Google's AlphaGo Wins with Value and Policy

AlphaGo is a deep-learning bilateral neural network, which is a computer program that has two main personalities; Value and Policy. AlphaGo Value and Policy in effect talk with each other but have fundamentally different feelings about how to win the game of Go.

theverge AlphaGo

Value loves to win more than he hates to lose, but Policy hates to lose more than she loves to win. In other words, AlphaGo Value and Policy represent the basic nature of feeling and choice that people recognize as consciousness. The basic definition of consciousness is a recursion of action and sensation; a conscious person acts just like they see (or sense) other conscious people act.

AlphaGo Value corresponds to the human emotion of pleasure while Policy corresponds to the human emotion of anxiety. People make choices based on a singular feeling that involves the processing of many pairs of complementary emotions and not just pleasure and anxiety. Compassion and selfishness, for example, is how people bond or conflict with others, joy and misery, anger and serenity, and pride and shame complete a basic set of complementary emotions that approximate human feeling.

AlphaGo Value gets great pleasure in winning as many stones as possible and Value is willing to take risk while AlphaGo Policy is anxious about losing only one stone...the one stone that wins the game, and plays very cautiously and avoids risk. While Value takes risk and goes for as many stones as possible to win, Policy avoids risk and settles for the one stone that wins the game.

We journey in our lives desiring the same bilateral futures as AlphaGo; a part of us wants the pleasure of winning big and taking risks and a complementary part of us is forever anxious about simply getting by and surviving by avoiding risk. People have more complex emotions than just pleasure and anxiety and so we have more complex and cooperative relationships with other people and the environment.

What AlphaGo's two personalities represent is a fundamental part of the recursion of consciousness and therefore what it is that we mean when we say that someone is conscious. Lee Sedol is the Go world champion who played against Value and Policy, who had been playing each other for four months prior and had therefore both won and lost literally millions of games with each other prior to the match with Sedol.

Sedol has played many hundreds of thousands of games during his life but is simply not able to play the many millions of games that taught Value and Policy how to beat him. While Sedol will improve his skill by playing Value and Policy together, he might do much better playing Value and Policy separately.

Also, to be fair, AlphaGo should also have additional human personalities like anger and shame, for example. That way Sedol could gain advantage in ways that better represent the complexity of human consciousness. The question is...how do you make an AlphaGo angry at a opponent's board position or ashamed of a its own board position. And of course, AlphaGo must show some compassion in not crushing its opponent and allowing some victories while still being selfish enough to win the tournament.

The Pleasure and Anxiety of Discovery

The emotions of pleasure and anxiety are what kick start purpose and without some kind of purpose, consciousness is simply not possible. So it is the pleasure of discovery that allows us to survive as well as allows us to thrive when we discover futures beyond those we need for bare survival. When we discover something about the universe that seems like no one else yet knows, the pleasure of that discovery is especially intense.

And yet anxiety about the unknown tempers that pleasure and makes me wonder if I am right. Aethertime is a discovery that defines a universe with the simple axioms of matter, time, and action. The actions of two complementary electron spins complements the actions of discrete aether with the universe and its decoherence time that is what drives both gravity and charge forces. The axioms of matter, time, and action close aethertime and with the constants of matter, time, and action form an anti+universe pulse and our present epoch is just 82% decay from that pulse center.

Figure 1. Aethertime boson pulse that describes the anti+universe where the current epoch lies.

Just like the universe is a matter pulse in time, the universe is also a spectrum of objects of matter like people and neurons. In fact, just as people interact and bond, so do neural packets of aware matter as the figure shows. The neural impulses from excitation and inhibition of action potentials form EEG spectra that represent consciousness as objects of aware matter particles. Just as aware matter particles bond into objects of thought, people interact and bond as a result of those same objects of thought.

Mainstream science supposes that time is a continuous displacement in a continuous 4D spacetime and that is motion in space. While it is certainly true that atomic clocks have continuous pulses, atomic clocks therefore tick with a stream of discrete atomic events. So the atomic time that we sense is really not a continuous displacement on an infinitely divisible timeline of past, present, and future. Atomic time is instead average discrete frequency periods along with the deoherence for those periods. 

Objects that we sense have just one time delay, which is only one of the two time dimensions of a clock needed to tell time in the present moment. All objects including atomic clocks have both atomic frequency periods along with a decoherence rate for those periods and so there are two dimensions for time. Mainstream science imagines atomic time as a constant that does not run down or decay even though all working clocks including atomic clocks actually do run down as well as tick at regular intervals. 

Normally people view a clock running down as an artifact and for an electronic or any clock, the lost energy of decoherence or entropy is simply replaced with more coherent power from a battery or power plant. Since the tick frequency defines the duration of a moment for that clock and the tick frequency does not seem to change, it seems like clocks simply need energy to operate. But how fast a clock runs down also tells an absolute time for the clock in how often the clock needs to be charged or wound. In aethertime, there is a very small an intrinsic and universal decoherence rate not only for clocks, but also for all objects and that decoherence tells a universe time.

The aethertime universe clock is the decoherence decay of the universe matter pulse as 0.255 ppb/yr in the present epoch.

Decoherence time is provides a quasi-continuous time from the edge of the universe just beyond the CMB. Unlike atomic time, which depends on the frame of reference, decoherence time represents the absolute frame of the boundaries of a closed universe. Just like the thousands of millisecond pulsars that keep time for the cosmos, time has both a dimension of tick frequency as well as a dimension of tick frequency decay as shown in Fig. 2 below. Although millisecond pulsars decay due mostly to light and gravity radiation, there is also an average decay rate that coincides with many other measurements of matter decoherence.

Figure 2. Shows the many measurements that are consistent with the universal decoherence decay of the universe.

Along with atomic time in this epoch, this universal decoherence is very simply a dimensionless ratio of gravity and charge force and that ratio unifies these two forces by a scaling of the time period of the universe over that of the hydrogen atom. While charge acts at the microscopic scale of an atomic clock pulse, gravity emerges along with space from the cosmic scale of the universe pulse, a wrapping of charge force by the time scale of the universe.

Quantum Fine-Structure Constant

One of the more pervasive and mysterious nonmysteries of science has to do with the fine-structure constant, α. The fine structure constant shows up whenever there is moving charge since moving charges have both magnetization as well as charge forces. Of course, quantum particles are in perpetual charge motion of quantum phase and so the only real mystery of the fine-structure constant is that it does not seem to have a role in relativity gravity. Because classical particles do no have the perpetual motion of quantum phase, classical particles do not show the fine-structure constant.

In other words, there is no vector force for gravity like the vector force of magnetization for moving charge. In the collapsing universe, gravity is a result of photon exchange bonds and therefore, collapsing universe gravity does show a vector force.

The fine structure constant first showed up as the Lamb shift of some hydrogen spectral features. The spinning electron has its own magnetism called spin and in certain hydrogen orbits, that electron also generates  orbital magnetism. The Lyman, Balmer, Paschen, etc., spectral series are light emissions that show the main energy levels of the hydrogen atom that converge on the hydrogen ionization energy at 13.6 eV as the Rydberg energy. (see figure)

The coupling between electron spin and orbital spin magnetism, spin-orbit coupling, has no classical analog and results in a splitting proportional to α². However, the collapsing universe does couple star motions in a galaxy and therefore also star motion with star rotation as well.

The quantum mystery of the fine structure constant deepened when increasing measurement precision of the electron magnetism found that the electron spin magnetism affected its charge. The anomalous electron magnetic moment is due to a quantum self energy that does not have a classical meaning and there is no such gravitization self energy for classical gravity force. It was then discovered by Feynman and Schwinger that the fine structure constant nicely predicted that a spinning electron created a counterspinning vacuum electric field with its own magnetism and the fine structure constant defined that coupling.

With higher resolution spectrographs, spectroscopists in the 1800's came to realize that spectral lines showed even further splitting and that spectral splitting came to be known as fine structure. Although not completely understood until Dirac in 1928, electrons can orbit in either spherical or donut-shaped ellipsoid orbits with different orbital angular momentum and phase or orbital magnetism. In fact, electrons exist in superposition states that involve some of all possible states and the interaction  of those states splits their degeneracy into what was termed the fine-structure constant by Sommerfeld in 1916, actually the square of the fine-structure constant α².

An electron in the perfect symmetry of a spherical orbit does not have any average orbital magnetism, but an electron in various donut orbits does have magnetism due to the reduced symmetry of such orbits and the orbital magnetism of donut orbits then couples with the electron spin magnetism. In addition, the intrinsic spins of the electron and proton are also interact and cause the hyperfine splitting observed at even higher resolution as the figure below represents. The quantum underpinnings for the fine-structure constant would have to wait until Dirac in 1928 and by that time, the hyperfine spectral splittings were also discovered.

The key to all of these quantum magnetic interactions turned out to be the fine-structure constant quantum quantum phase, but there is no classical analog to spin orbit coupling and so the fine-structure constant is not part of a classical reality. Indeed, Feynman developed his quantum field theory in 1958 that conveniently used α to represent a perturbation expansion to account for the effect of quantum electron charge on itself.

In fact, there is another common dimensionless constant called the gyromagnetic ratio, g, which is around two and expresses the frequency differences between classical and quantum rotating charges. The gyromagnetic ratio turns out to be completely determined by a series expansion of α, which then reveals the mystery of the quantum spinning charge with g = 2 reality versus the classical spinning charge with a g = 1 reality.

Somehow the gyromagnetic ratio all by itself embodies the difference between quantum and classical charge motion and there is a similar factor of two that shows up with gravity deflection of light. The equivalent mass from light's momentum deflects light passing near a gravity body like the sun. The gravity deflection of quantum light has twice the angle of an equivalent classical body like a comet or asteroid.

Just like the interaction of photon magnetism with quantum spin in a magnetic field is the result of many exchanges among virtual states, the interaction of photon momentum with gravity is also the result of many photon exchanges among virtual states. It is likely that a similar correspondence with α and gravity occurs for quantum gravity, but a quantum gravity is not yet in common use.

The figure above shows the gravity fine structure expected for the hydrogen atom that is many orders of magnitude less, 1e39, than current science can measure for a single atom in the present epoch. However, in the CMB creation is a gravity object that releases light and shows the quantum gravity resonances as fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background.

While the CMB emission at 2.7 K represents the hydrogen ionization energy in the early universe, the gravity modes oscillate with a fundamental at around 5e-5 K or 50 ppm of the 2.7 K CMB emission. The CMB gravity modes represent the multipole peaks in the CMB spectrum below.

There are any number of papers that show that α² varies on the order of 3e-15/yr for astrophysical spectra and 6e-17 for terrestrial atomic clocks and not the 0.26 ppb/yr decoherence rate predicted by quantum aether. Actually the standard cosmology of mainstream science does not recognize any variation in α and the measured variations have not yet been widely accepted. With quantum aether, there is a phase factor for α that is consistent with a variation in α² that is as reported. Thus the variations of α² with both astrophysical and high precision atomic time are consistent with the aether decoherence rate of 0.26 ppb/yr.

The key turns out to be a complementary α phase factor that accompanies each oscillating charge dipole that generates a photon of light. Although mainstream science approximates a hydrogen atom with the motion of an electron in orbit around a proton and that motion shows an average velocity of αc, the product of α and the speed of light, c.

This means that the dipole average kinetic energy of the photon from the oscillation is proportional to α²c². However, there is a neglected phase factor associated with charge motion that is why distant galaxies show the same α² as we experience in our epoch even though both α and c actually increase at 0.26 ppb/yr. In quantum aether, it is the ratio of c/α that is constant and h becomes the matter scaled Planck's constant h/c² is the Planck constant in quantum aether.

A basic premise of quantum aether interaction with matter is that the constants h, c, and α all expand over time and actually begin at zero at the aether pulse peak of the CMB that is the transition of our universe from the its precursor antiverse expansion. Thus it is important to understand why the relative splitting of the hydrogen atom spectrum that is α does not seem to vary in early galaxies back in time.

Although it seems a bit incredible that mainstream science has long misinterpreted the meaning of spectral splittings in distant galaxies, there are many measurements that validate the ongoing decay of matter at 0.26 ppb/yr (8.1e-18s^-1) along with the increase in both gravity and charge forces that complements the decay of matter. Moreover, it is the decoherence of quantum aether that determines and unites the two forces of matter that mainstream science calls gravity and charge.

Finally, with the quantum gravity of quantum aether comes the gravitization of moving matter like stars that complements gravity force. Matter gravitization is most obvious in the coupled motions of stars in galaxies due to star radiation and motion. Mainstream science now attributes galaxy star motions to an as yet unmeasured cold dark matter but the simple star to star coupling of gravitization makes galaxy star motion explicable without any need for the unseen mystery of dark matter.

Why Does the World Exist?

Questions about the infinity of nothing that is empty space date to ancient Greece and Zeno. How can we get anywhere in space, the ancient Greek philosopher Zeno asked, when we need to take an infinity of steps just to span the infinity of infinitely divisible space. More contemporary philosophers often simply accept the infinite divisibility of nothing without any objection and do not bother with the infinite discourse about nothing.

The recent book by Jim Holt Why Does the World Exist interviews a number of philosophers, religious scholars, and scientists and provides a wide litany of the standard answers to this infinite philosophical discourse. Somehow Holt felt that he could write a whole book about the dark nothing of empty space and people would actually buy it and read it...and I did...

Holt supposes that nothing would be a much simpler reality than the world that exists but he somehow does not really explore the inherent paradoxes of the infinities of nothing. As a result, infinity does not seem to bother Holt and he seems quite comfortable with the simplicity of infinity.

A statement that nothing could exist seems to contradict itself. Much like the square circles or married bachelors that Holt twice mentions, supposing nothing as something is a similar foil of words. Simply asking a question with words does not mean that the question has any meaning or any answer either.

The finite universe exists and is what existence means. Existence is simply a belief that we acquire as young children around two years of age as we learn consciousness. We simply learn to accept the belief about the universe of existence consisting of sources and observers of sources that undergo action and therefore change with time. The dark lonely nothing of empty space is a convenient object that we use to represent the universe itself and therefore empty space helps us keep track of the objects of matter within an otherwise empty universe.

The shrinking decoherence of aethertime defines both the gravity and charge of our quantum universe. In a universe of matter and time, space and momentum are just convenient representations that are consistent with sensation and neural thought. Each of general relativity and quantum charge exist as overlapping regimes of quantum aethertime.

Asking why the universe exists is then the same as asking why existence exists; the question's answer is a circular identity. Such identities are useful in that they allow us to know the boundaries of what we can know. There is no empty universe devoid of sources because the only universe that we can know and that can exist is one that is full of sources and observers all changing in time. The notion of a mostly empty universe filled with just a few sources is a useful one just like the number zero is useful for describing the absence of having something like an apple, but the notion of empty space is fundamentally limited and flawed and does not describe all changes in the universe.

Instead of a mostly empty universe filled with just a few observers and sources, the universe of discrete aether is made up of variations of matter and action. Aether is the matter that is the universe and the action of discrete aether is what clumps aether into sources and observers. Discrete action is the exchange of discrete aether particles between observers and sources and action describes how aether clumps into discrete matter spectra.

On the Need for Compassionate Free Choice

Humanity uses good and evil as notions of what is right and wrong behavior, but compassion and free choice are much more useful notions for actually predicting how people act. While compassion is what tends to bond people together into cooperative families, clans, villages, cities, and countries, free choice is more often what conflicts people with each other or groups of people with other groups of people. With compassion, people cooperatively share the wealth they have acquired and with free choice, people put their own survival first and acquire wealth more for themselves.

There is a strong association between the notion of evil and the emotion of free choice, but that is a very limited useful association. People must have some free choice in order to survive and likewise, people must also have some compassion in order to bond with other people. If a people only have free choice, they accumulate wealth and may actually take wealth from other people, including the lives of other people. But people must have some free choice, a compassionate free choice, and so the absolute notions of good and evil and the emotions of love and hate are much more limited. Instead, it is the free choice of compassion and compassionate free choice that better predict how people feel about each other.

There is a long history of the emotions of love and hate and many religions tout love as the most important emotion for bonding people together. Hate as the complement to love engenders the conflicts that people have with each other and there is an ultimate evil in hate. Since hate is always undesirable, the emotions of love and hate are more limited compared to compassion and free choice for predicting how people act.

Religions usually promote various transcendent agents for good compassion and other evil agents for  free choice, but really compassion and free choice are both part of the dual representations for how the universe works; relational and Cartesian. A relational person is compassionate and relates better with and cares more about others and is therefore a person who is on a common journey with many others. A Cartesian person has more free choice and cares more about themselves than other people and free choice people are therefore more separate and alone on their own objective Cartesian journeys. Just as a relational person subjectively bonds with many other people in a common journey of compassion, Cartesian people are largely on their own objective free choice journeys and only weakly interact with other people.

The complements of each emotion form five emotion pairs that represent the basic duality of matter and action. While compassion represents the matter and bonding of feeling, free choice represents the action and conflict of the inhibition of compassion. Compassion is then the inhibition of free choice and compassion bonds people together while the excitation of free choice is action where people conflict.

In our brains, excitations and inhibitions of neural action potentials represent how we feel and form the EEG spectra of brain waves as the figure below shows.  In the spectral reality of the universe, free choices are discrete particles of neural action called aware matter that bond into larger aware matter objects called thoughts as neural packets in the brain. Thoughts resonate as the EEG spectra of the brain and are the matter or feelings that bond two people and that bonding likewise results in further matter spectra that show those relationships.

Science does not yet understand how neural action results in the EEG spectra of free choice, but sleep is a very important part of neural action. In fact, there are two primitive neural matter packets during sleep that appear in sleeping EEG called K complexes and sleep spindles. Both K complexes and sleep spindles are made of delta mode packets and the delta mode is the fundamental mode of neural action. The EEG K complex seems to be the simple delta dimer while a sleep spindle seems to be a delta dimer with an alpha mode carrier and both are the basic primitive neural packets that appear during deep sleep. These primitive neural packets appear to be what keep our mind asleep and yet they also represent the basic neural aware matter that binds or conflicts us with others as well with compassion and free choice.

Compassion and free choice are therefore the two most important emotions for bonding and conflict and people actually have both compassion and free choice in all journeys in life. Compassion and free choice are much more useful than love and hate for describing the complexity of relationships. Bonding relationships come about from pleasurable neural excitations and results in delta dimer bonds that inhibit anxiety. Conflicts among people inhibit pleasure and excite anxiety, which is the alpha carrier mode.

People always need free, a compassionate free choice, in order to survive and so there are no journeys with only free choice just as there are no journeys with only compassion. There are no people in life that are only Cartesian or only relational, there is likewise neither complete free choice nor complete compassionate…all people must act both with compassionate free choice as well as free choice compassion in order to survive. This is why love and hate are more limited complements of bonding emotions.

A Cartesian person journeys on a path that is more isolated from other people and so a Cartesian generally represents free choice that cares more about their own needs than the needs of others. In contrast, a relational person journeys as a superposition of many possible outcomes that are more bonded with others by compassion. A relational has more compassion for other people and a relational inhibits free choice. A relational person has more compassion for others that inhibits free choice for their own needs and therefore relationals are more open about the many possible outcomes with other people.

By extension of compassion and free choice to the governments of clans, villages, and states, the notions of compassion and free choice represent the cooperation and conflicts that bond and conflict people into a community with many largely anonymous people living together in large cities and countries. The constitution of a balanced government incorporates the notions of a balance of compassion and free choice to assure survival just as people freely choose assure their own survivals.

Religions have sometimes very strict guidelines for compassion and free choice and such guidelines provide religious people with purpose and meaning. States provide less rigid guidelines for compassion and free choice as compared with religion and governments therefore States often tolerate a much wider range of behavior and therefore purpose and meaning. A government ideology balances compassion and free choice and governments can show compassion as well as free choice just as people do.

Governments balance compassion, sharing, and cooperation with free choice and that balance allows competition to promote commerce and innovation. The markets of commerce permit free choice and trade for goods and services that not only meet the needs of survival, but also provide goods and services for others as well in a form of compassion. The government builds roads, transportation, buildings, parks, and social welfare represent the compassion of public resources shared for all.

What Is Nothing Like?

When we as young children begin our journey of consciousness, we discover by about age two the belief that the lonely dark nothing of empty space is something after all. That belief in the nothing of empty space anchors further discovery and helps us discover the way the world of objects works. The discovery that the nothing of space is really something not only anchors further discovery for survival, but provides purpose and meaning far beyond survival.

But we begin life by sensing objects and light, not space, and objects and light are actually what reality is all about, not really space. When we no longer sense an object, we come to believe that an empty space now exists where that object was. This belief in empty space allows us to know that the object still exists and is simply now hidden by other objects or by some distance away from us and that is why we no longer sense the object. We come to believe that space exists even though we never sense space directly and even though empty space is simply the lack of an object that is now hidden from view or sensation.

We sense objects and learn their objective properties like color, texture, mass, time delay, and so on and can agree with others about those objective properties. Each object in the universe exists with a well-defined and measurable time delay from us and various time delays from other objects. These time delays are all equivalent to spatial distances from us and other objects and that is how we keep track of objects. We use particular objects called landmarks to provide reference frames for locating other objects, but there is really never any lack of objects in our perception or even anywhere in the universe. In other words, the notions that we have about continuous empty space and time are just that...convenient notions that help us to keep track of objects.

There is a long history of discourse in philosophy about the nature of the nothing of empty space. Why is there something rather than nothing? is a question in a recent book by philosopher Jim Holt, "Why Does the World Exist?" The history of nothing ranges from Zeno in ancient Greece up through modern times with Nietzsche and Wittgenstein. Since we neither sense nor measure the nothing of empty space, there is actually no way to answer such an inexplicable question and this book simply continues the endless discourse about the nature of nothing. The world is existence and so the question reduces to the identity of existence existing and the nature of this identity is obvious.

Philosophy, after all, is an endless discourse about the nature of the universe. Philosophy asks and attempts to answer many inexplicable questions since it is not always clear which questions we can answer. Why there is something rather than nothing is an existential question that has no answer other than the identity; the universe exists because it exists. There is no sense to a discourse about nothing except that nothing is a convenient way to keep track of a lack of objects. Just like the zero of our number system, the notion of the nothing of empty space provides a way of keeping track of a lack of objects of certain kinds. However, there is simply no sense to the absolute lack of all objects including a universe since the universe is what defines what exists and we are an inextricable part of the existence of that universe.

Reality exists as objects, light, and time and with discrete matter, time delay, and action; from just these three axioms all reality emerges. When we sense a red object, in addition to its red color that many others agree is red, we have feelings about that red object that are unique to us. Our unique lifetime of experience with red objects and unique development mean that the red object results in a feeling about the object that is unique for each person. It could be that the red color is an illusion, for example, or that we may see all objects as red because we happen to lack other pigments in our retina.

So it is very important for consciousness to have some kind of anchor as a belief in nothing, which is simply the belief that objects continue to exist even when we no longer see or sense them. After all, when an object hides other objects or when objects are simply out of our immediate perspective or simply be too far away to sense, we say then that there is empty space between us and some background behind where the object was. However, objects simply do not disappear and reappear according to common classical reality.

In our quantum reality, though, objects as matter waves always exist in superposition states and there is a coherent phase that somehow links their futures together. It is quantum phase coherence that provides a kind of glue that binds the universe of both charge and gravity together. Knowing the state of a matter wave provides information on the complementary coherent states of that matter wave everywhere else in the universe as well.

Although instantaneous information transfer cannot occur, quantum entanglement does make it seem like matter-wave information transfers instantaneously across the universe. However, the information about a matter wave state is simply received or felt by each of two quantum observers across the universe and those quantum observers do not transfer or communicate that information across the universe in a classical and deterministic sense of cause and effect.

If two quantum observers know about each other's complementary matter wave phase coherence, they will feel and come to know the complementary events even across the universe. However, the observers do need to know before hand about the common source that created those two events and have discovered the way the universe really works. In other words, there is a quantum bond between the two observers across the universe as a result of the coherence of a common matter wave. These two observers will then have complementary feelings about those two events that they will simply not be able to understand without a lot of prior knowledge.