Original Version Here
July 12 , 1997
AVI File of Morphing Fitness Landscape
New August 20, 1997 Slide Show
axis@trinidad.net wrote (August 20, 1997):
" Dear Dr. Sarfatti,
I have written to you previously on the utility of a semiotic viewpoint in getting PQM straight. Later, I have written on the idea that the "Universe-at- large" might consist of "all the information that might ever be" which I identified with "nothing". I suggested that fieldlike functions can configure our specific universe, "filtering" it out of the Universe-at-large either directly, or via a set of "buffer spaces" which would then become a hierarchy of implicate order.
Thus we need only deal with a universe of quantum fields. No beables to confound our postquantum mechanics.
Well you are wrong about that -- at least in the low-energy limit where we exist. You must obey the actual mathematics. Have you read The Undivided Universe? What you are doing is going back to the conventional idea that Hilbert space is everything. Bohm discusses this quite thoroughly in his book which you should read.
"The problem incurred here is that the sheer size of the spaces involved would force us to add to our theories of functions and computation: Some of the "fieldlike functions" referred to may indeed be recursive structures, lending a deep fractal nature to our observable universe. Additionally, computational structures that execute in steps leading to sets which are not just dense, but of higher cardinality than the continuum, might lead to obnoxiously "non-godelian" computation."
"Now, I must lay my cards on the table. I am very much interested in the development of the device you call a "Q-chip". I suppose such a device would exhibit raw consciousness eventually equal to or, much more likely, far surpassing human consciousness. "
Yes, that is the idea.
"A superconscious Q-chip would be able to exploit signal and gravitational nonlocality sufficiently well to act as a "stargate" or "warp drive"; or even configure a neutron star into superconsciousness. So your dual goals might well be one and the same thing. This you know."
Yes, we seem to be getting similar messages! :-)
Exactly, that is the power of the WEB. This may be my Quixotic "Impossible Dream", or it may be correct. Let experiment decide whether this is bona-fide CONTACT with advanced VALIS intelligence, John Lilly's "solid state entities", "The Nine", "conscious computers on space-craft from the future" or just some wacky fun conceptual Psi Fi art - or all of the above :-)
"I also suppose that you are fully aware of how postquantum computers of the kind you envision will impact on the eschatology of Homo sapiens, and perhaps our spacetime universe."
Yes, of course I am. You have seen
" I assume that you realize that, if theoretically possible, weak Q-chips are currently well within the range of micro-fabrication techniques available to late 20th Century civilization. "
Yes, of course. If the people at Intel etc. realized what I have here they would start learning about microtubules and how to emulate them in the solid-state.
"I therefore deduce that you fully appreciate that advent of your Q-chip might be inevitable and imminent; and, at least in the mathematical sense, catastrophic."
"Apre mois, Le Deluge!" (Louis XIV):-)
"What might your initial materials be: semiconductor; conductor or superconductor? Time may be very short."
That is for experimentalists like Ray Chiao et-al to figure out. I am only a "Wandering Minstrel" -- a thing of shreds and patches, ballads, songs and snatches, .. and dreamy lullabies." :-)
your internet student,
Alain Huitdeniers
axis@trinidad.net
also Quantum Chaos new July 12, 1997
by Jack Sarfatti
For the Vigier Symposium, August, 1997
“No choice of two roads; if there were,
I don’t doubt I’d have chosen both.”
Gregory Corso, MINDFIELD
A Commentary on David Bohm’s World View from The Undivided Universe written with Basil Hiley (Routledge)
The outer world naively revealed to us by our senses rely on the relatively stable classical structures
“which are outside of each other in every sense and which interact only locally.” (p.176)
“Without such a world we would not be able to make sense of our observations of matter, nor to assign causes in any orderly way. Indeed it is for this reason that there is a natural reluctance to consider ideas such as nonlocality and indivisible wholeness...”
A good example of this “natural reluctance” is Chapter 12 of Murray Gell-Mann’s The Quark and the Jaguar where nonlocality is called “the story distorted”. Another example is Victor Stenger’s The Unconscious Quantum where the author comes up with an obscure Rube Goldberg alternative to nonlocality which is, in contrast to Bohm’s picture, not intuitively clear.
Most of the books now on the market that try to make quantum mechanics intelligible cannot even get to first base with the double slit experiment which Richard Feynman called “the fundamental mystery of quantum mechanics.” One explanation, favored by Stephen Hawking in A Brief History of Time is that the particle takes both paths simultaneously, or, in Paul Davies words, the particle is at two places at the same time. One can also imagine the particle takes only one path in a given world, but there is a parallel universe next door where the particle takes the alternate path. This is a lot of “excess metaphysical baggage” says John Archibald Wheeler. Strictly speaking, if we are true to Niels Bohr’s Copenhagen interpretation, we must be entirely pragmatic and not even try to picture a detailed motion of a tiny particle in space. Bohm’s ontological interpretation of quantum mechanics is crystal clear on how to picture the double slit experiment, and all other crucial experiments in terms of detailed motions of particles in space. Bohm demystifies Feynman’s mystery. It is ironic that the skeptics who so decry the pop books by Fred Alan Wolf, Gary Zukav and Fritjof Capra which attempt, with various degrees of success and depth of understanding, to connect the meaning of modern physics to mystical philosophy, are themselves captive to a fundamentally mystical conception of the meaning of quantum mechanics. Bohm, who is seen as a leader of mysticism in the new physics, in fact is the least mystical of all! I find this very amusing.
“To be sure we still assume a particle, which at first sight would appear to be what is also done in classical physics. But we now say further that this particle is profoundly affected by the wave function, i.e., through the quantum potential and the guidance condition. The action of the quantum potential depends only on its form and not on its magnitude, so that its effect may be dominant even when the wave intensity is small. This implies the possibility of a strong nonlocal connection of distant particles and a strong dependence of the particle on its general environmental context. The forces between particles depend on the wave function of the whole system, so that we have what we may call ‘indivisible wholeness’. This means that for different wave functions we can have radically different connections between particles (not expressible, for example, in terms of a predetermined interaction potential). Thus there is a kind of objective wholeness, reminiscent of the organic wholeness of a living being in which the very nature of each part depends on the whole.” (p.177)
There is a very interesting parallel here to Feynman’s discovery in 1940 that the quantum mechanical amplitude of a particle on a path is proportional to the exponential of the classical mechanical action of that particle on the path multiplied by twice pi with the imaginary unit i divided by Planck’s tiny quantum of action h. Paul Adrian Maurice Dirac had already written a paper on the Lagrangian in quantum mechanics in which he noticed that there was an analogy between his transformation function and the exponential of the action. Feynman wondered what Dirac meant by the term “analogy” in this context. In the same way, I wonder what Bohm meant by the phrase “reminiscent of the organic wholeness of a living being”. More specifically, what is the meaning of “reminsicent”? Do we have only an analogy here or is there a deeper identity?
Just for the sake of argument, let us conjecture that the quantum potential is really a thoughtlike mental field that connects key particles in the organism that control the classical mechanical outer behavior of that organism. The Hameroff conjecture that the physical substrate of consciousness is in the substructure of the microtubule infrastructure of living cells is qualitatively consistent with this general idea. The mental field of qualia is not in ordinary three-dimensional space, but is, rather, an evolutionary “fitness landscape” in the classical mechanical configuration space that guides the complex system of particles which control the behavior of the brain. The role of fitness landscapes in biological evolution has been described by Stuart Kauffman in the Origins of Order. Its role in physics is described in Lee Smolin’s The Life of the Cosmos. However, many good mathematical physicists would not accept my specific idea that the protected Bohm quantum potential of certain key particles in the brain is the objective mind-field of our immediate experiences including the subconscious processing which is a quantum computation. For example, Gerard ’t Hooft, sounding like a solid Dutch burger in a Rembrandt painting, wrote:
“The elusive mystery of quantum mechanics gave rise to a great deal of controversy, and the amount of nonsense that has been claimed is so voluminous that a sober physicist does not even know where to refute it all. Some claim that ‘life on Earth started with a quantum jump’, that ‘free will’ and ‘consciousness’ are due to quantum mechanics. Even paranormal phenomena have been ascribed to quantum mechanical effects ... Very many people seem to cherish some deeply felt desire for the unknown, for mysticism, and quantum mechanics seems to fill this desire. Not for me....” pp. 13-14 In search of the ultimate building blocks (Cambridge).
Curiously, t’ Hooft advocates a “hidden variable” interpretation of quantum mechanics, but does not seem to have digested the world-view found in the above quote by David Bohm. On the quantum nature of conscious experience Bohm, in one example, writes on the extent of nonclassical behavior
“Even if such objects are suspended in liquids or gases, the possibilities of interference will be limited because their mobilities are so low. It is clear that there will be an interesting area of study in the mesoscopic range, between the classical and the quantum domains. It is perhaps significant that in this range the simplest forms of life are to be found.” (p. 176)
The Hameroff picture is “mesoscopic” in Bohm’s sense. The mesoscopic nanometer range is on the edge between the determinism of classical mechanics and the indeterminism of quantum mechanics. When certain subsystems, e.g., the lone control electrons in the protein dimer switches of the microtubules, are protected or isolated from thermal noise, these control electrons form a quantum computing switching network controlling the classical switches of the dimer conformations. Sensory information is transduced into mental experience by a post-quantum “back-active” direct flow of information from these control electrons to their guiding coherent quantum potential. These control electrons are in a kind of non-equilibrium analog to the superconducting state. The control electrons have bosonic collective electric dipole modes which form a non-equilibrium analog of a Bose-Einstein condensate as first shown by Hubert Frohlich. These collective modes are material oscillations in space. They are not directly the mind-field. The mind-field is the Bohm quantum potential attached to these collective material oscillations of the control electrons. It is important to realize that the “backactivity” of classical sensory information to qualia patterns in the quantum potential is a really new physical effect not found in standard quantum mechanics. This is a post-quantum mechanical effect whose possible existence was already recognized by Bohm in his 1952 hidden-variable papers. The idea here is that the quantum potential of a complex nano-system has a non-unitary “charge” in the mesoscopic regime when there is suitable isolation from environmental decoherence. Roger Penrose has discussed this protective isolation in his recent popular books, e.g., The Large, the Small and the Human Mind (Oxford). My model is compatible with qualitative ideas set forth by Brian Josephson and co-workers on biological utilization of quantum nonlocality. The post-quantum feedback control loop between the coherent mental quantum potential and its attached material is the Bohmian way to describe both Penrose’s “orchestrated objective reduction” and Henry Stapp’s “ontological collapse”. The important realization here is that the decidedly non-mystical physical modeling of life and mind requires an extension of the foundations of quantum mechanics analogous to Einstein’s extension of his special relativity to general relativity.
Another important idea here is that the introduction of post-quantum backactivity is a precise model for what Murray Gell-Mann calls the “IGUS” for “information gathering utilization system”. Ordinary quantum mechanics does not permit the fundamental self-organization allowed by a direct two-way flow of information from the mental quantum potential to its attached material particles (and classical electromagnetic fields).
Bohm also wrote:
“Meaningful perception requires a large number of quanta and therefore, ... this will imply an essentially classical behavior. Meaningful communication between people also requires classically describable processes involving a large number of quanta. Thus it is not that we are assuming that the brain responds only to the states of particles and not to their wave functions. Rather we are simply calling attention to the observed fact that meaningful sense perception and communication has to go through a classical level in which the effects of this wavefunction can be consistently left out of account.” p.178
The wave function cannot be left out of account when we want to explain the physical nature of our immediate experiences of qualia. Indeed, Bohm adds:
“Most neuroscientists seem to believe however that the brain can be completely treated in terms of classical concepts. At present this is evidently a speculative assumption ... we know that retinal cells respond to a few quanta at a time and that this response leads to a multiplication of their effects to a classical level of intensity. But the retina is just an extension of the brain .. the brain would be a system that could ... manifest and reveal aspects of the quantum world in the overall processes. Such quantum sensitivity would imply that in more subtle possibilities of behavior of the brain, a classical analysis would break down. All this means that as the processes of perception unfolds into the brain, it may as it were connect to the subtle quantum domain..”
This connection of classical perceptual signals to the “subtle quantum domain” is exactly what post-quantum backactivity does. Bohm continues:
“the subtle quantum domain which latter may in turn reconnect to the classical domain, as outgoing action is determined through amplification of quantum effects.”
This reconnection from the subtle quantum domain of our inner felt-experience is effected by the gradient of the Bohm quantum potential which is already in standard quantum mechanics in the Bohm interpretation. That is, Bohmian quantum mechanics explains how thought influences its brain using only standard quantum ideas, but one needs to go beyond standard quantum ideas to explain how the brain literally changes its quantum coherent mind via post-quantum backactivity. It is this change in the patterns of the the quantum potential that is our inner felt experience.
Finally Bohm wrote:
“... we have seen it is just through certain kinds of nonlocality that locality can emerge ... Similar nonlocality may be required for the brain to have a local and essentially classical sub-domain of function ... it may well be that a fuller understanding of the brain will require ... more extensive theories going beyond the quantum mechanics.” pp. 179-180
Hence my post-quantum backactivity which coherently explains how the brain imprints classical information into its quantum potential mind-field.
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Editors
Scientific American
There appears to be a conceptual error on what classical general relativity predicts in Leonard Susskind’s article “Black Holes and the Information Paradox” (April 1997). Susskind writes: “Windbag has lowered to the horizon a cable equipped with a camcorder and other probes, to better keep an eye on Goulash.” As Kip Thorne shows in Black Holes and Time Warps (pp. 34-35) the cable will snap well before it gets near to the horizon of the black hole. While it is true that Goulash in a free falling geodesic orbit feels nothing strange at the horizon, Windbag’s cable will experience a stronger and stronger tidal force as it approaches the horizon because it is on a non-geodesic hovering worldline. Thorne writes “If your capsule spirals in much further, your body will give way; you will be torn apart! There is no hope of reaching the horizon’s vicinity.” It is not clear if Susskind’s error invalidates his later claim that we see all the material that ever fell into the blackhole flattened and stretched all over the horizon.
Susskind also claims that quantum mechanics is time-reversible. This remark is ambiguous. Does he only mean the unitary time evolution between measurements in the Copenhagen interpretation? If so, what about the collapse of the wave function in a measurement? Is that reversible? He also claims that irreversible information loss down the blackhole leads to enormous amounts of energy being generated. Indeed, Susskind claims that time-reversibility is required for conservation of energy in quantum mechanics. This is non-standard and there is no explanation of this in the article. Noether’s theorem says that invariance of the action under time displacements gives conservation of energy. How does the break down of time-reversal invariance affect that?
John Baez
Contains popular articles on advanced modern mathematical physics.