Guardian | Where most sci-fi movies quickly date, Blade Runner has improved with
age. Of course, it was always a fantastic ride, superbly detailed and
steeped in neo-noir atmospherics, but its deep, troubling ideas about
technology, humanity and identity chimed with postmodern and cyberpunk
theory, and launched a thousand PhD theses. One of the few student
lectures I can remember was about the French theorist Jean Baudrillard, orders of simulacra,
and how nothing is really real any more. In a down-with-the-kids
gesture, the lecturer stood behind a TV monitor playing a muted video of
Blade Runner. “You’ll probably get more out of watching this than you
will by listening to me,” she said. She was right. Deciphering
Baudrillard’s arcane prose is like wading through treacle; Blade Runner
is a ride you don’t want to get off. And, against all odds, its belated
follow-up, Blade Runner 2049, carries the baton brilliantly, both in
terms of visual spectacle and finishing the debates the first movie
began.
Between the two movies and Philip K Dick’s source novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?,
Blade Runner serves as a record of how our dystopian fears have evolved
over the past half-century. When Dick wrote the story, in 1968, he was
thinking of the dehumanising process of nazism. His “replicants”
(artificially engineered humans with a four-year lifespan) were
“essentially less-than-human entities”, Dick stated. They were
“deplorable because they are heartless, they are completely
self-centred, they don’t care about what happens to other creatures”.
Ridley Scott’s film turned it around, somewhat. Far from being a
deplorable, heartless machine, Rutger Hauer’s chief replicant,
supposedly the baddie, develops empathy for the cop trying to kill him.
Replicants were the superior beings. “More human than human,” as their manufacturer, Eldon Tyrell,
puts it. Apart from the four-year lifespan, what was the difference?
This was the part Baudrillard and co were so keen to engage with: what
was “real” when the copy was better than the original? “The real is not
only what can be reproduced but that which is always already reproduced.
The hyper-real,” wrote Baudrillard. Human status was no longer a matter
of biological or genetic fact. You couldn’t trust your memories either –
they could just be implants. So how do any of us know we are human?
Booz-Allen | On Thursday, July 20, China’s State Council released the New Generation of Artificial Intelligence Development Plan.
Numbering nearly 40 pages, the plan lays out China’s aspirations in
impressive detail. It introduces massive investment that aims to
position China at the forefront of technological achievement by
cultivating the governmental, economic, and academic ecosystems to drive
breakthroughs in machine intelligence. To achieve these goals, the
Council aims to harness the data produced by more the internet-connected
devices of more than a billion Chinese citizens, a vast web of
“intelligent things.”
The plan also details the strategic situation precipitating the need
for a bold new vision: “Machine intelligence [is] the strategic
technology that will lead in the future; the world’s major developed
countries are taking the development of AI as a major strategy… [We]
must, looking at the world, take the initiative to plan [and] firmly
seize the [technology] in this new stage of international competition.[i]”
The China State Council’s plan evokes a document that marked the
beginning of the defining global technological competition of the last
century—the space race. In August 1958, ten months after watching the
Soviet Union launch Sputnik 1, President Dwight Eisenhower’s
administration released the U.S. Policy on Outer Space. In it,
the U.S. National Security Council (NSC) urged massive investment to
cultivate the talent and technology base necessary to exceed the Soviet
Union’s achievements in space.
The United States is now at the precipice of another defining moment in history.
The NSC included an urgent mandate to act, declaring, “The starkest
facts which confront the United States in the immediate and foreseeable
future are [that] the USSR has surpassed the U.S. and the Free World in
scientific and technological accomplishments in outer space, [and] if it
maintains its present superiority…will be able to use [it] as a means
of undermining the prestige and leadership of the United States.”[ii]
The United States is now at the precipice of another defining moment
in history. The world’s greatest powers are entering a technological
contest that will parallel or exceed the space race in the magnitude of
its economic, geopolitical, and cultural consequences. Maintaining our
role as a global superpower requires us to achieve parity, and ideally
dominance, in the race to a future powered by intelligent machines.
Moreover, we must develop a comprehensive national strategy for
maintaining this technological advantage while also advancing our
economy, preserving our social norms and values, and protecting our
citizens’ dignity, privacy, and equality.
Guardian | He was particularly aware of the allure of Facebook “likes”, which he
describes as “bright dings of pseudo-pleasure” that can be as hollow as
they are seductive. And Rosenstein should know: he was the Facebook
engineer who created the “like” button in the first place.
A decade after he stayed up all night coding a prototype of what was
then called an “awesome” button, Rosenstein belongs to a small but
growing band of Silicon Valley
heretics who complain about the rise of the so-called “attention
economy”: an internet shaped around the demands of an advertising
economy.
These refuseniks are rarely founders or chief executives, who have
little incentive to deviate from the mantra that their companies are
making the world a better place. Instead, they tend to have worked a
rung or two down the corporate ladder: designers, engineers and product
managers who, like Rosenstein, several years ago put in place the
building blocks of a digital world from which they are now trying to
disentangle themselves. “It is very common,” Rosenstein says, “for
humans to develop things with the best of intentions and for them to
have unintended, negative consequences.”
Rosenstein, who also helped create Gchat during a stint at Google, and now leads a San Francisco-based company that improves office productivity, appears most concerned about the psychological effects on people who, research shows, touch, swipe or tap their phone 2,617 times a day.
There is growing concern that as well as addicting users, technology
is contributing toward so-called “continuous partial attention”,
severely limiting people’s ability to focus, and possibly lowering IQ. One recent study
showed that the mere presence of smartphones damages cognitive capacity
– even when the device is turned off. “Everyone is distracted,”
Rosenstein says. “All of the time.”
But those concerns are trivial compared with the devastating impact
upon the political system that some of Rosenstein’s peers believe can be
attributed to the rise of social media and the attention-based market
that drives it.
Drawing a straight line between addiction to social media and
political earthquakes like Brexit and the rise of Donald Trump, they
contend that digital forces have completely upended the political system
and, left unchecked, could even render democracy as we know it
obsolete.
emotionalsentience | When phenomenal experience is examined through the lens of physics, several conundrums come to light including: Specificity of mindebody interactions, feelings of free will in a deterministic universe, and the relativity of subjective perception. The new biology of “emotion” can shed direct light upon these issues, via a broadened categorical definition that includes both affective feelings and their coupled (yet often subconscious) hedonic motivations. In this new view, evaluative (good/bad) feelings that trigger approach/avoid behaviors emerged with life itself, a crude stimulus-response information loop between organism and its environment, a semiotic signaling system embodying the first crude form of “mind”.
Emotion serves the ancient function of sensory-motor self-regulation and affords organisms e at every level of complexity e an active, adaptive, role in evolution. A careful examination of the biophysics involved in emotional “self-regulatory” signaling, however, acknowledges constituents that are incompatible with classical physics. This requires a further investigation, proposed herein, of the fundamental nature of “the self” as the subjective observer central to the measurement process in quantum mechanics, and ultimately as an active, unified, self-awareness with a centrally creative role in “self-organizing” processes and physical forces of the classical world. In this deeper investigation, a new phenomenological dualism is proposed: The flow of complex human experience is instantiated by both a classically embodied mind and a deeper form of quantum consciousness that is inherent in the universe itself, implying much deeper e more Whiteheadian e interpretations of the “self-regulatory” and “self-relevant” nature of emotional stimulus. A broad stroke, speculative, intuitive sketch of this new territory is then set forth, loosely mapped to several theoretical models of consciousness, potentially relevant mathematical devices and pertinent philosophical themes, in an attempt to acknowledge the myriad questions e and limitations e implicit in the quest to understand “sentience” in any ontologically pansentient universe.
bloombergview | "Politics" might even be the wrong word for it. As Bishop describes it in his book (and Andrew Sullivan does in a new essay in New York magazine),
the divide is really more about identities, or tribes. Policy disputes
aren't what separates us so much as differences in attitude and
language. Which is why Donald Trump, despite his New York County address
and all-over-the-political-map statements on the campaign trail, seems
to be mainly just deepening the divide. Attitude and language -- and
loyalty -- are what he cares about most, so those are the buttons
that he keeps pushing.
How do we counter this growing tribalism, and growing
conviction that those outside our tribes are motivated by Satanic
impulses? I don't know! If I did, I would have told you already. Still,
as a starting place, I recommend this: Just assume that those who
disagree with you politically are really, really stupid.
alt-market | Despite the vicious measures of interference, reports suggest that
the vote was still successful, with 90% of the citizenry in support of
independence. What happens now is unclear, but I can tell you two
things are relatively certain.
First, a 90% vote in favor will result in a militarized response
from the Spanish government. If the vote was less overwhelming, the
government might attempt to pit one side of the population against the
other, causing internal strife and disrupting secession. This strategy
is unrealistic given the mass movement for independence. So, the only
other option for the government is full blown martial law.
Second, such a crackdown will result in a violent counter-response.
This happened in the 1970s in Catalonia and I see no reason why it would
not happen again. When you have almost an entire population in
agreement on separation and you use force to stop them from attaining
it, they will become violent. Civil war is inevitable if martial law is
declared.
It is vital that we examine the root ideological catalyst in this scenario.
The most rational solution would be for the Spanish government to
accept the Catalan vote (if they believe in "democracy" as they claim,
then they have to accept it, otherwise they appear extraordinarily
hypocritical). This could result in a more harmonious economic
relationship and less drastic damage to Spain's fiscal structure.
However, this is not going to happen. Instead, Spain is going to use the
age old collectivist tactics of intimidation and carnage to oppress
the Catalan's and subsume their economic production (as socialist
governments always do). When civil war erupts, and it will, production
in Catalonia will grind to a standstill and Spain STILL loses 20% of
its GDP.
You see, this is a lose/lose scenario for Spain, all because the
collectivist doctrine demands a jackbooted reaction to any movement for
decentralization. Collectivist systems are parasitic in nature; they
see the citizenry as food, as units of production for the state that
cannot be allowed to leave, for the "greater good of the greater
number." Collectivists rationalize their behavior as essential to the
well being of the society at large, but this is dishonest, for their
behavior more often harms society by crushing individual innovation and
instigating wars that might not have ever happened in the first place.
There is at the same time the matter of sovereignty movements across
Europe. The only people who benefit from stopping these movements are
globalists/collectivists. They may also benefit by sabotaging these
movements after the fact, making an example of them and holding them up
to the rest of the world as symbols of the "failures of populism."
zerohedge | We harp on the massive, unsustainable, yet largely unnoticed, debt
burdens of American cities, counties and states fairly regularly
because, well, it's a frightening issue if you spend just a little time
to understand the math and ultimate consequences. Here is some of our
recent posts on the topic:
Luckily, for those looking to escape the trauma of being taxed into oblivion by their failing cities/counties/states, JP Morgan has provided a comprehensive guide on which municipalities haven't the slightest hope of surviving their multi-decade debt binge and lavish public pension awards.
If you live in any of the 'red' cities above, it just might be time to start looking for another home...
From 1937 to 2008 there were fewer than 600 municipal bankruptcies.[2] As of June 2012 the total was around 640.[3] In 2012 there were twelve chapter 9 bankruptcies in the United States, and five petitions have been filed in 2013.[4] Since 2010, 61 petitions have been filed.[5]
Previous to the creation of Chapter 9 bankruptcy, the only remedy
when a municipality was unable to pay its creditors was for the
creditors to pursue an action of mandamus, and compel the municipality to raise taxes.[6] During the Great Depression, this approach proved impossible, so in 1934, the Bankruptcy Act was amended to extend to municipalities.[7][8] The 1934 Amendment was declared unconstitutional in Ashton v. Cameron County Water District.[9]
wikipedia |Mandamus ("We command") is a judicial remedy in the form of an order from a superior court,[1] to any government subordinate court, corporation, or public authority,
to do (or forbear from doing) some specific act which that body is
obliged under law to do (or refrain from doing), and which is in the
nature of public duty, and in certain cases one of a statutory duty. It
cannot be issued to compel an authority to do something against
statutory provision. For example, it cannot be used to force a lower
court to reject or authorize applications that have been made, but if
the court refuses to rule one way or the other then a mandamus can be
used to order the court to rule on the applications.
Mandamus may be a command to do an administrative action or not to take a particular action, and it is supplemented by legal rights. In the American
legal system it must be a judicially enforceable and legally protected
right before one suffering a grievance can ask for a mandamus. A person
can be said to be aggrieved only when he is denied a legal right by
someone who has a legal duty to do something and abstains from doing it.
nakedcapitalism | And speaking of Goldman, notice that Trump takes an explicit swipe at
the investment bank turned Beltway heavyweight. He must be chafing at
have been leashed and collared by the generals and the Goldmanites.
President Donald Trump said on Tuesday while on a trip to
Puerto Rico to observe hurricane recovery efforts that the island’s
massive debt will have to be wiped out.
“They owe a lot of money to your friends on Wall Street and we’re
going to have to wipe that out. You’re going to say goodbye to that, I
don’t know if it’s Goldman Sachs but whoever it is you can wave goodbye
to that,” Trump said in an interview with Fox News.
Even before the storm brought Puerto Rico to a near
standstill, the government there already struggled with an economy in
shambles and a default on billions of dollars of public debt.
Today, the U.S. territory has nearly $70 billion in debt, an
unemployment rate 2.5 times the U.S. average, a 45 percent poverty rate,
nearly insolvent pension systems and a chronically underfunded Medicaid
insurance program for the poor.
Puerto Rico’s job base continues to shrink, taking its economy along
with it. Since the recession ended, a lack of job prospects has sent
many Puerto Ricans fleeing to the mainland, where the job market is much
stronger.
However, it is unlikely that Goldman would suffer much, if at all, in
a Puerto Rico bankruptcy. It might hold some bonds in its trading
inventory, but its big exposure would come via funds it manages. On
those, under the Volcker Rule, Goldman is limited to owning a small
percentage of the equity investment in the fund (3% is the nominal
amount, although there may be some tricks of the trade for increasing
the exposure).
But David Dayen has found one of the big owners of Puerto Rico debt,
as reported in a new story at the Intercept. If you read the article in
full, tracking down the who was behind the shell company used to hide
the ultimate owners is very reminiscent of the sort of gumshoe work that
Richard Smith does chasing international scammers.
nakedcapitalism | As reader RabidGhandi had caught, the Spanish government has already
put itself in the position of using its power over the banking system to
control the payments now being made by Catalonia’s government. As I
read this article
(and I welcome corrections and additions, since trying to understanding
legal/regulatory interventions via an article translated by Google is a
fraught business), Spain has used the secession threat to take control
of Catalonia’s spending, taking the view that the violation of the
Constitution gives it unlimited authority to intervene. From the rough English version of the El Mundo story:
The government begins to hit and where it hurts most. The
Generalitat will not have free from its budget. Cristóbal Montoro has
confiscated the keys of the box. From next week all the expenses
destined to cover the essential public services of Catalonia will have
to have the approval of Finance that will be who directly pay them. It
is a question of preventing the money from being diverted to the
referendum of 1-O .
This decision of exhaustive control of the Catalan accounts affects
the salaries of the civil servants, the cost of the health, the
education, the civil protection, the dependency and the diverse
transfers in aid and subsidies to the families. In total, the
approximately 1.4 billion euros per month of community funding is left
to the central government, which is prepared to ensure that not a single
public euro is diverted to pay for the 1-O referendum and the
secessionist process…
What the Government decided this Friday is practically the
application of Article 155 of the Constitution for economic purposes. It
is true that the Government does not seize political competition from
the Generalitat but, in fact, it binds its hands to decide on what it
spends the money, since who will open the portfolio and make the
appropriate payments, after strict justification by the Intervention
General of the Generalitat , will be the Ministry of Finance.
And notice the mechanism for seizing control:
The central government will supervise even the
approximately 250 million euros per month of own collection in Catalonia
– a relatively small item, in the words of the minister – since when
the Government orders financial institutions to make payments from these
funds, thereof.
In this sense, Hacienda will send to the banks the text of the
agreements adopted so that they are vigilant and do not allow any
payment that is not justified by a certificate of the Catalan
Intervention. If they detect that any of the operations may be related
to the celebration of the independence consultation, they must
immediately notify the Attorney General’s Office. It is a very similar
method to that used to avoid criminal operations of money laundering.
In other words, Spain has mechanisms already in place by which it can
require banks to step in and seize control of collections and
expenditures made by parties engaging in criminal activity….and Spain’s
courts have deemed the secession to be illegal. Reader Sue confirmed our
reading of Spain’s ability to strangle Catalonia’s finances:
Banks cannot issue payments to Catalan public servants
and Catalan institutions which depend on the Catalan Government,
“Generalitat”, without previous paperwork submission and rubber stamp
approval from the Spanish State bureaucracy. This has caused some anger
among some Catalan public sector enterprises and contractors doing work
for them when quick timely payments are of the essence. Nevertheless,
right now public servants and organizations directly or indirectly
linked to the Generalitat are being paid because Catalonia as of today
is not a State and, (although micromanaged and surveilled and controlled
by “Spain’s Ministry of Plenty”), payments reach their destination.
So what would happen if Catalonia actually secedes? Rajoy does not
need to send in troops when he has banks, although he could use the belt
and suspenders approach.
Spanish banks, like Santander and the cajas like Caixa/Caixabank, are
licensed by the Spanish government. Spain can revoke the licenses of
any Catalan banks and could also make it illegal to transfer funds in
and out of Catalonia, similar to the sanctions imposed on Iran. Any bank
licensed by Spain would fall into line immediately out of the threat of
losing its license. It would take the cooperation of the bank
regulators in other European countries for them to put similar
restrictions on their banks, but given the unified EU position against
separatist movements, similar rules would almost certainly be issued on
an emergency basis.
As least as important, the case study of Greece 2015 shows that the
ECB is perfectly happy to be the heavy as long as it has elected
officials giving it political cover.
How this would play out in detail is way over my pay grade, but here are some of the things I imagine would happen:
1. No more stocking of cash in Catalonia’s ATMs
2. Cutting off merchants from electronic point of sale systems
3. Bank closures, as in at least a bank holiday and possible
shuttering of banks/bank branches, with what happens to frozen
Euro-denominated deposits an open question.
Notice that the measures imposed on Catalonia could be even more
brutal than what was done to Greece, which merely behaved very badly in
negotiations while having its banking system dependent on ECB life
support. A declaration of independence is a much greater act of
intransigence.
libertyblitzkrieg | While extremely significant, the Catalan independence movement is
just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to a global drive toward
political decentralization. For example, just today I came across
another potential secessionist hotspot in an unexpected place, Brazil.
Inspired by the separatist vote in Catalonia,
secessionists in three wealthy southern Brazilian states are redoubling
their efforts to break away from the crisis-battered nation.
Residents of Rio Grande do Sul, Santa Catarina and Parana states are being called to vote in an informal plebiscite
on Oct. 7 on whether they want independence. Organizers are also urging
residents of the three states to sign a legislative proposal for each
of their regional assemblies that would call for a formal, binding
referendum. The non-profit group “The South is My Country” aims to mobilize a million voters in 900 out of the region’s 1,191 cities.
Cooler, whiter and richer than the rest of Brazil, these southern
states have long nursed separatist ambitions. Rio Grande do Sul even
briefly claimed independence 180 years ago. Few Brazilians expect the
current movement to succeed any time soon, not least because it is
prohibited by the Constitution. But the country’s deepest recession on
record and a massive corruption scandal have exacerbated the region’s
longstanding resentment towards the federal government in Brasilia. With
just one year to go until general elections, the rekindling of
separatist sentiment in the south is another indicator of the unsettled
state of Brazilian politics.
Celso Deucher, the leader of The South is My Country, says the
region contributes four times as much tax as it receives and suffers
from a below-average level of political representation. He argues that
such an unjust situation outweighs any legal concerns. “Whenever the subject of separatism comes up, they ban it
because the federal Constitution does not allow it,” he said. “But the
law is not immutable.”
Rio Grande do Sul is currently immersed in a financial crisis and
has lost much of its economic clout, according to Fernando Schuler, a
professor of political science at Insper University in Sao Paulo.
“There’s a huge cultural detachment between the Tropicalia Brazil
and the South,” he said. “The reasons for separation are solid,
justifiable, but I don’t think they are viable.”
There are two aspects of the above story I’d like to address. First,
is that, like Catalonia, the regions thinking about secession from
Brazil are relatively wealthy. This is not insignificant and certainly
worth thinking about when it comes to wondering what sorts of
responsibility these regions should have to the former union should a
peaceful breakup go forward. It’s also worth remembering that the
leaders of the American revolution were also extremely wealthy. An
Independence movement driven by wealthy factions doesn’t necessarily
preclude the creation of a superior governing structure.
The second point relates to the fact that Brazil, like Spain,
apparently provide no “exit option” for any province or region which
decides it no longer wishes to be part of the nation-state. As such,
this is by definition an oppressive and involuntary political
relationship completely inappropriate to conscious human beings. As I
explained in Monday’s post,
all political associations should be voluntary and it’s absurd that
people are simply born into nation-states that are assumed to be forever
entities with no escape latch.
In June 2014, Wolfram officially announced the Wolfram Language as a new general multi-paradigm programming language.[65] The documentation for the language was pre-released in October 2013 to coincide with the bundling of Mathematica and the Wolfram Language on every Raspberry Pi computer. While the Wolfram Language has existed for over 25 years as the primary programming language used in Mathematica, it was not officially named until 2014.[66] Wolfram's son, Christopher Wolfram, appeared on the program of SXSW giving a live-coding demonstration using Wolfram Language[67] and has blogged about Wolfram Language for Wolfram Research.[68]
On 8 December 2015, Wolfram published the book "An Elementary Introduction to the Wolfram Language"
to introduce people, with no knowledge of programming, to the Wolfram
Language and the kind of computational thinking it allows.[69] The release of the second edition of the book[70] coincided with a "CEO for hire" competition during the 2017 Collision tech conference.[71]
Both Stephen Wolfram and Christopher Wolfram were involved in helping create the alien language for the film Arrival, for which they used the Wolfram Language.[72][73][74]
wikipedia | The thesis of A New Kind of Science (NKS) is twofold: that the nature of computation must be explored experimentally, and that the results of these experiments have great relevance to understanding the physical world. Since its nascent beginnings in the 1930s, computation has been primarily approached from two traditions: engineering, which seeks to build practical systems using computations; and mathematics,
which seeks to prove theorems about computation. However, as recently
as the 1970s, computing has been described as being at the crossroads of
mathematical, engineering, and empirical traditions.[2][3]
Wolfram introduces a third tradition that seeks to empirically
investigate computation for its own sake: He argues that an entirely new
method is needed to do so because traditional mathematics fails to
meaningfully describe complex systems, and that there is an upper limit to complexity in all systems.[4]
Simple programs
The basic subject of Wolfram's "new kind of science" is the study of simple abstract rules—essentially, elementary computer programs.
In almost any class of a computational system, one very quickly finds
instances of great complexity among its simplest cases (after a time
series of multiple iterative loops, applying the same simple set of
rules on itself, similar to a self-reinforcing cycle using a set of
rules). This seems to be true regardless of the components of the system
and the details of its setup. Systems explored in the book include,
amongst others, cellular automata in one, two, and three dimensions; mobile automata; Turing machines in 1 and 2 dimensions; several varieties of substitution and network systems; primitive recursive functions; nested recursive functions; combinators; tag systems; register machines; reversal-addition. For a program to qualify as simple, there are several requirements:
Its operation can be completely explained by a simple graphical illustration.
It can be completely explained in a few sentences of human language.
It can be implemented in a computer language using just a few lines of code.
The number of its possible variations is small enough so that all of them can be computed.
Generally, simple programs tend to have a very simple abstract
framework. Simple cellular automata, Turing machines, and combinators
are examples of such frameworks, while more complex cellular automata do
not necessarily qualify as simple programs. It is also possible to
invent new frameworks, particularly to capture the operation of natural
systems. The remarkable feature of simple programs is that a significant
percentage of them are capable of producing great complexity. Simply
enumerating all possible variations of almost any class of programs
quickly leads one to examples that do unexpected and interesting things.
This leads to the question: if the program is so simple, where does the
complexity come from? In a sense, there is not enough room in the
program's definition to directly encode all the things the program can
do. Therefore, simple programs can be seen as a minimal example of emergence.
A logical deduction from this phenomenon is that if the details of the
program's rules have little direct relationship to its behavior, then it
is very difficult to directly engineer a simple program to perform a
specific behavior. An alternative approach is to try to engineer a
simple overall computational framework, and then do a brute-force search through all of the possible components for the best match.
Simple programs are capable of a remarkable range of behavior. Some have been proven to be universal computers. Others exhibit properties familiar from traditional science, such as thermodynamic behavior, continuum behavior, conserved quantities, percolation, sensitive dependence on initial conditions, and others. They have been used as models of traffic, material fracture, crystal growth, biological growth, and various sociological, geological, and ecological
phenomena. Another feature of simple programs is that, according to the
book, making them more complicated seems to have little effect on their
overall complexity. A New Kind of Science argues that this is evidence that simple programs are enough to capture the essence of almost any complex system.
Mapping and mining the computational universe
In
order to study simple rules and their often complex behaviour, Wolfram
argues that it is necessary to systematically explore all of these
computational systems and document what they do. He further argues that
this study should become a new branch of science, like physics or chemistry. The basic goal of this field is to understand and characterize the computational universe using experimental methods.
The proposed new branch of scientific exploration admits many
different forms of scientific production. For instance, qualitative
classifications are often the results of initial forays into the
computational jungle. On the other hand, explicit proofs that certain
systems compute this or that function are also admissible. There are
also some forms of production that are in some ways unique to this field
of study. For example, the discovery of computational mechanisms that
emerge in different systems but in bizarrely different forms.
Another kind of production involves the creation of programs for the analysis of computational systems. In the NKS
framework, these themselves should be simple programs, and subject to
the same goals and methodology. An extension of this idea is that the
human mind is itself a computational system, and hence providing it with
raw data in as effective a way as possible is crucial to research.
Wolfram believes that programs and their analysis should be visualized
as directly as possible, and exhaustively examined by the thousands or
more. Since this new field concerns abstract rules, it can in principle
address issues relevant to other fields of science. However, in general
Wolfram's idea is that novel ideas and mechanisms can be discovered in
the computational universe, where they can be represented in their
simplest forms, and then other fields can choose among these discoveries
for those they find relevant.
Wolfram has since expressed "A central lesson of A New Kind of Science
is that there’s a lot of incredible richness out there in the
computational universe. And one reason that’s important is that it means
that there’s a lot of incredible stuff out there for us to 'mine' and
harness for our purposes."[5]
wikipedia | As a young child, Wolfram initially struggled in school and had difficulties learning arithmetic.[28] At the age of 12, he wrote a dictionary on physics.[29] By 13 or 14, he had written three books on particle physics.[30][31][32] They have not been published.
A 1981 letter from Feynman to Gerald Freund giving reference for
Wolfram for the MacArthur grant appears in Feynman's collective letters,
Perfectly Reasonable Deviations from the Beaten Track. Following his PhD, Wolfram joined the faculty at Caltech and became the youngest recipient[42] of the MacArthur Fellowships in 1981, at age 21.[37]
nakedcapitalism | With that said, here’s a handy dashboard from the Puerto Rican goverment
that shows the status of various systems on the island. In this post,
I’m going to focus on the two systems that are in the worst shape:
Power, at 5% coverage of the island, and water, where coverage differs
by region: Metro, 57%; Norte, 29%; Oeste, 20%; Sur, 67%; and Este, 50%.
But first, I’m going to look at one factor that differentiates the
“natural” disaster of Maria in Puerto Rico from others on the mainland;
then I’ll show how that factor affects the power system, and then
cascades to affect the water supply.
The U.S. House of Representatives approved PROMESA on the evening of
June 9, following a strong endorsement by President Barack Obama. The
bill, which would also impose an unelected and unaccountable federal oversight board
and allow court-supervised restructuring of part of the island’s $73
billion debt, now awaits consideration by the Senate…. Puerto Rico is
not the only place, under the global regime of austerity capitalism to
face predatory creditors and the imposition of unelected rulers —as
illustrated by cases like Argentina, Greece, and post-industrial U.S.
cities such as Flint, Mich.— but its century-old colonial status has
made it particularly vulnerable and defenseless.
The House vote followed a concerted, carefully timed media push by
the Democratic establishment, on the premise that “despite its flaws”
PROMESA represents a bipartisan compromise that is, in Obama’s words,
“far superior to the status quo.”
PROMESA’s oversight board, which will be staffed by San Juan and
Washington insiders with the bondholders’ best interests at heart, is
sure to continue to impose draconian austerity measures that have already slashed much-needed social services.
Of course! Austerity! Why did nobody think of this before? Mark Weisbrot in the New York Times:
This board, to which President Barack Obama appointed four Democrats
and four Republicans, has now approved an austerity regimen that, if
things go according to plan, envisions a second lost decade —
in other words, no economic growth from 2005 through 2024. But the plan
[reminscent of the austerity imposed on Greece] doesn’t take into
account the impact of such austerity, which would add more years of
decline. And there’s more: All the budget tightening over the second
decade, including cuts to health care and education, would pay only
about $7.9 billion of Puerto Rico’s $73 billion debt.
That means that creditors’ lawsuits, which have already been filed,
could inflict additional damage and worsen the quarter-century of
economic stagnation that is now in the cards. Hedge funds hold much of
Puerto Rico’s debt, and since May their claims have been under
consideration in a bankruptcy-like proceeding — also under the Promesa
act — that does not look any more promising than the oversight board’s
plan.
(One of Trump’s earlier tweets — September 25 — read: “Texas & Florida are doing great but Puerto Rico, which was already suffering from broken infrastructure & massive debt,
is in deep trouble.” So it’s pleasing to see that the Democrats’ tender
concern for the hedgies and vulture funds is shared across the
political spectrum.)
Now let’s look at the effect of this thoroughly bipartisan austerity on the Puerto Rican power system.
Guardian | By now images of police violence against peaceful voters, old and young,
were zipping across social media. Old people pulled to the ground;
fleeing women hit with batons; a man jumped on down half a flight of
stairs by a fully armoured riot cop . These pictures were horrifying Europe, but the thousands of people milling in the school courtyard did not look frightened or surprised.
Though brutal, the Guardia Civil actions on Sunday were calculated:
in the selection of riot squads from outside areas, where casual hatred
of Catalans is rife; in the targeting of old people and women; and in
the pinpoint nature of the interventions, which people on the barricades
thought were concentrated on middle-class areas.
There were thousands of riot cops on hand, on ships in the harbour.
If Madrid had wanted to, it could have confiscated every ballot box
within minutes and, for good measure, jammed the smartphone app the
Catalan authorities were using to tally the results against the
electoral roll. But prime minister Mariano Rajoy wanted to send a
subtler message: let the most fervent separatists have their vote and
get their heads broken, while scaring the rest of the population into
non-participation, including any waverers.
strategic-culture |Most
Puerto Ricans are unaware that their neo-colonialist “commonwealth”
status as a US territory was cooked up by the Central Intelligence
Agency to ensure that Puerto Rico remained a US military base for Cold
War operations directed against Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Haiti,
British Guiana/Guyana, Venezuela, Panama, Guatemala, and other countries
in the Western Hemisphere.
For
Washington, Puerto Rico has never been taken seriously. Its days as a
major US military and intelligence “aircraft carrier” in the Caribbean
are long over. Washington, via a long line of pathetic “quislings” who
have served as governors of the territory, would rather Puerto Rico be
seen and not heard, especially when it comes to treating the islanders
as full and equal US citizens. The recent hurricanes that have hit the
Caribbean have taught all the colonial vestiges in the region that they
would be better off as independent states responsible for their own
well-being and recovery than be treated as insignificant colonial pawns.
theconservativetreehouse | 50% of the native Puerto Rican National Guard refused to report to duty
when the governor called them up. •Thousands of tons of supplies and
equipment, provided by FEMA, U.S. military and U.S. relief agencies, sit at ports
while municipal government has no process for delivering them. •Frente
Amplio (PR Teamsters Union – truck drivers) are on strike and refusing to deliver supplies. •Over 10,000 U.S. federal personnel are providing recovery and relief on the island….
…and the priority for the Mayor of San Juan, with no power or infrastructure, is to have T-Shirts made to push a political agenda?
Funny how Anderson Cooper never asks:Where does one get a shirt like this made when Puerto Rico is under water and out of power? (rhetorical question)
phys.org |
Stuart Kauffman, from the University of Calgary, and several of his colleagues have recently published a paper on the Arxiv server
titled 'Quantum Criticality at the Origins of Life'. The idea of a
quantum criticality, and more generally quantum critical states, comes
perhaps not surprisingly, from solid state physics. It describes unusual
electronic states that are are balanced somewhere between conduction
and insulation. More specifically, under certain conditions, current
flow at the critical point becomes unpredictable. When it does flow, it
tends to do so in avalanches that vary by several orders of magnitude in
size.
Ferroelectric metals, like iron, are one familiar example of a material that has classical critical point. Above a critical temperature
of 1043 degrees K the magnetization of iron is completely lost. In the
narrow range approaching this point, however, thermal fluctuations in
the electron spins that underly the magnetic behavior extend over all
length scales of the sample—that's the scale invariance we mentioned. In
this case we have a continuous phase transition that is thermally
driven, as opposed to being driven by something else like external
pressure, magnetic field, or some kind of chemical influence.
Quantum criticality, on the other hand, is usually associated
with stranger electronic behaviors—things like high-temperature
superconductivity or so-called heavy fermion metals like CeRhIn5. One
strange behavior in the case of heavy fermions, for example, is the
observation of large 'effective mass'—mass up to 1000 times normal—for
the conduction electrons as a consequence of their narrow electronic
bands. These kinds of phenomena can only be explained in terms of the
collective behavior of highly correlated electrons, as opposed to more
familiar theory based on decoupled electrons.
Experimental evidence for critical points in quantum phase transitions
of materials like CeRhIn5 has only recently been found. In this case
the so-called "Fermi surface," a three-dimensional map representing the
collective energy states of all electrons in the material, was seen to
have large instantaneous shifts at the critical points. When electrons
across the entire Fermi surface are strongly coupled, unusual physics
like superconductivity is possible.
The potential existence of quantum critical points
in proteins is a new idea that will need some experimental evidence to
back it up. Kauffman and his group eloquently describe the major
differences between current flow in proteins as compared to metallic
conductors. They note that in metals charges 'float' due to voltage
differences. Here, an electric fields accelerate electrons while
scattering on impurities dissipates their energy fixing a constant
average propagation velocity.
By contrast, this kind of a mechanism would appear to be uncommon in
biological systems. The authors note that charges entering a critically
conducting biomolecule will be under the joint influence of the quantum
Hamiltonian and the excessive decoherence caused by the environment.
Currently a huge focus in Quantum biology, this kind of conductance has
been seen for example, for excitons in the light-harvesting systems. As
might already be apparent here, the logical flow of the paper, at least
to nonspecialists, quickly devolves into the more esoteric world of
quantum Hamiltonians and niche concepts like 'Anderson localization.'
To try to catch a glimpse of what might be going on without becoming steeped in formalism I asked Luca Turin, who actually holds the patent
for semiconductor structures using proteins as their active element,
for his take on the paper. He notes that the question of how electrons
get across proteins is one of the great unsolved problems in biophysics,
and that the Kauffman paper points in a novel direction to possibly
explain conduction. Quantum tunnelling
(which is an essential process, for example, in the joint special ops
of proteins of the respiratory chain) works fine over small distances.
However, rates fall precipitously with distance. Traditional hole and
electron transport mechanisms butt against the high bandgap and absence
of obvious acceptor impurities. Yet at rest our body's fuel cell
generates 100 amps of electron current.
In suggesting that biomolecules, or at least most of them, are
quantum critical conductors, Kauffman and his group are claiming that
their electronic properties are precisely tuned to the transition point
between a metal and an insulator. An even stronger reading of this would
have that there is a universal mechanism of charge transport in living
matter which can exist only in highly evolved systems. To back all this
up the group took a closer look at the electronic structure of a few of
our standard issue proteins like myoglobin, profilin, and
apolipoprotein E.
In particular, they selected NMR spectra from the Protein Data Bank
and used a technique known as the extended Huckel Hamiltonion method to
calculate HOMO/LUMO orbitals for the proteins. For more comments on
HOMO/LUMO orbital calculations you might look at our post on Turin's
experiments on electron spin changes
as a potential general mechanism of anesthesia. To fully appreciate
what such calculations might imply in this case, we have to toss out
another fairly abstract concept, namely, Hofstadter's butterfly as seen
in the picture below.
scribd | Schrodinger unleashed modern molecular biology with his “What Is Life?”.[1] The order in biology must be due, not to statistical processes attributable to statistical mechanics, but due to the stability of the chemical bond. In one brilliant intuition, he said, “It will not be a periodic crystal, for these are dull. “Genes” will be an aperiodic crystal containing a microcode for the organism.” (my quotes around “genes”.) He was brilliantly right, but insufficient.
The structure of DNA followed, the code and genes turning one another on and off in some vast genetic regulatory network. Later work, including my own,[2] showed that such networks could behave with sufficient order for ontogeny or be enormously chaotic and no life could survive that chaos.
We biologists continue to think largely in terms of classical physics and chemistry, even about the origins of life, and life itself, despite Schrodinger’s clear message that life depends upon quantum mechanics.
In this short article, I wish to explore current “classical physics” ideas about the origin of life then introduce the blossoming field of quantum biology and within a newly discovered state of matter, The Poised Realm, hovering reversibly between quantum and “classical” worlds that may be fundamental to life. Life may be lived in the Poised Realm, with wide implications.
The widest implications are a hope for a union of the objective and subjective poles; the latter lost since Descartes’ Res cogitans failed and Newton triumphed with classical physics and Descartes’ Res extensa. What I shall say here is highly speculative.
2 Classical Physics and Chemistry Ideas about the Origin of Life
There are four broad views about the origin of life:
1) The RNA world view, dominant in the USA.
2) The spontaneous emergence of “collectively autocatalytic set”, which might be RNA, peptides, both, or other molecular species.
3) Budding liposomes or other self-reproducing vesicles.
4) Metabolism first, with linked sets of chemical reaction cycles, which are autocatalytic in the sense that each produces an extra copy of at least one product per cycle.
Almost all workers agree that however molecular reproduction may have occurred, it is plausibly the case that housing such a system in a liposome or similar vesicle is one way to confine reactants. Recent work suggests that a dividing liposome and reproducing molecular system will synchronize divisions, so could form a protocell, hopefully able to evolve to some extent.[3]
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