If God were all-powerful, all-knowing and all-good, wouldn't that be self-evident?

It seems to me that the formulation of the laws of nature as differential equations leaves room for several solutions. They are formulated from one point of time to the next. But there is no next point of time. Only in retrospect it can be determined whether the solution fits the differential equation. But this only plays a role in special cases like Norton's dome.

There's a reason I say I'm not the same person as you. — InPitzotl

It's not about the triviality of you not being me or anyone else, it's about whether you COULD be someone else in a hypothetical world.

So I can imagine to have been born e.g. in India. It doesn't matter if this imagination is detailed, it is enough to have a rough and principled idea. If you don't know what an imagination is or have no imagination, then of course the discussion is superfluous.

To get this scenario to make sense, it's necessary to presume that identity is, rather than constructed and generated by a physical construct, somehow fundamental and separate from physical constructs. And that presumption is basically just a presumption of dualism. — InPitzotl

It is not true that you always get out what you put in. The proof that sqrt(2) is irrational starts with assuming it is rational.

I don't put anything into my proof except that it is conceivable to be a different person in a different (imagined) world. Then simply asking what the difference is between WA and WZ. There I still wait for a conclusive answer.

I wanted to warm up my cold thread again and ask whether the existence of an immaterial instance can be regarded with my consideration now as proved.

Only the question remains whether the qualia now belongs to the matter or to the pointer proved by me.

And thus I think God can create a stone too heavy for him to lift, and lift it. — Bartricks

The example of the stone may not be good because we cannot watch.

Imagine someone in the desert praying for it to rain. It will then rain or not rain (before he dies of thirst). He will know. How can it rain and not rain at the same time?

The problem occurs when God contacts us. We cannot perceive contradictions.

Thus, it is irrelevant whether God can create contradictions, we would not perceive them.

Most of them are just silly questions that admit of easy answers. I believe in God, so I'll answer them.

Heavy Rock:

1. Can God create a rock so heavy, he himself cannot lift it? — elucid


Yes. God is all powerful and so can do anything, including making a rock so heavy he cannot lift it. He can lift it too. — Bartricks

I don't understand. If he does lift it, he obviously hasn't fulfilled the first condition.

On reflection, of course, if there is no life after death we have nothing to fear. — Apollodorus

How do you imagine this "nothing"?

Is it like floating in a dark and silent room? Seeing and hearing nothing forever?

A very terrible idea.

Anyways we've been going around in circles for a while now. — khaled

That is in the nature of things, that is philosophy.

Yes, I'm just making assumptions. I assume that an animal feels pain when you hit it. You have to decide what you believe. That is life.

But even if Qualia only depended on the physical configuration, you have absolutely no way of finding the significant variables. Maybe people born after 3 pm on Wednesdays actually enjoy torture (though they’ll act like the rest of us and scream). — khaled

I assume that the "Qualia law" (matter->Qualia) is a law of nature similar to the other laws of nature, thus steady and time-independent.
Like Newton's law of universal gravitation, it has no jumps and is not different on Wednesdays than on Tuesdays.

If everything would be arbitrary, do you then go in the evening on the street and beat up people, because it can be that they are sad, if you do NOT do it?

But as you said, qualia must be completely separate from any physics, or else the physicists will consume it as some force or other. So you have no reason to believe that a clone of you, with the exact same matter configuration, would have the same, or similar, or any qualia. — khaled

After all, I am a victim of my own arguments. That qualia can have no effect on the matter is logical, since every effect entails a contribution in a physics book. So it remains only matter->qualia and not vice versa.

That the arrow in matter->qualia, however, should result in different right sides with the same left side, would mean that the qualia would still have to depend on something else. What should be that?

And you have 0 reason to believe they are experiencing the same qualia as you, if any qualia at all. — khaled

There is an infinitesimally narrow gap of realization if someone has EXACTLY the inner configuration of oneself.

Then it is to be assumed that the equality also leads to equal qualia. Now it would be extremely implausible that a small deviation would lead to a completely different qualia (or no qualia). That would be very discontinuous.

Anything is possible, but that doesn't get us anywhere.

I doubt qualia can be treated as a good basis for ethics. Especially given that you can't even tell anyone else has it other than yourself. How do you know the keyboard you're typing on right now isn't in extreme pain? Those are the questions you have to ask when you propose an ineffable, private qualia. — khaled

Exactly. I cannot know it. But I can accept it as plausible that I am not the exception in the universe.

We are faced with the amazing situation of not being able to prove something intuitively true.

Which is more probable?
1) I am the only human being who has qualia.
2) There is a principle which material configuration has qualia.

↪SolarWind

"Epiphenomenalism is true and we can prove it:

If there would be a mind effect, this effect could be captured by the physicists, they will eat everything what has an effect and define a force to it.

What remains can only be an epi. Q.e.d. !" — SolarWind

This assumes that something will remain. I don't think so. — khaled

It is the other way to eliminate qualia. However, this would mean that ethically speaking, any genocide would be the same as breaking stones.

I think that is not the whole truth.

Do you think that some physical effects are not caused sufficiently by physical causes? Because it's that or epiphenomenalism. — khaled

Epiphenomenalism is true and we can prove it:

If there would be a mind effect, this effect could be captured by the physicists, they will eat everything what has an effect and define a force to it.

What remains can only be an epi. Q.e.d. !

The mistake most make when it comes to time is to conceive of it as a kind of extended stuff, and that immediately generates actual infinities. For now any region of time, like any region of space, can be infinitely divided. And thus we have to posit actual infinities. Which can't exist. — Bartricks

I would actually phrase it a little differently. For me, time is the display of an imaginary clock. After all, it is not possible to place a clock inside the sun. Would someone claim in the inside of the sun there would be therefore no time?

One must distinguish simply between events and the time itself. The events play no role for the abstract time, also not the Big Bang. I can imagine a clock, which survives all events and therefore this clock can indicate any time (it would have to be able to indicate however arbitrarily many digits).

This clock could have shown any time back to negative infinity.

Jellyfish, bacteria and viruses can reproduce well and have no brain.

... and the impotent ones are not self aware sentient.

I would say that qualia is not explained by information alone. Is your computer happy when it beats you in chess? If yes, why not?

The "measurement problem" is not a problem scientists who measure things face, ... — boethius

Of course not. According to the Schrödinger-Newton-Equation, even the cat is big enough to cause a collapse. Together with the Bohmian Mechanics and the entanglement of measuring object and measuring apparatus (e.g. the cat) everything is explained. The cat is already in a defined state before looking. And the moon is also there when nobody looks. Nobody needs MWI.

Usually in these discussions what I am calling "a fork in the road" is called a branch in a graph of possible state changes.

What it means is simply that when a "wave collapses" and a value previously represented by a range of possibilities becomes one possibility ... — boethius

However, splitting into different possibilities again involves the definition of measurement, which is precisely what is to be avoided in the MWI. If I have defined what exactly a measurement is, then I can simply choose the Copenhagen Interpretation. The MWI would then be superfluous.

There's no wave collapse in MWI, as the idea there is all possibilities really exist in some physical definite state and new universes pop into existence every time there is a quantum fork in the road. — boethius

What exactly is a "quantum fork"?

One can discuss the question of free will for many miles. All unnecessary, because the question is wrongly posed. My will is free from what? That would be the right question. My will is free from the atoms on Sirius, but certainly not from the laws of nature.

Strange that it should be unsolved. The solution is the impossibility of practical execution. How could the prisoner prove that he is not surprised? He could claim it, but he could do that every day. If he claims it on Monday and is not killed, may he claim it again on Tuesday?

Each individual neuron doesn't think or feel anything, but combined, they are more than the sum of their parts. Your position is going to lead to the hard problem: if the parts of a person don't experience pain, but the person does, how does that work? Which parts are involved? What's their function? How do they combine to produce the experience of pain? Why pain and not some other experience? — RogueAI

Of course, no one can answer that these days. But maybe a picture will help. Consciousness is like superconductivity, it is there or not. If something is not right (too high temperature, too strong magnetic field), then the superconductivity disappears. The whole system is superconducting, not the single atoms.

If you have toothache, what good is the idea that it is an illusion?

If two people stand back to back and begin walking away from each other, the space between them is not expanding, all the is happening is the distance between them is increasing. — Present awareness

At first glance, this is correct. But the difference between an explosion and an expansion of space is the presence of inertial forces. With an explosion they are obviously present, with the space expansion they are not. The galaxies "swim" quasi in the expanding space and feel no inertial forces.

"Latest" I wrote. But the truth is a combination of Bohmian Mechanics and the Schrödinger–Newton equation causing the collaps. It depends in the mass of the measuring apparatus. The cat is heavy enough.
— SolarWind

Fair enough. Is that different to the Penrose interpretation? — Andrew M

Yes. The Bohm-Schrödinger-Newton interpretation does not need the general relativity. The particles move according to Bohm, entangle with the measuring apparatus, this localizes itself over its own gravity and acts back over the entanglement, which causes the collapse. At 10^10 atomic mass units, the transition is quantum mechanical-classical according to SN equation.

OK, so consciousness causes collapse, on your view? Or something else? — Andrew M

"Latest" I wrote. But the truth is a combination of Bohmian Mechanics and the Schrödinger–Newton equation causing the collaps. It depends in the mass of the measuring apparatus. The cat is heavy enough.

But the thought experiment is not about what the cat observes, it's about where the line is drawn (if at all) for when a system stops being in a superposition of states. — Andrew M

The line is my consciousness at the latest, because I experience only one world.

"the photon still interacts with the apparatus at the slits"
— Andrew M

Not the photons passing the slits. — Olivier5

And what about the many neutrinos that are flowing through the earth, and what about the virtual particles?

Van der Waals forces are inter molecular. Gravity does not affect light. — Olivier5

Matter is an antenna for electromagnetic waves via displacement of charge distribution (Van der Waals) and partially absorbs the EM waves.

With gravitation the deflection of light is known.

I would assume that the photon behaves as a wave until it interacts with something, at which point somehow it behaves as a particle. — Olivier5

That is childish. An interaction always exists: The Van der Waals forces from the laboratory, the natural radioactivity and the gravity of the earth.

MWI isn't proposing that anything different happens with wavefunctions than that they evolve in accordance with Schrodinger's Equation. — InPitzotl

Oh sorry. I actually thought "many worlds" had something to do with many worlds. And in every book about MWI it says that they divide at a measurement. But maybe you are talking about something completely different.

"The MWI supporters claim the world divides when the states are decohered. But decoherence is an exponentially decreasing process that is theoretically never complete. Therefore already the basic assumption is wrong and the MWI can be thrown into the garbage can."
— SolarWind
That does not follow. — InPitzotl

What does not follow from what?

"This may be true if the probability is 0.5 vs 0.5. What if we wait shorter for the radioactive element to decay and the ratio is 0.58 (living cat) vs 0.42 (dead cat)? How many SA2 and SB2 are there then?"
— SolarWind
Still two, or many. It depends on how you resolve the fact that the BR appears to work in MWI, and that's something I'm not sure how to do... possibly that's a good reason not to buy into it, or maybe it's just something beyond my scope. — InPitzotl

It's even worse. The MWI supporters claim the world divides when the states are decohered. But decoherence is an exponentially decreasing process that is theoretically never complete. Therefore already the basic assumption is wrong and the MWI can be thrown into the garbage can.

Let's say S1 is Schrodinger before opening the box, SA2 is Schrodinger who opens the box seeing a living cat; SB2 is Schrodinger who opens the box seeing a dead cat. — InPitzotl

This may be true if the probability is 0.5 vs 0.5. What if we wait shorter for the radioactive element to decay and the ratio is 0.58 (living cat) vs 0.42 (dead cat)? How many SA2 and SB2 are there then?

MWI is just saying as with the cat, so with Schrodinger. — InPitzotl

I cannot see myself as a quantum object. What determines in which of the many worlds I am? It makes a difference to me whether I win the jackpot or one of my many copies.

"Why are we classic? Isn't that a contradiction to MWI, where everything is quantum mechanical?"
— SolarWind
No, it's in the wavefunction. — InPitzotl

I don't understand a word, can't it be more detailed?

Don't look at the many worlds, because that's not the assumption; the worlds are just perspectives. They're descriptions to classical beings like us. — InPitzotl

Why are we classic? Isn't that a contradiction to MWI, where everything is quantum mechanical?