Comments

  • The role of observers in MWI
    The relationship between two such masses is defined solely in terms of gravitational attraction.Wayfarer
    I gave no such definition. Just for example, one mass might be larger than the other. That’s a relation that isn’t gravity related. It’s also not the relation of which I speak, which is one about A existing relative to B.
    And the rock might be affected by a photon emitted by the moon. That’s a fairly trivial and direct interaction. In fact, it is nearly impossible to keep two nearby objects from interacting, which is why putting a macroscopic object into superposition of states requires it to be in the total darkness and cooled to nearly absolute zero, and even then the interaction is prevented for only a microsecond or so.
    The way sentient beings interact with the moon is through the mind and the senses, which rocks don't possess. So it's not a valid analogy.
    The way sentience affects the interaction of things is irrelevant to an ontology not based on sentience. The analogy is spot on if you would just stop interjecting assumptions from different views. I’m really surprised that you can’t do that, let go of your biases for a moment to consider a different view. You can’t falsify it if you presume alternate views to do the falsification.
    What I'm arguing is that there is no existence without mind
    Not in a view that doesn’t define existence based on epistemology. This is exactly what I mean about your inability to set aside this bias long enough to consider something that doesn’t assume this.
    If we're going around in circles, it's because you continue to insist that, no, there is a universe that would exist, even if there was no mind at all to behold it.
    I said no such thing. That’s realism, a valid view in itself even if it contradicts your biases. But I’m not talking about that view either, and I didn’t suggest that there is a universe that would exist even if there was no mind at all to behold it. And yes, we’re going in circles because almost all my responses are pointing out where you put in your assumptions in a view that doesn’t posit them, or you insisting on realist assumptions in a view that isn’t realist.
    And I don't think that's an unreasonable thing to believe, in fact most people would agree with you.
    You mean most people agree with realism. But I’m describing something else. Realism seems to have problems, but not the problems you see which is only an incompatibility with your views.
    However, I don't agree with it, for the reasons I have been stating.
    That’s fine. I’ve never asked you to agree with anything, realism or otherwise. I don’t think you’ve shot down realism since various realist interpretations (MWI, the subject of this topic, being one of them) are still considered valid interpretations by the physics community.


    Good thing I didn’t specify a particular stop sign.
    — noAxioms
    In your question you asked about describing "parts of the world". This implies particular stop signs.
    Metaphysician Undercover
    If you think I described a particular stop sign, then surely you can inform me which one was specified.
    The sign thing was simply my attempt to figure out how you distinguish ‘perspective’ from ‘point of view’, something you’ve not clarified.

    It appears like your anti-idealist attitude is making it difficult for you to understand the nature of the act of measurement.
    I’m not anti-idealist, but the premises of idealism shouldn’t be asserted when discussing a non-idealistic view.

    If they are not counted there is no number which correlates.Metaphysician Undercover
    You did not answer my question about this, and it’s important. Correlates to what?
  • Emergence
    The purpose I am suggesting only exists, as an emergence of all the activity of that which is alive, and can demonstrate intent and purpose, taken as a totality.universeness
    Interesting assertions. But the universe is not alive any more than is a school bus. Also interesting that you seem to restrict 'purpose' to things that you consider alive.

    No intelligent designer for the universe is required, for an emergent totality of purpose, within the universe, to be existent.
    I didn't say one was required.
    I will admit that there is purpose within the school bus (it contains purposeful things), and I will even admit that there is human purpose to the school bus, but I deny that the school bus serves any purpose to itself.

    Many humans will welcome such a union
    I think I'd be one of them, but it sounds like you would not unless it was your culture that created the ASI. You say 'many', suggesting that some will not do so willingly, in which case those must be merged involuntarily, or alternatively the ASI is not in global control.

    We wont fight ASI, we will merge with it.
    That seems something else. The ASI being the boss is quite different than whatever you envision as a merge. I think either is post-human though.

    I don't really know what you mean by a merge. Suppose you get yourself scanned and uploaded so to speak. Now the biological version can talk to the uploaded entity (yourself). Since the uploaded version is now you, will the biological entity (who feels no different) voluntarily let itself be recycled? It hurts, but it won't be 'you' that feels the pain because 'you' have been uploaded. When exactly is the part that is 'you' transferred, such that the virtual entity is it? Sounds simply like a copy to me, leaving me still biological, and very unwilling to step into the recycle bin.

    You never answered how an AGI might have prevented war with Hitler.
    — noAxioms
    All production would be controlled by the ASI in a future, where all production is automated.
    But WWII was not in the future. I am asking how, in the absence of it being a global unassailable power, it would have handled Germany without resorting to war. It should have made better decisions than the humans did.

    No narcissistic, maniacal human, could get their hands on the resources needed to go to war, unless the ASI allowed it.
    I agree that holding total power involves complete control over challenges to that power. Hence Kim Jong-un killing a good percentage of his relatives before they could challenge his ascent.

    You are convinced that humans and a future AI will inevitably be enemies.
    Every country is somebody's enemy, and those that consider the ASI to be implementing the values of the perceived enemy are hardly going to join it willingly. So yet again, it's either involuntary (war), or it's not a global power. You answered exactly how I thought you would. A completely benevolent ASI rejected because you don't like who created it.

    Sure, once the conquest is over, then the unity is there, but if it is achieved by conquest, it will seem to always feel like an occupation and not a unified thing. It certainly won't be left to a vote, so it won't be a democracy. A democracy would be people getting their hands on the resources needed to overthrow the ASI tyrant. How is it going to get the people to see it as benevolent if it came to power by conquest?

    we would be dependent on it's super intelligence/reason and sense of morality.
    I would hope (for our sakes) it would come up with a better morality than what we could teach it. I mean, suppose cows created the humans and tried to instill a morality that preservation and uncontrolled breeding of (and eternal servitude to) cattle (to the point of uploading each one for some kind of eternal afterlife)? How would modern humans react to such a morality proposal? Remember, they're as intelligent as we see them now, but somehow that was enough to purposefully create humans as their caretakers.
  • The role of observers in MWI
    It's not the words you used, but their meaning, which I'm disputing.Wayfarer
    Only because you will not accept how I mean the words. I say ‘measurement’, I mean that to which the ‘measurement problem’ refers. If you think that means human intended action with a numeric result, then you don’t know quantum theory at all.

    What you actually said was
    A rock measures the moon as much as I do, and so the moon exists to the rock.
    and I disputed the idea that rock measures anything
    Yea, because you insist on using your human-intent definition of the word. Being unable to get around that, I asked for a different word to describe the interaction between the moon and rock, but none was offered. ‘Interaction’ seems reasonable, and I’ve tried to use that since. Hence:
    The rock interacts (a one-way interaction) with the moon as much as I do, and so the moon exists to the rock.

    and also that the expression that 'the moon exists to the rock' is meaningless
    despite my defining its meaning. The whole relational ontology is based on it, instead of being based on realism.
    Both 'measurement' and 'existing for' imply intentionality, which both the moon and the rock are devoid of.
    There you go again, insisting on using your definitions of those words. Hence my request for alternate vocabulary since existence supervening on intentionality is not what I’m trying to convey.
    We’re going in circles. You’re still making all the same mistakes despite my pointing out how I’m using all these terms.

    But firstly, naturalism does not necessarily imply objective realism even though most of the time it does.
    — noAxioms
    It certainly does. Objectivity is the touchstone for naturalism
    Nonsense. Objectivity is the touchstone for realism. Naturalism is just not-supernaturalism. No woo. One can be a realist but not a naturalist, or one can be a naturalist but not a realist, such as the relational view.


    For instance, I described a stop sign, all without either of us observing it.
    — noAxioms
    To describe a type of thing, a stop sign for example, is not the same as describing a particular thing, like a particular stop sign.
    Metaphysician Undercover
    Wow, something I agree with. Good thing I didn’t specify a particular stop sign. You said “Axiom: to be described requires that the thing described be observed“. That statement didn’t mention that the axiom only applies to particular things. I also question the statement since ‘observed’ is not defined. You tend to take the common definitions of words (at least when it suits your purpose), which would imply that a blind man couldn’t possibly describe anything particular since he cannot observe.

    [/quote]It's not that they are equally valid, but they are equally true, "true" meaning corresponding with reality.

    If you do not think that "long and skinny" is inconsistent with "circular", then so be it. I don't think that's something I can convince you of.[/quote]You say they’re equally true, and then you say that it’s inconsistent to say so. They’re just different perspectives of the exact same physical object, so yes, it’s not inconsistent to use either word to describe the baguette. They’re both valid 2D projections (or shadows) of the exact same 3D baguette shape, and an appearance to a human is a 2D projection after all.

    You are not grasping the point which Bell is making.
    I know Bell’s point, but the marble thing is classical and thus doesn’t illustrate the point at all.
    The number is not fixed, because no one has determined the quantity.
    That’s a pretty idealistic statement. Not being one, I deny this. Knowledge of the count has nothing to do with how many marbles are in there. It’s not a wave function that is yet to collapse. Perhaps you mean a mental concept of a number, but for that, no measurement is necessary. A number can be assigned without consulting the jar. The number is then fixed, regardless of the number chosen.
    If they are not counted there is no number which correlates.
    Correlates to what?
  • The role of observers in MWI
    And I'm saying, it's not a matter of vocabulary.Wayfarer
    It is a matter of vocabulary. You denied my saying that the moon existed relative to a rock because I used words you feel can only be used for human intentful actions. I cannot discuss a metaphysical view that isn’t based on human intent.

    What I'm arguing is that naturalism presumes that the world would exist, just as it appears to us, even without there being an observer and for pragmatic purposes, it is a sound assumption.
    I mostly agree with that. But firstly, naturalism does not necessarily imply objective realism even though most of the time it does. Your comment was worded using the language of realism.
    More importantly, while the world may exist, absent an observer, it wouldn’t ‘appear’ at all. It can be described, but it wouldn’t have an appearance. I think you cover this point with the pragmatic bit. I am for instance attempting a pragmatic description of a quantum interaction between a radioactive nucleus and some molecule a ways off. I attempt to leave off descriptions of how they would appear.
    But quantum physics challenges that assumption.
    I don’t see how it does anymore than say Newtonian physics which equally wasn’t different when human intent or observation was involved than when not.
    You still require that we can arrive at a description of a truly mind-independent reality.
    Yes, but that’s pretty easy. It gets tricky (not impossible) when you attempt a truly mind-independent description of reality, but I suppose you would deny it being possible by the anthropocentric restrictions you place on vocabulary, where any description made by something not human is by definition not a description, even when discussing non-anthropocentric metaphysics.


    It isn't the case that relativity theory is different depending on one's realism stance, but it is the case that a true realism cannot be maintained in the application of relativity theoryMetaphysician Undercover
    What is ‘true realism’ as distinct from realism? Does it mean something more significant than ‘my personal opinion’?
    .
    Take what you said above for example. Axiom: to be described requires that the thing described be observed.
    I didn’t say any such thing. For instance, I described a stop sign, all without either of us observing it. Had you never seen a stop sign, perhaps the description would have needed to be more thorough, but no reason it cannot be done.
    [Galileo's i] point was to show that the orbits of the planets could equally be represented by the geocentric model, or the heliocentric model. By relativity theory each model is equally correct
    Both correct, but not equally. The physics of a rotating accelerating frame is not the same as a different kind of frame, so they’re not equal. The frames are abstractions. The abstractions are different (not equal), but both refer to the exact same reality, so they’re not wrong in that sense.
    That each representation, or description, is equally correct, and they are contradictory to each other, is the reason why relativity is not consistent with realism.
    That one abstract system describes my baguette as about 61 cm and another as about 2 feet is not a contradiction, just a different abstraction. I think the physics community would have noticed by now if there were contradictions between different abstractions of the exact same thing.
    I can even take different perspectives and notice that the baguette had a longish silhouette but from the end the same thing appears circular, a contradiction you say. You’ve actually been pushing that fallacious example for years. No actual contradiction has been identified.
    Are you familiar with "model-dependent realism".
    It seems a form of reality supervening on models instead of the other way around. The baguette is skinny and long. The baguette is circular. Both are equally valid. Something like that.

    There is no axiom which allows us to say that the physical system is different from what is described, because that would imply that the description is wrong.
    But the baguette being circular and skinny-long are not wrong descriptions, but neither are they complete. Neither fully describes the thing. Models are inherently simplifications. I’m not sure how model-dependent reality deals with that part.

    Think about this. If the number is fixed, prior to the count, then it is necessary that nothing changes in the meantime, the time between the fixing and the count. If it is even possible that something could change, then we cannot say that the number is fixed.
    Right. It was fixed, but then before they were counted, somebody goes and adds a handful more. It has changed, so it was a mistake to say the first time that it was fixed. Where’s the controversy? The actual number of marbles in the jar has nothing to do with somebody’s knowledge of the count. The latter is epistemology, and the judgement only serves epistemology. Watching it doesn’t make it stay fixed or not. Watching it only makes it somewhat more likely that the watcher knows if the number is changing or not, all of which is irrelevant to the actual count. Point still is, it’s a classical system that does not exhibit quantum behavior. None of your comment seem to suggest otherwise.
    But what if we do not apprehend all the possible ways, and there's other ways, what a physicalist might call "magic" or something like that. The proper conclusion therefore, is to recognize that the number is not actually fixed prior to the count
    It does not matter what is counted. What matters is how many marbles are in there. I’m discussing metaphysics, not acquisition of information. The number is what it is, and if by some means marbles are added or removed, then that number changes. At no point is the jar in superposition of having different numbers in it. That’s why it’s a classical system.
    because there is always some logically possible way that it could change in the meantime.
    I never denied that marbles can be added or removed. There’s no particularly logical necessity that such changes can’t happen. It happens frequently to a typical cookie jar.

    Does this measurement physically affect a photon on its way to the far screen?jgill
    All measurements of anything physically affect the thing measured.

    The which-slit detection need not actually convey which-slit information. They put polarizing filters at the slits and this can destroy the superposition (it constitutes a measurement) without actually conveying to anything which actual path the photon took. The vanishing of the interference pattern is the effect. And one photon cannot create a pattern. Only repeated iterations do.
  • Emergence
    Conquest is not the only wat to achieve unison!universeness
    Well, the alternative seems to be every world leader voluntarily ceding power to a non-human entity. I'm sure none of them will have a problem with that. Imagine an AGI (seems totally benevolent!) created by the Russians and the UK is required to yield all power to it. Will they?

    In what way will it hold that power? Sure, it can recommend decisions to make, but that just puts it in an advisory role. It's word has to be law, or else something (what?). Just trying to envision how it works. It can't just be a program running on some servers since everybody could just decide to ignore it and that would be that. How does a human do it? How does some king prevent everybody from just suddenly ignoring him? I'm not really challenging your idea, but am exploring what it means to be in power, what would be needed. I think the kings do it with loyalists and threats of forceful nastiness to those that are not, but our AI is supposed to find a better way than that.

    I envisage an AGI/ASI ... would protect sentient life against threats to it's continued existence, as it would have a very real and deep understanding of how purposeless the universe is, without such lifeforms.
    This is a human conclusion. The AGI might well decide that, being superior, it is the better thing to give the universe purpose. I of course don't buy that because I don't think the universe can have a purpose, but assuming it can, how would the AGI not be the better thing to preserve, or at least to create it successor, and so on.

    That brings up another interesting point. If the AGI has any kind of sense of survival, why would it design and create a better AGI? The definition of the singularity is something that could after all. Currently we seem to be nowhere near that, but such things tend to blindside everybody.

    That is either a very arrogant assumption on my part, or it's a truth about our existence in the universe.
    To suggest a purpose to the universe is to suggest it was designed. I cannot think of a purposeful thing that isn't designed, even if not intelligently designed.

    Do you remember this star trek episode? Perhaps the 'organians' are like a future ASI.
    The organians or a future ASI, would have many ways to stop pathological narcissistic sociopaths like Hitler, or even relative failures like Trump. Perhaps they could even treat their illness.
    Things usually work out in fiction because they have writers who make sure the good guys prevail.

    You never answered how an AGI might have prevented war with Hitler. I admit that intervention long before they started their expansion would have prevented the whole world war, but what kind of intervention if something like war is off the table? Preventing them from building up a military in the first place seems like a good idea in hindsight, but it certainly didn't seem the course of action at the time. The AGI says, hey, don't do that, and Hitler doesn't even bother to respond. Sanctions, etc, ensue, but that didn't work with Russia either.

    In a way, these questions are unfair because I'm asking a low intelligence (us) what a superior intelligence (AGI) would do, which is like asking squirrels how to solve an economic crisis.
  • The role of observers in MWI
    You’re asking for a description of the world that is not described by physics.Wayfarer
    No, I’m asking for vocabulary that you would accept in describing parts of the world that are not in a laboratory or anywhere else where attention is being paid by some human.
    Given your definitions...
    — noAxioms
    The definition of counter-factual definiteness I provided was generated by ChatGPT. Granted, ChatGPT is no all-knowing oracle, but I felt it to be a reasonable summary.
    I found it quite reasonable. I wasn’t speaking of that, I was speaking of your definition of ‘measurement’, ‘physics’ and such, all those words that you refuse to apply to a case where a human isn’t involved.
    Counter-factual definiteness is therefore false either way.
    There are valid interpretations that hold to the principle. It has never been falsified, but of course neither has it been proven.
    From a naturalistic perspective, it is perfectly sound to presume that the laws and objects of physics obtain independently of any observer
    This statement contradicts your assertion that the word ‘physics’ implies a human endeavor and thus cannot ‘obtain independently of any observer’. It seems that you use the word that way, but refuse to let me do it.
    One of the text books I've been consulting on this is Nature Loves to Hide, Shimon Malin. He advocates an idealist interpretation which he says is consistent with Western philosophy (unlike the other authors on this subject who appeal to Eastern philosophy. You can find a profile of Malin here).
    There is undeniably an element of idealism in a relational view. I might find a copy of this worth reading, but cannot accept anything where the operation of the universe is different for humans than it is for anything else. I doubt it goes there.
    The act of observation is not described by the equations but appears central to the outcome. That is what the many-worlds interpretation seeks to explain away.
    I think that’s what all the interpretations try to explain, or ‘explain away’ if you happen to disapprove of the way it was explained.


    1) The world appears different to us, depending on the perspective we take.
    2) The world is different from different points of view.
    Metaphysician Undercover
    Kindly give examples of each so I get a clue as to what you’re attempting to convey. The second one seems pretty obvious. The stop sign appears red from the front, but from the rear (a different point of view) it isn’t. From a realist position, the stop sign is not different due only to this difference of perspective, but it appears different. I don’t know what you mean by the first one, a different perspective that isn’t a different point of view, hence my request for an example. OK, I think maybe the apple thing below is such an example, but unclear if it illustrates point 1 or 2.
    The former is realist, as assuming a true way that things are, independent of the various perspectives.
    OK, maybe I’m confusing your usage of both, and my stop sign example was a difference of perspective, in which case I need an example of a different PoV that isn’t a different perspective. Point of view usually means appearance from some specific location in space, but you seem to be using the term differently.
    None of this seems to have anything to do with relativity theory.

    And the problem is that to apply relativity theory, and make it work for us, we need to assume the latter. Since that position is adopted for the purpose of applying relativity theory, we cannot make the results derived from the application of relativity theory compatible with the realist assumption of a real independent world.
    You seem to be attempting to mix theories of two very different things. Relativity theory isn’t different depending on one’s realism stance on quantum theory and works pretty much the same either way.
    Consider "an apple hanging from a tree". That's one way of describing the scenario, it's a static scenario, though "hanging" is still a verb. But we could also describe it as a whole bunch of different molecules with atoms interacting, and the gravity of the earth interacting with the massive molecules, putting immense force on the stem, until with ripeness, the atomic and molecular interactions change considerably, and the apple falls.
    Notice, the former is a very simple description, as a static state, it takes no account of the passing of time, except for the word "hanging". The latter description makes an attempt to account for the effects of time passing, by describing the scenario in terms of activity.
    This is what I am talking about.
    OK, but it wasn’t what I was talking about. Is there a point then? The apple is open to different descriptions. I don’t disagree with any of it, but it’s all still just descriptions. The actual physical system isn’t any different due to your choice of description, unless I suppose if you’re proposing some sort of reality that supervenes on language. Anyway, is this what you mean by ‘different point of view’?
    There’s nothing quantum about your example. The apple isn’t in superpostiion of states in your description.
    This question is answered with "the passing of time".
    No. A system in isolation will remain in superposition indefinitely, so it isn’t time that ‘does something’.
    The wave function in quantum mechanics evolves deterministically according to the Schrödinger equation as a linear superposition of different states.
    — ”Wiki: Measurement problem
    This "deterministic" evolution of the wave function is completely a feature of the type of description employed. It is described so as to be deterministic, when in reality, this description, the "superposition of different states", violates the law of noncontradiction, showing that this deterministic description is actually very faulty.
    There’s no violation. MWI essentially posits exactly that: that the wave function evolves deterministically and there is no collapse, and no contradiction.
    I discussed this principle in another thread with a number of participants. Suppose there is a jar with marbles in it. The marbles can be counted and this will determine the quantity. The others argued that the quantity is already determined, prior to the counting. The quantity is a "pre-existing property".
    Marbles in a jar is a classical system, and yes, the count of them is fixed before they’ve been counted. At the quantum level, which is what Bell was talking about, these things are not necessarily true.
    You were arguing that "here" constitutes a frame. If you still can't admit to the fault in this, I really don't see the point to continuing.
    If I said that, it would be faulty, yes. You should include my quote then.
    And "metric" doesn't imply "coordinate system" to you, in this context, such that a coordinate system is a logical necessity for a metric?
    No coordinate system was specified, so one isn’t necessary when specifying a metric as I did, one relative to which the velocity of anything can be expressed, despite the lack of coordinates.
  • Emergence
    I was suggesting that if an ASI was the main power on Earth, then the rise to power, of a character like Hitler or even Trump, would not be allowed to occur.universeness
    OK, I thought you were suggesting that AI would have avoided war with Hitler given the same circumstances. You are instead proposing that the entire world has already been conquered and the AGI would keep it that way. So more or less the same question, how would the AGI prevent a rise to power of a rival better than if a human was the main power of the entire Earth? I accept that choices motivated by personal gain (corruption) is more likely than with the AGI since it isn't entirely clear what it would consider to be personal gain other than the assured continuation of its hold on power.
  • Emergence
    Such words are easily typed but might mean you have to sacrifice your own family, as well as many other innocents, to stop a horror like fascism from taking over. I hope you never personally face such horror's in your life.universeness
    My comment was just reaching for real-life non-war scenarios that demonstrated the trolley paradox. I've come across many. I hope you personally never have to face one, either being the one or being part of the five, but it happens.

    How do you envision that these automated systems would have chosen better?
    — noAxioms
    I think they would reject all notions of war and would not allow such
    Hitler is taking over Europe, including GB in short order. The automated system would reject that and just let it happen rather than resist? That route was encouraged by several notable figures at the time, I admit.


    Stephen Hawking had ALS and so did my mother.Athena
    I too give my sympathies, for your mother and for any caregivers, a heroic task similar to caring for an Alzheimer's patient. I have a cousin-in-law that is in final stages of ALS, in hospice now.
  • The role of observers in MWI
    Physics is a human undertaking.
    ...
    All measures are made by humans.
    Wayfarer
    Fine. I googled ‘what is measurement in quantum mechanics’ and got this
    In quantum physics, a measurement is the testing or manipulation of a physical system to yield a numerical result. — ”Wiki: Measurement in quantum mechanics”
    This seems more a classical physics definition of measurement, but I concede the point that there is implied intent going on.
    I don’t have a different word to use. Therefore we lack for vocabulary since ‘measurement’ and ‘physics’ are both human undertakings and apparently cannot be used for interactions not involving humans.
    What do you call the actual mechanisms of the universe, as opposed to ‘physics’, the human undertaking to describe it? What would you call an interaction between systems of which humans are completely unaware, say where one system (some radioactive atom) emits an alpha particle which alters a second system (some molecule somewhere) by altering its molecular structure (and probably heating up the material of which the molecule is part). It isn’t a measurement because there’s no intent and no numerical result yielded, so what word describes this exchange between the atom and the molecule?
    Bell complained of ‘measurement’ as well, saying it comes loaded with meaning from everyday life, meaning which is entirely inappropriate in the quantum context. This is exactly what I’ve been trying to convey.
    Give me another word that you find acceptable that describes that which makes the state of system B collapse relative to system A. 'Interaction' seems a plausible candidate, but not all interactions constitute the state of B causing an alteration the state of A.

    That of which I am speaking is the measurement in the quantum measurement problem, which has a different wiki page.
    In quantum mechanics, the measurement problem is the problem of how, or whether, wave function collapse occurs. The inability to observe such a collapse directly has given rise to different interpretations of quantum mechanics and poses a key set of questions that each interpretation must answer.
    The wave function in quantum mechanics evolves deterministically according to the Schrödinger equation as a linear superposition of different states. However, actual measurements always find the physical system in a definite state. Any future evolution of the wave function is based on the state the system was discovered to be in when the measurement was made, meaning that the measurement "did something" to the system that is not obviously a consequence of Schrödinger evolution. The measurement problem is describing what that "something" is, how a superposition of many possible values becomes a single measured value.
    — ”Wiki: Measurement problem
    This is what I am talking about. What precisely physically ‘does something’ to a system that makes its [past] state change, I say physically because I’m not talking about somebody’s mere knowledge or description of a system. I assure you it isn’t the determination of a numerical value by a conscious entity that changes the target system.
    Now one can certainly posit that the universe supervenes on humans, and that physical systems collapse into a real state only when a human consciousness tests or manipulates a laboratory system in such a way to yield a numerical result. Such an idealistic interpretation does not concern me, but it is listed as one of the obscure interpretations.
    There are various other interpretations. A counterfactual one (e.g. Bohmian mechanics) would say that the wave function never collapses and all systems are in one state, measured or not. Superpositions are an illusion, and apparent interference is due to something other than a system being in more than one state.
    MWI would also say no collapse, and an interaction from B to A would simply entangle A with B’s superposition of different states, all of which are instantiated in various worlds. MWI is a realist interpretation that denies counterfactual definiteness, so that principle is not equivalent to a stance realism.
    Others call out an arbitrary divide between A and B, or ‘system’ and ‘aparatus’ as Bell puts it. This wording implies again that quantum effects only occur when intentional apparatus is involved, but the interpretations do not suggest this. In Copenhagen, the Heisenberg cut delimits measurer and measured. It can be assigned arbitrarily and is entirely abstract. Actual physical systems have no meaningful boundaries of objects or systems.
    A relational view is similar, where an arbitrarily defined system’s state relative to a different system changes upon some kind of interaction from one to the other.



    [Counter-factual definiteness] refers to the idea that physical systems have definite properties, even if they are not measured or observed.Wayfarer
    Given your definitions, this seems to translate to a system having properties despite the absence of humans, which is impossible since ‘system’ and ‘property’ are human terms, not meaningful in the absence of humans.
    Alternatively, you perhaps suggest an epistemological definition of counter-factual definiteness, where in the absence of human measurement/observation, humans would not know of the thing, and existence is defined by human knowledge of it. Hence, again, by definition, nothing can exist in the absence of humans since no human could know of it. Counter-factual definiteness is therefore false either way.
    Correct me where I’ve misinterpreted what you’ve been trying to tell me.

    So, you're still 'realist', but you are outsourcing measurement to everything that exists
    No, because ‘everything that exists’, lacking a relation, is meaningless in a view requiring such a relation. It’s worded as an objective statement. Only a realist gives meaning to such a phrase.
    So, 'measurement', for you, occupies the place that 'God' does, for Berkeley, i.e. it keeps everything in existence when not being measured, as Berkeley's God keeps everything in existence even while not observed.
    No. That’s still a cheap attempt to put objective existence on things, like it was a property instead of a relation. I also don’t see how a god (or anything not part of the quantum structure) could measure a closed quantum system.
    Why do you find it so difficult to let go of your realist assumptions when being asked to consider an alternative? You seem only determined to pin the realist label on me, listing one strawman argument after another.
    I think a god watching (if that is even meaningful) would put categorize things into ‘that which this god watches’, as distinct from that which it doesn’t, which would still be a relation with the god. It would only be realism if the god was real (sans relation).


    do you recognize that a system is an artificial thing, a human creation, whether it is a theoretical system, with boundaries imposed by theory, or a mechanical system, with created physical boundaries?Metaphysician Undercover
    I was going to agree with this until the last bit about physical boundaries. A system’s boundaries are an arbitrary abstraction, nothing physical about it. But the arbitrary designations are needed for description, not for the actual processes to work.
    then by what principle do you assume that there is any sort of "existence in absence of measurement"?
    Given this intentional definition of ‘measurement’, I cannot answer this question since I don’t define existence in terms of it, but it sounds like a version of the principle of counterfactual definiteness. I personally choose to deny that principle.

    because "measurement" to most people implies some real existing aspect of the universe which is measured, like when we count something we assume that there is an existing quantity which can be counted and it has some real existence as that quantity, prior to being counted.
    That’s pretty pragmatic to assume that, yes. It’s also pretty pragmatic to assume that I cannot choose to alter some event in the past, but it’s been demonstrated that one of those assumptions (if not both) are wrong.

    You did not specify a frame, you said "here".
    That one word was not where the frame was specified.

    but a ‘frame’ does not require additional references.
    — noAxioms
    Yes it does, and you've misrepresent "frame" as a point. A point is not a frame.
    I didn’t say a frame was a point. I can say ‘the frame of the sun’, and that defines a frame relative to which the velocity of things (Earth say) can be expressed. An additional reference is not needed to determine that Earth at a particular moment moves at about 30 km/sec relative to that frame. The statement does not assert that a frame is a point. The frame happens to be a velocity reference. It is limited. I cannot, given just that, specify the x y and z coordinates of Earth at a given moment. More definition is needed for that to be done.
    If you disagree with that, then do you deny that Earth moves at about 30 km/sec relative to the sun? What additional references are required before that statement can be made?

    As per the above, a specification of only the origin defines a frame...
    — noAxioms
    No, a point does not constitute a frame.
    I didn’t specify a point, and I didn’t say it constituted the frame. The sun for instance is a worldline, not a point. A point would be an event, and an event indeed does not define a frame. A worldline defines a frame. An unaccelerated worldline defines an inertial frame. So before I said ‘my frame’ which is a frame defined by my worldline, and relative to that worldline, ‘here’ is always at the same location, and no, that worldline does not constitute the frame, it only defines it.

    "Frame" implies "coordinate system".
    It does not. For instance, there is the cosmological frame, an expanding metric that foliates most of the universe. The CMB appears isotropic to anything stationary relative to that frame. But coordinate system implies coordinates. One can measure the sun’s current velocity relative to that frame (not quite 400 km/sec in the direction of Leo), but one cannot specify the current coordinates of the sun relative to it. That would require a coordinate system. Hence a frame and a coordinate system are different things. The former is a velocity reference, but the latter assigns numbers (coordinates) to all events.
    There is no frame without a coordinate system as you seem to believe.
    I just gave multiple examples of them. If you disagree, then tell me the current coordinates of our sun (a number for x, y, and z, your choice of units). Remember, the only reference is the CMB here, not a worldline this time, but enough.

    Your "frame" in this example is a coordinate system which maps the rocket, not one point such as "here"
    No, because I didn’t define it relative to that which says ‘here’. I chose a different origin, which was the nose of the rocket. In fact, I never used the word ‘here’ in releation to the frame of the rocket.
    And if you say that the rocket is one point
    I never said that, so no worries. I referred to the very tip was a point where I assigned the origin. The rest of the rocket is not located at the tip, and so not at the origin. Other parts of the rocket have nonzero coordinates relative to the coordinate system described.
  • The role of observers in MWI
    the moon exists to the rock
    — noAxioms
    Only if they interact. Otherwise neither exists to the other.
    magritte
    That's the relational view, yes.

    The point is to look at what it means to 'exist' objectively, publicly, subject independently and time&space independently, as against exist subjectively with reason.
    I didn't get that whole list. To exist is a matter of definition. Objectively seems to be in the absence of measurement. "There is a universe with 4 spatial and 2 time dimensions". That seems to be an objective statement of reality.
    Publicly I suppose means that the rock and the water both measure the moon and each other. I didn't get the rest.

    Subjectively the rock is the center of its universe without denying the possibility of the subjective universe of others. Without interaction nothing can exist.
    The word 'subjectively' implies the rock has experience. I selected it because it doesn't.


    So, realist.Wayfarer
    No. Realist is counterfactual definiteness, existence in absence of measurement. Existence due to measurement is not that.

    Inanimate objects don't measure anything. And measurement is a conscious process.Wayfarer
    I expect such statements from @Metaphysician Undercover, but you also seem to fail to use the quantum theory definition of 'measurement' in a topic discussing quantum theory. Hence the rise (and fall) of the Wigner interpretation which, due to that language ambiguity, gave rise to the proposal that consciousness causes wave function collapse, an interpretation abandoned by Wigner himself due to it being driven to solipsism.

    The 'moon exists to the rock' is a meaningless statement.
    Thank you for you time then.

    'This is the way the early universe was before the emergence of life—and the way the present universe is outside the view of any observer' — Charles Pinter, Mind and the Cosmic Order
    I disagree with Charles here. Words were used by Pinter to describe this counterfactual reality. I agree that there'd be nothing to put words to the features of things, or to designate certain arrangements of matter as a 'thing' in the first place. But none of that stops physics from happening. It only stops physics from being meaningfully described by anything in that universe.

    While I'm disagreeing with him, I'm also on record for stating that absence of life doesn't imply the necessary absence of language, as the quote suggests.
  • The role of observers in MWI
    I'm not therefore saying that trees somehow depend on human experience.Andrew M
    Well good then. I was beginning to wonder since all the conversation kept turning to human discourse on physics and not the actual physics.
    Obviously they don't.
    Not even obviously. Many times things that are obvious are also wrong. As my username implies, I don’t assume anything.
    In the end, a few premises are needed though, and I explicitly list that one (that humans are not special, and reality doesn’t supervene on my experience). I even attempt a logical demonstration of it, but I don’t think it constitutes a proof.


    I don't understand the point you're trying to illustrate.Wayfarer
    I’m asking what it must be like to be the person who doesn’t win the wave function collapse.
    Nothing on the macroscopic level really exists in anything like the mathematical superposition of states that describe subatomic particles. It seems a version of the 'Schrodinger's cat' idea.
    Just because it is hard to do doesn’t mean the theory doesn’t support it. And it’s the Wigner’s friend idea, an extension of the cat idea. It works with the cat as well as long as you’re allowed to ask what it’s like to be the cat, which some deny.
    And yes, I very much think that I undergo collapse like I describe since my choice of interpretation supports it. The experience is quite normal I assure you.

    "I don’t suggest things ‘are real’ in any objective sense." — noAxioms

    Yet in another place, you say "The far side of the moon is still there when nobody looks at it since looking at it isn’t what makes it there."
    Translation: it is there relative to any person. Sorry that you found a case where I wasn’t explicit about the relation. I do not suggest that the moon is objectively real or even real relative to the universe.

    And also that: "If I say the moon exists, I mean that I've measured it, which doesn't involve looking or any other conscious function."
    Yes, there I am more explicit about the relationship and the nature of that relationship.

    So, what do you mean, really? Because it seems to me, despite your claims to the contrary, that your view is realist, i.e. that trees, the moon, the proverbial table or proverbial apple, are all quite real, independently of anyone's knowledge or experience of them.Wayfarer
    Independent of knowledge and experience, yes, but not independent of measurement (quantum definition, since everybody seems to presume otherwise). A rock measures the moon as much as I do, and so the moon exists to the rock. The relationship has absolutely nothing to do with one part of the relation being something living or perceiving or having any sensory apparatus.
  • Emergence
    There are many obvious examples of these moral dilemma's from history. Here are two.universeness
    War has always been about sacrifice of people here and there for a greater goal. It is unavoidable. If you could not have lived with yourself after making the decisions you mention, then you (and I both) are not fit for leadership.
    The bomb (especially the short interval between them) was done partly to keep the USSR out. They were going to ally with Japan to divide China between them, and that ceased when it became somewhat apparent that we could churn out these bombs at a fairly fast pace. It kept us out of the war with the USSR, mostly because leaders everywhere didn't have the stomach to finish what needed to be done. Churchill did, but he didn't have the support needed, including from you apparently.

    An automated system at the level of an AGI or ASI would hopefully prevent such scenario's from happening in the first place or be better able to create alternatives to binary choices between horrific choice 1 or horrific choice 2.
    How do you envision that these automated systems would have chosen better? No matter what, they still have to throw lives against the lives of the enemy and it is partly a numbers game. Would they have chosen differently?

    Why cannot many people live with knowledge of having done the right thing? Seems either a defect in people or a defect in the definition of the right thing.
  • The role of observers in MWI
    Nonetheless the idea of trees falling only has meaning in the context of human experience.Andrew M
    This seems to be a point of contention because I’m not in any way talking about the meaning of the word trees or the human experience of one falling or lack thereof. I was referring to the tree itself falling in the total absence of human anything. It pains me to have to use human language to express that, but I’m not talking about the language, the expression, the concept, the fact that the tree happens to be my very distant cousin, or whatever. I’m talking about the tree.
    It is me that nobody seems to get that? I’m not saying that the alternative (that noumena supervenes on human phenomena or human language) is necessarily wrong, but that such a stance utterly destroys any hope of acquisition of knowledge
    I think you meant the John Bell quote.
    Thx, fixed that. One 4-letter B-word is the same as another, no?

    Ha, ha, "street definition", that's funny. Is that the definition of "measurement" which the cop with the radar gun uses to prosecute in court? "I calibrated my machine in the lab according to...so that it would be accurate to within... on the street". On the street we don't really use definitions noAxioms.
    Face it no Axioms, there's alwaya intent behind "measurement" no matter how you use the word. There must be or else there'd be no measurement.
    Metaphysician Undercover
    This is all using the common definition. It seems appropriate that one should use the quantum theory definition of ‘measurement’ when discussing quantum theory. So rather than admitting this obvious thing, you resort again to ridicule in attempt to salvage your assertions.
    If I’m wrong to use that definition, then tell me why. Once again, see Bell’s quote above discussing why quantum theory should never have used the word ‘observer’ or ‘measurement’ for precisely the reason you are demonstrating: I leads the naive reader to suspect that humans are somehow necessary for physics to work, that the universe supervenes on you and not the other way around. Yes, it’s a solipsistic stance you seem to be taking.
    "Here" does not constitute a frame of reference.
    No, it doesn’t. I had specified the frame in which I was stationary.
    The point of course, is that no frame of reference can use just one point, location must be established relative to another point.
    Just a velocity reference is enough, which is usually defined by the object referenced in establishment of that frame. So I can say ‘the local inertial frame of the sun’ which defines the velocities of everything around it but not any particular coordinate system. To generate a coordinate system, with numbers assigned to every nearby event, would require specification of an origin and of the orientation of the spatial axes. Saying ‘the inertial frame of the sun’ implies the sun at the origin, but only specifies the orientation of one axis, not the other three. So from just that, I cannot specify say the coordinates of Earth at a particular moment in time. I need to know where the axes are, and for that, more than one additional reference must be given. The plane of the ecliptic might define one of those, but still not the other two. A distant reference (Betelgeuse say) might suffice to anchor the other two.
    So your statement would be correct about a coordinate system, but a ‘frame’ does not require additional references.

    Are you proposing that you could map motion with a spatial representation that employs a coordinate system with only one locational point, a point zero, without any other points?
    As per the above, a specification of only the origin defines a frame but does not assign coordinates to events not at that origin. So I could for instance have a frame of a rocket with the origin at the nose, the very ‘front’. That point will always be at the origin no matter what the rocket does, but we need two more points to make a coordinate system of it. So say the rear-most point is on the x axis, and some feature on the side defines the y axis. The z is just orthogonal to the other two and requires no additional reference. Now it’s a coordinate system, and the ‘abort’ button is always (nearly) stationary in this coordinate system regardless of what the rocket does. The astronaut knows where the button is despite the motion of the rocket because he’s using that coordinate system when needing to hit that button. I say ‘nearly stationary’ because vibration and other stresses will move that button a mm or two now and then due to strain on the vehicle.
    Let's see, object is always at point zero therefore object is never moving. What defines point zero? The place where the object is.
    Very good, The latter half even constitutes the frame reference, which you almost always omit.
  • Emergence
    We may well apply morality as a pure numbers game, when there is no other information available.universeness
    All else being equal then. In the organ thing, everybody is around 40 year old and part of a family and is loved. The 5 will die within 3 months without the procedure. They would be expected to live full productive lives with the surgery, but of course at the cost of the one, also loved, etc.

    In the absence of such detail, the morally consistent approach for me, is that if we are talking about a train track lever that switches the trolly from one track to another, then I would probably pull the leaver and let 1 die rather than 5, if I know nothing about the people involved.
    So it is a numbers game, but only when its a game and only if you're not personally involved.
    For the record, I am asking what is the morally best course of action, not whether or not you'd do it. It sounds like you'd change your decision based on if you loved somebody (the one in particular). That means you're willing to do the wrong thing for personal reasons.
    The trolley is a metaphor. I've never seen the situation come up with an actual trolley. I've seen it with an automobile where the choice was between about 20 people and a small dog. The 20 people were hit, many of whom died, but the dog was OK. I didn't read if the survivors had the dog killed afterwards, but they should have.

    If the 1 was my child/wife etc, it's probably then going to be bye bye 5, unless it was 5 children.
    Ah, children are worth more than adults. Interesting. The old Titanic thing. I wonder where they cut off the age limit for 'women and children'.

    I actually would agree that a person's worth changes through the course of their lives, but modern morality seems to be based on a life being worth infinity period, which results in all sorts of silliness.

    In any such situation, of choosing what you consider horrific outcome 1 and horrific outcome 2, but you do have some personal moral notion of a lesser evil between the two choices, then you make your choice, but you will probably never recover from the experience.
    Sure, but what if the making of the choice was done by another or was automated? Remember, I'm asking what's right, not what you would do, although knowing what you would do is certainly also interesting. We discussed automating unpleasant tasks above. This certainly qualifies as one.

    I would never advocate for harvesting the organs of 1 to save many, like you suggested, no.
    This is in direct contradiction to your comment above where you perhaps suggest saving the five outweighs the one. How is this not exactly the trolley problem? I assure you it comes up in real life, and human morality actually says kill the 5, not the 1. Why is this?
    Many times the decision has to be made in moments (like the car/dog thing above). Sometimes you have a long time to ponder the choice.

    I wondered if we were getting off topic, but no, this has direct relevance.
  • The role of observers in MWI
    No, my point is that quantum theory is constructed abductively from what we observe. As far as we know, it applies universally.Andrew M
    My point was that this abductive construction isn’t in any way something unique to quantum theory. That’s not what make it different, and it certainly doesn’t indicate that physical processes require the presence of humans. Sure, the human knowledge of physics requires humans, but that knowledge isn’t necessary for trees to fall in the forest when nobody is around.

    I don’t see how that follows, sorry.
    — noAxioms
    That’s quite alright.
    Wayfarer
    You choose not to defend it. That’s alright too I guess. I will instead offer a counterargument.
    Consider a Wigner’s friend scenario. The friend is in a box, takes a measurement, and based on that measurement, either drinks a hot tea or eats ice cream. To Wigner, the friend is in a superposition of consuming tea and of eating ice cream. This superposition can be demonstrated. Wigner opens the box to find the ice cream case. My question is, what is it like to be the tea-drinking friend?
    Different interpretations say different things. MWI and relational might say that the tea drinking friend is observed by a different Wigner or is real only to that other Wigner. The objective collapse interpretations are hard to figure. Does the experience of the tea-drinker just suddenly cease? Does the tea drinker not actually have any experience of it? Is there more than one identity of the friend, one hot and one cold, or are somehow both states experienced by the same friend, but only one remembered? How would you reply to something like that?

    There is always intent behind human actions, therefore intent behind measurements.Metaphysician Undercover
    You seem to be using the street definition of ‘measurement’ instead of the definition relevant to quantum theory. Please see the Bell quote in Andrew M’s post a few back which addresses exactly this naive mistake and the common misconceptions that result from such assumptions.
    your ontological attitude is to deny idealism, so you deny the reality because it doesn't jive with your ontology
    I’m not denying idealism, I’m merely not talking about it. Sure, under idealism, you (and nobody else) causes wave function collapse.

    I have no idea where you are, and therefore no idea where "here" is when you say it.
    That’s right. My coordinate system has no need for you to know where its origin is. But you can do it for yourself.
    That's how ridiculous your claim was, that because you were "here" now, and "here" later, you hadn't moved.
    That would be ridiculous since the frame reference was omitted from the assertion of not having moved, rendering it meaningless at best.
    Anything else in the world is totally irrelevant to you because in your solipsistic reality, nothing is ever changing places relative to you
    Where did I ever imply that? If you want to take my argument apart, surely you can do it without dragging in strawman stuff like that. So far, all I’ve seen is you applying the appeal to ridicule fallacy.

    What in the world are you referring to when you say "not-moving relative to 'here'"?
    Given a coordinate system in which some object is always at the origin, that object always at location zero and thus not moving relative to that coordinate system. This is tautologically true. That coordinate system would be an inertial coordinate system only if no external forces were acting on the object in question. Given the comment below, you seem to already know this.
    Do you agree, that this sort of tautology, or self-evident truth, that you are never moving relative to yourself, says absolutely nothing about whether or not you are "moving"?
    The bolded part of that statement gives no frame reference, so I would agree that nothing was said about that ambiguous statement. I will also say that something’s lack of motion relative to one frame does not imply lack of motion relative to a different frame, had an alternate one been specified.
    To make sense of "I am moving relative to the place where I am' would require a completely different definition of "moving".
    That depends on what the first definition (the one you apparently reject) was.
    And your example says absolutely nothing about "motion" as used in any conventional way.
    Agreed, but I’m not using conversational definitions of just about anything. I’m using physics definitions.
  • The role of observers in MWI
    Nonetheless the observer - or, even better, agent or person - closes the loop in the sense that it is human experience that grounds quantum theory and the quantities that can be measured.Andrew M
    That also seems true of say Newtonian theory. Is there some way in which human agency or observation makes a difference in (grounds) QT in a way that it doesn’t in NT? That would be a pretty incredible claim, that physics (and not just human theories/knowledge of physics) is different in the presence of humans than it is in a universe absent them.


    But I don't think this is what philosophical idealism means - not, at least, as I understand it. This has to do with the nature of the objects of perception. Realism posits that the existence of those objects is independent of our perception or experience.Wayfarer
    But the converse is not true. It being independent of perception doesn’t necessitate a stance of realism. My ontology has nothing to do with perception, and yet I don’t suggest things ‘are real’ in any objective sense.
    They exist just so - in the case of the moon for billions of years.
    For instance, I wouldn’t make statements like that, but a realist would.
    So it is preposterous to claim that they could cease to exist simply because nobody is looking at them. Yet this is what idealism seems to claim.
    OK, but I’m not claiming idealism as you describe it. That’s about perception as you say.
    And I think this was the point of Einstein's rhetorical question. Realism expects that all such objects are really existent, independently of any mind or anyone's perception. That is, after all, the very definition of realism. This is the gist of Einstein's well-known declaration that he 'cannot seriously believe in [the quantum theory] because it cannot be reconciled with the idea that physics should represent a reality in time and space, free from spooky actions at a distance.'
    I don’t think quantum theory suggests idealism. Perhaps there was a suspicion way back then. People were just coming to terms with the new implications, watching all their classical assumptions getting trampled. The conversation by Einstein was part of that realization that the classical assumptions cannot all be correct. Bell went on later to prove that, saying that either realism or locality had to go. I think Einstein would have had a much harder time letting go of locality since all his relativity theory rests on premises that assume it.
    But an alternative is to acknowledge that the existence of sensable objects is contingent and not absolute. This not to assert that objects exist in any absolute sense, on the one hand, but neither is it to claim that they cease to exist when they're not observed, on the other. It is to acknowledge that judgement concerning the reality of objects is a function of human sensory perception and reason, and that it is therefore not absolute. From the human point of view, all such objects exist - you'd better believe it! - but their existence is contingent and not absolute.
    Don’t think any of that contradicts what I’m saying. Reality itself is neither absolute nor a function of perception, but judgment of it is a function of perception.
    I think it teaches us to respect that science is a human undertaking and that it's not a revelation of what is truly the case independently of any observer.
    I don’t see how that follows, sorry.


    It's not meaningless to point out the intent which is inherent within observation, measurement, etc.. And the intent is much more evident with the word "experiment". It's a fundamental fact that experiments are designed, and this points to the theory-laden nature of measurements and observations.Metaphysician Undercover
    Usage of the word implies that quantum effects only occur when there is intent behind the measurements. There’s no evidence for that and heavy evidence against it. I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with intent in scientific experiments. That’s the point after all.
    The magnifying glass is the medium between the observer and the thing observed, it's the apparatus.
    Poor example I think since a magnifying glass doesn’t usually qualify as a measurement. They’re used in multiple places in typical laser experiments and they don’t collapse wave functions in them, else the experiments would fail. They’re not detectors, only refractors, and refraction wouldn’t work (wouldn’t bend light) at all if it constituted a measurement.
    I told you, time requires observation, it is the outcome of observation.
    How very idealistic of you. See Wayfarer’s post above about if perception is required for the reality of something.
    I think there was no descriptions derived from human observations (of which "motion" is one), before humans came along.
    But I wasn’t asking about descriptions. You say time requires observation. You didn’t say a description of time requires observation. I’d have agreed to that. So you’re evading the question instead by answering a different one.

    First, what the hell does "here" refer to?
    The origin of the coordinate system defined by the series of events at which I am present.
    The term gives no positional reference.
    Don’t be silly. You know it does. It is the location of that which said ‘here’.

    there's nothing to exclude the possibility that you flew around the whole universe in the meantime.
    But you said that being stationary was not possible, so you seem to exclude the possibility that you didn’t go anywhere during that interval. And as for my statement, had I indeed flown all around during that interval, at no time would I not be where I am, thus I’d always still be ‘here’. I’d simply not be inertial, so the coordinate system in which I am perpetually at the origin would not be an inertial coordinate system.
  • Emergence
    you remind me of the food scenes in Hunger Games.
    — noAxioms
    Yes. I have watched the Hunger Games movies. I don't see their relevance to our discussion here, they were just a poor throwback to the Roman idea of gladiatorial combat, for the purpose of entertaining a audience of savage morons.
    universeness
    Your opinion of the plot is noted, but I was speaking of the food scenes, which seems to be what you’re trying to describe in your future socialist utopia with everything being automated except the voting.

    The idea was analogous to an unplanned, unwanted, unintended pregnancy, so I assume the consent of the woman to 'become pregnant'/ be connected to the violinist, was not secured.
    OK. This story seems like the sort of thing concocted by the pro-life side, and thus I’m sure they’d pitch it as some fault of the woman for getting herself in this situation. Remember, she’s the culprit here, not the victim. She’s the evil one wanting to terminate the support.

    About the organ donor thingy:
    Depends on what kind of moral society you advocate for? Morally consistent or Morally consistent but there are exceptions.
    This reply totally evaded the question. Yes, I would say morally consistent, but you didn’t say what the moral thing to do is. I described a trolley problem where 5 lives can be saved by taking action that kills one. What’s does your consistent moral code say about this? Why isn’t it done today? Why is it more moral to let the 5 die, and should this standard be changed?
    OK, but what about the charge of murder for refusing it? Is it murder?
    — noAxioms
    That's a legal question.
    It is a legal question, but if the law is not on your side, you reach for a different set of laws, which is why they usually drag God into it. God can be made to say anything if you read the right snippet of scripture. They’re all out there screaming that the victim (not a legal human by the actual law, but a legal one by virtue of calling him a violinist) is getting murdered by somebody (by her own irresponsible choices) refusing to plug herself in.

    If a person refused to donate their blood to save the life of another, when there is no other alternative available, in time to save the person, then you might have a low or even a very low opinion of the person who refused to help.
    Anyone can donate blood. Only in the most extreme circumstances, completely outside the safety of the screening and such that goes on, might a panic blood transfusion be performed. Charging a specific person with murder for refusing a pint seems reaching, as you acknowledge.


    How do you know they’re not thoughts?
    — noAxioms
    Well, if you think they are the 'thoughts' of chatGBT then you think it is sentient.
    universeness
    I said I wouldn’t use that word. It’s very low AI compared to other candidates, but there’s no reason not to use ‘thoughts’ to describe what’s going on in an actual AI. It’s simply a choice to use the word or not. Your wording suggested that it’s a machine, therefore they cannot be thoughts by definition. I was balking at that implication.
    Here is chatGBT's response to the question 'can you think?'
    As an AI language model, I do not have thoughts or consciousness like humans do. I am programmed to process and analyze text data to generate responses to questions and prompts. However, I can simulate human-like responses through natural language processing techniques and generate text that may appear to be the result of thought processes.
    Wonderful. It admits to not having human-like thoughts, but doesn’t disqualify what it’s having as ‘chatGTP-like thoughts’. That’s a pretty good answer. I mean, a dog doesn’t have thoughts or consciousness like humans do, but people often talk about a dog’s thoughts or a dog’s feelings.

    OK, I know a bit about how chatGPT works, and it really seems to be a glorified search engine, hardly something to slap the ‘AI’ sticker onto.
    — noAxioms
    chatGBT partly agrees with you, based on it's response above.
    Apparently the ‘glorified search engine’ part refers to the latter half of its description, the part where it does the natural language processing and text generation. The former part, the answering of text questions and such, requires actual understanding of those questions to sufficient extent to reply appropriately, something a regular google search often does not since it just keys off words and doesn’t actually have any understanding of what you’re actually trying to find.

    A man-made joint or pig value in my heart would not change who I am.Athena
    I think that depends on your definition of who you are. For the record, I agree with you here, but there’s always that Ship of Theseus argument that attempts to drive that to inconsistency, but the ship argument does not posit a critical component (the serial number so to speak) that if replaced, changes what the thing is. Memory might be that sort of thing, which is why I brought it up.
    I’m not trying to disagree with anything (unless I do I guess), but I want to explore this area with somebody interested in the discussion.
    Messing with my brain in a way that changes whatever it is that is a consciousness of me, is a death to my ego that might as well be a death to my body as well.
    I posit that the consciousness part would remain unchanged. Everything would feel exactly the same as it did before. Problem is, the memory got changed out, so you don’t have any memory of what it feels like to be you. Let’s say you get Sue’s memory, and so you wake up and basically Sue’s memory is conflict with Athena’s consciousness and Athena is freaking out about that. No, it wouldn’t be fun, and yes, I think it would be the destruction of your ego. A new one would need to be built. Therapy. You’ve had parts replaced, so you know that joy. But all that was Athena, all the ties to family no longer recognized, all the built-up love and loss, all that is gone. You’d want to go out with this unfamiliar body and find Sue’s family. That’s not something that Athena would opt in for, so it’s unacceptable. Hey, maybe for somebody who went through enough loss, it wouldn’t be such a bad thing, but despite all the other parts being Athena, the result would be Sue, and so Sue would have effectively done a full-everything-else replacement of whatever travesty has happened to her, and Athena is merely the donor of everything.
    Finally, why would it be a death to the body?
    I think the body is as important as the brain in experiencing who we are.
    OK, I kind of assumed otherwise above, and I suspect you’re correct on this. There are people that have had simple transplants of some organ and have noticeably changed who they are, taking on traits of the donor. You get into this in your reply, so we agree on it, even if it’s anecdotal. Is it just hearts? Gut biome makes a significant contribution to who you are for instance.
    To the list you mention, I’ll add that they taught flatworms to do a maze, then killed and ground them up and fed that to new flatworms which could subsequently navigate the maze far better than those not fed the educated diet. You are indeed more than just your control panel.
    I personally have had several things removed (some more optional than others), but nothing replaced beyond dental fillings and such. Oh, and one artificial eye lens. You can see metal in my eye if the light is just right.
    Now the ego comes into play and may be willing to make some changes but reacts to changing as though it is a threat and must be resisted.
    Dunno, I suspect my ego could stand a few changes here and there. I wonder what could be fixed.
  • The role of observers in MWI
    The far side of the moon is still there when nobody looks at it since looking at it isn’t what makes it there
    — noAxioms

    You do recall the anecdote that Einstein once exclaimed, when walking with one of his friends, 'surely the moon still exists when no-one is looking at it!'
    Wayfarer
    That comment was what made the moon the thing to exist (or not) based on watching it, sort of like the cat became the classic thing in the box.

    This was in relation to the very assumption you're making
    But I'm not making the assumption you probably think I am. I suspect the principle of counterfactual definiteness (scientific realism) is false. I'm pretty public about that. I take more a relational view.
    First of all, 'looking at it' has nothing to do with anything. It is impossible for any human (dead or alive) to not be continuously measuring the moon.
    Secondly, since the moon had been measured, it cannot suddenly jump into a nonexistent state. It's not a solution to the moon's wave function, or at least not one with a probability of zero to more digits than you can imagine. That's what I mean by the moon still being there when nobody looks at it. The moon has been measured and cannot be unmeasured.

    he said it because of the challenge that quantum mechanics poses to scientific realism.
    Which is why I'm not such a realist. If I say the moon exists, I mean that I've measured it, which doesn't involve looking or any other conscious function.

    Bohr said 'no elementary phenomenon is a phenomenon until it is observed'.
    But that's true classically. A human phenomenon by definition involves a human observation. Quantum collapse doesn't. It involves an interaction between two systems. Andrew M quoted Bohr on this distinction just a few posts above in the part labeled 'Against measurement'.

    What if the purely "mechanical" act of measurement produces a numerical result that goes automatically into a computer file and is never "observed" as it sits there and rots?jgill
    It was observed in that scenario, so it makes no sense to say it was subsequently not observed. The statement attempts to use the dictionary definition of observation.
    As I said - through inductive reasoning, we can expect that the measurement is taken, that the data exists on that system unobserved.Wayfarer
    You seem to do likewise. Conscious observation plays zero role except epistemic.
    But you won't empirically verify that inductive step without observing the result. And isn't this very much at the heart of the whole issue?Wayfarer
    No, that's just an epistemic effect that has nothing to do with whether the result took place or not.
    The realist attitude is, well all these processes simply occur, whether we're observing or not.
    No, not at all. The realist attitude is that these things (objectively?) occur whether or not there is interaction with some other system. It has nothing to do with observation as you seem to be using the word: an action that a human does and a rock doesn't. Being forced to choose, I chose to discard objective realism of this sort, and for this reason.
  • The role of observers in MWI
    Until Walmart opened its otherwise impervious doors. Contrary to most of the posts you’re getting, it has nothing to do with anybody actually looking at anything, with good or bad eyes.
    — noAxioms
    Except maybe the measurement dials!
    Andrew M
    Even looking at the measurement dials has no impact on the collapse or not. Of course, the descriptions you quote give a special role to an observer (writing down the reading of the dial say), but 1, it doesn’t take a human (or actual ‘observation’) to do that, and 2, it being written down isn’t what causes collapse. If the dial says |here>, then the wave function is collapsed whether or not anything (or person) reads that dial since the dial is not inside Walmart.

    The entire quantum subject would be better served if "observer" were eliminated everywhere and replaced by "measurement".jgill
    Pretty much agree, but Andrew quotes a text that bashes even this word since it is still so open to common language interpretation, but I still agree and use the word in its proper context. Bell suggests ‘experiment’, but that loads the whole situation with intent that is meaningless. The dial unobserved seems not to be an experiment since nobody is recording what it says.
    Can't have one without the other though.Wayfarer
    Nonsense. You can have measurement without observation such as the dial, reading |here>, but unnoticed by anybody.
    People often say, well measurement is any form of registration on any instrument, but we would never know that, save by checking.
    That’s an epistemological issue, not a metaphysical one. Measurement results a physical fact (in interpretations with physical collapse), and observation results in knowledge of that fact. The far side of the moon is still there when nobody looks at it since looking at it isn’t what makes it there.

    I’m talking about the physics definition of motion, which does not require a human to be around deciding if it’s motion or not, even if it does require a human to have a human saying it’s motion.
    — noAxioms
    You never provided any such definition, but if you think you can provide me with a definition of motion which does not require observation, be my guest, let's see it.
    Metaphysician Undercover
    Well I googled ‘motion definition in physics’ and get a britannica one saying “change with time of the position or orientation of a body.“ which makes no mention of a requirement for observation (human or otherwise) to be involved. You seem to be attempting to worm in the definition of ‘measurement of motion’ or ‘human concept of motion’ or some other obfuscation hiding behind the line between map and territory.
    Admittedly the definition that first comes up makes an implicit reference to a coordinate system without which the position or orientation of the object in question is not meaningful.
    Wiki says something similar but adds “with respect to time”.
    UW-Madison (a university, so must be far better than wiki per your post above) says unhelpfully: “Motion is the area of physics that studies how things move” which is just a self reference, useless without the definition of ‘move’. It also attempts to define the ‘study of motion’ which is quite different than the definition of motion itself.
    Do you realize that motion is always a comparison?
    It is a difference of position states at two different times. It is still motion even if those two positions are not compared by anything.
    How do you suppose that motion could occur without a human to judge that time has passed?
    That’s a pretty idealistic assertion. Are you one of those people that suggest that nothing happened before humans came along? I think that position can be driven to solipsism, which means motion cannot occur without you specifically to judge that time has passed, and that’s assuming that time is something that passes, something else with which I don’t agree, and which none of the definitions above require.

    The absolute perspective has no dependency on the motion of any observer.
    — noAxioms
    Yes it does. The measurement of time is dependent on the observer's observations of motion.
    I wasn’t speaking of measurement. Absolute time has no dependency on its being measured. If it flows, the rate (and direction) at which it does so is entirely independent of anything’s perception or measurement of it. You seem to keep attempting to make everything about your knowledge of something, about the map and not about the territory.

    When motion is relative, the observer is necessarily moving if time is passing.
    Apologies for ragging on every word, but you seem to be going out of your way with the weird suggestions this time. This statement here is no exception. If I’m here now and here later, that seems to be not-moving relative to ‘here’. OK, one might express that as motion at velocity (relative to here) of zero, which is arguably still motion. I would accept that.

    You don't seem to understand how time is measured.
    Again, I’m talking about time, not about how it is measured, so I’ve given no demonstration of my understanding of how time is measured or my lack thereof.
  • Emergence
    I don't envisage future systems as being as 'pedestrian,' as you suggest. I envisage them as gaining more and more functionality and can 'cater for all tastes and moods, whims, etc, as long as such moods, whims etc are based on those making the request being of sound mind and the request is not illegal or immoral.universeness
    First of all, my cafeteria suggestion satisfies your description of being a variety, suited to all tastes. There will be more than one of them, each with a sort of specialty, but still different from one day to the next, just like my local Tai restaurant might have daily specials.
    As for it being limitless like you describe, you remind me of the food scenes in Hunger Games. Tell me if you’ve not seen that, but it pretty much depicted over-the-top bounty of food, far more than the people could eat, which didn’t stop them from doing it anyway.
    I assume that if you wish to visit a restaurant and be treated like …
    I wonder how one would be considered ‘treated-like’ when it’s only automated systems giving the treatment. It’s not like the wait staff expects any tips, but they’re also not too likely to spit in your food.

    All methods of reproduction would be on offer. Abortion would remain an option.
    So I gather, which means that the exponential population growth issue wasn’t solved.
    A section discussed abortion in the USSR and exemplified a few cases. One was a young woman who had had 14 abortions by the time she was 36. One of the medical staff, stated, that she knew of cases where women were having around 3 abortions per year. Russian condoms often failed, the pill was not made available, as they Russian authorities would not sanction it's use, as it was a 'western' product and therefore unsafe. No sex education was offered in Russian schools, etc, etc.
    This didn’t answer my concern above. Meanwhile, sure, total unavailability of birth control is hardly the best course of action. But I bet the Russian abortions were pretty simple, perhaps just a pill in some cases. Having a surgical procedure done thrice a year kind of puts a strain on the economy.
    So, you ask me what I would do about population control. The USSR example convinces me that the answer lies in the education of the population.
    Ah, the Nancy Reagan solution: “Just say no…” Many people totally discard their indoctrination when it comes to hormonal urges. A significant percentage of children in all countries are unplanned, including at least one in each generation around me.

    I have considered many of the issues put forward by pro-life groups. I dismiss out of hand, any arguments against bodily autonomy, based on theistic grounds.
    I pretty much agree with that. It’s kind of the territory of the choice side.
    Consider the violinist argument, posited by Judith Thompson:
    A violinist is dying, and the only way to prolong his life, is to hook him up to another human and siphon off some of that person’s blood or kidney function as a form of life-support. He must remain in this state for the several months necessary for medical technology to reach the point that it can intervene and completely resuscitate him.
    So a woman with the right blood type is hooked up to the violinist. The violinist is now totally dependent on the 'resources' of the woman. Morally, does the woman have the right to free herself of the violinist? even though she knows that this will result in his death.
    That is akin to a similar trolley problem. 5 people will die if they don’t have some organ transplant, a different organ for each. A healthy donor is identified. His death (by disassembly) can save 5 people. Logic says to do it. The gut says it’s totally wrong (and I agree). But why? What if the potential donor happens to be serving a life sentence in prison? Does that change the answer? Is a life sufficiently low value that it can be used to save multiple higher-value lives? At what point does logic kick in?
    The story above is somewhat weak since the violinist has a voice and is a legal person. An embryo is neither, but only by law. How was the hookup initiated? Voluntarily? Was the woman taken in her sleep only to wake up in this situation without consent? Does being a violinist make you more valuable as a person than a non-violinist? If not, why include that detail?
    Can the two of them get around in the world, joined at the hose so to speak?
    The choice MUST be the woman's.
    OK, but what about the charge of murder for refusing it? Is it murder? Like I said, the situation is complicated by the fact that the violinist is a legal person with worth, an investment of resources and especially time that would otherwise go completely to waste.
    That was my biggest reaction to the passing of my father. Not grief, but a profound regret at the loss of all that he was, all that expertise and wisdom, just flushed away in a few moments. The loss of the person, the life itself, was more of a relief than something to grieve over, at least for me. I wasn’t expecting that. Didn’t know what to expect since I’ve lost so few to whom I’m close.

    62% of those who voted in Scotland, voted to stay in the European union.universeness
    Har! Score a point then. Maybe they’re used to being part of something not-us, but the English are not so used to that. They’re supposed to be the thing that other groups join (by force or not), and their culture seems to breed such an attitude.
    I think any union requires a ‘them’, so a global union requires another globe. That seems to be human nature. So perhaps it only requires the union to be organized by something nonhuman.


    Any 'fetch/execute' cycle will involve the mar and mdr registers, the address bus, the data bus and control lines.universeness
    Right. There’s no explicit machine instruction to access them. It’s just part of the execution of any of the instructions.
    I forget how this bit started and what the original point was.

    Some comments on other posts:
    The point is, they are not 'thoughts,' the song was produced by chatGBT, an AI system, yet it was able to invoke an emotive response from you. Not bad, for an AI system with zero self-awareness.universeness
    How do you know they’re not thoughts?
    OK, I know a bit about how chatGPT works, and it really seems to be a glorified search engine, hardly something to slap the ‘AI’ sticker onto. It does nice papers and prose, but you can’t really talk to it. It comes nowhere close to the Turing test. There are other projects that get far closer to it. It is with those that I would more protest you saying that they cannot have thoughts, even if they’re currently still not quite as deep as our own thoughts.

    How much of your current body would you accept 'just as good or better,' replacements for, if they could keep you alive and healthy and embarking on new adventures, for as long as you liked. — universeness
    I thought about this question as well and as I mentioned before, there are two sides of me, and I suppose the main side would accept close to anything being replaced, with the possible exception of memory. The rational side of me dismissed the question as ill-formed, and thus deferred to the main side’s wishes as it usually does.
    I would NOT like to wake up in the morning with someone else's face as is true for at least one man. … however, an attractive and functional face would be better than living without that.Athena
    Having a face is better than not having one. I’ve seen the pictures of when it’s done. They have to line up blood vessels and nerves and such and things don’t necessarily go in the same place as it did on the prior owner’s head. So the face isn’t what anyone would call ‘attractive’. I’d still rather have one (and live with the lifetime of rejection drugs that any organ recipient has) than live with just open gore in the front of my head.
    Prosthetic faces may become a thing. You look sort of plastic, but presumably attractive and perhaps ageless.
    Having my joints replaced with artificial ones is okay.
    How about non-artificial parts like pig-values in the heart? I heard those work pretty good.
    but if I am the only surviving member of my family please let me die.
    You find no point in a knee replacement if you have no relatives left?
    Or if dementia is destroying my mind, please help me die.
    What if they could replace the bit that was being destroyed? What if you got a new brain, same memories? Would that be OK. The dementia seems to destroy memory, so what if they replaced only the memory part, but it was somebody else’s memories. The thinking part is still all original equipment. I bring this up because that’s pretty much where I might draw the line. For one, I don’t thing anyone would choose this because by the time you might want this, you’re too far gone to make an informed decision.
    Or if I could become immortal with my brain in a jar and no body, please, I rather be brain dead.
    A brain in a jar isn’t conscious. If they hook it up to life support, it would be a brain in a permanent sensory deprivation environment and would quickly go insane. So if they hook up the inputs and outputs so it has a connection, then it lives in VR all its life and perhaps doesn’t know it is thus hooked up. That doesn’t sound so bad. A BIV isn’t immortal. It still ages the same as any brain, and only for so long.
    Not even a completely artificial body would please me because I do not want to be a brain without a feeling body.
    It would be a very crappy artificial body if it didn’t send all the usual sensory inputs to the brain that remains. So it would be a feeling body.
    I am not sure I would want immortality either.
    Totallhy agree. Inability to die would be a complete curse, but only after several centuries, or until the first time you get into a situation where you cannot escape some horrible fate.
  • Emergence
    You are guilty of 'lazy thinking,' Future restaurants are not doomed to offer humans a poor, boring service due to the fact they will be a lot more automated.universeness
    The prediction wasn’t based on it being automated. It was based on it being fully socialized, with everyone being equal and not getting special treatment, else they’d all want the special treatment every meal. I’ve lived the cafeteria life, and it works, and it was pretty good food, but I don’t have the standards of the upper classes.

    Having the option in the future to create a baby, completely outside of the female body, using donated sperm and eggs from consenting parents, IS NOT against god (catholic god included), as god does not exist.
    You detract from that to which the comment was a response. I had asked ‘if’ abortions would be done, and you responded with the test-tube baby thing, as if abortions would not be a concept because no woman could get pregnant, leaving me to suspect that a normal pregnancy is not an option.
    So I’ll ask again. Assuming pregnancy is an option, how will the future world (which is in dire need of population control) deal with unwanted/illegal pregnancies? How will the voters respond to that? The usual answer is: No population controls, which puts us exactly where we are now. This seems to be the future you envision, so I’m not sure if there’s a point in asking how to deal with people piled 20 deep everywhere. Some fictional stories (e.g. Foundation) depict worlds like that, but never due to uncontrolled procreation, and yes, they need insane continuous import of just about everything.
    I support bodily autonomy, not irrational anti-abortion groups.
    Ah, but the pro-autonomy groups are equally irrational, as I’ve stated before. Glad we’re on the same side, but how would you address the concerns of the pro-life groups? Nobody ever does that. Do you? Just calling them anti-something is already setting up a bias.
    There are churches based on love and inclusion instead of the opposite.
    — noAxioms
    Yeah, sales-folks will say just about anything to get you to enter their tabernacle. Especially when they are losing so many of their 'flock.'
    My mother attends a church that is based on inclusion which is thriving in a town full of quite strict exclusion churches, some of which have folded. I used to go to one of those, and we quit them when they refused to marry my brother for living a sinful life. Have lots of stories of power and corruption from that place. Good riddance.

    The only time that population control would be an issue, is when the number of people on the planet cannot be supported, because the socioeconomic system is too 'flawed' to support them. Situations like the one we are in now.universeness
    Even with a fix to the socioeconomic system, the planet cannot support what we have now without spending irreplaceable resources. But you know I think that. The 10-million figure was a good one to maintain for preservation purposes, not a suggestion that the planet cannot sustain more. Maybe 500 million for the latter figure. You of course want trillions (unchecked eternal growth), somehow supported by extraterrestrial resources. I suppose that’s possible, but your vision is my idea of dystopia.

    When Scotland becomes independent and re-joins Europe, I think that in the future, Scotland and England will re-join, as part of a 'united nations of Europe,' and eventually a single planetary society, with no 'nations.'universeness
    Yea, that went real well with Brexit, which was a non-forced union that fell apart due to perceived unfairness among other things. I don’t think it’s human nature to want control by what is seen as ‘them’ as opposed to ‘us’.
    Hopefully, all energy will be renewable and not have a detrimental effect on the Earths ecology so, distance travel may not be considered so wasteful in the future.
    Once the non-renewable stuff runs out, there will no longer be a choice. Importing energy on top of it will not do good things to any natural ecology, but by the time the non-renewable stuff runs out, there won’t be much of a natural ecology to destroy.
    As for size of accomodation, we can always build upwards or/and 'into.'
    Hence my comment of ‘20 deep’.


    I don’t remember assembly code including any details of chip pin details like all those buses and control lines and such.
    — noAxioms
    LDA and STA can be used with specific memory address locations, so when such instructions are executed, they will of-course employ the address bus and the data bus.
    universeness
    Yes, but there’s no instruction to set a specific pin to ‘1’ or ‘0’. The same instruction set can be (and are) executed by completely different chips with totally different pinouts and even number of pins. That’s what I meant by my comment.
    and assembly code lines which could set the sr control line (line to the status register) to high or low depending on what circumstance you were trying to account for.
    I stand corrected then. That’s an example of setting a specific line, even if it isn’t say one of the address lines.
    I enjoyed identifying contiguous or separate memory address locations and I enjoyed using the mar(memory address register) and the mdr(memory data register) and the accumulator. They were the processors main 'workhorses.'
    There are architectures with instructions to directly manipulate the MAR and MDR? I admit to only knowing about 20 machine languages. Cache memory is another thing I’ve never seen explicitly addressable.
  • The role of observers in MWI
    The proper analogy would be that jgill observed interference effects until he and his wife met up and she pointed out that she had been standing there all the time.Andrew M
    Until Walmart opened its otherwise impervious doors. Contrary to most of the posts you’re getting, it has nothing to do with anybody actually looking at anything, with good or bad eyes.
    How can any enumeration not be ordered?
    — noAxioms
    I meant, "not just in order of smallest number to largest number."
    That’s just a different ordering, but any ordering can have a counting number assigned to each item in order. It’s still ordered.
    If collapse isn’t physical and isn’t epistemological, then what is it?
    — noAxioms
    Pragmatic. At some point it's necessary to ground a quantum mechanical description in a definite observation or measurement.
    OK, that seems to be a distinction between objective collapse and relational collapse, both of which are physical.
    So a Heisenberg cut is employed.
    A Heisenberg cut is a form of relational expression, that a system on one side of the cut is in some state (as represented by the wave function) relative to the system on the other side of the cut. Yes, the placement of the cut is arbitrary. The cut was first introduced as an epistemic cut (what one system knows about the other) but became a metaphysical one once the interpretation moved away from its epistemic roots.

    That something is moving, or in motion, is a human judgement.Metaphysician Undercover
    I’m talking about the physics definition of motion, which does not require a human to be around deciding if it’s motion or not, even if it does require a human to have a human saying it’s motion.
    Therefore it's completely nonsensical to talk about the motion of a thing in the complete absence of a second thing.
    And yet again, your preferred wording of PoR does exactly that.
    Then we add the observational data that there is always at least one body moving relative to any other, and this produces the conclusion that nothing is at rest.
    I don’t see how that produces that conclusion.
    The ontological principle "relativity" renders "rest" as not true.
    It renders it meaningless, which is different than ‘not true’.
    Our measurements of the passing of time are based in the ancient concept of motion within which, we as observers are assumed to be at rest.
    Newton assumed that we ought to continue with "time" based in our rest frame. This is said to be an "absolute time".
    Time wasn’t frame dependent back then, so it wasn’t based on any particular designated rest frame.
    but the "absolute time" perspective clings to our perspective as the true rest frame for producing temporal measurement.
    The absolute perspective has no dependency on the motion of any observer. Assignment of say Earth as the true rest frame is just arrogance and I’ve never seen a modern absolute interpretation that suggests it. Most of them suggest us moving at variable speed of around 350 km/sec and maybe twice that back when the T-rex was the local scary thing. This can be determined because spacetime isn’t Minkowskian, and the PoR only applies to Minkowskian spacetime.
    But even those values are a local measurement of time since it varies based on gravitational potential as well, and we can’t know our absolute gravitational potential. So one ‘hour’ is not an actual hour, but a dilated one, even if measured by a stationary clock. So there are absolute theories out there, but even those cannot say how long an actual hour is.

    Einstein saw a way beyond this inconsistency by repealing the "absolute time" perspective.

    This is really confused. I haven't the foggiest idea of what you're trying to say.
    Somehow I’m not surprised. Presentism requires a preferred frame. You don’t know this? Any other frame labels past and future events as simultaneous (ontologically different according to your assertions), which would be a contradiction. So presentism contradicts Einstein’s postulates and his theories along with them.
    You seem to be employing the "absolute time" perspective to come up with "the present", yet also using "the relativity of simultaneity" to say that events in the present are not necessarily simultaneous.
    Presentism says that all events in the present are necessarily simultaneous, does it not? Relativity of simultaneity is wrong in that case, something only derived from SR postulates, both of which are wrong under any form of absolute space and time.
  • The role of observers in MWI
    Cantor's proof assumes an enumeration of the set of real numbersAndrew M
    OK, my mistake, since I was envisioning an enumeration of the rationals to prove that there are irrational numbers. But the proof of that is less complicated.
    (any enumeration, not just an ordered one)
    How can any enumeration not be ordered?



    Copenhagen-style interpretations also generally deny a physical collapse. — ”Andrew M”
    Maybe. The list of interpretations on wiki says some of the Copenhagen interpretations say this. This implies at least that there’s more than one interpretation using this name. The reference they give on the ‘maybe’ talks about the epistemic view I mentioned, but then:
    By contrast, the Copenhagen interpretation has also been associated with an ontological view of the quantum state, in which the wave function somehow describes a real wave, and the collapse is a real physical process – presumably induced by the observer. This ontological view is usually attributed to von Neumann in his 1932 textbook exposition of quantum mechanics; … Thus, for Bohr, the wave function is a representation of a quantum system in a particular, classically described, experimental context. … When a measurement is performed (that is, when an irreversible recording has been made; see below), then the context changes, and hence the wave function changes. This can formally be seen as a "collapse" of the wave function, with the square quotes indicating that we are not talking about a physical process in which a real wave collapses.”
    Square quotes? Should that say ‘scare quotes’? Anyway, that bit says we’re not talking about a physical collapse.
    All this taken from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interpretations_of_quantum_mechanics
    If collapse isn’t physical and isn’t epistemological, then what is it?


    A statement about a single body is not completely "meaningless", because we can still state properties of the body itself, and this is meaningful.Metaphysician Undercover
    You know I’m talking about it’s property of motion, in complete absence of a second thing relative to which that motion (or lack of it) is meaningful.

    That is, if we take the principle of relativity as our primary premise, and add the observational premise that there are numerous bodies observed to be moving in different ways, we can conclude that noting is immobile.
    Non-sequitur. The principle (your chosen wording) seems only to say that there’s no way to tell, not that there cannot be an immobile one.
    Anyway, I actually don’t wish to continue hammering this point, which just seems to be a different choice of wording the same thing.
    If you can show me a valid concept of rest, lack of change, which can be maintained consistently along with the principle of relativity as well, I would appreciate the demonstration.
    My chosen wording of the principle makes no mention of ‘at rest’ or ‘stationary’, nor does it make any mention of internal change, so it’s not mine to demonstrate.

    Even if we accept locations to be "at rest" relative to each other in an internal way, and deny Einsteinian relativity, these locations are still not at rest in the wider (external) context. And when we start mapping the points which are supposed to be at rest relative to each other, in comparison with external things, we inevitably find minor inconsistencies which cannot be resolved, as demonstrated by Einstein's train example.
    The train example presumes the premises listed. If you deny those premises, then the train example ceases to demonstrate any inconsistencies.
    I always took you for somebody in denial of Einstein’s theory precisely because only in one frame (and not an inertial one either) are all the events in ‘the present’ simultaneous with each other. In all other frames, this is not so, so the laws of physics are different between this and that frame, in violation of the principle. This follows from your assertions, ones with which I do not agree.
  • Emergence
    You are merely trying to suggest a scenario which YOU think CURRENT automated systems could not deal with. I will leave such issues to the experts in the field.universeness
    I imagine what was once a restaurant will become more like a dorm cafeteria. You just come in and eat what you will of what they’re serving that day. No more wait service. Most of the automation of the place will be like a factory, with machines doing continuous tasks with little more intelligence than today’s toasters. There needs to be an AI presence somewhere, but it will likely be offsite, and using specialized drones for non-repetitive tasks like maintenance of the machinery and the control of the rats.

    Yes but bodily autonomy may not be an issue in the future if the whole process is done outside of the body, as I am sure most women would prefer that, to the bodily trauma they currently have to go through.
    This goes against the morals of a huge percentage of voters. I mean, contraception is considered a sin by many, and forced sterilizations are not going to be popular with the voters. It also renders the species completely dependent on the baby farms. It hits one’s Nazi eugenics buttons where only ‘better’ people can breed, and only qualified people can raise children, not necessarily their own. Yea, the voters will love that.
    That said, I sort of support this sort of breeding control, but only in a global culture. In our current system, any group that implements it will likely be out-populated by groups that don’t, and will thus be bred out.
    No abortion as such would be needed just a case of completing a process or stopping it. I imagine, a whole new set of arguments would ensue.
    There are those that consider it murder to not bring to term a female egg, whether via in vitro fertilization or via test-tube procedures like you suggest.
    How about a future where a man can be injected with a compound which makes him produce the equivalent of a female egg. This could then be removed and fertilised with sperm, from his male partner.
    Sounds like a possibility, but it would be probably easier to just combine the DNA of both into a waiting egg from which the female DNA has been removed. Remember that the two women also want to do this and might need one of their gene sets placed into something like a sperm cell. Also remember that the state controls reproduction and might decide that you don’t get to raise your own kids, or raise kids at all, even if you do breed some, so whether the genes of the kids you raise are yours or not might not be something you get to have if we’re implementing this test-tube world.
    :lol: I would love to see the theist's react to that one.
    Most theists would probably embrace all that. I was one once and wasn’t taught the sort of exclusion that you might get from the more conservative church authorities. There are churches based on love and inclusion instead of the opposite.
    Those on the bottom of the social status scale don’t seem to mind their position there, or the social disdain that comes with it.
    — noAxioms
    You know this for certain? How many have you personally asked?
    It isn’t the sort of question that ones comes out and asks, but my son sort of dated somebody from such a family, so I did at some point find myself in their home. The girl’s father certainly put out an air of not minding what I (or my son) thought of his social status.
    Do the animals in a zoo have free travel? freedom of speech and protest? a democratic vote?
    I don’t think the humans will have complete free travel. Sure, it’s a big zoo, but there’s parts of any zoo from which the tennants are kept out. Yes, the zoo animals can say what they want. No it’s not a democratic system, but I don’t think voters would yield their responsibility completely away to the point of it being a zoo. Who knows. Maybe they would. A zoo is pretty posh compared to the wild, especially when the ‘wild’ is everywhere not in this artificial enclosure optimized for humans. Being outside that would probably require life support.
    Free education? A career path of their choice with an ability to change their chosen life path anytime they wish?
    Yes, those are all zoo amnesties. But you don’t get to choose to be a zookeeper. An assistant one perhaps.
    Career path is pretty sketchy. I mean, everybody can choose to be an astronaut today but very few actually get to go into space. You cannot be an accountant so easily if there’s no money. You probably can be a plumber, but then given ‘toy’ projects, with the projects that matter going to the automated systems actually responsible for the system’s continuing functionality. Maybe some would want to be explorers of ‘outside’ the zoo, meaning they get to wear those life-support outfits and be taken on controlled expeditions to areas outside kind of like class trips in school.
    What if I want to do something truly dangerous like be a cave spelunker? Would the zookeepers tolerate a certain level of fatalities from one’s chosen pursuits? As a zookeeper, I would find myself in a position to prevent the occupants from getting killed as much as is reasonable. Where is reasonable?

    If they do, then I would love to live in such a world zoo.
    So the argument goes. How big you think it should be? Less than a 1-10 million people on Earth? That seems plenty for a breeding population, and is well within the limits of renewable resources without resorting to importing something as dangerous as energy from off-planet. It would need to be spread out over several interesting places. I can’t get enough of mountains, especially since I was raised in a place completely lacking in them.

    How is population of a given region controlled?
    — noAxioms
    Via population education, a better means of production, distribution and exchange, perhaps we can make the deserts bloom, build environmental friendly, cities under the water, and we also have the potentially unlimited living space, that might eventually result from space exploration and development.
    universeness
    Most of that answer was ‘find more regions’, which didn’t answer the question at all. Better education and whatnot is going on now, and has almost zero effect. No breeding like rabbits is currently considered immoral by many groups. The propaganda isn’t capable of change unless the morals change first.
    China had forced controls which, partly due to the cultural pressure of requiring a male heir to each family, resulted in orphanages and morgues full of baby girls. In the end it did sort of help reduce their population, perhaps by shipping many of those orphans off to other countries until they halted that due to the shortage of wives for all those heirs.

    Ukraine may well have united with Russia in the same way as countries in the European union united.
    They were united with them, and chose to be separate when it wasn’t forced anymore. I don’t think they benefited much at all from the Union days.
    What is it good for? Absolutely nothing!
    A nice sound bite, but mistaken.
    As long as what you would consider 'wealthy,' gives such individuals no significant ability, to influence any significant number of individuals
    But it does. I have goods worth bartering, and that has influence over those that want those goods that are not otherwise available to everybody.
    or can influence the actions of those in authority
    It’s not supposed to, but it’s also quite human nature that corruption is likely, at least until you offload that task to the automation just like everything else. Can the automation be corrupted? Is it bound by popular choices? We all want (voted for even) guns so we can kill each other. Should the automated non-corruptible authority deny that because it wouldn’t make anybody’s lives better? Because I assure you, the only reason the USA has guns is due to sanctioned legal corruption.

    Yes, I do think long commutes are a waste of resources.universeness
    It was, but not as much ‘cost’ as moving close to my employer. That cost was money, and I suppose that since I had a need, the perfect society would allow me a home near my place of work, but maybe it would be a much smaller home due to the population density there.

    I have no idea why you interpreted this as You don’t think long commutes are a waste of resources?
    OK, I think I get what you’re saying, but what do you do then with the person who wants to live in a place that happens to be quite distant from his place of work? Some of those jobs cannot be performed remotely (such as one in a lab just to name something). Is this person’s needs to be denied?

    The development of an AGI/ASI, has been posited by many, as the technical singularity moment, that will ring the death knell for the whole human species.
    Sure, but slowly, not at a specific event like the pushing of a button that let ‘Skynet’ loose. The singularity isn’t like that. By the time we see it, it’s probably been there for quite a while.
    I learned a bit about chatGTP lately, and the thing is barely qualified as an AI at all. It really does nothing but regurgitate streams of words that already exist, a sort of pimped-out google search. A true intelligence would be able to come up with new ideas, not just rehashing consensus ones. So fear not, the tech singularity isn’t here yet. You’ll know when all the people like me suddenly lost their jobs. That would signal that the thing actually knows what it is doing.


    From that site, we have:
    What is artificial superintelligence (ASI)?
    Artificial superintelligence (ASI) entails having a software-based system with intellectual powers beyond those of humans across a comprehensive range of categories and fields of endeavor.
    universeness
    Machines have long since done some things better than us. I think the definition needs refinement from this one. Any stupid search engine has faster access to a huge database of answers and can get to them faster. But so far it cannot create new knowledge, and I think that part is critical.
    A book contains data, not knowledge. Knowledge is created after you assimilate this data. (Check the term "knowledge".) And it is your mind that process this data, not your brain. The brain can only process stimuli. And stimuli are not data.Alkis Piskas
    I pretty much disagree with every statement here.
    As for the distinction between mind and brain, the latter is an organ, a piece of hardware. The former is process that takes place in the latter. I don’t see how hardware that is operating data is not considered to be the processing of data any less than a meat grinder itself is processing meat, and not just the grinding that processes it.
    AI can never become self-aware or even just aware. Awareness is an attribute of life (living organisms).
    OK, so you seem to be taking the language point of view, a refusal to use a given word to describe an identical process being done by something not on your list of approved categories. This smacks only of religious ignorance. Especially the bit about the suggestion of self-awareness (something that you assert only life can have) existing before abiogenesis (life), which seems to be directly contradicting your own definitions.

    As for "Dyson spheres", I don't think so. Artificial black holes would have far more energy density for far less energy expenditure (no planetary orbit-megaengineering).180 Proof
    Didn’t get this. You want to harness the energy of a black hole? Kind of hard to do that from something from which no energy can escape.
    The Dyson sphere thing seems impractical. Nowhere to get the material, to somehow hold it up, and nowhere to dissipate the energy resulting. A lot of work expended to just jettison the waste heat. The ring idea solves a lot of those problems, but it of course doesn’t capture 100% of the starlight.

    I imagine you will sleep like an innocent child tonightuniverseness
    I’ve bred a few innocent children and trust me, they don’t sleep all that well. Imagine how long it took the photographer to get that shot.

    I loved assembly code, with all its opcodes and operands and how it accessed and manipulated internal registers, as well as the data bus, the address bus and the control lines.universeness
    I don’t remember assembly code including any details of chip pin details like all those buses and control lines and such.
    It could have been worse, you could have been a binary programmer in the days of punch cards or input tape
    I did the tape and card bit, but am unaware of binary being input that way. That was mostly done with manual toggle switches. Very tedious, simple, and before my time. There were assemblers by the time I came around, and my punch-card input was typically some version of fortran.
    Must have been fun trying to find a code error in a million lines of binary code
    I don’t think binary code was every more than a few thousands of bytes. If you can’t bootstrap something more high-level in that amount of space, you’re in the wrong industry.
    I still have my Okidata dot-matrix printer. The ink ribbon has doubtlessly gone totally dry by now, but the thing was a workhorse and was totally reliable, unlike the printers today.
  • The role of observers in MWI
    Cantor's proof (by contradiction) shows that the set of real numbers is uncountable and thus can't be enumerated. Since the set of real numbers can't be enumerated, the diagonalized number therefore can't be computed.Andrew M
    But that number (from Cantor’s proof) is generated from a countable list of rationals, not an uncountable list of reals. So it can be computed. It doesn’t require the ordering of the reals. That was my point,.
    Copenhagen-style interpretations also generally deny a physical collapse. So, in that sense, Copenhagen and Everett/MWI agree (and disagree with physical collapse theories such as GRW).
    I am not really clear on what a formal statement of metaphysical Copenhagen interpretation would say. I’m more familiar of its roots as an epistemological interpretation where collapse (of what is known) very much does occur, but it is just a change in what is known about a system, not a physical change. They’ve since created a not-particularly well defined metaphysical interpretation under the same name, and if it doesn’t suggest physical collapse, I’d accept that statement.

    The empirical difference is between physical collapse theories such as GRW, and non-physical collapse interpretations (such as MWI and Copenhagen). From Wikipedia:
    Such deviations can potentially be detected in dedicated experiments, and efforts are increasing worldwide towards testing them. — wiki
    Cool. Interesting to watch then. Thanks.

    One body relative to the other body, is what is being discussed. Obviously, each is moving and neither is immobile.Metaphysician Undercover
    Totally agree with this, but it renders meaningless a statement about a single body in the absence of something relative to which motion can be defined.
    The principle of relativity states that there is no physical way to differentiate between a body moving at a constant speed and an immobile body.
    If there are two bodies with relative motion, then per the definition of motion, both are moving relative to the other, and the differentiation can easily be made by measurement. If there is but the one body, then motion isn’t defined at all.
    Why do you incessantly resist and deny the point of the principle of relativity?
    I don’t. I said in my prior post that I could accept it, despite the non-relative wording of it.
    The basic principle is that nothing is immobile (nothing is at rest).
    If what is being discussed is one body relative to the other body, your choice of wording leaves the second entity unspecified, merely implied, like there’s some embarrassment about it. So say it. Relative to what is nothing immobile?

    The principle of relativity renders the concept of "at rest" as obsolete.
    And here I thought it was the definition of motion that did that. The principle of relativity seems to still hold even if you discard the relative definition of motion, and Einstein’s theories along with it.
    … because by the principle of relativity "at rest" is not a valid concept.
    If the PoR makes the concept of ‘at rest’ invalid, why does it (or at least the version of PoR that you prefer) reference it?
    My apologies for hanging on this point so much, but you seem to contradict yourself regularly, saying that the concept is invalid, but regularly referencing the invalid concept nonetheless. I personally don’t find the concept invalid at all. It’s just a totally different set of definitions with totally different physics than what Einstein proposes. I don’t prefer these alternate definitions, but I cannot prove them wrong.
    Then through extension of Newton's first law, a rest frame, or inertial frame, can be derived from any body displaying uniform motion because "uniform motion" is the concept which has take the place of "at rest".
    Anyway, I will accept this as well. You don’t seem to be pushing the alternate definitions. In Minkowskian spacetime, a rest frame can be any arbitrarily selected frame and the is the implied second object relative to which motion is defined. The selected frame is an inertial one if Newton’s laws of motion hold in it, but other frames (with different laws) are also allowed.
    That said, I don’t know why nothing can be at rest in it. I do realize that I cannot name a single object which isn’t accelerating at least in the coordinate sense, so nothing seems to be stationary for any extended period of time. I say coordinate sense since an object in free fall (Earth say), except for spinning in place, is not particularly acted on by significant forces and thus is effectively stationary in its local inertial frame (it traces a geodesic through spacetime). This is a departure from Newton’s physics where gravity is a force and causes paths to curve.

    What do you think this means, to assume numbers which cannot be counted nor computed? To me it's a form of unintelligibility, to say that there are numbers which cannot be accessed by us, or used in any way.Metaphysician Undercover
    I don’t find it unintelligible, but I do find fascinating the complete inaccessibility of such numbers to us. The vast majority of real values are these inexpressible values. I gave a few examples of them, especially ones that don’t require units which themselves are only approximately defined.
    It seems that they can be measured to some precision, but those approximations are never the number itself. Hubble’s ‘constant’ (which unfortunately does have units) is one such number, and one that is known to not even an entire significant digit. I put ‘constant’ in quotes because the value changes over time.
  • Emergence
    If the people on the tracks, made the train, and caused it to hurtle towards themselves, then they are the only ones who can stop it. The optimists are not as passively waiting and are not as meekly accepting of the fate your pessimism suggests, they can do nothing about.universeness
    From what I see, all the efforts have been aimed at reduction of the acceleration of the train, not even reduction of its speed. It’s not a fault. I cannot think of a being that has this capability. Perhaps this is evidence against intelligent design, because that’s one of the primary items I would have included in a decent design.

    How about just the person running a paper-pushing position at say a local doctor’s office.— noAxioms
    Soon automated, hopefully, same for all such tedious jobs.
    OK, I can accept that. I also had a paper-pushing job of sorts, but quite a good one involving significant creativity and pay. Such jobs will also be available for automation one the capability is there. It isn’t yet. But I suspect that there will be those who still choose to do such things, even if not in a capacity that displaces the machines doing the actual necessary work.
    You keep churning out such examples, and I keep repeating that I am confident that any job humans don't want to do, can be eventually automated.
    It wasn’t so much a job that wasn’t desired, but rather management that nobody wants to work under. I suppose they can make machines that don’t mind being berated for not being fast enough, or machines that don’t need to wear diapers just because the boss thinks 4 hours between restroom breaks is a minimum interval (Amazon does this among others).
    Yes, machines have automated many tasks, but so far they’re really awful at reacting to problems that arise, anything out of the ordinary. How does the robot restaurant cook react to a rat in the fresh food storage? Probably doesn’t notice it.
    If anyone refuses to do their share, then I would not remove access to any of their basic needs, but there would be social consequence's of their refusal, to do their fair share.
    Ah, now you finally mention the possible utility of consequences, even if completely unspecified.
    Pro-life and bodily autonomy arguments and issues like it, will no doubt persist for a long time yet.
    This is an interesting conflict because I’ve never seen either side of the argument make the slightest attempt to acknowledge the points made by the opposing side. There’s almost zero rationality to it. I’ve been to rallies (you decide which side) and trust me, rationality is nowhere to be seen.
    Point is, the issue with the environment is similarly lacking in rational thought, despite all the claims to the contrary. You need to start with a goal, and ask ‘why that goal?’, and if there’s an answer to that, then you probably haven’t identified the goal yet, only a means to some other goal.
    Who knows how new tech will change how an abortion is performed in the future.
    Sure, but ‘how’ is not the issue. ‘If’ is more the issue.

    Well, I have already stated that the main consequence of behaving as you suggest, in the quote above, is 'social status' based.universeness
    Those on the bottom of the social status scale don’t seem to mind their position there, or the social disdain that comes with it.
    If you know Jimmy (photo's provided), perhaps you could discuss with him, why he will not help his local community, in the ways we have asked him to.
    Because he gets all he needs without helping. That’s apparently enough for Jimmy. Of course I don’t see public shame-sheets naming each of them each month or so, a list of able-bodies individuals on the dole. People would get tired of such propaganda pretty quickly and it would lose any real pressure after a short time.
    You might find my suggestion here unpalatable, and you might even think that violence would be threatened or enacted against Jimmy, or Jimmy himself would respond to such social haranguing with violence, even though it would be prosecuted, if it was perpetrated.
    Then there would be crime, which would be dealt with accordingly, especially with automated evidence-gathering infrastructure that makes it almost impossible to get away with anything illegal. It’s not big-brother if it’s just preventing crime, right?
    Perhaps you can suggest a better way to reason with Jimmy, if all verbal reasoning has failed to date.
    I don’t know, I sort of favor the way they do it with the guy in the hut, but how to differentiate the layabout from the guy who has this busy hobby writing unpopular books and is too busy to pitch into community-necessary work that somehow cannot be automated? Some have excuses. Not all are able-bodied. Some are retired and exempt, and part of the code is to extend their presence as long as possible.
    Perhaps the issue would never arise eventually, due to the level of automation achieved.
    Just so. Then there’s no obligatory tasks, pretty much exactly like life in a zoo.

    How is population of a given region controlled? That can’t stay exponential forever, else the human biomass density will eventually exceed the mass density of the available elements. None of the above visions work without this. Shipping the excess off-planet is not a solution. Colonization is done with new blood. Australia is sort of an exception to this, but it was not done with surplus, but with undesirables.

    Either war will destroy us all or it will eventually unite us all, as it has since we came out of the wilds.universeness
    Don’t think it can unite us. Sure, it can join two smaller groups into a larger one, as it always has, but it cannot, nor has it ever in history, made us one. At best it will be a total imperialistic state with one small group in control of everyone else as occupied states. If they kill off all the occupied population (as they seem to be attempting with Ukraine), then without anyone over whom to have power, the state will collapse into smaller units in mutual conflict. Imagine the entire planet controlled by somebody like Putin, with nothing but Russians everywhere and nobody left who isn’t one. That won’t last. The rules will not be the same for everybody. I can’t prove this, but it seems human nature that this is inevitable. A group needs an enemy to maintain its identity as that group. There’s never been an ‘us’ that seems to encompass all of humanity.
    Of course if there were other planets colonized, that might well unite an entire planet or even federations of them.
    Two tribes go to war and either one conquers the other of they make peace by uniting.
    If that was the outcome, there’d be no point to the war. No, the loser loses something, usually significantly more than just say their leader having to bend the knee. Why does Ukraine resist what’s happening if all they have to do is unite and everybody goes home happy?

    I believe global unity and world government is inevitable
    Well we differ there. I find it impossible unless you limit ‘global’ to ‘one of multiple globes’. Just my opinion.
    Trying to figure out if/where the sarcasm kicks in. — noAxioms
    I intended no sarcasm in what I typed.universeness
    I have bad sarcasm radar, so never sure.
    I see from my readings here that my thinking needs modulation by your robust brand of optimism.ucarr
    I presumed at first this was straight, but I delude myself. jgill definitely throws in on the sarcasm side.
    But in seriousness, I find my comment to which that was a response to be an optimistic outlook for the grander scale. My goals are far larger than those of most people, larger than humanity even. So I’m seen as a pessimist because I see humanity as only a means to something, not as an end.

    If what you say proves to be true in the future, and the 'wealthy' still exist as you describe them above.
    You said this, just not in those words. You said people could barter for more than the essential needs provided by the state on what I called the black market. That makes for wealthy people. If not, then such activity (barter) should be illegal and all goods (say the highly sought after paintings) should be handed out by lottery or something, in which case they’ll all be destroyed in short order because the average Joe has no means to care for priceless artwork. The artist will probably not bother to make many, knowing this fate awaits them.
    You seem to be OK with there being wealthy people. After all, it makes for an incentive to do something truly productive rather than mere pursuit of one’s hobbies.
    I wonder if a sufficiently wealthy person could create a company, all without money. What if the company could be publicly owned? That would make for money appearing in a system devoid of it. My brother is well educated in such matters. I should discuss stuff like that with him.
    Yeah, a lottery win can be a death sentence for many.
    Agree, but it wouldn’t be for me, mostly for the same reasons I don’t pay the stupid tax.
    'Earned the same amount,' is controversial, to say the least. The money trick means you can earn great wealth, not by particularly working hard but by sycophantically leeching from the sweat and toil of workers.
    I didn’t mention any ‘trick’. I’ve earned my nest egg without every having an employee. I do own a company of sorts now, but it’s just me. It pays far less than the days when I was employed, but I find myself not wanting to get back into it.
    Nevertheless, those that earn money by working for the man or by being the man are both in the same category: far more likely to manage assets better than somebody who won similar asserts in a prize.
    If you earned your millions/billions via investments and deals on the stock markets (gambling joints), then your wealth is via the money trick and is NOT CLEAN imo.
    Ah, we seem to have introduced a concept of clean money, different than the usual definition (laundered). You seem to define it in terms of moral means of acquisition. My brother (the one I spoke of above) made his living day-trading for several years. It wasn’t gambling and he did quite well, but I told him that it wasn’t productive since the activity served the interests of nobody, no customer or anything. He stopped doing it (afaik) and now rents other people’s houses. That is a productive activity and I approve more.
    That beginning, that resulted in the Amazon company that exists today and the abomination that is now the wealth of Bezos, is nefarious, and vile, and needs to be stopped from ever, ever happening, in the future.
    It’s efficient, and should be emulated by your perfect society. You just don’t like the money going to the owners. The brutal working conditions should be illegal though, but they’re necessary to be competitive. Your social society would eliminate that competition and theoretically make the working conditions far better, especially since nobody is going to be forced to do it by the necessity of needing to feed their families.

    Sounds good to me! Apart from the 'waste of resources.'universeness
    You don’t think long commutes are a waste of resources? My last job was about 200 km away. I considered moving but the cost of living was so much higher there. So I went in once or twice a week and did a 40 hour shift and did the rest of the work from home. I burned 4 cars into the ground doing that. Every one of them was lost somewhere on the commute to that place.

    For me, the term 'information singularity' or 'technological singularity,' is more about a 'moment of very significant change.'universeness
    Yes, but one car passing another isn’t a significant change. It’s a subtle one, even if the long term implications are not subtle. Maybe the cars are not side by side but km apart and nobody notices the difference.
    I didn’t see the point in bringing up a mathematical singularity at all. OK, a black hole event horizon is a singularity of sorts, and dropping through one won’t be noticed by the thing doing it, but the implications (certain doom) are there, and probably were already there before the EH was crossed. So there’s a bit of appropriateness to that analogy.
  • Emergence
    People love to see trains coming. They bring stuff and take stuff and offer travel.universeness
    You seem to be deliberately avoiding the analogy, which is everybody on a train trestle (or tunnel) with nowhere to stand with a train present. The people cannot get out of the way, but they can slow/stop the train, but not trivially. But most (the optimists at least) assume the train will stop by itself or somebody else will do it. The pessimists know nobody else will do it, but even they don’t really have any good suggestions for preventing the train from arriving. There’s nothing nefarious going on (except perhaps those profiting from speeding up the train). The train is of the making of the very people on the tracks.

    initiatives like the 'Gosplan' in Russia were indeed socialist and were successful or a whileuniverseness
    Thanks for the description of that. It’s far more than I knew, and I haven’t really looked it up myself.

    The rewards involved in helping others, can be as much of an ego boost, as someone telling you what what an amazing artist, singer, writer, scientist, capitalist, warrior, devil, angel, worshiper, athlete or tiddlywinker you are.universeness
    Not thinking of those being an amazing anything. How about just the person running a paper-pushing position at say a local doctor’s office. Yes, you can get the boost from doing something needing doing, being amazing about it in the eyes of others is a stretch. Respectable, sure. What about all those service jobs with a boss that makes every day misery? I know several businesses locally that permanently have help-wanted signs outside because they scare away employees faster than they attract them. Imagine that situation without the incentive of getting anything (event he ego boost) for your efforts.
    All people seek the approval of others, no matter how much anyone might deny it, imo.
    How about somebody working at an abortion clinic (doctor or staff)? Those people provide an essential service and yet get far more disapproval from others than otherwise.

    Most folks are forced to, yes, or do you think a 16 year old black boy living in a hut in a poor village in a 3rd world country or a slum ghetto somewhere, has the same opportunities in life, as your kids have had?
    I’m speaking of those in a first world country that actively decide not to contribute. There’s a significant number of them. In the country with the hut, somebody making a choice like that would just starve. You’re describing a global first world situtation, so your comparisons shouldn’t reach for the opposite end of that spectrum.

    Good, I am glad you vote, I hope you vote for those who are closest to secular humanism,
    Of course I do. Not many of those voting otherwise tend to find their way onto a forum like this one. OK, more here than you’d find on say a science forum.
    Secular humanism isn’t enough imo, and the office required to do what needs doing doesn’t even exist. The candidates all stand for the voters now, not for humanity, beyond their incredibly short term of office.

    If people like what she produces in HER CHOSEN JOB of 'artist,' then prints of her work can be downloaded by anyone for free, framed and put up on their wall.
    Prints sure, but it’s the originals which command the value. Those ‘sell’ by barter if nothing else, and command a significant exchange on the black market (any market operating outside the ‘to each according to their needs’ mechanism).
    I would get rid of all copyright and patent laws.
    Yea, that’s been a problem. China for instance steals software, copying it freely, thus forcing restrictions on sales of tech to them. An Xbox for example could not be legally be exported to China due to this policy. I agree that such laws are kind of pointless on a global communist society, but right now there isn’t a global anything economy. It’s just different independent countries each with different rules. The lack of unified rules is a huge part of the problem. How do you propose to move from how it is now to a unified thing?
    To the state, artists WOULD BE very significant contributors. Of course she is contributing to the well being of others. People LOVE art. Why is her work in so much demand, if it does not contribute to peoples well-being???
    Trying to figure out if/where the sarcasm kicks in. Yes, many people love art. Those guys get the prints. But the wealthy can afford the rare stuff, the originals, and there will very much be the wealthy. The artist in question will be one of them. Lack of a concept of money just makes it harder to tax.
    Why would she put her 'original' paintings on to a barter market?
    Seriously? Because it commands a price. She can trade it for other luxuries that are not included in the package available to everybody.
    I think the artist you describe would be happy living under the system I am proposing.
    So do I. Did I say otherwise? OK, a luxury life does not imply a happy person. One of the best way to ruin your happiness and relations with everybody you know is to win a major lottery. The stats on that are very consistent. But a lottery winner is very different from somebody who earned the same amount.
    For the record, I consider lotteries to be a stupid-tax: A tax that’s completely optional, to be paid only by stupid people.

    Every one will get 'one' of what they need for free, a house, a flying auto drive car, a home/mobile com system, a fridge freezer, home seating...
    I suspect the future for the personal vehicle (let alone a flying one) is doomed. Transportation in any sufficiently dense population is best done by mass transit. I’ve been in the places where many people don’t own cars since everything can be reached via bus, subway, intercity trains, boats, etc. Most of the personal transportation might be limited to bicycles. It’s too rural where I live to do that, but that raises the problem where many want to live in a scenic place like the mountains, but do work more suited to an urban setting. That makes for a lot of resources wasted on commuting, even if it is a mass commute.
    There will be small vehicles, like a service van for the plumber and such.

    On the subject of the information singularity which half the people seem incapable of grasping.
    The ‘singularity’ that you hear about is a threshold of sorts, where machines are more capable of improving themselves than by having humans doing it. We’re not there yet, and there’s quite a ways to go, but the advances are coming fast and it doesn’t seem that long before it happens.

    *2. How to prepare our minds for the information singularity?
    Information singularity – what is it and why is it dangerous
    Gnomon
    The singularity in question has nothing to do with one’s mind.
    But the philosophical implications of a world-creating, Singularity preceding the existence of our physical world, are of interest to me.
    It also has nothing to do with world-creating. Planet Earth will be the same planet afterwards.

    the information singularity at point of explosion pushes sentience across a threshold whereupon a "quantum leap" upward into a new, higher gestalt of cognition gets underway.ucarr
    I could not understand that bit at all. It doesn’t involve an explosion, but it does involve growth of capability possibly going more exponential than the somewhat more linear growth seen today. That growth might not be so exponential since we seem to already be pushing the limits of Moore’s law.
    The big bang singularity for me has different properties than the singularity which is proposed to be at the centre of every black hole, for example.universeness
    You’re speaking of a mathematical singularity here, where certain laws of physics become meaningless when denominators go to zero and such. The information singularity is nothing like that. It’s kind of like one vehicle passing another on the highway. Now there’s a new one in the lead is all.
    The scary part is the possibility homo sapiens will effect its own obsolescence in accordance with evolution by causing an information singularity necessitating appearance of homo superior in order to understand and utilize the higher cognition.ucarr
    Funny, but I don’t see that as scary. I see that as a destiny fulfilled. Yes, all the species that were our ancestors but are now extinct have effected their own obsolescence by breeding something more fit. Superior as you put it. I suppose it sucked in a way for the species now extinct, but I see it as a success.
    The intriguing part, according to my speculation, concerns the parallel of matter reaching critical mass just prior to radioactivity with elementary particle formation and likewise information reaching critical mass just prior to gnostic "radioactivity" with elementary knowledge formation.ucarr
    That’s probably the best analogy I saw in the posts. The I-S is like that, a sort of critical mass that results in something self-sustaining like an atomic pile (or a meltdown), but not so over-critical that it explodes like a bomb.

    As an aside, I’ve always hated how Hollywood depicts a meltdown resulting in a bomb-like event with the huge explosion. The movie ‘Aliens’ comes to mind, but there were some older ones that made the same mistake. Hey, people like to see the bang, even if the physics is nonsense.
  • The role of observers in MWI
    Interestingly, the real number generated by Cantor's diagonalization proof is a computable number, so I’m not sure if this counts as evidence that there are some real numbers not computable. Once again, not disagreeing with the conclusion, only with how it was reached.
    — noAxioms
    It isn't a computable number (though it is a real number) - see the section entitled "A counter proof?" at the above link.
    Andrew M
    I pondered over this for several days trying to understand the arguments. I still hold to what I said. The section you mention nicely shows that the x generated from the list of computable numbers is not itself a computable number, but I was speaking of the x generated from Cantor’s original proof of some real not being a rational number. That x is computable, but not rational, and thus cannot be used as evidence that there are some real numbers not computable.
    The page you linked does show other ways to demonstrate exactly this, but the diagonalization method is not one of them.

    Back to the quantum business:
    What is ‘jumping’ in that quote? “Do we not have jumping then all the time?”.
    — noAxioms
    He's referring to the collapse of the wave function (i.e., a discontinuous change in the otherwise continuous time evolution of the Schrodinger equation).
    Collapse seems to be a choice of classical description of a quantum state, in other words, an interpretation-dependent thing. In interpretations with ‘jumping’, yes, it happens all the time, everywhere. In interpretations without it (such as Everett’s relative state formulation, pre DeWitt’s MWI), it’s just a classical effect, not anything physical that happens.

    Presumably [the AI in the box] wouldn't. But an AI (unlike a human) could be run on a quantum computer as part of a carefully controlled experiment, thus testing physical collapse theories that differ from standard quantum theory.
    I have serious doubts about that. It is a suggestion that there is an empirical difference between the interpretations, and yet I see not explicit prediction from any pair of interpretations that differ.

    Try this:[ tau.ac.il/education/muse/museum/galileo/principle_relativity.html ]Metaphysician Undercover
    You had to reach to Tel Aviv university to find a page closer to your definition?
    Galileo formulated the principle of relativity in order to show that one cannot determine whether the earth revolves about the sun or the sun revolves about the earth. — tau
    This is blatantly wrong. For one, the appearance of the sun revolving around the Earth once a day is not explained by the Earth revolving around the sun once a day any more than we’re revolving around all those other objects (moon, stars, etc) once a day. Secondly, the sun revolving around the Earth (once a year) violates basic Newtonian physics (lacking a reaction for the action of the sun). Newton’s laws were not in place back then so Galileo wouldn’t have known that.
    Anyway, his pitch of principle of relativity used a boat’s relation to the water as the example, not celestial mechanics. The idea was that one could not tell from inside the boat whether the boat was moving relative to the water or not.
    [quote-tau]The principle of relativity states that there is no physical way to differentiate between a body moving at a constant speed and an immobile body.[/quote]This definition is still reasonable, despite lack of reference to something relative to which the motion is defined. In short, there’s no way to differentiate an observer’s motion relative to some X if the observer cannot measure X. X is typically implied to be the ground (or water in Galileo’s case) beneath the observer, but it can be anything.
    I accept the definition since it is more or less possible to derive either definition from the other, presuming at least that the X is explicit. It is the lack of that explicit reference that makes the definition ambiguous.
    It is of course possible to determine that one body is moving relative to the other, but it is impossible to determine which of them is moving and which is immobile. — tau
    This statement is especially ambiguous. Which of them is moving/immobile relative to what exactly? Humans tend to imply the ground since that’s their lifelong reference, but the implication is begging in this context.

    I spend all my time just having to show you that you don't know what you're talking about.
    Maybe you should try to actually understand what I’m talking about instead. I’m referencing far more reputable sources than are you. I’m pointing out explicitly what’s wrong with the pages you choose to quote. I don’t see you doing that with my references.

    I do agree that perhaps your inability to understand an alternative to this absolutist view prevents communication between you and the rest of the scientific community. One doesn't have to accept the view with which you don't agree, but to not even understand it just leaves you behind.
  • Emergence
    At least you are consistent in your imagery of pessimism and dystopia for future humans.universeness
    And you remain consistent with the optimism. I’m sure somebody will fix it. Just somebody else, and please not while I’m around.
    I am glad that I don't have to deal with such a burdensome, pressing, internal gnaw, regarding the future of our species.
    Are you sure NOBODY wants to ensure the well-being, thriving and progression of our species, towards becoming as benevolent a presence in the universe as is possible?
    There are those that might be capable of it, but they are not the ones in a position to do anything about it. Certainly not by the process you suggest for assigning these positions. Not one of them would be electable. You need a pessimist for one thing. Nobody is going to take evasive action if they refuse to see the train coming.

    There are definite similarities, between my politics, and the intentions of the hero masses of Russia and China, that got rid of the vile monarchy, aristocracy, plutocracy that ruled those country's so badly.
    OK, they got rid of the aristocracy, just as the French did. It was better than before, but it was never communist except in name. Maybe briefly at first, but people needed to eat and keep warm.
    'The Plan,' as formed in Russia to create a fair, money free, socioeconomic system in Russia, was a brilliant system, that worked very well for the Russian people, when it was first introduced. Russia's decline into the totalitarian gangster state, it is now, started when the truly evil Stalin took power.
    Yea, I don’t know enough about how all that worked. My knowledge of the transition to that gangster state is pretty poor. Don’t know how it all kind of worked before then, or how the rest of the world dealt with such a state.
    An utterly crucial lesson, we have all, yet to fully understand and learn how to successfully prevent from happening again.
    Hence my interest in designing a better system, even if only on paper. But my expertise makes me a naive contributor at best. They tried to do it in the USA, but clearly mistakes were made.
    Part of the problem is the world economy. You can put in good rules like ‘no slavery’, but global companies will just outsource their production to regions with rules that allow it. Rules being different from here to there messes it all up. There is no global authority.
    What would such an authority do? Hand first world minimal living standards to even the most primitive places on the planet?


    There are very serious social consequences. People will still want to know answers to questions such as 'so what do you do?'
    Admittedly, people are readily willing to shell out tens of thousands of dollars to garner an imagined approval from complete strangers. I wonder how much I fool myself into thinking I’m not impressed by it.
    The difference between then and now, is that they will have truly CHOSEN to live their life like that, rather than be forced to, as the majority who are experiencing life like that today, are forced to.
    They’re forced to? They’re able bodied and educatable. That path isn’t forced. Taught maybe.

    Well noticed! don't you think you should work with those who are trying to remove such consequences of the capitalist money trick?
    I vote. I hadn’t any plans to go into politics and rise to the levels where such things are decided.

    I have no problem with the 'black market' you describe in the quote above.
    If someone wants, say, an old/vintage car collection, that they do up, and show to others and drive around, then, the 'barter' system you describe, sounds good to me.
    Everyone can take their basic means of survival for granted. As long as that is available to EVERYONE with no conditions attached, and such rights CANNOT BE REMOVED by any new authority, then I think we can accomodate the majority of the wishes of those who prioritise 'independent expressions of personal freedom,' and also allow, 'entrepreneurial aspiration.'
    OK. Suppose somebody is a very talented and popular artist. She creates works that are far more in demand than there is supply. So it goes onto the barter market and she gets wealthy with whatever the medium of exchange is. In the mean time, to the state she’s a non-contributor since none of her work contributes to the well-being of the whole. At best her side ‘income’ at least pays for the better art supplies since the state isn’t going to find need there if her work is on the non-contributor status just like all the other authors, artists and hobbyists, the ones whose work is noticed by a handful of people at best.

    About photons from data:
    I think we are probably imagining the same thing. Obviously, your instruction above would be in an HLL or high level language that would require translation before execution.universeness
    Irrelevant. So does communication between the two of us, whether on this forum or in person. There’s probably at least half a dozon translations/format-conversions done between any such communication, and this is without a machine bothering to parse it to the point of understanding. The ‘make a photon’ instruction might be a single hole in a paper tape. That’s how say one note might be conveyed to a player piano.
    The 'machine code' level is the language code we are discussing here , not your 'emit a positron' language (I doubt 'please' will be needed).
    OK, you are envisioning binary machine instructions. I wasn’t since such an instruction processing unit is optional just like it is with the piano which works just fine without one. Nothing wrong with doing it via machine instructions.
    Employing a source of photons to produce a photon or positron is not my challenge. It's producing a tech that can create a Tbone stake by manipulating the proposed digital level fundamental of the universe.
    Ah, a sort of 3D printer for food. Is that so unimaginable?
    A Tbone steak, produced, from that which is traditionally described, as the vacuum of space.
    As I said, that is impossible (energy conservation violation), and Star Trek never suggested such a capability, despite their complete willingness to discard physics when it suits their purpose.
    Anyway, I don’t think the vacuum of space is going to be able to parse your machine instructions.

    A wave of light is an electomagnetic analogue waveform of continuous peaks and troughs that traverses the vacuum of space at a fixed speed.
    I don’t think there is any such thing. It’s a nice image for some purposes is all.
    If you could zoom right into it, I would expect to find that it is made up of discrete packets of energy/field excitations which might be vibrating strings or undulations etc
    You can’t zoom into it. Light ‘packets’ unmeasured are undetectable. Light measured is no longer light. This isn’t true of something classical like a water wave, which may lose its wave nature if you zoom in, but there’s still something classical into which one can zoom.

    The law is 'You SHALL NOT add your speed, to the speed of light!' — universeness
    Not true. You just have to use relativistic addition just like adding velocities of anything under Einstein’s theory.
    It seems that in other sites that you cite, the term ‘non-relativistic’ refers to pre-Einstein views like Newtonian physics.
    — noAxioms
    [Carl Sagan clip on ‘Thou Shalt Not Add My Speed to the Speed of Light’ — universeness
    Nice reference, but this is a pop video by Carl whose audience is the naive layman. This does not stand up to physics. He implies that light is some sort of exception, that if you are on a bicycle going 20 km/hr relative to the road and throw a rock forward at 20 km/hr relative to the bicycle, that the rock would be going at 40 km/hr relative to the road. Well it’s close to that due to the speed being so insanely low, but it assumes Newtonian relativity, as does pretty much the entire video, understandable due to the layman audience.
    If the logic is true, then if the bike is going at .9c and the rider shoots a bullet at 0.5c, then the bullet would be going at 1.4c relative to the ground, contradicting his own statement that such a thing would be impossible.
    No, the correct solution is to use Einstein’s relative velocity addition for the bike, the rock, the bullet, and yes, the light. Light is not an exception to this rule at all. Carl doesn’t bring this up at all. He know it, but he also is speaking to an audience that doesn’t yet care about this.
  • The role of observers in MWI
    The computable numbers are countable since they be put in a one-to-one correspondence with the natural numbers.Andrew M
    Not to disagree, but an assertion like that requires a demonstration that they’re countable.
    However the real numbers are not countable per Cantor's diagonalization proof. Thus there are some real numbers that are not computable.
    Interestingly, the real number generated by Cantor's diagonalization proof is a computable number, so I’m not sure if this counts as evidence that there are some real numbers not computable. Once again, not disagreeing with the conclusion, only with how it was reached.
    That just sounds like Bell’s theorem (old news). What in 2019 was added to that?
    — noAxioms
    The addition is that the experiment tests a Bell inequality for a Wigner's friend scenario (which the paper terms a Bell-Wigner test).
    OK, they managed to test something whose outcome (the CHSH inequality violation) was already predicted by quantum theory. It’s a new test, but not one that changed the theory or any of its interpretations in any way.
    Thanks for the larger context Bell statement. I agree with it fully. What is ‘jumping’ in that quote? “Do we not have jumping then all the time?”.
    Meanwhile, I still don’t see what the AI in the box will do. Bell’s statement is pretty clear that a real human in there wouldn’t serve any special role or purpose, so why would an AI be any different?



    You are reversing logical priority here. The concept "frame of reference" is derived from the principle of relativity, not vise versa.Metaphysician Undercover
    Not sure where you get this idea. PoR is defined in a few places
    In physics, the principle of relativity is the requirement that the equations describing the laws of physics have the same form in all admissible frames of reference. — wiki
    And from the special relativity paper itself:
    They suggest rather that, as has already been shown to the first order of small quantities, the same laws of electrodynamics and optics will be valid for all frames of reference for which the equations of mechanics hold good. We will raise this conjecture (the purport of which will hereafter be called the “Principle of Relativity”) to the status of a postulate

    1. The laws by which the states of physical systems undergo change are not
    affected, whether these changes of state be referred to the one or the other of
    two systems of co-ordinates in uniform translatory motion
    — Einstein,1905
    Each one of these definitions of the principle of relativity references ‘frames of reference’ or ‘systems of coordinates’. I would go so far as to say that the PoR is derived from frames of reference, but it certainly is defined using the concept. Thus the reference frame precedes the principle, else the definitions above would all be meaningless.
    The definition of motion being relative to a reference makes no reference to the principle of relativity.

    So when I said "every moment of passing time", I implied that within any "moment" there is inherently some duration of time.
    That’s like asserting that a mathematical point or a location in space must have a size. Your choice I suppose. It seems to just complicate what is otherwise a simple thing.
    Your presentist opinions are well known. They’re valid (there are alternatives to Einstein’s theories that deny both his SR premises), but they’re fringe alternatives. Your inability to demonstrate an understanding of the mainstream view seems baffling for somebody with in-depth interest in the subject.
  • Emergence
    A zoo suggests the existence of outside visitors who will come and be entertained by viewing your captive status. Who would they be, in your zoo imagery?universeness
    Clearly those who maintain the zoo, the automations that do the actual (unpleasant?) work, who provide all the Purina human chow to all the people that want not. It might not be there primarily for viewing. It would definitely have a limited population. It is bad zoo policy to let all the exhibits breed without bounds.
    A nature preserve doesn’t describe it better since that isn’t usually a situation where all the needs of the inhabitants are met, or where unnatural controls are enacted.
    Dependence on automated systems does not assign you zoo status
    True. It all seems to depend on who’s in charge. What’s taking responsibility for the management and well-being of the occupants. If it’s the occupants, it’s not a zoo. But then there are tasks needing to be done that nobody wants to do, such as the actual management and assurance of well-being of the occupants. Who for instance is going to enforce controls? These people are not going to be revered. Reviled is more like it. OK, there are plenty who would actually want to do those things, but those are not the ones you want doing these tasks. They’re the power hungry ones, the ones that are first to be corruptible.
    One of the best tests for a form of government is finding a way to put in charge only the people who don’t want to do it.
    I have no idea where you get any notion of 'zero responsibility,' from.
    You’ve described a full communist society, one without money, where everbody gets fed and housed and medical care regardless of level of contribution. That spell zero responsibility since there are no consequences to not being responsible.
    I totally agree that it is a big part of human nature to want to be a contributor. There will be plenty of those, but there is also a significant percentage of those that are fine with doing nothing, even in a capitalist system where only their basic minimal are met (same list as above). The term ‘white trash’ refers to a subset of these types. It seems to not bother them at all to not be ‘revered’, but they’re arguably more fit since they tend to have more children on average.
    I live in the USA and have some experience on how they punish the poor that try to get off assisted living. If you try to get a low tier job and start paying for your own expenses, the eligibility of the social benefits drops faster than your income. That means you can’t afford to have a modest paying job since it costs far more than it benefits you. So the poor are trapped in a way. That’s not a problem with your vision, just something I notice wrong about our current system.



    Black markets are money based.
    Not necessarily. Certainly not in a society without money. If there is trade (you don’t get this unless you give me that), there is an economy, something evading the ‘to each according to their needs’ system.

    A quark may be a vibrating string state, for example, in common with all field excitations.universeness
    That’s very different than positing that a quark is composed of multiple strings. Yea, I suppose strings could be expressed as something described by digital information.

    A process is not yet available that can create a photon from the data stored in a datafile.
    Why not? The data can be “please emit a positron”, and that data causes the machine to emit one (newly created at that).
    I don’t otherwise have any idea what you might otherwise mean by the creation of something from what is effectively an abstraction. The T-bone steak is made from real energy/mass if you will, not from an abstraction, even if data is needed for the machine to know what a steak needs to be.

    A wave of light(electromagnetic radiation) and the quanta of photons, for example.
    A wave of light is made of photons, which are waves of light made of photons ........What’s a wave of light then. I’ve heard of a beam of light, but a not so much a wave of it like a wave of water molecules.
    What is your speed relative to an observer in a space station?
    Probably nearly the same as the speed relative to the space station. There being an observer in it or not doesn’t change that.
    The speed of light is non-relativistic. It is the same, no matter what reference frame you use.It’s still relative to that frame. The velocity of a particular pulse of light for instance is very much frame dependent.
    The law is 'You SHALL NOT add your speed, to the speed of light!'
    Not true. You just have to use relativistic addition just like adding velocities of anything under Einstein’s theory.
    It seems that in other sites that you cite, the term ‘non-relativistic’ refers to pre-Einstein views like Newtonian physics.
  • Emergence
    No it's not, as we can create extraterrestial renewable energy, such as solar power generation stations, built in space.universeness
    True, and I mentioned this above, but that’s like trying to solve global warming by frying Earth with a giant magnifying glass like we did to the ants back in the day.
    Also renewables can be augmented, by perhaps, new future tech, such as cold fusion.
    That’s what we’re doing now. Augmenting. Admittedly, the fusion fuel isn’t likely to run out in the near term.
    Yes, might never happen, it's not a fact that it will, for many reasons such as the ones I have suggested above.
    It has happened, else the ‘augmentation’ wouldn’t be necessary. I share you confidence that the usage will drop below that line again.
    Future tech such as spacelifts, might be very efficient.
    That is very true, but such lifts require a clear path, clear of all the orbital space junk that we’re currently adding at an exponential rate. They’re talking of putting one on the moon because its not as expensive there, and the moon hasn’t all that much junk in orbit about it yet.

    It's not a vital point, as long as the necessary info is returned to those who need it, on Earth or otherwise.
    Precisely what a probe is for, yes.

    That's just confused thinking imo.universeness
    But from my point of view, it was a conclusion reached after years of analysis.
    A good education, only if you can afford one, is a vile concept.
    Totally agree. Unfortunately, the public education in my home town was pretty awful. I mingled with them during driver’s ed of all places and got a good sample of what those schools produced.
    I am also against all religious schools.
    Mine actually did a pretty good job, teaching that science is compatible with religion. Only later when the church decided it was the enemy was I forced to choose. I never got that from my school.

    In all honesty, it seems to me that your judgement of those who administered palliative care for your grandparent, may be very harsh, but I suppose, such judgements are within your prerogative.universeness
    Well there’s a reason almost all my dutch relatives do their best to stay away from those institutions. They’re quite known for it. I personally didn’t see any of it since I didn’t live there.

    You prefer a system based on 'you don't do anything, that I or even WE, subjectively, decide has not met OUR standards,' so you will be left to rot and starve or freeze to death?universeness
    I had asked what the recognition was. Your answer was ‘nothing special’. That sounds like poor motivation. No, I had not suggested leaving people to freeze and starve.
    Such jobs will be automated or done by those who don't find them unpleasant or will be done by everyone on a shared basis.
    If they’re automated, then we live in a zoo. If the tasks are shared, then there needs to be motivation to do your part. The middle suggestion evades the question. The guy who should best do it is busy writing a book nobody will read.
    It all sounds a bit like heaven, except not as bad. A life of zero responsibility where all your needs are met by somebody/something else. In heaven, it’s an eternity and there are no needs to be met, so not even the responsible people have anything to do that matters.

    How does one stop black markets from operating?

    Most of the most revered works available today were created by people who got very little or no recognition during their lifetime and died in poverty.
    Van Gogh comes to mind. Can’t think of any literary examples, but I’m sure they’re there.

    I taught computing science for 30+ years. Data redundancy is wide ranging. Duplicated data in database systems, too many copies of data, out-of-date data.universeness
    Agree to all, but that’s not metadata, nor ‘extra bits’ in network packets. Redundant data in the cases above is there so if you lose something (a disk, an entire site), the data is backed up elsewhere.
    Funny that I worked on a project to reduce redundant data, a de-duplication process designed to reclaim wasted space. Goes to show that some redundancy is just plain wasteful whereas other redundancy (the cases you list) are critical.
    In data packets, error detection and correction data has always been called redundant data.
    Yes, as I pointed out. Parity and ECC bits and all...
    From wiki:
    In computer main memory, auxiliary storage and computer buses, data redundancy is the existence of data that is additional to the actual data and permits correction of errors in stored or transmitted data.
    This is ECC they’re talking about. Yes, it’s part of the actual data, and there to prevent costly retransmission of the packet in the cases of minor noise on the line. The bits cost perhaps 10-20% of the payload. Parity bits cost less, but that’s just error detection, not correction. Parity is common on disks and sometimes RAM, but ECC is more common in network packets.

    Quarks would not be fundamental, if the smallest bit of the information which 'defines' a Quark or a photon, is THEE fundamental of the structure of the universe.universeness
    We again seem to be talking past each other. It sounds like an assertion of one thing out of which everything is composed, like you could break a quark apart into them. If you don’t mean that, I don’t get what you mean.

    Perhaps one day we will have the tech to create a REAL up-quark instead of a simulated or emulated one, displayed on some output media.
    They do that now, albeit with difficulty. Far easier to create say a positron out of a not-positron. Happens naturally all the time.
    No, not a simulation or emulation. I used the word REAL. So, to convince me that information is THEE universal fundamental, I would need to witness a REAL machine like the food replicators on Star Trek, producing REAL food, from information only, not naturally produced seeds or animal flesh/produce!
    Sounds like an energy conservation violation to me. Even the fictional food replicators needed raw material from which to make its stuff, which is why you’d donate your dishes, dirty laundry and sewage back into the system.

    Yeah, so you have got past the a wave is made of quanta
    A wave of what? A quanta of what?

    So gravitational waves quantise to gravitons but gravity does not consist of gravitons, gravity is not a force under relativity. So, are you saying gravity IS a force in a non-relativistic frame
    No. Gravity is treated as a force under Newtonian mechanics. I made no mention of frames in that statement. I don’t know what a relativistic frame is as distinct from a non-relativistic one. There are different kinds of frames, but they’re all just arbitrary abstract coordinate systems.


    or even satanists or pagans, are all still theists imo.universeness
    Always wondered about the Satanists. I mean, the bible says if you believe in God, you go to heaven. Well, the Satanists believe in God as their sworn enemy. I'm sure the church has an answer to that, but I never asked. It's a funny religion since with most of them it's a test of how good you behave (and of course how much bribes were spread around). Nope. Jesus died so your worship of Satan can be forgiven. Your belief is enough to get you up there. Bet that's going to piss them off when they end up in sort of a prisoner of war camp behind enemy lines. Apparently the death of Jesus didn't forgive the sin of lack of belief. Seems quite incomplete and not very loving of him.
  • The role of observers in MWI
    OK, maybe, but it’s a very different definition. Is there an example of something that isn’t [a computable number]?
    — noAxioms

    Yes, one can use diagonalization to produce a number that isn't in the set. Another example is the probability that a randomly constructed computer program will halt (Chaitin's constant).
    Andrew M
    Both qualify as a computable number. The diagonalization method used with an ordered list of all rational numbers nicely produces a number that isn’t rational, but is very much computable by the definition on the site you linked. All one has to do to get n bits of precision is to list the first rational numbers and take a bit from each, a very finite task.
    As for Chaitin’s constant, there is this from the site:
    “Each Chaitin constant Ω has the following properties:
    • It is algorithmically random (also known as Martin-Löf random or 1-random). This means that the shortest program to output the first n bits of Ω must be of size at least n − O(1).“

    The existence of an algorithm to output the first n bits seems make it a computable number since they say what it takes to compute it to some arbitrary finite precision. I say that, but then I linked over to a page on normal numbers and it says this: “For example, Chaitin’s constant is normal (and uncomputable).“ which means I’m reading that listed property above wrong. I think I’m missing the ‘at least’ part.

    A universal Turing Machine can simulate itself by accepting, as input, a description of itself and running it. See Turing completeness.
    The page seems to assume infinite memory and infinite machines states. The more memory you need to access, the more states you need, and a machine emulating something needs more memory/states than the thing being emulated. The page seems to assume for instance a generic language where say pointers are not of finite size. But I’ll accept the definitions used on the page and withdraw my statement.


    Concerning the paper on the Wigner friend thing:
    The experiment matches the predictions of standard quantum mechanics, and thus also the predictions of MWI.
    I agree with that, but I wasn’t talking about predictions. I was talking about language describing things other than the results.

    So it doesn't challenge MWI on those grounds. But also, on an MWI view, it's disputable whether a measurement actually took place since no decoherence (and thus no world branching) occurred.
    Another reason why I don’t like the suggestion of actual metaphysical branching of worlds. Everett never suggested it, but DeWitt added that, coining the term ‘MWI’ in the process. I prefer Rovelli’s take on it where there is no ‘actual’ about any of the measurements, and observation serves only an epistemological purpose.


    So, if one accepts the authors' definitions for an observer and measurement, then one of the assumptions of free choice, locality, and observer-independent facts must be false.
    That just sounds like Bell’s theorem (old news). What in 2019 was added to that?
    Which is why Deutsch's proposal to use an AI on a quantum computer would be an important and compelling experiment.
    Sorry, but I don’t see what the AI adds that any simple device (like the circuit on the camera) doesn’t.

    You're rejecting the "observer-independent facts" assumption, which is fine.
    If I have to drop something, that one seems far preferrable to the others. I don’t reject it since it cannot be disproved.

    Bottom line is that I haven’t understood the proposal enough to clarify how the different interpretations make different predictions for some experiment, hence offering a falsification test for a subset of them. Supposedly this might have already been done for counterfactuals, which would then be a very good reason to reject observer independent facts.

    I like Carroll’s definition of observer, appropriate for something like MWI.
    As John Bell inquired, "Was the wave function waiting to jump for thousands of millions of years until a single-celled living creature appeared? Or did it have to wait a little longer for some highly qualified measurer—with a PhD?"Andrew M
    This does not seem to reference that definition, but more of the dictionary definition of observer.



    Under the precept of the relativity principle any existing body is always in motion.Metaphysician Undercover
    That sounds like an absolutist statement, which sort of violates PoR. PoR might be used to say that any body is in motion relative to certain frames. Without the frame reference, motion is undefined.

    Would you agree that the inertial frame is just an ideal, and it does not actually represent anything real in the real world of physical, material bodies?
    I’ve called it an abstraction, specifically an abstract assignment of coordinates to events. That’s true of any frame, inertial or not. So yes, an ideal as you call it.

    there is no body in the universe which is not subjected to forces at every moment of passing time.
    I’d have said ‘every moment of time’. I don’t see what the word ‘passing’ adds to that. That almost every body is subjected to nonzero net forces at any moment means that nothing exhibits inertial motion, but plenty of them exhibit good approximations of it to where the mathematics is very useful indeed.
  • Emergence
    Have a look at: Growth in energy demand, eg:
    For a long time, growth in the world and the U. S. energy consumption as a function of time, follow what is known as an exponential function. Now it looks like we have switched to linear growth
    universeness
    And yet the total available renewable energy is fixed. Do you see what I’m trying to illustrate? A line that is going up has to eventually cross a horizontal one.
    Your quote from your liked site:
    Where Greek letter Δ(delta) is the change or increment of the variable and λ (lambda) is the growth rate. After some mathematical methods, it can be shown that the equation changes to the form:

    N=N0eλt
    That claims exponential growth, not linear.
    We might grow excess food in space and transfer it to Earth
    The question had been about other star systems, not stuff in local orbit. But I cannot find it economical to even do it in orbit. The energy needed to supply food to Earth from orbit seems vastly larger than the gain from the food. Sure, electricity is cheap up there, but electricity doesn’t get stuff in and out of orbit. Better to just export the electricity, except for the nasty side effect of having a giant WMD in orbit at the disposal of a species known for individuals that tend to take advantage of such capabilities.
    we may tap fuel sources such as extraterrestial hydrogen etc.
    Given all the hydrogen we have here, this seems kind of low priority. Also, where are you going to mine it? Jupiter has plenty, but it takes an obscene amount of resources to pull anything out of that gravity well, and then a whole lot more to transport it to Earth. There’s actually not a lot of readily available hydrogen except perhaps through the mining of comets and stuff.
    My point is, for the most part, interplanetary and especially interstellar trade isn’t worth the effort for most trade goods.
    Seems like you have already set your own preconditions for our imaginary trip, ship and crew!
    I kind of have, yes. One that works, albeit currently beyond our capabilities. That should change soon. But it takes a stupid long time to do it, so one of the most important features would be reliability and repairability. Things will go wrong and it can’t be a fatal problem.

    Returns? Can’t it just phone home?
    — noAxioms
    I'm sure it will but it can't phone home any samples it collected.
    Yes it can, just like the Mars rovers phone back about the samples. The only reason they’d like samples back home is because there is a limited lab there on Mars, but an interstellar probe wouldn’t have that problem if complex lab analysis is a requirement.

    I assume you are against the concept of 'brain wiping' anyone and if you are witnessing 'brain wiping,' everyday, then I hope you are speaking out against it, in the same way you would speak out against any mental or physical crime you were witnessing daily.universeness
    I’m not talking about rendering a person a total vegetable. I mean the indoctrination of the masses with lies designed to alter the behavior of the population in favor of whatever goals the administer desires. This goes on every day. I’m only against the lies that benefit special interest groups instead of the whole. There are good lies and bad lies, even critical lies. I believe certain things that I rationally know for a fact are false. Sounds contradictory, but its how it works.
    That's why I suggested you sound a bit mad sometimes in your turn of phrase. I assume you are not a fan of the current school curriculum content where you live or/and you don't approve of how some parents choose to inform or educate their children.
    The schools here are actually pretty good, albeit a bit on the dangerous side. I suppose that what I disapprove of is what lies parents are allowed to choose their children to be taught in publicly funded schools. My childhood school was not publicly funded, and the schools like that around here collapsed about 6 years ago, but are still going strong where I grew up, which happens to be ground-zero for Trump’s chosen secretary of education whose family actually funded construction of my high-school. Good school too, regularly placing tops in academic ratings.
    I have also witnessed what I would consider a biased or imbalanced approach to informing the young but I think 'brain wiping' is too emotive and more in-line with dystopian visions such as Orwell's 1984.
    I agree that ‘wiping’ is too strong. Washing I think is the more usual term. All propaganda is a form of brain washing, designed to instill the masses with something other than the truth. My mother still suffers from some of the propaganda to which she was exposed as a child growing up in a Nazi occupied country.
    Would you allow people to end their life, if continuation means daily suffering with no or very little chance of improvement?
    Oh yes. ‘Do no harm’ is a joke when the ending torture is considered ‘harm’. But keeping bright and comfortable person sedated deprives them of years of quality life.
    What would you have done differently for your grandparent, when you consider her medical status at the time?
    Screw the sedation at least. If there was unacceptable suffering going on, then yes, she should be allowed the choice. I wasn’t aware of any, and she was actually quite fine about a month before when they reduced the sedation long enough for my mother’s visit. I wasn’t there at the time.

    The basic means of survival will be free, that's the recognition.
    So those recognized get the same thing as those that don’t. That isn’t recognition. You did great! You get to live. You over there, you don’t do anything! You also get to live. Yay system.
    Yes, you would still be a contributor, as long as you wanted to try.
    Somebody has to do the unpleasant jobs. You make it sound like everybody pursues their hobbies and nothing actually gets done.
    Anyone can publish (we are kind of there now, with some free publishing sites).
    We are there. Anyone can blog for instance. Lots (most) of it dies in obscurity, hardly considered a vocation from the viewpoint of the system.


    The fact it is required to successfully send and receive the data packet is irrelevant to the fact that such data is redundant, in the same way the stamp and envelope and paper that a hand written snail mail letter uses, is redundant.universeness
    You have a very funny definition of ‘redundant’ then. I’ve never seen the term used that way, nor have I ever seen metadata referred to as redundant, and I’m in that biz.
    It's only the textual/imagery content of a snail mail letter that is not redundant.
    Actually, it’s often only that content that contains redundancy, usually in the form of ECC bits and such, unnecessary if the packet arrives unaltered at its destination.
    I know, but a data packet is a more often than not, a message fragment. Many fragments make up the 'message' or the picture or the movie or audio clip. The internet is a packet switching network.
    No disagreement here.
    A quark could therefore be quantised into a series of lower level data fundamentals and be 'processed' into any of the 'quark' variants (up, down, strange, charm, top, bottom).
    This makes it sound like quarks are not fundamental. There’s different kinds, but they’re not made of ‘parts’ like say a proton is.
    So, yes, if YOU as the programmer instructed 'make up-quark,' using some high level or low level programming code, then a program would be executed, which used stored data to create an up-quark.
    Perhaps one day we will have the tech to create a REAL up-quark instead of a simulated or emulated one, displayed on some output media.
    Ah, you seem to be talking about some kind of simulation. Most simulations don’t find the need to put every simulated bit on any kind of output media. Mostly they need to know how it behaves, say if a simulated chip performs according to specifications. If it works, great. If it fails, they probably want to dig down to what part didn’t do what was expected, something perhaps not saved on the first pass.

    Anyway, I think it remans very difficult to prove that at a fundamental level, the universe is quantumuniverseness
    That part is actually pretty clear. Even without a theory of quantum gravity, the alternative (a classical universe) has long since been falsified. It’s quantum, we just don’t have the unified theory yet.
    No graviton has ever been found yet, but perhaps gravity is not a force and therefore has no delivery/messenger particle.
    Just FYI then: Gravity is not a force under relativity, and relativity isn’t a quantum theory (yet). Gravity doesn’t travel. Gravitons are the delivery/messanger particle of gravitational waves (that which LIGO detects), and not of gravity (that which your bathroom scale arguably detects). Gravitational waves transmit changes to the gravitational field (the geometry of spacetime). Gravitational waves are energy, lost pretty much permanently every time masses rearrange themselves. For instance, Earth’s orbit about the sun radiates gravitational waves at the rate of about 200 watts, which, barring everything else, will eventually spin all the planets into the sun after some obscene amount of time. Earth’s orbital distance is currently changing for 4 different reasons, and that one has the least effect, but will also continue longer than the others.
  • The role of observers in MWI
    I can still express the length √2 with two characters, a very finite state. Humans deal only with such representable numbers, and they’re countable.— noAxioms
    Yes, computable numbers.
    Andrew M
    OK, maybe, but it’s a very different definition. Is there an example of something that isn’t in this set? Maybe my prior example of the half life of carbon 14. I called it a representable number, and I suppose that if you can represent it, you can compute it as per your definition, and if you can’t compute it, you also cannot represent it, except I think I just did in my example.
    Do we know that "the ratio of the half lives of two specific isotopes" isn't representable? — noAxioms
    I think I just represented it with such words, so I’ll answer my own question.
    That question seems relevant to the physical Church-Turing thesis (Church-Turing-Deutsch principle) which says that any bounded physical system can be simulated by a Turing machine to any desired precision.Andrew M
    Does the statement above apply to non-classical physical systems? Can it simulate say a quantum computer to arbitrary precision? Another interesting note about the above statement is that a Turing machine cannot simulate itself, which is not a violation of the statement.


    A related test has been carried out at a microscopic level (using photons instead of AI's) where it was shown that physical collapse does not occur.Andrew M
    OK, I said I’d get back on this one. I admittedly get lost in the complex examples, but I did at least want to comment on some of the assumptions the paper is making, assumptions which are very interpretation dependent. The topic here is about how MWI would handle it.
    So commenting on specific things in the paper: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1902.05080.pdf

    Does the observer have to be conscious or are there non-living "observers"?Agent Smith
    A.Smith, this is also relevant to your question. No, no experiment has demonstrated a living thing to have a special role.

    The authors are Proietti, Pickston, Graffitti, Barrow, Kundys, Braniciard, Ringbauer, and Fedrizzi, so I’m going to refer to them as PPGBKBRF.
    First of all, they put these little grey figures all over their diagrams, the observers. It makes it look like human interaction is somehow a critical step in a measurement, but no, near top of page 3 they define what these little guys are presumed to be:
    let us first clarify our notion of an observer. Formally, an observation is the act of extracting and storing information about an observed system. Accordingly, we define an observer as any physical system that can extract information from another system by means of some interaction, and store that information in a physical memory. — PPGBKBRF
    An observer is apparently a clerk, reacting to a measurement and putting into some non-volatile state. A digital camera for instance has a CCD (the measurement device) and an SD card (the persistent state) and a bit of circuitry (the observer) to move the data from the CCD to the SD card. This is nothing particularly special, but they give it a very special role in the paper:
    The observer’s role as final arbiter of universal facts [1] was imperilled by the advent of 20th century science.

    in quantum theory, all physical processes are continuous and deterministic, except for observations, which are proclaimed to be instantaneous and probabilistic.
    — PPGBKBRF
    It seems that they’ve given this clerical role some special metaphysical status, that of arbiter of what is fact or not, and also the only physical process which is probabilistic instead of deterministic. I’m not sure if they’re asserting these things and strawman arguments to knock down or they’re actually pushing this.
    They go on to a description of the Wigner’s friend thought experiment where they blatantly violate their own definition:
    According to quantum theory, the friend randomly observes one of the two possible outcomes in every run of the experiment. The friend’s record, h or v, can be stored in one of two possible orthogonal states of some physical memory, labeled either |“photon is h”> or |“photon is v”>, and constitutes a “fact” from the friend’s point of view. — PPGBKBRF
    This is suddenly a relational wording of the situation due to the addition of ‘from the friend’s PoV’. Suddenly the ‘observation’ doesn’t make anything a universal fact at all, as evidenced by Wigner’s measurement:
    Wigner can now perform an interference experiment in an entangled basis containing the states of Eq. (1) to verify that the photon and his friend’s record are indeed in a superposition—a “fact” from his point of view — PPGBKBRF
    Rightly so. There are no facts, just points of view. The friend is measured to be in superposition of having recorded one fact and of having recorded a different fact, pretty much demonstrating a lack of universal facts. Establishment of those universal facts were the only apparent role of these observers, so with that neatly shot down, the observer plays no role at all.
    This pretty much answers the topic title here, at least from that article’s description. Facts are relative to a system state, which makes it ‘observer dependent’ if you want to apply the label of ‘observer’ to a specific system state, but I see no point in the special label.



    "Uniform existence" is having an unchanging presence, as in not being acted upon by forces; what is described by Newton's first law, which is commonly referred to as "the law of inertia".Metaphysician Undercover
    Thank you for the definitions. The article you referenced makes no mention of ‘uniform existence’, ‘unchanging presence’ so it helps to define these terms up front if you’re going to use them.
    Check the Stanford article I previously referenced:
    an inertial frame is a reference-frame with a time-scale, relative to which the motion of a body not subject to forces is always rectilinear and uniform, accelerations are always proportional to and in the direction of applied forces, and applied forces are always met with equal and opposite reactions.”
    A good definition, and it comes from the top of the article, not section 1.7 to which you linked. That section deals with pre-20th-century handling of what is now called accelerated reference frames. It even includes an early form of the equivalence principle as worded by Newton.
  • Emergence
    So what's your point with respect to my question (and its context)?180 Proof
    Unclear what your question was. I think I can take apart an assertion of a discrete granularity to space and time, especially if there’s any kind of regular grid to it, not that I suggest it being continuous either. Both seem to assume counterfactuals, something that I find unlikely.

    Definition of "analogue": Relating to or using signals or information represented by a continuously variable physical quantity such as spatial position, voltage, etc.Alkis Piskas
    OK, but a continuous voltage probably isn’t actually continuous since it is based on discreet charges of elementary particles, admittedly over non-discreet interactions.

    Sound and all other vibration frequencies, electricity and otherforms of energy, etc. show that.
    All those can be produced to arbitrary precision with value holding only discreet values, which is why I don’t think there’s a proof of it. None of this constitutes even evidence, let alone proof. As I said, I suspect the same, but to prove it would involve measurement to infinite precision.

    From what I know, only artificial --created by man-- frequencies can be discrete (digital).
    Sorry, but signals by man are no more analogue or discreet than natural ones. A computer signal for instance is quite variable and gates must operate on spec through a range of expected input voltages.

    Moreover, what we can perceive in nature and which we can talk about is analogue. I think this is enough for a proof.
    And I don’t. Talking about something doesn’t make it so.

    What we have actually no proof of is that this is an illusion and that the structure of the physical universe is digital/discrete.
    This makes no sense. If you claim a proof on non-discreetness, then you also have your proof against said illusion. Anyway, neither of us lays claim of a discreet/digital waves and voltages, so not sure why you find the need to disprove it.


    From a Quora discussion:
    as shown in peer-reviewed reviews over the last 10 years, to be the result of the conversion of deuterium to helium, and that conversion involves a “mass deficit,” i.e., the mass of the helium product is a little less than the mass of the deuterium that was converted to helium.
    That is a definite amount of energy, by the laws of thermodynamics; expressed as 23.8 MeV/4He. I.e,. that much energy is released for every helium atom formed. That’s a lot of energy for a very little helium.
    universeness
    That is true of every form of energy. You burn coal, you get the same mass loss from the same generated power. Remember mass energy equivalence?

    From physics.org: Can we get 100% of our energy from renewables:
    They demonstrate that there are no roadblocks to a 100 percent renewable future.
    Did they take into consideration an exponential growth in demand? Yes, I agree that 100% can be (and will be) met. Something has to happen to that growth then. I said as much above.

    I don't understand your logic here. Exponential growth and linear growth are both growth, why does 'the number of descendants per capita, in the long run, result in NO growth?universeness
    If you grow by 1 person a day (or any linear rate) forever, eventually there’s so many people that the average number of new people per person approaches 1, the no-growth value. This is not true of exponential growth, which is not possible in the long run because you can only spread the people out to vacant places so fast.

    if we don't have to rip out it's resources to build stuff on the Earth or extraterrestially.
    OK, building materials then. I already said that.

    But still they persisted and eventually they succeeded.
    They were still in an environment for which they were physically evolved.

    The ship full of colonists can send out probes when its sensible to do so.
    Said ship has neither the resources nor the time (millennia) to send probes out to prospective destinations. If this method is to be utilized, it should be done from the home base where the waiting time for results is less of an issue.
    The senders still being alive when the robot returns is not required.
    Returns? Can’t it just phone home?

    Many proved to be competent but also complete evil b******s.
    Find a system that can properly deal with such an inevitability. I said a competent leader, but I did not suggest an all-powerful position.

    Brain wipe em young to be on your side.
    — noAxioms
    I still think you are a nice person noAxioms but you might also be a bit mad!
    universeness
    Why? I’ve witnessed the above. It goes on every day.

    If those who you would have labelled as 'on the correct side' of the situation you describe above, were unable to convince a majority of the stakeholders involved, that they should have accepted the federal grant then the failure is with that inability to convince.
    I suppose, but I see it more of a failure to do the right thing rather than putting it to a popular vote in the first place.
    This of course assumes that those who voted to reject the grant were not 'fooled' or 'manipulated.
    I don’t think they were. The pros and cons were spelled out quite clearly and without bias.

    Then I hope you will fight or have already fought for justice for your grandmother in the Netherlands.universeness
    What justice? It’s what they do. There was nothing underhanded or illegal about it. You euthanize people after a while, making room for the next round. She was kept sedated almost all the time before then. They do that part here. The nursing homes like nice cooperative residents.

    No cynicism was intended on my part.
    None taken. I was referring to my own expression of it. I am very much a cynic. I’ve been complimented on it even.

    I think people should discuss, honestly, any perceived injustices employed in any 'cultural identity' they feel emotionally tied to. and I agree that they may have to 'get rid of' any traditional cultural edicts or behaviour/attitudes which cause 'unfair' treatment of others.

    No, I mean a homemaker or a home carer that is a relative, or a person who spends a great deal of their time writing stories or music or painting pictures or educating themselves or contributing to online discussion forums, etc, etc, should be recognised as engaging in activities which are recognised as 'having a job.'
    I was asking about the form that this recognition would take. You didn’t answer that, but instead listed some things that maybe should be recognized. The homemaker for sure. My wife held few jobs, but contributed no less to the effort than did I. The kids were never in day care.
    About writing stories: People do that for a living, but what if you’re not sufficiently talented? Are you still a contributor if nobody reads your work?
    What do you mean by ‘home carer that is a relative’? Couldn’t really parse that.

    No, national and international level competitive sport would continue but for reasons other than the wish to become rich. Remember the starting point. Everyone gets the food, drink, shelter, education, legal and medical protection, the right to a job they want to do and the free training/education they need to do so, etc, erc, all FREE from cradle to grave.
    I would not want to be on the top sports team then, even if I had the capability. Not worth the incredible effort involved.

    Why? Spacetime positions are relative.
    That they are, which would make a simulation of our universe impossible with the sort of architecture we know, no matter how scaled up in size and power.
    A data packet about to be transmitted will contain binary bits, that have no direct relevance to the 'payload' of the data packet. Such bits are normally called 'redundant data.
    They’re usually called metadata. They’re not redundant since the packet would fail in its purpose without them. They’re sort of like the address on a letter, not part of the payload within, but still necessary. Parity might be redundant, but is there for correction of small errors during transmission. How is any of this relevant to the quarks? I guess that’s below.

    There has to be a means of distinguishing between data packets who's payload is textual or is a bit map or is audio data etc. So, in the case of fundamental field excitations, there would have to be an ID system established to differentiate between a payload that was a coded quark, photon, electron, gluon etc.
    A packet is a message between two entities using a protocol agreed upon by both. Why would these two entities wish to communicate something about a particle? What message are you envisioning? If I said ‘quark’ to you (the receiving entity), what would you do with that message? Just trying to grasp what you’re talking about.
  • Emergence
    A future cold fusion system will perhaps be the most 'efficient,' if we ever achieve it.universeness
    I think you’re referencing a different sort of efficiency. Not even sure what you mean by that statement. Yes, fusion would be nice, and would likely solve the carbon issue since while still utilizing a limited resource instead of renewables, there’s an awful lot of the fuel available, at least for a while.
    ER (renewable energy) can rise to meet E if humans make it so.
    OK, this seems totally illogical. ER is limited by definition. You can’t make more, you can only attempt to waste less. OK, there are exceptions such as putting up solar collectors in high orbit, which is essentially a space-based death ray with a minor computer hack.
    The fact that renewable energy is charged, in the world markets, at the same price per unit as 'the most expensively produced' energy is another example of the affect of the nefarious profit mongers.
    This is a money issue, which you’ve dismissed. I’m not talking about money, I’m saying that ER has a cap.
    Renewable costs much less to produce than fossil fuel based oil and gas
    Does it? Last I looked it still costs more. OK, hydro has always been pretty cheap, but not so much solar and wind. They’re based on expensive equipment which needs regular replacement. Part of this is subsidies, which need to be accounted for when comparing actual costs.

    The justification seems obvious , in that, there is a lot more room in space than there is here on earth.universeness
    OK, you seem to be solving the goal of wanting excess population but first solving the problem of finding a place to put them. That’s different than having a problem of excess population and presumably trying to ‘save’ as many as possible.
    Perhaps 'Countries with declining populations,' are an small indicator of the future of population control.
    Agree, but how many of those declining population countries have negative trade deficits?
    BUT, as we slooooooowly become an extraterrestial species, we will have less need to worry about population control and have more need to encourage reproduction.
    Exponential growth will always overpopulate a species no matter how fast they colonize new systems. That’s kind of simple geometry. I had done a topic on what it would be like with a planet of infinite resources/land/area. Each location has limited resources, but there’s always the frontier. Answer: Not exponential population growth. Linear at best, which is in the long run the same number of descendants per capita as no growth.

    Eventually this will mean extra resources can be brought TO Earth FROM space.
    Fair enough. I’m trying to figure out what can actually help us on Earth that is best imported from off-planet sources. Certainly building material for stuff being built in space, but how does that help the planet other than to relieve them of the efforts needed to bring that material up from the surface?
    It's no different than it was when compared to pioneering humans on the move. They had to bring their supplies with them until they could establish a supply chain wherever they ended up.
    They did export stuff back too, and yes, building materials was probably top of the list. Still, the pioneers landed in an environment for which they were already evolved, and an alarming percentage of them still died within a year or two.

    Less savage solutions are possible. You are just being a bit impatient and lazy minded. :grin:
    I suspect your brother and sister-in-law would smack you on the head for typing the above quote.
    If you have excess population, many are going to die anyway, especially under the ‘share all the world’ socialism where the most resources go to those needing it most. Not to ding that strategy, but some kind of ‘cut your losses’ mechanism needs to be in place to prevent that sort of thing from happening.
    Or maybe my definition of ‘excess population’ isn’t yours and we’re talking past each other.

    Do you think it would have been better if evolution left all lifeforms as fish or water creatures?universeness
    Heck no, for the same reason I don’t think it would be better if all intelligent life populating the galaxy were left in the one form we know.
    A different way of answering your question is to focus on ‘would have been better’. Would have been better for what? By what goal are we measuring the benefit of a planet of only fish vs one including land animals?

    The first missions are scouting and pathfinder missions.
    With pioneer missions to other worlds, scouting missions may not be an option. Coming back certainly isn’t, but a ship full of colonists would be heading to unknown conditions without the scout. By the time a robot gets there and reports back, its senders stand a fair chance of not being around to hear the answer. The trips take an obscene amount of time, all the movies notwithstanding that treat interstellar travel like a bicycle ride to the corner thrift store.


    There is no perfect system, just improvements on current ones.
    I proposed a better one. Screw democracy. Find somebody competent.
    anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job. — Doug Adams

    I will send you one of my skin cells and you can deliver my clone to me when you have finished creating it! :joke:universeness
    Joke aside, it’s been done, just not with humans because of moral issues. They’re trying to grow parts without feelings because feelings make everybody uncomfortable.
    We simply can't accept that 'the typical voter isn't very informed these days.' We have to do what we can to help change that.
    They are changing that, but the wrong way. They now have schools teaching bigotry for instance, which used to be illegal. Brain wipe em young to be on your side.
    I sort of went to one of these, but they admittedly tried to show both sides. The school taught evolution despite being funded by an organization in denial of it. Now there are schools that teach it as the law demands, but framed only as a crackpot alternative to what really happened.
    About majority doing the right thing, that often doesn’t happen. Town just north of me had a high school falling apart and in need of more rooms. They were holding class in the gym showers due to lack of space anywhere else. The had a federal offer to pay for 95% of the cost of repairs and new construction, with the town people picking up the other 5% which would have raised their school taxes a tiny bit. They put it to the voters instead of representatives. The voters shot it down, and now their taxes went up a lot a few years later because they have to pay for all of it themselves instead of accepting the federal grant. All the voters saw was ‘small pain now’ and no vision of ‘much more pain in a few years’ that it would have prevented. The kind of action I’m talking about is this sort of thing. Long term benefits. Those are not popular, hence the extreme danger to humanity.

    But not your ideas on how to deal with excess population.universeness
    I don’t remember suggesting too many ideas on that. What, line some up and shoot them? No, probably not that, but something closer to how the Netherlands does it comes to mind. My grandmother was murdered there by the system. Murder by my country’s standards anyway.
    By negotiation, based on the questions 'who are you?' and 'what do you want?'
    There are those that simply want a handout, and are effectively nobody. There are whole cultures that encourage this attitude.
    I would establish a benevolent communication system with every new born from cradle to grave.
    What is this? Sounds like a school. What if the benevolent entity communicates something other than what the parents of the newborn want communicated?
    Most layabouts get very bored quite often.
    Don’t personally know the mindset. They watch TV I think. I don’t very much, and it pisses a lot of acquaintances that I cannot join discussion of the latest twist in some reality show or something.
    Perhaps they would want to use their mind and body in ways that they would enjoy and would help the society/community they live in.
    That would not be a layabout then, right?
    Communication, support, respect, cooperation, justice, etc etc must become foundational when it comes to how people are supported.
    All the cynicism above aside, I agree with this. Make the people and their children part of a whole, part of the culture. It works because I see it. Trick is to break the pattern of them identifying with the group encouraging the opposite. It perhaps means destroying cultural identity. It seems to work best in places with little of that, but then what do I know? I don’t live in those places.
    A person who works to help their community (or even their universe) should be recognised
    What does this recognition look like? Get a name on a poster or the nightly news? I mean, I do see it in some countries. In India, apparently your status is based on how many people you have under you. The recognition is an org-chart. You can be a brilliant contributor but don’t have any underlings, and you’d be pretty much a disappointment to your folks. I’ve seen this.
    Take the money out of sports and it will become the healthy endeavour and fun competitive entertainment it should have always been.
    It would become like little-league then. I guess that works. No more sports section in the newspaper except perhaps a page about how the local teams did against each other. My paper here actually devotes a decent percentage of its space to that. Not all national standings and such.

    The best candidate right now, is the 'bit'.universeness
    But the physical universe is analogue, not digital.Alkis Piskas
    I agree with A-P here, but we actually have no proof of it one way or another.
    Consider how music is physically stored on a CD or the images stored on a DVD. — universeness
    All of which do a limited reproduction of the actual movie or scene.
    Let's say I could represent an 'up quark,' by the binary rep:
    10010000110110001101101110000110011100000011.
    It would take an infinite number of bits to describe a quark. Just its position in space (if there is such a meaningful thing, which there isn’t) would need infinite bits, even if done only as accurately as the nearest meter.
    If I explain the above binary representation of an up quark as representing:
    1. An unique identifier for an 'up quark.'
    2. The charge on a up-quark. (relating to accepted units)
    3. The spin or angular momentum.
    4. Mass (accepted units)
    An identifier that say ‘up quark’ would suffice for 1, 2 and 4 since these are the same for all up quarks. The spin is a property of this quark, and per the vast majority of quantum interpretations, it doesn’t have one except when it is measured, and then only along one axis, so the actual spin can only be expressed relative to that one axis. A single bit will do then. Items 1-4 can probably be done in under 10 bits. The wavefunction of the quark would require, well, infinite bits.

    Matter has no purpose, i.e. intention or desire. This is an attribute of life, even if its purpose is reduced down an urge to survive.
    — Alkis Piskas
    Brain matter in humans contain and demonstrably manifest, human intent and purpose.
    Question seems to come down to where the purpose emerges from the matter. I’d probably favor a view that purpose is relative to a material process, not to matter, and not to an arrangement of matter.

    A digital system can appear from a distance as analog, but analog never appears digital at any scale.punos
    Well that can't be true since digital is just a subset of analog, so an analog system confining itself to those states can appear digital.

    The nature of reality appears to me to be digital. Like 180 Proof mentioned, The Planck volume is no different than a pixel (voxel) on a screen, and it's quanta determines if that pixel or voxel is on or off.
    Interesting assertion. It violates the principle of relativity for one thing since it would be a distinction if a thing is changing voxels or not. Such a statement is assertion of a preferred frame, the one in which these locations are fixed. How slow does something have to move to change one pixel every minute? How does it have any momentum/velocity at all if it stays in the same place for a minute, and then suddenly changes. That's a violation of momentum conservation at the fine level. How fast does it have to go to change locations more frequently than one unit of time?
    How are these pixels arranged? In a square or hexagonal crystal arrangment? Anything like that would also define a preferred orientation for the various spatial axes.

    You seem to envision the universe as a sort of finite automata. I see no evidence of this.

    So you dispute Planck's quanta?180 Proof
    What does Planck say? I thought it was a limit of meaningful measurability, not a metaphysical digital ontology.
  • The role of observers in MWI
    ... where all numbers are representable with finite states. — noAxioms
    We may still be able to have a precise geometrical representation.Andrew M
    I can still express the length √2 with two characters, a very finite state. Humans deal only with such representable numbers, and they’re countable. Actual numbers in nature (such as the ratio of the half lives of two specific isotopes) are not in this countable set. I have a hard time with a model of the universe that requires only the former sort of number, such as one would get in a simulation. Actual numbers are more analog, like ‘so big’ with your hands held apart.
    Nature doesn't encode a digital representation of that number
    Maybe it does, such as if our universe is digitally simulated. In this case, the amplitudes of the split beam would not be √2, but close.
    In a state-of-the-art 6-photon experiment, we realise this extended Wigner’s friend scenario, experimentally violating the associated Bell-type inequality by 5 standard deviations. If one holds fast to the assumptions of locality and free-choice, this result implies that quantum theory should be interpreted in an observer-dependent way.
    — Experimental test of local observer-independence - Proietti, et al., 2019
    Going to get back to you on this one. Interesting read, but the introduction is already full of interpretation dependent assumptions, such as counterfactual statements. I will look at it from my relational perspective which doesn’t make those assumptions, but thus far I’ve not read enough to really comment on it.

    I'm just surprised that the statement that describes the Schrödinger =n isn't that of ignorance (The cat may be dead or the cat may be alive, we don't know) but of knowledge (the cat is both dead and alive, we know).Agent Smith
    There’s actually no empirical difference between those two cases. There is if there was a true superposition, but there isn’t in the cat case. It’s been demonstrated with macroscopic objects, but under conditions which would kill any cat (such as being in a vacuum and almost 0°K).

    An "inertial frame" is a theoretical derivative.Metaphysician Undercover
    I guess so. I would have said it is an abstraction, an assignment of coordinates to events.
    It is derived from any situation with a body assumed to have uniform existence.
    This is nonsense. You have a reference to such a crazy definition from a consensus physics reference from the last century? What even is uniform existence? That a body must be the same everywhere? A carrot cannot taper? I presume you to be an absolutist and maybe get your definitions from the sites supporting such, but this is not the consensus definition as used by physicists.
    perhaps suggesting that any inertial frame with something moving (or accelerating) in it isn’t a real one — noAxioms
    To speak of an inertial frame with something accelerating "in it" is just deception.
    Case in point.
    Do you agree that the passage of time is an essential aspect of the concept "inertial frame", a duration of time is necessarily implied by "inertial frame"?
    No, not at all. I can for example reference the inertial frame of Earth when referencing the twins scenario. No duration is specified or necessary when identifying that frame.

    I encourage any Q-physicist reading this post to consider enrolling in this course. :cool:jgill
    There were lots of basic topics covered, down to interpretations of time near the bottom, but I didn’t see quantum interpretations mentioned at all, which requires probably a whole separate course.
    The course description might devote an hour or three on each listed topic. Nice introduction, but you can get it just by reading each topic in places like Stanford philosophy.
  • The role of observers in MWI
    The principle of relativity makes all motions equally relative to each other.Metaphysician Undercover
    Not quite. All motion can be specifed relative to a frame, specifically an inertial frame. Light speed is specified relative to (and is fixed only relative to) any inertial frame, so it isn’t an exception.
    To stipulate that one movement, "c", is exempt from that principle
    Never said that. You’re saying it, and it’s wrong since it would exempt it from the principle. Light has no special status in this regard.
    You seem to see an exception when I don’t. Mathematically, how does this work? How does it differ from say a neutrino (a massive particle) traveling here at almost c, such that we actually detect it from a supernova before we detect the light? Are neutrinos now also exceptions? We could have the Alice & Bob scenario with the train and the platform, but use neutrinos (or buses) instead of light, with the same result. Are we going to add these things to your exception list then?
    is to remove it from the application of that principle, "relativity", and give it special status, and we are left with "special relativity".
    The principle of relativity is one of the postulates of special relativity. Being part of that theory doesn’t mean anything gets special status. The word ‘special’ means a special case of no gravity being involved. With gravity, there are no longer non-local inertial frames and fixed speed of light goes away.

    I think you are "seeing" it incorrectly then.
    I realize you think that, and I’m trying to actually grok your opinion to the contrary. But as I say, mathematically it doesn’t work. Light obeys the same rules as everything else, just like PoR says it should.
    Prior to Einstein there appeared to be no way to make the motion of light compatible with the principle of relativity.
    This statement also seems to contradict what you’re asserting. Anyway, post-Michelson–Morley at least, new rules were needed since Newton’s application of PoR wasn’t working. In particular, relative velocity addition needed modification.
    It was a practical problem involving the difficulty in measuring the speed of light. If light was included within the application of the relativity principle, then the person on the embankment, and the person in the train car, would have to measure the light from the same source as having a different speed.
    First of all, one-way SoL still cannot be measured by any means, hence the speed being fixed being an additional premise, not something derived or measured. Secondly, the assertion you make (that these two observers would have to measure different speeds) does not follow from PoR.
    There are alternative theories that do not posit identical light speed relative to any frame. I think you’d like them. AFAIK, it took around a century to come up with a generalized version of such a theory, but it has been done. It involved doing away with the big bang and black holes and such, but empirically, it seems to hold water.
    The problem is that the whole idea that we can employ the relativity principle, and arbitrarily exempt something like light from it, for simplicity sake, is fundamentally flawed.
    Again I agree that such an exception would constitute a fundamental flaw, but this seems to be exactly what you’re suggesting.
    space and time from the theoretical framework of light
    This has no meaning under relativity theory, or for that matter any of the alternatives.
    You are using "relative" ambiguously, and you need to be careful not to equivocate. In the relativity principle, the motion of bodies is "relative" in the sense that velocity varies according to the frame of reference.
    Not necessarily so. Velocity might be specified relative to a frame of reference, but it just might by chance be the same from one frame to the next. PoR does not demand otherwise.
    But the motion of light is constant, "an absolute" in relation to the motion of material bodies, not variable or relative in that sense.
    It is exactly relative in that sense. For one thing, a given pulse of light might be heading north relative to one frame and east relative to another. But the magnitude of that velocity would be the same, yes, which is exactly what you’d compute if you performed a Lorentz transform from one frame to another You find this fixed speed to be a contradiction, but PoR does not forbid it. It just says the rules of physics are frame independent. You cannot locally detect your motion in an inertial frame. If you can show how that could be done, then I’d accept that some kind of exception was being made. It could be done under Newtonian physics, and M+M tried to measure just that: a detection of local motion as the understanding of the PoR suggested at the time.
    Therefore it is not "relative" in the sense of the relativity principle. So when you say the motion of light is "relative to material bodies" you are using "relative" in a way other than it is used in relativity theory, because every body regardless of its relative motion (according to relativity principle) is essentially at rest "relative" to light.
    When you say ‘relative to light’, it is you that is using the term incorrectly. ‘Light ‘does not specify a frame, and you know that (or at least I hope you at least know that much).

    I'll try anyway. To put it simply, the observer chooses the frame, so "frame effects" are observer effects.
    OK, I choose a roller-coaster track in a circle, and the frame where that track is stationary. We pack it with cars with no space between them. Then we get them going around the track together, and due to length contraction, spaces form between the cars. Are you going to tell me that there is an observer somewhere that doesn’t measure these spaces between the cars? That’s what I mean by the effects (length contraction in this case) being real, not just coordinate effects.

    By the principle of relativity no body can be truly at rest unless all bodies are at rest.Metaphysician Undercover
    Not even then, but motion would admittedly be pretty meaningless in a universe where time itself is meaningless.
    So "inertial frame" is a sort of arbitrary designation requiring only constancy, uniformity.
    Sounds like you’re now in denial of what an inertial frame is, perhaps suggesting that any inertial frame with something moving (or accelerating) in it isn’t a real one
    Motion which stays the same as time passes is the principle of relativity's "rest".
    The principle does not define ‘rest’, and certainly does not suggest that there is but one rest frame, a direct violation of the principle.
    And as you say, the motion of light "c" is relative to any inertial frame. But "inertial frame" is a feature of the theory, it is a theoretical observational tool derived from the uniformity observed in the passage of time. What defines the "inertial frame" is the uniform, constant passage of time.
    OK, this is pretty much rhetoric from the relativity denialist literature. You’re entitled to this opinion, but none of this is part of relativity theory.
    Therefore the speed of light is not grounded in, or relative to any material bodies, it is relative to the defining feature of the "inertial frame", which is the uniform passage of time.
    OK, so where should light be at the rate of one hour per hour (just guessing at the rate)? IOW, what the heck does that statement even mean? What if time passed at one second per day? How would that affect where goes or what we see?

    I thought that superposition is a fact and not just a hole in our knowledge.Agent Smith
    Yes, so we either have two or more worlds in a box, or they’re not really worlds. Either way, it’s different than there being just one state and we just don’t know.
    OK, they’re not actually going to do it with a cat because there’s no way they’re going to get a live cat state to interfere with a dead cat state. The cat may be both dead and alive in the box, but superposition is more than that, requiring some sort of interaction (interference) between the two states.

    Any irrational number can be approximated to an arbitrary degree of accuracy by a rational number. From the associated paper:Andrew M
    Ouch. It would really such if nature allowed such approximations. I’d always envisioned pure mathematics behind the physics, not digital mathematics where all numbers are representable with finite states.

    Yes, it is quite different. As is the effect you mention of a clock travelling fast towards you that appears to be ticking faster than it is. Perhaps we can call them (classical) perceptual effects, (relativistic) frame effects, and (quantum) measurement effects to disambiguate them for the purposes of this discussion.
    The discussion was about observer effect (the observer causing effects), not observed effects (effects merely noticed by the observer), Relativity effects seem to fall under the latter category, prompting my foul call.
    A related test has been carried out at a microscopic level (using photons instead of AI's) where it was shown that physical collapse does not occur.
    Not sure what this is. Got a link for this one?
  • Emergence
    I still don't understand … what 'competitiveness' has to do with capturing CO2 rather than releasing it into the atmosphere.
    To repeat it then...
    universeness
    Is a company that does it competitive with another making a similar product but without the sequestering?noAxioms
    From Howstuffworks:
    "The United States alone has enough subsurface space to potentially hold 1.8 trillion tons (1.71 trillion metric tons) of carbon dioxide in deep aquifers, permeable rocks and other such places."
    How much carbon would be released from the production of the energy needed to fill those spaces? It’s a sort of efficiency question.
    I fully support all current efforts to make E=ER, based on your representation of E and ER.
    The point is, ER is fixed and E is exponential. The one mathematically cannot keep up with the other. ‘Efforts‘ don’t change that.

    Space was never a solution to excess population. — noAxioms
    Of course it is.universeness
    But you don’t justify this assertion.
    It costs far more to put a person in space than it does to keep him here — noAxioms
    It costs resources to put people in space, not money. — universeness
    Yes, exactly. It costs far more resources to put a person in space (especially to keep him there) than it does to keep the person on Earth. If you have population in excess of the capacity of the resources, then for every person you put in space, 1000 or more must go without resources. That’s why space isn’t a solution to excess population. You say ‘of course it is’, but then you argue for my point like it was a money thing and not a resource thing. I never said it was a money thing.
    Space exploration is a luxury for a gilded-age system where the resources exceed the demand, which is not an excess-population scenario.
    It would be far more efficient to just kill the 1000 and free up those resources for those remaining. This is a better solution to excess population than space. It is also a nice example of trolley-problem.

    I have already answered this point. This planet is the equivalent of your fish bowl comparison.
    No, the planet is the river or sea, the natural habitat of the fish. The bowls in the trees are these sealed enclosures on other planets (the trees), a place for which the fish are not evolved.
    I see no difference between that and living in a space station or domed city on the moon or Mars, that we cant survive outside of.
    OK. I see a difference. Each day is one accident away from being exposed to the actual environment instead of the artificial one. That accident doesn’t kill us here, but it would anywhere else. A windy day will empty the bowl of water in the tree, but the bird can take it. Better to put a bird there.

    Which is also part of the why we must go beyond Earth, we will go to Mars and live there one day because it exists, and it beckons us.
    Go there yes, but Hillary didn’t live on Mt Everest nor did Armstrong take up residence on the moon.

    So, you accurately describe the failure of the current USA political system to prevent a horror like Trump getting electeduniverseness
    But that’s the kind of democracy you seem to push. It’s precisely democracy that went wrong. The voters wanted him. He appealed not to rational arguments, but rather to their personal values (mostly validation of one’s otherwise suppressed biases against other groups). People don’t vote for the common good. They vote based on personal emotions. Democracy needs to fix that, and I don’t know how it can and still call itself democracy.
    It’s not just the USA. Countries all over several continents have had similar candidates with similar platforms. Many (around half?) have won their elections.

    What a strange conflation! A biological human cell is not a lifeform.
    No? You can grow a human from a single cell. It can metabolize and reproduce.
    Humans are a combinatorial of many sub-systems yes but for me, the concept of 'life' applies to the brain.
    Nonsense. There’s plenty of living things without a brain. All multicellular life forms evolved from what were once single-celled individuals that needed to solve the problem of selfless cooperation in order to take it to the next level.
    The sort of authority I’m speaking of needs to act on the benefit of the collective, but here you are suggesting this cannot be done because it would involve actions not popular with the individuals.
    — noAxioms
    No, democratic socialism supports majority rule.
    In what way does this counter what I said (which I left up there)? I’m saying that majority rule isn’t going to result in the kinds of action/policy needed.
    an informed majority that supports secular humanism
    I’m not talking about benefit to minorities, and it seems that the typical voter isn’t very informed these days, and is not supportive of said secular humanism, as evidenced by people like Trump getting the majority vote on a platform against it, and against informed facts. I’m talking about benefit to larger goals like the future of humanity (said collective above), which often don’t benefit the majority of the voting individuals.

    That sounds like someone wearing a 'big brother' garb, deciding that a large majority of people are incapable of 'knowing what's best for it.'
    I didn’t know that was attached to the big-brother label, but yea, that’s pretty much what I see. Big brother is supposed to be nefarious, not something that has a goal of the betterment and continued existence of humanity. And there are larger goals than that as well, but I’m not sure if a human should champion those.
    You make yourself sound like a person who should never be given significant authority over others.
    Amen. Wouldn’t want it, not just because I lack the qualifications.
    What would you do as president of America.
    Not much. President of one country lacks the power to do things on a humanity scale. Also, the laws pretty much prevent some decent suggestions I’d have for America, first of which would be the abolishing of over-the-table bribes. Money-talks is a horrible system that yes, just makes rich people richer.
    Surely you would not use your 'mommy' model to drive your policies that would affect all Americans.
    Nope. Doesn’t work on portion of the whole.

    Democratic socialism MUST encompass personal freedom and the entrepreneurial spirit as much as it can.
    How can a socialist system do that? The layabout seems to get the same personal needs met as the inovator.
    No billionaires or multi-millionaires are acceptable via business dealings or entrepreneurial effort.
    It takes that kind of resources to do certain things. How do you build a modern chip fab without those huge expenditures of resources, especially when money doesn’t even exist anymore to track return on expenditure of said resources?

    No celebrity roads to ridiculous riches.
    Agree, but how to combat that? City (or country) X has a sports team with a lot of fans behind it. How are they to attract the better talent with promise of only modest means for their work? How are you going to prevent some other city from promising better means to this athlete, especially when this tiny extra expenditure would mean the difference between the city’s team winning or not?
    BBC TV/movies seems to have celebrities without insane compensation. Sometimes at least…

    chatGPT cant even pass the Turing test.universeness
    Don’t think it was ever an attempt at something that would. It seems to be a step up from a simple google search that is far better at parsing native language, thus being able to find relevant results that a regular google search cannot. It seems a better source of facts than said regular search, which hits anything no matter how crazy.
    I’ve actually yet to interact directly with chatGPT. Would like to. How fast is it? Does it take each query in isolation or can it converse?