That's not correct. Beauty knows that she is awake and that is relevant information.

P(Heads) = 1/2
P(Heads|Awake) = 1/3

Whether 1/2 or 1/3 is assigned depends on whether one interprets the experiment as being about a coin toss event (1/2) or an awakening event (1/3). — Andrew M

Maybe you could turn that around a bit:

p(Heads) = 1/2
p(Tails) = 1/2

p(Awake|Heads) = 1/3
p(Awake|Tails) = 2/3

Which strikes me as just a restatement of the conundrum.

I prefer the Monty Hall problem.

Says the master of the technique of going silent when proved wrong. — MetaphysicsNow

Be a man of your word, and tell us how to measure energy.

Take the chemical laws of catalysis. Point me to the theoretical work that has reduced those to the laws of physics. — MetaphysicsNow

OMFG!

Given the economic importance of chemical processes involving catalysis, do you not think that a great deal of time, effort and money has been put into understanding the various processes at a fundamental level. There are literally sections of libraries devoted to this.

You really should use google, but perhaps you have no idea even what to search for. Anyway, if you ever try to educate yourself on chemical reactions, stability of atoms, blah, blah, you will discover, underneath it all, is the Schrödinger equation. Only under rare circumstances are you forced into relativistic equations for the bulk of chemistry.

"Why aren't maths and logic sciences" remains one you have not addressed (other than to simply pronounce that they are not). — MetaphysicsNow

Have you heard of the Criterion of Demarcation? Look it up.

You don't use the principle of conservation of energy to check for the conservation of energy. You check for conservation of energy by measuring energy. — MetaphysicsNow

How do you measure energy to check that the Principle of Conservation of Energy holds?

Show a little philosophical sophistication please, this is a philosophy forum after all. The fact that QM is useful and always will be does not entail it tells us anything about reality. — MetaphysicsNow

Your:

I think the laws of that cover chemical reactions do not reduce to the laws of physics - if by laws of physics you are specifically talking about the laws covering the so-called four fundamental forces. Certainly nobody has ever reduced them - the claim that they are so reducible is just that, a claim, and a pretty empty one at that. — MetaphysicsNow

Is a keeper though, you know whenever I want a laugh.

Oh, and by the way, QM has told us a great deal about the structure of reality, but I don't think I'll bother going into that right now.

And you keep ducking the conservation of energy question, why?

Irrelevant. The point is that if you tie "laws of physics" to "current laws of physics" you rule out any further development. If you just mean "whatever becomes a law of physics" your original claim is vacuous because who knows what will be subsumed under future laws of physics in that sense. — MetaphysicsNow

What we have discovered about reality cannot be undone by future knowledge. Quantum mechanics will always work as well as it does, and nothing it has revealed to us about reality can be forgotten.

I think the laws of that cover chemical reactions do not reduce to the laws of physics - if by laws of physics you are specifically talking about the laws covering the so-called four fundamental forces. Certainly nobody has ever reduced them - the claim that they are so reducible is just that, a claim, and a pretty empty one at that. — MetaphysicsNow

You're not joking are you? I hope you are because the alternative is quite worrying.

I imagine it would depend on the circumstances - why, what's your point? — MetaphysicsNow

How do you use the principle of conservation of energy, to check for the conservation of energy? Give it a try.

What are counted as the laws of physics have changed and continue to undergo development, so you are okay that what counts as physical changes? — MetaphysicsNow

Remind me, when was the last time the Schrödinger equation changed?

Also, what about other special sciences such as chemistry, biology and so on - are they studies of non-physical things? — MetaphysicsNow

You think chemicals don't obey the laws of physics?

why don't you class mathematics and logic as sciences — MetaphysicsNow

Because they aren't.

So far Uber's idea of linking the physical to energy conservation constraints seems the most promising. — MetaphysicsNow

How do you check for energy conservation?

And I would like everyone to remember the obvious (something often lost in philosophical debate): we are in a thread called the "non-physical." There's no way to even begin making sense of that unless we make some sort of sense of what's physical. And if the ultimate answer is "there's no way in hell to make sense of either one," then we are in a pretty terrible situation where hardly anything meaningful can be said about pretty much everything that is currently under discussion. It would all be a bunch of random people on the Internet talking past each other. It should be our group project to first come up with a good definition of physical. Doesn't have to be perfect, it just has to be good enough. — Uber

I can see no issue with defining as physical, everything that is subject to the laws of physics. And no, that isn't circular, because we know what the laws of physics are, to very high accuracy.

Non-physical things then have to be those entities that are not subject to the laws of physics. These will include such things as the necessary truths of mathematics and logic.

Slightly murkier ground might be things such as information, which I'm going to suggest is non-physical. While the medium in which the information is instantiated is subject to the laws of physics, the information itself is not. Information can easily be copied from one medium to another, using a variety of encodings. The physical instantiation can be quite different, but the information is still the same. Also, let's not forget that information is defined counter-factually.

If information is non-physical, then algorithms must be, and by extension, the running of these algorithms on a computer. This seems wrong, because the computation consumes resources, and we are all too familiar with the heat noise and light emitted by computers, and the electricity bill. Even so, I think we are making the mistake of identifying the instantiation with the abstraction. Abstractions are non-physical.

You mean SR? And you mean that SR is a physical model that hardwires in a global time symmetry by treating time as a spatialised dimension? — apokrisis

No, I typed general relativity, because I meant general relativity, according to which, we inhabit a 4D static bloc universe.

Well now that, that implicit assumption that I have held has been expressed and open to criticism and examination, I'm not that sure it be true anymore. So, I seem to be at fault in assuming so. — Posty McPostface

What were you quoting from?

I don't think I need to spell out the fact that nationalism goes hand in hand with authoritarianism. — Posty McPostface

There seem to be several countries that are nationalistic, but not authoritarian. Iceland springs to mind, as does Japan, and certain Eastern European democracies. Why do you think "nationalism goes hand in hand with authoritarianism", when empirical evidence suggests otherwise?

Yep, but if or when there are, they will be physical and treat of physical events which are not spatiotemporal, so Uber is right that his idea of the physical in terms of energy constraints is more inclusive than mine in terms of spatiotemporal locations. — jkg20

Well, the total energy of the Universe is zero. So much for energy constraints

A problem with the view that the physical is whatever has spatiotemporal location is that physicists increasingly believe time and space are themselves emergent properties of quantum entanglement. So my definition covers those systems too (ie. the things that give rise to space and time). — Uber

Not sure there are any viable theories of an emergent space.

The basic idea behind most of cognitive neuroscience these days is the functionalist one that what a mental state is can be defined in terms of what typically causes it and what it typically causes. — jkg20

But since we know that completely different and unrelated physical states give rise to identical mental states, then cataloging human physical states cannot take us anywhere to solving the hard problem.

What other types of activity? — SteveKlinko

It depends on how the particular universal computer is constructed. There are many ways to do that.

Today we know a vast amount more about the Neural Activity (Neural Correlates of Consciousness) but in spite of that we know zero about how this Neural Activity causes Conscious experiences. — SteveKlinko

But at least we now know there is nothing particular about the neural nature of the activity that causes consciousness. It can be other types of activity. I think that is much more progress than it appears to be, and is almost completely ignored.

Is a physical mental state a contradiction? To truly argue that, you would need to provide your understanding of the word "physical." — Uber

It might not be a contradiction, but it probably is a mistake. There appears to be no sense in which any particular physical state is necessarily associated with any particular, or indeed any mental state. We know this because all computationally universal devices are equivalent, thus there is no correlation between physical and computational states.

Yes, but "laws" are a calculational machinery and so they have to represent the holism of nature indirectly. You get time-reversal because time itself has to be taken for granted as a backdrop dimension not accounted for by law. — apokrisis

I was tempted to go a bit further into the global determinism of our fundamental theories, but decided not to, because the point was made, that our "calculational machinery" is nomological, it does not capture, or attempt to capture anything relating to causation.

General relativity tells us that reality is a static 4D block - quite a feat for a mere calculating machine, I think you'll agree. Quantum mechanics, when interpreted realistically and freed of metaphysical baggage, slightly disagrees. It tells us that reality is, approximately, a countably infinite set of static 4D blocks. Again, not bad for a calculating machinery. Then of course, there are theories of quantum gravitation, such as Wheeler-DeWitt, where time is completely absent.

So, no, time is not a "backdrop dimension" and is accounted for, and these accounts have experimental support.

https://medium.com/the-physics-arxiv-blog/quantum-experiment-shows-how-time-emerges-from-entanglement-d5d3dc850933

Newton's second law is one formalism that specifies the dynamics of a classical system. It is a second-order differential equation. To solve it you need the position and velocity of a system at some given time t. You do not have to specify acceleration to solve the second law. — Uber

So acceleration is not one of the initial conditions, and is captured in the Hamiltonian or whatever you like to call the force and potential terms that evolve the state of the system with time.

Also I don't know what Tom means when saying that the acceleration is "captured" by the Hamiltonian. The canonical coordinates of the Hamiltonian formalism are position and momentum. Maybe Tom means that the time derivative of momentum in Hamilton's equations reduces to the second law? — Uber

What time evolves the initial canonical coordinates?

OK, so you are talking about Langrangian-Hamiltonian mechanics, whereas my example was expressed in the context of Newtonian mechanics. — MetaphysicsNow

You think there is a fundamental difference?

In Newtonian mechanics, the "accelleration" is captured by the "Hamiltonian" as well - the forces acting in other words, it is not an initial condition.

Have you ever actually done any physics rather than just talking about it? — MetaphysicsNow

As a matter of fact, yes.

What are you talking about, your reply makes no sense whatsoever? In dynamics, if your system involves a particle in motion, part of specifying the intial conditions for that system is to specify the particle's acceleration and whether or not it is constant. — MetaphysicsNow

The "acceleration" is captured by the Hamiltonian, not the initial conditions.

Initial conditions by themselves don't tell you how things were prior to those conditions, this is the fundamental error you are making. An initial condition at time t involving a ball with constant acceleration a an initial velocity v and an inital spatial location p will determine the forward trajectory of that ball. — MetaphysicsNow

Oh dear!

The conditions at any time give you the future, and the past. You seem confused what these are. Acceleration is not one of them.

Seth is not suggesting that consciousness is caused exclusively by neurons. He would say that consciousness emerges from the dynamical interactions between the brain, the body, and the rest of the world. The exact mechanisms are still under study. — Uber

If that is the case, then why image the brain?

Also, why ignore the fact that tells us there is nothing particular about the brain. Any computationally universal device will do?

Then why does everyone ignore the discovery that all universal computing machines are equivalent, which means that consciousness cannot be caused by neurones?

It's a great video because he does some really eye-popping live demonstrations and reviews our current state of experimental knowledge on the issue. Seth considers the "hard problem" too metaphysical, so he says he's more interested in finding and categorizing the neural correlates of conscious states. — Uber

A bit like trying to figure out what program is running on a computer by imaging the CPU.

One makes an assertion, and another accepts or rejects an assertion? — Marcus de Brun

Far better that one offers an argument, and the other offers criticism, don't you think?

Anyway, the important thing is that Popper solves Hume's "Problem of Induction" with his Scientific Method, and that knowledge of causes is indeed possible, and always fallible.

What cluelessness is MetaphysicsNow manifesting? I was under the impression that time-reversal symmetry in physics was precisely the idea that given intial conditions and terminating conditions, you can get from the latter to the fomer by reversing the time-dependent parameters. — jkg20

Nope, you only need initial conditions, which can be given at any time. Differential equations are by their very nature time-symmetric, deterministic. The laws of nature, expressed as differential equations, are of low order, and the most important one is even linear.

So, come out from under your impression into the light.

An acceptance of Humes assertion that effects are not necessarily or even reasonably 'caused' precludes a subsequent reliance upon the 'scientific method' as a methodology towards 'preference.' It merely encourages particular types of preferences and subsequent hypothesis. — Marcus de Brun

An acceptance of an assertion?

I don't mean to be pedantic, but have you really read Hume?

To repeat myself: "There is no such thing as evidence for a scientific theory."
"We cannot gain direct evidence for [a] cause."

I'm not quite sure why you think this contradicts Hume in any way. It is also standard fare in the Scientific Method.

The basis for this knowledge is the scientific method, which if flawed (as it is) would mean that your use of the word knowledge might be revised to that of 'hypothesis'? — Marcus de Brun

I don't wish to be pedantic, but are you in any way familiar with Popper?

And, yes, we actually do know what causes the sun to shine.

Why do you want to know if I have read Hume? Have you?

If you have, then perhaps you could point out anything in my post that contradicts, or disagrees with Hume in any way.

Nowhere near as low as the faked white-helmets video that lead to 105 cruise missiles being fired on Syria, nor as intriguing as the fake Skripal affair.

There is no evidence to suggest that effects are caused, there is merely repetition, possible temporal relation in that one appears to precede the other and nothing more. — Marcus de Brun

But, according to the Scientific Method, there is no such thing as evidence for any theory. All evidence can achieve is to render a theory problematic, or in rare cases, allow us to prefer one theory over another.

For example, we have a theory about what causes the radiation from the sun. This theory rests on a great deal of knowledge, involving particles, antimatter, mass to energy conversion, and many other discoveries. Now, just because we cannot gain direct evidence for cause, does not mean we do not know and understand the cause, just as we can't gain direct evidence for a scientific theory.

Given this reality, it appears that either mind and brain must be identical or the brain causes conscious experience. I have already argued against identity--not as much as I could, but that would take too long. Suffice it to say, causation is far more likely than identity. It is the only realistic option. Thus, in all likelihood, the brain causes, creates, produces, and generates conscious mental experience. — George Cobau

I've not caught up with the arguments, but it seems to me that the distinction between identity and causation might be a distinction without a difference. Either way, there will be some new physics that needs to be discovered, and that is an extremely tall order.

There is a third option, which may not have occurred to you, which I think you should consider. The major advantage it has over identity and causation theories, is that it requires no new physics. We already have the necessary physics, and even the necessary technology. We just have not made the necessary philosophical advance yet in order to implement and empirically test this third option, which, for want of a better title, I'll call abstraction theory.

The argument goes like this:

The brain is a computationally universal object. (Which you would need to argue)
All computationally universal objects are equivalent. (This is known physics)
Therefore a mind can be implemented on a computer. (A word about this in a moment*)

This leads us inexorably to conclude, that consciousness cannot be identical with the brain, or caused by the physics of the brain, but can only be caused by an ALGORITHM running on a computationally universal object. Consciousness is a software feature!

So, we no longer need to consider how matter and consciousness can be identical (they are not) or how matter can cause consciousness (it can't). What we need is to understand ABSTRACTIONS better, what sort of abstractions can exist and their properties. One property of abstractions that we now know, is that they can be conscious.

(*This might be the assumption of physicalism?)

Of course, given an initial conditionand a terminating condition, the equations of dynamics and thermodynamics will allow you to get from one to the other in either direction by making appropriate reversals to the time-dependent variables and their derivatives, but that was not the question you asked. — MetaphysicsNow

You are exhibiting the stratospheric level of cluelessness frequently encountered in those who impute ignorance to others.

First, differential equations themselves do not determine anything. Second, if your point is that all physical laws are time-symmetric, you are not accounting for the Second Law of Thermodynamics. That allows for some time-symmetric solutions where there are no changes in entropy of a system, but where changes in entropy are concerned, we have irreversibility and, yes, there are differential equations (to be specific, partial differential equations) that are used to model entropy changes. — MetaphysicsNow

So, you cannot find a single case where a physical system, whose time-evolution is determined by laws of motion, expressed in differential equation form, is not set for all times given a set of initial conditions.

And you have the temerity to accuse me of being "unaware of basic mathematical terminology"!

Now, as for the 2nd law, are you seriously suggesting it cannot be used to calculate the entropy in the past?

No, I mean simply equations that relate functions to their derivatives (of any order): i.e. the mathematical definition of a differential equation. It would perhaps help the discussion if you were aware of some basic mathematical terminology. — MetaphysicsNow

When the ignorant impute ignorance, it is never pretty, is it?

Now, because I am "unaware of basic mathematical terminology", perhaps you could find, using your deep knowledge and expertise in mathematics, one of these "differential equations" pertaining to a physical system, that does not determine the past and the future given initial conditions at any time?

Making an observation that you don't know what you are talking about and that you keep reinforcing every time you post, is not an ad hominem attack.
I'm still waiting on your explanations. — Harry Hindu

Read Darwin.

Questions about the nature of scientific laws, and the nature of numbers, and whether number is real, and, if so, in what sense, are metaphysical questions. And as such, they're not the kinds of questions which physics can provide an answer to even in principle. — Wayfarer

Science does not rely on any inductive principle, particularly as such a principle has never been successfully formulated.

How about you answer the questions that show you know what you are talking about instead of engaging in ad hominem attacks? — Harry Hindu

Sure, I

obviously do not understand the basic concepts of natural selection — Harry Hindu

Says the ass and the hypocrite.

Darwin wrote about this very issue in his most important work. Perhaps he obviously also did not understand the basic concept of natural selection?

Then let me clarify it for you. When you model what you take to be causal relations using mathematical tools, you end up - if you are successful - with a set of equations. Often enough these equations are differential in form, and differential equations can have different solutions. — MetaphysicsNow

Differential equations you say? You mean the type of equations, that given the state of the system at any time, the states for all other times may be calculated? You mean the very equations by which you may retrodict the future and predict the past?

Bingo!

Could this be the very reason that Russell and others have concluded that the laws of physics do NOT express causal relations?

Yet you still believe that science is about modeling known causal relations mathematically, and thus miraculously capturing unknown causal and acausal relations, without being aware of what you are doing.