#30. The Russian-dolls--multiverse Part II [physics]

PH

Red, theory; black, fact

Continuing from the previous post, leptons may arise as electromagnetic wave functions originating in p2 that are transported into our p3 universe/condensate by ordinary diffusion and convection. Wave functions in p2 that are already leptons become our baryons when they are transported in. The only kind of wave functions that are "native" to a given frame of reference are electromagnetic (photonic) in that frame of reference. If they subsequently propagate towards increasing p (inwards) they gain mass as matter; if they propagate towards decreasing p (outwards), they first lose mass as matter until they are photonic (i.e., massless) and then gain mass as antimatter.

To produce stable leptons from in-migrating photons, the first condensates, the p2s, would have had to be rotating simultaneously about three mutually perpendicular axes. If this is impossible for p3 physics, we have to appeal to the possibility of a different physics in p1 for any of these ideas to make sense.

A "universe" is something like an artist's canvas with a painting in progress on it. First, nature makes the blank canvas, and then, in a second stage, puts the information content on it. Consider the moon. It formed out of orbiting molten spray from the collision of two similarly-sized planetesimals. In the molten state, its self-gravity could easily round it up into a perfect sphere which could have solidified with a mostly smooth surface. Call this smooth surface the "canvas." Subsequently, the very same force of gravity would have brought down meteors to cover the surface in an elaborate pattern of craters. Call this the "painting." 

Now consider the neutronium core of a neutron star, viewed as a p4, or small universe. The tremendous energy release of the catastrophic gravitational collapse in which it forms homogenizes all the matter into pure neutrons, thought to be a superfluid. This creates the "canvas." Subsequently, matter and energy from our p3 migrate into the superfluid, producing a "painting" of leptons (our photons), baryons (our leptons), and "uberbaryons" (our baryons). Indeed, the neutron-star core is actually thought to be not pure neutronium, but neutronium containing a sprinkling of free protons and electrons (as seen in p3, of course).

#29. The Russian-dolls--multiverse Part I [physics]

PH

Red, theory; black, fact

A Matryoshka

The space we live in may have an absolute frame of reference, as Newton taught, and which Einstein taught against. This frame of reference may be a condensate, like the water a fish swims in.

The divide-and-conquer strategy that has served science so well thus far can continue with the conceptual disassembly of this space into its constituent particles. The question arises if these particles are situated in yet another space, older and larger than ours, or if we go direct to spacelessness, where entities have to be treated like Platonic forms. In the former case, does that older, larger space in turn comes apart into particles situated in a still older and larger, etc, etc, ad infinitum?

Infinities are the death of theories. Nevertheless, let us continue with the Russian-dolls idea, merely assuming that the nesting sequence is not infinite and will not be infinite until the entire multi verse is infinitely old, because the "dolls" form one by one, by ordinary gravitational collapse, from the outside in.

Wave functions would be the basic building blocks, following quantum mechanics. In the outermost space, previously called #, the wave crests always move at exactly the speed of light.

This speed is not necessarily our speed of light, c, but more likely some vastly greater value.

The space-forming particles of # are themselves aggregates with enough internal entropy to represent integers and enough secondary valences to form links to a set of nearest neighbors to produce a network that is a space. This space acts like a cellular automaton, with signals passing over the links to change the values of the stored integers in some orderly way. The wave functions are the stereotyped, stable figures that spontaneously develop in the automaton out of the initial noise mass left over from catastrophic gravitational collapse. 

The dimensionality of a space would increase steadily over time, because the number of links emanating from each node in the underlying network increases slowly but surely. Macroscopically, this dimensionality increase could look something like protein folding. 

Let us label the Russian-dolls universes from the outside in, in the sequence 1, 2, 3,...etc, and call this number the "pupacity" of a given frame of reference. (From the Latin "pupa," meaning "doll.") Let us further shorten "pupacity" to "p" for symbol-compounding purposes. Thus, the consecutively labelled spaces can be referred to as p1 (formerly "#"), p2, p3,... etc.

pn can exhibit global motions ("n" is some arbitrary pupacity), such as rotation, in the frame of reference of p(n-1): a whole universe rotating as a rigid unit. Probably, it can drift and vibrate as well.

Global motions must be subtracted from the true, outer, speed-of-light speed of the wave crest to produce its apparent speed and direction when seen from within pn. Thus, the universe's love of spinning and orbiting systems of all sizes is explained: a spinning, global-motion vector is being subtracted from the non-spinning, outermost one. As the pupacity of the frame of reference increases, more and more of these global vectors are being subtracted, causing the residual apparent motion to get progressively smaller. We would assume under current physics that the wave functions are acquiring more and more mass, to make them go slower and slower, but mass is just a fiction in this scenario. However, the reliance of current physics on the mass construct is an opportunity to determine the pupacity of planet Earth: it is three.

Three, because physics describes three broad categories of particle mass: the photon, leptons, and baryons. The photon would be native to p1, leptons, such as electrons and positrons, would be native to p2, and baryons, such as protons and neutrons, would be native to p3, our own sub-world. 

The positron atom would be a standing-wave pattern made up of oppositely rotating wave functions, an electron and a positron, both native to p2. A neutron would be exactly the same thing, but native to p3. 

#28. My Second Theory of Everything [physics]

PH

Red, theory; black, fact

How does wavelike, low-frequency light becomes particle-like, high-frequency light as frequency is smoothly increased? Waves are continuous, whereas particles are discontinuous; how, then, does the breakup occur?

You have to put the source in the picture. Recoil of the source atom sends the wave function off in a specific direction, but the wave function is known to expand (about its center of symmetry?) as it goes. Presumably, it is the vector sum of these two motions that must equal the speed of light; either one is presumably free to take on some lower speed, say, that of a pitched softball. I conjecture that as frequency increases, the particle-like drift of the center progressively dominates the mixture at the expense of the local, wave-like expansion of the wave function about its center. This is how I see waves morphing into particles as the frequency increases. 

• There is an absolute frame-of-reference, #.
• All motions seen in this frame of reference will be observed to occur at the speed of light (c); and only this frame of reference has this property.
• All speeds lower than c are illusions caused by the motion of the observer's frame of reference.
• That which moves always at c is not a wave function, but a phase marker of some sort within it, such as a zero crossing or a wave crest.
• The local wave function evolution relative to its center of symmetry combined with the drift of that center relative to # always travels at c relative to #.
• If local evolution is an expansion along all wave function radii, you have light; if it is a rotation about the center of symmetry (i.e., motion perpendicular to radii), you have matter.
• Light wave functions will be like nested spherical shells, whereas matter wave functions will have a lobar, angle-dependent structure like a p-, d-, or f-orbital in theoretical chemistry. The lobes are essential to provide a contrast pattern that could, in principle, be observed to spin.
• The presence of one axis of rotation produces the neutrino; two simultaneous axes of rotation produce the mesons; three produce the remaining stable particles, e, p, and n. If the three rotational rates are distinguishable, the resulting structure has a handedness.
• The matter/antimatter dichotomy arises from this handedness, when combined with a law of conservation of spin that would result from space initially being symmetrical. 
• The mesons should have an ability in 3-space to flip over into their corresponding antiparticles.

#27. The Origin of Consciousness [neuroscience]

NE

Red, theory; black, fact

We begin life conscious only of our own emotions. Then the process of classical conditioning, first studied in animals, brings more and more of our environment into the circle of our consciousness, causing the contents of consciousness to become enriched in spatial and temporal detail. Thus, you are now able to be conscious of these words of mine on the screen. However, each stroke of each letter of each word of mine that now reaches your consciousness does so because, subjectively, it is "made of" pure emotion, and that emotion is yours.

Some analogies come to mind. Emotion as the molten tin that the typesetter pours into the mold, the casting process being classical conditioning and the copy the environmental data reported by our sense organs. Emotion as the area on one side of a fractal line and sensory data the area on the other side. Emotion as an intricately ramifying tree-like structure by which sensory details can send excitation down to the hypothalamus at the root and thus enter consciousness.

The status of "in consciousness" can in principle affect the cerebral cortex via the projections to cortex from the histaminergic tuberomamillary nucleus of the hypothalamus. Histamine is known to have an alerting effect on cortex, but to call it "alerting" may be to grossly undersell its significance. It may carry a consolidation signal  for declarative, episodic, and flash memory. Not for a second do I suppose all of that to be packed into the hippocampus, rather than being located in the only logical place for it: the vast expanse of the human cerebral cortex.

#26. Why Organized Religion? Theory Two [evolutionary psychology]

EP

Red, theory; black, fact

Emotions are an "endophenotype," a term from functional magnetic resonance imaging, that provides a useful stepping stone from evolutionary arguments to explanations of our daily lives. 

Starting with the Emotion 

What is the mood or feel as you enter a place of worship and participate in the ceremonies conducted there? More than anything else, the mood is one of great reverence, as though one is in the presence of the world's most powerful king. Kings are supposed to "represent their race." 

Problem

If the emotional outline of people's behaviour is being partly randomized in each generation by recombination-type mutations, a consistent moral code seems impossible if we assume that morality comes mostly from peoples' inborn patterns of emotional reactivity, that is, the sum total of everyone's preferences. The purpose of a king may be to find and coincide with societies' moral center of gravity, around which a formal, if temporary, moral code can be constructed. In a complex society, everyone must be "on the same page" for efficient interaction. 

It Gets Bigger

The same problem no doubt recurs each time organisms come together to form a colony, or super-organism: the conflict between the need of a colony for coordination of colonists and the need of evolution for random variability. Such variability will inevitably affect the formulation and interpretation of the coordinating messages that the colonists exchange, like all their other inborn characteristics. 

A Social Solution 

With kingship comes the corrupting influence of personal power and  tyrannical government. Replacing a real king with a pretend-king named "God" would seem to be the solution that accounts for organized religion, but then one loses the flexibility that goes with having a flesh-and-blood king who can change his predecessor's laws based on current popular sentiment.

Mechanistic Interpretation 

However, human nature may well have a core-and-shell structure, with an "unchanging" core surrounded by a slowly changing shell. The former would be the species-specific objective function and produced by species-replacement group selection within the genus, and the latter would be due to selection of smaller units, and would represent the stratagems hit upon by our ancestors to meet the demands of the objective function in our time and place. This shell part may account for cultural differences between countries. The core may be implemented in the hypothalamus of the brain, whereas the shell may be implemented in the limbic system. The core, being very slow to change, could be managed by organized religion, whereas the shell could be codified by the more flexible institution of government. Though the core is unchanging overall, specific individuals will harbor variations in it due to point mutations, necessitating the standardizing role of religion. Synaptic plasticity would then be used to cancel the point-mutational variation in the objective function.

The Big Picture 

The core may consist of four pillars, or regulatory themes: regulation of genetic diversity, memetic diversity, altruism, and dispersal. Our energetic investment in obtaining each item is to be optimized.

#25. The Phasiverse [physics]

PH

Red, theory; black, fact

The nucleus around which a theory of everything will hopefully crystallize.

The Concept

Our reality, the world of appearances, is encoded in the relative phases of an ineffably large number of oscillators, each of which is a kind of primitive clock.

Inspiration from Quantum Mechanics 

An early interpretation of the theory of quantum mechanics was that there is a harmonic oscillator somehow assigned to each point in space, and that these account for the matter fields of the universe. Examples of oscillators would be a mass bouncing up and down on a spring and an electronic device called a tank circuit, which is just one capacitor connected across the terminals of one inductor. 

Consider Huygens's Clocks

If a set of such oscillators can communicate with each other (exchange oscillatory energy), this is called coupling, and it can make the oscillators tend to pull each other in to the same, common phase. The Huygens's clocks experiment began with two old-school pendulum clocks in a case with their pendulums swinging in some random phase relationship. The next day, mysteriously, the pendulums were found swinging in opposite directions. The coupling is evidently due to tiny, rhythmic forces travelling through the common supporting beam from clock to clock.

Enter Positive Feedback 

If the coupling is positive, as assumed here, (it's negative in the above experiment), the phase pull-in effect becomes stronger the closer the two phases approach each other, causing a positive feedback effect. This is very reminiscent of Hebb's rule in neuroscience and the tendency of natural attractive forces such as gravity to depend inversely on distance. 

A Organizing Principle 

The phase pull-in effect provides a simple answer to questions such as where the organizing principle comes from. All you need to explain is where the oscillators themselves all came from, how they oscillate, and why they are coupled. Since the oscillators begin life in spacelessness, they cannot avoid interacting to produce a coupling effect. Second, oscillators need no past or future; they can arise as a succession of causally related nows that alternates between two contrasting forms. Figures in Conway's game of Life would seem to be examples of this alternation.

Enter Entropy

A great many oscillators all with the same phase is not an interesting universe. However, suppose that this is impossible because of "train wrecks" happening during the synchronization process that produce frustration of the synchronization analogous to spin frustration in spin glasses. An example would be a cyclic relationship of oscillators in which a wave goes around the loop endlessly. Such cycles may correspond to particles of matter in our universe, and the spiral waves that they would throw off into surrounding space may correspond to the fields around such particles.

Gravitational Lensing Explained

A black hole or galaxy would be surrounded by a tremendous number of such radiating fields. The resulting desychronization of the oscillators making up the surrounding space would increase the average phase difference between phasically nearby oscillators, thereby inhibiting their coupling, thereby inhibiting the travel of signals generally through the region. Result: the speed of light is reduced in the vicinity, resulting in the bending of light rays, called gravitational lensing.

Quantization is not explained, which is a limitation of the present theory.

#24. Proxy Natural Selection from the Inside [evolutionary psychology, genetics]

EP   GE

Red, theory; black, fact

Morning hymn at Sebastian Bachs' By Toby Edward Rosenthal

What Does Darwinian Fitness Feel Like?

My first post on post-zygotic gamete selection (PGS) left open some questions, such as what it should feel like, if anything, when one is fulfilling the species objective function and being deemed "proxy-fit" by one's own hypothalamus.

How Our Emotions Program Us

I conclude that it's just what you would think: you feel joy and/or serenity. Joy is one of Ekman's six basic universal human emotions, the others being fear, anger, disgust, sadness, and surprise. I think that emotions collectively are the operations of the highest-level human behavioral program. (That is, the program in its broadest outlines.) The unpleasant emotions force you to get off the couch until they are taken care of, and joy lets you get back on. Thus, the unpleasant four are the starting emotions, and joy is the stopping emotion. 

Surprise may be a meta-emotion that tells you that your threshold for experiencing one of the other emotions is too high, and immediately lowers it. Each activation of an emotion may tend to lower the threshold for activating it next time, which implies a positive feedback loop capable of changing the personality to suit suddenly changed circumstances, especially if the emotion eventually begins issuing with no trigger at all.

Where Our Emotions Come From

To relate this to the mechanism of PGS, the crossing-over events that went into making the sperm cell that made a given person would theoretically affect brain development more than anything else, specifically connecting some random stimulus to one of the unpleasant primary emotions. This creates temperament, and thus  personality, which is the unique quality which they have to offer the world, and on which they are being tested by history. If the actions to which their own, special preferences propel them are what the species objective function is looking for, they succeed, feel joy and serenity, and experience an altered methylation status of the DNA in the spermatogonia if male, which suppresses further crossing over in the manufacture of sperm, so that their personality type breeds true, which is what the population needs. Famous musical families, for example, may originate in this way.

PGS is quick evolution to respond to challenges that come and go on less than a multi-thousand generation timescale, and it explains the complexities of sexual reproduction.

A Flaw in the Argument, Addressed

However, trees have no behavior, much less personalities, and yet they have sexual reproduction. However, trees probably adapt quickly not by behavioral change, but by changes in their chemistry. The chemistry in question would be the synthesis of pesticidal mixtures located in the central vacuole of each plant cell. In terms of such mixtures, each tree should be slightly unique, an easily testable prediction.

The Big Picture 

Each of the four unpleasant "starting" emotions may sub-serve one of the four pillars of the species objective function. Thus: sadness, altruism; disgust, genetic diversity (due to point mutations; what is motivated here is the screening of such novelties during mate selection, screening always being the expensive part); fear, memetic diversity (or motivating prescreening of memetic novelties through fear of public speaking); anger, dispersal.

Each of these emotions seems to have another use, in preserving the life of the individual, as opposed to the entire species. Thus: sadness, unfavorable energy balance; disgust, steering one away from concentrations of harmful bacteria; fear, avoidance of injury and death; anger, driving away competitors for food and mates.

Picture credits: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Copyright_tags/Country-specific_tags#United_States_of_America