Category Archives: Science

Not About the President, But Still Very Strange

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From the Washington Post:

A recent uptick in sightings of unidentified flying objects — or as the military calls them, “unexplained aerial phenomena” — prompted the Navy to draft formal procedures for pilots to document encounters, a corrective measure that former officials say is long overdue.

As first reported by POLITICO, these intrusions have been happening on a regular basis since 2014. Recently, unidentified aircraft have entered military-designated airspace as often as multiple times per month, Joseph Gradisher, spokesman for office of the deputy chief of naval operations for information warfare, told The Washington Post on Wednesday.

Citing safety and security concerns, Gradisher vowed to “investigate each and every report.”

He said, “We want to get to the bottom of this. We need to determine who’s doing it, where it’s coming from and what their intent is. We need to try to find ways to prevent it from happening again.”

Luis Elizondo, a former senior intelligence officer, told The Post that the new Navy guidelines formalized the reporting process, facilitating data-driven analysis while removing the stigma from talking about UFOs, calling it “the single greatest decision the Navy has made in decades.”

Chris Mellon, a former deputy assistant secretary of defense for intelligence and staffer on the Senate Intelligence Committee, was less laudatory.

“I don’t believe in safety through ignorance,” he said, scolding the intelligence community for a lack of “curiosity and courage” and a “failure to react” to a strong pattern of sightings.

In some cases, pilots — many of whom are engineers and academy graduates — claimed to observe small spherical objects flying in formation. Others say they’ve seen white, Tic Tac-shaped vehicles. Aside from drones, all engines rely on burning fuel to generate power, but these vehicles all had no air intake, no wind and no exhaust.

“It’s very mysterious, and they still seem to exceed our aircraft in speed,” he said, calling it a “truly radical technology.”

According to Mellon, awestruck and baffled pilots, concerned that reporting unidentified flying aircraft would adversely affect their careers, tended not to speak up. And when they did, he said, there was little interest in investigating their claims.

“Imagine you see highly advanced vehicles, they appear on radar systems, they look bizarre, no one knows where they’re from. This happens on a recurring basis, and no one does anything,” said Mellon, who now works for To the Stars Academy of Arts and Sciences. Because agencies do not share this type of information, it is difficult to know the full extent of activity. Still, he estimated that dozens of incidents were witnessed by naval officers in a single year, enough to force the service to address the issue.

“Pilots are upset, and they’re trying to help wake up a slumbering system,” he told The Post.

Lawmakers’ growing curiosity and concern also appeared to coax action out of the Navy.

In 2017, the Pentagon first confirmed the existence of the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP), a government operation launched in 2007 to collect and analyze “anomalous aerospace threats.” As The Post’s Joby Warrick reported, the investigation ranged from “advanced aircraft fielded by traditional U.S. adversaries to commercial drones to possible alien encounters”….

Elizondo, who ran the AATIP, said the newly drafted guidelines were a culmination of many things, most notably that the Navy had enough credible evidence — including eyewitness accounts and corroborating radar information — to “know this is occurring.”

“If I came to you and said, ‘There are these things that can fly over our country with impunity, defying the laws of physics, and within moments could deploy a nuclear device at will,’ that would be a matter of national security,” Elizondo said.

With the number of U.S. military personnel in the Air Force and Navy who described the same observations, the noise level could not be ignored.

“This type of activity is very alarming,” Elizondo said, “and people are recognizing there are things in our aerospace that lie beyond our understanding.”

PS: It’s time to impeach the bastard.

Ladies and Gentlemen, Our President

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He smiles at Putin and ignores global warming. He couldn’t be bothered to honor fallen American soldiers in France because there was rain in the forecast. 

More at An Ingenious Device for Avoiding Thought.

The Strange Order of Things: Life, Feeling and the Making of Cultures by Antonio Damasio

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Antonio Damasio is a neuroscientist with a philosophical bent. His earlier books were: 

  • Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain
  • The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness
  • Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain
  • Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain.

In The Strange Order of Things, he emphasizes the role of homeostasis in making life possible. Here’s one definition:

[Homeostasis is] a property of cells, tissues, and organisms that allows the maintenance and regulation of the stability and constancy needed to function properly. Homeostasis is a healthy state that is maintained by the constant adjustment of biochemical and physiological pathways. An example of homeostasis is the maintenance of a constant blood pressure in the human body through a series of fine adjustments in the normal range of function of the hormonal, neuromuscular and cardiovascular systems.

Damasio explains how, billions of years ago, the simplest cells began to maintain homeostasis, and thereby survive and even flourish, using methods, including primitive forms of social behavior, that are similar to methods used by complex organisms like us. He also emphasizes the role of feelings in maintaining homeostasis. He doesn’t suppose that bacteria are conscious, but points out that they do react to their surroundings and changes in their inner states. He argues that organisms only developed conscious feelings of their surroundings and inner states as nervous systems evolved. He thinks it is highly implausible that a human mind could function inside a computer, since computers lack feelings and feelings are a necessary part of human life. Furthermore, Damasio concludes that culture has developed in response to human feelings. Culture is a complex way of maintaining homeostasis.

I’ll finish with something from the publisher’s website written by the British philosopher John Gray:

In The Strange Order of Things, Antonio Damasio presents a new vision of what it means to be human. For too long we have thought of ourselves as rational minds inhabiting insentient mechanical bodies. Breaking with this philosophy, Damasio shows how our minds are rooted in feeling, a creation of our nervous system with an evolutionary history going back to ancient unicellular life that enables us to shape distinctively human cultures. Working out what this implies for the arts, the sciences and the human  future, Damasio has given us that rarest of things, a book that can transform how we think—and feel—about ourselves. 

I can’t say the book changed how I think about myself. That’s because for some years I’ve thought about myself as a community of cells. It’s estimated that an average human body is composed of some 37 trillion cells and contains another 100 trillion microorganisms necessary for survival. Once you start thinking of yourself as a community of cells, adding homeostasis to the mix doesn’t make much difference.

For more on The Strange Order of Things, see this review for The Guardian and this article John Gray wrote for Literary Review.

Where Does the Weirdness Go? (Why Quantum Mechanics Is Strange, But Not As Strange As You Think) by David Lindley

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If you want an introduction to quantum mechanics, this is a very good book to read. I didn’t get some of it, but I don’t blame the author, who does an excellent job. He was a theoretical astrophysicist before he began editing science magazines. Since the book was published in 1996, some of it may be out of date, but not enough to make a difference to the general reader.

The title “Where Does the Weirdness Go?” refers to a puzzle. Since events at the quantum level are weird, why doesn’t that weirdness show up at the level of our ordinary experience? Reality looks fairly well-defined to us. We don’t see the things around us as probabilities. The chair you’re sitting on is right there under you; it’s not possibly there and possibly not there. Electrons and photons may be in an indeterminate state, possibly here and possibly there, but that probabilistic weirdness disappears when it comes to higher-level stuff.

I think the book’s subtitle (“Not As Strange As You Think”) refers to the puzzle’s answer. Lindley explains that, roughly speaking, quantum weirdness disappears when something called “quantum coherence” turns into “quantum decoherence”. When a quantum state is “coherent”, its properties are mere probabilities. But that can only be the case if the quantum system is isolated from other quantum systems. Here’s how Wikipedia puts it:

… when a quantum system is not perfectly isolated, but in contact with its surroundings, coherence decays with time, a process called quantum decoherence. As a result of this process, the relevant quantum behaviour is lost.

The quantum behavior referred to here is the weirdness (things like “is it a particle or is it a wave?” and “spooky action at a distance”). Since quantum systems (photons, electrons, paired particles) are rarely, if ever, appropriately isolated inside objects like chairs, clouds and chickens, those types of things don’t behave weirdly.  The constant atomic and sub-atomic turmoil inside everyday objects means that their properties are defined or definite, not probabilistic. The stuff we see around us doesn’t display any quantum weirdness because there are trillions upon trillions of quantum-level interactions occurring at every moment.

One thing the book makes clear is that there’s nothing special about quantum states being measured. Nor does human consciousness have any special role in quantum mechanics. In fact, measurement is an example of decoherence. When a physicist measures an electron, it is no longer isolated. In order to be measured, the electron has to interact with something else at the quantum level. That results in the electron’s possible position or momentum becoming real, not probabilistic. So when we hear about the importance of measurement in quantum mechanics, it only means that something at the quantum level is interacting with something else at that level. Most such interactions have nothing at all to do with us humans. 

Something (among many) I don’t understand: Once an electron has lost its probabilistic nature by interacting with some other quantum-level thing, do any of its properties ever become probabilistic again? If not, it would seem like every electron or photon in the universe would eventually have well-defined properties. 

I’ll say one more thing about the book. The author subscribes to what’s known as the “Copenhagen interpretation” of quantum mechanics. Apparently, most physicists do. The Copenhagen interpretation is a response to questions like “what’s really going on at the quantum level?” and “is it possible to explain why quantum events are so weird?” The answer given by the Copenhagen interpretation is: “Don’t bother trying to understand what’s happening. We can’t explain what’s happening and there is no sense in trying, because there is no definite reality to be explained at that level until measurement (or quantum-level interaction) occurs. This is just the way the world is.”

The author concludes by asking “will we ever understand quantum mechanics?” Here’s his answer:

But we do [understand it], don’t we? As an intellectual apparatus that allows us to figure out what will happen in all conceivable kinds of situations, quantum mechanics works just fine, and tells us whatever … we need to know….

[But] quantum mechanics clearly does not fit into any picture that we can obtain from everyday experience of how the world works… It throws us off balance… Physics, and the rest of science, grew up with the belief in objective reality, that the universe is really out there and that we are measuring it…. And the longer the belief was retained, the more it came to seem as it must be an essential part of the foundation of physics….

Then quantum mechanics came along and destroyed that notion of reality. Experiment backs up the axioms of quantum mechanics. Nothing is real until you measure it [or it comes into contact with something else!], and if you try to infer from disparate sets of measurements what reality really is, you run into contradictions….

A true believer might conclude that objective reality must still be there somewhere, beneath quantum mechanics. That’s what Einstein believed….[But] if quantum mechanics does not embody an objective view of reality, then evidently an objective view of reality is not essential to the conduct of physics…

[But] quantum mechanics, despite its lack of an objective reality, nevertheless gives rise to a macroscopic world that acts, most of the time, as if it were objectively real… And so, almost paradoxically, we can believe in an objective reality most of the time, because quantum mechanics predicts that the world should behave that way. But it’s because the world behaves that way that we have acquired such a profound belief in objective reality — and that’s what makes quantum mechanics so hard to understand [222-224]. 

Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea and the Deep Origins of Consciousness by Peter Godfrey-Smith

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Peter Godfrey-Smith is an Australian professor of philosophy who has spent many hours scuba-diving in order to observe the behavior of octopuses and cuttlefish. The book is an attempt to trace the evolution of mental activity from its earliest beginnings hundreds of millions of years ago, when bacteria began reacting to their surroundings. The author believes that mind and consciousness didn’t suddenly spring into existence; they developed gradually through millions of years. But he admits that nobody knows for sure.

Neither do we know what it’s like to be an octopus. We don’t even know for certain that it’s like anything at all. Maybe octopuses go about their business without feelings or anything like consciousness. Godfrey-Smith, however, argues that it’s reasonable to believe that creatures of many sorts feel pain when they are injured. But where to draw the lines (if there are any lines) between bacteria that simply react, animals that feel pain and creatures like us who are self-conscious is a mystery.

Octopuses are especially interesting because our common ancestors lived about 500 million years ago. Octopuses developed complex nervous systems, arranged differently than ours, independently from most other animals, including us. That means, in Godfrey-Smith’s words, “meeting an octopus is, in many ways, the closest we’re likely to get to meeting an intelligent alien”. It’s really too bad that they can’t tell us what it’s like to be them.

I wish the book ended with a summation of the author’s conclusions. I do remember the idea that nervous systems first evolved in order to respond to a living thing’s surroundings, and then to monitor its internal states and control its movements. And I remember a lot about the interesting behavior of octopuses and their close relations, cuttlefish. But I can’t say I came to any solid conclusions about the deep origins of consciousness. If the author reached any conclusions, he should have reminded his readers what they were.