Tags / 21 quotes from 7 sources
#physics
Beyond Zero and One (Andrew Smart)
Voltage values are a human invention
As I mentioned, when voltage is measured and digitized using signal processing technology, the probability that the real voltage on a computer chip has a particular value is negligible. This is a subtle but very important point. It is the fundamental fact about moving from the…
Computers don't really compute
On a deeper level, which we might call the ontological level, the distinction between analog and digital disappears, as both concepts like “analog” and “digital” are ultimately epistemic tools humans have invented to describe natural and man-made signals. On a computer chip the…
The mysterious flame of consciousness
The fundamental problem arises because all our current physics, including the Theory of Everything, has no prediction for, or understanding of, how subjective states can be objective states—or even how subjective states could be based in an objective state. Here we can see the…
Information is like lift
The concept of information is useful; so is the concept of lift for flight. This does not mean that lift is real. Importantly, we do not include lift in fundamental physics because the phenomenon of lift is reducible to still more basic laws of physics like mass and gravity…
Flight without a theory of everything
invoke the flight analogy, we understand enough about
Skeptical about building a conscious machine
physics to build flying machines even without a final “theory of everything”–style complete understanding of the physical laws that govern the universe. I am skeptical that the same is possible with building a conscious machine.
Constructor Theory
Constructor theory
The basic principle of constructor theory is that all fundamental laws of nature are expressible entirely in terms of statements of which tasks (i.e. classes of physical transformations) are possible and which are impossible, and why. This is a new mode of explanation, intended…
International System Of Units - Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia
Origins of the International System of Units
At the end of Second World War, a number of different systems of measurement were in use throughout the world. Some of these systems were metric system variations, whereas others were based on customary systems of measure. It was recognised that additional steps were needed to…
Introducing Artificial Intelligence (Henry Brighton and Howard Selina)
Penrose: conventional computers cannot be conscious
Like Searle, Penrose argues that conventional computing machinery cannot support consciousness. A conscious mind requires very specific physical characteristics.
Quantum gravity and the conscious mind
If human thought comprises non-computational processes, then how is the brain supporting these processes? To answer this question, Penrose appeals to physics, and claims that the theory of quantum gravity is likely to be the kind of physics required to explain a conscious mind.
Microtubules as the seat of consciousness
The idea that quantum gravity may prove important to our understanding of consciousness predates Penrose, but he has stuck his neck out and specifically proposed that quantum gravity effects in the brain are likely to rely on microtubules – conveyor-belt-like structures inside
Mind: A Brief Introduction (John R. Searle)
Conscious agents in a world of mindless particles
A third reason for the centrality of the mind is that, for many of us, myself included, the central question in philosophy at the beginning of the twenty-first century is how to give an account of ourselves as apparently conscious, mindful, free, rational, speaking, social, and…
Free will in a causally closed world
Do I genuinely have free will, or is it only an illusion? The question comes in a very sharp form for Descartes, because if my free will is a feature of my mind, how can it have any effect on the physical world, if the physical world is entirely determined? This problem is an…
Dualism versus the conservation of energy
It seems impossible to make substance dualism consistent with modern physics. Physics says that the amount of matter/energy in the universe is constant; but substance dualism seems to imply that there is another kind of energy, mental energy or spiritual energy, that is not…
Three ways of making mental substance fit the world
It is not easy to make the idea that the mind is a separate substance consistent with the rest of what we know about the world. Here are three ways of trying to do it, each with a different conception of the mind. First, divine intervention. Physical science is incomplete. Our…
The insight that drives dualism
My guess is that dualism, in spite of being out of fashion, will not go away. Indeed in recent years dualism, at least property dualism, has been making something of a comeback, partly due to a renaissance of interest in consciousness. The insight that drives dualism is…
The mental qua mental is physical qua physical
This is one of the most important messages of this book. Once you revise the traditional categories to fit the facts, there is no problem in recognizing that the mental qua mental is physical qua physical. You have to revise the traditional Cartesian definitions of both…
Nature is radically contingent
nature is radically contingent. Many of the most important explanatory principles in science are by no means intuitive or obvious. Think of the Schroedinger equation or Planck’s constant or for that matter, Einstein’s famous e=mc2. In each case, this is just how nature turned…
Research Fronts 2014 : 100 Top Ranked Specialties In The Sciences And Social
Small's co-citation analysis maps scientific specialties
In 1973, Small published a paper that was as groundbreaking in its own way as Garfield’s 1955 paper introducing citation indexing for science. This paper, “Co-citation in the scientific literature: a new measure of relationship between two documents,” introduced A new era in…
The Ego Trick (baggini, Julian)
Nothing but the stuff of physics
the third truth: that there is no stuff in the universe other than the stuff of physics. Not so long ago, you could have put that same basic thought in simpler terms and it would probably have been more persuasive: there is nothing in the universe apart from matter. That…
The physical is what fits physicists' equations
the only way physicists can really understand the universe is in the language of mathematics. The fundamental basis of physics is not atoms, or even subatomic particles, but equations. That is why, for all its mysteriousness, dark matter does have all the reality that is needed…