Voters are cynical. Why else vote into power a party that has a documented, total disregard for the truth since 2016? — Benkei

What this and other recent and not-so-recent events show, I think, is that in times of stress people often act irrationally; self-destructive forces prevail, and when it comes to voting, people end up voting against their self-interest. In this, collectives act not unlike individuals: they lash out, become dysfunctional, and end up digging themselves even deeper.

The following Wittgenstein anecdote seems apt here. — Andrew M

It's an eye-opener, isn't it? Keeping the phenomenological perspective in mind helps to not get oneself confused with language and clever abstractions and remember what really matters.

OK, though SEP notes that "The debate about conventionality of simultaneity seems far from settled". It seems that what is important here, as with any thought experiment, is to be clear and upfront about the assumptions made. — Andrew M

I take your point. It is arguable whether in SR one can find a synchrony that is in some sense objective (though GR throws a monkey wrench into that scheme and makes things much messier). But I don't think it helps much with the personal perspective, because any such objective synchronization procedure (such as the Einstein synchronization, which they say is considered to be the best candidate in SR) is still going to differ from your personal clock, which governs everything that happens to you, including your observations and your aging processes. Nor does it enable us to subvert the speed limit on communication (and thereby conventional causality), which is what usually restores intuitive sanity to abstract paradoxes of this sort.

As you noted, these what-if questions pop up in different contexts. In the 1980s paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould raised this question with respect to the history of life on Earth. He supported the "butterfly effect" view: replay the tape of evolution, and due to the accumulation of contingencies, life would most likely go on a different path, and there would probably not be anything like the human species. Others, including another eminent paleontologist Simon Conway Morris, took the opposing "ergodic" view: convergent evolution would lead to similar, if not exactly the same forms developing, assuming the environment is roughly the same.

As you might imagine, neither side could offer much in the way of hard evidence for their position. However, since then other paleontologists and evolutionary biologists have weighed in. There is some limited empirical support building for convergence (ergodicity), but generalizing and scaling these results is difficult (see for instance a recent Science paper Contingency and determinism in evolution: Replaying life’s tape).

I think that part of the difficulty here, in addition to the scale and complexity of the problem, is that we use different models for different scales and granularities, and these models are neither practically, nor in most cases theoretically reducible to each other. When we go up the scale and coarse-grain our analysis, what was deterministic at a smaller scale becomes random or altogether invisible. Thus the butterfly may flap its wings, but we wouldn't know it or wouldn't have the means to factor it into our analysis. Of course, the very existence of coarse-grained models implies some degree of robustness: if the world really did go askew every time some damned butterfly did something in China, then what would be the point of trying to predict anything on a larger scale? We would all be reduced to butterfly-watching.

The philosophical point here, I think, is that we make a simplifying assumption regarding the present moment because of our everyday experience on Earth. But if that assumption is false (as SR would seem to indicate), then that has consequences for other concepts that depend on that assumption. Such as, for example, what it means for distant objects or events to exist right now. This idea is explored further with the Andromeda paradox. — Andrew M

I think the way Penrose explains the situation makes it clear that it is only superficially paradoxical:

Two people pass each other on the street; and according to one of the two people, an Andromedean space fleet has already set off on its journey, while to the other, the decision as to whether or not the journey will actually take place has not yet been made. How can there still be some uncertainty as to the outcome of that decision? If to either person the decision has already been made, then surely there cannot be any uncertainty. The launching of the space fleet is an inevitability. In fact neither of the people can yet know of the launching of the space fleet. They can know only later, when telescopic observations from Earth reveal that the fleet is indeed on its way. Then they can hark back to that chance encounter, and come to the conclusion that at that time, according to one of them, the decision lay in the uncertain future, while to the other, it lay in the certain past. Was there then any uncertainty about that future? Or was the future of both people already "fixed"? —  Roger Penrose, The Emperor's New Mind

There is no "difference that makes a difference" here, and I think this is the important lesson, which also shows the silliness of those who bitch and moan about how counterintuitive and just wrong relativity is. The fact is that relativity does not contradict our everyday experience. Ask yourself, what would have been different from your point of view if simultaneity was absolute rather than relative?

Another thing to note is that this and other such thought experiments rather cavalierly assume that there is some specific surface of simultaneity associated with each observer. It may be argued that the assumption is natural, but there is no physical significance to it. The standard theory of relativity says that simultaneity is conventional; there is no fact of the matter about simultaneity of distant events.

This system is not about straight up solving the is-ought gap since I think that it is unsolvable. This system is about bypassing it by giving a functional equivalent to an objective moral system with a system that gives a necessary personal goal for everyone the choice of which doesn't need to be justified since it's not a choice. It is all about whether this goal of "stability" is choosable. — Qmeri

You keep saying this, but three pages into the discussion it makes no more sense than in the beginning. I think we may as well leave it here.

I think that your main worry here is the relativity of simultaneity, the conventionality of clock synchronization protocols in SR. The only time when one can unambiguously match the chronology of the twins is when they are collocated, i.e. before or after the journey. The rest of the time the question "How long has my twin been in traveling?" does not have an unambiguous answer: it depends on the reference frame from which the length of the timeline is measured.

There is only one frame that has a special significance here: the comoving frame, the frame associated with one of the twins. Since all of the aging processes will be synchronous with this frame, this is the frame that you want to use if you want to know how much a twin has aged over time. However, that answer will only be useful to the other twin at the end of the journey, when the two twins meet, because at any other time there is no non-arbitrary way for the one twin to tell how much time has elapsed in the other twin's comoving clock as of this momement.

BUT many physicists DO believe that she doesn't have a well-defined current AGE when he is separated from her (at least if he has accelerated recently). THAT'S the conclusion that I can't accept philosophically: it seems to me that if she currently EXISTS right now, she must be DOING something right now, and if she is DOING something right now, she must be some specific AGE right now. So I conclude that her current age, according to him, can't be a meaningless concept. — Mike Fontenot

Her current age is not a meaningless concept, just under-defined. Pick a reference frame - any reference frame - and the ambiguity will disappear. The problem is that there is no absolute reference frame, so that you could say that her age is this many years, without any further qualifications, as you would in Newtonian world. In the relativistic world you must specify the reference frame to go with the age figure, and there is no right or wrong answer.

In the very same responte, khaled says that my system prescribes a course of action for every circumstance - just that it does not give simple universal courses of action like "be charitable" irregardless of circumstance. — Qmeri

I don't know which part of what you wrote he had in mind. As I already pointed out, you equivocate between a trivial (but wrong) descriptive statement about decision-making and a bare-bones prescriptive theory. To recap, the descriptive bit is that wish fulfillment necessarily leads towards a permanent state of satisfaction ("stability"). This just tell us what is, but this doesn't say anything about what ought to be. This is not a prescriptive system of ethics.

And then there is the prescriptive part, which says that you ought to make decisions so as to achieve this putative state of stability-nirvana in the most optimal way. This does not follow from the above, for all the usual reasons. You fail to bridge the is-ought gap.

Sorry, k_i ∈ (0, 1) was supposed to mean that k_i is in a set consisting of 0 and 1. Not sure what the correct notation should be.

ETA: Corrected the formula:

$\frac{1}{2}+\sum_{i=2}^{\infty}(-1)^{k_i}(\frac{1}{2})^i$, where $k_i$ is 0 or 1

We should be able to prove a stronger claim that a series composed of only positive fractions can converge to any real number between 0 and 1:

$\sum_{i=1}^{\infty}g_i(\frac{1}{2})^i$, where $g_i$ is 0 or 1

We can demonstrate this by a variant of the interval halving method. Let r be a real number between 0 and 1. If r < 1/2, then g₁ = 0, otherwise g₁ = 1. Take the next bracketing interval - [0, 1/2) or [1/2, 1] - and repeat the procedure to find the next g_i. Since each consecutive bracketing interval is half as wide as the previous one, then for any ϵ we can find n such that

$\sum_{i=1}^{n}g_i(\frac{1}{2})^i \in (r-\epsilon, r+\epsilon)$

(I beg your indulgence. It pleases me that I can still solve an elementary calculus problem decades after I took the class :) This thread should probably be moved, since it doesn't really contain any philosophy.)

His sum, the one he claims can only converge to a rational number, is something like this:

$1/2+\sum_{i=2}^{\infty}(-1)^{k_i}(\frac{1}{2})^i$, where $k_i \in \{0, 1\}$

ETA: Corrected the formula. Thanks

It can be easily shown that the series is convergent by Cauchy's criterion (yes, I just looked up the name - hey, I am three decades out of practice, you guys should be doing this :)). I suspect that it is also order-invariant (if that's the right term), but I won't attempt a proof.

The series can converge to any real number in the interval [0, 1]. There is a simple root-finding numerical method - interval halving, or bisection method - that can be used to demonstrate this. Take the function f(x) = x - r, where r is any real number between 0 and 1. Finding its root in the interval [0, 1] using the interval halving method will produce a series of the above form.

Except your willful actions can still be wrong. If you make an action that makes you temporarily more stable, but that decreases your stability in the long run, you have objectively made an error according to this system. — Qmeri

How is this "objectively an error?" You have not shown this. Your argument is that a closed system will by necessity converge towards a stable (static) state. This is both wrong and irrelevant, but let's set that aside for now. I just want to emphasize that your argument doesn't say anything about right and wrong - it just says, in the more restricted case, that whatever choices you make, in the long run they will tend to converge towards a state of perfect satisfaction. That is all.

is absolutely right: your "system" doesn't help us make decisions, it just claims to make an objective statement about decision-making in general. It is not a system of ethics, because it cannot prescribe any course of action.

If instead you propose that we ought to optimize our decision-making in order to maximize satisfaction, as measured by some metric (which you will also supply), then there is nothing "logically necessary" about that - that is just another in a long line of ethical systems that will have to compete with the rest.

I will leave you with this admonition from the recently departed philosopher Jaegwon Kim (hat tip to ), because I feel that this is kind of a theme with your posts:

There are no free lunches in philosophy any more than in real life, and I believe the cheap ones aren’t worth the money. We might as well go for the real stuff and pay the price. — Jaegwon Kim

Actually, if two proofs prove contradictory things, then there is a problem with one or both of the proofs. To say I understand one, but not the other, and I accept the one that I understand, therefore the other is wrong, as SophistiCat did, is illogical because the acceptance of the one may be based in a failure to see that its unsound, a mistaken understanding. Until you can exclude the possibility of mistake from your understanding, it is illogical to reject demonstrations which would show that your understanding is mistaken. — Metaphysician Undercover

By the same token, my hypothetical acceptance of the contrary proof could be "based in a failure to see that its unsound, a mistaken understanding." If that's the standard by which you propose to decide between the two proofs, then it cannot resolve anything. Examining the other proof wouldn't tell me anything that I didn't already know: that whatever opinion I form about the soundness of each proof, it might be mistaken.

How odd, you dismiss an argument you don't understand and don't even try to. That sounds like some sort of dogma to me. — Umonsarmon

It's not odd and it's not dogma. It's just straightforward logic: If Cantor's proof is correct, then his result is a theorem and therefore it is right. Cantor's proof is demonstrably correct, therefore his result is a theorem. You do understand that your result cannot be right if a theorem exists, according to which it is wrong, do you? If you are so confident about your result, then show us how Cantor's proof is wrong. It's as simple as that.

Have you understood the proof? — Umonsarmon

No, I haven't read your proof. I don't need to, because I have read and understood Cantor's diagonal proof. That's all I need to know that Cantor is right. Unless you can show how the diagonal proof is wrong, Cantor's result stands.

Just so you know, there's a bazillion cranks out there doing just what you are trying to do: attempting to prove Cantor wrong by proving something contrary to his result. They've been at it for decades: even before the Internet they've been inundating mathematicians and mathematical journals with their proofs. It is something like a perpetuum mobile for mathematical cranks. But none of them have managed to invalidate Cantor's proof yet.

Also a tip, since you are new on the forum: if you reply by clicking what looks like a crooked arrow underneath a post, or select some section of text and click on the "quote" prompt, then the person to whom you reply will get a notification about a reply in this thread.

This is a post on an idea I've had for awhile as to how time could exist before the big bang. Now the nearest that I can imagine to a state of pure nothingness is a state of pure homogeneity — Umonsarmon

That's a far cry from "nothing," especially when you add some sort of periodic state change, as you do further on. And it isn't anything that any cosmological theories postulate or even speculate. As a purely fictional scenario though, sure, this (with a periodic state change of some kind) would constitute a physical clock. But it wouldn't be time out of "nothing" - it would be time out of a structure that is just complex enough to support something like time.

First, to be clear, your argument is not, strictly speaking, against what you wrote in the title, that there isn't "more than one infinity," because you can't talk strictly about something as vague as that. Your argument is specifically directed against Cantor's proof that the reals cannot be put into a one-to-one correspondence with the integers. Which in Cantor's set theory means that the real set has a higher cardinality than the integer set. Which, informally, can be interpreted as the infinite real set being "bigger" than the infinite integer set, since cardinality is a generalization of the concept of set size.

Second, Cantor's proof is a theorem. The only way that you can invalidate it is if you find an error in his proof (good luck with that). If you cannot do that, then the right question to ask is not "Is Cantor wrong?" but "How is my proof wrong?" Is this what you wanted to ask?

Stability was defined precisely, although I do agree that the text has other things in it that are interpretable. Stable state is simply a state of a system that doesn't try to change aka doesn't change without outside influence. Instability is the opposite of that. And by those precise definitions an unstable system is trying to achieve change of its current state by logical necessity, which is a goal by most definitions and therefore a logically necessary one. Not just your goal is your goal.

At least for most people "your goal is your goal" does not give the same ideas as "trying to achieve a change in an unstable state is a logically necessary goal that isn't a choice". "Your goal is your goal" does not demonstrate any logically necessary goals for anyone, which is the main point of this theory. — Qmeri

You are just playing with words here. No one would describe a ball rolling downhill as trying to get to a more stable state, except metaphorically. No, a goal, by most definitions, is something that only sentient beings can have. It involves desires, intentions, planning, active pursuit - something that you won't find in non-sentient systems. Most importantly in this context, normativity does not apply to non-sentient systems (and arguably to non-humans). The movement of a ball cannot be inherently right or wrong. Only our goals can have that normative dimension. If you think otherwise, you'll have to argue for that - you cannot just play fast and loose with words and think that sufficient for an argument.

You are right in that you don't just stop at a simple tautology in your original argument. You do worse than that. By your reasoning, our willful actions can never be wrong. If you do something in fulfillment of your desires, that moves you closer to a state in which you will no longer have those desires and thus no motive to perform any further action - a stable state. So the argument goes. Of course, as someone has pointed out, living systems are only quasi-stable; they have to constantly work to maintain homeostasis, an unstable equilibrium with their environment. In conscious beings, such as humans, desires are a part of that equation. We never seize to have desires; perfect stability is death. But this isn't the biggest problem with your ethical theory. Your theory pretty much abolishes right and wrong. And since we know right and wrong, we know that your theory has to be wrong just for that reason alone.

It is true true that no logical necessity can ever give us any information about our world since they are true in every possible world. They are all trivialities. But since our intuition doesn't seem to understand all the logically necessary trivialities, they can still teach us new things we didn't realize before. (Like: I think, therefore I am.) Therefore proving things as logical necessities accomplishes useful things. In this case it demonstrates a trivial yet unintuitive goal that everyone in every possible world has. At least I didn't know that before I came up with this theory. A logically necessary triviality gave me new understanding, therefore logically necessary trivialities can give new understanding. — Qmeri

You are right that we can learn by means of logical arguments implications of which we were not aware, even though they were always "contained" in the premises. However, you are not making a logical argument here. The only reason the triviality of what you are saying is not immediately apparent isn't because of the structural complexity of the argument but because you couch your pronouncements in obscure metaphorical language - which is precisely the opposite of a logical argument, in which strict, unambiguous formal language is used, with every term having a precise definition.

You say that the goal of every person is to achieve stability. But when we unpack this sentence, it turns out that by "stability" you mean nothing other than fulfillment of a goal. So once the obscure language is peeled away, it turns out that what you said was a simple tautology: your goal is your goal is your goal. Great! Thanks for making that clear.

You are trying to do two contradictory things at the same time. On the one hand, you are trying to make your statement trivially true, so that you can call it a logical necessity: my goal is that which I am trying to accomplish. That's what your latest explanations of your stability/instability talk amounts to. This is indeed trivially true, but because of that, you cannot achieve your other goal (as it were): formulating a meaningful ethical theory.

Of course, you set yourself up for failure by the very premise of your inquiry: developing a logically necessary ethics. Anything that is logically necessary cannot tell us anything about what is or what ought to be. Logic is a sealed system, it is limited to its own abstract playground. Unless you feed it some real-world premises - which you will then have to justify - it cannot accomplish anything that doesn't collapse into triviality.

And I define a "goal of a system" as a state in which the system does not try to change meaning a state of stability. — Qmeri

But you cannot just define goals. I as a moral agent select my goals according to what I judge to be good or bad; you cannot unilaterally define my goals for me and then call it a "logical necessity."

Stability is a logically necessary property of everything since everything either is trying to change its current state or isin't. Therefore everything is trying to achieve stability since instability means that one is trying to change its current state. Therefore everything has a goal of achieving its own personal stability by logical necessity. — Qmeri

You keep repeating this, but it makes no sense whatsoever. It is trivially true that every thing either changes or it does not, but no normative statements can be logically derived from this truism.

The fact is that in most cases (not all) trying to achieve personal sustained stability is intuitively moral. — Qmeri

Although too vague and probably false, this at least is a potentially truth-apt statement - unlike what you wrote above, which is just nonsense.

This is just foundationalist utilitarianism, with your preferred utility inexplicably declared as "logical necessity."

The word “logic” has faced the same fate as every other word in our common language - it has become ill defined. — Qmeri

You are making it sound like corruption, but this is just how language normally functions: in the most general, informal context words have multiple usages and meanings, sometimes vague and imprecise. In more restricted, professional domains terms are given more narrow and strict definitions, and this applies to logic as well. Have you tried a dictionary? Or a textbook?

Fundamentally, logic is the analysis of rules. — Qmeri

Not just any rules. No one would call rules of behavior or rules of chess "logic." Logic is specifically about rules of reasoning or rules of inference - see the dictionary entry linked above, for example.

What follows in your post is a lot of words expended on explaining a very simple and commonsense concept as if it was something new. I am not sure why you felt the need to coin something that is already well understood with a neologism. (I think constraints are better than limits for what you are trying to describe. Limits are simple boundaries: you can freely move along some direction up to a hard limit. Constraints can be established with more general rules of unlimited complexity.)

So I do or I don’t, and it makes no difference whatsoever which it is. It can only be one or the other, from which follows the probability of .5 for the answer — Mww

No, it doesn't. You are misusing probability.

Sure we can; he is lying or he isn’t lying. No such thing as a partial lie. The probability is exactly .5. — Mww

If you say that the probability is 0.5, then you are saying that you have no more reason to believe one way than the other. And you appear to deduce this just from the fact that there are two disjoint possibilities. Either you are misusing probabilities or you are being unreasonable. (Just try to apply the same logic to the disjoint events of winning or losing the lottery: surely it isn't fifty/fifty?)

The probability that your friend won the the Powerball jackpot is 1 in 292,201,338. The probability that your friend is lying is likewise is very slim. Either way, you have to choose to believe in something improbable, am I right? — Wheatley

Again, just noting that something is improbable is too unspecific. Something, somewhere is always probable or improbable, depending on how you look at it. I am going to do a bit of probability algebra, but before I do I just want to emphasize that the most important thing is not cranking the handle and spitting out formulas, but to be very clear about what it is that you are evaluating - otherwise it's GIGO.

So, what do you know? You know with certainty what you just heard from your friend (let's assume that you are not dreaming or hallucinating):

E = My friend told me that he won the lottery
P(E) = 1

This event could happen in one of two ways: either your friend really won the lottery and he is being truthful, or your friend lost the lottery and he is lying (for simplicity we'll neglect all other possibilities):

W = My friend won the lottery
P(W) = 1/292,201,338 = w << 1 (very unlikely)
T = My friend is telling the truth
P(T) = t ~ 1 (very likely)

What we want to know is the probability of the first of these two disjuncts: P(W ^ T) = ?

1 = P(E) = P(W ^ T) + P(-W ^ -T)
P(W ^ T) = 1 - P(-W ^ -T) = 1 - P(-W)P(-T | -W) = 1 - P(-W)P(-T) = 1 - (1 - w)(1 - t)

Here I made another important assumption: P(-T | -W) ~ P(-T), i.e. my friend's sincerity is unconditional. The converse of that would be that my friend's sincerity can be depended upon only when nothing important is at stake. If we push aside that ugly thought, then we have our result:

I can believe my friend's claim if the probability 1 - (1 - w)(1 - t) is not too low - let's say, if it is greater than 0.5:

1 - (1 - w)(1 - t) > 0.5
(1 - w)(1 - t) < 0.5

Here we have a product of two numbers: (1) the probability of losing a lottery, which is known and is close to 1, and (2) the probability that my friend is lying, which is less certain but is assumed to be close to 0.

So it comes down to how much you trust your friend's truthfulness, but you knew that all along, didn't you? The moral of the story though is that what is rational to believe is what is probable. No exceptions. The trick is to evaluate not just any probability but the appropriate probability.

Probability can be used to decide whether to believe something - arguably, probability is nothing more than degree of belief (according to the epistemic interpretation). But you need to carefully consider what constutes the event and how it should be conditionalized.

If K is your entire body of knowledge at the moment, and E is some hypothetical event, then E is not believable if the conditional probability of E given K is low:

P(E | K) << 1

In your first example, the probability of a specific sequence of cards being dealt from a deck (E_i), given that the deck is shuffled and the dealer is not cheating (K), is low:

P(E_i | K) << 1

But the probability of any sequence being dealt is a certainty:

P(E₁ V E₂ V ... V E_N | K) = 1

So if this case seems puzzling, that just means that you were confused about which event you were considering.

Likewise, in your second example if the event is that a specific child ends up in the NBA, the probability is low, but the probability that someone's child ends up in the NBA (given that NBA is still around by that time) is a certainty.

Migration has a lot to do (and will have even more to do) with climate. People flee from lands that are stricken by severe droughts, floods, hurricanes, and other climate disruptions that result in pest infestations and crop failures. Local conflicts are also fueled by the same underlying conditions - which in turn produces more migration.

Failure of reading comprehension. As per usual.

When I said the mechanisms of quantum behavior are mysterious, I meant as they occur in natural environments, not research settings. — Enrique

If quantum behavior is different in natural settings and in research settings, then it is not not the quantum behavior that we know from quantum physics. Quantum physics is supposed to be universal, so that quantum physics in natural environments is no more mysterious than quantum physics in research settings. This then goes in the "future physics" file. At this time there is no reason to suspect anything of the sort - which of course doesn't mean that it couldn't still be true, but that's just the usual fallibilist disclaimer that we attach to almost everything.

What's the relationship of entanglement to coherence? — Enrique

Probably none, if we are talking about quantum physics, as opposed to something completely speculative.

Note the difference between the cases of chemical magnetoreception in birds and reported brain wave synchronization between different individuals. In the former case the radical pair chemistry, which is hypothesized as one of the mechanisms, takes place on a molecular spacial scale and over the duration of a chemical reaction. That's a far cry from quantum entanglement somehow getting established and maintained over vast distances and durations (by quantum measures) and in extremely noisy environment.

What exactly are you referring to when you say "sensory processing" and "naïve interpretations of qualia"? — Enrique

I mean that we cannot introspect much about the way our senses work just from the way they feel to us. They may feel like something immediate and intimately familiar, but in reality there is a lot of brain activity involved in producing that sensation, and that activity is itself is quite opaque to introspection. Being the subjects of perception doesn't give us all that much privileged knowledge about the nature of perception.

please ignore my posts as I will yours — Coben

Um... ok. I certainly didn't expect such an overreaction to my critical response. I'll take your suggestion.

Is the proposition

falsifiability should be a criterion for valid scientific hypotheses and theories

falsifiable? — Coben

What does it matter if it isn't? The proposition itself is not a scientific hypothesis or theory, so you can't turn it on itself.

This is a common but cheap epistemological critique: to demand of an epistemology to justify itself, to pull itself up by the bootstraps. Epistemology is usually offered as a foundational framework. It is not supposed to be self-justifying: take it if it works or leave it if it doesn't.

We can’t fight climate change. To fight it is to refuse to accept that climate changes - that it should change - as if it’s the change that threatens us, as if it’s us that’s most important. It’s the wrong focus. We need to be more aware of what is really happening without fearing it, to connect with what is happening, and to collaborate with it. All of it. A good start would be to stop referring to it as ‘climate change’ - it’s humanity that we need to halt... — Possibility

While everything that you wrote up to this point is very reasonable, this is pure sophistry. It's like saying "you can't fight death." A truism, of course, if you state it like this, out of context. But if you say it while watching a toddler drown in a bathtub, anyone would be in their rights to bash your brains in.

"Citizen science" is a thing, and I think scientists, by and large, welcome that. But most good citizen science is just what you might expect someone who is not well versed in the field to be able to do well: grunt work, such as data collection. There's usually a lot of such grunt work in any science, even theoretical physics (though for the latter you would need to have at least some math or computer skills in order to be useful).

Asking questions is another thing. As a nerd by nature, I like picking the brains of scientists and other professionals, and in my experience the response is usually positive at best, neutral at worst.

I think (I hope) that we are adaptable enough to survive this crisis without actually diving ourselves to extinction, as other species and populations sometimes do. But survival is the lowest bar. Can we avoid a major population crash and the collapse of our technological civilization? Maybe. Can we get through relatively unscathed? That seems very unlikely.

Certainly, as the realization of the urgency and the severity of the problem grows, the concerted efforts to combat it will intensify and become more organized. But we have few good options left to us. Drastic scaling down of greenhouse gas production seems more and more like a lost opportunity already. Some miracle sequestration technology? That would be nice, but I wouldn't bet on it. I think the most likely optimistic scenario is that we'll just cope with the consequences as best as we can.

Give it up, troll. You might as well be peddling Moon landing conspiracies here.

The mechanisms are mysterious — Enrique

No, they are not. If you are talking about QM, and entanglement specifically, the mechanisms have been laid out out in theory decades ago, and have since been very precisely measured and confirmed. "Entanglement" is not a metaphor, it's a very specific feature of QM.

If you are talking about some hypothetical future physics, then of course all bets are off (but don't expect to see anything much different where we have already done a lot of experimental research). But I don't see much point in such unconstrained speculation, to be honest.

Thinking about the relationship of human vision to qualia, it seems eyesight does involve patchiness from saccading that is partially organized neuronally pre-awareness, but this seems to be distinct structurally from what we would consider our synthetic qualitative experience. Research shows that the vast majority of neuronal activity is directed towards the senses rather than into the brain. The mind is not a passive representation of the environment, it independently generates qualia beyond the influence of a sensing that is in its basics peripheral and subsidiary to the forms of perceptual consciousness. — Enrique

And pretty much all of this sensory processing flies under the radar of our introspection, which I think is a major reason to be skeptical of naive interpretations of "qualia" - I find that illusionists have a good point here.

Despite the euphoria surrounding the Paris Climate Accord — Tim3003

Euphoria? More like weary skepticism, that was my impression. And at this point there is not much hope for it.

UN Emissions Gap Report: "The 1.5°C goal is on the brink of becoming impossible"

It would be tempting to blame pigheaded denial (@Tzeentch) or special interests, but I believe it's more a symptom of the problem than its cause. The problem, in general terms, is that we as a multi-billion civilization just aren't capable of such a collective action. Technologically, averting the worst consequences would probably be within reach if we did what is required of us, but realistically it's not going to happen.

It probably depends on what human beings are willing to introspectively assert regarding their own minds. Qualitative experiences happen that contradict a thermodynamic interpretation of nature, and some of this has been empirically observed in systematic experiments, like synchronicity in the brainwaves of meditators, but we may find some major perceptual variability, so we have to carefully navigate around our susceptibility to prejudice when we model mental capacities. — Enrique

It's a big and to my mind unjustified leap from reported "synchronicity in the brainwaves" to "contradict a thermodynamic interpretation of nature." I am quite willing to entertain the possibility of some quantum effects coming to the fore as neuroscience details its models, but I wouldn't base specific conjectures on such a shaky foundation.

As for entanglement, it is very difficult to maintain at a distance between isolated particles, even in laboratory conditions. A single photon interaction is all it takes to break it. That entangled states could somehow (?!) come into existence between particles embedded in separate bodies and then persist over time is completely implausible. This looks like very loose analogical thinking ("synchronicity" <-> "entanglement").