Born to do Math: January 2019

Tuesday, 22 January 2019

Born to do Math 105 - Human Beings as Mathematical Structures (2)

Born to do Math 105 - Human Beings as Mathematical Structures (2)

Scott Douglas Jacobsen & Rick Rosner

January 22, 2019

[Beginning of recorded material]

Rick Rosner: ...Your choices are fairly simple. It is either open or closed. That is still only one molecule out of basically trillions in your body. It is the combination of trillions working together based on systems that have evolved over 4 billion years; that makes thems sense complicated and mathematical.

But when you get down to it, it is still mathy. When we get into the era of big data, humans can only understand things up to a certain amount of information. But as we build bigger and bigger information understanding structures, they will understand things that we can only understand in an indirect way.

We only understand things in an approximate way. Bigger information processing entities will be able to understand things better. I read the book 21 Lessons for the 21st Century. One of the chapters is that humans don't understand anything.

I guess they did an experiment asking people if they understand how zippers work. Most said, "Yes!" But then they tried to explain, most failed. I think data entities of the future will understand things that we understand only half-assedly in much greater depth.

They will have a much greater understanding and appreciation of the mathiness of the messiness of the human body, where we can only understand it in little bits.

[End of recorded material]

Authors [1]

Rick Rosner
American Television Writer
RickRosner@Hotmail.Com
Rick Rosner

According to semi-reputable sources, Rick Rosner has the world’s second-highest IQ. He earned 12 years of college credit in less than a year and graduated with the equivalent of 8 majors. He has received 8 Writer’s Guild Award and Emmy nominations, and was named 2013 North American Genius of the Year by The World Genius Registry.

He has written for Remote Control, Crank Yankers, The Man Show, The Emmy Awards, The Grammy Awards, and Jimmy Kimmel Live!. He has also worked as a stripper, a bouncer, a roller-skating waiter, and a nude model. In a TV commercial, Domino’s Pizza named him the World’s Smartest Man. He was also named Best Bouncer in the Denver Area by Westwood Magazine.

He spent the disco era as an undercover high school student. 25 years as a bar bouncer, American fake ID-catcher, 25+ years as a stripper, and nude art model, and nearly 30 years as a writer for more than 2,500 hours of network television. He lost on Jeopardy!, sued Who Wants to Be a Millionaire over a bad question, and lost the lawsuit. He spent 35+ years on a modified version of Big Bang Theory. Now, he mostly sits around tweeting in a towel. He lives in Los Angeles, California with his wife and daughter.

You can send an email or a direct message via Twitter, or find him on LinkedIn, or see him on YouTube.

Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Editor-in-Chief, In-Sight Publishing
Scott.D.Jacobsen@Gmail.Com
In-Sight Publishing

(Updated September 28, 2016)

Scott Douglas Jacobsen founded In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal and In-Sight Publishing. He authored/co-authored some e-books, free or low-cost. If you want to contact Scott: Scott.D.Jacobsen@Gmail.com, Scott.Jacobsen@TrustedClothes.Com, Scott@ConatusNews.Com, scott.jacobsen@probc.ca, Scott@Karmik.Ca, or SJacobsen@AlmasJiwaniFoundation.Org.

He is a Moral Courage Webmaster and Outreach Specialist (Fall, 2016) at the UCI Interdisciplinary Center for the Scientific Study of Ethics and Morality (Ethics Center), Interview Columnist for Conatus News, Writer and Executive Administrator for Trusted Clothes, Interview Columnist for Basic Income Earth Network (BIEN), Chair of Social Media for the Almas Jiwani Foundation, Councillor for the Athabasca University Student Union, Member of the Learning Analytics Research Group, writer for The Voice Magazine, Your Political Party of BC, ProBC, Marijuana Party of Canada, Fresh Start Recovery Centre, Harvest House Ministries, and Little Footprints Big Steps International Development Organization, Editor and Proofreader for Alfred Yi Zhang Photography, Community Journalist/Blogger for Gordon Neighbourhood House, Member-at-Large, Member of the Outreach Committee, the Finance & Fundraising Committee, and the Special Projects & Political Advocacy Committee, and Writer for Canadian Students for Sensible Drug Policy, Member of the Lifespan Cognition Psychology Lab and IMAGe Psychology Lab, Collaborator with Dr. Farhad Dastur in creation of the CriticalThinkingWiki, Board Member, and Foundation Volunteer Committee Member for the Fraser Valley Health Care Foundation, and Independent Landscaper.

He was a Francisco Ayala Scholar at the UCI Ethics Center, Member of the Psychometric Society Graduate Student Committee, Special Advisor and Writer for ECOSOC at NWMUN, Writer for TransplantFirstAcademy and ProActive Path, Member of AT-CURA Psychology Lab, Contributor for a student policy review, Vice President of Outreach for the Almas Jiwani Foundation, worked with Manahel Thabet on numerous initiatives, Student Member of the Ad–Hoc Executive Compensation Review Committee for the Athabasca University Student Union, Volunteer and Writer for British Columbia Psychological Association, Community Member of the KPU Choir (even performed with them alongside the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra), Delegate at Harvard World MUN, NWMUN, UBC MUN, and Long Beach Intercollegiate MUN, and Writer and Member of the Communications Committee for The PIPE UP Network.

He published in American Enterprise Institute, Annaborgia, Conatus News, Earth Skin & Eden, Fresh Start Recovery Centre, Gordon Neighbourhood House, Huffington Post, In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, Jolly Dragons, Kwantlen Polytechnic University Psychology Department, La Petite Mort, Learning Analytics Research Group, Lifespan Cognition Psychology Lab, Lost in Samara, Marijuana Party of Canada, MomMandy, Noesis: The Journal of the Mega Society, Piece of Mind, Production Mode, Synapse, TeenFinancial, The Peak, The Ubyssey, The Voice Magazine, Transformative Dialogues, Treasure Box Kids, Trusted Clothes.

Endnotes

[1] Four format points for the session article:

Bold text following “Scott Douglas Jacobsen:” or “Jacobsen:” is Scott Douglas Jacobsen & non-bold text following “Rick Rosner:” or “Rosner:” is Rick Rosner.
Session article conducted, transcribed, edited, formatted, and published by Scott.
Footnotes & in-text citations in the interview & references after the interview.
This session article has been edited for clarity and readability.

For further information on the formatting guidelines incorporated into this document, please see the following documents:

American Psychological Association. (2010). Citation Guide: APA. Retrieved from http://www.lib.sfu.ca/system/files/28281/APA6CitationGuideSFUv3.pdf.
Humble, A. (n.d.). Guide to Transcribing. Retrieved from http://www.msvu.ca/site/media/msvu/Transcription%20Guide.pdf.

License and Copyright

License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Based on a work at www.in-sightjournal.com and www.rickrosner.org.

Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen, Rick Rosner, and In-Sight Publishing 2012-2019. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen, Rick Rosner, and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

Tuesday, 15 January 2019

Born to do Math 104 - Human Beings as Mathematical Structures (1)

In-Sight Publishing

Born to do Math 104 - Human Beings as Mathematical Structures (1)

Scott Douglas Jacobsen & Rick Rosner

January 15, 2019

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Nature can be described via mathematics. In this sense, as humans are inescapably a part of nature, humans can be described via mathematics, in principle. That is to say, human beings, in some sense, are mathematical structures in the sense of nature existing as a mathematical structure and human beings existing as a part of nature. This seems like an unavoidable modern conclusion of philosophy and science: human beings are mathematical structures.

Rick Rosner: You have mentioned this before. Biology boils down to physics. Physics boils down to quantum physics. Quantum physics is highly mathematical. When you boil it down, it is the physics of information; the physic and math of information. Information is the most featureless thing that you can have.

The most basic information you can have is a choice between two things. But you can probably go below that too, where you have a fuzzy choice between two fuzzy things without a clear choice between two things. But it almost boils down to nothing.

You can build back up from there into humans and the world around humans. The reason that humans do not seem mathematical is that we are so macro. In economics, there is microeconomics dealing with little things like one person buying this stick of gum or this candy bar.

Macroeconomics is the largescale behavior of economic systems. Quantum mechanics is micro with all the weirdness of the quantum world at the micro world. But the macro world makes sense to us because we are macro beings living in the macro world.

I have been messing with micromosaics, recently. Carole likes micromosaics. I guess I do too. They are like these thin pieces of glass, like a millimeter across. Some are less than a cubic millimeter. I think that these things are so small and should not contain so many atoms.

But if you do the math, a cubic centimeter - what's a mole? 6*10^23, so a cubic centimeter contains 10^23 atoms roughly. A cubic millimeter still contains close to 10^17th atoms. So, even this thing that is as small as you want to deal with in regular macro life, it still contains a billion, billion atoms.

We are super macro. It also that we are organic, i.e., soft, squishy, and wet and mucousy. None of that has the clean sharp purity of math. When you think of math, you think of things that are super symmetrical and pretty well behaved. Things that are limited, perhaps, in extent.

When you think of parabolas, every parabola looks like every other frickin' parabola. Every circle looks like every other circle. Every ellipse looks like every other with some tilting. You have these simple structures. There is nothing, at least on the surface, on 3. The threeness of something seems simple.

A die, the kind that you throw, is only having 6 different outcomes; unless, it gets wedged against a wall with no face on top. But if you're throwing craps and one die, there are only 6 possible outcomes. But humans with our huge number of components and 4-billion-year evolutionary history that makes us complicated; there's not a lot of simplicity in our form, or in our behavior.

It is basically because of our bigness and the number of components. Our duration, our evolutionary history, our extent in time. Everything is macro and macro is messy. You can boil it all down to math. Every single interaction in the human body can be characterized by quantum mechanics.

At the smallest level, you can find these interactions that boil down to simple possibilities. Is this blood cell going to capture oxygen molecules or not? Hemoglobin can exist in two states, generally. Either folded up having absorbed oxygen atoms and expanded, where the hemoglobin has four holes for oxygen molecules.

You put it in an oxygen-rich environment. Under the laws of quantum physics, it will pop open and grab four oxygen atoms. The first gym I ever belonged to; it was owned by a guy who started as a graduate student at the University of Colorado to see if you could actually see the moment when a hemoglobin molecule goes from having grabbed no molecules to having gone open and grabbed four oxygen molecules.

It was something that happened, at least with the technology then, or seemed to happen instantaneously. When the hemoglobin went from empty to full of oxygen, there was never a point when you saw it has two oxygen atoms.

I do not know if that is still the case. Even though, the hemoglobin molecule consists of, maybe, 50 atoms to make this mechanism. But it still governed by laws of quantum physics and can exist in basically only one or two states.

[End of recorded material]

Authors [1]

Endnotes

[1] Four format points for the session article:

Bold text following “Scott Douglas Jacobsen:” or “Jacobsen:” is Scott Douglas Jacobsen & non-bold text following “Rick Rosner:” or “Rosner:” is Rick Rosner.
Session article conducted, transcribed, edited, formatted, and published by Scott.
Footnotes & in-text citations in the interview & references after the interview.
This session article has been edited for clarity and readability.

For further information on the formatting guidelines incorporated into this document, please see the following documents:

American Psychological Association. (2010). Citation Guide: APA. Retrieved from http://www.lib.sfu.ca/system/files/28281/APA6CitationGuideSFUv3.pdf.
Humble, A. (n.d.). Guide to Transcribing. Retrieved from http://www.msvu.ca/site/media/msvu/Transcription%20Guide.pdf.

License and Copyright

Tuesday, 8 January 2019

Born to do Math 103 - Read Nature's Fine Print: Preconditions on Consciousness

In-Sight Publishing

Born to do Math 103 - Read Nature's Fine Print: Preconditions on Consciousness

Scott Douglas Jacobsen & Rick Rosner

January 8, 2019

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: So, you have the larger structure that is an as if. But you have a certain set of preconditions to get to it.

Rick Rosner: If you want to disregard consciousness with regard to mind, mind, or at least an organism with a mind, is an organism that can a bunch of different possible states and actions and possible states of awareness, depending on what is going on in its environment.

That an organism with a mind can put itself into a whole bunch of different states as part of a survival optimization. Maybe, that is more mechanistic and a more understandable way of approaching organisms.

That something in the mind, as opposed to a tree, has an option of taking action to preserve itself, to not be obliterated. A tree has a bunch of mechanisms to increase the probability of its survival. The probability that it can reproduce.

But it is severely limited in how can react to moment to moment changes in its environment. A tree cannot get out of the way of a truck. A tree is not aware of a truck. But it does have protective mechanisms.

A tree can be big and thick and cannot be knocked over by the truck, because its base trunk is two feet across. But most of the tree's mechanisms aren't moment to moment, and moment to moment reactions to the environment are sufficiently helpful; that you have an entire branch of the kingdoms. The plants are one; the animals are another.

The animals, for the most part, can have a moment to moment understanding of their representations of their environment, and can react. Although, that is not 100% true. It is not true entirely. I am not sure if an amoeba is any more sophisticated in its moment to moment defenses than a tree.

However, an amoeba is a tiny little thing. It is no more likely to react on a momentary basis than an amoeba. When you think of animals, you think of things that can react to situations on a moment to moment basis.

Basically, the moment to moment reactions are such that the organism assumes a state or takes on a state that changes from moment to moment to optimize its survival to the best of the ability of its evolved systems.

In some cases, that involves reflecting the world, developing an information processing model of the world that is sufficiently sophisticated that it embodies consciousness. Not only that a conscious being has subconscious systems to handle things that can be handled in contingent situations, which can be handled without much more than algorithmic processing.

For example, the traversing of terrain by walking is via the mechanisms of taking a step and are not very conscious. It can be handled with or by algorithms that generally do not throw the central problems of walking into the conscious arena.

But in a general sense, the order seen in animals is the ability to change state from moment to moment based on the information that the entity gets from its world.

That's it.

[End of recorded material]

Authors [1]

Endnotes

[1] Four format points for the session article:

Bold text following “Scott Douglas Jacobsen:” or “Jacobsen:” is Scott Douglas Jacobsen & non-bold text following “Rick Rosner:” or “Rosner:” is Rick Rosner.
Session article conducted, transcribed, edited, formatted, and published by Scott.
Footnotes & in-text citations in the interview & references after the interview.
This session article has been edited for clarity and readability.

For further information on the formatting guidelines incorporated into this document, please see the following documents:

American Psychological Association. (2010). Citation Guide: APA. Retrieved from http://www.lib.sfu.ca/system/files/28281/APA6CitationGuideSFUv3.pdf.
Humble, A. (n.d.). Guide to Transcribing. Retrieved from http://www.msvu.ca/site/media/msvu/Transcription%20Guide.pdf.

License and Copyright

License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Based on a work at www.in-sightjournal.com and www.rickrosner.org.

Copyright

© Scott Douglas Jacobsen, Rick Rosner, and In-Sight Publishing 2012-2019. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen, Rick Rosner, and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

Tuesday, 1 January 2019

Born to do Math 102 - All Together Now: Hows and Whys as "As If"

In-Sight Publishing

Born to do Math 102 - All Together Now: Hows and Whys as "As If"

Scott Douglas Jacobsen & Rick Rosner

January 1, 2019

[Beginning of recorded material]

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: I am getting the sense of the why questions being how questions. Why do we have minds? Because of evolution. How that? If chemistry, then biology, then minds, eventually. So, what you're tapping into is, really, the bridge between those how questions and how they extend more into a why?

Rick Rosner: I kind of think everything boils down to consciousness and information spaces, and also the larger physical processes of the universe. They are "as if" questions. The information of the universe at large and the information of mental worlds.

Both the large information processing structures and the small ones do a lot of stuff that behaves as if they know stuff. The "as if" is enough to embody actual knowing. If you set it up right, it's information processing capacity is far mre than straight up serial processing with integrated circuits clacking along.

It is a setup - the quantum computers - in as if systems. You set up indeterminate states that behave as if in multiple states for a computational purpose. If everything is in an as if state, then everything is in 3-bit quantum computer that runs as if in 8 different states, and then is consistent across all 8 states.

Something like that; I don't know. It seems as if there is a tacitness, an as ifness. The efficiency of as if information, as if knowledge, and as if knowledge-sharing probably exists in the universe at large and in individual minds at the small.

Becuase it is persistently efficient.

[End of recorded material]

Authors [1]

Endnotes

[1] Four format points for the session article:

Bold text following “Scott Douglas Jacobsen:” or “Jacobsen:” is Scott Douglas Jacobsen & non-bold text following “Rick Rosner:” or “Rosner:” is Rick Rosner.
Session article conducted, transcribed, edited, formatted, and published by Scott.
Footnotes & in-text citations in the interview & references after the interview.
This session article has been edited for clarity and readability.

For further information on the formatting guidelines incorporated into this document, please see the following documents:

American Psychological Association. (2010). Citation Guide: APA. Retrieved from http://www.lib.sfu.ca/system/files/28281/APA6CitationGuideSFUv3.pdf.
Humble, A. (n.d.). Guide to Transcribing. Retrieved from http://www.msvu.ca/site/media/msvu/Transcription%20Guide.pdf.

License and Copyright

License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Based on a work at www.in-sightjournal.com and www.rickrosner.org.

Copyright

© Scott Douglas Jacobsen, Rick Rosner, and In-Sight Publishing 2012-2019. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen, Rick Rosner, and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.