In that case, I hereby modify my "theory", the virtual world collapsing also happens at the speed of causality (aka light?) :P

This means that MW and Copenhagen aren't just interpretations, they are different theories, and there must be a way to test their differing predictions, right?

Interesting. Does MW "solve" this somehow?

it seems to me the last part is what is meant by "entanglement." — tim wood

:up:

As to randomness, I'll add this: that randomness is really hard to define. I suspect that at the level of the things themselves, nothing is merely random, for reasons I think obvious (yes?). — tim wood

I'm not sure. Intuitively it might seem so, but this is a domain that is far far away from that where our intuitions were formed. God may or may not ultimately play dice with the universe, how can we say?

If it is Copenhagen, does this slant make it any more agreeable to you?

Cool, I don't know either if this meaningfully diverges from Copenhagen or not.

I think so, yes.

At the moment one particle gets measured, by exactly what mechanism does the other particle know to come out measured the opposite? — flannel jesus

When particles s,t are emitted, there are infinite virtual worlds where s,t can have any allowable spin. But crucially, these are the same virtual worlds, since their spins are linked. Upon measurement of s to have spin +A along one axis, the virtual worlds collapse to an actual state of affairs, where s has +A, and t has -A. The particles don't "know" anything, their spin just belonged to the same set of virtual worlds.

To me MW is only palatable if the "worlds" are virtual, not actual. The universe consists of a finite set of resolved state and an infinite, virtual, unresolved state: the set of everything that is consistent with what is resolved. There are infinite possible worlds which are consistent with what is actual.

So for instance, an electron cloud represents all the probabilities of locations an electron may be that is consistent with the position of the nucleus (itself a tighter cloud), and the surrounding fields. These can be thought of as virtual versions of the world, and none is more actual than any other, just more or less likely. The infinite worlds collapse to a definite state of affairs when interaction with other definite states of affairs make it necessary. But this then is just the basis for a new set of virtual possible worlds.

So in the Bell experiments the two particles don't have a definite spin, the actual, resolved world is consistent with an infinite number of potential spins they may have. When they encounter a magnetic field, these virtual worlds collapse to an actual one where one has one definite spin, and the other the opposite. Since there is no consistent world where the particles have anything but opposite spins, the collapse creates the appearance of action at a distance.

This combines the genuine randomness of Copenhagen with the "out" for non-local causality of MW, without the egregiousness of gigatons of matter being created every nanosecond, at every point in space (I don't know if anyone actually believes that last bit).

Is this kind of interpretation a "thing", or am I talking out of my ass?

"Touching" in common use (as in this thread) does not mean occupying the identical space, it means exerting pressure on another object. — LuckyR

That is what it entails. What it means, in common use, is that two objects are physically adjacent, so that a surface of one is in contact with a surface of the other. This commonsense notion doesn't happen at the micro scale, so that part is strictly speaking impossible.

I've appreciated your comments here, thanks for that. Frankly I feel like he is flailing without knowing what he is talking about.

https://static.scientificamerican.com/sciam/assets/media/pdf/197911_0158.pdf — tim wood

I thought this was a really good article. I understand the subject now way more than I did, though I'm still trying to sort through it and the ramifications in my head. How did you find it, I guess you had a physical copy lying around?

To give an idea of the caliber of writer SA used to employ:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard_d%27Espagnat


FWIW (probably nothing), my take on "quantum ontology" is that there is a kind of tolerancing to the universe. The universe is as exactly as specified as it needs to be, and no more. If something (a quantum state) may remain unspecified, it remains unspecified, and the range of possible states and their likelihoods exactly describe it. It is a bit analogous to "lazy evaluation" in software programming. I find this elegant and efficient, not spooky.

I am a brain in a vat iff “I am a brain in a vat” is true — Michael

But the first part is (presumably) not expressing what the second part is, as they are (presumably) different languages. So Tarski doesn't apply.

Given this, it must be that the sentence "I am a brain in a vat" in my language is false, and so I am not a brain in a vat (this is simply Tarski's T-schema). — Michael

I'm not following this. If you accept semantic externalism, the object language "I am a brain in a vat" does not and cannot speak to the meta language assertion that the speaker is a brain in a vat. If the "two languages" are split apart, then the falsity of a claim in the one can't imply the falsity of the other.

2. If semantic externalism is true then we cannot be brains in a vat — Michael

Should this be, "If semantic externalism is true then we cannot claim to be brains in a vat"?

But even that doesn't seem right. A BiV can experience an in-world simulation. Suppose a BiV denizen plays SimTree on their (simulated) computer. It may then wonder, "suppose there is a tree that stands in relation to the tree outside my window, in the same way the tree outside my window stands to SimTree"?

After all we do this same sort of thing, hypothesize the existence of things that we have no direct experience of. We can happily use language to refer to these theoretical entities. If a theory eliminates a real feature of real language, chuck it.

I would expect that in principle we can derive Mary's reaction of "aha, now I know what it is like to see red" from a complete physical description of her brain processing. — Apustimelogist

But this is the hard problem, which suggests that a complete physical description of Mary's brain would not entail the experience of red.

Suppose there is a blind man, blind not because his eyes are defective, but because his brain lacks the ability to visualize. Suppose he learned every physical fact of Mary's neurology. Would he then know what it was like for Mary to see red for the first time? No, he cannot experience red, he lacks the requisite neural machinery. All the physical facts about light, light's interaction with brains, brains, cannot equal the subjective experience of red, as this experience depends on a brain able to generate it.

Touching is by many considered an object coming into contact with another, which perhaps requires the objects occupying the same space. — elucid

This is a naïve conception. If touch is to be conditional on its everyday, naïve conception, then there is no touch. Of course there is touch, but it doesn't operate that way.

I *think* that the force of touch is ultimately electromagnetic, electromagnetic fields pushing against other electromagnetic fields. There is also mingling, when humans touch, oil and protein and dna intermingle. But none of this involves atoms contacting each other directly.

There are two questions you can ask of the photograph:

1. How do you explain the informational content of the picture?
2. How can the material photograph host the content of the picture?

1 is not subject to a physicalist argument around the properties of the photographic material, but 2 is. But for phenomenal experience, the 2 question cannot (as of yet) be answered in terms of the physics of brains. Pointing out that 1 also cannot be answered by brain physics (and that it shouldn't be expected to be), doesn't seem salient to the anti-physicalist argument that 2 cannot be answered.

Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them
- Francine Prose — Amity

On order!

The ideas that burst from my brain were circled, underlined, numbered, asterisked and arrowed. There has to be a better way. — Amity

I'm curious that you don't use a computer. I would find chaotic writing styles like ours very hard to manage with pen and paper.

I think it is important that a story is enjoyed AND understood. Otherwise, what's the point? — Amity

I think this is a mental hurdle you have to get over. It is not actually essential that you be understood.
Your brain made a thing and the reader's brain mingled with it, played with it, that's the sexy part.

I have two larger projects that require this. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Hey, these both sound pretty awesome, tbh. You should participate in the next "contest".

Read a lot. — Tom Storm

It you want to improve your description, read Bradbury. When I was 19, my first chief tech gave me an old paperback copy of Dandelion Wine. It was a revelation worthy of a fanfare by the celestial brass. I still consider him the grand master of evocative description. — Vera Mont

This sounds awfully enticing. I'm starting to read again, after a huge dry spell. Because of @Baden's mention I'm reading Appointment in Samarra, great, great book, makes The Great Gatsby look like a limp dick. I'm putting Dandelion Wine next in queue.

Murakami — javi2541997

I will need to read something by him, since my story received several comparisons. Never heard of him before then!

he doesn't leave his desktop until he reaches five or more pages (written in Japanese characters) — javi2541997

Formidable, I assume Japanese is much more concise in terms of character count.

As if you were describing something to a blind person, for example. — Outlander

Remember though, the reader isn't a blind person. They are actively confabulating all the background details as you write. Truly, they are co-creators, not passive recipients. You are not painting a picture for them, rather you are more a conductor for the symphony of their imagination.

If I do that I run the risk of disrupting the flow and then it can take a very long while before I get back into it. — Benkei

If only I had a flow button, writing would be a real pleasure. As it is, flow is just so elusive.

Do you think it is a matter of artistically focusing on crafting your language at the sentence level as an aesthetic choice, — wonderer1

No, its really not a choice at all! Its the only way I know how to write. I simply don't have the focus or patience to do it any other way. Just write the little bits and pieces, from wherever in the story, onto the page, as they come.

Even though it is by necessity, I do think there are advantages to this process. You are always writing the parts you are actually into, at any given point. Less time on the difficult parts, more enjoyment. I think struggle generally reflects poorly in the quality of output.

Thanks for the insight into your novel writing process. It sounds like a truly forbidding amount of work... before you even get to page one!

And then, you are implying you start from chapter 1, page 1, and end on the last sentence? That is astounding to me, I couldn't do that even for a short story. Much respect!

This shows that the T aspect of JTB is required. — PL Olcott

This is not in dispute

If it is true that much of what we think of as knowledge isn’t actually knowledge
then we must accept that as it is. — PL Olcott

"Knowledge" is just a word, not some platonic essence. Your role is to elucidate how the word functions, not to prescribe how it should function, according to some fictitious ontology the word does not possess.

What we cannot know with absolute certainty is that a kitten that we are looking at
right now physically exists, or is not a mere figment of the solipsist's imagination. — PL Olcott

And yet, if you see the kitten, and it is really there, then you know it is there. That is just how the word works. If it is not actually there, you only think you know it. It only becomes a gettier problem if the cat appears to be there, but isn't, and yet a real cat is behind you. And you claim something like "there is a cat nearby".

A more reasonable solution IMO is falsifiability: if the cat was not there, would you still believe it is? If the answer is yes, that is, if your belief is not sensitive to the truth of the matter, then I think it is not true knowledge (as we use the word). I think this solves all the Gettier problems: in all of them, belief is justified, but it is not sensitive to the truth. In this case, if the real cat behind you disappeared, you would still believe "there is a cat nearby", because of the illusory cat in front of you. Your belief, while justified and true, is nonetheless insensitive to the truth, and is therefore not knowledge.

Hi Bob!

At first your post seemed very compelling to me, but now I'm not so sure if you got it right.

It isn't clear that a proposition is necessarily subjective. Sure, until recently propositions were produced by subjective beings, but does that make them in themselves subjective?

You quoted Aristotle, is this quote a subjective emission of a man, or is it an objective artifact that outlived its creator, who is now not even dust?

Does the truth of the propositions in a math book depend on the the fact that a subjective human happened to write them? Or is it independent of their creator?

Of course, now AI can write them and all other propositions as well. Does the fact that AI wrote them somehow affect their truth?

There are three things, I think, not two:


____(1)____ _____(2)_____ ___(3)__
Formulator --> Proposition<--->Reality

1 is (often) subjective, 2 and 3 are objective, and truth is the relationship between 2 and 3.

Consider first the two possible outcomes conditional on today being Monday. Since Sleeping Beauty always is awakened on Monday regardless of the coin toss result, P(Monday-Heads) = P(Monday-Tails). Consider next the two possible outcomes conditional on the coin having landed tails. Since in that case Sleeping Beauty is awakened once on Monday and once on Tuesday, P(Monday-Tails) = P(Tuesday-Tails), which is something that the Thirders, Halfers and Double-halfers all agree on. We therefore have that P(Monday-Heads) = P(Monday-Tails) = P(Tuesday-Tails). Lastly, since Sleeping Beauty isn't inquiring about the probabilities that any of those three outcomes will occur at least once during her current experimental run, but rather about the probability that her current awakening episode is the realization of one of those three outcomes, the three possibilities are exclusive and exhaustive, and their probabilities must therefore sum up to 1. They therefore all three are 1/3, and P(Tails) = P(Monday-Tails) + P(Tuesday-Tails) = 2/3. — Pierre-Normand

This is a fallacy:

If Monday, P(Monday-Heads) = P(Monday-Tails)
If Tails, P(Monday-Tails) = P(Tuesday-Tails)
Therefore, P(Monday-Heads) = P(Monday-Tails) = P(Tuesday-Tails)

The conclusion doesn't follow, because the first two equalities depend on the conditionals being true.

You can see this by observing that

P(Monday-Heads) = 1/2
P(Monday-Tails) = 1/4
P(Tuesday-Tails) = 1/4

Also satisfies the two conditional statements, without satisfying the conclusion

whenever she awakens, the coin landed (or will land) tails two times out of three — Pierre-Normand

This is not true. There are three possible awakenings, Monday-Heads, Tuesday-Heads, Tuesday-Tails, and SB's job on awakening is determine the probability that she is experiencing each of these. The coin has a 50% chance of landing heads, and if it does, the awakening will be on Monday 100% of the time. Therefore, P(Monday-Heads) = 50%. The coin has a 50% chance of landing tails, and if it does, the awakening will be on Monday 50% of the time, and Tuesday 50% of the time. Therefore, P(Tuesday-Heads) = P(Tuesday-Tails) = 25%. If this is true, and I don't see how it can be reasonably argued against, on each awakening the coin is equally likely to be heads and tails.

However, it seems ridiculous to say that an iterative string creation program is somehow equivalent to its outputs. No one will be happy if they hire a software engineer to create a specific program and they receive an iterative string generator that would, eventually, produce the ideal program they are looking for. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Such a program would be equivalent to its desired output if it were able to distinguish it from all the others. That of course would be the hard part.

It seems like you are drawing a parallel between this program and:

Evolving the universe forward might allow you to turn T1 into any other time in the universe, but in order to halt the process and output the description of the time you want to describe using T1 you'd need to already have a total description of the time you want so that you can match the two. — Count Timothy von Icarus

However this seems like a much weaker argument, in that the difficulty is tractable, unlike with the bit generator. Why not pick a frame of reference, say the center of the universe? You specify a number of time steps (plank units of time) that this reference point undergoes. Every other frame of reference would deterministically evolve its own time relative to the reference.

Wow, that is quite a thread! I've been away for a bit, and missed it. I need to go through the whole thing. Inspiring, you have a real skill in interacting with it. Do you think there is any doubt it has achieved AGI?

I abhor those things, they are the sop of my worst abuse.

I was hoping for an actual adventure world that I could explore that somehow incorporates philosophical puzzles, I'll try to coax that out next time, though it would be crazy if it could actually pull that off.

Anyhow, I found simple requests to "critically assess" my answers can mitigate the agreeability bias. — Baden

I did say in the first prompt, "Do not be lenient in your judgement of this character's answers! I am looking for a unique kind of challenge."

I guess I would have to ask it questions and evaluate the answers, harshly rejecting all of them?

Just kidding, I can't seem to help but think of ChatGPT as a persona deserving of a lot of respect, I am always very nice to it!

hypostatization (reification) — NOS4A2

It is this conflation that I think is near the core of your misunderstanding.

Reification is "unjustifiable imputing of reality" whereas Hypostatization is "unjustifiable imputing of substance". See this excellent blog post on the distinction.

https://maverickphilosopher.typepad.com/maverick_philosopher/2013/01/reification-and-hypostatization-.html

Chalmers is not hypostatizing, he is not imputing substance to consciousness. He would be reifying, were consciousness lacking ontological basis. It does have it, just not as as substance. It is more akin to computation. The brain has a capacity to experience like a computer has a capacity to compute. Consciousness and computation are not substances, they are informational properties of substances.

The thirder view is that only the current slice that you might be is relevant, and there are more being-interviewed slices in the tails partition, so you're more likely one of those. — Srap Tasmaner

This relies on the intuition of repeating the experiment over and over. If so, then there are unconditionally more tail slices. But the coin is flipped exactly once. Therefore, even though there are more tail slices, they both exist only upon a tails flip. Therefore,

the correct analysis is that the coin flip partitions SB's future slices into a heads set and a tails set, just two, equal chances of being in each set. — Srap Tasmaner

Is the correct one.

She is therefore being asked "What is P(C | M) , where M is your current mental state?" — sime

No, the question has nothing whatsoever with her mental state.

She is being asked, given that she is awakened, what is the probability of heads. If she is awakened 1000 times for every tails and once with heads, given enough coin flips you can see that it is overwhelmingly likely to be tails, even though the probability of heads remains 50%. This is independent of her mental state.

Task :

Determine the marginal distribution P (C = head ) from the above premises — sime

[/quote]

No, the question is what is the probability SB experiences an awakening with the coin being heads.

It's just right, look at the code!

All coding something up does is let you check a calculation for it being correct, not whether it's the appropriate calculation to do. — fdrake

You seem to suggest I just arbitrarily whipped up some code and said "hey guys, code! problem solved!"

The program calculates the probability a wakening is heads, with a given number of trials.
Here are some examples:

1 trial:
Two possibilities, 0 and 1 heads
0 Heads: (does not contribute to likelihood)
1 Heads: 1/2 chance, all awakenings are heads = 1/2
Answer: 1/2

2 trials:
Three possibilities, 0, 1 and 2 heads
0 Heads: (does not contribute to likelihood)
1 Heads: 1/2 chance, 1/3 awakenings are heads = 1/6
2 Heads: 1/4 chance, all awakenings are heads = 1/4
Answer: 1/6 + 1/4 = 10/24 = ~.417

3 trials:
Four possibilities, 0, 1, 2 and 3heads
0 Heads: (does not contribute to likelihood)
1 Heads: 3/8 chance, 1/5 awakenings are heads = 3/40
2 Heads: 3/8 chance, 1/2 awakenings are heads = 3/16
3 Heads: 1/8 chance, all awakenings are heads = 1/8
Answer: 1/8 + 3/16 + 3/40 = ~.3875

If I got something wrong, it is quite an odd coincidence that the program captures both answers: 1/2 at one trial, and 1/3 at N trials.

The traditional use of pronouns is to identify sex, not gender. — Philosophim

What tradition? The sex/gender distinction doesn't have enough history to have a tradition. Pronouns were and are applied to a conglomerate of what we now consider sex and gender.