Pretty pictures

South polar region of Enceladus with a peculiar semi-regular series of cracks.

Enceladus crescent with faint Saturn-shine.

A mysterious-looking close one. (Many of the very closest images seem to be pictures of the night side and don't show much in JPEG form; I'm hoping that the actual raw images lit in Saturn-light can be stretched into something usable.)

Epimetheus.

A particularly beautiful picture of Saturn and the transparent innermost rings near periapsis.

Deep Impact followup

One of the stated goals of the Deep Impact mission was to punch through the upper, dustier layers of the comet to expose pristine water ice in the interior. It now appears that this didn't happen: the impact mostly threw up dust from an unexpectedly thick layer poor in volatiles, which is probably why the impact ejecta appeared brighter than expected.

For some of the scientists on the project this has to be disappointing, but it's interesting in itself, since the theory of the internal composition of comets like Tempel 1 is going to have to be revised. Tempel 1 is a periodic comet that's been orbiting more or less in the inner solar system for a long time, but it isn't quite right to just say that it's deader than expected, since astronomers already knew exactly how active it is (and plenty of jets and such have been seen in the intensive observations before and after the impact). Apparently the volatiles are further down and the boiled-out crust thicker than previous theory stated. There's also the mystery of why it looks so different from Comet Borrelly, which was photographed by the Deep Space 1 ion-drive test spacecraft; as far as anyone knew, Borrelly and Tempel 1 ought to have been similar objects.

They're all ganging up, I tell you

Oh, great, now Intelligent Design advocate William Dembski has become a fan of the quantum-consciousness people.

The Schwartz, Stapp and Beauregard paper's abstract critiques neuroscience:

Thus, terms having intrinsic mentalistic and/or experiential content (e.g. ‘feeling’, ‘knowing’ and ‘effort’) are not included as primary causal factors. This theoretical restriction is motivated primarily by ideas about the natural world that have been known to be fundamentally incorrect for more than three-quarters of a century. Contemporary basic physical theory differs profoundly from classic physics on the important matter of how the consciousness of human agents enters into the structure of empirical phenomena.

This absolutely floors me. Sure, there are people pushing consciousness-based interpretations of QM, as I've mentioned earlier. But the centrality of consciousness is very far from a consensus feature of quantum theory, and to act as if it is without any caution in the matter strikes me as highly misleading.

They elaborate on what they mean in section 5 of the paper, "The quantum approach". The rhetorical tack here is basically to speak of the measurements described by observable operators as necessarily conscious human measurements, and the choice of what observable to measure as a conscious human choice. But there's really nothing about that in the theory; this is a feature of certain interpretations of quantum mechanics.

The authors describe it as a necessary feature of the popular Copenhagen interpretation (I'll remain agnostic on the subject, and just say that the more I studied quantum physics, the less I knew what the words "Copenhagen interpretation" really meant; everyone who used it seemed to mean something different, Bohr's own statements were frustratingly vague, and early on there was a lot of emphasis on things like the wave-particle distinction that seem kind of quaint now). But the distinction between interpretation and experimentally-verified theory gets lost as they go on, until they're saying things like

The intentional actions of agents are represented mathematically in Heisenberg’s space of actions. Here is how it works.

Each intentional action depends, of course, on the intention of the agent, and upon the state of the system upon which this action acts. Each of these two aspects of nature is represented within Heisenberg’s space of actions by an action. The idea that a “state” should be represented by an “action” may sound odd, but Heisenberg’s key idea was to replace what classical physics took to be a “being” by a “doing.” I shall denote the action (or operator) that represents the state being acted upon by the symbol S. [...]

And then they run through some basic formulae of Heisenberg's operator formulation of QM, describing it all in this "intentional actions" language. I don't really know how Heisenberg treated this stuff philosophically—for all I know he talked about agents and actions—but I do know that you can use this math just fine without insisting on the symbols saying anything about intentions or conscious agents, and that to imply otherwise as if three-quarters of a century of quantum mechanics rests on some Heisenbergian theory of intentionality is really sort of a bait-and-switch.

I can't really intelligently comment on all the stuff about calcium ion channels in the brain, except to say that I've been hearing stuff like this from Fred Alan Wolf and Jack Sarfatti for ages, but Ian Musgrave's article linked at the top expresses some doubts.

Commenter "scordova" on Dembski's blog says:

This is a wonderful development! It declares that MIND is a fundamental, irreducible component of physical reality based on reasonable interpretations of contemporary physics. I have seen the idea of “MIND as fundamental” being mentioned directly or alluded to in the works of Wigner, Barrow, Tipler, Davies, Gribbin, Morowitz, von Baeyer, etc. — all respected physicists.

Now, some of these guys are respected physicists and others are better described as popular and controversial figures who happen to have science degrees. But I know von Baeyer and, while I could be wrong, I have serious doubts that he'd go for all this stuff.