Discuss anything, including but not limited to whether the principle of random ‘swerves’ in Greek atomism, introduced to defend the ethical concept of free will against of the apparently total determinism implied by that school of thought, accurately anticipated how quantum-level stochasticity contributes to modern theories of consciousness.
Also: picture of a bug.
Yatsuno
Needs moar Maxpuppeh.
Oh wait, I think I found him.
Amir Khalid
Could you translate that first paragraph into layman?
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Amir Khalid: “My cat’s name is Mittens”
Poopyman
Well, HRH Kate is laboring away, with QE II’s current AND former gynecologists in attendance. Must be that vaunted British healthcare I keep reading about.
Also too, Prince Charles is up north doing his royal duties, and here I quote today.com: “…where he was scheduled to take part in celebrations marking the 75th anniversary of the world record for the fastest steam train being broken.”
How fast can you break a steam train, one wonders?
reflectionephemeral
I’d been inclined to think that Democritus coming up with the atomic theory was essentially a matter of trivia, a lucky guess. But somewhere– maybe in “The Swerve”– I came across the point that he was reacting against Zeno’s paradoxes. That made it all seem much more interesting– a hypothesis to reconcile empirical observation with Zeno’s fun little logic puzzles.
I really doubt it had anything to do whatsoever with modern theories of consciousness at the quantum level, but then, I don’t really know anything about anything, so, who knows.
Mnemosyne
Remember when I was talking about how people find it difficult to believe that something is criminal if they can picture themselves accidentally doing the same thing?
Man who gravely injured Palo Alto boy to face misdemeanor charge
Because hitting someone with your car and almost killing them is just one of those things that happens and certainly shouldn’t carry any kind of criminal penalty.
Poopyman
… And to address TimF’s first paragraph: Even a Greek sundial is right once a day.
Corner Stone
No, it does not.
Villago Delenda Est
Everyone needs to believe in something.
I believe I’ll have another sip of coffee.
Villago Delenda Est
@Corner Stone:
Oh, is this another argument clinic thread?
PeakVT
@Poopyman: Did they get the machine that goes ‘ping!’ out of storage, too?
Corner Stone
@Villago Delenda Est: No, it is not.
sparrow
I read a book by Lucretius a while back (well, started, haven’t finished it…), who was a Roman scholar/poet (circa 55 BC?) & devotee of Epicureanism. This is where I have heard of the “atoms swerve” idea, and I thought it was attributed to Epicurus (more famous and somewhat mistakenly for the belief that pleasure is the ultimate good), but my memory is bad and maybe it was a general belief back then… In any case, as a physicist, it gave me a bit of the chills considering the idea definitely has the flavor of quantum physics! It has been stated before that the classical Greeks had many of the ingredients to have a Rennaisance 2000 years before we got one in Western Europe. Too bad they were sitting on such good real estate…
danielx
That paragraph sounded like something from the Modern Language Association…but I could be wrong.
MattF
Umm. Well. Define ‘random’. Without appealing to QM.
Pogonip
If I’d known Tim was going to put up an open thread, I wouldn’t have interrupted the below. Mea culpa.
The AT & T phone tree must be watered from time to time with the tears of customers.
I am reading a fun book of lurid Ouija-board stories. Does anybody have a good Oiuja story? We had one when I was a kid, but nothing ever happened. The planchette wouldn’t budge.
Steeplejack (tablet)
That bug clearly has stochastic autonomy.
Lurking Canadian
Wait. Quantum theories of consciousness are being taken seriously? I though they were considered hand-wavy, pseudoscience bullshit.
Yatsuno
@Lurking Canadian: I guess it depends on who you ask.
Villago Delenda Est
That bug has far more intellectual heft than Mark Steyn can ever hope for.
Villago Delenda Est
@Yatsuno:
I see what you did there.
Pogonip
@Steeplejack (tablet): Poor little thing.
Yatsuno
@Villago Delenda Est: I KNOW NOTINK!!!
Waiting to hear back on the new place. Fergot their office opens at 10:30.
kindness
I’m seeing WAY TOO MANY Liz Cheney for Wyoming ads all over the intertubes today. Neocons, damn….They may be idiots but they apparently have swimming pools of money to throw around.
Mnemosyne
@Pogonip:
One of my favorite ghost stories is “Four Ghosts in Hamlet” by Fritz Leiber, which involves an Ouiji board. At one point, the narrator pisses off his would-be girlfriend by asking her why it’s a “Yes-Yes” board and not a “No-No” board (as in, why do the ghosts always answer “yes” to every question?)
Sadly, the Leiber books it appeared in are out of print and the story is still in copyright, but you can sometimes track down an anthology that has it. I have Ghosts, edited by Marvin Kaye, which includes it.
Yatsuno
@kindness: That’s…really funny. Wyoming is not exactly known for reliable Interwebs access outside the big towns.
The Red Pen
“B*g” is offensive to insect-Americans.
Tim F. is the real racist.
Villago Delenda Est
@kindness:
I thank FSM that my IP address is not considered relevant by the Liz Cheney intertubes ad team.
jeffreyw
Bug, snubbed.
Villago Delenda Est
@Poopyman:
Prince Charles totally fulfilled his actual royal duties with Bill and Harry.
Everything else is gravy.
Mandalay
This probably won’t mean anything to most here, but it looks like Lonely Planet may be going the way of the typewriter and the vinyl record…
Sad.
Corner Stone
Barkevious Mingo!
Cermet
@sparrow: Far more their ‘failure’ had to do with slavery and the strong belief that physical experiments were only fit for slaves to do … all that was fit for a elite scholar was to do things that only involved the mind; all else was fit only for woman or slaves – kind of takes the class out of classical … .
askew
Interesting news – Univision was the highest rated network in July sweep. Good news for Dems as more people are getting their news from a network that has been slamming the GOP non-stop for months now over immigration and other issues. And if it keeps beating the networks over time, it might force the other channels to add some diversity to their series and news shows. Imagine that.
Cermet
@reflectionephemeral: If Democritus really did developed his idea of atoms to address Zeno’s paradox, then that guy was light years ahead of everyone but some of today’s physicist … few realize that this does concept, does in deed solve that issue (so does the calculus (see the idea of limits to define a derviative) but that is another issue.) Amazing.
pacem appellant
@reflectionephemeral: I quite enjoyed “The Swerve” both for the historical importance of Lucretius and for the zeal of the Renaissance treasure hunters and their commitment to lost texts.
burnspbesq
The anti-marriage-equality folks are still at it in California. An update from SCOTUSBlog.
http://www.scotusblog.com/2013/07/untangling-the-two-distinct-questions-in-the-new-california-marriage-petitions/
And former Justice Stevens uses the pretext of a book review to rip his former colleagues a new one over Shelby County.
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2013/aug/15/the-court-right-to-vote-dissent/
Xenos
I think anyone linking modern theories of thought to quantum mechanics is full of hooey.
Unless we rewire our brains using ansibles, in a Dan Simmons meets Orson Scott Card kind of way.
Mike E
Why does the insect have an anime exclamation point on its head?
Xenos
@Cermet: As a relatively ignorant modern, I thought that the only obvious answer to Zeno’s paradox was that space was somehow granular, and that at some point you just can’t divide it in half any more. Either that or there was some other explanation I was too stupid to figure out. Have I been a genius all along? (don’t answer that question, please)
Xenos
@askew: Any chance that Univision would offer a English-language channel? I would definitely watch that
Anoniminous
@Amir Khalid:
Things interact in unpredictable ways leading to unpredictable other things.
RSA
@Xenos:
Like Roger Penrose, for example? I agree.
This is pretty cool, though: Can quantum probability provide a new direction for cognitive modeling? Pothos and. Busemeyer argue (if I remember correctly–it’s been a while since I’ve read the article) that quantum probability, purely as mathematical framework, has some interesting advantages over classical probability for modeling some cognitive phenomena, even without a commitment to quantum effects being present.
Anoniminous
@Lurking Canadian:
Only by people who have no knowledge of QM, neuroscience, and/or psychology.
Only by people who have knowledge of QM, neuroscience, and/or psychology.
NotMax
Consciously speaking, I feel a a lot more like I do now than when I first came in.
Mike E
@burnspbesq: Heh, I like how Stevens turned Scalia’s DOMA-pout into an indictment of the conservative majority’s VRA ruling.
Anoniminous
@Xenos:
Mathematically, the answer is Limit Theory.
[For Amir Khalid: that means dividing until the “bugger this, for a game of soldiers” Limit is reached and they are declared Equal, Because I Said So.]
2liberal
was this “sentence” generated by a gibberish-creating bot?
Redshirt
Planck is down there, with the furthest Turtle, laughing.
Comrade Dread
The obsession with royalty is nauseating.
Then again, I can’t complain, since we have our own little obsessive loons over here who hang on the Village’s every word.
I’d say we should adopt a figurehead monarchy too in the hopes that all of the current Village idiots would follow after them like a lapdog leaving other (hopefully better) journalists to actually report on the government critically, but I lack the dataset to determine whether or not that would actually happen. My inner misanthrop believes that we’d simply have two classes of chattering idiot journalists instead.
Gin & Tonic
Nothing to do with the Greeks or quantum theory, but I read where Dennis Farina, one of my favorite actors and star of one of my favorite TV shows, “Crime Story”, has died. RIP.
catclub
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: That works best if your screen name is schrodinger.
Higgs Boson's Mate
The things we find to do. I am halfway through a paper on the similarities between Michael Jackson and W.C. Fields. I’m focusing on Fields’ juggling and Jackson’s dance moves. Both Jackson and Fields made very difficult things appear offhand. They both did it using huge amounts of practice and rehearsal.
It’s an interesting piece. I’d love to publish it for critique, however I haven’t the faintest idea who would publish it or why they would do so.
This is a direct threat: nice little blog ya’ got here. If one of youse don’t come up with a way to publish the above youse will find yourselves wearing concrete kimonos and six miles offshore.
Comrade Dread
@Gin & Tonic: That sucks. Even when he was in dreck, he was usually one of the bright spots of the movie.
reality-based
ok, topic swerve – does anybody else have elderly parents who have become lunatic, obsessive Weather Channel watchers? And get angry because you are not? see: my 90-year-old mother.
It was only mildly amusing ten years ago when I lived in Silicon Valley and she would call me in a panic about fires in San Diego 500 miles away – “but it could spread.”
But I moved back to NoDak to look after her five years ago – and in the ensuing years, she has completely lost the critical distinction that “You are watching this on the TeeVee – it is NOT HAPPENING TO YOU.”
Last night, there were severe thunderstorms 40 miles away, we were just on the pretty-lightning, much-needed-rain edge of it – and she was FURIOUS with me because instead of staring at the TV for an hour, listening excitedly to warnings for towns 40 MILES AWAY repeat over and over – I was sitting on the porch, enjoying the rain and the distant lightning.
I was raised in NoDak, I’m no fool – you mention my town, or my area, and everybody, including the cats, relocates to the basement .
But jeez, it’s gonna be a long summer if she freaks out every time I won’t watch the weather channel with her!
– whew – good to get that off my chest –
reality-based
@Comrade Dread:
I have always maintained that if we had had a king – some genial old fellow – we wouldn’t have had to have Ronald Reagan as president.
Gin & Tonic
@Comrade Dread: To tie it back to an earlier thread, “Crime Story” was directed by Michael Mann, presumably before he went to Penn State.
Jack the Second
The problem with both swerves and quantum magic is that you’re replacing determinism with randomness. Congratulations! You still don’t have classical free will, and now there is an arbitrary random chance you’ll do terrible misdeeds.
SiubhanDuinne
This here is why I keep reading Charlie Pierce:
Jack the Second
@reality-based: I don’t think kings solve anything. The UK has had quite a few turds for Prime Ministers.
gogol's wife
Have we heard from commenter JMN since the earthquake in China? I think he’s in that area.
Mnemosyne
@Higgs Boson’s Mate:
I think there are still popular culture journals out there that might be interested. It’s a little tricky since you’re cross-comparing stage/film to music, but if you find something that accepts papers that go across disciplines, you can see what their submission process it.
Mnemosyne
@gogol’s wife:
He’s probably okay — it looks like Gansu Province is pretty far from Beijing. It’s about 2:30 am in Beijing right now, so we probably won’t hear from him until it’s morning there.
SiubhanDuinne
@gogol’s wife: He posted yesterday (or very early today?) that he felt it from his tall building, but haven’t seen anything from him since then. Hope’s he’s all right (assume “he/him” but on the Internet, you can never know for sure).
Yatsuno
@gogol’s wife: @Mnemosyne: He’s in Xi’an, and he reported feeling the earthquake not long after it happened. But last I heard he was just fine.
AdamK
Quantum-level stochasticity doesn’t rescue free will, since quantum-level events precede “willed” events causally. “Will” is still determined, whether the determinates are random or not. “Swerves” would have had the same problem. We control neither by our will.
The Red Pen
@AdamK:
Not to mention that the quantum-level events have no measurable effect on the electro-chemical reactions that occur in our brains.
But try telling that to the kids today.
catclub
@AdamK: In the process of me waking up from sleep this morning, I assume that no chemical rules were broken in the operation of my body and brain.
I only heard the teaser for a radio interview in which the premise would be “We are all just chemistry.”
gogol's wife
@Yatsuno:
Thanks.
becca
Federal Court ruled ND abortion laws unconstitutional. Bush Jr judge, to boot.
The Supreme RATS are salivating in anticipation.
Shakezula
@burnspbesq: The Prop H8 grifters are going to ride that gravy train until it runs out of steam. Once equal marriage is legal nationwide, I suspect efforts to overturn it will become a perennial issue, like abortion.
Villago Delenda Est
@Shakezula:
There is money to be made from the natural serfs.
So the grifters are firing up the address databases.
AdamK
@catclub: I must say I enjoy using my free will to attempt to causally break all manner of chemical rules involving my brain.
AdamK
@AdamK: Not to mention the lumbering mass of damaged cells I used to call my body.
Redshirt
@AdamK: If you define “free” as the potential to do anything, we clearly cannot possibly have Free Will.
Cermet
@The Red Pen: Not always – electric fields produced by the electro-chemistry reactions are an effect that is strongly coupled/created by the electrons (which are quantum controlled) and these fields have been shown to control neuron growth direction and (I believe, if memory serves … pun here) in storing recent memories.
There is no reason that consciousness itself isn’t caused by these same electric fields (and no reason it is, of course) and if such was the case, consciousness would be a purely quantum state (and unique since quantum states are a higher infinity than even any standard countable infinities. ) So even if the Universe is flat (which microwave data says it is) and hence infinite, then there are an infinite number of exact copies of us having this blog discussion right now but each of us (identical down to subatomic level) would still differ in the quantum field that forms their awareness and not be the same person… .
Corner Stone
@Cermet:
My contention is that there are an infinite number of realities where we are having every possible conversation all at the same time. Each FP’er that could possibly post a thread does so, on every subject they could possibly imagine. All at once.
And by “at once” I mean in the limited way our human brain can conceive of “at once”.
edited
The Red Pen
@Cermet:
No. Just no.
I know this is a rude response, but I don’t have time to give a proper one. Suffice to say that quantum states have no measurable effects on the electric fields that control these reactions. Quantum effects are measurable on small numbers of electrons, but these fields involve billions of them.
Added:
Also, AdamK’s observation that these effects are in play prior to any application of what we would consider “free will” still holds.
Corner Stone
Regarding free will, some studies have shown that signal firings to muscles can be generated before any registered activity in the brain.
So, arguably, the action was achieved before the brain rationalized taking the action.
Joey Giraud
I was about to toss out my old copy of “The Emperor’s New Mind.”
Anyone want it?
Cermet
@The Red Pen: No, you are incorrect relative to electrons; electrons are always controlled by quantum effects – no way around that. Now, the electric field (created by electrons) IS caused by a vast number of electrons and your point that these are summed and hence quantum effects are highly reduced (but can not be zero) is a good point. As for controlling the gross chemical reactions of huge neurons, I never said that – yes, electric fields have strong effects on these macro objects but single electrons? NO; and I didn’t say that.
The Red Pen
@Cermet:
I think the term your looking for is “not measurable.”
And this.
Redshirt
Someone correct me, but I recall reading something that posited the following: A black hole can be considered a macro level atomic object. Thus, quantum affects should be present at the macro level regarding it. The same is true for a “Quark” star.
hilzoy
“whether the principle of random ‘swerves’ in Greek atomism, introduced to defend the ethical concept of free will against of the apparently total determinism implied by that school of thought, accurately anticipated how quantum-level stochasticity contributes to modern theories of consciousness.”
No.
Pink Snapdragon
@Yatsuno: If the purpose of your campaign is grifting, you want the ads targeted to locations where people have money and are likely to give it to you. Somehow, I think Liz Cheney’s grifting efforts are directed towards those who don’t actually live in Wyoming.
Aardvark Cheeselog
All claims that the notions of this or that ancient sage accurately anticipated some finding of modern (i.e. since about 1600CE) science are bullsh*t. Any resemblance is accidental.