isomorphismes

I had judged The Emperor’s New Mind by the negative reviews but never actually picked it up. It has a lot of great stuff, almost like an “early draft” of The Road to Reality.

All I knew about Emperor’s New Mind before was that it invokes quantum mechanics to explain free will, which was perceived as “icky” by people who study the brain. (Despite that, like quantum nonsense, the “greats” of QM—Bohr, Schrödinger—also weighed in with QM/free-will speculations (do you hear me, Conrad&Kochen? Quantum communication folks?) — because, let’s be real here, free will is a millennia-old conundrum and I think we’d all appreciate it if the people who understand compositions of Hilbert spaces weighed in on whether and what the latest “master theory” (bringer of semiconductors = transistors, LCD’s, lasers, MRI/PET and certain polymers/piezoelectrics/other materials) would say about the age-old question)

I got a bit more of the debate whilst reading about pi-1 sentences, which is a computability/knowability/logic dealio. But again, this was the level of “What’s RP’s argument in a nutshell?” rather than “Is here anything worth reading in the 400 pages?”. It’s a lot of good.

• Are the Israelis bellicose because countries are always antagonizing them, or are countries always antagonizing the Israelis because they’re bellicose?
• Do you think that boy is cute because he likes you, and he likes you more because you like him, and where did this liking start in the first place?
• If the rich get richer, how do you get rich in the first place? And if poverty leads to violence, lack of education, and ill health, which leads to more poverty, how do you stop the vicious cycle?
• Do cops mess with people because there are too many criminals around, or do people become uncooperative and untrusting of cops because they’re always messing with people?
• Nature or nurture?
• Do Americans commute long distances to work because the country is built around roads, highways, and the assumption that everyone has a car, or is the highway infrastructure good because Americans have so many cars?
• If child abuse is caused by the parent being abused as a child — if gang violence is usually retaliation for other gang violence — where did it all begin?
• Does the culture generate the media, or does the media generate the culture?

So many chicken-and-egg questions. Dynamical systems theory comes to the rescue.

A dynamical system is a time-evolving list of equations that mutually affect each other. In the real world the arrow of causation often runs both ways. By thinking about chicken-and-egg questions as a dynamical system, suddenly circular causation becomes logical, even quantifiable.

More technicals on linear operators on dynamical systems, some famous examples including ecosystem modeling, mind-body dynamics, Jon Gottman, toy models, and the similarity to (I thought boring) differential equations later.