Улу Панди Мониюм

Улу Панди Мониюм (b. 1884) was a Chechen mystic and self-styled "natural philosopher" who was best known for groundbreaking experiments with electromagnetism, and especially for experiments relating to the levitation of small metal objects.  He never was awarded any formal academic degree, but he conducted most of his work in close collaboration with Prof. Pavel Ivanovich Ustinov, then Chair of the Department of Natural Sciences at Moscow State University.  When Ustinov was liquidated in one of the last of Stalin's Great Purges, in 1936, he "self-exiled" almost immediately to the Far East, but survived for only about eighteen months thereafter.  In October of 1938, he and a traveling companion were ambushed and killed by Mongolian bandits on the shores of Lake Baikal.

At the urging of the German physicist Friiedrich Bolt, Element 115 in the Periodic Table initially was named for him, as "Pandemonium."  It is now known as "Muscovium."

 

These Days

I am drowning in metaphysics.  Hence the quietude.  

"Whereof we cannot speak, thereof we must remain silent."

 

Dream Scapes

This one not two hours old as I write this.

I was down in Tennessee with my old college buddy Billy Evans.  It was about nightfall. We wanted to score some weed.  He handed me a wad of all-mixed-together bills, way more than the $100 that would be his share; he was fine with me hanging onto the whole wad until the deal was done.

The place to buy the weed was a Chinese restaurant that was about a mile walk from where we were.  We started off, soon to be joined by my sister Denise and a bunch of her friends/colleagues in a legal, medicinal marijuana thing that they had going.  Bringing up the rear with that group was a real down home Southern character, probably in his 60s, with a big moustache, horn-rimmed glasses and a ten-gallon hat.  Turns out he was the local sponsor/benefactor/investor that got Denise's business going.

There's more, about a near brush with a squad of young policemen on the porch of the house where the Chinese restaurant was situated, but before that, as we began to troop towards that locale, the benefactor stopped and asked me and Billy to look at his left eye.  Then he peeled back not his eyelid but the skin on the left of that eye.  On the usually unseen part of the eyeball there were thin blue and white stripes running up and down, about fifteen across and of varying lengths.  "Look at this!" he said.  "By the length of these stripes, going left to right, you can tell how rich a man has been over the course of his entire life!"  Clearly, he had been very rich indeed.

This all in the context of me trying for the first time in my life to do a deep dive into the remarkable work of Carl Jung.  In his celebrated "Red Book," which I am now reading, he more or less descends into Hades for a long spell.  (I almost said "a personal Hades" but clearly that is not right, coming from the man who popularized the idea that most of our insights bubble up out of a collective unconscious.)  When he returns, he is a more integrated and whole person.  Indeed, he would have us believe that in the absence of such a harrowing journey we ourselves cannot become integrated and whole.

But the journey to the Underworld and back is not a dream; it is accessed rather via a personal regimen that looks to one like me a lot like a particular form of deep meditation.

Still and all, for Jung dreams are an essential key to self-understanding.  And in this I feel that he must be on to something; he is a man of towering intellect and insight after all.  But it also seems to me beyond belief that the Cracker with the Metric Eyeball has a veiled life lesson for me.  Will a sudden synchronicity yet invade my space and prove me wrong in this?

 

Premonitions of Delirium at the Hour of the Wolf

In November of 1989, we were ensconced in a pleasant, rented apartment on the outskirts of Asuncion, the capital of Paraguay, awaiting the completion of all of the paperwork needed to support the adoption of Sam, our first child.  It felt rather like imprisonment, with outside daytime temperatures approaching 100 degs and no real access to transportation.  And so, for long periods between visits with the authorities, we were left with only a TV to keep us company.  There were soap operas, game shows and silly commercials on tap, and also a daily children's extravaganza hosted by a Brazilian former porn star known as "Xuxa" -- "Shoo-sha."

And at every break in the action, an imposing and sonorous voice, almost Darth Vader-ish, sounding to me a caricature of machismo, intoned the same phrase -- "Red Privada de Television!" -- "Private Television Network!", but also perhaps a multilingual play on words insofar as the ruling far-right party of the Paraguayan republic for decades had been the Colorado -- the "Reds."

Now as I lie sleepless at 3:33, the Hour of the Wolf, the phrase repeats itself in my head in the same sonorous voice, like waves booming off of a particular forlorn lighthouse.  And it occurs to me that I might come to repeat it aloud myself in a final delirium, without context for my caregivers, the repetition without context fitting the very definition of raving madness.

 

From the Red Book of C.G. Jung

In the fifth of the spiritual exercises of St. Ignatius of Loyola, individuals are instructed in "how to see with the eyes of the imagination the length, breadth and depth of hell," and to experience this with full sensory immediacy.

 

Don't Look Now, Cont'd

But perhaps I was too eager to embrace the extravagant claims made for GoogleQ.

Sean Carroll, Professor of Natural Philosophy (!) at Johns Hopkins, is a brilliant expositor of the state of modern physics.  For Great Courses, he has given a whole set of lectures on the "Many Worlds Interpretation" of quantum mechanics, which he seems to embrace.  According to that interpretation, when a wave function assigns a set of probabilities to the position of a particle, each position that has any probability assigned to it actually exists as a location for the particle in some real world!  This undermines, if it does not eliminate, the role of "measurement" and "observation," and hence of consciousness, in fixing "what is actually happening" as opposed to "what is predicted to happen."  Measurement and observation certainly do not depend upon the existence of a human observer.  Schrodinger's cat is actually alive in one world, actually dead in another.

And so I feel so much better now that we are back on solid empirical ground (sarcasm).

 

Don't Look Now

But sources say that scientists connected with Google, of all places, have just made a profound discovery.

Quantum mechanics holds, of course, that at the tiniest levels, wave and particle are both accurate descriptions of the phenomena before us.  Before observation, we can only say that a wave function predicts the probability of a particle having a particular location; it is only upon observation, however, that the wave resolves to a particle at a particular spot.

This by itself is highly mysterious; why should it be so?  It seems to be too anthropocentric for the modern world, rather a throwback to the times before Galileo when we were assumed to be at the center of all things.

I do not understand quantum computing.  I guess that quantum concepts can be exploited to create computers that are vastly quicker and more efficient than ones that rely on conventional computation.  To date, though, quantum computers are said to have been plagued with little errors, inherent in the nature of how they work, that have been a big barrier to commercial development.

Now, though, comes a system developed by Google that promises to break the big barrier.  It does this by melding the work of the physical quantum machine with a particular and novel form of Artificial Intelligence that is able to predict and adjust for the effect of these errors before they happen!  The machine and the AI talk to each other in real time, and the machine improves its operations by learning, continuously, from the AI component!  Let us call this breakthrough technology, for now, GoogleQ.

Even before all of this, it was fair to ask, apropos of quantum mechanical theory in general, whether the gaze of an orangutan counts as "observation" sufficient to fix the location of a particle.  And beyond that, could the gaze of a perfect android do the same?  If so, the theory would no longer be anthropocentric, but we would be faced with a different but no less profound ontological shock -- a merging of man and machine "in the eyes of the universe" as it were!

Well, it seems that we are here.  The people running GoogleQ need a break once in a while as we all do.  As I understand it, they could all lock the doors of the lab with the machine and the AI running over this coming Memorial Day weekend, and the observer-induced wave collapses would continue to occur!

Some have called the Google breakthrough "a philosophical earthquake" that buttresses the idea that consciousness, not matter, is fundamental.  It would seem as well to drive a stake through the heart of pancomputationalism, the view that all the world is a computer, because if it were, and computers can "observe" in a quantum sense, then there would be nothing that is not observed!

And indeed, what exactly is "unobserved" after GoogleQ?  

Wind the clock back to 1965.  We are in a state-of-the-art (for 1965) pencil factory in Dubuque.  At one point in the assembly line, there are hundreds of two-foot-long lengths of wood and graphite, proceeding apace.  A cutting machine is employed to cut them into uniform lengths of six inches.  But the machine is not perfect.  It sometimes errs, but always on the side of making the pencils too big! Accordingly, further down the line there is a little ruler against which each pencil is laid.  If it is too long, another blade automatically comes down and trims it to six inches exactly.

Certainly this machine, without human intervention, can be said to have "measured" the pencils.  Did it need to "observe" them in a quantum sense to measure them?  Isn't GoogleQ doing something very similar to what the assembly line did in more primitive fashion?

It seems that we are on the verge of teasing out the relationship between information technology and consciousness itself.  This is something that Jacques Vallee, the brilliant computer scientist and ufologist, has long predicted, raising quizzical looks as he did.  It makes me wish that I had another 20 years before me in this life, just to "see what happens."