Quantum Non-Linearity: Fireside Problem

Monday, December 31, 2007

Fireside Problem

Over the Christmas period I have been grappling with a problem that has been hanging around with me for some time.

Now, it is possible to generate highly disordered sequences of 1s and 0s using an algorithm. An algorithm is also expressible as a sequence of 1s and 0s. However, whereas disordered sequences may be long – say of length Lr, the length of the algorithm sequence generating it, Lp, may be short. That is Lr is less than Lp. The number of possible algorithm sequences will be 2^Lr. The number of possible disordered sequences will be nearly equal to 2^Lp. So, because 2^Lp is much less than 2^Lr, then it is clear that short algorithms can only generate a very limited number of all the possible disordered sequences. For me, this result has a counter intuitive consequence: It suggests that there is a small class of disordered sequences that have a special status - namely the class of disordered sequences that can be generated algorithmically. But why should a particular class of disordered sequences be so mathematically favoured when in one sense every disordered sequence is like every other disordered sequence in that they all have the same statistical profile? My intuitions suggest that all disordered sequences are in some sense mathematically equal, and yet it seems that algorithms confer a special status on a small class of these sequences.

I think I now know where the answer to this intuitive contradiction lies. To answer it we have to go back to the network view of algorithmic change. If we take a computer like a Turing machine then it seems that it wires the class of all binary sequences into a network in a particular way, and it is the bias introduced by the network wiring that leads to certain disordered configurations being apparently favored. It is possible to wire the network together in other ways that would favour another class of disordered sequences. In short the determining variable isn’t the algorithm, but the network wring, which is a function of the computing model being used. It is the computing model inherent in the network wiring that has as much degree of freedom as does a sequence as long as Lr. Thus, in as much as any disordered sequence can have an algorithmically favoured position depending on the network wiring used by the computing model, then in that sense no disordered sequence is absolutely favoured over any other.

Well, that’ll have to do for now; I suppose I had better get back to the Intelligent Design Contention.

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THE IDEAS-EXPERIENCE CONTENTION

“Ideas Versus Experience!" is a slogan expressing the uneasy relation between what we think the world to be and what our actual experience suggests it is. Experience makes or breaks ideas. But the reverse is also true: Well established ideas can influence the recognition, acceptance and even the perception of experience. In short there is a two way dialogue between ideas and experience. Sometimes that dialogue can turn into an argument, even a row.

The success of Science is based on a formalisation of this potentially contentious relationship as it seeks to support or refute theoretical notions by systematically comparing them with experience. In the far less formalized contexts of daily living we probably are using a similar heuristic when we display a tendency to drop ideas that lose the confrontation with experience, and retain those that win. Winning ideas, like the gladiators of the Roman arenas, live to fight another day. This Darwinian slant on the struggle for ideological survival is itself ideology that must, for consistency sake, submit itself to the very process it purports to describe. For example, it should be able to give account of the resilience of traditional theories in the face of contra indicators. And in the extreme, explanation also needs to be given of how conspiracy theorists continue to hold on to a ramifying structure of untested elaborations.

Human theoretical visions are often grand and sweeping, confidently affirming states of affairs that are far beyond immediate sensation. The vast unseen domains covered by our best theories contrasts with the limitations on human perceptual resources, resources that only allow a very sparse experimental sampling of our most ambitious ideas. Even a professional scientist only ever tests a small portion of any theoretical structure. Moreover, our theoretical concepts are ambitious enough to cover unreachable areas like the center of distant stars, sub-atomic dimensions, events long past into history, and very complex inscrutable objects like the human mind and its societies. Thus, science is metaphysical in as much as it has to admit that it covers vast domains inaccessible to testing in practice if not in principle. For the intelligent layman even the keyhole view of the experimental scientist may not be available. So whence comes the authority to affirm ideas that are often so grandiose in their sweep that they make claim to impinge upon the very meaning of life the universe and everything?

The fact is that for most of us the really big ideas diffuse through to us from our societal context, and at most these big ideas are only illuminated here and there, at a very few places, with actual direct experience of the phenomenon they conceptualise. These big ideas float around in the ether-like-media of society in the form of books, lectures, programmes, and the Internet etc, objects that the postmodernist philosophers call "texts".

For someone such as myself the battle to make sense of life was joined as soon as I was aware of mystery. But looking back it is clear to me that I haven't done an honest scientific experiment in the whole of my life. For me the effort to bring sense and integration to the complexity of life boils down to grappling with the many texts of society; These texts carry both big theoretical ideas and raw data from which ideas crystallize. These texts are compared with other texts in the search for coherence and consistency. These texts take the place and role of experiments as one tests theories using texts. These texts are in effect the experience of life. My own modest attempt at grandiose theorising has already been presented to the world. (See this blog "Physics and the Wild Web") and my excuse is that I have simply inherited the theoretical hubris of the human race.

The postmodern philosopher Jacques Derrida said, "There is nothing outside the text". I think he was at least right about the primary role texts play in the life of those like myself whose instinct has been to grapple relentlessly with the riddles of life, and to seek out meaning and go where no man has gone before. But one could equally claim, "There is nothing outside the experience". For one might read the "text" of the clouds in the sky as a predictor of impending weather just as one reads socially generated symbolic configurations as the predictor of certain kinds of thought or potential experience. For the text is just as much an experience as more primeval phenomenon like thunder and lightning. Texts are part of our cosmic experience and they imperceptibly grade into the more conventional notion of experience. Where the crossover point is, is difficult to say.

Postmodernism may have got it right about the primary role of the text, but it has made one very serious mistake. Where I would radically differ from the postmodern view is that I believe the mass of social texts, if we allow them, naturally converge upon grand consistent narratives and those narratives are here to stay. And that is because these texts, I submit, are part of a world with an underlying rational integratedness and that integratedness is being revealed to us bit by bit. For revelation it is: Revelation is what we cannot discover unless God chooses that we discover it. My perceptions and reason, limited though they may be, were not self-made, they had to be discovered as gifts. These gifts are given to all of us; one can but trust and use them. Reason is a grace of Revelation. For this reason the hubris of theory making is justified.

Quantum Non-Linearity

Monday, December 31, 2007

Fireside Problem

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THE IDEAS-EXPERIENCE CONTENTION