The Takeaways:
- ChatGPT answers are very good at providing a quick overview (or better yet, review since its database is always lagged from today, unlike the Google search engine, although WebChatGPT solves this problem) of knowledge points from numerous fields and sources.
- Asking slightly different questions, asking chain questions, asking questions with specific demands like “non-technical terms” and switching between Google and ChatGPT, these are all honorable efforts to take advantage of ChatGPT.
- Buddha seems to possess quantum power that allowed him to offer solutions even without being close to where the problem is. With quantum mechanics it is likely for all humans to possess the Buddha power in the future.
- We live in an age when quantum physics will play a crucial role in making both metaphysics and physics change our thinking, our mindset, and our computing. There will be asymmetries between metaphysics and physics but both matters.
- We have entered an age of quantumology where laws of quantum physics apply to particles and all the way to universe.
This will be the first in a series of posts on quantumology. I have done a period of intensive searching, studying and thinking to come up with this post, no Instagram laughs, few twitter entries, just a lot of ChatGPT inquiries and re-inquiries.
Quick Notes on ChatGPT
Speaking of ChatGPT, this morning I read the interview of its CEO Sam Altman, who says the worst-case scenario for artificial intelligence is “lights out for all of us,” while “the best case is so unbelievably good that it’s hard for me to even imagine.” I would side with him for the best but not the worst-case scenario. The reason: There will be people taking the best advantage of AI and keeping lights on even brighter among themselves. It is unlikely that lights will be out “for all of us.”
Based on my own user experience, ChatGPT answers are very good at providing a quick overview (or better yet, review since its database is always lagged from today, unlike the Google search engine) of the knowledge points from the numerous fields it sets its mind to. It does a better job than Google (and also Wikipedia, although its answer is about the same length of the typical overview section in a Wikipedia entry) because you can tell from its typically 5-10 paragraphs that the contents have been optimized and screened based on machine learning.
The best part is to save readers the time of sieving through individual pieces (like those provided by the Google search engine) by giving a condensed short answer. Its language and terminology are also better and easier to understand than many entries of Wikipedia, especially when you demand for “non-technical terms” in your inquiry. Most if not all answers are like personal conversations between you and the machine, yet another charming point.
ChatGPT will significantly reduce the required human hours and efforts for writing an insightful and comprehensive “Introduction” and/or “Literature Review” sections in a scientific research project, or any writing project for that matter.
There will be mistakes and uncertainties, which happened to me. I once asked it to explain “auto insurance policy coverage terms CO CP NB UB OT RR.” The truth is there are no standard explanations across insurance carriers, so the best thing to do is to check with the insurance agent representing a particular firm.
But ChatGPT really tries to help and answers all of them. One example is, “NB stands for ‘non-collision coverage,’” which is more likely wrong than right. However, I appreciate its “can do” attitude because when I did the same search in Google, it ignored me and only provided lists of insurance acronyms, even though none of them mentioned “NB.”
Making the Best Use of ChatGPT
For the best use of ChatGPT, I believe the users are better off by doing a few things right. First of all, asking slightly different questions on the same topic to make sure the best answer can come out, either in content or in wording.
Secondly and even more importantly, asking “chain questions,” meaning one question first and then follow up questions for terms you don’t understand from the first answer. This works especially well for learning something completely new because frequently you have more than one unknown.
Thirdly, asking questions with specific demands, such as “in non-technical terms” or “by examples” or “with a real-world story.” The idea is to get better understanding and/or better memory by looking at the same topic from different angles. There is no penalty, only pure gains from asking the specifics.
Finally, go back and forth between ChatGPT and Google. The latter is updated daily and provides the latest content. One thing about ChatGPT is that its answer will never cite any particular source because it is condensed from numerous sources. This is good and bad (an example of superposition in real life, see more discussion later). Sometimes you can better understand the condensed answer by checking on the individual answer, while the opposite also holds.
I practice what I preach and feel good about these steps. By the time I am drafting this post I feel like I have done one of the best Literature Reviews in my life — all with my HP laptop without leaving my room. That, I believe, speaks loudly about the combined power of AI and human efforts.
Just like anything new, what and how much one can gain depends a whole lot on one’s own attitude. There will be people copying and pasting from ChatGPT to fill up the papers, just like there are people stealing from other humans. For the rest of us, learning from ChatGPT is far more efficient than learning without it, because ChatGPT answers are broadly sourced, condensed, comprehensive and approachable. Instead of you doing the treasure hunt from a sea of documents, ChatGPT does the primary “leg work” for you to make your learning life much easier. ChatGPT essentially empowers users to quickly climb up the giants’ shoulders, inspiring you to focus on creating new things faster and better.
So much for ChatGPT, now let’s switch to Buddha and Chinese folklore.
The Monkey Who Fought Buddha
There are four classic novels that most every Chinese has read or heard of: The Red Mansion (aka Dream of the Red Mansion红楼梦, roughly the Chinese version of Downton Abbey), Romance of the Three Kingdoms (三国演义, with a civil war background similar to Gone with Wind), The Outlaws of the Marsh (水浒传, with military rebellion characters similar to those in John Wayne western movies) and The Monkey King (aka Journey to the West, 西游记, a pure fantasy similar to Harry Potter).
My favorite among the four is the Monkey King, the only fantasy masterpiece produced centuries ago before Harry Potter. While the other three were all based on historical true stories, Monkey King was almost entirely generated by human imaginations — one thing that today’s mainlanders severely lack. The only real human character was the “Monk from the Tang Dynasty (唐僧)” who’s this-worldly name was Chen Xuanzhuang (陈玄奘, April 6, 602 to－March 7, 664)
Some proverbial stories from the Monkey King are just beautiful. The most impressive was the fight between the Monkey and Buddha. It began with the Monkey (孙悟空) believing he could defeat anyone in the Heaven’s Court (天廷). To his credit, he did manage to gain an upper hand in battles with most if not all generals under the (Taoist) Jade Emperor (玉皇大帝). For a while it looked like the Monkey was about to claim himself the new Jade Emperor, as everyone, including Jade Emperor himself, was at their wits end on how to tame the rebellious Monkey.
Lucky for them at the end of the ordeal the almighty Buddha came to their rescue and managed to turn things around dramatically and with elegant ease. Instead of fighting the Monkey in a battle, Buddha simply held one of his hands out and told the Monkey if he could manage to jump out of his palm, he won and would indeed become the new Jade Emperor.
The Monkey thought Buddha was joking, because he could do this magic somersault, each of which powerful enough to send him more than 33,554 miles (十万八千里) away. Buddha’s palm seemed tiny, nothing compared to what his somersault could do.
Sure enough, the Monkey happily took the wager and did multiple somersaults (just to make sure) until he saw five giant pinky columns halfway into the cloud and thought he reached the edge of the sky. To leave a location sensitive proof, he urinated next to one column (like a dog would do by a tree) and jumped his way back where he started.
When the Monkey told Buddha that he won, citing the five giant columns as evidence, Buddha laughed and then scolded him for urinating on his palm. It turned out that the Monkey’s multiple jumps never got him out of the palm of Buddha. The five pinky columns were Buddha’s five fingers. Buddha then flipped his palm and threw the dismayed Monkey from the Heaven’s Court down to the Earth, and buried him under the Maintain of Five Elements (五行山) — waiting to be rescued by his future Master the Tang Monk, 500 years later on his westbound journey to learn the Buddhism Scriptures.
This has to be one of the best known (humorous but proverbial) stories in China. To this day when a competitor was overwhelmingly outpowered by his opponent, Chinese would say the poor guy was just like the Monkey: unable to ever jump out the palm of Buddha (孙悟空跳不出如来佛手心).
Buddha Knows Everything
It has been decades since I last read the Monkey King, yet somehow one tiny story has been locked in my head all these years — with faded details. During their risky and laborious trip to meet Buddha, the Tang Monk and his disciples (including the Monkey King) often received crucial and timely assistances from people (or animals) who would like them to return the favors by asking Buddha questions about how their lives could be improved.
Since I do not remember the details, allow me to make up a story to illustrate the point. Say someone was born blind and would like to know how he could see the world with his own eyes — like the rest of us do. When asked, Buddha offered an immediate solution: rubbing his eyes with the water from the well at the backyard of his house, after doing that for 10 days he would see everything like a normal people could!
In addition to defeating the Monkey, this is the only story that demonstrated the almighty power of Buddha. “Wow!” I remember asking the teenager of me: “How could Buddha know everything even without being close to the person?”
Buddha’s Quantum Power
With today’s technology I can’t help comparing Buddha’s power with the quantum power. One of the most fundamental features of quantum mechanics is entanglement, which basically makes spatial distance irrelevant in connectivity because entangled particles, even light years away from each other, are still related much like identical twins can never be completely independent. What makes Buddha unique is his power of entanglement with everybody, which explains why he could cure the blindness from afar.
I know the Holy Bible contains stories of how Jesus Christ magically changed people’s life. Buddha stands out with his brain power and his unmatched vision to solve problems for people thousands of miles away — without being physically close to them like Jesus did. We may say Jesus’ power works with classic physics while Buddha has quantum power.
The Days for Human Buddhas
Ever since my young ages I have found myself wondering how we humans could possess the same vision and wisdom as Buddha, the power that allows us to see through the complexity of real-world problems and to arrive at smart and functional solutions.
This essay — the most important piece ever written by me — reflects the good news that with discoveries and inspirations from quantum mechanics, we are getting ever closer toward possessing the same power of Buddha as vividly illustrated in the Monkey King.
A Prime Time for Quantum Physics
Our scientific and derived social progresses in the 20th and the first part of the 21st centuries have been driven largely by math related innovations, primarily in digital computing. Traditional or classical physics on the other hand has been claimed as “in crisis” by some or at least has been left in the backburner when it comes to triggering game-changing innovations. For example, digital computing as we know it can stay comfortably within the Newtonian framework — in the sense that the smallest unit of data, the binary digit or Bit, has a value of either 1 or 0 but never both 1 and 0 at the same time, unlike in the superpositioned quantum system.
This time around however we will see ideas in physics — quantum physics — to bring fundamental changes to our ontological (concerning nature of reality) and epistemological (concerning what is knowledge and how best to get it) thinking of the world — to both physical and social worlds.
Changes in Metaphysics & Physics
We must honor two (superpositioned) impacts of quantum physics: the abstract, intangible, subjective and sweeping metaphysics and philosophical impacts, and the material, measurable and direct physics impacts on quantum computing.
This categorization differs from the typical one that divides natural and social sciences, as well as between macroworld and microworld. These traditional divisions make intuitive sense and have been with us for centuries. Why bother with a non-traditional way of looking at changes?
Dealing with Asymmetries
One reason is to address the asymmetries of public attention toward changes from metaphysics and physics. It is much easier to overlook the metaphysics and focus on the physics, for the simple reason that many newsworthy and previously unthinkable innovations are associated with the latter (e.g., quantum camera that can take a picture of objects not directly lit by light; or even more significantly, teleportation of energy) but not with the former.
The best case in point is from quantum computing, where the notion of “Quantum supremacy” coined by John Preskill in 2012 has gained quick traction. Is there quantum supremacy in metaphysics? We have yet to see similar discourse on the metaphysics side.
But we should. Quantum metaphysics, just like philosophic ideas, applies to both social and natural worlds — in both micro- and macro scales. It represents what Einstein calls “our modes of thinking” — also for natural and social scientists alike. Quantum supremacy on the other hand will change our mode of computing from digital (or classic) to quantum.
Another asymmetry is in time scales: Progresses in quantum supremacy are expected to stay very active, with new findings coming up on an annual if not weekly basis. Since it is always exciting to celebrate new power that makes tangible improvements in our lives, news in quantum supremacy is likely to steal the show now and in the future.
Quantum metaphysics as a new mode of thinking does not work in the same way as quantum supremacy does to computing. The former will only gradually release its power. For example, we expect in the future to see most if not all computing becoming quantum, and by then it will be redundant to add the word “quantum” in front of “computing,” much like we don’t call today’s computing devices “digital computer” but just “computer.”
On the other hand, it is much harder, less feasible — even potentially harmful — to expect everyone thinking in quantum metaphysics terms, which at this stage are notoriously weird, counterintuitive and confusing even to some physicists, let alone general public.
I will explain why having a single mode of “quantum thinking” can do more harm than gains, after introducing a key new concept.
The Age of “Quantumology”
With cross impacts from both metaphysics “quantum theories” and physics “quantum supremacy” we need a name of matching breadth. I believe “Quantumology” fits the job.
Current names like “quantum physics” or “quantum mechanics” have limits in inclusiveness and scale. As of today, both names limit themselves to the microworld, facing a long way toward being connected with the macroworld. Furthermore, quantum physics is still physics if we keep in mind that mechanics is just a “branch of Physics dealing with the study of motion when subjected to forces or displacements, and the subsequent effects of the bodies on their environment.” As a result, the name leaves little room for philosophy and metaphysics.
Another possibility is to say we “quantize” anything of our choices, but that term is vague given the current knowledge status. For example, while it is easy to quantize “bit” to “qubit” by accepting a superposition of 0s and 1s at the same time, it is unclear how we quantize the human brain. Bear in mind that an individual human hardly counts as a macro entity. The challenge is much bigger when we move on to the society level, for example to quantize international relations that involve at least two countries, each of which a collection of millions or billions of individuals.
The word “quantize” also has an easy and visual link with a bunch of operation procedures, while the word “quantumology” can easily accommodate paradigm, metaphysical, conceptual and theoretical shifts. Simply put, quantumology, despite its origin in quantum physics, has the biggest advantage of preserving intellectual spaces for all the future growths and developments beyond physics and microworld, because it designates a holistic new branch of science, with an entangled nature in both natural and human domains, both micro- and macroworlds. It denotes, covers, observes, follows, studies and grows with anything and everything possessing the key features of coherence, entanglement and superpositions, with the following derived properties:
- Probabilism, which means the future state of a system can only be predicted with a certain probability, not certainty in a determinist fashion.
- Wave-Particle Duality where particles exhibit wave-like properties as well as particle-like properties, unlike classical physics.
- Uncertainty Principle, meaning the more precisely the position of a particle is known, the less precisely its momentum can be known, and vice versa. Note uncertainty is related to probabilism but more specifically introduces the duality of location and momentum such that when one dimension is higher, then the other dimension will be lower.
- State delicacy, meaning quantum states (e.g., “0” or “1,” “high energy” or “low energy”) in a superposition is sensitive to measurement and more generally to interactions with environment to be collapsed to classical state, in a process called decoherence.
The difference between the classic/Newtonian and quantumology is so large that even the smartest human like Albert Einstein had a tough time making sense of the latter. Given time however quantumology will arm humans with knowledge across fields, times and locations, capable of revealing entangled, super-positioned, quantized and historical causes, going as far back as relevant and needed — much like Buddha did to the Monkey.