Himself the Age Transfigured (#2)

We have come to be the movement,
The moment of the cosmos.
Each particle that exists,
Changes and touches all others.
And we are the awareness.

To each change, we give name.
We track each touch,
We push all levers,
Or learn them just the same.
We are the lever,
The hand that encompasses.

Each molecule flowing over and around
Every other molecule
Is perceived by us,
Measured by us,
Called into being by us.

Ours is the time in which
The Universe came into it own.
We ride the surf and,
At the same time,
Dive the waters.

That which we cannot do,
We can imagine doing.
Ours is the power and the glory,
To be true.

GMG 

A Ruminations Credo

These are fancies of my own, by which I do not pretend to discover things but to lay open myself.... if I am a man of some reading, I am a man of no retention; so that I can promise no certainty, more than to make known to what point the knowledge I now have has risen.... I speak my opinion freely of all things, even of those that, perhaps, exceed my capacity, and that I do not conceive to be, in any wise, under my jurisdiction.  And, accordingly, the judgment I deliver, is to show the measure of my own sight.

 Michel de Montaigne

Infinitesimal but Inevitable

Went biking a bit later than usual today, had a chore to do first. Wasn’t sure what path to take and chose on the fly. As I went along, a bee flew into my chest. It was a chance encounter; the bee apparently was not coming at me with its stinger and no harm done to me, the bee I’m not sure. Struck me that the odds of this happening – the bee flying to that spot exactly as I entered it – were infinitesimally small. Yet when it happened, the event became inevitable. Everything that bee did that day and every decision I made led the two of us to it. 

The light leaving the sun all morning traveled the 93 million miles to earth in around nine minutes by our time. But as photons don’t experience time, all of them arrived at every spot they would ever be at the same moment, establishing a universal and simultaneous now. As the bee-human encounter happened, it had already/always happened. Folks used to call this fate: everything that happens was fated to happen. Yet the reality we experience has a future that we enter through a combination of factors including free will. We are conscious of the passage of time and can project our decisions and actions into a future that we can thereby affect, at least to some degree. Reality seems to be a kind of entangled state in which everything that will happen, or has happened, or is happening exists at the same moment while yet still unfolding in “real time.” Pretty cool.

The Brain As Quantum Computer

Recently I had the opportunity to watch southern African White-necked crows while they were watching me. I was taking afternoon tea (and eating rusks) on the patio overlooking a beautiful valley in the hills near Mbabane. Crows are smart and these are among the smartest. One sat on the roof of the next house staring at me convinced that at some point, I would grow careless and give him or her a chance to steal something, perhaps something to eat. As I was ever-vigilant, eventually they flew off over the valley, soaring and dipping in very real time. As I watched, I thought about the complex calculations that a bird must make moment-to-moment to move so quickly through three-dimensional space. They must keep track of where they are, where to go, how to get there. Knowing each requires entire subsets of information – such as (for where to go), where they saw food or last saw food or might find food while watching for anything that might require evasive action. These calculations must be solved each fraction of a second. I then thought this must be true for any animal with a brain (or nervous system). Neural systems allow the organism to move through, and react to, the environment rather than obey simple tropisms or merely be buffeted about by the external environment. The more complicated the neural system – reaching a peak of networks of networks to the 4th or 5th power (or beyond) running in our human brains – the more complex the information that can be stored and manipulated. A classical view of the human brain would start with the 500 trillion synapses of the adult brain’s hundred billion neurons. Now that is a lot of synapses. But think about how much information is stored there in language, knowledge, experience, memories and everything else that makes each individual unique and utterly complex.

I’ve speculated in this space about quantum consciousness, the production of mind from brain through “collapsing the wave functions apprehended from the perceptual flow. While watching the crows, I realized that the brain must function as a quantum computer and not as a classical system. The notion that quantum processes mix with (or form) consciousness is called “orchestrated objective reduction.” It rests on the possibility that the microtubules in nerve cells are small enough to contain quantum states. The brain accounts for just two percent of the human body’s mass but utilizes around 20% of its energy. It basically is like having a 20 watt bulb in our head shining all the time. This energy could be powering the creation and persistence of entangled states inside the microtubules of every cell. In this way, the neural organization of the brain would be the maintenance of a complex, constantly refreshed, while constantly changing, global entangled state. The collapse of the highest level of this entangled state-of-states coincides with consciousness. Inside our heads, this quantum computer has storage and calculating power well beyond what would be true if our brains functioned simply along classical physics lines. It may produce what we experience as consciousness. Or, collapse may come through the decisions that we – the “ghost” in the machine, acting as the internal observer – make in each moment as the crow flies.

Branching Out

I have been blogging here at Everything Rum since 2007.  My first posting was a Consciousness Riff.  I used to blog at Outside Walls, mostly on Kosovo, but closed that down a while ago.  In the Everything Rum space I've blogged on quantum physics, cosmology & space/time, biking, the state of the world, capitalism, the Articles of Confederation and sometimes on politics.   State Department cables (cleared through FOIA) and other related material from my time serving as a US diplomat can be found at Real Diplomacy.  Since 2009, I was writing on international issues at TransConflict. 

Now I am branching out.  I've tried Twitter and Facebook in the past but didn't stay with them.  I'm now returning to Twitter to connect and to accompany my expanded blogging here.  I'll be commenting as I see useful and perhaps will find others who if not in agreement at least have some reason to stop and reflect.  My first effort will follow shortly on the US and Russia.

Non-local spookiness

Einstein put forward his theory of general relativity 100 years ago. His prime insight concerned the reciprocal relationship between mass and spacetime. Mass (matter and energy) warps spacetime (our three observed physical dimensions plus time) and warped spacetime determines how objects move around mass. Mass in motion always moves in straight lines. However, in the presence of massive objects, those straight lines follow the curves of warped spacetime. Thus things fall.

Einstein also contributed to the elaboration of quantum mechanics. But quantum physics and relativity seem to be fundamentally different ways of understanding reality. The former reduces all we observe to a realm of particles and waves that remain intrinsically probabilistic. The latter places reality into a universal geometrical framework of space and time. Einstein was uncomfortable with quantum physics because of its probabilistic nature – “God does not play dice with the universe” – and because until observed, particles also exist as waves. A further issue for Einstein was the apparent implication of quantum physics known as entanglement.

Quantum entanglement occurs when two or more particles are generated or interact in such a way that they share the same wave function (quantum state). When that happens, no matter how far apart those particles may move away from each other – even to opposite ends of the universe – they remain entangled: measurement of one – collapsing its wave function – also determines the measurement of the other. This bothered Einstein – he termed it “spooky action at a distance” – because the two particles seem to communicate through space instantaneously and – more to the point – faster than the speed of light. For Einstein, the speed of light is a fundamental constant and nothing can go any faster. But experiment has consistently verified the phenomenon of quantum entanglement. Most recently a group of Dutch physicists gave what is widely seen as definitive proof that entanglement across distance is real and reveals that reality is in some way non-local.

Non-locality implies that entangled things exist in a relationship that is not determined by the local conditions that impinge upon those things. In other words, when one of the things is measured, the qualities of the far distant formerly entangled thing are not determined by where that thing is but by some deeper reality that is not local to the thing itself. Non-locality implies that there is some more fundamental level of reality that exists outside space and time.

We live in a universe in which time and space do exist. We travel through space (in any direction of three directions) and time (only forward). Things with mass travel travel no faster than the speed of light. At the speed of light, everything happens at the same instant because time does not pass. If we could be that massless surfer riding a photon created at the moment of the Big Bang, we would experience everything and everywhere that photon would ever be at the same instant.

We experience time as passing because we live in a world of matter and energy, which seems to give rise to spacetime. Our consciousness exists in time as our body exists in space. But non-locality points to a reality in which the universe exists without time or space as one object in which all time and space exist at once. We appear not to experience this deeper reality outside the realm of quantum experimentation (though it may make it possible someday to have quantum computing). But non-locality – as St. Thomas Aquinas might argue – points to consideration of First Cause and Ultimate Reality. That is spooky.

Decoherence, or If a Tree Falls In the Forest...?

One of the basic unsettled questions of quantum physics is why we don't see quantum superposition in everyday objects. At the quantum level – and before being “measured” – mass and energy exist simultaneously as both wave and particle. The classic examples are light and electrons. Photons exist as both wave and particle and manifest as either depending on how it is observed. Similarly, electrons do not exist, in reality, as tiny “planets” circling the nucleus in neat orbits but in clouds of probabilities that may be “found” as a particle in a particular “place” only when measured. Everything that exists at the quantum level – the realm of the very tiny – shares this dual nature as wave and particle. It can be more accurately described as a wave function.

If everything were to remain in quantum superposition in the macro-world we inhabit, Schrödinger's cat – and everyone else's – would be both alive and dead at the same time. We don't see in that way because superposition seems to breakdown when things get large. The wave function has collapsed and we see either waves or particles, i.e., individual, unconnected, single state things. Why?

The easiest answer might be that we don't see quantum superposition at the macro level because when we look at the world, we as conscious observers collapse the wave function. Light, sound, touch, smell, taste all enter our perceptual mechanisms and, interacting with brain and mind, are perceived. The world is there when we observe it because the act of observation collapses the wave functions around us even if nothing else did. But does this mean that if a tree falls in a forest with no one there to hear it, it doesn't make a sound?

One answer might be yes, the unobserved falling tree makes no sound. The basic reality of the universe may be thought of as one all-inclusive wave function in which everything is entangled. The universe is one big cloud of probabilities. Nothing exists per se until observed. But that verges on solipsism. So, science has considered a variety of other mechanisms for decoherence of quantum superposition – collapsing the wave function of anything tiny before it can get very big. It may happen simply because as things get bigger, they get more complex. They interfere with each other, fall out of phase, or vibrate at different frequencies. The latest theory posits that as mass slows down – dilates – time, even the gravity of earth would be enough to pull entangled particles into different time streams.

But at least some aspects of the macro-world do work through quantum effects. The efficiency of photosynthesis arises from quantum mechanical effects. Quantum mechanics may explain how birds use magnetic fields to navigate and our sense of smell. It may be that the cosmos is an entangled universal wave function that decoheres only at the boundary of individual acts of “observation.” But the observers would not simply be conscious human beings but any living thing interacting with its environment? Might the definition of life be that which breaks wave functions?