[FRIAM] idle questions while in self-quarantine

[Frank Wimberly]

Cosmology:  globally speaking, everything is moving away from everything
else.  I asked Hywel can't you extrapolate backwards and determine the
location of the "big bang".  He said, "You're not allowed to ask that
question".  Is/was he an anti-realist?

---
Frank C. Wimberly
505 670-9918
Santa Fe, NM

On Mon, Mar 30, 2020, 12:25 PM Prof David West <profwest at fastmail.fm> wrote:

> 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
>
>
> ============================================================
> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
> Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
> to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
> archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
> FRIAM-COMIC <http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/FRIAM-COMIC>
> http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://redfish.com/pipermail/friam_redfish.com/attachments/20200330/7b2ff2b0/attachment.html>