I’m sorry to have to announce that my author and friend, J. Neil Schulman, has died. Here is an obituary written by another friend of Neil’s, Stephan Kinsella.
Announcing a new novel by J. Neil Schulman
For Immediate Release
Steve Heller Publishing is pleased to announce that its premiere book publication is The Fractal Man, the fourth novel from award-winning novelist and filmmaker, J. Neil Schulman. The novel will be serialized at stevehellerpublishing.com and will be published as an Amazon Kindle book when completed.
Schulman’s previous novels, Alongside Night (Crown 1979) and The Rainbow Cadenza (Simon Schuster, 1983) each won Prometheus Awards, and his third novel Escape from Heaven (Pulpless.Com, 2002) was a Prometheus Award finalist.
Over the course of his literary career Schulman’s novels and nonfiction books have received endorsements from Anthony Burgess (A Clockwork Orange); Nobel laureate Milton Friedman; Nebula Grandmaster Robert A. Heinlein; Academy-Award winner Charlton Heston; and many other celebrities and best-selling authors.
His books have received rave reviews in The Los Angeles Times, Detroit News, Publishers Weekly, Library Journal, Reason, National Review, and many other national magazines and newspapers.
In addition to his work as an author, J. Neil Schulman wrote one of the best remembered episodes of the 1980’s CBS Twilight Zone — “Profile in Silver”; wrote and directed two feature films currently streaming on Amazon Prime — Lady Magdalene’s (2008) and Alongside Night (2014); and the Wall Street Journal in January 1989 called him a pioneer in the field of digital book publishing.
Full information on J. Neil Schulman is available at http://www.pulpless.com/jneil/jnsbio.html as well as on Wikipedia, Amazon, IMDb, Facebook, Twitter, and his YouTube channel.
Why the negative formulation of the Golden Rule implies the positive one
The positive formulation of the Golden Rule is “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you”.
The negative formulation (according to Rabbi Hillel) is “If something is hateful to you, do not do it to others”.
Here is the proof that the negative formulation implies the positive formulation:
If there is an action X that you find hateful, then by definition you would not want someone else to do X to you.
Therefore if you do X to another, you are not doing unto them as you would have them do unto you.
This therefore violates the positive formulation of the Golden Rule.
Q. E. D.
Now, does the positive formulation imply the negative one? Yes, but that is more complex to prove, so it will have to wait until I have the time for another post.
Another practical use for spooky action at a distance
As David Deutsch pointed out in “The Fabric of Reality”, factorization of large numbers via quantum computing would harness computation from a very large number of universes. He gave 10^500 as a very rough suggestion of scale.
Absolutely no time lag can be tolerated when dealing with numbers like that. The mechanism for coordinating that number of parallel processors must be instantaneous, or the answer would take far longer to reach than the lifetime of the universe.
This seems like an insoluble problem, but fortunately the mechanism is quantum interference, which is just another name for “spooky action at a distance”.
Which, as we all know, is instantaneous.
So that’s one of its practical uses. I think there are others…
A new interpretation of quantum mechanics, part 4: some staggering implications
Continuing from the previous post, what are some of the implications of the hypothesis that life is of a higher order than the material world, metaphysical rather than physical?
If this hypothesis is true, then that means that life bears the same relationship to the apparent physical universe as a chess player does to a game of chess that he is playing.
What happens to the chess player when he finishes the game he is playing? Does he “die”?
No. He goes onto another pursuit, perhaps another game of chess, or perhaps something else quite different.
What does this mean about the apparent “death” that all humans face, most of them knowingly?
It means “death” is an illusion. When you finish with this lifetime, you are finishing a game, not finishing your entire existence.
Of course exactly what might happen after “death” is something that has been speculated about since time began, and will undoubtedly be a subject of much thought and discussion for the rest of the apparent flow of time in this universe.
But now there is a rational reason to conclude that “death” is a sham. No belief in anything contradictory to reality is necessary. It is reality itself that points to this conclusion.
Einstein famously said that quantum mechanics is trying to tell us something important and we should try to figure out what it is.
This is it.
A new interpretation of quantum mechanics, part 3: some speculations about life
My hypothesis is that “life” is a metaphysical quality that allows its possessors (via some currently unexplained mechanism) to modify the results of quantum mechanical operations that lead to different static frames as described in the previous parts of this series.
When I say that it is a metaphysical quality, I mean that it is literally higher than physics, as all movement and change in the apparent world around us depend on this ability of life. Physics cannot explain the passage of time because it is a metaphysical operation, not a physical one.
Different living creatures have different amounts of control over their environment, but they all effect that control by this method.
Human beings are different qualitatively from other known living creatures because they exhibit purposeful action, that is, action intended to produce a more desirable state of affairs (“end”) via a conscious selection of means; this is what is referred to as “free will”. This is a subset of the general ability of living creatures to affect the course of events, although of course a very important one to humans.
Since you have free will, you can do a very simple experiment that will show you how radical this idea is.
Lift your hand, then put it back down.
What could be simpler? Actually, it’s not simple at all.
If you ask the most learned scientists in the world how you did that, the answer (although perhaps not in so many words) is: We don’t know.
Yes, they can explain nerve conduction, firing potentials, and the like, but what they cannot explain is how the whole process begins. That is, how does your intention to hold out your hand start the chain of events that leads to the nerve signals and muscular contractions?
It’s not that no one has a good explanation. It’s that no one has had any explanation. Until now.
A new interpretation of quantum mechanics, part 2
I believe I have solved the “quantum enigma”, which suggests very strongly that consciousness has an effect on the universe. The enigma is how it is possible that you can get an answer to a question you ask that seems contradictory to the answer you would have gotten if you had asked another question that you could have asked but didn’t. An example is the fact that you can perform an experiment that shows that particles have no specific location, and another experiment that shows they do have a specific location, but the answer you get depends on the experiment you do on the specific particles in question. For a more complete description of this problem, see https://www.amazon.com/Quantum-Enigma-Physics-Encounters-Consciousness/dp/0199753814/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1491429953&sr=8-1&keywords=quantum+enigma.
The very unsatisfactory answer to this in the standard “Copenhagen” interpretation of quantum mechanics is that free will is an illusion.
I have found another answer.
But before I tell you that answer, let me bring in another issue that is plaguing physics: time.
One of the greatest mysteries in physics is the appearance that time passes. Of course many equations include t as a variable. But the picture of the universe painted by relativity is a static one. Time is “just” another dimension, albeit one with a different role in the equation from the space dimensions. As a result, you can view the entire history of the universe as a 4-dimensional solid. Yes, there is a beginning and an end (probably). But these are like the left and right sides of a solid object, with no place for our experience of “past”, “present” or “future”.
What is the cause of our conviction that “time passes”? The “passage of time” corresponds to nothing in the equations of physics. Of course many physics equations contain a variable named t, but Einsteinian relativity leads to a static view of a four-dimensional universe. Every so often there is an article or two in Scientific American suggesting that time is an illusion, which is about as (un)satisfactory as the Copenhagen interpretation of free will as an illusion.
I have found another answer.
That answer is: Life creates time.
Let us imagine what a multiverse uninhabited by life would look like.
Assuming the multiverse is infinite, then every possible arrangement of nucleons (and anything else necessary to make a unique universe) occurs an infinite number of times.
But there is no time. Without time, there can be no motion, so these universes are static.
Life arrives.
As suggested in my previous post, the “passage of time” may be the effect of living beings’ ability to switch from one of these static frames to another in which the particles have positions and velocities representing a slightly “future time”. The sequence of frames experienced by each being is affected by laws that we don’t yet know in detail to the extent that they are not predictable by classical physics. But this sequence is affected to some extent by the being’s desires; this latter is what is known as “free will”. If we were to be able to learn at least some of the rules for how each successive static frame is selected via quantum effects, that knowledge might look astoundingly like magic to the uninitiated, as it could be used to predict (or even possibly affect) what might otherwise look like random outcomes.
How is this related to quantum physics?
If this interpretation is correct, life is what causes time’s arrow by constantly switching to a different static frame that is “advanced in time”. This same effect is also responsible for the otherwise mysterious “collapse of the wavefunction”, when one outcome is selected out of all of the possibilities represented by the wavefunction.
Thus, this interpretation accounts for time, life, the collapse of the wavefunction, free will, and a possible use for the otherwise seemingly senseless “random spooky action at a distance”.
Of course, that doesn’t mean that this interpretation is correct. But it does seem to make sense of a number of otherwise puzzling facts of physics and life.
Why the NAP does not apply to animals
On occasion, a good-hearted person decides that the NAP applies to animals. What they usually mean by this is not that animals can be expected to accept it, of course, since almost no one is that divorced from reality.
What they mean is that if person A is harming an animal, then person B is entitled to use “defensive” force against person A, just as would be the case if person A were harming another human.
Obviously this cannot be true, because if it were, it would mean that anyone who interacts with any animal without the animal’s consent is guilty of a crime, as he would be if the animal were a human being.
This leads immediately to the conclusions that pet owners are slaveholders, meat-eaters are (at least) accessories to murder, and many other obviously ridiculous conclusions.
Again, of course it is not true that anyone who follows the NAP is a “good person”, or is entitled to have others deal with him voluntarily. If most people think that meat-eating is a terrible evil, then those people would be free in anarchy to shun meat eaters. But they would still not be free to use violence against them, as that would be a NAP violation.
But if you don’t accept the consequentialist reasoning above, then you should also consider that “argumentation ethics”, which logically proves the validity of the NAP, applies only to beings capable of reasoning. If a dolphin (for example) turns out to be able to discuss and agree to the NAP, then that dolphin would also be entitled to claim its protections.
So far, though, we have only us.
What is a crime?
Short answer: Anything that violates the NAP.
Long answer: A crime is any aggressive action. For example, theft, assault, fraud. The NAP says that no one may initiate aggression against another; thus, any such action violates the NAP.
Note that this does not mean that all actions that avoid violating the NAP are morally correct. They aren’t. Many actions violate the Golden Rule, and are therefore morally improper, but that doesn’t mean that one can use violence in response to them, as that itself would be a NAP violation.
Of course it must also be noted that this is not the legal definition of a crime. All that means is that we do not live in anarchy. Under anarchy, that would be the definition of a crime, because anarchy does not authorize the violation of the NAP by anyone at any time. Using violence to prohibit actions that are not NAP violations is in itself a NAP violation, which cannot be considered legitimate in anarchy.
Does paying taxes mean that you consider the State legitimate?
Short answer: No.
Longer answer: No, because paying taxes is involuntary.
It should be obvious that anything that another person forces you to do cannot validate the legitimacy of the commands of that other person.
By definition, if you have not initiated aggression, any use of force against you must be violating the NAP, which means that it is a crime.
Thus, it is impossible for your forced cooperation with this person to signify that their commands are legitimate.
What it signifies is that you are choosing to avoid even worse penalties as a result of disobeying a command backed up by force.