#21. The Cogs of Armageddon [evolutionary psychology]

EP

Red, theory; black, fact

The Mechanism of Human Dispersal 

How does everyday human behaviour eventually accomplish the biological function of dispersal for the human race? 

Background 

Dispersal is things like dandelions shedding airborne seeds, slime molds developing into spore cases on stalks and releasing the spores into the wind, territorial systems of birds and mammals forcing the unlanded young to seek widely for their own territories, and humans going into space because our science fiction writers keep scaring us about the possibility of meteor crashes wiping out life on Earth. 

The slime mold Dictyostelium is triggered into its dispersal program by the food supply running short; I will adopt the assumption that the human dispersal program is also triggered by the end of the good times, that is, the price of bread rising relative to wages.

The Psychology of Dispersal

Human neural pathways may potentiate aggression when the hard times come, but of an elaborate kind featuring many evolved adaptations that ensure efficient dispersal (i.e., with minimal loss of life). 

Our evolved dispersal program begins with a two-person feud of the sort illustrated in cultural references too numerous to mention. An arbitrary stimulus, made offensive by some piece of Pavlovian conditioning, is traded back and forth with rapidly increasing energy. 

Features of Human Dispersal Explained by Evolution 

1) The emotional component is strongly threatening because the participants must be induced to seek allies, which people do when  threatened, until all of society is eventually polarized. The acts of provocation being traded back and forth become progressively more outrageous, as they must, to keep the polarization process going. Eventually, one side gets the upper hand and forces the other to flee.

2) The result is a diaspora, i.e., dispersal. Because of the long polarization process, an entire group is expelled, not single individuals one at a time. Thus, members of such a group can assist each other to survive and relocate, thereby reducing the mortality associated with dispersal, thereby making the dispersal event more efficient in terms of number of people relocated.

3) The group who flees is then seen by the international community as the blameless victim, and the group who stays is seen as the unprincipled aggressor. This tends to elicit a sheltering of the refugees and an intimidation of the "aggressor," who is deterred from pressing his advantage, that is, pursuing the refugees and slaughtering them to the last man, which is what each side would like to do to the other by this point. This, again, is an efficiency from the point of view of producing dispersal.

4) However, if each side is continually threatening the other, why don't they flee each other's presence during the very early stages? Humans may have a reflex that converts feeling threatened into a wish to injure the threatening party, possibly a behavioural leftover from some earlier adaptation, such as an anti-predation defence. To injure, you have to stick around. 

5) Finally, settled refugees usually do not integrate completely into the host society, instead forming ethnic neighbourhoods. Being seen as ethnic by the host society, due to slow integration, could improve the reproductive success of refugees because of disassortative mate-choice effects evolved to favor genes that produce dispersal.

6) The dispersal-producing dynamic just outlined is powerful, because it must overcome all the reasons a person would not leave their homeland forever at some arbitrary time: expense, risk of mortality in transit, opportunity costs, temporary loss of livelihood, need to learn a new language and customs, vulnerability to exploitation in the new country, etc.

#20. Is Higher Math Really Undiscovered Physics? [physics]

PH

Red, theory; black, fact

Back to the Aether Theory 

This post was inspired by the realization that to progress in physics, we need to accept the Newtonian position that absolute space exists. Not only that, but that absolute space is complicated, like a network, crystal, or condensate.

The Reasons

1) Too many fundamental constants of nature (20, according to Lee Smolin) are required to explain the behaviour of supposedly elementary particles with no internal structures to which such constants could refer. 

2) The wave model and the particle model of mass and energy are both very useful in Quantum Mechanics, our best theory of the very small. The wave model demands some kind of medium and thus an absolute frame of reference. The particle model, however, does not demand its absence. For example, observing frictionless motion of a particle could be due to the absolute frame of reference being a region of superfluid. Relativity theory uses the particle model exclusively and denies the existence of an absolute frame of reference, but this conclusion comes at the end of a long and convoluted chain of reasoning and is thus weaker than the claim made by use of the wave model.

3) The importance of the speed of light in Relativity is highly consistent with the wave model: it could be the propagation speed of the waves underlying both matter and energy.

The Medium is Complex

Thus, I assume that the fundamental constants refer to the vacuum between the particles, now more readily understood as a complex medium. Looking at the pattern set by the rest of physics and cosmology, such a medium may more readily be understood as a condensate of myriad "space-forming entities." Matter would be flaws in this condensate, entropy left over from its rapid formation. Energy may have the same relation to time: irregularities in its rate of progression.

The Thought Barrier 

To theorize about how space formed and what came before it, we have to give up visualization. I suspect this will be a big deal for most physicists. However, the abstractions of higher math may be an island of understanding already existing on the far side of the spatial thought barrier.

Beyond the Thought Barrier 

In other words, sets, integers, categories, mappings, etc., may be concrete things, and not abstractions at all. Presumably, our spatial and temporal reality still bears the properties it had from the very earliest stages of the universe, co-existing with later-developed properties, which have enabled mathematicians throughout history to access the deepest levels of description of reality, deeper than space-time itself.

Set Theory as Physics Beyond the Barrier

Consider set theory. Can the familiar concepts of set, union, intersection, and complement be placed into correspondence with physical processes and objects in today's space-time to make a case that set theory is pre-spatial physics, so primordial as to be unimaginable if thought of as the rules of a real universe? 

Development 

1) To get started, we have to begin with Leibniz's monads, the "empty set," now considered a real thing. (If you must visualize these, visualize something unpretentious like Cheereos™ floating in milk, when the bowl has reached the single-layer stage.)

2) The physical process of binding is prefigured by the set-theoretical operation of union. In the simplest case, two monads combine to form a second-order set.

3) The physical process of pattern recognition, which is, in essence, energy release, is prefigured by intersection. Note that with intersection, the internal subset structure of the set is important, suggesting that the "operating system" of the universe at this stage must keep track of such structures.

4) We can associate a size measure with a set, namely the total of all the monads inside it once all subsets have been accounted for. The usefulness of numbers in dealing with the world is explained if this size measure is the basis of laws governing what sets may combine as unions and in what frequency (i.e., fraction of all sets extant.)

5) The fact that most of physics seems to be governed by differential equations may be prefigured by a tendency of these combining laws to depend on the difference of two sizes. 

6) The set-theoretical operation of complementation may prefigure the existence of positive and negative charge and the Pauli exclusion principle of fermions, on which molecular complementarity  interactions depend.