The Zen of Technology & Scientific Discovery! (& Robots)

[Jundo]

Our latest addition to the Electronic Dharmaverse (thank you to Shingen's friend for spotting this first) ....

The Android Kannon, which is a Buddhist deity of mercy, was unveiled to the news media on Feb. 23 at Kodaiji temple before it starts preaching to the public in March. ... The 100 million yen ($909,090) project to build the android was a collaboration between the zen temple and Hiroshi Ishiguro, professor of intelligent robotics at Osaka University.

The temple asked Ishiguro and his team to develop an android that can preach Buddhist teachings in an easily understood manner to help give peace of mind to troubled people. ... The Kannon deity transforms itself into various forms to help people.
“This time, Kannon changed into an android,” according to the temple.

[Jundo Note: The "Devil Horns" may confuse some folks :-) ]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KptQUZ6Vjj0

Article in English:

http://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/AJ201902240022.html?fbclid=IwAR3uslB9DM5m2dJGsAxd2flKXPsAtZAMurCXYh2Cfz6mItq9_2XC2eGxGGk

Gassho J

STLah

[Jundo Note: The "Devil Horns" may confuse some folks :-) ]

[Jundo]

How much weight would the Milky Way weigh if the Milky Way could be weighed?

The Milky Way is even weightier than imagined. Using data from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope and the European Space Agency's Gaia satellite, astronomers have determined the most accurate measurement of its mass: Our vast galaxy clocks in at 1.5 trillion solar masses.

One solar mass is the mass of our sun, which is 2 times 10 to the 30th power kilograms. It's not exactly as if the Milky Way, or even stars and planets, can be put on a scale.

https://us.cnn.com/2019/03/07/world/...scn/index.html

Zen Take: Not one ounce too much, nor too little, each ounce just what it is.

Gassho, J

STLah

[Seibu]

Would you weigh it on Earth, Mars, Jupiter, the Moon? They would all produce different outcomes, and in space it would be weightless.

[Jundo]

Sometimes the human touch is needed ...

It seems to have been more a Skyped doctor on a mobile device ...

Hospital 'robot' gives grandfather end-of-life news, leaving family outraged

A California hospital delivered end-of-life news to a 78-year-old patient via a robotic machine this week, prompting the man's family to go public with their frustration.

Ernest Quintana was admitted to the Kaiser Permanente Medical Center emergency department in Fremont, California, on March 3, granddaughter Annalisia Wilharm told USA TODAY in a written message Saturday. The family knew he was dying of chronic lung disease.

After an initial diagnosis, a follow-up visit was made to Quintana's intensive care unit room by a machine accompanied by a nurse.

The "robot," as Wilharm says the family refers to the machine, displayed a video of a remote doctor who communicated with Quintana.

A video of the exchange provided to USA TODAY by Wilharm shows the machine being used on Monday to tell grandfather and granddaughter that the hospital had run out of effective treatments.

Annalisia Wilharm needed to restate much of what the the machine communicated, as her grandfather struggled to hear and understand. They learned that the doctor believed Quintana would not be able to return home for hospice care. They discussed the appropriate amount of morphine to use to ease Quintana's suffering.

"If you're coming to tell us normal news, that's fine, but if you're coming to tell us there's no lung left and we want to put you on a morphine drip until you die, it should be done by a human being and not a machine," Catherine Quintana — Ernest's daughter and Wilharm's mother — said Friday.

Ernest Quintana died on Tuesday, Wilharm told USA TODAY in a written message.

The hospital says that the situation was highly unusual and said officials "regret falling short" of the patient's expectations, according to Michelle Gaskill-Hames, senior vice president of Kaiser Permanente Greater Southern Alameda County.

"The evening video tele-visit was a follow-up to earlier physician visits," Gaskill-Hames said in a written response. "It did not replace previous conversations with patient and family members and was not used in the delivery of the initial diagnosis."

Wilharm told USA TODAY on Saturday that the hospital's response was insufficient: "The apology they gave wasn't good enough for me at all," she wrote.

In an interview with KTVU, the family expressed dismay that the machine was unable to speak to Quintana in a way he could hear. That forced Wilharm to herself deliver the news to her ailing grandfather.

Speaking generally, Steve Pantilat — the chief of the palliative medicine division at University of California — said bad news is always difficult to deliver and not all doctors do so in person with empathy.

Pantilat said that the robot technology has helped many patients and families in his experience.

Gassho, J

STLah

[Jakuden]

Yeah well, in the hospital I had an in-person Doctor for two days in a row who couldn’t open the mri images that showed my stroke, and almost sent me home. I would have rather had a robot that actually understood why I was there and had something relevant to say about my case. (Thank goodness for the surgeon who was able to get me diagnosed based on just the CT scan)

Plus it wasn’t the first time the family had heard the news, there were other doctors telling them similar things earlier. In that situation, it takes time to sink in. Hospitals just are difficult, stressful places to be no matter what.
Gassho
Jakuden
SatToday


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[Amelia]

Wow... that is quite sad. It would be unnerving to receive that news from a Skype call, that's for sure.

Sat today, lah

[Jundo]

By the way, on the new book that I am writing ... entitled "ZEN of the FUTURE!" ... this is what I happened to be writing today ...

Jobs will change in the future, and many jobs will be taken over by automation (goodbye to truck drivers and cash register check out boys, but also maybe pharmacists and math teachers and maybe computer designers themselves. Perhaps robots would do a better job of teaching Zen! After all, most of what a Zen teacher does is incomprehensible gobbledygook anyway, with an occasional admonition to “go sit Zazen.” ) However, for those jobs that do remain, the highest ethics will be required. As we have discussed, it will be a nicer world if manufactures become physically ill inside (the same feeling that they might feel if they found out that their own child had been diagnosed with cancer) each time they make a choice regarding marketing a product which might have great value to society but also possibly cause some number of children in the world to develop cancer (e.g., a manufacturer of very beneficial drugs with some risks and side effects, or nuclear or other cheap energy sources that could potentially harm the public too). Would it be possible to alter our brain and hormonal reactions so that we come to have "parental mind" for all children much as for our own children? The manufacturer would have the same feeling about the general public that any parent has when, for example, they strap their child into a car (hopefully in a safety seat) or take them on an airplane, balancing the benefits and the potential risks.

Cooks in restaurants (assuming they are not all automated in the future), doctors and nurses, politicians, parents, school teachers, robot designers, judges and even Buddhist and other clergy would all contribute to a better world if they all became physically ill at the prospect of hurting people beyond what they truly felt in their heart was right and necessary in that case, just as any parent (or normal parents at least) today feels physically ill at the prospect of hurting their own child beyond what is necessary for their good. I will, for example, let a doctor poke and probe my child if necessary for their overall well-being, with my brain making the hard choice about what is necessary in that situation. Would it not be wonderful if that same brain center of "parental mind" became activated when our political leaders need to make a hard choice for society, or a businessman needs to market a new product, or a food manufacturer needs to raise healthy foods, all with the same feeling inside that the people of society are "my children" as much as their own biological sons and daughters? We want the programmers of computers to design programs that do little harm too.

Alcoholics today are prescribed certain drugs that make them physically ill at the mere taste or thought of liqueur, might it be possible to do the same for thoughts of selfishness and greed?

...

“Right action” will be as necessary to the practice of Buddhism as now. However, the difficulty involved in actually living in such ways may change with our ability to invent pills and effect mental changes that make our having such intent easier to keep, more pleasant and desired. When we want to study Buddhism and do good actions as much as we now want sex and hamburgers, it will become easy to study Buddhism and do good actions. Perhaps all that we need to do is "cross the wires" of our internal emotional and physical response mechanisms and connect “Buddhism” in the brain with the same pleasure centers that activate when I just say the words “sex” and “hamburgers.” We are willing generally to go to fantastic extremes of effort and endurance for sex and hamburgers, and we can rewire ourselves so fregarding all the good qualities we are discussing here, and the efforts to live by them. Oh, if we only went to the same extremes for a charitable act as we go to now to have the pleasure of a new fancy car in the driveway, the world will be a better place. All we need to do is figure out how to trip the same pleasure centers triggered by "new car in my driveway" with the pleasure of "charitable act." Probably, not to long from now at all, nuero-scientists are going to figure out how to trip those same pleasure centers for whatever we wish.

It will be even easier for our robots and computers, because they will have the intent to learn and practice Buddhism simply when we program that intent into their software.

What do you think? Possible? A hope for a better world? Scary? Brave New (Zen) World?

Gassho, J

STLah

[Tairin]

A little off topic but I am in the process of reading “21 Lessons for the 21st Century” by Yuval Noah Harari. He touches on topics like the Skype Doc above. If you find these topics interesting I’d recommend his books.

Not completely off topic though. Harari maintains a Vipassana practice

For the record, having recently under gone unsuccessful surgery to correct my hearing loss, I feel I’d still prefer a human breaking the bad news to me in person rather than what happened in the article. I can’t imagine being delivered such devestating news via Skype


Tairin
Sat today and lah

[Shinshi]

And in other news. - We have turned back time

Physicists reverse time using quantum computer

Researchers from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology teamed up with colleagues from the U.S. and Switzerland and returned the state of a quantum computer a fraction of a second into the past. They also calculated the probability that an electron in empty interstellar space will spontaneously travel back into its recent past. The study is published in Scientific Reports.

Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2019-03-physic...e-quantum.html

Gassho, Shinshi

SaT-LaH

[Jundo]

And in other news. - We have turned back time

Physicists reverse time using quantum computer

Researchers from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology teamed up with colleagues from the U.S. and Switzerland and returned the state of a quantum computer a fraction of a second into the past. They also calculated the probability that an electron in empty interstellar space will spontaneously travel back into its recent past. The study is published in Scientific Reports.

Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2019-03-physic...e-quantum.html

Gassho, Shinshi

SaT-LaH

Ok, you send time backwards, and I will add another one also announced today (or yesterday back in time) ...


==============

MIT Technology Review March 12, 2019:
A quantum experiment suggests there’s no such thing as objective reality
Physicists have long suspected that quantum mechanics allows two observers to experience different, conflicting realities. Now they’ve performed the first experiment that proves it.

Back in 1961, the Nobel Prize–winning physicist Eugene Wigner outlined a thought experiment that demonstrated one of the lesser-known paradoxes of quantum mechanics. The experiment shows how the strange nature of the universe allows two observers—say, Wigner and Wigner’s friend—to experience different realities.

Since then, physicists have used the “Wigner’s Friend” thought experiment to explore the nature of measurement and to argue over whether objective facts can exist. That’s important because scientists carry out experiments to establish objective facts. But if they experience different realities, the argument goes, how can they agree on what these facts might be?

That’s provided some entertaining fodder for after-dinner conversation, but Wigner’s thought experiment has never been more than that—just a thought experiment.

Last year, however, physicists noticed that recent advances in quantum technologies have made it possible to reproduce the Wigner’s Friend test in a real experiment. In other words, it ought to be possible to create different realities and compare them in the lab to find out whether they can be reconciled.

And today, Massimiliano Proietti at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh and a few colleagues say they have performed this experiment for the first time: they have created different realities and compared them. Their conclusion is that Wigner was correct—these realities can be made irreconcilable so that it is impossible to agree on objective facts about an experiment.

Wigner’s original thought experiment is straightforward in principle. It begins with a single polarized photon that, when measured, can have either a horizontal polarization or a vertical polarization. But before the measurement, according to the laws of quantum mechanics, the photon exists in both polarization states at the same time—a so-called superposition.

Wigner imagined a friend in a different lab measuring the state of this photon and storing the result, while Wigner observed from afar. Wigner has no information about his friend’s measurement and so is forced to assume that the photon and the measurement of it are in a superposition of all possible outcomes of the experiment.

Wigner can even perform an experiment to determine whether this superposition exists or not. This is a kind of interference experiment showing that the photon and the measurement are indeed in a superposition.

From Wigner’s point of view, this is a “fact”—the superposition exists. And this fact suggests that a measurement cannot have taken place.

But this is in stark contrast to the point of view of the friend, who has indeed measured the photon’s polarization and recorded it. The friend can even call Wigner and say the measurement has been done (provided the outcome is not revealed).

So the two realities are at odds with each other. “This calls into question the objective status of the facts established by the two observers,” say Proietti and co.

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/613092/a-quantum-experiment-suggests-theres-no-such-thing-as-objective-reality/

Gassho, J

STLah

[Shinshi]

Ok, you send time backwards, and I will add another one also announced today (or yesterday back in time) ...


==============

MIT Technology Review March 12, 2019:
A quantum experiment suggests there’s no such thing as objective reality
Physicists have long suspected that quantum mechanics allows two observers to experience different, conflicting realities. Now they’ve performed the first experiment that proves it.

Back in 1961, the Nobel Prize–winning physicist Eugene Wigner outlined a thought experiment that demonstrated one of the lesser-known paradoxes of quantum mechanics. The experiment shows how the strange nature of the universe allows two observers—say, Wigner and Wigner’s friend—to experience different realities.

Since then, physicists have used the “Wigner’s Friend” thought experiment to explore the nature of measurement and to argue over whether objective facts can exist. That’s important because scientists carry out experiments to establish objective facts. But if they experience different realities, the argument goes, how can they agree on what these facts might be?

That’s provided some entertaining fodder for after-dinner conversation, but Wigner’s thought experiment has never been more than that—just a thought experiment.

Last year, however, physicists noticed that recent advances in quantum technologies have made it possible to reproduce the Wigner’s Friend test in a real experiment. In other words, it ought to be possible to create different realities and compare them in the lab to find out whether they can be reconciled.

And today, Massimiliano Proietti at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh and a few colleagues say they have performed this experiment for the first time: they have created different realities and compared them. Their conclusion is that Wigner was correct—these realities can be made irreconcilable so that it is impossible to agree on objective facts about an experiment.

Wigner’s original thought experiment is straightforward in principle. It begins with a single polarized photon that, when measured, can have either a horizontal polarization or a vertical polarization. But before the measurement, according to the laws of quantum mechanics, the photon exists in both polarization states at the same time—a so-called superposition.

Wigner imagined a friend in a different lab measuring the state of this photon and storing the result, while Wigner observed from afar. Wigner has no information about his friend’s measurement and so is forced to assume that the photon and the measurement of it are in a superposition of all possible outcomes of the experiment.

Wigner can even perform an experiment to determine whether this superposition exists or not. This is a kind of interference experiment showing that the photon and the measurement are indeed in a superposition.

From Wigner’s point of view, this is a “fact”—the superposition exists. And this fact suggests that a measurement cannot have taken place.

But this is in stark contrast to the point of view of the friend, who has indeed measured the photon’s polarization and recorded it. The friend can even call Wigner and say the measurement has been done (provided the outcome is not revealed).

So the two realities are at odds with each other. “This calls into question the objective status of the facts established by the two observers,” say Proietti and co.

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/613092/a-quantum-experiment-suggests-theres-no-such-thing-as-objective-reality/

Gassho, J

STLah

I wonder if I could come up with a measurement device that would let me create the reality I wanted. Then again, I am sure there would be some catch.

Gassho, Shinshi

SaT-LaH

[Roland]

Kannon transformed this time into a gender neutral robot.

Roland

Gassho,

SatToday

[Jundo]

Kannon transformed this time into a gender neutral robot.

Roland

Gassho,

SatToday

Just noting use of "goddess" and "deity" about Bodhisattva Kannon in the narration, which is not really correct (although, granted, it is a fine line sometimes as the Bodhisattvas are depicted traditionally in very idealized, other-worldly forms representing the perfection of qualities such as mercy and compassion.) In this case, it is an ideal carved into silicon.

For anyone who would like an explanation about Kannon and the other Bodhisattvas, we have this group of talks. In my view, Kannon and the others become real as real can be when our hands and eyes act with mercy and compassion.


Whattsa Who'sa Bodhisattva? (A Sit-a-Long Series)

https://www.treeleaf.org/forums/showthread.php?17227-Whattsa-Who-sa-Bodhisattva-%28A-Sit-a-Long-Series%29

on Kannon particularly:

https://www.treeleaf.org/forums/showthread.php?17227-Whattsa-Who-sa-Bodhisattva-%28A-Sit-a-Long-Series%29&p=248704&viewfull=1#post248704

Gassho, J

STLah

[Kyousui]

Artificial Intelligence, computer modeling, and religion

Rather fascinating article on computer modeling and religion topics:

https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2018/07/artificial-intelligence-religion-atheism/565076/

sat/lah

[Jundo]

Water, water everywhere ...

If water is one of the basic constituents necessary for life, then this is big news ...

Hayabusa2 detects minerals containing water on Ryugu asteroid

The unmanned space probe Hayabusa2 has detected small amounts of minerals containing water on the surface of the asteroid Ryugu, a Japanese research team has said.

The findings may provide a clue to solving the mystery of the origin of Earth’s water. Scientists say that at least part of the water came from asteroids and comets.

...

Observation results obtained so far suggest the possibility that Ryugu originated from the parent body of the Polana or Eulalia asteroid family. Both families are in the asteroid belt between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter.

Rocks that make up Ryugu are believed to have been heated inside its parent body, which was created 4.56 billion years ago, just after the solar system was formed.

https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2019/03/20/national/science-health/hayabusa2-detects-minerals-containing-water-ryugu-asteroid/#.XJIvC9SLTX4

Gassho, J

STLah