Scommessa per il nuovo millennio

Un articolo del 1999 con una particolare scommessa in risposta a coloro che dichiaravano la fine del mondo imminente.

Domani è già oggi.

Quella che segue è la traduzione di un articolo online del libero giornalista tedesco Oliver Scheel, collaboratore di Wetter.de. Testi come questo mostrano la gravità della situazione climatica contemporanea e, al tempo stesso, quanto il dibattito culturale autentico su temi e problemi della più profonda gravità sia ormai relegato ai margini della società, nonostante l’urgenza drammatica di un tale dibattito ed a dispetto dei benefici che se ne trarrebbero.

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Blog del 24 luglio 2018: Tempeste e disastri ovunque e noi continuiamo come se nulla fosse.

In Grecia 75 morti, in Giappone 41 gradi, una temperatura mai misurata prima, incendi boschivi fuori controllo in Svezia e Lettonia, ossia nel freddo Nord Europa, alte temperature a Capo Nord ed una grave siccità in Germania. In più anche un tornado negli Stati Uniti, oh, ma non parliamone più. Così come non vogliamo parlare dei 21 morti causati da tifoni in Vietnam mentre in Bangladesh, come annunciato dall’associazione SOS-Kinderdörfer, il prossimo disastro è imminente. Oltre 100.000 bambini sono in pericolo mortale a causa del monsone. E allora?

Quelli che preferiscono chiudere gli occhi sulle enormi dinamiche del cambiamento climatico dicono che è sempre stato così. Sì, l’uno o l’altro evento climatico singoli si sono sicuramente verificati una volta o un’altra, ma la violenza e l’intensità delle crisi cui assistiamo è nuova, così come la loro estensione. Il cambiamento climatico è qui, è reale ed assale con forza allarmante le nostre esistenze.

Al momento la politica conosce solo il tema “rifugiati e integrazione”. Al tempo stesso, i nostri capi di governo non si avvedono del fatto che il cambiamento climatico è una delle cause della migrazione che aumenterà enormemente nei prossimi anni.

La finestra d’opportunità per limitare il cambiamento climatico a due gradi si chiuderà presto. Forse si è già chiusa e non lo sappiamo. I drastici cambiamenti nel nostro clima, così come si nota al momento, avranno un pesante impatto sulle nostre vite. In Germania ci stiamo dirigendo verso condizioni climatiche di tipo spagnole o almeno simili al nord Italia. Questo significa che abbiamo bisogno di più serbatoi idrici a causa dei fiumi in secca, forse dovremo anche coltivare piante molto diverse. Tutto ciò produrrà costi devastanti per la nostra economia. Esattamente la stessa economia che, in uno sforzo congiunto con i governi europei, sta attualmente ponendo in secondo piano il tema dei cambiamenti climatici. Vi saranno perdite nel settore del turismo e dell’agricoltura, enormi costi sanitari e una spesa esorbitante per le infrastrutture idriche da realizzare. Eppure continuiamo ad andare avanti come se non ci fosse un domani. E con questa arroganza e ignoranza, lasciamo ai nostri figli un pianeta distrutto. Semplicemente perché non vogliamo vedere con quanta velocità sta cambiando tutto. Con lo sguardo verso il basso continuiamo ad andaresempre più giù verso la catastrofe climatica.

Oliver Scheel

Sito web: https://www.wetter.de/cms/olis-klimablog-das-klima-kreist-aus-und-keinen-juckts-4125726.html

(Fonte: wetter.de)

Traduzione dal tedesco di Sergio Caldarella.

Testo originale:

Blog vom 24: Juli 2018: Unwetter und Katastrophen überall - und wir machen einfach weiter wie immer

75 Tote in Griechenland, 41 Grad und damit eine Temperatur wie sie in Japan noch nie gemessen wurde, außer Kontrolle geratene Waldbrände in Schweden und Lettland, also im eigentlich kühlen hohen Norden Europas, hohe Plusgrade am Nordkap, die krasse Trockenheit in unseren Breiten. Dazu ein Tornado in den USA, ach, über den reden wir schon gar nicht mehr. Genausowenig wie über die 21 Toten durch die Taifune in Vietnam. In Bangladesch steht die nächste Katastrophe bevor, warnen die SOS-Kinderdörfer. Mehr als 100.000 Kinder befänden sich wegen des Monsuns in Lebensgefahr. Na, und?

Das hat es doch schon immer gegeben, sagen die, die die Augen vor der enormen Dynamik des Klimawandels verschließen. Ja, singulär hat es das ein oder andere Ereignis sicher schon einmal gegeben. Aber die Wucht und die Intensität der Krisen ist neu, genau wie das Ausmaß. Der Klimawandel ist da, er ist real und er greift mit beängstigender Kraft nach uns und unseren Leben.

Aber die Politik kennt derzeit nur das Thema "Flüchtlinge und Integration". Dabei verkennen unsere Staatenlenker sogar, dass der Klimawandel eine der Fluchtursachen ist. Und zwar eine, die in den kommenden Jahren enorm zunehmen wird.

Das Zeitfenster, den Klimawandel auf zwei Grad zu begrenzen, wird bald geschlossen sein. Vielleicht ist es schon geschlossen. Wenn sich unser Klima aber so drastisch verändert, wie es sich momentan andeutet, wird das für unser aller Leben einen heftigen Einschlag bedeuten. Wir steuern in Deutschland auf spanische oder wenigstens norditalienische Verhältnisse zu. Das heißt: wir brauchen mehr Stauseen, weil Flüsse trocken fallen werden, wir müssen vielleicht ganz andere Pflanzen anbauen. Das wird alles verheerende Kosten für unsere Wirtschaft erzeugen. Genau jene Wirtschaft, die derzeit in gemeinsamem Schaffen mit den europäischen Regierungen den Klimawandel schön auf die lange Bank schiebt. Einbußen im Tourismus, Einbußen in der Landwirtschaft, enorme Gesundheitskosten und horrende Ausgaben für die zu errichtende Infrastruktur für unsere Grundversorgung mit Wasser.

Aber wir machen einfach so weiter als gäbe es kein Morgen. Und wir hinterlassen mit dieser Arroganz und Ignoranz unseren Kindern einen kaputten Planeten. Einfach, weil wir nicht einsehen wollen, wie schnell sich alles wandelt. Augen zu und ab in die Kimakatastrophe.

Oliver Scheel ist Freier Journalist und arbeitet für Wetter.de. Er setzt sich deshalb für den Klimaschutz ein, weil er keine Lust darauf hat, dass alles vor die Hunde geht.

(mehr dazu bei wetter.de)

The self and the reality of perception.

Ways to understand consciousness: the self and the reality of perception[1]

by

Sergio Caldarella

                                                                                                                 Deny the reality of things

                                                                                                                 and you miss their reality;

                                                                                                                 assert the emptiness of things

                                                                                                                 and you miss their reality.

                                                                                                                                      Jianzhi Sengcan

            If someone would try to explain, to an audience of people without a scientific background, the principles under which modern physicists consider the world, the audience would probably see his or her statements at least as mildly delusional or even entirely crazy: not only is contemporary science crowded with all sorts of strange objects,[2] bizarre theories,[3] and counterintuitive behaviors,[4] it also affirms that those concepts and representations are the roots of an unknowable “fundamental reality.”[5] The first realization coming from this apparent “strangeness” of our universe is that every ultimate representation of the so-called “physical reality” is not only impossible, but epistemologically wrong! A physicist once joked that the reason we are unable to mentally represent dimensions higher than the 4^th is because we’re made to gather bananas from trees, not to think about the dimensions of our universe. In psychological terms, this means also that every effort to “match” the so called “reality” of the world to our mental faculties is doomed to fail from the very beginning, unless, by stating that the world is as simple as it looks (a rock is just a rock, a tree is just a tree),[6] we prefer to substitute illusion – or a shared illusion – for reality. After all, illusions have power because human beings, in contrast with other animals, tend to act according to what they believe to be true. Therefore, whoever is able to shape your worldview controls you, because most people will act according to the belief system that has been proposed to or imposed upon them. The social consequences of this attitude have been vast and extraordinary throughout the entire history of mankind. If someone can, then, establish a consistency of illusion, that person can create a consistent unreality that benefits him or her in various ways.[7]

            Modern science – including logic – shows that we are allowed, from a physical standpoint, only a vague glimpse into reality, a feeble understanding similar to an island surrounded by a sea of illusions. Isaac Newton, the father of classical physics, after a long series of successful scientific discoveries, humbly declared: “I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.” Human beings generally tend to be suspicious, or openly skeptical, about such a viewpoint, because they intuitively believe that they possess some sort of personal certitude about the forms of their perceptions and their consciousness of the so-called “reality” of the world. Some philosophers have even announced a convenient conflation of being with perception, as expressed in the phenomenalist proposition of the Esse est percipi, To be is to perceive,[8] by the Bishop of Cloyne. But reference to perception per se doesn’t solve intellectual dilemmas and paradoxes about cognitive issues:[9] we can easily perceive matter as “solid,” a straight stick partly immersed in water as “bent” or the earth as “flat,” all the while knowing that they are not; therefore our esse doesn’t necessarily depend on, or follow, our percipi, unless we prefer to exchange the illusion of the flat earth for its spherical reality. Perception is a limited (and too-often wrong) tool in the investigation of realities, whether they be internal or external, and the same errors that apply to the resulting interpretation of the world through perception are easily carried over to the understanding of ourselves.

            Following the various claims and doctrines of Empiricism, Materialism, Utilitarianism, Huxleyan-Darwinism and Pragmatism, today’s biological sciences have taken a certain approach to consciousness, declaring, in many instances, that “the world is an illusion constructed in our heads.” Obviously, neurologists are not claiming “there is no world out there”; they are simply pointing out the inadequacy of our brain to process reality “as it is.” Strange as it seems, this conceptual attitude is a derivation from the belief that there is indeed a “reality as it really is” out there, and that, even if our mind is playing tricks on us, we can select from this “reality” what is useful or convenient to our survival.[10]

            Somehow we take for granted that the topic of consciousness is related to perception[11] or to the “reality” of the external world; by doing so, we’re establishing a hypothetical relationship between ourselves and what we call, in general terms, “the external world.” When the Peripatetic axiom, nihil est in intellectu quod prius non fuerit in sensu, nothing is in the intellect that was not first in the senses, eventually made its way into modern philosophy, [12] it became a key element of Empiricism, supporting the belief that our entire thinking is a patchwork of elements we have experienced through the senses. Following this line of reasoning, a unicorn is then merely the sum of a horse and a narwhal or, in other words, all there is is what there is: est quod est.[13] Lewis Carroll, himself a mathematician and a logician, well-aware of the intellectual debate regarding consciousness and perception, instead had Alice say, “one can’t believe impossible things,” to which the Queen replied “sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.” The irony of such an answer should be duly noted.

            When we try to ponder the aforementioned discoveries of physics, we’re thinking about something beyond our realm of perception; then, accepting such conclusions, we can’t interpret reality any longer through only the senses,[14] but through the intellect. Therefore, Leibniz’s addition to the Peripatetic axiom, “nisi ipse intellectus, except the intellect itself,” gives an opening to reach above and beyond the mere senses.

            The idea that what’s outside us determines what’s inside us is an interpretation of reality characteristic of the Western cultural tradition, mainly based on the fact that each human being is a privileged “point of perception.” Other cultures have instead related consciousness and perception only to the interior of the human being and have understood the problem of consciousness as autonomous from the external world: this is the reason why the statues of the Buddha have closed eyes, because they are contemplating the “real reality” inside. Similarly, the Gospel of Luke declared, “No one will say, ‘Look, here it is!’ or, ‘There it is!’; because the Kingdom of God is within you,”[15] and centuries later, M. K. Gandhi echoed, “the truth is to be found nowhere else other than within ourselves,” pointing once again to a concept of truth not based on sign and reference, but which requires a deeper understanding, not necessarily dependent on the external world. Is not just ethical/philosophical thinking that points to an internally generated reality; even neurobiology asserts that the world is, in fact, “inside your brain,” meaning that reality is something generated by the brain, or, to use a similitude, the world is the canvas on which the brain paints “reality.” Some contemporary academics go so far as to claim an “illusion of consciousness,”[16] or a dream within a dream, as Edgar Allan Poe would probably have said, poetically. Neurobiology, with the statement that “reality” is something that “happens inside your brain,”[17] seems to have rediscovered the old philosophical concept of representation (Vorstellung), i.e. that reality seems to be, up to a certain extent, a selection of perceptions. If the brain really manipulates the world to the point of creating a representation that resembles reality in the way that a Tintoretto painting resembles Venice, then all our minds are merely producing elaborate hallucinations and illusions. If this were true to the extent claimed by some neuroscientists, we would have no physics, mathematics, logic, philosophy, or even any common understanding, because a long chain of physiological illusions would not allow any consistent cognizance of the external world, nor any possibility for real communication – If your triangle is my square and my triangle is someone else’s octagon, then our languages cannot meet on the ground of a common hermeneutic.

            Although we accept that the world cannot be entirely perceived in absolute clarity – a realization as old as rational thinking – there are, at the same time, intellectual instruments and methods that allow us to cross the gap between appearance and reality, without necessarily retreating into mechanistic or reductionist explanations that would lead to bizarre conclusions.[18] If we did not have intellectual tools to investigate the universe apart from our wishes, desires, misperceptions, etc., we would be fatally abandoned to a subjective physiological response to the external reality, and the entire human world would resemble a solipsistic asylum where each individual lives in some sort of a personalized cosmos generated by his/her brain and for himself/herself, therefore incapable of any real communication with others. It’s a monadic vision of the human being, a fractured interpretation of reality, where the individual is living in some sort of a cosmic theater with just one spectator. A thinking being should refuse such solitude, as it only leads to confusion, a radical separation from other humans, error and despair.

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[1] Published in «The Bulletin of Computational Mathematics and Epistemology» vol. III, #49, pp.35-40, NYC, February 2018.

[2] Hypercubes, Riemann sphere, chronotope, etc.

[3] Wave–particle duality, closed timelike curves, etc.

[4] A straight line is impossible in our universe but only geodesics are possible, etc.

[5] At a fundamental level, Heisenberg proved that it’s impossible to know both the position (p) and the momentum (x) of a particle on an atomic level. Moreover, at the Planck scale, the laws of physics, as we understand them, break down entirely.

[6] Dr. Johnson, a champion of naïve realism, believed he had refuted Berkeley’s thesis of the non-existence of matter just by kicking a stone and spouting: “I refute it thus.”

[7] See also S. Caldarella, The Empty Campus, Dark Age Publishing, Princeton 2016.

[8] Usually translated as “To be is to be perceived.”

[9] In many ways, Descartes reacts to the uncertainty of perception when he is looking for a certain ultimate ground with his res cogitans.

[10] Once again, a disguised Darwinian doctrine emerges here. From the epistemological side, Niels Bohr was the greatest critic of any representation of atomic realities: “We must be clear that when it comes to atoms, language can be used only as in poetry.”

[11] Plato rejected the idea that knowledge can be identified with perception (αἴσθησις): see Theaetetus 184b-186e.

[12] The axiom was first posited through a Scholastics interpretation of Aristotle, was later put forth again by Pierre Gassendi, then by John Locke (“There appear not to be any ideas in the mind before the senses have conveyed any in,” An Essay concerning Human Understanding, II, 1, 23), and was finally taken up by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz with the addition, “nisi ipse intellectus.”

[13] A conceptual attitude that can easily be converted into support of any kind of authoritarianism.

[14] In mathematics, for example, the equations can reveal things of which we were not aware before performing the calculations, so our wishes or preconceptions play little role in the logical conclusions. As a major example, we can recall the discovery of irrational numbers, made by the Pythagoreans: they wanted the world to be commensurable, but mathematics taught them otherwise.

[15] Luke 17:21.

[16] But if consciousness is an illusion, who is making this statement and what legitimacy does it have? Logically such a statement has the form of a self-referential paradox similar to when people declare that “all truths are relative,” without realizing that for such a statement to be valid, there must be at least one truth that is not relative, and that’s the truth stating that all truths are relative. See also the Epimenides paradox that tricked even Saul of Tarsus (Epistle to Titus, 1:12–13).

[17] It’s called “the internal model” or “mental model.” Optical illusions are examples of how the “internal model” works.

[18] I believe this attitude of viewing reality as a pure solipsistic product of our brain is deeply influenced by the modern predominance of sophistry that allows people to believe it is legitimate to say that there is “your truth” and “my truth,” “your logic” and “his logic.” Therefore it seems plausible that there is even “your world” and “my world,” which is a radical non-communication among human beings.

Notes about the "Google algorithm".

(DRAFT)

Random notes on some elements of the PageRank algorithm.

by

Sergio Caldarella

PageRank is, in short, a sampling algorithm for search engine optimization (SEO) that operates by calculating averages (normalized sum) and assigning a value to web pages and does not contain any non-standard logic approach.

Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page in the now classic paper The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual

Web Search Engine (1998) describes “The PageRank of a page A” (i.e. the probability distribution over web pages), giving the algorithm:

PR(A) = (1-d) + d (PR(T1)/C(T1) + ... + PR(Tn)/C(Tn))                         [1.1]

where,

• PR(A) = Page Rank of page A

• PR(Ti) = Page Rank of pages Ti which link to page A

• C(Ti) = number of outbound links on page Ti

• d = damping factor which can be set between 0 and 1.

Assuming that “page A has pages T1...Tn which point to it (i.e., are citations). The parameter d is a damping factor, which can be set between 0 and 1. We usually set d to 0.85. There are more details about d in the next section. Also C(A) is defined as the number of links going out of page A.” (Brin and Lawrence).

We can rewrite [1.1] as follow: p^T = p^T(αS + (1 – α)E)                                        [1.1a]

Let’s reinterpret [1.1] with:

             PR(A) → f(x) d = 17/20 + ⟨d₁, d₂, d₃, d_n⟩ + C                                            [1.1b]

                                                                        with PR(p_i;0) = 1/N for t = 0.

Assuming C(A) = A. The = 20 PageRank of a page A is given as follows: = 20. The basic structure of PageRank is set to a = model of=20 user behavior where “"random surfer" who is given a web = page at=20 random and keeps clicking on links, never hitting "back" but eventually = gets=20 bored and starts on another random page. The probability that the random = surfer=20 visits a page is its PageRank. And, the d damping factor is the=20 probability at each page the "random surfer" will get bored and request = another=20 random page. One important variation is to only add the damping factor = d=20 to a single page, or a group of pages. This allows for personalization = and can=20 make it nearly impossible to deliberately mislead the system in order to = get a=20 higher ranking. We have several other extensions to PageRank, again see = [Page=20 98].=20”. This set the scalability to be “=20 near term to a goal of 100 million web pages”. A value that is larger than that will not be computed.

PR(A) = 3D (1-d) + d (PR(T1)/C(T1) + ... + PR(Tn)/C(Tn)) = 20                                 [1.2]

“PageRank=20 or PR(A) can be calculated using a simple iterative algorithm, = and=20 corresponds to the principal eigenvector of the normalized link matrix = of the=20 web. Also, a PageRank for 26 million web pages can be computed in a few = hours on=20 a medium size workstation.”

As pointed out by Ian Rogers (The Google Pagerank Algorithm and How It Works), equation [1.1] has 5 main components two of which (1) & (2) define an interval:

(1) PR(Tn)               - The computation define an interval PR(T1) -> PR(Tn)

(2) C(Tn)                 - Assign a value in an interval C(T1) -> C(Tn)

(3) PR(Tn)/C(Tn)    - Defines a backlink range. Being backlinks any link received by a “web node” a higher hierarchical set containing web pages, directories, websites, etc. as subsets (Rogers put it as: “If page A links out to page B, then page B is said to have a “backlink” from page A.”)

(4) The factor d = 0.85 – Is used as stop factor (most likely there is another stop factor or a simple timer not showed in the algorithm – that’s why if we perform the calculations using this rough algorithm results may vary extremely although they are always contained in the mathematical interval that could be defined by (1) + (2)).

(5) (1 - d)               - This is the normalization (damping factor) factor (set between 0 and 1) that multiplies Ti.

Following those steps PageRank can generate a value calculated for every url, allowing to determine a value for the page relevance (“page rank”) in the search engine results page (SERP). [- See more at: http://www.marketingignite.com/blog/how-does-google-pagerank-work/#sthash.A2W6bu5y.dpuf.]

From [1.1a] follows: p^(k+1)T = p^(k)T E [1.1.a1] with E = ⟨d₁, d₂, d₃, d_n⟩ + C.

For an increment in the results from a S matrix {p₁, p₂, p₃, p_n} “noise” increase accordingly: S = E + a(1/ne^T). Brin and Page added a so called “Google matrix” to adjust the results: G= αS + (1 – α)1/nee^T [see 1.1a] with α = 6/10.

[1.1a1] can be then rewritten as: p^(k+1)T = p^(k)T G [1.1a2], applying a different α of 9/10, producing a visible implementation.

For the calculation are eigenvalues essential and what is here fundamental are the arbitrary eigenvectors.

There are many possible ways to graphically represent the operations performed by PageRanks. A matrix model is the more efficient.

To set a limit on response time, once an x number (at the moment x = 40,000) of matching entries are found, the searcher will go to a previous step until there is a document that matches all the search terms.

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A few other points to be noted (from: The Basics of PageRank: What Does It Measure & How Does It Work? February 14th, 2009):

 “•PageRank values are not arithmetic. Nobody outside of Google’s upper echelons knows the formulae, but it is generally agreed that the scale is logarithmic. In other words, it takes a lot more to advance from PR4 to PR5 than it takes to advance from PR1 to PR2.

 •A site’s total PageRank (the combined PageRanks of each of its component pages) is also an important measurement. More than anything else, this is determined by the number of unique pages within a site, clearly benefiting larger sites. New pages (“orphans”) should be directly linked to existing pages in order to yield any benefit for the PageRank of the overall site.

 •Links to pages with no outbound links of their own (or pages that Google has not indexed) are known as “dangling” links and have little or no value.

 •There are many experts who agree that outbound links that are not reciprocated can be a drain on a site’s total PageRank.

Because the Internet is constantly growing, the logarithmic scales that determine PageRank, by definition, must be continually evolving.”