[FRIAM] idle questions while in self-quarantine

[thompnickson2 at gmail.com]

Dave, 

Glad to have you back in the country.  It seems safer with you in it. 

I can only speak to one of your questions at the moment. 

I know, puzzling as it seems, Peirce called himself a realist, or even, half mockingly, an "idealist realist".  

He basic doctrine of realism is that there is at least some thing that is the case whether or you, or I, or any other finite cognitive system believe it.  Most realists are dualists, thinking that there is a world outside the reach of human cognition that we are constantly taking stabs at but only accidentally will ever know.  Some of us, like Frank, are dualist realists, about "inner" mental states.  

But Peirce is a monist.  An experience monist can be a realist IFF he is willing to assert that some experience sequencess converge on an endpoint that is beyond the reach of  you, me, or any particular 'us'.  That point of convergence, which can be inferred but no definitively known, from stabilities in observation, is the real, the true, whatever you call it.  For that reason, Peirce would agree, that the speed of light is PROBABLY "real."  

Nick 

Nick 
Nicholas Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology
Clark University
ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com
https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/
 


-----Original Message-----
From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> On Behalf Of Prof David West
Sent: Monday, March 30, 2020 12:23 PM
To: friam at redfish.com
Subject: [FRIAM] idle questions while in self-quarantine

After two weeks in isolation in Holland, I returned to the U.S. Friday for two more weeks of isolation on the mountain in Utah. Because of possible exposure while traveling will get tested tomorrow or Wednesday - give the bug a chance to become detectable. Still convinced there is far less to fear from the disease than from civil unrest and/or loss of liberty.

In the absence of external stimuli, lots of questions on different subjects came to the fore along with the impulse to inflict them on the group, perhaps as a bit of distraction from more serious matters.

Covid related:
1. Given patient zero as a Pangolin seller/buyer/consumer and Pangolin-zero, what conditions must be satisfied to ensure a species-to-species jump?
  a- mutation in the virus in Pangolin-zero?
  b- mutation in patient-zero that made him uniquely susceptible?
  c- first time a Pangolin sneezed in the face of a human, or first time a human licked Pangolin scales?

2- Numbers I would like to see:
  a. total tested - TT
  b. percent of TT that were positive TP or negative TN
  c. percent of TT that are one-percenters
  d. percent of TT that are in top 20th percentile in terms of money, power (e.g. politicians), fame (e.g. entertainers, athletes)
  e. percent of TT that are front-line personnel
  f. percent of TT that are "middle class"
  g. percent of TT that are poor
  h. percent of TT that are illegal, homeless, etc.
  i. percent of TP that were asymptomatic
  j. percent of TP that required little or no treatment
  k. percent of TP that could be treated with OTC or off-label meds
  l. percent of TP that required outpatient treatment  plus emerging medication
  m. percent of TP that required hospitalization and serious treatment, e.g. ventilators
  n. percent of TP that died - by age and degree of underlying causes
  o. transmissions per infected TPI
  p. percent of TPI to others within one-degree of distance (e.g. family, close friends)
  q. percent of TPI to others within two-degrees of distance (e.g. classmates, spring breakers, neighbors)
  r. percent of TPI to others within three-degrees of distance (e.g. supermarkets, fellow train commuters)
  s. percent of TPI to others within four-degrees of distance (strangers in the casino, at the concert, at restaurants)

Philosophy of Science
1. Lee Smolin talks about a schism with regard the nature of science grounded in a disagreement about the nature of Reality — realists and anti-realists.
2. Realists assert that there is a natural world existing independently of our minds and properties of that that Reality can be comprehended  and described. Anti-Realists would deny one or both of those assertions.
3. Most scientists are Realists, excepting the case of quantum mechanics, where anti-realists dominate.
4. Some Anti-Realists assert that properties ascribed to elementary particles are created by our interactions with them and exist only at the time of measurement.
5. Other Anti-Realists assert that science as a whole does not deal in or talk about the nature of Reality, but only about our knowledge of that world; e.g. quantum epistemology.
6. Operationalists are agnostic about Reality and just want to calculate.
7. I assume that Peirce would be an anti-Realist. Would he be a quantum epistemologist? Or, some other variant of the categories Smolin describes? Or, something totally different? Of course Peirce could not be a quantum epistemologist, per se, but he does seem to assert a similar anti-Realist position with regard macro-phenomenon where most scientists are Realists.

Cosmology:
1. why geocentric expansion - why is everything moving away from us?
2. why can we not detect where we are going? what direction are we expanding into?

Quantum Physics
1. both pilot-wave and many-worlds interpretations lead to a need for either many worlds or ghost waves to deal with superposition "residue" once an observation has been made and a particle at a specific place exists. Wheeler's, It from Bit, interpretation bases everything on information.
2. What if the many worlds / ghost waves were simply erased when a measurement was made and the wave collapsed to a particle. We know that erasure costs energy. So observation would consume some tiny bit of energy from the Universe and increase the mass of the Universe by the mass of the particle.
3. Would this lead to a change, over eons of time of course, in the Hubble constant because there was more mass to slow down expansion and less energy to fuel it?
4. Could this change account for the problems people have coming up with a consistent measure of the Hubble constant.

Off-the-Wall
1. Vedic physics posited five elements — the same four that Aristotle asserted much later, i.e. air, earth, fire and water plus consciousness.
2. Would it be possible to do some kind of parallel evolution of physics from Aristotle to Einstein using the Vedic five elements instead of Aristotle's four. What might that physics look like, what would the consciousness factor look like, how would a value/variable/constant for it look like in equations? E.g. E+consc = MC squared?
3. is there a way to map consciousness to information and via that path come to an account for Dark Energy, Dark Matter?

Incipient Nonsense
1. Assume pervasive consciousness in matter, ala Vedic cosmology; is "consciousness" translate/equate in some fashion to observation? One way to think of observation is simply awareness/being conscious of.
2. If so, can the consciousness of elementary/quantum particles be summed when those particles become parts of an aggregate structure?
3. Is there a threshold, like the formation of an atom, or a molecule, where the sum of consciousness ensures that every particle participating is "observed" by consciousness if not by a physicist or instrument.
4. Could this account for the fact that macro phenomenon like physicists, cats, and instruments cannot participate in superposition?

A Galaxy Far Far Away
1. Assuming the Vedic-Quantum-Consciousness stuff, could we calculate the amount of consciousness-observations necessary to yield the macro structure of Universe?
2. If you could obtain such a number, could you somehow differentiate, and measure, the amount of consciousness-observation available from the non-sentient mass of the universe and that of sentient-observation contribution?
3. If yes, could you then take the amount of sentient-observation required, deduct some amount contributed by human-sentient-observation and any leftover would indicate the number of non-human sentient observers must be lurking around?

And Nick, no these are not the result of drugs, just my overactive imagination and the fact that I read four different books on quantum physics, Jung's Red Book, and DMT Dialogues the past week.

davew


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