ttj

A new cross-over from MacTaggart A-series to B-series

2009-09-29T02:13:00.002+01:00

A new cross-over from MacTaggart A-series to B-series

Abstract

An attempt is made to find sources of new parameters whereby an essentially B-series model of A-series matters can be more accurately obtained. These matters will, it is hoped, allow specific physical parameters to be applied to a study of human consciousness. To do this, the experiment of Libet (1985) has had to be re-examined.

Introduction

A new - quite possibly the first - clear cross-over from MacTaggart A-series to B-series is being considered. This may give some new parameters to work with in the studies of consciousness.

The large amount of dreamwork available today claims to refer mainly to effects in the part of the mind considered during dreams (Yates, 2009a etc) and dream results have traditionally seemed inchoate, often contradictory and hard to fathom. Nonetheless they are observable phenomena and should therefore be regarded as such. Stickgold and others have found correlations between dreams and waking states so a full description of "consciousness" should involve them.

In the present note,we go on to consider what could be regarded as more tangible or concrete results, namely regarding the Libet experiment or so-called "Libet half-second" matter.

Work relating to the Libet (1985) experiment has often traditionally been regarded as relating directly to the 'conscious person', such as he may be. This is because in this experiment, individuals have to determine or estimate mentally when they decided on a particular task. The recent work of Banks (2008), though not necessarily being used exactly in the way Banks (2009) intended, can help to show how these results might actually be used. However we care to look at it, these results are interesting in my opinion.

First a brief survey of some aspects of the Libet experiment is perhaps due, as any parameters referring directly to the mind may be of use in these lucubrations (Yates, 2009).

Brief survey of some aspects of the Libet experiment

In the important blog "Conscious Entities" (2009) the question has been posed "Libet was wrong ?" and that blog suggests that in some respects Libet may have been wrong over the "Libet half-second" matter. Largely it is suggested and explained briefly but fully, that the work of Trevena, mentioned in this blog (Yates, 2009) and referred to in "Conscious Entities" (2009) is significant in that regard. In effect the EMG measurements are just manifestations of neural activity and provide no totally complete neural markers. But in considering Trevena, the free will enthusiasts are trying to recover the free will concept within the B-series. It seems to me that to try to recover the free will concept inside a block time model is a far fetched idea.

The block time model was developed on the basis of the calculus of Newton and Leibniz who both seemed to believe (or to pretend to believe) in some sort of all-powerful God, and whilst their beliefs ran in somewhat different directions, most of modern physics (including general relativity and quantum mechanics) seem to include an essential ingredient which gives us this block time model (however varied and tortured), without the possibility of free will in the sense accepted in what is now termed 'folk psychology' and is the subject of (often very desultory) surveys by the X-phi community. Block time is more like a map of a country showing say "past" as the south and "future" as the north with effectively only one way traffic from South to North. As Feynman (1970) for example illustrated, there may well be nothing wrong with that one way street. Nonetheless - even if it is not a bug - the one way street is only a B-series feature. It is not necessarily an A-series feature, in fact it probably isn't. And that is independent of whether most proposed B-series time travel supposed thought experiments - of which by now there are many, usually involving wormholes and the like - actually work in practice.

Anyway the Trevena tests should have been done long ago. For the moment we can possibly just assume from them that EMG evidence for an earlier unconscious intention is not supplied in enough detail to make totally adequate assumptions from.

Now referring to Bank's work. Banks has of course provided us with a detailed book (Pockett, 2006) which cantains much work on the human aspect of the matter. The more recent work (Banks, 2008, 2009) implies considerable variations in the 'decision time' W.

In private communication with us Banks mentioned the following "Meanwhile, it's not the case that W is always about -200 ms. The values in the literature range from about -100 ms to -1.42 seconds by Matsuhashi & Hallett, 2008. Soon, et al (Soon, C.S., Brass, M., Heinze, H., & Haynes, J. 2008. Unconscious determinants of free decisions in the human brain. Nature Neuroscience, 11, 543-545) found the RP to begin very early (up to 7 seconds before the response), and the estimated W inn their study to be about -600 ms. My article with Isham makes a qualitative point that should not be confused in any way with the precise number of milliseconds W is shifted by the deceptive auditory cue. The point is that W is affected by an event that comes after the response. This finding is evidence that the W people report is a retrospective inference from their observation of when they respond. I am writing up a more elaborated theory of the response and the estimate of W that I can send when it is ready. The point is that the action being judged for W in the Libet paradigm is at the level of intention-in-action (in Searle's terms), and it has been recognized at least since Lashley that we have no conscious access to our behavior at this level."

Now it remains to be seen that W is actually obtained from 'retrospective inference' within the B-series. If Banks is correct as I assume pro tem, it is very likely to be considered as such..

I would have expected on the face of it that W should be about equal to the human reaction time in the B-series if decisions were intended to be followed immediately by keypresses. In the Libet experiment when actually carried out in the way that it usually is, the subject seems to be rather dragooned into pressing the key right way, and this is almost an experimenter's command. The whole matter needs to be a lot more thought out, "First awareness of a wish to act" are the specific words used by Libet in his 1985 experiment as apparently part of a definition of W, which places W clearly as a marker which should at the very least be within the bailiwick of any consciousness theory and more specifically could be an actual measurement of an A-series result. (One is reminded that the A-series does have 'actual' past, present, and future by definition and may not be one to one mappable to a B-series time model).

Conclusion

The variations in W and also in any timings concerning the keypress we hope to be able to investigate for a number of subjects over a period of time, also using various audiovisual distractions, possibly including some of a so-called 'subliminal' nature, bearing in mind such matters as the work of Phil Merikle and of Nilli Lavie. We also do not know that the B-series is not fundamentally flawed per se . So a good A-series model (even in crude B-series representation) may also be better than a simple traditional B-series model, though there are no current hopes in that regard.

We also hope that Professor Banks may be able to describe his experiments and his own views in detail at our conference next year, as he has kindly agreed to do.

References

Banks W.P., Isham E.A., (2008) "We Infer Rather Than Perceive the Moment We Decided to Act", Psychological Science,Vol 20, Issue 1, Pages 17 - 21

Banks W.P., Isham E.A., (2009) "Do we really know what we are doing? Implications of reported time of decision for theories of volition". In: Nadel L., Sinnott-Armstrong W. P.. "Conscious Will and Responsibility: A Tribute to Benjamin Libet". Oxford University Press, in press

Conscious Entities (2009) September 26, 2009, "Libet was wrong ?" , http://www.consciousentities.com/?p=233

Feynman R.P., (1970), "Feynman lectures in Physics", especially near end of chapter on Entropy.

Libet B., (1985), “Unconscious Cerebral Initiative and the Role of Conscious Will in Voluntary
Action.” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 8: 529-66 ; enormous amount of other work such as Libet, B. 2004. Mind Time. Cambridge, Mass. Harvard University Press.

Pockett S., Banks W.P., Gallagher S., (2006), "Does Consciousness Cause Behavior?", MIT Press, ISBN: 978-0-262-16237-1

Yates J., (2009) http://ttjohn.blogspot.com/2009/09/new-look-at-fitzhugh-nagumo-method-in.html#links

Yates J., (2009a), http://ttjohn.blogspot.com/2009/05/many-bubble-interpretation-externalism.html#links , http://philpapers.org/archive/YATTMB

2009-09-07T11:45:00.005+01:00

A new look at the Fitzhugh-Nagumo method in MacTaggart A-series simulation, together with the use of solitons or chaos theory

In our dynamical systems models (1) for the waking and sleeping brain, we used Berkeley Madonna for the simulations and after exploring a very wide number of possibilities and many parameter values. The Fithugh-Nagumo (FHN) model is discussed briefly in Section E of that paper. The conclusion was come to in that paper that "In common with results for many cases where modelling is made slightly more complicated but requires more parameters, so far (the FHN) does not seem to have really paid off at this level of model making. It might be a way forward at a later date however." However some quite satisfactory results were obtained with slightly simpler models, such as the one referred to as N003b.

I had in mind numerous previous instances such as the great initial effectiveness of the Kuramoto model, its obvious applicability to many systems and yet the extremely difficult process of refining it much further in specific cases. The Kuramoto model seems to have been useful in a general way in areas as varied as descriptions of neural processes and the London Millenium Bridge.

Solitons

Since we are working in reference (1) in the region of models like the FHN model it seemed reasonable to consider whether any alternative or sufficiently differing brain models might produce better results. The Soliton Model (2) in neuroscience is justified as follows: "The model starts with the observation that cell membranes always have a freezing point (the temperature below which the consistency changes from fluid to gel-like) only slightly below the organism's body temperature, and this allows for the propagation of solitons. It has been known for several decades that an action potential traveling along a neuron results in a slight increase in temperature followed by a decrease in temperature. The decrease is not explained by the Hodgkin-Huxley model (electrical charges traveling through a resistor always produce heat), but traveling solitons do not lose energy in this way and the observed temperature profile is consistent with the Soliton model. Further, it has been observed that a signal traveling along a neuron results in a slight local thickening of the membrane and a force acting outwards; this effect is not explained by the Hodgkin-Huxley model but is clearly consistent with the Soliton model. It is undeniable that an electrical signal can be observed when an action potential propagates along a neuron. The Soliton model explains this as follows: the traveling soliton locally changes density and thickness of the membrane, and since the membrane contains many charged and polar substances, this will result in an electrical effect, akin to piezoelectricity."

Now this is a new model and differs in very significant ways from the FHN model and similar models, and whilst it is claimed to have many advantages, such as in an understanding of the Meyer-Overton observation, this attempt to explain nerve transmission by sound impulses rather than simply electrical impulses certainly has not replaced the conventional model. At the same time, the model we were trying to use is basically an interpretation of the A series using B series mathematics. It is only a model not an elixir, and the position is very like that of the traditional John Godfrey Saxe description of the blind man describing an elephant - it will not be right in every detail. David Corfield's general suggestion (3) involving the use of vector solitons, as has been already used in somewhat similar cases, could well be a further way forward.

And this is not a walk in complete darkness - consciousness has frequently been described as an emergent phenomenon in a collection of neurons, as indeed have matter wave solitons and optical solitons been described as emergent and placed in the same category. Filamentation is a related phenomenon as exemplified by meandering rivers and lightning bolts.

And, just as consciousness can clearly be said to presumably relate to the P=NP? problem, in 2002 I had considered looking at soliton theory and the Backlund transformation, in the hope that Mielnik's idea could be extended.

Further, it has even been suggested by Hameroff and Penrose (4), that quantum computation in the brain works by solitons. Both Hameroff and Penrose have produced many interesting ideas, though this one has encountered much opposition, so it is mentioned here although we do not propose to use it at this time.

So as distinct from simple philosophical argumentation and questioning - still important tools - we can do the calculations in Berkeley Madonna, without - and this is a key and important point - losing important philosophical stringency in the way that seemingly began in quantum physics on the introduction of the Copenhagen Interpretation and then got to the point where a dog can now seem to be able to understand quantum mechanics better than a human can.

But we already have the added problem in X-phi (experimental philosophy) of a trend to mathematical oversimplification and a rush to philosophical relativism almost like a Hollywood star might run to a Dr. Feelgood with dire consequences, so a lot more work needs to be done steadily and carefully in X-phi also.

I do not yet know if the soliton approximation will help, but it is a matter of trying it for various cases without seeking a mental Theory of Everything, and solitons could be said to be more physically realistic than FHN though for the moment model N003b is still the top priority.

Chaos Theory

Another important model is described in a video (5). This can possibly correspond to the sandpile effect we have been mentioning in this blog for some time now.

The effect is now discussed in the eminent and well recognised Conscious Entities blog (6), which particularly states "One claim not made in the article, but one which could well be made, is that all this might account for the sensation of free will."

I have to agree with that possibility and reference (1) of course remains open to that effect and indeed briefly discusses it as the "butterfly effect". You would expect a chaos effect to arise in any model which allows for the so-called 'unconscious mind' as its existence is what might be called a 'brute fact' as clearly the conscious mind is not capable at this time of fathoming the hidden realms of day to day consciousness. Hence there is scope in our present models for both dreams and chaos. Furthermore there is certainly no immediate requirement for 'pure chance' or 'god' or some sort of 'blind watchmaker' or indeed a 'homunculus', because of where our theory has come from.

Conclusion

So the next step is possibly to consider the recent work of Banks (7), which may have produced a live psychological experiment, not involving brain tampering, which provides a clear physical example of the Libet and Haynes effects.

Provided we realise that any instances of our brain model are merely partial mappings of the A series to the B series, there should be no conflict with free will concepts, and further progress may be becoming clearer.

References

1. http://ttjohn.blogspot.com/2007/05/work-in-progress-on-application-of.html#links

2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soliton_model

3. Corfield D., (2009) http://golem.ph.utexas.edu/category/2009/09/where_have_all_the_solitons_go.html#c026247

4. Hagan S., Hameroff S.R., Tuszynski J.A., (2000), Decoherence and Biological Feasibility, arXiv:quant-ph/0005025v1

5. Video, in "Disorderly genius: How chaos drives the brain", New Scientist, 29 June 2009, http://brightcove.vo.llnwd.net/d7/unsecured/media/981571807/981571807_27451004001_chaotic-brain.flv?videoId=27532501001&lineUpId=&pubId=981571807&playerId=1873822884&playerTag=&affiliateId=

6. http://www.consciousentities.com/?p=202

7. Banks W.P., Isham E.A., (2009), Psychol Sci. 2009 Jan;20(1):17-21, http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19152537

2009-08-11T14:24:00.003+01:00

Submissions invited - Philosophy and neuroscience conference, and "Burning Armchair" Medal competition

Current neuroscience results and experimental philosophy both illustrate current developments in mind sciences, ethics and allied disciplines.

The Institute for Fundamental Studies is therefore organising a conference and a call for experiments in experimental philosophy. We're having an international conference in Goa in December 2010. Even if you currently cannot come, please spread the information about our work and conferences.

Email: uvscience [AT] gmail.com Details: http://ttjohn.blogspot.com/

Joshua Knobe says that this conference "looks like it has potential to be an important new direction for work in this area".

Scientists today are beginning to recognise the need for more philosophical discussions to further all scientific research. For example, a new book "How to Teach Physics to Your Dog" (by Physics Professor Chad Orzel) points out that a dog now has a better folk philosophy for understanding quantum theory than a human being does ! For instance, one extract, relating to current quantum mechanics, goes "If a great big steak were to suddenly appear on your dining room table, you'd probably be a little perturbed. The dog, on the other hand, would feel it was nothing more than her due". Now Orzel is clearly trying to popularise quantum theory but many general questions which may involve experience, morality and other factors more familiar to the experimental philosopher than the theoretical physicist immediately arise, and I cover some of these in a little more detail in my resume, attached and on our website, of some of the Institute's work "Explorations of available philosophical ideas using modern observations".

Clearly experiments can include, as well as the work currently under consideration at the Institute (as attached and at http://ttjohn.blogspot.com/), many other topics like surveys of personal views on variations of the Newcomb Problem and its multicultural freewill ramifications, and discussions on such work as that of Beggs and its neural interpretations of phenomena like self-organised criticality and the sandpile model. All contributions will be considered and highly appreciated, not just the specific topics above.

It has been found that some of these experiments need queries put to persons of non English origin, because of possible differences in mindset due to differing ethnic origins.

Simple queries like those in the video, URL below, seem to have produced excellent results in the past. A new experiment as simple as that could prove very worthwhile. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sHoyMfHudaE&feature=channel

Anyway general results from different countries will add to the literature.

We will do these X-phi queries for you in India, for Hindi, Marathi, Tamil and Konkani subjects. Your query will probably be in English. Most of our subjects speak enough English for English to be an acceptable language for your query but the subjects come from the cultures and backgrounds above. All correspondence is in English only.

Details of the queries you want to ask should be emailed to us as soon as possible.

An embossed gold plated certificate from the Institute for Fundamental Studies will be given to each applicant who submits an acceptable entry. The experiment which turns out the best results will be given the much coveted "Burning Armchair" Medal. This in turn can lead to publicity, publication and fame. We do have a printing firm working for us.

Usually applicants will be expected to be existing members of a qualified professional body of good standing, such as for example the Experimental Philosophy Society or the American Institute of Physics. But this opportunity is open to all people, including for example members of informed lay bodies like the Sceptics Society. All queries regarding the above matter will be answered.

2009-08-05T10:46:00.000+01:00

Explorations of available philosophical ideas using modern observations

Abstract
For nearly a century, since the discovery of wave/particle duality, physics has not been a description of the world as we know it. With the event of QED and particle physics, even dogs seem to have more gut comprehension of physics than humans. Worse, for half a century, important descriptions of the mind using physics have seemingly not adequately represented ideas like freewill, and these have largely been effectively ignored or devolved in some sense to the 'folk psychology' and 'folk philosophy' realm. Current philosophical ideas must resolve this matter, and here we have begun an attempt to do so.

The work of Cleeremans (1999) and Haynes (2008) stress the importance of the so called NCCs or "Neural Correlates of Consciousness" in studying mental activity. Haynes (2008) provides physical results which some would say raise questions about free will.

In fact Cleeremans (1999) goes so far as to say specifically "philosophy of science may help and provide a metatheoretical framework for the current interdisciplinary project.... Indeed, the only assumption such an approach requires is that of a lawful covariance between cerebral and phenomenal processes"

This assumption in itself seems to presuppose a sound superstructure of theoretical physics, as the phenomenal processes are traditionally described in terms of current physics.

I remark in a current paper (Yates, 2009a) "free will philosophers either ignore Haynes's work, or deny free will already, or are seeking a work round. Fortunately I do not seem to need a work round as Haynes's work seems to provide simply more evidence that the McTaggart B series is insufficient and we need the A series as well." So, I am satisfied with Haynes's (2008) results and (generally speaking and contrary argumentation aside) with free will also.

In my view, philosophy can provide additional questioning which may be able to add further parameters to my mathematical dynamical systems model (which incorporates both the McTaggart A and B series) as well as the current fMRI results and so on whose value must be subsumed to philosophical considerations. This model is discussed in Yates (2008).

I believe my present model may ultimately solve many problems relevant to philosophy, in subjects like time and freewill. And I think it is already doing so. So the right philosophical queries to subjects and many other philosophical matters are of great importance to me.

I have been well aware of the work of Kornhuber, Libet etc., more or less since it was published, as founder and editor of the "International Journal of Theoretical Physics" (1), for which I personally attracted many years ago the usual array of specialists and Nobel prizewinners. People like David Bohm, Roger Penrose, George Gamow and Louis de Broglie were on my editorial board. The journal is referred to occasionally in my websites, in particular http://ttjohn.blogspot.com/ . I needed to know of the Libet, Kornhuber etc. work for my fundamental studies.

Basically current physics is unfortunately completely quite inadequate. Dogs understand physics better than people (Orzel, 2009), and that gives no kudos to dogs but at a basic level may simply indicate that people are smarter than dogs and more reflective. Physics was accurate enough for purpose in the days of Newton and Einstein but today we live in a different world. For example, it is only weeks ago (Cubrovic, Zaanen, and Schalm) that the current very basic B-series string theory in physics may have been given a firmer foothold. A-series is mainly overlooked in practice.

Haynes's (2008) work obviously moves the work of Kornhuber, Libet, etc. forward another step. And to omit a proper consideration of the A series at this point is rather like trying to do timekeeping at relativistic speeds without special relativity theory. Timekeeping at speeds much slower than relativistic speeds clearly works well enough for its own purposes, but special relativity is obviously needed for the higher speeds. In the case of studies involving mental processes at the level of abstraction of say freewill or (if postulated) qualia, the A series, not just the B series, is needed.

I am hoping for some help in this regard. I am really trying to get some important new work done and I wonder how best to get this across to the philosophical community, and also to get more feedback for my own work.

Simple exposition of what we have done so far: The brain is treated not in a totally simplistic way as a wired up and complex computer or a bunch of neurons, but like a mind battling between objectives. For the moment 'conscious' mind is taken as 'Juliet' and 'unconscious' mind as 'Romeo'. Using Gottman's mathematical theory of marriage guidance counselling and attractor theory after considerations like those of Winfree and Strogatz, equations arise, as given in Yates (2008) and on the website. Further references are in Yates (2008, 2009) and on the website.

More complex brain models are of course possible and are welcome additions to any discussion. Primarily, just as marriage counselling requires actual discussions as well as measurements, the present approach requires experimental philosophy as well as fMRI readings.

Already we (Yates, 2008) have discovered the Reverse Stickgold Effect, which seems to mean that we may dream about what we are going to do, as well as what we have done. In a way this sounds obvious, but the details are not so obvious as sometimes people seem to have no advance idea as to what they will do. More and more this may be coming into phase with current physics experiments such as the Haynes work (which tends to verify/extend Libet), and philosophy owes it to all not to allow scientists to throw out the ideas like free will without thinking it through, as they tend to be prone to do.

We had posters at three consciousness conferences recently, in Budapest, Salzburg and Tuscon but putting across useful work at such places is not easy. My website http://ttjohn.blogspot.com/ contains many of my current thoughts.

References

Baez J., (2007), "What We Can Do About Science Journals", especially 'Sneaky Tricks' section, http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/journals.html ; and elsewhere e.g. http://golem.ph.utexas.edu/category/2009/07/elsevier_pays_for_favorable_bo.html

Cleeremans A., Haynes (1999) J-D., "Correlating Consciousness: A View from Empirical Science" , Revue Internationale de Philosophie 3 (209):387-420 http://srsc.ulb.ac.be/axcWWW/papers/pdf/98-NCC.pdf

Haynes J-D., (2008), http://medgadget.com/archives/2008/04/not_a_free_will_after_all.html

Orzel C., (2009), "How to teach Physics to your Dog", Simon & Schuster, ISBN-13: 9781416572282.

Yates J. (2008), "Category theory applied to a radically new but logically essential description of time and space", http://cogprints.org/6176/

Yates J., (2009), "A study of attempts at precognition, particularly in dreams, using some of the methods of experimental philosophy", http://philpapers.org/archive/YATASO.1.pdf

Yates J., (2009a), "Do Intuitions about Reference Really Vary across Cultures?", on my website http://ttjohn.blogspot.com/ at http://ttjohn.blogspot.com/2009/06/do-intuitions-about-reference-really.html

1 The journal (initially distributed by Plenum) which I ran for many years is now probably hived off to Elsevier or somewhere - to get the gist of how such things happen read Baez (2007), and of course Paul Dirac warned me about how such a thing can happen.

Dr. John Yates, M.Sc., Ph.D.
Institute for Fundamental Studies,
Vasai, Mumbai, India & Fulham, London, England
Institute address: Goa Campus (Assonora, provisional), Institute for Fundamental Studies, Goa ; Vasant Nagri, Vasai
E, Mumbai, India ; Fulham, London, England
Correspondence address: email: uvscience[AT]gmail.com

Do Intuitions about Reference Really Vary across Cultures?

2009-06-29T10:07:00.005+01:00

2009-05-15T11:00:00.005+01:00

The Many Bubble Interpretation, externalism, the extended mind of David Chalmers and Andy Clark, and the work of Alva Noe in connection with Experimental Philosophy and Dreamwork

Abstract

The idea of dreams being mere internal artifacts of the mind does not seem to be essential to externalism and extended mind theories, which seem as if they would function as well without this additional assumption. The Many Bubble Interpretation could allow a simpler rationale to externalist theories, which may be even simpler if the assumption that dreams have no worthwhile content outside the mind is omitted.

Almost everybody agrees that mind and world are causally coupled (Prinz, 2009).

In normal perception we don't have the problem of stabilising detail. Noe (2009) points out - and in that follows the point made by LaBerge and many others - that if a dreamer looks more than once at, say, a printed sign in a dream the sign is likely to say something different on second viewing (apparently always in LaBerge's experience). The sign's content may even change whilst it is being watched. It often does in my experience of dreamwork. In general terms I have found that recorded results of dream experiments are more consistent over a series of experiments involving many different dreamers, than some experiments in the waking world which could be expected to be much more easily quantifiable and even more easily measurable (Yates, 2008). Synaesthesia is one example. That is to say with dreamwork we are left with a pile of reasonably consistent data to consider, even though the data itself may be construed as irrationally produced or even arising from a random source. Others such as Domhoff seem to confirm this.

But, even though dream results are in some way scientifically collatable, there is still the problem with instability of detail within individual dreams. For example, it is not like measuring UV spectra, when the same pure substance should give the same results each time. Now variability is not too unusual in psychology experiments, but clearly this level of variability is well beyond the norm.

Noe interprets this as meaning that dreams are not real, in the sense that waking experience is real, though he admits that the perceptual experience of dreaming is real. He then reasonably says that this implies that waking experience is different to dreaming experience, and that dreams cannot be construed as evidence in effect that reality is just another dream.

Yes, we can go this far. Andy Clark and Chalmers also seem largely to admit this view. In principle for day to day working purposes we can accept such an idea but we would use Ockham's razor yet again to say that it does not mean, either, that dreams necessarily consist ONLY of results from within the brain. In a way Noe would betray the thread of his own argument if he took the view that dreams necessarily consist only of results from within the brain, as he is very much into Merleau-Ponty type externalism.

In other words, if we accept Noe's variety of externalism in principle, we should leave it as open ground that dreams may come not just from a simple B-series 3+1 dimensional lump of white and grey neural matter. In fact our own position involves the A-series as well, where externalism, we trust, provides less of a problem. (Yates, 2008, 2008a, 2008b).

So such a position should be arguable and indeed essential at least in principle with Noe.

And in fact the mental status of dreams is still not clearly known, and there is no need for dreams to be purely internal in origin to allow most of Clark's argumentation.

Of course anyone who seems to claim entirely the unfortunate implied position that we only need consider what goes on in the brain to understand how the brain operates in the world, probably can be dealt with using a slightly different paradigm, not the topic of the present note.

The position of both Andy Clark and of David Chalmers seems to differ quite substantially from that of Noe. Although they both seem to favor augmented extensions of the simple B-series 3+1 dimensional lump of white and grey neural matter, it is sometimes difficult to visualise a satisfactory precise detailed formulation of that idea. Without a clear A series somewhere, instinct tends to make one fall back to Fodor's position.

With the A series on board, things differ dramatically. Purely to illustrate this point in another quite different case, if we consider Butterfield's (2001) critique of Barbour's work (Part 3.1), we realise that the moment McTaggart's paradox is invoked, the situation changes drastically.

It looks to me that Andy Clark is apparently activating the Foundation Argument against dreams, according to his correspondence with Noe (2009) at least. This seems to be a needlessly blunt edged sword to establish his views. The idea that consciousness depends only (or mainly) on what is happening in the brain the brain would take him away from the more extreme stance of Noe. And the Foundation Argument idea seems quite unproven anyway. It is essentially close to the idea of Crick. Noe gives quite cogent reasons against that, which may not concern the present argument. It really hardly matters to Clark's main argument that he should also apply it against dreams if he applies it to a lot of other things too. In other words, Clark's occasional comments that "dreams" seem to constitute almost purely cranial/neural matters do not really seem to be a clincher to his argument, but incidental ideas.

And as I just pointed out, we can look at even more unfortunate paradigms elsewhere. To put it largely, arguments against solipsism and generally accepted brute fact can come into such a discussion, except in specialised areas of mind science. There we are talking of Churchland as well as Crick and Searle, and our own working argumentation would be presented differently in such a case.

So it is perhaps simplest to look at the views of Fodor (2009) and Chalmers (2009). Fodor is claiming that Clark is effectively using the slippery slope argument between Otto and Inga, and also that notebooks are not the same as minds. Now that, apart from intentionality factors, does seem to be the case.

I'm not sure of the dispositional claims of Chalmers. Obviously Chalmers seems maybe to eventually want to solve a problem which Noe refers to on the first page of his preface "Only one proposition about how the brain makes us conscious . . . has emerged unchallenged: we don't have a clue." The Chalmers solution could presumably involve yet more machines, and Fodor presumably would not quite take that line.

I think here we are left with different levels of implied logic. Noe's approach could be construed as a sophisticated "ad hominem" level argument, briefly to the effect that everyone knows that the world exists in the way most people think it does (for example, in no sense is it anything resembling the Matrix). That is somewhat in the sort of way that some have said Dr. Johnson tried to refute Bishop Berkeley, by kicking a stone and saying "I refute it thus". The problem is of course not just time constraints but more importantly constraints as to apparently available accurate scientific knowledge about situation and circumstances. In the context of neurophysiology and consciousness research generally we frequently seem to be deep into the area of informal logic (Groarke, 2008, 1999). Of course Noe has written a lot to expand and rephrase his arguments and to include a great detail of neurophysiological detail, and that is indeed of great value to his comments, and that fact must be remembered.

But in the case of Clark and Chalmers I am left feeling that they are looking for more of a logical commitment (Groarke (1999), Walton, (2002)). The most recent post of Chalmers (2009) suggests that it has not got there yet, but my thinking is that the sort of overall approach that Mandik (2009) has used, where he actually goes so far as to question the current idea of representation, is perhaps more relevant. Details in Mandik's case are sketched out by others in Mandik (2009a).

Whether there is an appropriate formalism is not the point here, as dreams is our current topic in this note. But it is possible to point out that it is only if the brain is considered as a simple B-series 3+1 dimensional lump of white and grey neural matter that worries about externalism overawe us so much. In the Many Bubble Interpretation (Yates, 2008, 2008a, 2008b) the relationship comes out naturally. Simple mathematics is not there in detail yet but so far all seems straightforward.

To look briefly forward, purely for a simple modus operandi in experimental philosophy, I consider that Knobe's (2009) style of approach may be better than a lot of mathematics before we can contrive more parameter values.

---------------------------------------

Conclusion

It cannot be assumed that dreams are of necessity simply part of a simple internal mental continuum.

The Many Bubble Interpretation could allow a simpler rationale to externalist theories, which may be even simpler if the assumption that dreams have no worthwhile content outside the mind is omitted.

References

Butterfield J., (2001), "The end of Time ?", arXiv:gr-qc/0103055 v1 ; especially for example 3.1

Chalmers D., (2009) http://fragments.consc.net/djc/2009/02/fodor-on-the-extended-mind.html

Fodor J., (2009) http://www.lrb.co.uk/v31/n03/fodo01_.html

Groarke L., (2008), "Informal Logic", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2008 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = .

Groarke L., (1999), "The Fox and the Hedgehog: On Logic, Argument, and Argumentation Theory", ProtoSociology, (13), p29.

Knobe J., Phillips J., (2009), Psychological Inquiry, Volume 20, Issue 1, 30 - 36,

Mandik P., (2009a), http://www.consciousentities.com/?p=117

Mandik P., (2009), Journal of Consciousness Studies, 16, No. 1

Noe A., (2009), "Out of our Heads", numerous pages: including p179 on dreams, p203 on Andy Clark etc, ; Hill & Wang.

Prinz J., (2009), "Is Consciousness Embodied?" [In P. Robbins and. M. Aydede (Eds.) Cambridge Handbook of Situated Cognition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (forthcoming)] ; http://subcortex.com/IsConsciousnessEmbodiedPrinz.pdf

Walton D.N., (2002), "Are Some Modus Ponens Arguments Deductively Invalid?", Informal Logic, Vol. 22, No. 1 (2002): pp. 19-46 ; http://io.uwinnipeg.ca/~walton/papers in pdf/02modus.pdf

Yates, J. (2008a). http://cogprints.org/6176/ , "Category theory applied to a radically new but logically essential description of time and space",PHILICA.COM, Article number 135.

Yates, J. (2008b), http://cogprints.org/6232/ , "Experimental philosophy and the MBI", PHILICA.COM, Article number 139.

Yates, J. (2008). "A study of attempts at precognition, particularly in dreams, using some of the methods of experimental philosophy." , Philica.com , Article number 146.

A study of attempts at precognition, particularly in dreams, using some of the methods of experimental philosophy

2008-12-25T21:58:00.002+01:00

Dr. John Yates, M.Sc., Ph.D. Institute for Fundamental Studies, Vasai, Mumbai, India & Fulham, London, England

Institute address: Goa Campus (Assonora, provisional), Institute for Fundamental Studies, Goa ; Vasant Nagri, Vasai E, Mumbai, India ; Fulham, London, England

Correspondence address: email: uvscience[AT]gmail.com

Published work: Yates, J. (2008). "A study of attempts at precognition, particularly in dreams, using some of the methods of experimental philosophy." , Philica.com , Article number 146.

Abstract: Actual situations where folk philosophy might have predicted precognition effects were studied and dealt with experimentally and theoretically. Extremely strong experimental results were obtained but the findings supported not precognition but the Many Bubble Interpretation, which uses at this time dynamical systems theory as applied to the physics of the brain. Further experiments and theoretical work were discussed.

Introduction:

Blackmore's (2002) analyses are possibly the most up to date detailed appropriate account of controlled trials on precognition. Her remarks go back as far as the early dream work of Lord Kilbracken. Any results reported in Blackmore (2002) or implied by it seem to suggest that the subject does not present much future hope for precognition. Specifically with regard to dreams, Hobson (2005, 2006) doubted if there is any precognitive element in dreams though he seems to have had at least one dream which could be fitted to that category (a totally different thing, of course). I am largely in agreement with some aspects of Hobson's position on interpretations to date though there is still much exciting work to do, some of which I begin in this essay .

I have already considered the dreamwork of Domhoff (2002, 2003), Hobson, Metzinger (2004) and others elsewhere (Yates, 2008). The point has to be made that Domhoff has tried to computerise many aspects of dreamwork and his approaches to the multifarious problems of detail and interpretation plus his genuine attempts to involve internet interactions have to be borne in mind at all times, if not necessarily to be followed. Hopefully further experiments may be carried out at least partly on the internet, but many additional considerations, including those of experimental philosophy, will need to be dealt with.

Generally speaking, Hobson's and Blackmore's results and the largest fraction of similar work carried out with reasonable scepticism suggests that precognition does not happen, inside or outside of dreaming, under the constraints and conditions which have been imposed to date. I think that both Hobson (2006) and Blackmore (2005) were willing to be convinced otherwise by an effective proof, and therein lies the rub.

However we have already pointed out in earlier essays (Yates, 2008, 2008a, 2008b) that existing statistical methods may be inappropriate here and also that there is much more to be found or interpreted through observations.

I have also looked at other statistical and quasi-statistical aspects of the situation and have come to the conclusion that the methods of experimental philosophy have led to surprisingly exciting insights into dreamwork from a rather different angle.

Of course I refer to the continuing work of Schwitzgebel (2002, 2003, 2006, 2009) into colours in dreams as being seminal in this regard, and also with regard to specific methodologies.

Accordingly and also consequent to Yates (2008a,2008b), some experiments have been carried out on a number of subjects, as detailed below.

Whilst we have said that conventional statistics will not give a full picture of events (Yates, 2008) we now point out relatively conventional alternative methods by which dream studies can be carried out (Schwitzgebel, 2002, 2003, 2006, 2009) and there is doubtless much more to come. Schwitzgebel (2005) favours up to a point the classical traditional methods of the Titchener school of psychology and we could see that these can be leavened by some comments of Sosa (2007) (for example "if philosophers are ill-equipped to probe the brain in the ways of neuroscientists, it would be easy enough to broaden the movement’s self-conception to include interdisciplinary work, provided neuroscientists care enough about such issues with philosophical import, as no doubt some already do. Indeed, many experimental philosophers would probably define the movement in this interdisciplinary way").

We also have to bear in mind that much work of the Titchener school seems to have been only repeatable precisely enough by the Titchener school. I refer particularly to the chequered history of the Perky effect (Segal, 1964), (Martens, 2005) as a clear instance, but have to point out that Baars (2003), for example, still seems to take the Perky effect, or what it seems to imply, quite seriously and we have to consider the at least roughly feasible interpretations of Brockmole (2002). So whilst we cannot but concede that the general Titchener approach can be taken as somewhat of a curate's egg (addled but good in parts, as the curate proverbially says), it is a valiant attempt at a difficult problem in consciousness and as Schwitzgebel (2005) says, can be suitable for improvement. Schwitzgebel's own work at least hints as to directions which this may take.

The Experiment as Performed

This experiment helps us to discover the degree if any of backward leakage using the present approach which can be obtained by dream studies. The MBI ('Many Bubble Interpretation') approach and the importance of McTaggart's work certainly do not stand or fall on the basis of such studies but they could provide a pleasant confirmation of its correctness. The MBI may ultimately replace the present crude 19th/20th Century idea of punctal time, which seems like only a dim shadow of reality in comparison.

In Stickgold's experiment he had his subjects perform sequences of tasks and then showed that many of the subjects subsequently dreamt about these tasks. The present experiments record the dreams and then have the subjects carry out the tasks, which of course are chosen prior to the dreaming without informing the subjects in any way of the tasks, prior to the dreams. In terms of folk psychology, successful results could be regarded as precognition but according to the Many Bubble Interpretation, it is simply backwards leakage.

One idea will be to then try to obtain some parameters to enable us to improve our existing dynamical systems models (Yates, 2008) along the lines of the work of Hannon and Ruth (1997) or using other mathematical brain models such as those of Baars, Franklin or Koch, appropriately modified.

But first we will describe briefly the original Stickgold experiment. Following this we give an explicit mathematical account of how a reverse Stickgold effect can be produced. Then we will go on to obtain results which may help to confirm or indicate the reverse Stickgold effect, referred to in an earlier paper.

Stickgold's experiment

Stickgold (2000, 2003, 2005) controlled the content of 17 different people’s dreams after the first hour of sleep. Twenty-seven test subjects played Tetris on Nintendo sets for three days, with a two-hour morning session and a one-hour evening session the first day, and a one-hour morning and evening session the following days. Of the 27 people, 12 were beginners to the game and 10 were experts. Five of them were amnesiacs as well. Seventeen members of the group recalled dreaming of falling Tetris pieces at least one hour after falling asleep. Most of the dreams occurred the second night.

As far as I am aware these are the first major trials in history which so consistently seem to induce specific and definite dreams, and as such they should be extremely relevant to the present backward leakage study. The problem with psychological tests as compared to simple physics measurements has usually been the great difficulty in obtaining clear and consistent results. The chequered history of, for example, the Perky effect which I mentioned in detail earlier is an extreme but only too typical example. At the other end of the scale we have, say, Milgram's (1974) torture experiments which seem to have had very high repeatability all over the world.

Mathematical Representation of Stickgold and reverse Stickgold effects

To write down a mathematical model of the reverse Stickgold effect (Yates, 2008, 2008b), we use experimental philosophy and the work of Pizarro (2006).

This concerns the ripple effect. Now we consider a simple B1 series representation of the A series bubble. This is only a preliminary model and is not necessarily an accurate description. Because the A series cannot be precisely mapped onto the B series the model will never be completely accurate, because it cannot be. Thus the B1 series representation may appear to have substantial weaknesses as compared to a bona fide B series, and indeed may be inconsistent with it. We regard a present time bubble as PaPrFu(n) at Tn.

The ripple effect - the giving of an individual at a present time, information about an event which he remembers, is supposed according to Pizarro (2006) to alter his real (perceived) memory of the event. Here we have a physical effect on the brain from an applied information input. Say by an application of information f in the present the new configuration becomes PafPrfFu?(n) . Paf is the modified memory. Prf is the new present situation. We have not filled in Fu? because we do not need to for present purposes.

Now we need to remember that we are dealing with the neurology of the brain and presumably other factors. Now along the B or the B1 series we have a simple timeline. So one way of writing it would be that at T(n) we have one bubble PafPrfFu?(n) and at T(n-) , an earlier time, we have PaPrfFuf(n-). This is only a rough preliminary model but we are talking about real neural and perhaps other configurations at two different times. I do not deal with Fu?(n) at T(n) because in the present treatment we do not need to, but the work of Hohwy and Frith (2004) and others, makes it clear that Fu? is likely to be a real 'physical' configuration in a real 'physical' B series.

Here Fuf(n-) represents the future in the B1 series where there is going to be a a perturbation f. At this point we do not have to immediately consider many of the problems and paradoxes which one might normally expect as we know that it is not physically likely to be possible to get a completely accurate and consistent B1 series model as we would expect in the B series.

Now what is the relation of PafPrfFu?(n) to PaPrfFuf(n-) ?

Well these are two representations of a individual at times T(n) and T(n-). They are both brain models which can or should be each writeable down consistently and mathematically although we are not certain of their mutual consistency.

Well we specifically defined PafPrfFu?(n) above. As for PaPrfFuf(n-) , common sense hopefully tells us that it will exist too. It seems to mean that could well be a future perturbation of Fuf(n-) and that this will also occur in a simulated present Prf(n-) which of course is combined with past and future to form the bubble PaPrfFuf(n-) at T(n-).

So at T(n-) we should be able to write down, or to predict, the future. It is possible that it will only be a weak prediction, at the present state of the art, as we remember that Pa(n) was clearly weak.

But the general point is made that, in the B1 series at least, we can perturb the system by a perturbation f at time T(n) and that this will appear in the bubble PaPrfFuf(n-) as Fuf(n-). One's first reaction is that in a normal block time B series, this would be expected as that is how mathematics works. We might take the view that it could hardly be any other way anyway, and that toy models should also wrap up quantum and chaos effects in the same kind of system.

But this is a B1 series in the MBI . And the existence of the bubble PaPrfFuf(n-) implies that at time T(n-) we already have in our system enough information to write down (or if you like in folk philosophy terms 'forsee') something concerning the future. And we can use methods like those, for example, of Hannon and Ruth (1997) to actually mathematically represent the system at time T(n-) and to include the future of that system at T(n).

So now we have to ask what PaPrfFuf(n-) is in real terms. Well one representation might be a person in a particular psychological state. For example the dream state in Stickgold's experiment seems to represent Paf2Prf2Fu?(n) where f2 is a perturbation in the past (in Stickgold's case, the playing of Tetris), mirrored in a present dream state Prf2(n) (where Tetris is presumably dreamt about), in a simple situation where future involvement is not concerned.

So the equivalent representation of PaPrfFuf(n-) is the dream of a future perturbation, perhaps the playing of a game of Tetris in the future. All this does not prove the matter but it makes it clear that it can be written down mathematically using say the methods of Hannon and Ruth (1997). So perhaps the big question is: how reliable and consistent can such experiments be made ?

The work of Jones and Pashler (2007) suggests that prediction is never superior to retrodiction, even when subjects are forewarned of a forward-directional test. Only 217 and 353 subjects were used in their two experiments and of course the test was carried out subsequent to all the images to recall being memorised. It has been suggested that prediction may be an organizing principle of the mind and/or the neocortex, with cognitive machinery specifically engineered to detect forward-looking temporal relationships, rather than merely associating temporally contiguous events. There are not many tests for this idea, other than Jones (2007). The fact that Jones's work seemed to show no evidence of temporal asymmetry tends to bode well for the more advanced cases we consider in the present paper.

Factors taken into account in experiment planning. These include the idea suggested by Montague, Hyman, and Cohen (2004), it may be that events as reward or punishment cause prediction-focussed mechanisms to become active, whereas affect events like those used in Jones (2007) do not. The common observation that people are better at reciting the alphabet forward than backward also reflects the existence of inherently directional motor plans. A temporal asymmetry confined to sequential motor plans that have been repeatedly performed is quite different from an overall specialization of the memory system for prediction, however, although it could point to prediction improvement methods.

Freewill, intentionality (Malle (2001,2004) and such ideas as free will illusionism (Nadelhoffer, Feltz, (2007) may be the subject matter of further discussion and also they could have an obvious role in future experiment design.

Reverse Stickgold effect experiments

We did several studies. Here are two of them:

(1) This was essentially a repetition of the Stickgold experiment using 8 of our own subjects but recording dreams on evenings 7 days before and 7 days after, the Tetris plays.

The dreams were recorded by the subjects themselves, in English. The subjects also filled in a brief questionnaire as to dreaming habits. The subjects were from 6 to 15 years of age. Their mother tongues were Marathi and Hindi, but all could write and speak fluent English, as they were students at a local school where English was taught as a first language. A primary reason for their learning of English was allow personal advancement in whatever sphere of life they were later to lead. Their level of English presentation and expression was thus of a higher standard than would be the case in the average UK school for children of the age range.

Subjects were not told why or how the experiment was being carried out. The Tetris console was simply supplied to them in the middle of the testing session, when they were preoccupied with school, their hobbies and other such things. The subjects had just been asked to record dreams for a fortnight and, in mid session, were given the use of a Tetris gameboard and told to play Tetris a lot over a brief mid session period.

Briefly, the results were that for the 8 subjects there were 10 dreams of a probable Tetris type before play and 6 such dreams after play. Of these dreams, there were 4 very Tetris like dreams before play and none after play. These dreams averaged over the subjects, and there were no notable peak scores. One subject reported no dreams at all after play and one reported no dreams during the entire session.

(2) In this experiment, another group of subjects gave detailed answers to a dream questionnaire. Incidentally, the contention of Schwitzgebel (2006, 2009) that few people dream only in black and white was true for all our subjects. No test subject said that they dreamt solely in black and white. We used 13 subjects, aged between 8 and 15. The mother tongue of all these subjects was Marathi, but they all spoke good Hindi and reasonably fluent English as well. Detailed dream results were collected for four days before, and four days after the mid session day. Details were taken down carefully by an experienced and quadrilingual test assessor over a period of over 10 days and for many hours per subject.

I do not at this point propose to give a quantitative assessment of the results but I bear in mind Stickgold's apparent contention that form rather than specific substance is what is best measured. i.e. in his Tetris and Alpine Skier experiments he was looking generally in the first case for activities which had the same qualities as Tetris and Alpine Skier. Thus in the case of Tetris he might have considered simply pieces moving in the air or at a pinch even raindrops or such like of an appropriate design or pattern. In the case of Alpine Skier he seems to have been looking for the visceral effect of someone actually skiing, or perhaps one of the more advanced multicolored Virtual Reality ski or switchback games now to be found at the better grade of amusement parks. Specifically I saw an excellent such VR game at the seaside in Blackpool, England some years ago. Such games are roughly like the switchback equivalent of a Link Trainer for pilots, and ambitious home construction details are available on many websites (Wikipedia, 2008) There is clearly scope for more ambitious experiments in this regard but the time and effort involved will mean that careful advance experiment planning, relatively speaking as detailed, thought out, and meticulous as the Titchener school had expected to realise, is likely to be required.

At the midsession period, Tetris was not played but a small gift given to each child, of a kind they might like. Examples are a remote control toy car and a remote control toy helicopter. Scoring was based on dreams about the chosen object, i.e. car, helicopter and so on. They were not told before the test what they were getting as a gift. This was a relatively poor area and the subjects rarely received gifts, in fact some had never had any gifts before.

Be all that as it may, on the broad criterion above, which counted some cases of running in motor traffic as amounting to a dream of a car, and so on, the score was 10 subjects having prior (in folk philosophy perhaps precognitive) dreams and 9 having subsequent dreams. One subject claimed to have had only one dream during the entire period and one subject could only recall a vague prior dream. Now this is an extremely good prior score !

On a more narrow criterion, where only dreams specifically about an object exactly the same as the chosen object were included, the prior score was again high, being 6 prior with 7 subsequent dreams. The total number of all dreams per subject recorded was not high, being on average 2 or 3 before and 1 or 2 subsequently. The criterion here was that if they got a toy car (for example), a positive result would be if they dreamt about a car. One subject's prior dream was not only about a car, but he specifically dreamt the correct color which he mentioned without prompting, being the only subject to mention the relevant color (yellow) of the significant object in the dream series.

Now these subjects were all impartially and individually quizzed and questioned over a period of time, without any leading of them in a particular direction. But of course we cannot yet draw too many conclusions, nor determine whether we will always get the same result. One interesting problem (Haidt, 1993) concerns the idea of quizzing subjects about their views on a story in which a person has a pet dog, which unexpectedly dies, probably by accident. The dog is then eaten by its owner. Most people react that such a thing seems to be quite disgusting and gross, given the particular tale, and the relatively limited questionnaire and possible replies allowed, but in some ways it is hard to understand why it should be disgusting and maybe further experiments would clarify the situation. What I am trying to say is that these projects are often hard to understand and are not basically necessarily having a simple and clearcut follow up.

There is probably no very simple external situation either. The subjects' main interest tended to be not in (cars or whatever the gift was) but in sports and football. They did not know what the gift was, and whilst like any small child they liked presents, there was no special liking for motor vehicles, the closest connection being perhaps that one child's father was a rickshaw driver. The subjects had no known motive to 'cheat' or to make wild guesses at what they might have dreamt, or to invent dreams. Of course, mirroring the Tetris experiment, the idea was that the subjects should play a lot with the present voluntarily when they received it. They indeed did so, so at that level the technique used was cheap, modest, but apparently adequate to get a preliminary result.

Possibilities for further improvement in performance

The use of a very large number of experimental subjects of differing backgrounds and personality types could be one step forward. Another step could be the use of virtual reality apparatus during the experiment as mentioned earlier in this paper.

The use of email experiments and some form of content analysis as in Domhoff (2002, 2003) could also lead to more results though such methods become very mechanical sometimes and important detail is likely to be lost.

On that latter theme, epidemic tracking via Google (2008) is by now a commonly used method and with some variations epidemic tracking might be usable for this work. And then of course there is Google Trends, another powerful tool. Careful use of these and similar techniques could eventually be incorporated in or even replace the humble questionnaires. Less conventional internet approaches to detection as in FindTimeTravel.com have not succeeded to date.

Vul (2008) appears to take the view that cognition may be described as statistical inference, and points out that averaging reasonable guesses is better than having only one try - a result which seems to hold for one person as well as for a statistically designed goup. There are several reasons why this may be so, including the idea that the brain is continually generating hypotheses and checking them against reality. Such methods may be considered in a brain model under development. and indeed were implied in one or two earlier attempts to create a model (Yates, 2008).

Philosophical Comment

Philosophically, we are left with the interesting speculation that, using reasonable present day B-series only physics, from the work of Watanabe (1955) right up to the present day (e.g., (Gott, 1997) time travel to the past from the future as well as from the past to the future could become possible. In Gott's example, this form of time travel would be subsequent to the discovery of the first time machine. How this would apply in the case of effects relating to the reverse Stickgold effect, which we may be demonstrating in the present work, still may need to be determined. But clearly the physics might well force that Gott's condition above to apply, and we certainly cannot assume otherwise without good reason. Information theory might seem to make the restriction apply to retain consistency with current theoretical physics. But for the record, my own first patent (Yates, 1980) of time travel was made public in Patent GB2051465A during 1971 to 1979. There are plenty of potential paradoxes here for philosophers, and in my opinion, especially experimental philosophers.

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Yates, J. (2008b), http://cogprints.org/6232/ , "Experimental philosophy and the MBI", PHILICA.COM, Article number 139.

Experimental philosophy and the MBI

2008-10-02T10:17:00.003+01:00

Experimental philosophy and the MBI

Dr. John Yates, M.Sc., Ph.D. Institute for Fundamental Studies, Vasai, Mumbai, India & Fulham, London, England

Institute address: Goa Campus (Assonora, provisional), Institute for Fundamental Studies, Goa ; Vasant Nagri, Vasai E, Mumbai, India ; Fulham, London, England

Correspondence address: email: uvscience[AT]gmail.com

Published work: Yates, J. (2008). "Experimental Philosophy and the MBI" , Philica.com , Article number 139.

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Abstract

Various facets of the MBI are discussed, and how it can be used in connection with experimental philosophy, experimental psychology and neuroscience. Brief historical references are given. The large implications of the MBI with regards to McTaggart's paradox and the resolution of the difficulties with quantum mechanics is mentioned. Later sections deal with the mereological fallacy, multiple universes, teletransportation, mind cloning and mind splitting. Dreamwork is chosen as a prime example of the use of the MBI and recent work by Tononi and Baars is referred to.

Introduction

In this paper we deal generally with various facets of the MBI ("Many Bubble Interpretation"), (Yates, 2008), and how it can be used in connection with experimental philosophy, experimental psychology and neuroscience. I begin in section (1) with brief historical references and then proceed in section (2) to refer to the large implications of the MBI with regards to McTaggart's paradox and the resolution of the difficulties with quantum mechanics, continuing in sections (3) and (4) to deal briefly with the mereological fallacy, multiple universes, teletransportation, mind cloning and mind splitting. Dreamwork is chosen as a prime example of the use of the MBI and recent work by Tononi and Baars are referred to in that connection in section (5).

(1) History of my Contact with Experimental Philosophy and some other matters

My first contact with experimental philosophy was probably a comment in about 1967 by Ted Bastin during a meeting with Ted Bastin, and also Dorothy Emmet and R.B. Braithwaite (the 'epiphany philosophers') at a large house in Cambridge. The “Epiphany Philosophers” seemed to take it as a goal to show that christianity and science were not only compatible but that they supported one another. Further, some of their considerations of matters such as ESP could certainly be taken as pseudo-science and as such I certainly never endorsed them. It also appeared that Ted Bastin's contention at one time (Noyes, 1999) was that paranormal phenomena should be defined as contradicting physics.

From a philosophical point of view, I thought then, and still think, that there could hardly be a basic objection to making hypothetical contentions of a somewhat speculative nature as it allowed for at least a metaphorical way - if a somewhat doubtful and even sometimes probably far too naive way - to the nicing down particularities in metaphysical conjectures. Some of such conjectures could give rise to real practical concerns with the forwarding of technology, in such ways as proposed 'mind uploading' and 'mind duplication'. I go into a little more detail later in the essay, whilst considering the work of Parfit.

However. The term 'spam' was not at that time used, I believe, as the art term it seems to have become but I think Ted did not at that time altogether approve of some of the rather mechanical sounding questionnaires which are still associated to some extent with the concept of experimental philosophy and there seemed to be a feeling that the idea of experimental philosophy could well become popular, but could eventually degenerate. The effect is probably noticed as early as 1938 in the work of Naess (Naess, 1938 ; Appiah, 2007). I suppose part of the problem is that we might in effect, be throwing away the baby with the bathwater by being over zealous with some of our refinements. This must of course be avoided when it is appropriate to do so.

To sum it up, to me experimental philosophy sounded as if it might be a good idea and that it might allow such positive factors as the sharpening up, refining, and sometimes rejecting for day to day purposes, the ideas of folk philosophy.

(2) The MBI ('Many Bubble Interpretation') and its use with McTaggart's Paradox

A plan for a model of the MBI ('Many Bubble Interpretation') is described in Note 5 of Yates (2008) and elsewhere in the same paper. The MBI has already shown its utility and potential further utility as described in Yates (2008). The McTaggart paradox is regarded nowadays by many philosophers as a real paradox, which it is. Much literature is available to that effect and this will be assumed, though it can be argued in detail as has been the case elsewhere. We resolved McTaggart in Yates (2008) and the effect shown is that, to do physics or neuroscience properly, we need to bear the paradox in mind, and to use both A and B series. As an analogy, not to do so would be like pretending to live not in 3 spatial dimensions, but instead to live in Flatland. Mathematical detailing of the MBI can have a very intimate connection with the human brain and we have used a neutral monist approach, though not critically, and we tend to bear neutral monism in mind for the future. The Gestalt Bubble model of Lehar (2003) is of course not the same as the Many Bubble Interpretation (MBI), although for many years I also have been a great enthusiast of the work of Kohler and Wertheimer, as well as Lewin and Leeper and so there may be some similarities in approach.

Velmans (2003), whose model has some philosophical appeal, holds a different view from authors like Lehar (I've often referred to Velmans' work in my blog, http://ttjohn.blogspot.com/), and for this present paper I hold a similar view, up to a point. Velmans states that Lehar argues that the phenomenal world is in the brain, and concludes that the physical skull is beyond the phenomenal world. Velmans argues that the brain is in the phenomenal world and concludes that the physical skull is where it seems to be. This fits in with my own work and Velmans is also a monist. James, too, was also said to be a kind of neutral monist, as Velmans (2003) points out.

And, although Velmans (2008) very reasonably makes objections (particularly in his notes 4 and 5 and related comments) to some of the ideas put forward by Baars, the popular GWT (Global workspace Theory) model of Baars has some advantages for general use, though particular instances such as Baar's theories on magnetic fields may need to cope with some objections, and may be a little too direct. We can consider the model overall and with some refinement it can possibly cope with the thrust of my argumentation.
I will continue in Section (3) by surveying the alleged mereological fallacy and multiple universes, and then go on in Section (4) to discuss brain cloning, and in Section (5) I will briefly discuss the ongoing experiments in dreamwork, one of the many possible applications of the MBI.

(3) The mereological fallacy, multiple universes and related matters.

The mereological fallacy (Hacker, 2003) ìs supposedly that it isn’t actually your brain that does the thinking at all. In fact, the very idea that it does is virtually incoherent: not just wrong, but meaningless. Only you as a whole entity can do anything like thinking or believing. Hacker's views are essentially based on the philosophy of Wittgenstein, which many serious thinkers disagree with entirely, or accept at best only in part as in Hohwy (2003), and in present cases relevant to neuroscience, Hohwy and Frith (2004). In fact Table 1 of Hohwy and Frith (2004) almost in itself constitutes a formula for the start of writing an experimental philosophy paper but it needs more 'aha' possibility added for an appropriate questionnaire, like the early ideas of Knobe (2003) have.

To discuss Knobe's ideas I must go into a little detail about various multiple universe conjectures.

We must distinguish plainly between firstly such ideas as the many worlds interpretations of such as Deutsch and Everett, which largely seemed to be based on the many peculiar and at times often seemingly paradoxical results which arise in relation to quantum theory; indeed the still commonly accepted Copenhagen interpretation, sometimes even described as the "shut up and calculate" interpretation, is still frequently made use of, despite its problems - indeed it was over 30 years ago that Sir Rudolf Peierls commented to me, at a meeting I had convened at the Institute of Physics, London, as to the advantages that alternative-universe approaches seemed to have over Copenhagen. Since then we have had the work of David Deutsch, Gerard 't Hooft and much other work, and hopefully this will eventually help to illumine remaining difficulties in quantum mechanics and produce other results and perhaps even allow us to specifically explicate and use in detail, at least quantum multiverses - or other and totally different approaches. But like the poor, the problems of quantum mechanics are unfortunately still with us. However up to a point we may still stand aloof from all this in our present treatment. In the MBI (or 'Many Bubble Interpretation') the Schrodinger cat problem and other such problems slot in neatly enough, and to all intents and purposes are resolved or resolvable ! And for a start quantum theory as at present described in the literature is totally B series anyway, and we know in the MBI that for a proper description of a universe we need to use an A series also.

But of course we now have a newish breed of speculated universes, namely the multiverses of such people as Tegmark, Rees and Vilenkin. Tegmark (2007) neatly classifies his universes currently in 4 levels, and roughly speaking the old style 'quantum multiverses' seem to occur in level 3. But it seems to me that, however worthy such attempts may be, they are still in my opinion very clearly within the realm of speculation, like the continuous creation theory and other theories of Fred Hoyle, and like the 'Fundamental Theory' of Eddington of previous times. Does this matter ? I think it does, as we need a serious breakthrough if any great merit is to be ascribed to such work. At the end of the day, of course there may well be some points of such theories sufficiently in touch with known reality to allow us to proceed, and of course that is important, but such a toehold in scaling the mountain of wisdom will definitely not do for all, even though we must admire the efforts of such intrepid mountaineers. Now one rider to this probable fact is that philosophical studies based on such theories can be a bit lacking. I am talking for example of Knobe's ideas on freewill and this was basically discussed by him, in Knobe (2008). The interviewer John Horgan presents the view which can lead to the idea that a relatively straightforward inflationary universe theory could be best left unused because of moral implications.

Now at this point I think it is correct to mention some brief details about the background of these two authors. Horgan it seems is an agnostic journalist increasingly disturbed by religion's influence on human affairs. His details are available on the web, and seem to be mainly in the realm of popular science. He is currently unhappy with the Templeton Foundation which he seems to feel should have been more even-handed in their funding, by awarding the Templeton Prize to someone like Richard Dawkins for example and on the other hand seems to have bet Michio Kaku that “By 2020, no one will have won a Nobel Prize for work on superstring theory, membrane theory, or some other unified theory describing all the forces of nature.” Joshua Knobe is a well known philosopher whose father-in-law is Alexander Vilenkin, Director of the Institute of cosmology at Tufts University, and with whom Joshua Knobe has discussions about the universe, and indeed has published with jointly.

Basically I cannot concede to Horgan's idea that important theories (like Tegnark's or Deutsch's theories, for example) may be only 'metaphysical' in the sense that they may never have any currently acceptable proof. Also I cannot concede to Knobe's apparent idea that Vilenkin's theory, one out of many, is necessarily likely to be the right theory to follow, although Knobe (2008) himself wisely states high levels of general philosophical doubt.

It seems to me that for any theory, from my standpoint there should be a meaningful likelihood that it can be proved or disproved at some present time or within the forseeable or conceivable future. The ideas of Max Tegmark and David Deutsch, for example, look as if they are sitting there on the shelf waiting for elements of proof or disproof and whether these can be found, at some point, can be good reasons as to whether they are worthy of consideration in current physics and related disciplines. Though they could, regardless, perhaps cast meaningful shadows on the wall of philosophical speculation. Anyway the hope in present ventures is to obtain meaningful and provable results. My problem here is that some of Knobe's ideas (Knobe, 2006) on freewill would appear to be based on the philosophy of Vilenkin.

The inflationary world idea of Knobe (2006) is very clear and refers to real, observable worlds, given that Vilenkin's theory is more or less correct. It also seems to me that Knobe's theory does indeed differ from the actualism of Ayers, which is just a strong form of determinism, in some forms ruled out by way of chaos theory anyway. On the basis of inflationary theory Knobe says we may not even have “a unique copyright on our own identities” These new theoretical ideas casts up a set of new philosophical questions. Now my worry is that we are here going well into unknown territory. I for one do not accept that there is any good evidence for the inflationary world idea. Philosophers may like to speculate on it and I do not contest that idea, but a blind semi-acceptance of its truth is very much another matter. One positive possibility may be the assignment of likelihood possibilities or betting odds, so we can know how to decide how much time to give such theories or even to set up some ranking order.

For example in (Marshall, 2000) on MWI (the "Many Worlds Interpretation") it seems that "Political scientist" L David Raub reports a poll of 72 of the "leading cosmologists and other quantum field theorists" about the "Many-Worlds Interpretation" and gives the following response breakdown.
"Yes, I think MWI is true" 58%
"No, I don't accept MWI" 18%
"Maybe it's true but I'm not yet convinced" 13%
"I have no opinion one way or the other" 11%

Amongst the "Yes, I think MWI is true" crowd listed are Stephen Hawking and Nobel Laureates Murray Gell-Mann and Richard Feynman. Gell-Mann and Hawking recorded reservations with the name "many-worlds", but not with the theory's content. Nobel Laureate Steven Weinberg is also mentioned as a many-worlder, although the suggestion is not when the poll was conducted, presumably before 1988 (when Feynman died). The only serious "No, I don't accept MWI" named is apparently Penrose.

Obviously these statistics would not be easy to prepare, and probably would be much harder than simply referring to the citations index. Status of person holding the opinion and accessibility and clarity of a particular theory would be just some of the factors involved. Also it would be unwise to expect too much of new or revolutionary theories, or to base too much on impressive personalities. Joshua Knobe himself, who is seemingly becoming more and more doubtful as to which if any views on many philosophical matters are relevant or justified, seems to have begun his polls with a much less straightforward idea of how to indulge the philosophical relevance of various views, and I mention in particular the very interesting paper of Kimpe (2008) in this regard. To my mind Kimpe's (2008) paper illustrates at least one way, though it be pedagogical, as to how this sort of thing should be carried out, and of course we also have the highly inspiring early example of Knobe ( Nadelhoffer, 2008). My own feeling is that a touch of Milgram (1974) could be needed for further work, and indeed in Slater (2006) the UCL group got their volunteers to wear VR helmets to experience a simulated version of the Milgram experiment. It was designed to be the same, but the strangers getting shocked were just computer animated avatars. Yet the UCL team conclude their test subjects reacted on "the subjective, behavioural and physiological levels as if it were real in spite of their knowledge that no real events were taking place." Measurements of heart rate and heart rate variability showed they reacted as though the situation was real. They were just as aware and worried they were doing wrong, but shocked the stranger anyway. Other experiments seem to have also shown much the same effect, and one could very easily be led to suppose that some feelings of grief, kinship and empathy are merely biological reactions. Without doing a study of these matters, I tend to assume that some of these reactions relate simply to the novelty of the avatar situation, and may reduce in effect the more generally experience on these matters is available. Also there is the immersive effect and the fact that the participants knew they were being watched. It is also very unclear as to the ethical situation of such experiments, and whether such methods can be used in other mass murder experiments. On the other hand these factors can be partly put aside, bearing in mind the massive and apparently largely harmless exposure of world cultures to some forms of television and video gaming.

Slater's (2007) subsequent experiments indicate that much more work needs to be done on the effect of virtual environments, but that the Slater (2006) result was no individual chance happening. Slater (2003) makes it plain that the idea of 'presence', and probably many other concepts, may need to be meticulously defined for philosophical purposes in a world which is part VR and part factual reality.

Philosophy has so far not had quite the same need of definition, and it could turn out to be very enlightening - given enough further experiments. The task is probably large but well within our control, in my view.

(4) Teletransportation and brain cloning

However now we will get down to a simple case, the one referred to by Parfit (1984) in "Reasons and Persons" as teletransportation on p199-200 of the above book. I have to say that whilst the theoretical possibilities of teletransportation may be there, using methods which have been used for atoms, the actual teletransportation of human beings or indeed any animate matter - even beings as hardy as tardigrades (Jönsson , 2008) for example - is so far not possible and for a variety of reasons may never be so.

As Parfit points out, for circumstances like the above, Wittgenstein would have pointed out "It is as if our concepts involve a scaffolding of facts .......... if you imagine certain facts otherwise.....then you can no longer imagine the application of certain concepts" or Quine who advised not to "suggest words have some logical force beyond what our past needs have invested them with". But Parfit says (to paraphrase) "we strongly ... don't like" - unpleasant consequences of teletransportation. And we believe that these visceral reactions will also apply even in real circumstances. At the present state of experimental philosophy, this also seems to mean that the Wittgenstein/Quine view may be the view (i.e. we can ignore such outlandish possibilities, prior to any actual such device being in play, or as existing as a mere hypothesis) on our 'abstract' side, and the 'visceral' view may apply to our judgement for real cases (i.e. if we suppose that such a device could somehow be brought into being).

And we certainly seem to have come much closer, in recent years and since the publication of Parfit's book, to a 'visceral' situation rather than an 'abstract' one, so if we were to consider Parfit's view directly in terms of experimental philosophy, we would be perhaps wise to frame our queries in accordance with the temporal change, if we were to ask a class of aspiring young philosophers about such issues, in a rather similar way to Kimpe (2008). And indeed some of these interviews if repeated every few years might give outstandingly differing poll results.

Effect of Temporal Change on Philosophical Reasoning : But indeed we would probably for the moment at least, confine our attentions for the moment to late 20th and 21st century philosophers like Parfit, who must have been involved with the effect of temporal change (scientific change being of most importance as this can induce immediate 'no-no', but also spiritual change and political change) on philosophical reasoning over a period of time already. That of course partly accounts for the changing views of philosophers even in the 20th century, Bertrand Russell's changing (political) views on the use of nuclear bombs being only one instance out of many. And it probably also accounts in part at least for Joshua Knobe's expressed feelings for the apparent indeterminism of philosophical results, perhaps not to the level of Heidegger or Wittgenstein (Minar, 2001) who seem to try to show us how skepticism presents a symptom of our way of inhabiting our condition. They take a view as if the world had first to be stripped of the taint of meaning before it could again be rendered an hospitable environment for the dwelling of mortals.

Since Knobe takes a look at a world, constantly changing even in basic scientific and physical understanding all the time, thus leading to a continual shaking of its philosophical foundations, he is understandably not eager to take very definite views on many matters, as next week's scientific advance in (say) perception theory could undermine an entire philosophical structure of a lifetime ! Not that the proponents of such a theory will want to admit it, of course, any more than Heidegger after World War II must have really wished to truly change his philosophical lucubrations from a semi-political viewpoint to a quasi-poetical one, but circumstances, and not just physical circumstances must have made him 'want' to do so. So too Knobe has his 'abstract' and his 'visceral' and it is probably possible to take great pains to venture from there. His views on such matters as freewill, morality, ethics, and even crime and punishment, seem to be up to a point conditioned by his tentative acceptance of Vilenkin's physics, and the fact that he is attempting to obtain great achievements in his thought, and indeed to relate, through experimental philosophy, his 'take' on these matters to that of others. From the present point of view a fairly all inclusive theoretical base and nonetheless a directed approach seem the most appropriate, at this time. And we bear in mind that the use of experimental philosophy may be one good way to attain this.

Perhaps obviously, deep questions of relativism arise and I try to proceed with the work by avoiding these, and also avoid a detailed consideration of the perhaps rewarding work of Gadamer on hermeneutics, or for that matter of Davidson's work.

Parfit on p203 of "Reasons and Persons" says that he considers identity as "the spatio-temporal physical continuity of an object". (One perhaps looks at Kimpe (2008) to consider the mereological aspect of this matter). One can see the relevance and explication of physical continuity, probably, but psychological continuity (and particularly continuity of memory) are also reasonably considered by Parfit at some length on p205 et seq. However in regard to something like memory, which leaves the impression of relating to the obvious physical aspects of the brain, but to an as yet unclearly defined mental feature, we seem to be right there at the coal face of understanding, and could go very wrong. We certainly do not even know accurately how to erase very specific and individually chosen memories by physical means, for example, using needles or electrodes in very small areas. Many people say that such things as thoughts and memories are spread out in some way over the whole brain, as it were like a mathematical Fourier transform. And of course Hacker goes even further than this, suggesting that it is one thing to suggest on empirical grounds correlations between a subjective, complex whole (say, the activity of deciding and some particular physical part of that capacity, say, neural firings) but there is considerable objection to concluding that the part just is the whole. Hacker then uses the traditional Wittgenstein view that to do so is nonsense. For myself I would not care to take the traditional Wittgenstein approach so far, but like Parfit would like to consider the evidence as and when it arises through neurological experiments. And Parfit's continued strivings can be looked at fairly benignly until at least p209, up to which he more or less accepts the possibility of and/or need for some sort of physical and psychological continuity.

It seems to me that in the teletransportation case of Parfit, there can be both physical and psychological continuity for both of the persons (the teletransported person and the clone), as the original person has obvious continuity and the person on Mars also has continuity in space and time, using real teleportation methods of the kind - not known when Parfit wrote his book - we have at the moment for single particles, if these can be extended to larger objects. There is a quantum effect during the creation of the clone, but this is day to day and in an emaciated way is satisfactory in B-series quantum physics, and also occurs in the MBI. The only problem is that we now have two 'originals'. A perfect chance for experimental philosophy to ask each of them questions to decide which is the authentic item, and, to me, it seems fair enough if they both seem to be authentic. But duplication is common in every production line and if people can be duplicated, both duplicants should have importance, and in fair systems, human rights.

The only 'visceral' worry to either clone should probably be as to whether he and other clones are treated fairly. Whether such a worry need occur depends on historical circumstances which are not yet with us, and which basically seem to have no immediate connection to the act of cloning.

Amusingly, then, mass production could almost produce a 'detournement' effect on Heidegger's ideas. Heidegger apparently (according to Steiner) warned as early as the 1920s that 'as this soap powder [i.e. conveyor belt consumerism] spreads over the planet, over the universe, it will be almost impossible for you to be you and not just one'. On the contrary, individual 'ones' and their clones may each be able to show great individuality from a basic cloned person, and each one of us may become independently available as millions of quite separately acting individuals, totally disconnected to each other, with their own psychological reactions after the cloning. Furthermore, unlike Vilenkin's inflationary world-view where it could be said free will (given the noted restrictions) is effectively almost written out of the scheme of things in the universe, overall, there would be an almost limitless free will available for individuals to put into practice, as each clone could try something different and even compare notes. Whether there would be any means of contact between clones, other than normal physical ones available to everyone, is of course unknown. And of course such a universe could also exist in (or on top of) Vilenkin's version.

Returning now to the work of Parfit, on p273 he starts discussing mind backups. Again, this is outside of existing technology, so up to a point one could assume discussion on the matter is empty. The idea presumably is that the mind backup will simply replace the existing mind, should it become damaged, say in transit. However such a backup in practice is unlikely to have access to what happens in the mind after backup and until fatality, so is likely to to be 'just another approximate clone'. Maybe whether individuals would see such a clone to be of value could depend on their circumstances, for example family responsibilities and commitments for continuity of an existing enterprise. But it seems clear that personal continuity will have been breached.

At this point we have to bear in mind that Parfit is what he claims to be a 'reductionist' and in his understanding, persons are nothing over and above the existence of certain mental and/or physical states and their various relations. But this point in his chain of argument appears to be circular as he either claims that we can give a full description of each individual thought without assuming it has a thinker, or perhaps he is claiming that we can describe the totality of our thoughts without assuming that that has a thinker. That a person's life may be seen for some purposes as a sequence of temporal events, each one an aggregate of mental or other events, provides no grounds for the assumption that the person themselves can be identified as being this sequence. Such a sequencing may perhaps be used to tag, or keep track, of a person and even to develop theories such as the MBI, but that does not mean that we have thereby established the sequence or tagging as being the person himself. Furthermore Nagel (Harth, 2004) and others seem to define reductionism in a somewhat different way to Parfit.

(5) Use of MBI and GW theory for dreamwork

We are seeing apparent continuity of human beings' existence whilst dreams occur. Most normal people simply welcome a good night's sleep, and have no fear that it will be the end of their life, or that a new person will take their place when they 'wake up' the following day. Parfit and others have of course considered such possibilities, but we can probably rule them out for the current practical exercise.

We have already used dynamic systems modelling for the sleep condition and referred to it in Yates (2008). For the interim, rather than refining existing models we intend to try to determine empirical factors which will sharpen and enhance the reverse Stickgold effect, but to relate such progress to MBI theory also.

We note from Knobe's work that there seem to be two aspects to any real philosophical views, namely abstract ideas or views and visceral ideas or views. This suggests the possibility of something quite different to Pavlovian 'conditioning' or effects of such a nature, such as simple computer-aided classical conditioning after the manner of Richard F. Thompson. The idea is simply to give some of the subjects small rewards during the process of dream recording, likely to take place over about 10 days with the reward given mid-session. The control group will not be given rewards and we will see what difference this makes to the dreams, if any. A number of other techniques will be used during the tests, some of which are currently ongoing.

Global workspace and other theory : In connection with his theories of consciousness, Tononi (2008) claims that consciousness fades during early sleep, and that this is likely to be due to the dreamless brain either breaking down into causally independent modules, shrinking its repertoire of possible responses, or both. He has carried out work using EEG and rTMS results to help to validate this view. As Tononi puts it his theory suggests that "the brain breaks down into little islands that can't talk to one another." Now this is a reasonable postulate in the B series and whether in effect something similar occurs in the A series (which may well have additional ability to integrate information in the brain, notwithstanding B series dissociation ) is as yet undetermined. Stickgold had said earlier "He has plainly and elegantly demonstrated a breakdown in the ability of cortical areas to interact normally as we fall asleep, but he hasn't provided any reason to think that this is related to the changes in consciousness as we fall asleep." "Scientists have nothing approaching an understanding of why we are conscious when we are awake or, indeed, why we are awake. So looking for what changes cause a loss of consciousness is a very difficult question because we don't know what we're looking for. I don't think this adds anything substantive about consciousness. It does add some information about the changes in brain function that accompany the shift to sleep, in a very elegant and beautiful way to show it." Tononi however seems to be of the view that "the ability of distant parts of the brain to communicate with each other constitutes consciousness."

I have by now written at length about psychological aspects of this matter - clearly a lot can be said about the hard problem , where the deceptively simple position could roughly in effect be that "the map is not the country" (or, "the Tononi effect is not consciousness"), and indeed a lot can also be said about the work of Jack et al (2007), who can also see that there are problems but would favour a different mode of tackling them. From my own standpoint, dynamic systems theory may give interesting results for the MBI, but our additional experiments could also be helpful. And, we clearly would be much happier if we could carry out mind cloning to help with the parameters (as in that case, the differences between the A series of the clones might help with parameter values, but for the moment we can certainly contrive to make do with dreams and other experimentation. But the assumption of the mere possibility of cloning could perhaps help us to better formulate the A series.

In Baars (2006) it is pointed out that Hobson and Stickgold have suggested a neural mechanism for this phenomenon in terms of cholinergic activity during REM sleep. Thus the only memory available for the recall of a dream is the small capacity WM (working memory), resulting in dream amnesia. The limited capacity of WM would yield a memory only of the final small portion of the dream. The rapid decay of WM would account for no memory of the dream at all after a slow awakening.

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Yates J., (2008), Philica no 135 ; http://cogprints.org/6176/

Category theory applied to a radically new but logically essential description of time and space

2008-08-27T05:49:00.005+01:00

Category theory applied to a radically new but logically essential description of time and space
Dr. John Yates, M.Sc., Ph.D.
Institute for Fundamental Studies,
Vasai, Mumbai, India & Fulham, London, England

Institute address: Goa Campus (Assonora, provisional), Institute for Fundamental Studies, Goa ; Vasant Nagri, Vasai E, Mumbai, India ; Fulham, London, England

Correspondence address: email: uvscience[AT]gmail.com

Published work: Yates, J. (2008). "Category theory applied to a radically new but logically essential description of time and space", PHILICA.COM., Article number 135.

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Abstract

McTaggart's ideas on the unreality of time as expressed in "The Nature of Existence" have retained great interest for many years for scholars, academics and other philosophers. In this essay, there is a brief discussion which mentions some of the high points of this philosophical interest, and goes on to apply his ideas to modern physics and neuroscience. It does not discuss McTaggart's C and D series, but does emphasise how the use of derived versions of both his A and B series can be of great virtue in discussing both the abstract physics of time, and the present and future importance of McTaggart's ideas to the subject of time. Indeed an experiment using human volunteers and dynamic systems modelling which was carried out is described, which illustrates this fact. The Many Bubble Interpretation, which also derives from McTaggart's ideas, is discussed and various examples of its use and effectiveness are referred to. The Schrodinger Cat paradox is essentially resolved in principle, the quantum Zeno effect interpretable, Kwiat's recent result referred to, and the newly discovered reverse Stickgold effect described.

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Introduction

I began in the late nineteen sixties , with Professor R.O. Gandy in Manchester, England, by trying to describe and attempting to completely incorporate into a mathematical system, the laws of physics. I used basic methods, such as those of Gentzen, Heyting Brouwer etc., etc. But both I and Professor Gandy found a practical solution, even in the very abstract, to be too difficult at the time. I believe we both thought that we needed some new mathematics, which either did not seem to exist or which we simply had not located !

Now the work of Turing, and later Chaitin and Connes, for example, should have helped but somehow it seemed to me necessary to go even deeper down and more basic. In fact the philosophy of approach with which I began was that of the early formal system theory of Smullyan (1961). Clearly on the face of it, it looked as if strange mathematical constructs like that of Godel universes as well, could be included in such an approach. But at that point, the pieces did not seem to fit. For example, pursuing the Turing path, which has been trod by so many workers by now, like for example Juergen Schmidhuber, was not going to be enough. There was more to it than simple computability problems, we needed to go in a sense to a higher level. Even using the physically peculiar looking results of quantum theory which have by now been incorporated into modern methods of quantum computing, and some of the early results of which, for example, were first published in a journal which I founded and of which I was Editor in Chief for many years (Feynman, 1982) could certainly enlighten us and might well have to be included in some more complete description of the universe which more finally became of use to us, were probably too intellectually ad hoc and thus too flimsy to effectively suppress or even mollify the deep angst of our lack of basic understanding. It was almost like trying to understand modern number theory in a position where transfinite numbers had not been invented. There almost had to be "another dimension or dimensions", or even another "kind of dimension".

Early string theory was around at the time, but at this very basic level, the explanation was unlikely to have that kind of simplicity. It was likely to be much more basic, deep and profound. In sum we were looking for fundamental mathematics, not just the simple technical physics that string theory, even today, would seem to amount to.

I felt in the early nineteen sixties, and still feel now, that the great Emmy Noether, who has since been described flamboyantly but possibly realistically as the greatest mathematician who ever lived, in making a comment on the equality of numbers outlined a more basically sensible approach and that comment should be able to enlighten our understanding. "If one proves the equality of two numbers a and b by showing first that "a is less than or equal to b" and then "a is greater than or equal to b", it is unfair, one should instead show that they are really equal by disclosing the inner ground for their equality". The same idea applies of course if, for example, a does not equal b but the formulation of our problem here is thornier. And although I end up here talking about the A and the B series, it is not with the idea of using a simple logical, physical, or mathematical proof but a striving for something closer to the absolute.

McTaggart and Angst

Referring now back to space and time, Buber (1959) pointed out 'A necessity I could not understand swept over me: I had to try again and again to imagine the edge of space, or its edgelessness, time with a beginning and an end or a time without beginning or end, and both were equally impossible, equally hopeless – yet there seemed to be only the choice between the one or the other absurdity'. The problem here is that when Buber tried to get down to philosophical details he just had not got the right stuff and relativity theory shows us that. There is really no certain reason, using relativity, why time or space would have a beginning or an end - philosophical problem solved.

Now we could say that Buber's confusion was caused by his acceptance of Newton's concept of space rather than Leibniz's. In Newton's world-view physical objects could exist by being in space, but space could exist even if devoid of any physical objects. In Leibniz's view, objects existed anyway and could touch one another, be separated by various distances and so on but space, per se, did not exist. This immediately resolved Buber's problem. One can solve such a problem by showing that it contains an untenable proposition. In this case the problem was not with space itself, but with Newton's conception of space. The answer was to accept Leibniz's more economical view, or simply to look for a consistent definition of space, which without relativity was hard to find.

McTaggart (1927) reasonably showed that in his context time showed a contradiction and he was right and logical to suggest that time did not exist, or is unreal. That was a sensible and economic view but slightly harder to develop than in Leibniz's case, where Leibniz had effectively inferred that space, per se, did not exist and was able to get quite a good theory for his era. But McTaggart's concern with time is in many ways very analogous with Buber's concern with space. Buber knew more or less what space was, but when he thought about it, it looked somehow spooky and unreal. Maybe we could say that that is "Angst". It is certainly a clear indicator that something needed to be done.. Anyway, the same thing happened to McTaggart with time, and as we will pointed out here, just as Einstein resolved Buber's philosophical worry about space, so too category theory can up to a point resolve McTaggart's problem with time. But that of course does not give us the right to ignore McTaggart's problem just as relativity has shown we should not certainly not have ignored Buber's problem. Just as in a way we have all been ersatz Leibnizians, prior to Einstein, let us importantly try to avoid continuing the same line of error with McTaggart, whether or not a resolution of his problems is more of a serious mathematical and philosophical challenge than Einstein's resolution of Newton's problem was.

Neurophenomenology and Category Theory

The term 'neurophenomenology ' was used by Varela, who also made a serious effort to understand consciousness (Varela 2000,2000a). It has to be said that it is a good idea to take his work at least almost as seriously as that of McTaggart (1927), and indeed Lawvere (2005).
In his day (till 2001) Varela was probably at the forefront of neurophenomenology. However even as recently as the end of the last century, there was relatively little work on complexity theory and category theory as applied to neurophenomenology. The papers of the Ehresmanns (1999) gives an account of how the Ehresmanns at least, tried to use category theory. And references (Ehresmann, 1999) at least explain how it could be done. Some ongoing work is being done, for example, by Brown (2006). This indicates potential use of category theory which is anything but irrelevant and abstract.

Varela and the Specious Present

I should point out that though Varela wrote frequently about the specious present he does not seem to have ever actually used category theory as a working mathematical tool, nor to have given reasons why not. However both Varela and many others have clearly found coping with the specious present to be difficult, and certainly have not given convincing accounts on McTaggart's paradox. However when we read the account of Brown (2006), for example, we can readily work out that at least a meaningful account of the specious present can be made. At this point we are not unduly concerned with emergence, for which Brown thinks he may be able to obtain answers and, apparently, even mathematical results.
What we can certainly try to do now is to use colimits in a way like Brown et al (2006) tried to use them. There is a problem with Varela's work and it comes out clearly, for example, in section 3(2) ('The neurodynamics of temporal appearance') of reference (Varela, 2000a). I believe that one problem is that earlier workers have had to try to describe the McTaggart A series in terms of Newtonian time. Newtonian time is essentially punctal and in using it, we would have, very often, in effect to try to turn a blob into either one dot or into a series of dots. That is what happens to Varela. I will not give a bibliography here of all the other efforts to turn a blob into a dot, but they are common. For example, some of them are referred to in the references in Savitt (2002). Symbolic logic certainly produces some intricate formulae but those do not describe an 'instant in time' very well either.

Colimits and the Specious Present

We may not need to go quite so far as Brown et al (2006) does. We only need for the moment to consider an approach somewhat like that of the Ehresmanns. I append two diagrams from the Ehresmanns' study (Ehresmann, 1999).

I will carry out this explanation in a way paralleling reference (Ehresmann, 1999), so that anyone who reads and understands Ehresmann,(1999) may be able to refer back to it directly to help to make it clear what I am saying here. There are many important differences to Ehresmann (1999), however.

Now for anyone who has not a copy of McTaggart (1927) on hand, Professor Soshichi Uchii's rough one-page summary (Uchii, 2003), which does not go into all the subtleties of McTaggart's two volume book but will do for an introduction though is probably inadequate for the preparation or consideration of critical comment, is available on the internet. Uchii's summary at least tries to represent the A series as instants in time. (Don't worry about most of his comments or views at this stage).The B series can be a 'block universe' or some other punctal time representation that we care to use.

We don't worry about the McTaggart paradox as such at this point either, we just set up a McTaggart style representation.

We consider an instant P as a pattern of past present and future. This could be at this point the past present and future of the universe or of one object, say an observer, in a universe.

In a category, a pattern P is modelled by the data of a family of objects Ni and of some distinguished links between them. A collective link from the pattern to another object N' is a family of individual links fi from each Ni to N', correlated by the distinguished links of the pattern, in the sense that, if g is a link in P from Ni to Nj, we have gfj = fi .

The collective links model collective actions (constraints, energy, or information transfer) of all the Ni acting in cooperation along their distinguished links, and which could not be realized by the objects of the pattern acting individually. The cooperation can be temporary, as in a group of people who decide to cooperate for a particular work. But the association itself can be represented in the system by a more complex object N, which 'binds' the objects of the pattern and acts by itself as the whole pattern, in the sense that its links to any object N' are in 1-1 correspondence with the collective links from the pattern to N'.

In a category, the object binding the pattern (if it exists) is modelled by the colimit (or inductive limit) of the pattern. An object N is the colimit, or the binding, of the pattern P if it satisfied the two conditions:

1. there exists a collective link (ci) from the pattern to N,

2. each collective link (fi) from the pattern to any object N' binds into a unique link f from N to N', so that fi = cif for each i.

If a pattern has a colimit, it is unique (up to an isomorphism). In this case, we also say that the pattern is a coherent assembly and that its colimit represents a higher order object which subsumes the activity of the assembly.

The colimit actualizes the potentiality of the objects to act together in a coherent manner by integrating the pattern in a higher unit (for example, the protein as such). In a natural system where the links have a given 'strength', the formation of a colimit is characterized in two ways:

1. 'locally and structurally', a strengthening of the distinguished links of the pattern restricts the degrees of freedom of the objects to ensure a more efficient cooperation among them;

2. 'universally and functionally', the actions of the colimit on the other objects of the system subsume the activity of the whole pattern (they correspond to its collective links).

For example, a molecule is the colimit of the pattern formed by its atoms with the chemical links defining its spatial configuration.

Roughly, the colimit forgets the precise organization of the pattern and records only its collective actions, and these can be the same for more or less differing patterns.

The rôle of the distinguished links of the pattern P is paramount: they determine the 'form' of the colimit and allow for the emergence of collective actions, transcending the individual actions of the objects. The coherence and the constraints introduced by these links can be measured by comparing the colimit to the simple amalgam of the objects Ni of the pattern, obtained if the links are forgotten, which is modeled by their sum.

The sum (or coproduct) S of the family (Ni) is the colimit of the pattern P' formed by these same objects but without any distinguished link. It classifies the individual actions of the objects, while the colimit of the pattern P classifies their collective actions made possible thanks to their distinguished links in P. (Think of the difference between the behaviour of an unorganized mob, and the behaviour its members adopt under the direction of leaders.)

There is a comparison link c from the sum S of the Ni to the colimit N of P, which binds the canonical links from the Ni :to N. It measures the constraints imposed to the objects by their distinguished links, hence by their participation to a collective action. The links from S to an object N' which factor through c correspond to the emergent properties of the complex object N compared to the properties of its components Ni.

Now we could say that a series of 'instants' P, which we could call {P} could occur as part of an ordered set or otherwise but we do not have to do this. And each 'instant' has its own past-present-future. And a series of instants will exist in some category Cp, say.

The specific 'instants' are not like a series of beads to be hung on a string, but form significant but differing parts of a whole. In a sense each instant could be taken as a past-present-future representation of some whole. The whole could form a specific structure, possibly a category we might like to call MacA. We bear this in mind as a structure, which like so many others, needs further definition in due course dependent on circumstance.

But to sum up, I realised before too long that McTaggart's paradox, far from being well understood - and indeed it now almost seems to some to be like an effete toy for philosophers - still had not been resolved. There is in fact both a McTaggart A series and a McTaggart B series, even if philosophers try to pretend it has all been sorted out. We know that Zeno's paradox, for example, still has much to say, and so indeed has McTaggart's paradox. I will press on for the moment rather than to justify in detail. Philosophers still make a lot of money by dicussing the pro's and con's of McTaggart's paradox, so I will not add further to the agony at the moment. (Chalmers, 2006)

So we have an A series and a B series, and we need to know what to do with them. Just an A series, just a B series, or two separate series which do not seem to map properly onto each other.

The A series in more detail

So what is really wanted now is something which gives solid physical prospects, such as more detailed dream experiments (as I tried to point out in Yates (2008)) or OBEs (out of body experiences) or NDEs (near death experiences). The mathematical and physical prospect of many worlds type interpretations is better than those of much of today's physics, in fact a useful quantum computer is likely to be built by 2020 (Ball, 2006), and this may help the process of such lines of understanding or intuitive interpretation. As these things go, the present supposed restrictions of any MWI is certainly likely to evolve in that time, and of course we have as yet no details as to how. But the A series for instance will probably turn out to be be a proper class (Note 1) and to begin with we may have to map a pseudo A series onto a mock B series to get results, and in effect I recently suggested something like that in my blog, Yates (2008). The 'block universes' of the B series type have been relatively easy to handle so far, though philosophically and to the intellect not altogether satisfactory, without an A series.. When we look at the A Series and the work of, for example, Varela and Ehresmann, but consider problems such as (and only "such as", certainly not exclusively) that the A series may be a proper class (that is, roughly, a class which is not a set) we are left with at least two obvious approaches, the first being to examine further immediately the A series properties of time and consciousness in terms of the work of Varela, Brown and Ehresmann for example.

Preliminary plans for a detailed MacA (or Category Theoretic Mactaggart A series)

Chalmers (2006) said : "The Time and Consciousness conference in Sydney yielded a lot of food for thought. The talks focused on a number of different connections between the phenomena .....There's obviously a lot of room for further work here, and I'm looking forward to seeing how things develop in coming years."

Chalmers is right about the conference providing a lot of food for thought and he is even more right in that there is a 'lot of room for further work'. In fact a lot of ideas but nothing solid yet. And I am hoping to provide something a bit more solid, as I have already tried to do in my blog, especially involving 'specious time" and category theory

To be more explicit about the last paragraph: What I am finding from the conference details, and from earlier work, is that in problems being in and relating to the 'specious present', philosophers are frequently putting forward interesting discussions and concepts nowadays but that these on closer examination seem to have a circular or self-serving element. I choose as an example Kelly (2006) I quote "...the specious present, by nearly all accounts, lasts only a relatively limited time. Recent estimates generally agree that it is in the area of three seconds or so. But we often experience things to be moving for periods that are longer than this. If you watch an airplane taking off from the runway you can follow its continuous motion for several minutes before it disappears."

Great concept! Kelly then discusses the Retention Theory and its relation to perception experiments and philosophy. Well, for me the whole manifesto of such lucubrations to date seems encapsulated in Alexander Pope's doggerel. "Remembrance and reflection - How allied ! What thin partitions sense from thought divide." In fact Kelly goes on by discussing Kant and Husserl and ends with "What we would like is a standard set of examples that give us the feel for what it is to experience something now as just-having-been." A good idea perhaps - but how? So I am left with the view that a more satisfactory category-theoretic interpretation has to be made and this will come closer to giving us a correct mathematics. When you think of it, perhaps he is looking for an extended A series here but may end up by conflating the lot with a B series, or something other writers may see as a B series.

In sum, a simple B-series interpretation of the world involving the physics of Galileo or Newton/Leibniz or Einstein is very adequate for some predictive descriptions. If we need to we further note that there is as yet no apparent compulsion (as in Le Poidevin (2006)) to consider Relativity (special or general) in any detail to start with, during our own continued lucubrations. Hopefully it will not add to time-ordering problems in our A series or can be dealt with when it does. These problems, which Kelly and others mention, should either fall from our existing simple A series work, but very clearly manifest themselves in the A series discussions.

But there will only be relatively generalised answers at least to begin with, and this is not necessarily bad either. Consider the Baez example of a beautiful and possibly prehistoric use of category theory (Note 2). So we are trying to be like the shepherds of old, but not just inventing the B series as we could assume they did, but the A series!

Smith (2006) is probably also worth chewing on as the dynamic nature of time does seem to come out rather roughly in a scheme which proposes individuals existing at independent 'specious presents" ie a row of ...p0, p1, p2,..... etc. The idea of dynamic following is the hard one to include in the category and there is no reason why we are obliged to spell it out in terms of B series physics. However it exists as individuals exist in the frames ... p0, p1...etc. for each individual and the fact that we have mapped them on to a kind of ersatz (using Chalmer's (2006a) B-series word) A series or 'fallen' A-series does no harm.

The point is here that the MacA has to include dynamism whether or not some decategorified or set theory version does. At the same time, present day mathematics has no simple format for providing dynamism within category theory statements or proofs. Certainly, the proof could be presented for example in the form of a video or even a notional mental headup display but this would not seem to present more actual mathematical content than the more normal pen and paper. Bearing in mind that at this point we are trying to present an A series in B series terms, this is not surprising.

And it is as well to remember that, say, the B series equation representing a ball rolling down an inclined plane does not need to be rolling down some inclined plane itself to be of immediate use. But this obvious fact is not the same as our current problem.

Indeed the obvious way is to try to write down a decategorified version of MacA in terms of some decategorified element pa where pa is a member of ...p0, p1,...is possibly to let pa be a presentism's p at time ta. This may help to eventually write the matter down in more detail in category theory terms. It sounds like a cumbersome multistep way to do things but may be appropriate. It should perhaps be pointed out that this process is not simply intended to result in an unnecessarily tautologous form of presentism but ultimately for enough positive description to allow an A series.

What to do then? From Chalmers (2006a) we could try to sort out the two-stage model (Note 4) and maybe relate it to Velmans'(2002) work - bearing in mind Chalmers claims to allow different models (presumably including Velmans' model with required justifications i.e. provisionally as I might do). The result may eventually be a new or a mutual model which could be multi-stage. However Note 4 is only an indication of possible proceedings; certainly the result should be expressible in terms of category theory.

On the face of it there clearly can be some form of mapping from 'real time' (or 'eden time' or whatever it might be) to a B series time as such mappings have given many of our results in physics to date. To say that is almost tautology. Whether such a mapping presents a suitable or adequate representation or not is another matter. And certainly we may be now encumbered with an 'eden time' A series and an 'apparently observed' A series. Whether this will be a simpler or better way to handle things, as yet we cannot be sure but one way would be to bear in mind a 2-stage representation as a possibility until the matter is more specifically concretised. I think we will need the A series even with the two stage model in any event. It could be that a 'de-Edenised' A series will not look very different to a 'de-Edenised' B series. The process which I would have in mind would be similar to or perhaps equivalent to obtaining categorification by first decategorifying and the categorification again, really not too different to what could normally be used in category theory anyway to obtain suitable categories from naive mathematical results in a fairly transparent way. (Note 5)
So I get to a point that a reasonable physical assumption seems to be that the A series is a Proper Class. Bays (2001), in "Reflections on Skolem’s Paradox " says "if we start with a proper class which “satisfies” some finite collection of sentences, then the Skolem hull construction lets us find a countable set which satisfies the same collection of sentences".
Briefly what I am saying, and obviously there are many provisos, hedges and restatements, is that I consider a form of A series and a form of B series - but the A series is probably a proper class (like the somewhat similar class of all automata for example is a proper class (Adamek et al, 2004 )) and probably cannot be effectively mapped, certainly not one to one, onto the B series. We only need to look at say Goldblatt (1984). In other words time is a rather complicated entity and when we get down to the mathematics or even the logic of time, we are using at least two different and not one to one mappable onto each other (mathematical) categories, A and B say (Note 4). And McTaggart had thus considered that he had found unreality in time when he was actually trying to compare two different things - though it is possibly not necessary to follow through his precise reasoning here, particularly on the C and D series. Clearly when considering a complex entity like 'time', there may ultimately be many more matters to consider but that does not remove the fact that McTaggart had found at least two such entities, the A and the B series.

In other words, I can use conventional complexity theory mathematics to study the A series as long as I remember that I am no longer in "block time" or B Series time. Now authors like John M. Gottman (2002) have used simple enough mathematics for years to solve psychological problems and seemingly eventually tried to shoehorn their ideas rather without thinking into a "block time" scenario where they will not properly work. And the heartbreaking discussions amongst proponents of tensed and non-tensed time may never again have to carry so much weight, (at the Sydney conference, (2006) they mainly did carry weight) in a situation where a tensed time (A series) is used where convenient for people, and a non-tensed time (B series) where convenient for objects. And the maths can be great in both cases. Though of course that does not say it will be straightforward or easy.

Also the fact that we are using not a real A series but a pseudo A series mapped into the B series, undoubtedly changes the mode of operation and the character of any work we may do. And in sum, the above tends to dispose of the somewhat short sighted idea, which I feel may have been despised by such as Emmy Noether, that we only need deal with the B series anyway. Then we would not have a past, present and future, but only idealised 'block time', which is in no way a complete description of the universe though it has served physics in a limited fashion for generations.

The Many Bubble Interpretation

The ‘Many Bubble Interpretation”or MBI, (Yates, 2008a) appears by means of a model of the McTaggart A series. Without being intially sidetracked into the fascinating coherentist theories of epistemic justification, we simply loosely define A series bubbles for present purposes as being entities inside which a person, persons or whatever are for the moment severally confined, each at some personal present (which we know from as far back as the work of Kleinhuber, Libet, etc., is not readily defined as a single point in time, but more usually is taken by psychologists and others to have at least some ongoing ‘duration’), and with a past, a present and a future, in accord with the spirit of the McTaggart A series. The work of LePoidevin, Quentin Smith, Dean Zimmerman and many others is borne in mind. And as Dyke has said, we may not be forced to countenance plurality of further worlds in such circumstances – although we can. The A series is treated as a large category, intrinsically unmappable one to one onto the B series. There is also a B series and this can often be represented by a quantum mechanical description of the universe.

So we have both an A series and a B series, and McTaggart’s work and Zeno’s work, (and/or their modern counterparts), can pose no problems. Now in practice, since the A series will almost certainly be a proper class, we still have not pinned it down in great detail and indeed may because of its nature, never to be able to do, so we are using a pseudo A series written in the B series. Obviously there will be lacunae and these lacunae may exhibit themselves partly in the form of the quite hard to describe Berkeley Madonna equations we will be immediately confronted with.

Outline of the MBI

A relatively simple basic mathematical model for a “bubble” in the MBI (’Many Bubble Interpretation’) discussed earlier, can be constructed. For a 'look and feel' description, see Note 5. Many bubbles – and there would be many – could be much the same, in principle, and given by Berkeley Madonna, for example. And in the simpler cases of the model there need not exist episodic memories to retain many of the apparently intrinsic features of human thought (Egan, 2007). Even total loss of personal memory made no difference in subjects tested. Indeed Rosenbaum (2007) goes so far as to say: “We found that if you’re trying to put yourself mentally in someone else’s shoes, you don’t need to put yourself in your own shoes first.” We do not even need, of necessity, to consider mirror neurons to ‘have a life’. We can even, in terms of level of simulation simplification, try to emulate Winfree. And no complex ‘Theory of Mind’ is required (Ramsay, 2007).

There is no need to deal at this juncture with the problems posed by Honderich or by, for example Trevena and others, to the work of Libet (2003), and its defence by Haggard, Klein and others. Libet’s results, or others, will just be part of the Madonna formalism within the bubble, which can be “pseudo A series” in its formulation, I think.

Obviously, more complex contents can be given to the MBI and this is being done.

Applications of the MBI (example only)

A concrete case of the application of the application of the Many Bubble Interpretation appears in Complex System Theory. I used the standard Dynamical Systems methods as described in Hannon and Ruth (1997). Whilst that book recommends the use of the program STELLA, I in fact used BERKELEY MADONNA (8.3.11) but the results come out in a somewhat similar format. In fact I used a Romeo and Juliet type model (Sprott, 2004) (Yates, 2008b).

There are many potential uses of such a model, and various examples have been considered. A very striking example, though one out of many, is the example of what may happen when we dream. This seems much more flexible than many other cases - synaesthesia, for example, is a difficult though potentially rewarding one, and this as well as other cases is being documented in the literature. (Yates, 2008, 2008c)

Clearly one direct entry to a study of the unconscious could be by studying dreams, without any necessary preconception as to what these dreams are, or what they mean - if anything. A brute fact about dreams is that they exist, and can thus be studied. Studying dreams is what the shaman did (Charlton, 2002) , and we can do the same. As Charlton (2003) pointed out "The altered states of dreaming consciousness enables hunter-gatherers to cross further boundaries of time and space in pursuit of high-level insights that synthesise and integrate complex knowledge of many kinds ", but he then goes on to say that using systems theory would make this difficult. In fact, to date most studies of dreams look relatively speaking rather basic, to those who want an early quick explanation of such matters. There are interesting exceptions and I mention the experiments of Stickgold, and the Stickgold effect (also perhaps better known in the vernacular as "Tetris Dreams", because of the frequency it was noticed anecdotally, and "Tetris Dreams" even gave over 1500 Google results including a T shirt, but of course the effect can be located in many other cases than simply playing Tetris, and it has interesting neurological implications also).The Stickgold effect (1999, 2000) is a pretty simple idea, in essence - one performs a simple task like playing a computer game, and then dreams about it. So apparently the Stickgold effect induces dreams. We found that there also seems to be a reverse Stickgold effect, where the dreams are dreamt and subsequently the acts dreamt are performed, within the confines of a controlled experiment using double blinds, for example the subjects are kept in the dark about the experimental details during the experiment.

Now there are real problems in assuring reproducibility of results and I for one will not be happy until at least we reach the high levels of experimental reproducibility obtained in the early Milgram (1974) experiments in general psychology. Preliminary experiments are proceeding at our Vasai, India address at the moment but we are also considering setting up a Science 2.0 style site which will allow the comparison of varied psychological experiments, some of which may contain physical data like DT-MRI data as well as the normal psychological profiling data. Such sites are now relatively common in genome experiments and there seems no reason why the idea cannot be usefully extended to many psychological experiments such as those on the Stickgold effect and the possibly newly discovered reverse Stickgold effect. Perhaps modified versions of the Science 2.0 idea can be described as Psychology 2.0 or in the case where applications could be said to 'transcend' or supplement science, and experimental philosophy results are in the offing. then it can be described as Philosophy 2.0., where we might wish to consider such workers as Chalmers and Knobe (2008). In the present context of the Many Bubble Interpretation there are already possible equations of constraint obtained using the modelling tool Berkeley Madonna and the simplified form of the equations in the present mode, described in more detail on the website of Yates (2008b), is

dR/dt =a*R +b*J*(1-|J|)+e*Z
dJ/dt =c*R*(1-|R|)+d*J +f*Z
dZ/dt =h*S +g*R (S is Heaviside step functions :in N003a,g=f=0)

The next step may we involve the refinement or replacement of the present equations in Berkeley Madonna using methods of Self Organised Criticality,and in particular the use or incorporation of a mode like the sandpile mode may help. If these equations can be improved and/or accurate limits set on their parameters,they could be used for yet more tests and even more accurate results,in for example the mode,duration and timing of stimuli. We bear in mind Winfree’s work as a parallel example of such methods. In the above equations, very roughly, R ('Romeo') and J ('Juliet') represent the 'unconscious' and 'conscious' mind or equivalent representations in other philosophical approaches,and Z the applied impulse. The notation is like that of Sprott (2004). The improvement in the equations will likely be carried out along with attempts at semi-empirical assessment of the physical factors under consideration.

In Quantum Theory:

After a consideration of the MBI, the Schrodinger Cat Paradox ceases to seem like a paradox and in a poster (Yates, 2008d) I illustrate this and further examples of the simplification of an understanding of quantum theory and related topics like quantum computing, even including Kwiat's work. The Schrodinger Cat description is in Note 6, equations are as in Yates (2008b) plus conventional quantum theory..

A Specific Application:

A problem involving some applied mathematics and philosophy.

The Many Bubble Effect described herein, together with other factors like McTaggart’s paradox and Zeno’s paradox, allowed a formulation in terms of differential equations of Stickgold’s dream experiments and my interpretation and furthering of them. This led to a number of equations and graphical results. In particular to equations like that described as N003b on my website at http://ttjohn.blogspot.com/ (RSS feed available) and on the CD.

Very briefly, as the ‘pseudo A series’ might describe it, there could be tiny pushes and impulses to the mind at a given time, from both past and future stimulations, but at a particular time it could be said that the mind is in some kind of dynamic balance which Stickgold altered in the ‘Tetris dream’ by a push from the past, relatively easy in retrospect. In my case I alter the position of the push from the future to the present, and this worked too. Experiments and trials are still under way, and could show conclusively the merits of the MBI, though their success is not essential to it. And a sandpile Madonna model is considered in Note 7.

Notes

Note 1. Goldblatt's 'Topoi' refers to a 'proper class' as 'a class which is not a set'.

Note 2. arXiv: math. QA/ 9802029 v1 5 Feb 1998 Categorification John C. Baez. This says: "Long ago, when shepherds wanted to see if two herds of sheep were isomorphic, they would look for an explicit isomorphism. In other words, they would line up both herds and try to match each sheep in one herd with a sheep in the other. But one day, along came a shepherd who invented decategorication. She realized one could take each herd and `count' it, setting up an isomorphism between it and some set of `numbers', which were nonsense words like `one, two, three, . . . ' specially designed for this purpose. By comparing the resulting numbers, she could show that two herds were isomorphic without explicitly establishing an isomorphism! In short, by decategorifying the category of finite sets, the set of natural numbers was invented."

Note 3. Chalmers (2006a) states: "It is a further question how this model should be extended to the representation of time and motion. I am inclined to say that the two-stage model can be extended to time as well as to space, though this turns on subtle issues about the metaphysics of time. A natural suggestion is that the Edenic content of temporal experience requires A-theoretic time, with some sort of true flow or passage. Our own universe may not instantiate these perfect temporal properties, but it may nevertheless instantiate matching B-theoretic properties (involving relative location in a four-dimensional “block universe”) that are sufficient to make our temporal experiences imperfectly veridical, if not perfectly veridical. The representation of motion could be treated in a similar way." and

"One might go so far as to suggest that Eden is a world with classical Euclidean space, and an independent dimension of time, in which there is true passage and true change. Our own world is non-Euclidean, with time and space interdependent, and with pale shadows of perfect passage and change. On this view, Einstein’s theory of spacetime was one more bite from the Tree of Science, and one more step in our fall from Eden."

Note 4. Chalmers (2006a) on two-stage: "the two-stage view yields natural answers to the objections to the Fregean view that were grounded in phenomenological adequacy. On the relationality objection: the two-stage view accommodates relationality by noting that there are certain specific and determinate properties—the perfect color properties—that are presented in virtue of the phenomenology of color experience.

When Jack and Jill both have phenomenally green experiences in different environments, the two experiences have a common Edenic content, and so both are presented with perfect greenness. This captures the intuitive sense in which objects look to be the same to both Jack and Jill; at the same time, the level of ordinary Fregean and Russellian content captures the intuitive sense in which objects look to be different to both Jack and Jill. By acknowledging Edenic phenomenal content in addition to Fregean phenomenal content, we capture the sense in which perceptual phenomenology seems to be Russellian and relational."

Note 5. In my mind, I tend to think of the A series as being like a lot of bubbles floating freely, each of which representing a person or sentient object, and his or her past, present and future at some time, and we could hopefully index the persons in the bubbles as (Pn,Tm), this being person Pn at time Tm. By now the apparition has degenerated to a pseudo A series (almost nearer to being a B series). But in principle we are mapping an A series to some model we can understand. And if we want we can follow memes through the bubbles by now, and index like (Pn,Tm,Mi) where Mi is some meme which may occur as part of one or more bubble. But this is intended as a guide rather than mathematics or metaphysics.

And whilst as presented above, the A series has a "future" along with each "present" and "past", in the individual bubbles. This is only a model and not a metaphysical description of the universe. It is however by the nature of the model, many world in structure. The claim is not made that these many worlds have to exist in actual fact. So the MBI ("Many Bubble Interpretation") seems to be in basic distinction from the MWI of Price or Deutsch or indeed the MCI ("Many Computations Interpretation") of Mallah (2007). The latter two are in origin B series, and to aid consistency should possibly be assumed to exist, in some sense, at least in the sense that the quantum mechanical results in Hilbert spaces exist. In the MBI, the many bubbles of time, each with its own past, present and future, are as real as the person or conglomerate observing them, and only exist in a model of the A series. The A series itself, in some metaphysical sense at least, can be taken to exist. So the Baldwin (Note 5b) style bubble referred to above, will contain the person (TRB) at the indexed time in the bubble in York, with a past somewhere else, perhaps partly in Leeds, and presumably a future somewhere else again, perhaps partly in Blackpool. This will simply be at the 'time' referred to above for TRB, and the bubble is only part of a model which contains many more bubbles. But this is only part of a model of the A series.

And, without even invoking quantum theory, Quentin Smith (2002) explains how some models of the A series can seem to have B series concomitants, even in special relativity. In fact if we wish, we could consider our A series bubbles corresponding to different Tm values to be linked to one another by a spider web of gossamer chains. The spider web could now seem to be very clearly savouring of the B series, although we had started with a model based on the A series. Given suitable provisos, that spider web might well suit STR (Special Theory of Relativity).

Furthermore, the Schrodinger Cat riddle seems to give no essential problems in the MBI, and the MBI has the additional virtue of flagging up the obvious apparent anomalies that the Cat paradox has seemed to show to some, in the B series (Note 6 gives more details).

Note 5a. Professor T. Baldwin said "This point connects with a deep distinction between practical and theoretical points of view. The practical point of view is essentially ‘first-person’ (‘subjective’): it assumes knowledge of who I am (TRB), where I am (York), what time it is (today’s date). The theoretical point of view is essentially impersonal (‘objective’). It doesn’t require this first-person knowledge. So the A-series/B-series distinction is a case of the distinction between these two points of view, the practical and the theoretical."

Note 6. In the case of the Schrodinger Cat Paradox, as shown on the poster (Yates, 2008), instead of having the epomymous Cat in a room with a bomb and a puzzled query in the mind of persons outside the box, this neatly splits into roughly into three cases, in the present treatment.
(1) A series: Cat and observer, each in their own bubble, no way that we know of so far that the 'observer' bubble can get at the 'cat' bubble. So no paradox.
(2) Pseudo A series: We might try to simulate the cat ideally in the observer bubble, for example. Category theory suggests how. We try procedures as in "Applications of the MBI in the main text above.. N.B. May use 'B' series maths.
(3) B series: cat and observer have the same math structure so far. Not a complete descriptiom but mathematically OK.

Note 7. We can now consider further simple ideas like using the sandpile analogy as it has been tried, for example, with software development, without the physics actually disappearing from the system as the actual software used for development does in the paper (Wu, 2002). That contained an excellent analogy:

Driving force / sand drop /change request
Response / sand slide / change propagation
System state / gradient profile / release, iteration plan
Relaxing force / gravity / stakeholder satisfaction

but plainly "the mathematics was not the territory" just as "the map is not the territory" to a geologist. Even if a geologist goes along with the mathematical fractals approach, it does not get the dirt under his fingertips. But with the MBI approach in physics, we seem to be as close to a physical simulation of the real world as we can be at the moment. Importantly, for example, we have not simply beaten off McTaggart's paradox but on the contrary, we we have used it as strongly as we can.

This may well give us the ability to prepare a more precise or even a new and better Madonna model than the model N003b suggested in an earlier entry, using for instance some of the methods of Dhar (2006) particularly as described in Dhar's section 3 onwards and other such SOC methods, as well as what we are using to date.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Deepak Dhar and Navin Singhi, both of the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Mumbai for their helpful advice, encouragement and discussions, and Deepak Dhar for the chance of having a fine lunch at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Mumbai. I would also like to thank David Chalmers, Professor of Philosophy at the Australian National University, for his helpful advice and encouragement .

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Varela F.J. , (2000a) "The Specious Present : A Neurophenomenology of Time Consciousness Francisco" in: J.Petitot, F.J.Varela, J.-M. Roy, B.Pachoud "Naturalizing Phenomenology: Issues in Contemporary Phenomenology and Cognitive Science", Stanford University Press, Stanford

Velmans M., (2002) "How could Conscious Experience affect Brains ?", JCS, 9 (11), Special Issue, Imprint Academic, UK & USA, ISBN 0907845 39 8

Wu J., Holt R., (2002) "Seeking Empirical Evidence for Self-Organized Criticality in Open Source Software Evolution", Available Research Reports, David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science, University of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada

Yates J., (2008) ,"TSC 2008", April 29, 2008, and throughout site, http://ttjohn.blogspot.com/ ; and "Towards a Science of Consciousness", p147-8, April 8-12, 2008, Tucson Convention Centre, Tucson, Arizona, Center for Consciousness Studies, University of Arizona.

Yates J., (2008a), work to be archived or published elsewhere and in part in ttjohn.blogspot.com ; in fact the Many Bubble Interpretation, proofs for the importance of its use, and current applications, are to be discussed in more detail in separate papers.

Yates J., (2008b) , ttjohn.blogspot.com , especially including "Work in Progress on application of dynamic systems theory to the A series (1) and (2)" at http://ttjohn.blogspot.com/search?q=dR%2Fdt&x=45&y=8 etc

Yates J., (2008c) , http://ttjohn.blogspot.com/2006/07/precognition-dreams-and-mctaggarts.html#links "Can dreams predict the future ? : Experiments and considerations of them". (The answer to the question is "It is not easy but I am working on it" as per the top paper here). http://ttjohn.blogspot.com/2006/04/do-we-dream-of-future.html and elsewhere in this blog. This is not a simple 'precognitive' effect and that is not claimed. Point 4, "Self-Organised Criticality - a possible tool for the MBI " on January 26th, 2008 for example, illustrates this point.

Yates J., (2008d) , Poster at http://ttjohn.blogspot.com/2008/04/tsc-2008.html and elsewhere in blog

TSC 2008

2008-04-29T00:03:00.006+01:00

"Towards a Science of Consciousness" for Tucson 2008 was a most interesting conference and a large number of papers were submitted. The large 8 feet by 4 feet poster for the Institute for Fundamental Studies is located here. (Download the PDF version). It attracted interest to the point where 100 CDs of current work on the Many Bubble Interpretation were given out. It is believed that the Many Bubble Interpretation has progressed an understanding of the Science of Consciousness considerably, as explained on the poster.

International Conference

The first International conference for the Institute for Fundamental Studies may be held in about a year's time. Details, venue and topics have not yet been firmly decided, but are expected to include work particularly in category theory, neuroscience, psychology, philosophy, and theoretical physics, with special attention being given to applied virtual reality simulation and experimental philosophy.

Institute News

The Institute for Fundamental Studies has acquired a small branch in Mumbai (see first two photos) from which some of the work on this CD was done.

We are also in the process of obtaining a very large estate (see next four photos) in a charming region in the pleasant foothills of Goa quite near the beach, where it is hoped that much of the work of the Institute, particularly in virtual reality, may in future be done. Purchase of this property is by no means complete, and we are still considering the possibility of other sites, hopefully in equally idyllic surroundings. Suggestions welcome, remembering budget is strictly limited. Many improvements, including a swimming pool and helicopter pad, may be added in future. With some improvements in the 'reverse Stickgold effect', it is hoped that a new virtual reality setup may literally allow "the fastest and most thrilling ride in the entire Universe".

Dr. J. Yates, President,
Institute for Fundamental Studies Association [ uvscience AT gmail.com ]

Why did God make consciousness ? Ways and means to find out.

2008-02-21T18:17:00.002+01:00

Introduction

"Why did God make consciousness ?" That is a question which has been asked by many people, specifically including such people as Jerry Fodor (Humphrey, 2008) who seems to have assumed, as indeed almost everyone else does, that phenomenal consciousness must be providing us with some kind of new skill. In other words, it must be helping us do something that we can do only by virtue of being conscious, in the way that, say, a bird can fly only because it has wings, or you can understand this sentence only because you know English. Humphrey thinks rather that it could be to encourage us to do something we would not do otherwise: to make us take an interest in things that otherwise would not interest us, or to mind things we otherwise would not mind, or to set ourselves goals we otherwise would not set.

The difference between these two concepts is outlined and discussed in some detail by Humphrey. Perhaps in his terms consciousness comes closer to being part of a sandbox, allowing a temporary space for the holding of various forms of reality.

Even Jerry Fodor recently claimed, "The revisions of our concepts and theories that imagining a solution will eventually require are likely to be very deep and very unsettling."

Others comment (Mindhacks, 2008) : "We need a place to erase reality and redraw it or the procreative possibilities of our existence are limited by a far more slow process of biological adaptation to our environment. To experiment internally without display on the canvas of consciousness seems as impossible as experimenting in the real world without a real world. How do you test a hypothesis without positing a thesis somewhere? That somewhere is our phenomenological awareness.............I think the problem is that consciousness and unconsciousness are often thought as completely different processes, when in fact simply by focusing our attention to them we can become conscious of most of our unconsciousness processes (not all of them at once, of course, but any of them we choose to focus on). As implied in above quotes, I also think consciousness is clearly related to attention and learning new things. While adults can walks or drive a bike unconsciously and focus their attention to something else, children who are still learning these skills cannot...........It seems to me that psychologists and philosophers have come too much uncritically to accept the assumption that every biological development must serve a purpose and that all we need to do is dream some purpose and we have the explanation for the development in question. This is pretty haphazard reasoning. Evolutionary "purpose" thus becomes a substitute for Divine Will. In the case of consciousness, I don't see in what way assuming it serves a designated purpose contributes a jot to answering the putative hard question of how it arises from biophysical processes."

Recalling the 'Janus' paper by Dudai (2005) and the work of Suddendorf (1999 etc.), imagining needs use of the future and inevitably the conscious mind, thought of as part of the sandbox, must also entail the future. On the other hand, an example given by Humphrey, the triangle illusion, is one of many which do not seem to relate to the future at all, but more to a simple 'sandbox' of the mind. There could therefore be elements of truth in the views of both Fodor and Humphrey.

Now the work of Aks (2003) on self-organised criticality can almost certainly allow us to adduce a mathematical schema - or indeed several schemata - to fit the present position.

How is this related to our MBI ?

We should be able to find out by creating a test or an experiment, whether it be in psychology or in physics or indeed in both. In earlier work, experiments were done relating the 'conscious' (Juliet) mind and the 'unconscious' (Romeo) mind to impulses. These, in fact, were presented by means of a computer game which was 'Tetris' in the rough example shown, though 'Alpine Skier' may have made a stronger impulse, bearing in mind Stickgold's (Cromie, 2000) results. The experiment can be modified by altering the various parameters.

Currently, a larger series of tests of various sorts is being carried out by the Institute for Fundamental Studies in India.

As has been described earlier, one easy and direct way to do this could be rTMS. A very clear example of the strength of rTMS as a brain moulding tool is given in a simple video (Gazzaniga, 2006) and a typical example of its actual use in a somewhat cognate problem, synaesthesia, occurs in (Mattingley, 2004).

Seneker (2002) and Sagiv (2006) thus came to roughly the conclusion that neurobiological evidence shows that separate features of visual information are projected to different cortical regions of the human brain. Relatively early in the processing of visual stimuli, color and shape are separate, and the brain can encode these features without awareness. This work supports the idea of modularity in the human cortex.
It is possible that color-grapheme synaesthesia results from a flaw in the modular organization of the brain. Results agree with the possibility that cortical regions for processing shape and color are abnormally linked, but only during awareness. These findings suggested to them that attention signals associated with awareness are required to produce normal binding.

Leaving aside any theoretical problems with this idea, the practical fact is that here we have a use of brain abnormalities and TMS in order to - hypothetically at least - shed light on fundamental brain processes. Reflections on some of these ideas on brain processes have been discussed in earlier work on this website, but the point being made here is that we do have a real tool which might be able to determine quite a lot of what is going on in the brain

There are problems here. The use of rTMS is in no way a routine procedure, can be heavily invasive, and is known to lead to brain damage in its use in certain cases. A less invasive technique is probably hypnosis, which already has given some results for Mondrians (Kosslyn, 2000),and which in my view may ultimately be of value in the field of synaesthesia. In fact Kosslyn may have come somewhere near inducing a synaesthetic effect on non synaesthetes and whilst no firm current results have yet been obtained from synaesthetes our experiments on hypnosis of colour grapheme synaesthetes suggested that hypnosis seems in our experiments to have (possibly) made an improvement to the degree of synaesthetic ability, and it certainly seems to have worked at reducing alleged synaesthesia, at least temporarily, for those who desire to lose it. The latter result at least seems to agree with common sense, but we take care not to be in any way dogmatic about this.

So it may be possible to use hypnosis in the present series of experiments on the reverse Stickgold effect, since now it is felt that the 'numbing' effect (as it were) of rTMS has somewhat similar brain effects on specific brain areas, as has been illustrated by the mildly controversial work of Dudai (2008) who explains (Maxmen, 2008) "In normal memory retrieval there is a set of areas that are important so we suggest that the area in the left rostrolateral prefrontal cortex is abating this process early on, halting activity that would occur downstream."

The rTMS results seem to suggest a similar numbing, blocking or traffic jam result. I carried out few experiments in hypnosis on known/believed synaesthetes and the work looked promising. In other words, the area denies access to memory-related regions until the hypnotic cue to remember flips its switch. Now Dudai (2008) has done hypnosis experiments combined with fMRI scans to show qualitatively and quantitatively the effects on the brain during temporary imposed memory loss. It therefore may be possible to obtain results in the roughly cognate field of the reverse Stickgold effect and this may also be one way forward on the blocking effect of hypnosis.

Fortunately in the Many Bubble Interpretation, all the ideas of our Introduction above emerge as part of an explication rather than as part of a problem. We use the tentative assumption of the existence of a so-called "conscious mind" (Juliet) and an "unconscious mind" (Romeo) and allow an interplay of both. As earlier blogs have indicated, this is not the only model but it seems to be one which constellates with our overall notions. Freud, Jung and very many others (obviously including by default, conceivably even Jerry Fodor) could well think such a representation to be real enough, so, allowing for later (perhaps extreme) restrictions and modifications, it should do for us here. In Pinker's terms this is something like 'emergence'.

O'Regan (2001) pointed out that he considered that the metric quality of V1 cannot in any way be the cause for the metric quality of our experience. It is as though in order to generate letters on one's screen, the computer had to have little letters floating around in its electronics somewhere. Further he pointed out that we really have little reason to believe that dreams are pictorial. Dreamlike experiences appear to be unstable and seemingly random, though Stickgold and ourselves have added a modicum of order to the apparent chaos. But a hallmark of dreams is this seemingly random character, particularly of detail, as where for example if there is writing on a card, it is likely to differ each time you look at the card. So there is a fair view that brain does not contain pictures of the detailed environment and even that the visual system per se lacks the resources to hold an experienced world steady. Again, with the MBI, this does not faze us, to whatever reasonable extent O'Regan's views hold.

A broader issue - Attention

Tibetan Buddhists, like various other Asian contemplatives, assert that it is possible to develop various forms of extra-sensory perception and paranormal abilities (Wallace, 1998), using attentional stability and vividness. Attention is a subject which is also currently of great interest in psychology. Some would say that attention is identical with consciousness, but others that this is not (Koch, 2006).

In the experiments of Lau (2007), using TMS, the perceived onset of intention depends at least in part on neural activity that takes place after the execution of action, which could not, in principle, have any causal impact on the action itself. An alternative view that is compatible with the data is that one function of the experience of intention might be to help clarify the ownership of actions (Wegner, 2002, 2003), which can help to guide future actions. This process could take place immediately after action execution. While Lau's conclusions need not disturb MBI enthusiasts very much, they still do seem to come from the use of TMS as a tool.

The extremely interesting article by Koch (2000) suggests how ways to manipulate attention could come closer to our efforts and to those of Stickgold (1999, 2000). Koch (2008) also insists that it is his view, amongst other things, that it is important to separate out the effects of attention from the correlates of consciousness in the search for NCC as he takes the view that it is plausible that some previously proposed NCC might have been contaminated by the neuronal correlates of attention, not consciousness. A process like their dual-task visual gymnastics seems to approximate to the sort of level of mental manoeuvres one would need to play a game of Tetris. We have already shown (and are proceeding to do further work) that such games, may have a time-reverse directional effect, in that the dreams may proceed the game playing. Obviously it would be nice to amplify this effect, amongst other possibilities. The Stickgold effect was very clearly present during "Alpine skier" games, as Stickgold pointed out, and full-scale virtual reality games and tests might be expected also to show a strong effect. By full-scale virtual reality games I am thinking of games like the 'virtual switchback' games that they have at leisure resorts, which offer quite real simulation, often up to the standards of say a Link Trainer (2008). There was such a ride currently in use at an amusement arcade at Blackpool, England and it should be possible to very significantly amplify such effects in such circumstances, and to vary them much more than is possible in reality. Some attempts to set up such virtual environments have already been carried out for other purposes, for example in the different field of attempting to pursue apparent claims of extrasensory perception (Wilde, 2006).

With an environment of that kind, many further experiments could be carried out, for example experiments somewhat like those of Eagleman (2008) or even rather simpler but with added general applicability. Second Life (Physics World, 2008) could also be under consideration but as very much a 'poor man's virtual reality', it clearly has even more restricted applicability and in some ways probably lacks the scope of even games like Tetris. As well as this there are many other parameters which can be adjusted, such as variation of waking up times, times at which sleep takes place, chemical supplements and additives, light and sound stimulations and so on. Further there can be the use of monitors such as Watch-Pat and the various 'lucid dream' monitors on the market, to perhaps alert sleepers, for example as to a suitable time to wake up and record dreams.

And then of course there is every psychological trick in the book, from those employed by Stanley Milgram to tricks on false memories. For example Loftus (2005) at the University of California managed to put participants off strawberry ice cream, pickles and hard-boiled eggs by implanting false childhood memories: "In the strawberry ice cream experiment a group of students were asked to fill out forms about their food experiences and preferences. Some of the subjects were then given a computer analysis which falsely said they had become sick from eating strawberry ice cream as children. Almost 20% later agreed in a questionnaire that strawberry ice cream had made them sick and that they intended to avoid it in the future." Future studies plan to implant positive memories of fresh vegetables. (Ethics ?)

But there is much more to adjusting parameters than the above, and as we have already described, there are physical and mathematical equations on hand to do so in our proposal.

References

Aks, D.J. & Sprott, J. C. (2003) Resolving perceptual ambiguity in the Necker Cube: A dynamical systems approach. Journal of Non-linear Dynamics in Psychology & the Life Sciences, 7(2) 159-178.

Cromie W.J., (2000) Harvard Gazette Online,/2000/10.26/01, http://www.hno.harvard.edu/gazette/2000/10.26/01-sleep.html

Dudai Y., (2005),"The Janus face of Mnemosyne", Nature, Vol 434, p567

Dudai Y., (2008), "Mesmerizing Memories: Brain Substrates of Episodic Memory Suppression in Posthypnotic Amnesia", Mendelsohn A., Chalamish Y., Dudai Y., Solomonovich A.,, Neuron 57, 159–170, January 10

Eagleman D.M., (2008), http://neuro.bcm.edu/eagleman/

Gazzaniga M. (2006), http://www.wwnorton.com/college/psych/psychsci/media/4_tms.html from: "Psychological Science", Second Edition, Gazzaniga M., Heatherton T., ISBN-10: 0-393-92497-1 • ISBN-13: 978-0-393-92497-8, Norton Books

Hameroff S.R.,(1998), "Funda-mentality: is the conscious mind subtly linked to a basic level of the universe?", Trends in Cognitive Science 2(4)119-127 ; also exchange with Spier and Thomas.

Humphrey N., (2008) "Seed Magazine" January 2008, http://www.seedmagazine.com/news/2008/01/questioning_consciousness.php

Koch C., Tsuchiya N. , (2006), "Attention and consciousness: two distinct brain processes", Trends in Cognitive Sciences Vol.11 No.1, p 16

Koch C., (2000), "How to manipulate attention" ,
http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Attention_and_consciousness/how_to_manipulate_attention

Koch C. Tsuchiya N., (2008), "The Relationship Between Top-Down Attention and Consciousness", Toward a Science of Consciousness, April 8-12, 2008 - Tucson, Arizona

Kosslyn S. M. et al, (2000), "Hypnotic Visual Illusion Alters Color Processing in the Brain", Am J Psychiatry 157:8, August, 1279

Lau H. et al, (2007), "Manipulating the Experienced Onset of Intention
after Action Execution", Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 19:1, pp. 1–10

Link Trainer (2008), http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Link_Trainer ; but also see http://www.link.com/ or simply Google "Flight simulators at home".

Loftus E.F., et al (2005)," False beliefs about fattening foods can have healthy consequences", PNAS September 27, 2005 vol. 102 no. 39, 13724–13731 www.pnas.orgcgidoi10.1073pnas.0504869102

Mattingley et al (2004),Nature Neuroscience, Vol 7 (3), 217

Maxmen A., (2008), "Mind Control: Hypnosis offers amnesia clues", Science News, Jan. 12, 2008; Vol. 173, No. 2 , p. 20

Mindhacks (2008), http://www.mindhacks.com/blog/2008/01/false_trails_in_the_.html

O'Regan, J. K., Noe, A. (2001) "A sensorimotor account of vision and visual consciousness", Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 24(5)

Physics World (2008),"Doing physics in Second Life", Feb 1st, 2008 ; http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/print/32673 and sad comments at http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/print/32675;jsessionid=EB8F77783C2FB2484BD8B16775E45E49

Sagiv, N., J. Heer & L.C. Robertson (2006), "Does binding of synesthetic color to the evoking grapheme require attention?", Cortex 42 (2): 232-242, PMID 16683497

Seneker S.S., (2002) M.A. thesis, East Tennessee State University

Stickgold, R., Malia, A. & Hobson, J.A. (1999) "Sleep onset memory reprocessing and Tetris. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience" 11(supplement)

Stickgold, R., et al , (2000), "Replaying the Game: Hypnagogic Images in Normals and Amnesics" Science 290 (5490), 350. [DOI: 10.1126/science.290.5490.350]

Strogatz S.H., Mirollo R., (2007), "The Spectrum of the Partially Locked State for the Kuramoto Model", Journal of Nonlinear Science, Volume 17, Number 4, August, 2007, 309-347 (online)

Suddendorf, T. (1999). The rise of the metamind. In M.C. Corballis and S. Lea (Eds.), The descent of mind: Psychological perspectives on hominid evolution (pp. 218-260). London: Oxford University Press

Wallace B.A.,(1998), "Training the attention and exploring consciousness in Tibetan buddhism", "Toward a Science of Consciousness", Abstract No:748, "Tucson III" April 27-May 2, 1998 The University of Arizona Tucson, Arizona

Wegner, D. M. (2002), "The illusion of conscious will", Cambridge: MIT Press.

Wegner, D. M. (2003), "The mind’s best trick: How we experience conscious will. Trends in Cognitive Sciences,7, 65–69.

Wilde, D.J et al (2006), "The design and implementation of the Telepathic Immersive Virtual Reality System", Paper Presented at the 2006 Parapsychological Association Convention, Stockholm,Sweden.

Zhaoping L., (2006), "Theoretical understanding of the early visual processes by data compression and data selection", Network: computation in neural systems, December 2006, Vol 17, Number 4, Page 301-334

Zhaoping L., (2007), " A bottom up visual saliency map in the primary visual cortex --- theory and its experimental tests", Adapted from the invited presentation at COSYNE (Computational and Systems Neuroscience) conference, Salt Lake City, Utah, USA. Feb. 2007 http://www.cs.ucl.ac.uk/staff/Z.Li/prints/CosyneForPost.pdf

Zhaoping L., (2002), " Computational vision --- a window to our brain", Presentation CUSPEA conference on "Physics in twenty first century" in June 2002, Beijing. http://www.cs.ucl.ac.uk/staff/Z.Li/prints/talk.ppt

Zhaoping L., (2008), ScienceDaily, Feb. 19, 2008 http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/02/080215103210.htm

Appendix: Computational neuroscience and some of its problems

Computational neuroscience as such, is an important subject insofar as it places itself to ask many awkward questions, and often expresses great dissatisfaction with some of the answers. Some of these difficult processes are often applicable in other contexts as well. I give the example of Zhaoping (2008) who recently apparently pointed out "When you see them throw a ball into the air, followed by a second ball, and then a third ball which 'magically' disappears, you wonder how they did it. In truth, there's often no third ball - it's just our brain being deceived by the context, telling us that we really did see three balls launched into the air, one after the other. .......... Mathematical modelling suggests that visual inference through context is processed in the brain beyond the primary visual cortex. By starting with a relatively simple experiment such as this, where visual input can be more easily and systematically manipulated, we are gaining a better understanding of how context influences what we see. Further studies along these lines can hopefully enable us to dissect the workings behind more complex and wondrous illusions". This simple sort of experiment, when redefined in terms of the neuroscience lab rather than those of the juggler, certainly looks like a excellent way to relate context to details and has a close correspondence with other more detailed lucubrations, well illustrated in Zhaoping (2002, 2006, 2007).
But we are not obliged to accept all of Zhaoping (2002, 2006, 2007) or indeed any of it, while we might still retain the brute 'common sense' of the idea about the three balls. Clearly we may accept some of Zhaoping's other reasoning in Zhaoping (2002, 2006, 2007) - and almost certainly might do so - but it is a far step to say we accept it all, or indeed accept in its entirety some such line of research in computational neuroscience. These are topics that philosophers argue about, each perhaps convinced that they are right. In our situation, with the MBI, we could stake the claim that we have ideas that are founded at the very highest level, that of McTaggart's paradox and large category theory - and then go ahead and use a great deal of computational neuroscience to further our work.

Anything like computational neuroscience must be 'down' from McTaggart's paradox and large category theory, we could argue, just as we could argue that simple sums are 'down' from Peano algebras though doubtless the whole philosophical idea of a hierarchy of thought could be quibbled at - but it is probably easier to look at specific facts in computational neuroscience, for example the possibility of overtraining. Now there are certainly checks which can be placed on that process, as there are several methods available to check the degree of generalization and/or to detect overfitting, for example cross-validation and the use of noise addition - and it is not suggested that Zhaoping has overtrained anyway. But the fact still remains that a lot of such 'small' factors could arise in an intricate scheme, and one way or another they usually do, at some point.

An example of where such a thing can admittedly happen is suggested through the work of Strogatz (2007) for example, where the elegant work of Kuramoto seems to have led to rather difficult complex system theory, even though Kuramoto's actual results seem to serve for useful models in many situations. Many attempted 'expansions' of Kuramoto's approach seem to go no further, for various good reasons. On the other hand the ideas of McTaggart's paradox and large categories stand well above all this, and are not specific in nature, even to the extent for example that we are not simply having a disagreement over the relative merits of neutral monism for example, which is about the sort of level to which argumentation over the Penrose/Hammeroff (Hammeroff, 1998) ideas at one time descended. The real crux of the Penrose/Hammeroff matter probably was that Penrose/Hammeroff was wrong about microtubules, superconductivity etc. etc. but right that the Eccles-Popper overall viewpoint of Penrose/Hammeroff could not be simply thrown over readily by (basically naive) computational neuroscience, whether rightly or wrongly, for a partial reason that it was defined and delineated in roughly Popper-Eccles terms. That level of 'philosophical' dispute is not what we are looking for.

Clearly then, what we must do is to use computational neuroscience to help our measurements but not accept it as necessity in any way in our descriptions. In other words we must use the results of computational neuroscience with reason, if we can relate them in a useful way to other claims. The Zhaoping example above, therefore, looks like we could use it somewhere in an experiment fairly readily but that does not mean that its context must, in essence, ruin other assumptions or views which we might have, or might wish wish to consider later.

21/02/2008 Institute for Fundamental Studies, Vasai, Maharashta, India

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Self-Organised Criticality - a possible tool for the MBI

2008-01-26T23:54:00.000+01:00

(1) Some neurological notes on our method of approach

First some brief details of current results in cognitive dissonance.

Children and monkeys both show 'cognitive dissonance', which has been - and still is in some theories - perceived as being very complex.

Given alternatives A and B and both of equal value (details in Egan's paper) they were asked to make a choice on the basis that they were not of equal value. Then they tended to derogate unchosen alternatives, when faced with a selection of a third item C in place of either the chosen or the unchosen alternative.

There is some white noise in the choice but overall the results were reasonably good.

When the choice is between A and C or B (not-A) and C, a simple computer could give the expected result for the derogated alternative.

Complexity of neural pathways in adults allows more mentally complex thoughts, perhaps, which simply overlay the above simple idea.

So in that sense, relatively simple 'computer-like' choices can be made for a brain model - in fact we had previously used 'Berkeley Madonna', and some results are online at http://ttjohn.blogspot.com/ (RSS feed available) and on a compact disc.

But if, for example, in the simple choice alternatives above, we had used instead a multiple procedure of choice with sophisticated undergraduates, the experiment would have led to some very different statistics, as in Eisenstein's example. There, there are clearly sophisticated reasons not found in the basic example.

A particular other case would be sarcasm - apparently a highly sophisticated mental process.
According to the results of Shamay-Tsoory we should be able to put this into a suitably revised version of our Madonna program.

i.e. To interpret a statement literally, the right hemisphere is used (it is averred), the frontal lobes process the emotional content whilst the prefrontal cortex intreracts with both. This was found out partly because posterior brain damage seemed to have little effect, and from other such clues. Whilst there are only 25 full studies reported, there would be further anecdotal evidence. All this seems to fit in with a basically simple 'Madonna' model still being satisfactory.

But we can go further and consider episodic memory. Rosenbaum's work seems to indicate that theory of mind (ToM) can work independently of episodic memory. Results come from participants with strongly impaired memory. There were so far only two good subjects but Tulving is a co-author of the paper and even one result would almost do. And also effects like sarcasm were still there in the chosen cases. It amounts to enough empathy to put oneself in someone else's shoes.

In fact Rosenbaum even said that "If you try mentally to put yourself in someone else's shoes, you do not even need to put your own shoes on, mentally speaking".

So a very simple theory involving a brain working like a computer with no long term memory provides a model.

Now we can use a simple 'Madonna' model to describe the brain mathematically in one of our 'bubbles', in the so-called 'pseudo A series'.

We do not need even to consider to begin with the work of Honderich, Libet, Klein, Trevena, Haggard and the like. And of course we have dealt with McTaggart's paradox in the MBI.

And it is hoped that we may be able to reach a basic philosophy of approach as simple as as, say, Winfree's, at least to start with.

(2) Some philosophical notes on our method of approach

According to Itano (2006), Zeno of Elea (490-430 BC) said that 'an object can only be in one place at one time. It cannot be in two places at one time. But to be in one place at one time is to be at rest. Therefore, the object is at rest. Therefore, motion is impossible'.

Strangely, Zeno's paradox has echoes of McTaggart's paradox in this framework, and the super-Zeno effect (Dhar, 2005) seems to mirror this idea.

I have tried to roughly indicate in previous blogs how the results of both Kwiat and Dhar are perfectly lacking in mystery and philosophical paradox in the MBI approach. Indeed these could lead in time to the building of a successful quantum computer, and help in many mathematical problems (e.g. Wigderson, 2006).

We also have a case already laid out in the MBI to look at some of the viewpoints of Hansen (2004) who points out that current physics special relativity has philosophical problems with regards to both Zeno and McTaggart. We point out a general way in Note 1 how such problems evaporate, as does the mystification with them, in the MBI.

At this point perhaps we should ask. Exactly what are we doing ? Well Frigg (2002) perhaps gives some pointers as to that. Frigg takes the view, for example, that the sandpile model, as such, does not fully describe the space-time view. He says, quoting references and reasons, "I don’t think we are entitled to say that real sand-piles do exhibit Self-Organised Criticality". Well, whatever view is taken on that statement we are certainly only making sketches which can misdescribe at their extremes and give only a (useful) impression of reality. This is perfectly in accord with the thinking of the MBI. Frigg in fact says "often when a model is presented, only the briefest suggestive remarks are made about its bearing on the world ... one has to start somewhere, and quite often a false model may provide a good point of departure. The strategy then is to ameliorate the false model and to build a better one on its basis. Iterating this procedure leads to a series of models in which every one is an improvement of its predecessor. In this way, a simple and false model can initiate a series of models of ever increasing complexity and accuracy..... a model, even though clearly false, may lead us to think differently about certain problems, motivate new questions, shed a different light on some issues, and finally make it easier to adopt an altogether different point of view. In doing so, the model acts as an antipode to stagnant assumptions, undercuts too readily accepted hypotheses, and helps to ‘de-familiarise’ deeply entrenched styles of reasoning. In short, a false model can indicate alternative ways to deal with a phenomenon".

In other words, in the MBI we are acting more precisely by effectively specifying that we have a "pseudo A-series", which from earlier notes we consider we can use up to a point to mirror the A series using effectively B series mathematics. And in knowing what we are doing, we are more likely to be able to put matters right if and when the proposed mathematics goes astray with respect to physics as it really describes the world, or as we try to make the physics do.

(3) Some further possible work (potentially in progress)

(a) We can now consider further simple ideas like using the sandpile analogy as it has been tried, for example, with software development, without the physics actually disappearing from the system as the actual software used for development does in the paper (Wu, 2002). That contained an excellent analogy:

Driving force / sand drop /change request
Response / sand slide / change propagation
System state / gradient profile / release, iteration plan
Relaxing force / gravity / stakeholder satisfaction

but plainly "the mathematics was not the territory" just as "the map is not the territory" to a geologist. Even if a geologist goes along with the mathematical fractals approach, it does not get the dirt under his fingertips. But with the MBI approach in physics, we seem to be as close to a physical simulation of the real world as we can be at the moment. Importantly, for example, we have not simply beaten off McTaggart's paradox but on the contrary, we we have used it as strongly as we can.

This may well give us the ability to prepare a more precise or even a new and better Madonna model than the model N003b suggested in an earlier entry, using for instance some of the methods of Dhar (2006) particularly as described in Dhar's section 3 onwards and other such SOC methods, as well as what we are using to date.

(b) We know that Stickgold discovered a postcognitive effect by studying dreams, and used it in a very simple way, by stimulating the subject through the game of Tetris, and thus in turn controlling his future dreams. Our studies indicated that there is a retrospective effect as well, but existing models like N003b suggest that the effect will need to be finely tuned, with due consideration of the model used. At the moment a further simple test of individuals is planned, but the so-called precognitive results may or may not arise quickly. In the light of some field studies I made with some of Jeffrey Gray's allegedly mildly synaesthesic patients, of informal discussions with Colin Blakemore and Simon Baron-Cohen, and other matters, the conclusion was reached that right now mildly anomalous but indicative effects like popout synaesthesia are often hard to achieve and detect. Indeed Blakemore (2007) indicated that he only knew of two popout synaesthesic cases in the entire world, one of which was also known to me, and both of these cases are being studied in America. That would confirm my results on the matter of synaesthesia so far.

The present work does not seem as if it needs special subjects, in fact we are more or less using any generally suitable subject at this time but it has become clear that a carefully planned model may be needed to enhance the reverse Stickgold effect. Results for both the forward and reverse Stickgold effect should be of interest in neurophysiology and both come under our remit as scholars. The fate of the MBI does not depend on the success in discovery of a reverse Stickgold as theMBI proves itself already as outlined above, but it would be a unique prediction for the model, confirming yet again its relevance.

(4) Easier observation and/or enhancement of Stickgold effect and reverse Stickgold effect

From a purely mathematical point of view, one could perhaps include in a more detailed way in N300b the fact that there could be tiny pushes and impulses to the mind at a given time, from both past and future stimulations, but that at a particular time the mind is in some kind of dynamic balance which Stickgold has altered in the 'Tetris dream' by a push from the past, relatively easy in retrospect. In my case I alter the position of the push from the past to the future, and this worked too. There is also plenty of anecdotal evidence for so-called 'prophetic dreams' but I have had discussions with Susan Blackmore and we are both of the same mind that this is not followed up with adequate statistics. But here we have a mathematical model which can be improved, applied to pushes from the future, and even checked by known pushes from the past which were confirmed to work at Harvard by good and acceptable research. We got the future pushes from my model which is still in a period of development.

Some kind of sandpile model might give further success. Obviously my preliminary Madonna model can be much improved. The earlier work is already on my website at http://ttjohn.blogspot.com/ and a CD and notes are available.

Simple attempted enhancement of these MBI models like N003b must be possible also by, for example, playing Tetris on a series of nights and trying longer and shorter times of play and times of day. There are other forms of stimulation which can be used. 'Alpine Racer', a skiing game of the early 'virtual reality' type, seems to have worked even better for Stickgold, perhaps because of the controlled switchback effect of such sports games and other factors. It is clearly important what effect on the visual field particular modes of presentation can have, but other factors such as the time in advance or after of the stimulus to the dream must be important. Also there is the level of dream recall by the subject, and the time of the dream during the sleep.

References

Blakemore C., (2007), personal communication.

Dhar D, (2006), "Exactly Solved Models of Self-Organized Criticality", http://theory.tifr.res.in/~ddhar/leuven.pdf

Dhar D., L. K., Grover L.K., Roy S.M., (2005), "Preserving Quantum States : A Super-Zeno Effect", http://arxiv.org/pdf/quant-ph/0504070

Frigg R., (2002), "Self-Organised Criticality - What It Is and What It Isn't", Centre for Philosophy of Natural and Social Science Measurement in Physics and Economics", Technical Report 19/02

Hansen N.V. (2004), Organization, "Where Do Spacing and Timing Happen? Two Movements in the Loss of Cosmological Innocence" 11: 759-772 ; "Spacetime and becoming", http://www.nielsviggo.net/philwork/

Itano W.M., (2006), Proceedings of the Sudarshan Symposium, Univ. of Texas, November 2006 ; arXiv:quant-ph/0612187v1

Wu J., Holt R., (2002) "Seeking Empirical Evidence for Self-Organized Criticality in Open Source Software Evolution", Available Research Reports, David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science, University of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada

Wigderson A., (2006), "P, NP and Mathematics –a computational complexity perspective", Proc. of the 2006 International Congress of Mathematicians. Madrid, August 2006

----------------------------
Note 1.
As pointed out earlier, without even invoking quantum theory, Quentin Smith (2002) explains how some models of the A series can seem to have B series concomitants, even in special relativity. In fact if we wish, we could consider our A series bubbles corresponding to different Tm values to be linked to one another by a spider web of gossamer chains. The spider web could now seem to be very clearly savouring of the B series, although we had started with a model based on the A series. Given suitable provisos, that spider web might well suit STR (Special Theory of Relativity). Now to quote Hansen:"One of the central theories of modern physics has particularly fascinating consequences when compared with concepts of time reflecting ordinary daily life experience: the Special Theory of Relativity (SR). The way SR is at odds with the classical idea of dynamic time or passage of time is not by implying that ideas of change or passage are themselves self-contradictory, as in the classical atemporalist arguments from Zeno to McTaggart. Rather, SR dissolves a necessary condition for the classical idea of passage: the existence of a unique order of the events of the universe, the allocation of every event to a point or interval on one axis of time over which the passage of the now might take place. (Or, with the equivalent inverted metaphoric of passage preferred by some, what is dissolved is the sequence of 3-dimensional "pictures" constituting a universal movie which might pass across the "projector" point of temporal presence.) In SR's reorganized grammar of spatiotemporal relations, events can no longer be said to be placed in such a 1-dimensional continuum of time and in a separate, independent 3-dimensional continuum of space, rather they are placed in a 4-dimensional continuum of spacetime allowing for a multiplicity of equally valid formulations of timelike and spacelike orderings, relative to velocities. This reorganization seems to complete what Bergson aptly phrased "the spatialization of time" so that the passing of the "now" becomes not only foreign and irrelevant in the physical universe but even cannot be formulated coherently in the context of physical theory. Apparently the result is a direct contradiction between our systematic knowledge of time as part of the structure of the physical universe and our intuitive notions of time, based on whatever unsystematic and perspective-dependent view of a fraction of the physical universe our immediate experience covers." Clearly this problem does not arise if we use the MBI.

Episodic Memory, Cognitive Dissonance, and the MBI Bubble

2007-12-31T18:57:00.000+01:00

Egan (2007) has recently carried out a series of experiments which could be taken to suggest that humans and monkeys have similar cognitive dissonance responses. i.e. children and monkeys apparently tend to change current preferences to fit past decisions. In Egan's experiments, for example, the subjects had first assessed two possibilities as of equal value, and then had to make a decision based on the idea that they were not. Then they derogated unchosen alternatives. This seems to lead to the idea that the core mechanism of cognitive dissonance is simple as very young children and monkeys do it.

Enthusiasts of the principle of cognitive dissonance (Stafford, 2007) often assume complex mechanisms. But we do not have any decent evidence that the change in attitudes or 'dissonance' comes from an uncomfortable mental state or that it arises from a contradiction between beliefs and actions.

Indeed, it would seem that not only do you need to have abstract beliefs about the world and yourself, you need to have some mechanism which detects when these beliefs are in contradiction with each other or with your actions, and which can (unconsciously) adjust selective beliefs to reduce this contradiction. Secondly, all this sophisticated mental machinery is postulated to exist from changes in behaviour, but it is never directly measured.

But for young children and monkeys, that all seems rather complicated. Surely a much simpler process of choice is somewhat like the idea of the mind operating like a basic computer in naive cases. A decision between A vs B is not just "choosing A" but is also "not choosing B".Then, when the choice becomes B vs C, even a naive mind is more likely to choose C because it is simply re-applying the previous decision of "not choosing B", rather than performing some complicated re-evaluation of its previously held attitudes a-la cognitive dissonance theory. These choices include some statistical white noise, so ultimate results for a choice about C are going to reflect that, of course.

Children and monkeys both grow and evolve, and one way this might happen is that the increasing complexity of neural pathways during this process could add perceived elements to the mind which might be construed by it as chagrin or whatever appropriate feeling is relevant. This too, may be relevant in some ways to discriminatory process but from the work of Egan does not seem necessarily to be at the core of the adult, sophisticated discriminatory process. The advantage of the latter is that it might lead to better and more sophisticated decisions for reasons such as personal or species survival.

Interpretation is not neutral, but represents a statement to the world as to the stance it implies. For example, chagrin at a perceived wrong first opinion (which in the simple example above would be a preliminary perceived idea that A was substantially the same as B), may alter to puzzlement if the same situation arises again and again - say in respect of some D,E and F. An example is in Eisenstein (2007) where a lecturer plausibly debunks a largish group of students about their several views as expressed in individual essays. Eventually they begin to protest at his alleged scepticism. This probably at least illustrates the high level of sophistication they have reached, and on the face of it suggests that more and better window dressing is needed for any theory of mind than we get directly from cognitive dissonance.

This really seems to amount to a similar level of discrimination to that of the recognition of sarcasm. Now we have some neurological evidence as to how such levels of discrimination operate. Shamay-Tsoory (2007) found that people with prefrontal damage had trouble recognising sarcasm, but people with damage in posterior brain areas were unaffected. People with damage in the right hemisphere and the prefrontal lobe (most profoundly evident in those with right ventromedial lesions) also had problems understanding the emotional cues involved in processing sarcasm, such as tone of voice, which correlated with their ability to understand sarcasm.

It was construed that the brain’s language areas interpret the literal meaning of a statement, the right hemisphere and frontal lobes process the emotional context, while the prefrontal cortex integrates the two. The total sample size was 25. This suggested to the experimenters that the right frontal lobe mediates understanding of sarcasm by integrating affective processing with perspective taking.

Now consider episodic memory. Recent work (Rosenbaum, Tulving, 2007) seems to show that theory of mind (ToM) can operate independently of episodic memory. ToM is doubtful in autistic behaviour (Baron-Cohen, 1985) and some doubt it even for non-mammals (Ramsay, 2007). Rosenbaum also says that ability to detect sarcasm , deception, and similar attributes, are not removed by such memory loss. Further, total loss of personal memory made no difference in subjects tested. Indeed Rosenbaum goes so far as to say: "We found that if you're trying to put yourself mentally in someone else's shoes, you don't need to put yourself in your own shoes first."

On that basis, which comes from practical experiments actually carried out with only some fairly basic and probably defensible propositions, we do not need of necessity a very complex ToM to cover a great deal of human behaviour. Even episodic memory of episodes relevant to cognitive dissonance, can perhaps be left out of a preliminary model which deals with cognitive dissonance !

We can even work out which parts of the brain may be relevant to such a proceeding. For episodic memory the relevant regions may be regions within the medial temporal lobe (MTL), such as the perirhinal cortex, parahippocampal cortex and entorhinal cortex (Moscovitch et al. 2006).

Now the above results on cognitive dissonance and episodic memory seem to indicate that we can set up a pretty good Stella or Madonna model for human behaviour without taking account, at least in a preliminary (highly foundational) way, of a complex ToM (Ramsay, 2007).

So a relatively simple basic mathematical model for a "bubble" in the MBI ('Many Bubble Interpretation') discussed earlier, can be constructed. Each bubble will be much the same, in principle, as given in the mathematical Madonna descriptions given in earlier blog entries herein. And in the simpler cases there need not exist episodic memories to retain many of the apparenly intrinsic features of human thought. We can even, in terms of level of simulation simplification, try to emulate Winfree (e.g. in Izhikevich, 2007).

Now there is no need to deal at this juncture with the problems posed by Honderich (1984) or by, for example Trevena (2002) and others, to the work of Libet (2003) and its defence by Haggard (2005), Klein (2007) and others. Libet's results, or others, will just be part of the Madonna formalism within the bubble, which can be "pseudo A series" in its formulation, I think.

Further experimental work will follow.

References

Baron-Cohen, S., Leslie, A.M., & Frith, U. (1985) Does the autistic child have a ‘theory of mind’? Cognition, 21, 37-46

Egan L. C., Santos L.R., Bloom P. (2007), "The Origins of Cognitive Dissonance: Evidence from Children and Monkeys". Psychological Science, 18, 978-983.

Eisenstein C., (2007), http://www.realitysandwich.com/node/845

Haggard, P. (2005). Conscious intention and motor cognition. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 9, 6 : 290–295.

Honderich T., (1984). "The time of a conscious sensory experience and mind-brain theories", J. Theoretical Biology 220:115-119. ; "Is the mind ahead of the brain? -- Benjamin Libet's evidence examined"; "How Free Are You? The Determinism Problem" and many others.

Izhikevich E.M.,(2007)"Dynamical Systems in Neuroscience",ISBN 978-0-262-09043-8, M.I.T.Press reprint, http://vesicle.nsi.edu/users/izhikevich/publications/dsn/index.htm

Klein S.A., (2007) "Do Apparent Temporal Anomalies Require Nonclassical Explanation?", http://cognet.mit.edu/posters/TUCSON3/Klein.html ; "Libet’s Timing of Mental Events",
Consciousness and Cognition 11, 326–333 (2002) doi:10.1006/ccog.2002.0569

Libet B.,(2003). "Can Conscious Experience affect brain Activity?", Journal of Consciousness Studies 10, nr. 12, pp 24-28 ; and many others.

Moscovitch M., Nadel L., Winocur G., Gilboa A., Rosenbaum R.S. (2006) "The cognitive neuroscience of remote episodic, semantic and spatial memory" Curr Opin Neurobiol. 16(2):179-90.

Ramsay T.Z. , (2007), Science and Consciousness Review, November 26, 2007

Rosenbaum R.S.,Stuss D.T.,Levine B., Tulving E.,(2007),"Theory of Mind Is Independent of Episodic Memory", Science, 23 November 2007:Vol.318.no.5854, p. 1257 DOI: 10.1126/science.1148763

Shamay-Tsoory S.G.,Tomer R., Aharon-Peretz J., (2007), Neuropsychology (vol 19, p 288)

Stafford T., (2007), http://www.mindhacks.com/blog/2007/12/cognitive_dissonance.html

Trevena J.A., (2002),Conscious Cogn.,Jun;11(2):162-90; discussion 314-25.
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Institute for Fundamental Studies, Vasai, Mumbai, India December 2007.

Quantum Interrogation, the McTaggart A Series, and the Many Bubble Interpretation

2007-10-04T10:20:00.000+01:00

Abstract

The 'Many Bubble Interpretation" appears in a model of the McTaggart A series. Without being intially sidetracked into the fascinating coherentist theories of epistemic justification, we simply loosely define A series bubbles for present purposes as being entities inside which a person, persons or whatever are for the moment severally confined, each at some personal present (which we know from as far back as the work of Kleinhuber, Libet, etc., is not readily defined as a single point in time, but more usually is taken by psychologists and others to have at least some ongoing 'duration'}, and with a past, a present and a future, in accord with the spirit of the McTaggart A series. The work of LePoidevin, Quentin Smith, Dean Zimmerman and many others is borne in mind. And as Dyke has said, we may not be forced to countenance plurality of further worlds in such circumstances - although we can. The A series is treated as a large category, intrinsically unmappable one to one onto the B series. There is also a B series and this can often be represented by a quantum mechanical description of the universe.

I start with a brief explanation of the idea of quantum interrogation as clearly the relevance of quantum theory to the mind has great relevance. This fact was noted at a very early date in the so-called 'Schrodinger Cat Paradox'. I attempt to retain the 'Cat paradox' here, in my new Many Bubble Approach, but in a way that is helpful and warning in a kindly way, rather than minatory and implying the possibility of immediate muddle and paradox - a use for which the 'Cat paradox' seems to have been frequently historically put.. It transpires that when used with the MBI, that according to Kwiat's interpretation of his work on quantum optics, for the purposes of computing by a quantum computer, it should be possible to almost noninvasively study the human mind, probably in a way at least as nonivasive as fMRI scans. In explaining this, the illustration given by Dean Carroll about measuring the presence of a sleeping puppy without waking him up is considered, as well as other aspects of the quantum interrogation matter.

Further, there are other useful applications of the MBI, in particular for dream research and perhaps many varied psychological experiments such as near death experiences and synaesthesia. Work is proceeding at the Institute for Fundamental Studies, Vasai, near Mumbai, India. The dream research experiments are not construed as precognition but as an application of an advanced Stickgold effect.

Introduction

There is a brief discussion of quantum interrogation followed by its application to the effect on the McTaggart A series, in a way which also expands the description of the A series given on 4th July 2007 and on 22nd September, 2007, at http://ttjohn.blogspot.com/. The Many Bubble Interpretation (MBI) is introduced. A rough notional illustration shows how in principle we can detect the presence of a sleeping puppy in a box, using quantum theory, without disturbing the puppy by more than an almost infinitesimal amount. The MBI also allows a better understanding of the Schrodinger Cat paradox, and so on. An obvious potential application to neuroscience, using the A series, is referred to in the conclusion of the article.

Brief explanation of Quantum Interrogation

Quantum interrogation appears a stranger phenomenon than most which are found using quantum mechanics. Press reports have frequently suggested that it is even stranger than it is.

Kwiat says roughly the following: Sometimes called interaction-free measurement, quantum interrogation is a technique that makes use of wave-particle duality (in this case, of photons) to search a region of space without actually entering that region of space. Utilizing two coupled optical interferometers, nested within a third, Kwiat’s team succeeded in 'counterfactually' searching a four-element database using Grover’s quantum search algorithm.

Briefly, the Press in effect have sometimes omitted the word "entire" from a paraphrased version of the statement apparently made by Professor Kwiat "It seems absolutely bizarre that counterfactual computation – using information that is counter to what must have actually happened – could find an answer without running the entire quantum computer." The word "entire" is there to stay in my view, but needs explaining - and the explanation involves the almost equally bizarre Quantum Zeno effect.

A lack of understanding of what happens has led to the following explanation by some (not I). Say you’ve got two programs running, P1 and P2. P1 is performing some enormous calculation, while P2 is doing nothing. If P1’s calculation returns any answer other than 5, then P1 closes P2. You come back to your computer and find that P2 is still running. Even though P2 didn’t calculate anything, and even though P1 never did anything to P2, you can immediately conclude — from P2 alone — that the answer you wanted was 5.

But that is not how it happens, and it is important to know that.

The simple "sleeping puppy" explanation in Carroll (2006) seems to me to roughly explain the matter.

Thought Experiment :

A puppy is allegedly sleeping in a box. We wish to make sure he is in the box without opening it. If we pass dogfood to him through a slot in the box, he will wake up noisily and eat it, and we will know he is still in the box. If we pass in a salad, the puppy will stay asleep.

We do not want to wake the puppy. To avoid this, we use quantum theory. Let us suppose we can describe the puppy's food quantum- mechanically in a simplistic way, as in the equation of Carroll (2006)

food = a* salad + b*dogfood The components of the vector are a and b. ............. (1)

In Note 1 we briefly explain how in these circumstances, we can detect the presence or otherwise of the puppy in the box with an extremely small (almost as small as we want) chance of waking him. It seems to me that, in Note 1, the first time the wave function is rotated by a small angle it will collapse if observed by the puppy, under the Copenhagen interpretation. The main problem in Note 1 is that Note 1 requires a good deal of removal and insertion of the food into the box, having the experiment set up in such a way that it involves quantum mechanics, and so on, or in real life terms, for example something like carrying out the Kwiat (2006) experiment which involves fairly normal experimental equipment in quantum optics.

Interpretations of the Kwiat experiment still seem to be at issue, Kwiat (2006a) and Mitchison (2006). Furthermore, it seems to me that to understand the fully the application of the quantum Zeno effect in the Kwiat approach, one has to consider the actual Kwiat experiment as described, and indeed the hypothetical Kwiat experiment and not go to the simple illustrative example above and in Note 1. In Carroll (2006) there is reference to Kwiat's own blogged comments, which should help somewhat. Kwiat (2006b) gives Kwiat's own account of the Quantum Zeno effect.

Relation to the A series

I have written several times about the McTaggart A series so will only briefly recapitulate. There are numerous interpretations of the A series, presentist (rather like actualist in metaphysics), 'Growing Block' (almost explanatory), eternalist (for example perhaps Smith, Craig, and Williamson) and in my view a few other types. Zimmerman (2005) mentions some variants of the A series. Newton-Smith mentions "We [may] lack the grounds to assume time has its topological properties as a matter of necessity ... It is [perhaps] the task of the philosopher to demonstrate the consequences of supposing it to have such and such a topology". Quite so. For immediate purposes we will not even consider where, if at all, Swinburne and others fit in with all this. And the work of Dyke (1998) makes it clear that we may be dealing with models only in such circumstances and may not be forced to countenance further plurality of worlds.

Indeed, there seem to be more 'metaphysical' variations of the A series, in existence or possible, than there are of a 1958 Ford Edsel, but hopefully not of the same fate.

So to keep it simple for the moment, I am provisionally simply copying from Maxwell (2004) the rough definition, which we may change if fitting "McTaggart, famously, distinguished two conceptions of time: the A-series, according to which events are either past, present or future; and the B-series, according to which events are merely earlier or later than other events".

Now Baldwin (2004) says "This point connects with a deep distinction between practical and theoretical points of view. The practical point of view is essentially ‘first-person’ (‘subjective’): it assumes knowledge of who I am (TRB), where I am (York), what time it is (today’s date). The theoretical point of view is essentially impersonal (‘objective’). It doesn’t require this first-person knowledge. So the A-series/B-series distinction is a case of the distinction between these two points of view, the practical and the theoretical."

Or to put it my way, we would probably be talking about a person in the A series, a map in the B series, and whilst we leave aside Baldwin's idea that the A series is practical but the B series theoretical, which is pretty much an exact fit so far, it does follow that my brief definitions in http://ttjohn.blogspot.com/ that the A series is good for people but the B series is best for objects, is actually more mainstream than some of the bizarre metaphysics in the literature, though as with all mildly homespun (some prefer the term foundational) ideas it does need watching closely.

Of course we need not bother with all this, and just stick with the B series or something like it that will satisfy our problems in a half-hearted way, but then we seem to be left with a 'theoretical' result that looks sort of funny, with a Schrodinger's cat and kittens and many other things unexplained, with no clear chance of getting at humanity or even a God or Gods if we believe them to be there, no direct link to biophysics or psychology or even the study of dreams and other as yet rather strange but undoubtedly existing phenomena, and perhaps worst of all, what distinctly looks like an unresolved case of McTaggart's paradox, implying perhaps the non-existence or vacuous nature of time itself, unresolved metaphysical puzzles and all the rest of it. Much more can be said but why strain ? My way can lead to a simple and constructive expansion of the philosophy of the mind. And of course time does involve change, we know from personal experience that it does and that people have a past, a present and a future, and allowing change is the essence of the MBI approach.

In my mind, and not entirely accurately, I tend to think of the A series as being like a lot of bubbles floating freely, each of which representing a person or sentient object, and his or her past, present and future at some time, and we could hopefully index the persons in the bubbles as (Pn,Tm), this being person Pn at time Tm. By now the apparition has degenerated to a pseudo A series (almost nearer to being a B series). But in principle we are mapping an A series to some model we can understand. And if we want we can follow memes through the bubbles by now, and index like (Pn,Tm,Mi) where Mi is some meme which may occur as part of one or more bubble. But this is intended as a guide rather than mathematics or metaphysics.

And whilst as presented above, the A series has a "future" along with each "present" and "past", in the individual bubbles. This is only a model and not a metaphysical description of the universe. It is however by the nature of the model, many world in structure. The claim is not made that these many worlds have to exist in actual fact. So the MBI ("Many Bubble Interpretation") seems to be in basic distinction from the MWI of Price or Deutsch or indeed the MCI ("Many Computations Interpretation") of Mallah (2007). The latter two are in origin B series, and to aid consistency should possibly be assumed to exist, in some sense, at least in the sense that the quantum mechanical results in Hilbert spaces exist. In the MBI, the many bubbles of time, each with its own past, present and future, are as real as the person or conglomerate observing them, and only exist in a model of the A series. The A series itself, in some metaphysical sense at least, can be taken to exist. So the Baldwin (2004) bubble referred to above, will contain the person (TRB) at the indexed time in the bubble in York, with a past somewhere else, perhaps partly in Leeds, and presumably a future somewhere else again, perhaps partly in Blackpool. This will simply be at the 'time' referred to above for TRB, and the bubble is only part of a model which contains many more bubbles. But this is only part of a model of the A series.

And, without even invoking quantum theory, Quentin Smith (2002) explains how some models of the A series can seem to have B series concomitants, even in special relativity. In fact if we wish, we could consider our A series bubbles corresponding to different Tm values to be linked to one another by a spider web of gossamer chains. The spider web could now seem to be very clearly savouring of the B series, although we had started with a model based on the A series. Given suitable provisos, that spider web might well suit STR (Special Theory of Relativity).

Furthermore, the Schrodinger Cat riddle seems to give no essential problems in the MBI, and the MBI has the additional virtue of flagging up the obvious apparent anomalies that the Cat paradox has seemed to show to some, in the B series (Note 2 gives more details).

At any rate, the important factors which may distinguish the A series from the B series, both being discussed in some detail in http://ttjohn.blogspot.com/ , are likely to be in the simple supposition of use referred in this note. That the situations involving human interaction are likely to be best described in the A series. Since the human/puppy experiment mentioned above will entail human and puppy observations, and/or possibly contrived mathematical situations simulating or paralleling these, we will see in the A series, the 'counterfactual' (?) results of these experiments - in a reasonably good model of the circumstances at the corresponding A series point. In other words, much what Copenhagen theorists would predict from a quantum-mechanical Kwiat experiment. The math may occur in the B series, but the human (and possibly the puppy) observers would emerge in a good A series model. So the strange thing of Kwiat will be intrinsic to the B series but only be necessary in terms of results in the A series model - which could still probably drill down deeper by a mathematical formalism which would parrot the B series. And of course we must remember that we are really dealing with a pseudo A series in formalisms devised for the B series. The interesting thing is that here the A series will represent the stolid physical truth, in a provisional model, but the B series will look mildly paradoxical in human terms. But the system has now been tamed to the point where the apparent absurdities in quantum mechanics now sound no more unusual than the use of, say, complex numbers in algebra. And importantly there is now a link between quantum mechanics and consciousness.

And, we can use different A models for different circumstances Swinburne's evangelising can, at a pinch, fall under our aegis. And models being what they are, there is nothing unusual in using new models for new positions within the A series, if we need to change our description of the A series somewhat as time goes on.

Conclusion

The fairly simple discussion above shows that with the A/B series differentiation I have discussed elsewhere we can avoid worrying too much about strange quantum results, and concentrate on obtaining new biophysics results as I have done in the http://ttjohn.blogspot.com/.entries on 4th July 2007 22nd September, 2007 entries. In the long term we will thus probably be able interpret latest quantum results in a totally non-paradoxical way, which is even true, or may be true if Kwiat is correct, for counterfactual quantum interrogation. MBI is clearly not simply Copenhagen, MCI or MWI, but a description which can create models and building blocks capable of being better than all of these and can incorporate all or any of them, and humans as well.

Further applications of Quantum Interrogation: In the simple example above, we could replace the sleeping puppy by a human brain, in principle, and thus be led to a wonderland of strange quantum mental applications, with which, as with fMRI scans, we might hope not to damage or alter the brain. Now generally speaking, whether we all end up agreeing with Kwiat or not, the puppy seems to have been interrogated while still asleep, and this makes a point anyway. If sticklers query that as well, I need only refer to Smith's (2002) comments on well-established special relativity theory and point out that our MBI interpretation will smooth over that problem in the A series enough to show MBI's potential utilisation. So whilst it will be much happier if Kwiat is right, in no way is that matter intrinsic to the continued merit of the MBI.

Acknowledgements

My thanks to Professor Kwiat for providing a copy of "Counterfactual quantum computation via quantum interrogation".

References

Bouwmeester D., Ekert, A., Zeilinger A., (2000), "The Physics of Quantum Information", pp146, 159, Springer.

Carroll S., (2006), "Quantum Interrogation" http://cosmicvariance.com/2006/02/27/quantum-interrogation/ ; Kwiat's own comment is at http://cosmicvariance.com/?p=674 and fully covers his position up to the point of writing, as far as I know.

Dyke H., ( 1998), pp93-117, "Real Times and Possible Worlds", in "Qestions of Time and Tense", Le Poidevin , Oxford University Press, Oxford, England OX2 6DP.

Kwiat P.G. et al, (2006), Nature 439, 949-952 (23 February 2006) doi:10.1038/nature04523 ; there is a very brief description at many other places, for example http://www.primidi.com/2006/02/23.html

Kwiat P.G. et al, (2006a), "Counterfactual computation revisited", arXiv: quant- ph/0607101 ; "Weak measurements and Counterfactual computation", arXiv:quant-ph/0612159v1

Kwiat P.G. et al, (2006b), "The TAO of Quantum Interrogation", http://www.physics.uiuc.edu/people/Kwiat/Interaction-Free-Measurements.htm

Mitchison G., Jozsa R. , (2006), "The limits of counterfactual computation", arXiv: quant- ph/ 0606092 ; "Sequential weak Measurement" , arXiv: 0706.1508v2 [quant- ph]

Mallah J.,(2007), arXiv:0709.0544 "The Many Computations Interpretation (MCI) of Quantum Mechanics".

Maxwell N., (2004), “The Ontology of Spacetime”, Conference in Montreal, 14 May 2004

Newton-Smith W.H., ( 1980), "The Structure of Time", 61-66 inter alia, Routledge and Kegan-Paul.

Penrose R., (2000), "The Mysteries of Quantum Physcics" in "The Large, The Small, and the Human Mind", p70 onwards, Canto, Cambridge University Press.

Penrose R., (2005), "The Road to Reality", p804 onwards, Vintage Books, London.

Smith Q., (2002), "The incompatibility of STR and the tensed theory of Time", Published In: "The Importance of Time", editor, L. Nathan Oaklander. Kluwer: Philosophical Studies Series.

Zimmerman D.W., (2005), "The A-Theory of Time, The B-Theory of Time, and ‘Taking Tense Seriously’", dialectica Vol. 59, N° 4, pp. 401–457

Note 1

This is largely due to Carroll (2006). Start with some food in the (salad) state. Stick it into the box; whether there is a puppy inside or not, no barking ensues, as puppies wouldn’t be interested in salad anyway. Now rotate the state by ninety degrees, converting it into the (dogfood) state. We stick it into the box again; the puppy observes the dogfood (by smelling it, most likely) and starts barking.

But now imagine starting with the food in the (salad) state, and rotating it by 45 degrees instead of ninety degrees. We are then in an equal superposition, (food) = a(salad) + a(dogfood), with a given by one over the square root of two (about 0.71). If we were to observe it (which we won’t), there would be a 50% chance (i.e., [one over the square root of two]2) that we would see salad, and a 50% chance that we would see dogfood. Now stick it into the box — what happens? If there is no puppy in there, nothing happens. If there is a puppy, we have a 50% chance that the puppy thinks it’s salad and stays asleep, and a 50% chance that the puppy thinks it’s dogfood and starts barking. Either way, the puppy has observed the food, and collapsed the wavefunction into either purely (salad) or purely (dogfood). So, if we don’t hear any barking, either there’s no puppy and the state is still in a 45-degree superposition, or there is a puppy in there and the food is in the pure (salad) state.

Let’s assume that we didn’t hear any barking. Next, carefully, without observing the food ourselves, take it out of the box and rotate the state by another 45 degrees. If there were no puppy in the box, all that we’ve done is two consecutive rotations by 45 degrees, which is simply a single rotation by 90 degrees; we’ve turned a pure (salad) state into a pure (dogfood) state. But if there is a puppy in there, and we didn’t hear it bark, the state that emerged from the box was not a superposition, but a pure (salad) state. Our rotation therefore turns it back into the state (food) = 0.71(salad) + 0.71(dogfood). And now we observe it ourselves. If there were no puppy in the box, after all that manipulation we have a pure (dogfood) state, and we observe the food to be dogfood with probability one. But if there is a puppy inside, even in the case that we didn’t hear it bark, our final observation has a (0.71)2 = 0.5 chance of finding that the food is salad! So, if we happen to go through all that work and measure the food to be salad at the end of our procedure, we can be sure there is a puppy inside the box, even though we didn’t disturb it! The existence of the puppy affected the state, even though we didn’t (in this branch of the wavefunction, where the puppy didn’t start barking) actually interact with the puppy at all. That’s “non-destructive quantum measurement,” and it’s the truly amazing part of this whole story.

Note that, if there were a puppy in the box in the above story, there was a 50% chance that it would start barking, despite our wishes not to disturb it. Is there any way to detect the puppy, without worrying that we might wake it up? You know there is. Start with the food again in the (salad) state. Now rotate it by just one degree, rather than by 45 degrees. That leaves the food in a state (food) = 0.999(salad) + 0.017(dogfood). [Because cos(1 degree) = 0.999 and sin(1 degree) = 0.017, if you must know.] Stick the food into the box. The chance that the puppy smells dogfood and starts barking is 0.0172 = 0.0003, a tiny number indeed. Now pull the food out, and rotate the state by another 1 degree without observing it. Stick back into the box, and repeat 90 times. If there is no puppy in there, we’ve just done a rotation by 90 degrees, and the food ends up in the purely (dogfood) state. If there is a puppy in there, we must accept that there is some chance of waking it up — but it’s only 90*0.0003, which is less than three percent! Meanwhile, if there is a puppy in there and it doesn’t bark, when we observe the final state there is a better than 97% chance that we will measure it to be (salad) — a sure sign there is a puppy inside! Thus, we have about a 95% chance of knowing for sure that there is a puppy in there, without waking it up. It’s obvious enough that this procedure can, in principle, be improved as much as we like, by rotating the state by arbitrarily tiny intervals and sticking the food into the box a correspondingly large number of times. This is the “quantum Zeno effect.”

So, through the miracle of quantum mechanics, we can detect whether there is a puppy in the box, even though we never disturb its state. Of course there is always some probability that we do wake it up, but by being careful we can make that probability as small as we like.

Note 2

The Schrodinger Cat riddle has been discussed by many authors, Penrose, in Penrose (2000, 2005) and in many other accounts, gives particularly detailed modern descriptions for example, and Bouwmeester (2000) gives reference to it in his book on quantum computing. Penrose (2005) gives 5 accounts (a) to (f). The Copenhagen account, (a) on Penrose (2005) page 805 clearly sounds simply a very early compromise which has worked remarkably well in some cases, the others he mentions are many-worlds, decoherence, consistent histories, split wave, some new theory (e.g. Wigner's). Equations 2.9(b) and 2.9(c) in Penrose (2000) give two accounts, for example. He defines these equations in the same semi-formal way as equation (1) above. As Penrose (2000) points out, both of these can bring problems.

In the MBI interpretation however, these problems do not arise, as we are not considering various interpretations or restatements of a known, and hopefully valid mathematically, quantum mechanical description, but a B series in which we can write the maths just as we need within the guidelines of the B series, and an A series which probably brings humans, their problems, and their past present and future, directly into play.

We know, or hope we know, that the A series exists as otherwise, along the lines of McTaggart, time is unreal. We have a century of varied philosophical and other discussions on that already.

And in the MBI A series, the human consciousness exists too. As far as we so far know, in human consciousness, outside of shamanically or drug induced cases or the like, the 'cat' will only occur in two forms, 'dead' or 'alive', and we can write this into our description of the A series as we know it. In other word the only valid human A series maps, assuming for the moment that we are considering human A series (though there is certainly no objection to considering the A series of dogs, cats, and other creatures, or indeed clever mechanical, optical or electronic devices of a deliberately or accidentally pseudo-intelligent nature) which may indeed be important in some pseudo-A or pseudo-B series, should contain no intermediate 'cat' states directly. We would just be wrong in using the wrong A series model, no paradox or riddle at all. But obviously sections of any A series bubble or indeed the entire content of it can contain by fiat no human style devices in an A series model, and then presumably Schrodinger cat states may be directly involved.. But they presumably would be involved directly in the quantum mechanics of the B series anyway, or in derived manifestations in our A series model. Of course even the point that humans cannot experience mixed 'cat' states may be disputed, looking for example of the bizarre but real mental manifestations encountered by such workers as V.S. Ramachandran or at such strange effects as we obtain in synaesthesia or in the Bonnet or Cotard syndromes, and we are considering all three but particularly synaesthesia. But if strange but surmised or actual mental effects are applicable, these can routinely be incorporated in the A series, and where necessary further work done in the B series as well.

There is clearly a lot more experimental work which can be done on the A series, to obtain models and the status of the A series more precisely. But one thing that seems clear at this stage is that the A series does exist, and can be used in a neatly understandable way to include descriptions of elaborate models involving B series results like the Schrodinger cat experiment as well

McTaggart's A and B series and how they relate to modern science and neuroscience in the 21st Century.

2007-09-22T13:43:00.000+01:00

Abstract

McTaggart's ideas on the unreality of time as expressed in "The Nature of Existence" have retained great interest for 100 years to scholars, academics and other philosophers. In this essay, there is a brief discussion which mentions some of the high points of this philosophical interest, and goes on to apply his ideas to modern physics and neuroscience. It does not discuss McTaggart's C and D series, but does emphasise how the use of derived versions of both his A and B series can be of great virtue in discussing both the abstract physics of time, and the present and future importance of McTaggart's ideas to the subject of time. Indeed an experiment using human volunteers and dynamic systems modelling which was carried out is described, which illustrates this fact.

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"Let's return McTaggart to his final resting place, and let him molder there in peace" (Maudlin)

"No chance" (Me)

In this brief essay I will leave aside the notion that McTaggart's work has been exposed as being wrong, as in Maudlin (2002). Gale's work on "The Philosophy of Time" appeared nearly 40 years ago and much of this work was about McTaggart's approach. In the early summing up of Gale (1968) for example, and often enough elsewhere subsequently, the choice of A series or choice of B series or choice of either A or B series as desired is suggested. The great Arthur Prior, for example, as I remember him, had a clear penchant for the A series - and when I worked with Robin Gandy I remember that Gandy found the A series at least acceptable.

Later workers, particularly in mathematical physics, tend to gravitate to the B series without really paying much attention to abstruse details. Simple special relativity or even simple dynamics will often solve the problems of such workers to date and these kinds of models almost give the impression of begging for the B series - or even simply ignoring McTaggart as a whimsical philosopher - quite wrong in my view. When general relativity or loop quantum gravity rear their ugly heads - variations of simple 3D or 4D (space time) descriptions do not easily let most people pause for an A series. Philosophers can see value in the A/B series distinction in principle but often prefer a form of B series (Oaklander's (2004) "new theory" for example), (Note 1). This approach neatly fits in with conventional physics, but also with the idea that such apparent deliberate blinding to reality is perhaps a neo-Tychonian heresy, Margolis (2002). The problems tend to come out perhaps in psychological rather than clearly philosophical areas and I am thinking particularly of such things as Wason selection and even the work of Tooby and Cosmides. I have looked at these areas (Note 2) These matters are worthy of study in more detail and I will come to a few points later.

Briefly what I am saying, and obviously there are many provisos, hedges and restatements, is that I consider a form of A series and a form of B series - but the A series is probably a proper class (like the class of all automata for example is a proper class (Adamek et al, 2004 )) and probably cannot be effectively mapped, certainly not one to one, onto the B series. We only need to look at say Goldblatt (1984). In other words time is a rather complicated entity and when we get down to the mathematics or even the logic of time, we are using at least two different and not one to one mappable onto each other (mathematical) categories, A and B say (Note 4). And McTaggart had thus considered that he had found unreality in time when he was actually trying to compare two different things - though it is possibly not necessary to follow through his precise reasoning here, particularly on the C and D series. Clearly when considering a complex entity like 'time', there may ultimately be many more matters to consider but that does not remove the fact that McTaggart had found at least two such entities, the A and the B series.

Again roughly, much of current physics can be described by the B series but human nature - where we know we each have a past, a present, and a future - can perhaps best be described by the A series. And Yates (2007) has used dynamic systems theory to get working models and to try to obtain specific results for them. The details are a little more devious but I have presented posters at the Salzburg and Budapest conferences on the mind and consciousness this year, and am giving lectures in Mumbai later this year. Some details are in the following URL (Yates, (2007), details start at top of page)

So I got to a point that a reasonable physical assumption seems to be that the A series is a Proper Class. Bays (2001), in "Reflections on Skolem’s Paradox " says "if we start with a proper class which “satisfies” some finite collection of sentences, then the Skolem hull construction lets us find a countable set which satisfies the same collection of sentences". In other words, I can use conventional complexity theory mathematics to study the A series as long as I remember that I am no longer in "block time" or B Series time. Now authors like John M. Gottman (2002) have used simple enough mathematics for years to solve psychological problems and seemingly eventually tried to shoehorn their ideas rather without thinking into a "block time" scenario where they will not properly work. And the heartbreaking discussions amongst proponents of tensed and non-tensed time may never again have to carry so much weight, (at Sydney conference, (2006) they mainly did carry weight) in a situation where a tensed time (A series) is used where convenient for people, and a non-tensed time (B series) where convenient for objects. And the maths can be great in both cases. Though of course that does not say it will be straightforward or easy.

In a sense we can argue that people have been misled by the B series followers - the 'soul-less' physical scientists - whose methods undoubtedly work excellently in simple dynamic or relativistic situations - into thinking that the B series really is all there is to be used, and that results have to be niced down to fit in with B series dogma. In this regard one could almost place such people as neo-Lysenkoists - with equal certainty of failure in the long term, though minor agreement with facts if the mathematical models are not too bad. One is not speaking polemically, merely stressing the fact that a modern version of the Tychonian heresy brings many problems.

So now comes the crunch: Where are there, in the known physical or biophysical world, clear distinctions between A series and B series results but that A series triumphs ? To narrow down the field, first we may ask why we need the A series anyway if we are doing physics. One simple answer is that when physics added wave/particle duality to its toolbox, it became apparent that it did not describe the world as we know it. We know that people would take an entity to be either a wave or a particle, not both. Simple tricks like the Copenhagen Interpretation cover up the cracks. Certainly, but the cracks are still there. More complex ideas like many-worlds-interpretation may eventually lead to the discovery of alternative universes, but right now these haven't been found and the new worlds of science are already not the worlds of human beings. There is worse to come. And that is chaos theory and non-linear equations. After the work of May, Lorenz and many others, we know now that even classical predictability is uncertain. As they say, the change in the direction of a butterfly in Santiago today can change the weather in Toronto tomorrow. And there is not way that we can, or indeed probably want to, change such minutiae. There is, though, a gleam of hope! We can make predictions about the duckrabbit in Note 2, for example. The duckrabbit problem has been solved to the point of quantitative assessment! The details are in Sprott & Aks (2003) and it has been done for the Necker cube. So these 'psychological' techniques are going to work quantitatively.

An objection could be that we don't care, that we see lots of optical illusions. What we want is a 'real' phenomenon that can be really observed. I have considered many possible phenomena of this kind. A good example, though, is hypnosis. Apparent visual and other mental phenomena which individuals claim to perceive under hypnosis are legion. These are sometimes bizarre and well outside the laws of physics, yet they are there - as Galileo said in his alleged historical quip "it (the phenomena) still moves (still is observed) ". Normally other people who are not hypnotised do not see them, but often enough, appearances to those who do can go against the present laws of physics for a long time. Now for years many people didn't believe hypnosis is anything other than a simple artifact of the mind. But recently Kosslyn (2000) showed, using PET brain scans, that 'something' (physical) is happening in the mind when hypnosis is carried out, and that 'something' can, for example, change the appearance of a Mondrian style picture to the hypnotised viewer. So we have a 'real' phenomenon that can be 'really' observed, by one or more real persons. Now to say that does not count, it is only in the mind, simply places the burden of doubt somewhere else. In terms of physics it is as 'real' as anything else. PET scans prove it.

We could have a grim choice of discounting observations coming from the area of the human skull as being 'unphysical', or alternatively placing them in a new class of mental-but physical phenomena. It did not perhaps much matter if we assigned such observations as 'unphysical' when there were many fewer quantitative and accurate measurements of what goes on in the brain, but now, with fMRI and other new techniques, it does matter. It is also plain that the provenance of all sensations, real or imagined, should be regarded as suspect. The era of Dr Johnson kicking a stone with his foot as a way to disagree quickly and reasonably adequately with Bishop Berkeley is, for good or ill, now long gone.

There are clearly other many other such cases arising. In my blog I try to consider some of them. Near death experiences are perhaps one of the most controversial of these. Dreams are the most common example, perhaps, and for the moment it may be easier to manipulate or create these than to change other human sensations or to look for difficult cases, though needs must. For example Quinton (1973), when he criticises Kant, for example, specifically makes use of thought experiments on rather unusual and somewhat obsessive dreams. I must point out that whilst dreams are not the precise lychpin of Quinton's argumentation, at least they are an important part of the argumentation's thrust, so dreams definitely cannot be ignored as an arena for philosophical work of this nature.

Dreams are also of great interest in neuroscience as for example, it is now possible to preprogram people's dreams in advance, at least to a limited extent, as Stickgold (2005) has shown. A simple computer program using Berkeley Madonna was therefore used to set up a model to describe this effect, and the results are shown on my blog at http://ttjohn.blogspot.com/ . Now the philosophical problems involved in predicting the future using a B series representation and such a model could be endless. A lot of counterexamples (Note 3) could readily be set up, in some cases at least reasonably convincing, in block time. But in the A series we have the luxury of not having to bother to do so, even though real restrictions will undoubtedly be likely to be apparent to its actual physical (not just philosophical) use in the long term. So for the A series we just need to consider a person at some phase, with a past, present and future which has no known necessary call to alter other bit of the A series, as yet unexplored, and to record dreams before and after a Stickgold perturbation. Then the same Berkeley Madonna model with slightly different parameter values allows precognition within the model, which also occurred for our test case. In other words the unexpected dream 'prediction' of playing a game of Tetris occurred before the stimulation was made, by a subject unaware of the nature of the exercise.

Repeatability: I would consider the Milgram (1974) experiments to be perhaps the best experiments ever done in recent years in experimental psychology and they are highly predictable, over many experiments by many people. I am hoping for that level of predictability but so far we have only catalogued one test subject (of Indian origin) and will be looking for more suitable subjects in India during (2007/8). The Berkeley Madonna results suggest that quite tiny parameter changes could greatly affect results and therefore these experiments may take a long time and if necessary co-ordinated with other related matters, and different experiments. What we do have, however, would seem to be a proof of concept in that ordinary modern mathematics can be used, and possibly ordinary experiments will lead to useful results. I claim only proof of concept so far. Out of interest, the present work is very recent but a patent on time travel was taken out by me on the topic, probably covering basic points, about 25 years ago, and I have let it lapse, so I trust that most serious future work may effectively remain open source, at least in the U.K.

References

Adamek J., Herrlich H., Strecker G.E. (2004), "The Joy of Cats", p15, John Wiley , and katmat.math.uni-bremen.de/acc/acc.pdf

Bays T., (2001), Ph.D. Dissertation. "Reflections on Skolem’s Paradox" p86, UCLA Philosohy Department.

Gale R.M. (1968), "The Philosophy of Time", p65 et seq, Macmillan

Goldblatt R, (2008), "Topoi", p10, Dover

Gottman J.M., et al., (2002), "The Mathematics of Marriage", MIT Press , ISBN : 0-262-57230-3

Goguen J. (2006), "Mathematical Models of Space and Time", http://www.cs.ucsd.edu/~goguen/pps/taspm.pdf

Kosslyn S. M. et al, (2000), "Hypnotic Visual Illusion Alters Color Processing in the Brain", Am J Psychiatry 157:8, August, 1279

Le Poidevin R., (1991), "Change, Cause, and Contradiction", p34-37 inter alia, New York, St. Martins Press.

Margolis H, (2002). "It started with Copernicus", McGraw Hill

Maudlin. T. (2002), "Philosophers 'Imprint, Vol.2,No.4, "Thoroughly Modern McTaggart ". In that article. Maudlin says "Let's return McTaggart to his final resting place,and let him molder there in peace". Earman (up to a point) disagrees. And so it goes on. Works like the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy still publish disagreements either way or any way. But the point has to be made that not all philosophers agree on the relevance of McTaggart's work, though that does not of course imply that counterfactual arguments will easily bear fruit.

Milgram, S. (1974) "Obedience to Authority", Harper & Row, USA

Mortensen, C., (2006),"Change", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2006 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL =

Oaklander N., (2004), "Freedom and the New Theory of Time" p337 - "From The Ontology of Time", (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2004)

Quinton, A, (1973), "The Nature of Things", p164, inter alia, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London.

Ryberg et al (2006), "The Repugnant Conclusion", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2006 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = .

Stickgold R., (2005), "Sleep-dependent memory consolidation" , Nature, Vol 437, p1272

Swartz N., (2001) "Beyond Experience: Metaphysical Theories and Philosophical Constraints", Second Edition free at http://www.sfu.ca/philosophy/beyond_experience

Smith Q., (1993), "Language and Time", Oxford, Oxford University Press ; an important and additionally elucidatory discussion in Swartz (2001).

Sprott J. C., Aks D. J., (2003), "The Role of Depth and 1/f Dynamics in Perceiving Reversible Figures", "Nonlinear Dynamics, Psychology, and Life Sciences, Vol. 7, No. 2, April 2003

Stevens J. C. , (1984), Ethics, Oct;95(1):68-74

Sydney conference (2006), "Time and consciousness Conference", http://fragments.consc.net/djc/2006/07/time_and_consci.html

Tooley M., (1998), "Time, Tense, and Causation", Oxford, Clarendon Press.

Tooley M., (2006), http://spot.colorado.edu/~tooley/LectureforExercise4Phil3480.html

Yates J., (2007), http://ttjohn.blogspot.com/2007/07/2007-tsc-qmind-conferences-my-abstracts.html#links

Note 1

Two important recent books which illustrate this fact are Smith (1993) and Tooley (1998), both of whom seek to escape from the strictures of McTaggart, but in different ways. Very briefly, Smith uses a changing present which needs peculiar tensed (past/future) facts which change relative to their successive "presents". In short it is almost an A series. Tooley's accretion of times seems to require an infinity of instantaneous accretions of times for any finite change, or worse, a finite number of "timed" accretions of times. So Tooley, like Oaklander, is very nearly a B theorist. All these ideas are philosophically interesting but to me they don't trump Prior. Le Poidevin (1991), for example, speaks of Prior's "temporal solipsism" but nonetheless points out that Prior's tense ontology is, in his view, perhaps the most plausible way to avoid McTaggart's contradictions while maintaining McTaggart's intuitions of the significance of tensed propositions. The newest relevant commentary may be Mortensen (2006).

Note 2

In my blog at http://ttjohn.blogspot.com/ in the article "Are Physicists suffering from the Tychonic Illusion ?" I place the incisive comment of Margolis "So are cognitive illusions likely to occur and be hard to correct beyond the narrow contexts of psychology experiments? I think that is inevitable, so that it is important that we come to understand these illusions. Careful thought about simple puzzles like Wason can help illuminate what happens in vastly more consequential realms." To put it crudely, it is almost as if the solar system were just a large duckrabbit unclearly unidentified or a Wason card test unsolved. [A duckrabbit is a picture which seems to mentally alternate during viewing between looking like being a duck and a rabbit].

Note 3

The question of counterexamples and paradoxes is a major one for time travellers, and has filled many encyclopedia pages. We are left with problems with counterexamples of any type. Those commonly given by Tooley (2006) on other topics for example, have been disputed, often for possibly good reasons or sometimes apparently for unphilosophical ones, Stevens (1984). We are fortunate that counterexamples are not so prevalent so far in the A series. And indeed some would say that counterexamples go in our favour here, as even one example of time travel proves that it happens and we now have one example - which I mention in this essay and give details of in my blog. I would say that in principle there is a strong counterexample here, but in my view we do need more cases to pursue a convincing program. And I have come across many general problems with this "one example proves it" approach when considering the synaesthesia work of Jeffrey Gray with him, also discussed briefly at http://ttjohn.blogspot.com/ A further angle to the McTaggart work is of course ethics and the "repugnant conclusion" (Ryberg, 2006) as well as relating to the work of Parfit, which has to be omitted for the moment since we are largely pursuing the physical/mathematical side of the paradox in this brief essay.

Note 4

Of course category theory is at the crux of a proper mathematical explanation of the paradox, as Yates (2006) duly notes elsewhere. In a somewhat similar instance, the Buddhist Monk puzzle, perhaps first described by Koestler and mentioned by Fauconnier and Turner, a category theoretic explanation comes closer to the light of day in the mathematical discusion of Goguen (2006). Fauconnier and Turner use a network model which would need re-examination to apply to the present context. And indeed, for a spiritual interpretation, real Buddhist monks are at work right now but for present purposes we stick to mathematics, physics, neuroscience and philosophy for the moment.

2007 TSC & QMind Conferences: My Abstracts & brief Details

2007-07-04T10:27:00.000+01:00

(A) The Abstracts
Toward a Science of Consciousness 2007 Budapest, Hungary, July 23-26

Frequently it is suggested that mental effects related to the brain and qualia depend directly on quantum effects. This obviously relates to other ideas such as qualia and various theories such as computationalism. There are real problems in terms of things like orders of magnitude, with conventional attempts like those of Stapp and Penrose. It would probably be easier if many-worlds interpretation could readily describe quantum brain or consciousness effects directly but at this time there would be deep fungibility problems with some expositions of this idea.

My approach uses category theory and a McTaggart A series as well as the conventional B series effectively used by Deutsch, Bohm and Penrose.

This sounds philosophically and physically more realistic but at the present state of the art it may be required that the A series is a proper class.

My theory will relatively easily link with any physically meaningful and duplicable NDE results which may be provided by NDE experiments like those of Fenwick and Greyson and has many other advantages.

Dream precognition results and ESP are very much denied by sceptics and on the whole by physicists. At this time I see no evidence whatsoever of ESP personally, but dream precognition ideas raise a few thoughts even if largely seemingly disproved as such, probably correctly by such as Blackmore. On dreams I certainly have not obtained precognition as normally defined but noted apparent peculiar effects not dissimilar in superficial appearance. In psychology it is necessary to remember that many conclusions have been drawn and are repeatable from work like that of Strogatz. I favour dynamical systems psychology somewhat along the lines of Lange, but requiring an A series approach. By adding some ideas due to Stickgold and Hobson, I have already obtained preliminary surprising results. Presently I am proceeding to look at a structure somewhat along the lines of the Sprott work on psychology.

I believe that through ignoring the McTaggart A series or trying to subsume the A series to within the B series, important opportunities are being lost and that early calls on quantum theory may be being made, when complex system theory could be more directly appropriate

Quantum Mind Conference 2007

Registration ID:
Last Name: Yates
First Name: John
Abstract Title: New quantum approach to qualia, consciousness and the brain.
Abstract: In this paper I do not rule out the possibility of including the consideration of results such as those of Jahn, Walach, Radin and others, in the spirit that I feel that, unlike much early USA scientific and technical opinion, I would not have effectively ruled out the possibility of the Wright Brothers as having discovered aviation. At the same time such results are certainly not paramount in considerations at this time. My approach uses category theory and a McTaggart A series as well as the conventional B series effectively used by Deutsch, Bohm and Penrose. This sounds philosophically and physically more realistic but at the present state of the art it may be required that the A series is a proper class. My theory will relatively easily link with any physically meaningful and duplicable NDE results which may be provided for example, by NDE experiments like those of Fenwick and Greyson and has many other advantages. Dream precognition results and ESP are very much denied by sceptics and on the whole by physicists. On dreams I certainly have not obtained precognition as such but noted apparent peculiar effects not dissimilar in superficial appearance. In psychology it is necessary to remember that many conclusions have been drawn and are repeatable from work like that of Strogatz. I favour dynamical systems psychology somewhat along the lines of Lange, but requiring an A series philosophy. By adding some ideas due to Stickgold and Hobson, I have already obtained preliminary surprising results. Presently I am proceeding to look at a structure somewhat along the lines of the Sprott work on psychology. I believe that through ignoring the McTaggart A series or trying to subsume the A series to within the B series, important opportunities are being lost and that early calls on quantum theory may be being made, when complex system theory could be more directly appropriate. http://ttjohn.blogspot.com/ presents the entire blog to date, including more work than that required here. The simplest appreciation of the situation may be that the present approach contains a past, a present and a future without further ad hoc additions and so in a sense exhibits qualities, generally recognised as certainly existing in human consciousness, but which are not obvious in theories which do not. Also it allows the existence of a God or Gods and free will (or indeed hypothetical gods or freewill) within its bounds, though does not insist on their existence a priori and in this sense it is more appropriate to consciousness theory than a conventional physics theory would be which almost excludes these factors or a theological theory which a priori insists on them. The absence of the possibility of freewill in a physical theory suggests solipsism or incompleteness rather than some disproof of free will and this is carefully avoided with the present approach, which yet contains much mathematics including all of quantum theory and high energy physics, together with chaos and catastrophe theories where relevant.
Abstract Keywords: qualia brain consciousness McTaggart chaos catastrophe
Abstract Comments:
Abstract Submission / Modification Time: 2/20/2007 4:54:42 AM

(B) Links to further details

I have to point out that the considerations in the abstracts above involved a deep and unusual reappraisal of modern physics and resolve, in my opinion, certain important aspects of its problems. Simply as an example, Smolin (2006), pp 256-258, seems to be shouting from the housetops for some such reappraisal, which in my case has been carried out carefully and with experimental diligence over many years. How this has been done is covered only briefly in the abstracts but much further detail is given in the links below.

[Smolin L., (2006) "The Trouble With Physics : The Rise of String Theory, The Fall of a Science, and What Comes Next", pp 256-258, Houghton Mifflin, ISBN: 0618551050]

Thus there follow links to some recent papers of mine, which may eventually form the basis of a book together with much earlier work. These are all relevant to the abstracts. The earlier ones listed tend to be the most recent.

In my estimation modern physics, frequently implying only the B series (or roughly, tenseless time) has somewhat the relation to physics as it should be that intelligent design has to modern evolution. In short, both modern physics as it is and intelligent design leave out too many pieces and then fill up the spaces with the meaningless, the bizarre, or the simply wrong and illogical in its own terms, leading to conclusions which themselves often prove to be meaningless, bizarre, or simply wrong. Tenseless time without tensed time (if one wishes for those terms) is like saying that the existence of the Grand Canyon proves Noah's flood, and in fact last time I was at the Grand Canyon there were even books which said exactly that, though almost the opposite is provable. Now physics has its chance to try to put its faults right, as Smolin, for example, says it must do. But this is likely to add to physics in the present case, not to detract from it. One could say that is a difference between science and creationalism.

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Work in Progress on application of dynamic systems theory to the A series (1) :

Description of the way it is intended to proceed with the work in the Abstract http://ttjohn.blogspot.com/2007/03/work-in-progress-on-application-of.html#links

Work in Progress on application of dynamic systems theory to the A series (2) :

Some details of how Part (1) was then carried out, including calculations, graphs and comments. http://ttjohn.blogspot.com/2007/05/work-in-progress-on-application-of.html#links

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Memetics and the A Series (1) : Consideration as to how the A series may be grappled with, particularly from a mathematical standpoint. Varela, Baas, Robert Brown and others are considered. Consideration of the meme as a standpoint to begin to continue to grapple with the A series, particularly bearing mind the probability that the A series is a Proper Class. http://ttjohn.blogspot.com/2006/12/memetics-and-a-series-1.html#links

Memetics and the A Series (2) : We hope to establish the concept of a model or series of models which can be developed mathematically and lead to consequences which, as well, can relate to mathematically predictable facts, ideas, results or further enquiries. http://ttjohn.blogspot.com/2007/01/memetics-and-a-series-2.html#links

Are Physicists suffering from the Tychonic Illusion ? : At this point we try to hammer in again the idea that physicists may still suffer from the Tychonic illusion. In a general sense like that implied in the work of Margolis of course, not specifically in the exact way of Tycho. http://ttjohn.blogspot.com/2007/01/are-physicists-suffering-from-tychonic.html#links
Memetics and the A Series (3) : Here we try to tackle ways we can actually physically take the work further and briefly review some earlier pioneering work including that of W. J. Freeman, D.J. Kaplan, Rinaldi and others as well as returning to Gale's early review of McTaggart and related matters discussed earlier in detail in this blog, as leading to the essential A series feature of our work. Bearing in mind Aaronson, Strogatz, Sprott, Guastello and others. http://ttjohn.blogspot.com/2007/01/memetics-and-a-series-3.html#links

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A simple new approach involving application of category theory to a number of obscure results and hard to fathom facts. : Various odds and ends. Some reflexions on the A series and its relevance to quantum physics and even near death experience. NDE is a phenomenon still conjectured but not proved to the satisfaction of most people, including me at time of writing and probably even Bruce Greyson. Also there is the point that great experimental rigor is required and for purposes of accuracy the non elimination from statistics of "unwelcome" reports without very good reason. In the case of NDE to be accurate could conceivably prove most rewarding. Some possible pitfalls in computationalism. There is also a brief explanatory addition to "The Application of McTaggart's results to Consciousness Studies and Category Theory." referred to below. http://ttjohn.blogspot.com/2006/10/simple-new-approach-involving.html#links

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The new blog of David Corfield and John Baez : Just a brief reference to a new and important blog. http://ttjohn.blogspot.com/2006/09/new-blog-of-david-corfield-and-john.html#links

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Preliminary plans for a detailed MacA (or Category Theoretic McTaggart A series) : As implied by the title, with quite a lot of detail. http://ttjohn.blogspot.com/2006/08/preliminary-plans-for-detailed-maca-or.html#links

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*** Summary of some work *** : summary of The Application of McTaggart's results to Consciousness Studies and Category Theory : This will hopefully fill the reader in on some earlier material in the blog, relevant to the current work. http://ttjohn.blogspot.com/2006/07/summary-of-some-work.html#links

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Earlier than that reference there is a great deal of earlier work such as

Precognition, dreams and McTaggart's paradox http://ttjohn.blogspot.com/2006/07/precognition-dreams-and-mctaggarts.html#links
Can dreams predict the future ? : Experiments and considerations of them. (The answer to the question is "It is not easy but I am working on it" as per the top paper here). http://ttjohn.blogspot.com/2006/04/do-we-dream-of-future.html

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Entire blog to date, including many more papers than those above, http://ttjohn.blogspot.com/

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And there is a treasure trove of work on Foundations of Quantum Theory, Hidden Variable Theory, TDCS , rTMS, BCI , general psychology experiments and synaesthesia (with ideas in some ways after the manner of the late Jeffrey Gray) as well. There is also a large number of reports, much of it not placed on the web, including my casework on some of Jeffery Gray's synaesthesia subjects and so on. And of course my own patent on time travel which dated back to 1980 and in my view is still largely within the current views.

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(C) Personal Details

Dr. John Yates : 7 Rigault Road, London SW6 4JJ, England.
Tel: 0207 371 7436 email: uv@busi8.freeserve.co.uk

Some highlights: Founded "International Journal of Theoretical Physics" and did pretty
well all the work involved (other than some of the reviewing), without any fees or salary for the first seven years after I founded it.

"International Journal of Theoretical Physics" was, whilst I ran it, an eminently internationally reputable journal in the subject of theoretical physics and at least tolerably reputable. I recruited leading scientists to serve on the Editorial Board, to review publications and to submit papers to it, and they did indeed do all these things. Those I personally recruited included Nobel Prize-winner Prince Louis de Broglie, and other research scientists including David Bohm, Roger Penrose, George Gamov, N.N. Bogolubov, Paul Roman, Yuval Ne'eman and other famous names. Shortly after I left, it published the Deutsch many-worlds interpretation and I probably would have done so too.

Began "Institute for Fundamental Studies Association" for which I recruited in addition four Nobel prize-winners including Brattain and Onsager. This also had many International Business Associates, holding assets in total of more than 4 billion dollars (a lot of money in those days)
.
Travelled world wide in various countries including USSR, Canada, U.S.A., China, Philippines, Thailand, India.

Invented a "Method and Device for enhancing the apparent tachyon particle density", i.e. a time machine, in 1971-1979. Patent GB2051465A .This used Everett many-world theory and electric and magnetic stimulation of the human brain amongst other things. Like so many other inventions it was very temperamental and I am still striving to improve techniques, at my own expense.

I now have a small establishment in India as well as London and recently I have used (with permission from the Maudsley Institute, King's College, London) some of its relatively small list of synaesthesic subjects for further brain research. I may use more subjects for my dream research in India but for the moment am writing some little papers, some references here, to try to improve the field of physics and consciousness research.

At present I am looking chiefly at two ideas.

1. Dream precognition results. Here I favour dynamical systems psychology somewhat along the lines of Lange, but requiring an A series philosophy, may be a satisfactory approach. By adding some ideas due to Stickgold and Hobson, I have already obtained preliminary surprising results. Presently I am proceeding to look at a structure somewhat along the lines of the Sprott work on psychology.

2. Near death experience using my own work on the McTaggart A and B series and many worlds. Briefly I do not believe that B series work using many-worlds-interpretation is likely to be enough, due to the (perhaps basically) disjoint separation of the many worlds in the B
series but for reasons which I have tried to outline in my blogs believe that successful near
death experience results may help to show the necessity of the A series as well as the B series in physics as well as philosophy. For a start it means that some apparently "failed" results (if and when useful results of this nature occur outside anecdotal results, which themselves could be the groundwork of confirmation) in the tests put forward by Fenwick, Greyson and others may in fact establish the NDE phenomenon and indeed give further confirmation of the importance of the A-series.

Generally speaking, I believe that through ignoring the McTaggart A series or subsuming the A series in the B series that important opportunities are being lost and that early calls on quantum theory may be being made, when complex system theory could be more directly appropriate. There are probably many other lines of approach where the A series is an active requirement.

(D) The Institute for Fundamental Studies does have a Neuroscience Department in Vasai, India which I am trying to get started on a very slim budget but it would be more practical if we could do screening first in the UK, rather than more intensively and on a much larger number in India so as to follow up more easily with DCS, rTMS and fMRI etc. if appropriate. There could also be an interesting and worthwhile Television project, dealing for example with synaesthesia. The picture below is of the proposed neuroscience department. That building in Madh Island was unfortunately sold before we could get it but there are temporary headquarters in Vasai. [ The Institute was founded in 1968 and over the years has had many celebrities and Nobel prizewinners etc associated with it. It was constituted in Geneva in 1968 under Arts 60-79 of the Swiss Civil Code. I myself am President and Founder of the Institute].

Work in Progress on application of dynamic systems theory to the A series (2)

2007-05-28T12:50:00.000+01:00

Choice of software.

For much of this work it was found that the Macey & Oster program "Berkeley Madonna (8.3.11)" (Note #1) provided a simple way to give models of real situations and I used this sytem rather than "Stella (3.0.7)" which is rather similar, and has an excellent written instruction handbook (in Hannon (1997)) and numerous example. Stella was used occasionally too, but the models are nearly interchangeable in practice here. Another model I gave careful consideration to using was the G.A. Korn program "Desire", but most of what we wanted to do so far seems possible in Berkeley Madonna. The copy of Desire which I obtained did not come with the Windows distribution. I do in fact have a running Linux box, but as the work had been done so far in Windows it was decided not to use the rather more complex but possibly more flexible Desire at this time. One point of note was that inverse Fourier transforms, for example, if required can be obtained from the quite flexible Algebrus, which is readily available as a Windows program. For much of this work Windows 98SE has been adequate to date.

Madonna, like Stella, has the advantage that the actual models simulated are produced at the time the program is prepared, rather than just leaving us with a lot of algebra to report.

Discussion

Madonna makes it very easy to simulate numerous possible models for a system and it is essential to choose one best for the needs of the time. I have tried a great many models and find that a very simple conscious (waking) / unconscious (dreaming) model can give quite good results.

This model is referred to as N003b.

In this model shown in N003b diag.clp (see Note #4 to find graphs and equations) the unconscious mind (Romeo) is R and the conscious mind (Juliet) is J. The equations N003b equns.rtf can be substituted into Berkeley Madonna.

Further elaborations are briefly noted later in this piece.

Now this model works well for descriptions of precognitive dreams, using the Sprott (2004) values for a hermit Romeo and an eager beaver Juliet. (Note #2)

For Stickgold (postcognitive or Tetris) dreams we need to vary values slightly from the (Sprott, 2004) values of Note #2 which as mentioned below correspond to a 'hermit' Romeo and an 'eager beaver' Juliet. In fact the example graph [N003b graph S a -1.99 c 1.01 d 1.017.bmp] or in brief N003b graph S.bmp uses a slightly more enthusiatic Juliet (with c increased from Sprott's value 1 to 1.01 and d increased from 1 to 1.017) and a slightly less introverted Romeo (with a decreased from -2 to -1.99). e is also varied from the standard value of 1 down to a lower value of 0.6 which permits postcognition (or for these values almost simultaneous cognition which could be lowered further if appropriate).

Now this seems to be a fairly good model to be going on with, and the relative positions of red and black lines with respect to each other can fluctuate by parameter change.

Some slightly different models, including one with some random elements in R to simulate random dream effects, are mentioned in Note #3.

Stickgold's results and my extensions to them

Stickgold's dream creation results devolve around the fact that it appears that we have two different memory systems. The hippocampus codes information on events from our lives. The findings suggest that the brain does not go to the hippocampus to get images for dreams, but to the long-term, neocortical system. Stickgold uses evidence like the fact that in one series of experiments, three amnesic patients with extensive bilateral medial temporal lobe damage produced similar hypnagogic reports to the control sample despite being unable to recall playing the game, suggesting that such imagery may arise without important contribution from the declarative memory system.

I set up a preliminary model M002 (see Note #4) which contains a representation of a sleeping mind (R), a waking mind (J) and a perturbation (Z) (or 'Tetris or ski-ing game') and the details and parameters need to be filled in and/or added to or altered to give flesh to the model.

Then a large number of other models and parameter sets were tried (Note #3) and mainly we used N003b as stated.

A few neurological details as to obtaining choice of model

A Kahn and Hobson (1993) proposed the use of a simple Verhulst equation model as a starting point. In their equation (2) they formally visualise x as the density of images in a dream report and t as the time. This gives

dx/dt = ax -x*x

or in a more advanced form,

d x_t = ( alpha * x_t - x_t * x_t ) * dt + F * x_t * dW_t

where alpha is described by equation (4) of Kahn (1993) as an 'average value', x_t is the stochastic variable and W_t the Wiener process (that is, the basic process of Brownian motion).

B Clearly, remembering and forgetting could be two important features of a model. The second Christos (Christos (1996), Goertzel (1997)) experiment, which uses the Crick-Mitchison (1983) hypothesis (or some similar credible approach) to produce a Hopfield net which (unlike a properly trained Hopfield) produced some positive results.

Sprott (2007) used tanh functions for his neural net model of the logistic map and the same approach could be tried for further work on Christos's problem. Goertzel also has looked at this aspect of the topic of dreams in great detail.

C Flor (1998), for example, uses a simple log-linear model to give the operation of the brain.in terms of task response times.

RT(t) = k * t ^ b

where RT is task response time, t is the time and k and b are constants. This seems to me to be more or less rather like the use of the common Stephens' formula.

D Hannon (1997) mentions stochastic resonance effects in Chapter 16, and such effects can also be incorporated in a model and in fact I did so in the slightly more complicated SR003A which includes some aspects of the Hannon model in the Romeo or dreaming state. In common with results for many cases where modelling is made slightly more complicated but requires more parameters, so far this does not seem to have really paid off at this level of model making. It might be a way forward at a later date however.

E FitzHugh-Nagumo models. Izhikevich (2007) has a large page of publications, some devoted primarily to the FHN effect and Hasegawa (2006) had a lot of articles both in citebase and in the condensed-matter archive arXiv relating to the FHN and the neocortex and indeed small-world results. I found Sailer's (2007) dissertation contained a useful summary of some of the recent work. Hannon (1997) Chapter 11 outlines how it can all be done but the current situation is pointed out in models like that in section D above (SR003A) I have done just a little introductory work here. Use of more known physical parameters over a range might help, perhaps somewhat along the lines of the way Kahn (1993) approached the matter.

F It may be a good idea to differentiate between the forms of our R and J, so it could mean altering the model so that we may for instance want a Hobson and/or Christos style of model for R and say a Flor model for J. And then to get the parameters using bang-bang or Pontryagin method. This complexity has so far not been needed and I tend, by analogy, to look at the realtively high success of the very simple early Kuramoto models and at the fact that later models seem to add more problems for the number of concrete results obtained., admittedly not inconsiderable in some cases.

Results from Model N003b
N003b is tbe model considered most appropriate so far.

N003b equns.rtf are the Berkeley Madonna equations for a very simple model.

The diagram N003b diag.clp shows how it works and it is displayed on the graph. Anyone with a Java enabled copy of Berkeley Madonna can reproduce this system and easily vary parameters.

The small green line on N003b graph.bmp describes a simple impulse or blip, to represent for example a Tetris game, and it is on the same sale as R. The black and red lines are respectively Romeo (call it unconscious mind, dreaming mind or what you will - no complex neurology system or pseudoscientific patter is necessarily implied by the term) and Juliet (conscious) - R and J are both in the same brain.

The a and b values of -2 chosen for Romeo (unconscious mind) are the 'hermit' values (Sprott, 2004). The Juliet values of unity for c and d are the 'eager beaver' values (Sprott, 2004). This suggests that the conscious mind is eager to look and to interact and the unconsious mind appears more like a hermit, (which may well have hidden depths of course). The two of course do interact and in the present model the blip is only supposed to interact with the unconscious mind, or in a dream if we like. These are preliminary choices only to keep in line with earlier work. In fact it was not found that substantial variations from these reasonable choices do much more than add parameters unless there are clear reasons to do so.

N, M and P of course just confirm the there is a real pulse or blip at around time 31, affecting an otherwise blank or 'normalised' mind in the way shown on the graph.

As e is raised from a value of unity through 2 (as shown on the graph N003b e 2.bmp - similar notation for other graphs) to say 10, the time values of R and J peaks get lower and lower, until there are two series peaks for each on the graph, one being dream precognition peaks quite early and the other possible real peaks when the dream comes true. By the time e is 1000 and there is strong interaction, the main peaks occur 'at or around' the time of the pulse again.

Note that if we try e less than unity, at say 0.5 both R and J peaks rise to times later than the pulse. So clearly on this model the intensity of the pulse has to be finely adjusted to allow a 'precognition' effect.

The black line (the dream and/or unconscious mental impingence ) rises just before the red line (the observed result) in time - which can be through direct observation or memory of the dream. By altering the parameters the extent of the black line's peak preceeding the red line's peak or vice versa can be altered. In fact in Fig 1 they are about equal, as in the case of a dream and its first physical recollection being almost simultaneous - clearly the various parameters allow fine tuning as to their relative positions.

At a zero value of e, there are still peaks at very high time values and these are probably simply explained by model interpretation, model crudity and butterfly effect. At e = 0 there is a very strong butterfly effect as can be readily seen by altering INIT R and INIT J by say 0.001 on this simple and illustrative model. This variation is very clear in an R v J (or phase diagram), and is extremely important here just at e = 0.To put it differently, in the A series if the past, present and future are laid out on the same time line like this, the past present and future may not map adequately onto a B series diagram, so at large times, or at otherwise anomalous times, we cannot expect such a model to necessarily be suitable. We might well feel therefore that in our pseudo A series model, in practice high large or anomalous peaks can fairly be disgarded though there is a mathematical reason for them to be there.

On the other hand for very large values of e, or very large interactions, the time values of R and J may not show very great anomalies at large times. In fact they may become rather pedestrian, as they seem to do here at e = 1000.

As pointed out above, if we try e less than unity, at say 0.5 both R and J peaks rise to times later than the pulse, and if e is very much larger than unity the results again seem pedestrian. So clearly on this model the intensity of the pulse interaction has to be finely adjusted to allow a 'precognition' effect. But on this model there is a reasonably wide range of interaction adjustment allowing us to obtain precognitive effects, not necessarily a single point "sweet spot" or cusp.

Conclusions

Up to a point the Dream postcognition model (Stickgold) (Figure 8) and the Dream precognition model (Yates) (Figure 1) speak for themselves. And we can also see that the interesting precognition effect can occur over a serious but possibly brief range of parameter values, as remarked above, and does not necessarily just refer to a singularity or a cusp. Also, the whole idea fits in well with the A series idea as essentially we are only considering a fragment or portion of the time of one individual, and his or her past/present/future.

There is clearly very much more to be said about the use and utility of such a model, which could lead to further awe-inspiring results and further experiments, possibly of a very targeted nature in terms of psychological environment. That is: We are not thinking of yet another general dream survey of the kind which we already have in large numbers, and which indeed are often useful and of great worth.

Much more mathematical explication may be advisable as well as more experiments. Both can occur together. There is a great deal of ongoing experimentation (for example in Garcia-Ojalvo (2004)) from many fronts and I am deeply impressed by the relatively easy blog of Harris (2007, and also 2007a) and likewise by the fine philosophical and psychological comments of Draaisma (2000) also quoted with some approval in Harris's blog.

I will just conclude for the moment in pointing out the relatively easy use of Fourier transforms using the present type of model, perhaps directly or by using the Algebrus program (Note #1) and the possible easy relation of holographic models to the present model in this way. I give some brief but perhaps relevant and important details in Note #5 where I further indicate why the homunculus paradox in our model need not, even carefully bearing in mind Draaisma (2000) on that matter, be of any difficulty with the present approach.

Important Note

The appropriate graphs are essential and were posted, but anyone who cannot read them on this blog can get them from me by email or by post (normally Airmail from London, England).

References

There are other references located in earlier blog entries but I have tried to include some of the more important ones used here.

Bohm D., Hiley B.J., (1993) "The Undivided Universe" p353, Routledge.ISBN 0-415-12185-X or on a tribute website http://www.vision.net.au/~apaterson/science/david_bohm.htm#HOLOMOVEMENT

Christos, G. (1996) Investigation of the Crick-Mitchison Reverse-Learning Dream Sleep Hypothesis in a Dynamic Setting. Neural Networks, 9, 427 - 434.

Crick F, Mitchison G., (1983), "The function of dream sleep", Nature 304, 111-114

Draaismsa, D. (2000), "Metaphors of the Mind", particularly chapter 7, Cambridge, ISBN 0 521 65024 0

Flor R., Dooley K., (1998), Noetic Journal, 1(2): 168-173

Goertzel B., (1997) "From Complexity to Creativity", Chapter 10: 'Dream Dyanmics' , Plenum

Garcia-Ojalvo J, Elowitz M.B., Strogatz S.H. (2004), "Modeling a synthetic multicellular clock: repressilators coupled by quorum sensing", Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A., Jul 27;101(30):10955-60. Epub 2004 Jul 15.

Hasegawa H., (2006) for example http://arxiv.org/abs/cond-mat/0506301

Hannon B., & Matthias R., (1997) "Modelling Dynamic Biological Systems" , Springer.

Harris (2007), http://nine-radical.blogspot.com/2006/11/preview-of-blog-in-early-1990s-our.html ; especially "5. Gems in a junkyard" on holography.

Harris (2007a), a wide range of often relevant papers can be found at http://www.cnel.ufl.edu/hybrid/publication_paper.htm, particularly for example his reference 9 Harris, Nicolelis et al "Ascertaining the importance of neurons to develop better brain-machine interfaces"

Izhikevich E.M. , (2007) http://vesicle.nsi.edu/users/izhikevich/publications/index.htm

Kahn D., Hobson J.A., (1993) "Self Organization Theory of Dreaming", Dreaming, Vol. 3, No. 3

Prideaux J., (2000) "Comparison between Karl Pribram's "Holographic Brain Theory" and more conventional models of neuronal computation", http://www.acsa2000.net/bcngroup/jponkp/

Pribam K., (2007) http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Holonomic_Brain_Theory

Sailer X., (2006), "Controlling Excitable Media With Noise" (Dissertation), edoc.hu-berlin.de/dissertationen/sailer-franz-xaver-2006-03-31/PDF/sailer.pdf , Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Mathematisch-Naturwissenschaftliche Fakultät I

Sprott J.C., (2004) "Dynamical Models of Love", Nonlinear Dynamics, Psychology, and Life Sciences, Vol. 8, No. 3, July.

Sprott J.C., (2007), "Neural Net Model of Logistic Map", technical online notes, http://sprott.physics.wisc.edu/chaos/nnmap.htm

Stickgold R., (2005), "Sleep-dependent memory consolidation" , Nature, Vol 437, p1272 ; popularly in Leutwyler K, (2000) "Tetris Dreams", Scientific American, October 16.

Yates J., (2006), "Can dreams predict the future ?",
http://ttjohn.blogspot.com/2006/04/do-we-dream-of-future.html ; and many other entries in this blog.

Notes

#1. Berkeley Madonna: http://www.berkeleymadonna.com/
Stella: http://www.iseesystems.com/ ; a very useful guide book for Stella and also helpful for Berkeley Madonna is Hannon & Matthias (1997)
Desire: Korn, G.A.: "Advanced Dynamic-system Simulation: Model Replication and Monte Carlo Simulation", Wiley, New York, 2007.
Algebrus: http://www.astrise.com/software/algebrus/

#2. Specifically this is the model described in equation (4) of Sprott (2004).page 310. Calculations with the slightly simpler model (1) seem ultimately to lead to similar overall conclusions.

#3. SR003A
This includes a random factor during the dream. It does not improve our results technically so far. There are more parameters, not just e but f,k1,k2,k3,F2.

This one has both R and J involved and even e = 100 does not seem to move the pulse much from a sort of 31 on R and J - this is with f = 5

It did not seem to make much difference anywhere f was between +50 and -50and eventually tried e over +100 to -100

So both R and J are involved - but there is not much that is not pedestrian.

Other working notes for a few models are mentioned in this note (Note #3) and it all could be expanded on in a later essay - if there seems need to.

A001btempnew This actually seem to give a meaningful result at only about f = 81 (like e = 81 effectively) and no precog. effect. It also included more terms like a sine wave and a random term in R an a cusp effect. But the pulse was only on J which seems to be one source of less interest for the model, whilst the random (or dream) effect was on R.

N003a which had not connection whatever to the pulse and n e term, also had butterfly like behaviour for small INIT J and INIT R but a good behaviour for slightly larger INIT values, say over 0.001 each i.e. The existence of the pulse does not seem to determine other characteristics than that conncerned with the pulse itself - and we should keep away from very high and very low times on the model, probably.

There were many other models tried including A001, SR003, SR002, M004.

#4. Captions to diagrams, and equation details:

Figure 8 DREAM POSTCOGNITION MODEL (Stickgold)
Figure 1 DREAM PRECOGNITION MODEL (Yates)
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Figure 1 N003b graph e1
Figure 2 N003b graph e2
Figure 3 N003b e10 graph
Figure 4 N003b e1000 graph
Figure 5 N003b e0.5 graph
Figure 6 N003b e0.1 graph
Figure 7 N003b e 0 graph
Figure 8 N003b graph S a -1.99 c 1.01 d 1.017
Figure 9 SR003A graph
Figure 10 N003b diag
Figure 11 SR003A diag
-----------------------------------------------
N003b equns.rtf is the following:

These are the Madonna equations for a very simple model. The diagram shows how it works and it is displayed on the graph. Anyone with a Java enabled copy of Berkeley Madonna can reproduce this system and easily vary parameters.

The small green line describes a simple impulse or blip, to represent for example a Tetris game, and it is on the same sale as R. The black and red lines are respectively Romeo (call it unconscious mind, dreaming mind or what you will - no complex neurology system or pseudoscientific patter is necessarily implied by the term) and Juliet (conscious) - R and J are both in the same brain.

The a and b values of -2 chosen for Romeo (unconscious mind) are the 'hermit' values (Sprott, 2004). The Juliet values of unity for c and d are the 'eager beaver' values (Sprott, 2004). This suggests that the conscious mind is eager to look and to interact and the unconsious mind appears more like a hermit, (which may well have hidden depths of course). The two of course do interact and in the present model the blip is only supposed to interct with the unconscious mind, or in a dream if we like. These are preliminary choices only to keep in line with earlier work. In fact it was not found that substantial variations from these reasonable choices do much more than add parameters unless there are clear reasons to do so.

N, M and P of course just confirm the there is a real pulse or blip at around time 31, affecting an otherwise blank or 'normalised' mind in the way shown on the graph.

As e is raised from a value of unity through 2 to say 10, the time values of R and J peaks get lower and lower, until there are two series peaks for each on the graph, one being dream precognition peaks quite early and the other possible real peaks when the dream comes true. By the time e is 1000 and there is strong interaction, the main peaks occur 'at or around' the time of the pulse again.

Note that if we try e less than unity, at say 0.5 both R and J peaks rise to times later than the pulse.

At a zero value of e, there are still peaks at very high time values and these are probably simply explained by model interpretation, model crudity and butterfly effect. By e = 0 there is a very strong butterfly effect as can be seen by altering INIT R and INIT J by say 0.001 on this simple and illustrative model. To put it differently, in the A series if the past, present and future are laid out on the same time line like this, the past present and future may not map adequately onto a B series diagram, so at very large times, or at otherwise anomalous times, we cannot expect such a model to necessarily be suitable.

On the other hand for very large values of e, or very large interactions, the time values of R and J may not show very great anomalies. In fact they may become rather pedestrian, s they seem to do here.}

{Top model}

{Reservoirs}
d/dt (R) = + x1
INIT R = 0
d/dt (J) = + x2
INIT J = 0
d/dt (Z) = + x3
INIT Z = 0

{Flows}
x1 = a * R + b * J * (1 - ABS (J) ) + e * Z
x2 = c * R * (1 - ABS(R) )+ d * J
x3 = h * SQUAREPULSE (N,M) - h * SQUAREPULSE(N+ P,M) + h1 * SQUAREPULSE(N + h2,M) -h1 * SQUAREPULSE(N+P+h2,M)

{Functions}
a = -2
b = -2
c = 1
d = 1
h = 0.1
h1 = -0.1
h2 = 1
N = 31
M = 1
P = 1
e = 1
{Globals}
{End Globals}

----------------------------
SR003A equns.rtf is the following :
{Top model}

{Reservoirs}
d/dt (R) = + dR
INIT R = 0
d/dt (J) = + dJ
INIT J = 0
d/dt (Z) = + dZ
INIT Z = 0

{Flows}
dR = a * R * (1 - R) + b * J + e* Z + TT * (1 + k3 * R)
dJ = c * R + d * J + f* Z
dZ = R1+g * R

{Functions}
S = h * SQUAREPULSE (N, M) - h * SQUAREPULSE(N + P, M ) + P * 0
a = -1.8
b = -2
c = 1
d = 0.6
g = 0.8
e = 1
N = 31
M = 1
h = 2
P = 1
f = 0.1
k = 0
k1 = 0
k2 = 0.02
TT = k * RANDOM (k1,k2)
k3 = 1
V = 0
F1 = SIN (X1 * F2)
X1 = time
F2 = 5
V1 = 1
R1 = V * S + V1 * S * F1
{Globals}
{End Globals}

----------------------------
M002 equations are the following:
{Top model}

{Reservoirs}
d/dt (R) = + dR
INIT R = 0
d/dt (J) = + dJ
INIT J = 0
d/dt (Z) = + dZ
INIT Z = 0

{Flows}
dR = a * R + b * J + e* Z
dJ = c * R + d * J + f* Z
dZ = S+g * R

{Functions}
S = h * SQUAREPULSE (N, M) - h * SQUAREPULSE(N + P, M )
a = -1.8
b = -2
c = 1
d = 0.6
g = 0.8
e = 1
N = 31
M = 1
h = 2
P = 1
f = 0.1
{Globals}
{End Globals}
-----------------------------------------------
A001btempnew
{Top model}

{Reservoirs}
d/dt (R) = + dR
INIT R = 0
d/dt (J) = + dJ
INIT J = 0
d/dt (Z) = + dZ
INIT Z = 0

{Flows}
dR = a * R * (1 - R) + b * J + TT * (1 + k3 * R)+ k4 * R^3
dJ = c * R + d * J + f* Z
dZ = R1+g * R

{Functions}
S = h * SQUAREPULSE (N, M) {- h * SQUAREPULSE(N + P, M )} + P * 0
a = -1.8
b = -2
c = 1
d = 0.6
g = 0.8
N = 31
M = 1
h = 2
P = 1
f = 70
k = 0
k1 = 0
k2 = 0.02
TT = k * RANDOM (k1,k2)
k3 = 1
V = 0
F1 = SIN (X1 * F2)
X1 = time
F2 = 5
V1 = 1
R1 = V * S + V1 * S * F1
k4 = 1
{Globals}
{End Globals}
----------------------------------
#5. To do a fast Fourier transform of say R or J in Berkeley Madonna we just press F on the graph of R or J versus time, altering the scaling if desired (in Graph/Axis Settings/Scales) so we can see the frequencies more clearly. Then if we want to we can, say, remove from or add to the frequencies displayed and then do an inverse FT if desired, bearing in mind of course, the comments in Harris (2007) or Prideaux (2000) or for a current overall assessment Pribam (2007). We can also read Bohm & Hiley (1993). The intention is not to assume a holographic interpretation of the brain but the FTs and inverse FTs condition us to think of possible holographic type interpretations of our model, though of course we are not obliged to do so in terms of what we have said so far.

Draaisma (2000) points out the apparent possible relevance of the homunculus paradox to any holographic model or assessment in several places in his book, in particular on pp 156-7, 178, 212-18, 226-8. First I will point out that this fine book contains much philosophical comment, which by its nature demands constructive consideration. Briefly - and of course there is much more to say - mentioning his comments on p218 it seems to me that since each part of a hologram includes a total (though perhaps unclear) image (Prideaux (2000), Harris (2007)) so too if a truly complete image is said to actually include the homunculus, the homunculus will fade along with the image. So that an accurate representation which we give will include the homunculus.

For example if we take a somewhat Spinozan view of the universe, the total image of the moment of a person's consideration may well include the whole universe and this concept is possibly a good enough rough metaphysical expose - the metaphysics people often say things like this, it fits in well enough with the idea of the butterfly effect etc. Even though we aren't using it in the present study - and it is important to remember that we are not trying to write metaphysics and I feel that the homunculus concept tends to rather betray us into that field - it is probably not difficult to see how we could mathematically give a loose exposition through the work of Prideaux (2000) or even at a pinch Bohm (1993) - in fact a few weeks ago the idea was also independently brought to my mind during a popular lecture on Bohm at the Scientific and Medical Network, who often seem to deal with such rather outre ideas.

Given the result of the last paragraph, the model which we consider must inevitably be a rather faded and blurred hologram and we are downright lucky to have even that. In fact we are not likely to find the homunculus except as a blur somewhere in the diagram. So we can say "This is not like the story of the little Dutch girl holding a can with a picture on it of a little Dutch girl holding a can with a picture ..." to an undecipherable infinite regress - and you know even if it were, infinite regresses expressed as infinite series are not so bad in physics. But here there is, as far as I can see, no essential infinite regress anyway, and thus no homunculus problem implied or entailed. In physics it is almost a sad thing when a paradox is not there - we recall Zeno's paradox being said to be a precursor of the calculus and so on. But still, if a paradox is not there then it isn't, and that for the moment at least my own belief is that such an interpretation may quell homunculus paradox worries, even if we may be left with some even more inspired and oracular ideas in the painstakingly long run in considering, if we can and wish to, .holograms.

Work in Progress on application of dynamic systems theory to the A series (1)

2007-03-30T10:44:00.000+01:00

At this point there seem to be a variety of ways to proceed. The FitzHugh-Nagumo (FHN) model, as used by Longtin (2002) and others, could perhaps be very useful - we'd have liked to have gone down that road - but does not seem a sufficiently developed approach at the present time ( Note 1) and as it stands could add complications without adding enough merit.

The approach, roughly defined by Lange (2001) and indeed Guastello (2002) also carries problems.

Something a bit more basic, beginning with the work of Sprott (2005) and Gottman (2002), is a more basic approach. There seems no reason why it cannot be a useful line to follow, bearing in mind the analogous success of the Kuramoto model and then extended work along the same lines. As Strogatz (2003) points out, that very basic model and indeed almost too simple a model did lead to further breakthroughs. So something basic is what we will try: At this point, in our hearts is phase locking of a leaky integrate-and-fire model - at the very least - but we stick with looking for a simple and fairly descriptive model at least for a start. Like Winfree, perhaps, we are looking for early experimental success.

Dreams were first made predictable by the work of Stick gold (2005) who showed us how to actually create dreams in advance. Whilst we would like to consider them to be dreamt prior to their creation as I seem to have already done in accord with possible expectations (Yates, 2006), the neurology should have similarity so we can look at the Stickgold work first.

I am waiting to obtain my copy of Stella and may use it to explore the present situation in more detail. I have already looked briefly at Rinaldi's (1998) Laura-Petrach model (Note 2), obtained graphs, and thus note that suitable comprehensible models are possible.

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References

Gottman J.M., et al., (2002), "The Mathematics of Marriage", MIT Press , ISBN : 0-262-57230-3

Guastello S.J., (2001), "Nonlinear Dynamics in Psychology", Discrete Dynamics in Nature and Society, Vol. 6,11-79 ; "Progress in applied nonlinear dynamics: Welcome to NDPLS Volume 8." Nonlinear Dynamics, Psychology, and Life Sciences, 8, 1-16.

Lange R., Schredl M., Houran J., (2001), "What Precognitive Dreams are Made of", Dynamical Psychology ; http://goertzel.org/dynapsyc/2000/Precog%20Dreams.htm#_ftn1

Longtin (2002) Fluctuation and Noise Letters, Vol. 2, No. 3 (2002) L183-L203

Rinaldi S., (1998), "Laura and Petrarch: An intriguing case of cyclical love dynamics", Siam J. Appl. Math., Vol. 58, No. 4, pp. 1205 - 1221

Sprott J.C., (2005) , "Dynamical Models of Happiness", Nonlinear Dynamics, Psychology, and Life Sciences , Vol. 9, No. 1, January; and others.

Stickgold R., (2005), "Sleep-dependent memory consolidation" , Nature, Vol 437, p1272

Strogatz S., (2003) "Sync", p60 and elsewhere, Penguin Books, UK. ISBN: 0-141-00763-X

Thomson-Gale publ. (2005), "The Rise and Fall of Catastrophe Theory" from "Science and Its Times", 2005-2006 Thomson Gale

Weckwesser W, (2006) http://math.colgate.edu/~wweckesser/solver/LauraAndPetrarch.shtml

Yates J., (2006), "Can dreams predict the future ?".
http://ttjohn.blogspot.com/2006/04/do-we-dream-of-future.html

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Notes

1. The following quote gives one Encylopedia style summary (Thomson-Gale, 2005) of the recent situation on catastrophe theory: "Despite the initial acceptance of the theory, it eventually became controversial. The number of variables involved in a discontinuous process must be small in order for catastrophe theory to model it with any accuracy. In the real world, however, especially in inexact sciences such as biology and sociology, these conditions rarely occur. One less than practical application of catastrophe theory involved its use to model the escalation of hostilities between nations. The variables used were threat and cost. It was argued that catastrophes—in this case, sudden attacks or surrenders—would occur when threat and cost were both high. Although such a model might be used to describe theoretical nations in very general terms, many more variables come into play when real people and real nations are involved. Therefore, such a model could not be used to make predictions of any practical value. Catastrophe theory was also applied with varying degrees of success and failure to social topics ranging from the stock market to prison riots to eating disorders."

"Varying degrees of success and failure" is probably the key term. Results depend very much on the particular model and the degree and variety of accuracy expected from it. The attitude of mind of a theoretical chemist rather than that of a fundamental mathematician or even psychologist is probably more appropriate in very general terms, but all techniques (including catastrophe theory in that name or some other) available to the problem could need to be applied. In that sense we are still in accord with workers such as Winfree or even May, up to a point.

2. I used the stimulus made by the computer in producing the dream to place Laura as the conscious mind and Petrarch as the dreaming (unconscious) mind of the same person. This could mean that beta1 is not zero (when it is, you do not seem to get a phase diagram for the values considered). I mainly used L(0) as 2 with delta as 0 and lowered the coupling between 'conscious' and 'unconscious' by bringing beta1 down to 0.1 .

The periods used were not 'years' but brief periods like days or weeks. In fact the interesting results for me occurred mainly within the first three 'periods'. I'm not too clear how gamma is best interpreted in this rough model and did best leaving it alone.

Also raising beta1 to 10 (strong coupling between conscious and unconscious) was tried and increasing the rate of fade for Laura to alpha1 as 100 and a quick fade for Petrarch as alpha2 as 10 . Neither gave an obvious loop.

I will not show the graphs as readily available mathematics programs like Madonna can produce graphs. Indeed some graphs can be readily obtained using a web solver and for Laura/Petrarch I would mention Weckwesser (2006). Values such as alpha1,2,3 as (3,1,0.1) and beta1,2,3 as (10,10,10) gamma as 1.0 , delta as 0 , AL as 2.0 and AP as - 1 are intriguing for example. What is needed is a slightly more precise approach which I am presently considering.

Memetics and the A Series (3)

2007-01-26T06:45:00.000+01:00

In "Memetics and the A series (2)" we looked at the Hurst exponent, in an effort to use it in an A series context. Aside from the fact that the use of such concatenations of scalars was simply a tentative start - which could yet bear fruit - there turned out to be a lot of other problems, which were discussed. Rohani's efforts to use the Hurst coefficient for research purposes of not perhaps a pedestrian nature, but at least a conventional one, and the cries of woe of others (not the least Kaplan (Note 4) for example) has made it seem expedient for the moment to consider other avenues as well as the Hurst exponent.

Overall, then, and bearing in mind the difficulties, it was decided to look further, and also to look further at other people's ideas and conjectures. The most obvious thing to consider was the idea that throughout the literature was the 'strange attractor' idea, often applied to memetics. We mention for example R. D. Smith, Gabora, Combs and Rinaldi in this connection.

But first we note that Saperstein (1997) says - and his view merely echoes that of many others -"the paradigm of chaos was intimately associated with battle was certainly well known to von Clausewitz and the earlier Greek military historians. ..... do we gain anything from the visits of the soldier and statesman to the academy of the mathematician and physicist, besides some new, exotic descriptive metaphors (e. g., "strange attractor," "self-organizing criticality")?" ..." It is not evident to me that a single metaphor/tool—like chaos—is available or useful to us in dealing with a world system characterized by "complexity." Instead of specific new tools, these metaphors can contribute to the development of the new attitudes required for the more complex modern world. They can help sharpen minds dulled by a Newtonian world view so as to be alert to all new possibilities." Now whilst Saperstein's article is nicely presented, we are not really interested in pursuing "exotic metaphors"in this context.

We know more or less exactly (in mathematical terms) what we are talking about with the phrase "strange attractor" and that point must be strictly held to when we look at comments embedded in the literature.

That being said we summarise comments on Gabora (Note 1), Combs (Note 2), and Rinaldi (Note 3). Rinaldi seems to benefit us with more detail than most of these writers, but my words in the last paragraph apply, that is we are still not sure what he is talking about in precise mathematical terms.

Notes 1, 2, and 3 aside, out best hope seems still to be with Sprott and Puu if we want to use chaos theory. It is probably plain that I consider the other work above as mainly largely too speculative to take extremely seriously. But the papers listed in "Supplementary References" below, and some of the work cited in Part (2) are (or should be) worthy ones. And even if they are sometimes having little obviously memetically applicable content, they help to build up a picture for further work.

Walter J. Freeman (1991) claims to have found strange attractors in EEG results concerned with the olfactory system, again not too surprising as they are nowadays a simple result of basic maths. He says : "The images suggest that an act of perception consists of an explosive leap of the dynamic system from the "basin" of one chaotic attractor to another; the basin of an attractor is the set of initial conditions from which the system goes into a particular behaviour. The bottom of a bowl would be a basin of attraction for a ball placed anywhere along the sides of the bowl. In our experiments, the basin for each attractor would be defined by the receptor neurons that were activated during training to form the nerve cell assembly. We think the olfactory bulb and cortex maintain many chaotic attractors, one for each odourant an animal or human being can discriminate. Whenever an odourant becomes meaningful in some way, another attractor is added, and all the others undergo slight modification."

He goes on to say "One profound advantage chaos may confer on the brain is that chaotic systems continually produce novel activity patterns. We propose that such patterns are crucial to the development of nerve cell assemblies that differ from established assemblies. More generally, the ability to create activity patterns I may underlie the brain's ability to generate insight and the "trials" of trial and-error problem solving." and "We have found widespread, apparently chaotic behaviour in other parts of the brain." Freeman's theories are currently regarded, in part at least, as unproven and controversial (Bear, 2001)

Lucas (2002) goes on to elaborate the idea into a complete mental (but rather short on detailed maths as presented) scheme but at this point I feel it not necessary to follow suit. By now Tsuda (2001) and many others have also amplified the strange attractor idea into an inclusion in fully fledged brain descriptions.

Well there is certainly not a fully accepted model of the brain as is shown by the multifarious other brain theories available, but it does rather leave the way fairly clear to work out some kind of memetics approach within the A series, and realistically using chaos theory and (perhaps) strange attractors, as we are not bound to find an equation for individual neurons but just general effects, importantly within the A series, and in a way which could also encompass Hurst coefficients.

So if we are to produce a result it may prove best to try to neither achieve a major global nor a highly specific result to start with, like the number of terrorist bombings in a certain area. I did do some sums on such matters but so far, like Edmonds, do not see a very clear way ahead there though I appreciate the work of Gatherer and others.

To recapitulate, we did suggest in an earlier exercise (Yates, 2006) that by suitable primes, it was possible to arrange for a subject to have a particular dream, not a ordinary one but one dependent on future events not considered by the subject in advance. This followed on our earlier dissertations on dream psychology where we noticed that Professor Stickgold could produce dreams, almost to order, in at least some subjects. So the reasoning was, if he could produce dreams after stimulation, would we be able to produce some dreams before stimulation. I also pointed out that there were going to be some knotty problems in interpretation and in repetition of the phenomena. At this point the sort of objections which arose could almost be of the order of those which arose with reference to Asimov's early joke paper on the imagined substance "thiotimoline".

Having made that experiment work on dreaming ahead of the stimulation to dream, I then looked (as indeed I had done before) for factors related to such predictions, which I found even in Professor Hobson's work and again we must carefully point out that he certainly is not of the Freudian or Jungian school, and has always taken a very down to earth view on dreams as can be told from his many books and papers, cited elsewhere in these blogs.

In Part 2 of this paper I outlined the difficulties with experiments on objects and animals. Then the next stage may be to look at memes of a nature which may relate to human beings. There is a large amount of scientific, quasi-scientific, sociological material and so on. For the moment my approach follows that of Sprott to a greater extent than the not dissimilar view of Guastello (Note 5 ) for various reasons but a principal one seemed to be that it looked relatively easy to me. We leave Freeman's ideas in our pocket for the moment but I will again stress the idea that "the map is not the territory".

From our standpoint, we can refer back to Gale's (1967) excellent anthology of some of the work up to that time, and notice that on p69 he gives three differing ways to deal with McTaggart's paradox these being

(1) The B series alone is enough
(2) The A series alone is enough
(3) either the A series is enough or the B series is enough but they must not be confused with one another.

Now I take a fourth view and that is that we need a B series (which roughly speaking, and exceptions aside) does for physics and an A series which on the whole we use for human perception and other matters, like the possibility of an immortal soul. But both A and B series are required, and often enough they use similar mathematical techniques. If we are not diligent we can certainly fall into philosophical and, depending on the nature of A and B series, mathematical and logical problems. This is a newish view not considered by Gale and other workers. Certainly it would be unwarranted to assume a simple mapping between A and B series as I have indicated in detail in earlier blogs, hence avoiding McTaggart's paradox.

But even within the A series, we are best not generally assuming that "the map is the territory" and if we are careful there is no need for an infinite regress.
To put it very simply, we see things we think we know should be found in an A series,we try to identify them (as we did with the Hurst exponent in "Memetics and the A Series (2)" for example) and then we describe them in terms of the A series. This of course normally may require mathematics but we have to be careful that a past, present and future are involved. This will give us an A series or a pseudo A series written after the form of a B series at worst.

Its very hard to know how far we can go with these pseudo A series in my opinion.

One thing that can be done is to try to extend non-linear dynamical psychology. First we note two very interesting recent cases of that by Sprott (2004, 2005). These involves such things as a mathematical description of Love and Happiness and this is really quite a clear mathematical example to the point where it is used by Strogatz (1994), Speigelman (1997), Parwani (2001) and others to provide elementary/advanced training courses in chaos theory, catastrophe theory and the like. Somewhat similar work has even been done on the Mexican wave (Farkas, 2006).

Most of this is welcome enough, it seems to me. But we need more useful attempts to universalise the phenomena and specific figures for actual events are often lacking, although some figures appear in the work of, for example, Jones (1995) , Helbing (2000) and Aks & Sprott (2003). The latter paper is interesting for two reasons : Firstly it goes into much detail on the Necker cube phenomenon (which of course is like the duckrabbit discussed in the earlier blogs ) and secondly insofar as it applies directly to neuroscience and we are left musing the comment "During the last decade, it has been established that a large number of natural systems containing several interacting individual components have statistically similar dynamical properties, independent of the particular details of the system (italics mine). Examples include earthquakes, population dynamics, DNA base sequence structure, epidemic outbreaks, and various cognitive and reaction time behaviours. Examination of the statistical properties of these system fluctuations has revealed dynamics with well-defined generic scaling properties in the form of power laws .... etc". We bear in mind the Packard-Ruelle-Takens method and also Aaronson's (2006) recent comments about the universality of NP-complete results, considered since the early 1970s.

But the work of Aaronson (2006) makes it clear where conjecture can lead simply to disaster and at least in his flamboyant exercise in that paper, he clearly seems right into the B series when he speaks of quantum computing and there are problems there, when serious attempts are made to express directly in terms of the B series, ideas that in fact seem to come from the A series.

Strogatz (1994), Sprott (2004, 2005), Jones (1995) Spiegelman (1997) and Parwani (2001) seem to be writing largely in A series terms but flowing over to a limited extent to the B series, whereas the problems in this sort of position come out clearer in Aaronson's (2006) work I think. Aaronson takes a great interest in quantum computation so this effect seems normal, natural and almost expected. In fact Aaronson's (2006) exercise in places looks a bit like one of Sprott's (2004, 2005) exercises on love and happiness gone wrong, perhaps with some humorous intent by Aaronson but it seems to me close to the amusement often allied with bizarre and important curiosity. One of my own pet slugs seemed to show such amazed curiosity when I put down extra food for it last night, but perhaps I anthropomorphise there a bit too much.

We need to bear in mind that some, if not all, of these A series uses can be construed as faux-A series. That is in the sense that some peope would claim to find similar B series results in one way or another. But we must bear in mind that we have tried to find things that we know we would expect to find in an A series, identify them, describe them and try to use them. And we really need to distinguish two things from one another. Firstly, is there a difference between the A series and the B series ? Secondly, are certain items, for sure, A series or B series? Now we can be sure on the first query. The A series gives us a past, a present and a future and more, while the B series perhaps gives easier mathematical conjectures. Roughly like the difference between tensed time and tenseless time. There is a difference between A series and B series. On the second query, usual physical 'rough assumptions' (no worse than say renormalisation problems) can always appear at the present state of the art. Certainly some items or manipulations clearly seem one or the other but as elsewhere in life there are margins of doubt. At the moment we are probably at least no better off than physics was on mass renormalization without the RG groups.We do know, though, that an inappropriate mix of A and B series will lead to paradoxes according to McTaggart.

Well now we have indicated at least some of the ways the A series may be used. There definitely seems the groundwork for further progress now.

For example there is beginning to appear ways, at least in principle, how an element of precognition could be detected. Typically dream precognition has been said to be related to intense emotional experience. It has to be stressed that at the current state of the art, no seriously satisfactory evidence other than anecdotal is available and an open and rather sceptical viewpoint has to be considered for that, but of course there are countless anecdotal cases which claim precognitive results in cases like 9/11 .

In the case of the experiments that we have done, it is true that we obtained positive results. But we would certainly like to obtain a series of independently controlled trials to the same effect. With direct mental involvement particularly, this may not be easy. The feeling is that usually results evaporate when supervision and scaled up psychology experiments are tried for anything so ambitious. The earlier work in this blog has tried to find out why positive results even for very large and clear systems take so long to emerge. And more often than that, these involved simple models like the solar system, physical rather than obviously psychological. Stanley Milgram, whose work I greatly admire, was one of those who was able to stand by his results in experimental psychology, to world acclaim. On the other hand some effects, even when they are physically obvious on examination, may simply remain as 'anecdotal' and be suppressed in the way results regarded as 'currently unfavorable' so often are. For very straightforward esperiments sometimes this is clearly this suppression is often dispensed with quickly. We look for example at early repetitions of the Milliken oil drop experiment where some results were clearly suppressed. And we earlier in this blog mentioned chemical reactions, where results dependent on chaos were simply apparently omitted as not falling within the limits which experimenters would have expected. And then of course we have the almost-parable of Semmelweiss.

Here we are not witch-hunting in advance - but we bear in mind that many of the early Rhine experiments are now regarded as fraudulent after clear admissions by their practitioners and other experiments on children as apparently involving pedophilia also have perhaps to be excluded, though that it seems that 'pedophile' is now a current cry by small children resisting arrest by the police,whether their complaints are true or not. I'm all in favour of doubt to the level of people like Randi but we do need to be sure if and when it is justified given the circumstances.

We looked at somewhat dubious and borderline work such as some experiments on 'synaesthesia' and earlier in this blog I have mildly queried some examples, done interviews of synaesthetes and experiments on them and tried to estimate roughly the apparent present state of the art in that field. The Perky effect appears also to be borderline but the evidence is still not all in, though some hazard a guess that most of it is. And now we are left with the matter of near death experience. I have spoken to Dr. Peter Fenwick about this and he seems to hold a very positive point of view, and Dr. Bruce Greyson also suggests that there may be much evidence available which has not yet come in but allows that consideration of NDEs may also have a psychotherapuetic value. Now I have unfortunately in my blogs made things a little more difficult as I have pointed out that hitherto considered but then omitted cases of NDE may actually be part of evidence of a striking success in discovery of NDEs !

I do not ignore the many apparent continuing successes in ESP and such like and certainly Dr. Fenwick mentioned some of those to me. However other people, often very eminent ones have very negative opinions on ESP and such like. At the moment therefore, I feel that it may be contentious to include these issues in a program. Dean Radin's (2007) work, for example, is well known but I enclose a current Wiki URL on it which is very negative at time of writing, and illustrates the problems which anything unusual tends to have, often for good reason.

Experience here suggests certainly with dream precognition that some direct involvement with brain action, after the precognition, possibly occurs, if there is any precognition which I am not prepared to gamble on. The cases described here of course simply used omething like the computer game technique pioneered by Stickgold and mentioned above, but that clearly involves a lot of brain action. In many of these cases it is so easy to set up a large series of controlled experiments and I am not yet convinced as to how they would be best best operated. It would not have been good science, for example to try to claim that nobody can carry out extremely rapid mental calculations and in doing so ignore Ramunjan, Erdos or others in the small class of savants. So using the mathematical techniques used in this article as above, exemplified typically by Sprott (2004, 2005) a more detailed presentation may develop, perhaps in later blogs of this series.

I would suggest that there is still a good deal of work to be done even on very simple cases like dream precognition which seems to do no more than show some A series influence, and near death experience which may do the same and for the moment these seem like the most likely success cadidates.

The "rotters and scoundrels" in the case of the existence and relevance of the A series, happily seem to be conventional physicists as everyone else would seem to see that we do each have a past, a present and a future, and that some people do believe in free will and God. To not admit that can lie on the borders of solipsism, and even madness, and if physicists persist in their views we can draw our own conclusions. But it could be argued that the jury is still out on contrived dream precognition.

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References

Combs A., (1995), "Chaotic and Strangely Attractive", Dynamical Psychology. (journal) also in "Mind in Time: the Dynamics of Thought, Reality and Consciousness", co-edited by Allan Combs, Ben Goertzel and Mark Germine ; and at www.goertzel.org/dynapsyc/1995/combs.html

Gabora L., (2001), "Cognitive Mechanisms Underlying the Origin and Evolution of Culture", Doctoral Thesis, Free University of Brussels.; and many other publications with Aerts D., etc quoted at http://www.vub.ac.be/CLEA/liane/Publications.htm

Gabora L., (2007) A case for applying an abstracted quantum formalism to cognition. Invited paper for New Ideas in Psychology quant-ph/0404068

Lucas C., "Evolving an Integral Ecology of Mind", http://www.calresco.org/lucas/eiem.htm#refs
Radin D. (2007) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dean_Radin ; these wikis alter and accesses after Jan 2007 may differ from the case chosen for illustration.

Rinaldi, S., G. Feichtinger and S. Wirl (1994) 'Corruption Dynamics in Democratic Systems', Research Report #168, Institute for Econometrics, Operations Research and Systems Theory. Technical University of Vienna. Vienna, Austria.

Rosicky A., Pavlícek A., (2006), "Knowledge and Conceptual Information", Proceedings of the 50th Annual Meeting of the ISSS, ISSS 2006 Papers

Saperstein A., (1007), "Complexity, Chaos, and National Security Policy: Metaphors or Tools?" in "Complexity, Global Politics, and National Security" edited by David S. Alberts D.S. , Czerwinski T.J. , National Defense University Washington, D.C.

Smith, R. D. (1998) 'Social Structures and Chaos Theory' Sociological Research Online, vol. 3, no. 1, http://www.socresonline.org.uk/socresonline/3/1/11.html
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Supplementary References
Aaaronson S., (2006), "Notes for a talk given at the Stanford Institute for Theoretical Physics, December 15, 2006 ", http://www.scottaaronson.com/talks/anthropic.html

Aks, D.J. & Sprott, J. C. (2003) Resolving perceptual ambiguity in the Necker Cube: A dynamical systems approach. Journal of Non-linear Dynamics in Psychology & the Life Sciences, 7(2) 159-178. Helbing D. et al , (2000), "Nature", (407), 487

Bear M.E., Connors B.W, Paradiso M.A., (2001), "Neuroscience", p612.

Earn D.J.D., Levin S.A., Rohani P., (2000), Science, "Coherence and Conservation" November, Vol 290, 1360

Farcas I.J., Vicsek T., (2006), arXiv: physics/ 0601181 v1 23 Jan 2006

Freeman W. J., (1991), "The Physiology of Perception", Scientific American, Vol 264, (2) Pgs. 78-85.

Freeman W. J., (1999), "How Brains make up their Minds", p104 and elsewhere, Phoenix, ISBN 075381 0689

Gale R.M., (1967), "A Philosophy of Time", MacMillan, London WC2.

Guastello S.J., (2006), Nonlinear Dynamics, Psychology, and Life Sciences, Vol. 11, No. 1, pp 167-182.

Guastello S.J., Pincus D, Gunderson PR (2006), Nonlinear Dynamics Psychol Life Sci 2006 Jul; 10(3) :365-99.

Jones, F.J. (1995). The Structure of Petrarch's Canzoniere: A Chronological, Psychological and Stylistic Analysis. Cambridge, England: Boydell & Brewer, www.boydell.co.uk/1764.HTM

Keeling M.J., Rohani P., (2002), "Estimating spatial coupling in epidemiological systems: a mechanistic approach", Ecology Letters, 5: 20-29

Keeling M.J., Rohani P., Grenfell B.T., (2001) "Seasonally forced disease dynamics explored as switching between attractors" Physica D, 148, 317–335

McSharry P.E., (2005) "The Danger of Wishing for Chaos", Nonlinear dynamics, psychology, and life sciences,9(4):375-397

Miramontes O., Rohani P., (2002) "Estimating 1/f ^á scaling exponents from short time-series", Physica D 166 147–154

Parwani R., (2001), "Complexity", http://staff.science.nus.edu.sg/~parwani/c1/book.html

Pelletier J.D., (1995) "A Stochastic Diffusion Model of Climate Change" arXiv: ao- sci/ 9510001 v1 5

Rinaldi S., (1998), "Laura and Petrarch: An intriguing case of cyclical love dynamics", Siam J. Appl. Math., Vol. 58, No. 4, pp. 1205 - 1221

Rohani P., Green C. J., Mantilla-Beniers N. B,. Grenfell B. T., (2003), "Ecological interference between fatal diseases" Nature, Vol 422, 885

Rohani P., Wearing H. J., Cameron T., Sait S. M., (2003) "Ideas and Perspectives: Natural enemy specialization and the period of population cycles" Ecology Letters, 6: 381–384

Rohani P., Keeling M.J., Grenfell B. T., (2002) "The Interplay between Determinism and Stochasticity in Childhood Diseases" vol. 159, no. 5 The American Naturalist (May)

Spiegelman M., (1997), "An Introduction to Dynamical Systems and Chaos", http://www.ldeo.columbia.edu/~mspieg/Complexity/Problems/

Sprott J.C., (2004) "Dynamical Models of Love", Nonlinear Dynamics, Psychology, and Life Sciences, Vol. 8, No. 3, July.

Sprott J.C., (2005), "Dynamical Models of Happiness", Nonlinear Dynamics, Psychology, and Life Sciences, Vol. 9, No. 1, January.

Strogatz, S.H. (1994). Nonlinear Dynamics and Chaos: With Applications to Physics, Biology, Chemistry, and Engineering. Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley.

Tsuda I, (2001), "Toward an interpretation of dynamic neural activity in terms of chaotic
dynamical systems", Behavioral and Brain Sciences , 24, 793–847

Wearing H.J., Sherratt J.A., (2001) "Nonlinear analysis of juxtacrine patterns", SIAM J. Appl. Math. 62, 283-309. ; others on http://www.ma.hw.ac.uk/~jas/researchinterests/juxtacrine.html

Yates J., (2006), "Can dreams predict the future ?".
http://ttjohn.blogspot.com/2006/04/do-we-dream-of-future.html

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Notes

1. Gabora (2001) "Abstractions are not only driven by the memetic fitness landscape, they feed back on and actually alter its topology. Much as the evolution of rabbits created ecological niches for species that eat them and parasitize them, the invention of cars created cultural niches for gas stations, seat belts, and garage door openers. As one progresses from infant-hood to maturity, and simple needs give way to increasingly complex needs, the trajectory of a stream of thought acquires the properties of a chaotic or strange attractor. The landscape is fractal (i.e., there is statistical similarity under change of scale) in that the satisfaction of one need creates other needs. This is analogous to the fractal distributions of species and vegetation patterns described by ecologists (Mandelbrot[60], Palmer[69], Scheuring & Riedi[83])."

Now this sort of thing is all very well but there seems to be no clear reason why such an analogy may have direct mathematical meaning. And I further point out that attempts are made to drag quantum mechanics, still a useful buzz-word, into all this in Gabora (2007). I would say that whilst this may be a brave attempt at interdisciplinary study, I have expunged similar work from my files since the days of G.D. Wasserman and his field theory about ESP. Call me a sceptic if you like, but sometimes I can understand why David Deutsch seems to get upset by people like Brian Josephson, who really should know better, possibly unlike Gabora who is really just having a rather flashy try. And hard scientists can ponder (a little bit) on her stuff - should they choose.

2. Rosicky (2006) says: "Combs [2002] explains cognitive/mental processes by term (chaotic) attractor – processes on the edge of chaos reach over two dynamic stable states - Lorenz’s strange attractor." The rest of the paper is not completely clear. So let's try Combs. Combs (1995) says "To my mind Tart's ideas are of the first order, but can benefit from more recent advances in the sciences of complexity, which yield more dynamic and fluid conceptions of the nature of systems. For example, a state of consciousness can be reconceptualized as an attractor. Speaking informally, an attractor is a condition to which a system is drawn by its own nature. If a cup is placed slightly tilted on a table, it will roll about in a spiral till it comes to rest standing up. This latter condition is termed a static attractor, because it represents the static position to which the cup is disposed. More interesting are cyclic or fixed cycle attractors. The human heart, for instance, runs through its cycle many times each minute. The moon passes through its various phases each month. These, and many others, are instances of systems that naturally settle into predictable cyclic routines. Most interesting, however, are the class of attractors that are neither fixed nor precisely predictable. These are termed strange or chaotic attractors." As for Charles Tart, you can get opinions on his work from http://skepdic.com/tart.html . So Combs uses the ideas of Tart - not necessarily all incorrect - to suggest that a state of consciousness is a chaotic attractor, bringing in many elements to coalesce to a unified pattern.

Combs may be on better ground when he brings William James's ideas into it and suggests consciousness is "a constantly changing process, clearly not static or even following a fixed cycle, but nevertheless one that has an identifiable global character, at least for each individual. Memories come and go, thoughts pass through the mind only to disappear and return again later, moods are continually changing, and alertness and energy levels vary from hour to hour. These are the elements of a kind of mental soup, or more accurately a kind of mental weather, with the equivalent to the latter's constantly fluctuating temperature, humidity, wind, barometric pressure, and so on".

So in essence Combs is saying that, like the weather, consciousness may be represented by mathematical equations and some of these may arise from chaos theory. Now many simple equations need chaos theory to represent them, as Sprott's book (ref in Part 2) makes clear. And it is clearly fair to say that a chaotic attractor may thus occur in some of them, equations being what they are.

Combs then says:"It is not surprising that weather is chaotic. Indeed, the elements that comprise it, such as temperature, oscillate in an identifiable cycle from day to day, but cannot be predicted with precision. What is more, it is unlikely that temperature fluctuations ever follow exactly the same course on any two days. Much the same can be said about mental weather. It is formed of the interaction of elements such as moods, thoughts, memories, and so on. These are Tart's original psychological functions. For some, such as moods, there is already empirical evidence that they are chaotic (e.g., Combs, Winkler, & Daley, 1994; Sacks, 1973/1990; Winkler & Combs, 1993), while virtually all are consistent with the general description, above, of chaotic processes. As a group, their interaction, like the interaction of the elements of the weather, yield an exquisitely complex process fabric that we know as consciousness. This fabric is far too complicated to describe in detail, but efforts have been made to mathematically conceptualize it as a grand chaotic attractor."

Apparently consciousness, on such models, is to hard to conceptualise in detail. But Combs perseveres "If the system gets stuck in the attractor of a wrong solution, subsequent recall will be incorrect. What is needed is a process that keeps it from settling down too quickly in the first attractor basin that comes along. This process is chaos. One can easily think of it as operating in a similar fashion during the search for a solution to a mathematical or linguistic problem, or a quest for the right artistic expression. Chaos is the antidote to stasis and stagnation."

But we still need a detailed mathematical description of what is going on. As such writers do, Combs says much more, in various places, but that is a brief gist of it. Rinaldi perhaps enlightens us with more detail which we describe briefly in Note 3.

3. R.D. Smith (1998) is good enough to enlighten us as to Rinaldi's (1994) thoughts: "In order to have a formal notion of structure which is consistent with the chaos theory paradigm we now need to return to a requirement so far unelaborated. In its most precise rendering chaos can only arise when the possibility of any given state repeating itself is potentially zero. To take the illustration of a strange attractor such as the Lorenz attractor (as in Figure 4) what is needed is a situation in which the orbital pathway of a flow or flux can continue for an indefinitely long period of time (for eternity) without ever passing through the same point twice. If this condition is not met then the orbit is not in fact chaotic but periodic even though highly convoluted. What this in turn means is that the phase-space in which the flux is propagated should be continuous and not quantised. A quantised space (says Smith), however large, is effectively finite and thus cannot provide for truly chaotic behaviour. Other more deductive approaches to large-scale pattern identification can also be used. Recent hypothetical studies by have produced the following application of 'strange attractor' concepts to the flux of political popularity.

and follows this with a brief mathematical description also due to Rinaldi. Smith also mentions the duck/rabbit example of Wittgenstein, somewhat similar to the spotted dog against a spotted background, which is neverthless easily distinguished by the human eye. To his great credit Smith also says:" Chaos, like Relativity, Darwinism and Mechanism before it, has the potential to be transformed into a metaphor and to have its terminology misunderstood and misapplied". And that is what we must be sure not to do here.

4. Ian Kaplan says in a long useful URL "I thought that the Hurst exponent calculation would be easy .... Sadly things frequently are not as simple as they seem" http://www.bearcave.com/misl/misl_tech/wavelets/hurst/index.html

5. Guastello says "First, we should not become overly preoccupied with its (NDSs) [nonlinear dynamical systems] principles of system connectedness at the expense of forgetting the basics – attractors, bifurcations, chaos, fractals, self-organization, catastrophes, and so on"

"Before basic NDS, change was understood in the social sciences as only one amorphous entity – change."

"It is also historically important, in my opinion, that two of our most central concepts, chaos and fractals, originated about a century ago when aviation was in its infancy and the very first papers on rocket science, not to mention the Theory of Relativity, were being published and discussed. In our travels we picked up nonlinear topology, information and entropy concepts, catastrophes, and self-organization; by the mid-1980s had begun to see formal connections among all these systems phenomena. Given the time horizon involved, it is doubtful that post-modern philosophy can claim with a straight face any more credit for the scientific developments than perhaps generating a little more interest than what would have been the case otherwise. It is also doubtful that any philosophical genre could claim more credit than any other genre for having discovered creativity itself."

In my opinion this is very true and by using McTaggart's paradox I am trying now to rid us of the Tychonic illusion and present us with time travel and immortality.

Guastello then goes on to say "where it has been possible to compare the accuracy of nonlinear and linear models, and the nonlinear model was adopted as the conclusion, the average ratio of variance accounted for was 2:1 in favor of the nonlinear model (Guastello, 1995, 2002). This is obviously a utilitarian riterion of success."

Fair enough. and here I must quote one of the many papers in the field by McSharry (2005) as to likely problems (but which also offers some methods) which have occurred in the past to these methods, and may occur when applied here.

" With the discovery of chaos came the hope of finding simple models that would be capable of explaining complex phenomena. Numerous papers claimed to find low-dimensional chaos in a number of areas ranging from the brain to the stockmarket. Years later, many of these claims have been disproved and the fantastic hopes pinned on chaos have been toned down as research with more realistic objectives follows." etc etc

Guastello's approach is outlined in Guastello (2006) and is well worth considering but there are difficulties in its complexity of arrangements

Are Physicists suffering from the Tychonic Illusion ?

2007-01-19T16:22:00.000+01:00

To begin with we may examine the duckrabbit picture

Along with such figures as the Necker cube and the Schroeder staircase, Jastrow used the duck-rabbit to make the point that perception is not just a product of the stimulus, but also of mental activity – that we see with the mind as well as the eye. From a constructivist point of view, many illusions illustrate the role of unconscious inferences in perception, while the ambiguous figures illustrate the role of expectations, world-knowledge, and the direction of attention (Long and Toppino, 2004).

For example, children tested on Easter Sunday are more likely to see the figure as a rabbit; if tested on a Sunday in October, they tend to see it as a duck or similar bird (Brugger and Brugger, 1993).

Kihlstrom (2004) and many others have written at great length on this and related perceptual phenomena, and of course many and varied views have been expressed.

And this ties in (Pearson, 1998 ; Margolis, 1998) with Margolis's work, which I have frequently referred to in this blog, on the Tychonic illusion. There was a long correspondence in the literature (Psycholoquy, 1998) but the upshot seems to be that the Tychonic illusion subsists, (Margolis, 2002a) whatever the worldly circumstances of Tycho at the time. I discussed all this in several places before, in my blog on Wed, 17 Aug 2005, for example. I state a portion of this article on Margolis's book below for convenience (Note 1).

In actual fact the matter also ties in with the Wason selection test, which I'll assume is generally well known. On this, Margolis (2002) says "So are cognitive illusions likely to occur and be hard to correct beyond the narrow contexts of psychology experiments? I think that is inevitable, so that it is important that we come to understand these illusions. Careful thought about simple puzzles like Wason can help illuminate what happens in vastly more consequential realms."

Now in both the present circumstances and those of Tycho the position and status of the Tychonic illusion, to those not duped by it, is fairly clear.

In Tycho's case it surrounds the controversy (involving the Pope and various nobles, scientists and others) concerning the disposition of the solar system, now generally clarified, we hope. Margolis and others have already discussed that. To put it crudely, it is almost as if the solar system were just a large duckrabbit, unclearly unidentified or a Wason card test unsolved.
In the present case we are dealing with the properties of time and how it is observed by us. The simplistic way, as adopted by Einstein, the quantum theorists and the computationalists, is to go right ahead and assume we have a block universe (a McTaggart B series) and hang it all on that. (Note 3).

To pursue the analogy a little further, it may be all very well to hang a caravan on the back of a car, by contrivance we can even include the kitchen sink in the caravan hung on the back, but it would be extraordinary folly to hang a 4 bedroom detached house on the back of the car. I will accept that a house move may be possible in that way (I think using heavy trucks it has even been done in Vancouver Island) but it is not a practical way to run things generally and would lead to stress and hardship. In the same way, by its nature the B series does not contain a past, a present and a future, it does not distinguish in any acceptable way any real element of freewill, and plainly does not represent the universe as we know it. Einstein may well have said "God does not play dice" but it is torturing facts to say that "God created a Universe without freewill, he created humans as robots controlled as by a computer, and he laid it all out for us to see". That God does not correspond to the God of Einstein's somewhat dodgy anthropomorphisms or to that of anyone but a scientist who has made too many assumptions and believes in no grounds to justify them Or if you like, has used an oversimple model. If we say all that, where is God or even further, where is the possibility of conceiving that there may be a God. Certainly the B series is a useful working tool, but it is hardly even a full hypothesis.

It is unscientific to assume that God will or could somehow appear in the works when we know that possibility is right there from the start. The possibility of God is a fundamental axiom of any physical description of the universe and we know that simply because we know that we have that possibility before we start. To say otherwise is like assuming that some important factor will eventually cancel out from our sums, and therefore leaving it out from the start. That is clearly unscientific. Obviously there are ways of leaving out irrelevant factors before we do start. Traditionally, atheists try to do this. My experience is that a convinced atheist is the only person I can think of more philosophically frightening than a convinced cleric, be he Christian, Muslim, or any other. Agnosticism still leaves the door open for God and allows God into a theory as someone's idea, however outrageous it may seem to some. Now given the possibility of God, we do not have to assume he is just or fair, but we could assume that we are rational so it is reasonable to allow the further 'working assumption' that God, if he is indeed there, may be rational too. But the B series rationality of a God escapes most people especially those who see the Tychonic illusion and even more, Wason selection.

Fortunately we have the A series as well, which allows past, present and future to individuals, and the possibility of free will, known to us all in some sense. We don't have to have a past, a present and a future or freewill of some kind if there is an A series. But if we believe our senses we are living with a past, a present and a future and hopefully with some element of freewill - indeed we may be optimistic enough to believe in the existence of a higher power (or powers), called God (or Gods).

As far as I am aware an easy mathematical representation of what is happening in the A series may sometimes be made in terms of some ordinary mathematical techniques already familiar to us from their use in the B series, and that of course there is a tendency to do, but that of course cannot be allowed to confuse the issue of a fundamental difference between the A series and the B series. And it is necessary to remember what we are doing, and that any mathematics which we write down as supposedly representing happenings in the A series is not necessarily an identical representation of what is going on in the A series, and it certainly would not transfer into a piece of B series mathematics without careful thought, if at all, and indeed the mathematics may at best only be a partial representation of what is going on in the A series and certainly not nessarily a complete model of some part of the A series nor representing all the sufficient and necessary constaints of that part.

Certainly, most people would see from common observation that we are not "simply" like in the B series, just in effect a lot of flies preserved for ever in some timeless aspic or solid jelly. And I certainly do not take a Panglossian view that all that will "eventually" come out of the existing physical theories. Yes indeed, it seems that modern physics tends not only to be caught up in the Tychonic illusion but simply to be Panglossian about it. Certainly physics, and even we may hope the future of say the Higgs boson, may have achieved remarkable results during the last 100 years and we may hope that it continues to do so. But we cannot assume that for that reason it has comfortably set out its mathematical stall to adequately cover important and relevant fields like human perception, consciousness and insight, even insofar as these matters are directly relevant to physics. I think of the early expositions of special relativity in this context, and see how far physics has proceeded in just using them, and their simple analogies of time and distance ! How much further can it proceed using the A series of McTaggart. Perhaps modern string theory (Greene, 1999 and many others pro, con and doubtful) could eventually get us out of our problem, but that in a way, could be just like the Ptolemaic epicycles getting us out of the idea of the earth revolving around the sun. The symptoms looks similar and the matter seems highly Tychonic so starting with an A series and a B series seems the right way around to go about things. It will not damage modern physics as that is in the B series already, nor will it force us to adopt some bizarre new theory. (Note 2) Instead it will complement and add to existing physics, as well as being based on the ideas of someone who was undoubtedly one of Britain's greatest philosophers, namely J.M.E. McTaggart.

It seems to me that one reason why we are in the grim position that we are, may be the dogged insistence of atheists (often wrongly trying to describe themselves as agnostics) trying to leave out anything remotely Godly (almost in an HG Wellsian way) set up against the often equally dogged insistence of clerics to presume some strange opposite view, often enough without even trying to add reason to that view. (I'm sure we have all heard the American snake oil evangelists who often do not have even any decent snake oil). Each party seems to be trying to drive the other to strange excesses.

Clearly if a person uses the A series as well as the B series it does not automatically allow the assumption that such a person has a belief in God, but it does imply perhaps that he knows that there are other people, probably fairly rational in some cases, who do believe in a God or Gods. In fact one could possibly deduce that for a person not to have an A series at all is possibly for him to commit a philosophical solipsism to the point that arguments made by such a person are philosophically incorrect.(Rather like the conference of solipsists said to be the butt of jokes in that their organiser was so pleased to see so many people of the same mind). Even leaving aside the God question, a similarly convincing argument can possibly be made in terms of human psychology but it might be a little longer.

The question of using chaos theory and strange attractors is another issue which I am also exploring at present (Yates, 2006a, 2006b, 2006c, 2006d, 2006e, 2006f, 2006g, 2007a). And of course I bear in mind the work of Freeman. Especially in considering Freeman's work, we must also give careful attention to the old maxim "the map is not the country" but given that, there is, for example, a very simple suggestion from Calvin (1996) to consider in that context: "When the Necker cube switches back and forth between top-down and bottom-up perspectives, it’s presumably because we’re switching in and out of lobes of an attractor". Now this can be fitted in with the A series in numerous ways but it is not immediately philosophically evident that the "flies in apsic" B series can properly philosophically cope with it at all, except perhaps in some Panglossian way.

References

Brugger, P., & Brugger, S. (1993). The Easter Bunny in October: Is it disguised as a duck? Perceptual & Motor Skills, 76, 577-578.

Calvin W., (1996), "The Cerebral Code", Chapter 5, MIT Press, ISBN 0262531542 ; http://williamcalvin.com/bk9/bk9ch5.htm

Greene B., (1999), "The Elegant Universe", ISBN 0393 058581

Jastrow, J. (1899). The mind's eye. Popular Science Monthly, 54, 299-312.

Kihlstrom J.F, (2004) http://ist-socrates.berkeley.edu/~kihlstrm/JastrowDuck.htm

Long, G.M., Toppino, T.C. (2004). Enduring interest in perceptual ambiguity: Alternating views of reversible figures. Psychological Bulletin, 130, 748-768.

Margolis H., (1998) "Tychonic Illusions: Hard vs. Easy". Psycoloquy: 9(38)

Margolis H., (2002), "Wason's Puzzle and Real Problems", AIBS conference on behavioral economics, Great Barrington MA, 2002)

Margolis H., (2002a), "It started with Copernicus", McGraw-Hill. ISBN 007 138507X

Pearson D., (1998) "Imagery need not be blind to fail - Commentary on Margolis on Cognitive-Illusion" Psycoloquy: 9(34)

Psycoloquy topic Cognitive Illusion, (1998) , http://www.cogsci.ecs.soton.ac.uk/cgi/psyc/ptopic?topic=Cognitive-illusion

Yates J. (2007a), Memetics and the A Series (3); references to the rest mainly in earlier blogs.

Notes

1. Margolis "It Started with Copernicus": This book begins with very ambitious claims. Margolis gives a very impressive Table I-1, giving a list of scientific discoveries made around the year 1600 and a further (empty, qualified) list of the work done in their respect in the previous 14 centuries. He then states on page 6 " The sharp step that is visible about 1600 almost by definition requires something new" and he says that this was not merely improved
experimentation or indeed new mathematical techniques.

Margolis is a distinguished writer so these claims must be taken seriously and considered in conjunction with his work on Wason tests.

We have to try to work out 'what 'something new ' was involved, and why.

Now the rest of the book is mainly a historical exposition and we have to sift through the history to find explanations of current relevance.

Firstly one has to mention that he really may have something new to say, bearing in mind for example his Wason conclusions and also his historical comments about Tycho. The latter are summarised on p48 "It would be 400 years before anyone noticed" (the Tychonic illusion). Following this matter up later he says."we have also seen that many logically accessible discoveries waited 2000 years to be made" (p200) and compare Wolpert "... find a new phenomenon where you could open up a whole new world . you'd jump on it like a shot" ([q-ball] The Telepathy Debate, 18/07/05).

Now what Wolpert says is unfortunate but common and easily sympathised with. Margolis's idea really ought to help to sort it out. Of course we must bear in mind the academic discussions (for example by Topper) on Margolis's Tycho conjecture but as far as I can see, Margolis has a case to proceed with his views - and indeed he does proceed. I can think of several other problems with his comments on Tycho, the chief two being that I am far from sure that Margolis was the first to notice this matter as I had heard it elsewhere much previously but haven't tried to locate it in the scholarly tomes - and secondly I doubt that many people cared all that much for the last 300 or so years. But these points may matter little or more likely, may fit in with Margolis's own theory, when expounded in detail, if and when it can be.

Also, the Tychonic illusion is likely to have been one illusion amongst many.

On page 26 he criticises Kuhn for use of the term "aesthetic" to describe a part of the valid approach towards theory-selection [At this time I must make the point Kuhn and Popper schools of thought are often regarded as different and Americans often tend to regard themselves as Kuhnians; to me, Popper and Kuhn both appear to be thoughtful philosophers of their time]. Margolis however seems to prefer the word "economy" to deal with what he is talking about and speaks of a "cognitive fit" to make an idea "comfortable". In terms of modern science this idea can be perhaps be used more readily with brain-scanning, though Zeki has spent a considerable time on aesthetic points of view towards brain scans too.

But Margolis points out that an uncomfortable fit of ideas can improve with time, in the sense that 'everyone believes it' and this makes it more comfortable. This probably does not apply to a case like the aesthetic value of Mozart as compared to Salieri. which is unlikely to change significantly with time. So it looks to me as if we already have a way to distinguish between the "aesthetic" and the "economical" with regards to brain scans. One area will change with time and probably circumstance and one area will not, and the cases can be shown on a graph. Indeed we can probably dig out brain scan ideas for 'comfortable' as well.

Most people could already construct a theory comparing and contrasting say "aha!" to "aesthetic", and bear in mind that acclimatisation can occur quite quickly.

Margolis makes p56 the important point that the difference between a Ptolemaic system and a Tychonic system was not AT THAT TIME (my emphasised capitals) logical. Indeed it was aesthetic (or maybe economic). As Kepler pointed out, God could have set up the solar system in pretzel shapes had he wanted. But eventually comfort drove people to Tycho and those after him. Easier to do circles than pretzels in effect.

Now at this point we are clearly tempted to try to work out if such a principle can reasonably be generalised, to the work of say Turing and indeed Schmidhuber and others. Well the first answer is, that such authors will probably automatically try to simplify their models either through their own mathematics or on some metamathematical principle, such as Godel's theorem which in Godel's original formulation was very long but, if you have the patience, very comprehensible. Thus we can certainly simplify models, in size or complexity or understandability, and do our best to choose the simplest one, but the 'beauty' or 'aesthetics' or indeed 'economy' or 'comfort' of an idea will probably need more MRI scans to obtain correlation coefficients. Anyway we still have problems with the white matter, the fact that most results are MRI not DT-MRI and fundamental facts such that to use simple blood flow in this way almost smacks of phrenology.
Anyway there is at least a brisk platform, we now have a pulpit to preach from as they might say in adspeak.

Margolis noted (p58) that Tycho's work was an enormous wrench in terms of comfort away from Ptolemy, even though he still took the sun to travel round the earth. He destroyed the Ptolemaic idea of the spheres and moved the orbits of Mercury and Venus, and this fitted facts as then known. He got away with it possibly because by then Copernicus's work was somewhat accepted or at least scientifically recognised as a theory. It is arguable that Tycho was by now just climbing on to a bandwagon, but simply had respect for Rome. It is almost like the end of Marxism, but it is unlike to be the decline of capitalism as capitalism has tried to make sure that no workable alternative system remains. A faith like Islam is unlikely to fill the gap capitalism will leave. As they say, you cannot beat the system (or Bilderberg, it seems).

So at least Margolis implies a recipe: when a good new theory comes, take away the unobjectionable parts of the old theory, replace them with as much of the new approach as possible, and leave the kingpin of the old theory till last, like gradually and competently removing the foundations of a house. Very Machiavellian, or perhaps purblind and naive?

Margolis says, however, 'why should a (partly) heliocentric system (Tychonic) be appealing to a geocentric astronomer'? Margolis refers to his two qualities 'economy' and 'comfort'. He then refers to Zajonc's experiments, which roughly involved subliminal presentations being supposed to enforce liking partly through familiarity (In the spirit of 'Mother's cooking is best' i.e. repeated exposure to a stimulus brings about an attitude change in relation to the stimulus). It's probably worth noting that Zajonc's work tended to imply reinforcement rather than liking. Anyway Copernicus's view and Tycho's view became familiar if not always accepted. But the only clear advantage that Tycho's view had was that it was similar to Copernicus's view (p64)! One can reach the conclusion, if one chooses, that free speech without penalty could have allowed Copernicus's view to predominate earlier. But Margolis stresses continuing comfort as being important, Tycho's view being substantially similar to Copernicus's. Easier for comfort, to overlook the errors in Tycho's work.

Basically we are left almost with an Edison/Tesla situation. Edison gave Tesla a great contract for the use of Tesla's alternating current (as opposed to Edison's inferior DC) reticulation - the electric chair for executions. In the same way, we could reckon Tycho left the heliocentric solar system idea to Copernicans.

So we have a rough blueprint for the use of MRI for discovery. Aesthetics, economy, comfort, MRI, and correlation coefficients. This lays the groundwork, I may write later in more detail.

2. It is probably unfair to call Penrose's twistor theory a bizarre new theory as I remember first glancing through the proofs of a version of Penrose's twistor theory in Sale, Cheshire, nearly 40 years ago. By now it is a bizarre old theory I suppose, but in its present form it has many competing theories to contend with.The fact remains that even today, the future of string and gravitational theory, and certainly of the TOEs is nowhere near settled.

3. Nearly all decent philosophy conferences dealing with time these days devote a lot of conjecture to the ideas of tensed and tenseless time, which still are very much on the philosophy agenda (as indeed I have mentioned in more detail in earlier blogs of this series) even if not clearly on the physics agenda.

Memetics and the A Series (2)

2007-01-07T12:19:00.000+01:00

We hope to establish the concept of a model or series of models which can be developed mathematically and lead to consequences which, as well, can relate to mathematically predictable facts, ideas, results or further enquiries.

We can look at points in the A series (or its derivations) which may be disjunct mathematically but can have some relationships which can up to a point be defined within themselves. Crudely, at each point in the A series or its derivations, for each individual point we may want to write down a past, a present, and a future,

Perhaps the obvious things to look at are the logistic map, (or some extension thereof) and the Hurst exponents which should lead to some temporal inequalities within the A series. The classical case of the Hurst exponents is that developed by Hurst himself and concerns flood levels on the river Nile. The historical structure led to the construction of the Aswan high dam and ecological problems ensuing from it, these facts and the UK/French/Israeli Suez invasion 50 years ago. All these matters need to be considered if the historical context has to be properly explored, though we'll leave them aside for now.

We leave historical context aside for the moment and bear in mind the exposition in Peters (1991) (Note 4). Fig 9.7 in this book, for instance, shows how R/S and the Hurst exponent vary with time for the Standard and Poor’s 500 index. It is important to remember that the R/S is time dependent and in theory (depending on how we scale the exponent) a value of 0.5 is a noisy value, between 0.5 and 1.0 means future dependence on past and between 0 and 0.5 means some kind of de-correlated future and past. Thus the Hurst coefficient in principle should allow us to set up a series of scalars - and we could start at one time and work to a future time or start at a distant future time and work towards an earlier time or a present time, merrily graphing the Hurst exponents as we do so. In this way we could in principle reverse future and past.(Note 6 and beware Note 5)

Another point perhaps worth referring to at this juncture is that, as Schlather's (e.g.2001) work clearly shows, there is no equation relating the Hurst exponent H to the fractal dimension D for all systems although some people seem to assume that the two things are necessarily simply related by D = n + 1 - H
(n being the normal dimension of the space). Hurst exponent is not the same as a kind of rescaled fractal dimension. (see Note 3)

Now Ian Posgate's Lloyds Syndicates, for example, give instances of contrived statistics which will have a different (or 'human' ) element to those of flood measurements on the River Nile. In one case nature gives us a set of statistics and in the other clearly human revisions will have given us the figures. The same is even true in something as simple as stock options, where the person holding the book (however bad a mathematician he may be) will have taken great pains to ensure that his commissions should compensate for any inadequacies in the system, making it plain that any mathematical computation in advance of say, stock options or casino odds is a losing venture, even if for no other reason than that large winners at casinos are usually banned unless for some such reason like the winners are simply shills. So money making ventures using Ruelle-Takens methods, for example, as Packard apparently did, are unlikely to be useful from our viewpoint and indeed are just part of the system, now in large part human, which we need to consider.

This does not mean that human enterprises cannot come under our scrutiny of course, quite the opposite as we are considering memetics not winning at casinos. In fact I take the view that the work of Ian Posgate and Nick Leeson come, as memes, directly and very appropriately under our aegis ! (This does not imply that we are looking for such things as economic prevention of such practices - or indeed the reverse - but rather that we see a meme qua meme). But it is possibly easier to begin by considering natural physical processes or events resulting from more humble living creatures than humans. This does not imply that humans are the only creatures capable of rational thought as some memeticists would like to claim, the question is still open at this point. Here we are just plain that a bird, a dog, or a slug seems to act more like a human than a drop of rain does, and that the statistical laws and other behaviour of such creatures will likely seem more 'human' than those of a drop of rain. This does not of course mean either that we are trying to outsmart non-human creatures, more that because their attitudes are different their attitudes are possibly less likely to conflict with our experiments. (Note 2).

To calculate Hurst exponents and interpret them should be child's play with the aid of a great deal of free software (Note 1) already on the market. One might also expect that the human or animal Hurst exponents might reveal a lot of information as to differences from simple 'physical' results (perhaps along the lines of Velman's philosophical postulates), a good meme leading to survival giving one result and an unsuccessful meme leading to another. One could also traverse the time scales from past to future or from future to past and obtain Hurst tables which by the way they are written could obtain different results forward in time' to those taken 'backwards in time'.

One clearly would expect living creatures to present a different showing of Hurst exponents to non-living ones. Unfortunately the figures are far from clear, even for blowflies. Nicholson's pioneering work on the ongoing population of flies in a bottle, for example, is described in particularly clear lay terms in Stewart (1989) (p263, 270 et seq). Miramontes and Rohani (1998) have a newer take on this matter. ("The ubiquity of 1/f dynamics is one of the major puzzles in contemporary physical science" also see Note 7).

Rohani (2002) now suggests using more advanced methods than the Hurst exponent which, also in my experience, carries a lot of perplexities with it. It is also hard to get enough useful and interpretable data. This and other similar matters will be discussed in "Memetics and the A Series (3)" being written now, and which contains further approaches to the statistical problems which a great many people from Edmonds (2002) through to myself and Rohani see as important, such as the relatively large amounts of data required and the relatively meagre and uncertain results obtained.

Gatherer (2005), and others such as Marsden and Lynch, suggests inclusion in a study of memetics items like terror and says it may help us to identify cases where our a priori thinking about a cultural phenomenon is inadequate. But he feels that the future of the real world can't be confirmed with a computer model. My own findings were, when I tried the more mundane statistics like London Tourism figures and the like, was that those tend to be tedious, similar and very often give the appearance of being massaged (though I reserve judgement on whether they are, or just look that way if one is seeking anomalies) there is certainly seems to be more to learn from the 'homebodies vs. the hellraisers’ model which Gatherer seems to largely espouse. And I point out from my comments above on Leeson and Posgate that such matters should be important in the use of statistics. But in the cases of Leeson and Posgate it is unfortunately prime facie clear that statistics have been massaged and that is probably even true for some terrorist crime statistics. It is vaguely annoying when you think that you may be onto something good but find that quite a lengthy search for useful statistics in quite sane places seems to provide no useful results. ('We all knew that this figure or that one increased every year', someone may well say, and statistics correspond). I found US Bureau of Justice Statistics (2007) well worth considering though. They are worth running through the computer and quite easily I got Hurst values varying from about 0.51 for later homicide statistics (semi-random slaughter in statistical terms) to a more predictable 0.97 for earlier ones through 0.78 and .and 0.84. The interesting part of the murder figures is the dip between about 1940 and 1960 when the rise apparent earlier, appears again. On a cyclic basis maybe the rise should soon start again. If you reverse the statistics and start at the later end the Hurst figure tends to be very near unity. But here again there are only rough accounts possible.

These matters are proceeding - the A series is in rough lay terms something like a tensed theory of time as opposed to the (tenseless) block time of the B series which physics (up to a point) is so happy with. The idea of using scalar entities as various points in the A series representing (past-present-future) at different points in time is an approximation that we may have to live with for the moment. However to look into further steps to be considered, we can look at the work of Gabora ('strange attractors' and the like) on the one hand and Sprott (etc.) and Rohani on the other in our next instalment "Memetics and the A Series (3)".

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References

Edmonds, B. (2002), "Three Challenges for the Survival of Memetics". Journal of Memetics - Evolutionary Models of Information Transmission", 6 , http://jom-emit.cfpm.org/2002/vol6/edmonds_b_letter.html

Gatherer, D. (2005). "Finding a Niche for Memetics in the 21st Century" Journal of Memetics - Evolutionary Models of Information Transmission, 6.
http://jom-emit.cfpm.org/2005/vol9/gatherer_d.html

Miramontes O., Rohani P., (1998) "Intrinsically generated coloured noise in laboratory insect populations", Proc. R. Soc. Lond. B (1998) 265, 785-792

Miramontes O. Rohani P., (2002) "Estimating 1/f scaling exponents from short time-series" Physica D 166, 147–154

Peters E.R, (1991), "Chaos and Order in the Capital Markets", p62 et seq

Puu T., (2003) "Attractors, Bifurcations and Chaos - Nonlinear Phenomena in Economics" , Springer ISBN 3540-402268

Schlather M., Gneiting T., (2001) arXiv: physics/ 0109031 v1 13 "Stochastic models which separate fractal dimension and Hurst effect"

Sprott J.C. (2003), "Chaos and Time-Series Analysis", Oxford ISBN 019 8508 409

Stewart I, (1989) "Does God Play Dice ?", Penguin edn 1990.

US Bureau of Justice Statistics (2007), "Homicide rates from the Vital Statistics", 1900-2002, http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/glance/tables/hmrttab.htm
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Notes

1. I favour particularly Gretl and use vers 1.60 (2006). [gretl.sourceforge.net/win32/ ]. Tisean is also pretty good and it could help to run R. In Gretl it is just necessary to type 'hurst' (without quotes) at the command line, having entered a suitable data set which can be done in many ways. But a lot of data is preferable to obtain results and Chebychev interpolation or alternatively imterpolation by inspection may not be suitable.

2. Ask any keen and dedicated but perhaps nonexpert gardener whether it is easy to outsmart a slug. I think it is not. As for me, slugs are my friends and I get a great deal of pleasure from simply observing them.

3. This does not occur in many standard works, e.g. Sprott (2003) section 9.4.6 p226 which only mention a direct correlation between fractal dimension and Hurst exponent. Given Schlather (2001), for philosophical purposes, which can be relevant here, we may have to probe deeper.

4. Puu (3003) gives a more up to date account than Peters (1991) of economic chaos theory with some cogent observations on economic theory, relating clearly directly to a study of memetics. Basically Puu's book is a book dealing with chaos theory as it can be applied to economics as distinct from Sprott's book which is basically an advanced introductory book on mathematical chaos theory. But unfortunately Puu does not deal with Hurst exponents. Peters (1991) does. Peters (1991) is the classic book in the field, and deals with Hurst exponents in great detail but not as much detail as some would have liked.

5. Ian Kaplan says in a long useful URL "I thought that the Hurst exponent calculation would be easy .... Sadly things frequently are not as simple as they seem" http://www.bearcave.com/misl/misl_tech/wavelets/hurst/index.html
I have to say I concur with this as so much of the data seems almost intractable from a Hurst function viewpoint. This is not just equities, which I have also looked at (mainly S. & P. 500 1946 - 2007 over various ranges) but blowflies as well, references as above. (Rohani etc.)

6. Using Gretl (Note 1) there are definite, but in the cases which I have dealt with quite small. differences in starting at a late time for (say a rainfall series - I used recent daily figures for Norman, Oklahoma as these are readily available on the internet - or a S. & P. 500 range) and working backwards or starting from an early time and working forwards, both forward Hurst and reverse Hurst tending to a similar result over a long period of course. But as yet there are no striking results AFAIK and possibly no reason to expect them at this early stage. There is a long way to go yet.

7. Rohani (1998) comments :"Hurst exponents fall in the range 0-1 and have intuitive interpretations. A value 0:5 < H =< 1 indicates what is commonly termed `statistically persistent behaviour'; that is, whatever the past trend in the series, it is likely to continue in the future, implying a strong degree of predictability. The most extreme case is H = 1 which represents a straight line with a non-zero slope. Here there are no changes along the line when passing from the past to the future; there is absolute predictability in the process. A value 0 <= H < 0:5 represents `anti-persistent behaviour': it is expected that whatever the current direction of change, it is unlikely to continue in the future and so predictability decreases. In the limit of H = 0, successive changes in the time-series are totally uncorrelated and prediction is not possible. In summary, white noise is characterized by H = 0, a value of H = 0:5 indicates Brownian motion, and 1/f noise is located in the range 0 < H < 0:5:
The Hurst exponents calculated for Nicholson and Utida's laboratory populations all lie in the range 0 =< H < 0:5. For Nicholson's blowflies, H is about 0:22 (the first and second halves of the data showed H about 0:46 and H about 0:37, respectively). The bean weevil had H about 0:15, while its parasitoid had H about 0:14: These values lie well within the range expected for a 1/f process. The estimates of H obtained for Utida's populations are, however, quite low. Could these time-series be governed by a white noise process ? To address this question, we used a property of the so-called fractional Brownian motion, generated after performing integration (successive addition) on the time-series generated by uncorrelated Gaussian processes. The integration of a Gaussian uncorrelated signal (with H about 0) produces a random fractal with H about 0:5 (Sprott & Rowlands 1995): We have integrated Utida's data and have found that the Hurst exponents of the two integrated signals are H about 1, leading us to conclude that Utida's time-series are extremely unlikely to be Gaussian uncorrelated processes.
There is an important relationship between the value of the Hurst exponent of a time-series and its fractal dimension, D (Feder 1988; Peitgen et al. 1993): D = 2 - H. A straight line with H = 1 has a fractal dimension equal to 1. White noise with H = 0 has a fractal dimension of 2, as expected for a process that is space filling. On the other hand, all the Hurst exponents found for the populations above signal that their fractal dimensions are non-integers, as is expected for a dynamical behaviour that has properties of self-similarity.
The foregoing results provide strong evidence that populations free from the influences of environmental forcing can produce fluctuations characterized by well-defined scaling laws. These findings relate to a recent debate regarding the importance of the dominance of
high and low frequencies in the power spectra of ecological time-series (Steele 1985; Pimm & Redfearn 1988; Halley 1996; Caswell & Cohen 1995; Cohen 1995; Sugihara 1995, 1996; White et al. 1996a,b; Kaitala & Ranta 1996; Ripa & Lundberg 1996; Sumi et al. 1997; Petchey et al. 1997). Clearly, our results support the generally accepted fact that many natural population fluctuations show `reddened' spectra, with low frequencies dominant. Traditionally, the dominance of low frequencies in ecological systems has been attributed to external environmental forcing (Steele 1985; Pimm & Redfern 1988; Halley 1996; Sugihara 1996). In contrast, however, we have shown that red noise may arise in laboratory systems, generated by internal population processes in the absence of environmental noise.
What intrinsic ecological mechanisms could be generating these patterns ? It has been shown that simple single-species models exhibiting chaos as a result of strong density dependence may give rise to red noise (Blarer & Doebeli 1996; White et al. 1996b). Whether the demographic parameters required for this are sufficiently realistic as to be expected in nature is a moot point. We propose what we believe to be a more generic mechanism.
We suggest that these dynamics may simply arise naturally from the interaction between (demographic) stochasticity and density dependence. ............. The ubiquity of 1/f dynamics is one of the major puzzles in contemporary physical science. It is well known that many diverse phenomena generate 1/f noise, and many theories been advanced to attempt an identification processes responsible."
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Memetics and the A Series (1)

2006-12-16T16:49:00.000+01:00

When we look at the A Series and the work of, for example, Varela and Ehresmann as frequently referred to in earlier blogs, but consider problems such as (and only "such as", certainly not exclusively) that the A series may be a proper class (that is, roughly, a class which is not a set) we are left with at least two obvious approaches, the first being to examine further immediately the A series properties of time and consciousness in terms of the work of Varela, Brown and Ehresmann for example.

Now attempts (which unfortunately normally did not specifically invoke A series) have already been made in the literature to do something like this - I am thinking particularly of the work of Baas (1997, 2004), the work of Ronald Brown often referred to in this blog, and in particular a recent summary of the situation in the n-Category Cafe blog (Baez, 2006) and there is the Blog "Machine Learning Thoughts" (Bousquet, 2006). The latter brief blog entry makes it exceptionally clear that not only is a lot more work needed before machine learning can reasonably aspire to the rare and refined level of detailed philosophical debate, but we can see that the maths is not yet well enough founded even allowing for the fact that nowadays proofs or even establishment of ideas is in itself tied up in computerisation (I'm thinking Chaitin and further, also Note 1 in addition as other problematic areas), which of course could make it all far more complex.

So basically what simply looks like a relatively straightforward mathematical exercise (if undoubtedly an extremely difficult one) is truly fraught with complexities. In other words I am not just saying, OK it's a difficult topic but I am suggesting that perhaps the easiest option might be to take a different angle on the whole thing, even though in my opinion we have very much gone some way along the course by establishing the apparent need for the A series as well as the B series and suggesting that all this is mathematically and philosophically feasible. So we may have made some headway, which we will retain if possible.

What I am saying now is - lets look at the facts, find enough new scientifically establishable work, take a head on view that there may well be a real 'hard problem' as well as many other basic philosophical problems which we must at this time seriously confront, and keep it all very empirical to begin with.

Whilst nowadays many regard Carl Gustaf Jung as somewhat of a ladies' man and simply a verbose mystifier, he said a lot of smart things. In particular in his disagreements with Freud he brought out the idea of the Oedipus Stain - this meant that in a way Freud was considering his patients as if looking at a culture under a microscope and, by staining it, considering only certain features. Clearly if he had used a different 'stain', he'd have considered different mental faculties and of course up to a point Jung seemed to profess that he had a whole series of different 'stains' he could use or even, up to a point, no stain at all. So what we may need to do is to consider different mental perspectives on the problem of A series time, and see which if any of them produce the best results and even allow us to present an effective, even predictive, mathematical model. This could be either a true A series (which we would hope for) or a pseudo A series, perhaps even presented mathematically like a B series or concatenation of B serieses, as mentioned in earlier blog entries.

For this purpose at least, why not consider memetics?

Considering Memetics

I have been looking further at the idea of memes and genes, since it does look as if it could possibly fit in with the McTaggart A series in the way which I am using it at the moment, assuming that the A series is a proper class. Thus a complex systems explanation of the A series could help to tie in with experiment.

I note that memetics has a long way to go yet, for example Susan Blackmore's (1999) ideas in her important early work tends to run against problems with mirror neurons, which I think were not well known (Rizzolatti, 2004) at the time of writing, and certainly are now known to occur in animals and humans. There is other potentially hostile work such as some fairly recent work by Edmonds (2002, 2005), insofar as both his "three challenges" and the "revealed poverty" article are concerned but the "revealed poverty" article itself, for example, has problems as the "Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation" which he refers to as to an extent providing more successful replacements for memetics seems little more successful than the (currently discontinued but possibly to restart) "Journal of Memetics", and I know from many years of experience, high circulation of a journal does not relate to correctness, relevance or often even much to popularity and acceptability anyway.

So I think the meme idea still may have mileage and use, but the idea of memes being a sort of "Theory of Everything" may be a bit much as even physics is finding that idea difficult.

The early papers on Chaos Theory by Lord May for example, were pretty precise but maybe it is too much to expect that sort of precision at this early stage, I feel we are are still, relatively speaking, in the days of Lorenz.

Part 2 of this paper will provide preliminary results.

References

Baas N.A., Ehresmann A.C., Vanbremeersch J-P., (2004), "Hyperstructures and memory evolutive systems" International Journal of General Systems, Volume 33, Number 5, October, 2004, pp. 553-568(16)

Baas, N. A., Emmeche, (1997) "On Emergence and Explanation", Intellectica 1997/2, no.25, pp.67-83

Baez J., Corfield D., et al (2006), n-Category Cafe http://golem.ph.utexas.edu/category/2006/12/back_from_nips_2006.html

Blackmore S., (1999), "The Meme Machine", p49, OUP, ISBN: 0198503652

Bousquet, O., (2006) Machine Learning Thoughts, "Making Machine Learning more Scientific", http://ml.typepad.com/machine_learning_thoughts/2006/06/making_machine_.html

Edmonds, B. (2002). "Three Challenges for the Survival of Memetics".
Journal of Memetics - Evolutionary Models of Information Transmission, 6.

Edmonds, B. (2005). "The revealed poverty of the gene-meme analogy – why memetics per se has failed to produce substantive results". Journal of Memetics - Evolutionary Models of Information Transmission, 9.

Josephson B., (2001) Cavendish Physical Society talk 9 May 2001, http://www.tcm.phy.cam.ac.uk/~bdj10

Kandel E.R., (2000) "The Molecular Biology of Memory Storage" Nobel Lecture, http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/medicine/laureates/2000/kandel-lecture.html

Rizzolatti G., Craighero L., The mirror-neuron system, Annual Review of Neuroscience. 2004;27:169-92

Notes:
1. Brian Josephson, for example, has written papers on mathematics and brain functioning, and without including a bibliography of such work, a brief description as in (Josephson 2001) makes it clear that he has plumbed to the depths of a lot of relevant ideas. Perhaps on a more practical note, workers such as Kandel (2000) try to sort the brain out but my take on Kandel's work is that in his own way he is a good deal more practical than say Penrose but he certainly does not answer all our questions, or so far even point a finger as we might want.