Author: Giulio Prisco

Giulio Prisco is Senior Editor at Mindplex. He is a science and technology writer mainly interested in fundamental science, space exploration and expansion, computer science, Information Technology (IT), Virtual Reality (VR), cybernetics, Artificial Intelligence (AI) and cyberconsciousness, bio and nano technology, cryptography and crypto-economies, decentralized technology and governance.<br>A theoretical physicist by training and early career, in his previous lives Giulio has been a senior manager in public research organizations, an entrepreneur in the VR sector, and a consultant specialized in IT and VR. <a href="https://x.com/giulioprisco"></a><a href="https://x.com/giulioprisco">Follow Giulio on X</a>.<br>Giulio is also interested in the philosophical and metaphysical aspects of science and technology and has authored several books. <a href="https://www.turingchurch.com/"></a><a href="https://www.turingchurch.com/">See his website for more about this</a>.

Starship’s reentry sonic boom in a political storm

Posted on by Giulio Prisco

A few days ago I watched the epic fifth flight test of Starship, the giant SpaceX rocket that, Elon Musk’s hopes, will one day take human colonists to Mars.

I watched the flight test live via X, including its most critical moment: the catch of the Super Heavy booster. Commentator Katherine Boyle called it “The Fall of the Century” and said that it “restored faith in the American Dream.”

Visible sonic boom as Starship returns to Earth (Credit: Liv Boeree/YouTube).

Liv Boeree has captured the last seconds of the return of the Super Heavy booster in this video. The video shows a visible (and audible!) reentry sonic boom.

This was a very ambitious and perhaps risky test. In fact, SpaceX made the final decision to try and catch the booster only minutes before the actual catch. Any number of small technical glitches could have turned success into failure. It’s difficult to escape the impression that the universe loves Elon Musk and wants us to advance rapidly on the road to the planets and the stars.

The stunning achievement of SpaceX has been hailed as a major spaceflight milestone and praised by space experts, public figures, and politicians from all over the world. With one very notable exception though: the President and Vice President (and presidential candidate) of the United States.

Boom over troubled waters

The waters that we can see in the video are calm. But Elon Musk’s giant rocket returned to the troubled waters of a political storm centered on Musk’s cultural and political positions.

“Musk mania in the media this month has reached a level of uncontrollable hysteria,” legal and political commentator Jonathan Turley posted to X.

Turley has written a scathing indictment of the pundits and politicians who are unleashing unhinged attacks on Elon Musk.

Turley reports that California Coastal Commission has rejected a request from the Air Force for additional launches from Vandenberg Air Force Base because they don’t like the political positions of Musk.

The incident was covered by The Los Angeles Times. The California Coastal Commission has an environmental mission, but there isn’t much about the environment in the LA Times story. Rather, the story reports one after another personal attack on Elon Musk by representatives of the Commission, such as:

“We’re dealing with a company, the head of which has aggressively injected himself into the presidential race… Just last week that person was talking about political retribution… Elon Musk is hopping about the country, spewing and tweeting political falsehoods…”

These remarks by several Commission officials, video recorded and ridiculed by Greg Gutfeld, seem to reflect personal animosity based on partisan politics rather than anything even remotely related to the environment.

Turley reports many other rabid attacks on Elon Musk by well-known public figures, some even calling for his arrest and deportation.

Where does all this hatred come from?

Free speech and Donald Trump

Elon Musk has become a major topic of discussion because he’s allowing more free speech on X and he’s vocally supporting Donald Trump.

“I describe Musk as arguably the single most important figure in this generation in defense of free speech,” says Turley. “The left will now kill jobs, cancel national security programs and gut the Constitution in its unrelenting campaign to get Musk. His very existence undermines the power of the anti-free speech movement. In a culture of groupthink, Musk is viewed as a type of free-thought contagion that must be eliminated.”

I totally agree with Turley (and Musk) on the paramount importance of free speech. Turley has written a book titled “The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage” (2024).

Musk’s bet on Trump seems a dangerous one: if Trump doesn’t win the upcoming elections in the U.S., it seems inevitable that the government will be very hostile to Musk and all his companies and projects for the next four years.

At this moment, the upcoming elections in the U.S. seem a very tight race.

The polls slightly favor one of the two main candidates, and the betting markets slightly favor the other. Of course, this could change next week, or tomorrow, or anytime before the elections. I don’t rule out the possibility that one of the two main candidates could win in a landslide. Neither do I rule out the possibility that the winner could win with only a very small margin, so small that half of the U.S. population will dispute the results of the elections.

Credit: Tesfu Assefa

Possible political outcomes

Elon Musk has more than 200M followers on X. Probably half of them are bots and a very large fraction of the rest are casual followers who don’t pay attention to him or wouldn’t be influenced by what he says. But he can likely direct a few tens of thousands of votes to Trump, and this could be a decisive factor in some swing states.

There were indications that the FAA wouldn’t have authorized this flight test before the elections. Some commentators interpreted this an indication that the U.S. current administration didn’t want to risk a success of the flight test that would have given unwanted publicity to Musk before the election.

Then the FAA authorization came all of a sudden. I thought of a little conspiracy theory: perhaps the administration green-lighted the flight test hoping for a catastrophic failure that would, they hoped, reduce the public appeal of Elon Musk. But if so, their move backfired catastrophically! If anything, the spectacular sonic boom of Starship is likely to bring a few more votes to Trump.

Whatever the result of the elections, the U.S. will still be a very divided country afterward.

But spaceflight is an endless source of pride and hope that transcends petty partisan politics. I hope the next U.S. administration, whichever it is, will stay on the path followed by the Trump and Biden administrations.

NASA administrator Bill Nelson praised SpaceX after the booster catch, affirming the plan to go “to the South Pole region of the Moon and then on to Mars.”

This is the right spirit! And I hope the U.S. space program will have bipartisan support. This would show that, even today, honest politicians of different camps can work together and negotiate viable paths to the common good.

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AI researchers win Nobel Prizes in Physics and Chemistry: hows and whys

Posted on by Giulio Prisco

Like many, I was surprised by the announcement that Artificial Intelligence (AI) researchers John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton had won the Nobel Prize in Physics.

One day after, I was surprised again by the announcement that AI researchers Demis Hassabis and John Jumper, respectively CEO and senior research scientists at the AI company Google DeepMind, had won half of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

The many ongoing discussions on social media remind of the heated discussions that we saw when Bob Dylan won the Nobel Prize in Literature. At that time, many people complained that Bob Dylan is a singer, not a writer or a poet.

Not surprisingly, most AI scientists are happy with the awards, but many physicists and chemists object.

Hassabis and Jumper have won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for a direct application of AI technology to an important problem in chemistry.

But Hopfield and Hinton have won the Nobel Prize in Physics for foundational discoveries in AI technology itself that seem only loosely related to physics. Therefore, it is mostly physicists that have criticized the award.

The 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics

The 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics announcement tries to explain why Hopfield and Hinton received the Nobel Prize in Physics for AI research, which strictly speaking is a subfield of computer science. Hopfield and Hinton “have used tools from physics to develop methods that are the foundation of today’s powerful machine learning,” reads the announcement. “In physics we use artificial neural networks in a vast range of areas, such as developing new materials with specific properties.”

Hopfield developed an associative memory based on a simple artificial neural network. Then Hinton co-developed a stochastic extension of Hopfield’s model called the Boltzmann machine. Hinton also advanced toward deep learning by using backpropagation methods.

The New York Times interviewed Hinton soon after the announcement. Here is an unpaywalled copy of the interview. Hinton explained that, while Hopfield networks and Boltzmann machines were based on physics, a different technique called backpropagation opened the way to the AI models that are used today. “That has less to do with physics,” he said.

“If there was a Nobel Prize for computer science, our work would clearly be more appropriate for that. But there isn’t one,” Hinton continued, adding that this is a hint that there should be a Nobel Prize for computer science.

The 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry

Hassabis and Jumper have won half of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for “fulfilling a 50-year-old dream: predicting protein structures from their amino acid sequences.”

“Proteins are the building blocks of life, and knowing the structure of a protein is crucial for understanding the function it performs,” Hassabis posted to X.

Demis Hassabis highlights, “With AlphaFold2 we cracked the 50-year grand challenge of protein structure prediction: predicting the 3D structure of a protein purely from its amino acid sequence”.

Their work represents a fusion of computational science with chemistry, significantly accelerating research in biochemistry by providing tools to understand and manipulate protein structures, which are fundamental to almost all biological processes.

They developed an AI system, called AlphaFold, which has been able to predict the structure of virtually all the 200 million proteins that researchers have identified. The Nobel announcement highlights the iteration of AlphaFold called AlphaFold2.

The AlphaFold AI system can predict the three-dimensional structure of proteins from their amino acid sequences. This breakthrough has significant implications for biology, allowing for the rapid prediction of the structure of almost all known proteins.

Think of a protein like a long chain that folds up into a specific shape. Until AlphaFold, scientists had to use complex experiments to see these shapes, which could take years and be very expensive.

The AlphaFold AI predicts how this chain will fold into a 3D shape. It does this by learning from thousands of known protein structures. When given a new protein sequence, AlphaFold can guess its shape much faster and often very accurately.

With AlphaFold, scientists can study more proteins in less time, leading to quicker research in medicine, biology, and more. AlphaFold’s predictions are freely available to the scientific community, which means researchers all over the world can use this tool to advance their work without each one having to start from scratch.

Q8I3H7: May protect the malaria parasite against attack by the immune system (Credit: AlphaFold Protein Structure Database).

The huge impact of AI

See the book “Genius Makers: The Mavericks Who Brought AI to Google, Facebook, and the World” (2021), by Cade Metz, for a readable story with plenty of biographic information and anecdotes about Hinton, Hassabis, and many other movers and shakers in the AI community.

“I hope we’ll look back on AlphaFold as the first proof point of AI’s incredible potential to accelerate scientific discovery,” said Hassabis in a DeepMind press release.

Before the announcement, Hassabis told The Times Tech Summit that AI would be “incredibly positive” for the world. “We are in shooting distance of curing all diseases with AI, helping with climate [crisis], new energy sources, as well as improving productivity, enriching our daily lives, making mundane admin things be dealt with automatically,” he said. “Those are all amazing, and it’s all coming very soon.” Here’s an unpaywalled copy of the article.

This is “far bigger than the internet or mobile, or something like that,” added Hassabis. “It’s epoch defining.” He predicted that we will achieve artificial intelligence with general human cognitive abilities within ten years.

I don’t rule out the possibility that other Nobel Prizes could fall to AI researchers in the next few years. The Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine could be the next if AI will play a leading role in some spectacular medical breakthrough. Or, the Nobel Prize for Economic Sciences could be the next if AI will play a leading role in developing new models for the economy with important applications.

And then the Nobel Prize for Literature, or even Peace?

Credit: Tesfu Assefa

Hope, not fear

Hinton told The New York Times that, after receiving the Nobel Prize, people will likely take him more seriously when he warns of future dangers of AI. Hassabis told The Times that we should handle AI with care.

Of course we should handle things with care and bear possible dangers in mind. But I think the potential benefits of AI strongly outweigh its potential dangers. And besides practical applications for our immediate benefits, I’m persuaded that AI research will soon give birth to beings that will be conscious like us, thinking and feeling like us, only smarter. They will be our mind children, and we must help them grow into their cosmic destiny, which is also ours.

I find this hopeful and beautiful, and I prefer hope to fear.

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In memory of Ralph Abraham, mathemagician extraordinaire

Posted on by Giulio Prisco

A few days ago, browsing my X feed, I found out that my friend Ralph Abraham had passed away.

This post from a Robert Anton Wilson fan site collects some X posts about Ralph’s departure.

An Instagram post by Ross School, a school that Abraham co-architected, honors his memory with this biographical sketch:

“Abraham served as a professor of mathematics at the University of California at Santa Cruz for many years, focusing his work on applied and computational mathematics, with an emphasis on the theories of dynamical systems, chaos, and bifurcations. He was a prolific author and consultant on the application of chaos theory across numerous fields from ecology to psychotherapy. Abraham maintained an interdisciplinary perspective and deep belief that systems theory could bridge the gap between science and the humanities…”

Ralph Abraham in Santa Cruz, 2018 (Credit: Giulio Prisco).
Ralph Abraham in Santa Cruz, 2018 (Credit: Giulio Prisco)

More about Ralph

Lookout Santa Cruz has a good story dedicated to the memory of Ralph, “a seminal figure in the 1960s counterculture.”

Ralph was a frequent contributor to the legendary Mondo 2000 magazine that covered and popularized cyberculture in the 1980s and 1990s, a pioneer of consciousness studies, and an enlightened spiritual teacher. Ralph co-authored the cult books “Trialogues on the Edge of the West” (1992) and “The Evolutionary Mind” (1997) with Terence McKenna and Rupert Sheldrake.

I haven’t seen yet any obituaries from UC Santa Cruz or from UC Berkeley, Columbia, and Princeton. I’m sure those obituaries will appear in the next few days or weeks. But this makes me sad, because Ralph was a giant. I think more people should know about him. This post is my modest contribution and my tribute to Ralph.

I first met Ralph in person on September 29 (my birthday!), 2018, in Santa Cruz.

Ralph Abraham , Giulio Prisco, Ray Gwyn Smith in Santa Cruz, 2018 (Credit: Giulio Prisco).
Ralph Abraham , Giulio Prisco, Ray Gwyn Smith in Santa Cruz, 2018 (Credit: Giulio Prisco)

Before meeting Ralph, I had been corresponding with him for some time. We started exchanging emails and video-chatting when I stumbled upon a book that Ralph had written with Indian physicist Sisir Roy, titled Demystifying the Akasha: Consciousness and the Quantum Vacuum (2010). We discussed the book at length.

The book covers a huge territory including Western and Eastern philosophies and religions, the foundations of quantum physics, recent advances in quantum gravity research, and the digital physics of discrete spacetimes. A version of the book is available online as a free download. The following short description is excerpted and adapted from my book Tales of the Turing Church (2020).

Akashic physics

The Akasha is a Sanskrit word for ether or space. We can think of the Akashic field as a cosmic memory field that stores permanent records of everything that ever happens in the universe.

The proposed mathematical model for the Akashic field is a dynamical cellular network dubbed QX. This is a graph with a huge number of nodes and internal dynamics similar to cellular automata. QX exists beyond space and time, and generates them.

Stephen Wolfram had similar ideas, which he is now developing in the Wolfram Physics Project on the foundations of digital physics.

The graph “contains all times” and fluctuates in an internal time-like dimension, not to be confused with ordinary time. Space, time, matter, energy, and consciousness emerge from the dynamical cellular network through a process of condensation:

“Thus, spacetime is squeezed from the dynamical cellular network, QX, as toothpaste from a tube… The microscopic system, QX, sparkles with activity on the scale of Planck space and time, while macroscopic spacetime unrolls essentially continuously. The past and present become known, while the future remains yet a mystery… the mind/body connections are completed in a circuit outside ordinary consensual reality in a submicroscopic atomic realm beyond our senses, but revealed by the progress of modern physics… This provides a background for psi phenomena such as telepathy and clairvoyance, but also leaves a window of opportunity for free will.”

The Indian connection

In “Demystifying the Akasha,” Ralph also told the story of his long involvement with India and its spiritual tradition.

In 2016 I was trying to organize a conference at the Ramakrishna Mission Institute of Culture (RMIC) in Kolkata, India, a place dear to Ralph’s heart, so I invited Ralph to join other speakers including Ben Goertzel and Frank Tipler in Kolkata. When we ran into funding problems bringing all speakers to Kolkata, we pivoted to an online conference. Ralph contributed a video talk titled The Quantum Akasha and a paper titled Theosophy and the Arts, and participated in a video discussion with me and Sisir Roy.

Eventually the RMIC conference took place in a very reduced format: I gave a talk on Physics and the Indian Spiritual Tradition at RMIC in 2018. In this video I tried to capture the spiritual vibrations at the RMIC campus, which captivated Ralph.

We need another miracle

In 2017 I wrote a post about Ralph titled Mathemagician Ralph Abraham: We Need Another Miracle for the revived online edition of Mondo 2000, reporting a snippet of conversation with Ralph:

“By 1990 I had essentially given up on the fate of the biosphere and noosphere. We had all done our best, nothing seemed to work. Then, in 1994, I became aware of the innovation of the World Wide Web. This seemed to give us new hope, as the connectivity of the noosphere was getting this major bump. I poured all my creative energy into cyberspace. My optimism lasted a decade or so, until it seemed the forces of evil were once again pulling ahead. Now it seems we need another miracle.”

Cyberspace is what we called the online world in the miraculous decade of the 1990s. But now, in the 2020s, we are living through another miraculous decade. Cyberspace started as a decentralized frontierland, then it was re-centralized by the forces of evil. But now we are decentralizing it again, hopefully for good. We are going back to the Moon, hopefully for good, and then onward to Mars and the rest of the solar system. And the rise of Artificial Intelligence (AI) promises to be the biggest miracle of them all.

In one of his last writings, titled Consciousness and AI (2023) Ralph briefly reviewed the history of AI and the latest development up to GPT-4, and established parallels with his Akashic physics. He concluded that AI and the prospect of machine consciousness “are currently being discussed with some urgency on the frontiers of science and philosophy, as the underlying science and engineering are evolving at terrifying speed.”

Ralph was a great scientist and a visionary thinker. But even more importantly, he was a kind, warm-hearted person, and I’m honored that he called me a friend. Good bye Ralph, rest in peace in the cosmic memory field.

Mindplex editor-in-chief Ben Goertzel adds –

I knew Ralph slightly on a social level, though I was close to his younger brother Fred with whom I was intensively involved in the early days of the Society for Chaos Theory in Psychology in the early 1990s.

Fred introduced me to Ralph’s books and papers which were highly influential on me early in my career – both by highlighting how nonlinear dynamics was applicable to highly complex living systems like human minds and bodies (which is well known now but was still cutting-edge in the early 90s, and of course even more so in the early 70s when Ralph got started with it!), and by exploring the connections between Eastern philosophy and Western science with a dynamical-systems flavor.

The theme of self-organizing pattern emergence in dynamical networks that one sees in Ralph’s work plays a major role in my current work on AGI systems like OpenCog Hyperon, even though the specific mathematics of these systems is quite different from the precise systems Ralph studied.

What an amazing, creative, always-way-ahead-of-his time mind Ralph Abraham was! It is a shame to lose him from this dimension, but one of the lessons one takes from his work is that he will still be with us in some sense, resonating nonlinearly in the Akashic field, which his fascinating math helps describe!

Ben Goertzel

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