# Neutrinos and black holes **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [January 24, 2000, 12:15am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/neutrinos-and-black-holes/6519 "2000-01-24T00:15:00Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 9
**Author:** ![allotrope](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/edb3f5/32.png) [@allotrope](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/allotrope)\ **Post date:** [October 6, 2012, 12:05am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/neutrinos-and-black-holes/6519/161 "2012-10-06T00:05:37Z")
> [@cmyk](#): > > can it learn from and correct for errors that affect the way it forms hypothesis in very subtle and abstract ways across its entire [architecture](http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:DeepQA.svg&page=1) as humans do? I had checked to see if it was available w/o being logged in. Odd. Anyway, that seems to be the objective. > [@](#): > > To improve, Watson is now absorbing records - tens of thousands at Sloan-Kettering alone - of treatments and outcomes associated with individual patients. Given data on a new patient, Watson looks for information on those with similar symptoms, as well as the treatments that have been the most successful. The idea is it will give doctors a range of possible diagnoses and treatment options, each with an associated level of confidence. The result will be a system that its creators say can suggest nuanced treatment plans that take into account factors like drug interactions and a patient’s medical history. As for it’s ability to assimilate, collate, etc. Here is it’s [content acquisition strategy](http://www.aaai.org/Magazine/Watson/watson.php) as developed for the Jeopardy challenge. I would imagine that’s been refined a bit over the past year and a half. > [@](#): > > **Content Acquisition** > > The first step in any application of DeepQA to solve a QA problem is content acquisition, or identifying and gathering the content to use for the answer and evidence sources shown in figure 6. > Content acquisition is a combination of manual and automatic steps. The first step is to analyze example questions from the problem space to produce a description of the kinds of questions that must be answered and a characterization of the application domain. Analyzing example questions is primarily a manual task, while domain analysis may be informed by automatic or statistical analyses, such as the LAT analysis shown in figure 1. Given the kinds of questions and broad domain of the _Jeopardy_ Challenge, the sources for Watson include a wide range of encyclopedias, dictionaries, thesauri, newswire articles, literary works, and so on. > Given a reasonable baseline corpus, DeepQA then applies an automatic corpus expansion process. The process involves four high-level steps: (1) identify seed documents and retrieve related documents from the web; (2) extract self-contained text nuggets from the related web documents; (3) score the nuggets based on whether they are informative with respect to the original seed document; and (4) merge the most informative nuggets into the expanded corpus. The live system itself uses this expanded corpus and does not have access to the web during play. > In addition to the content for the answer and evidence sources, DeepQA leverages other kinds of semistructured and structured content. Another step in the content-acquisition process is to identify and collect these resources, which include databases, taxonomies, and ontologies, such as dbPedia,7 WordNet (Miller 1995), and the Yago8 ontology. ---
**Author:** ![Gin\_Bell](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/4af34b/32.png) [@Gin\_Bell](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Gin_Bell)\ **Post date:** [October 6, 2012, 12:12am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/neutrinos-and-black-holes/6519/162 "2012-10-06T00:12:24Z")
> [@cmyk](#): > > I suppose my point is, it’s not cognitive. It cannot _think_ on its own terms, forming its _own_ ideas. It seems the need for survival in nature is one of the basic requirements for consciousness. Even a virus is alive and tries to survive, yet general believe is that a virus is not conscious. Regardless, researchers such as Philip Bell believe that the cell nucleus itself has a viral origin. ---
**Author:** ![Gin\_Bell](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/4af34b/32.png) [@Gin\_Bell](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Gin_Bell)\ **Post date:** [October 6, 2012, 12:35am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/neutrinos-and-black-holes/6519/163 "2012-10-06T00:35:24Z")
If you like to see Watson at work –\> [IBM's Watson Supercomputer Destroys Humans in Jeopardy | Engadget - YouTube](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WFR3lOm_xhE) ---
**Author:** ![Gin\_Bell](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/4af34b/32.png) [@Gin\_Bell](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Gin_Bell)\ **Post date:** [October 6, 2012, 1:16am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/neutrinos-and-black-holes/6519/164 "2012-10-06T01:16:55Z")
Quote “To improve, Watson is now absorbing records” I think Google can beat Watson in many areas. ---
**Author:** ![eschereal](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/eschereal/32/18939_2.png) [@eschereal](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/eschereal)\ **Post date:** [October 6, 2012, 3:16am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/neutrinos-and-black-holes/6519/165 "2012-10-06T03:16:08Z")
The painful question is “_How would Watson feel about the way we have been running it down here?_” Does emotion play a role in qualifying consciousness? That is, I think, a massive can of worms that could be debated for days with no resolution, but it is worth noting that a human who lacks emotion is considered to have one or more types of affective disorder (autism, sociopathy, etc). The crucial point, however, is that Watson is still “it”. When a non-impersonal pronoun is broadly considered more appropriate for a device, then we can start to _feel_ like we have made serious progress toward true self-aware AI. Sophisticated number-crunching correlation systems look good with natural language capabilities, but so far, the UI is little more than fancy window dressing for an elaborate abacus. Even Eliza looks fairly good, but it is really no more than algorithms. ---
**Author:** ![allotrope](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/edb3f5/32.png) [@allotrope](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/allotrope)\ **Post date:** [October 6, 2012, 3:26am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/neutrinos-and-black-holes/6519/166 "2012-10-06T03:26:55Z")
Were they being completely honest, I suspect even the folks at IBM might not object too strenuously to that assessment since in the immediate term, it’s the usefulness of the abacus that will be regarded as the most important consideration. ---
**Author:** ![cmyk](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/cmyk/32/3353_2.png) [@cmyk](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/cmyk)\ **Post date:** [October 6, 2012, 4:07am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/neutrinos-and-black-holes/6519/167 "2012-10-06T04:07:47Z")
> [@Gin\_Bell](#): > > It seems the need for survival in nature is one of the basic requirements for consciousness. Not necessarily, however I’d have no qualms adding that requirement for whatever your definition for "life"is. > [@Gin\_Bell](#): > > Even a virus is alive and tries to survive, yet general believe is that a virus is not conscious. Right, because it hasn’t been shown that consciousness, at least the high levels we’re discussing here, isn’t necessary for life to proliferate. Instinct is something very different than consciousness. > [@Gin\_Bell](#): > > Regardless, researchers such as Philip Bell believe that the cell nucleus itself has a viral origin. Irrelevant. Anyhow, perhaps this thread should be splintered off into Great Debates, now that we’ve gone quite afar fron neutrinos from a zombie thread. ---
**Author:** ![Gin\_Bell](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/4af34b/32.png) [@Gin\_Bell](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Gin_Bell)\ **Post date:** [October 6, 2012, 4:50am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/neutrinos-and-black-holes/6519/168 "2012-10-06T04:50:31Z")
More interesting texts [can be found here](http://www.quantumbrain.org/MindMediatedSpin.pdf). If anyone decides to read it then please let me know what you think ---
**Author:** ![Gin\_Bell](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/4af34b/32.png) [@Gin\_Bell](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Gin_Bell)\ **Post date:** [October 6, 2012, 10:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/neutrinos-and-black-holes/6519/169 "2012-10-06T22:49:17Z")
After reading all this I tend to agree with Niels Bohr, Quote: ‘It is wrong to think that the task of physics is to find out how Nature is. Physics concerns what we say about Nature.’ ---
**Author:** ![Derleth](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/b9e5f3/32.png) [@Derleth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Derleth)\ **Post date:** [October 7, 2012, 1:04am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/neutrinos-and-black-holes/6519/170 "2012-10-07T01:04:14Z")
> [@Bremidon](#): > > What evidence? Evidence as you probably mean it, is only meaningful inside a scientific (or at least rational) construct The computer you’re using is evidence. > [@](#): > > which makes clear that however useful something was in the past, only faith allows us to believe it will continue to be useful in the future. This is nonsense. It’s like saying that you have faith in the fact a rock will drop if released from your hand. **Your definition of ‘faith’ is not useful!** > [@](#): > > Well actually, yes, that is what they state. However, in the interest of brevity, I was incomplete. ‘Wrong’. The word for what you were is ‘wrong’. > [@](#): > > In layman’s terms, his theorems show that for any interesting formal system, you cannot prove all true statements in the system with the system itself (Completeness). If you ever _were_ able to do so, then you would have proven that all statements in that system could be simultaneously proven true _and_ false. All formal systems that are complicated enough to be interesting will suffer this problem. And to top it off, any attempt to _fill the holes_ by adding new axioms to cover the unprovable truths, will simply lead to new unprovable (but true) statements in the system And none of this is relevant to any of the arguments you are making. > [@](#): > > I assumed that you would not want to believe in the inconsistency of mathematics, which means that we have to believe it is incomplete. I have no problem with certain axiom systems being inconsistent. However, others are known to be consistent. > [@](#): > > every fiber of my body says that math _must_ work. Nobody cares what your ‘fibers’ think. We know math works in physics because we test it every single day. > [@](#): > > Einstein: “The more success the quantum theory has, the sillier it looks.” > Richard Feynman: “Nobody understands quantum theory.” > Niels Bohr: “If quantum mechanics hasn’t profoundly shocked you, you haven’t understood it yet.” > Isaac Asimov:“How I want a drink, alcoholic of course, after the heavy lectures involving quantum mechanics!” So? Who says physics has to be intuitive to a bunch of plains apes? After all, Newton didn’t really think that gravity could work at a distance. It isn’t relevant. > [@](#): > > We don’t what? I assume you are refering to the last sentence. I suppose I could appeal to every day events, like turning on your computer with the expectation that the start-up routine will finish. I could appeal to entire industries that exist because the people investing millions or billions of dollars believe that it is possible. Every developer that does not want to lose his job will at some level, believe he has written a program that finishes. All this faith in something that has been _proven_ not to be possible in the general case. It’s almost irrational. And so we see that **Your definition of ‘faith’ is not useful.** ---
**Author:** ![Gin\_Bell](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/4af34b/32.png) [@Gin\_Bell](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Gin_Bell)\ **Post date:** [October 8, 2012, 2:29am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/neutrinos-and-black-holes/6519/171 "2012-10-08T02:29:59Z")
> [@Derleth](#): > > And so we see that **Your definition of ‘faith’ is not useful.** Whether Bremidon’s definition is useful or not is really besides the point. Regardless, I do believe he has a point. Believing in what he said about faith though actually does make things more confusing. Bremidon seems to question even commonly accepted reality. For example when I see something and look away, is it there simply because I have seen it? Or, if I see something but don’t touch it, how can I be sure the object is real? We cannot deny that even in math, we make assumptions and take things for granted. One often believes the conclusions we have come to in science in the past, will still be valid tomorrow. Yet nothing guarantees this. Reality is not a certainty. ---
**Author:** ![Derleth](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/b9e5f3/32.png) [@Derleth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Derleth)\ **Post date:** [October 8, 2012, 3:52am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/neutrinos-and-black-holes/6519/172 "2012-10-08T03:52:43Z")
> [@Gin\_Bell](#): > > Bremidon seems to question even commonly accepted reality. For example when I see something and look away, is it there simply because I have seen it? Or, if I see something but don’t touch it, how can I be sure the object is real? My only response to this is that object permanence is typically mastered by two years of age. > [@](#): > > We cannot deny that even in math, we make assumptions and take things for granted. True. In math, we make our assumptions explicit in the form of ‘axioms’. That’s one of the things mathematics does for us, in fact: It allows us to reason from a fixed set of starting assumptions, as opposed to trying to reason from the contradictory mass of nonsense we humans are pleased to call ‘common sense’. > [@](#): > > Reality is not a certainty What, precisely, do you mean by this? Do you think there’s anything useful to be gained by claiming that the real world might cease to exist tomorrow? (Well, of course there is _something_ useful to be gained, if you consider a false equivalence to be useful.) ---
**Author:** ![cmyk](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/cmyk/32/3353_2.png) [@cmyk](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/cmyk)\ **Post date:** [October 8, 2012, 4:26am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/neutrinos-and-black-holes/6519/173 "2012-10-08T04:26:25Z")
> [@Derleth](#): > > My only response to this is that object permanence is typically mastered by two years of age. > > True. In math, we make our assumptions explicit in the form of ‘axioms’. That’s one of the things mathematics does for us, in fact: It allows us to reason from a fixed set of starting assumptions, as opposed to trying to reason from the contradictory mass of nonsense we humans are pleased to call ‘common sense’. > > What, precisely, do you mean by this? Do you think there’s anything useful to be gained by claiming that the real world might cease to exist tomorrow? (Well, of course there is _something_ useful to be gained, if you consider a false equivalence to be useful.) To add, reality just _is._ It’s indifferent to the way we perceive it. Our brains evolved in reality over millions of years, made up of matter from _this_ reality, and its cognition is rather biased to our body’s sensory input, as to interpret this input in a way we can make sense out of it, and adapt/survive in the reality us humans happen to find ourselves in. To put it another way: We know our brains are biased toward a particular intuition that can be deceiving, yet we do overcome it through the scientific method. Our cognition developed _because_ of the nature of reality, not in spite of it. Reality built us, and if it were playing tricks on the everyday-level, we wouldn’t have survived as a species to even question it, because all logic and reason would fail us. However, we do have evidence of a rabbit hole in QM and GR. How deep it goes, and how much falling to the bottom of it to find out might affect us remains to be seen. ---
**Author:** ![Gin\_Bell](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/4af34b/32.png) [@Gin\_Bell](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Gin_Bell)\ **Post date:** [October 8, 2012, 5:11am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/neutrinos-and-black-holes/6519/174 "2012-10-08T05:11:44Z")
> [@Derleth](#): > > My only response to this is that object permanence is typically mastered by two years of age. Surely when you look at the stars at night, you believe them to be where you see them. :rolleyes: Also, It was not too long ago that we discovered a black hole in the center of each universe and string theory now [explains the big bang](http://wwwphy.princeton.edu/~steinh/npr/) as a collision of two three-dimensional worlds in a space with an extra spatial dimension. How are those for unexpected changes? > [@Derleth](#): > > True. In math, we make our assumptions explicit in the form of ‘axioms’. That’s one of the things mathematics does for us, in fact: It allows us to reason from a fixed set of starting assumptions, as opposed to trying to reason from the contradictory mass of nonsense we humans are pleased to call ‘common sense’. Thus, everything is based on assumptions. > [@Derleth](#): > > What, precisely, do you mean by this? Do you think there’s anything useful to be gained by claiming that the real world might cease to exist tomorrow? (Well, of course there is _something_ useful to be gained, if you consider a false equivalence to be useful.) Well, for starters this thread is very amusing. ---
**Author:** ![cmyk](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/cmyk/32/3353_2.png) [@cmyk](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/cmyk)\ **Post date:** [October 8, 2012, 5:34am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/neutrinos-and-black-holes/6519/175 "2012-10-08T05:34:45Z")
> [@Gin\_Bell](#): > > Thus, everything is based on assumptions.Well, for starters this thread is very amusing. Mathmatics is. Physics starts with what we’ll call “facts”, like, _The sun is bright and hot._ From there you’d make assumptions working from already established theories, hypothesis or “facts” to form a new hypothesis for how the sun works. Now, test your hypothesis with experiments, acquire data, make predictions. If it checks out with your observations, and works within the framework of every other theory in physics, you have yourself a pretty damn good explaination for reality. In physics, you _start_ with “facts” not end with them. ---
**Author:** ![Gin\_Bell](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/4af34b/32.png) [@Gin\_Bell](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Gin_Bell)\ **Post date:** [October 8, 2012, 6:03am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/neutrinos-and-black-holes/6519/176 "2012-10-08T06:03:37Z")
> [@cmyk](#): > > Mathmatics is. Physics starts with what we’ll call “facts”, like, _The sun is bright and hot._ > > From there you’d make assumptions working from already established theories, hypothesis or “facts” to form a new hypothesis for how the sun works. > > Now, test your hypothesis with experiments, acquire data, make predictions. If it checks out with your observations, and works within the framework of every other theory in physics, you have yourself a pretty damn good explaination for reality. > > In physics, you _start_ with “facts” not end with them. My point was that although you may have designed a working model, it is not necessarily the only model, or even a proper model. Additionally, in case you do have a working model, it may fail to work tomorrow. 😛 While math is likely the best language we have for making accurate observations and predictions in nature, when putting things in a bigger perspective, there can always be factors that cause math to fail working properly. ---
**Author:** ![cmyk](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/cmyk/32/3353_2.png) [@cmyk](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/cmyk)\ **Post date:** [October 8, 2012, 7:31am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/neutrinos-and-black-holes/6519/177 "2012-10-08T07:31:50Z")
> [@Gin\_Bell](#): > > My point was that although you may have designed a working model, it is not necessarily the only model, or even a proper model. Additionally, in case you do have a working model, it may fail to work tomorrow. 😛 > > While math is likely the best language we have for making accurate observations and predictions in nature, when putting things in a bigger perspective, there can always be factors that cause math to fail working properly. And that’s what science is all about. Refining the model(s) as new evidence comes to light. This doesn’t mean anyone ever closes the book, and says, _“welp! That’s it then.”_ We’ll keep looking under every lepton until we can’t look any further. Philosophy being more concerned with the questions, rhetorical as they may be, and less about any answers is always a good place to start. But don’t start juggling all the rhetoric, and conclude reality isn’t understandable or is meaningless. Personally, I’m a big fan of 2T-Field Theory (Two-Time), that is 4 macro dimensions of space (our three familiar ones, and the fourth holographic; casting 3 dimensional “shadows” as matter/energy with gravity emerging from behind this 4D veil… or something, blah, blah strings and branes and shit), and two dimensions of time, which might explain all the quantum weirdness we witness, and things like singularities. Just keep asking questions. 😉 ---
**Author:** ![cmyk](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/cmyk/32/3353_2.png) [@cmyk](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/cmyk)\ **Post date:** [October 8, 2012, 7:41am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/neutrinos-and-black-holes/6519/178 "2012-10-08T07:41:21Z")
Paper on [Two-Time Field Theory.](http://arxiv.org/pdf/0705.2834.pdf) Warning: PDF. ---
**Author:** ![Gin\_Bell](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/4af34b/32.png) [@Gin\_Bell](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Gin_Bell)\ **Post date:** [October 8, 2012, 8:26am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/neutrinos-and-black-holes/6519/179 "2012-10-08T08:26:33Z")
> [@cmyk](#): > > But don’t start juggling all the rhetoric, and conclude reality isn’t understandable or is meaningless. _logging into my facebook account_ ---
**Author:** ![Bremidon](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/ac91a4/32.png) [@Bremidon](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Bremidon)\ **Post date:** [October 8, 2012, 11:17am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/neutrinos-and-black-holes/6519/180 "2012-10-08T11:17:09Z")
> [@Derleth](#): > > The computer you’re using is evidence. > > _snip, snip, snip_ > > And so we see that **Your definition of ‘faith’ is not useful.** I can’t really answer such terse negations of my arguments. If you would like to elaborate on any of these points, please feel free, and I will happily counter if I can. Until then, I think everything interesting has been said, and I will simply politely disagree with all your points. Well, I do have one more thing. My faith in science is personally useful: it gets me through my day and lets me get on with whatever I am doing. It is also useful for me in opening up new avenues of investigations, which in turn have been useful as well. And, my definition of faith has been exceedingly useful to me in reminding me that there are some things that science, math, and logic as we understand them cannot explain. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/neutrinos-and-black-holes/6519.md?page=8) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/neutrinos-and-black-holes/6519.md?page=10)