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OfflineDeviate
newbie
Registered: 04/20/03
Posts: 4,497
Last seen: 8 years, 6 months
Re: Research into Consciousness Interfacing with matter [Re: Deviate]
    #4524326 - 08/11/05 10:50 PM (18 years, 7 months ago)

"i think anyone can work whatever reasoning they want. whether that reasoning is scientific or not is another question. i dont believe that science is the only valid experience a person can have. but yes, certain things are scientific and certain things aren't, which is okay, IMO.

i don't understand how you conclude from your link that quantum mechanisms connecting the brain, plus the brain connecting in classical physics, is a simpler explanation for consciousness, than the brain connecting in classical physics alone."



interesting link btw."

i conclude it based on the need for a theory which explains the phenomena oberved. the link i posted explains my experiences and observations far better than any other theory i have encountered. every test i have concieved of has been correctly predicted by it so i have to accept it as a starting point for my reasoning. the theory is very simple, it only becomes complex in application because the brain is very complex.

edit: i have to go right now but ill be sure to re-read the article and check this thread later. fascinating discussion and many of you have made very good points.

Edited by Deviate (08/11/05 10:56 PM)

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Offlinecrunchytoast
oppositional

Registered: 04/07/05
Posts: 1,133
Loc: aporia
Last seen: 17 years, 1 day
Re: Research into Consciousness Interfacing with matter [Re: Deviate]
    #4524379 - 08/11/05 11:00 PM (18 years, 7 months ago)

rednucleus-
i would say individual consciousness of a particular person appears to end when the material configurations dissolve

"the number of people who agree on something has nothing to do with how true it is. people thought the earth was flat a long time.'
but the fact they have report similar experiences from which they independentally drew the same conclusion suggests they are on to something.

still, people thought the earth was flat, for a long time, and they were wrong.


"like spiritual experiences, placebo effect "
how does quantum physics brain explain this better than the classical physics brain?"

"i conclude it based on the need for a theory which explains the phenomena oberved. the link i posted explains my experiences and observations far better than any other theory i have encountered. every test i have concieved of has been correctly predicted by it so i have to accept it as a starting point for my reasoning. the theory is very simple, it only becomes complex in application because the brain is very complex. "
i don't understand from your link how this theory points to quantum physics brain + classical physics vs. classical physics brain only


--------------------
"consensus on the nature of equilibrium is usually established by periodic conflict." -henry kissinger

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InvisibleRavus
Not an EggshellWalker
 User Gallery

Registered: 07/18/03
Posts: 7,991
Loc: Cave of the Patriarchs
Re: Research into Consciousness Interfacing with matter [Re: gettinjiggywithit]
    #4524443 - 08/11/05 11:11 PM (18 years, 7 months ago)

Quote:

gettinjiggywithit said:
deviate,

No where in the article do they even refer to consciousness being like computer software. He didn't read it and is making posts arguing against other stuff he's read elsewhere as if it came from this article.

I asked him to copy and paste what he is arguing against from here on.




Jiggy, I said that was my analogy. I was responding to the article with my own ideas that would dispute their assumptions.

You are not reading my posts at all correctly for some reason. Perhaps I need to clarify them, but I didn't think they were that confusing. I did point out the section I was responding to, and then responded to it with my own ideas and talked about why I didn't believe the leap needed to be made.

I said:

Quote:

It's like saying the software from a computer must have some sort of quantum availability all over the universe because simply wiring wires together will never generate a program like we're observing now with Firefox (if you know what a good browser is ).




That seems to be quite evidently my own words. It would be counterproductive for the quantum argument for them to use that analogy, because they're trying to say consciousness is more than the hardware. I disagree.


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So long as you are praised think only that you are not yet on your own path but on that of another.

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Invisiblegettinjiggywithit
jiggy
Female User Gallery

Registered: 07/20/04
Posts: 7,469
Loc: Heart of Laughter
Re: Research into Consciousness Interfacing with matter [Re: Ravus]
    #4524478 - 08/11/05 11:18 PM (18 years, 7 months ago)

Ravus, If you are ready to conclude that consciousness comes from classical physical reality, that is fine by me.

Deviate has concluded it doesn't. Fine by me.

I have come to no conclusions and am not prepared to as existance has not concluded itself yet. I just wish to explore it along with science as they havn't come to any conclusions either.

Rock on! :hairmetal: :heart:


--------------------
Ahuwale ka nane huna.

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Offlinecrunchytoast
oppositional

Registered: 04/07/05
Posts: 1,133
Loc: aporia
Last seen: 17 years, 1 day
Re: Research into Consciousness Interfacing with matter [Re: gettinjiggywithit]
    #4524530 - 08/11/05 11:29 PM (18 years, 7 months ago)

science may not have come to any conclusions
but the most scientific interpretation, would be the simplest one.

does science ever come to conclusions?

i admire your openness to the quantum physics consciousness perspective jiggy- i find myself getting stuck cringing  :twitchy:


--------------------
"consensus on the nature of equilibrium is usually established by periodic conflict." -henry kissinger

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InvisibleRavus
Not an EggshellWalker
 User Gallery

Registered: 07/18/03
Posts: 7,991
Loc: Cave of the Patriarchs
Re: Research into Consciousness Interfacing with matter [Re: crunchytoast]
    #4524567 - 08/11/05 11:35 PM (18 years, 7 months ago)

Quote:

i admire your openness to the quantum physics consciousness perspective jiggy- i find myself getting stuck cringing




Same here. It seems to be New Age spirituality wrapped up in the veil of science as they say consciousness is a force pervading the universe. I've heard that before, but it's easy to ignore as a spiritual philosophy. It's only when it's presented as a scientific theory that it seems excessive.


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So long as you are praised think only that you are not yet on your own path but on that of another.

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OfflinePhanTomCat
Teh Cat....
Male User Gallery

Registered: 09/07/04
Posts: 5,908
Loc: My Youniverse....
Last seen: 15 years, 1 month
Re: Research into Consciousness Interfacing with matter [Re: gettinjiggywithit]
    #4524588 - 08/11/05 11:39 PM (18 years, 7 months ago)

It is all interesting to me....

I can see how some people can relate the brain functions to a computer - hardware and software.... Then the question comes up as to if or when a man made computer will be made to sustain consciousness to a level of man's consciousness....

Then it brings up questions in my mind of why we can't "safely" reboot our "software".... Or weather there will be ways to "load intelligence programs", or "programmed experiences" at a quicker rate of speed then real-time experienced learning.... If one is to take a stance that we are just organized chemicals, then wouldn't it be safe to form a conclusion that you could get a IV "shot of organized chemicals" that could make make for a perception of memories containing "past" experienced consciousness/awareness....?


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I'll be your midnight French Fry....  :naughty:

"The most important things in life that are often ignored, are the things that one cannot see...."

>^;;^<

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InvisibleSwami
Eggshell Walker

Registered: 01/18/00
Posts: 15,413
Loc: In the hen house
Re: Research into Consciousness Interfacing with matter [Re: gettinjiggywithit]
    #4524642 - 08/11/05 11:48 PM (18 years, 7 months ago)

Ravus, If you are ready to conclude that consciousness comes from classical physical reality, that is fine by me.

Deviate has concluded it doesn't. Fine by me.


Consciousness is a word; an ephemeral concept like beauty. It is not an inherent property to be measured and examined. Beauty comes from a certain arrangement of colors on a canvas or the symmetry of face. Consciousness is a certain complexity of neuronal arrangement.

Does beauty arise at the quantum level? The question itself is ridiculous based on the false notion that a word is a shorthand for what IS.


--------------------



The proof is in the pudding.

Edited by Swami (08/12/05 01:23 AM)

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Invisiblegettinjiggywithit
jiggy
Female User Gallery

Registered: 07/20/04
Posts: 7,469
Loc: Heart of Laughter
Re: Research into Consciousness Interfacing with matter [Re: Ravus]
    #4524948 - 08/12/05 12:32 AM (18 years, 7 months ago)

It's scientists, neural biologists and quantum physicist who are being presented in it Ravus.

They are taking research and ideas from scientific pioneers.

Perhaps I should grab all of the names referred to and google them and their accomplishments and credentials and post them.

Why would the author of the article post a bibliography for you to research the research yourself with if it would turn up bogus?

Regardless of all of the interesting ideas presented and research done and facts given, they still didn't find the interface.


To present them as being "new age" people isn't correct.
Since when did research into the quantum field become new agey?

I never considered that maybe some people don't believe the quantum field even exists and has been observed.

Is that the case with you Ravus. Did you Razor cut it away? That was discussed as the research in general was first done from the Descartes division of matter and spirit, dealing with matter only.

Swami, you are freaking me out. That was poetic. Sweet! Not only that, catch this weird synchronicity. In your sky post, I saw a father and son in the portion Blue posted and mentioned that. I questioned it later for fun from the Rorshack perspective we discussed. Came up with zippo and forgot about it. Today, in the car, RUSH's 2112 was on. The lyric ran,

"We work together father and son,
Never need to wonder how or why."

While I have been wondering how and why it works.

Then you post in here where I am wondering that , to say that it is to be left a wonder. My life is freaky fun.

Anyhow, guess what guys. I have come to no conclusions on where the interface between consciousness and matter is. For now, I am rolling as if that is how it works. Though I am only on page 7 now, I am a bit disappointed that all the research has them looking within the neurons for it. I don't think it's there myself.

The article has given me new ideas for where to hone in on more specifically.

Make of it as you all will as I am doing for myself! Nothing like the freedom to be as you will!

I'm just appreciative to be sharing the journey with you all!

Love you guys! :heart: :crazy2:


--------------------
Ahuwale ka nane huna.

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InvisibleRavus
Not an EggshellWalker
 User Gallery

Registered: 07/18/03
Posts: 7,991
Loc: Cave of the Patriarchs
Re: Research into Consciousness Interfacing with matter [Re: gettinjiggywithit]
    #4525047 - 08/12/05 12:52 AM (18 years, 7 months ago)

Quote:

To present them as being "new age" people isn't correct.
Since when did research into the quantum field become new agey?

I never considered that maybe some people don't believe the quantum field even exists and has been observed.

Is that the case with you Ravus. Did you Razor cut it away? That was discussed as the research in general was first done from the Descartes division of matter and spirit, dealing with matter only.




I have no problem with quantum field theory. It is indeed interesting science, and never stated an objection to it.

My main problem with it can be summarized in the following quotes from the article:

Quote:

I am conviced that, no matter how detailed an account is provided of the neural processes that led to an action (say, a smile), that account will never explain where the feeling associated to that action (say, happiness) came from. No theory of the brain can explain why and how consciousness happens, if it assumes that consciousness is somehow created by some neural entity which is completely different in structure, function and behavior from our feelings.

From a logical standpoint, the only way out of this dead-end is to accept that consciousness must be a physical property.

Similarly, if consciousness comes from a fundamental property of matter (from a property that is present in all matter starting from the most fundamental constituents), then, and only then, we can study why and how, under special circumstances, that property enables a particular configuration of matter (e.g., the brain) to exhibit "consciousness".

Any paradigm that tries to manufacture consciousness out of something else is doomed to failure. Things don't just happen. Ex nihilo nihil fit. Consciousness doesn't come simply from the act of putting neurons together. It doesn't appear like magic. Conductivity seems to appear by magic in some configurations of matter (e.g. metallic objects), but there's no magic: just a fundamental property of matter, the electrical charge, which is present in every single particle of this universe, a property which is mostly useless but that under the proper circumstances yields the phenomenon known as conductivity.

Particles are not conductors by themselves, just like they are not conscious, and most things made of particles (wood, plastic, glass, etc. etc.) are not conductors (and maybe have no consciousness), but each single particle in the universe has an electrical charge and each single particle in the universe has a property, say, C. That property C is the one that allows our brain to be conscious. I am not claiming that each single particle is conscious or that each single piece of matter in the universe is conscious. I am only arguing that each single particle has this property C which, under the special circumstances of our brain configuration (and maybe other brain configurations as well and maybe even things with no brain) yields consciousness.




To put it bluntly, the bolded statement is really indicative of the intent of the article. Very unscientific mystical bullshit in my opinion. It's good for spiritual discussions between stoned people maybe, but as a scientific hypothesis seems ridiculous.


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So long as you are praised think only that you are not yet on your own path but on that of another.

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Invisiblegettinjiggywithit
jiggy
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Registered: 07/20/04
Posts: 7,469
Loc: Heart of Laughter
Re: Research into Consciousness Interfacing with matter [Re: Ravus]
    #4525062 - 08/12/05 12:57 AM (18 years, 7 months ago)

The bolded part agrees with what you have been saying.  :confused:


--------------------
Ahuwale ka nane huna.

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InvisibleRavus
Not an EggshellWalker
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Registered: 07/18/03
Posts: 7,991
Loc: Cave of the Patriarchs
Re: Research into Consciousness Interfacing with matter [Re: gettinjiggywithit]
    #4525083 - 08/12/05 01:02 AM (18 years, 7 months ago)

:confused:


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So long as you are praised think only that you are not yet on your own path but on that of another.

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Offlinetomk
King of OTD

Registered: 09/22/04
Posts: 1,559
Loc: PNW
Last seen: 3 years, 11 months
Re: Research into Consciousness Interfacing with matter [Re: gettinjiggywithit]
    #4525127 - 08/12/05 01:11 AM (18 years, 7 months ago)

I was a philosophy major in college.  Philosophy of mind was my favorite subject.  In particular, the Hameroff/Penrose model of consciousness fascinated me.  I remember not having to take the phil of mind final because the prof wanted me to proofread it instead.  :laugh: 

However, I think many of us make two mistakes.  First of all, by failing to understand the mathematical basis of quantum mechanics, none of us, myself included, are in a position to speculate much about it.  It is better to admit ignorance then to try and claim to see similarities.  The fact is, you need a mathematical grounding to understand quantum physics deeply.  If you do not have this grounding, you are just jacking off your brain.  Not that there is anything wrong with that, but you'll never find the truth about this issue that way.

Second of all, the sorts of quantum effects needed in the Penrose/Hameroff model are very, very, very picky.  In a system with a lot of noise, including the noise from being 98.6 degrees in temperature, like a brain, quantum effects are going to be cancelled out by the noise from the temperature.  Although, I think Penrose postulates a very convincing response to this problem, anyone who is not initially convinced by this problem is not attacking this issue with a skeptical enough mind to have an opinion worth listening too.  It's very easy to see some superfical similarities between eastern mysticism, psychedelic states, quantum mechanics, etc, and start saying they are the same thing.  That is all fine, but in making these claims, we must be sure that we are not letting our desire to see unification between these disparate things cloud our rational thinking.

Finally, there are two deep philosophical problems. 

First of all, trying to understand consciousness as chalmers wants to leads to a big problem.  You see, chalmers asks, "how to get from the material world to consciouness?  Science can't do it." and then smokes some DMT and says "Thats a really hard question dude." and gets famous.  But, Chalmers, working from an analytic tradition, is working exactly backwards.  The interesting an relevant questions are not how to get from the material world to conscious experience, but realizing that conscious experience transcends the material world.  That is, our consciousness does not come from the material world, rather, the material world arises from our consciousness.  Chalmers (and the entire tradition he is working from) in his writing, misses this point, and is trying to work backwards.  (ETA:  I don't think chalmers is ignorant of this point, just that he doesn't bring it up much in his writings.  I remember thinking that reading between the lines of what he writes in some more speculative places, that this must of been in his head.)  The question should be, how does our conscious experience give rise to the material world.  I would predict that this, and not the 'hard question', is going to be the root of the involvement of consciousness and the material world.  This is why theories involving all matter having proto-consciousness are the only theories I think work the right direction, except for a certain reading of the penrose/hameroff model.  Ultimately, I think these proto-consciousness theories are also wrong, but they are closer to the right track. 

The deeper issue is going to have to wait for tomorrow.  It's bedtime.

There is a fascinating aside on how the structure of space (namely, it being quantitizable rather then continuous) could lend support to some of these views.  This is fascinating in large part because there are experiments underway to determine if space is quantitizable or continuous, and these empirical results will influence these views a lot. 

I can dig up some of my old papers on this topic if anyone is interested.

I will say that the article is good on historical overview, but rambles a bit and is not nearly the best article I've read on this topic.


--------------------
"I am eternally free"

Edited by tomk (08/12/05 01:16 AM)

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Invisiblegettinjiggywithit
jiggy
Female User Gallery

Registered: 07/20/04
Posts: 7,469
Loc: Heart of Laughter
Re: Research into Consciousness Interfacing with matter [Re: gettinjiggywithit]
    #4525134 - 08/12/05 01:14 AM (18 years, 7 months ago)

I started my research on these guys. they are far from being new age flakes. they are highly accomplished and accredited scientists. I will provide info on all the article was done on. It may take a few replies as there are so many and I won't get to it all tonight.

In order of the article and in this reply we have Alfred Lotka, Evan Walker, Bose-Einstein, and Herbert Froehlich.
Lotka, Alfred James (1880 - 1949), USA

Read up on them, they are some impressive mother fuckers!



Alfred Lotka, chemist, demographer, ecologist and mathematician, was born in Lviv (Lemberg), at that time situated in Austria, now in Ukraine. He came to the United States in 1902 and wrote a number of theoretical articles on chemical oscillations during the early decades of the twentieth century, and authored a book on theoretical biology (1925). He is best known for the predator-prey model he proposed, at the same time but independent from Volterra (the Lotka-Volterra model, still the basis of many models used in the analysis of population dynamics). He then left (academic) science and spent the majority of his working life at an insurance company (Metropolitan Life). In that capacity he became president of the PAA (the Population Association of America).



The article that made him famous as a bibliometrician (avant la lettre) is just a footnote in his oeuvre. He showed that the number of authors with n publications in a bibliography is described by a power law of the form C/na, where C is a constant. The exponent a is often close to 2. Rewriting this equation as a statistical distribution (so that the sum over all n becomes 1), he showed that in the case that a is exactly equal to two, C must be 6/(pi)?, or approximately 0.61. This means that if a bibliography can be described by Lotka's square law, approximately 61% of all authors have contributed just one article to this bibliography.



Lotka A.J. (1926). The frequency distribution of scientific productivity. Journal of the Washington Academy of Sciences, 16: 317-323.

Lotka, A. J. (1925). Elements of physical biology. Williams and Wilkins, Baltimore. [Reprinted in 1956: Elements of mathematical biology. Dover Publications, Inc., New York, New York].



See also my Time Table of Bibliometrics

and a program to fit Lotka's law (more information about this program can be found in a corresponding article published in Cybermetrics).

Dr Evan H Walker
President of the Walker Cancer Research Institute

Bio

Dr. Walker continues his important research in cancer chemotherapy as the Director of the Walker Cancer Research Institute with laboratories in Tallahassee with collaborative efforts at Florida State University and the National Magnet Laboratory and a laboratory at Wayne State University, Detroit Michigan.

Dr. Walker is the author of The Physics of Consciousness (Perseus Books: 2000). He is regarded by many to be the founder of the modern science of consciousness research, in particular, of the quantum theory of consciousness with publications dating back to 1970. He has made significant contributions to the measurement problem in quantum mechanics and originated the 'Observer Theory' relating to state vector collapse. He has contributed to the fields of neurophysiology, specifically to the mechanism of synaptic functioning, and in psychology to understanding optical illusion phenomena.

Dr. Walker's physics research has been directed toward the problems of Big Bang cosmology, black hole phenomena, and dark matter in the universe.

Dr. Walker has developed numerous concepts and designs that have resulted in twelve inventions including one invention in the field of solar energy and a recent development in the field of environmental protection.

Bose-Einstein Condensate
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
A Bose-Einstein condensate is a gaseous superfluid phase formed by atoms cooled to temperatures very near to absolute zero. The first such condensate was produced by Eric Cornell and Carl Wieman in 1995 at the University of Colorado at Boulder, using a gas of rubidium atoms cooled to 170 nanokelvins (nK). Under such conditions, a large fraction of the atoms collapse into the lowest quantum state, producing a superfluid.


Velocity-distribution data confirming the discovery of a new phase of matter, the Bose-Einstein condensate, out of a gas of rubidium atoms. The artificial colors indicate the number of atoms at each velocity, with red being the fewest and white being the most. The areas appearing white and light blue are at the lowest velocities. Left: just before the appearance of the Bose-Einstein condensate. Center: just after the appearance of the condensate. Right: after further evaporation, leaving a sample of nearly pure condensate. The peak is not infinitely narrow because of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle: since the atoms are trapped in a particular region of space, their velocity distribution necessarily possesses a certain minimum width.Contents [hide]
1 Theory
2 Discovery
3 Slowing light
4 See also
5 External links
6 References



[edit]
Theory
The collapse of the atoms into a single quantum state is known as Bose condensation or Bose-Einstein condensation. This phenomenon was predicted in the 1920s by Satyendra Nath Bose and Albert Einstein, based on Bose's work on the statistical mechanics of photons, which was then formalized and generalized by Einstein. The result of their efforts is the concept of a Bose gas, governed by the Bose-Einstein statistics, which describes the statistical distribution of certain types of identical particles now known as bosons. Bosonic particles, which include the photon as well as atoms such as helium-4, are allowed to share quantum states with each other. Einstein speculated that cooling bosonic atoms to a very low temperature would cause them to fall (or "condense") into the lowest accessible quantum state, resulting in a new form of matter.

The critical temperature (in a uniform three-dimensional gas with no or uniform external potential) at which this happens can be derived to be:


Where:

Tc = the critical temperature
n = particle density
m = mass per boson
h = Planck's constant,
kB = Boltzmann constant
&#950; = the Riemann zeta function.
[edit]
Discovery
In 1938, Pyotr Kapitsa, John Allen and Don Misener discovered that helium-4 became a new kind of fluid, now known as a superfluid, at temperatures below 2.2 kelvins (K). Superfluid helium has many unusual properties, including the ability to flow without dissipating energy (i.e. zero viscosity) and the existence of quantized vortices. It was quickly realized that the superfluidity was due to Bose-Einstein condensation of the helium-4 atoms, which are bosons. In fact, many of the properties of superfluid helium also appear in the gaseous Bose-Einstein condensates created by Cornell, Wieman and Ketterle (see below). However, superfluid helium-4 is not commonly referred to as a "Bose-Einstein condensate" because it is a liquid rather than a gas, which means that the interactions between the atoms are relatively strong. The original Bose-Einstein theory has to be heavily modified in order to describe it.

The first "true" Bose-Einstein condensate was created by Cornell, Wieman, and co-workers at JILA on June 5, 1995. They did this by cooling a dilute vapor consisting of approximately 2000 rubidium-87 atoms to 170 nK using a combination of laser cooling (a technique that won its inventors Steven Chu, Claude Cohen-Tannoudji, and William D. Phillips the 1997 Nobel Prize in Physics) and magnetic evaporative cooling. About four months later, an independent effort led by Wolfgang Ketterle at MIT created a condensate made of sodium-23. Ketterle's condensate had about a hundred times more atoms, allowing him to obtain several important results such as the observation of quantum mechanical interference between two different condensates. Cornell, Wieman and Ketterle won the 2001 Nobel Prize for their achievement.

The initial results by the JILA and MIT groups have led to an explosion of experimental activity. For instance, the first molecular Bose-Einstein condensates were created in November 2003 by teams surrounding Rudolf Grimm at the University of Innsbruck, Deborah S. Jin at the University of Colorado at Boulder and Wolfgang Ketterle at MIT.

Bose-Einstein condensates are extremely fragile, compared to other states of matter more commonly encountered. The slightest interaction with the outside world can be enough to warm them past the condensation threshold, causing them to break back down into individual atoms again; it will likely be some time before any practical applications are developed for them.

[edit]
Slowing light
Despite our inability to fully understand these new states of matter, several interesting properties have already been observed in experiments. Bose-Einstein condensates can be made to have an extremely high gradient in optical density. Normally, condensates do not have a particularly special refractive index, due to having an atomic density far less than normal solid materials. However, additional pump lasers can be used at frequencies designed to alter the state of atoms in the Bose-Einstein condensate, increasing drastically the index for a beam of a precise target frequency recorded at a probe point. This results in extremely low measured speed of light within it; some condensates have slowed beams of light down to mere meters per second, speeds which can be exceeded by a human on a bicycle. A rotating Bose-Einstein condensate could be used as a model black hole, allowing light to enter but not to escape. Condensates could also be used to "freeze" pulses of light, to be released again when the condensate breaks down. This is done by shutting off the pumping lasers with pulses still in transit and allowing the photons to be absorbed. Reapplying the pump lasers can then release the pulses of light, and due to the coherence of the Bose-Einstein condensate, there may be very little degradation. Research in this field is still young and ongoing.

[edit]
See also
Electromagnetically induced transparency
Slow glass
Gravastar
Superfluid
Supersolid
Super-heavy atom
Tonks-Girardeau gas
Gas in a box
Bose gas
[edit]
External links
Bose-Einstein Condensates at JILA
Atom Optics at UQ
Europhysics News Report on Slowed Light
[edit]
References
S. N. Bose, Z. Phys. 26, 178 (1924)
A. Einstein, Sitz. Ber. Preuss. Akad. Wiss. (Berlin) 22, 261 (1924)
L.D. Landau, J. Phys. USSR 5, 71 (1941)
L.D. Landau, Phys. Rev. 60, 356 (1941)
M.H. Anderson, J.R. Ensher, M.R. Matthews, C.E. Wieman, and E.A. Cornell, Science 269, 198 (1995).
D.S. Jin, J.R. Ensher, M.R. Matthews, C.E. Wieman, and E.A. Cornell, Phys. Rev. Lett. 77, 420 (1996).
M.R. Matthews, B.P. Anderson,P.C. Haljan, D.S. Hall, C.E.Wieman, E.A. Cornell, Phys. Rev. Lett. 83, pp. 2498 (1999)
S. Jochim, M. Bartenstein, A. Altmeyer, G. Hendl, S. Riedl, C. Chin, J. Hecker Denschlag, and R. Grimm, Science 302, 2101 (2003)
M. Greiner, C.A. Regal, and D.S. Jin, Nature 426, 537 (2003)
M.W. Zwierlein, C.A. Stan, C.H. Schunck, S.M.F. Raupach, S. Gupta, Z. Hadzibabic, and W. Ketterle, Phys. Rev. Lett. 91, 250401 (2003).
C. J. Pethick and H. Smith, "Bose-Einstein Condensation in Dilute Gases", Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2004.
Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bose-Einstein_condensate"

INTERNATIONAL INSTITUTE OF BIOPHYSICS


Herbert Fr?hlich FRS, 1905 - 1991



GJ Hyland: Associate Fellow of the University of Warwick, UK
Member of Int. Institute of Biophysics, Neuss-Holzheim, D




Fr?hlich was born in the Black Forest town of Rexingen on 9th December 1905, and, after a brief period in commerce upon leaving school at the age of 15, entered the University of Munich as an undergraduate in 1927. There, under Sommerfeld's direction, he obtained his D.Phil (for a thesis on the Photoelectric Effect in Metals) after only 3 years, and without ever having taken a first degree! With the rise of Nazism, however, he was soon dismissed from his first post in Freiburg - where he was Privatdozent responsible for introducing modern physics - and in 1933 left Germany for Russia, to work (at Frenkel's invitation), as a 'Foreign Expert', in Joffe's Physico-Technical Institute in Leningrad (St. Petersburg). There he became acquainted with current work on semiconductors, and included a discussion of them in his now famous book, Elektronentheorie der Metalle (Springer, 1936, 1969). Being for some years the only textbook to contain a treatment of semiconductors, it later proved very influential when the technological potential of these materials started to be appreciated, particularly in the USA, where it was reprinted, un-translated, in 1943.

After only 2 years, the political situation in Russia forced him to flee again, and eventually, in 1935, he found himself in England - in Mott's department at the University of Bristol. Apart from a short stay in Holland in 1937, and a period of internment during the War, he remained in Bristol until 1948, rising to the position of Reader. Then, at Chadwick's instigation, he took up the first Chair of Theoretical Physics at the University of Liverpool. This he held with great distinction until his retirement in 1973, after which he was Professor Emeritus from 1976 until his death on 23rd January 1991, at the age of 85. Between 1973 and 1976, he was Professor of Solid State Electronics at the University of Salford, during which time he still maintained an office in Liverpool, spending there a total of 43 years.

Fr?hlich was elected Fellow of the Royal Society in 1951, was awarded the Max Planck Medal of the German Physical Society in 1972, and received numerous Honorary Degrees worldwide. From 1974 until his death, he was a Foreign Member of the Stuttgart Max Planck Institute, where he regularly made extended visits, as he also did to many other parts of the world, lecturing and discussing physics.

During his long and illustrious career spanning some 60 years, Fr?hlich made many contributions of fundamental significance to areas as diverse as meson theory and biology. Most influential of all was undoubtedly his introduction, around 1950, of the methods of quantum field theory into Solid State Physics, which completely revolutionised the future development of the subject. First came his work with Pelzer & Zienau on the motion of slow electrons in polar materials, from which emerged 'large' polaron theory. This was immediately followed by his fundamental contribution to the theory of superconductivity, which proved crucial to the eventual solution of the problem - namely, that the basic underlying interaction was a hitherto unrecognized aspect of the same interaction as is responsible electrical resistivity: the electron-phonon interaction. From field-theoretical considerations, with which he was already familiar with from his earlier work on the meson theory of nuclear forces with Heitler and Kemmer, he realized that this entailed an (attractive) interaction between electrons mediated by the exchange of virtual phonons. Consistent with the involvement of the ions in the phenomenon of superconductivity was, of course, the contemporaneous discovery of the isotope effect, for which his theory perfectly accounted.

1952 marked the start of a new era in Solid-State Physics, with his introduction of creation and annihilation operators for both electrons and phonons, in terms of which what is now known as the 'Fr?hlich Hamiltonian' was first formulated, and from which he re-derived his phonon-mediated electron-electron interaction by canonical transformation.

He then succeeded in solving exactly a one-dimensional model of a superconductor, obtaining, for the first time, an energy spectrum with a gap, and one that exhibited an essential singularity in the electron-lattice coupling constant - a feature shared by the eventual BCS solution 3 years later.

Prior to these contributions, he was best known for his work (loc.cit.) on nuclear forces during the late 1930's, and for his many contributions - which were to continue for almost 30 years - in the field of dielectrics, where he was a world authority; of particular importance was his early work on dielectric breakdown, out of which later evolved the subject now known as 'hot' electrons. His second book, Theory of Dielectrics (OUP, 1949, 1958), immediately became the definitive work on the theory of the dielectric constant and dielectric loss, and was subsequently published in several languages, including Japanese. On its pages were also born such topics as ferroelectric 'soft modes' and 'polaritons', although these names were introduced somewhat later by others.

He was also active in many other areas, such as statistical mechanics, where he did much to elucidate, using reduced density matrices, the connection between microphysics and the physics of macroscopic systems near

thermal equilibrium, including not only 'classical' systems, but also those exhibiting quantum effects on a macroscopic scale, such as superfluids and superconductors, where Yang's concept of 'off-diagonal-long-range order' played a crucial role.

Nowhere, however, was Fr?hlich's holistic outlook better illustrated than by his brilliantly daring introduction of concepts of modern theoretical physics - in particular, that of coherence - into biology. From the point of view of physics, living systems are highly non-linear, open, dissipative systems with remarkable dielectric properties, which are held far from thermal equilibrium by their metabolic activity. Using these facts, he showed in 1968 that, given a sufficient level of metabolic activity, the lowest frequency mode of a longitudinal electric polarisation field in such a system becomes strongly excited, attaining macroscopic significance as a 'coherent excitation', which is stabilised through elastic deformations.

In 1972, he went on to show that between two coherent systems of almost equal frequency is an attractive interaction (stronger than that of van der Waals) proportional to the inverse cube of their separation, via which the specificity of the attraction between enzymes and their substrates, for example, becomes immediately understandable. This attractive interaction later played a central role in his model of electrical brain-wave activity based on self-sustaining (limit cycling) oscillations.

The importance of his pioneering work on coherent excitations in living systems is that it directed attention from (static) biological structure to dynamic biological functionality. It continues to generate considerable interest because of the variety of possibilities it offers for understanding the ultra-sensitivity of living systems to very weak electromagnetic radiation at specific frequencies, in which deterministic chaos was later found to be implicated. Quite unexpected, was the role that macroscopic quantum effects apparently play in living systems - a role that has been subsequently invoked in consciousness studies.

These ideas - for which there is now some experimental support - stimulated much other work, both theoretical and experimental, and led to the establishment of series of international conferences, such as those at l'Institute de la Vie in Paris, which continued for many years. The situation as of 1988 was summarised in the book Biological Coherence & Response to External Stimuli (Springer, 1988), which he edited at the age of 82.

It is perhaps not generally appreciated that throughout his life Fr?hlich maintained a profound interest in elementary particle physics. In 1960, he developed an ingenious treatment of space reflections as continuous (rotational) transformations in a 4-dimensional space, which not only accounted for all mesons known at the time, but also predicted a further 4 particles with properties identical to those of subsequently discovered vector mesons. During his later years, eschewing contemporary approaches based on interactions, he focused on attempting to understand the separation of elementary particles into leptons and quarks in terms of a novel bilocal extension of the conventional Dirac theory. This programme, which sadly remained incomplete at the time of his death, made unexpected contact with his earlier work on continuous reflections.

Outside of physics, Fr?hlich's interests included hiking, skiing, music and abstract art - an interest he shared with his wife, herself an artist.

For all his eminence, FR?HLICH remained always accessible to the two generations of researchers who studied under him, and who benefited so much from his wise counsel, always so generously given; on them his magnetic personality made an indelible impression. His enthusiasm for physics was infectious, and his incisive, critical insight legendary. His holistic outlook and constant alertness to the possibility that certain concepts might well have relevance to fields other than those in which they had first arisen helped to resolve some of the most enigmatic mysteries of the physics of his era.

His most heroic attribute, however, was undoubtedly a courage to entertain an unusually wide range of novel ideas and to have the conviction to express them without fear of possible refutation - an attribute not uncommon amongst physicists of his generation, but one that is sadly conspicuously absent today.


--------------------
Ahuwale ka nane huna.

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OfflineFiveLights
Stranger

Registered: 08/09/05
Posts: 9
Loc: Texas
Last seen: 18 years, 7 months
Re: Research into Consciousness Interfacing with matter [Re: gettinjiggywithit]
    #4525143 - 08/12/05 01:19 AM (18 years, 7 months ago)

I think two different definitions of "consciousness" are being used in this discussion.

The first one,

1) Consciousness is the information processing that occurs in the brain

is NOT what jiggy is referring to (lemme know J).

The second,

2)Consciousness is the information processing that occurs in the brain as well as the subjective experience that occurs alongside it

is. So here's a quote for further deliniation:

Why doesn't all this information-processing go on "in the dark", free of any inner feel? Why is it that when electromagnetic waveforms impinge on a retina and are discriminated and categorized by a visual system, this discrimination and categorization is experienced as a sensation of vivid red? We know that conscious experience does arise when these functions are performed, but the very fact that it arises is the central mystery. There is an explanatory gap (a term due to Levine 1983) between the functions and experience, and we need an explanatory bridge to cross it. A mere account of the functions stays on one side of the gap, so the materials for the bridge must be found elsewhere.

http://consc.net/papers/facing.html

I recommend that everyone go read sections 1-6 of that article (it's short). The discussion on separating the Easy (how information processing happens) and Hard (why there's a subjective experience) Problems of Consciousness would be enormously helpful to those interested in the subject.

Also, here's a site for more information on QC: http://www.quantumconsciousness.org/

I think I'll read up more on the Hard vs. Easy problem and write something about it sometime soon.

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Offlinecrunchytoast
oppositional

Registered: 04/07/05
Posts: 1,133
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Re: Research into Consciousness Interfacing with matter [Re: FiveLights]
    #4525218 - 08/12/05 01:52 AM (18 years, 7 months ago)

Quote:

The same goes for nonlinear and chaotic dynamics. These might provide a novel account of the dynamics of cognitive functioning, quite different from that given by standard methods in cognitive science. But from dynamics, one only gets more dynamics. The question about experience here is as mysterious as ever.




only when experience and brain dynamics treated as different things!

IMO feelings are just processes
i "feel" pain, this is "real" but what does real mean?
i talk about it
i act on it
i think things based on it
i can talk about the fact that i feel it

it's just this element in this larger system

the brain is not an information processor but a process itself IMO

when you end up with "i am aware" it's like it's information and it becomes a problem, you start saying things like "experience is this basic thing" but if you just treat awareness as an element in a process, i think the problem is dissolved.

tomk- i still don't see why quantum effects are needed to explain consciousness, complicated math or no. i understand the issue to be 1) show that quantum physics are necessary to explain it 2) work out all the mathemetics of the explanation

but the first thing hasn't been shown
?


--------------------
"consensus on the nature of equilibrium is usually established by periodic conflict." -henry kissinger

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Invisiblegettinjiggywithit
jiggy
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Registered: 07/20/04
Posts: 7,469
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Re: Research into Consciousness Interfacing with matter [Re: gettinjiggywithit]
    #4525230 - 08/12/05 01:56 AM (18 years, 7 months ago)

Continued research on researchers. Many more to come in more replies.

John Bell, Bertrand Russell, John Eccles, Nick Herbert


John Bell and the most profound discovery of science
Feature: December 1998

Quantum theory is the most successful scientific theory of all time. Many of the great names of physics are associated with quantum theory. Heisenberg and Schr?dinger established the mathematical form of the theory, while Einstein and Bohr analysed many of its important features. However, it was John Bell who investigated quantum theory in the greatest depth and established what the theory can tell us about the fundamental nature of the physical world.


John Bell

Moreover, by stimulating experimental tests of the deepest and most profound aspects of quantum theory, Bell's work led to the possibility of exploring seemingly philosophical questions, such as the nature of reality, directly through experiments.

And this was just Bell's "hobby".


Early life


John Stewart Bell was born in Belfast on 28 July 1928. The families of both his parents, Annie and John, had lived in the north of Ireland for several generations. Annie's family had originally come from Scotland and John's middle name, Stewart, was her family name. In fact, John was known as Stewart at home, only becoming John when he went to university.

John Stewart, his elder sister Ruby and his two younger brothers David and Robert were brought up as firm members of the (Anglican) Church of Ireland. There was no hint of prejudice in the family, and Annie Bell had many friends in the Catholic community.

Bell's parents were known as intelligent lively people, and although the family was not well-off, love and care were never in short supply. In particular Annie Bell was keen to impress on the children that education was the key to a satisfying life in which "they could wear their Sunday suits all week". Although only John was able to stay at school much beyond the age of 14, David studied in the evening to become a qualified electrical engineer, and now lectures at Lambton College in Canada, while Robert is a successful local businessman. Later in life they were all able to joke with their mother that they could indeed wear their Sunday suits all week, although John rarely did!

John showed exceptional promise at his first schools, Ulsterville Avenue and Fane Street, and also used the public library in Belfast voraciously. Indeed, he was known as "The Prof" at home because of his tendency to amass great quantities of information, on which he would then freely expound. At the age of 11 John announced to his mother that he wanted to be a scientist.

Although John did extremely well in his "qualifying examination" at 11, his family could not afford to send him to any of Belfast's more prestigious schools. However, money was found for John to attend the Belfast Technical High School for four years. This was probably ideal for him, as practical courses, which he enjoyed, were mixed in with a full academic curriculum that allowed him to qualify for entrance to university.



Entering physics

At age 16, however, Bell was a year younger than the minimum age for admission to Queen's, the local university. Instead in 1944 he entered the physics department at Queen's as a technician in the teaching laboratory, where he greatly impressed the lecturing staff, Professor Karl Emeleus and Dr Robert Sloane. Indeed, Emeleus and Sloane lent John books and allowed him to attend the first-year lectures while still working as a technician. With savings from this year's salary, and help from other sources, Bell was able to enter the university as a student in 1945. His performance was outstanding and he graduated with first-class honours in experimental physics in 1948.

Bell was especially interested in theoretical physics and a year later he was able to graduate for a second time, obtaining a first in mathematical physics in 1949. His teacher in this area was Peter Paul Ewald, famous as one of the founders of X-ray crystallography, who had been driven out of Germany by the Nazis and had been in Belfast since 1939. Bell enjoyed his contact with Ewald from an academic point of view and for its lack of formality.

Bell was less happy about the way Queen's taught quantum theory, a subject in which he was already interested. Although there was a good course on the basics, later courses concentrated on applying quantum theory to atoms, whereas Bell wanted to study the more philosophical aspects of the theory as well. In particular he clashed with Sloane, whose account of the Heisenberg principle made it appear rather subjective in nature, which was not unusual in those days.

In retrospect Sloane should not feel guilty about not living up to Bell's standards concerning quantum theory; over the next 40 years or so, many others would follow suit.

Career: particles and accelerators


In 1949, after he graduated, Bell joined the UK Atomic Energy Research Establishment (AERE) at Harwell, although he soon moved to the accelerator design group in Malvern. After the financial stresses of student life, it must have been pleasant to have a tenured position and a steady, if modest, income. He bought a motorbike, though a nasty accident while riding this led to a deep cut around the mouth, and thus to the famous beard.

An important event in this period was meeting his future wife, Mary Ross, who had joined the accelerator design group with a degree in mathematics and physics from Glasgow. They married in 1954, and enjoyed a long and happy life together, even writing joint papers. When some of John's papers were collected as Speakable and Unspeakable in Quantum Mechanics in 1987 (see further reading), he ended the preface with the following words: "I here renew very especially my warm thanks to Mary Bell. When I look through these papers again I see her everywhere."

Bell's work up to 1953 consisted of modelling the paths of charged particles through accelerators. Without the benefit of computers, the work required a thorough knowledge of physical principles, together with the skill to retain the important physics while making sufficient approximations to allow the problem to be solved on a mechanical calculator. Bell's work, produced in a series of AERE reports (including one in collaboration with Mary), was excellent.

This was the period when the discovery of "strong focusing", in which axial and radial focusing are applied separately to the beam being accelerated, led to the next generation of synchrotrons. Bell's numerical calculations had shown signs of the strong focusing principle, and when it was established formally in 1952 he rapidly became an expert and acted as a consultant to the team designing the Proton Synchrotron at CERN in Geneva.

The accelerator design group moved from Malvern to Harwell in 1951. That same year Bell was delighted to be offered a year's leave to work with Rudolf Peierls, professor of theoretical physics at Birmingham University. At Birmingham, Bell discovered the important CPT theorem of quantum field theory. The CPT theorem states that the combined operation of charge conjugation (in which a particle is replaced by its antiparticle), parity reversal (reflection in a mirror) and time reversal is a symmetry operation that leaves the system unchanged. This is a fundamental theorem which proves, for example, that particles and antiparticles must have equal masses. Unfortunately Gerhard L?ders and Wolfgang Pauli performed similar work at the same time and received all the credit for what is usually called the L?ders-Pauli theorem.

Bell, however, had built up his reputation where it counted, and on his return to Harwell in 1954 he joined a group being set up to work on elementary particle physics, obtaining his PhD in 1956. However, in the years that followed he and Mary became worried that Harwell was moving away from fundamental work, and in 1960 they moved to CERN, where they spent the rest of their careers.

Between 1955 and 1984, Bell published around 80 papers in the general area of high-energy physics and field theory, including nuclear physics and many-body physics. Some work was directly concerned with experiments at CERN; for example, Bell helped to analyse the first neutrino experiments performed there in 1963. Most of the work, however, tackled theoretical issues.

Bell's most famous paper in this area - published with Roman Jackiw in Il Nuovo Cimento in 1969 and cited more than any other of his papers - was the discovery, clarified to some extent by Stephen Adler, of the Bell-Jackiw-Adler anomaly. At the time, theory predicted that the neutral pion could not decay into two photons, but this had been observed in experiments. Bell, Jackiw and Adler were able to explain the observed decays theoretically by adding an "anomalous" term resulting from the divergences of quantum field theory. A condition that the "anomaly" produced agreement with experiment was that the sum of the charges of the elementary fermions had to be zero. This provided support for the idea that quarks come in three colours, now part of the widely accepted Standard Model. (The first family of elementary fermions consists of the electron, which has charge -1; the neutrino, which has no charge; and the three colours of up- and down-quarks, which have charges 2/3 and -1/3, respectively. If quarks came in only one colour, then the sum of the charges would be -2/3, not zero.)

Another crucial paper was Bell's 1967 argument that weak interactions should be described using a gauge theory. (Gauge theories possess gauge symmetries: these symmetries are connected with the idea that quantities such as electric charge and quark colour are conserved locally as well as globally.) This suggestion was picked up by his collaborator, Martinus Veltman, whose research student, Gerard 't Hooft, later showed that the unwanted infinities in this gauge theory could be removed or "renormalized". This in turn gave mass to the particles, now known as the W and Z bosons, that carried the weak nuclear force. The Standard Model of particle physics is based on gauge theories.

In the 1980s Bell returned to accelerator design, writing papers with his wife on electron cooling, radiation damping and quantum bremsstrahlung, including a theoretical tour de force in which he related Hawking radiation to the heating of electrons in an accelerator beam.

The quantum background


As a man of the highest principles, Bell gave every effort to his work on accelerator and particle physics, for which CERN paid him. Quantum theory, on the other hand, was his hobby, perhaps his obsession. And it was quantum theory that was to make him famous.

From his student days Bell had been fascinated by the theory and its implications for the nature of the physical universe. Many of these implications had been argued over by Bohr and Einstein in the 1920s and 1930s (see Whitaker in further reading). From the birth of the theory it was clear that if the only properties of the system that exist are those that are implicit in the wavefunction, then many properties with precise classical values just do not have quantum values at any particular time. The most famous example was the Heisenberg uncertainty principle: if a particle has a precise value of position, then its momentum cannot have a value. Similarly, if a spin-1/2 particle possesses a value of spin in the z-direction, sz, then it does not have values of spin in either the x- or y-direction. This is a much stronger statement than saying that the particle may have such values but that we do not or cannot know them. Physicists often call this property a lack of realism, although philosophers may define the same word in a more general manner.

Furthermore, measurement has a very special role in quantum theory: if we measure, say, spin in the x-direction, sx, then we must obtain a precise value for this quantity, even if a precise value did not exist beforehand. There are two possible results or "eigenvalues" for sx: +hw/2, which is associated with a quantum "eigenstate" a+, and - hw/2, which is associated with the eigenstate a-. We can predict the result of a measurement if the initial state vector describing the system, y0, is either a+ or a-: if y0 = a+ the result will be + hw/2, and if y0 = a- the result will be - hw/2.

In general, however, the state vector will be a linear combination of both eigenstates: y = c+a+ + c-a-, where c+ and c- are complex constants, and c+2 + c-2 = 1. In this case, we are still bound to get one or other of the eigenvalues, but it is not certain which one. Born's postulate tells us that the probabilities of obtaining +hw/2 and - hw/2 are c+2 and c-2, respectively. Therefore the long-cherished principle of determinism, according to which identical initial conditions (e.g. identical state vectors) must always evolve with time in exactly the same way, is no longer valid.

The most common approach to measurement is von Neumann's collapse postulate: for example, if the result +hw/2 is obtained in the measurement, then the state vector collapses at that instant to the corresponding eigenstate, a+, and another measurement of the same quantity will again yield +hw/2. The scheme works well pragmatically but, as von Neumann admitted, the collapse process is mathematically distinct from the normal evolution of the state as described by the Schr?dinger equation. However, as measurement is just a conventional physical process, it should be governed by the Schr?dinger equation.

Moreover, to Einstein the collapse postulate was an even more pernicious retreat from realism than that described above: it implied that physical quantities usually have no values until they are observed, and therefore that the observer must be intrinsically involved in the physics being observed. This suggests that there might be no real world in the absence of an observer!


Enter the hidden variables


One obvious way to reinstate realism and determinism was to add "hidden variables" to the wavefunction to provide the most complete description of the system possible. These hidden variables might, for example, provide values for all components of the spin at all times, and thus dictate whether the result +hw/2 or -hw/2 was obtained in a measurement. However, Bohr and Heisenberg were convinced that one could not supplement quantum theory with hidden variables. Therefore they were pleased when, in 1932, von Neumann claimed to have proved that the application of hidden variables to quantum theory was indeed impossible. This was to remain accepted wisdom for over 30 years.

A conceptual approach to the problems of quantum measurement was provided by Bohr in the 1920s. Bohr's starting point was that the results of a measurement must be expressed classically; there must be a classical region of every experiment where physicists can set apparatus, read pointers and so on. And since (in the absence of hidden variables) there must also be a quantum region, then there must also be a "cut" between the two regions. The position of this cut will, to a considerable extent, be arbitrary.

The arbitrary position of the cut implies what Bohr called wholeness. The object being observed and the measuring apparatus cannot be regarded as separate - they are inextricably linked. Therefore measurement is not a passive registration by the apparatus of the value of a pre-existing property of the observed system. Rather measurement is a physical procedure involving the entire experimental set-up. So values of, say, sz and sx cannot be combined in a simple way, because completely different experimental arrangements are required to measure these two quantities.

This led Bohr to his framework of complementarity, according to which the value of a particular quantity can only be discussed in the context of an apparatus for measuring that quantity being in place. Evidence obtained under different conditions cannot be comprehended within a simple picture but is complementary. Thus one may not discuss simultaneously values of sx and sz, or x and px. Complementarity essentially forbids one to discuss the very situations that gave rise to conceptual problems; whether it actually explains anything is another question!

Bohr's position was at least self-consistent, and quickly became regarded as "orthodox". But it also contradicted many of science's most cherished beliefs, such as realism, and, as is well known, Einstein had a long-standing debate with Bohr over what he perceived to be its inadequacies. The only aspect of Einstein's criticisms that really struck home, and even then it took decades to do so, was his demonstration of entanglement via the famous Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen (EPR) thought experiment of 1935 (see box 1).

EPR argued that either there was a breakdown in locality, in the form of an instantaneous movement of information from one point to another (and obviously Einstein was appalled by this as it implied faster-than-light communication), or that the orthodox view of quantum theory was incomplete and there were elements of reality over and above those implicit in the wavefunction. EPR concluded that quantum theory was incomplete, but Bohr strongly disagreed with them. His response was to extend his definition of wholeness - both spins in the EPR set-up, although spatially separated, should be regarded as aspects of a single system. The scientific community almost unanimously sided with Bohr.


Enter John Bell


When Bell became interested in these matters in the late 1940s, his position on the Bohr-Einstein debate was unambiguous. Years later he explained this to Jeremy Bernstein: "I felt that Einstein's intellectual superiority over Bohr, in this instance, was enormous; a vast gulf between the man who saw clearly what was needed, and the obscurantist." Bell later showed Einstein to be wrong on this question, but that was the opposite of what he intended.

Bell felt that the introduction of deterministic hidden variables was very natural for three reasons. First it might eliminate the need for the cut between the classical and quantum regions of a measuring apparatus. In the terms used above, it could restore realism. His second, less compelling, motivation was to restore determinism.

His third motivation was specifically connected with EPR. Bell regarded Einstein's call for the completion of quantum theory as a simple call for the addition of hidden variables: if all components of each spin had precise values at all times, there could be no problems for locality. Bell may have actually misunderstood Einstein - who probably hoped for a theory on a much grander scale, rather like his general theory of relativity, that would almost incidentally solve all the problems of quantum theory - but much of Bell's major work would stem from this approach to hidden variables.

Bell described himself as a follower of Einstein. As for Bohr, Bell practically regarded him as two separate people. Bell strongly supported his assertion that apparatus must be classical in nature and his concept of wholeness in an individual measurement. Moreover, Bohr's idea that the measurement process was not a simple discovery of a pre-existing property was a major component of Bell's most important work, and he gave Bohr great credit for this insight. But Bell was repelled by what he felt was the complete lack of clarity in Bohr's complementarity, which he preferred to call contradictoriness. Bell regarded Bohr's "solution" of the EPR problem as incoherent.

Bell's enthusiasm for hidden variables had been tempered by reading about von Neumann's "proof" of their impossibility in his student days. He was frustrated because von Neumann's book was written in German and was not translated into English until 1955. However, in 1952 Bell "saw the impossible done". David Bohm, largely repeating work done a quarter of a century earlier by Louis de Broglie, was able to add hidden variables, actually particle positions, to standard quantum theory, and to obtain a fully realist and deterministic version of the theory.

Bohm suffered the strange fate of being dismissed equally by Bohr and Einstein. Bell, however, was enthralled and for a long time was just about the only supporter of the de Broglie-Bohm theory, which is also known as the pilot wave theory or the causal interpretation of quantum theory.

In 1953 Rudolf Peierls, who was to be a life-long friend and supporter, asked Bell to give a short talk at Birmingham. Bell offered to talk about either accelerator design or the foundations of quantum theory. Peierls, however, was part of the generation who considered that all the problems of quantum theory had been solved by Bohr, so he asked Bell to talk about accelerators. In fact it was probably a good thing that Bell resisted the temptation to join the debate on quantum theory until he was more established. By 1963, however, he had reached the peak of his "daytime" profession of high-energy physics, and a year's stay at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center in California gave him time and space to think.


John Bell and quantum theory


At last Bell was able to devote a fair proportion of his time to the questions that had interested him for so long. First he addressed von Neumann's work on hidden variables in the light of Bohm's theory. Bohm's argument had been fairly complicated, and it was easy for those who did not welcome its conclusions to assume it was flawed. Bell started by producing a hidden-variable model of his own. It was fairly simple, covering just the measurement of any component of spin for a spin-1/2 particle. But the simplicity was really the point - it was too simple just to ignore.

Bell then turned his attention to von Neumann. Clearly both Bohm's hidden-variable model and his own must violate one of the axioms of von Neumann's proof, and Bell was soon able to trace this down. In quantum theory let us say we measure sx and then sy on a particular spin. It is obviously wrong to say that, had we measured sx + sy, we would have obtained the sum of the two individual measurements. Bohr's argument of wholeness tells us that all three measurements require totally different arrangements of the apparatus, and that we cannot combine the results in a simple way.

However, if we calculate the "expectation value" of sx + sy, which is essentially the value of sx + sy averaged over all possible states of the system, we find that it is equal to the sum of the expectation values of sx and sy. Although this is little more than a strange coincidence in quantum theory, von Neumann had used this result as an axiom for his hypothetical hidden-variable states. There was no justification for this axiom and it did not work for either Bohm's or Bell's hidden-variable models. And when it was removed, von Neumann's theorem crashed. Thus Bell was able to remove a 30-year-long log-jam from the study of the fundamentals of quantum theory. There were other well known "impossibility theorems" and, in the same paper, Bell disposed of these as well. Although the paper was written in 1964 while Bell was at Stanford, it was not published in Reviews of Modern Physics until 1966. (The journal had mis-filed Bell's revised version of the paper, and by the time the editor had written to Bell to ask about the revisions, he had already returned to CERN and the letter was not forwarded.)

In the same paper, Bell also discussed two rather unwelcome properties of hidden-variables theories. The first was contextuality. This tells us that, except in trivial cases, any hidden-variable theory must be such that the result of measuring a particular observable will depend on which other observable(s) are measured simultaneously. The second was non-locality. All the hidden-variable models that Bell examined, including Bohm's, had the unpleasant feature that the behaviour of a particular particle depended on the properties of all others, however far away they were. In the EPR case, the measurement result obtained on one particle would depend on what measurement is performed on the second. As Bell said, this was the resolution of the EPR problem that Einstein would have liked least, and it is in this sense that it may be said that Bell proved Einstein wrong.



Bell & colleagues

These two features are actually related, for contextuality in a system with entanglement suggests that the results of a measurement on one particle may depend on measurements made simultaneously on a second particle, spatially separated from the first, with which the first has become entangled.

Suggestions of non-locality were one thing; Bell wished for a rigorous proof, and was able to provide one in his second great quantum paper, written and published in Physics, a now-defunct journal, in 1964. Bell wrote the first draft of the paper during a stay at Brandeis University in Massachusetts and completed it at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.

As he stressed later, Bell started from locality and, following EPR, argued for the existence of deterministic hidden variables. However, he also went beyond EPR and considered measurements of spin components along arbitrary directions in each wing of the experiment (rather than just sz or sx as in EPR). Bell calculated what happened when the measurement direction was kept constant in one wing of the experiment and varied in the other. He was able to show that the behaviour predicted by quantum theory could not be duplicated by a hidden-variable theory if the hidden variables acted locally.

As subsequently shown by Bell and others, local realist theories (i.e. theories with hidden variables) satisfy a so-called Bell inequality. This is a constraint on the relationship between the joint probability densities of the signals recorded in the two wings of the apparatus; it involves the four distinct cases that may be obtained by having two settings in each wing (see box 2). Quantum theory, on the other hand, does not obey the Bell inequality. In this way Bell had opened up the possibility of experimental philosophy, the study of what are normally thought of as philosophical issues in experiments. Not only do these experiments probe the deepest and most profound aspects of quantum theory, they also provide information on the fundamental nature of the universe. Henry Stapp of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California was later to call Bell's work on quantum theory "the most profound discovery of science". Bell's work in this area is also a major influence on the rapidly growing field of quantum information (see Physics World March 1998).


After the inequality


A large number of Bell inequality experiments have been performed over the last 30 years or so, the most famous being those of Alain Aspect and co-workers at Orsay. In these experiments, pairs of photons are emitted in a cascade from an excited atomic state and their polarizations are measured along different axes. More recent experiments have used pairs of entangled photons emitted by nonlinear optical crystals. In these experiments the polarization of the photon plays the role of the spin in the EPR-Bohm-Bell set-up.

However, the low efficiency of the detectors used in the experiments means that additional assumptions (essentially that those photons detected are a fair sample of the total flux) have to be made to test the Bell inequality. If these assumptions are made, the results are found to rule out local realist theories, and to be in good agreement with the quantum predictions. Most physicists now accept that quantum theory is correct, and that local realism has to be abandoned.

However, other physicists, often known as the realists, strongly disagree. They question the additional assumptions in the experiments and insist on the "detection loophole" being taken seriously (see Selleri in further reading). Particles are easier to detect than photons and it will be possible to close the detection loophole with measurements of the kaons produced in f-meson decays. Such experiments are planned for the "f-factory" that was opened in Frascati, Italy, last year.

Bell himself was worried that, according to special relativity, the nonlocal (faster than light) influence demonstrated in the Aspect experiment could involve propagation backward in time in other inertial reference frames of equal status. What he called the "cheapest resolution" to this problem was to return to the Lorentz (i.e. pre-Einstein) approach to relativity in which an ether is retained. In other words, there is a preferred frame of reference in which a real causal sequence may be defined (see Bell's contribution to The Ghost in the Atom in further reading). Propagation backward in time in other frames may then be dismissed as "unreal" or "apparent". More generally, however, Bell hoped for better theories than the ones we have now, and insisted that our current version of quantum theory was no more than a temporary expedient.


Back at Queen's

In the 1980s Bell's work on quantum theory was centred on criticisms of the orthodox view of quantum measurement and suggestions for its modification. At the 1987 Schr?dinger conference, he famously championed the 1985 theory of Ghirardi, Rimini and Weber (GRW) in which the collapse of the wavefunction is not an arbitrary and artificial device but is represented by a precise, though probabilistic, term in a nonlinear modification of the standard Schr?dinger equation. Collapse would occur very fast for systems of macroscopic size, but its speed would decrease with the size of the system, and become negligible on the atomic scale.

In 1990, in an aggressive article called "Against 'measurement'" published in Physics World (August pp33-40), Bell severely criticized the von Neumann collapse procedure and the very idea of "measurement" as a "fundamental term". He also dismissed other approaches that, although more sophisticated, were in Bell's opinion no less contrived. Once again he advocated Bohm and the GRW theory.


The man


John Bell was greatly respected by all who knew him as a man of total integrity and great generosity. He was modest and unassuming, with a delightfully puckish sense of humour - most notably exhibited in his "Bertlmann's socks" paper in which the EPR problem was explained in analogy with the unmatched socks of one of his closest collaborators, Reinhold Bertlmann. Bell and his wife were both long-term vegetarians, and in his version of Schr?dinger's cat paradox, the two states of the cat are being hungry or not hungry, rather than being dead or alive.

Bell became a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1972, and although he received many awards, they did not come for many years, until the nature of his exceptional achievements became fully realized. Indeed, between 1987 and 1989 he was awarded the Hughes Medal of the Royal Society, the Dirac Medal of the Institute of Physics and the Heineman Prize of the American Physical Society. And in 1988 he received honorary degrees from both the Queen's University of Belfast and Trinity College, Dublin. He was nominated for a Nobel prize and, had he lived longer, might well have received it.

In 1988 he made another visit to Belfast to lecture to the British Association. However, Bell remembered his early days in the teaching laboratory and spotting Reggie Scott, with whom he had worked as a technician over 40 years previously, left the assembled bigwigs to have a yarn about the old days when they were two young men making their way in the world.

Sadly it was much nearer the end than anyone would have hoped. On 1 October 1990 John Bell died suddenly of a stroke. This was of course a terrible tragedy for family and friends, but also a cause of great sadness to all those who knew him mainly from his work and his reputation. It may be a source of a little consolation that, over the last eight years, recognition has increased still further, and it is now unquestioned that he stands among the truly great scientists.






Bertrand Russell

Bertrand Arthur William Russell (b.1872 - d.1970) was a British philosopher, logician, essayist, and social critic, best known for his work in mathematical logic and analytic philosophy. His most influential contributions include his defense of logicism (the view that mathematics is in some important sense reducible to logic), and his theories of definite descriptions and logical atomism. Along with G.E. Moore, Russell is generally recognized as one of the founders of analytic philosophy. Along with Kurt G?del, he is also regularly credited with being one of the two most important logicians of the twentieth century.
Over the course of his long career, Russell made significant contributions, not just to logic and philosophy, but to a broad range of other subjects including education, history, political theory and religious studies. In addition, many of his writings on a wide variety of topics in both the sciences and the humanities have influenced generations of general readers. After a life marked by controversy (including dismissals from both Trinity College, Cambridge, and City College, New York), Russell was awarded the Order of Merit in 1949 and the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1950. Also noted for his many spirited anti-war and anti-nuclear protests, Russell remained a prominent public figure until his death at the age of 97.


Other sources of biographical information include Ronald Clark's The Life of Bertrand Russell (London: Jonathan Cape, 1975), Ray Monk's Bertrand Russell: The Spirit of Solitude (London: Jonathan Cape, 1996) and Bertrand Russell: The Ghost of Madness (London: Jonathan Cape, 2000), and the first volume of A.D. Irvine's Bertrand Russell: Critical Assessments (London: Routledge, 1999).

For a chronology of Russell's major publications, readers are encouraged to consult Russell's Writings below. For a more complete list see A Bibliography of Bertrand Russell (3 vols, London: Routledge, 1994), by Kenneth Blackwell and Harry Ruja. A less detailed, but still comprehensive, list also appears in Paul Arthur Schilpp, The Philosophy of Bertrand Russell, 3rd edn (New York: Harper and Row, 1963), pp. 746-803.

Finally, for a bibliography of the secondary literature surrounding Russell, see A.D. Irvine, Bertrand Russell: Critical Assessments, Vol. 1 (London: Routledge, 1999), pp. 247-312.

Russell's Work in Logic
Russell's contributions to logic and the foundations of mathematics include his discovery of Russell's paradox, his defense of logicism (the view that mathematics is, in some significant sense, reducible to formal logic), his development of the theory of types, and his refining of the first-order predicate calculus.
Russell discovered the paradox that bears his name in 1901, while working on his Principles of Mathematics (1903). The paradox arises in connection with the set of all sets that are not members of themselves. Such a set, if it exists, will be a member of itself if and only if it is not a member of itself. The paradox is significant since, using classical logic, all sentences are entailed by a contradiction. Russell's discovery thus prompted a large amount of work in logic, set theory, and the philosophy and foundations of mathematics.

Russell's own response to the paradox came with the development of his theory of types in 1903. It was clear to Russell that some restrictions needed to be placed upon the original comprehension (or abstraction) axiom of naive set theory, the axiom that formalizes the intuition that any coherent condition may be used to determine a set (or class). Russell's basic idea was that reference to sets such as the set of all sets that are not members of themselves could be avoided by arranging all sentences into a hierarchy, beginning with sentences about individuals at the lowest level, sentences about sets of individuals at the next lowest level, sentences about sets of sets of individuals at the next lowest level, and so on. Using a vicious circle principle similar to that adopted by the mathematician Henri Poincar?, and his own so-called "no class" theory of classes, Russell was able to explain why the unrestricted comprehension axiom fails: propositional functions, such as the function "x is a set," may not be applied to themselves since self-application would involve a vicious circle. On Russell's view, all objects for which a given condition (or predicate) holds must be at the same level or of the same "type."

Although first introduced in 1903, the theory of types was further developed by Russell in his 1908 article "Mathematical Logic as Based on the Theory of Types" and in the monumental work he co-authored with Alfred North Whitehead, Principia Mathematica (1910, 1912, 1913). Thus the theory admits of two versions, the "simple theory" of 1903 and the "ramified theory" of 1908. Both versions of the theory later came under attack for being both too weak and too strong. For some, the theory was too weak since it failed to resolve all of the known paradoxes. For others, it was too strong since it disallowed many mathematical definitions which, although consistent, violated the vicious circle principle. Russell's response was to introduce the axiom of reducibility, an axiom that lessened the vicious circle principle's scope of application, but which many people claimed was too ad hoc to be justified philosophically.

Of equal significance during this period was Russell's defense of logicism, the theory that mathematics was in some important sense reducible to logic. First defended in his 1901 article "Recent Work on the Principles of Mathematics," and then later in greater detail in his Principles of Mathematics and in Principia Mathematica, Russell's logicism consisted of two main theses. The first was that all mathematical truths can be translated into logical truths or, in other words, that the vocabulary of mathematics constitutes a proper subset of that of logic. The second was that all mathematical proofs can be recast as logical proofs or, in other words, that the theorems of mathematics constitute a proper subset of those of logic.

Like Gottlob Frege, Russell's basic idea for defending logicism was that numbers may be identified with classes of classes and that number-theoretic statements may be explained in terms of quantifiers and identity. Thus the number 1 would be identified with the class of all unit classes, the number 2 with the class of all two-membered classes, and so on. Statements such as "There are two books" would be recast as statements such as "There is a book, x, and there is a book, y, and x is not identical to y." It followed that number-theoretic operations could be explained in terms of set-theoretic operations such as intersection, union, and difference. In Principia Mathematica, Whitehead and Russell were able to provide many detailed derivations of major theorems in set theory, finite and transfinite arithmetic, and elementary measure theory. A fourth volume was planned but never completed.

Russell's most important writings relating to these topics include not only Principles of Mathematics (1903), "Mathematical Logic as Based on the Theory of Types" (1908), and Principia Mathematica (1910, 1912, 1913), but also his An Essay on the Foundations of Geometry (1897), and Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy (1919).

Russell's Work in Analytic Philosophy
In much the same way that Russell used logic in an attempt to clarify issues in the foundations of mathematics, he also used logic in an attempt to clarify issues in philosophy. As one of the founders of analytic philosophy, Russell made significant contributions to a wide variety of areas, including metaphysics, epistemology, ethics and political theory, as well as to the history of philosophy. Underlying these various projects was not only Russell's use of logical analysis, but also his long-standing aim of discovering whether, and to what extent, knowledge is possible. "There is one great question," he writes in 1911. "Can human beings know anything, and if so, what and how? This question is really the most essentially philosophical of all questions."[1]
More than this, Russell's various contributions were also unified by his views concerning both the centrality of scientific knowledge and the importance of an underlying scientific methodology that is common to both philosophy and science. In the case of philosophy, this methodology expressed itself through Russell's use of logical analysis. In fact, Russell often claimed that he had more confidence in his methodology than in any particular philosophical conclusion.

Russell's conception of philosophy arose in part from his idealist origins.[2] This is so, even though he believed that his one, true revolution in philosophy came about as a result of his break from idealism. Russell saw that the idealist doctrine of internal relations led to a series of contradictions regarding asymmetrical (and other) relations necessary for mathematics. Thus, in 1898, he abandoned the idealism that he had encountered as a student at Cambridge, together with his Kantian methodology, in favour of a pluralistic realism. As a result, he soon became famous as an advocate of the "new realism" and for his "new philosophy of logic," emphasizing as it did the importance of modern logic for philosophical analysis. The underlying themes of this "revolution," including his belief in pluralism, his emphasis upon anti-psychologism, and the importance of science, remained central to Russell's philosophy for the remainder of his life.[3]

Russell's methodology consisted of the making and testing of hypotheses through the weighing of evidence (hence Russell's comment that he wished to emphasize the "scientific method" in philosophy[4]), together with a rigorous analysis of problematic propositions using the machinery of first-order logic. It was Russell's belief that by using the new logic of his day, philosophers would be able to exhibit the underlying "logical form" of natural language statements. A statement's logical form, in turn, would help philosophers resolve problems of reference associated with the ambiguity and vagueness of natural language. Thus, just as we distinguish three separate sense of "is" (the is of predication, the is of identity, and the is of existence) and exhibit these three senses by using three separate logical notations (Px, x=y, and x respectively) we will also discover other ontologically significant distinctions by being aware of a sentence's correct logical form. On Russell's view, the subject matter of philosophy is then distinguished from that of the sciences only by the generality and the a prioricity of philosophical statements, not by the underlying methodology of the discipline. In philosophy, as in mathematics, Russell believed that it was by applying logical machinery and insights that advances would be made.

Russell's most famous example of his "analytic" method concerns denoting phrases such as descriptions and proper names. In his Principles of Mathematics, Russell had adopted the view that every denoting phrase (for example, "Scott," "blue," "the number two," "the golden mountain") denoted, or referred to, an existing entity. By the time his landmark article, "On Denoting," appeared two years later, in 1905, Russell had modified this extreme realism and had instead become convinced that denoting phrases need not possess a theoretical unity.

While logically proper names (words such as "this" or "that" which refer to sensations of which an agent is immediately aware) do have referents associated with them, descriptive phrases (such as "the smallest number less than pi") should be viewed as a collection of quantifiers (such as "all" and "some") and propositional functions (such as "x is a number"). As such, they are not to be viewed as referring terms but, rather, as "incomplete symbols." In other words, they should be viewed as symbols that take on meaning within appropriate contexts, but that are meaningless in isolation.

Thus, in the sentence

(1) The present King of France is bald,
the definite description "The present King of France" plays a role quite different from that of a proper name such as "Scott" in the sentence
(2) Scott is bald.
Letting K abbreviate the predicate "is a present King of France" and B abbreviate the predicate "is bald," Russell assigns sentence (1) the logical form
(1&#8242;) There is an x such that (i) Kx, (ii) for any y, if Ky then y=x, and (iii) Bx.
Alternatively, in the notation of the predicate calculus, we have
(1&#8243;) &#8707;x[(Kx & &#8704;y(Ky &#8594; y=x)) & Bx].
In contrast, by allowing s to abbreviate the name "Scott," Russell assigns sentence (2) the very different logical form
(2&#8242;) Bs.
This distinction between various logical forms allows Russell to explain three important puzzles. The first concerns the operation of the Law of Excluded Middle and how this law relates to denoting terms. According to one reading of the Law of Excluded Middle, it must be the case that either "The present King of France is bald" is true or "The present King of France is not bald" is true. But if so, both sentences appear to entail the existence of a present King of France, clearly an undesirable result. Russell's analysis shows how this conclusion can be avoided. By appealing to analysis (1&#8242;), it follows that there is a way to deny (1) without being committed to the existence of a present King of France, namely by accepting that "It is not the case that there exists a present King of France who is bald" is true.
The second puzzle concerns the Law of Identity as it operates in (so-called) opaque contexts. Even though "Scott is the author of Waverley" is true, it does not follow that the two referring terms "Scott" and "the author of Waverley" are interchangeable in every situation. Thus although "George IV wanted to know whether Scott was the the author of Waverley" is true, "George IV wanted to know whether Scott was Scott" is, presumably, false. Russell's distinction between the logical forms associated with the use of proper names and definite descriptions shows why this is so.

To see this we once again let s abbreviate the name "Scott." We also let w abbreviate "Waverley" and A abbreviate the two-place predicate "is the author of." It then follows that the sentence

(3) s=s
is not at all equivalent to the sentence
(4) &#8707;x[Axw & &#8704;y(Ayw &#8594; y=x) & x=s].
The third puzzle relates to true negative existential claims, such as the claim "The golden mountain does not exist." Here, once again, by treating definite descriptions as having a logical form distinct from that of proper names, Russell is able to give an account of how a speaker may be committed to the truth of a negative existential without also being committed to the belief that the subject term has reference. That is, the claim that Scott does not exist is false since
(5) ~&#8707;x(x=s)
is self-contradictory. (After all, there must exist at least one thing that is identical to s since it is a logical truth that s is identical to itself!) In contrast, the claim that a golden mountain does not exist may be true since, assuming that G abbreviates the predicate "is golden" and M abbreviates the predicate "is a mountain," there is nothing contradictory about
(6) ~&#8707;x(Gx & Mx).
Russell's emphasis upon logical analysis also had consequences for his metaphysics. In response to the traditional problem of the external world which, it is claimed, arises since the external world can be known only by inference, Russell developed his famous 1910 distinction between "knowledge by acquaintance and knowledge by description." He then went on, in his 1918 lectures on logical atomism, to argue that the world itself consists of a complex of logical atoms (such as "little patches of colour") and their properties. Together they form the atomic facts which, in turn, are combined to form logically complex objects. What we normally take to be inferred entities (for example, enduring physical objects) are then understood to be "logical constructions" formed from the immediately given entities of sensation, viz., "sensibilia." It is only these latter entities that are known non-inferentially and with certainty.

According to Russell, the philosopher's job is to discover a logically ideal language that will exhibit the true nature of the world in such a way that the speaker will not be misled by the casual surface structure of natural language. Just as atomic facts (the association of universals with an appropriate number of individuals) may be combined into molecular facts in the world itself, such a language would allow for the description of such combinations using logical connectives such as "and" and "or." In addition to atomic and molecular facts, Russell also held that general facts (facts about "all" of something) were needed to complete the picture of the world. Famously, he vacillated on whether negative facts were also required.

Russell's most important writings relating to these topics include not only "On Denoting" (1905), but also his "Knowledge by Acquaintance and Knowledge by Description" (1910), "The Philosophy of Logical Atomism" (1918, 1919), "Logical Atomism" (1924), The Analysis of Mind (1921), and The Analysis of Matter (1927).

Russell's Social and Political Philosophy
Russell's social influence stems from three main sources: his long-standing social activism, his many writings on the social and political issues of his day, and his popularizations of technical writings in philosophy and the natural sciences.
Among Russell's many popularizations are his two best selling works, The Problems of Philosophy (1912) and A History of Western Philosophy (1945). Both of these books, as well as his numerous but less famous books popularizing science, have done much to educate and inform generations of general readers. Naturally enough, Russell saw a link between education, in this broad sense, and social progress. At the same time, Russell is also famous for suggesting that a widespread reliance upon evidence, rather than upon superstition, would have enormous social consequences: "I wish to propose for the reader's favourable consideration," says Russell, "a doctrine which may, I fear, appear wildly paradoxical and subversive. The doctrine in question is this: that it is undesirable to believe a proposition when there is no ground whatever for supposing it true."[5]

Still, Russell is best known in many circles as a result of his campaigns against the proliferation of nuclear weapons and against western involvement in the Vietnam War during the 1950s and 1960s. However, Russell's social activism stretches back at least as far as 1910, when he published his Anti-Suffragist Anxieties, and to 1916, when he was convicted and fined in connection with anti-war protests during World War I. Following his conviction, he was also dismissed from his post at Trinity College, Cambridge. Two years later, he was convicted a second time. The result was six months in prison. Russell also ran unsuccessfully for Parliament (in 1907, 1922, and 1923) and, together with his second wife, founded and operated an experimental school during the late 1920s and early 1930s.

Although he became the third Earl Russell upon the death of his brother in 1931, Russell's radicalism continued to make him a controversial figure well through middle-age. While teaching in the United States in the late 1930s, he was offered a teaching appointment at City College, New York. The appointment was revoked following a large number of public protests and a 1940 judicial decision which found him morally unfit to teach at the College.

In 1954 he delivered his famous "Man's Peril" broadcast on the BBC, condemning the Bikini H-bomb tests. A year later, together with Albert Einstein, he released the Russell-Einstein Manifesto calling for the curtailment of nuclear weapons. In 1957 he was a prime organizer of the first Pugwash Conference, which brought together a large number of scientists concerned about the nuclear issue. He became the founding president of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament in 1958 and was once again imprisoned, this time in connection with anti-nuclear protests in 1961. The media coverage surrounding his conviction only served to enhance Russell's reputation and to further inspire the many idealistic youths who were sympathetic to his anti-war and anti-nuclear protests.

During these controversial years Russell also wrote many of the books that brought him to the attention of popular audiences. These include his Principles of Social Reconstruction (1916), A Free Man's Worship (1923), On Education (1926), Why I Am Not a Christian (1927), Marriage and Morals (1929), The Conquest of Happiness (1930), The Scientific Outlook (1931), and Power: A New Social Analysis (1938).

Upon being awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1950, Russell used his acceptance speech to emphasize, once again, themes related to his social activism.

Russell's Writings
A Selection of Russell's Articles
A Selection of Russell's Books
Major Anthologies of Russell's Writings
The Collected Papers of Bertrand Russell
A Selection of Russell's Articles
(1901) "Recent Work on the Principles of Mathematics," International Monthly, 4, 83-101. Repr. as "Mathematics and the Metaphysicians" in Russell, Bertrand, Mysticism and Logic, London: Longmans Green, 1918, 74-96.
(1905) "On Denoting," Mind, 14, 479-493. Repr. in Russell, Bertrand, Essays in Analysis, London: Allen and Unwin, 1973, 103-119.
(1908) "Mathematical Logic as Based on the Theory of Types," American Journal of Mathematics, 30, 222-262. Repr. in Russell, Bertrand, Logic and Knowledge, London: Allen and Unwin, 1956, 59-102, and in van Heijenoort, Jean, From Frege to G?del, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967, 152-182.
(1910) "Knowledge by Acquaintance and Knowledge by Description," Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 11, 108-128. Repr. in Russell, Bertrand, Mysticism and Logic, London: Allen and Unwin, 1963, 152-167.
(1912) "On the Relations of Universals and Particulars," Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 12, 1-24. Repr. in Russell, Bertrand, Logic and Knowledge, London: Allen and Unwin, 1956, 105-124.
(1918, 1919) "The Philosophy of Logical Atomism," Monist, 28, 495-527; 29, 32-63, 190-222, 345-380. Repr. in Russell, Bertrand, Logic and Knowledge, London: Allen and Unwin, 1956, 177-281.
(1924) "Logical Atomism," in Muirhead, J.H., Contemporary British Philosophers, London: Allen and Unwin, 1924, 356-383. Repr. in Russell, Bertrand, Logic and Knowledge, London: Allen and Unwin, 1956, 323-343.
A Selection of Russell's Books
(1896) German Social Democracy, London: Longmans, Green.
(1897) An Essay on the Foundations of Geometry, Cambridge: At the University Press.
(1900) A Critical Exposition of the Philosophy of Leibniz, Cambridge: At the University Press.
(1903) The Principles of Mathematics, Cambridge: At the University Press.
(1910, 1912, 1913) (with Alfred North Whitehead) Principia Mathematica, 3 vols, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Second edition, 1925 (Vol. 1), 1927 (Vols 2, 3). Abridged as Principia Mathematica to *56, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1962.
(1912) The Problems of Philosophy, London: Williams and Norgate; New York: Henry Holt and Company.
(1914) Our Knowledge of the External World, Chicago and London: The Open Court Publishing Company.
(1916) Principles of Social Reconstruction, London: George Allen and Unwin. Repr. as Why Men Fight, New York: The Century Company, 1917.
(1917) Political Ideals, New York: The Century Company.
(1919) Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy, London: George Allen and Unwin; New York: The Macmillan Company.
(1921) The Analysis of Mind, London: George Allen and Unwin; New York: The Macmillan Company.
(1923) A Free Man's Worship, Portland, Maine: Thomas Bird Mosher. Repr. as What Can A Free Man Worship?, Girard, Kansas: Haldeman-Julius Publications, 1927.
(1926) On Education, Especially in Early Childhood, London: George Allen and Unwin. Repr. as Education and the Good Life, New York: Boni and Liveright, 1926. Abridged as Education of Character, New York: Philosophical Library, 1961.
(1927) The Analysis of Matter, London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner; New York: Harcourt, Brace.
(1927) An Outline of Philosophy, London: George Allen and Unwin. Repr. as Philosophy, New York: W.W. Norton, 1927.
(1927) Why I Am Not a Christian, London: Watts, New York: The Truth Seeker Company.
(1928) Sceptical Essays, New York: Norton.
(1929) Marriage and Morals, London: George Allen and Unwin; New York: Horace Liveright.
(1930) The Conquest of Happiness, London: George Allen and Unwin; New York: Horace Liveright.
(1931) The Scientific Outlook, London: George Allen and Unwin; New York: W.W. Norton.
(1938) Power: A New Social Analysis, London: George Allen and Unwin; New York: W.W. Norton.
(1940) An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth, London: George Allen and Unwin; New York: W.W. Norton.
(1945) A History of Western Philosophy, New York: Simon and Schuster; London: George Allen and Unwin, 1946.
(1948) Human Knowledge: Its Scope and Limits, London: George Allen and Unwin; New York: Simon and Schuster.
(1949) Authority and the Individual, London: George Allen and Unwin; New York: Simon and Schuster.
(1949) The Philosophy of Logical Atomism, Minneapolis, Minnesota: Department of Philosophy, University of Minnesota. Repr. as Russell's Logical Atomism, Oxford: Fontana/Collins, 1972.
(1954) Human Society in Ethics and Politics, London: George Allen and Unwin; New York: Simon and Schuster.
(1959) My Philosophical Development, London: George Allen and Unwin; New York: Simon and Schuster.
(1967, 1968, 1969) The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell, 3 vols, London: George Allen and Unwin; Boston and Toronto: Little Brown and Company (Vols 1 and 2), New York: Simon and Schuster (Vol. 3).
Major Anthologies of Russell's Writings
(1910) Philosophical Essays, London: Longmans, Green.
(1918) Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays, London and New York: Longmans, Green. Repr. as A Free Man's Worship and Other Essays, London: Unwin Paperbacks, 1976.
(1928) Sceptical Essays, London: George Allen and Unwin; New York: W.W. Norton.
(1935) In Praise of Idleness, London: George Allen and Unwin; New York: W.W. Norton.
(1950) Unpopular Essays, London: George Allen and Unwin; New York: Simon and Schuster.
(1956) Logic and Knowledge: Essays, 1901-1950, London: George Allen and Unwin; New York: The Macmillan Company.
(1956) Portraits From Memory and Other Essays, London: George Allen and Unwin; New York: Simon and Schuster.
(1957) Why I am Not a Christian and Other Essays on Religion and Related Subjects, London: George Allen and Unwin; New York: Simon and Schuster.
(1961) The Basic Writings of Bertrand Russell, 1903-1959, London: George Allen and Unwin; New York: Simon and Schuster.
(1969) Dear Bertrand Russell, London: George Allen and Unwin; Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
(1973) Essays in Analysis, London: George Allen and Unwin.
(1992) The Selected Letters of Bertrand Russell, London: Penguin Press.
The Collected Papers of Bertrand Russell
The Bertrand Russell Editorial Project is currently in the process of publishing Russell's Collected Papers. When complete, these volumes will bring together all of Russell's writings, excluding his correspondence and previously published monographs.
In Print
Vol. 1: Cambridge Essays, 1888-99, London, Boston, Sydney: George Allen and Unwin, 1983.
Vol. 2: Philosophical Papers, 1896-99, London and New York: Routledge, 1990.
Vol. 3: Toward the Principles of Mathematics, London and New York: Routledge, 1994.
Vol. 4: Foundations of Logic, 1903-05, London and New York: Routledge, 1994.
Vol. 6: Logical and Philosophical Papers, 1909-13, London and New York: Routledge, 1992.
Vol. 7: Theory of Knowledge: The 1913 Manuscript, London, Boston, Sydney: George Allen and Unwin, 1984.
Vol. 8: The Philosophy of Logical Atomism and Other Essays, 1914-19, London: George Allen and Unwin, 1986.
Vol. 9: Essays on Language, Mind and Matter, 1919-26, London: Unwin Hyman, 1988.
Vol. 10: A Fresh Look at Empiricism, 1927-42, London and New York: Routledge, 1996.
Vol. 11: Last Philosophical Testament, 1943-68, London and New York: Routledge, 1997.
Vol. 12: Contemplation and Action, 1902-14, London, Boston, Sydney: George Allen and] Unwin, 1985.
Vol. 13: Prophecy and Dissent, 1914-16, London: Unwin Hyman, 1988.
Vol. 14: Pacifism and Revolution, 1916-18, London and New York: Routledge, 1995.
Vol. 15: Uncertain Paths to Freedom: Russia and China, 1919-1922, London and New York: Routledge, 2000.
Vol. 28: Man's Peril, 1954-56, London and New York: Routledge, 2003
Planned and Forthcoming
Vol. 5: Toward Principia Mathematica, 1906-08.
Vol. 16: Labour and Internationalism, 1922-24.
Vol. 17: Behaviourism and Education, 1925-28.
Vol. 18: Science, Sex and Society, 1929-31.
Vol. 19: Fascism and Other Depression Legacies, 1931-33.
Vol. 20: Fascism and Other Depression Legacies, 1933-34.
Vol. 21: How to Keep the Peace: The Pacifist Dilemma, 1934-36.
Vol. 22: The Superior Virtue of the Oppressed and Other Essays, 1936-39.
Vol. 23: The Problems of Democracy, 1940-44.
Vol. 24: Civilization and the Bomb, 1944-47.
Vol. 25: Civilization and the Bomb, 1948-50.
Vol. 26: Respectability at Last, 1950-51.
Vol. 27: Respectability at Last, 1952-53.
Vol. 29: "D?tente" or Destruction, 1955-57.
Vol. 30: The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, 1957-60.
Vol. 31: A New Plan for Peace and Other Essays, 1960-64.
Vol. 32: The Vietnam Campaign, 1965-70.
Vol. 33: Newly Discovered Papers.
Vol. 34: Indexes.
Bibliography
Selected Articles
Selected Books
Selected Articles
Broad, C.D. (1973) "Bertrand Russell, as Philosopher," Bulletin of the London Mathematical Society, 5, 328-341.
Carnap, Rudolf (1931) "The Logicist Foundations of Mathematics," Erkenntnis, 2, 91-105. Repr. in Benacerraf, Paul, and Hilary Putnam (eds), Philosophy of Mathematics, 2nd ed., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983, 41-52; in Klemke, E.D. (ed.), Essays on Bertrand Russell, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1970, 341-354; and in Pears, David F. (ed.), Bertrand Russell: A Collection of Critical Essays, Garden City, New York: Anchor Books, 1972, 175-191.
Church, Alonzo (1976) "Comparison of Russell's Resolution of the Semantical Antinomies with That of Tarski," Journal of Symbolic Logic, 41, 747-760. Repr. in A.D. Irvine, Bertrand Russell: Critical Assessments, vol. 2, New York and London: Routledge, 1999, 96-112.
Church, Alonzo (1974) "Russellian Simple Type Theory," Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association, 47, 21-33.
Gandy, R.O. (1973) "Bertrand Russell, as Mathematician," Bulletin of the London Mathematical Society, 5, 342-348.
G?del, Kurt (1944) "Russell's Mathematical Logic," in Schilpp, Paul Arthur (ed.), The Philosophy of Bertrand Russell, 3rd ed., New York: Tudor, 1951, 123-153. Repr. in Benacerraf, Paul, and Hilary Putnam (eds), Philosophy of Mathematics, 2nd ed., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983, 447-469; and in Pears, David F. (ed.) (1972) Bertrand Russell: A Collection of Critical Essays, Garden City, New York:


--------------------
Ahuwale ka nane huna.

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Invisiblegettinjiggywithit
jiggy
Female User Gallery

Registered: 07/20/04
Posts: 7,469
Loc: Heart of Laughter
Re: Research into Consciousness Interfacing with matter [Re: gettinjiggywithit]
    #4525240 - 08/12/05 02:03 AM (18 years, 7 months ago)

Many many more bios to go, only on page 3 out of 14.

At this time, I would like to remind everyone that Ravus called the work of these men New Age Bullshit. He is entitled to his opinion.:confused:

Ravus, may I ask for your credentials and accomplishments in the fields of Neural Science and Quantum Mechanics?

off to bed now.........:kiss:


--------------------
Ahuwale ka nane huna.

Edited by gettinjiggywithit (08/12/05 02:10 AM)

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InvisibleSwami
Eggshell Walker

Registered: 01/18/00
Posts: 15,413
Loc: In the hen house
Re: Research into Consciousness Interfacing with matter [Re: gettinjiggywithit]
    #4525261 - 08/12/05 02:11 AM (18 years, 7 months ago)

Next we will research how many trees make a forest.


--------------------



The proof is in the pudding.

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Offlinecrunchytoast
oppositional

Registered: 04/07/05
Posts: 1,133
Loc: aporia
Last seen: 17 years, 1 day
Re: Research into Consciousness Interfacing with matter [Re: tomk]
    #4525263 - 08/12/05 02:11 AM (18 years, 7 months ago)

Quote:

The question should be, how does our conscious experience give rise to the material world. I would predict that this, and not the 'hard question', is going to be the root of the involvement of consciousness and the material world.



i am unable to experience what another person experiences. i can only empathize imperfectly.

so is my own consciousness really the generative source of other people's consciousness?


--------------------
"consensus on the nature of equilibrium is usually established by periodic conflict." -henry kissinger

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