[General] SR

Sun Nov 12 16:20:00 PST 2017

Dear Grahame,

You wrote: "For massive neural networks that are remarkably adept at seeing patterns in randomness, this would be no problem – it’s almost guaranteed."

We tend to never think about this, but we each have at our disposal a personal copy of the most massive neural network in existence, our neocortex. 

Its only handicap is our tendency to become certain of our conclusions, which causes us to stop correlating possible further pertaining data that should cause reconsideration, which perfectly accounts for your observations about past history.

If interested about this specific issue, this article synthesizes the research done in this regard by Pavlov, Hebb and Chauchard:

https://www.omicsonline.org/open-access/on-the-relation-between-the-comprehension-ability-and-the-neocortexverbal-areas-2155-6180-1000331.pdf
Best Regards

---
André Michaud
GSJournal admin
http://www.gsjournal.net/
http://www.srpinc.org/

On Sun, 12 Nov 2017 22:30:49 -0000, "Dr Grahame Blackwell"  wrote:

Dear All,

In the past five days two members of this group have questioned if/why we should be discussing the issue of whether SR is a subjective or objective phenomenon (or, as I see it to be, a combination of both of these).

This leads me to think that maybe a(n) historical parallel is called for.

Please consider the following:

Around 1670 Newton discovered that white light can be split into its component colours – the visible spectrum – by passing it through a prism. In true scientific fashion he then investigated whether those component colours can be further subdivided, and of course found that further separation simply refines the shades of those colours as they smoothly transition from one to the next: red through to violet.

130 years later Herschel accidentally stumbled across evidence of a heating effect beyond the red end of the visible spectrum, whilst trying to find a way to cut down the glare when looking at the sun through a telescope – he had discovered infrared. However, he rejected the notion that this effect and light are associated phenomena, stating that “the law by which heat is transmitted is different from that which directs the passage of light; and, in this case, it must become an irrefragable [irrefutable] argument of the difference of rays which occasion them.” In other words, Herschel himself rejected the evidence of his own experiment that suggested ‘invisible colours’ beyond the red end of the spectrum, and returned to his telescope. The scientific community as a whole agreed with him, choosing not to pick up this potential breakthrough and run with it.

A notable exception was Ritter, who conducted experiments at the other end of the visible spectrum and found chemical effectsfrom the region beyond violet: he had discovered ultra-violet. It’s significant, though (particularly in light of my observation below), that rather than this being seen as an extension of the visible spectrum it was regarded as a different type of radiation, ‘actinic rays’, that gave rise to chemical reactions. Not only were Ritter’s experiments highly criticised by his peers, any possible opening-up now of the light spectrum was dashed by the common view that there were in fact three separate but overlapping spectra: heat, light and ‘actinic rays’.

Another player in this game was of course Young, whose ‘slits’ experiment demonstrated the wave-like nature of light. His findings were not received well by other scientists, not least because most people venerated Newton and so Newton’s corpuscular theory of light for them could not be wrong; the suggestion that light was anything other than corpuscular was out of line with Newton’s views and thus unsound (this wasn’t helped by Young assuming a longitudinal waveform, which was blown out of the water by Malus’ discoveries re polarization). Young decided instead to focus on medicine.

It was left to Fresnel, 15 years later, to establish that light is in fact a transverse wave – though neither this nor Fraunhofer’s work the following year appears to have led to any investigation of possible ‘invisible light’ from the same type of wave outside the visible range.

It was 50 years after this that Maxwell introduced the totally new concept that light is in fact an electromagnetic construct. 20 years after that Hertz demonstrated the existence of ‘invisible light’ extending out very significantly from both ends of the visible spectrum – and the rest, as they say, is history. Note that this development followed directly from a breakthrough in understanding ofthe underlying mechanism giving rise to light.

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

There’s another aspect of this that seems to me quite significant, but that I’ve never seen written about anywhere. I suspect that few (if any) others have considered it consciously, but I have little doubt that it’s affected perception of the situation at a subconscious level. It has to do with the sequence of colours in the spectrum and the mixing of colours.

In the spectrum, colours transition from red to yellow via orange. Orange light can of course be monochromatic – or it can be a mixture of red and yellow, the two colours that it lies between. Similarly, yellow transitions to blue via green: green light may be monochromatic – or it may be a mixture of yellow and blue, the colours either side of it in the spectrum.

Now let’s consider violet/purple: this may be monochromatic – or it may be a mixture of blue and red. At some level – if not consciously – this carries the impression that violet is the ‘transition’ colour from blue to red, lying between blue and red in the spectrum. This in turn sows the seed in the mind – again at a subconscious level – that the visible spectrum is a closed loop: from red via orange to yellow, from yellow via green to blue, from blue via purple to red ….. *

[* Note that this is unlikely to be either accident or coincidence. Our minds are very good at ‘joining up loose ends’, also at economical representation of data. It’s more than likely that as a part of the evolutionary process our minds have rationalised an apparently illogically open-ended system by closing the spectrum loop, at the same time reducing the number of colours our grey cells have to accommodate. For massive neural networks that are remarkably adept at seeing patterns in randomness, this would be no problem – it’s almost guaranteed.]

Although this has never actually been explicitly stated – or maybe even consciously recognised – it’s almost inevitable that this would lead to a disinclination to search beyond the ends of the visible spectrum – since a closed loop has no end. It’s not totally surprising, therefore, that no attempt was made to follow up Newton’s identification of the spectrum by looking for further ‘colours’ beyond either end of that spectrum – note that Newton’s own search was confined to deeper investigation within that range; nor that those who came across evidence of such ‘invisible colours’ more than 130 years later were greeted with disinterest, scepticism, or outright offensiveness – to the extent that, for the most part, they walked away from their discoveries and found something more fruitful to which to apply their considerable talents.

It was to be another 80 years – more than 200 years after Newton’s characterisation of the visible spectrum – before Heinrich Hertz actually broke open that ‘closed loop’ and experimentally revealed the unlimited extent of those ‘invisible colours’, acting on theoretical evidence from Maxwell just 20 years before. Note that this discovery was occasioned not by a questioning of the apparent limitations of the visible spectrum, but by prior identification of the underlying ‘causation’ of that spectrum as periodic oscillations of electromagnetic fields. Without Maxwell’s investigative work in that apparently unrelated field (electromagnetism), and his realisation that the propagation rate of such field effects exactly matched that of light, we would be no further on now in our understanding of the spectrum than in Newton’s day almost 350 years ago.

===================

So to sum up:

We have a possible avenue of research virtually unexplored for 200 years – with attempts to open up that field rejected and roundly ridiculed, due primarily to (a) their conflict with the views of a highly-regarded historical figure, and (b) arguably, evidence of our own senses that it’s a tightly defined system with no room for going outside clearly-defined parameters. The only way for that field to be opened up, ultimately, was for evidence from another area of investigation to reveal the underlying mechanisms of that phenomenon, showing that field to be far wider and more rich in potential than had formerly been recognised.

Sounds familiar? And do we have to wait another 100 years?

Cheers,

Grahame

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