Origin Gaps and the Eternal Sunshine of the Second-Order Pendulum

The rich experiences of an intentional, goal-oriented life emerge, in an unpredictable fashion, from the basic laws of physics. Here I argue that this unpredictability is no mirage: there are true gaps between life and non-life, mind and mindlessness, and even between functional societies and groups of Hobbesian individuals. These gaps, I suggest, emerge from the mathematics of self-reference, and the logical barriers to prediction that self-referring systems present. Still, a mathematical truth does not imply a physical one: the universe need not have made self-reference possible. It did, and the question then is how. In the second half of this essay, I show how a basic move in physics, known as renormalization, transforms the "forgetful" second-order equations of fundamental physics into a rich, self-referential world that makes possible the major transitions we care so much about. While the universe runs in assembly code, the coarse-grained version runs in LISP, and it is from that the world of aim and intention grows.Comment: FQXI Prize Essay 2017. 18 pages, including afterword on Ostrogradsky's Theorem and an exchange with John Bova, Dresden Craig, and Paul Livingsto

Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Machinocene: Illusions of instrumental reason

In their seminal work, Dialectics of Enlightenment, Horkheimer and Adorno interpreted capitalism as the irrational monetization of nature. In the present work, I analyze three 21st century concepts, Anthropocene, Capitalocene and Machinocene, in light of Horkheimer and Adorno’s arguments and recent arguments from the philosophy of biology. The analysis reveals a remarkable prescience of the term “instrumental reason”, which is present in each of the three concepts in a profound and cryptic way. In my interpretation, the term describes the propensity of science based on the notion of physicalism to interpret nature as the machine analyzable and programmable by the human reason. As a result, the Anthropocene concept is built around the mechanicist model, which may be presented as the metaphor of the car without brakes. In a similar fashion, the Machinocene concept predicts the emergence of the mechanical mind, which will dominate nature in the near future. Finally, the Capitalocene concept turns a perfectly rational ambition to expand knowledge into an irrational obsession with over-knowledge, by employing the institutionalized science as the engine of capitalism without brakes. The common denominator of all three concepts is the irrational propensity to legitimize self-destruction. Potential avenues for countering the effects of “instrumental reason” are suggested

Creation and Revelation: Two Edges of Contact Between Science and Religion

The author, who is a physicist, engages in theological conjecture suggested by some of the concepts of his discipline, demonstrating the fruitfulness of creative appropriation of ideas across disciplinary boundaries. Two futuristic scenes contrast possible developments of the Church within a technological society

The Riddle of Gravitation

There is no doubt that both the special and general theories of relativity capture the imagination. The anti-intuitive properties of the special theory of relativity and its deep philosophical implications, the bizzare and dazzling predictions of the general theory of relativity: the curvature of spacetime, the exotic characteristics of black holes, the bewildering prospects of gravitational waves, the discovery of astronomical objects as quasers and pulsers, the expansion and the (possible) recontraction of the universe..., are all breathtaking phenomena. In this paper, we give a philosophical non-technical treatment of both the special and the general theory of relativity together with an exposition of some of the latest physical theories. We then give an outline of an axiomatic approach to relativity theories due to Andreka and Nemeti that throws light on the logical structure of both theories. This is followed by an exposition of some of the bewildering results established by Andreka and Nemeti concerning the foundations of mathematics using the notion of relativistic computers. We next give a survey on the meaning and philosophical implications of the the quantum theory and end the paper by an imaginary debate between Einstein and Neils Bohr reflecting both Einstein's and Bohr's philosophical views on the quantum world. The paper is written in a somewhat untraditional manner; there are too many footnotes. In order not to burden the reader with all the details, we have collected the more advanced material the footnotes. We think that this makes the paper easier to read and simpler to follow. The paper in full is adressed more to experts.Comment: 40 pages, LaTeX-fil

High-Precision Numerical Simulations of Rotating Black Holes Accelerated by CUDA

Hardware accelerators (such as Nvidia's CUDA GPUs) have tremendous promise for computational science, because they can deliver large gains in performance at relatively low cost. In this work, we focus on the use of Nvidia's Tesla GPU for high-precision (double, quadruple and octal precision) numerical simulations in the area of black hole physics -- more specifically, solving a partial-differential-equation using finite-differencing. We describe our approach in detail and present the final performance results as compared with a single-core desktop processor and also the Cell BE. We obtain mixed results -- order-of-magnitude gains in overall performance in some cases and negligible gains in others.Comment: 6 pages, 1 figure, 1 table, Accepted for publication in the International Conference on High Performance Computing Systems (HPCS 2010