Who's looking at you?
http://plus.maths.org/content/whos-looking-you

EXCERPT: [...] The observer has once again returned to a central role in physics with cosmology, says Hartle. This is because many cosmologists today work with the assumption in their models that the Universe is very large, and could contain many possible observers. And the future we will observe will be very different depending on what kind of observer we are.

"In these large universes where, in principle, systems could be replicated, [the physical situation of the observer] comes back again to affect the observations," says Hartle. Since we are physical systems, like any other, we have only a certain probability of existing in the Universe. There's a probability we are as we appear to be, a population of human beings existing together on a small blue-green planet. But in these very large Universes it's also possible we are merely a Boltzmann brain — a random fluctuation in the Universe that has coalesced momentarily into a conscious brain who's memories and knowledge, a random fluctuation of data, matches our own.

It's slightly alarming but according to the maths it's far more likely we are one of these Boltzmann brains, these deluded observers who are just imagining they have all the data and experience that we have. "It's much rarer to have multiple individual human beings, of course, but, in the large universes that are contemplated by today's theorists, that would occur." And the future we will observe will be very different depending on which of these possible "copies" we are. So not only do we need theory that describes the evolution of the Universe, making predictions for what each of these copies will observe. But in order to make first-person predictions about what we will observe we also need to know which copy we are, or have a probability distribution for which copy we are most likely to be. Hartle and his colleague Mark Srednicki call this distribution the xerographic distribution, and it is this combination of theory and xerographic distribution that is testable by observations....

http://www.thenation.com/article/195553/...humanities#

EXCERPT: History has a history, and historians rarely tire of quarreling over it. Yet for the past few centuries, historians have maintained an uneasy truce over the assumption that the search for “facts” should always take precedence over the more fractious difficulty of interpreting them. According to Arnaldo Momigliano, the great twentieth-century Italian scholar of ancient history, it was the Renaissance antiquarians who, though they did not write history, inadvertently made the modern historical profession possible by repudiating grand theory in order to establish cherished fact. The antiquarians collected remnants of the classical past, and understandably they needed to vouch for the reliability of their artifacts at a time when so many relics were wrongly sourced or outright fakes. Momigliano cited the nineteenth-century Oxford don Mark Pattison, who went so far as to remark about antiquarians—approvingly—that “thinking was not their profession.” It may remain the whispered credo required for admission to the guild.

More wary than anthropologists, literary critics or political scientists of speculative frameworks, historians generally have been most pleased with their ability simply to tell the truth—as if it were a secret to be uncovered through fact-finding rather than a riddle to be solved through interpretation. Anthony Grafton once honored Momigliano with the title “the man who saved history,” and it seems fair to say that the latter voiced the consensus of a profession that makes facts almost sacred and theories essentially secondary.

Even when historians started to think a little, they did so gingerly. [...] In the early days of Gibbon’s Enlightenment, most of the frameworks on which historians relied were theories about the origins and progress of society; in the two centuries since, historians have been willing to have their facts consort with a wide variety of suitors, from nationalism to Marxism to postmodernism. The discipline has gone through so many self-styled theoretical “turns” that it is frankly hard to keep up. It is paradoxically because most historians have looked on theory with suspicion—as a lamentable necessity, at best, to allow the facts their day—that they have often been avid trend-watchers. Precisely because they are so fickle, opportunistic and superficial in their attitude to speculation, historians seem to change popular theories often, treating them not as foundations to be built on, but as seasonal outfits to clothe the facts they have so assiduously gathered.

Today, historians worry that they have lost their audience, and their distress has made the search for the next trend seem especially pressing. At the beginning of her new book, Writing History in the Global Era, Lynn Hunt remarks that “history is in crisis” because it can no longer answer “the nagging question” of why history matters. David Armitage and Jo Guldi, in their History Manifesto, concur: in the face of today’s “bonfire of the humanities,” and a disastrous loss of interest in a topic in which the culture used to invest heavily (and in classes that students used to attend in droves), defining a new professional vocation is critical. History, so often viewed as a “luxury” or “indulgence,” needs to figure out how to “keep people awake at night,” as Simon Schama has said. Actually, the problem is worse: students today have endless diversions for the wee hours; the trouble for historians is keeping students awake during the day....

http://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/...sciousness

EXCERPT: One spring morning in Tucson, Arizona, in 1994, an unknown philosopher named David Chalmers got up to give a talk on consciousness, by which he meant the feeling of being inside your head, looking out – or, to use the kind of language that might give a neuroscientist an aneurysm, of having a soul. Though he didn’t realise it at the time, the young Australian academic was about to ignite a war between philosophers and scientists, by drawing attention to a central mystery of human life – perhaps the central mystery of human life – and revealing how embarrassingly far they were from solving it.

The scholars gathered at the University of Arizona – for what would later go down as a landmark conference on the subject – knew they were doing something edgy: in many quarters, consciousness was still taboo, too weird and new agey to take seriously, and some of the scientists in the audience were risking their reputations by attending.

Yet the first two talks that day, before Chalmers’s, hadn’t proved thrilling. “Quite honestly, they were totally unintelligible and boring – I had no idea what anyone was talking about,” recalled Stuart Hameroff, the Arizona professor responsible for the event. “As the organiser, I’m looking around, and people are falling asleep, or getting restless.”

He grew worried. “But then the third talk, right before the coffee break – that was Dave.” With his long, straggly hair and fondness for all-body denim, the 27-year-old Chalmers looked like he’d got lost en route to a Metallica concert. “He comes on stage, hair down to his butt, he’s prancing around like Mick Jagger,” Hameroff said. “But then he speaks. And that’s when everyone wakes up.”

The brain, Chalmers began by pointing out, poses all sorts of problems to keep scientists busy. How do we learn, store memories, or perceive things? How do you know to jerk your hand away from scalding water, or hear your name spoken across the room at a noisy party? But these were all “easy problems”, in the scheme of things: given enough time and money, experts would figure them out. There was only one truly hard problem of consciousness, Chalmers said. It was a puzzle so bewildering that, in the months after his talk, people started dignifying it with capital letters – the Hard Problem of Consciousness – and it’s this: why on earth should all those complicated brain processes feel like anything from the inside? Why aren’t we just brilliant robots, capable of retaining information, of responding to noises and smells and hot saucepans, but dark inside, lacking an inner life? And how does the brain manage it? How could the 1.4kg lump of moist, pinkish-beige tissue inside your skull give rise to something as mysterious as the experience of being that pinkish-beige lump, and the body to which it is attached?

What jolted Chalmers’s audience from their torpor was how he had framed the question. “At the coffee break, I went around like a playwright on opening night, eavesdropping,” Hameroff said. “And everyone was like: ‘Oh! The Hard Problem! The Hard Problem! That’s why we’re here!’” Philosophers had pondered the so-called “mind-body problem” for centuries. But Chalmers’s particular manner of reviving it “reached outside philosophy and galvanised everyone. It defined the field. It made us ask: what the hell is this that we’re dealing with here?”

Two decades later, we know an astonishing amount about the brain: you can’t follow the news for a week without encountering at least one more tale about scientists discovering the brain region associated with gambling, or laziness, or love at first sight, or regret – and that’s only the research that makes the headlines. Meanwhile, the field of artificial intelligence – which focuses on recreating the abilities of the human brain, rather than on what it feels like to be one – has advanced stupendously.

But like an obnoxious relative who invites himself to stay for a week and then won’t leave, the Hard Problem remains. When I stubbed my toe on the leg of the dining table this morning, as any student of the brain could tell you, nerve fibres called “C-fibres” shot a message to my spinal cord, sending neurotransmitters to the part of my brain called the thalamus, which activated (among other things) my limbic system. Fine. But how come all that was accompanied by an agonising flash of pain? And what is pain, anyway?

Questions like these, which straddle the border between science and philosophy, make some experts openly angry. They have caused others to argue that conscious sensations, such as pain, don’t really exist, no matter what I felt as I hopped in anguish around the kitchen; or, alternatively, that plants and trees must also be conscious. The Hard Problem has prompted arguments in serious journals about what is going on in the mind of a zombie, or – to quote the title of a famous 1974 paper by the philosopher Thomas Nagel – the question “What is it like to be a bat?” Some argue that the problem marks the boundary not just of what we currently know, but of what science could ever explain. On the other hand, in recent years, a handful of neuroscientists have come to believe that it may finally be about to be solved – but only if we are willing to accept the profoundly unsettling conclusion that computers or the internet might soon become conscious, too....

By using ever more machines we lose not only physical skills, but cognitive faculties....

http://www.newstatesman.com/culture/2015...achine-age

EXCERPT: [...] [Nicholas] Carr’s previous book The Shallows argued that the internet is making us stupid, by turning us into a twitchy, distractible species capable of little more than clicking on someone else’s answers. The Shallows was rather one-sided: it underestimated the capacity of the web, used thoughtfully, to extend and deepen our thinking. Carr is an avid internet user and if his thesis was correct he should hardly have been able to write another book. But I am glad he did, because The Glass Cage, a more nuanced account of human cognition in the age of digital automation, is very good.

The Glass Cage warns that we may be creating a technological environment that erodes our skills, anaesthetises our curiosity and dims our critical faculties. From airline cockpits to central heating systems, cars and phones, we are swaddling ourselves in technologies whose workings we don’t understand, and that ask so little of us that we feel no need to enquire further. Carr quotes the technology historian George Dyson: “What if the cost of machines that think is people who don’t?”

In Seattle in 2008 the driver of a 12-foot-high school bus ran it into a nine-foot-high bridge. The top of the bus was sheared off and 16 students were injured. The driver later told police that he hadn’t seen the signs and flashing lights warning him of the bridge ahead because he was following GPS instructions. In 2009 Air France Flight 447 crashed into the Atlantic, killing all 228 of its passengers and crew. A subsequent investigation showed the aircraft had run into a storm that caused the autopilot to disengage, which threw the plane’s human pilots into a panic. In the words of the report, the crew suffered a “total loss of cognitive control of the situation”.

Carr acknowledges that digital automation has benefits, and to argue otherwise would be absurd. [...] But none of this is to say we should not interrogate automation’s downsides. If we don’t, we may end up making ourselves redundant.

In The Second Machine Age, one of last year’s most important books, the economists Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee invite us to think about the relationship between human beings and technology as a race in which we are competing with machines for the best jobs. The race has had two stages. The first, which started with the Industrial Revolution, was mechanical. In the workplace and the home, machines took over the heavy lifting, performing physically demanding and repetitive tasks more reliably and efficiently than people. In the short term this created human losers such as the Luddite weavers, but in the long run many more of us were winners.

New technologies made some jobs obsolete but created whole new categories of employment, and the newer jobs have, on the whole, been more productive and better paid. They have also been more interesting: human beings have responded to the challenge of machines by cultivating brain over brawn. The grandchildren of Luddite weavers became factory managers; the children of typists in the 1960s became software engineers. A vast and prosperous middle class was created – if “middle class” means anything it indicates the ability to make a living from your mind rather than your muscle.

Understandably, given how well the past two centuries turned out, it has become almost heretical among economists and policymakers to suggest that technological automation is anything but beneficial, at least in the long run (as Hairy Back might put it, Automation is Awesome). So it is brave of Brynjolfsson and McAfee to contend that this time the machines really have put humanity on notice. The second stage of the race has begun, and we are in danger of losing it.

Human beings won the race with the machines of the Industrial Revolution by cultivating their intelligence. But information technology automates mental, not just manual tasks, and now, due to a huge increase in computing power and the sheer number of interconnected devices, the machines are catching up. [...] As the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen said, “software is eating the world”.

[...] Brynjolfsson and McAfee sketch a potential future in which corporate profits rise higher than ever and an elite of robot-owners grows phenomenally rich while the rest of us wonder what to do with our time or how to feed our families. You might say that’s a fair description of the present. They would say you ain’t seen nothing yet. They note that there is no iron (nor bronze) law of economics that says most people benefit from technological progress, even if that has been true to date. It is quite possible that, to adapt Keynes, in the long, long run we are all obsolete.

Despite this, Brynjolfsson and McAfee are optimistic. They advise us to make the most of what remain uniquely human capabilities: inventiveness, empathy, an ability to cope with the unpredictable. To ensure that machines remain in the service of human happiness, we need to play to our strengths.

Sensible as that sounds, something tells me the robots have thought this one through. By taking so much out of our hands, and now our brains, they are neutering the very capabilities that might enable us to outrun them....

The Virtue of Scientific Thinking
https://bostonreview.net/steven-shapin-scientism-virtue

EXCERPT: [...] So natural science without the capacity of moral uplift, and grown-up scientists, so to speak, without moral authority, are—in historical terms—recent creations. Both the disenchantment of the world and the supposed invalidity of inferring ought from is derive from the historical development of a conception of nature stripped of the moral powers it once possessed. That development reached its culmination in the science and metaphysics of Darwin and the scientific naturalists of the late nineteenth century. Their modern conception of nature could not make those who studied it more moral than anyone else because no sermons in stones were to be discerned. Nature, said the great nineteenth-century biologist T. H. Huxley, “is no school of virtue.”

The insistence that science cannot make you good, or make the scientist into a moral authority, flowed from a natural philosophical position: there are no spiritual forces operating in nature and there is no divine meaning to be discerned in nature. That is to say, Weber was making a sociological statement about what belongs to certain social roles, but he was doing so by way of historical changes in science and metaphysics.

This attitude had significant ramifications. Sometime between the beginning and the middle of the twentieth century—especially in America but in other settings too—the idea of the scientist shed its remaining priestly associations, and a presumption of moral specialness gave way to moral ordinariness.

There was no single cause of this change; shifting conceptions of the world that scientists interpreted had much to do with it. But it was accompanied by notable developments in the nature of the scientific career, in the social relations and cultural standing of the scientific community, and in changing academic and lay ideas about what sort of thing science was and what it was for.

[...] There are still many millions of [Max] Weber’s “big children” around who think that nature is a divine creation and that its study yields moral lessons, but few of them are now to be found in university physics and chemistry departments. (The disenchantment of the world looks more plausible within the confines of research universities than it does off campus.) So accepting that science, of course, cannot make you good is just an acknowledgment of the world’s disenchantment and of the massive achievements of amoral modern science. With the existentialists, “grown-ups” now recognize that solutions to problems of meaning and morality can come only from us and not from above—and certainly not from scientists. Morality cannot be outsourced.

Writing after World War II, Oppenheimer warned against thinking of scientists as having the answers to all questions or the power to solve them. If scientists were indeed the stewards of a unique, coherent, and powerful method, that stewardship showed, at most, in a certain modesty of manner and judgment, notably including humility about the scope of their knowledge. “Science is not all of the life of reason; it is a part of it,” he wrote. Scientism—the tendency to think one could extend scientific method everywhere and thereby solve problems of morality, value, aesthetics, and social order—was just sloppy thinking.

The scientism Oppenheimer warned against had a history. It traces back to nineteenth-century social Darwinism and the advertised reduction of morality to biology. This was exactly the sort of reasoning the naturalistic fallacy targeted—the notion that what was moral could be rendered in terms of what biological evolution had formed us to do or to feel.

[...] The worldview that guides the moral and spiritual values of an educated person today is the worldview given to us by science. Though the scientific facts do not by themselves dictate values, they certainly hem in the possibilities. By stripping ecclesiastical authority of its credibility on factual matters, they cast doubt on its claims to certitude in matters of morality.

According to this newly confident scientism, science is the only bit of culture that can make you good because it trumps all the others—religion, traditional ethical codes, common sense. Or it shows them to be nonsense. Or—with or without awareness of the irony—it brands them immoral: religion is a “God delusion,” licensing prejudice, servility, and slaughter, all of which are morally wrong.

But there are several reasons why the ambitions of the new scientism may be self-limiting. Those who speak in the name of nature must face the fact that nature has never spoken with one voice.

[...] The thief and the murderer follow nature just as much as the philanthropist. Cosmic evolution may teach us how the good and the evil tendencies of man may have come about; but, in itself, it is incompetent to furnish any better reason why what we call good is preferable to what we call evil than we had before.

Nor does the new scientism solve the long-standing problem of whom to trust. Just like every modern scientist, the advocates of the new scientism do what they can to sell their wares in the marketplace of credibility. And here the new scientism, for all its claims that there is a way science can make you good, shares one crucial sensibility with its opponents: having secularized nature, and sharing in the vocational circumstances of late modern science, the proponents of the new scientism can make no plausible claims to moral superiority, nor even moral specialness.

Resurgent scientism is less an effective solution to problems posed by the relationship between is and ought than a symptom of the malaise accompanying their separation. So there is a price to be paid for the of-courseness of the view that scientists are morally no better than anyone else, and among those paying it are scientists themselves. The idea that scientists are priests of nature, that they are morally uplifted by the study of God’s Book of Nature, may be dead—as Weber suggested, that is central to what modernity means—but the question of whether scientists are selflessly dedicated to truth remains alive and is central to contemporary tensions surrounding scientific expertise and public policy.

If the disinterestedness and selflessness of scientists can be no more relied on than that of bankers, then scientific conclusions should be no more trusted than financial derivatives, and science should be policed in the same way as the banking industry. Regimes of surveillance and control are a modern indication of distrust. Yet science, like the financial system, works on credit, and, while there is excellent sense in subjecting both scientific and financial conduct to a degree of regulation, there is no sense at all in thinking that surveillance can ever eliminate the need for trust. If you don’t find scientists trustworthy, if you think of them as mere servants of power and profit, then the ultimate price to be paid is that you’ll have to do the science yourself—and good luck to you in making your findings credible.

So the cost of modern skepticism about scientific virtue is paid not just by scientists but by all of us. The complex problems once belonging solely to the spheres of prudence and political action are now increasingly conceived as scientific problems: if the global climate is indeed warming, and if the cause is human activity, then policies to restrict carbon emissions are warranted; if hepatitis C follows an epidemiological trajectory resulting in widespread liver failure, then the high price of new drugs may be justified. The success of modern is-expertise has propelled it powerfully into the world of ought-judgment.

That is why there can be no glib “of course” about discarding the idea of scientific virtue. We need to trust scientists, but we need scientists to be trustworthy....

You can be at work AND relaxing on the beaches of Tahiti at the same time! Well, maybe if you're a Caesium atom..

(Nanowerk News) Can a penalty kick simultaneously score a goal and miss? For very small objects, at least, this is possible: according to the predictions of quantum mechanics, microscopic objects can take different paths at the same time. The world of macroscopic objects follows other rules: the football always moves in a definite direction. But is this always correct? Physicists of the University of Bonn have constructed an experiment designed to possibly falsify this thesis. Their first experiment shows that Caesium atoms can indeed take two paths at the same time.

Almost 100 years ago physicists Werner Heisenberg, Max Born und Erwin Schrödinger created a new field of physics: quantum mechanics. Objects of the quantum world – according to quantum theory – no longer move along a single well-defined path. Rather, they can simultaneously take different paths and end up at different places at once. Physicists speak of quantum superposition of different paths.

At the level of atoms, it looks as if objects indeed obey quantum mechanical laws. Over the years, many experiments have confirmed quantum mechanical predictions. In our macroscopic daily experience, however, we witness a football flying along exactly one path; it never strikes the goal and misses at the same time. Why is that so?

“There are two different interpretations,” says Dr. Andrea Alberti of the Institute of Applied Physics of the University of Bonn. “Quantum mechanics allows superposition states of large, macroscopic objects. But these states are very fragile, even following the football with our eyes is enough to destroy the superposition and makes it follow a definite trajectory.”

Do “large” objects play by different rules?

But it could also be that footballs obey completely different rules than those applying for single atoms. “Let us talk about the macro-realistic view of the world,” Alberti explains. “According to this interpretation, the ball always moves on a specific trajectory, independent of our observation, and in contrast to the atom.”

But which of the two interpretations is correct? Do “large” objects move differently from small ones? In collaboration with Dr. Clive Emary of the University of Hull in the U.K., the Bonn team has come up with an experimental scheme that may help to answer this question. “The challenge was to develop a measurement scheme of the atoms’ positions which allows one to falsify macro-realistic theories,” adds Alberti.

The physicists describe their research in the journal Physical Review X ("Ideal negative measurements in quantum walks disprove theories based on classical trajectories"): With two optical tweezers they grabbed a single Caesium atom and pulled it in two opposing directions. In the macro-realist’s world the atom would then be at only one of the two final locations. Quantum-mechanically, the atom would instead occupy a superposition of the two positions.

“We have now used indirect measurements to determine the final position of the atom in the most gentle way possible,” says the PhD student Carsten Robens. Even such an indirect measurement (see figure) significantly modified the result of the experiments. This observation excludes – falsifies, as Karl Popper would say more precisely – the possibility that Caesium atoms follow a macro-realistic theory. Instead, the experimental findings of the Bonn team fit well with an interpretation based on superposition states that get destroyed when the indirect measurement occurs. All that we can do is to accept that the atom has indeed taken different paths at the same time.

“This is not yet a proof that quantum mechanics hold for large objects,” cautions Alberti. “The next step is to separate the Caesium atom’s two positions by several millimetres. Should we still find the superposition in our experiment, the macro-realistic theory would suffer another setback.”


Read more: Atoms can be in two places at the same time

All hail Baphomet!


If they get that up, I'll visit that one personally! lol!

http://www.vice.com/read/oklahomas-satan...ong-nicely

" And I looked when He broke the sixth seal, and there was a great earthquake; and the sun became black as sackcloth made of hair, and the whole moon became like blood; 13 and the stars of the sky fell to the earth, as a fig tree casts its unripe figs when shaken by a great wind. 14 The sky was split apart like a scroll when it is rolled up, and every mountain and island were moved out of their places.…"===Revelation 6:12


Well, advanced super artilects of our own creation, long after the extinction of fleshly humans, will have plenty of time to work out this problem if they don't want to be circling the drain in 22 billion years.


"A universe dominated by phantom energy expands at an ever-increasing rate. However, this implies that the size of the observable universe is continually shrinking; the distance to the edge of the observable universe which is moving away at the speed of light from any point moves ever closer. When the size of the observable universe becomes smaller than any particular structure, no interaction by any of the fundamental forces (gravitational, electromagnetic, weak, or strong) can occur between the most remote parts of the structure. When these interactions become impossible, the structure is "ripped apart". The model implies that after a finite time there will be a final singularity, called the "Big Rip", in which all distances diverge to infinite values.

The authors of this hypothesis, led by Robert Caldwell of Dartmouth College, calculate the time from the present to the end of the Universe as we know it for this form of energy to be
t_{rip} - t_{0} \approx \frac{2}{3|1+w|H_0\sqrt{1-\Omega_m}}
where w is defined above, H0 is Hubble's constant and Ωm is the present value of the density of all the matter in the Universe.

In their paper, the authors consider an example with w = −1.5, H0 = 70 km/s/Mpc and Ωm = 0.3, in which case the end of the Universe is approximately 22 billion years from the present."