MYcrobes or Ourcrobes

Sometimes this space features egregrious examples of fallacious thinking. Today though we excerpt an article from an Oxford University Press blog. We like it for a complex look at man's interconnectedness. We like it so much we will not even stress how it understates this interconnectedness.


Missing the opportunity to learn something about microbiology is a mistake. The uninformed are likely to be left with a distorted view of biology in which they miscast themselves as the most important organisms. For example, “Sarah” is a significant manifestation of life from Sarah’s perspective, but her body is not the individual organism that she imagines, and nor, despite her talents, is she a major player in the ecology of the planet. Her interactions with microbes will include a healthy relationship with bacteria in her gut, bouts of influenza and other viral illnesses, and death in old age from an antibiotic-resistant infection. Sarah’s microbiology will continue after death with her decomposition by fungi. In happier times she will become an expert on Milton’s poetry, and delight students by reciting Lycidas through her tears, but she will never know a thing about microbiology. This is a pity. Learning about viruses that bloom in seawater and fungi that sustain rainforests would not have stopped her from falling in love with Milton.

How to fake it

The Atlantic magazine asks this question. We quote large amounts of the article.

Could a Computer Think Up as Many Unique Snowflakes as Nature?

Given enough time, enough storage, and enough information on how a snowflake's path affects its growth, the answer is... maybe.

....

while computers can easily model snowflakes, they're missing the natural, unpredictable element to snowflake formation: the way they grow.

"The final shape of a snowflake depends on its complicated growth history," he says. "No two crystals follow the same complicated path. On a computer it would take forever, just because the number of combinations is very large."

.....

Our excerpt above shows the researcher skirting the nature of an infinite with vague phrases like "forever...very large." The fact is any concluding item in an infinite series, is contradictory, because by definite, an infinite has no end. That however is not the impression this report suggests. The concluding last lines of this article:

In other words, a computer could simulate snowflakes, but coming up with just as many unique ones as nature can requires knowing how many permutations are possible at all, of which there would have to be a concrete, albeit astronomically large, amount. "A snowflake's certainly not random," Libbrecht says. "The growth depends on a very well defined temperature and humidity, and we understand some of it."

But understanding the rest of it wouldn't be possible without man-made tools. In his lab, Libbrecht grows tiny hexagons, the smallest of snowflakes. Then, one snowflake at a time, he uses a computer to model what they might become.

The conclusion, in other words--- is that the giraffe on the balcony, -- the incomprehensibility of a real infinite, -- is ignored in this article. I highlight this sentence again, in fact, the concluding one of any cognitive value: 

But understanding the rest of it wouldn't be possible without man-made tools. 

The conclusion in other words ignores the central text of the their own argument, which at least hints at the meaning of the word 'infinite', with a reassuring pat on man's rational, binary, shoulders.

Eaters of the dead are rarely considered charismatic animals.

"Eaters of the dead are rarely considered charismatic animals."  This is a line from a jstor article. I hope the link is good for awhile. It goes to a fascinating article talking about how important vultures are. The facts noted point to how everything is connected, and it is apparent that this Work commonplace does not come easily to those called scientists. 

But what startled me was the clueless, and unqualified statement: Eaters of the dead are rarely considered charismatic animals. It is clear from the context the author is talking about vultures and trying to generalize. Is it not obvious if you think about it. Why should people not be considered part of the animal world. Myself, I eat the dead, not a lot, but gotta have that chicken fix once in a while. I like my dead with mustard and relish. You'll have to take my word for how charismatic I am, but -- I am. 

The author Matthew Wills is not being called out. I am certain his thinking sounded few alarms or chuckles in the positivist and science popularizing crew. Just step back, a bit. How COULD ecology, his theme, not include us? 

The robots have already taken over

Quoting: phys.org, an article header---

Artificial intelligence: Hawking's fears stir debate
There was the psychotic HAL 9000 in "2001: A Space Odyssey," the humanoids which attacked their human masters in "I, Robot" and, of course, "The Terminator", where a robot is sent into the past to kill a woman whose son will end the tyranny of the machines.

I guess everyone has read the conversation. Stephen Hawking thinks that there is a chance robots will be a threat to the human race. His assertions are a great example of the limitations of ordinary, binary thought--- that rational part of the mind, where everything is this or that, as a principle of processing talk. Jan Cox used to laugh and say scientists could only count to two, and this is what he meant. No amount of binary programming can topple humanity. What Hawking misses is the whole dimension of human creativity, the unprogrammable side which feeds, inflects, and furnishes human reality. Hawking has no place for this because it is not rational -- the unknown is not either/or, But this other dimension is a constant aspect, not just an incidental accidental occasional thing people trip on. Jan called it various things. C Flow is one label. It is a constant aspect of our world. It is not the only causal feature, but it is critical and makes calculating the future a different chore than the spokespeople for rational man realize.

Mindfulness and Habit

I did not bother to read the article entitled: Forget "Mindfulness": Habits Make Us Human. 

The link is below. I submit it as a great example of binary thought. Either we are human because something in us seeks, or we are a mound of habits. We are one or the other. I suppose the conclusion of this article says something about both being true. Standard scientistic jargon. The point is the way the rational mind works, and that is to see with a binary function that defines everything as this or that. When in fact an awareness of inclusiveness is an aspect of any real personal growth. Both and more, and either/or. You start with trying to see what is going on, inside and out. So read the article and see how close I came.
http://bigthink.com/wikimind/forget-mindfulness-habits-make-us-human

Reading the chemicals on the wall

A writeup in ArsTechnica suggests a star recently studied has an anomalous abundance of elements [when did abundance stop meaning just lots and start to also mean some measurable amount?] which can be explained by this star being just one generation removed from the earliest stars from the big bang. If correct, this star is hugely more ancient than the other observable stars, which themselves are many cycles on in the birth, death and rebirth cycle which typifies all the stars we can study.

Dog research reveals a lot about people

This article on dog research tells us a lot, a lot about how humans think and design experiments. Reading the results of their experiments on how one dog can control 80 sheep, one thing jumps out. For an animal that relies most on its nose, the researchers can only come up with models that test their visual talents. Which would be okay, except -- the researchers think they have answered the question.

It is possible they have provided a glimpse of what makes sheepdogs smarter --- maybe they do rely on a visual sense which most dogs do not --- I have no idea really --- but the point is, even if their research is valid, at most, it should make us aware of the question, what part of the dogs talent is visual, and what part olfactory. The people doing this research are helpful in illustrating human intelligence. 

Puzzle Pieces

Koberlein has an interesting post this morning. Our favorite astrophysicist discusses how the hologram universe idea does NOT mean our world is a hologram, but that the research in this area may help us grasp how quantum mechanics and general relativity are combined. So here I am hanging on by a fingertip to his arguments, hardly able to understand his prepositions,  when he writes that:

The holographic principle states that the information contained within a region of space can be determined by the information at the surface that contains it.

Nothing daunted by a passing woozy feeling, I thought--- that could be consciousness he's talking about. That could be words, verbal abstractions.   Somebody else probably thought of this -- the hologram could be a model for consciousness, -- but the extrapolation is not one Koberlein made. I do get one thing Koberlein probably does not--- even if this holographic principle is verified, it explains nothing.  But my approach is, you dance with the jigsaw puzzle that brought you, at least til you get out on the patio. 

Higgs finding did NOT solve all the problems

Interesting article in Wired, reprinted from Quanta: an outline of an alternative to super symmetry theory. This means that there is a nice, no doubt superficial, mention of the defects in this and other theories. The problems with current theories are often hard to come by for an outsider.

Mentation which strangles insight

An interesting science article includes this summary paragraph:

"The typical way that plants communicate is through chemicals that they release through their leaves and roots," says James Westwood, a plant physiologist at Virginia Tech and a co-author of the study. "So to find out that there is an exchange of RNA" — the intermediary form of genetic information that fills the gap between DNA and proteins — "is a new concept that hasn’t been explored at all."

The headlines of this article demonstrate a reliance on binary thought:

Scientists think they've discovered an entirely new mode of plant communication
And parasitic species might be using it for espionage

Rather than conceiving these plants are already mixed up, we start with the idea that the plant species are separate. This gives rise to metaphors of hacking and espionage. If the plants are actually both part of something else at the start, the options for understanding change. But the narrowly understood rational mentation, which assumes everything is isolated, then can only imagine one of two options. I can only guess at an alternate vista, which I do merely to make my complaint clear--  What if these two plants are actually collaborating on something new which will become apparent in a different climate. Whatever.

My point is the thinking process of the scientists, not the, also quite fascinating, plants in question.

Larger structure mysteries

From arstechnica we quote

Large galaxies such as the Milky Way appear to have been built by repeated mergers of smaller ones, but not every small galaxy has ended up being swallowed completely by a large one. The Milky Way is orbited by dozens of dwarf galaxies, some of which have been disrupted and stripped of stars, while others may have slipped into orbit largely intact. Similar dwarf galaxies orbit our nearby neighbors, including Andromeda.

Based on what we know about these mergers and computer modeling of galaxy formation and growth, the collection of dwarfs should be an unruly lot, having approached the galaxy they orbit from directions that are essentially random. Yet the dwarfs orbiting the Milky Way largely inhabit a single plane, orbiting in a manner analogous to moons around a giant planet.

....

and also the concluding paragraph--

Overall, the disks of dwarf galaxies probably play a significant role in the physics of the local environment. The authors estimate that their collective angular momentum is roughly the same as all the stars in the main galaxy. As for how they got there, that's less clear. The fact that the orientation of these disks is correlated with the nearby galaxies suggests that it may be dictated by the larger-scale structural organization of the Universe. But how large-scale structure can influence the dwarfs isn't obvious, and it will be difficult to determine until we can start getting our models to reproduce it.

Has mathematics fallen into the same hole as philosophy

The article at this link is titled

Dividing the indivisible.

http://plus.maths.org/content/dividing-indivisible

A g;lance at the contents reveals it to be about dividing goods between two parties, like divorcing people.
I got excited to see the headline, it harks back to the beginning of religion, philosophy, and mathematics when the point of inquiry was simply to figure out what the heck is going on.

In fact the phrase

Dividing the indivisible

refers to an experiential investigation of the edge of the visible and invisible. You keep dividing something into smaller parts, and you find, unexpectedly, that logic reaches an edge. A worthy path to follow but it is not easier with inane applications.

Some cosmological mysteries

Excerpting the article at this link:

http://listverse.com/2014/05/30/10-unsolved-stellar-mysteries-in-our-galaxy/


The Nebula Of Uncertain Parentage
Planetary nebulae were discovered in the 1780s. The astronomer William Herschel believed that they were newly forming planetary systems. He was wrong, but the name stuck. They’re actually glowing clouds of gas around a dying star, and they’re often quite beautiful....
Many planetary nebulae are bipolar, meaning that they have symmetrical clouds coming from opposite sides of their star—they’re often compared to an hourglass or a butterfly. Sharpless 2-71 is made of multiple bipolar lobes in different orientations....

The Neutron Stars That Look Too Old
....The neutron star [left from a supernova explosion] in the center is spinning with a period of 6.7 hours per rotation. Since a star’s rotation speed slows down over time, this would normally put this particular neutron star’s age at several million years. However, the parent star went supernova around 2,000 years ago. The variation in the neutron star’s X-rays are also unusually large, so something is going on....

Multiple Messier Mysteries
...The stars of the Messier 15 globular cluster are unusually bunched in its center....

Crab [Nebula] Flares

"...Until 2011, it was thought to be one of the most steady sources of light, radio, and gamma radiationin the sky....
But between 2007 and 2010, astronomers from different observatories detected three powerful gamma ray flares with no change in other wavelengths. This was described by one astronomer as a “big puzzle,” while another called it a “real mystery.” The unexpected flares were the first seen from a nebula and were five times more intense than any other yet observed....."

Aligned Bipolar Nebulae

"...It’s not just the jumbled bipolar nebulae in Sharpless 2-71 that pose a mystery to astronomers. Scientists used the Hubble to examine 130 such objects in the central bulge of the Milky Way and found something weird. The nebulae were in different places, formed at different times, and have never interacted. Yet despite that, most of them appear to be aligned along the same axis...."

The Great Eruption
"....In 1838, the glow of Eta Carinae increased until it became the second brightest star in Earth’s sky. It stayed that way for 10 years...."

Mysterious Magnetars
"...Magnetars are a type of neutron star with a magnetic field quadrillions of times stronger than Earth’s. They’re the most powerful magnets in the universe. They were only theorized in the 1990s and they’re filled with properties that we still haven’t figured out...."

The Sun’s Mysterious Cousins
'...Around a third of Sun-like stars have year-long periods of varied brightness as they approach the ends of their lives. ... The conclusion [of a recent study] was clear, and told us exactly what we already knew: “All the possible explanations for their unusual behavior just fail....”'

Epsilon Aurigae’s Disc

Polaris Is Awkward
as described in an essay entitled "The North Star Mysteries: The Remarkable Brightness Increase of Polaris from Historical and Modern Observations."

Crows and kids

Our link is to an article on experiments with wild crows. My point here is beyond the conclusions the scientists and bloggers may have made.

The setup is that crows who have not been in a laboratory setting before could not figure out how to extract food from the plastic box with levers, setup in the laboratory. 

Here is how Ed Yong put the point----
quote
These two abilities—understanding causality, and using that understanding—seem so simple and mundane to us that it feels weird to lay them out, and weirder still to separate them. But they are separate. That much becomes clear when you study an animal that can do one of these things and not the other.end quote

What the study purports to conclude is that without the experience of successfully using their problem solving abilities, they cannot repeat and extend their problem solving. Read the article.

In fact, this study is much more interesting.  Not surprisingly little attention is paid to the moment crows or humans DO get the connection between cause and effect. That is because the study, as is typical of much natural science, begs the question of origins.Ignoring this question leads to the idea that crows in the wilderness never have a moment of insight about causality, and that babies come out of the womb with an abstract idea of this connection. Rather silly if you draw out these conclusions. 

And origins is exactly where this study took me. The question of whether essence precedes existence (what the study calls "understanding causality, and using that understanding") is the tawdry story of 20th century philosophy. But that is really an aside. 

What Yong calls the ability to 'understand causality' I am calling, rather vulgarly and more broadly, a moment of mystical insight, that is.essence --that which can directly perceive something, say the fact of causality. 

What the blogger calls applying the principle of causality, I am calling existence in the way that term was used in 20th century philosophy, that is a life of words. 

And the exciting possibility to which this study points is not only that the moment of insight comes before the typical cascade of words that unravel and develop that insight -- but that you can see this on a scale beyond that of the human.

And if you want to extend the crow story the implications of this study concern the wordless and the wordfull. One would not have thought this mystical goal extended to the creatures without verbal capacity. But maybe it does!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Electric arguments

Brian Koberlein, the physicist with a most amazing humility and clarity in his expositions, at this link to his website  examines the claims of an alternate model which apparently is popular among some quite intelligent folk.

I post this because it made me think about the kind of minds that would originate a theory like the Electric Universe. A hallmark to me, in this EU alternative to the picture painted by modern physics, is that it seems to be based on a view of the mind which says I can understand everything and complexity is obfuscation. On the one hand this is an admirable approch, and explains the progress of modern science: the human mind is capable of comprehending the world of which it is a part. The implication that the measure of the world is the measure of my own mind, however, means we may see a collapses into egoism. Of course it is comforting to think that the ordinary binary mind is the best measurer of our world. Scientists, kooks, and EU proponents all crave this plank. But the ability to teeter on the plank of rational thought, to reach higher, see farther, to risk even, falling off the plank, adds bravery to the mix of what it takes to apprehend an edge between knowledge and mystery, along with a determination to press on, regardless of consequences, The fine minds have this to some degree.  Koberlein, in listening to an alternate theory, is a good example.

My notes here, towards what may be called an anthropology of the human mind, point toward a love of complexity as a distinguishing factor for true pioneers. I suspect, and wonder, if mathematicians might not fall into this category. I know it is a broader category than even scientists imagine. 

A Charming Example

Chad Orzel . a science blogger, wrote recently these sensible words:

“Science Is Never Over,” ... there are a nearly infinite number of phenomena that you can investigate scientifically. The universe is a never-ending source of amazement and wonder, with surprisingly rich dynamics in the simplest of things. I mean, look at the thousands of words I’ve gotten out of talking about sticky tape."

This approach could take you far, I almost put this note in the american mysticism blog. What interested me is the evidence here of a certain stance: there is always the manageable spigot. Notice the word "nearly." What the heck does that mean. If you were getting near counting finits, you could characterize that point somehow, and yet he cannot, and one has to wonder if that 'nearly infinite' is not some deflection of a rigorous pursuit of the logic, or the evidence. He gets his infinites, notoriously hard to corral, and yet can twist the faucet whenever he gets panicky.  He gets to look out the plane window -- to change the metaphor mid altitude-- and know he won't have to use the parachute.

"A nearly infinite number' puts the reality of change in a squarely nouny [static] context. That spigot is binary thought, two options. To make sure, the mind, does not get overwhelmed by --- reality.

How true his words though---...[There is] an infinite number of phenomena that you can investigate scientifically. The universe is a never-ending source of amazement and wonder,

What's the topic again?

The headline says a lot, a lot more than it delivers, but that is the nature of headlines: A tiny part of the most low level memory is what they are mentioning.

Breakthrough allows scientists to watch how molecules morph into memories

http://medicalxpress.com/news/2014-01-breakthrough-scientists-molecules-morph-memories.html#nwlt

Wormholes and Quantum Entanglement

Is quantum entanglement the result of standard space-time wormholes?? John Baez thinks it is worth considering:

http://golem.ph.utexas.edu/category/2014/01/wormholes_and_entanglement.html

If we posit an ultimately physical nature for all reality, consciousness, and the whole chirping business, this might be a nice model of how that would work. What natural scientists don't grasp is that there is nothing contradictory between the material and the mystical. Not if you soldier on in your theorizing.

Veering towards reality

How birds fly in a V formation --

http://phenomena.nationalgeographic.com/2014/01/15/birds-that-fly-in-a-v-formation-use-an-amazing-trick/

Notice the big questions are unanswered, like how the birds manage to stay in tune.