Where Am I? A Thought Experiment
November 22, 2011
Many years ago the philosopher Daniel Dennett wrote an ingenious essay entitled Where Am I? It is a fictional story where the pentagon asks the professor to go on a top-secret mission deep within the Earth, but in order to complete the task, they need to remove his brain from his body due to extreme radiation. They put his brain in a vat and then connect it to another body using wireless electronics. Dennett then controls this second body for the mission, complications happen, and well, many interesting questions about identity and space are addressed throughout. Professor Minsky, who was in charge of the operation, connected Dennett’s brain to a super-computer which was simulating his brain activity exactly. At some points Dennett is controlling his remote controlled body via the super-computer and at other times via his brain. I won’t ruin the rest for you.
I originally read the essay in a cognitive psychology textbook of mine, but I’ve just recently found out that he has made a “docudrama” acting out this entire scenario on film! You have to watch it. I loved it.
It won’t be all that long before nanotechnology makes this sort of thing actually possible. If your body gets completely run down, it’s possible that it could be extracted, placed in a vat, and then remotely wired up to a prosthetic body. And when you start thinking about things like this, carefully analyzing it all, it only gets more and more confusing. At the very start you see Professor Dennett staring at his brain saying, “Here I am, staring at my brain in a vat.” Then he soon catches himself and thinks, “No, that’s not right. Here I am? Isn’t the real me in the vat?”
I honestly think that humans will eventually shed their physical bodies in favor of remote controlled prosthetic bodies. Not clunky looking cyborg bodies, but elegant bodies which are more beautiful and well constructed than our own. Made of stronger materials, not needing all the burdensome upkeep, and much easier to repair if something goes wrong. We’ll have mastered fusion power and have practically limitless energy. We’ll erect giant super-computers which will simulate a virtual universe filled with all sorts of worlds in which we’ll stay “plugged into”. Robotic sentinels powered by AI millions of times more intelligent than our own minds today will keep our brains functioning and when we wish to explore the real world, we’ll “possess” a robotic body and use it. There won’t be a need to travel from point A to point B. We’ll move as fast as our information technology. I don’t think I’ll live long enough to see it (absent some huge breakthrough in medical technology allowing me to live for a very long time), but within a few hundred years things are rapidly moving that way. It sounds like science fiction, but just study it out and look at the technology. Something incredible is evolving here on planet Earth.
A lot of questions about space and identity arise in these scenarios. We tend to associate ourselves with our bodies, but even by simply removing your brain and remotely connecting to another body removes that problem. That’s not even counting virtual reality and its possibilities. And are you even really your brain and nervous system? To some extent you certainly are, but say you’re a mean-spirited person, unkind, and always unhappy. We’re tempted to say, “So and so is such a mean person. I don’t like him.” But there will come a time in the not so distant future when we can implant small chips in a person’s brain which dampen signals from some regions and amplify signals from others and lift them out of depression, hatred, or any other unwanted behavior. When your brain is in a vat, filled with nanobots supplementing your brain and altering its signals, you would consciously have experiences, but you’re not stuck with any particular personality, level of knowledge, or temperament. We’re not anything which we currently think we are. We’re not our bodies. We’re not our location in space. We’re not our personalities. We’re not our gender. We’re not our thoughts. We’re not our desires. We’re not what we know. I don’t know what we are, but we’re not any of those things, at least not absolutely considering they’re all subject to change, especially with advances in technology. We’re something beyond all that. Beyond morality. Beyond feelings. Beyond emotion.
The collective consciousness of humanity is slowly rising from the depths, though it’s still wading around in the mud. Originally we couldn’t accept anyone who worshiped a different God, wore different clothing, styled their hair differently, spoke differently, and had different cultural values. Later we matured and realized the value in freedom, and governments allowed freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and protected minorities from the majority. Humanity flourished in ways it had never done before. Next we struggled with skin color. Segregation was eliminated and humanity further prospered. Even today racism is rampant, but it’s been diminishing with time. Our next step is to accept gays, lesbians, and transgender individuals. We’re not our gender or sexual orientation. We’ll move beyond that. Then we’ll move beyond geographic borders and stop fighting with one another over fictional lines drawn in the sand. Later we’ll hopefully learn that a person isn’t what he or she does. Their actions are a consequence of their nervous system, not some immaterial “free will”. People seem to understand this in bits and pieces, such as economists pointing out how people respond to incentives, sociologists indicating how the poor and struggling are more likely to commit crimes, and psychologists telling us how people’s desires can be shaped by their culture and environment, but we still haven’t completely caught on. We still hold to deep seated convictions of responsibility, justice, and retribution, and base our society around them. We point fingers at individuals and say, “You’re bad. You’re no good. You’re evil.” Instead we should ask, “What environment did this person live through? How was this person raised? What was he or she exposed to? What are his or her brain scans showing? Is everything functioning?”, and so on. Empty blame won’t tell us why a person did what they did or help us learn how to fix the problem. We’ll attribute it to their “free will” and say, “it’s uncaused, their spirit made a decision which controlled their body to do this or that”, instead of asking, “Why did this person do that?” I think we still need laws enforcing retribution and justice, but very few people realize how the brain is chemistry all the way down. As we do so, humanity will move into a new level of love and compassion, and instead of cruelly executing people, we’ll further research which brain areas aren’t firing, such as why the mass murderer feels no guilt or compassion, and supplement his or her brain with new implanted hardware, fixing their mind and behavior.
I think humanity is up for a long train ride and it’s going to be hell, at least initially. This new technology is going to force governments to change and it’ll require radical shifts in our collective consciousness. Religion is being thrown against the wall as more and more facts show how bogus its claims are and they won’t give in without a fight. They’ll contest every form of progress and consider these developments as playing God and blasphemy. Religiously motivated terrorism will only increase. Our economic systems are failing us as more and more efficient methods of production are coming into place. Robots will eventually take over all mundane work, and keep climbing in capabilities and worth to employers, leaving normal people unemployed. Eventually people won’t need to work at all to live, but it’s unlikely that our governments and social institutions will be able to keep up with the rapid changes. Millions and later billions will be out of work, trying to compete with augmented humans with better skills, trying to find ways to afford prosthetics, and struggling to work within this system of money, trade and competition. Wealth disparities will be far beyond what they are today, and there will surely be wars and riots. When people can download knowledge and skills into their supplemented brains, old ideas of identity have to go. Humanity may well be wiped off the planet by rich transhuman overlords who view them as worthless and have the masses exterminated.
But with all these new developments, people will be connected in ways they never have been before. They’ll be able to share information and knowledge at the speed of light, brain to brain transfers. Think about when we can beam experiences to one another. Millions and even billions could instantly be made aware of injustices, “teleported” right on the scene. We’ll be able to simultaneously receive information feeds from the same body and share near exactly the same experiences. There will probably be movie theaters where thousands or even millions of people connect to the virtual body of a character, and we all live that character’s life, and see their perspective, live their thoughts, and feel their emotions. And since it’ll be digital information, countless different perspectives could be absorbed and analyzed in ways far beyond what our internet and blogs are today. There’s a lot to think about, and it’s all coming too fast to even begin to understand.
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My Personality Type: INTJ
November 21, 2011
I took several long Myers-Briggs personality tests and the result was always the same: I am definitely an INTJ. However, on one exam I came awfully close to an INTP. They gave a percentage indicator for each letter, and on that particular exam I was like 60% Judgement, 40% Perceptual. Apparently we’re the most rare personality type only constituting 1-4% of the population. I’m not going to spend much time talking about INTJ’s on here because there’s already loads of information out there about us. But if you are interested by chance, you can read about the INTJ personality type here.
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Onward To The Edge!
November 18, 2011
There’s a new symphony of science video out. Have you seen it? What!? You haven’t? Well here it is!
I don’t think I posted the last symphony of science video either. It’s about quantum physics. Nice!
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Reference Frames Part 1: Relative Simultaneity
November 18, 2011
Yesterday I wrote a post about space-time, giving an example of how strange things can be when dealing with special relativity. If some of you have already read it, forgive me, for I wrote it at like 3 AM, and it had a few minor errors in it. My brain was tired because I struggled for hours to get Latex working in my posts (it allows you to put math equations in blog posts). Earlier today I went back and read over that post and thought, “Woah, that ain’t right.” So if it confused you the first time, check it out again and see if it makes a little more sense now. I have to remember that after I click “publish” on this site, it also emails it out to everyone on my list as well, and some of you get my posts that way. I need to wait until the next day after I’m rested, and make sure I didn’t make any mistakes!
For the next couple of days I want to make some posts regarding reference frames and explore the strange things that happen when you accelerate relative to someone else. You’ve probably heard about Einstein’s relativity theory, and one of its main premises is that the speed of light is constant, regardless of how you’re moving. It’s the same in each and every reference frame. Let’s move slowly and explore the implications of an idea like that, and see how it works.
We’ll take a very simple example of how events can happen at different times in different reference frames, going very very slowly, and dissecting the situation in detail. We’ll begin by assuming we’re a woman named Anna, and we have two lamps in our hands which each have a button on them. If we press that button, the lamps emit a strong flash of light. Let’s hold up our lamps, one to the left, one to the right, both an equal distance from our head. Now we’ll hit the buttons on each lamp at the exact same time. What happens?
In order to avoid any weird confusions, let’s assume that our brain is infinitely fast and that we’re aware of everything going on around us, and we do not depend on sensory organs to get information about the world. We don’t need eyes or ears, but we can just perceive what’s going on around us because we’re directly tapped into the space-time fabric. In order to perceive the lamps we’re holding in front of us, we don’t have to wait for light to bounce off of them and fall on our eyes. We simply feel and sense the distortion in the space-time fabric which they make. We can also directly sense and feel the electro-magnetic waves of light pulsing through the space. We’re kind of like a puppet master, where small strings are connected to each and every point in space, but our strings aren’t normal strings. They feel every tiny vibration, no matter how small, and we don’t have to wait for the wave to propagate up the string to us in order to sense it. The instant anything happens to those strings, any change or anything at all, we know about it. I could use the analogy of a spider on the space-time web, but I don’t want to be a spider. Alright, we’re fully connected and aware of everything. This connection to our web is an analogy for a reference frame. Our equations for a reference frame will represent those strings to each and every point around us.
Let’s hit our buttons.
The moment we press the buttons we sense the electricity pulsing through each lamp and then the lamps themselves light up. Both emit electro-magnetic vibrations (the light waves), and we sense them moving through the space-time fabic, vibrating through each point in space toward us, both from our left side and our right side. The two waves travel through space at the speed of light (299,792,458 meters per second), and in a very very short time period they each connect with our left and right cheeks at exactly the same time.
So far everything is going as expected. We’re beginning to feel adventurous. We invite our friend Bob to join us, and he also possess this “spider” like ability to sense everything going on around him as well, connected to each and every point of space-time in his reference frame. We decide to climb up on a moving train car which is moving to the east relative to Bob.
As we climb up on the train car, we notice some amazing things happening. As the friction between our shoes and the train car applies a force on our body, accelerating us faster and faster, we feel ourselves being “disconnected” from our web of space-time strings, and we’re being connected to a new set of strings. Every instant in time we’re being connected to a new set of strings until eventually our body reaches the same velocity as the train car and then things stabilize. We’re now connected to a brand new set of strings. We’ve entered a new reference frame.
Whew. That made us dizzy for a second. We notice that Bob has become thinner in the direction we’re moving. His length has been contracted in the direction of motion of the train car. In this case, he’s less wide and looks like a skinny bean pole. We further notice that the electricity pulsing through his brain is moving slower than it was before we hopped on the train car. We now decide to do the same experiment we did before with our lamps. We hold them out to our left and right and press the buttons. What do you think happens? You might guess this.
Let’s say our train car is moving 75% the speed of light. That’s pretty darn fast. You might expect that because we’re moving so fast, the light wave coming out of our right-hand lamp would have to chase our moving body, whereas the other light wave coming from the lamp in our left-hand would come at us faster. The light wave from the left-hand lamp should hit our cheek before the right-hand lamp. As strange as this may seem, that’s not what happens in reality. In real life, you’d press the buttons and we’d have the same experience as when we were on the ground – both waves strike our cheeks at exactly the same time.
So wait a minute. Does light ignore the fact that we’re moving? Sort of, but it’s a bit more subtle than that. The speed of light will be the same for any reference frame. As the spider-like puppet-master watching that electro-magnetic vibration pulse through space along one of our strings, we’ll always, ALWAYS, sense it moving at the speed of light.
Ok, but what about Bob? He’s connected to space-time in his reference frame which is different from ours. We left him on the ground. How does this all work for him? Well he watched us climb up on the train car and saw our body become tall and skinny like his did for us! In his frame of reference, our body contracted in the direction of the train’s motion. Also, he notices that the electricity pulsing through our brains is moving more slowly than his own.
So what about the lamps and the light beams we fired at our cheeks? What does he perceive to happen? Well we know that the speed of those light waves has to travel at the speed of light for him, just as they do for us. He sees those same light waves, but they’re traveling through a different space (down different strings). That’s one of the main assumptions of Einstein’s theory of relativity. It’s really weird, but it’s how it works. But this leaves us with a problem. To Bob, we’re moving at 75% the speed of light to the East. In his reference frame, the light pulse has to chase us down to catch up with our motion, just like in the third picture. So what happens? What’s the solution to this? Bob doesn’t see us press the buttons at the same time. To him, we pressed the button in our right hand first, and then pressed the left-hand button a bit later. To Bob, it looks like we timed it to where we’d fire the right-hand button a little early so that both waves will hit our cheeks at the same time. And that’s exactly what happens. The light waves do hit our cheeks at the same time in Bob’s frame as well, but the light pulses were not fired from the lamps at the same time. The right-hand light wave had to travel further and was emitted earlier.
Light is a pretty amazing phenomenon. It seems to be a sort of four-dimensional vibration. At least that’s how I understand it, but I have a lot to learn. In my next post, I want to talk about the Lorentz contraction and time dilation, showing how things don’t have a set size or shape. Until next time!
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A Look At Space Using Special Relativity
November 17, 2011
The other day I mentioned how I struggle to understand what “objective” space is, if such an idea even makes sense. I figured it’d be nice to bring you guys in on my struggle, so I’ll be posting some real world examples using modern physics, showing you guys just how weird and bizarre thinking about space-time really is. Before I begin though, if anything in this post is incorrect, please let me know. I’ve noticed that some of you who read this blog are physicists, and have contacted me by email in the past, so feel free to email me or comment on any errors in this. I’ll fix them, and hopefully you’ll help me understand all of this better!
In my last post, I embedded a Youtube video from the BBC program called What Is Reality. In it Dr. Tegmark of MIT wrote some equations on a glass window, pointing out that these mathematical equations are a window which we can use to look at and understand the world at its deepest levels. One of them was the Lorentz transformation, which describes how to deal with fast moving things (near light speed).
It relates the coordinate system and flow of time between two “reference frames”. For example, say I’m standing here on Earth, and I exist in 3D space with the coordinates x, y, and z, and time flows according to t. t = 1 second, 2 seconds, 3 seconds, and so on, moment by moment, just like we’re used to. Initially you’re beside me in a space ship on a long runway, but then you rapidly accelerate and by the time you lift-off, let’s assume you’re moving 80% the speed of light (0.8c). (A crazy example, but just bear with me).
As you accelerated relative to me up to 80% the speed of light, time itself was slowing down for you relative to me. The electricity flowing through your brain, the blood flowing through your veins, the very flow of your conscious thought, all slowed down relative to me. At the same time, from your perspective in the space ship, the big super-long runway is scrunching up shorter and shorter in the direction you’re accelerating. It’s very weird, and once I actually work an example for you, you’ll see just how weird all of this is.
Let’s write out the Lorentz transformation in equation form.
(1) 
The variable v is the speed between the two reference frames and c is the speed of light. x and t are position and time in the first frame, and x’ and t’ are position and time in the second frame. Let’s now work a problem and examine it. Here’s the problem:
According to Jason on Earth, a distant uninhabited Planet Y is 5 light years away. Steve is in a spaceship moving away from Earth at 80% the speed of light, or 0.8c. Steve’s on his way to check out the planet, but unfortunately for him, Greg didn’t care much for Planet Y, so he blew it up. According to Jason’s astronomical logs on Earth, this happened 2 years after Steve passed Earth. (We mustn’t forget that Jason had to wait a while for the light from the explosion to reach him.) Call the the passing of Steve and Jason time zero for both. (a) According to Steve, how far away is Planet Y when it explodes? (b) At what time did it explode?
Note that in this example, Steve doesn’t take off from Earth but is assumed to have been flying by at 0.8c from the get go. To solve this problem we simply plug the numbers into the Lorentz transformation equation, but the answer is quite intriguing.
(2) 
A NEGATIVE time? You may be thinking that’s a typo, but no, it’s not. That’s really NEGATIVE 3.33 years. What does all this mean? It means that if after Steve sees the explosion, he were to calculate when the explosion happened from his frame of reference, it would have happened over three years before the event of him passing by me on Earth. But I calculated it out and inferred that it happened two years after Steve passed by me Earth. This may sound impossible but it’s actually correct. His reference frame is “aware” of the explosion over three years before my frame of reference is.
Let’s break all of this down, working it all out from both my perspective on Earth, and next for Steve on his spaceship.
Jason’s Perspective
From my perspective on Earth, everything is “normal”, so none of the math is terribly confusing. Most of this problem is simple distance = rate * time stuff. The planet explodes at t = 2 years after Steve’s passing by me. At this time, Steve will have moved (0.8c)*(2 years) = 1.6 light years out toward the planet. I see a distance between Steve and Planet Y of 5 ly – 1.6 ly = 3.4 light years and a relative velocity between Steve and the light of the explosion of 1.8c (he’s moving at 0.8c toward the planet, and light is coming toward him at 1.0c from the planet). So the light from the explosion will reach Steve in another t = 3.4 ly / 1.8c = 1.89 years — at the time, according to me, Jason, of 2 + 1.89 = 3.889 years. The distance I now see between Steve and Planet Y (or the center of the debris) is 5 ly – (0.8c)*(3.889 years) = 1.889 ly. In the meantime, I will know that less time has gone by on Steve’s clock. In particular, 
.
Steve’s Perspective
Now on to Steve’s perspective. The distance the planet is from him when he realizes that it has been blown away is shorter for him. How much shorter? You apply the Lorentz contraction: 
Now the big question we have to solve is this: If Planet Y moves toward Steve at 0.8c, and light from the explosion moves at him at 1.0c, how long will it take light to get 1.133 ly ahead of the planet? The relative velocity between Planet Y and the light from the explosion is 0.2c, and 
Solving for 
, we get 5.667 yrs. If Steve’s clock reads 2.33 years when he first notices the explosion, and it took 5.667 years for that information to travel to him, the explosion must have happened at t’ = -3.33 years.
From this example you can see that objective events happen in different orders depending on your frame of reference (how you’re moving relative to one another). In Steve’s frame there’s the explosion, and then he passes by me on Earth. In my frame, Steve passes by, and then two years later Greg blew up the planet. Both of us are correct. When you accelerate, the flow of time changes, as well as properties of the space around you.
Currently I’m undergoing two different pursuits, but hope to tie them together. The first pursuit is to figure out how the brain creates the subjective of sense of space from images falling on our eyes, and information being processed within our brains. On the other hand, I work at understanding problems like the thought experiment above. I hope to understand it well enough eventually to fuse the two together as best I can. Most of the time, I just spin in circles, confused out of my mind.
I’ve mentioned many times on this blog that the way our brain represents space and the flow of time isn’t quite right. This example illustrates that problem pretty well. I struggle in vain to picture four dimensions in my mind, and see this fabric of space-time, and see the light-rays moving toward Steve, and also toward me, but I can’t even come close. And when I try to picture things from each person’s perspective, I always want to assign a common time between the two of frames. Some sort of “global” absolute time. In the end, I just have to work these equations, and work more and more problems, in more and more varied situations, and get a better and better “feel” for what’s going on.
I’ve finally figured out how to embed math equations in my posts, so I want to start adding thought experiments like this in areas related to modern physics. I’d like to maybe go into some of the basics of quantum mechanics, particle physics, nuclear physics, and all that good stuff.
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