At the risk of getting dunked on by liberal lefties, I will state up-front I find Professor Dave’s ꕷꖡꖹꘝꕯꕒiꖡꔇ far worse than Hossenfelder’s. Though “worse” is a matter of “in what quality/attribute?” No doubt Hossenfelder is far worse in distastefulness. Professor Dave is far worse in macroeconomic justice. But if your mind works like mine, in the end, you have to admit Professor Dave’s ꕷꖡꖹꘝꕯꕒiꖡꔇ is also the more distasteful, as much as your mind may violently rebel and balk against that, for the same reason my preprint on how the real costs of unemployment in a decade today exceed the horrors of all wars in human history is unlikely to ever gain recognition or a journal peer review. “Rejected before peer review” status. If I were a meme’r (which I am not1) … umm, I lost what I was going to write here 🤣.

Also, since Hossenfelder spews the same disinformation as Dave on macroeconomics, and since 𝒄𝑟𝒆𝑡𝒊𝘯𝐢𝒕𝒖𝑑𝑒 is an additive measure (so I hereby say🤣) she is in fact overall a terrible + terrible person — in what she spews in words. (I cannot comment on other aspects of her being, or Dave’s, which could be perfectly fine and cuddly).

Let me get one gripe out of the way first: I do not like Professor Dave’s youtube rants, he is puerile, and vicious & nasty, moreso than myself! But sometimes his puerile humour can be well-received. When he dunks on fascists, sexists, racists, and nazi’s it is pretty amusing, and I like it. But he is not particularly clever-funny, and I do not need the comedic miss-spelt words and memes &c, which detract from the critique I think (I guess not so for others?). But that’s just my taste, which is irrelevant.

Second issue to brush aside: I do not know what resides in Hossenfelder’s soul, assuming she has one (this is debatable🤣). No seriously. She admits herself that she has no soul, so I am being a bit generous assuming she still has one nonetheless. So I could at a squeeze generously assume Hossenfelder’s racism and Accelerationism and Peter Thiel boosting is just a n3rd gone astray, or a symptom of severe high-functioning autism. (Now, I am highly mid-functioning autistic myself, so I am not autism shaming here, i just know the mind can get a bit blinded by n3rdhood and reaching out ahead of one’s expertise.) You know what I mean: “The statistical data tell me race science is worth studying… It is unscientific to ignore race science …. We must follow the data …” — all that sort of ꕷꖾ𝕪𝘁ꗍ. To be clear, it is ꕷꖾ𝕪𝘁ꗍ because it is anti-scientific. Professor Dave does a great job debunking race science. It used to be a science, for sure, before science showed there was nothing there. Then it became just racism, pure and banal evil. (If you are a bit right-wing libertarian and still weaning yourself off the nonsense, then Nassim Taleb has me covered for you too.2)

A Double Coincidence of Wants

The tragic funny thing for me is that both Professor Dave and Hossenfelder both get the macroeconomics completely backwards. Thus we need to talk about the want of learning.

Hossenfelder constantly bemoans all the research funds going into Big Physics (the Large Hadron Collider &c.). Her advocacy for smaller table-top physics is fine. It is her framing of the issue that is all nuts & bananas. I just want to raise a few points about this. The overarching thing that is so depressing is that most of the n3rd nuttery here is of the complete backwards 180 degree variety, and there is nothing more tragic. I think it is worse than Flat Eartherism. Which is deliciously terribly bitter ironic concerning Professor Dave, who revels and delights in dunking on Flat Earthers.

I do not enjoy this irony! Professor Dave’s false beliefs are far worse, far more damaging, than any Flat Earth Society or Moon Landing Hoax Society ever. That’s the depressing thing. This is why I am writing about it, not to inform my readers (who already know this) but to relieve my depression. Thank you for sticking with me if you are still reading. Feel free to copy this essay and email it to all the “Professor Dave’s” in your life.

Also, before I begin my brief notes, this is not a personal attack on Sabine Hossenfelder nor Dave Farina. They are just the two avatars for so many academics one could name. Probably all academics outside MMT scholar circles.

• The “tax payer” is not losing anything when the government funds the Big Physics experiments. In fact, the tax payer is winning in “$” terms. (Completely contrary to Hossenfelder’s neoliberal–monetarist framing.)

• About 0.000001% of tax payers are losing from Big Physics. This is the small fraction who would be better off if the real resources going into the colliders and whatnot could be used instead to feed their families. This is an incredibly small number of tax payers.

• About 0.0001% of tax payers are losing in moderate real terms, these are the workers who work on building the Big Physics experiments who would rather be building their own homes or green energy infrastructure and whatnot, or the scientists working on the experiments who would rather be doing something else. In this case, the government wages are pulling these workers out of their own preferred labour, into socialized public science labour. The fraction may even be smaller, since “losing” in this context is fairly darn subjective and a matter of degree of the spiritual violence of working on someone else’s pet project in order to be able to feed your family.

• The Neoliberalism of Professor Dave is only out-matched by the low-key fascism of Hossenfelder. Dave’s memes3 of the (hilarious it must be said) German actress going full nazi in the comedy film are a chuckle, but for me it is cringe, because what Dave promulgates besides this is far more damaging and disgusting, and yet he has no clue. He truly believes the emotional investment in the “tax payer funding the government” myth is a good thing. Like Bernie Sanders and Kyle & Krystal, and all the rest of the fake-leftists. They are fake-lefties but do not know it.

The Seventh Deadly Innocent Fraud

I like to spot opportunities to repeat the Seventh Fraud. It is my favourite. Also, I think it is under-rated. It might be the most important. This is the fraud

“Higher government spending today will cause higher tax return tomorrow.”

It is the only one of the Seven Deadly Innocent Frauds that is true. The fraud is that it is a bad thing. Because it is a (banal) good thing. It means the automatic stabilizers are working correctly. If higher government spending does not cause higher tax return in the future, then the risk is massive growing Inequality. This would be on top of existing Pareto dynamics and Treasury bond instruments already causing massive continual unrelenting needless rise in Inequality.

Addendum — Eighth Deadly Innocent Fraud

To spoil the literary allusions in The Seven Deadly Innocent Frauds of Economic Policy one should add an eighth and maybe a ninth. I cannot resist proposing an Eighth. This is,

the myth that Inflation is a Real Constraint and a bad thing. It is not. It is a purely psychological constraint, and if the upwards adjustment in the price level is caused by lowering needless income Inequality together with a rising lowest real wage, it is unconditionally a good thing.

Part of the myth here is that inflation is equivalent to increasing inaffordability (decreasing affordability). That is false and complete nonsense. But many liberal-leftists perpetuate this dangerous myth. Monetary inflation has nothing to do with real inflation — they can go in opposite directions most of the time, and most often do. Nah, I strike that out, because I do not know if they do, probably not, but I want to point out they could be negatively correlated, under some appropriate policy regimes.

For me, a Ninth is that “We need a Wall Street sector for finance.” We do not. All we need banks for is to assess credit worthiness and clear payments. I believe private investors are a social an anti-social class we do not need.4 No one should have enough savings to be an investor as a career, period. One of my Quixotic quests is to educate people about why I think this way, along with why I believe all superannuation/retirement savings schemes should be stopped, immediately, we do not need them. Spend your savings now, or we burn those scorepoints. This is, I admit, a bit too fringe-scary, even for some MMT’ers, so I will not be re-writing Mosler’s little masterpiece (though he gave me an ok to do such edits for an Aotearoa edition).

Addendum — Volcker Shock

I thought it useful to document the real deficit and the real wage for this inflationary biased (by wonky policy choice) era.

We should really plot the rate of change of the real wage, but just look at the slope. Down-right is not good. But even during the high inflation era or recessions (light grey areas) there can be periods when the real wage is rising.

Perhaps the more interesting statistic is the correlation (before any causal analysis) between the rate of change of the real wage and inflation. Understandably it is a negative correlation.

Do not be too mislead though, only a small percentage of the inflation counts for loss of real wages, as you can plainly see. I do not really know how to best break down the inflation metric into progressive + regressive components, but clearly not all sources of inflation are regressive. After all, the wage price rise is an indirect source of inflation provided government supports a wage floor. In my circles, that is always progressive, practically by definition. (Modulo distributional issues.)

This data does not truly tell the story that what really matters (literally now) is how much of the goods your entire income can purchase, not what $1 can purchase. I’ve wlays thought that is a story that is also true by definition, so needs no data to verify. What would verify this tautology? Better said: what could possibly refute it? ~ seeing that your doubled wage mysteriously only buys half the bread at the same relative price??? We’d be into exotic Many Worlds quantum theory here.

Missing here is also the wage & income distribution and disparity story. But methinks one need not be a rocket scientist to know that is going to be a regressive story, because the cause of the inflation here is regressive (high government interest rate floor = basic income only for people who have a lot more money than they need) — on top of any monopoly price gouging shenanigans.

I did write a preprint a while back on the causal relations causing inflation, and I was right, the higher interest rate is a cause: roughly +20% of the effect, at least for the crude causal diagram I modeled, which included oil price setting.

People far too often ignore dynamics. Knowledge seems static, but in the real world this is never the case. When we gain knowledge we are continually refining it, or we die. One or the other. It is a sort of mainstream Economics N3rd thing to ignore dynamics, so please do not! (Do not be a n3rd, nor be a mere economist!🤣)

True, if all you had was mere knowledge then like an economist you’d be pretty useless.

My main message today is,

Knowledge is an infinite resource, once you draw upon it, it is still there. It might even be enhanced.

The issue then — to turn knowledge into power — is action. Even for the neoliberal who loves depoliticization of what should be public policy — taking the politics out of politics — inaction is a type of action. A wilfulness not to give a damn. The entire thesis of laissez faire doctrine is kind of madness in this respect. It is unconscionable for anyone with a moral conscience. That is to say, when you have political 𝕡𝕠𝕨𝕖𝕣 then inaction is a form of action. Why? Because you could have chosen to do otherwise. (I believe there is such a thing as free will, though I know not from where it springs nor what it permits, I only know the quantum cosmology permitting some freedom of action in a physical world. 1)

That’d be my second main point today: counterfactuals are also of huge importance, and people ignore them far too often. Judea Pearl wrote a third of a whole book on this. A lot of bad mistakes and bad science occurs when statisticians ignore counterfactuals.

Let’s then consider political 𝕡𝕠𝕨𝕖𝕣 to be something that requires knowledge. If the knowledge is false the 𝕡𝕠𝕨𝕖𝕣 is going to be very lively a terrible power, unjust, or good but only be sheer accident. 2

Since all knowledge is power, and is infinite in resource, but is dynamic so can be updated, MMT knowledge is Power. But as I just noted, it must be accompanied by action. Or — if you already have social power — this could be inaction. You do not get an escape clause. With great power comes great responsibility.

What we do with this power matters.

What about: “With great knowledge comes…” — well this is different! If you lack the particular power to act freely, or free-enough, then with great power comes great frustration and depression, but at least I think a responsibility to teach & educate. So we all have some social power. Hence all knowledge is power. Unless you are dead or socially isolated, completely isolated (an impossibility for any long period?).

Last thing then is the moral layer.

I wrote nothing yet about the good of knowledge, or the good of power. How do we make knowledge and power good?

The only reasonable answer in my view is with a moral lens. Even if you end up being wrong, you will know this and course correct if your motives were pure plain dumb good. But not necessarily if your motives were pure somewhat evil (if there is a such a thing, but let’s say “relatively evil”3).

MMT Knowledge is Power. It can be very nasty. The b̶e̶s̶t̶ most effective MMT politicians in our times were Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld. They drew on an “infinite” resource (the mere idea the US government debt is not operationally constrained) for absolutely no good ends. By “infinite resource” I just mean it could not be depleted. That mere idea, that knowledge (which was true) never depleted whenever they used it, could not be destroyed without invasive brain surgery, or the like, being performed on those old shriveled soul dudes.

People who say “MMT is not 𝕡𝕠𝕨𝕖𝕣” are clowns.4 Remember, you cannot help but act unless you are dead, so the mere knowledge impels you to act, or not act, but in not acting you are acting. I hate to trot out a Zen line like this, but Lord help me it is true, in this context.

A blind old lady is crossing the road and about to be hit by a lorry, and you are nearby. If you choose to not act have you been morally neutral? Or have you been pretty darn evil, in some relative terms?

You could, I suppose, choose to not act upon the knowledge of MMT. But be realistic and fair in your assessment? Who is that person?

We can admit that once everyone, or some critical mass, understand MMT — or whatever the system of units of account for social obligations in your neighbourhood happens to be, maybe not MMT — then knowledge of this generalized MMT, becomes a bit trivial.5 But just because it might then appear to have no effect is forgetting the second lesson: the counterfactual.

Good breakfast today1, since the opinion/journalist piece I consumed was this one:

(He could not be happier, but I could. Read onwards!)

It is always good to have the chance to be happier.

It 👆🏼👆🏼 was a good, though somewhat mundane, overview of the present state of the real resource consumption side of the techbro-superintelligence fever dreams dystopia/utopia stuff. Listening to this (Aussie?) journo recount the failures of the TechBro oligarchs was well short of Schadenfreude though, since the energy and land grabs of the TechOligs continues apace, and more disastrously enabled by issuance of government scorepoints apace. (There is no US Tsy “debt” crisis, yo.)

Mathematical Tasks Are Not Turks

The idea “Ai” (a nonsense term)2 will “take away mathematician jobs” is the crankiest slice of baloney I’ve perhaps ever heard. All the worse because so many otherwise intelligent people seem to believe it.

It is all a magic trick of Copperfield dimensions.

Both Copperfields I think, though it has been a while since I read Dickens. (Will explain in a few paragraphs.)

Today my theme is how machine algorithms designed to mimic human language and art are grand Copperfieldian illusions. Unlike Daniel Dennett’s ꕯꕒꕯꗞꖀꖡ thesis that consciousness is an illusion — (it is obviously not! How could a philosopher miss that!?🤣) — the so-called “Ai” fake-sentience is a giant David Copperfield magic trick.

Only, unlike a Penn & Teller episode, so many people want to be tricked. Actively. It is a near civilizational-level disease I think, as yet undiagnosed. I think we could provisionally name it … whathisname from “American Idol”??? … Simon Cowell I think. It is prosimoncowelitus:
Defn: “The active desire to want to be fooled and not want to know you are being fooled.”

Prof. Emily Bender writes and talks about this in more sagacious academic terms than I can muster.

On this piece of breakfast: “The Ai Takeover Has Completely Backfired” — Unlike the author, I am not “completely happy”. It would’ve been nice to get the ANN/CNN’s working to do basic tasks for us without all the land, electricity and water guzzling, and the anarchic handing over of the software platforms to dopey users with a bit of money generating masses of useless slop. A nod to China here for doing a bit better on regulation of the software. Not all authoritarian structure is diabolically evil? Yeah, but it could be less authoritarian. Just democratically hand everyone a ration of tokens to use, calibrated to respectable electricity usage, so we do not cook the local communities where the server farms are located.

When software platform tokens are rationed, I will bet people stop spending their access on so much slop. Maybe I miss something?, but I think the rations would be good. It’d at least make one think a bit harder about what they prompt. We might finally then eliminate so much of the horrid “Ai” cartoons and StableDiffusion images popping up on every substack and youtube headings/thumbnails/backgrounds. Damn I hate it all! I would even say it is ugly. I will not read the articles that have these images. And you’d be lucky if I even get through your abstract.

First level: let’s get some decent MMT framing out here: the cause of unemployment is the government imposed tax liability, by definition (there is no debate about this, or you haven’t understood the definition3). Thus any machine algorithm doing things “better than humans” (what does that mean? Just crunching numbers faster? Big deal, so what?!) is not a cause of any job losses.

Second thing: the machines are certainly not thinking better than humans, since there is no thought involved in the running of the algorithm. Thought is involved in making the algorithm start running.

Emergence is not a thing here. Emergence is about our capacity to perceive higher level abstractions, in the physical realm nothing new physical comes into existence. Ergo, consciousness is not a physical emergence phenomenon. “Embodied intelligence” is a vacuous term. Any singular intelligence (a soul ~ do not ask me what that is in essence, for I do not know) has some sort of body, at least in our universe, otherwise we would not know about it.

So anyway, the machines cannot possible take-away human jobs.

The automation of our systems removes the need for some forms of human labour.4 But does not mean we should not still labour. It is fun to work. Hence if for no other economic reason, we should all be working. I work even when I sleep. Indeed, I could not get half my work done without sleeping. Or at least resting my eyes.

A pretty sad-hilarious blog entry from Scott Aaronson I saw recently was maybe unintentionally funny. He wrote about some sort of summer Math camp for kids. Where they blithely ignored the fact everything they were doing could be done faster and more error free by a machine. (Also forgetting to run the machine they would have to first think of the problem.)

But they had a great fun time, pretending there was no math-assistant software.

But that’s the whole point of doing mathematics. It is for the fun. Not for solving the problem.

Whenever I solve a hard math puzzle I always feel deflated, like at the end of a good movie, but when you would rather re-write the ending yourself. (Almost every movie I have ever seen!) I prefer the David Lynch experience, where there is never any closure. Lynch pointed out this is better art. The human soul can endlessly imagine how things might end, or continue. Let me tell you a non-guilty pleasure I have: often I will not finish the last few pages of a great novel, and will often not watch the last 30 minutes of a great TV series or the last 15 minutes of a great film. It pains me sometimes, but after a few days I am far happier and richer for it, and never have the urge to go and watch the finale. Knowing the finale would now seem like spiritual violence to me. In the old days watching theatre or cinema house movies often deprived people of this choice. You’d have to stay in your seat to not upset the folks behind you. (A bittersweet sadness, I am ambivalent to, since community theatre dies out, while home streaming runs riot. Ambivalent since I hated having to go out to watch a movie. I kinda liked the VHS era though.)

The series and movies I watch the ends of tend to be the popcorn crap ones, like a Marvel MCU movie, SciFi fantasy garbage (but entertaining), Dirty Harry/Rambo type drama, or they’d be a documentary (one should as a general rule not imagine the ending of a documentary! — unless the producer was a reich-wing ideologue or Tory 🤣 in which case the imagination is necessary to get the truth).

An exception would be a Sergio Leone film, where the ending is the sort of violence to my imagination I can withstand.

The film maker or book writer who offers a neat wrapped up closed package is doing violence to our soul, but blocking our imagination. I do love a nice polished ending in some genre’s (spaghetti westerns). But not all of them. As a kid reading Marvel comics I grew accustomed to this open-endedness. (Ironic, given the above MCU comment.) Thanks Stan Lee! Pity the stories were a tad fascistic and nazi-ubermen-lite-homoerotic. (Was Stan Lee even aware of that? I’m prepared to give him a pass.)

It is much more fun pursuing the puzzle than finding the solution. This can be a bit pathological though: I often procrastinate precisely because I do not want that deflated feeling when the puzzle is solved. I like to prolong the fun of the investigation. Unless it is a trivial puzzle and just annoying (those are the puzzles I never choose to do).

Anyhow: because a machine cannot have the fun for me, it can never take away my mathematics job.

The job is the spiritual endeavour. No one can take that away. The wage compensation is just social accounting, good if one can get it. People should be able to get it. And not off any tax payer, but off the government computer.

We pay plenty of people to do useless things (play chess, fight in sports contests, play chamber music) but enough people somewhere seem to value such artistry that we are prepared to give people heaps of government scorepoints to continue doing such useless things. Yeah, but if they entertain other people then they are not entirely useless, are they? Certainly not useless to the “CIA”. 🤣

Same with mathematics.

Yeah, I am prepared to take oodles of government scorepoints to occupy myself with useless mathematics in order for the authorities to enjoy avoiding having me ranting about MMT.5

It is just that like some modern art movements, mathematics does not please very many people, so is under-funded. But we should pay decent wages to mathematicians anyway, regardless of their output, just because it is fun for some.

This raises a more serious philosophical fun question: to what extent is human spiritual ingenuity in fact non-algorithmic, and thus impossible for a machine to even mimic?

No one knows the answer, but i think it is clear that humans are not solving puzzles the way we program our machines to solve them. There is some other quality to human thought which no algorithm can stick in a can (software code). You cannot easily convince the compsci n3rds this, because too may of them just do not want to to know. They seem to want to believe in machine superintelligence. So in many ways they are beyond our help. Aaronson seems to be one of them. Such a shame for such a smart computer scientist.

Aaronson constantly invokes the fallacy of Behaviourism. He say, “Tell me why what you can do a machine could not?”

The yuuuge fallacy there is that he is forcing you to specify some input output response. This is obviously always something a machine can mimic. Like David Copperfield, the Los Vegas guy.

Hossenfelder was “at it” too “End of mathematics blahblahblah” , with the mathematical job loss fear mongering. She is hopeless, and has no comprehension of the human condition it seems. Is this a problem with living in Germany? 🤣

I am happy to report the deaths of human mathematical fun & games have been greatly exaggerated. For I, for one, will continue playing mathematical games regardless of any extra “compute” anywhere. You cannot stop me! You can just refuse to pay me government scorepoints for it. But just see if I damn well care!

You see, the extra compute we have can shift mathematical tasks to computers. It cannot possibly ever shift the jobs. Because you cannot stop people from thinking mad beautiful thoughts. Tasks are not jobs. Jobs are what we all do to benefit our community (hopefully). So let’s stop with the “jobs loss” hair-on-fire stupidity, huh? There are no job losses. There is just refusal to pay wages for people to do gloriously mad–beautiful things.

We find it easy to pay grown men to beat each other up playing rugby. And even cheer about it (as I do 🤣 … go the All Blacks!).

There is no way the machines can reproduce what goes on in your mind though, there is no output there anyone can ever know about That’s the definition of subjective sentience. Even you do not know how you perceive mental qualia. So do not try telling me a machine knows either, let alone can even generate qualia to know that it does not know.

This duality is real. It is a sharp thing. There is no new age Zen Buddhism about it, the subjective is simply not the objective, in the same same way a positive number is not zero, and the finite is not transfinite. Duality is a thing. (I do recognize there are many things for which there is a unity and non-dualism, but human subjectivity and a lot of mathematics is not of that type.)

It is all a bit Dickensian too, the other Copperfield.

Dickensian “Ai”? (Only if we allow it)

However, just as with during the industrial revolution there was no social necessity for the labour and child exploitation, so too today there is no need for any unemployment to result from enhanced machine automation.

People need to understand the source of all unemployment. For that, you might try my short article: “A Fermi analysis of the massive costs of unemployment” . Just my few cents worth, take it or leave it.

It is entirely with the power & capacity of our political class to regulate and impose rationing, and democratize the Internet. It is the Pervert Class unwillingness to do so which could create modern Dickensian conditions. Totally needlessly. Just like the US Tsy-bond faked “crisis”. The crisis serves some oligarchs or perverts agenda. It has real consequences, but was “fake” in any case. The tragedy is the grifters and cheats are getting away with the virtual murder. Too many people in the Pervert Class are also in the Political Class. There needs to be a separation.

Yes, yes. Eliminating class and unnecessary hierarchy also means eliminating the “political class”. But we do better with human specializations, so there should always be a well-experienced civil service. What am I saying? Nothing much really here, just felt the need to write that utopias are fictions, useful for discussion, but not something we have to ever achieve. Your utopia is almost undoubtedly someone else’s nightmare. Such are human beings and our idiosyncratic tastes. More non-computational power to us all! And our extraterrestrial cosmic brothers and sisters.

(That’s all for today. The note below is of no great interest, just putting it in for my own reference.)

Ai/LLM Detection Experiment

As a little exercise today, I conserved some electricity and water (my toes are freezing) to justify running a bit of “Ai” in order to detect some “fake Ai” (human written text meant to pass as “Ai”.). Only I used a T4G physics paper I wrote myself as the test.6 It is the most dry boring preprint I have available which is 100% Bijou written. I even did a reverse LLM, I tried to mimic some LLM text idioms.

Here is my score:

I am not sure what the benchmarks are, and there are several “ai detection” services available, I am not going to test them all, that’s a real journalists job.

Also, do not read too much into this. I was not making a serious attempt to mimic an LLM. The preprint was a serious T4G effort, compressing a few arguments I have written about more breezily and irreverently in my T4GU blog. The idea was just to see how much genuine academese can come out reading a bit like a robot. Hence unfit to publish, but more likely to get published. 🤣

What surprised me is only 9 sentences were marked as possibly “high Ai” generated. Since I tend to write academic papers like a robot, I thought it would naturally be higher. Maybe this is why I am no good in academia? Not robotic enough? But “essentially human”. Thanks to an “ai” platform for confirming my suspicions that I am indeed human. 🤣

Having said that, 33 sentences tagged as “moderate ai” was a little bit of a slap in the face. I thought that would be lower. This is a warning that if some wonks come along and accuse you of publishing LLM slop, it might be a grievous injustice? Maybe we all pretty much write slop, most of the time. The LLM’s are David Copperfield trying to fool us, and far too many people want to be fooled.

yeah but I wish my writing about topological 4-geon theory was turned into at least pixie dust dollars. Unfortunately none of this lands in my pockets, it is all trapped under my Corsair keyboard.

Sometimes I get a bit embarrassed by all the novel ideas T4G allows me to generate. They cannot all be good, so the embarrassment is knowing people who fancy themselves critics might only focus on the crazy. None of it is hugely esoteric or mystical, and is really quite minimalist and ordinary, yet it is still a huge advance on any QFT textbook. These days i regard all QFT textbooks as massive tomes on how to compute scattering amplitudes, which I am thoroughly not interested in.

Today the latest set of ideas I even half forgot on the trip from the bed to the shower to the breakfast table to the computer. It had something to do with the UV topological 4-geon stuff .

For a while I have been procrastinating on getting my python notebook dirty with exploration of the Clifford bivector structure of the Cℓ(8)​ Standard Model.

In this model are the algebraic clues to the doubled (bipartite) spacetime algebra mappings that are the cobordism boundary transform manifestations of T4G wormhole topology — the cause of all quantum mechanics.

We can reverse engineer the algebra to perhaps figure out the gnarlier wormhole topology and torsion structure. String theory without strings (is what I call it). I really w̶a̶n̶t̶ ̶t̶o̶ should whip a few postdoc students into doing all this for me, and then take all the credit. L̶i̶k̶e̶ ̶a̶ ̶p̶r̶o̶p̶e̶r̶ ̶P̶r̶o̶f̶e̶s̶s̶o̶r̶.̶ If I was a real professor.🤣 But I am very improper, and never want to be that real Professor. So I am stuck for now slumming it in a blog no one reads (except Douglas Renwick.).

The Planck Scale

The idea is whether all the following are deeply related, and one and the same phenomena.

1. Conformal symmetry breaking — fermion masses.

2. Emergence of an effective Planck scale.

3. Electroweak dynamical symmetry breaking (DEWSB) — vacuum condensation.

They have to all be related, right?

In conformal gravity (aka. quantum gravity) there is no fundamental Planck scale. So an asymmetry or hidden symmetry must develop dynamically in the very early universe (about 1E−11 s after the conformal τ=0 “big bang”). I am pretty sure Phillip Mannheim would say the same, I just have not yet read where he wrote this all explicitly in as few words.

Conformal symmetry breaking has to involve an effective Planck scale, because the Planck length is the most fundamental unit. Because the elementary fermions are massless they will not be anything like the M_p​, because they can only “acquire” effective mass through interactions, and so their masses will be feeble, and related to the couplings for those interactions. In Mannheim’s work this is a four-fermion vertex.

There is an “anomalous dimension” to these four-fermion interactions which is what generates the LR-asymmetry associated with breaking chiral symmetry, and this in turn is what the electroweak symmetry breaking is all about. Mannheim shows how the result is an effective composite Higgs.

Competing DEWSB Schemes?

I used to, until very recently, think there were several competing schemes. But the four I think most beautiful are … I think … deeply related, if not exactly the same then just formulated in different “languages”. These are:

1. Mannheim’s four-fermion vertex with the ⟨ψˉ_R ψ_L+ψˉ_L ψ_R⟩≠0 symmetry breaking amplitude. (It has to be zero for conformal symmetry.)

2. Turok & Boyle with some as-yet unspecified composite Higgs (they need a composite Higgs, but have not committed to how).

3. Miller & Zubkov with Fradkin–Tseytlin dimensions zero scalar coupling to the fermions. This also has a four-fermion vertex for the EW chiral symmetry breaking.

4. Jason Blood’s pullback mapping a field f^i_μ that scales the tetrad.

I believe Miller & Zubkov are compatible with Mannheim. But Mannheim does not use FT-scalars. So there is still something to smooth over there to unify those two.

Jason Blood’s versions of the Higgs (the pullback mapping field) is a lot like Miller & Zubkov’s FT-scalar in my opinion. But again some smoothing over may be needed to unify them.

It’d be nice if all three unify, but like getting two lines to cross is impossible to miss, getting three to meet at a point is impossible to not miss, so I am not holding my breath.

One hopeful thing is that Jason is working in a complexfied Clifford algebra, he says Cℓ(4)​, but I say it is Cℓ(8)​. It is a double Spacetime Algebra Cℓ(3,1)​. Jason quotes 4-dimensional basis, but he refers to the Witt basis (ladder operators) which are always half of an orthonormal basis. So tomaytoes and tomartoes.

Jason has a Triality automorphism not unlike Niels Gresnigt’s similar models. Thus we do not have only 12 mappings f^i_μ​, we might have actually 12×3=36 such pullback mappings. These are then equivalent to the FT-scalars of Turok–Boyle–Miller–Zubkov.

That is my hypothesis.

If you can do a sort of unification job and show me this is correct, I would be so grateful.

How does Mannheim fit in there?

Well, the

symmetry breaking condensation is not necessarily a one-fermion model. One figures out the basic theory using one fermion, but it works for any fermions in the Standard Model i think. (How could it not?)

Thus, if Mannheim has a condensate that is LR-sensitive but not lepton-quark sensitive, then he will have as many conformal parameters in the “condensed matter physics” of the DEWSB vacuum condensation guff as Miller & Zubkov. 36.

(This is the “sticky issue” for me, by-the-way. It really is nasty condensed matter physics, so icky.)

Since the f^i_μ​, or the 36 conformal compensators Miller & Zubkov name ξ^a, appear in the fundamental Lagrangian, coupling the fermions to the gravitational tetrad, they will contribute some zero point energy, or contribute to the vacuum expectation values of the energy–momentum trace (operator).

Borrowing then from the Turok ＆ Boyle analysis , despite these not being propagating particles, they have to be accounted for in the trace anomalies. When doing so for the LR-symmetric conformal Standard Model (so no Higgs) we find there must be exactly 36 such fields. So Jason better give us that Triality automorphism!

I am betting on this, almost literally with my life. Or at least with my decent livelihood. If I do not get to teach all this stuff some day soon I might go a bi crazy. There is no income to be made ranting about MMT. I just need some income security peace of mind so I can write MMT rants freely.

I thought, whoa! What a basket of mixed berries. Makes for some risque substack yoghurt flavour. (Are we going to burp or barf here?)

This is my amateur hour ok, so plz do not get triggered.

However, even a dopey ꕒꖹꕮꕗꗇꕷꕷ linguistics neophyte might glean in our language here some sort of subconscious aversion to democracy … among the “el33ts”?

I do not believe in “your words are your self” nonsense, but it was just interesting to muse (perhaps fruitlessly?) how some exact opposites are related here. But if you are in the Pervert Class you might be the type who thinks democracy truly is demonic. That’d make you intellectual buddies with Peter Theil, Mark Andresson, Curtis Yarvin, DJT, Stephen Miller, Sam Altman, et al.

Consider these entries:

demon(n.) c. 1200, “an evil spirit, malignant supernatural being, an incubus, a devil,” from Latin daemon “spirit,” from Greek daimōn “deity, divine power; lesser god; guiding spirit, tutelary deity” (sometimes including souls of the dead); “one’s genius, lot, or fortune;” from PIE *dai-mon- “divider, provider” (of fortunes or destinies), from root *da- “to divide.”

The malignant sense is because the Greek word was used (with daimonion) in Christian Greek translations and the Vulgate for “god of the heathen, heathen idol” and also for “unclean spirit.” Jewish authors earlier had employed the Greek word in this sense, using it to render shedim “lords, idols” in the Septuagint, and Matthew viii.31 has daimones, translated as deofol in Old English, feend or deuil in Middle English. Another Old English word for this was hellcniht, literally “hell-knight.”

The usual ancient Greek sense, “supernatural agent or intelligence lower than a god, ministering spirit” is attested in English from 1560s and is sometimes written daemon or daimon for purposes of distinction. Meaning “destructive or hideous person” is from 1610s; as “an evil agency personified” (rum, etc.) from 1712.

The Demon of Socrates (late 14c. in English) was a daimonion, a “divine principle or inward oracle.” His accusers, and later the Church Fathers, however, represented this otherwise. The Demon Star (1895) is Algol (q.v.) .

My thought:

1. An Oracle on Earth is pretty fash, so is pretty demonic.

2. The heathen masses of dirtbags are pretty powerful … if they could ever organize themselves. But so are the “non-heathen” heathens called The Clergy. (Most of the clergy are overtly anti-religious from what I have ever seen, that is, anti- The Good.)

daimon(n.) a transliteration of Greek daimōn “lesser god, guiding spirit, tutelary deity,” 1852; see demon. Employed to avoid the post-classical associations of demon. Related: Daimonic.

Further thoughts:

3. To the oligarchs and Pervert Class, ‘The People’ should seem pretty demonic. It is a relative relation. Your Daemon is my Saint.

4. All people together are a composite Saint, but no one alone.

5. But, as with a corporation, this composite Saint is not a person.

I think that is the magical thing here. A democracy is a Unity but not a Whole. It is anti-fragile but damn hard to form (historically speaking, in our times).

6. Democracy is for certain demonic — to the Perverts.

This came up recently in a basically throw-away comment I posted to substack, about Count Binface versus Farage. The dude who plays Binface is pretty funny, and revels in “democracy” (the right to “take the piss.” — that was a line he gave at the Oxford Union while wearing a business suit.) But at the end of the day he is only for lite entertainment, and is a distraction, another “CIA” diversion. Some deep state operatives do the work for free.

Sure, I would rather Count Binface won the election than Farage. Just on policy platform strengths and anti-corruption and comedic value. Farage seems to have no sense of humour, or at least a very twisted sort. But as I replied to one angry UK guy who seemed to think I was serious about wanting Binface to represent Clacton, I would not want Binface either, if he also thinks your taxes pay for government spending. And there is hardly a worse false-consciousness idea out there, polluting our hopes for a decent democracy. But at least Binface might let a few extraterrestrials reside in the UK and build one affordable house.

Hey Binface: on Earth “democracy” does not mean “get out to vote.”

Democracy should be boring, not a festival or competition fest. Because the better educated the people are, the more their fiscal policies will converge, towards goodness. The genocidal maniac finds no cause for anti-immigrant fever or race discrimination or class prejudice, once they realize their income depends on such workers. (Sure, they may still hunt for a cause, but they won’t find [a legitimate] one.)

Not only their income, but also their real goods too. The workers provide both! But order of operations is that the incomes go via government origin then to the workers and then to the bosses.1

The human festival is what happens when democracy has been safeguarded and the State currency operations benign background noise. That has to be highly demonic for the Lords and Emperors and petty government scorepoint hoarding bosses. They all want money to be the most important thing, we want it to be the least.

NB: if you would like a free crappy-but-original cartoon like this for your substacks, feel free to donate some government scorepoints and ask. 🤣

Here, “Can local data centre protests pop the AI Bubble” is a short from TheNerdReich that was prophesying a bubble collapse for data centre finance. I had to be slightly contrarian, just for the helluvit, but also because I suspect there is something here for one or two readers, like , and to comment upon (to your own readers, not to me! I do not need more grief).

To the NerdReich guest I say:

I would not bet on a bubble collapse so fast. When most funding is Federal (keystrokes) there is no “pop” until the Federal government turns off the spigot. (It is not “ tax payer funded” — it is the exact opposite, except this funding funds only the techbro tax evaders.) Same thing as the 2000 NASDAQ crunch, with Clinton-Gore running a Federal surplus = non-government sector deficit = turned off spigot.
To maintain sales to pay loans the Valley Machineheads only need to raise their rents. There is no need for the endless growth of data centres for them to profit, that dynamic is a floating-point-operations rate arms race among the big-tech firms. They will tend to eat themselves up until one or two big firms have the monopoly. Their bubble will thus not have collapsed. It is a self-sustaining fizzy drink when Congress is backing the spend, but only the biggest bubbles survive, the little guys collapse.

Be kind … I wrote that in the minute, no second thoughts. There may be nuances I am missing, bit in-the-macro I suspect this is about how things play out. It is a classic way so-called “disaster capitalism” works. It is tremendously wasteful. You have to burn a whole lot of companies in order to wait for the monopolist to arise from the ashes. But is it all that far off the way theorists of Capitalism say things are supposed to work? Not too far off. Their theory will say what is left over is a whole lot of medium sized firms all competing healthily for the consumer’s “tax dollar” (that’s right, the tax payer funds the private sector. Their government scorepoints that might otherwise have been used to extinguish their tax liabilities.) But in the real world the tendency is towards monopoly. Is three to ten big firms colluding & cooperating on price gouging the same as lots of medium sized firms in competition?

(When we do get to such monopoly consolidation in a vital sector (so not boutique underwear manufacture, say) I think it should be practically a biding Law of the Land that the big monopoly firms become properly publicly owned, not by stock-holders, but by the State. Of course, this is impossible under neoliberalism when the State is practically owned by oligarchs. But under some form of actual democracy I think it should be the Law —if we are to permit private ownership at all. Maybe it should all be worker-owned, all firms, without exception, and hence also a binding law, but also impossible under neoliberalism.)

Also, not that I care one iota for naïve tech investors getting screwed by the oligarchs. Maybe do not put your life savings into libertarian fever dream promises? (Why do people still invest in crypto, by the way? What’s that gambling all about? Not enough local Casinos to sink your savings in helping the mafia launder their dirty money?) I just do not want the epidemic of balance sheet degradation to cause my rents to soar as the ᖇᓵⓒᕼ ꕗ𖧥𖨚𖢧𖧥𖦪𖦧𖨚 seek to return to their usual five 60 day vacations a year normality.

Prophecies of Madness

The prophets who were predicting superintelligence have egg-on-face … but still will not admit it. You can now cook (rancid) omlets on their foreheads. Like cold fusion, or even blistering solar temperature hot fusion, the breakthrough is always “just a decade away.” (To be fair, Ray MachinePerv Kurzweil still has 14 years left.)

Only, in hot fusion I think one year it will be true. Though it is the height of hubris to think we can build a virtual friggin’ star on the Earth, yet this is possible hubris, like Sherpa Tensing and Ed Hillary. Hence fantastically good science, even if it proves far less efficient than solar + geothermal. Why? Just because is is cool. (Yeah. Yeah. Don’t nerd-scold me. It is not cool if it diverts millions of resources away from the needs of poor communities, ok.)

Abundant but costly (in terms of irradiated waste and embrittlement) fusion energy might have a best use-case outside of electricity generation, say in low energy physics research. Yeah, low energy! Plasmas are much cooler than the collisions at the LHC. We are not going to be exploring Beyond the Standard Model with fusion. It is a study of the fourth state of matter. Which has its own beauty for those of magnetohydrodynamical spiral bent.

But that’s beside my point today.

The relationship is one point. There is no bubble in fusion funding, because no one took the idea of building a friggin’ star on the Earth too seriously. So the number of start-ups is small. The amount of fizz is low.

With algorithmic “neural-nets” it is different of course, because some of the most incredibly fraudulent philosophers1 in history have lived in our time — Dennett, Hofstadter, the Churchland’s etc.2 — all predicting machines can think, if given enough ooomph. They know nothing of the human soul, thus it is forgivable their ignorance would spawn the “AI” industry fever dreams of “intelligence” singularities. I could perhaps forgive them if in every article they had published they had added the caveat: “This could all be ꕗꖹꝆꝆꕷꖾꕯꖡ.”

NB: this is not across-the-board. A decent skeptical article like Thomas Nagel’s “What is It Like to Be a Bat?” is so wholesome and skeptical of machine sentience that it needs no “could be ꕗꖹꝆꝆꕷꖾꕯꖡ” caveat. Also, Hofstadter wrote a couple of beautiful books, Le Ton Beau de Marot among the best, better than the nerd-indulgent fake Zen of GEB imho, so he at least should know better.

It is not for me to forgive them though. Who knows how many poor communities their diseased ideas published in innumerable journals will end up by proxy killing? Several million I would guess.

The relationship is that fusion research should know no end of funding. It can continue on shoestrings and breadcrumbs. Slow is fine. We do not need more electricity to live decent lives. We can solve the climate crisis by all cutting back on non-essentials. Same for machine algorithm string emission technology.3

This is what the 𖥐𖦪𖠢𖢧𖥣ꛘ𖥕ꚶ𖨚 Abundance guys do not comprehend. They want neoliberal growthism because they are greedy. They cannot stomach the idea the median USA lifestyle is unsustainable, but that also below the median USA lifestyle, with a few simple changes in habits, a family can be even happier, and less wasteful. It is not rocket science. It is a solved problem that the world seems to not wish to know. You indeed cannot countenance such knowledge when you measure your success against your rapacious next door neighbour. You need to stop using such measures.

(At least first check to see if your next door neighbour with the Tesla Roadster or BMW really is happy. My bet is anything that they think they still do not have enough government scorepoints.)

No Bubble Fizz

I think fusion research is rather flat. Possibly in 10 years time so will machine algorithm fantasies of superintelligence. It is the pain we might go through in the meanwhile that worries me, not the financial collapse.

Nathan Tankus was writing about this recently. But I cannot afford to subscribe to his substack thing Notes on the Crisis , I only get the free tier bulletins. But I suspect his opinion was that provided the Federal government keep supplying the mother’s milk (US$ scorepoints) the techbros will suck it all up and no giant bubble will burst.4 But as I wrote above, I am sure the chatBot fizzy drinks will lose some fizz as the monopoly forms. I am sure more than a few Insiders may realize the Chinese platforms will be standing on top at the end of the fizz? Like Japan, I wonder when the bureaucrats in these countries will admit that they knew MMT all along? Knew they had MMT, knew they were lying about not knowing it.

(There is no genie that escapes the bottle when the State acknowledges MMT. What’ll happen, I predict (albeit with no great confidence, being very non-genius) that the public will just be holding the government even more to account! To my mind that is a tautology, due to the inherent deep relationship between money and records of account and public accountability. They are literally the same thing, once you know the money is not generated by 𖦪𖥣𖥐𖦙 ꖿ⋒ℼԞ𝕤. On second thoughts, if the public starts holding the government even more to account, that would be a pretty good genie to let loose! Democracy has for a long time been trapped in a conservative wine whine bottle.)

There is a great (abysmal) parallel here I only recently was made aware of, thanks to Ghost , which was the Weimar/Nazi period MEFO bills , which funded German re-armaments, not too far in time from the Weimar hyperinflation, though well afterwards. It was possible the German monetary authorities were (falsely, imho) worried about another inflation event, and this MEFO bill was thus a thinly disguised veil to avoid the accusation of “printing money.”5

The data centre spend will not be inflationary zeroeth order because those guys love hoarding the scorepoints. Thus zeroeth-order will only want to pay the market price for electricity and silicon. Added scorepoints only inflates prices if they are spent.

First-order it should inflate the electricity and water prices, marginally, because of the arms-race dynamics absent a clear monopoly triumph. OpenAI doing a great job with Altman-Elemental-Kaos undermining their chance for monopoly, see Empires of AI by Karen Hao. (A say “marginally” but that cold finance-lingo can mean the difference between happy living and starvation for a family living on the edge of poverty, and death for those already past the edge.)

The popiness (sp?) and fizz come from the age-old speculative finance dynamics and nowadays also the techbro arms race. They all wish to be the First to Summit the Everest of Superintelligence.

Someone should reach into their 𝕚𝑑🄸🅾𝕥 dreams Inception style and tell them that mountain does not exist.

While there is this fantasy arms-race towards a weapon that will never exist, there is a ponzi-finance dynamic. But we all now know that there is no balance sheet crisis that cannot be eliminated with sufficient fiscal injection.

In String-Spewing-Algorithm finance terms, the based leftist take on this should be that ꕯꕒꕯꗞꖡ small fry investors who risked their houses and failed to early bank their gamble on the “AI” Boom should not have to suffer their own ꕯꕒꕯꗞꖀꖡ … too much. Just a little. In fair due proportion. They should not need to have to sell their house or re-mortgage, they only need a government guarantee of the same degree the techbro’s had to spawn the ponzi period, namely a Job Guarantee with a decent wage so they can make their old mortgage payments.

I am in favour of a Job Guarantee, but not a job guarantee only for people who already have the retirement savings of 100 median families, aka state subsidized bitstring-farming.

The Other Hype & Grift

A few dirtbag physicist/MMT’er talking points (thanks to Prof. Emily Bender for the (un-cited, but see here ) academic backings):

1. There is no such thing as “AI” so stop using the term. The term itself is hyping the grift. Stop using it without quotes or caveats.

2. The human mind is not merely emitting strings like the LLM’s. Or … to assert otherwise is a form of intellectual fascism, or at best techno-utopianism (bad enough). Stop doing that!

3. We do not have to all be Neo-Luddites. But I am. We do not need half the crap we have to live decent lives. More farming robotics I say, but more local & organic and sustainable. (I know “organic” is a dicey word, but you know what I mean. Glass house agriculture is fine if needed to feed the masses, but should be a last resort, due to the nutritional deficits.)

4. Even “neural net” is a bad phrase, I try to avoid it and stick to the acronym ANN/CNN.6 But obviously would prefer to avoid that too. The computer systems are nothing like biological neurons. The computational node architecture is so far abstracted from neurobiology it might as well be fairy dust. It certainly has engendered Peter Pan like fantasy.

5. “Reinforcement learning” is a bad phrase in algorithmic string emission context. There is no learning involved, not of the kind that occurs in the human mind. Weight updates are not “learning” in any way shape or form. It is yet another insidious neoliberal use of language. Every ounce as bad as “debt mountain” and “fiscal cliff.” Science does not even know what human learning is exactly. There is no good definition. We only measure behavioural input/output events and correlations. These are a poor substitute for the actual spiritual phenomenon of learning and spiritual growth (learning to be a better kinder person).7

6. The headlines, “AI Solves/Proves Hundred Year Old Math Theorem” are also fake headlines. Some dopey math nerd had to prompt the algorithm to get it running. The math nerd is where all the intelligence resides. Plus the software engineers who wort the algorithm and fed the algorithm ginormous amounts of mathematical results. To say the machine “thought” of the proof is like saying the lottery ball machine thought Joan Ginther would be a worthy winner.8

7. The human soul is not understood by any science. Science cannot even agree on whether there is such a reality. It certainly never helps that no definition exists.

Like usage for the abused term “hacker”, I quixotically must forever run against the grain. ‘Hacker’ means “playful inventiveness” and has nothing in particular to do with computer coding. The term for a malicious computer security break is “cracker,” — which in turn has nothing to do with the social class people think of as “white trash”. … I forgot the point of this remark … something about how despite materialist scientists broadly dismissing the reality of the human soul, they have no definition of what they are dismissing.9 Sheer folly.

I will try to remove the LaTeX in this piece, but if you want the mathematics as well then go straight to the T4GU Blog here. Why would you do that? — Bother to wait for an extra web page to load? Oh the interminable seconds of agony of it all? 🤣 Well, you would go there because doing some awesome theoretical physics gazing beats trying to teach dense people MMT macroeconomics all the live long day. You have to be light-weight and non-dense to comprehend MMT I reckon. That’s not an insult. It means having a clear open mind, unencumbered by too much Marxist and Neoclassical baggage alike, all the baggages.

Stokes Wedgies with LaTeX Removed

(I thought that a nice heading!) I just copy & pasted this stuff below from my T4GU Blog. There was a prior article here “Dilating Phillip” which should be read first. But I thought it too tedious to post them both here under what is really an MMT Substack.

Compli𝔁ating Phillip

As hinted last week, I am going to write a few notes on Ghostbusting, which I trailed off a bit with in last weeks blog .

First, as I mentioned last week, I got a bit bored of ghostbusting, since in the Clifford Algebra ℂℓ(8) model, which I use in T4G theory, there is no ghost.

Aha! … but that is because we use the appropriate Shirokov bilinears for the inner products. This is ostensibly the same as Bender & Mannheim, but slightly slicker, since we have packaged together the Standard Model symmetries with a proper inner product, or Witt conjugate. It is essentially the Bender & Mannheim CPT-adjoint we use, but in Clifford algebra rather than matrix algebra.

This brings me to the first interesting thing to remark upon, which came in around 1:38:00 in the podcast Curt did with Phillip.

Mannheim says, of PT-symmetric quantum gravity,

“People were trying to do quantum gravity with everything on the real axis.” — “… this theory lives on the imaginary axis.”

The first little thing to note is that quantum gravity is a CPT-symmetric theory, thus has an anti-linear symmetry, thus has no ghosts. I have not yet read where Bender & Mannheim prove this, but I trust that they are right. What they show Mannheim (2023) is that a fourth derivative theory does not have ghosts if it is PT or CPT symmetric.

There are a couple of problems here,

1. I am not sure a Hamiltonian exists for quantum gravity,

2. The claim thus relies on actual gravity being conformal, so no fundamental Planck scale.

those issues aside, I think I can believe Conformal Gravity has no ghosts.

One reason why I have confidence is that I’ve got independent reasons to agree with Mannheim that there is no graviton, and thus “quantum gravity” is simply conformal gravity, but with coupling the source of gravity (the (Standard Model fermions) to the tetrad.

Thus, gravity is already quantum mechanical by virtue of being coupled to the Standard Model. Mannheim does not explain how this coupling arises, he just deduces consequences, but T4G theory has the explanation … as well as being consistent with Mannheim’s consequences. At least this is how I see things today.

You can read my archives: well before I heard about Phillip Mannheim I was saying it as a personal motto that “one should not re-quantize gravity, since gravity is already a quantum theory and to re-quantize the theory invites pathologies.” I think Mannheim came to the same conclusion.

Resting Ghosts

To put ghosts permanently to sleep I think still needs a bit more work in T4G theory, since I have not really bothered tackling Conformal Gauge Gravity in any depth yet, but I hope that when someone does they will find similar results to Bender & Mannheim and obtain a ghost-free theory.

Emergent Planck

The question that may now occur is then how the devil does the Planck scale arise?

Well, I have a few ideas, or at least one.

I am pretty sure the Planck scale is related to minimal T4G wormhole cross sections, meaning the throat area. But I also think this is related to how 4-geon particle interactions can exist at all! Unlike field theories, in T4G we only have the particles. But to get point particles to interact is impossible if they are actual points. Thus they cannot be points. But a 4-geon wormhole is only two-points, so not much better. Thus, in order for 4-geon interactions to occur at all gravity must be “real” — meaning spacetime curvature bro!

This, I think, as well as ubiquitous vacuum entanglement.

However! … (to use a Mannheimerism) … vacuum entanglement density is not infinite, and this should be why coupling constants cannot diverge.

But then … aha! … by Ted Jacobson’s work Newton’s constant appears in the hydrodynamic limit of conformal gravity due to finite vacuum entanglement density. I think this can be linked to conformal symmetry breaking too, but that’s maybe for another day. It does not have to be strongly linked, since conformal symmetry breaking just means fermion mass is getting generated dynamically, it doe snot 1generate the Planck mass because there is no elementary particle that has to have the Planck mass.

It is more like vacuum condensation stuff. This is why it relates to conformal symmetry breaking (CSB) and EWSB (electroweak symmetry breaking) — because these are best theorized (imho) as dynamically hidden symmetries. This is the other life work of Mannheim.

I do not know what the exact relationship is though.

What I sometimes think about is that below the Planck scale the T4G wormholes are huuuuge. Since they are minimal, but still have a gravitionally constrained throat. That sort of thing is something fundamental about spacetime.

Or is it, Mahesh?

Maybe conformal symmetry also just can keep shrinking the wormhole throat, in which case there is then some freezing in at some cosmic temperature at which regime the wormholes stop expanding in area, and freeze at the Planck area. This would naturally give rise to the Planck scale. It may even be the CSB, or at least a precursor to CSB.

Of course, there are many ways a symmetry can be dynamically broken, so I’m not putting any oval eggs in any conformal baskets just yet.

Now that’s about all folks!

I seriously want to have the ballz to write a preprint and show it to Mannheim and Jacobson.

Scratch that though! I totally do have the ballz for that. The problem is getting an email past their crackpot filters. T4G theory is crackpot, I totally admit this … until it is not crackpot.

Oh, that’s right, I almost forgot, that’s not all folks.

Stokes Wedgies

In talking with Curt, Mannheim mentions the thing above about “quantum gravity” living on the imaginary axis, or more exactly in a Stokes wedge. Yeah, but “wtft?”2

How did gravity suddenly get complex numbers?

For me, the answer is in T4G theory, it is the wormhole topology. I wrote a pretty sketchy preprint on this here, Smith (2026) “The complex wormhole theorem” (slight clickbait title, it is not much of a theorem).

A brighter person than me could probably make something of this.

The idea was that complex structure in QFT is really wormhole topology. “But how?” you ask.

The answer is to recognize that QM is a theory of stochastic boundary transformation on a Clifford bundle — an inherently statistical theory and model. The complex structure is a Clifford tensor structure Cℓ(0,2) which joins the classical algebra Cℓ(3,1)​ or a doubled STA since now we have bipartite 4-geon topological structure.

QFT does not model the spacetime topology directly because QM and QFT are merely stochastic transformation theories. This is why the wormholes show up as Cℓ(0,2)⊗ structure, because they cannot show up in the quantum theory because the quantum theory has “no knowledge” of the interior of the spacetime cobordism. QM and QFT only “have knowledge” of the boundaries.

The way you might poetically state the relationship then is that the Cℓ0,2⊗Cℓ0,2​⊗ structure is the boundary stochastic shadow of wormhole topology.

I find it a beautiful unifying principle… which does deserve to be raised to a theorem. Let me know if you can do it!

Mannheim goes on to point out γ0γ1γ2γ3​ is his Lorentz invariant CPT operator on fermions, called γ5 in matrix QM. Bender had realized this was the anti-linear symmetry needed for PT-gravity, and that it had to be complex. In short, for fermions one needed CPT not just PT. Thus, in Mannheim’s words, it was intrinsically connected to the the complex Lorentz group

Then Mannheim changed the condition: he realized that since the cc-number multiplying the coefficients in superpositions gets complex conjugated upon time reversal, hence PT, so he needed to make the coefficient real. This was guaranteed by probability conservation (unitarity). Thus he could replace CPT with complex Lorentz + unitarity.

CPT ⇔ complex Lorentz + unitarity.

A funny thing for Clifford algebra experts here is that none of this is surprising at all.

Mannheim does contribute a nice bit of historic awareness in pointing out the reason for the Dirac adjoint. It was Paul Dirac having a big brain and knowing about the classical theory of partial differential equations and their boundary conditions. An Hermitian system is what guarantees well-behaved solutions by guaranteeing the boundary terms remain finite. Bender & Mannheim were merely pointing out that in quantum mechanics this is overkill, and generally a system only needs to be PT-symmetric, not necessarily Hermitian, to have meaningful real eigenvalues and no ghosts.

The Physical Reason

Unitarity is fine, that clearly has a physical basis. But why the complex Lorentz group and the need to restrict a theory to Stokes Wedges?

For the Stokes Wedges the argument can be inverted: we simply have the physical theory living in Stokes wedges because it is unphysical outside! This is a matter of making the ℙ𝕙𝕪𝕤𝕚𝕔𝕤 Rule not the Algebra. The algebra and restrictions thereof, are the physics content.

Without physical constraints we would just be doing math.

Bender & Mannheim have not given any reason for why Nature uses the complex Lorentz group. But I have a possible good reason, it follows from T4G theory, and is basically badly written-up in one or two of my preprints “The Complex Wormhole Theorem” and “Real Cobordisms and Complex Trajectories” .

One day I hope to revisit that paper and make it simpler. But 2026 was a damn hectic year for me, it was the year I decided to start putting T4GU into preprints. And I wrote about 6 in the space of a few moths. All unpaid work. So had no time to carefully edit them. But I stand by most of the content.

If you can do better then let me know.

Anyhow, I’m making a statement here, that I am squarely in the spacetime realist camp, and that complex algebra is a tool, not a physical reality, so we are obliged to explain why our models have to use complex algebra.

The issue is that ℂ algebra is merely a pure mathematics tool, it has no physical rhyme nor reason. It can be employed for all sorts of disparate stuff in engineering. If we then find ourselves forced to employ ℂ algebra there should be a nice physical reason behind this. In my Book that is the existence of spacetime wormholes, the “complex” trajectories they induce when a dumb-dumb chooses to use an everywhere Minkowski frame. You can choose to not be such a dumb-dumb and thus avoid the complex Lorentz algebra, but then I do not know any way to model quantum mechanics without being a dumb-dumb. At least I know the reason for the ℂ employment.

A Beautiful Derivation?

This is not Erdős level Proof from The Book, but I think there is something of The Book in this. It is almost a No Math Proof proof. It goes like this:

Start with coupling the fermions to the tetrad, or to the spin-connexion. In the Clifford Gauge Theory Gravity this is just the minimal coupling principle (the spin connexion is replaced by a rotation gauge field).

Integrate out the fermion ψ and ψˉ​ — doing the fermionic path integral. (OK this is a Math step, but you could also continue this proof argument just presuming this has been done.)

What remains is the conformal action, so we have CG.

It had to be conformal gravity because we started with a conformal theory (massless Dirac chiral/Weyl spinors).

Thus we really did not need to compute the path integral. We could have gone another route and shown the Weyl squared action is the unique conformal action. Starting with conformally coupled Standard Model fermions would then mean the Weyl squared action would be the only possible action. If it were not unique then the path integral would not have been possible, it would have been ill-defined.

Thus it is a type of consistency result that both roads lead to Weyl-squared gravity. Although either road alone if mistake-free would obviate the need for consistency proof. If they had led to different gravity actions it would have been a major problem, indicating a deeper inconsistency in the whole idea of no graviton quantum gravity. In this light the proof is a proof that a no graviton quantum gravity is a consistent theory.

But there was no ghost in the Dirac theory either. So there cannot be a ghost in the remaining Conformal Gravity. If there were, you’d have done something wrong.

Beautiful, huh?

Yeah, but who said a ghostless Standard Model still has no ghosts when the fermionic sector is path integrated away? That’s a missing piece of the proof.

On the other hand, ask how a ghost could have been introduced by path integration? Cannot be done, right? Why not? Well, because all the quantum fields you ever had were in the original coupled action. Path integration does not introduce more fields, it can only introduce quasi-fields that we conjure up as fictional effective actions at some arbitrary chosen energy scale. But these are not fundamental, so even if they have ghosts, they are not a pathology for the fundamental theory, which remains ghostless.

Not sure about you, but there was not much mathematics in that argument. All the math involved is mere “homework.”

For those who are hungry for fast-food mathematics, I can write it more mathy as follows:

Start with massless Standard Model fermions coupled to a tetrad or vierbein. Do not path-integrate over the metric. Hold the background geometry fixed and integrate over the fermions:

Because the Dirac theory is conformal, the local divergent part of IeffIeff​ must be conformal. In four-dimensional, torsion-free, parity-even metric geometry, the relevant non-topological curvature invariant is CμνρσCμνρσCμνρσ​Cμνρσ. Thus the fermion determinant induces conformal gravity.

One can reach the same place from the other direction. Ask what local gravitational action is compatible with a fundamental theory containing no mass scale. The Einstein–Hilbert action is excluded because GG is dimensionful. The cosmological constant is excluded because it is a dimensionful vacuum term. The Weyl-squared action remains:

(Sorry, I know I stated this’d be LaTeX-free, but I meant only the inline mark-up.)

So the two roads meet. The determinant road and the symmetry road both lead to Weyl-squared gravity. That is the beautiful part.

The ghost worry then has to be reinterpreted. The starting fermion theory was not a ghost theory. Integrating out the fermions does not create new fundamental negative-norm particles. It creates an effective curvature response. If a naïve decomposition of the resulting

propagator appears to contain a ghost, that is evidence that the naïve Hermitian graviton-Fock-space interpretation is wrong, not that the underlying conformal theory is sick.

There’s More Spin …

Mannheim explains that Conformal Gravity must have two gravitons if the propagators are to describe actual gauge bosons (gravitons). But there is a theorem due to Weinberg that if there is a spin=2 boson it must couple to gravity through the Einstein tensor, which cannot occur in Weyl conformal gravity. However, there is an escape clause to the theorem, which is that it requires the metric of that theory’s Hilbert space to be positive definite.

The escape Mannheim found is that the conformal gravity graviton has zero norm (so the metric is not positive definite). For CPT-gravity the Hilbert space is not negative definite, but can have states of zero norm, so is also not positive definite.

This means the graviton is not observable. Earlier I think I said this means the graviton “does not exist.” But that is a bit too dramatic. Since a spin=2 gauge boson is not a particle in the first place, no more so that a spin=1 gauge boson is a photon. The transformation instruction for U(1) symmetry is not the actual physical particle (photon) that is responsible for the appearance of that symmetry in spacetime. In a sense then, spin=1 bosons also do not exist, but since they have positive definite norms the physics of the photon for sure is real. Photons exist, but the gauge field we use to account for them is a fiction, a stochastic variable.

The physics of the graviton is much less clear. Gravity is observable after all. But the transform for the quantum gravity is not observable (at least not in Conformal Gravity and T4G theories).

Mannheim speculates that a type of “emission” of gravitons may still occur in the quantum theory, but that these correspond identically to “collapse of the wavefunction”. This is a little at odds with T4G theory, since in T4G theory there is no physical wavefunction, the ψψ are all abstract transformation instructions. But in some ways I found Mannheim’s speculation here to be in loose accord with T4G theory.

You see, in T4G theory what is the collapse of the wavefunction physically? The answer is it is collapse of entanglement, which is collapse of wormhole topology. But if the spin=2 gauge transform is anything then it is this non-local collapse of spacetime topology. There is no more natural T4G interpretation of a “graviton”.

This is why I am not worried about experiments portending to observe gravity Two-Slit interference, since gravity all along was the source of quantum entanglement. But the source of gravity is the Standard Model matter and vacuum. And we still do not quantize gravity my path integrals over the metric, since the fermion path integral has already done this.

In T4G theory the gauge bosons are just transformation instructions, but in the adjoint representation of the symmetries. We thus understand them as the way we describe the charges of the theory, the group invariants in other words.

What is the physical connection then? I believe it is that entanglement is not observable. This is a standard orthodox result in QM — if you ever try to directly detect entanglement then you collapse it. We can only observe entanglement indirectly, or via so-called “weak measurements” (i.e., via statistical ensembles). But in T4G theory entanglement is equivalent to ER-bridge structure. There are thus three more-or-less equivalent statements:

1. The graviton is not observable.

2. Entanglement is not observable.

3. Wormholes are topologically censored.

Mannheim might recognize the equivalence of the first two, but only T4G theory recognizes all three.

Negative Curvature

There is something of a Splinter remaining. When asked about his links to the work of Turok & Boyle, I think Mannheim mischaracterizes their work, saying they have a CPT-Mirror universe. But that is not what the most recent Turok & Boyle model has, rather they also have a conformal endless universe. There is no Big Bang per se because matter never gets to the mirror boundary. Why not? Because in the UV limit it is all massless.

The Turok–Boyle CPT-Symmetric Cosmos has a CPT mirror Big Bang, but there is nothing on the other side of the mirror. It is a mirror only in the sense of solving electromagnetism using the Method of Images also has a mirror. It is a mixed Neumann/Dirichlet boundary (for bosons/fermions respectively), not a literal mirror copy universe like Alice in Wonderland. But also there is no actual “big bang” since conformal matter never “reaches” the boundary.

This is then the same as Mannheim’s cosmology, in my dim view at least.

But Mannheim thinks he needs a negative curvature in the Friedmann Equation for this. But I do not think he does. However, it is an issue I have not deeply thought about.

Related perhaps, Mannheim also say he does not get the CMBR perturbations yet, and by contrast Turok & Boyle do! From the FT scalars. Hence you can tell I am dead keen to iron out this little wrinkle in their respective Big Bang scenarios.

“You never go full ‘VOTE FOR’!” —vaults of Grumbine.

It is a huge sadness because such people seem utterly lost to me, how can we even begin a conversation? It is about a billion lost souls globally, roughly.

Yes, but before losing myself in the quantum physics, how about contemplating what happens in the minds of these people when they realize all the government spending is funding the tax payer, them, not the other way around? They might even go further in love with fascisms — yay, all power to the State! — but I doubt it, I have never seen that as a result of MMT learning. Even outside the US of A, I suspect most people’s default preference is libertarian. They only go statist when they realize their own private liberties cannot be guaranteed except by legally binding social norms that are sometimes enforced. (I refuse to say Rule of Law, it is way too fascistic.1)

It might be a bit tired to offer Steve Grumbine up as ‘Exhibit A’, but I have few friends or acquaintances who were once full throat MAGA to offer as extra exhibits. I will take it on anecdote faith that plenty of MAGAheads can become good people overnight. I am serious. All you doomers and nihilists @-ing me in comments recently should look around a bit, get outdoors more. Stop doom-scrolling on the tubes. I am talking about how just understanding accounting records can flip political switches in people’s brains overnight. Every good teacher knows this. We call it an “Aha! Moment”. There is a whole literature on this in mathematics, but our brain cannot really tell the difference between mathematical thought and political thought, so it is universal I feel. Call it a thesis, I reckon someone can validate it.

Bear in mind, this is only one example. MMT awareness lights-on is not the only MAGA-turning switch around. I just think it is one of the most potent. It does not require anyone to change their “religion”.

That was a long MMT entrée. 😊 😂 My intellectual culinary skills need some work. But, you know, it’s never good to always serve salad.

Against the Statey State

All I really wanted to impress upon people smarter than me, is how about considering the Clifford Algebra view that the “wavefunction” — the so-called ‘quantum state’ — is not real, and not for any dopey philosophical reason, just for a hard core mathematics reason. This being in Clifford Algebra we can exactly map all known quantum mechanics from the matrix formalism over to the multivectors. When we do so, the wavefunctions are always spinors (or bosonic field strengths, given by the transformation generators in the algebra) and the spinors are scaled Clifford rotors. A rotor (a pure abstraction) is clearly a transformation instruction which acts upon the algebra of observables. Since rotors act only by conjugation (sandwich product) it is even more clear they are non-physical.

Not that mathematical objects in any model are physical, but you know what I mean. In some mathematical models we define objects that we do intend to be more-or-less directly physical. The r in Newton’s Law is (mapped to) a physical radius. This is the only way Kantian 𝕤𝕔𝕚𝕖𝕟𝕔𝕖 can work. Our mathematical model has to be mapped onto physical reality. This is not itself a mathematical operation of course, since it is on paper. The operation, the mapping, is all in our minds. I cannot emphasize strongly enough that this does not imply Idealism! The mapping is in our minds. Not the right-hand side of the map! Someone tell Essentia Foundation and Kastrup, so they can stop annoying the 𝕣𝕖𝕒𝕝 internerdnet.

If you re-read all your physics, especially QFT, with this in mind — that the spinors are transformation instructions — then I firmly believe you will go far, to highly unfunded places outside mainstream academia.🤣 But you will find it so beautiful you will never go back to highly paid2 slavery to the orthodoxy. Then again, it might just be that I have gone completely 𝓲𝓃𝓼𝒶𝓷ℯ. The odds are high, but there is some destructive interference, evidenced by the fact some thoroughly nice, kind, loving people seem to at least agree with the 𝕄𝕄𝕋 ingredients of my infusions.

On the one hand it is what I’ve always wanted, some recognition for the theory.

On the other hand it means my specialty that has left me unemployed is going to be over-run by n00bs who are smarter than me, leaving me even more unemployed.1 The flood gates are not fully open yet though, so I have a small window of time when I can still have fun with T4G.2

The occasion was Anton Petrov giving a review of a new paper on ER=EPR a boost. I am not really sure how much influence phystubers have in academia, but from Curt I have heard people at CERN and Fermilab listen to his podcast, so plenty will be already primed to be receptive to this new preprint that links the Turok–Boyle CPT-symmetric universe with de Sitter ER=EPR (it’s a bit nuts though, like all neolib academic claptrap, they indulge in immoderate ontologies, imagining an actual mirror cosmos). ((Listening 🎶 as I write to Dylan’s A Series of Dreams, which somehow seemed apt.))

This {CPT cosmology + LR-Standard Model + ER=EPR} stuff is T4G theory in a nutshell, more-or-less. Though I also have the Standard Model in complexified Clifford algebra motivated by pure 4D spacetime, which these recent papers on CPT symmetry do not have. (Field theory paradigm entrenchment.)

So … at last! 🙏 — a phystuber, other than Curt, promoting Turok and Latham Boyle’s CPT-symmetric universe. My local university will not entertain this, leaving me needlessly unemployed. But in fact the entire Standard Model and the CPT-mirror boundary proposal of Turok & Boyle fit together perfectly with conformal gravity as “quantum gravity” — you do not quantize the metric, you couple gravity to the Standard Model matter, so there is no graviton. Anton did not seem to have dug deep into this extra good fizziks kai.

Gravity mediated entanglement is just the entanglement of the source of gravity itself, namely the Standard Model matter. This implies matter is particulate and in Mark Hadley’s 4-geon model the matter is an element of non-trivial spacetime topology, which means all matter is already self-entangled, or you could say entangled with the vacuum. Einstein was right … again. There is no Spooky action-at-a- distance. Non-locality is an effect you see only if you falsely presume everywhere Minkowski topology at every single point, which is obviously laughable (it would mean there are no particles).

Confluences are good clues that you are really onto something good. I can give you two more:

1. Garrett Lisi recently (a few years back now) found he had to include CPT symmetry along with Triality permutation to get his fibre bundle nonsense working for the Standard Model. (Fibre bundles are statistical abstractions, but unfortunately Lisi and many others take them to be fundamental ontology, which I think is ridiculous. But that’s just me.) Lisi also uses biquaternions, which are just a poor mans way of using Clifford algebras. (He thinks he has fibre bundles, but (bi)quaternions are just frame transformation instructions, so are clearly not physical ontology.)

2. Phillip Mannheim reckons Conformal Gravity is all we need, since if it couples to the Standard Model we get dynamical EW and scale symmetry breaking, which replaces the Higgs (the Higgs is real at 125 GeV, but is a four-fermion interaction,3 not an elementary particle, which resolves the Hierarchy Problem).

This is a local version of ER=EPR. The wormhole is real, not just in imaginary holographic bulk space described by a “more fundamental” boundary CFT.

In other words, de Sitter spacetime inverts the orthodox AdS-CFT duality. Rather than the boundary being fundamental, in de Sitter (or our FRWL universe) the bulk is fundamental, and the boundary is a bit more transcendent (off at infinity, or in the CPT symmetric past at conformal τ=0, so also a type of infinity, since massless particles never see the past boundary).

((I actually have a “quantum” theory of the CPT-symmetric big bang that is the craziest preprint I have ever drafted, so far. I have no confidence in it. The rough idea being far UV quantum effects get suppressed at conformal τ=0. Sort of the opposite of what spacetime Doomers would expect.))

Anton mentioned how the black hole mirror boundary can dissolve the black hole information paradox (there is not interior). I had to comment:

@12:20 unitarity is no longer thought to be inviolate, Strominger and others are looking at a weaker principle of Isometry.

But that aside, the CPT-symmetric universe in the new paper by Gaztañaga et al , is not really the same as Turok & Boyle. Turok & Boyle do not say there is a mirror cosmos, they just say there is a CPT-boundary. Their version is the Wheeler–Feynman–Aharonov picture, where antiparticles are actually particles travelling back in time. So there is only one time coordinate, there are not two different arrows of times. Entropy is not a driving force you see, and so is not “making” the antiparticles travel in a different time arrow. The antiparticles are just by definition moving towards globally lower entropy, you can even consider that almost a definition itself (of how antiparticles relate to entropy), since in the CPT-symmetric universe the cosmic arrow of time is very natural, the future boundary being conformal gravity but not conformal matter (due to dynamical EW symmetry breaking).

There is a nice juicy subtlety here, which is that whole spacetime entropy is a constant. Statistical mechanics entropy is not the same. So actual 4D cosmic entropy is then clearly not a driving force (more clearly). The low entropy CPT mirror boundary and the far future de Sittter boundary are thus only in a relative entropy configuration. There are more ways the de Sitter boundary could be realized in macroscopic degrees of freedom than the initial CPT mirror conformal boundary (Dirichlet/Neumann for fermions/bosons respectively) .

Anton says the CPT-symmetric universe explains black hole information loss. I had to comment, to defend my boyz Neil and Latham:

@11:10 the CPT-Universe describes an awful lot more. Did you read all of the Turok–Boyle papers?

It explains isotropy, flatness, the arrow of time, the CBMR perturbations being gaussian with a small spectral tilt, it eliminates the trace anomalies, solves Strong CP, provides a perfect dark matter candidate (if needed on top of conformal gravity linear potential “non-matter dark matter”), eliminates the graviton, eliminates the Hierarchy Problem (the Higgs is not elementary, but instead is a four-fermion interaction or other condensate). It eliminates black hole info loss (the black hole has a CPT mirror boundary, hence no interior … I think Anton mentioned this) and by similar principles all singularities resolve analytically conically so only the metric degeneracy occurs, which is not pathological, it is analytically continued. The second sheet is not a literal mirror universe. It is our universe, but with matter and anti-matter swapped, so obviously we do not “observe” this since we tend to watch things with clocks running with the cosmic arrow of time, it being a little tricky to gather the data to write an EOM down with a future (to us) initial boundary (but in a sense this is what QM does, hence why it is stochastic).

What this new preprint does is add a crucial thing to Turok & Boyle’s work, CPT boundaries can now also explain ER=EPR, hence all entanglement is just spacetime symmetry. The wormholes are non-traversable classically (topological censorship) but still admit the EPR correlations (explains why entanglement is unobservable unless you break it). This is all of the quantum weirdness. Someone tell Tim Maudlin, he has been surpassed by old Einstein. It is also “stringy” (the spacetime wormholes are your strings, but no extra dimensions are required https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18503879 ).

It would have been unfair if Einstein had realized he was right all along, no one is allowed to be that big of a GOAT (conservation of humility under ego symmetry). Put it all together, if it is not a “TOE” then I will not ever know what is.

LLM Slop

Quick note. I saw today a claude.llm assisted substack from The Minority Report which ironically was about the evils of the Fartificial unintelligence technofascist industry, also known as “Ai industry”. The TMR article got attacked in the comments section for being LLM slop. (Do not refer to it as “Ai”, since that is presuming infinitely too much, or using a terrible definition of “intelligence” or both.)

The TMR substack author tried to defined themselves as having ESL and using Claude.llm only to “assist.” Not good bro, not good.

First: I love native ESL writing. It is beautiful.

If someone else complains you “cannot write English good” then stuff them, you do not need them as readers.

Second: if you need an LLM or Grammerly thing to assist you, maybe get another career?

Third: even if English is your first language, I prefer seeing your grammar and typo mistakes. Sometimes they can be funny. I even get cross at myself sometimes for spellcheck correcting my most common typo, “doe snot”.

Fourth: although blaming the individual user is bad praxis, I still cannot help lose all respect for people knowingly using LLMs who know the electricity and clean water guzzling nature of the data centres.

Fifth: If you feel threatened by being out-competed for readers by the people using the LLM’s, again, maybe get a new career? There are plenty of social activist spaces open for people with a social justice conscience. We should not all be writers.

Who was the wit who said, “In everyone there is a novel, and that is where it should stay.” It was before Hitchens, I think it was Somerset Maugham. Anyway, we are now reduced to Everyone has a blog article prompt in them each week, and that is where their El Farouk should stay.

Sixth: I have found myself capable of mimicking an LLM output. How? Just write a physics article I think will get through journal referees. It’s a great way to eliminate all human emotion and caring.

Needless to say, although I try,4 I cannot write like that, unless I am feeling really masochistic, Spartan, and have dosed myself with a few sandwiches and espressos (maybe even chocolate, in fact definitely chocolate for a few of the preprints below👇🏼, hate yourself afterwards or torture with exercise, but the amygdala must have some fake love to persist). So I give it a go from time to time, and you can see exactly what the results are, they are unreadable.

• Ultraviolet topological 4-geon theory — a good idea, but I dried it like a raisin into a wrinkled vitamin & moisture deprived sequence of nerd strings. The abstract is horrible. I will spice it up one day when I truly stop caring about getting this work on the arXiv.

• Superstring theory could be already correct — a bit clickbaity for the title, but the rest was ok I think. Still, it is easy to see the paragraphs where I was trying too hard to please non-existent referees.

I actually secretly suspect writing too dry is bad for one’s science career, though not in terms of government scorepoints, but in terms of self-respect. Yeah, you might squeak past the journal referees more frequently, but your brain turns to slop. Mine did when I was editing my more dry attempts, as exhibits:

• Complex wormhole theorem

• Cobordism boundary stochasticity

• Commutators and entanglement for spacetime physics

• Spacetime vacuum and spin statistics

• Are atomic tests for ER=EPR valid?

• Real Cobordisms and Complex Trajectories

Yeah, I see you did not read them. I found, although I wrote them, I could hardly read them myself. Sometimes my abstract & conclusions are not too bad.

But the ideas in those preprints deserve so much better literary effort. This is what I do on T4GU. At least to the extent I can think of good jokes and witticisms.

Those preprints above were not even meant for journals. I posted them this year only to demo my academic writing capacity, in the vain hope of getting hired. Contrast with how I write naturally and pure on T4GU! I much prefer editing my T4GU articles. I do not really want to publish in a journal ever again. Maybe the arXiv for a few of the above. But I will be unable to resist the urge to spice-them-up to worthy unpublishable high quality.🤣

I do not even think I am joking. Why? Because QM is not a complete theory, so there will be many valid interpretations. Absolutely valid, in the sense they could not be refuted.

Paradigm Flossed

Now while I agree with a lot of Kuhn and Feyerabend, I still think Popper had a few things correct. If X is not falsifiable in the future then X is not a scientific theory. It might be some other theory, we might not know that it is not falsifiable, but as a point of debate I think there is no debate. The practicalities ruin Poppers nice characterization, but only because it gets too tricky to nuance when we get to the cutting edge stuff, for the reason just given.

Thus, for me, the interpretations of QM are non-science. Not anti-science, for philosophy has a role, and 𝕊𝕔𝕚𝕖𝕟𝕔𝕖 is a proper subset of philosophy. ℙ𝕙𝕪𝕤𝕚𝕔𝕤 gets back on a good track when we imagine some reality, then figure out that it leads to quantum mechanics. Then no interpretation is necessary. This may not be possible of course, in which case … well, damn! But I have faith it is possible.

What seems falsifiable today might prove unfalsifiable tomorrow, or the converse. We already saw how 20th century science gave us more limitations, not fewer. Thus Popper’s view needs a healthy dose of humility. 𝕊𝕔𝕚𝕖𝕟𝕔𝕖 advanced, but in many ways also retreated. The domain of valid 𝕊𝕔𝕚𝕖𝕟𝕔𝕖 retreated thanks to QM and GR. This is something that Atheists seem to have not grasped. Militant atheists at least, the non-agnostics.

And just to trigger a few dummies, most self-professed “religious types” are actually atheists (imho ok). Why? Because (or when) they have a clear conception of God in their minds, which is most likely false. Anything that is a cause of hatred, bigotry or violence is anti-religious, regardless of what label people assign the ideology. Thus christian nationalism, hindu-fascism, military buddhism, monastic Zen, zionist judaism, islamic theocracy … all these things are anti-religion and hence atheist in a broad sense (atheists without knowing it). Religion is not a cause of any of these phenomena.

(And just to trigger a few more people, and alienate almost everyone: Marxism is basically a religion = source of Good. Although that can be endlessly debated. Let’s just say a source of Good modulo what shills for neoliberal capitalism think they think the word “Marxism” means (guys, it does not mean Stalinism, Leninisms, Maoism. Yah, that’s why there are different words for each.) It is not a divinely revealed component of religion, but it is a component present in all valid religions from ancient times, before K. Marx the German blowhard bearded guy was born. It irks me he got his named attached to some rather ancient good thoughts, like “Be generous. Be friendly (you can be comrades and still piss each other off endlessly). Do not be a liberal/fascist managerial ꕗ𖧥𖨚𖢧𖧥𖦪𖦧.”1)

OK, so that’s just by my definition of ℝ𝕖𝕝𝕚𝕘𝕚𝕠𝕟. Take it or leave it.2

LLM Substack Infiltration

Interestingly I think I ran into an LLM on substack comment replies the other day. (Third order mud bottom feeding.🤣 imagine the heavy metals, ooohhhffff!) It was critiquing a preprint I wrote on “The massive costs of unemployment” — debating (if you can call it that) with me about a mere definition. That’s not good manners Mr or Mrs LLM, parent of a lot of slop. Trampling on a thinker’s definitions is like telling them they do not love their children (maybe I do not 🤣, but who are you to say?).

As long as a definition is well-formed, you should behave in even impolite discourse (I used cuss unicode on the substack posts … excuse me for being human) and not criticize the guy for coming up with a definition that peeved you a bit. Get over it.

Anyway, that’s enough keystrokes wasted complaining about an LLM in the substack discourse. Sheeesh.

Today I wanted to post a few comments about a discussion between Emily Adlam and David Wallace , hosted with great connectives by Curt Jaimungal.

Spaghetti Gripes

Before I get into this, I later warmed to David Wallace, he was eventually able to admit the Many Worlds or Everettian Interpretation is not necessarily true. So below, lets just say I construct a straw man Wallace to have fun poking fun at, which honestly is mostly what I do on substack, construct strawmen to poke.3 It was still a bit weird how he has so much confidence the epistemological or probability theory flaws in the MWI as “solved” in his mind. How can they be solved if he has not thoroughly convinced everyone else they are solved? It is a stupid use of the word “solved” I think. That was probably my most severe annoyance. I do not mind that he has confidence in MWI, but he was ginning up the due credence in that nutcase interpretation. As well as leaning way too hard on String Theory. Although I guess that is equally as annoying.

Emily was good. She figures there is a tighter interrelation between gravity and QM than David thinks. David seems to carve off gravity as “handled by String Theory” and so otherwise fitting within orthodox Dirac–von Neumann QM. Here I think David is wrong, and Emily will be proven right in her suspicions. But only time will tell. I would just say to any young physicist, do not bother studying Many Worlds Theory, it’ll be a waste of your life, and even if MWI turns out to be true, you will not have wasted your research time looking into other things.

The “Wavefunction”

First I had to clear my throat (breadcrumbs off my keyboard).

She misspoke? @2:20 the spinors do not represent predictions. You only get a prediction by using the spinor to act upon the algebra of observables (computing the bilinear covariants). The spinor itself is an instruction for transforming the components, or basis objects, in your observable algebra. The observable algebra is itself only a model, so at least one layer removed from physical reality.

The wavefunction (actually the Dirac spinor, or for bosons the field strength, or symmetry generator — depending on usage) is indeed a function. Meaning it is a mapping. A mathematical mapping does not represent any physical object.

If we ever do have a model for the particle ontology (either particles or excitations of some fabric) then we would have a representation of the physical stuff. Superstrings are a good example. A little part of me still wishes that Superstring theory had been true, even though it was 𖢑𖧥𖦧 ꚶꗱꛚꚲ. If you have a friend who is true and loyal their looks will not bother you, am I right? Of course I am right. Speaking for myself.🤣

Speaking of myself, some victory here in manipulating The Algorithm. Very rare that I see my own channel recommended.

Quantum Mechanics is Fundamentally about Open Systems

David then said something about QM being concerned with closed systems. This is orthodoxy. Hence forgiveable. But I could not resist writing a comment.

Huge expert blind spot? @8:10 — You absolutely cannot assume systems can be “studied in isolation.” In topological 4-geon theory every system has to be treated as open (off-shell processes are not merely “virtual”, but are real though highly constrained).

Put another way, if you have no ontological causal account for entanglement, and only treat entanglement as correlation (which all orthodox QM does, including QFT) then you can make the model assumption of a closed isolated system up until measurement/detection. But this is precisely why things look “weird” to you, you have made a mistake in your model, and the patch or kludge for it was to say entanglement is spooky. It is not spooky. Or to put that in other words: any correlation whatsoever is “spooky” if you have no idea of the causation behind it. I do not like Kant’s writing, but he and Judea Pearl (for instance) were/are not wrong that 𝕊𝕔𝕚𝕖𝕟𝕔𝕖 is possible and is about causation, not mystical correlation.

Sticking entanglement at the AdS boundary is not good causal modelling, but would be ok if in fact our universe was Anti-de Sitter. But it is not. So I do not want to hear any more nonsense that entanglement is boundary correlation and is what gravity “emerges” from. If you flip the sign of the universe metric that also flips to:— gravity is the cause of entanglement. Not an emergence. T4G theory explains how.

That said, I do not think you even need to know T4G theory. You just need uncommon commonsense.🤣 Why did anyone ever think the measurement process is anything different to what happens all over the place? Sure, T4G theory gives a beautiful account of why measurement processes occur all the time. But even in a basically orthodox view, the Axiom concerning the “collapse of the wavefunction” (or take your preferred alternative) is only a formal statement, and should never be regarded as Base Marble reality. Many Worlds (fake) ontology is what you get when you ꕷꖡꖹꘝꕯꕒꛚꔇ take something like the Measurement Axiom as Base Marble Reality. In MWI they reject the Axiom, replacing it with “All Things Happen.”

That is basically what you call in debate or gaming a self-own, or own-goal, “not even a p0wn.” Or in logicbro land, an automated reductio ad absurdem. Emily is too polite to say so out loud, credit to her.

Remark on Ideology versus Faith

David is an ideologue. He admits it, so that’s fair.

I would not tarnish him with the label “scientist.” He is a pure philosopher, but one of the worst, since he is committed to a single interpretation of QM. To get anywhere in philosophy sometimes one must play the committed ideologue, more especially if your idea is nuts. (Like, “currency inflation is not a boogeyman“?🤣) But that sort of mode of philosophy is not for me.4 If you need to be a bit ideological, I think it only pays if you find something so Good and Beautiful it has to be true. That is the realm of faith. Most people are never lucky enough to obtain the genuine article (though I do believe that could change over time, we do evolve, there is progress, God is not malicious, ℕ𝕒𝕥𝕦𝕣𝕖 is not “out to get us”. Death is a release from physics. No new-age ꕷꖾ𝕪𝘁ꗍ intended here, ok.).

Emily is wonderful, mainly because she is agnostic, and honest about it. She is the epitome of a true scientist.

With topological 4-geon theory (T4G) I think I am in danger of becoming an ideologue, but this is different. T4G is my baby. So I will protect it, call it some parental instinct. (I do love my children.)

David on the other hand, did not invent Many Worlds Theory, so I cannot fathom why he is so in love with it? When there is an open problem in 𝕊𝕔𝕚𝕖𝕟𝕔𝕖, I cannot think of anything more wonderful than trying to come up with an original solution. I just cannot bring myself to work on someone else’s idea. I did that for several postdocs, and a few career attempts, and it near killed me. I feel very sad for David. But he seems happy, so I am not too sad. He surely has heaps more government scorepoints in his bank account from doing his derivative feeble philosophy. Why am I not at all envious? Well, there is no pleasure in getting paid heaps to think about other people’s ugly thoughts. If their thoughts were beautiful I could perhaps understand. So that is where I will land. I think David just has some odd aesthetics floating around his mind. He must really love the anarchy of MWI.

That’s my big counter-paradigm note for today. I am not too interested in the rest of the Adlam–Wallace dialogue.

Fuentes Flaming

I like Ivette Fuentes. But the NewSci episode chatting with her had a very bad bit of propaganda in the episode’s description (see below, it’s about the Many World propaganda).

Ivette said QM and GR are incompatible, because the Schrödinger or Dirac equation amounts to choosing a particular time coordinate. I think she has that wrong. But you would only know she was wrong if you take the T4G view that QM is a theory of measurement processes, not of all cosmology. Hence QM is a proper subset of Gravity. Hence, not incompatible.

@2:10 it is not incompatible in that way. The Schrödinger–Dirac theory is incorrect. You need QFT, and the path integral approach, then it is entirely compatible, since QM is a theory of two boundaries, you have to select them, which means choosing two time slices. This does not violate general covariance, you are merely choosing to define what you mean by “my experiment.” 4D Block Universe otherwise and QFT does not apply. Define two times and then QFT applies. There is no incompatibility between gravity and QM. The problem is in ultraviolet regularization etc., but ghostless conformal gravity solves that, since conformal gravity is power counting renormalizable and has well-behaved UV limit (mass less limit, as well as no need for an Inflaton, plus the Higgs can be dynamical, a composite thus also no hierarchy problem.) https://arxiv.org/pdf/1803.08928 Also, agreeing with Ivette, with conformal gravity there is no need to quantize or “sum over” the metric topologies, since the Standard Model is already doing that: the SM particles are the topology of spacetime already, see https://arxiv.org/pdf/2209.15047

You just do a Lorentz transform as per normal to figure out what someone else would see in the same experiment, or a trickier calculation in curved spacetime to account for horizon radiation effects (particle genesis for a distant observer).

Imposing exact CPT symmetry eliminates the black hole information problem (there was no problem, since the black hole has no interior). The older black hole solutions to Einstein-Hilbert gravity were all non-physical, since they were not CPT symmetric. Our universe is exactly CPT symmetric form all known observations ever known. It is one of the only exact laws known along with local Lorentz covariance. https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.09558

Entanglement causes superposition

This is a controversial idea. I’ve read papers where authors claim there can be superposition without entanglement, but I think they are not looking hard enough. The entanglement does not need to be in the form of a measurable Bell pair state.

In at least three theories underlying quantum mechanics, all superposition is due to entanglement. In the case of a single particle, you have to appreciate a particle can be self-entangled. The three theories are:

• Generalized probability framework (GPT’s).

• Indivisible stochastic QM (ISQM).

• T4G theory.

All these three frameworks are in fact fully compatible. The first two lack an account of the Standard Model, because theory are more generic, and agnostic about the exact particle symmetry transforms.

GPT’s have shown that entanglement and interference are equivalent (in the sense you cannot get one without the other). ISQM shows directly that interference is a result of indivisibility of the stochastic transitions, and that this indivisibility is also equivalent to entanglement in the same way as GPT’s, though the set-up and proof is different.

Three distinct approaches to QM in agreement! That’s pretty powerful, and places the burden of proof I think on those who persist in thinking superposition can be achieved without entanglement.

Still … I am going out on a limb I think, not that I am anywhere safe near the tree trunk of mainstream physics to begin with. 🤣

What Ivette does in the interview is to make it sound like we all agree that superpositions are real. I think she is wrong about that, for at least ISQM and T4G would say the superpositions are fictions, hence mere accounting tools.

This is not a stupid idea, Richard Feynman for one, often pointed out (perhaps to no avail among mainstreamers) that the fields in physics were fictional accounting tools. He was a Corpuscles all the way kind of guy, like myself. Feynman’s point: If you insist on Hamiltonian time evolution then you are forced to introduce fields to account for the advanced propagators. But the propagators are particle ontology.

You can criticize Feynman for believing too literally in his diagrams, which after all strongly hint at a possibility of a particles-only ontology.

But I think T4G theory recovers Feynman. We can think of the Feynman diagrams as statistical accounting tools, for an underlying particle ontology. We do not lose field theory either, since spacetime is still the Mother field. The beauty of T4G theory is that spacetime is the only necessary field.

All the children fields are just statistical features of the one spacetime field dynamics.

Anyhow, when Ivette says the experimentalists are putting 10,000 atoms in superposition, this is a bit of a myth. It is a statistical effect, not purely ontological. Nevertheless, because it is statistical, it has consequences, and the Fuentes–Penrose gravitationally induced “wavefunction collapse” is probably testable.

In T4G Context

We would say that these tests will be detecting entanglement collapse in the macro. Meaning pairwise collapse of topological structures in the entire system. This should scale something like what Fuentes and Penrose think, only with a T4G realist explanation. No wavefunction ontology is required. (The wavefunction itself is a stochastic concept, and should really be referred to as the spinor transform, or transform field strength for the case of bosons).

On Penrose’s Theory of Mind

Ivette simplified Penrose’s Gödel argument quite nicely. Understanding is not found in the application of the rules of mathematics. Understanding is a non-deterministic process (an assumption Penrose makes, I would say?)

But I do not buy Penrose’s whole argument for Mind being quantum mechanical.

The problem is, in a 4D block universe there is no non-determinism other than at the boundaries. Thus, to my mind, we cannot find Mind in the physical universe. If it is found anywhere, it can only be at the boundaries. And what determines the boundaries of spacetime is unknowable (unknowable to science).

The indeterminism of quantum mechanics is only relative to our view of time evolution. Not relative to the 4D Block (or infinite-dim Multiverse if you are one of those Everttheads).

Note that what I’ve got here is a type of Holography theory. But is is not theoretical physics. It is pure philosophy. The boundary is where we find Mind, or at least the Mind–Body interaction. This is very weird, since your body and brain appear to be nowhere near the boundary of spacetime. But I think that’s a huge prejudice or bias. How do you know your mind is not at the boundary at infinity?

What the mathematical Gauge–Gravity duality models tell us is that Holography is possible, and the bulk can be entirely represented on the boundary. The trouble in extending this to the Spiritual realm, for theory of Mind, is that we do not live in anti-de Sitter spacetime, so it is not clear physics Holography is going to yield us the Mind–Body Holography. Nonetheless, it is a good metaphor.

I have to say, the way Ivette put it near the end of the interview was quite lovely:

“I think consciousness is more like a background, like spacetime.”

That’s simpler and clearer, and I think better, than anything David Chalmers ever geeked-up. But the way I’d say it would be that the spiritual realm is background “like spacetime”. Consciousness (the individual soul) is structure in the Spiritual realm, like particles are structure in spacetime. The physical universe is a rhyme of the spiritual — is the more poetic way to say it, though as Paul Dirac once said, “science is the art of making the incomprehensible comprehensible, while poetry is the art of making the comprehensible incomprehensible.”

Ivette’s current viewpoint is a type of Dualism. Both matter + spacetime and consciousness are fundamental. Not separated, but interacting. I have to agree, based on present comprehension. How do these realms interact? Well … wouldn’t you all like to know!

Propaganda

As for the NewSci propaganda, I let them know:

Also, please remove your clickbait propaganda, quantum theory does not say “there is a multiverse.” One type of interpretation does, and that is an additional metaphysical assumption. Quantum theory, the 𝕊𝕔𝕚𝕖𝕟𝕔𝕖, says no such thing.

Only I get to say what propaganda is true.🤣

Turing Twats

First thing is Alan Turing was a total n3rd, and like a total n3rd who could basically help win a whole damn ‘World’ War, he still got many things badly n3rdified.1 From reading some Bios I get the feeling Turing did think machines could one day “think” — meaning have sentient thoughts and experience internal conscious qualia, and I believe that is because he was an ideological materialist/physicalist.

I won’t begrudge people their pet ideologies (unless they are neoliberals or the like, the sort of fascists whose ideologies murder people by many proxies). But just to say there are good reasons to reject Physicalism, the best is that you just do not know. So be humble.

The problem with Emily’s attempt to characterize whether “machines can do mathematics” is that it is just another Turing Test. The problem being behavioural (input—output) tests cannot possibly be tests for anything intellectual and subjective, like “thinking” and “intelligence.” The AI n3rds have redefined the word “intelligence” to suit their own ideological agenda. The Silicon Valley Big Tech utopia of machine society agenda, uploaded minds using massive polluting data centres (which implies massive biological human depopulation the like of which you and I cannot comprehend). Their response would be, “No, we will eventually fit a whole human being on a single chip!” Yeah, yeah, dream on Nightmare. To “get there” (one chip at 10 GHz per soul) you’d still have to pollute the planet beyond recovery — would be my not-too-pessimistic guess — ergo, we will never get there, and so should never strive to get there. But this is beside the point. Let’s grant the techno-utopians their one-soul-per chip without destroying the planet dreamer fantasy, in order to not get piled upon by CompSci n3rds wanting to eat my brain. I just want to focus on Emily’s thinking about mathematical assistants.

Emily described Alan Turing’s infamous Test for Intelligence as “clever.” The supposedly clever bit was making it an Imitation Game. Here is my comment:

@4:30 that was the opposite of “clever.” Turing took a word with a fine intuitive meaning to most people and made it into something completely different (without the John Cleese component). No behavioural test is ever a test for subjective mental states. Basically, here is Turing (and almost every compsci n3rd since): “I do not know what a Cow is, but, aha, I know what a sphere is, so let’s define the ‘cow’ to be a sphere. ... ” The opposite of cleverness. It is practically Pythonesque (without the Eric Idle tunes). It is not even close to clever. It was making a thing in one Category (which Emily should know about) into another in a completely different category by a dopey (re)definition of a word. Emily, this is not a proper functor.

It’s just terribly rotten science. All good scientists who have not yet been diseased by the Copenhagen Interpretation, will have ideas of causation in mind, not just input-output behavioural black boxes. Even if no one knows what “causal” means. It is a fundamental Principle of Science that is essentially untestable. So like an Axiom. Without this principle there is nothing culturally transcendent that we can call 𝕊𝕔𝕚𝕖𝕟𝕔𝕖.2

Thus I completely reject Turing and his n3rdified warped (re)definition of “intelligence.” There is no such thing as artificial intelligence. Intelligence is an actual state of being, not just a qualitative type of response to input, not just a quality of a process. Hence also 🅱𝗼𝚕𝖑𝗼🄲🄺🆂 to William James and all the 𖥐𖦪𖠢𖢧𖥣ꛘ𖨚 who define consciousness as “a process.” It’s the same disease as Turing’s. A process may reveal an intelligent entity, but is not the intelligent entity. The objective is never the subjective. (Is there sometimes a functor between these categories? For sure … I guess. But for that to be mathematized you need a good definition of the category of subjective phenomena, which no one has, except “not objective.”)

Emily’s Attempt

Emily does a great job of trying to codify what she means by “doing mathematics.” In fact, she several times mentions some of the key things involved, but the problem is she does not put them in her list of testable things, … because she cannot.

@20:00 after all this, I am still thinking this is just Turing Test 2.0 garbage. None of Emily’s proposals can be tests of whether machines can do mathematics. To do mathematics is far more than even her good intro demands. There has to be a desire to want to explore, and all the inner subjective life that goes with that desire. A prompt engine has none of that. As all great mathematicians know, mathematics is art of the highest order, and cannot be reduced to an algorithm. An algorithm is the communicable outcome, so about 1% of what “doing mathematics” should mean.

Emily mentions things like the “emotional labour” of a mathematics course TA (teaching assistant) answering a student’s questions. This is a huge part of “doing mathematics,” and I suggest not skipping it. Could the MathChatbot trained to answer mathematics questions perform the job of the TA? You may say “yes.” But what about, “Should the TA’s job be handed to a ChatBot?” The answer is “no,” and not because the human TA might be worse at handling the emotional labour! Let’s presume they might be worse.

Euthanize the Interns as Well as the Rentiers

My take on this is that the TA needs to handle the emotional labour, not just for the sake of the undergrad student, but more importantly for their own sake. Human labour of any meaning is a sacred act. We can hand it off to a ChatBot if we are overloaded I guess, but we should never shy ourselves away from such labour. It is the labour in “doing mathematics” that is of immeasurable value and priceless. This is based anti-neoliberal thinking about the value of labour. You cannot put a market price on these things. You can only fairly compensate the TA, and not with a welfare intern-level pittance.

Anti-Neoliberal (Dirtbag MMT): the value of good work is not in the output, it is 99% in the act of desiring to do the work, it is intrinsic reward, and needs no compensation. What requires compensation with oodles of government scorepoints is the actually effort expended in doing the work (which is often not the desirable part).

Euthanize all interns in fact, I would say. Interns should not exist. Pay the workers a fair compensation. If you cannot do so as a private firm because you cannot make enough sales, then you have no business running a business. Government, despite all the ꕒꗍꖀ𐝥ꗍꘝꕯꖡꖹꕒꗍ can always pay a fair wage for any labour. Period. (Willingness to pay, not capacity to pay.) Let’s get that done then. I believe getting that Job Guarantee done will almost automatically make most governments better, or at least far less ꕒꗍꖀ𐝥ꗍꘝꕯꖡ. It is like the Peter Principle: teach a person to fish, feeds them for a lifetime. Teach a government to eliminate unemployment, and you enlighten them them for a whole nation’s lifetime. Give real people real jobs, not welfare. The government has no need to dictate to us what those jobs can be, the local community can figure it out.

Only, it is actually better than the normative Peter Principle.

I cannot count how many times while teaching students something, I’ve learned a little more myself. If only it was that I still make mistakes with plus & minus signs roughly every 100 lines of symbolic expressions.

The aspect of the Peter Principle few teachers point out, is that “Peter” gets at least as much benefit from the work of teaching the person to fish.

By the way … “yes,” ⤔ machines can certainly produce “beautiful” answers, as Emily has seen. But she saw that for herself. She projected the attribute of beauty onto the strings, that projection was not produced by the machine. The beauty existed all in her mind. A beautiful thing. If only the n3rds knew.

The Dog & Bones Story Retold

During a long drive the other day I had the radio on to help confirm my MMT dirtbag content is not yet obsolete. Sure enough, even the slightest mention of macroeconomics is utterly backwards. Every single time. No hyperbole.

How do I get the ear of a Jessie Mulligan? If I ever did, how would I nail it so that he does not the very next day revert to the pervert-class statistical mean of neoliberalism-by-default? Actually, it is not a statistical mean is it? It is simply direct baked-in deterministic news reportage. Nothing probabilistic about it. Aha. But if I could just inject a little doubt in the mind of Jessie Mulligan, or the RNZ news readers (so that they actually had a thought before reading “the news” script) it might give us a little bit of nice stochastic news. Which is to say, on macroeconomics, slightly less neoliberal paradigm-entrenching horror.

He (Jessie) was talking to some US journalist (I think?) maybe the name was “Jill”, about her book. The interview was full of liberal sentiments and self-help for youngsters, and “just go follow your passion” ꕷꖾꕯꖡ. To my mind such nonsense talk is almost immoral nowadays, (by which I mean it has been immoral for about that last 40 years or more). You cannot lecture young kids about finding their passion and getting into a workplace as a start, blah, blah, unless you understand the source of all unemployment.1

That is because once you start lecturing kids that all they need to do is find a meaningful career, et cetera, but have no clue about why kids find it so hard to earn an honest pay-check, you are really part of the problem, not part of the solution. It’s the Dog & Bones Story retold daily on such “go get a job” self-help public radio 𖥐𖦪ꗇꘝ. I’m all for public media services, but I want to have a say on the content, I don’t want the neoliberal bureaucrats from RNZ head-office dictating the programming.

Brief reminder: there is no “ jobs up-skilling” in the macro Mr & Mrs Neoliberal. If you train one youngster to out-compete another, you’ve just made a different person poor, unless you are also prepared to increase the government scorepoints for hiring. (Lowering the tax does not work, the private sector never hire off the bottom.).

People, We the People, we need to understand the source of all unemployment (people seeking to exchange their labour for the government tax credit). It’s not 𝚏𝓾𝗴ℊ𝘪𝑛’ “Ai” folks.2 So much good follows from that simple understanding. I honestly think so much good that if everyone understood then we’ll never have to suffer the fake self-help guruization on RNZ/TVNZ air waves ever again.

Wallace’s Brainrot

On a 2am slot I think (I like driving when there’s no other traffic round) I heard a promo for Wallace’s show. I forgot what it is called, regular listeners will now … do drop me a comment. It was pretty disgusting. I think it was Wallace himself, or a sound-alike guest, rabbiting some Tory nonsense about how New Zealand is “allowing” wealthy Kiwi’s to head overseas with our regulatory framework hindering investment & profit. It was something like this:

“New Zealand is seeing an out-flux of wealthy Kiwis.”

… with the clear implication we should retain the wealthy perverts, have the top Ten Percent Perverts dictate where investment is channeled (the “data centres” of course are trendy), and stop poor immigrants from coming in, “those filthy lazy scum”.

So … I think the exact opposite! Yeah, But if I was a neoliberal I’d likely not know any better, and might agree with this Wallace Chapman guy. After all, if you think wealthy people fund out government then you too might want those perverts filling up our houses instead of hard working immigrants.

I’ve never heard such wanky self-serving nonsense in my entire life I hear such stuff all the time. Same as in the UK fear of the City-of-London. This is all completely backwards macroeconomics from the normies. Best I can do for today, to avoid the taste of vomit forming in my throat, is to bullet point it, by which I mean I am imagining pointing an intellectual gun at Wallace Chapman’s head and firing off shots on semi-automatic — so I get to feel the pull of the trigger and the kick-back on each shot.

• Savers are antithetical to a good economic system. We should never reward savers. Spenders are what we want, preferably everyone spends all their income.

• Savings schemes should be like hire-purchase agreements. If you do not spend it on the target, you lose it. (This is not punitive, it is for sustainable production. You only get to spend on things already available for sale). ((I also like rationing & voucher systems. No one should be “spending all their income” in order to deprive another being of (Maslow-level) living essentials.))

• All the profits from sales need to go to the workers. The business owners should be those ones on a pittance, for all they do is daily bad impressions of fascists, which can be amusing at times, but not the sort of artistic entertainment I want our economic system incentivizing.

• Ban all retirement savings. Increase the pension to a decent living income. (This tautologically means the UBI is a hard no-go. The less the UBI the higher the pension can be, ergo, UBI = $0.00.)

• All “wealthy Kiwis” should be banned from New Zealand. If you head overseas and have over $10 million in a bank account (in any currency at par to the NZD equivalent) you should be banned from re-entry. You’ve failed to circulate all your income, so are no use to us. (I think $10 million is pretty generous! One can do a lot of damage with $10 million, not to mention getting completely immoral inequality generating unearned income from the NZ Tsy Department. Actually, let’s make it $1 million threshold.)

This👆🏼👆🏼 is my Immigration Policy 101. I hope MMT101 picks this up and re-posts.

For the perennial pedants: yes, I know none of this is realistic. Too bad for you. My job is to write about what is operationally possible, not what I hope will occur in my lifetime. I am 1000% Quixote. But at least I acknowledge I’m tilting at neoliberals.

Wallace (or his Tory guest) has no clue. He thinks the NZ$ comes from wealthy Kiwis. Where are all their counterfeit operations Wallace? Tell me. Since it sounds a darn cite easier bombing or cracking them than trying to change our Neoliberal government policies (regardless of which party gets elected in our Mixed Member Neoliberal-Hat-Rotation Pervert-Proportional voting system). Yeah, in NZ (for you who do not know) we get to choose our flavour of Neoliberal. Every four years people will throw parties still, to celebrate having the chance to eat the other form of recycled 𖨚𝖍𝖎𝖙 … again. It’s an 8 year cycle. Every 8 years Kiwis forget the other side of the menu was also 𖨚𝖍𝖎𝖙. It will always be 𖨚𝖍𝖎𝖙 until the “ordinary Kiwi” gets educated that not only the menu was always 𖨚𝖍𝖎𝖙 , but also how it does not need to be so, and how it could be fresh fruit and veges for all, even some gourmet for all.

The real gear grinder for me was RNZ promos had the gall to tell us they are a source of “truth.” I’m sure many in RNZ programming want to be a source of truth. It’s the curse of the Neoliberal do-gooder. Lord help them, for they know not what they spew.

Since community organization died back in the 70’s, and revival of the much needed form of human activity is hampered precisely by the forces that keep us poor 1 enough we have to work-as-a-neoslave all waking hours just to be able to pay rent and eat, so that we cannot organize and still sleep at night — we are 𝔇𝙤𝔬𝔪𝐞𝙙 unless we…

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What was it?

Well, I’ll get to it, patience grasshopper!

First, although QFT is still a very obscure thing to me, I always find it helps to filter what people talk about in terms of “states” through the T4G lens, because what we know is that a quantum state is not a physical state in any way shape or form. It is an abstract operator that acts upon an algebra of observables. It is used to extract results of measurements. It is not a direct physical description of physical systems. The “state” is a transformation instruction.

Bogoliubov Transformations

Hence when a chap tells Mannheim his similarity transform “changed the vacuum” I think I can correctly say no such thing happens! Our choice of model basis cannot have any physical effect.

??? @49:00 no? the physical vacuum is never changed by our reference frame or choice of basis. Under a Bogoliubov transform in curved spacetime with a horizon somewhere, the abstract vacuum state is redefined. That means an observer on one side of the horizon will see particle creation, since their vacuum state has been redefined relative to a frame on the horizon (or free falling) which sees no net particle creation. What we call “the vacuum state” in QFT is not an absolute concept, and is really not physical, it is an abstract transformation instruction that acts on the multivector algebra of observables, it is not (in QFT) a description or model of actual spacetime topology.

What the ℙ𝕙𝕪𝕤𝕚𝕔𝕤 of this is, is that in curved spacetimes when horizons form an observer not freely falling to the horizon will observe thermal radiation, so-called Hawking–Unruh radiation. That is what is physical. What allows them to compute how much of a thermal bath they’ll get is a Bogoliubov transform.

The CC-numbers, or cc-numbers?

For Mannheim, c-numbers are just commuting numbers. These are employed in classical mechanics. ℂ-numbers are just one sort of c-number. In fact we can do classical mechanics with them, they are not inherently quantum mechanical. (One of the “Don’t take everything Penrose says as gospel,” moments.)

Anyhow, Mannheim shows an example of a classical ℂ-scalar field (so a

theory) coupled to a classical electromagnetic vector potential, and asks, which Lagrangian should we use?

Can you tell?

Teasing, Mannheim suggests L1 seems “natural” if you want to work in real numbers, for “classicality”, but classical mechanics is not restricted to real numbers, it is only restricted to c-numbers.

However, only L2​ gives a valid quantum theory, but not because

are both Hermitian, since one cannot tell a theory is Hermitian just from looking at terms in the Hamiltonian. One must check no similarity transform can turn it into an anti-Hermitian form with complex eigenvalues. That can be hard to do. But there is an easier way!

The gold standard is to check the Hamiltonian is CPT-symmetric, then you can get real eigenvalues, even when the theory is not Hermitian. Something, something … “Stokes wedges.”1

The pertinent observation is thus that

are both CPT-even, thus you should use L2 so as to have a CPT-symmetric theory, which is, all else working out, going to be the physical choice. Violating CPT symmetry also violates Special Relativity, so is basically a no-go, unless for weird reasons a curved spacetime can somehow break CPT-symmetry without breaking Lorentz invariance (fat chances?).

Black Mirrors

I draw a little lesson from this. You might develop a classical theory that violates CPT symmetry. How would you know? Well, obviously not many physicists bother to check! They think Lorentz invariance will suffice, but if all you check is invariance under boosts you’d be missing CPT invariance, I think. This has caused black hole paradoxes to arise in models.

If we impose CPT symmetry the black hole information loss paradoxes disappear, since one gets a CPT-mirror boundary , and the black hole interior simply does not exist! (Or no information gets in.)

Yummy Take-aways

This is better than KFC. It had worried me for a while why the usual Lagrangian for the Standard Model places the unit i in front of the kinetic terms?

The answer is because we want a CPT-symmetric Lagrangian. We can take it off the kinetic terms and stick it on the others, that’s just switching the “+h.c.” around.

My residual mystery is just why the quantum theory seems to automatically “know” about wormholes!!! That’s because the wormhole structure of the spacetime vacuum is never explicitly incorporated into the axioms for QM nor QFT. But it is implicit. And I’ve never really had a clean explanation for where the implicit is found. I go back and forward between “phase oscillation” and “need for interference.” But are these the same?

Naïve Dirac Theory is really semi-classical in this sense, since it can be written down and used in good predictive models without wormhole topology, since the “complex” structure needed can all be arranged with the Spacetime Algebra (STA) bivectors and pseudoscalar. These are not c-numbers. Yet they are classical mechanics! So Mannheim was a bit off in his remarks.

In fact there are no numbers that quantum mechanics uses that classical mechanics does not use — if you do classical mechanics like a Clifford Wizard.

What? … did you expect a physical theory split would depend on what type of language/numbers you employ? 🤣🤣

No.

What distinguishes QM from Classical mechanics is entanglement, or in more grunty operationalist terms, it is that in QM continuous and reversible transitions are allowed, while in Classical Mechanics only reversibility is guaranteed (you cannot transition from a ⚂ to a ⚅ of a dice throw by going smoothly through the uncountably infinite real numbers between two and three on the dice. But you can in QM! Superpositions dude!) This is fair warning to you all that superpositions are “fake”. They account for weird uncertainty of a non-Markov transition variety. The quantum die (singular of dice) are not actually in superposition. We nevertheless have to place bets as though they are. That’s all due to entanglement.

The backdoor entry of wormhole topology into Dirac Theory is the permission to have superposition of the solutions as valid physics. That is the essential old school QM postulate (before they knew about entanglement). There is just no way classical mechanics should be permitting superpositions, you are only “allowed” to pick one solution, the one extremizing the action. This is the “classical saddle” in the quantum path-integral theory.

This is a pretty darn implicit way to have wormholes. You have to trace back to why superpositions are effective descriptions for the transition from one boundary ∂M1​ of a spacetime cobordism lightcone envelop to the next ∂M2​. That traces to interference, which traces to entanglement. But few textbooks acknowledge all interference is a result of entanglement. I’ve even read some articles where it is expressly stated that interference may occur without entanglement. That is a profound misunderstanding. It occurs because people tend to think of “entanglement” as a Bell pair state. But that is not true. A particle is generically always entangled with the vacuum. Always. It is impossible to engineer anything where an elementary particle is not entangled with something. If it is not in a Bell pair, then it is with the vacuum. And this is what causes interference.

Hence Erwin Schrödinger was right imho. Entanglement is the quintessential quantum mechanical phenomenon. He and Einstein were very smart cookies, smarter than most physicists alive today.

Other Stuff Today

I am trying (for the fifth time?) to learn (but this time properly2) Clifford Gauge Gravity. The 2004 Lasenby paper had no PDF sidebar bookmarks, and I find this inconvenient nowadays.

You can however use my python script here to create the sidebar bookmarks:

pdf_addbookmarks

I never bother packaging my scripts, so you’ll have to self-install. The only new package I needed to fresh install was,

pip install pdfplumber

Stick pdf_addbookmarks in your PATH somewhere, say $HOME/.local/bin/ and run it in a folder in terminal with,

pdf_addbookmarks -i <pdf-filename> -o <outputfiename>

It’s desperation. Instead of admitting you are too pathetic to find the laws of nature, you go for the gross whole hog of evolutionary explanations. Only there is no cosmic DNA to evolve my dudes.

This idea of Lee Smolin, and now jumped upon by Magueijo, is utter nonsense.

It may of course be true.🤣

But it is not a chaotic cosmology. If you find the DNA strands for actual physical reality, then you’ve merely found the base laws. They will not in turn be chaotic. Chaos is simple laws, in non-linear dynamical systems. Where’s the cosmoi interactions?1 Yeah. I highly doubt there is any genetic component to the Laws of Physics. Why? Because we are already pretty close to fixing them down. We do not need cosmic darwininsm, for example, to explain a CPT-symmetric Big Bang and the Arrow of Time, and the Standard Model. The symmetry principles (among them conformal symmetry and CPT-invariance) are sufficient.

One can always dream up further metaphysical questions. But they’re not scientific. They can be valid, and well-posed, but still not scientific. Science does not, and should not, seek to answer every question a mind can ask. Hubris never does anyone any ultimate good.

What a lot of science n3rds also fail to realize is that Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution was itself not fundamental science. It is based upon random mutation of genes and selection pressure. But that is a Top Down argument, it is not reductionistic.

Once you mention Selection pressures you are lifting to a higher category, one which is only ever approximate. A geneticist in a lab CRISPR editing genes is performing “natural selection”?

Darwin’s theory of evolution was always incomplete, until molecular biology came along and provided the physical mechanism.

Same for cosmic darwinism. If it truly is a thing, then we’d be able to find the physical basis for it, the “molecular biology” so-to-speak of entire cosmoi. I call ꕗꖹꝆꝆꕷꖾꕯꖡ on the idea.

Try harder João, to understand the laws we know, before inventing fantasy meta-laws that allow all things possible. Stop doing science in the comic book Marvel Multiverse.

I like SciFi, don’t get me wrong. But I dislike false advertising. Same for Brian Greene and Jana Levin and their Klein Bottle universe. That should be published in SciFi Monthly alongside Greg Egan pieces, not in PhysRevLett. People call us nontenured guys crackpots, but who are the real Dementors of trust in science?

Here in “What is classical and what is quantum?” he is trying to explain how classical mechanics is a high entropy limit of QM. Let me say I can agree mostly with that, but it is a little bit banal. To see why, I’ll try to summarize his arguments a bit, Summery but not too summary 🤣.

A Summery View

The paper on this is here (Carcassi et al (2026) .

I do not see too much wrong technically in that paper. Some of the emphasis seems a bit off. That’s it. Summer is over. Winter is coming.

A Cool Dissenting Opinion

Now the winter. I disagree with the thrust of Carcassi’s project if he is actually claiming, “QM is closer to CM than you think.” But that’s a vibe. He does not claim this. It just seems like he does. So this is a Straw Man Gabe I am going to now object to. I love attacking Straw Men, they’re the only good ones to attack. Most people with objectionable ideas (like UBI, or “tax to-pay-for”) are not terrible people. So I set them up as straw boys & girls. When they raise a good objection to things I write they are wonderful people.

First, I think “S≫0”, is far too coarse a view of the classical limit. Carcassi needs the other S, the action or effective action S_eff, not the entropy! But even,

is a bit too coarse for me. Why?

You can treat classical mechanics (CM) as “billiard balls”, and thus have finite entropy. With a continuum phase space you get an entropy density. I believe this cures the first problem Carcassi has with CM. (Not sure, but I think so?) In other words, the CM entropy is a “straw entropy”! 🤣 (if you are a fields fundamentalist I still think you can be ok, just normalize correctly, and apply a Planck–UV cut-off.)

Engineers do not bother with these nuances because they set up models that avoid them! Why wouldn’t you?! (Like using an arbitrary cut-off — why? because you can if you know in your engineering system above (or below) the cut-off regime will never occur.)

Which reminds me that Carcassi seems too often to be taking an engineering stance, not a true fundamental physics stance. I’m not complaining. His engineering POV is good to heed. But it is making things too simple.

In fundamental physics you should not care about entropy, at least not at first. Entropy is a statistical derived concept, it is not fundamental. Likewise you should not care about the Lagrangian in quantum mechanics, since the Lagrangian in quantum mechanics is a statistical notion, unlike in classical mechanics! (That is a topic for another day, let me just state that the spinors in the QM Lagrangian are stochastic descriptors, or stochastic transforms, not elementary particle! Nuff said?)

So I wrote to Carcassi.

(Repeat: 👆🏼👆🏼) Even “S_eff/ħ >> 1” is a bit too coarse for me. Why? You can treat classical mechanics (CM) as “billiard balls,” and thus have finite entropy. This is a quantum theory, you’ve got “quanta” (billiard balls) and so can count them. With a continuum phase space you get an entropy density. No problem. I believe this cures the first problem Carcassi has with CM (negative entropies). The real issue with getting a CM limit is to remove entanglement, not merely “go to high entropy.”

Entanglement entropy “is a thing,” and swamping it with classical uncertainty (missing information in a large N system) does not make QM go away. That’s because we’re talking statistics here, not ontology. So there is no actual classical limit. QM always holds. What goes away are the effects of entanglement, which include interference (hence superposition of a single spinor with itself — the sauce, and source, of all the spookiness).

There is a way to make “QM” go away though, you remove all entanglement. But how can you if entanglement is a metaphysical statistical correlation? The answer (imho) is to not be so ꕷꖡꖹꘝꕯꕒ. Correlations are just statistical, so are not fundamental. You need to figure out the physical ontology of entanglement, and show how that gets either removed or becomes insignificant in the action, then you have a proper classical limit, without appealing to statistical notions like entropy. Plus you’ve not killed quantum mechanics. One should never kill the source of all life.

Caveats

It took me 30 minutes to write this blog post. Carcassi probably spent several months on his essay and paper, so you should not trust my opinion here, it’s just a little contribution.

It took me another 50 minutes to write a self-critique of my critique, which I loved doing. It’s self-interference dude!

But I won’t bother you all with it! Here is the screenshot of my github T4GU where I wrote a full account of my dissent. Hope it is entertaining and insightful.

Home-schooling is not the answer. Why not? Because it is individualistic and greedy, and also self-defeating. Creating a silo is a fake superior education.

The reason to expose yourself to public schooling is precisely for the test. You need to learn to inoculate yourself against ignorance and superstition, and especially against neoliberalism. Making a silo against the idiocracy is no solution, for how can you ever be sure you’re not just making a worse idiot of yourself and your kids? (I am sure many home-schoolers know this, and do take steps to expose their students to the idiocracy. I’ve privately tutored a few, but it was amazing how naïve they still were, and impoverished in thought.)

A dose of Neil Postman never goes amiss.

However, my little point today is that it is not only because it is good to put yourself and your students through the trial of confronting idiocy and dogma, it is also good for the dogmatists and school teachers. How on earth are they going to improve without conscientious students challenging them? Maybe you’ll get nothing of benefit from confronting public education dogmatists, but they might get a lot out of confronting you, and that is sufficient good reason to engage in public education.

After all, what chances you Mr or Ms Genius Homeschooled are going to be President or King?

Same goes after school. In political economy and social discourse. Everyone should consider themselves a politician. When we have people who are too precious and clean and consider themselves above all the partisan fray (yeah right🤣! just go on believing that you pompous 𖥐𖦪𖠢𖢧𖥣ꛘ𖨚), with no political dirt on their hands, we all lose from their lack of engagement. Even if they remain pompous ⋐ℾⅇ╬ⅈℼ𝕤 when they do engage in nasty old politics, we benefit from their input.

If they have a good view, we benefit directly. If they have a bad take we benefit from seeing it is a bad take. It’s exercising the old 🅱🅄🅛🅻🆂🅗🄸🆃 deflectors. I notice the lack of exercise whenever I do a stint of theoretical physics and fail to keep up with the laughable takes Danny Haiphong and Aaron Good, et al., have on monetary operations. Those are just two representative bros among too many, who have very good guests and views about some things, and unfortunately also very bad views about money.

I’d love a world where may favourite podcast bros have 90% good views, since that’d clearly help myself — I probably have only 80% good view on most things I write about, and yet get it right more than most.1 I’m at least 95%±5% true about my own opinions.🤣 2 Unfortunately, those unwilling to actually damn-well learn MMT (and all the consequences thereof) are doomed to far less than 80% accuracy in objective terms. Since 𝕄𝕄𝕋 touches so much politics. It is ubiquitous. (Subjectively, Iam almost certain they are honest chaps, and 99% accurately reflect their own opinions, as I read/hear them. It’s just, Aaron can make all the points he makes well enough, without having to ramble incoherently about the gold standard and petrodollar myths and Pro-Thatcherite talking points, “Me tax dollah iz payin’ furrit.”)

It won’t be until years after the looming recession that I can conduct a causal inference analysis, but I’d say right now the Congress spending on the wars and genocides are propping up the USA economy. Albeit in the most disgracefully oppressive way. (Prop up the economy and cause massive increases in Inequality.)

Do any of the leftiepol bros realize, once the poorest cannot afford the higher prices, they do not just die off, they endure. Government welfare (UBI-Lite) means they can still pay the blood price to the rentiers. It doesn’t “crash the economy”. It just maintains the current life expectancy despite massive medical knowledge advances.

Do not flame at me that a climate/ecological catastrophe will be the “crash to end all crashes.” Sure it will. The point is, it is not the current financial crashes that will change things. The Marxist FRP fairy story does not work. Financial crashes are great for the rentiers and parasites. They’re not going to complain (too much) about the next oil shock. They’re the ones who still get the “oil.” If they cry it’ll be crocodile tears.

When the financial shocks bleed into the real economy only the poorest really suffer. None of these types of crash will change things for the better unless and until working class consciousness is raised, and education promulgated, failure to educate will be the root cause of the latter ecological disaster. You cannot excite a revolutionary from thin air without educating them.

I am just jealous. I wish I could make sales, but I probably never will. I am kinda disgusted by academia these days. See Curt’s juicy The Reverse Elephant

I found it richer than Hofstadter’s Gödel, Escher, Bach — fwiw. Though, like a first love (who turns traitorous), GEB will always be in my heart.

Almost needless to say, if I get a job offer in academia I’m gonna take it! Teaching is an addiction to me, more powerful than heroin.

“The Teacher cannot survive without the Student.” — Morpheus.

I wrote this comment 👇🏼👇🏼 to Shilo and Anastasia. I’d only call it shameless if I was begging for a few government scorepoints, which I am not. GoFund MMT-101 or RealProgressives instead, you’ll get more bang for your bucks. Do not donate to the Levy Institute or the Aussie MMT crowd, they’ve got plenty of funding. Do immigrate to New Zealand, since our MMT is anemic. Do not fund me, just hire me! I’ll work for peanuts (that can be magically transformed into sandwiches and coffee).

Hey, Shilo and ‘Stasia:

Since you asked, @4:10 — if you’re interested, I do have a better version. Highly parsimonious too. The only “aether” is spacetime itself. No book for this, just a series of pre-preprints for discussion on the “crackpot arxiv.” 🤣

https://doi.org/10.5281//zenodo.17995242 — connects topological 4-geon theory with Barandes.
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17971874 — The Standard Model.
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18005217> — bit sketchy (reduced to dumb Monte Carlo computation of cos(θ)🤣so pretty hilarious) , but “explains” EPR correlations, if you accept the mild premise. Experimentally falsifiable at least.
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18503880 — a proper string theory.
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.19756230 — origin of the complex phase. Would like to simplify this for normies.
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.19937838 — alternative “proof” for the complex phase, and discussion of QM as the boundary stochastic theory of spacetime cobordisms.

NB: I agree with them about there being too much mysticism in modern physics. It’s ok though, you get mysticism when no one understands the thing, it’s natural.1 The question is whether experiments (or just better review of existing knowledge, à la Turok & Boyle) can ever push us beyond unphysical notions like “point particles” and inflatons or whatnot. A scientist has to hope yes, even if it’s wrong.

However, none of that matters one iota by comparison with economic (in)justice, so I spend most of my time on analysis of MMT and how to change public policy to suit demands for justice — there is no point to war & austerity once you understand the state currency operations and source of unemployment: https://smithwillsuffice.github.io/ohanga-pai/questions/001_basic_ohangapai/

That’s it for me.

I am near end-of-days times. Too old to be hired at a university, too y̴o̴u̴n̴g̴ indebted, homeless, impoverished and starving to retire.

I find myself these days thinking about karma and fate. Can it truly be I am such a pisspoor teacher that I am doomed to finding no students? Evidence suggests not, since although other adult teachers hate me,2 I always got wonderful feedback from my students when I was teaching. That doesn’t happen by spontaneous vacuum fluctuations. Justsayin: I’m available to teach either the above theoretical physics or MMT. With an overwhelmingly strong bias to 𝕄𝕄𝕋 education. If you ask, “What are your credentials?”3 you can forget I asked you, you 𖥐𖦪𖠢𖢧𖥣ꛘ. The Vikki Wiesskopf method always works.

I have a hot take.

I do not think the AdS–CFT correspondence really is so “remarkable.” Of course everything like that discovery of Maldacena’s is certainly remarkable. No way I could've discovered it.1 It is only ever in hindsight we can understand some of these things as mundane.

Having not put much serious effort onto studying AdS–CFT, you must take my opinion with buckets of salt. Nevertheless, I have a T4G take.

I would say the AdS–CFT correspondence is unremarkable, because gravity was already a quantum theory. Already in FRLW. Our own universe, not the Toy Universe.

Howso?

The issue is wormholes being responsible for all entanglement (ER=EPR). Then the question is how the boundary theory for AdS gets entangled? I would say that’s because in AdS you can reach the boundary in finite time, and zip back again, and zig-zag all over the show. In a Block AdS universe sense that yields a type of global “non-locality.” (An effective concept, not literal.) So clearly you have a quantum theory on the boundary, as in ordinary T4G theory. Roughly speaking. Do not take this too literally.

The vague concept is what matters. You need Minkowski-frame2 non-locality for a quantum theory. The question is how to get it. In AdS it is a cheat, you allow yourself to live at infinity. We do not have that luxury (or horror?).

I also posted this comment when Minwalla started rambling about the higher dimensional models. SO(3,2) et cetera (more non-physics). Or was he SO(4,2)? ((pffft, who cares 🤣))

@26:00 instead of piddling around with toy physics, you should be considering FRLW asymptotically de Sitter with two null directions in the metric, not one extra time dimension. Then you have spinors (rotors) for conformal transformations. Those extra d.o.f will not be associated with elementary particles.

But you need to appreciate the spinors also are not the particles. Spinors are just the fundamental rep. for the rotations (i.e., they are Clifford rotors, but scaled for the boundary statistics at two times for a given finite cobordism region). There is no fundamental graviton in such a theory, the graviton violates the curing of the energy anomalies. The energy anomalies (Weyl, trace, vacuum) should be regarded as no-go results forbidding gravitons (hence invalidating String Theory). You do not need to re-quantize gravity, since gravity was already a quantum theory (not classical GR, but gravity writ large, permitting non-trivial topology).

That’s almost all for now, except for a bite at the end👇🏼👇🏼. I might add more later if I feel like it.

It’s not like I have an overwhelming desire to delve into AdS-CFT correspondence. If you can show a generic map from a spacetime cobordism containing Planck scale wormholes generates complexified Clifford algebra statistics on the two boundaries, then you’ve no need for the AdS Toy model. You would’ve shown gravity is already a quantum theory. (I’ve convinced myself this is true, but you need to prove it for yourself.) EPR already corresponds then to ER. (You will need to assume the information (the “qubit”) can traverse the ER-bridge. But I regard that as not unreasonable. It’s not like experimentalists can do the probing to show this is what happens. Quantum computers can only probe the boundary data.)

The interesting thing here is that — thanks to Sückelberg & Feynman — we know our ordinary humdrum spacetime has miniature approximate AdS-CFT’s all over the place. They’re just called “experiments.” The light cone envelope surrounding a single photon which has enough energy to break an ER-bridge counts as an ”experiment.” Why? Because even if we had nothing to do with it, we might still observe it with a CCD. When a tree falls in a forest it makes a sound, it just might take googol-flops of compute power to recover it from ambient noise for our audio pleasure. This is why Zen and Griftoverse Maintenance gains footholds on weak imaginations. We all lack the compute power to discern the ka-chings of distant bank account mark-ups. Silence of the cash registers you see. Billionaires only exist if you observe them? Let me assure you they exist in the ambient noise of your poverty.