From: heintzelman-george@CS.YALE.EDU (George Heintzelman)
Subject: Re: Psionics
Organization: Yale University Computer Science Dept., New Haven, CT 06520-2158
Date: Wed, 29 Jul 1992 21:37:27 GMT

In article <1992Jul29.191916.12331@msuinfo.cl.msu.edu> cassidy@cps.msu.edu.cps.msu.edu (John J Cassidy) writes:
>In article <1992Jul28.183601.12340@cs.yale.edu> heintzelman-george@CS.YALE.EDU (George Heintzelman) writes:
>>In article <1992Jul28.164746.4299@msuinfo.cl.msu.edu> cassidy@indian.cps.msu.edu (John J Cassidy) writes:

>>>	About life or sentient life being "special" being indentical to magic: 
>>>we already know that there is something special about sentience, Scientists 
>>>know it.  Perhaps we don't know in what exact way sentience is special. 
>>>Perhaps there are special consequences to sentience in order to create all the 
>>>effects that sentience requires?  
>
>>	No. We do NOT know that sentience is special. We humans have a
>>strong bias towards wanting to think that way, because we are sentient
>>(or at least, we think we are. :),
>	
>	I understand the smile, but you should know that you could not
>possibly by ARGUING this point, not in any stance that we can call
>argument.  And then again all the talk about what is possible and what
>is not possible is about as informative as a burp.  If you prefer to
>regard your views and arguments as NOTHING but secretions of your brain,
>then I waste my time speaking to you. :) 
	Well, the mention of us only thinking we are is a joke,
because sentience is whatever we define it to be...and we take
ourselves to be the model of what is sentient. But the point about
secretions of your brain is precisely the point I intended to make,
put a bit more crudely than I would have...There's no reason to think
that there's anything in our thought not accounted for by our brains,
or anything in our brains not accounted for by physics.
	That doesn't mean that you, being the 'consciousness' in the
brain, don't at least have the impression of free will, and since the
brain is amazingly complex, for all intents and purposes you may as
well have, but I believe that on some level you don't.

> 
>>                                    but there is no accepted scientific
>>evidence to suggest that sentience cannot be produced with the
>>laborious application of the current physical model. 
>
>	Now we get to a topic that *I* think is "handwaving", Artificial
>Intelligence.  How could we, after programming a machine to be as
>sentient as we can make it, judge its degree of sentience?  It could
>have a vast problem-solving routine, with a vast bag of random items
>that it could pull out based on the problem solving routines, so how could
>we tell extremely low-probabilty of reaction from emergent behavior?
>Isn't it possible that a failure in designing actual intelligence could
>end up with a system that APPEARS so?

	We can't. That's one of the things behind modern physics
research, almost always you CANNOT say that 'This is true'....you can
only say that x = y, within error z, to probabilty p. Eventually you
get to the point where p is large enough and z small enough that you
think you've learned something.

>	And to your point: can you come up with conclusive evidence by
>the scientific community that proves that ghosts don't exist?  No, you
>can't.  You can only show me "disconfirming instances" of such
>existence, i.e. debunking reports.  Therefore disconfirming instances
>of AI are all that is required to believe that biological sentience may
>indeed be special.  
	The fact that we haven't yet made a sentient AI is, at best, a
failure to disprove the assertion. AI technology has not yet created a
machine with the number of elements or interconnections of our brains,
and silicon is quite different from neural mush, so I don't think this
says anything.

>	Going on what we have now, empirically, we must regard sentience
>as special, or -- at least excuse yourself when you burp.

	I suppose it depends on what you mean by 'special'. I was
taking it, in the context of the discussion beforehand, to mean
something not adequately explained by the current model. This I don't
think is the case; certainly, there isn't any evidence now to suggest
it.
	On the other hand, this is NOT to say that sentience isn't an
extremely complicated, difficult-to-understand phenomenon which we are
far from understanding completely. 

>
>>                                                      If there were, it
>>would be reason to tear down the physical model & work on a new one.
>>
>>>Any future investigation of science into this
>>>would be its own science, proposing a new avenue of scientific investigation is
>>>fair game for SF.  Do we really KNOW all the ways that science will evolve?
>>>If this all seems like handwaving to you, you can ignore it.  But I would be   
>>>interested in specific questions on this subject if you wish.
>>
>>	No, we don't know all the ways that science will evolve.
>>However, anything postulated must not produce observations different
>>from those currently well-known, within the limit of the accuaracy of
>>those measurements. In hard SF, it must provide an explanation as to why we
>>HAVEN'T observed it yet. 
>
>See above section on disconfirming instances and AI...
	Um, that's no really the point. The point is that whatever
theory you create must explain everything we already think we know,
as well as any new effects.
>
>>	Frankly, I've never seen a satifactorily done explanation of
>>psi effects, by anyone. The relatively common '5th force' postulate
>>falls down almost always because, in order not to be observed, it must
>>be either 1) incredibly weak, and therefore useless (except in very
>>sepcial circumstances, see above) 2) Incredibly short ranged (ie
>>inside quarks) and therefore useless for macroscopic effects -- every
>>macroscopic effect we have seen can be explained with quantum
>>electrodynamics & general relativistic gravitation; or 3) Effective
>>only between rare types of particles, and therefore again, generally
>>useless.
>>
>	Right away, I'll admit that I'm no physicist.  But let me ask
>about SuperStrings: what are they?  I mean not a description, but what
>are they made of?  They are what they are, like quanta.  You can't even
>say for them that they are made of quanta, because, as I last understood
>it, quanta are a particular representation of a superstring, they are
>the Flatland version of a superstring.  By some superstring theory,
>quantum effects can be explained because the effect does not have to be
>local -- which by the way is a big part of the assumptions that
>Scientists make about cause and effect.  Yes taken to this extent
>psionics do pose to make the world something other that what current
>20th century scientists believe it to be, but 20th century science is SO
>different to what 18th or 19th century scientists expected it to be.
>Whether or not it makes it acceptable SF is something each person has to
>judge.
>
Superstrings are a phenomenon of the 'quark confinement' model in
physics. A brief explanation: quarks exchange 'gluons', the carriers
of the strong nuclear force. If the quarks start moving apart, the
gluons between them become more energetic (like a spring, in basic
mechanics), as well as creating more and more of them, 'strung out' in
a line...hence the term. Eventually, the energy can become so great
that a new quark anti-quark pair is created from vacuum, and you get
all sorts of neat quantum effects. So I guess you could say that a
superstring is 'made from' gluons.
	'Quanta' aren't really anything. We often speak about quanta
of energy, which are just representations of the discrete energy
levels of a system.
	Whatever you've typed in the above sentence makes absolutely
no sense to me (the physics part), sorry to say. (And yes, I am a
physicist (in training, at least :) )
	As far as the differences is physics...yes and no. Quantum
physics, in the limit of what was observable then, is completely
compatible with the physics then, and macroscopically little has
changed, other than certain optical effects and so forth. Enginneers
armed with nothing but Newton could still build a bridge.  All that
I'm saying is that any effect that doesn't fit in with our current
physics would be unable to produce the kinds of effects depicted by
psi. We have a huge store of observations, and any new science MUST
remain compatible with them, unless you want to give up the principles
of isotropy (that is, that physical law is the same in all places &
all times.). 

George Heintzelman

Ignore the above address, its just where I read news...email should be
sent to heintzel@cernapo.cern.ch




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