Análisis firmado por el presidente de la Fundación Concepto, Andrés Montero, para el Real Instituto Elcano en España.
Resumen
Las empresas estratégicas y de infraestructuras críticas son el objeto preferente de los ciberataques, con el apoyo implícito o explícito de Estados con geopolíticas agresivas, que utilizan cepas sofisticadas de malware (virus informáticos) para atacar y vulnerar los sistemas tecnológicos de esas empresas, robar información de alto valor (ciberespionaje), destruir sus datos o distorsionar sus procesos críticos. Los Estados y las empresas han desplegado y robustecido capacidades de ciberseguridad y de ciberdefensa, pero no logran impedir ciberataques cada vez más sofisticados y dañinos.
Algunos Estados están considerando o incluyendo directamente en sus estrategias nacionales de ciberseguridad, capacidades de disuasión ofensiva (deterrence by punishment) como paquete de medidas adicionales a la defensa reactiva a fin de contener las operaciones de las ciberamenazas. En ese contexto de superación o complementación de las medidas de defensa reactivas, surge el debate de si las empresas también podrían adoptar mecanismos y procedimientos de defensa ofensiva activa que sean útiles y no contraproducentes, pero sobre todo legales y legítimos. Este análisis proporcionará los elementos para sustanciar el debate sobre esta cuestión.
Leer completo
El análisis está enmarcado en la línea de trabajo nº 5 de la Fundación, dedicada a la computación en el ciberespacio.
This essay considers some issues regarding a possible theoretical framework exploring the possibility of developing an equation of state for the human being, understanding the whole human being -including variables traditionally considered cognitive or psychological- as a physical system governed by the laws of mechanics. In this respect, we discuss the different approaches of mechanics that would be applicable, suggesting that a hypothetical equation of state for human mechanics would consist of a core composed of a quantum-domain human state vector supplemented at the macroscopic level by equations in classical mechanics.
Click to download the full text of the essay in .pdf
This paper is a speculative essay within the Imaginary Conference Series established by The Concept Foundation.
Produced by The Concept Foundation with a Creative Commons license
Entre el 31/5 y el 2/8/2017 la Fundación Concepto, en colaboración con el Departamento de Matemática Aplicada de la Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, organizó el curso Inmortalidad Robótica y Personas Electrónicas en el contexto de los cursos de verano de la Universidad Internacional Menéndez Pelayo.
Dirección
Andrés Montero
Presidente de la Fundación Concepto
Juan Carlos Nuño
Profesor Titular de Matemática Aplicada
Universidad Politécnica de Madrid
Descripción y motivación
La intersección entre robótica e inteligencia artificial cambiará la sociedad del futuro. Estos cambios no estarán limitados ni interesarán únicamente a la tecnología, sino que configurarán un nuevo modelo social en donde los robots inteligentes serán considerados como un nuevo tipo de personas, las personas electrónicas.
En este contexto, el curso en la UIMP tratará de explorar no sólo los avances en inteligencia artificial que lleven al desarrollo de robots capaces de asumir comportamientos tradicionalmente humanos, sino las profundas implicaciones que la inteligencia robótica tendrá para la naturaleza humana, tanto en lo relativo a la interacción entre humanos y máquinas como en lo que tenga que ver con una nueva concepción de funciones y realidades humanas, a saber, la consciencia, la identidad o la muerte.
Al situarse en la vanguardia de la reflexión sobre inteligencia artificial robótica, el encuentro mostrará a los estudiantes itinerarios vocacionales posibles en un ámbito de desarrollo tecnológico con elevada confluencia interdisciplinar. La inteligencia artificial aplicada a la robótica es un campo profesional en donde trabajan juntos ingenieros, científicos, lingüistas y psicólogos del comportamiento para definir tecnológicamente a una máquina robótica programada para desarrollar conductas basadas en aprendizaje; pero esa tecnología se inscribirá en un modelo de relaciones humano-máquina en donde los robots tendrán que encontrar un encaje tanto sociológico como regulatorio, ajuste que está demandando ya la contribución de filósofos que definan nuevos modelos éticos, sociólogos y politólogos que analicen y desarrollen propuestas de convivencia social en un entorno de máquinas inteligentes, y juristas que caractericen el nuevo entorno legal que regule las relaciones de robots inteligentes con las sociedades humanas.
Programa
Lunes 31/7/2017
Mañana Sesión 1ª Robótica Cuántica
Miguel Martín-Delgado Alcántara, Director del Grupo de Investigación de Información y Computación Cuántica de la Universidad Complutense de Madrid.
Sesión 2ª Robótica Cognitiva y Comportamiento Inteligente
Martín Molina González, Catedrático del Departamento de Inteligencia Artificial de la Universidad Politécnica de Madrid.
Tarde Sesión 3ª Personas Electrónicas
Alejandro Sánchez del Campo Redonet, Director Académico de Robotiuris y Consejero Legal de Telefónica.
Álvaro Moreno Bergareche, Catedrático de Filosofía de la Ciencia y Director del departamento de Lógica y Filosofía de la Ciencia de la Universidad del País vasco
Martes 1/8/2017
Mañana Sesión 4ª Internet de las Cosas Robóticas
José Javier Samper Zapater, Instituto de Robótica de la Universidad de Valencia.
Sesión 5ª Identidad Humana y Consciencia Artificial
Carlos González Tardón, Profesor de U-Tad.
Tarde Sesión 6ª Creatividad Computacional
Ramón López de Mántaras, Director del Instituto de Investigación de Inteligencia Artificial del Centro Superior de Investigaciones Científicas.
Miércoles 2/8/2017
Mañana Sesión 7ª Inmortalidad Robótica y Personas Híbridas
Jordi Vallverdú Segura, Investigador del Departamento de Lógica y Filosofía de la Ciencia de la Universidad de Barcelona.
Sesión 8ª Hackers Robóticos
Alfonso Muñoz, Senior Cybersecurity Expert & Research Lead, BBVA Innovation for Security
LA REDUCCIÓN DE LA ENTROPÍA COMO PROPÓSITO DE LA EXISTENCIA
El poder de la palabra.
Al principio fue el verbo.
¿Y si el constituyente básico no sólo de la realidad que percibimos sino principalmente de la materia fuera la información?; ¿cuál sería el vínculo entre información y materia?
La respuesta implícita la pregunta, que la información es el constituyente básico de la materia, no es una idea nueva si no que se remonta al universo platónico y desde allí y a través de sucesivas aproximaciones teóricas a largo de la historia ha sido objeto de varias propuestas. Investigadores como Paul Davies o Seth Lloyd han elaborado planteamientos en el contexto de los sistemas de información cuántica (computación cuántica) o Marx Tegmark, entre otros, en torno a la hipótesis de que la realidad material se construye sobre una estructura subyacente de información matemática.
La propia certeza de que la vida biológica esté regulada por un centro de mando basado en instrucciones de información genética codificada, el ADN, representa un sugerente referente simbólico desde el que comenzar a pensar la realidad en términos de “estructuras de información”.
En este contexto de la biología, es decir, de las ciencias de la vida, precisamente una quasi-paradoja nos acerca a esa conexión íntima que parece existir entre información y materia, incluso en ausencia de vida: los virus son seres, que la biología todavía no tiene claro si calificar como “formas de vida”, desprovistos de células y cuya única composición (aparte de una cubierta proteica) es la propia estructura de ADN que busca a toda costa replicarse (replicar la información genética) infectando y secuestrando los sistemas celulares de otros organismos, en este caso organismos vivos según la clasificación de las ciencias biológicas.
En física, la designación de los constituyentes fundamentales de la materia ha tomado tamaños y realidades paulatinamente más pequeñas y difusas ha medida que la capacidad humana de detectarlos y medirlos ha incrementado su sensibilidad. Para ser considerados fundamentales, elementales o básicos, los componentes de la materia deben ser aquellos que no puedan ser divididos en estructuras más pequeñas, en subcomponentes que tengan sentido interno en sí mismo, es decir, una función que sume o se combine con otros subcomponentes para formar estructuras mayores.
En el siglo XIX las partículas elementales eran los átomos, para posteriormente descubrirse que eran divisibles en piezas aún más fundamentales, protones, neutrones y electrones. La mecánica cuántica reveló que esos componentes del átomo que se creían indivisibles lo eran aún más, en forma de quarks y gluones. Actualmente todas las variantes de las denominadas Teorías-M, Teorías-U o, más generalmente, teorías unificadoras, postulan que los quarks estarían aún compuestos por estructuras funcionales más pequeñas: las cuerdas.
Las hipótesis sobre la información como constituyente (ya no partícula) elemental de la materia no establecen de momento qué tipo de jerarquía, y desde luego mucho menos qué clase de mecánica, relacionaría a la información (en principio inmaterial) con las micro-estructuras que se discuten, ya sean quarks o cuerdas. En todo caso, parece claro que el nivel de “habitabilidad” de la que sea estructura elemental de la materia será el cuántico o, tal vez, sub.cuántico, si se permite la expresión.
Imaginemos que toda la realidad, desde el objeto “taza”, pasando por los fenómenos atmosféricos, o los sociales y económicos, o funciones más humanas e intangibles como el amor o las cuatro emociones básicas, incluso la muerte, respondieran a específicas estructuras informativas subyacentes codificadas. Tratándose, si se tratara, de información cuántica la unidad mínima de medida de la materia sería un qubit (quantum bit) o bit cuántico.
El qubit es en realidad un sistema cuántico y, por tanto, un objeto matemático abstracto sin soporte físico concreto. A efectos de materializarse, actualmente puede hacerlo los qubits en diversos “soportes” físicos, como los puntos cuánticos o las trampas de iones; casi todas las formas físicas que pueden ser empleadas como qubits están siendo ingeniadas para servir de utilidad a la computación cuántica, al diseño y construcción de un ordenador cuántico.
En un espacio bidimensional, el sistema cuántico del qubit expresa dos estados que son asimilados del bit de los sistemas clásicos, representados por los números 0 y el 1. Además y por su naturaleza cuántica, el qubit puede tener un estado de superposición que contenga, al mismo tiempo, el 0 y el 1. Es decir, el qubit se ha codificado por analogía con el sistema binario de información, con la certeza de que información en cualquier otro sistema (decimal, octal, hexadecimal…) puede convertirse al binario y por tanto representarse informativamente como bits y qubits. Esta analogía queda simbolizada en la expresión de John Wheeler “it from bit”, es decir, todo lo físico (el it) responde a una codificación informativa binaria (los bits).
Queda entendido pues que el qubit es una unidad de medida, una abstracción, como podría haberse elegido otra, y no un componente o estructura fundamental e irreductible de la materia. El qubit mide la información contenida en un sistema cuántico.
Por tanto, aunque pueda plantearse que el constituyente básico del universo, de la materia y de la no materia, es la información, todavía queda por dilucidar qué naturaleza tiene esa información más allá de las unidades de medida que utilicemos o de los códigos empleados para representarla. Al igual que la consciencia humana se ha hipotetizado (como ha hecho Tegmark) que puede estar sustentada en un nuevo estado de la materia, en el estado actual de conocimiento respecto de la información como constituyente fundamental e irreductible de la realidad tal vez habría que estar contemplando, precisamente, un nuevo estado de la materia. En la actualidad, sobradamente superados los conceptos limitativos de los estados clásicos, líquidos y gaseosos con otras realidades sobre la agregación de la materia (condensados de Bose-Einstein o de Fermi, plasma, líquido de espín cuántico…), tener en mente la posibilidad de un nuevo estado para el componente fundamental de la realidad no es una especulación gratuita.
La información cuántica (o subcuántica) como constituyente esencial de la realidad no es una aproximación únicamente orientada a entender la naturaleza última de la materia y de los fenómenos de momento considerados intangibles, sino que al mismo tiempo podría estar relacionada con la respuesta a otras de las grandes preguntas tan física como metafísica: ¿cuál es el propósito de la existencia, de la realidad, del universo?… si es que hubiera algún propósito para -por ejemplo- la vida, más allá de ser un quasi-accidente biológico que queda gobernando por las leyes de la evolución de las especies…. ¿porqué, además, la realidad humana o cualquier otra realidad natural son crecientemente más complejas?.
Investigadores de primera línea como Seth Lloyd consideran que el universo, es decir, el soporte físico de toda la realidad, es una inmensa máquina computacional que crea la realidad a partir de la información cuántica que procesa. Es una idea nada extraña si se tienen en mente escenarios que nos son tan familiares como que el desarrollo biológico de cualquier especie animal y vegetal, del propio ser humano, esté gobernado por información codificada en las pares de bases nitrogenadas de las cadenas de ADN: es decir, información codificada para regular la vida.
En esta línea de hipótesis para preguntas metafísicas, supongamos que la naturaleza de la información en el universo y, por tanto, la naturaleza de la realidad y de la vida tienen que ver con la entropía.
Aunque la definición más popular de entropía se debe a la termodinámica y a su segunda ley, que afirma que la entropía del universo tiende a incrementarse con el tiempo, la comprensión de la entropía fuera de los círculos científicos más especializados no es la más afortunada (la mayoría de las personas tienen interiorizado el concepto de que la entropía es la tendencia inexorable de los objetos hacia el desorden). Considérese de entrada que la definición de esa ley es aplicable a sistemas aislados en equilibrio termodinámico y que, a pesar de incluirse la palabra “tiempo” en la definición tan popular, el tiempo no es una variable termodinámica (la entropía se asocia con el tiempo porque los sucesos reales, donde ocurren los fenómenos termodinámicos, están ligados al principio de la “flecha del tiempo” o la decoherencia cuántica, ambos irreversibles) . En realidad, la entropía creciente afectaría al universo si lo consideráramos como sistema aislado (lo cual está por ver), que partiendo de un equilibrio termodinámico (supuestamente el Big Bang como paradigma aceptado) evoluciona incrementando su entropía hasta alcanzar una temperatura y presión completamente uniformes, es decir, un máximo de entropía, momento en el cual se produciría la conocida como “muerte térmica del universo”.
La entropía tiene otras acepciones además de la propiamente termodinámica y una de ellas fue formalizada por Claude Shannon para la teoría de la información, según la cual (simplificando mucho la cuestión) la entropía tiene que ver con la incertidumbre o impredictibilidad asociada a un sistema de información: un sistema es tanto más entrópico cuanta más incertidumbre haya asociada… o, expresado de otro modo, la entropía se maximiza en un entorno informativo (de decisión) en donde todas las posibilidades de la realidad tienen la misma probabilidad de ocurrencia. No obstante y sin restarle mérito a la inmensa contribución de Shannon con su teoría matemática de la comunicación, tal como ha expresado Luciano Floridi la formalización de la información de Shannon tienen en cuenta la información como unidades y conjuntos de “datos”, pero otros planos de la información, como el significado o la semántica…. y está claro, aunque sólo sea intuitivamente, que la semántica es una “capa informativa” en sí misma, probablemente de considerable “densidad” a tener en cuenta.
Por tanto, es un muy probable que para caracterizar adecuadamente la entropía relacionada con la información como constituyente elemental de la realidad (material e inmaterial) sea necesario un nuevo concepto de entropía de la información adicional a la entropía de Shannon.
Tanto uno de los padres de la física cuántica, Erwin Schrödinger, como otros investigadores (Williard Gibbs, Albert Lenninger) han relacionado la evolución biológica con la entropía termodinámica, pero poco se ha dicho sobre la entropía de Shannon (informacional) y la evolución de la realidad, la vida biológica incluida.
¿Y si el objetivo informativo de la realidad y de la vida fuera la acumulación de información relevante para reducir la impredictividad y, por tanto, la entropía? ¿Qué ocurrirá en un futuro a muy largo plazo en donde la incertidumbre asociada a la realidad sea cada vez menor?
La respuesta a estas preguntas sería pues la hipótesis de que el sentido de la realidad, de la materia y por tanto de la vida sería evolucionar generando estructuras de información que redujeran la entropía (una nueva concepción de la entropía de Shannon) en el universo. En términos metafóricos tal hipótesis sería equivalente a un estado de entropía cero en donde un demonio de Laplace conociera la localización y momento exactos de cada partícula (física) del universo en cada unidad de tiempo.
A priori esta hipótesis podría parecer contraintuitiva, puesto que la “verdad oficial” de la Cosmología es que el universo se dirige a mayores niveles de entropía; incluso se están postulando planteamientos, todavía débiles empíricamente, que relacionan la consciencia humana con el incremento de la entropía en las conexiones cerebrales (ver Guevara, Mateos, Wenneber y Pérez Velázquez: https://arxiv.org/abs/1606.00821). También contradice planteamientos filosóficos de la “gran unificación” como las teorías del punto Omega (Teilhard de Chardin) que abogan por una especie de big crunch unificador de la consciencia universal al final de los tiempos, por tanto por un nivel máximo de entropía asociado a una “consciencia universal unificada” y por tanto homogeneizada.
Sin embargo, toda la física cuántica es contraintuitiva…. y no obstante parece que es el modelo rector más prometedor para explicar la estructura subyacente de la realidad.
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Este contenido es un ensayo especulativo en el marco de la serie Conferencias Imaginarias de la Fundación Concepto
An intricate mathematical building to avoid infinity
Nothing less than in 1930 Wolfram Pauli conceived the hypothesis of what later would be the neutrino (a name coined by Enrico Fermi), a subatomic particle that was necessary to respect the principle of conservation of the energy when he observed how a neutron decayed by virtue of the weak nuclear force into a proton and an electron. Pauli concluded that in order for the original neutron's energy to be preserved by "disintegrating" into two other particles, there needed to be another "something" that added energy to the missing proton and electron together, so that all resulting products of the decay (the three) were equivalent to the energy that was originally present in the neutron. Energy is neither created nor destroyed, it is only transformed: the first general principle of thermodynamics.
Thus neither Pauli nor anyone else had verified experimentally, let alone imagined, that neutrinos were constitutive particles of matter. However, his calculations were consistent with the fact that a particle of the hypothetical characteristics of the neutrino (without mass, without electric charge) had to exist to preserve the laws of thermodynamics.
Since Pauli glimpsed the neutrino hypothesis until it was shed experimental light to the neutrino twenty-six years passed: it was in 1956 when traces of neutrinos were detected, for decades later to be proved experimentally that there are several types of neutrinos (muónico, tauónico) and that some of them have mass, although so slight as to be able to cross the earth without being aware of.
Even more dramatic are the times of correspondence between theory and empirical verification in the issue of the Higgs boson, the rock star of the elementary components of matter: the Higgs field (with its quantum, the boson) was postulated in 1964, with the substantive transcendence for the known matter as that its role would be to mediate the acquisition of mass by all particles having mass; according to the standard model of physics, the mass of the universe would depend on whether the Higgs or something like the Higgs does exist.
Although such an assertion of its indispensability in the mass of matter is a "poetic license" that is used to popularly convey the relevance of the Higgs (and by what has been dubbed the "particle of God"), since reality is more that the Higgs was an ingenious theoretical mechanism to meet the insurmountable requirement of fitting into the mathematical model of the weak nuclear interaction some particles that were supposed to have no mass, but had it (the Z and W bosons).
When the theory of this fundamental weak interaction was being formulated in order to integrate it with the equations of the already validated physical model of the electromagnetic force, the mathematical field that was to describe such a nuclear interaction (mathematically a special unit group of second order in the body of the complex numbers, SU-2) should not contain mass for the calculations to fit; but the three particles that mediated this interaction, one Z boson and two W bosons, had been experimentally "weighed" by checking that they had mass. There is a mathematical object, the Lagrangian, whose function is to describe "what it is" in the field of weak nuclear interaction and where it was imperative to couple those two particles with mass in a field where they should not have mass or .... in other words, to ensure that they ended up having mass in a Lagrangian when previously they should not have it.
And there came Peter Higgs and two other independent teams of researchers to propose a mathematical mechanism that "spontaneously" breaks the symmetry of the Lagrangian to give mass to the bosons that theoretically should not have had but experimentally had it. This distance between theory and empirical research was arranged with more theory, the theory of the field of Higgs.
Until 2012, with confirmation in 2013 but still awaiting further verification, the CERN particle accelerator did not detect anything that could be assimilated to a Higgs, yet to be confirmed. In total, forty-eight years between the theoretical formulation of the hypothesis and an experimental verification beginning that is still provisional.
These accounts of neutrinos and Higgs have two elements in common: the tenseness that has always prevailed in Physics between theorists and experimentalists; and the gradual predominance of increasingly advanced mathematical models to support theories on the nature of matter in the Universe.
Although not always the case, most of these mathematical "jumps" forward to save the coherence of a theory about the structure of matter in Physics are performed to avoid so-called singularities in calculus, which can be infinite or indeterminate, both types of results causing the calculations to "colapse" and make it impossible for physics -rather mathematical models of physics- to "stand up."
Infinity appears in a mathematical equation, for example, when something is divided by a zero. Then the result is infinite ... and physics, much less the physics of matter, does not know how to manipulate infinity when it has to be associated with tangibility. An example is what happens when crossing the event horizon (the edge, simplifying much) of a black hole, which is not something that could be verified empirically, but a mathematical result derived from the application of Einstein's equations to the known features of a black hole: by putting the ingredients of a black hole in these equations the result is a mathematical singularity, because the intensity of the gravitational field goes to a mathematically infinite.
The avoidance of infinities in calculus leads precisely to theories that postulate that reality could be composed of more spatial dimensions than the three of the high, wide and long that we are able to perceive with our senses, as well as detect and measure with our technology. At the heart of this is the goal of unifying gravity with the rest of fundamental interactions (electromagnetic, weak nuclear and strong nuclear) in an integrated theory whose equations take into account all these forces with coherence, without any equation going "to infinity" when one of the fundamental interaction is inserted into the equations. However, since Einstein that is precisely what has been happening when trying to insert the force of gravity or gravitational field into equations that already solved the electromagnetic force: by bringing in Einstein's gravity into electromagnetism the results go to infinity, being ungovernable.
All variants of string theories, superstrings or their unifying M-Theory postulate more than three spatial dimensions. This oversizing is not new and was already proposed by the German Theodor Kaluza in 1919 and later by the Swedish Oskar Klein in trying to reconcile gravity with electromagnetism: the equations were only stable without producing "infinites" if the known three spatial dimensions rose mathematically to four.
The five spatial dimensions of Kaluza-Klein proved not to be sufficient in the equations when, in addition to electromagnetism and gravity, the other two fundamental interactions -the weak and the strong- were to be taken into account: with all four forces, the equations did not withstand and the results went to infinity. So to accommodate more fundamental forces mathematics required to contemplate theoretically more spatial dimensions.
This increase in dimensions is not physical (at the moment empirically it is not) but mathematical. That is to say, postulating 10 spatial dimensions as currently does M-Theory is an indispensable mathematical requirement for the results of the equations to avoid infinity: with fewer mathematical dimensions, the equations collapse.
In fact, when gravity was paired alongside with the electromagnetic and weak nuclear interactions in the equations of string theories, stability was only achieved in calculations with more than twenty spatial dimensions in theory, added to the three-dimensionality in which we live. And it is not that the reality suddenly had twenty additional spatial dimensions, but that as the equations were being mathematically drawn up the infinites did not disappear from the calculations until the ecuations reached the 25 spatial dimensions.
At the moment, spatial dimensions above three are not physical but mathematical objects. Simply put, dimensions in mathematics reflect the number of coordinates with which the position of an object in space is designated; for example, in Einstein's relativity space-time are four points that provides the location of an object: its length, its height, its width and its position in time.
Injecting more dimensions implies that the position of objects in space-time is described by more coordinates than the usual three plus time. As objects of structures beyond the three-dimensional have empirically never been observed, the theoretical hypothesis is that all the objects of the universe are composed of particles that we perceive as three-dimensional but that actually have more spatial dimensions, but that are curled and compactified in nanoscopic structures we can not see nor detect. That is, according to the candidates for the "theory of everything", all objects would have a position in height, length and width at a moment of time, but also other additional "metrics" that we would not see and we cannot describe.
Thus accepting multidimensionality or hyperspace ( "hyper" for a space of more than three dimensions), string theory accomplished equations that unified subatomic forces of quantum physics with the relativistic gravity by drawing up calculations that respected all known physical laws (mainly conservations of energy, mass, momentum ...) if each elementary particle of matter was considered to move in mechanics of 25 spatial dimensions in time.
However, the 25 spatial dimensions seemed too many, not because they were physically excessive (after all, since they were untested and unobservable dimensions, no matter if there are ten or thirty), but due to the fact that such a number of dimensions complicated tremendously the numerical calculations. In this line of mathematically abridging complications, in 1984 John Schwartz and Michael Green realized that by introducing into the equations of string theory what has been coined as supersymmetry, the equations become as light as to make stable going from being 25 to 10 the spatial dimensions necessary for the equations that combined the laws of quantum mechanics with those of Einstein's relativity, without the results being disrupted to infinity.
The mathematical technique of supersymmetry inserts into the equations quantum states of additional particles which are symmetrical to each particle occupying a position in hyperspace: for example, for each electron of atoms it is hypothesized that there exists a supersymmetric and -in this case- bosonic superpartner (the selectron) which is a twin brother but with opposite spin (the spin is a kind of sense of internal rotation of the particle).
By bringing these new supersymmetric partners in, mathematics get simpler by letting a number of terms in the equations cancel each other out, reducing the number of theoretical spatial dimensions necessary to keep the equations stable with no results going to infinity. The price to pay in order to un-complicate the mathematics of these equations of string theories is to super-complicate physics: the reality that empirically must verify these new equations of seven additional dimensions to the three observables must take shape with new elementary particles of the matter, the socalled supersymmetric particles whose quantum states have been injected into the Lagrangian equations to "cancel" computational intractability.
So in the new superstring theories reality do have ten spatial dimensions plus a temporal one and the number of fundamental particles of matter has doubled. All this arsenal of dimensions and particles lives, for the nonce in theory, on mathematical equations, and is the resource of calculus to avoid that infinities -mathematical singularities- would appear in the results of calculus when trying to model the movement or the mechanics of a particle by respecting both the quantum laws governing the fundamental forces of electromagnetism/weak nuclear interaction/ strong nuclear interaction and the rules of Einstein's relativistic mechanics governing gravity.
Therefore, all this historical journey started in the twenties of the twentieth century to put us in front of two evidences: spatial extra-dimensions beyond tridimensionality, and extra and symetrical subatomic particles to those already known, are both mathematical conjectures, a laborious and complex hypothesis drawn up to provide meaning to a theory that unifies in the same equations the four fundamental forces of physics.
In this immense mathematical conjecture in which we find ourselves, giving a certain sense to Max Tegmark's proposition that reality is not physical but mathematical, the experimental reality states on the contrary that no evidence of physical dimensions has been detected beyond tridimensionality and that for now there are no supersymmetric companions for each boson or fermion we have observed yet.
The main problem in this mathematical building is not the conjecture by itself, since mathematics has shown throughout the history of physics that it is able to provide a valuable and powerful arsenal for the predictions: Einstein began with equations that later have been experimentally corroborated.
Perhaps the problem is not to pose conjectures, to theorize in order to fit fundamental forces, but the mathematical route chosen to do it. That is to say, it is indispensable to explore mathematical models to reconcile the four fundamental forces in the same equations, but there could be a different way of implementing mathematics -or of generating new mathematics- to avoid that the exploration path will have to necessarily assume that there are more than three spatial dimensions .... or maybe not, but it's a possibility.
After a century of mathematical models that have led us to conjecture a reality of ten spatial dimensions in time (time as another physical dimension thanks to complex numbers), just as it is postulated that a "new Physics" could be at stage to integrate quantum reality with gravitation, it could also be that a new mathematical approach is the one that draws us out of the quagmire of multidimensionality.
What we should bear in mind is that we are in the hyperspace of more than three dimensions due to the fact that the mathematical solutions of hyperspace is able to stabilize the equations that integrate quantum and relativistic gravity without their calculus solutions break awaty to infinity. If Kaluza and Klein in the twenties of the twentieth century had found a different mathematical path to unify relativistic gravity and electromagnetism, would multidimensional hyperspace be a construct reserved for spirituality and science fiction? It is a speculative but admissible question.
Obviously everything is extremely more complicated as we are exposing it, but the essence of the issue lies on simple questions: does physical reality have more than three spatial dimensions?; is there any other mathematical strategy, unlike the tactic of canceling terms by adding dimensions and spatial coordinates, to unify relativistic gravity with quantum forces?
Or perhaps, the proponents of hyperspace and supersymmetry will tell us, all we lack is energy, enough capabilities to generate very high energies in particle colliders so as to effectively glimpse the existence of supersymmetric particles and a fourth spatial dimension that neither we can even draw because our sensory system has us anchored to three-dimensionality.
In case of being physical dimensions beyond mathematics, in those extra dimensions we the humans would already be living in: that is, each three-dimensional point of our body, our cells, our atoms, would correspond to 10 spatial dimensions, even if we only operate with three in our universe with our sensory own limitations.
Producido por la Fundación Concepto con licencia Creative Commons
It is the human being a "being" beyond his/her biological continent, the body?
Without a human body, the human being ceases to "be"?
Was the "being" before the body, that is, there is any "being" before the biological conception of life?
Typical questions posed by 'The Concept Foundation', a non-profit organization focused with a scientific approach and an open mind into issues that have so far been the realm of the paranormal, spiritual or religious.
These questions have a pre-human and post-human component, in the sense that we wonder if before the body was "being" and if after the body will "be". It's exciting to think that the response to pre- and post- can come from the "inter", that is, the biological present, in order to answer the question of how it is the "being" over the course of human life with the biological body functioning.
If we look at the biological body in three spatial dimensions and the additional temporal dimension (with the timeline past-present-future) and we do not get out of that framework, it is reasonable to conclude that the "human being" comes to life with the biology and become extinct with biological death.
However we could (for now) speculate that with the four dimensions of space-time the possibilities of "being" would not arrive to an end, although the "body" or the continent of the "being" will stop. This should be an acceptable view unless we have the certainty that "human being" and "human body" are completely equivalent (being honest, no one can have that certainty for sure).
Going back to what we noted that the answer to questions from the pre-being and post-being could be in the "present of being", a very promising framework in Physics to explore is the "M-Theory", or the theory of unification of a number of approaches in all the theories of strings and superstrings.
Without entering into technical issues let's simply stress that "M-theories" predict that reality is structured in 10 spatial dimensions (some variant includes 11 space dimensions) and one time dimension: that is, the reality is a undecadimensional universe.
The point is that undecadimensional hyperspace of string theories would structure reality, the whole reality. That is, we humans in the present and with our three-dimensional bodies would be living in a undecadimensional hyperspace, though it would only be perceived corresponding to a four-dimensional space-time. Being conceived biologically, our bodies would gestate, develop and die in a undecadimensional space-time, though we will never perceived that way. Thus, after being biologically conceived we humans would be born in four-dimensional reality perceived that way but embedded, integrated or structured in a undecadimensional reality, which is imperceptible by our senses.
The "M-Theory" suggest that the 10 spatial dimensions of our reality are always present and reality is operating through them. However, six of those spatial dimensions would be "hidden" not only to our perceptions but also to our detection systems by any of our current technological instruments. The way to hide would be in "the smallest": the hypothesis of "M-theory" is that those six spatial dimensions of reality of the undecadimensional model would be curled into an extra-nano-structure that mathematically would take the form of a Calabi-Yau manifold (a "manifold" is a geometric or rather topological object... it does not matter much to know now in order to understand the substance of the argument).
Most revealing of all this theoretical framework is that every point of our perceived space three-dimensionality is actually a ten-dimensional space point (undecadimensional space-time if we add the time). This means that our ears are perceived three-dimensional but it have ten spatial dimensions, six of them unnoticeable and curled in a Calabi-Yau type structure; so it is with our arms or brain, our car or our home, the road we drive on or the rails we touch.
And what happens with consciousness, with the feelings or thoughts, what happens with love or with the memory we have of a person or situation? ... good question currently not even with any answer but either a hypotheses to address an answer, since it is not considered that a thought, a feeling or a memory would have "dimensionality" because these "objects" are classified as intangible or immaterial realities, and therefore without any spatial dimensions.
However, with a solid approach as the eleven dimensions of "M-Theory":
1- it would make sense that we postulate that any of these "objects" we consider intangibles under current standards would otherwise have "anchor points" in any of the six spatial dimensions that we do not perceive although phenomenologically these intangible "objects" are expressed in our tretradimensional perception?.
2- and if we were beyond in our speculation and we will hypothetically establish that in the ten-dimensional spatial nature of the "human being" the biological body is the allowed three-dimensional spatial expression for our range of perception (and technology)?
3- with a "ten-dimensional being" in space, is it possible that the death of the biological body in its three-dimensional expression does not extinguish the "being"?.
These questions, however unconventional they may seem, from 'The Concept Foundation' we will do our best to bring them to the field of scientific research (at least in order to theorize ... others will follow us, hopefully, to encourage experimentation), respecting but without going into other domains such as paranormal, spiritual or religious which have been trying to address these issues by asking the questions in another way and giving the answers otherwise.
Producido por la Fundación Concepto con licencia Creative Commons
