Hi Rhea, I've been really interested in Quanta Magazine for the last few years. They discuss a lot of math, physics, neuroscience, and computer science issues in a rigorous way while remaining understandable to a non-expert.
This morning I was thinking in regards to your essay-in-process about how "best" to discuss quantum theory related ideas outside of a professional theoretical physics framework, and who is qualified to do so. One the one hand, some things are better left only to experts and specialists; on the other hand, poetic and artistic license have a right -- perhaps a responsibility -- to go places even without a terminal degree as passport. (Calvino in Six Memos, for example, talks about quantum theory as it relates to Ovid and Lucretius among others, and I personally am glad he does.) As to your mention of quantum theory in your interesting discussion of blockchain, I was thinking "even if a 12-year old, who had only heard the term 'quantum theory' and overheard a few conversations about it had a deeply-felt opinion about quantum theory they should be allowed to express it without excessive judgment; leaving room for intuition is how art and science move forward best." Granted, if the context is design of a nuclear reactor then the poetic 12-year old's equations should not be placed on an equal level with those of the trained expert (due to the risk of disaster). But in art and imagination, which do pertain to science, such dire risks are not present. Thus this morning I thought of what a 12-year old with only a rough hunch about quantum might say, and the following statement occurred to me: "quantum theory ignores water too much." If a 12-year old said this, would that be "OK" or somehow a "bad thing"? My thought was, it should be totally allowed and never discouraged much less punished. One can picture a strict boarding school where a sensitive student says such a thing and is sanctioned. But even Einstein said, free imagination is important and he himself was strongly criticized by experts for his ideas early on. Should an 18 or 20, or 30 year old be condemned for the same comment allowed the 12-year old? I personally like comments like "quantum theory ignores water too much." It's something the 12-year old in me still likes to say and hear. I can't prove it's OK to say things like this, much less that they are 100% accurate mathematically, but to me the burden of proof so to speak should be on those who would bar the expression as harmful to prove the risk of disaster is real and high. Banning everything that deviates from expert accuracy is to me one of the gravest possible errors and has hobbled science and art for far too long; it may even be the primary reason that science and art still have trouble preventing rapid planetary destruction. So count me on the side of those who say things like "quantum theory ignores water too much" and don't feel guilty about it. 🙂 Not that this is what you said, or that your reference was simplistic, just that even if it were I would say it's OK to run with it. The only reason I'm writing this, rather than keeping it to my own personal self, is that just now, after thinking the above in the morning, I got this link from Quanta Magazine in the afternoon: https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-mystery-at-the-heart-of-physics-that-only-math-can-solve-20210610/?mc_cid=3c135a55aa&mc_eid=df8a5187d9 Which is to say, even the Institute of Advanced Studies says that maybe quantum theory ignores water too much. 🙂 All best, Max PS -- With regards to uncertainty as it relates to art and poetic license, I sometimes find Gödel's incompleteness theorem easier to manage. (Calvino mentions Gödel and alludes very directly to Hofstadter's GEB in Six Memos, clearly trying to weave the two books together, though ironically when I wrote to Hofstadter about this he replied generously that he knew about Six Memos but had never read it.) To my layperson's understanding, Gödel's incompleteness theorem simply says that for any system defined by theorems that do not contradict each other there are results in the system that cannot be proven by those theorems; i.e., if a system is consistent it is necessarily incomplete. I don't know if this at all relates to your correlation of quantum theory and temporality but it seems possible. The Quanta article quotes a mathematician from the Perimeter Institute, which was founded by a physicist (Lee Smolin) who believes that time itself is a fundamental building block of physics, so that could be a relation between time and quantum. PPS -- I also like how the Quanta article talks about the "bridge" between math and physics. 🙂 To my primitive sense of metaphor, any time two entities (fields or particles) can twist or enmesh without becoming identical a "bridge" of sorts is created. Put another way, what if "quantum is bridge"? I looked up "quantum bridge" on internet search just now and it refers to something real, in both software design and in physics, and a scifi novel too: interesting netsearch fodder though of course of indeterminate value. I guess my intuition would be to ask: what does the "bridge" or "the connect" in chains like blockchains mean, do, or tell us, or not, and do we read it aright? This search result from 2019 seems the most interesting: "Quantum bridges in phase space: interference and nonclassicality in strong-field enhanced ionisation." "We perform a phase-space analysis of strong-field enhanced ionisation in molecules, with emphasis on quantum-interference effects. Using Wigner quasi-probability distributions and the quantum Liouville equation, we show that the momentum gates reported in a previous publication (Takemoto and Becker 2011 Phys. Rev. A 84 023401) may occur for static driving fields, and even for no external field at all. Their primary cause is an interference-induced bridging mechanism that occurs if both wells in the molecule are populated. In the phase-space regions for which quantum bridges occur, the Wigner functions perform a clockwise rotation whose period is intrinsic to the molecule. This evolution is essentially non-classical and non-adiabatic, as it does not follow equienergy curves or field gradients. Quasi-probability transfer via quantum bridges is favoured if the electron's initial state is either spatially delocalised, or situated at the upfield molecular well. Enhanced ionisation results from the interplay of this cyclic motion, adiabatic tunnel ionisation and population trapping. Optimal conditions require minimising population trapping and using the bridging mechanism to feed into ionisation pathways along the field gradient." ________________________________ From: NetBehaviour <netbehaviour-boun...@lists.netbehaviour.org> on behalf of Rhea Myers via NetBehaviour <netbehaviour@lists.netbehaviour.org> Sent: Wednesday, June 9, 2021 8:04 PM To: NetBehaviour for networked distributed creativity <netbehaviour@lists.netbehaviour.org> Cc: Rhea Myers <r...@hey.com> Subject: Re: [NetBehaviour] Work in Progress: Blockchain Temporalities Thank you! Yes I need to tune up the QM invocation, you are right. I’m trying to gesture towards limits on knowability within current physics rather than handwave with quantum woo. Any suggestions on how to improve that would be greatly appreciated. 🙂 On June 9, 2021, Rhea Myers <r...@hey.com> wrote: I also liked the sound of Iota, but: https://www.coindesk.com/iota-being-shut-off-is-the-latest-chapter-in-an-absurdist-history https://twitter.com/SarahJamieLewis/status/1161353122343604225 😿 Each block in a chain does have every previous block as a (grand-)parent through the trail of hashes linking them. Making this an immediate relationship would be interestingly anti-patrilinear. 😺 The space between the blocks is invisible onchain. Offchain, the time between blocks is spent gathering transactions for the block after the one being currently mined. These are very different universes. Also: https://rhea.art/simple-blockchain-art-diagram 😺 On June 9, 2021, NetBehaviour for networked distributed creativity <netbehaviour@lists.netbehaviour.org> wrote: rhea, wonderful, thank you. a few thoughts- I've been looking at Iota lately. While coinbase and others describe Iota as a blockchain, their documentation says they are not a blockchain, but rather a different form of distributed ledger. They claim they're not a blockchain because each block refers to multiple parent blocks. In a tangled blockchain like Iota, blocks can share the same height. I wonder about a theoretical blockchain where the number of parents approaches the total number of blocks. While technically impossible, as a thought experiment it seems like such a thing would collapse the temporality by bringing all blocks to a block height of 1 and 2. Each block simultaneously being the genesis block and the first child block. From the perspective of any block on this impossibly tangled chain, it would be the most current description of the state of the chain, and every block, including itself, would be the combined origin of the entire chain. I know a block can't hash itself and no one can be their own grandpa, but it seemed like this thought experiment shared some characteristics with multiplicity and other things. -- There's also something interesting about the space between the blocks. In the same way that motion is a perception our brains construct when multiple static images are shown in quick succession. Seems like the succession of transactions in bitcoin is a kind of montage of value exchange, and it makes me curious about what other mental models we're perceiving in the space between. with admiration, bz On Tue, Jun 8, 2021 at 7:34 PM rhea via NetBehaviour <netbehaviour@lists.netbehaviour.org<mailto:netbehaviour@lists.netbehaviour.org>> wrote: Bitcoin secures itself by rewarding the people who run it with payments in Bitcoin. To get the rewards for publishing new blocks of transactions to the Internet every ten minutes (on average), Bitcoin miners compete to solve simple but time-consuming cryptographic puzzles. When Bitcoin launched, miners could use desktop computers. But as Bitcoin became more valuable it became worthwhile to use more and more powerful hardware in larger and larger amounts to continue competing for the block rewards. Bitcoin was written to handle this. Its difficulty algorithm creates a new target schema for the block reward puzzles This algorithm targets ten minute block times, and it will make the block puzzles as easy or as difficult as is required to do this. That singular objective, pursued without concern for externalities, means that Bitcoin's difficulty algorithm is a paperclipper. Its ever-increasing energy usage, which has caused such moral panic, would boil the oceans if it thought that the difficulty had to go that high - but then what wouldn't? This is the purpose that it embodies in unbounded cryptoeconomic incentives. For Bitcoin, securing the metronomic heartbeat/pulse/breath/throb of ten minute blocks of transactions is all that matters. Bitcoin exists to secure the value of those transactions over time. To nestle in that temporality is to subject oneself to blockchain temporality as surely as Stelarc's "Ping Body" was subjected to internet geometry. Block height is a clock. I've met people who have timed meatspace events to it. Block height has a calendar of "halvenings", block reward changes, that are treated as festivals, along with scheduled protocol forks and activations. It's more complex than that, though. Cyclical and linear time interplay in the blockchain as they do in capitalism, which is hardly surprising given Bitcoin's anarcho-capitalist roots. The different temporal scales and intensities folded into the blockchain in order to produce it make it a Deleuzean egg. Which, through a deliberate misreading, makes it a world. We can call it a welt if it helps, which it doesn't. The word "blockchain" does not appear in Satoshi Nakamoto's 2009 Bitcoin Whitepaper. Instead the pseudonymous creator (or creators) of Bitcoin talk about the creation of a timestamp server to ensure the succession of events (transactions) within a system. Time, for Bitcoin, is pure succession just as number is pure succession for XXXXXXXXX. It is in this sense that time on the blockchain is non-relativistic (as per Nick Land). Worse, that time occurs *in* time, breaking XXXXXX's argument that it cannot. We can recover from this a little by pointing out that it does not occur within itself, but in an outside temporality, and a reassuringly relativistic one. Still, it occurs in time, and produces a time of pure succession. Bitcoin is the technonomic instantiation of Deleueze’s fourth synthesis of time. It is an empty repetition determined by the future. For Bitcoin that future is the block height (not the date or the Unix timestamp) when all 21 million Bitcoin will have been minted, and the reality of that future determines its present - a hyperstition secured with an increasing fraction of the Earth's computing resources by the block difficulty targeting algorithm. This is a purely intensive world, an undialectical history within itself. Step back and the onchain world and its history are shown to be incomplete - the private keys that create its transactions are not part of that world. This veil of ignorance, similar to the sub-quantum realm's role in contemporary physics, also applies to on-chain time. The Unix timestamps placed in each Bitcoin block leak the offchain time that each block occur at, but they could be a lie. They must increase over time, but compared to the block height (the block number), they do so in irregular leaps. Block heights are certain, timestamps less so. Like cybernetics, block formation is probabilistic, converging on certainty over time as more and more blocks build on top of the chain. This process is irreversible, not just due to probability but to the trapdoor function-based proof-of-work system that secures the Bitcoin blockchain. Although it can be walked via the chain of hash values between blocks. Blockchain temporality comes into being with the blockchain, and vice versa, at the same moment. This is similar to the reciprocal emergence of capitalism with capitalist time as described by Anna Greenspan in "Capitalism's Transcendent Time Machine". This is important because different temporal orders afford different social orders. We can notice this, or we can continue to stan or sulk at atomic clocks. _______________________________________________ NetBehaviour mailing list NetBehaviour@lists.netbehaviour.org<mailto:NetBehaviour@lists.netbehaviour.org> https://lists.netbehaviour.org/mailman/listinfo/netbehaviour -- ((º Ω º)) http://bishopZ.com _______________________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________ NetBehaviour mailing list NetBehaviour@lists.netbehaviour.org https://lists.netbehaviour.org/mailman/listinfo/netbehaviour
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