Town hall meeting during dangerous times

Town hall meeting at Monarch High School in Louisville today with Colorado Representative Joe Neguse and Senator Michael Bennet.

They didn't seem to have that concrete of a plan for how we get out of this mess, but it felt great to be in a packed auditorium with thoughtful, enthusiastic people concerned about where our country is going. There was a feeling that at least so far, things are not falling apart at a local level.

 

And Neguse and Bennet were very aware that we are not in normal times. They seemed to really get the danger of the moment and were engaged and willing to listen to try to do what they can. I appreciated Bennet's historical perspective in which he said that he didn't actually think this was the worst moment in American democracy. He encouraged everyone to get involved, reminding us that "there is nothing in democracy that is self executing." Neguse's message regarding what we can do to make a difference is to try to make sure that everyone who is badly impacted by Trump's policies tells their story. He said that many of the executive orders have been walked back after push back and outcry from the public.

 

One of the best aspects (that I also experienced in Denver yesterday) is the conversations in line, and while waiting in the bleachers. There just seems to be palpable relief to talk to other people about this and not feel alone in the fear of what Trump is trying to do. Neguse reminded us that Trump's strategy of "flooding the zone" is supposed to make us feel helpless and to give up. Events like this pierce through that feeling of hopelessness that Fascism requires to succeed.

 

Kudos to Neguse and Bennet for doing these events, in contrast to the many Republicans who are hiding from their constituents. Neguse told us that he did several town halls in strongly Republican districts and got a big turn out with a lot of engagement. He seemed hopeful that at some point some Republicans may feel concerned about their election possibilities and do something. Of course, so far this doesn't seem to have happened, and Trump has been remarkably successful at cultivating a cult of personality amongst the Republicans.

Electron beams, stochastic processes and quantum mechanics

As the US government is taken over by Musk, Fascism solidifies and plans are carried out to destroy government infrastructure and our world-class science as well as undermine civil rights. Meanwhile I'm stuck inside, w/ a minor cold (snow and low temperatures in Colorado). I'm trying to get an application done for Denver University physics department by Saturday. I didn't succeed with the CU Boulder application, which was disappointing, though not so surprising. There are also some open positions at Colorado School of Mines I may apply for. Of course, the political changes make all of this a lot more uncertain.

Meanwhile, I'm reading a lot about stochastic processes to go back to my PhD thesis and try to give a clearer formulation of intrabeam scattering and synchrotron radiation for spin depolarization in high energy electron storage rings. I'm reading books and papers on stochastic differential equations: white noise, Ito calculus, Wiener process, Fokker Planck equation, etc.

I've also been trying to understand Jacob Barandes' "Stochastic Quantum Correspondence"  https://arxiv.org/abs/2302.10778
It gives a mapping between a quantum system with a Hilbert space, Hamiltonian and unitary maps, and a general stochastic process with transition probabilities. If the stochastic matrix factorizes at a given time, then you get classical behavior, if not you get quantum behavior (so-called divisible/indivisible processes). There are still interpretational questions about what types of things are actually going through this process, and Barandes is agnostic on the ontology. Still, a lot of difficult questions, like measurement, local causality, etc. are given easier, less murky explanations. I still think there may be some connection to consciousness, but the discussion is shifted and it feels more solvable. I'm appreciative of Barandes bringing this question into a more fruitful and deep conversation with philosophy.

Some additional commentary and possible critique on Barandes' work I've been trying to understand:
https://coexactly.github.io/blog/posts/stochastic-quantum/

Since I don't have a job for now, I may as well try to dig deep in various topics. Shoring up my understandings of stochastic processes and quantum mechanics is something I've long wanted to do. Of course, the dangerous developments of our government can take up a lot of my attention. I'm trying to not let that take over.

I'm hoping this material may help me with my research statement in my application. They want someone to support a program on quantum materials and information science, and this stuff, together with my experience with synchrotron light sources, beamline modeling and machine learning could make a strong application. I put a lot of time into the climate science research statement for CU, but this material may be less of a stretch for the committee, and maybe gives me a better chance to succeed, even though I was excited to try to move ahead on the climate science front.

American Identity

 

I'm watching the Star Trek: Next Generation episode "Birthright" about Worf finding a group of Klingons and Romulons who have learned to live together. Worf brings the Klingon kids their stories and traditions and this disrupts the balance with the Romulons.

 

What I wonder is how new stories and identities are created. Losing history and tradition isn't the answer, but one must also create new traditions.

 

I think about what the American identity is. I think we are being over-run by a limited, small idea of American identity right now.

 

How do we braid the threads of tradition together to form an American identity that can hold us together, but deny no one's history? The attempt to say that whiteness and Christianity is the American identity, is too cheap, too crude, and too disrespectful of so many people's histories. Jewish history must be part of what it is to be American as well as Islamic, Chinese, European, South American, and all other histories and ethnicities that make up the American people.

 

Multi-culturalism is part of the answer, but we also need a stronger answer about what it means to be an American. How else do we all feel a commonality with which we can work together?

 

Probably more reconciliation and reparations are necessary. The native American and African American histories and identities have been disrespected. My intuition is that part of what brings us to this moment of break-down is our failure to find a just integration of all our histories in the US.

What kind of resistance for American Totalitarianism?

 A lot of quotes by Hannah Arendt have been going around in my online circles in the last few days. (Here's some essays on Arendt by one of my favorite writers on technology criticism, Michael Sacasas: https://thefrailestthing.com/tag/hannah-arendt/)

 

Arendt was one of the great chroniclers of Totalitarianism, through Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia and after their downfall. When I think about what is happening in the US, the parallels are very strong, and I think it likely that the lessons learned from fascism and totalitarianism in the past will be very useful in dealing with what is to come.

 

At the same time, when I think about what I know of those who resisted during those times, the story feels so dire and my imagination shuts down. I'm more inspired by the history of civil rights, resistance to the Vietnam war and all the other progressive causes that have been so hard won in the US. There is a dramatic attempt to shut them all down and reverse all of that progress. How do we tap into this history of the US and move forward with courage and pride? We have to think about what we love about the US. If we don't fight for it, it will be taken away, faster than we can imagine. I think one needs to fight out of love, and not out of fear. That's what I'm working with right now. The fear is easy to find, right there on the surface. The love may be more ellusive, but it is also there, and deeper down and more sustainable.

An awful election: reflections

 

Well, another day has passed, and it still seems like Trump won the election. I hate this. I'm not sure I've really understood why people voted for this wanna-be dictator. The most resonant point to me that I've heard is that the US wasn't ready to elect a competent, effective woman president. And so we elected a monstrous man instead. This explanation, mixed with a fractured media environment (TV networks + social media) that could be gamed by bad actors gives the start of an explanation for this awful result.

I've often felt through my life that I would end up involved in some kind of non-violent resistance movement. So here we are. What will it look like? Let's hope this setback leads us forward to create a climate and justice movement of the scale needed to face the new time on this planet we are up against.

 

An idea comes up as I think about how to move forward. I've been reading "The Process Model" by Eugene Gendlin, the creator of the psychological technique of focusing. It's a terribly abstract book, extremely frustrating at times, but also with a large scope of trying to create another way of thinking that includes life and consciousness and first person perspective and pushes back against the Cartesian mind-body split. It fights back against reductionism by starting with fully functioning processes rather than trying to build them up from their parts. Gendlin next introduces the concept of a stoppage in which something prevents the process from moving forward (e.g. a lack of food means the feeding-energy gathering process can't move forward). Out of this stoppage, the process is able to change and evolve. Trump's election is a kind of stoppage in our political process. How can we respond creatively to encompass a larger perspective that moves our world forward?

 

A soft snow fell on us yesterday here in Colorado. Here's a plum tree, its green, yellow and orange leaves dusted with snow. This world is too beautiful to give up on.

 

Who inspires you during this time? I've looked to Gandhi and MLK as leaders of non-violent resistance. Who else can we look to for guidance as we find our way forward through this next challenge?

More clarity on the limits of reductionism

 

I've been really enjoying Erik Hoel's book "The world behind the world". (https://www.simonandschuster.com/.../Erik-Hoel/9781982159382)

 

Spending so many years on particle accelerators and synchrotron light sources, I started to think about the x-ray experiments that are done at these facilities. They are an important part of looking at and understanding the world at an atomic scale. For example, a large percentage of protein structures have been determined by x-ray diffraction experiments at synchrotron light sources.

One of the primary tools of science is reductionism, which seeks to look at smaller and smaller scales in order to explain: understanding by breaking something down to smaller parts. While it's certainly extremely valuable, it also has its limits, and feeds into what John Vervaeke calls "The meaning crisis", one manifestation of which is the idea that we "are nothing but a collection of atoms", or perhaps nothing but molecules, or perhaps nothing but quarks, electrons and photon excitations within the standard model in a quantum field theory framework. In high school, I remember reading Dawkins' "Selfish Gene" and getting quite depressed about this view of ourselves as only truly real, or interesting on the level of DNA/RNA.

 

I've long been interested in arguments showing the limits of this kind of thinking. Hoel's work is really helpful in this respect. I have more to learn, but one very concrete result is in terms of "causal emergence" (see https://arxiv.org/abs/2202.01854 )

(I'm also motivated to get back to the writings of the philosopher Nancy Cartwright, who talks about the limits of the language of physics in her books such as "The Dappled World" and "How the Laws of Physics Lie")

 

Hoel shows that under a wide range of concepts of causality, that one actually gains causal power when one goes up to larger scales. This relates to multiple realizability (e.g. how our bodies are replaced by new matter, but our identity remains, or the Ship of Theseus which is slowly replaced part by part). As biological systems evolve, there is a pressure to create large scale causal systems that are robust to changing randomness and complexity at the micro-scale. (It's nice to see Judea Pearl's work on causation referenced as well. I really loved "The Book of Why", which Josip recommended.)

 

I also learned a lot from this talk by Vervaeke (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vazO36OnGKI) in which he gives arguments towards a Neo-platonist ontology. He mentions Hoel's work here. This moves us beyond a purely materialist way of thinking, and makes room for transcendence and spirituality.

Further, the arguments in Hoel's work, show why "The selfish gene" picture is limited: there are causal structures at many different scales. And most of the human world that we care about exists at a larger scale than our genes. Our friendships and commitments, our intellectual pursuits and our everyday existence in our bodies is not on the level of DNA and does indeed have causal efficacy.

 

Anyway, this is another one of my directions that I'm really appreciating having more free time to explore!

Continuity between places

 As I start to think about what I may do next, I come back to the idea that I don't want to leave behind what I've done, either work-wise or community-wise.

I heard about a job opening in Berkeley and I think about moving there. At the same time, I've been really appreciating and getting deeper into my cohousing community here in Colorado. And I appreciate my art studio and the developing community through that.

I guess if I did move back to the bay area, I'd probably look for cohousing there and for an art community there as well.