Pi-Brained Schemas & Savants: Who's Normal Now?

Meesh Pi. Click to enlargeA most peculiar feat was reported in yesterday's Philadelphia Inquirer:  Marc Umile, a filing clerk from the Philly area, was able to recite the first 12,887 digits of π from memory - an American record. (The current verified world record is for 43,000 digits by Krishan Chahal of India.)

In an odd twist, Umile performed his prodigious feat at a law office, and not for the Guiness Book folks. In these litigious times, it is obviously prudent to be prepared for intellectual property infringement in any activity such as this, which in this case comes under the heading of π's and torts ...

While Umile's feat is incredible, I am more intrigued by the physical/mental issues involved in the data entry, storage and retrieval of these digits. The actual amount of data is not the issue - 12,000 is a very small number of single digits when compared to the potential of the human brain.  Data entry is not hard to comprehend, either, with Umile spending two-plus years memorizing the digits. (I am not commenting on motivation or sanity here.  See the Inquirer piece for this!)

How in the world are the values recalled/retrieved?

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Heisenberg and The Conscious Object

From "Seven Attempts at Liquifying the Self" by N. Schultz in his Experiment in Private Self-Consciousness Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle is rightly seen as the first 20th Century result that puts an absolute limit on what can be measured, and, by implication, known about the world.  The principle states that complementary variables such as the position and momentum  of a particle  cannot be simultaneously discerned to any arbitrary degree of precision.  The principle is often illustrated with a standard thought experiment:  in trying to observe smaller and smaller objects, the wavelength of the light used to "illuminate" the object must use a smaller and smaller wavelength, i.e. photons with larger and larger energy.  This large energy then gives the particle to be sighted some momentum change that makes it impossible to determine the particle's momentum.  This explanation, referred to as the Gamma-Ray Microscope thought-experiment,  is widely used at many educational levels. See the Discovery Education site for Grades 9-12, for example.   A more interesting use of the  illumination example can be found at the Fly in the Honey blog ,  posted by Mary (that's all the info I can determine about the author other than I believe that she is a teacher), where she claims to be very poor in math and science, yet is incredibly moved by the standard conclusion of the Uncertainty Principle: "the very act of observation changes the object being observed." 

The Gamma-Ray Microscope thought-experiment, a mythological story that began with Heisenberg himself, has been de-valued as a good example of the principle. It turns out that the world is much weirder than that pictured in the thought-experiment. (I will explain this in a future post.) Regardless, it does not diminish from the fundamental idea that observation affects the observed in fundamental ways that cannot be eliminated with more precise and careful instrumentation and methodology.

On one hand this is a very deep concept;  on the other it appears to be tautological, especially when both the experimenter and experimental subject are conscious agents.

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Stanislaw Lem: The Passing of a Deep Spirit

Stanislaw Lem, the great Polish "science fiction" writer died on March 27, 2006, at the age of 85. Two of Lem's works have played a role in the Chaos and Fractals course, and I describe the connection below. First, though, must be a tribute to this extraordinary writer.

Even though I know many who read, or have read a great deal of science fiction, I know very few who have read any of Lem's works. This is very odd, given that Lems' works have been translated into over 40 languages, with an estimated 27 million sold. (Some do read and prosper: Will Wright, the creator of the wildly popular SimCity simultaion game credits Lem's The Cyberiad as inspiration. )

With sci-fi readers (in the U.S., at least) not paying attention, what hope is there for more readership of this essential 20th-century author who is usually listed as I wrote above - a science -fiction writer, only without the quotes.

It has always been unfortunate that Lem's works are described as science fiction. This is itself a fiction. Lem - a brilliant scientist, writer, and thinker - told wonderful tales with an unnerving mixture of darkness, humor, philosophy, and theology that just happened to be placed deep in space, or inside a computer. While the location and time period of his stories are essential to their plots, Lem's stories are often more relevant to our current time and place because of his ability to paint rich characters in situations that are paradoxically both imaginable and impossibly strange.

Lem's life as a scientist and writer growing up in Poland, through Nazi occupation and Soviet rule, is much of the reason for his chosen genre, as described in the Times of London obituary -

He began to write fiction, his first works being in the tradition of socialist realism acceptable to the authorities. But he graduated to literary "fantasies", which he succeeded in hoodwinking the humourless and dogma-bound authorities into believing were innocuous, though they were in fact highly subversive and satirical.

I first read Lem in 1983, when my best friend, Eric Törnqvist, gave me a copy of Solaris as a birthday gift and demanded that I read it. To this day it remains not just the greatest "science fiction" that I have ever read, but one of the best books I have ever read. It is a book in which there is no action of the type usually associated with a sci-fi stories. Instead, Solaris chronicles centuries of observation of a liquid planet and its seemingly non-descript moons, a planet that may be sentient, and may be malicious. With this simple idea , an idea that seems to present little opportunity for

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Chaos, Consciousness, & Dreaming

Originally Posted by Rachel Hensey and John Sehi

In a dream, Paul McCartney (1965) created the melody to the popular song, "Yesterday."  Likewise, Tse Wen (2003) was inspired in a dream in which he developed a breakthrough drug that greatly reduces the risks for people who suffer from peanut allergies. These two men are examples of scientists, musicians, athletes, mathematicians, writers, and artists who have reported accounts of moments of inspiration or breakthroughs during dreaming time.

This construction of nonlinear meaning that occurs during dreaming is an example of chaos theory at work in the brain. The brain is a complex, chaotic system, and small shifts in its input during any state can dramatically alter how it operates. Inputs of order and chaos cause a tension in the brain that is mandatory for proper growth. Without the input from order, the brain would dream too much and thus fall into irrationality. Without the input from chaos, the brain would no longer dream and thus would function like a robot/automaton, without any real creativity. The output (our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors) depends upon a proper blend of chaos and order. For additional information on chaos in the brain, click here.

Pondering Life...A Reaction to Non Serviam

Originally Posted by Meridyth Mascio

In the personal struggle to determine whether my mind has been created to think mathematically, I have started to look at my general feelings of disdain for computers. In actuality, I realize their usefulness, but I struggle with my one-on-one daily encounters with them. It has always bothered me that if a program stopped running or an error occurred, then I could not obtain a direct response to my questioning what had caused the error. I think that I now see that I find it unnatural to communicate with this entity as it does not possess consciousness (a term described frequently in Non Serviam).

A computer does not perceive the contradictions that qualify humanity. Logic is not the only component of a person; beings are diverse. As mathematics underlies the structure of the world, the "chaotic" element are the perspectives of human beings. We see things as we perceive them, and so the world is defined intrinsically to each individual as such. However, are these decisions and perspectives "programmed" into us? If so, can is it possible for us to ever replicate this program?

So many other questions remain in my mind from this reading: Why have we been "created"? What is the general purpose of humanity? What is my individual purpose? Are humans guided by some unknowing force? How do religious beliefs factor into our existence?

I had never before considered the idea of an "intermediate" God, where the one who has directly created us has been created by yet another "higher" power. Is this chain infinite? Can a process then ever be broken down to one?...

These questions plague my mind. I feel as though humans are trapped in the midst of incomprehensible infinities, never able to grasp the full extent of everything in the universe and yet not ever quite able to break down one situation, one entity completely (some sort of fractal nature).

What I do realize is that the scope of the world is beyond me; more specifically, I think that the reality of one's individuality is beyond any limited human perspective.