Consciousness and Second law of Thermodynamics

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I have wondered in the past (and guess written an article somewhere on my blog) about how coming across Heisenberg uncertainty made me think that this is the first time science, especially hard science like particle physic, has brushed against the boundary of human consciousness. The more and more uncertainty is explored, especially with experiments like Wheeler delayed choice experiment, it seems to me that what creates the paradoxes that throw our intuition a curved ball is the presence of conscious observer, or more generally introduction of consciousness in the experiment. The very fact that someone is watching that experiment changes outcome of that experiment.

So Heisenberg Uncertainty principle made us confront the fact that there is consciousness in the universe, which is trying to know the universe.

Is there any other law that has come close to this area before?

I think yes. I think the second law of thermodynamics has actually come across this problem before. When consciousnes is introduced, we get into a territory that the law may or may not apply.

Second law of thermodynamics is expressed by various scientists, but I like the Uhlenbeck and Ford statement – ” In an irreversible or spontaneous change from one equilibrium state to another (as for example the equalization of temperature of two bodies A and B, when brought in contact) the entropy always increases.”

Seems rather obvious, well researched and proven beyond doubt, right? Where does the question of consciousness come here?

Aha, the word “sponteneous” is the key here. The author of this statement is acknowledging sponteneous change is the boundary. That means non sponteneous changes, such as those performed by an entity exerting its willpower, are not under the jurisdiction of the law.

This is what we clearly see. Take a ball and throw it on a slope and it will roll downhill. But a human being can push the ball up the slope. So take a state of the ball before being human started pushing up and after human done pushing up. The ball has gained energy through intervention of human consciousness.

Could the ball have gone up by itself? Yes, perhaps in case of some kind of magnetic field, or something like that. But in that case, the gain in one form of energy would come only at the cost of some other form of energy.

So if we consider the ball as a system, isolated from its environment and also excluded is the actor who can push or pull, the ball can undergo increase in entropy that cannot be explained by any of the physical properties of the ball. If there are 10 balls and a human is asked randomly to pick a ball and move it upwards so it gains potential energy, then the gain in that particular ball’s height cannot be explained by it’s physical properties alone. It can be only explained when taken into account human intention.

So consciousness can in fact result in increase entropy of a particular subsystem in the universe (but not that of the universe as a whole). Thus exposing boundaries of second law of thermodynamics.

Subjectivity Is The New Relativity

Every now and then I open “The Elegant Universe” and read a couple chapters. I like that book. If you don’t know, it’s a great book about string theory that explains other concepts of physics, like relativity and quantum mechanics quite well.

At first, a disclaimer. I am not a scientist. I just like to read about it and think. I may be completely off mark here. All I am saying is that this is what I ended up thinking.

Back to the topic. I was reading the chapter about Quantum theory and how Quantum theory predicts infinite probability of certain events in black holes. With the current mathematical understanding of probability, the probability of all the possible outcomes of an event should add up to 1. So what does any value of probability, may it be 2, 10 or infinity really mean? On the face it seems nonsense.

But if you think about probability a little differently, it does make sense.

When we think of events and their probability, one thing we always take for granted is presence of observer and the act of observation. So essentially we are not taking about events, but about “event-observations”. And what we call probability today is formed of two factors  -“happenabiliy” and “observability”. Observability is what we always take for granted.

When a event-observation occurs, there is some energy of the system under observation and there is some energy used to observe it. In most of the real life, the energy used to observe is so small compared to the energy of the system observed that it does not disturb the system that much.

Imagine a bag containing a black ball and white ball. If you take out a ball and it is black, the probability of the ball in the bag being white is 1. But that is provided the photons used for observation do not change the color of the ball.

If you used sufficiently high energy photons, you might significantly change the color of the balls while observing, may be by burning the surface of the ball or something. Thus, in spite of you using one black and one white balls, the probability of a ball being white or black will be smaller than 0.5 each. Thus the (probability of drawing white ball + probability of drawing black ball) will not be equal to 1. For sufficiently high energy photons, the combined probability (black and white) will be almost zero. This is a case where the observation has a high chance to disturb the system/event.

In other side extreme case, if it is impossible for observation to disturb the system, i.e. in case of black hole, where the amount of energy of system is infinite, making observation impossible, the probability should be infinite.

In scientific terms if I have to define observability, I will define it as the ratio of (enthalpy of the system-event / enthalpy of the observer). As this ratio starts approaching zero, observability goes to zero and the probability goes to infinity.

This brings us to the boundary of a very serious scientific issue. Even if you and I both are observing the same ball, we are using different photons. So in effect we have two event-observations. Or in another words, what you are watching is slightly different from what I am watching. That means every experience in reality is subjective. That literally threatens to pull the rug under the feet of science. Because we all agree that we don’t call it science unless it’s verifiable and it’s not verifiable unless it’s objective. No place for subjectivity.

Or is it? About a century back the world of physics was still Newtonian. Everything was absolute. Einstein shattered this world and introduced the concept of relativity. He postulated that the world looks different if you are in different frame of reference and and if there are discrepancies in different worlds as observed from different frames of reference, there is no way to reconcile. It’s just different experience.

May be we are at crossroads and need to make a decision. Science needs to be logical first or verifiable first? If it needs to be logical more than verifiable, then the natural logical development of the facts at our hand is subjectivity, the fact that your experience of an event and my experience of an event will be different and if there is an discrepancy, we will never be able to resolve it. If we really dig deep, we might find that the speed of light and other physics constants are slightly different for you and for me. Even in the same reference frame, the world relative to you is different from the world relative to me.

Thus, subjectivity might be the new relativity.

“The Lost Glasses” Problem

A couple days back I lost my eye-glasses. My eyesight is not that bad without the eye-glasses. But it indeed threw me off a bit.

Losing eye-glasses seems to be one interesting type of problem. The very existence of the problem reduces your ability to solve the problem. Like if you lost keys, you can search keys fine. Losing keys does not affect your ability to search for the keys, but losing glasses does.

I started to think about other kinds of problems of this type. Alcoholism also seems to be of the same type. The very fact that you are drunk takes your ability to think straight and makes it harder to kick the habit.

Often times, when estimating the difficulty to solve the problem, we only consider the magnitude of effect the problem has on our lives or the level of difficulty involved in solving it. But there are two more dimensions. I am just going to coin my own terms here for the lack of existing words or for lack of my vocabulary. “Visibility-affector” is how easy the problem makes to notice itself, and “Fix-ability-affector”- or how the problem effect our abilities to solve the problem. Together, these two factors can created a cognitive dissonance, compromising our ability to comprehend and fix the problem.

Visibility-affect can be positive, where the problem is as we see it. Like spilled coffee.

It can be zero, where it is hard or impossible to see the problem from the symptoms and we have to go on wild goose hunt. Like finding who stole my phone. I just see the phone is gone, but seeing that the phone is gone does not help me to find who took it.

It can be negative. In this case, the symptoms make us believe exact opposite of what the problem really is. A paradox situation. I remember reading in a six sigma book about how an attempt to control a process can make it go haywire and make you believe that you are not controlling it enough, thus making you believe that more control is needed. While in fact, the improvement can be seen by controlling less. There are some dogs who go on eating till they die, unless stopped by someone else. Because when the dogs overeat and feel discomfort, they feel like the discomfort can be fixed by eating more.

The second dimension is “fix-ability-affect” can be affected in positive, zero and negative way as well.

In positive fix-ability-affect, the very nature of problem increases our ability to fix it. Like in an attempt to design a light electric vehicle, say you are forced to reduce the size of battery, then the weight of the battery goes down. This makes the required size of chassis smaller , thus helping your goal of reducing the overall weight. So when you try to make a vehicle 1 kg lighter, you end up making it 1.5 kg lighter.

In zero fix-ability-affect, the problem does not effect our ability to fix it. This is very common case. Like spilled coffee. It neither increases nor reduces your ability to clean it.

And the third is negative fix-ability-affect, like losing glasses, or becoming alcoholic. As clearly seen, these kinds of problems can be hard to solve.

 

“Kids on The Train Tracks” Problem And Design of Social Systems

A thinking exercise. Say there are two railroad tracks. One track is closed for use, another is in use. Five or six children are playing on the open track. One child is playing on the closed track.

A train is coming from away. The train blows the horn, but it’s not working. The train is too close now and the only option the driver has is to switch the tracks. Whether he should continue on the track he is on and hit five kids or whether he should switch temporarily to the closed track and hit the only kid there?

The quick reflex answer, a response grounded in humanity for most people, is to switch the tracks and hit one kid instead of five. Why not? The less casualties, the better. Right?

Here is a risk reward matrix that explains the decision.

Action	Risk	Reward
Take open track	Kill more kids for sure	100% safety of train passengers, 100% guarantee that anyone who has followed instructions is safe.
Take closed track	Risk train passengers, risk future confusion	Kill less number of kids in short term.

On deeper thought, the kid playing on the closed track might have inquired which track is closed before playing there. He/she might have asked the train company and might have trusted in the answer they gave. If the lone kid has done his/her due diligence, then switching the tracks seems something very unfair, an injustice to the kid.

Even if the kid playing on the closed track had not confirmed the track closure, letting the train driver decide who lives and who dies creates a confusing and dangerous situation for future kids playing on the tracks. Kids do not have a firm rule to follow to decide where to play. They have to constantly make sure they are playing with bigger group of kids. Or they have to constantly scan the horizon for the oncoming train.

Also not to mention, the closed track might be dangerous for the train to travel on. When passengers board the train, they place their lives in the hands of train driver. The train driver made an implicit promise to them that he/she will them safe. Had the passengers known that the train driver might switch to a possibly risky tracks for humanitarian reasons, some of them might not have boarded the train.

So if the driver switches the tracks, the train passengers, the driver and collectively all kids are left with no clear strategies, clear rules, to make their life decisions.  There is something peculiar happening here. Any line of thought that insists on the train switching track to hit the lone kid makes the decision process dependent on outcome of the decision, i.e. more kids should survive, and has no place for the interests of people involved in decision making process, i.e. the stakeholders, the driver and passengers in this case.

This makes the decision making process complicated for everyone and opens up areas for conflict of interest. In such case, people feel an acute, unexplained sense of discomfort. They do not feel confident. They do not feel in control of their own destiny, something very detrimental to social trust. It leads to everyone preparing for worst case scenario, taking extra steps to reduce their risk, not putting trust in the rules and systems. This lack of social trust, a sense of unfair world, leads to far more casualties in future.

Why fairness is so important? Because the sense of unfair treatment plays on our very primal instincts. In one of the psychological experiment, researchers rewarded two monkeys differently for the same action. For doing the same task, one monkey was rewarded with one raisin,  and the other with five raisins. The monkey that got one raisin should ideally have taken it, because refusing it earns him nothing. But that monkey refused the raisin, showing that even animals notice unfair treatment.

“Fair” system works far better than a “good” system or “beneficial” system in the long run. This is the primary distinction between the two major types of social systems in the world today. A system that guarantees privilages, like socialism and a system that guarantees freedom, like real capitalism (not bailout capitalism). A system that guarantees “larger group of people will survive” guarantees privilage of survival. Whereas a system that guarantees “if you follow rules, you will not die” guarantees you a level of trust, making your decision making simpler, enabling you more choices and thus guaranteeing your freedom. You can still choose to die, but that is your own choice and other people are not put in danger because of you.

This is why Western societies made so much progress. Ideals advocated in revolutions like French and American revolutions, justice and liberty, stressed more on fairness and guaranteeing freedom. Conversely the socialist slogans like “rule of farmers/workers” attempted to guarantee privilages to particular classes in society for a short term. But the guarantee was artificial and soon collapsed.

Both types of revolutions began to correct a society that was unfair to begin with. But socialism/ communism overcompensated and created unfairness from the opposite direction.

Nuclear Warfare III – Nuclear Proliferation And Missile Defense

Date: Sept 26, 1983, Location: Moscow, Soviet Satellite command section.

A few minutes past midnight, Sargent Stanislav Petrov was monitoring the systems as a part of normal routine when suddenly one of the alarms started beeping. The radar system had detected a few missiles launched towards Soviet union.

An inner voice inside his mind was telling Stanislav something was not right. If US wanted to launch a nuclear attack, they would have launched it full scale. They would not have stopped at a few missiles. This was more likely to be a computer glitch.

He faced a tormenting decision. Whether to believe his gut and risk a small chance of destruction of his homeland, or whether to follow proper military protocols and alert nuclear command, which could have resulted in Soviet nuclear missile launch. If he waited a few minutes, the boundary radars would confirm if they are seeing missiles or not. But if they were indeed missiles, it would be too late by then.

At the end, he chose to wait. Boundary radars never went off. There were no missiles. It was a computer mistake. The world came back from a brink of total disaster.

This was not the first incident and the people involved in command and control chains on either side were painfully aware that this would not be the last. While…

The last two posts were dedicated to the understanding of nuclear strategy and strategic countermeasures. This post deals with the latest development, LASER missile defense and its implications of nuclear warfare, especially the phenomena of nuclear proliferation.

Let’s visit the strategic objective equation in the previous post once again.

SOA = SOA1 & SOA2

SOA = ( N1 x PS1 x PH1 x BA > TA ) & (  N2 x PS2 x PH2 x BA > TA )

Where N1,N2 are number of nuclear weapons of first and second strike. PS1 and Ps2 are probability of survival of respective strikes. PH1, PH2 are probability of hitting target, or accuracy of weapons of respective strikes, and BA is area destroyed by each bomb or weapon.

TA is total area of the enemy regions.

As we can see in the initial phase of nuclear race, the nuclear powers were focused on the number of nuclear weapons, N1 and N2. This lead to tremendous increase in number of nuclear weapons. We could call this intra-country nuclear proliferation.

Also there was considerable inter-country nuclear proliferation. This was for two reasons.

One, any nuclear power was happy when one of its allies went nuclear. Russia was willing to deploy weapons in Cuba in 1960s Cuban crisis. America was happy to see Pakistan become nuclear, since it meant some America friendly weapons right at the doorsteps of Russia.

There was second and important reason. Once a country goes nuclear, all countries it had conflict with will also want to go nuclear. South East Asia is good example of this phenomenon. Since China became nuclear, and India had fought war with China, India went nuclear. Then Pakistan felt too vulnerable  and it also went nuclear. Sort of a chain reaction.

Going back to blackboard, let us capture that in an equation. Imagine this as “game of life” simulation.

Let Pc = probability of conflict between two countries.

Nmax  = max number, or total number of countries in the world.

Nx = total number of nuclear countries at iteration no x

Let us say that in every iteration of the game max one conflict happens.

So in x’th iteration, the additional number of countries going nuclear is

delta Nx = probability of conflict x probability of conflict between one nuclear and one non nuclear nation

bool[RND{0-1}(x) > Pc]  gives us whether conflict will happen or not in that iteration, where RND{0-1} is a random number between 0 and 1, Pc is conflict probability (also a fraction larger than 0 and less than 1)

deltaNx = [bool(RND{0-1}(x) > Pc)] * (Nx)C1 * (Ntotal-Nx)C1/(Ntotal)C2

But from the basic permutation combination theory we know that (N) C 1 = N

Thus deltaNx = [bool(RND{0-1}(x) > Pc)] * (Nx) * (Ntotal-Nx)/(Ntotal)C2

Total number of nuclear countries in x’th iteration is summation of countries going nuclear in each iteration from 0 to x.

If we were to actually calculate these using some numbers we would notice one interesting thing. The rate at which the world becomes nuclear increases exponentially with increase in Pc. So if the probability of conflict is doubled, you have four times as many countries going nuclear in the same time, eight times if the probability is tripled and so on.

With global warming, financial crisis, etc. we have lot more possibilities of conflict. So the risk of world becoming nuclear increases very fast. And as we saw, unless you and your opponents are capable of fully destroying each other, there exists a probability of nuclear war in the game. Two smaller powers could really drop nuclear bombs on each other. A rogue dictator, or terrorist hell bent on destruction, could end up firing a nuclear missile or two.

So in this new world, USA is not only worried about full scale attack from Russia, it is also worried about small scale attacks from rogue nations. A credible missile defense will serve two purposes.

One, it will reduce the PH, the probability of hitting enemy’s weapons. As we have seen a reduction in PH by factor of two will require the enemy to double their arsenal. This could result in prohibitive costs. Instead it is easier for the enemy to develop similar missile defense and have similar effect on PH of the first country.

This lead to the development of next phase of nuclear warfare, strategic missile defense. In the decade of 1980s the Americans considered this seriously for the first time. The original ambitious star wars program was later scaled down and was implemented as an array of radars linked with strategically placed surface-to-air missiles. The whole world watched this at work in 1991 gulf war, where Iraqi SCUD missles were intercepted by USA patriot missiles. Even though the accuracy of intercept was only in the range of 2%, it was proven to be a feasible option.

While patriot missiles were being used as interceptors, the work was under way to use direct energy, aka LASER beams. It faced multiple problems. The missiles were too fast, thus the heating energy quickly dissipated. A particular chemical, readily available in paint shops was found to be very effective in reflecting LASERs, thus reducing effective heating. Any such LASER beam would have to be fired from Airplane, which made it challenging to focus a beam accurately over a long distance.

One by one the problems were worked out. Finally on Feb 11, 2010 the US Airforce successfully carried out first test of Airborne Missile Defense using YAG  LASER ( LASER beam created using Yttrium Aluminum garnet crystals as lasing medium).

Apart from USA, Russia, China and India are working on missile shields. But no other country has made significant progress, especially as far as direct energy (LASER) weapons are considered.

Effective missile defense will shift the weight of strategy away  from more missiles and weapons. In addition, it will discourage small scale nuclear powers from developing weapons. They can see that their weapons have very minimal chance of reaching target. They are not likely to have enough resources to develop and deploy enough weapons to cause legitimate threat. That’s why, if you haven’t noticed, the announcement of successful LASER missile defense came from USA shortly after the news that Iran made significant progress in developing nuclear weapons material.

A credible missile shield is still a far shot, but LASER missile defense is a giant step in that direction. Again the world stands on the brink of new age, the age of reduced nuclear arsenal, and if the luck smiles, perhaps one day a nuclear free world.