May 21, 2017 03:43 AM
Where do numbers come from?
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2017/...come-from/
EXCERPT: When I was addressing this lunacy about how God exists because minds and mathematics are supernatural, I was also thinking about a related set of questions: biologically, how are numbers represented in the brain? How did this ability evolve? I knew there was some interesting work by Ramachandran on the representation of digits and numerical processing, coupled to his work on synesthesia (which is also about how we map abstract ideas on a biological substrate), but I was wondering how I can have a concept of something as abstract as a number — as I sit in my office, I can count the vertical slats in my window blinds, and see that there are 27 of them. How did I do that? Is there a register in my head that’s storing a tally as I counted them? Do I have a mental abacus that’s summing everything up?
And then I realized all the automatic associations with the number 27. It’s an odd number — where is that concept in my cortex? It’s 33. It’s the atomic weight of cobalt, the sum of the digits 2 and 7 is 9, the number of bones in the human hand, 2 times 7 is 14, 27 is 128, my daughter’s age, 1927 was the year Philo Farnsworth first experimentally transmitted television pictures. It’s freakin’ weird if you think about. 27 isn’t even a thing, even though we have a label and a symbol for it, and yet it’s all wrapped up in ideas and connections and causes sensations in my mind.
And why do I have a representation of “27” in my head? It’s not as if this was ever useful to my distant ancestors — they didn’t need to understand that there were precisely 27 antelope over on that hillside, they just needed an awareness that there were many antelope, let’s go kill one and eat it. Or here are 27 mangoes; we don’t need to count them, we need to sort them by ripeness, or throw out the ones that are riddled with parasites. I don’t need a map of “27” to be able to survive. How did this ability evolve?
MORE: http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2017/...come-from/
(video) How quantum superposition could unravel the ‘grandfather paradox’
https://aeon.co/videos/how-quantum-super...er-paradox
INTRO: The ‘grandfather paradox’ has long been one of the most popular thought experiments in physics: you travel back in time and murder your grandfather before he’s ever born. If you’ve killed your grandfather, you’ve prevented your own existence, but if you never existed, how could you have committed the murder in the first place? Some physicists have avoided the question by arguing that backwards time travel simply isn’t consistent with the laws of physics, or by asserting a ‘many worlds’ interpretation of the Universe. But could the concept of quantum superposition remove what seems so paradoxical from this tale of time travel and murder once and for all?
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2017/...come-from/
EXCERPT: When I was addressing this lunacy about how God exists because minds and mathematics are supernatural, I was also thinking about a related set of questions: biologically, how are numbers represented in the brain? How did this ability evolve? I knew there was some interesting work by Ramachandran on the representation of digits and numerical processing, coupled to his work on synesthesia (which is also about how we map abstract ideas on a biological substrate), but I was wondering how I can have a concept of something as abstract as a number — as I sit in my office, I can count the vertical slats in my window blinds, and see that there are 27 of them. How did I do that? Is there a register in my head that’s storing a tally as I counted them? Do I have a mental abacus that’s summing everything up?
And then I realized all the automatic associations with the number 27. It’s an odd number — where is that concept in my cortex? It’s 33. It’s the atomic weight of cobalt, the sum of the digits 2 and 7 is 9, the number of bones in the human hand, 2 times 7 is 14, 27 is 128, my daughter’s age, 1927 was the year Philo Farnsworth first experimentally transmitted television pictures. It’s freakin’ weird if you think about. 27 isn’t even a thing, even though we have a label and a symbol for it, and yet it’s all wrapped up in ideas and connections and causes sensations in my mind.
And why do I have a representation of “27” in my head? It’s not as if this was ever useful to my distant ancestors — they didn’t need to understand that there were precisely 27 antelope over on that hillside, they just needed an awareness that there were many antelope, let’s go kill one and eat it. Or here are 27 mangoes; we don’t need to count them, we need to sort them by ripeness, or throw out the ones that are riddled with parasites. I don’t need a map of “27” to be able to survive. How did this ability evolve?
MORE: http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2017/...come-from/
(video) How quantum superposition could unravel the ‘grandfather paradox’
https://aeon.co/videos/how-quantum-super...er-paradox
INTRO: The ‘grandfather paradox’ has long been one of the most popular thought experiments in physics: you travel back in time and murder your grandfather before he’s ever born. If you’ve killed your grandfather, you’ve prevented your own existence, but if you never existed, how could you have committed the murder in the first place? Some physicists have avoided the question by arguing that backwards time travel simply isn’t consistent with the laws of physics, or by asserting a ‘many worlds’ interpretation of the Universe. But could the concept of quantum superposition remove what seems so paradoxical from this tale of time travel and murder once and for all?