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A Theory of Reality as more than the sum of its parts

Natalie Wolchover
Quanta Magazine
Thu, 01 Jun 2017 17:08 UTC
causual emergence quantum reality
© Olena Shmahalo/Quanta Magazine
New math shows how, contrary to conventional scientific wisdom, conscious beings and other macroscopic entities might have greater influence over the future than does the sum of their microscopic components.

In his 1890 opus, The Principles of Psychology, William James invoked Romeo and Juliet to illustrate what makes conscious beings so different from the particles that make them up.

"Romeo wants Juliet as the filings want the magnet; and if no obstacles intervene he moves towards her by as straight a line as they," James wrote. "But Romeo and Juliet, if a wall be built between them, do not remain idiotically pressing their faces against its opposite sides like the magnet and the filings. ... Romeo soon finds a circuitous way, by scaling the wall or otherwise, of touching Juliet's lips directly."

Erik Hoel, a 29-year-old theoretical neuroscientist and writer, quoted the passage in a recent essay in which he laid out his new mathematical explanation of how consciousness and agency arise. The existence of agents — beings with intentions and goal-oriented behavior — has long seemed profoundly at odds with the reductionist assumption that all behavior arises from mechanistic interactions between particles. Agency doesn't exist among the atoms, and so reductionism suggests agents don't exist at all: that Romeo's desires and psychological states are not the real causes of his actions, but merely approximate the unknowably complicated causes and effects between the atoms in his brain and surroundings.

Comment: On causality from another point of view: Free will is real

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NPC

'Total-surveillance shopping experience' with Amazon Fresh as new till-less grocery store opens in London

Leo Kelion
BBC
Sun, 07 Mar 2021 11:55 UTC
Amazon
© Getty
Amazon tracks each customer as they move around the shop
Amazon has opened a till-less grocery store in London - its first "just walk out" shop outside the US.

Visitors to Amazon Fresh scan a smartphone app when entering and are automatically billed as they leave.

The store stocks hundreds of own-brand items as well as third-party products, and also serves as a place to collect and return goods bought online.

Campaigners have raised privacy concerns but one retail expert said the opening marked a "watershed moment".


Comment: Both?


Comment: See also:

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Cassiopaea

Unknown magnetospheric mechanisms in the polar aurora revealed

Nagoya University
Phys.org
Fri, 05 Mar 2021 12:00 UTC
Arase
© ERG science center
The Arase satellite captured data about electrons accelerated from very high altitudes.
A critical ingredient for auroras exists much higher in space than previously thought, according to new research in the journal Scientific Reports. The dazzling light displays in the polar night skies require an electric accelerator to propel charged particles down through the atmosphere. Scientists at Nagoya University and colleagues in Japan, Taiwan and the U.S. have found that it exists beyond 30,000 kilometers above the Earth's surface — offering insight not just about Earth, but other planets as well.

The story of aurora formation begins with supersonic plasma propelled from the sun into space as high-speed, charged particles. When these charged particles get close to Earth, they are deflected and funneled in streams along the planet's magnetic field lines, eventually flowing towards the poles.


Comment: To the surprise of scientists it was recently discovered that energy from the solar wind favors the north.


Comment: See also:

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Blue Planet

Woolly mammoths lived alongside first humans in New England

Dartmouth College
Phys.org
Thu, 04 Mar 2021 19:02 UTC
mammoth
© Flying Puffin (Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic license: creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/deed.en).
Replica of a Woolly mammoth (Mammuthus primigenius) in the Royal BC Museum in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada. The display is from 1979, and the fur is muskox hair. Credit:
Woolly mammoths may have walked the landscape at the same time as the earliest humans in what is now New England, according to a Dartmouth study published in Boreas. Through the radiocarbon dating of a rib fragment from the Mount Holly mammoth from Mount Holly, Vt., the researchers learned that this mammoth existed approximately 12,800 years ago. This date may overlap with the arrival of the first humans in the Northeast, who are thought to have arrived around the same time.


Comment: There's good reason to believe that the Americas were populated much more widely and much earlier: America Before by Graham Hancock - Book review


"It has long been thought that megafauna and humans in New England did not overlap in time and space and that it was probably ultimately environmental change that led to the extinction of these animals in the region but our research provides some of the first evidence that they may have actually co-existed," explains co-author Nathaniel R. Kitchel, the Robert A. 1925 and Catherine L. McKennan Postdoctoral Fellow in anthropology at Dartmouth.


Comment: Indeed drastic changes in the environment appears to have had an impact on the world's megafauna, but the question is: what caused the drastic shifts in climate? Of Flash Frozen Mammoths and Cosmic Catastrophes


Comment: See also: And check out SOTT radio's:

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Star of David

Pfizer CEO Admits Israel's Exclusive Use of mRNA Vaccine Makes it 'World's Lab' as Covid-19 Mortality Rate Spikes

Gilad Atzmon
gilad.online
Sat, 27 Feb 2021 00:00 UTC
rats pic
© unknown
If Israelis are confused by the fact that their government treats them like laboratory pets, if they wonder why their freedom to travel, to socialise or even earn a living have evaporated, Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla produced a genuine answer yesterday. In an interview on NBC Bourla said:

"I believe Israel has become the world's lab right now because they are using only our vaccine at this state and they have vaccinated a very big part of their population, so we can study both economy and health indices."

I have no issue with medical experiments involving humans if the participants are fully aware of all possible circumstances and considerations involved in their consent. This didn't happen in Israel. By means of 'green passports,' the government practically threatens to penalise anyone reluctant to participate in a 'lab' experiment for a giant pharmaceutical company with a very problematic record.

The results of this Pfizer-Israeli experiment aren't necessarily encouraging. Though it may be possible, as some studies suggest, that most vaccinated people have at least short-term protection from Covid-19, no one can deny the astonishing fact that in just 8 weeks of mass vaccination the total number of Covid-19 deaths in the Jewish State almost doubled from the number accumulated in the prior ten months.

Comment: Atzmon offers an alarming and compelling statistical argument for refusing the jab. Buyer beware!

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Alarm Clock

Supercomputer shows doubling masks offers little help preventing viral spread

Rocky Swift
Japan Today
Fri, 05 Mar 2021 03:29 UTC
japan children masks
© REUTERS / Thomas Peter
Schoolgirls, wearing surgical masks, cross a street in Kyoto.
Japanese supercomputer simulations showed that wearing two masks gave limited benefit in blocking viral spread compared with one properly fitted mask.

The findings in part contradict recent recommendations from the U.S. Centers of Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) that two masks were better than one at reducing a person's exposure to the coronavirus.

Researchers used the Fugaku supercomputer to model the flow of virus particles from people wearing different types and combinations of masks, according to a study released on Thursday by research giant Riken and Kobe University.

Comment:

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Comet

First time organic materials essential for life on Earth found on surface of asteroid

Royal Holloway, University of London
Phys.org
Thu, 04 Mar 2021 12:00 UTC
Itokawa
© ISAS-JAXA
New research from Royal Holloway, has found water and organic matter on the surface of an asteroid sample returned from the inner Solar System. This is the first time that organic materials, which could have provided chemical precursors for the origin of life on Earth, have been found on an asteroid.

The single grain sample was returned to Earth from asteroid Itokawa by JAXA's first Hayabusa mission in 2010. The sample shows that water and organic matter that originate from the asteroid itself have evolved chemically through time.

The research paper suggests that Itokawa has been constantly evolving over billions of years by incorporating water and organic materials from foreign extra-terrestrial material, just like the Earth. In the past, the asteroid will have gone through extreme heating, dehydration and shattering due to catastrophic impact. However, despite this, the asteroid came back together from the shattered fragments and rehydrated itself with water that was delivered via the in fall of dust or carbon-rich meteorites.

Comment: Proponents of Panspermia posit that life itself may be distributed throughout the Universe by asteroids and other debris:

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Hearts

European domestic dog may have originated in Southwestern Germany

Senckenberg Research Institute and Natural History Museum
Phys.org
Thu, 04 Mar 2021 12:00 UTC
Canidae
© Senckenberg
The domestication of wolves was studied on the basis of Canidae fossils from the Gnirshöhle cave in Southwestern Germany.
Together with a group of international colleagues, a research team from the Senckenberg Centre for Human Evolution and Palaeoenvironment at the University of Tübingen studied the beginnings of the domestication of wolves in Europe. Using a multi-method approach, the researchers analyzed several Canidae fossils from a cave in Southwestern Germany. In their study, published today in the nature journal Scientific Reports, they reach the conclusion that the transition from wolves to domesticated dogs may have occurred in this region between 16,000 and 14,000 years ago.

Dogs are generally considered the oldest domestic animals. "However, to date it is still not clear exactly when the transition from wolves to domestic and herding dogs occurred. Scientific estimates range between 15,000 to 30,000 years ago," explains Dr. Chris Baumann of the Senckenberg Centre for Human Evolution and Palaeoenvironment at the University of Tübingen, and he continues, "Moreover, the location where this transition from wild to domestic animals occurred also continues to be uncertain."

Comment: Interestingly, it has been proposed that the domestication of dogs may have happened more than once:

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Magnify

The Stats on Covid-Vaccine Injury and Death Don't Add Up

Rosemary Frei
rosemaryfrei.ca
Thu, 25 Feb 2021 19:52 UTC
graveyard headstone cross
There's a big mystery that needs to be solved.

It's how many people are getting sick and dying from the Covid vaccines.

There are reports from around the world of large numbers of elderly people dying right around the time they're vaccinated.

On rare occasions those reports of those deaths even percolate into the mainstream press. An example is this January 16, 2021, Bloomberg article. It quotes the Norwegian Medicines Agency as attributing more than a dozen deaths, perhaps many more, among people 75 and over to effects of the Pfizer-BioNTech mRNA vaccine such as nausea and vomiting.

And I've heard first-hand that a lot of people are getting sick after vaccination, particularly seniors. I've heard this also from others, including health care professionals.

But officials almost always quickly proclaim that deaths aren't caused by the vaccines. Instead they tell us that serious injuries are extremely rare.

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X

Academic intolerance on the rise, study finds, highlighting growth of wokeness in younger scholars


RT
Thu, 04 Mar 2021 18:06 UTC
cancel culture
© Pixabay / viarami
Surveying both victims and perpetrators of political discrimination in the US, the UK and Canada, researchers at an academic think tank have found intolerance toward dissent is only just beginning - and things may get much worse.

Purporting to be the first paper of its kind to "investigate authoritarianism and political discrimination in academia," the study, conducted by the Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology's Eric Kaufmann, seemed to support conservatives' longstanding complaints that they and their political viewpoints face disproportionate levels of ideologically-motivated censorship.

While what the researchers called "hard authoritarianism" - no-platforming, social media brigading, 'open' letters, dismissal campaigns, and formal complaints - was comparatively rare, the absence of any opposing intellectual force meant that the militant cancel-culture activists often got their way. Meanwhile, "soft authoritarianism" - punishing non-conformists by limiting their ability to publish, win grants for their work, be promoted or retain current positions - provided an added burden (and incentive to keep quiet about their beliefs) to conservative academics.

In the US, UK and Canada, some 40 percent of academics told the researchers they would not hire a Trump supporter, and one out of three in Britain would refuse a position to a Brexit supporter. But there's one scarlet letter that will get a person ostracized even further in academia, they found: being considered a gender-critical feminist, i.e. holding a biological-based view of sex.
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