Generalize (“Cartesian”) Doubt To Emotions

There is a difference between seeing something and integrating it in a system of thought… the latter being called understanding.

People can see corruption, inequality, fanaticism, fascism and many other noxious features, but still not understand them, and thus can’t project them into the future (and their inacceptable, disastrous consequences). 

Many individuals in Muscovy, China democracies, the “West” have become very powerful, and, or,wealthy while supposedly serving the people or engaging in publicly financed or arranged endeavors… say from a tax code which engages in discrimination favoring the wealthy. 

Mental inertia is a major problem… if one wants to stick to reality, as science, knowledge, perception and sensibilities, let alone problems and catastrophes, progress. 

If one wants to decrease mental inertia, one has to realize that few facts are left free-floating in one’s mind: they would be too hard to remember. The mind remembers logically, to a great extent, so facts have to be logically integrated. Facts tend to get integrated in a system of thought. They acquire meaning, moods and emotions connected to them. And the dominant systems of thought tend to integrate free floating facts.

 

For example the Catholic hierarchy decided that the Moon couldn’t be a physical object, because, if it were, the question of who lived there, and thus the problem of the non-unicity of the Lord’s creation, couldn’t be far behind. Islam followed obsequiously, as the Moon became a direct signal from God. Thus astronomers and the theory that the Earth orbited the Sun and the Moon, the Earth, were considered to be heresy during the Middle Ages. Astronomy got discouraged.

When looking at any fact or idea, and emotion or mood, we have to ask: where did it come from? 

Descartes recommended doubting everything at some point. That Cartesian doubt has to be extended to emotions. This logico-emotional systematic doubt has to be fostered, not just to become smarter, but also to become more ethical, or ethical enough for civilization to survive….

Patrice Ayme

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P/S: This is an extended version of a comment kindly published in the NYT by David Brooks. I may add a tech addendum on Descartes, his “error”, etc.

I emote, therefore I am, says Hautes Alpes 2022 denizen

Can Youth Handle Logic More Than Three Words Long?

Some US friends on the Internet regretted Notre Dame didn’t burn to the ground. Seduced by hatred, all too many nowadays loudly claim to prefer ashes to civilization. Are they now applauding the hundreds assassinated in Sri Lanka by anti-Christian, anti-tourist terrorists? (The 2019 Easter Sunday attacks there are now above 800 casualties, including 300 dead!)

A great source of gleeful anger among those who love to hate, was Donald Trump who boldly went where no US bigot is supposed to go: “I offered the help of our great experts on renovation and construction as I did in my conversation yesterday with President Emmanuel Macron of France.”

BBC “science” journalist Erin Biba, known for accusing others to insult exactly as she does, with a following I can only dream of, reacted by saying: “Notre Dame has already received… an offer of help from the U.S government but it’s only just now — years late — that Flint is getting the necessary funding. Our priorities are fucked.”

What’s “fucked” is her bimbo logic: water experts and cathedral experts are not the same, they don’t exist in the same space, they don’t make a zero sum game. But don’t worry: Erin Biba started at “Wired Magazine”, and was told that no science nor understanding of scientific topics was needed: only “excitement” was needed. Truly, excitement has replaced logic. (Hyena laughter may help…)

An even more deplorable reaction from a nephew of mine (I have problems with more than one nephew; in common, forms of violence):

“It’s nice to see our country’s priorities still lie with only helping the whites.”

East end of Notre Dame burning. Heaven and Hell sont des mots qui vont très bien ensemble.

One approving comment to the racist assertion prior consisted in a so-called “GIF” a micro movie showing somebody saying: “No, No, Bad!” to Trump. Bad because Trump was sending all this money to Notre Dame, allegedly (except he didn’t). The skin color declaration parroted the racism of a Pluto media called “The Root” [1] which opined that: “White People Don’t Live in Flint or Puerto Rico, So President Sends Aid to France.”

This is not what Trump implied, or did. As White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders put it, the U.S. will offer “assistance in the rehabilitation of this irreplaceable symbol of Western civilization.”

On the same day, word came in that the city of Flint, Michigan, was receiving a remaining $77.7 million in federal funding to assist in that community now almost five-year-long battle to again have clean water flowing through its taps. So what about bimbo Biba’ smartassology? [2] It’s not the same experts, not the same budget. Experts in building restoration have to keep exerting their trade. One can’t put them along a river and suddenly they purify water. Expertise has to be kept alive, thus, experts have to be kept busy.

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Another commenter on my site, Cory Francis, a tough ex-Marine, and author, suggested the “cathedral should have burned because of all the children molested there”. That is not cogent: as a maximally public monument for 856 years, Notre Dame was no place for molestation, quite the opposite.

What about the allegations of racism? Does Trump prefers Notre Dame because France is full of “whites”? Instead Trump said he loved Notre Dame because, as the hundreds of millions who have visited the cathedral, he was stunned by its beauty and the inspiration it shared.

France is officially not made of “whites”. Indeed, to have “whites” in France, one would have to identify those “whites”… That can’t be done in France. It’s explicitly against French law to categorize people according to origins, skin color, ethnicity, religion.

It’s possible to categorize, and thus, discriminate, among people according to their origin, in the USA. Because the USA is an officially racist country, where people are asked to flaunt their race, all too often, and declare it in all sorts of official documents. Whereas in France the protection against stigmatization by origins is as old as Carolingian law… five centuries older than Notre Dame [3]. The non official existence of “races” in France, and of religious characterization enabled to save most Jews in France. Nearly all French-born Jews and most refugee Jews; by contrast, the Netherlands, where religious characterization was entrusted to the US technology monopoly IBM:

https://www.annefrank.org/en/anne-frank/go-in-depth/netherlands-greatest-number-jewish-victims-western-europe/

France is the original melting pot, the USA is a pale imitation which still has a lot to learn from the original. It is difficult for young US citizens not to think racially, opposing the “whites” and the (presumably) “colored”. They can’t break out of it, they use their very racism to criticize the (alleged) racism of Trump. Let me repeat this explicitly: who distinguishes the “whites” from others is a racist. Trump has not done this, to my knowledge, so is less of a racist.

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So what is Trump proposing for Notre Dame? France has the greatest number of restauration workers in the world. However, independent opinions are important. Flying a few US experts to Paris for second opinion will not hurt. Just the opposite. Would it help only the French? Oh, no. US experts will profit from working on this gigantic, primordial project. And, looking forward, there could be some day millions of homes to repair, from a massive quake, or nuclear strikes.

US experts in cathedral restoration got active in 2011, when an earthquake damaged the Washington National Cathedral. The work is still going on. Such experts in building restoration, don’t repair electric grids on hurricane damaged islands, like Puerto Rico . It’s a different job. [4]   

However, those with Trump Derangement Syndrome do not understand, or do not want to understand, what “expertise” means. All they want is to exhibit their hatred for Trump: it helps the careers of the youth,as plutocrats know that those with TDS aspire to be sheep [5].

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Fundamental questions to all of civilization: where do you come from? And why? From the jungles of Amazonia or the Congo? Do you come from the Shariah? Or do you come from struggling for the honor of the human spirit? The latter, obviously. And that was done on Montagne Sainte-Geneviève, not in the steppes of Central Asia…however valuable the latter are. The holy alliance between secular quest for iconoclastic knowledge and the soaring of the human spirit deified and feminized, this is what we honor in Notre Dame.

And the racism, the skin color, Notre Dame never saw. So why does today’s youth sees it so much everywhere?

It requires more than three word logic to find out.

Meanwhile, the architect in charge of Notre Dame from 2000 to 2013 is formal: “That type of wood would not have burned so easily, if the fire had been accidental.” [6] I was personally struck by the fact the fire progressed quickly, in the exact direction opposed to the strong wind. I can’t envision which sort of weird aerodynamics could have brought such an effect.

But, once again, this is more than three word logic which bring to the logical conclusion.

Patrice Ayme

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[1] The Root was founded by Graham, a Pluto who used to publish the Washington Post and is a “lead” (whatever that means) director of Facebook (since 2009). It calls itself “Afro”, like in Africa, but “Afro-American” has little to do with Africa, but rather the opposite, I can tell you, as an African.

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[2]The concept of “smartasslogy” introduced above is central to the Internet civilization as it is. Logic has been replaced by smartassology, the incapacity of thinking beyond the sort of mentality characterizing rattlesnakes.  

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[3] There was occasional discrimination against the Jews; however, the one under Saint Louis, was not acted upon. The worst holocaust was against the Cathars, as Notre Dame was going up. The aim was the capture of the County of Toulouse, de facto a quasi republic, wealthy and very large… by King Philippe Auguste, the first one to call himself king of France (instead of king of the Franks). Prior to that, he defeated an all-Europe coalition in 1204 CE at Bouvines.  Killing 5 million Cathars set on fire the entire Christian Greco-Roman empire or civilization, from France to the Orient.

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[4] Force 5 hurricane Maria killed nearly 3,000 people in Puerto Rico.

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[5] Employers check social media. And the apparently genuinely anti-Trump youth know this. So, actually, they are applying for jobs, while chanting against Trump. If those officers of the Pluto system find a high degree of Trump Derangement Syndrome in an applicant, the belief that all US evil comes from the satanic messiah, Trump His Name, potential employers recognize in that this particular youth is someone who claims to have understood nothing about how the plutocratic system works. In other words, an obedient servant of plutocracy. Thus that youth will make an excellent servant, or henchman… just like Obama.

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[6] The architect-engineer, who was in charge of Notre Dame during 13 years, from 2000 until 2013 is astounded by the fire: how so, and how could it have gone so fast? He calls this “incomprehensible… very old oak, and one gets the impression it burned like matchsticks” The architect says that this sort of wood would never have burned so easily if the fire was accidental.

All the security was remade and the fire alarm system, and the electric installation at a higher level than state of the art, in 2010, and 2 employees were in charge of this, 24/7. The architect is adamant no fire could start, as the oak was so old and tough. and especially not propagate that fast. No fire during the 13 years he was at the helm.
Mr. Mouton says that an accidental fire was not possible: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3RLtMZGm_Sk

 

LOGIC IS MATERIAL

Logic doesn’t just matter, it is matter.

FUNDAMENTAL PROCESSES, INCLUDING COMPUTATIONS, LOGIC, ARE MATERIAL OBJECTS:

Is there something besides matter? No. What is matter? Ah, two types of things, corresponding to wave-particle duality… Or, as I put it often, process-quanta duality.

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We should have come a long way in 24 centuries, yet some keep repeating ideas of Plato, an Athenian plutocrat. Plato (and his teacher Socrates and student Aristotle) had an extreme right wing agenda, much of it pursued later as the “Hellenistic” regimes (dictatorships), imperial fascist Roman Principate, and the rage against innovation. Plato’s metaphysics has much in common, if not everything, with Christianism (this explains its survival…)

And now for a word from this essay’s sponsor, the gentleman contradicting me. Robin Herbert replied to me: …”many don’t seem to grasp that the classical logics are not tied to any physical assumptions… the classical logics are not tied to any physical assumptions. I think the problem is that we have this term “classical physics” and another term “classical logic” and people think they are related. They aren’t.”

Are we that stupid? I guess, our enemies wish we were…

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Only those who have never heard of Platonism would not be familiar with the notion that logic is not “material”: it is at the core of Plato’s view of the universe. And also at the core of Christianism, so help me not god!

I beg to oppose the dematerialization of logic. Differently from Plato, I have a careful observation of nature, Quantum theory, the mechanics of atomic theory, to back me up. Frankly, relative to what we know now, Plato is an ignorant twerp. So why the reverence for his antique antics? My unforgiving mood is driven in part by the observation that the Ancient Greeks had plenty of holes in their axiomatics… Especially in mathematics (where they made several ludicrous mistakes, such as forgetting non-Euclidean geometry, generations after discovering it).

If logic is not tied to “physics”, or what’s material, we want to know what that is. But, as I am going to show, all we do is go back to the Gospel of John as the ultimate authority (itself straight out of Plato!)

Twentieth Century physics has revealed that physics is made of “Fundamental Processes” (see the very nice, pre-QCD book by that title from Feynman)… And Quanta. The former, the processes, are described by waves, the second, those lumps of energy, by particles.

Thus, saying that “logic is not physics” is tantamount to saying that logic is neither a fundamental process (or set thereof), nor quanta (or set thereof).

Orbitals to an electron around a proton (the Hydrogen atom), visualized in 2013 (Phys. Review). What you are looking at is one electron, when it is delocalized. The electron is the cloud. The cloud is a process. The process is what an atom of hydrogen is, 99.9999999% of the time… At least…

There are several problems with such a claim: far from being immaterial, any logic shows up as quanta (aka “symbols”), and is itself a process (classical logic rests on implication, the simplest process:”if A then B”, and chains therefrom). Logic shows up as nothing else, so that’s what it is: a bunch of fundamental processes and quanta. This is the modern philosophy of physics, in action! (It originated with Newton and Laplace, and was then amplified by Jules Henri Poincaré)

There was a famous exchange between Heisenberg and Einstein; the latter, at the peak of his glory, accused the young Quantum physicist to have only put observables in his matrix quantum theory. Heisenberg coolly smirked back that it was Einstein who taught him to do so! (Constructively infuriated, ten years later Einstein rolled out the EPR thought experiment, alleging a contradiction between Quantum Mechanics and LOCAL “elements of reality“. The effect was relabeled “entanglement” by Schrödinger, now the central notion in Quantum theory… Einstein should have realized that it was this very delocalization which made atoms wholes…)    

So what’s “material”? What’s observable! And what is observable? (Delocalized) fundamental processes and (localized, yet ephemeral) quanta. Claiming that the logos is neither is (implicitly) done in the first sentence of the Gospel of John, and John adds that its name is god. We of the natural school shall excommunicate those evoking god. Those who claim “logic”, the logos, escapes nature (= physis) are just followers of whom John followed, namely Plato. They are Platocrats, a particular prototype of plutocrats…

Fundamental processes are described by equations, but that doesn’t mean the equations are “real”, beyond symbols (“quanta”) of a medium. First of all, equations are approximations: a classical computer can only make a finite number of operations (differently from a full Quantum computer, which works with a continuum, the circle S1). Instead what is really real is the fundamental process(es) the equations approximate.

Indeed, consider atoms: they are real, “indivisible” (sort of)… and yet mostly made of delocalized processes known as electronic orbitals.  It is the delocalization which creates the substance: see the picture above… 

So is a classical computation a real object, in the aforementioned sense? Yes, because it is a FINITE set of fundamental processes (moving electrons and photons around). However, if the proposed computation, or logical deduction, takes an infinite amount of time, it becomes something that never comes to exist. (That’s an allusion to a classical computer trying to duplicate Quantum computers; in the case of the chlorophyll molecule, no classical computer could do what the molecule, viewed as a Quantum computer, does!)

In this view, call it material logic, time, whether we want it or not, whether logicians realize it, or not, is an essential part of logic: the time-energy principle de facto granulates time (we need infinite energy for infinitely small time intervals, hence for would be infinite logical computations). To say time is not part of logic is another of these oversights (as Archimedes did, implicitly using what non-standard analysts, Robinson and Al. called “Archimedes Axiom”, which excludes infinitely small (or large) integral numbers). Any piece of logic comes with its own duration, namely how many steps it needs in its simplest form.   

Quantum computing uses one (hypothesized) infinity: the assumed instantaneity of what I call the Quantum Interaction (aka Quantum Collapse). That enables to delocalize Quantum logic (no distributive law of propositional logic!), as delocalized Quantum processes, and this is why it can’t be classically duplicated (aka “Quantum supremacy”).

Happy processes!

Patrice Aymé

DOING AWAY WITH INFINITY SOLVES MUCH MATH & PHYSICS

Particle physics: Fundamental physics is frustrating physicists: No GUTs, no glory, intones the Economist, January 11, 2018. Is this partly caused by fundamental flaws in logic? That’s what I long suggested.

Says The Economist:“Persistence in the face of adversity is a virtue… physicists have been nothing if not persistent. Yet it is an uncomfortable fact that the relentless pursuit of ever bigger and better experiments in their field is driven as much by belief as by evidence. The core of this belief is that Nature’s rules should be mathematically elegant. So far, they have been, so it is not a belief without foundation. But the conviction that the truth must be mathematically elegant can easily lead to a false obverse: that what is mathematically elegant must be true. Hence the unwillingness to give up on GUTs and supersymmetry.”

Mathematical elegance? Define mathematics, define elegance. What is mathematics already? What maybe at fault is the logic, that is the mathematics, brought to bear in present day theoretical physics. And I will say even more: all of today logic may be at fault (what logic is, is itself the deepest problem in logic…). It’s not just physics which should tremble. The Economist gives a good description of the developing situation, arguably the greatest standstill in physics in four centuries:

“In the dark

GUTs are among several long-established theories that remain stubbornly unsupported by the big, costly experiments testing them. Supersymmetry, which posits that all known fundamental particles have a heavier supersymmetric partner, called a sparticle, is another creature of the seventies that remains in limbo. ADD, a relative newcomer (it is barely 20 years old), proposes the existence of extra dimensions beyond the familiar four: the three of space and the one of time. These other dimensions, if they exist, remain hidden from those searching for them.

Finally, theories that touch on the composition of dark matter (of which supersymmetry is one, but not the only one) have also suffered blows in the past few years. The existence of this mysterious stuff, which is thought to make up almost 85% of the matter in the universe, can be inferred from its gravitational effects on the motion of galaxies. Yet no experiment has glimpsed any of the menagerie of hypothetical particles physicists have speculated might compose it.

Despite the dearth of data, the answers that all these theories offer to some of the most vexing questions in physics are so elegant that they populate postgraduate textbooks. As Peter Woit of Columbia University observes, “Over time, these ideas became institutionalised. People stopped thinking of them as speculative.” That is understandable, for they appear to have great explanatory power.“

A lot of the theories found in theoretical physics “go to infinity”, and a lot of their properties depend upon infinity computations (for example “renormalization”). Also a lot of problems which appear and that, say, “supersymmetry” tries to “solve”, have to do with turning around infinite computations which go mad for all to see. For example, plethora of virtual particles make Quantum Field Theory… and miss reality by a factor of 10^120 (one followed by 120 zeroes…). Thus curiously, Quantum Field Theory is both the most precise, and most false theory ever devised. Confronted to all this, physicists have tried to do what has NOT worked in the past, sometimes for centuries, like finding the intellectual keys below the same lighted lamp post, and counting the same angels on the same pinhead.

A radical way out presents itself to simplify the situation. It is itself very simple. And it is global, clearing out much of logic, mathematics and physics, of a dreadful madness which has seized those fields: GETTING RID OF INFINITY… at the logical level. Observe that infinity itself is not just a mathematical hypothesis, it is a mathematically impossible hypothesis: infinity is not an object. Infinity has been used as a device (for computations in mathematics). But what if that device is not an object, is not constructible?

Then lots of the problems theoretical physics try to solve, a lot of these “infinities“, simply disappear. 

Colliding Galaxies In the X Ray Spectrum (Spitzer Telescope, NASA). Very very very big is not infinity! We have no time for infinity!

A conventional way to get rid of infinities in physics is to cancel particles with particles: “as a Higgs boson moves through space, it encounters “virtual” versions of Standard Model particles (like photons and electrons) that are constantly popping in and out of existence. According to the Standard Model, these interactions drive the mass of the Higgs up to improbable values. In supersymmetry, however, they are cancelled out by interactions with their sparticle equivalents.” Having a finite cut-off would do the same.

A related logic creates the difficulty with Dark Matter, in my opinion. Here is why. Usual Quantum Mechanics assumes the existence of infinity in the basic formalism of Quantum Mechanics. This brings the non-prediction of Dark Matter. Some physicists will scoff: infinity? In Quantum Mechanics? However, the Hilbert spaces which Quantum Mechanical formalism uses are often infinite in extent. Crucial to Quantum Mechanics formalism, but still extraneous to it, festers an ubiquitous instantaneous collapse (semantically partly erased as “decoherence” nowadays). “Instantaneous” is the inverse of “infinity” (in perverse infinity logic). If the later has got to go, so does the former. As it is Quantum Mechanics depends upon infinity. Removing the latter requires us to change the former.

Laplace did exactly this with gravity around 1800 CE. Laplace removed the infinity in gravitation, which had aggravated Isaac Newton, a century earlier. Laplace made gravity into a field theory, with gravitation propagating at finite speed, and thus predicted gravitational waves (relativized by Poincaré in 1905).

Thus, doing away with infinity makes GUTS’ logic faulty, and predicts Dark Matter, and even Dark Energy, in one blow.

If one new hypothesis puts in a new light, and explains, much of physics in one blow, it has got to be right.

Besides doing away with infinity would clean out a lot of hopelessly all-too-sophisticated mathematics, which shouldn’t even exist, IMHO. By the way, computers don’t use infinity (as I said, infinity can’t be defined, let alone constructed).

Sometimes one has to let go of the past, drastically. Theories of infinity should go the way of those crystal balls theories which were supposed to explain the universe: silly stuff, collective madness.

Patrice Aymé

Notes: What do I mean by infinity not constructible? There are two approaches to mathematics:1) counting on one’s digits, out of which comes all of arithmetics. If one counts on one’s digits, one runs of digits after a while, as any computer knows, and I have made into a global objection, by observing that, de facto, there is a largest number (contrarily to what fake, yet time-honored, 25 centuries old “proofs” pretend to demonstrate; basically the “proof” assumes what it pretends to demonstrate, by claiming that, once one has “N”, there is always “N + 1”).

2) Set theory. Set theory is about sets. An example of “set” could be the set of all atoms in the universe. That may, or may not, be “infinite”. In any case, it is not “constructible”, not even to be extended consideration, precisely because it is so considerable (conventional Special Relativity, let alone basic practicality prevent that; Axiomatic Set Theory a la Bertrand Russell has tried to turn around infinity with the notion of  a proper class…)

In both 1) and 2), infinite can’t be considered, precisely, because it doesn’t finish.

Some will scoff, that I am going back to Zeno’s paradox, being baffled by what baffled Zeno. But I know Zeno, he is a friend of mine. My own theory explains Zeno’s paradox. And, in any case, so does Cauchy’s theory of limits (which depends upon infinity only superficially; even infinitesimal theory, aka non-standard analysis, from Leibnitz + Model Theory survives my scathing refounding of all of logics, math, physics).  

By the way, this is all so true that mathematicians have developed still another notion, which makes, de facto, logic local, and spurn infinity, namely Category Theory. Category Theory is very practical, but also an implicit admission that mathematicians don’t need infinity to make mathematics. Category Theory has now become fashionable in some corners of theoretical physics.

3) The famous mathematician Brouwer threw out some of the famous mathematical results he had himself established, on grounds somewhat similar to those evoked above, when he promoted “Intuitionism”. The latter field was started by Émile Borel and Henri Lebesgue (of the Lebesgue integral), two important French analysts, viewed as  semi-intuitionists. They elaborated a constructive treatment of the continuum (the real line, R), leading to the definition of the Borel hierarchy. For Borel and Lebesgue considering the set of all sets of real numbers is meaningless, and therefore has to be replaced by a hierarchy of subsets that do have a clear description. My own position is much more radical, and can be described as ultra-finitism: it does away even with so-called “potential infinity” (this is how I get rid of many infinities in physics, which truly are artefacts from mathematical infinity).  I expect no sympathy: thousands of mathematicians live off infinity.

4) Let me help those who want to cling to infinity. I would propose two sort of mathematical problems: 1) those who can be solved when considered in Ultra Finite mathematics  (“UF”). 2) Those which stay hard, not yet solved, even in UF mathematics.

Dark Matter Theories Enlighten Obscure Concept of Explanation

I have struggled with the Foundations of Quantum Physics for decades. Yes, struggle is the meaning of life, as our irascible friend the close-minded Jihadist said, and Albert Camus, too, maybe stimulated by the former, among his colleagues, the Natives of Algeria. I did the deepest studies, I could imagine, plunging in esoteric fields, so deep, I was laughed at, by those who prefer the shallows. Long ago. For example, I thought Category Theory (referred by its critics, then, as “Abstract Nonsense“) should be useful. Then even mathematicians would veil their faces, when Category Theory was evoked. Now, Category Theory is very useful, both in pure mathematics and physics.

The deepest mystery in physics is to understand the Quantum.

Some have sneered:’oh, you lunatic, there is nothing to understand.’ Let them sneer, they are amusing, in their obscurantism. This was always the answer of those who wanted to understand nothing new, in the last ten million years. But the rise of advanced animals is the rise of under-standing. Standing under the appearances of the universe. It is a case where we have to understand what understanding means. 

Giant Galaxy, 1,000 times brighter than Milky Way, ten billion year old, discovered July 2017. It is seen as portions of ring from gravitational lensing by (I suppose) a galactic cluster in between…)

An incontrovertible mystery in physics is Dark Matter. Since the 1930s, we know that there is a massive contradiction between galaxies and gravity. (Between rotations and motions  of galaxies and the theory of gravity, more exactly; be it Newtonian, or its slight modification, Einsteinian gravity.)

So far, physicists have trained less and less conventional explanations of Dark Matter. My own SQPR (SubQuantum Patrice Reality), built to explain the Quantum, provides readily with an explanation of Dark Matter.  It’s completely out of the plane of conventional physics (if you condescend to consider Quantum Field Theory conventional…)

The Superfluid-Anyon model of Dark Matter (“SAD”) supposes that there is a type of particle (anyon) with a strong self-interaction, making a superfluid. In my own theory, SQPR, none of this is supposed.

Some will sneer that I suppose the existence of some properties which give rise to Quantum Physics, and this is what SQPR is. Didn’t Newton, assuredly a greater creature, proclaimed he didn’t make up hypotheses? Right. (Actually the Universal Attraction law was not hypothesized by Newton but by French astronomer Ishmael Bullialdus. So easy for Newton to say; Newton also hypothesized that light consisted of particles, and that he had proven strict equivalence between Kepler’s law and mechanics plus gravity…)

However, to under-stand Quantum Physics, to stand under it, one will have to suppose new, underlying hypotheses explaining the physics of the Quantum. If fundamental, paradigm shifting progress in physics is possible, this is how it will happen.

The leaner those hypotheses, the better. The heliocentric theory of planets’ orbits made FEWER hypotheses than those who believe “heavenly bodies” were special. Why so special? How special? The natural thing

An enormous meteorite, streaked through the skies in a fiery manner, and landed in Northern Greece. It was visited for centuries. Clearly space was full of rocks, no crystal balls…  

Considering other evidences (distance of the sun, computed to be large, thus the sun, enormous), the heliocentric theory was most natural.

Dark Matter may well be the equivalent of that theory. My own SQPR predicts a slow apparition, and built-up of Dark Matter. The latest observations (2017) of Dark Matter and ancient galaxies show no Dark Matter say ten billion years ago.

SAD does not predict that: it predicts Super Fluid Anyon Dark Matter was always there.

Science does not just teach facts and how to organize them in theories. I also teaches what explanations are.

Ex-planation is generally viewed as meaning to spread out. But there is a more striking etymology: An explanation is how to get out (ex) of a plane. In other words, acquiring a further logical dimension.

There is no fundamental new dimension, logically speaking, by supposing one more type of elementary particle. But deducing observed facts from effects which go beyond Quantum Physics would be really a new dimension of logic.

I make hypotheses, but fewer. And they are more natural. That’s the key. When one thinks about it, it was more natural to suppose that, out there in the heavens, matter was as we knew it. Similarly, out there in the Quantum, it is more natural that interactions are as we know them: at finite speed, to preserve causality. This is the most fundamental intuition of SQPR: it supposes that the Quantum Interaction (because spooky action at a distance is still an interaction of some sort) has preserved that fundamental property we observe in all interactions…

By the way, some of the skeptical ones come around, and they sneer that all this science is a wild goose chase after a goose which does not exist. They are mistaken: we are chasing after ourselves. We are chasing after how we explain things.

Even attempted scientific explanation are real, and fruitful. Because scientific activity, even when mistaken, consists in chasing after how we could explain things.

Patrice Ayme’

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Technical description of SAD from Theory of Dark Matter Superfluidity:

…”a novel theory of DM superfluidity that reconciles the stunning success of MOND (MOdified Newtonian Dynamics) on galactic scales with the triumph of the ΛCDM (Cold Dark Matter) model on cosmological scales (where MOND fails miserably: MOND modifies gravity at some specific distance, way too small for galactic clusters; whereas ΛCDM leaves gravity alone, just adding mass, lots of mass, mass by a factor of ten…).

In the SAD model, the Dark Matter component consists of self-interacting axion-like particles which are generated out-of-equilibrium and remain decoupled from baryons throughout the history of the universe. Provided that its mass is sufficiently light and its self-interactions sufficiently strong, the DM can thermalize and form a superfluid in galaxies, with critical temperature of order ∼mK. The superfluid phonon excitations are assumed to be described by a MOND-like action and mediate a MONDian acceleration on baryonic matter. Superfluidity only occurs at sufficiently low temperature, or equivalently within sufficiently low-mass objects…

 

MORALITY IS ABSOLUTE, Since Evolution Is God

Science has demonstrated the existence of our creator. It’s not a black monolith, a la 2001, Space Odyssey, nor is it a somewhat crazed transgender humanoid with issues, as the so-called “New Testament” has it.

There is a God, and it created us in a little more than four billion years. Its name is biological evolution.  Evolution, this all too real god transcends the ones of all too obsolete religions.

Biological evolution, our Creator, made it so that we come endowed, by naturally developing, a natural morality, ethology. Ethology is more developed, more plastic, more variable and intelligent in human beings than in any other species. Why? Because naturally developing morality depends upon naturally developed logic. And human beings are more logically capable than any other animals (although recent political evolutions may lead one to think otherwise…)

Ethology is experimentally established: Capuchin Monkeys have a sense of fairness, for example. That sense of fairness can override more primal urges necessary for survival (like hunger, or safety).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t6OsVUlp7Y0

Tiny Moralists Think Hard: Experimental studies show that Monkeys Stay Away from Mean People.

Capuchin monkeys show biases against humans who deny help to others. This finding suggests that being able to identify undesirable social partners (even in other species) has very ancient evolutionary roots (since our common ancestors with Capuchin monkeys date at least from the separation of South America from Africa. Now that dates to the early Cretaceous: open marine conditions between America and Africa happened by 110 million years ago. This, in particular means that our proto-monkey ancestors, as suggested in some Disney animation movies, enjoyed the presence of dinosaurs for 40 million years; as a reminder, let me point out in passing that those smart primates around, omnivorous as they are, may have found dinosaurs eggs a very handy snack when the world got devastated by eruptions, asteroids, etc… Thus pushing the mesotherms (dinosaurs, etc.)  into extinction…) 

Recently, ethological studies were extended to rats. Rats can override their primal urges to help a fellow rat.

So we don’t need a god invented in the last 32 centuries to explain why we have a sense of right and wrong. There is an absolute morality, but its application can be extremely variable according to circumstances. That is clear when studying the ethology of lions, say, which is all over the place: lions can be fair, tender, devoted, demented, cruel, vicious, selfish, generous, and even protecting of other species… The same pretty much can be observed with chimpanzees (who, after all, have to scare away lions…)

Absolute morality is a mix of what our bodies find pleasurable (that’s the automatic, “genetic” and “epigenetic” part), and what logics compels us to do. Logic itself we learn from the environment, as a sort of proto-physics.

Then, in turn, this learned logics interacts with the ethical circumstances at hand. (Sometimes the logic gets entangled in circumstances to lead to sheer insanity; see the famous Melian dialogue where a maniacal Athens disingenuously explains to Melos why Athens has to be cruel and demented in the Athenian will to annihilate Melos, if Melos won’t submit…)

Logics (again, a proto-physics discovered by the baby, and then the child interacting with the world) is an integral part of what enables us to make our natural ethology operational. Those who “believe” in superstitions which stretch plausibility beyond the breaking point (son of god being crucified, as if that was going to save us, or Muhammad going to Jerusalem, carried by a winged horse, now that the Archangel Gabriel finished instructing him in Arabic, in the name of god…) are violating the law of logic.

Natural ethology is established in part from logic, and the logic each individual holds to be true, depends, to some extent, upon circumstances. Thus natural human ethology is relative, precisely because it’s absolute. In the end, like Brownian motion, it all averages out (absolutely). Moral outliers, like Nazism, get eradicated by evolutionary processes.

Babies discover at some point, that fellow humans don’t always tell the truth, and “belief” should not be absolute, except for excellent reasons (this is one of the point of the fables taught to children: don’t blindly believe others…)

Faith based on unbelievable beliefs deny this learned, mandatory suspicion.

In general, as science has progressed enormously in the meantime, unbelievable beliefs used to be more much believable than they are now. Thus unbelievable beliefs violate logics, the basic of our natural ethics, much more than they used to. Thank god!

That violation of ethics, coming from a violation of basic logic is neither accidental, nor incidental. Instead, it was a Machiavellian plot. Still is, when Obama tells us “Islam is a religion of peace” (which are the religions of war, tell us, please, Oh, Great Bama?)

Violating basic logics is precisely why Roman emperors imposed Christianity (under the penalty of death found in the edicts of emperor Theodosius, 390 CE). That enabled to make god in the image of the emperor, and thus, the emperor’s rule, divine. At the same time it habituated people to violate basic natural ethics, and even basic logic, thus making We The People much easier to dominate, exploit and abuse.

The same basic reasoning established Islam (the ferocious part of the Qur’an was written as Muhammad finally became dictator of Mecca, hence in the same position as Theodosius, 242 years prior).

By violating logic (not believing in anything whatever), the Abrahamic faiths are in violation of absolute, evolution given, ethology.    

Our physical powers are becoming increasingly divine. Our capacity for destruction, annihilation, horror, abomination and infamy, are ever greater, to the point we are in the process of destroying most of the most advanced life on Earth. The only way to stop, or mitigate, this, is by ever more rigorous ethics. Thus it has become a moral imperative more urgent than ever to break whatever threatens logics.

Patrice Ayme’

What Is A Logic? Just A Piece Of Mind

I would propose that a logic is anything which can be modelled with a piece and parcel of brain.

I will show, surprisingly enough, that this is a further step in Cartesian Logic.

At first sight, it may look as if I were answering a riddle, by further mysteries. Indeed, but with mysteries which can be subjected to experimental inquiry (now or tomorrow).

What is a brain? A type of Quantum Computer! And what is Computing, and the Quantum? Well, works in progress. There is something called Quantum Logic, but it does not necessarily defines the world, as exactly what Quantum Physics is, is still obscure.

In practice? Logic is what works, a set of rules to go from a set A of statements to a set B of statements.

In this perspective, Medieval logic did not decline. Instead it transmutated into mathematics.

The teaching of Logic or Dialetics from a collection of scientific, philosophical and poetic writings, French, 13th century; Bibliotheque Sainte-Genevieve, Paris, France. The 13th century was a time of extreme intellectual activity in Europe, superior to anything else in the world, centered 800 miles around Paris. In particular the heliocentric system was proposed by Buridan, after he overthrew Aristotelian Physics, by inventing and discovering inertia.

An article in Aeon, “The Rise And Fall And Rise Of Logic”,

https://aeon.co/essays/the-rise-and-fall-and-rise-of-logic

Reflects on the importance on the history of the notion of logic:

“Reflecting on the history of logic forces us to reflect on what it means to be a reasonable cognitive agent, to think properly. Is it to engage in discussions with others? Is it to think for ourselves? Is it to perform calculations?

In the Critique of Pure Reason (1781), Immanuel Kant stated that no progress in logic had been made since Aristotle. He therefore concludes that the logic of his time had reached the point of completion. There was no more work to be done. Two hundred years later, after the astonishing developments in the 19th and 20th centuries, with the mathematisation of logic at the hands of thinkers such as George Boole, Gottlob Frege, Bertrand Russell, Alfred Tarski and Kurt Gödel, it’s clear that Kant was dead wrong. But he was also wrong in thinking that there had been no progress since Aristotle up to his time. According to A History of Formal Logic (1961) by the distinguished J M Bocheński, the golden periods for logic were the ancient Greek period, the medieval scholastic period, and the mathematical period of the 19th and 20th centuries. (Throughout this piece, the focus is on the logical traditions that emerged against the background of ancient Greek logic. So Indian and Chinese logic are not included, but medieval Arabic logic is.)”

The old racist Prussian, Kant, a fascist, enslaving cog in the imperial machine turned false philosopher was unsurprisingly incorrect.

The author of the referenced article, Catarina Dutilh Novaes, is professor of philosophy and the Rosalind Franklin fellow in the Department of Theoretical Philosophy at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. Her work focuses on the philosophy of logic and mathematics, and she is broadly interested in philosophy of mind and science. Her latest book is The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Logic (2016).

She attributes the decline of logic, in the post-medieval period known as the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, to the rise of printed books, self-study and the independent thinker. She rolls out Descartes, and his break from formal logic:

Catarina writes: “Another reason logic gradually lost its prominence in the modern period was the abandonment of predominantly dialectical modes of intellectual enquiry. A passage by René Descartes – yes, the fellow who built a whole philosophical system while sitting on his own by the fireplace in a dressing gown – represents this shift in a particularly poignant way.”

Speaking of how the education of a young pupil should proceed, in Principles of Philosophy (1644) René Descartes writes:

After that, he should study logic. I do not mean the logic of the Schools, for this is strictly speaking nothing but a dialectic which teaches ways of expounding to others what one already knows or even of holding forth without judgment about things one does not know. Such logic corrupts good sense rather than increasing it. I mean instead the kind of logic which teaches us to direct our reason with a view to discovering the truths of which we are ignorant.

Catarina adds: “Descartes hits the nail on the head when he claims that the logic of the Schools (scholastic logic) is not really a logic of discovery. Its chief purpose is justification and exposition.”

Instead, Descartes claims and I claim that a new sort of logic arose: Medieval Logic transmuted itself into mathematics (Descartes does not say this, but he means it). And mathematics is not really logical in the strictest sense. As it has too many rules to be strictly logical.

Buridan, a great logician who studied well the Liar Paradox (which gave the Incompleteness Theorems) had students such as (bishop) Oresme, who demonstrated what, it turned out, were the first practical theorems in calculus (more than 2 centuries before the formal invention of calculus by Fermat, and Fermat’s discovery of the Fundamental Theorem of Calculus, that integration and differentiation are inverse to each other).

For example, under the influence of Buridan and then Oresme, graphs and later equations themselves were invented. So logic became mathematics. That was blatant by the time Descartes invented Algebraic Geometry. Algebraic Geometry gave ways to deduce, to go from a set A to a set B, using a completely new method never seen before.

In turn, by the Nineteenth Century, mathematical methods contributed to old questions in Logic (the most striking being the use of Cantor Diagonalization to show incompleteness, thanks to the Liar Paradox, self-referential method.

In this spirit, not only Set Theory, naive or not, but Category Theory can be viewed as types of logic. So is, of course, computer science. Logic is whatever enables to deduce. Thus even poetry is a form of logic.

Logic is everywhere there is mental activity, and it is never complete.

If logic is just pieces of brain, then what? Well, some progress in pure logic can be made, just paying attention to how the brain works. The brain works sequentially, temporally, with local linear logics (axonal and dendritic systems). The brain tends to be deprived of contradictions (but not always, and nothing infuriates people more, than to be exposed to their own contradictions and gaps in… logic). Also all these pieces of brain, these logics, are not just temporally ordered, but finite.

As we try to use logic to look forward, as a bunch of monkeys messing up our space rock, it is important to realize that what logic is, has not been properly defined, let alone circumscribed. Indeed, if, surprise, surprise, logic has not been properly defined, let alone circumscribed, much more is logically possible than people suspect!

Patrice Ayme’

 

Nature Of The Physical Law & Reaction Law

Human laws are modelled, in spirit, after physical laws. So it is socially important to realize how physical laws are established, and that they are not immutable. Physical laws are established by observation (some direct, some axiomatic; yes, a paradox). However, if you read the magazine “Wired”, you may feel that physical laws are established, like the Bible or the Qur’an, by the sheer power of a personality cult:

“LAST MONTH, NASA researchers dropped news with potentially huge consequences for space travel and science as a whole: They ran an experiment whose results seem to defy the very laws of physics, and could change how we travel through outer space. Problem is, experts say that it’s incredibly unlikely that Isaac Newton is wrong. Instead, the most likely explanation is the team simply made a mistake somewhere along the way

The team was testing a theory that there’s a new way to propel satellites, instead of using rockets powered by a limited supply of fuel. So they put a radio antenna in a specially designed, sealed container. Turned on, the antenna bounced 935MHz radio waves (similar to those used by some cell phones) around, and the container apparently moved a tiny, tiny bit. This violates Newton’s third law of motion, one of the basic tenets of physics.

Loosely put, Newton taught us that no action can occur without an equal and opposite reaction.”

[WIRED from August 2014: https://www.wired.com/2014/08/why-nasas-physics-defying-space-engine-is-probably-bogus/]

Reaction = Action Is An Experimental Fact. Or Was, Until Recently. Does not have to stay that way

Right, the article is from 2014. However, the riddle got more interesting in 2016, when the same tests were conducted in hard vacuum… with the same results (it was initially thought that radiation heated air, which expanded, creating a push; without air, that counter-idea failed).

Who are these “experts”? People who gave the Nobel Prize to each other? Newton did not “teach” us that action = reaction inasmuch as he demonstrated it (thanks to arcane mathematics). Before I explain what I mean, let me mention that Richard Feynman wrote a famous book “The Character of the Physical Law” (which I read). Feynman observes that there is a hierarchy of laws. Here I will observe something even more subtle: there is a hierarchy of how fundamental laws are viewed as fundamental.

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Newton ASSUMED this “Third Law”, he made an hypothesis of it (and the law was probably known to cannoneers for centuries). Using in part this action = reaction hypothesis, Newton was able to deduct, from a large axiomatic system, with lots of arcane mathematics, theorems. And some of these theorems had practical consequences which were found, or known, to be true (Kepler laws). So it was reasonably assumed that Newton’s Third Law was correct: it is an axiom the use of which bring the correct theorems. The same sort of reasonings established the First and Second Laws of motion, which were discovered by the stupendous genius Buridan, three centuries BEFORE Newton.  

To my knowledge, the Third Law was first stated by Newton. However, that law was certainly well-known by Roman artillery engineers, who were used to catapult large masses at enormous distances: they knew of the recoil all too well. Roman and European Middle Age artillery enabled to seize cities (armies which were less competent in artillery found seizing cities difficult to do; the Turks used Hungarians engineers to breach the walls of Constantinople with giant guns).

Thus we see there are two sorts of physical laws: those we assume as axioms, and then we certify them, because the mathematical logic they give rise to bring apparently correct results. Other natural laws are observed directly.

For example, the so-called “Standard Model” can be viewed as a sort of giant law. It uses, in its axioms, the so-called Higgs boson, and that was indeed found (sort of).

Thus direct observations can suggest a law (say action = reaction; or gravitation) which then is established through the axiomatic method (heavily used in modern physics). Actually the case of gravitation is even more interesting: observations suggested an attractive force. Then Ismaël Bullialdus, a French priest-astronomer-mathematician found a reasoning why it should be an inverse square law (Bullialdus has a crated named after him on the Moon). Armed with Bullialdus inverse-square law, Isaac Newton used the inverse square law as an axiom to “deduce” Kepler’s laws  (I wrote “deduce”, because, centuries later, it was called into question whether Newton had properly demonstrated Gauss’ law, which reduce, gravitationally speaking, planets to massive points)

Examples of laws observed directly are numerous: they include the classical laws of optics, of forces (depicted by vectors; but one cannot use vector theory to prove how force behave… because vectors are abstracted forces), much of electrical behavior, etc.

Some laws were deduced from axiomatics before being demonstrated experimentally. Newton’s crowning achievement was more or less) demonstrating the equivalence of Kepler Laws with the 1/dd inverse square universal attraction law… given the laws of “Newtonian” Mechanics.

As I said, the laws of mechanics were greatly deduced by Buridan and various engineers, generations before Newton.

Could the same be going on now? Who knows?

It is a question of observation. Ultimately physics, nature, is what is observed, nothing less. It gets to be more than what is observed, because of our imagination, and the fact it needs to use the logics and maths it knows.

Meta-lesson? Politics degenerated in the West, in the last 50 years, because what was really going on was observed only in a fragmentary way. This is in particular the drama of so-called “left”, or progress. We have to stick to what is observed.

In the case of democrats, what was observed is that “Democrats” selected a candidate who was the object of 4 Congressional inquiries (Sanders had none, never had any).

Now they insult us.

Patrice Ayme’

Mentality Trumps Logic

Mental States Trump, Prime and Build (Local Linear) Logic

How do people think? When thinking about thinking, intellectuals tend to go back to Plato describing the mythical Socrates ponderously going from a) to c) because a) implied b) and b) implied c). Well, this is NOT how the brain works. The brain has basically two systems: Local Linear Logic, and Topological Logic (TL = emotion, so we will call it ES, the Emotional System). LLL and ES are entangled. For example, ES, the Emotion System, shuts off, and opens, various sub-systems in the brain. Moreover the ES directs consciousness into these subsystems. Each of these systems comes with its own logic. So there is no such a thing as “logic” per se. 

Actually modern axiomatics in logic considers that any Logic L comes with its own Universe U (in which it sits, so to speak). Varying U varies L. Thus a Logic L in the brain, sitting in subsystem S1 will be different from one sitting in subsystem S2, because they constitute different universes U. (An aspect of that was long known, as thinkers argued that various drugs, from alcohol to THC enabled them to reach various stages of consciousness…)

Thus what Plato talked about is basically irrelevant to foster wisdom. What is relevant is mental subsystems selection, how, and why. And even subsystem management. Instead, Plato explores logic, LLL. And recent events have been enlightening: LLL is mostly secondary for directing people’s behavior. 

I Think, Therefore I Sting. At Least, Sometimes, I Feel That Way.

By “Trump Madness” I do not mean Trump is mad, far from it: after all, he is the next president, and already causing more change than Obama did in 8 years (see Europe dumping “austerity” within 30 hours of Trump’s election). Clearly, there was a very smart method to Trump’s madness, and it was highly successful for him, as he obtained the loftiest job in the world (at least as far as conventional wisdom has it; in truth the loftiest job is mine, but never mind…). Thus “Trump madness” was anything except madness, on the part of Trump… Or his supporters (who also got what they wanted).

The real madness has been the flow of insults and indiscriminate violence on the part of “Clinton” supporters. Innocent thinkers were called “unscholarly, uncouth, anti-semitic, racist, xenophobic, judged to have Obsessive Compulsive Disorder,  and compulsive liars”. This was just a sampler of the most polite insults directed at me… by “friends”… and I am NOT a Trump supporter. Just thought to be so, because I rolled out all sorts of graphs depicting demoncracy (from inequality, to incarceration, rate, to life expectancy, to government investment, etc.).

Never mind that this was all for positions I held sometimes for decades, they are all extremely progressive, and I am just culprit of having Trump embracing them.

Insults directed at Trump were often obviously more insane than grievous. Trump was called “xenophobic” (the evidence is, the exact opposite, that is, Trump is an extreme xenoPHILE). Trump was called “anti-semitic” (his beloved and trusted son-in-law is an observant Jew). Trump was called a business failure (he grew his “organization”, now in 60 countries, from 17 million dollar to somewhere around ten billion…)

How come Clinton supporters became so abusive? OK, they were surprised. Not just because people were scared to reveal in the polls that they would vote for Trump, skewing polls (pollster Nate Silver discovered this a week or two before the vote, so he “unskewed” the polls, and revealed the chances of Trump were significant; I knew for months, just talking to people, that people were hiding their Trump preferences).

Clinton supporters did not turn abusive and insulting just because what they worry about turns out not to be what most of the country worries about. But, mostly, they hated, because it turned out that they had become strangers to themselves, and the world. Part of them rose in fury, and took over their persona, because they wanted to lash out, so great was the pain that uncomprehension caused..

The Clinton supporters had no idea how neurohormonally entangled with (their idea of) their candidate. Precisely because they were deliberately ignored the (left, leftist, liberal, progressive) case I have made for more than eight years (with all those graphs), they had turned into fanatics, Jihadists, because they had rejected (the unsavory) reality.

The mental order in the brains of these self-described progressives, supposed to address politics, had become hopelessly disconnected from reality. For example, in judging Obama, they judged his brown skin, but not the fact Obama was led by the nose by Lawrence Summers, the Harvard-Goldman Sachs surrogate who had dismantled, under Bill Clinton, the Banking Act of 1933 (“G-S”). And this, seven months before Obama reigned. And they ignored hundreds of other indicators which were flashing way more right, and corporate fascism, than any other president before.

Thus the mental subsystems Clinton supporters activated over the years made them not just unreal, but incapable of activating anything else. One of my prefered game these days is to question Clinton-Obama fanatics about Quantitative Easing. I generally draw a blank. The self-perceived) most clever ones tell me it was a good thing. So here you have so-called progressives saying that giving more than ten trillion dollars to the world richest, most corrupt people and institutions was… a good thing.

Guess what, you dummies? It was a good thing only for plutocracy, also known as demoncracy. The only person who could understand what I was talking about, and agreed with me, before meeting me, is Senior VP in a major bank.

People think first with their neurohormones. Tell me their neurohormones most active, and I can tell you where their Local Linear Logic delves. Obsessions leads and localizes reflection.

Is there experimental evidence for the preceding? Yes, there is, from… insects. The theory of consciousness is starting to rise. It involves making flies play videogames, or seeing if, like American students, they can get scared. Flies can be put in a state of “scariness” and wanting to get to a “safe space”.

Insects have a rudimentary ego, though very different from Narcissus or classical literature would have it. Insect ego appears as the ability to act and mentally concentrate on certain environmental cues thus ignoring others. “They don’t pay attention to all sensory input equally,” cognitive scientist Andrew Barron of Australia’s Macquarie University declared.

When you and I are hungry, we don’t just move towards food, as bacteria do. Our hunger creates a particular feeling (an emotion) which, in turn rearrange which subsystems are activated in our brain. Such a state is called a “subjective experience” in traditional philosophy. Do insects have the same? Obviously they do (I can say from anecdotes, and thus as a philosopher; scientists will verify and make sure).

Insects can be led into mental states which do not fit reality. So can humans (humans even do this deliberately, when they play or make jokes). Once in such a state, a particular logic, the universe of which is that precise mental state, flows. That Local Linear Logic is particular, yet it leaves (neural) connections behind. If suddenly precipitated, for real, in a situation calling for that mental state, the LLL is ready to kick in. That’s why humans play, and make jokes.

This election was a joke. So were the mental states most citizens put themselves, or let themselves been put, in the last few decades. Time to wake up.

And time to wake up to the reality that it is moods which create logic, even more than it is logic which creates moods.

Some will rise their hands in surrender, reading this. They will see logic as defeated. But, well, not at all. Quite the opposite. That mentality trumps logic means logic has to go meta, meta on mentality. One can’t just be logical, to defeat enemy logic. Enemy logic, like ours, is grounded in mentality, and emotion. The fight has to be carried there, it’s not just logical, it’s metalogical.

Patrice Ayme’

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And example of emotion underlying logic has been TDS. TRUMP Derangement Syndrome (TDS) Is MENTALLY ENLIGHTENING, so thank you, all of you, clueless pseudo-progressives, for providing us with not just entertainment, but insights on how insects and other animals think. They think, because they sting. Most people with TDS are at a loss to inform us what progress should be made of, because they lose emotional power, contemplating progress. All the emotions they have tend to underlay their dislike of Trump. I personally disliked Trump 30 years ago, and find him rather improved, nowadays… And, on the progress side, I get more emotional than in my dislike of just one individual… 

DARK MATTER-ENERGY, Or How Inquiry Proceeds

How to find really new knowledge? How do you find really new science? Not by knowing the result: this is what we don’t have yet. Any really new science will not be deduced from pre-existing science. Any really new knowledge will come out of the blue. Poetical, and, or, emotional logic will help before linear logic does.

A top lawyer, admitted to the US Supreme Court, and several countries. told me that the best judges know, emotionally, where they want to go, and then build a logical case for it.

The case of Dark Matter is telling: this increasingly irritating elephant in the bathroom has been in evidence for 80 years, lumbering about, smashing the most basic concepts of physics. As the encumbering beast did not fit existing science, it was long religiously ignored by the faithful of the church of standard physics, as a subject not worthy of deep inquiry by very serious physicists. Now Dark Matter, five times more massive than Standard Model matter, is clearly sitting heavily outside of the Standard Model, threatening to crush it into irrelevance. Dark matter obscures the lofty pretense of known physics to explain everything (remember the grandly named TOE, the so-called “Theory Of Everything“? That TOE was a fraud, snake oil, because mainstream physics celebrities crowed about TOE, while knowing perfectly well that Dark Matter dwarfed standard matter, and while being completely outside of the Standard Model).

Physicists are presently looking for Dark Matter, knowing what they know, namely that nature has offered them a vast zoo of particles, many of them without rhyme or reason. or symmetries to “explain” (indeed, some have rhyme, a symmetry, a mathematical group such as SU3 acting upon them; symmetries have revealed new particles, sometimes). 

Bullet Cluster, 100 Million Years Old. Two Galaxies Colliding. The Dark Matter, In Blue, Is Physically Separated From the Hot, Standard Matter Gas, in Red. This BULLET CLUSTER shows that Dark Matter really exists, and is not just an effect of modifying gravity.

This sort of picture above is most of what we presently have to guess what Dark Matter could be; the physical separation of DM and SM is most telling to me: it seems to indicate that SM and DM do not respond to the same forces, something that my Quantum theory predicts; it’s known that Dark Matter causes gravitational lensing, as one would expect, as it was first found by its gravitational effects, in the 1930s…

However, remember: a truly completely new (piece of) science cannot be deduced from pre-existing paradigm. Thus, if Dark Matter was really about finding a new particle type (a “WIMP“), it would be interesting, but not as interesting as it would be, if it were not, after all, a new particle type, but instead, a consequence from a completely new law in physics (as I believe possible).

This is the quandary about finding truly completely new science. It can never be deduced from ruling paradigms, and may actually overthrow them. What should then be the method to use? Can Descartes and Sherlock Holmes help? The paradigm presented by Quantum Physics helps. The Quantum looks everywhere in space to find solutions: this is where its (“weird”) nonlocality comes in. Nonlocality is crucial for interference patterns and for finding lowest energy solutions, as in the chlorophyll molecule. This suggests that our minds should go nonlocal too, and we should look outside of a more extensive particle zoo to find what Dark Matter is.

In general, searching for new science should be by looking everywhere, not hesitating to possibly contradict what is more traditional than well established.

An obvious possibility to explain Dark Matter is, precisely, that Quantum Physics is itself incomplete, and generating Dark Matter, and Dark Energy, in places where said incompleteness (of the present Quantum theory) would be most blatant: large cosmic distances.

More precisely, Quantum processes, stretched over cosmic distances, instead of being perfectly efficient and nonlocal over gigantically cosmic locales, could leave a Quantum mass-energy residue, precisely in the places where extravagant cosmic stretching of Quanta occurs (before “collapse”, aka “decoherence”). (I call this theory of mine SQPR, Sub Quantum Patrice Reality.)

This would happen if what one should call the “Quantum Interaction” proceeds at a finite speed (much faster than c, by a factor of at least 10^23…). These two hypotheses of SQPR are enough.

The more one does find a conventional explanation (namely a new type of particle) for Dark Matter, the more likely my style of explanation is likely. How could one demonstrate it? Not by looking for new particles, but by conducting new and more refined experiments in the foundations of Quantum Physics.

If this guess is correct, whatever is found askew in the axioms of present Quantum Physics could actually help future Quantum Computer technology (because the latter works with Quantum foundations directly, whereas conventional high energy physics tend to eschew the wave aspects, due to the high frequencies involved).

Going on a tangent is what happens when the central, attractive force, is let go. A direct effect of freedom. Free thinking is tangential. We have to learn to produce tangential thinking.

René Descartes tried to doubt the truth of all his beliefs to determine which beliefs he could be certain were true. However, at the end of “The Meditations” he hastily conclude that we can distinguish between dream and reality. It is not that simple. The logic found in dreams is all too similar to the logic used by full-grown individuals in society.

Proof? Back to Quantum Physics. On the face of it, the axioms of Quantum Physics have a dream like quality (there is no “here”, nor “there”, “now” is everywhere, and, mysteriously, the experiment is Quantum, whereas the “apparatus” is “classical”). Still, most physicists, after insinuating they have figured out the universe, eschew the subject carefully.  The specialists of Foundations are thoroughly confused: see Sean Carroll, http://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2013/01/17/the-most-embarrassing-graph-in-modern-physics/

However unbelievable Quantum Physics, however dream-like it is, physicists believe in it, and don’t question it anymore than cardinals would Jesus. Actually, it’s this dream-like nature which, shared by all, defines the community of physicists. Cartesian doubt, pushed further than Descartes did, will question not just the facts, the allegations, but the logic itself. And even the mood behind it.

Certainly, in the case of Dark Matter, some of the questions civilization has to ask should be:

1. How sure are we of the Foundations of Quantum Physics? Answer: very sure, all too sure!
2. Could not it be that Dark Matter is a cosmic size experiment in the Foundations of Quantum Physics?

Physics, properly done, does not just question the nature of nature. Physics, properly done, questions the nature of how we find out the nature of anything. Physics, properly done, even questions the nature of why we feel the way we do. And the way we did. About anything, even poetry. In the end, indeed, even the toughest logic is a form of poetry, hanging out there, justified by its own beauty, and nothing else. Don’t underestimate moods: they call what beauty is.

Patrice Ayme’