Interview with Vladimir Voevodsky (part 1)
baaltii1
July 1st, 2012
This is an interview with the mathematician Vladimir Voevodsky. Usually, in the interviews of scientists, they concern the formal aspects of their activities, about what is clear without any questions and answers, but what is really interesting and important remains hidden. Vladimir Voevodsky - winner of the Fields Medal, professor of the Institute of Higher Studies in Princeton, creator of the motivational homotopy theory and univalent foundations of mathematics. This will not only be about mathematics, but also life in general, and in many respects about what it is not accepted to say aloud, at least in scientific circles.
This conversation we began in Princeton, walking through the local life and beautiful sunset. It seemed that such a conversation could be of interest to many: both mathematicians and just looking for people. So, questions are asked by Roma Mikhailov. Vladimir Voevodsky answers.
- The next academic year at the Institute of Higher Studies is devoted to the univalent foundations of mathematics. And you act as the founder of this direction. But at the same time, the main your scientific results, which brought recognition and fame, belong to a completely different field: to algebraic geometry, to the theory of motives. On your website, you wrote that you have dedicated the theory of motives for about twenty years, but you are not interested in it anymore. Has he radically changed the field of research?
- The question is rhetorical ...
- The most famous result of yours is the solution of Milnor's problem of K- functors of fields. You got it back in '96. And what happened next? How did your scientific interests evolve in the following years?
- First, it was necessary to prove the generalization of the Milnor hypothesis, now known as the Bloch-Kato conjecture. The basic idea of this proof I formulated at the end of 96, about the same time, when I wrote the first complete version of the proof of Milnor's conjecture. In the approach that I came up with for the proof of Bloch-Kato, there were several problems. First, it depended on some "sub-hypothesis", which was a generalization of a single result of Marcus Rost. Secondly, from the development of much more advanced concepts in the motivational theory of homotopy than those that were sufficient to prove the hypothesis of Milnor. It was clear that the first one could most likely finish Marcus, and the second one would have to do to me. As a result, the first was completed in, in my opinion, 2007 or 2008 by Suslin, Zhukhovitsky and
Weibel, based on Marcus's sketches. And I finished all the preliminary work and the proof itself only in February 2010.
It was very difficult. In fact, it was 10 years of technical work on a topic that did not interest me during the last 5 of these 10 years. Everything was done only through willpower.
Since the autumn of 1997, I already understood that my main contribution to the theory of motives and motivational cohomology was made. Since that time I have been very conscious and actively looking for. I was looking for a topic that I will deal with when I fulfill my obligations related to the Bloch-Kato hypothesis. I quickly realized that if I wanted to do something really serious, then I should make the most of my accumulated knowledge and skills in mathematics. On the other hand, seeing the trends in the development of mathematics as a science, I realized that the time is coming when the proof of yet another hypothesis will change little. That mathematics is on the verge of a crisis, or rather, two crises. The first is due to the separation of mathematics from "pure" from applied mathematics. It is clear that sooner or later there will be a question about why society should pay money to people who are engaged in things that do not have any practical applications. The second, less obvious, is connected with the complication of pure mathematics, which leads to the fact that, sooner or later, the articles will become too complicated for detailed verification and the process of accumulating undetected errors will begin. And since mathematics is a very deep science, in the sense that the results of one article usually depend on the results of many and many previous articles, this accumulation of errors for mathematics is very dangerous.
So, I decided, you need to try to do something that will help prevent these crises. In the first case, this meant that it was necessary to find an applied problem that required for its solution methods of pure mathematics developed in recent years or even decades.
Since childhood I have been interested in natural sciences (physics, chemistry, biology), as well as in the theory of computer languages, and since 1997, I have read a lot on these topics, and even took several student and post-graduate courses. In fact, I "updated" and deepened the knowledge that had to a very large extent. All this time I was looking for that I recognized open problems that would be of interest to me and to which I could apply modern mathematics.
As a result, I chose, as I now understand incorrectly, the problem of restoring the history of populations according to their modern genetic composition. I took on this task for a total of about two years, and in the end, already in 2009, I realized that what I was inventing was useless. In my life, so far, it was, perhaps, the greatest scientific failure. A lot of work was invested in the project, which completely failed. Of course, there was some benefit, of course - I learned a lot from probability theory, which I knew badly, and also learned a lot about demography and demographic history.
In parallel, I was looking for approaches to the problem of accumulating errors in works on pure mathematics. It was clear that the only solution is to create a language in which mathematical proof can be written by people in such a form that it can be checked on a computer. Up until 2005, it seemed to me that this task is much more
complicated than the task of historical genetics, which I was engaged in. In many respects this feeling was the result of an established and very widespread among mathematicians opinion that abstract mathematics can not be reasonably formalized so accurately that it is "understood" by the computer.
In 2005, I managed to formulate several ideas that unexpectedly opened up a new approach to one of the main problems in the foundations of modern mathematics. This problem can be formally formulated as a question of how to correctly formalize the intuitive understanding that "identical" mathematical objects have the same properties. Arguments based on this principle are very often used in modern mathematical proofs, but the existing foundations of mathematics (Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory) are completely unsuited for the formalization of such arguments.
I was very familiar with this problem and thought about it back in 1989, when Misha Kapranov and I worked on the theory of poly-pottery. Then it seemed to us that it was impossible to solve it. What I was able to understand in 2005, combining the ideas of homotopy theory (parts of modern topology) and type theory (parts of the modern theory of programming languages) was absolutely amazing, and opened up real possibilities for constructing the very language in which people can write proofs, which can check the computer. Further there was a big break in my mathematical activity. From June 2006 to November 2007 I did not do math at all. What happened during this period, we will discuss in another part of the interview. Now, thinking about that happening to me at this time, I often recall the story of A. and B. Strugatsky "For a billion years before the end of the world." I returned to mathematics at the end of 2007. Worked first at intervals, then over his ideas related to historical genetics, then over the end of the cycle of work with the proof of the Bloch-Kato hypothesis. To the ideas connected with the computer verification of evidence, I returned only in the summer of 2009, when it became finally clear to me that with historical genetics nothing happens. And just a few months later there were two events that advanced these ideas from general hints, which I thought I would have to work on for more than a year, to the stage at which I was able to state that I had come up with new foundations of mathematics that would solve the problem computer verification of evidence. Now this is called "univalent bases of mathematics" and they are studied by both mathematicians and theorists of programming languages. I have almost no doubt that these grounds will soon replace the theory of sets and that the problem of the language of abstract mathematics that will be "understood" by computers can be considered basically solved.
- How does this modern ideology perceive the modern mathematical community, namely experts in categories, logic, homotopy? How many comrades among professional mathematicians who are ready to work seriously over the univalent bases?
- Differently. Companions gathered quite a lot and is going more and more. Of course, the most difficult for specialists in logic and the foundations of mathematics is in fact actually what I propose, shifts both the theory of sets and classical logic to second plans.
- Do I truly understand that at the moment you are trying to explain to the machines, what is the categorical and theoretically homotopic intuition on which
many constructions of modern mathematics are based?
- No, it's not true. This was the first stage that ended in the autumn of 2009. Now there is much more technical work to improve the language as such. The first examples of the languages of the class I work with were created in the late 1970s and are known as "Martin-Lof type theories". Surprisingly, languages were, software systems using these languages were created and even became popular (especially the "Coq" system that the French created), but there was no understanding of what these languages allow to speak. It turned out that only a very small part of the language's possibilities is used, one that, as now it is clear, allows talking about sets. Language as a whole allows you to talk about homotomical types of any level of complexity. The gap, as you know, is huge. As a result, the languages themselves did not improve, because it was not clear what can be changed and what is not. Now that we understand that in these languages it is essential and what is not, it opens the possibility to make them much more "powerful" and, as a consequence, more convenient for practical use.
"As you can see, when will the computer be able to verify your solution to the problem of Milnor?"
"If we simply set ourselves the task of writing a formal version of evidence using the existing system for formal proofs of Coq, then probably this can be done in 3-4 years. I do not plan to do this, because I think it is much more important and interesting to develop a new system for formal proofs built with regard to univalent semantics and that new vision of the "meaning" in the languages of the type theory that it opens. And how long it can take, I still do not see.
- A couple of years ago a conference devoted to general scientific issues was held in St. Petersburg. You spoke there and said the following. "What we now call the crisis of Russian science is not only the crisis of Russian science: there is a crisis of world science, real progress will consist in a very serious fight between science and religion that will end with their unification.
I confess, when I read this statement, I laughed happily, I just covered my happiness, because someone spoke about a deep, not about politics-financing- economy, but about what is really important. But this statement certainly remained incomprehensible to many. You are a person who has been brought up in materialistic paradigms, with the corresponding ideology, aesthetics, and morality. Kastovo is a Soviet intellectual, at the same time, who made a brilliant scientific career. And society, stereotypes, templates scream from everywhere that in the life of such a person there is no place for religion and mysticism. But you openly start talking about some kind of unification of science and religion, at your home the table is covered with Hindu books, Sanskrit textbooks, books in Ancient Greek, books on supernatural phenomena, shamanism, history of religions stand on the shelves. How so?
"Here's the story." As I said, I'm pretty good, for a layman, I know the natural sciences. Several areas of physics, several areas of biology, chemistry, a bit of geology and paleontology. In addition, I was seriously interested in artificial intelligence and the semantics of languages. In 1997-1999, I read many modern
books, the authors of which tried to create a kind of scientific philosophy, i.e. from existing scientific theories to combine the general picture of our world. I particularly well remember Edward Wilson's book "Consilience" (I do not know how it is in Russian). As a mathematician, I am very sensitive to "holes" in arguments, to those places where the conclusion does not follow formally from the premises, and what is called, are pulled by the ears. So, having read all these books, I became convinced that those who say that modern science explains our world are wrong. Yes, some sciences very successfully and accurately explain certain groups of phenomena. But in the full picture of the world, these explanations are by no means "glued together." Moreover, some so-called scientific explanations are in fact, I'm not afraid of this word, profanation. The most important example of this situation is Darwinism. There is no doubt that the biosphere of the earth developed and develops, and the processes of natural selection and random mutations play a certain role in this development. But they in no way explain this development. I note by the way, that now it is gradually beginning to be discussed by serious biologists, but even ten years ago, in America, a biologist, having expressed such a point of view, could seriously spoil his career.
Understanding how little our science really explains, it came to me somewhere when I was 35 years old. approximately in 2001. Then I did not connect it with the fact that in the 20th century science excluded from the field of its attention what is now called "supernatural." I still treated everything mystical-religious as a deception or delusion. At this position, I stood very firmly until 2007. The period from 2001 to 2006 was very difficult. For several years I was only saved by the fact that I was engaged in wildelife photography. Some of my photos of that period can be found here: http://pics.livejournal.com/vividha/
"It happens that people of search become after contact with something that does not fit into their old understanding, into the familiar picture of the world. For example, they say that Gurdjieff as a child witnessed a ritual act, in which children outlined the circle around the Yezidi boy, and he could not escape from this circle. Struck by what he saw as supernatural, as well as human cruelty, Gurdjieff began to seek new knowledge about the world and man. Did you have any points, events, inexplicable phenomena that triggered a rethinking?
- In 2006-2007 a lot of external and internal events happened to me, after which my point of view on the questions of the "supernatural" has changed significantly. What happened to me during these years, perhaps, can be compared most closely to what happened to Karl Jung in 1913-14. Jung called it "confrontation with the unconscious". I do not know what to call it, but I can describe it in a few words. Remaining more or less normal, apart from the fact that I was trying to discuss what was happening to me with people whom I should not have discussed with, I had in a few months acquired a very considerable experience of visions, voices, periods when parts of my body did not obey me and a lot of incredible accidents. The most intense period was in mid-April 2007 when I spent 9 days (7 of them in the Mormon capital of Salt Lake City), never falling asleep for all these days.
Almost from the very beginning, I found that many of these phenomena (voices, visions, various sensory hallucinations), I can control. So I was not scared and did not feel sick, but perceived everything as something very interesting, actively trying to interact with those "creatures" in the auditorial, visual and then tactile spaces that appeared (themselves or by call) around me . I must say, probably, to avoid possible speculations on this subject, that I did not use any drugs during this period, tried to eat and sleep a lot, and drank diluted white wine.
Another comment - when I say beings, then naturally I mean what in modern terminology is called complex hallucinations. The word "beings" emphasizes that these hallucinations themselves "behaved", possessed a memory independent of my memory, and reacted to attempts at communication. In addition, they were often perceived in concert in various sensory modalities. For example, I played several times in a (hallucinated) ball with a (hallucinated) girl and this ball I saw, and felt tactile palm when I threw it.
Despite the fact that all this was very interesting, it was very difficult. It happened for several periods, the longest of which lasted from September 2007 to February 2008 without breaks and there were days when I could not read, and days when coordination of movements was broken to such an extent that it was difficult to walk.
I managed to get out of this state due to the fact that I forced myself to start math again. By the middle of spring 2008 I could already function more or less normally and even went to Salt Lake City to look at the places where I wandered, not knowing where I was in the spring of 2007.
It should be said that despite many conversations with non-material "creatures" during this period, I completely did not understand what actually happened. I was "offered" many explanations, including hypnotists, aliens, demons and secret communities of people with magical abilities. None of the explanations explained everything I observed. Eventually, since some terminology was needed in conversations, I began to call all these beings spirits, although now I think that this terminology is not true. The terms "world system" (apparently control over people) and, especially in the beginning, "the game hosted by fear" sounded in this context.
After I returned to a more or less normal state, and in particular I could read serious books again, I began to study very actively those areas of knowledge that I had previously ignored. First of all, I began to try to find descriptions of similar events that occurred with other people. I must say that it was not possible for me (not counting Jung). Something a little bit similar, but without visions, was with Karen Amstrong, who later began to write books about different religions. There were many descriptions of how people experienced visions, voices, unusual emotional states , etc. in the course of hours or days ("mystical experience"). As a rule, it either strengthened them in the religion in which they grew up or made them religious. A classic and very interesting example, when events of this kind continued with the man long is Swedenborg. In my case, however, it did not seem like that - Swedenborg quickly accepted what was happening to him as coming from God, and after that the process was completely different. Perhaps the most interesting thing for me was the story of the "confrontation with the unconscious" of Carl Jung, but there the situation was also
different because Jung, unlike me, came across "super-natural" events from his childhood and believed in God.
Interview with Vladimir Voevodsky (part 2)
This is the continuation of the interview with Vladimir Voevodsky. The first part was received by readers with interest. We thank you for your informative questions and continue.
- It is difficult for me to imagine what is happening inside a man of atheistic views, when unusual layers of reality are revealed before him. For people of religious perception and upbringing, this is part of the path, a state in which new aspects of being are revealed, it's just normal, as without it. Personally, I from the first breath strived for mysticism, believed, sought, found, secret societies and secret societies. You, as far as I understand, at some point was thrown into the "incomprehensible", being simply put in the face of a strange given. Type what to do if the angels look at you, and after you close your eyes and open them again, the angels will continue to look at you ?! What is normal and correct for a person of mystical-religious upbringing, people of other perceptions can easily drive mad.
- Probably, my views at that time should be called not so much atheistic as agnostic. The reaction was twofold. Firstly, indignation, because the most of what was discovered was dirt and mockery of people. Secondly, admiration and hope, when in this mud suddenly appeared glimpses of love, beauty and reason.
I did not go crazy, although sometimes there were "drifts" when I began to seriously believe in this or that "theory". As a rule, these drifts straightened quickly, usually in a few hours. More serious were periods of hopelessness. In such periods, the idea that it is necessary to continue fighting is very helpful, because from this, albeit to a small extent, depends in which spiritual world today's children will live.
- You mentioned the game, the host of which is fear. What is fear?
First, I think that there are a lot of "fears". For example, there is fear, which spurs to action, but there is fear, which paralyzes, and from which the legs subside. The first type of fear is understandable, it is the body's response to situations that are perceived as dangerous, which helps to avoid such situations. The second type of fear is much less clear. I had a hypothesis that this is one of the mechanisms by which ecosystems are regulated. For example, with an abundance of deer in the forest, a hidden mechanism can switch on, which switches the fear experienced by the deer at the sight of the wolf from the first type a, the second that facilitates the capture of the deer by the wolves.
Fear can be hallucinated - it's not completely paranoia, because a person during this period can be completely rational and understand that there is no reason for fear, and yet feel it, have a shiver in your hands, etc.
Fear can be overcome, but sometimes the attendant phenomena (trembling in the hands, weakness in the legs) remain, which is rather disgusting.
From the point of view of spirits, fear, as I understand it, is considered as one of the convenient and effective methods of influencing people.
- Here we are talking about a lot of aspects of a very peculiar experience, but it gives the impression of an uncontrolled flow of complex phenomena. And what did you learn from this experience and fix it inside yourself as important?
"The truly profound things that I have learned over the years are the ability to observe my own inner world on both the verbal and other levels, and it is rational to analyze these observations. For example, to notice when new "voices" are woven into my mind-stream, or to distinguish between styles of visual and other sensory hallucinations. These skills all, in one way or another, require keeping the clarity of thinking, even when you are immersed in an intense sensory and emotional state, and pay attention to details, to the "technique of building" the impressions that you experience, and not just their content .
Another group of observations, which I consider important, boils down to the fact that what we perceive as inner world events that we actively "create" in real time is often not. Basically, these are blanks that are "lost" in such a way that a very realistic illusion arises that what is happening is created with our participation and "now."
"What is madness?"
If you want a functional definition, then, for example, this: insanity is the inability to
be a productive member of society, not associated with physical illness.
And if seriously, I do not know.
- You said that you were offered pictures of the world. And, as far as I understand, it all evolved that it was a metaphysical scam. You broke through the layers of "explanations", realizing that certain manipulations with consciousness are taking place, that someone is building up whole philosophical systems inside you, and this happens as an invasion from the outside. So?
- It is difficult to build a real philosophical system solely on the basis of external influences. From the outside (not understandable to me by the way) come "seeds" - short ideas, associations, etc. In the vast majority of cases, what of these seeds grows, if they are allowed to grow freely, is useless or harmful. Somehow I sounded for such systems the interesting name "harness". Those. what can be used later to direct human behavior. Whether a person allows these seeds to grow or quickly culls depends largely on their skills of working with their inner world.
The problem is aggravated by the fact that sometimes the appearance of such "seeds" is accompanied by other phenomena, not of a mental, but of an emotional or even real plan, which seem to confirm the system that is starting to form. Another important property of these seeds and growing systems is that they, as a rule, contain, especially at the initial stage, really true and interesting ideas. The transition from the truth to the lies in these systems is often difficult to notice. A person develops an instinctive confidence in the emerging thought stream, then he begins to believe in its continuation which is already false, and then it is difficult for him to admit to himself that he believed in bullshit and he begins to deceive himself just to not feel fools. Often systems are built in such a way that starting from a certain level of growth, they support themselves also through fear.
- I will say about my perception of similar phenomena. You know, a couple of years ago I started studying card tricks to better understand the structure of deception. And at first it seemed that it was impossible, that people can not be led to such a trick, but practice showed that the trick is almost always. The more I entered this activity, the more I was amazed at the sophistication of existing card manipulations, as well as their impudence. There are methods of forcing, when the right card is slipped, and the viewer gets the impression that he chose it by accident. Here, after all, we are talking about the near, only manipulations are made at the level of metaphysics. On the other hand. You understand that archives of psychiatric hospitals store multiple stories of those who fought with scammers, who built their metaphysics, trying to break through the hierarchy of lies, to see the truth, who drew their cosmological schemes. Yes, and notebooks with diagrams, too, probably exist in the archives. And the world of the scientific community, with a high aesthetics, with reflection and accepted values - is it not scam? It's not a question, but so, reasoning in the air. You know, if I had not been torn from the inside by the awareness of these hierarchies of scammers, I would not have seen a profound meaning in such an interview. Sometimes I look inside and I shout "build your metaphysics, otherwise you will be fed with ready- made forms, from which you will puke your whole life." I apologize, broke on emotions. We continue the interview.
-How can you live in America?
- I have a feeling that when all this happened to me in April 2007, besides the whole mystical side of the matter, there was also a purely "social" one - after that I began to feel quite comfortable in America. I was kind of "registered", to put it bluntly.
- You were in India twice, visited both southern places, and Allahabad, Kanpur, Delhi. After a walk around Magh Mehl, you asked the local professors various questions about the arrangement of the local society, sometimes amusing and unexpected, such as whether the guru paid Magh Mela taxes from his dakshinas. How do you like this country at all? Do you plan to return there? Can you imagine that you would have stayed to live and work there?
- The country is big and complex. For example, those places where I was in the south, are completely unlike the places where we were in central India. Simply from general considerations I am almost sure that I will visit there. The option that I would choose to live and work there, I imagine badly.
- After we laid out the first part of the interview, there were many questions. In particular, readers were interested in your statements about the separation of pure mathematics from applied mathematics. This gap is felt by almost all mathematicians, what can I say, but the conclusions are different. Personally, this only makes me happy; There is an opportunity to work in deep worlds without risking harm to being. But from your words it follows that your attitude is radically different, and moreover, you have searched for a long time where you can apply modern high mathematics, and did not find it. One of the readers asks the following questions: "Is there any hope that this can be done? Or now it seems that the problem is fatal?"
- As for the question of the approximation of applied and pure mathematics, I have this picture. Pure math works with high-level models of abstraction and small complexity (mathematics call this small complexity elegance). Applied mathematics works with models more specific, but a high level of complexity (many variables, equations, etc.). Interesting applications of the ideas of modern pure mathematics are likely to lie in the field of high abstraction and high complexity. This area is now almost inaccessible, in large part because of the limited ability of the human brain to work with such models. When we learn how to use computers to work with abstract mathematical objects, this problem will gradually fade into the background and interesting applications of the ideas of today's abstract mathematics will appear.
So, now I think that the work that I do in the field of computer languages that allow to work with such objects will help in the future and in the question of applications of ideas of modern pure mathematics to applied questions.
- There were some more interesting questions. They asked about the period when you tried to apply interesting mathematics to historical genetics. What did you want to achieve and why did not it work?
- Initially, I wanted to understand the dynamics of the recombinant part of the genome and understand whether it is possible to extract information from it about the dynamics
of the number of populations in the historical time scale, i.e. say in the interval from now to 10,000 years ago.
Pretty quickly I realized that it was very difficult. There is not enough knowledge about the demographic structure of populations even over the last few hundred years. For example, the distribution of the number of children from an average man or woman, say, in a given city, is known. This information can be found. And the distribution of the number of grandchildren? It can, of course, be assumed that the number of children does not depend on the number of brothers and sisters. But this is obviously wrong. And the great-grandchildren? This is the first problem. This should work for historians and demographers, and now this work is especially in Europe based on data in the parish books. The data there is very complete, so gradually this information will appear.
On the other hand, gradually I realized that no one really knows how either there is a statistical recombination or how the mutations occur statistically. Measuring is difficult. Now there is more and more material due to police databases on the one hand and databases of companies dealing with genealogy genetics on the other, and the situation is gradually improving. But when I started to do this, there was no real data at all.
Mathematically, the situation was also not remarkable, since no one ever seriously studied such complicated and time-varying processes. As a result, everything ended with the fact that I came up with some new formalization for Markov processes, based on the notion of a system of paths. The article turned out to be rather long and technical, and now lies unfinished. I think to return to it and add it with the help of a convenient computer proof assistant.
- There was one more question. "Science is looking for the most compact descriptions (this is Alan Kay said, which Smalltalk came up with.) So you are engaged in science, are looking for more compact descriptions?"
- I do not agree with this. Those. science I can sometimes be and do, but that's not the point. Science must deal with the collection and comprehension of new knowledge. This is very important - the collection. There is a point of view that, supposedly, all the observations have been basically done, the general picture of the world is clear, and it remains only to order this knowledge, and put it into a compact and beautiful theory. This is fundamentally incorrect. And it's not just wrong, but leads to a very negative tendency to ignore everything that does not fit into a pre-prepared theory or hypothesis. This is one of the most serious problems in modern science.
- I'm quoting. "I will express a timid hope that in the second part there will be words about a critical analysis of the causes of those visions that have visited you, and about the relationship of these visions to physical reality."
"First, about a very general idea that I was difficult to accept, but based on all the experience I went through over the past five years, I could not think of anything else. Around us there are inhuman minds. Under the word "mind", I understand here an information system that has memory, motivation, the ability to model the external world and to plan. They are not "extraterrestrial," but primordial terrestrial and, most
likely, evolutionarily older than humans. These minds actively (and sometimes negatively) affect people's lives.
The world of these minds is very complex, maybe even comparable in complexity to that part of the world as a whole, which we now call physical reality. I would not like to speculate about the structure of this world, because I do not have enough for this facts, observations. Even the simplest questions for me today do not have unequivocal answers. I am sure that these minds interact with people. Almost sure that with higher animals. And how do they interact with lower animals? With inanimate matter? Considerations of logical consistency, which the complete picture of the world should satisfy, prompt that they somehow interact. In this sense, they are also part of the "physical reality". It's just a part about which we know very, very little. This part of the world needs to be studied and studied using scientific methodology.
Of course, attempts at such a study have been made. Especially in the late nineteenth century, but then there was not enough for this opportunity. Now it seems to me that such a study can begin with the group of phenomena that Jung called sinchronicity. In a simple way, these are unnatural in terms of existing models, patterns in the individual and collective behavior of people. In Russian it, as I understood from the comments to the first part of the interview, is called "synchrony."
Now, for the first time, it became possible to document such regularities (ie, instrumental) in a document and begin to understand their structure. It appeared due to the existence of a huge number of records of both human speech (for example, interviews on radio stations) and human movements (for example, "security cameras" in airports). These data need to be analyzed taking into account their binding to physical time. I am almost sure that in this way it is possible to discover regularities in the behavior of people who, on the one hand, are not explained by their conscious activity and on the other hand are too complex, and are too closely tied to objective (physical) time, so that they can be attributed to individual subconscious.
I personally do not want to do this, although I sometimes feel the internal pressure pushing me in this direction. I really hope that there will be people who have both access to the right data, as well as courage and the desire to deal with this problem. It will be real science. From here the chain to the present will understand the structure and driving forces of the historical process, and then the process of the evolution of life as a whole.
One specific idea is this. Make a website (for example, a page in LiveJournal) where people can leave a comment if they are synchronized when they are listening to the radio or TV and thinking about something their own, suddenly they hear a word continuing their thought or answering the question posed in their head . The main thing in such a commentary should be a word or phrase pronounced over the radio. As additional information, you can leave, or you can not leave, the thought-context, the time when it happened and the radio / TV station. Especially valuable in this respect are the cases when the synchronization occurs at the moment the radio is turned on and such cases must be necessarily indicated.
My hypothesis is that in the stream of words that we hear on the radio, there are
regularities by binding certain words or words from certain co-sense groups to moments of time (with a second accuracy) not known to the consciousnesses of those who say these words. Next is a good voice recognition software that can generate transcripts from time stamps to individual words and make up a large array of sequences of moments of time uttering each of those words with which people most often have synchronies. After this, it is necessary to look for deviations from randomness in these sequences.
Now there is a whole field of mathematics called the theory of pseudo-random sequences. These are sequences that at first glance look accidental, but are in fact highly predictable. We have a whole group working on them here. So, it is mathematically possible to find the presence of hidden regularities.
- There were also a few questions about doctors and schizophrenia. Clearly, for many, such revelations are perceived as schizophrenia. The person openly talks about visions and complex hallucinations.
- I'll try to answer. The first thing I did when I came back from Salt Lake City, it went to the hospital and asked me to do standard tests and X-rays of several parts of the body, because besides mental, this period was accompanied by a lot of unusual somatic sensations. I was told that I am completely healthy. In general, my physical health has improved over the past five years, although I'm obviously older.
I have not addressed this to psychiatrists. Somehow from the very beginning it was clear that this is not schizophrenia.
There is in all this a more general theme - the connection between mental disorders and those minds, of which I spoke above. This topic is complex and I believe that honest, clever and courageous specialists should first of all deal with this. I do not want to go into this here.
- Say something else at the end.
It seems to me that very much of what we talked about was left unsaid. Let's go back to this, say, in a year, and see what has changed, what's new.