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Missile Defense

Technology has always found its greatest consumer in a nation's war and defense efforts. Since the last attempts at a "Star Wars" defense system, has technology changed considerably enough to make the latest Missile Defense initiatives more successful? Can such an application of science be successful? Is a militarized space inevitable, necessary or impossible?

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rshow55 - 11:20am Nov 12, 2003 EST (# 17393 of 17395)
Can we do a better job of finding truth? YES. Click "rshow55" for some things Lchic and I have done and worked for on this thread.

Shakespeare lived before there was much math - but he'd have understood the connections to math needed here, I think.

There are functions.

Rates of change of functions.

Rates of change of rates of change of functions.

Rates of change of rates of change of rates of change of functions.

and so on - and though this may seem "circular" or "philosophically meaningless" - the fact is that "endless series" solutions involving these things (derivatives and derivatives of derivatives) are central to most of the key results of applied mathematics - and pure mathematics, too. Often - these sequences - properly chosen - converge.

In animal logic - especially human logic - some "intermediate processing" that is analogous goes on.

There are actions.

People think about their actions.

People think about how they think about their actions.

People think about how they think about how they think about (specific things)

People think about how they and specified others think about (specific things) in specific ways.

and so on - in complex recursive sequences . . Often these patterns not only "go round and round" - they converge.

THE PATTERNS THAT CONVERGE CAN BE REMARKABLY SIMPLE, COMPACT, POWERFUL, AND FIT TO PURPOSE.

Like f = ma .

The process is partly statistical - and partly logical. We'd be better human beings - in senses Shakespeare would understand - and other ways, too - if we knew this.

And SAFER.

Moves in that direction are going on in this thread. And even if you discount my work entirely - some excellent entertaining minds are involved. ( For instance, search Fredmoore ).

http://forums.nytimes.com/webin/WebX?8@13.frz0bsSmXM5.2893728@.f28e622/14463

A sense of what I've tried to do, and hopes worked on, is set out in a piece I wrote in the old How The Brain Works forum

http://www.mrshowalter.net/bw2203_apology.htm

That piece, read now -has elements of tragedy. Elements of comedy - and farce. And is involved with interesting stories.

_ _ _ _

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This passage is from Fundamental Neuroanatomy by Walle J. H. Nauta and Michael Feirtag ... the last paragraph of Nauta and Feirtag's Chapter 2 - The Neuron; Some Numbers reads:

"One last conclusion remains to be drawn from the numbers we have cited. With the exception of a mere few million motor neurons, the entire human brain and spinal chord are a great intermediate net. And when the great intermediate net comes to include 99.9997 percent of all the neurons in the nervous system, the term loses much of its meaning: it comes to represent the very complexity one must face when one tries to comprehend the nervous system.

To understand workable human logic at all - to "connect the dots" - and do so well - and form workable judgements - we must face the need to "go around in loops" with a lot of different kinds of crosschecking. To say "no fair doing self reference" is like saying "no fair for a neuron to connect to anything but and input or an output neuron." It doesn't work that way, and can't.

bluestar23 - 11:31am Nov 12, 2003 EST (# 17394 of 17395)

Chamberlain to Hitler @ Munich; "F=MA!!"

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