CBS and link to this:
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-501465_162-20086362-501465.html
CBS at least link to the website of the people who claim to have carried out the study:
http://www.aptiquant.com/news/is-internet-explorer-for-the-dumb-a-new-study-suggests-exactly-that/
Leaving aside the issues of sloppy journalism, reporters regurgitating each others’ work and a lack of validation of an issue which will be of interest to so many, not even especially engaging with the apparent shameless publicity stunt the study almost certainly is, there are things in the study itself which undermine any possibility of genuine and statistically significant results. I left a comment on the CBS website that read as follows:
I’m a little rusty, but I have a BSc (Hons) in Psychology and I have many concerns with this study.
This is from their own website:
“A Vancouver based Psychometric Consulting company, AptiQuant, has released a report on a trial it conducted to measure the effects of cognitive ability on the choice of web browser.”
They’re speaking as if reporting someone else’s findings and that seems quite odd.
They claim they’re studying the variable of cognitive ability against the variable of choice, but there is no establishment that the web browsers are chosen by participants, some of whom will potentially be accessing the test from work. Without establishing the factor of choice the results are confounded and unusable.
Next, I can’t find any numbers in the pdf report to indicate how many users there were per web browser. For this type of study that info is essential.
Let’s say, for sake of argument, out of 101,326 participants 101,306 use IE6-8 and the remaining 20 use IE9 or other web browsers. Now let’s say that just by chance half of the 20 have well above average IQs. That kind of slant is going to skew the data completely. The ‘population’ of the study (relating to the other web browsers) is too small and the data ‘not significant’. If the same thing happened at the other end, a handful of IE6 users with a few very low IQs mixed in, we have another set of skewed data and a ‘type 1 error’
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Type_I_and_type_II_errors). Averages are meaningless without the number of users.
There’s no indication in the report if the results were ‘significant’ – a term which indicates whether the results match the hypothesis, shown by a ‘P-value’. Where’s the P-value for this study? There are misleading uses of the word ‘significant’ in the Results section, e.g. “ranked significantly lower”, but this is not how genuine experiments use the word and it creates (presumably on purpose) confusion about the results by giving the impression they’re statistically significant when the author in fact means ‘pronounced’.
The Results section discusses the findings. That tips me off that this study either isn’t real or wasn’t done properly. It’s not for the Results section to convey the author’s opinion on the findings, that goes in the Discussion/Conclusion section(s). Students have it drummed into them not to talk about what they find until the correct part of the report. The Results section should be statements of bald facts and doing otherwise is either an amateurish mistake or deliberately misleading.
(Sorry for the lack of hyperlinks above. The script doesn't seem to be working today)
Edit later same day.
As suspected, it wasn't real:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-14389430
But the point remains that a few simple things gave this away and should have been spotted by the journalists or the journalists who borrowed from other journalists. Or the hoaxers could have done a better job of it. Clearly a lot of effort went into this (for reasons not yet known), but schoolboy errors tripped them up.
Wednesday, 29 June 2011
Because...
On a Facebook discussion thread I was asked to justify why it's ok to laugh at Bill Hicks' call for anyone in marketing or advertising to kill themselves (see link - NSFW)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gDW_Hj2K0wo
I declined to do so at the time, partly because the person I found myself arguing with wasn't looking for an explanation, he was looking for a victory. And partly because he asked me if it was ok to call for people in marketing and advertising to kill themselves then what next? Would we do the same for Jews?
Inwardly invoking Godwin's Law , I didn't engage with him. An hour later on my walk home along the seafront an answer occurred to me and I stopped to write it down. What follows is as it came to me.
Because...
Because there are two gods in my world: Truth and Beauty, and either one is diminished by the absence of the other.
Because walking home along the shore at the end of my working day listening to a well-written song, watching a gull soar on the breeze, I can start to cry at the inexpressible wonder of it all.
Because I loathe the culture of aspiration and the cycle of economic disaster and recovery it perpetuates. The embedded false inadequacies it inculcates, the endless procession of need-thrill-remorse-need-thrill-remorse instilled in the hearts of the naïve to line the pockets of the insincere.
Because it is abhorrent to me that some spend their days convincing the adequate they are not so, covering the truth with lies, using conjuror’s tricks to convince people to part with their money – money that, while earned by time and effort, its only value to the banks and corporations is pieced together from promises and greed and fear – to spend on anything; anything that will give them hope. A hope that must be made to die quickly or it will quench the insatiable need to buy things and fortunes will no longer be made so easily.
Because the market thrives on shattered dreams and misery and the promise of better that is only made good long enough to create another hopeless, cardboard aspiration. And because the world is made worse with every selfish lie, every dark deception, every failing hope, every moment of despair that profits the deceivers.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gDW_Hj2K0wo
I declined to do so at the time, partly because the person I found myself arguing with wasn't looking for an explanation, he was looking for a victory. And partly because he asked me if it was ok to call for people in marketing and advertising to kill themselves then what next? Would we do the same for Jews?
Inwardly invoking Godwin's Law , I didn't engage with him. An hour later on my walk home along the seafront an answer occurred to me and I stopped to write it down. What follows is as it came to me.
Because...
Because there are two gods in my world: Truth and Beauty, and either one is diminished by the absence of the other.
Because walking home along the shore at the end of my working day listening to a well-written song, watching a gull soar on the breeze, I can start to cry at the inexpressible wonder of it all.
Because I loathe the culture of aspiration and the cycle of economic disaster and recovery it perpetuates. The embedded false inadequacies it inculcates, the endless procession of need-thrill-remorse-need-thrill-remorse instilled in the hearts of the naïve to line the pockets of the insincere.
Because it is abhorrent to me that some spend their days convincing the adequate they are not so, covering the truth with lies, using conjuror’s tricks to convince people to part with their money – money that, while earned by time and effort, its only value to the banks and corporations is pieced together from promises and greed and fear – to spend on anything; anything that will give them hope. A hope that must be made to die quickly or it will quench the insatiable need to buy things and fortunes will no longer be made so easily.
Because the market thrives on shattered dreams and misery and the promise of better that is only made good long enough to create another hopeless, cardboard aspiration. And because the world is made worse with every selfish lie, every dark deception, every failing hope, every moment of despair that profits the deceivers.
Thursday, 26 May 2011
Dimensions and Creativity: Part Two
I include here a letter I sent to Professor Max Tegmark at MIT outlining the ideas, mine and other people's, that got me thinking and prompted Part One and the upcoming Part Three of my Dimensions and Creativity posts.
1-Dimensional Mathematics, The Echoes of the Universe, Roger Penrose and the Endless Loop of Time
Abstract
Below I will put forward several ideas; from a question on the validity of mathematical infinity, to the Universe existing as a cycle with no beginning or end.
I will suggest that Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle is the arbitrary behaviour of unobserved particles and their ‘echoes’ in potential realities which, when observed, can be specifically located only because other possible but less probable locations are cancelled out and disappear without trace. I will suggest that the double-slit experiment can be explained as what happens on the rare occasion when we are able to detect two possible universes at once.
I will describe multiple universes consisting only of ‘potential’; a single pattern of probability in a wave of the most probable ‘reality’ expanding toward heat death and zero mass before eventually looping back on itself to create the beginning of space-time from its own end. Not, as Roger Penrose has suggested, a new universe, but the very same universe; its cause, in the absence of any measurable time or space required for a sequence to form, being its own death when the end gives rise to the beginning in a closed loop of Time.
Dear Professor Tegmark,
I recently saw the Horizon programme “What is Reality?” on the BBC and was interested to hear you say the Universe is not simply described by mathematics, but actually made of mathematics.
As you have a standing invitation on your website for people to contact you with their ideas I’ve sent you mine. I included an abstract above so you can see at a glance where I’m going and decide if it’s worth reading on.
With relation to how maths is embedded within the fundamental structure of the Universe, it occurred to me that maths could be said to have direction without width or breadth, which, by my understanding, would make it one dimensional. Could it be that maths is the 1-D aspect of the physical universe? I may be way off here, but isn’t maths, when you cut it down to absolute basics, a continuum with only increase or decrease in value as possible directions and no ‘sideways motion’ to produce additional dimensions?
If the Universe exists on a mathematical framework that’s being discovered piece by piece, is it possible the first dimension is where we find that framework? A blueprint from which the other dimensions of space-time emerge? That’s my starting point, from which I head towards a far bigger picture along the way taking in a few other ideas I think are related.
The title of this e-mail includes so many big ideas it would take too long in this format to convey in any detail everything I’m weaving together, so I’ll sketch out an overview of the points. The list below maps out a progression of ideas as I see it, some are mine and some are not. Much of it has been gathered from many places over many years to form a wider concept that seems to fit together quite well. I’m sure there are many flaws, but I’d like to offer it to the experts in case it is of any use or interest.
At the risk of sounding like a Lewis Carroll character, I’d like to start with infinity.
On Infinity:
Infinity is used happily by mathematicians, but to a physicist it indicates a serious error in their equations.
If the Universe is built on a framework of mathematics then ‘pure’ concepts like infinity are idealised and not functional. Perfection doesn’t seem to exist in this universe as the physics of non-uniform dispersal through inherent imperfections appears to be the root cause of diversity.
There’s a mathematician (whose name unfortunately I can’t recall) who claims numbers don’t increase +1 to infinity, but at some very big number they somehow return to zero.
It would be impossible, even for an indestructible counting machine, to add +1 infinitely without the end of the Universe interrupting. Infinity seems to me to exist only in manufactured spaces, like halving the distance between an arrow and its target so that it travels forever without hitting its mark; always a fraction closer. This isn’t what happens of course, so is it any more realistic to say numbers are infinite if space-time is finite?
If the above is true there must be a ‘maximum number’. Perhaps if you take the smallest possible division of Time and multiply it by the full length of Time, i.e. the full duration of the Universe, that yields the largest possible number that could ‘fit’ into Time before somehow resetting to zero. As odd and counter-intuitive as this sounds, it would parallel what Penrose suggests for Space.
On Waves of Universes:
In Creation Revisited Atkins describes the behaviour of light waves through air and water and the resulting refraction. Light waves, he says, travel by the quickest route from A to B, but to find it they must first try everything then eliminate all the ones that aren’t the quickest. Light has a short wavelength so any waves deviating far from straight lines quickly interfere with each other and cancel out. When light travels through different media the wavelength is effected.
I’ve heard that anything that can be described as a single object with momentum can be thought of as a wave, including the Universe itself. (I think this relates to deBroglie’s ‘matter wave’.)
If the Universe described as a wave has an extremely short (near imperceptible) wavelength it may create multiple possibilities that, from our perspective, instantly cancel themselves out leaving just one wave as the optimum, most thermo-dynamically probable, configuration of everything.
I suggest the medium the universe-wave travels through consists of the vast number of possibilities that exist (the total potential energy of the Universe) and that all thermo-dynamic occurrences and choices of humans and animals affect the ‘direction’ of the wave. Where choice occurs the wave would take on a local characteristic, perhaps of a specific complexity (could this one day be used to detect life in distant galaxies somehow? A good plot for a sci-fi story). This doesn’t argue for Determinism as it doesn’t imply causation.
The interference that cancels out the other waves and leaves the one that is our Universe, what we call Reality, is according to probability. The improbable doesn’t happen, the probable does. Where this is arbitrary it can go either way and gives us an opportunity to detect it with experimentation. These areas of our reality appear ‘fuzzy’ to us, as in the double-slit test.
If the probability of an event (e.g. the location of an electron, the path of a photon) changes due to interaction such as measurement, observation, etc., the wave behaves differently and becomes less ‘fuzzy’ as the number of probabilities reduces. If an electron is unobserved it has the potential to be in more than one place due to equal probability of being in any specific location; but once observed that’s no longer the case. The extra waves of probable universes interfere with each other and cancel each other out until just one is left in a single location. If the electron’s velocity is measured, rather than its location, the Universe has no need to be so definitive and location can remain ‘fuzzy’.
In the double-slit test, while the photons aren’t measured, they can be in two places at once because they always were. The photons appearing on the screen are those that aren’t cancelled out by interference. No photon is split in two, no new universe is created, in fact one of many possible universes is revealed to us. When the photons are measured as they pass through the slits the probability changes and we can see the edges of Reality change. An echo normally hidden from us disappears. Measuring the photons applies the laws of physics at an increased local level, reducing the probability to one location per photon. Wouldn’t this fit with quantum mechanics and go some way to explaining the apparent paradoxes?
In current multiple universe hypotheses each universe begets further universes and each of these begets even more, increasing exponentially. This requires a limitless capacity for creation; and surely that would include the creation of energy. But energy can’t be created. Taking Occam’s razor to the problem, if the same energy is recycled again and again as the waves are cancelled out and return to potential energy state, we don’t need to explain anything new. The standard model fits.
In this hypothesis however, each new universe exists only for an infinitesimal amount of time (is there a lower limit on splitting Time, and could the duration of the new universes define it?). If events in those universes are possible yet not probable they cancel out. They wouldn’t occur over noticeable distances because the wavelength is so incredibly short. This occurs at the quantum level yet is simultaneously occurring throughout the Universe, each wave contributing to the universe-wave, the tiniest and largest scales linked together. The particles of the whole falling into place individually to create Reality as we understand it. Schrodinger’s cat now begins to make sense.
For us to be able to do anything we have to ‘move through’ the medium of what is possible, but we’re confined by the laws of physics and directed by what is statistically probable. In the medium of time-space I can get up from my chair or stay put. For those potentials to exist there has to be something for the variant universes to ‘fit into’ or ‘flow through’, but each choice or variation doesn’t have to be the cause of a whole new ‘Reality’ in its own right. If the potential that forms the possible is recycled back into the whole the problem disappears.
The ‘flow’ of potential begins to explain Time’s singular direction and why things bigger than an electron don’t spontaneously appear from nothing. The laws of thermo-dynamics dictate what is possible and what is most probable. If physics theoretically allows for time travel or the spontaneous appearance of conscious minds such events don’t occur because the probability of them happening is negligible at every moment a universe-wave cancels out and the possibility never becomes Reality. We’re misinterpreting the statistics by thinking the odds get better as Time goes on. Each moment is in one sense a new universe and the odds are the same for each one as it comes into being. The reset button is pushed. The chances of a bowl of petunias and a sperm whale suddenly springing into being are small enough to be discounted.
Time doesn’t need to flow in a specific direction, an illusory arrow may have come about due to the nature of statistical probability. A cup falling off a table is statistically weighted to keep falling because gravity bends space making the probability of it not falling zero. It smashes when it hits the floor because entropy says it will. The number of permutations the molecules can take other than as a fixed cup are so many, breaking is so probable, that nothing else can occur in the brief moments where the universe-waves come into being and cancel out. We experience Time as the flow of events towards the unavoidably probable, it can’t flow backwards or be perceived backwards without violating probability. There’s no ‘rule’ against it, but the capacity for it to happen isn’t there.
On the End of Time as its Beginning:
Roger Penrose has theorised that the end of the Universe and the dissipation of all matter and energy into potential energy is the catalyst which creates a new universe via its own Big Bang.
Penrose may have overlooked that it doesn’t need to be a new universe. A sequence of universes implies a continuum occurring within a timeframe, yet Time only occurs within a universe. To put the process into a procession of one universe following another is simply to imagine our universe within a bigger universe that behaves the same. But that doesn’t address the issue, it just moves locus, I believe incorrectly, further out. I can’t see how a sequence can occur outside Time.
A thought experiment: Compare the life of a universe to a train journey; the train itself represents space-time in any form (temporal sequences, matter, energy, potential energy), and Passenger A represents an immortal traveller who loves riding on trains and is able to survive the birth and death of universes. Each train runs exclusively on its own track and the tracks all run in large circles so that all journeys begin and end at the terminus. The terminus is at the South Pole and all tracks run up the lines of longitude, cross at the North Pole and return to the terminus. Other stations along the way are not relevant, remove them and there is still a journey. Direction of travel is irrelevant. Imagine a journey ending; the train stops but Passenger A doesn’t need to board a different train travelling on a separate track to begin another journey.
Our universe may be a closed loop. Time ends but instantly begins again, the whole Universe returning to the start. In the final moments of space-time dimensions become immaterial and it becomes possible to return to the point of beginning without moving. With no mass, no distance and no passing of time what in one moment were the furthest reaches of the void in the next are indeterminate from every other point in space-time. Time as we understand it no longer functions with nothing physical to affect. The entire Universe dissipates to potential energy and is reduced to a single point in Time and Space, an indefinably tiny speck of nothing containing literally everything. The Big Bang is the beginning of Time, but also marks its end.
I’m not a physicist or a mathematician. If I had the skills to express these ideas as equations I might be able to spot the (no doubt many) faults in them and understand why no one has made these connections before or come to these conclusions. Maybe I’m totally wrong…
…but about ten years ago I had an idea that universes could repeat, this was coincidentally about the same time Roger Penrose began thinking about it, but I only heard about his theory this year. That gives me confidence at least some of my ideas are respectable and make some kind of sense.
I hope you’ve had time to read this email and maybe, just maybe you’ll decide to respond. I’d love to know if I’m way off or if there’s anything interesting in there.
Regards,
Richmond Strange BSc (Hons), BA (Hons), MBPsS
1-Dimensional Mathematics, The Echoes of the Universe, Roger Penrose and the Endless Loop of Time
Abstract
Below I will put forward several ideas; from a question on the validity of mathematical infinity, to the Universe existing as a cycle with no beginning or end.
I will suggest that Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle is the arbitrary behaviour of unobserved particles and their ‘echoes’ in potential realities which, when observed, can be specifically located only because other possible but less probable locations are cancelled out and disappear without trace. I will suggest that the double-slit experiment can be explained as what happens on the rare occasion when we are able to detect two possible universes at once.
I will describe multiple universes consisting only of ‘potential’; a single pattern of probability in a wave of the most probable ‘reality’ expanding toward heat death and zero mass before eventually looping back on itself to create the beginning of space-time from its own end. Not, as Roger Penrose has suggested, a new universe, but the very same universe; its cause, in the absence of any measurable time or space required for a sequence to form, being its own death when the end gives rise to the beginning in a closed loop of Time.
Dear Professor Tegmark,
I recently saw the Horizon programme “What is Reality?” on the BBC and was interested to hear you say the Universe is not simply described by mathematics, but actually made of mathematics.
As you have a standing invitation on your website for people to contact you with their ideas I’ve sent you mine. I included an abstract above so you can see at a glance where I’m going and decide if it’s worth reading on.
With relation to how maths is embedded within the fundamental structure of the Universe, it occurred to me that maths could be said to have direction without width or breadth, which, by my understanding, would make it one dimensional. Could it be that maths is the 1-D aspect of the physical universe? I may be way off here, but isn’t maths, when you cut it down to absolute basics, a continuum with only increase or decrease in value as possible directions and no ‘sideways motion’ to produce additional dimensions?
If the Universe exists on a mathematical framework that’s being discovered piece by piece, is it possible the first dimension is where we find that framework? A blueprint from which the other dimensions of space-time emerge? That’s my starting point, from which I head towards a far bigger picture along the way taking in a few other ideas I think are related.
The title of this e-mail includes so many big ideas it would take too long in this format to convey in any detail everything I’m weaving together, so I’ll sketch out an overview of the points. The list below maps out a progression of ideas as I see it, some are mine and some are not. Much of it has been gathered from many places over many years to form a wider concept that seems to fit together quite well. I’m sure there are many flaws, but I’d like to offer it to the experts in case it is of any use or interest.
At the risk of sounding like a Lewis Carroll character, I’d like to start with infinity.
On Infinity:
Infinity is used happily by mathematicians, but to a physicist it indicates a serious error in their equations.
If the Universe is built on a framework of mathematics then ‘pure’ concepts like infinity are idealised and not functional. Perfection doesn’t seem to exist in this universe as the physics of non-uniform dispersal through inherent imperfections appears to be the root cause of diversity.
There’s a mathematician (whose name unfortunately I can’t recall) who claims numbers don’t increase +1 to infinity, but at some very big number they somehow return to zero.
It would be impossible, even for an indestructible counting machine, to add +1 infinitely without the end of the Universe interrupting. Infinity seems to me to exist only in manufactured spaces, like halving the distance between an arrow and its target so that it travels forever without hitting its mark; always a fraction closer. This isn’t what happens of course, so is it any more realistic to say numbers are infinite if space-time is finite?
If the above is true there must be a ‘maximum number’. Perhaps if you take the smallest possible division of Time and multiply it by the full length of Time, i.e. the full duration of the Universe, that yields the largest possible number that could ‘fit’ into Time before somehow resetting to zero. As odd and counter-intuitive as this sounds, it would parallel what Penrose suggests for Space.
On Waves of Universes:
In Creation Revisited Atkins describes the behaviour of light waves through air and water and the resulting refraction. Light waves, he says, travel by the quickest route from A to B, but to find it they must first try everything then eliminate all the ones that aren’t the quickest. Light has a short wavelength so any waves deviating far from straight lines quickly interfere with each other and cancel out. When light travels through different media the wavelength is effected.
I’ve heard that anything that can be described as a single object with momentum can be thought of as a wave, including the Universe itself. (I think this relates to deBroglie’s ‘matter wave’.)
If the Universe described as a wave has an extremely short (near imperceptible) wavelength it may create multiple possibilities that, from our perspective, instantly cancel themselves out leaving just one wave as the optimum, most thermo-dynamically probable, configuration of everything.
I suggest the medium the universe-wave travels through consists of the vast number of possibilities that exist (the total potential energy of the Universe) and that all thermo-dynamic occurrences and choices of humans and animals affect the ‘direction’ of the wave. Where choice occurs the wave would take on a local characteristic, perhaps of a specific complexity (could this one day be used to detect life in distant galaxies somehow? A good plot for a sci-fi story). This doesn’t argue for Determinism as it doesn’t imply causation.
The interference that cancels out the other waves and leaves the one that is our Universe, what we call Reality, is according to probability. The improbable doesn’t happen, the probable does. Where this is arbitrary it can go either way and gives us an opportunity to detect it with experimentation. These areas of our reality appear ‘fuzzy’ to us, as in the double-slit test.
If the probability of an event (e.g. the location of an electron, the path of a photon) changes due to interaction such as measurement, observation, etc., the wave behaves differently and becomes less ‘fuzzy’ as the number of probabilities reduces. If an electron is unobserved it has the potential to be in more than one place due to equal probability of being in any specific location; but once observed that’s no longer the case. The extra waves of probable universes interfere with each other and cancel each other out until just one is left in a single location. If the electron’s velocity is measured, rather than its location, the Universe has no need to be so definitive and location can remain ‘fuzzy’.
In the double-slit test, while the photons aren’t measured, they can be in two places at once because they always were. The photons appearing on the screen are those that aren’t cancelled out by interference. No photon is split in two, no new universe is created, in fact one of many possible universes is revealed to us. When the photons are measured as they pass through the slits the probability changes and we can see the edges of Reality change. An echo normally hidden from us disappears. Measuring the photons applies the laws of physics at an increased local level, reducing the probability to one location per photon. Wouldn’t this fit with quantum mechanics and go some way to explaining the apparent paradoxes?
In current multiple universe hypotheses each universe begets further universes and each of these begets even more, increasing exponentially. This requires a limitless capacity for creation; and surely that would include the creation of energy. But energy can’t be created. Taking Occam’s razor to the problem, if the same energy is recycled again and again as the waves are cancelled out and return to potential energy state, we don’t need to explain anything new. The standard model fits.
In this hypothesis however, each new universe exists only for an infinitesimal amount of time (is there a lower limit on splitting Time, and could the duration of the new universes define it?). If events in those universes are possible yet not probable they cancel out. They wouldn’t occur over noticeable distances because the wavelength is so incredibly short. This occurs at the quantum level yet is simultaneously occurring throughout the Universe, each wave contributing to the universe-wave, the tiniest and largest scales linked together. The particles of the whole falling into place individually to create Reality as we understand it. Schrodinger’s cat now begins to make sense.
For us to be able to do anything we have to ‘move through’ the medium of what is possible, but we’re confined by the laws of physics and directed by what is statistically probable. In the medium of time-space I can get up from my chair or stay put. For those potentials to exist there has to be something for the variant universes to ‘fit into’ or ‘flow through’, but each choice or variation doesn’t have to be the cause of a whole new ‘Reality’ in its own right. If the potential that forms the possible is recycled back into the whole the problem disappears.
The ‘flow’ of potential begins to explain Time’s singular direction and why things bigger than an electron don’t spontaneously appear from nothing. The laws of thermo-dynamics dictate what is possible and what is most probable. If physics theoretically allows for time travel or the spontaneous appearance of conscious minds such events don’t occur because the probability of them happening is negligible at every moment a universe-wave cancels out and the possibility never becomes Reality. We’re misinterpreting the statistics by thinking the odds get better as Time goes on. Each moment is in one sense a new universe and the odds are the same for each one as it comes into being. The reset button is pushed. The chances of a bowl of petunias and a sperm whale suddenly springing into being are small enough to be discounted.
Time doesn’t need to flow in a specific direction, an illusory arrow may have come about due to the nature of statistical probability. A cup falling off a table is statistically weighted to keep falling because gravity bends space making the probability of it not falling zero. It smashes when it hits the floor because entropy says it will. The number of permutations the molecules can take other than as a fixed cup are so many, breaking is so probable, that nothing else can occur in the brief moments where the universe-waves come into being and cancel out. We experience Time as the flow of events towards the unavoidably probable, it can’t flow backwards or be perceived backwards without violating probability. There’s no ‘rule’ against it, but the capacity for it to happen isn’t there.
On the End of Time as its Beginning:
Roger Penrose has theorised that the end of the Universe and the dissipation of all matter and energy into potential energy is the catalyst which creates a new universe via its own Big Bang.
Penrose may have overlooked that it doesn’t need to be a new universe. A sequence of universes implies a continuum occurring within a timeframe, yet Time only occurs within a universe. To put the process into a procession of one universe following another is simply to imagine our universe within a bigger universe that behaves the same. But that doesn’t address the issue, it just moves locus, I believe incorrectly, further out. I can’t see how a sequence can occur outside Time.
A thought experiment: Compare the life of a universe to a train journey; the train itself represents space-time in any form (temporal sequences, matter, energy, potential energy), and Passenger A represents an immortal traveller who loves riding on trains and is able to survive the birth and death of universes. Each train runs exclusively on its own track and the tracks all run in large circles so that all journeys begin and end at the terminus. The terminus is at the South Pole and all tracks run up the lines of longitude, cross at the North Pole and return to the terminus. Other stations along the way are not relevant, remove them and there is still a journey. Direction of travel is irrelevant. Imagine a journey ending; the train stops but Passenger A doesn’t need to board a different train travelling on a separate track to begin another journey.
Our universe may be a closed loop. Time ends but instantly begins again, the whole Universe returning to the start. In the final moments of space-time dimensions become immaterial and it becomes possible to return to the point of beginning without moving. With no mass, no distance and no passing of time what in one moment were the furthest reaches of the void in the next are indeterminate from every other point in space-time. Time as we understand it no longer functions with nothing physical to affect. The entire Universe dissipates to potential energy and is reduced to a single point in Time and Space, an indefinably tiny speck of nothing containing literally everything. The Big Bang is the beginning of Time, but also marks its end.
I’m not a physicist or a mathematician. If I had the skills to express these ideas as equations I might be able to spot the (no doubt many) faults in them and understand why no one has made these connections before or come to these conclusions. Maybe I’m totally wrong…
…but about ten years ago I had an idea that universes could repeat, this was coincidentally about the same time Roger Penrose began thinking about it, but I only heard about his theory this year. That gives me confidence at least some of my ideas are respectable and make some kind of sense.
I hope you’ve had time to read this email and maybe, just maybe you’ll decide to respond. I’d love to know if I’m way off or if there’s anything interesting in there.
Regards,
Richmond Strange BSc (Hons), BA (Hons), MBPsS
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