Sitemap for the Quadnets Website
Domains of Freedom

B.  (...) Technology Projects

C.  (...) Psychology of Freedom

D.  (...) An Alternative to Science

E.  (...) Archive of Development (prior to 2006)

(...) Author

A.  Principal Projects: multiple views of freedom

Important domains of freedom invented by human beings include contests (games, sports, markets, legal disputes). Contests suggest a unified form for psychological choices and engineering projects.

Eyes that look at objects (2023) constructs an engineering model that mimics certain activities of eyes, namely directing the gaze at an object that appears in the visual field. The "sensorial body" of the model mimics a retina in a human eye and includes a quadnet device that advances development toward long-range goals of mimicking feelings and movements of animal bodies.

A psychological model of an infant follows a course of development that starts with repetitive muscular movements and bodily feelings and then adds imagery of household objects as the child acquires habits in the home, following a pattern of growth suggested by child developmental psychologist Jean Piaget. Growth means acquiring repertoires of movements and associated mental images that are used in exercises of freedom. Additional developments lead in multiple directions: e.g., language, games, music, cooking according to recipes, yoga, math, money and markets, governments, sciences and religions.

2.  Wriggler Projects

A separate ... web page discusses the Wriggler Projects

Reports are available for download:

1. ... Wriggler I: an engineered organism (2020) (in .pdf format, 2.8 Mb).

2. ... Metamorphosis of Wriggler I (2021) (in .pdf format, 1.3 Mb)

3. ... Wavy movements in a hybrid domain of classical and Virtual Energy devices (2022)" (in .pdf format, 3.3 Mb)

4. ..., Reconstruction of the Wriggler I system for quicker, more compact operations (2022) (in .pdf format, 770 kb)

Reports of Wriggler projects are intended to be progressive, self-standing presentations. At the same time, they incorporate results from prior projects and develop concepts and methods that are based on standard technologies of electronics devices and circuits; on studies of biological organisms; and on physics models of classical mechanics and thermodynamics. These projects unify multiple streams of intellectual content by means of simplified and rudimentary paradigms that suggest further avenues for growth.
 

Wriggler I is intended to operate on the bottom of a tank of water, such as a home aquarium. Two kinds of movement are broadly classified as residential movements that are based in a sensorium in the body; and remotely-controlled movements that are directed from a scriptorium in the head. The first wriggler project constructs "a rational kind of movement" of the remotely-controlled class. Muscle-like movers (red and magenta in the figure) have independent sources of energy and produce forces according to signals based in scripts that are processed in the head. The scripted movements are very simple and consist of locomotion movements along a wall, using sticker attachments at both ends of a spinal array. Movements and underlying technologies are represented by math-like forms. E.g., a set of elemental movements resembles a mathematical group and a script resembles a matrix used in linear algebra. The metamorphosis project modifies a spinal array from the first project, preparing for development of body-based wavy movements, like the wavy or wriggling movements of a worm or an eel. Goals here are more difficult to reach than in the first project and appear to require quick processing of variable signals from sensor devices in moving body parts — similar to proprioceptive functions in animals based on sensor cells in muscles and joints. Certain rudimentary residential movements are produced by designs in the third "wavy movements" project. Starting from the Simple Harmonic Oscillator (a central paradigm in classical physics), the construction leads to arrays of coupled oscillators that produce coordinated squeezing and stretching movements in classes of "compression waves." Virtual Energy devices, muscle-like movers, provide variable driving forces. Anticipated Virtual Energy device systems control timings and strengths of movements. The fourth project reconstructs and develops prior designs in simpler ways, better suited for development of residential movements.

A separate ... web page discusses the Wriggler Projects

3.  Approaching freedom: unified paradigms of choice in psychology, physics and technology (2018)

An example of a psychological choice is selecting, picking and buying one particular snack in a food market that sells many different snacks. Another example occurs in a ping pong game when a player, who has a repertoire of strokes, selects one particular stoke to execute and try to strike an incoming ball. I call these examples "psychological" because they involve feelings such as taste and appetite, readiness and confidence. During such an exercise of freedom, multiple possible movements change into a single actual movement. The Approaching Freedom project reviews paradigms of physics and mathematics and paradigms of anticipated Virtual Energy technology that parallel psychological examples of choice. The project articulates long-range goals and current conceptions of Shimmering Sensitivity.

... web page     ... .pdf report (1.2 MB)

4.  Actual Time, Detached Time and Controlled Time: Physical Paradigms and Energy Constructions (2018)

Material bodies move and change in a common actual time, which is often measured by a national standard such as Greenwich Mean Time. In contrast, mental operations such as reading and arithmetic occur in detached time:  mental operations occur at a variable rate in an individual and at different rates in different individuals. Unlike most events in actual time, operations in detached time can be delayed or repeated identically or reversed or repeated with revisions. In mimed time operations, detached time systems mimic actual time systems,, e.g., an animated cartoon. Another kind of time, controlled time, occurs when a director conducts a musical band:  movements of musicians are collective and can be repeated with variations during rehearsals.

Important physics paradigms (e.g., Carnot cycle, phase diagrams) operate in detached time and mimed time. New Virtual Energy (VE) paradigms and devices — pulsers, force devices and bursting devices — resemble standard paradigms but operate in controlled time according to new forms based on rates and changes. Kits of devices are used in designs of engineered organisms. Principles of VE designs and engineered organisms provide perspective on a psychology of movements and freedom that is based in the "entire spine" of a person — which includes the vertebral spine and brainstem (cranial nerves, medulla oblongota, pons and midbrain).

... web page     ... .pdf report (4.5 MB)

{Earlier .pdf versions: ...  May 2016 (918 kB);   ... July 2016 (4 MB);   ... March 2017 (4.5 MB);   ... May 2017 (4.6 MB)}

A precursor to the Times and Paradigms project was the bursters project, "Elemental Constructions in Virtual Energy Domains" (2015). It included extensive constructions of force devices and bursting devices that have had significant implications in later designs.

...  web page     ... .pdf report, 1.1 MB.

5.  How to Solve Free-Will Puzzles and Overcome Limitations of Platonic Science (2016)

Free-will puzzles are failed attempts to make freedom fit into forms of science. The failures seem puzzling because of widespread beliefs that forms of science describe and control everything. Errors in such beliefs are shown by reconstruction of forms of "platonic science" that were invented in ancient Greece and that have developed into modern physics. Like Plato's Ideas, modern Laws of Physics are said to exercise hegemonic control by means of universal and invariant principles. Linear expressions and rigid symmetries are abstracted from geometry and indifference. Processes tied to equilibrium require static surroundings and confine changes to series of increments. Such forms, based on empty space, fail to describe actual material transformations that occur during the making of steel or the production of snowflakes. They also fail to describe muscular movements and related bodily feelings of persons and other animals that have actual life.

Limitations of platonic science are overcome by means of new forms with the character of time, beginning with "beats" and saccadic (jumpy) forms and extending to balancing forms. Important temporal forms — critical selection processes — include exercises of freedom during which balancing changes to loss of balance and possible movements change into actual movements. New technologies of action and freedom generate and control such temporal forms in proposed device models of muscles and brains. Development leads to episodic balancing forms, which pass through critical moments of transformation, resembling those that occur when persons exercise freedom, e.g., during a moment of overtaking in a footrace or during a moment of decision by a courtroom jury.

... web page     ... .pdf report (1.9 MB)

{Earlier .pdf versions: ...  2011 (1.5 MB);   ... 2013 (1.7 MB);   ... 2013, 2015 (1 9 MB);   ... 2015 (1.9 MB)}

6.  Quad Nets: Material Foundations for Thermal Device Models of Brains (2006)

A new domain of Virtual Energy (VE) devices is constructed in imagination. Constructions begin with primal or elemental devices that are developed into advanced individual devices and collective devices with multiple kinds of control and multiple changeable operations. Operating principles in proposed VE devices are congruent with parallel aspects of biology and electronics. A VE pulse resembles an electronic impulse on a wire that instantaneously transfers an exact quantum of energy; an action potential in a nerve is not so conveniently exact but discrepancies can be overcome with additional supplied energy and accomodations for delays.

Operations in parallel domains require flows of energy: blood sugar or electricity or VE. Each VE device has an independent supply of VE that is constant or controlled by a researcher in initial designs. A primal pulser directly converts a stream of incoming VE into a steady stream of pulses. More advanced devices hold VE until triggered; then cyclical actions and waves in strings of devices are controlled by triggers. Collective operations generate, modify and control patterns of pulses in large-scale constructions. Two-dimensional deformable sheets of interconnected devices called Quad Nets are attached to one another to construct networks of devices that hold and channel VE during critical selection processes of movement production and control.

The word "thermal" in the title refers not to temperature but to general principles of thermodynamics, which are developed from phenomena of physics and materials sciences such as steam engines and metallurgy. General principles are adapted and applied in new ways to support proposals of Shimmering Sensitivity as a principle of freedom operating in VE devices.

... web page     ...  .pdf report, 1.1 MB

B.  Technology Projects

Related materials:

• In the .pdf version of the Free-Will Puzzles project, images are reduced; full-size versions are available through links on a seperate (...) web page.

• (...) Mechanical metaphors (a web page, 2007) were constructed to articulate features of cyclical selection processes and Shimmering Sensitivity in Quad Net operations.

• Embodiment of Freedom (2007) constructs parallel domains that contain psychological decisions and Quad Net operations. A single set of principles unites psychology and physics with common concepts and a common vocabulary, e.g., "selection," "critical moment," "phase changes," "tiling," "resemblances" and "cyclical selection." These proposals later developed into the Approaching Freedom project.

  ...  web page     ... .pdf report, 225 kB.

2.  Timing Devices

Timing devices were an offshoot of the original Quad Nets design. Development led to sets of timing devices with varying functions. Timing devices were later adapted as to serve functions as parts of bursters, e.g., in the Wriggler project.

a.  Brain Models Built From Timing Devices, a web project (2011)

Summary.  The timing devices "kit of parts" resembles the system of "standard electronic components" that includes resistors, capacitors, transistors, signal generators and amplifiers. "An Ear for Pythagorean Harmonics" is a simple design for a system that detects harmonic relations between two pure musical tones. "An Eye for Sharp Contrast" is more highly developed. The Eye generates sensory-motor activity that detects and focuses on a visible edge in the environment. Although timing device operating principles and devices are novel, conceptual parallels with standard electronic circuits help to organize the presentation.

(  ...  ) Opening Page

(  ...  ) A Kit of Parts

(  ...  ) An Ear for Pythagorean Harmonics

    (  ...  ) A Procrustean Group of Harmonies

(  ...  ) An Eye for Sharp Contrast

    (  ...  ) Eyes That Look at Objects

(  ...  ) Fundamentals of Timing Devices

b.  An Ear for Pythagorean Harmonics: Brain Models Built From Timing Devices (2011) a complete presentation of timing device principles and designs.

... web page     ... .pdf report (460 kB) (2011).

c.  Other Timing Devices Publications

( ... )  Selecting and Controlling Action Using Networked Timing Devices (February 2007), the original timing devices paper, a .pdf file, 832 kB.

( ... )  Timing Devices or why brains are not computers, a web page that discusses the final version of ( ... )"Selecting and Controlling Action With Networked Timing Devices," (June 2008) a .pdf file, 833 kB.

( ...  )  Convolution Timing Devices (2009), a .pdf file (68 kB).

( ... )   An Ear for Pythagorean Harmonics: Mathematical Processing in Brain Models Built From Timing Devices (2009), a .pdf file (212 kB).

( ... )  Dancer - Shimmering Gaits of a Six-Legged Engineered Organism (2009), a web page.

C.  Psychology of Freedom

A pscyhology of freedom is based on simplified or primal combinations of muscular movements and bodily feelings of a person. Itching and scratching is a simple example. Bodily feelings are the first step in development of consciousness; the domain of bodily feelings is extended and modified to include sensations of objects, feelings of the heart (emotions), memories, trained and practiced sequences of movement, facts about reality, fantasies, movies and other images on screens, technologies, math and so forth.

1.  Principal Projects. Principal Projects have extensive materials on psychological aspects of freedom. The opening page Domains of Freedom summarizes numerous exercises of freedom in a structured survey. The Free-Will Puzzles project investigates a wide range of activities that extends from decapitated frogs and devices resembing muscle fibers, on the smallest scale, to cultural conflicts, sports competitions and judicial philosophies, on the largest scale. The Times and Paradigms project distinguishes multiple and diverse psychological functions that are based in different parts of the spine and in different kinds of time. Approaching Freedom focuses on a psychology of choice; and Wriggler projects focus on a bifurcated structure of residential/remote movements. Eyes that look at objects unites selective movements and triggering sensations in a simple quadnet device model that advances towards ultimate goals.

• (...)  Avian metaphors of freedom (2015). Birds excel in bodily freedoms and collective freedoms that include flight, foraging, migration, song, mating, nesting and chick-rearing. Poets have expressed emotional responses to the freedom of birds; some poems were collected during construction of the Free-will Puzzles project.

• (...)  How Freedom Became the Fable of "Free Will" (2015) borrows and develops a theme of Nietzsche's, smoothing over the rough treatment I gave him in the Free-Will Puzzles project.

2.  Shimmering Silences in Beautiful Music / An inquiry into the nature of personal experience (2009).

( ... )  Constructed in connection with An Ear for Pythagorean Harmonics, this web project investigated psychological forms of musical experience. Continuing investigations developed into the "Music practice and performance" domain of freedom on the opening page of the website.

Extracts from "Duo Seraphim," a piece in Monteverdi's, Vespers of 1610:

Extract 1:    ( ... ) -- music .mp3 (1.3 MB);	( ... ) -- score .pdf (455 KB).
Extract 2:    ( ... ) -- music .mp3 (2.5 MB);	( ... ) -- score .pdf (1.2 MB).

( ... ) a web page, "Performers of Concert Music."

( ... ) a .pdf file (22 kB), "Phases in a Performance of Harmonic Music (Duo Seraphim)."

3.  Testimony of Freedom (2008) was a web project with a spiritual perspective.

···  A Witness for Freedom (opening statement)

1.  ···  Body and Mind of Freedom

2.  ···  Personal Freedom vs. The Mechanical Cosmology

3.  ···  Vehicles of Freedom: Physical Science, Civil Law and the Christian Religion

4.  ···  My Personal Cosmology of Jesus Christ

5.  ···  Cultivating Spiritual Life and Power

6. Action Yoga and the Sankhya Cosmology of Person and Matter

7.  ···  An Obsessive Compulsion I Call Freedom

D.  An Alternative to Science

In The Assayer (1632), Galileo Galilei famously wrote:

Philosophy is written in this grand book, the universe, which stands continually open to our gaze. But the book cannot be understood unless one first learns to comprehend the language and read the letters in which it is composed. It is written in the language of mathematics, and its characters are triangles, circles, and other geometric figures without which it is humanly impossible to understand a single word of it; without these, one wanders about in a dark labyrinth.

My views resonate with those of P. W. Bridgman, who won the Nobel Prize in 1946 for laboratory investigations of properties of material bodies under high pressure. In The Nature of Physical Theory (1936) at 67, Bridgman criticized:

a certain mystical feeling about the mathematical construction of the physical world. Some sort of an idea like this has been flitting about in the background of the paraphernalia of the thinking of civilization at least since the days of Pythagoras, and every now and then, perhaps after some particularly striking mathematical success, it bursts forth again like a crop of mushrooms after a rain, as in the recent fervid exclaimation of Jeans that "God is a mathematician." The mystical feeling involves, I think, a feeling for the "real existence" of principles according to which this universe is run. We have seen how meaningless is the contention that principles exist independent of the mind in which they are formulated. What Jeans might have said is that Man is a mathematician, and reflected that it is no accident that he forms nature in his own image.

Separate items advance the foregoing projects:

1. (...)  Conserved Energy in gravitational paradigms conflates actual time, mimed time and detached time operations, (2017), a web page developing materials from the Times and Paradigms project.

2. (...)  All About The Yoonieverse (2015), a web page extending investigations of the Free-Will Puzzles project and satirizing doctrines of the modern scientific view.

3. (...)  Facts About Snowflakes (2009), a web page. Conventional physics restricts forces inside matter to the molecular scale or smaller. This approach is unable to account for the symmetrical growth of arms of large crystalline snowflakes where elements are repeated in six different places that are widely separated. Arguments on this page were later supplemented in the Free-Will Puzzles project.

4. (...)  On Cosmological Principles in Natural Science, (2007), a .pdf file (23 kB). An early version of the critical approach later developed in the Free-Will Puzzles project.

E.  Archive of Development— projects completed prior to 2006

1.  Researches in Personal Freedom (2005) was the project that led up to Quad Nets.

( ... )   Opening page

( ... )  a web page on poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, who provided spiritual inspiration for the project, especially with his sonnet "As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame."

An Objective Kind of Freedom analyzed conceptual and psychological failures in attempts to understand freedom. Constructions revolved around concepts of energy and personality. "Howdy Doody vs. Mickey Mouse -- or, there's a real person pulling my strings" explored the spiritual reality of a person (even in the guise of a marionette), in contrast to an insubstantial disembodied image.

... web page     ... .pdf report (639 kB)

Thermal Model of Idealized Brains and Conceptual Devices That Embody Their Activities

... web page     ... .pdf report (442 kB)

A Structural Engine Model of Consciousness

... web page     ... .pdf report (229 kB)

2.  Constructing Reality: An Exercise of Freedom (2003), a (...) .pdf file (209 kB). This exploratory construction of a psychology of freedom incorporated subjective evocations in passages from fictional literature (Vasishta's Yoga, Anna Karenina, "Heart of Darkness," and The Caine Mutiny).

3.  A Patchwork of Limits: Physics Viewed From an Indirect Approach (2000), a .pdf file (157 kB).

This paper was a preliminary investigation in criticism of standard paradigms of physics and the later development of Quad Nets. It contrasts "Ideal Gas" or "Perfect Gas" paradigms that are easily applied at certain limit points with "Critical Point" phenomena that are observed in experiments with fluids, magnets and other materials and that reveal incongruities with ideal paradigms. Shimmering Sensitivity, the physical principle of freedom embodied in Quad Net devices, is an activated form of Critical Point phenomena.

... web page     ... .pdf report (164 kB) (2011)

4.  Jean Piaget and the Hazards of the A Priori (1998), a (...) web page with a critical appreciation of Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget (1896-1980), whose "constructivist approach" to child developmental psychology has provided a foundation for my own constructions.

5.  Technology of Freedom (1997) was a large-scale web project that included device designs and a rudimentary psychology of freedom in parallel constructions. Another mode of presentation resembled an imaginary travelogue or "tour" of a mountainous terrain. One theme was that device designs then being shown were only preliminary to more powerful designs yet to be developed. Hence, the travelogue was also a reconnaisance for future projects. The ( ... ) highest point in the reconnaissance foresaw pulsational devices thereafter developed.

... opening page      ...  table of contents

6.  The Crucible: Structural Foundations of Consciousness and Freedom (1992) was a natural science approach to the psychological domain of freedom, borrowing principles of materials science and with applications to specific problems in common experience. "Crucible" refers to a metallurgist's crucible in which variable combinations of metals are combined to form alloys. The problems are: (1) verbal description of a visual image — the task of stating in speech or writing the scene now before your eyes; (2) drawing a boundary around a cluster — the task of imposing a certain kind of order ("boundary") on naturally-occurring ("clustered") activity, e.g., through zoning laws; and (3) resolving a dispute through litigation — the task of organizing a disputed matter for decision by a jury.

... web page     ..., .pdf report (78 kB)

As of March 21, 2023, Robert Kovsky dedicates to the public domain all materials posted on this website, waiving all of his rights to such works worldwide under copyright law, including all related and neighboring rights, to the extent allowed by law. This dedication incorporates The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication and provisions stated at https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/legalcode.