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.

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.

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.

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.

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=N₀e^λt

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 quantum — universeness

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.

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.

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.

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.

... 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 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?

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 elected — universeness

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?

Notice the quotes around 'bigger'. What I think you actually mean is, 'many'. They're very different things. — Wayfarer

They are very different things, and I meant ‘bigger’. Still one universe, but more of it than the story you found comfortable as a child. There were other universe theories (the only reasonable alternative to the intelligent design argument) long before Everett came along, so having other worlds is hardly a painful step.

Einstein didn't like the uncertainty principle or the 'quantum leap' because he was a determinist.

He also held to locality, so I think he would have liked an interpretation that was both local and deterministic.

The observer problem is a problem because there’s nothing in the maths to indicate where the observer must come into the picture. — Wayfarer

I suspect that decoherence calculations do just that.

This undermines the principle of objectivity

That it does. I’ve discarded that principle, as do most of the interpretations. The science doesn’t care. Quantum theory is not concerned with what goes on in the absence of interaction between systems.

Per your comment, "one also has to deal with how some of them are more probable than others", the basic idea (from Zurek - see the above post) is that paths that are not equally probable can be mathematically reduced to paths that are. For example, a beam splitter with a 2:1 transmission/reflection ratio is equivalent to a beam splitter with a 1:1:1 ratio once a 1:1 beam splitter is added to the transmission path. — Andrew M

What if the ratio isn’t rational?

There's an 'observer effect' in Einsteinian relativity which nobody objects to. That's not the problem. — Andrew M

There is? There are dependencies on frames (what velocity has object X?, a completely frame dependent question since Galileo), but I've not heard that observers have any effect at all. — noAxioms

Yes, I'm referring to frame dependency. — Andrew M

That is a dependency on a choice of coordinate system. No actual observer need be present, or be stationary, in an arbitrary choice of coordinate system. The people on the platform and the train may (or may not) just happen to make different choices. You make different choices for yourself, such as using one frame to describe where your house is, and a completely different one to describe what Neptune is doing (which is moving faster than c in the frame you probably chose for your house).

While the laws of physics are the same for all observers, they may describe things differently from their respective reference frames.

That’s quite different than the interaction (measurement) actually changing the system being measured, which is what this topic is about.

What Einstein does with "special relativity" is to give 'special' status to light, freeing it from the principles of relativity — Metaphysician Undercover

On the contrary, he brought light to be included in the principle of relativity, that it moving at c was such a law of physics that was unchanging, part of the principle of relativity. He freed light speed from being relative to a medium, or possible relative to that which emitted it, in both cases being different from one frame to the next. We each see the same things differently. I see it as bringing light into PoR, and you see it as being taken out.

to allow that its motion is not relative to the motions of material bodies.

But it’s motion IS relative to material bodies, or rather relative to any inertial frame including the one in which the material body is stationary. The second premise says that directly.

This amplifies the 'observer effect' by greatly increasing the possibilities for subtle differences. Now there is a need for principles like time dilation, length contraction, relativistic mass, and things like that.

But those are all frame effects, not observer effect. For instance, a clock coming at you fast will tick slow in your inertial frame, but it will be observed to run fast. Observer effects and frame effects are not the same.
There are objective demonstrations of say length contraction, contraction that is real regardless of observer or choice of frame. That makes length contraction part of ‘a true perspective’, if that phrase is to have any meaning.

Schrödinger's cat (call PETA asap) is both dead and alive (this is impossible in one world) — Agent Smith

Shouldn’t the cat simply be dead or alive then? What’s the difference when the box hasn’t yet been opened, other than the epistemological one where the lab guy doesn’t know the state of the cat. That would be a classic state like a coin tossed and caught, but not yet revealed. What makes the cat different if the world has already split?

They have no choice, if they are being true to Christian doctrine. — universeness

There is no one Christian doctrine. There’s the bible at best, and I don’t think it encourages environmental destruction, but I’m sure one would be able to find passages to support such a view. Bible is great fodder for cherry picking fallacy.

God spends half it's time in the OT, smiting people (one poor guy for dropping a corner of his ark of covenant). He also commands she bears to kill kids for insulting one of his prophets, and he demands murder and ethnic cleansing, all through the OT. It's not our sort of thinking that's the problem, it's the babble in the bible that's the problem, when deluded folks accept such babble, as the written will and character of their creator.

Yea, if God is so perfect, why does Jesus do things so incredibly differently in the NT? Pretty solid evidence of it all being a product of human legend if the story changes with the fashions.

The carbon sequestering is interesting. Does she do it? Is a company that does it competitive with another making a similar product but without the sequestering? What sort of tonnage rate are we talking here? Where is it put that it will stay out of the environment?
— noAxioms
I don't know what 'she' you are referring to? Greta Thunberg? — universeness

Does Greta do it, yes. It’s her suggestion. You didn’t answer the questions, especially those about competitiveness.

Not until you offer a the details needed or at least provide links to the specific maths / logic, that have been published, peer reviewed and contain strong empirical evidence that any claims made are robust and hard to counter.

So you haven’t.
The mathematics is pretty simple. No, it isn’t peer reviewed. I’m asking if you deny it, which apparently you do if it doesn’t come from a journal, which I’m sure it does in some form.
E is say energy use of the planet in a time period. ER is renewable energy and other resources like water (basically all the solar energy and rain falling on all of Earth). EF is fossil energy, anything of which there is but a finite supply. P is population, or people. ‘e’ is per-capita energy usage. The supply equation:
EF = E – ER.
That’s simple enough. Non-renewables make up for what renewables cannot cover.
E = p e
That’s by definition. This is the demand side. Twice as many people, you’ll probably need twice the energy. Over time, p goes up exponentially and E with it. Over time, ER is static. There’s only so much energy to be had. Conservation efforts might reduce e, but not exponentially, so that’s just a temorary relief on E.
Increase in solar farms and such will increase the amount of ER available to the people, but ER being static, there’s a ceiling to that. It also takes non-renewable resource to build the panels, the windmills, and the batteries needed. The lithium requirement is probably more than all the mines can produce, and the stuff needs to be replaced on a regular schedule.
I see an article claiming it can be done at least for now, but don’t see the numbers. It’s just a claim as far as this pop-article goes.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jan/23/no-miracles-needed-prof-mark-jacobson-on-how-wind-sun-and-water-can-power-the-world

We want to explore and develop space not exclusively to solve our problem of excess population

Space was never a solution to excess population. It costs far more to put a person in space than it does to keep him here. Sure, sending colonies to other planets might put new growth out there, but they’re not going to remove any significant number (other than by taking away their resoruces) from Earth in doing so.
The extinction threat is a somewhat better reason, but it would be like preventing a fish from going extinct by building fish-bowls in the trees. Better to just build a bird to put in the trees, and then call it a fish if that’s important to you.

Us, as we are now, us with transhuman augments as well or exclusively transhuman augments, at least until extraterrestial habitats, are made more comfortable and practicable for us, as we are now.

They’ll never be as comfortable as Earth. Where are all the exatons of material going to come from (and of course the energy required, far more than it took to decimate Earth) to make outdoors of an alien place less immediately fatal to us?
Interestingly, Earth did it by sequestering the carbon. Makes you wonder what the place was like say 1.5 billion years ago. If we had a time machine and went there, would it kill us to step out the door? I have some weird ideas about what Earth was like even sort of recently like under 100 MY ago.
How do they even get dust off the ground in those Martian dust storms if the air is less than 1% the pressure here?

What problem was being solved when Hilary climbed mount Everest or when Armstrong first footed the Moon.

Say you done it. Important with the moon since the USA got their butts pretty brutally kicked in the space race before then. Big cold-war motivation. One can always put ‘tech research’ out there. Learn to do stuff. Why do you think it took until Apollo 11 to actually land? The ones before were for learning stuff.

My detailed arguments of why I think so would have to be a different thread about democratic socialism, secular humanism and a resource based global economy.

Well I don’t have enough education to counter what is basically assertions on both our parts, but it seems obvious that the goals of the individual voter correspond little to higher goals, as demonstrated by recent history. Notice I don’t identity those higher goals. There are several, a matter of choosing one to at least the partial exclusion of the others. ‘Don’t ossify’ seems to be one to which you relate. Your fantasy cities seem to do just that. I like the idea of pushing forward and bringing it to the next level, but there are costs to that, most of which won’t be supported by the typical democratic voter who’s primary concern is his immediate personal comfort.

episodes like Trump, do not negate the need for such rigorous (hopefully even fool proof), checks and balances, on all those trusted with power.

But we’re talking about even more power here, enough apparently to render the checks ineffectual. He basically fired anybody related to investigations on his abuses. The authority should not have any authority over said checks, but they always do, especially when the abuses were embraced by an entire political part just because he wore the same color uniform. Police are the same way, almost impossible to prosecute for abuses because the police and even the courts stand behind their own most of the time.

You certainly can consider unpopular decisions as a reason to consider unseating any leader or group of leaders.

Disagree for the same reason the position shouldn’t be one left to the voters. Popularity will doom us. Our cells learned to cooperate into a larger entity, working for the entity and not the individual life forms. One of the first things to change was to select out any personal will that isn’t beneficial to the collective. 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.

you have invoked the 'mommy' model time and time again — universeness

I’ve frequently said that the larger the group of people, the less mature they act as a whole. The term ‘mommy’ is deliberately to emphasize that, an authority over something far to immature to know what’s best for it.

Google is owned by the nefarious rich, who nurture profit more that people, what do you expect from such? Such companies have been ever thus!

Yes, but they started out wanting to do it right. Mozilla (a competitor) is still trying very hard not to be evil.

An ontically fractional electric charge is my attempt to describe an energy field that can only be accurately mathematically modeled to experimental observation by assignment of a fraction, and not by an integer. — ucarr

But I did it with integers, so I guess it's not 'ontically fractional'.

Given this convention, could someone, by convention alone, assign -1/2, -1/3, -1/4... as numbers assigned to the charges of various elementary particles?

I don't see elementary particles with charges with those ratios, so no.

Does it follow from this that what we call the gravitational field of the earth and the gravitational field of its moon are really one gravitational field?

Yes, they are. Both moon and Earth contribute to the gravitational field, and their influence is not bounded, just like a = GM/r² never falls to zero regardless of how distant (r) you get from it.

Does this tell me the hypercube is not a real entity, just an imaginary object of science fiction?

Depends on your definition of being real. I certainly don't see any hypercubes in this universe, but it indeed would take 4 coordinates to define a point within one.

The holographic theory of the universe -- along with the event horizon surrounding a black hole -- adds complexity to the facts about the location of a material object in proximity to extreme gravitation.

Susskind's debate with Hawking re: the conservation of energy of material objects consumed by a black hole and the claims black holes are animate and eventually evaporate add complexity to the facts about where things are ultimately within spacetime.

Evaporation of a black hole doesn't contradict energy conservation. It all comes back as radiation.

Does this tell me that a charge can be considered fractional in a ratio with another charge but not ontically fractional in of itself? — ucarr

You still haven't defined what you mean by 'ontically fractional', so the question is unanswerable. The numbers assigned to the charges of various things are just conventions. They could just as easily have assigned charges of -7, +14 +21 and -21 to down and up quarks, protons and electrons respectively. There's nothing special about where they assigned '1'.

I've been assuming energy fields have some type of physically real boundary. Am I wrong about this?

Fields are 'the value of something at various points in space (or spacetime)'. Since a field by definition covers all of space, it would not seem to have a boundary. The EM field for instance cannot just stop somewhere, beyond which there are no EM effects. I think you're talking about not the field, but a given quantum excitation of one, but then the word 'boundary' only has classical meaning and I cannot figure out how to apply it to a quantum entity.

We humans have reason to believe our world includes a fourth spatial dimension

Spacetime has a time dimension, not a 4th spatial one. Certain higher theories like string theory posit more spatial dimensions, but they're not macroscopic like the three we know.

I've heard a claim the fourth spatial dimension is perpendicular to the other three spatial dimensions.

Doesn't have to be just like the 3 you know don't need to be orthogonal. Making them so just makes the mathematics far simpler. The time dimension is perpendicular to the spatial axes, but the specific direction it goes is an abstract choice. Once 3 dimensions are defined, the 4th no- longer has any choice if they're all to be orthogonal.
All that said, I've not heard any suggestion of a 4th macroscopic spatial dimension. It only takes 3 coordinates to define any point in space, so you'd have to demonstrate that to be incorrect.

I can now explain that the root of my inquiry pertains to the whereness -- I hope you can tolerate the neo-logism -- of material objects and how the perception of whereness is being modified by evolving theories.

Didn't understand any of that. Work from the back: what theories, how are they evolving, and in what way is that relevant to the rest of this?

Ah, ok, so you are basically agreeing, that the tenents of many religions and consequentially, the majority of it's adherents, consider all Earthly experiences/materials/ecology, disposable. — universeness

’Many’ is a strong word. There’s plenty that actually stress betterment in this life. Would ‘the’ Christian church actually agree that it is OK to trash the environment since it is disposable? I don’t think many would (‘the’ in scare quotes because nobody speaks for all). You can write off murder with that logic. OK, the guy is dead, but it must be God’s will or it wouldn’t have happened, thus I’m guilty only of implementing God’s will. That sort of thinking comes from the statement you made.

New carbon capture initiatives are an example of actions which are directly targeted at 'undoing, damage already done, as are all efforts to stop releasing greenhouse gases into the atmosphere so that such as the ozone layer can recover.

Ozone is recovering. It does fix itself due to efforts as simple as reduction.
The carbon sequestering is interesting. Does she do it? Is a company that does it competitive with another making a similar product but without the sequestering? What sort of tonnage rate are we talking here? Where is it put that it will stay out of the environment?

A great deal of work is also being done to help coral reefs repair.

How does that work if the water is too warm to keep the coral alive?

doomster words such as:
It buys time, but actually makes the crash worse.

Do you know what I mean by those words? Can you refute the mathematics/logic instead of just point out more examples of delay?

Slowing an advance, if continued, can eventually STOP an advance and eventually REVERSE an advance. Each of us must do what we can to help.

It does not follow that slowing an advance can eventually stop it, especially when there’s an ever growing number of consumers each ‘doing what they can’. Heck, it isn’t event the individuals that account for the vast majority of resource consumption.

Could be much the same as life in the box you currently call your home. — universeness

I’m not confined to my home. My food doesn’t come from it. So maybe not so much like that.

Logan's run just suggested you get killed when you get to a certain age.
…
(your Logan's run suggestion would not even solve that one.)

No, I was more referencing the closed environment than the religion built around forced population control (still a viable idea).The problem it solves might be how to live in a place with a hostile environment. Of course the hostile environment was a sham in that movie. People could live outside, unlike on some other world.

We want to explore and develop space not exclusively to solve our problem of excess population or the extinction threat we have due to 'having all on us on one planet only.'

Other than those reasons, what problem is being solved by it? Why exactly does it need to be ‘us’ doing the exploring instead of something more fit, designed for the task.

I want authority that is democratically elected

Absolutely won’t work. The elected guy will be one that does what the people want, not what they need as a whole. It cannot work that way. This authority must be able to make the tough decisions and will not be able to if he needs to get elected.

Authority that is answerable to very strong checks and balances that will instantly kick in, and cause any individual, to be removed from power, quickly and assuredly, if you are guilty of abusing your power and of acting nefariously.

Agree that such a mechanism is needed, but it’s another thing that seems unworkable. Look at the failed efforts to put checks on Trump’s abuse of power.

Your imagery of motherhood models of authority are dictatorial one's.

Probably, except for above checks, some sort of watchdog that doesn’t have a say in the decisions. Very hard to give somebody (or an entity) that sort of power than then still be able to keep it in check. Can’t consider unpopular decisions to be justification for unseating the leader. But the decisions need to be judged in the light of their higher purpose.

A mother may love her children or she may not.

Irrelevant. The authority I speak of simply needs there to be children a long time from now, not necessarily all of them. That’s a different priority, a different sort of love.

I agree that there are very valid security concerns regarding your personal data and exactly who has access to it and could abuse that access. — universeness

Remember about a decade ago when Google’s business model was ‘don’t be evil’. Notice they don’t say that anymore? They found out how very well it pays.

Screening for genetic defects is, I believe, mandatory in some countries that have the facility. — Agent Smith

What do they do if they find a defect? Is it mandatory to eliminate it? That goes against a lot of personal beliefs, and if you’re that sort of person, what’s the point of the mandatory screening?

So do you not accept photons, gluons as the fundamentals of energy, measured in elecrton-volts or joules? — universeness

Not really following this discussion, but calling these things ‘fundamentals of energy’ makes it sound like energy is made of photons and such and not the other way around.

mere fractional parts of elementary particles — ucarr

By definition, elementary particles cannot have parts.

fractional quarks and gluons are expanded into three spatial dimensions — ucarr

I don't know in what way you might consider a quark to be fractional (or worse, 'ontically fractional;) other than it being a part of something non-fundamental like a proton. I also don't know what you're trying to convey with the phrase "expanding into .. dimensions". You seem to be trying to apply classic properties to quantum entities, which doesn't make sense. A quark doesn't have meaningful size, but a pair of them might have a meaningful separation.

Do the fractional charges of quarks play an essential role in the outer boundary of a quark's field excitations? — ucarr

It is meaningful to talk about fractional charge, like a helium nucleus has 2/3 the charge of a lithium nucleus. Again, I don't know what you mean by boundaries of a field excitation. A field is arguably 4D, so the title of this topic might be about being trapped in a 4D world. I don't think an excitation has anything that can meaningfully be considered a boundary. An electron for instance might be measured anywhere with finite probability.

On face value, the many-worlds interpretation of quantum physics seems the opposite of parsimomious. — Wayfarer

It depends on how parsimony is understood. Many Worlds has the biggest universe but also the fewest postulates. — Andrew M

Wayfarer, I know you have a hard time with a 'bigger' universe, but many of us don't. These same sentiments were expressed when it was discovered that the stars were other suns, and then that there were other galaxies as far as you can see. People balked every time it got bigger, but they got over it.
Personally, I think the other interpretations (at least the realist ones) are tasked with explaining the unitary evolution.

Einstein didn't like God playing dice, but some of the interpretations seem to require it, and I think Einstein would have preferred one of the ones that don't. I don't think any of them were on the table at the time he said that.

The problem that the interpretation should solve is to explain the interference phenomena that we observe. Not merely to predict observations - that's what the formalism does. If Many Worlds were shown to be untenable, Wallace and Deutsch would say that we have no viable explanation (that we know of). — Andrew M

Totally agree here, but I think the effect with which MWI has trouble explaining is the Born rule. It's been a strong piece of criticism.

If you one of the types that actually think that MWI implies the creation/generation of ontologically separate worlds, then one also has to deal with how some of them are more probable than others, that meaning must be given to "X exists more than Y". That issue goes hand in hand with the Born rule thing.

There's an 'observer effect' in Einsteinian relativity which nobody objects to. That's not the problem. — Andrew M

There is? There are dependencies on frames (what velocity has object X?, a completely frame dependent question since Galileo), but I've not heard that observers have any effect at all. That seems to be confined to QM effects.

Deutsch's experiment provides a way of distinguishing between linear interpretations such as RQM/ QBism/Many Worlds and non-linear interpretations such as consciousness-causes-collapse/objective collapse theories like GRW. So it would enable us to rule out an entire class of interpretations. — Andrew M

That sounds cool. In my experience, new evidence just moves the goal posts. An interpretation like the consciousness one will just adjust its story if the linearity of QM can be demonstrated. Others may actually fall out of contention.

In the Wigner's friend thought experiment, the friend's lab is a closed/isolated system. A quantum computer provides a way to realize that isolation for a large, complex and artificially-intelligent entity (the friend AI). Then we can test for interference. — Andrew M

I am actually very unfamiliar with how they do such tests. I mean, the double slit thing is pretty obvious, but how do they test for superposition of spin? Far worse, they've succeeded in putting something large enough to see with the eye, in superposition of vibrating or not. My question is, how was that demonstrated? How might one actually attempt to do the sort of test your're talking about with the computer?

Oh, I completely disagree! Many theist preach, ... that this life, is of very limited importance — universeness

OK, that’s just assigning a completely fictional long-term goal. I agree with that, but was trying to say that they don’t address long term goals in this life.

Climate change would then be god's will.

The mommy will need to deal with that attitude then. No dealing with it unless it’s a mommy.

There are millions of organised folks trying to address the long term issues and they are having significant affect, globally, I don't know why you don't give them the credit they are due.

I seem to see only suggestions of slowing the destruction, not in any way undoing any of it. It buys time, but actually makes the crash worse.

You have heard of folks like Greta Thunberg, yes? Why have you heard of her?

An activist on the right side. She calls for action, but I cannot actually find any suggested action that doesn’t just fall under the category of slowing the advance.

I am probably sensing a 'misinterpretation' incorrectly here but just to be sure, you are not under the impression that they cryogenically freeze you just BEFORE you die, if you sign up for that service, do you? You have been declared medically brain dead before you are frozen so of course 'freezing isn't torture,' it would be, if you were still alive when someone was doing that to you.

If you’re dead, you cannot be revived. So their hope is that the definition of ‘dead’ changes between getting frozen and getting thawed. That definition is always in flux, so it’s a solid bet. No, I don’t think it would be torture either way. You’d certainly not be a conscious popsicle for decades.
I always wonder if I can feel the pain of say surgery and the only reason I’m willing to do it is that I can’t remember the pain. They very much have that fuhgeddaboudit sauce.

About Mars:

I assume we will start with some dome style construction with tech that can best emulate/simulate Earth's conditions but I accept that, initially, it will be a very rough and dangerous existence. — universeness

That’s the life in a box. Wouldn’t it be a lot easier to do it here, kind of like Logan’s run? Environment goes to hell, but at least not Mars-hell. But I actually cannot think of something practical that could be engineered to live on Mars except some incredibly static microbes or something.

I don't think much of your 'mommy' comparator.

You don’t want some kind of authority to keep each of the planets in the federation from stepping out of the agreements?

Many folks have done and still do, dedicate their lives to try to improve the lives of everyone else, surely you are willing to admit they exist and support them in everyway you are able to.

Plenty true of most individuals I know. It’s the larger groups that can’t do it. The larger the entity, the less mature their relationship with other such entities.

es, general tenets such as 'from each according to their ability’

Yes, that one. Capitalism has a nice motivator for that, but I have to admit that socialism also can do it, as evidence by the work ethic of more social countries. I suspect much of the problem is identification of a non-cooperative attitude with your peer group. For example, resistance to the Covid vaccines has been assiciated with a conservative viewpoint. Getting a shot is seen as a vote for the wrong party, so they don’t. I lost a sister-in-law to that mentaility. I’m such a proponent of free speech, but I obviously see a downside to it.

A republic is simply free of monarchic or aristocratic rule. A republic can be a socialist democratic republic. There have been some countries labelled as such but those proved to be nothing more than an abuse of the label[/quote]OK, I admit to not being up on the terminology, and agree that no country seems to actually operate under a system that their ‘label’ is supposed to describe.

I think there will come a more enlightened time in the future when there are not many theists left. If that happens, then theistic buildings will need to be repurposed. There are more and more empty churches nowadays. — universeness

That there are. They might return in numbers, but with less fancy large buildings.

Big brother is a nefarious, evil force how much are you concerned that such data is being misused?

I don’t see it much, but there’s a reason that many sorts of surveillance is restricted or just plain illegal. There is very much potential of misuse if you already have the data for supposedly normal purposes.

Make your mark before you’re gone. Make something that can last. That’s as good a purpose as I can think of. — noAxioms
I agree but I would add that your mark must be benevolent or else your life would have been better not lived at all, imo.

Agree except for the logic. Whether my life was better not lived or not depends heavily on the gauge by which the benefit of it is measured.

[/quote]did you think Leonard was positing a situation where superluminal communication or/and superluminal transportation was not impossible?[/quote]I got lost in the jargon enough that I couldn’t make that assessment. It was that for which I was looking.

We're doing it anyway, oui monsieur? — Agent Smith

Maybe. Pretty sure there is gender selection going on in places, and perhaps some gene therapy to help with known genetic issues like breast cancer, but maybe not going so far as to just change an ordinary person into an enhanced one, better in some positive way, not just more free of blatant defects.

Thanks for the post and transcript effort Andrew.

I didn't get where in the 2nd vid that Deutsch suggested some kind of empirical test that should yield different results from one interpretation to the next. I'm very skeptical of that. — noAxioms

6:50 Deutsch: Yes, so if that happened that would refute the Everettian interpretation or, as I would say, it would refute quantum theory. — Are There Many Worlds? David Deutsch in conversation with Markus Arndt

This seems to suggest that it is quantum theory that would be falsified given, well, apparently some sort of confirmation of 'consciousness causes collapse', except that in itself is another quantum interpretation (the Wigner interpretation) which was abandoned by Wigner himself due to it leading to solipsism, not because it in any way refuted quantum theory.

In my opinion, Deutsch is answering what seems to be a naive comment, not really describing a test result that differ empirically from one interpretation to the next. Consciousness causing collapse is not an empirical thing.

Essentially, Deutsch's proposed experiment would implement the Wigner's Friend thought experiment. — Andrew M

OK. Do any of the interpretations predict a different outcome of this experiment than the others? It's pretty straight-forward. The friend comes out and only remembers classical stuff. The experience of being in superposition relative to the box exterior is in no way different than the same thing without the box. You can no more get interference of the friend than you can get the dead and live cat to interfere with each other. Perhaps this is not the case with the quantum AI, in which case is kind of isn't the Wigner friend thing exactly.

In Deutsch's proposal, Wigner would be a human-level AI running on a quantum computer, with the friend (also a human-level AI) and the measured qubit being internal and isolated subsystems of Wigner.

By conducting an interference experiment on the joint friend/qubit subsystem, the Wigner AI would be able to determine whether physical collapse happened or not.

OK. I remain skeptical of any claim that this kind of thing can be measured without interpretation-specific assumptions.

- - - - -

Wayfarer, I do see your conundrum and cannot satisfactorily resolve it.

But the point is, the object has no specific location until measured. — Wayfarer

Interpretation dependent, but true in any local interpretation.

You can't say 'the photon caused the measurement' because this assumes that it has some definite existence in some unknown location prior to being measured.

The measurement became entangled with the emitting event? That sort of makes it sound like the measurement caused the emitting event. I have no problem with this given a relational view where ontology sort of works temporally backwards. A measurement causes the existence of something in the past (the moon say). Until it is meansured by you, it doesn't exist to you even if it exists relative to something else. Ontology as a relation.
MWI doesn't in any way make existence dependent on measurement as far as I know. There are worlds with the moon and worlds without, and you just happen to be coherent with one with a moon

There is no 'something' hiding in an unknown location until measured

That again seems the same as it existing, unmeasured. If so, not sure what changes upon the measurement.

- the measurement makes it 'something'.

So Rovelli would say I think. Copenhagen might say that measurement makes us aware of it, depending if the interpretation is taken as epistemological or metaphysical. There are forms of both, and I don't know how the latter would frame this.

That is why, indeed, 'exists' and 'real' have to be put in scare quotes in this context.

Agree with the quotes. Do the words mean different things? The problems you point out is a good part of why I am skeptcal of realism.

Are you simply referring to the idea or criticism that many theists (especially christian/moslem fundamentals,) don't care about sustaining/protecting Earthly resources, as their focus is on their faith in their promised existence after death? — universeness

No, that statement was not a criticism. Just noticing that they don’t really seem to be vocal about this subject. They do indeed not seem to address the long term issues, but nobody else does either, so religion is hardly taking a different stance here.

I try not to make judgements based on nationality. When things get tight, I don't think Russians act so differently from Americans, Germans, Englishmen, Africans or any other nationality.

Nope. We’d pull the plug as well when there’s no longer any profit in keeping it running.

I suspect that if you die

They’ll hopefully let me hasten the process rather than the prolonged torture that so many people go through, all under the heading of ‘do no harm’. Pretty ironic. At least freezing isn’t torture.

Oh, I get what you meant now, you mean, rather than trying to terraform Mars, its wiser to transform humans so they can live in the current Martian environment. — universeness

Something more like that, yes. Mars sucks. Only 1% the pressure of Earth and no water. Hard to engineer something that can thrive in such a hostile environment, especially a high-metabolism being such as ourselves. Can you have intelligence without that? I think so, but it would be quite slow, sort of like ents.

I appreciate your 'worries' about the situation and I think they are well founded and should not be underestimated but I do try to counter balance such with what humans do, when the possibility of their own extinction gets closer and closer.

Most of them have your positive attitude and assume somebody will fix it.

We will spread out, yes but not 'in conquest,' or as a pernicious force/presence. — universeness

I never meant it that way. I just mean colonize the galaxy, not conquer it.

Perhaps even a benevolent united federation of planets.

I think a federation of planets would resist a mommy even more than a single one.

Nonsense sir! no current first world country is socialist.

OK, we have different definitions. We feed the old and the poor. They used to starve before WWII.

They are all capitalist as they are all currency driven, free market economies.

OK, by socialist you want an economy devoid of currency. The problem there is the lack of the mommy. If some country does that, it cannot compete with the capitalist competitors in other countries. Balanced trade would falter, especially if there’s no currency to back that trade. A mommy would fix that since effectively the whole world would work the way you envision, but there’d still be little incentive to finding more efficient ways to produce things. This is a problem that needs solving. How do you salvage the advantages of the capitalism without the drawbacks? What do you do with the people reluctant to work? I mean, money is owed-labor in the end, and you’re throwing that away.
Socialism is more fragile, less resistant to shortages than other methods. It comes up often in war hospitals where there’s demand for some drug or treatment exceeds supply. Socialism says everybody in need gets some, but not enough. Better to give on a ROI basis: Give it to who gets the most benefit for the amount given, not to those most in need of it. Cut your losses. In this way, the most serious cases are lost, but in the ‘share all the world’ method, even more die and the survivors are worse off.

True democratic socialism has never been successfully established anywhere on the planet ..... yet.

Democratic? Most places are republics. What’s your definition of something being democratic?

A resourced based global economy, would be the most significant human change to the way we live, since we switched from nomadic hunter-gatherers to fixed communities supported by trade and agriculture.

If it’s self-sustaining without fossil fuel, then great! It’s a city. Where do the rednecks live?

It isn’t ever going to happen — noAxioms
The 'church' needs to drop god — universeness

That even more is never going to happen. Kind of kills the whole point of rule by unverifiable promises.

Or, at least, every church/chapel/temple/cathedral/mosque etc should also function as secular homeless shelters, substance abuse support centers, medical support centers, etc, etc.

The local hospital by me was run by the church, hence prohibited some procedures that they decided made you immoral. Have to go somewhere further away if you wanted those options.

Crops grown indoors depend on artificial light. Note that sunlight can be exploited for natural lighting or self-sufficient generation of electricity through photovoltaic solar panels.

Using a solar panels to create light for crops is far less efficient than just putting the plants in the light. I’m all for solar panels over parking lots and buildings and such, but the solar farms are mostly covering land that could be used to grow something.

While renewable and alternative sources of energycan promote the ecological soundness of vertical farming, the practice can still have a considerable carbon footprint if it still depends on the use of fossil fuels. There is a need to improve first renewable and alternative energy technologies to guarantee environmental sustainability and energy efficiency of vertical farming."

That’s the rub. Every watt of renewable energy consumed (and it sounds like VF uses more than regular farming) is one less renewable watt that can be used elsewhere. The excess must be taken up by the fossil fuels. It’s why I’ve not bought into the solar farm thing. If I did, that’s just so much green electricity that somebody else can’t have. The net benefit of switching is zero unless your money actually buys more capacity such as panels on your own house.

IDid you deliberately misspell Orca as these imaginings are alien Orca which you are calling OrKa? — universeness

Well it needs a different name, but one with the right vibes.

Half the stuff I read has obviously never seen an editor and cites no credible sources.
— noAxioms
But that's just half the stuff YOU have read, which is what percent of available 'stuff'?

It’s a good percentage of the random articles linked by sites like yahoo news or google news. Yes, there’s better written stuff out there, but almost impossible to find if you’re not explicitly searching for it. The algorithms for what gets put on the front pages of the site is not particularly based on factual content at all. This was a big change compared to only 20 years ago.

How much merit do you give to 'big brother is watching you?'

Quite a bit. I just served 2 months on a grand jury and got a taste of the sort of evidence they collect automatically. They knew where these baddies were by phone tracking and car-license monitoring on the main roads. All the big tech companies (apple, google, microsoft, etc) are quite up front now that they collect data on everything you do on your devices. It gets pretty obvious when new ads appear obviously based on recent browsing history.

I can only invoke the cosmic calendar again and say we have only been at this for a few seconds on the cosmic calendar scale. Give us a f****** chance mate!

That’s kind of evidence that it’s also not going to last long. Make your mark before you’re gone. Make something that can last. That’s as good a purpose as I can think of.

It would have been fun to have been part of that discussion.

We thought it got silly sometimes, but couldn’t exactly pinpoint where.

He finally asks 'how does Tom get from A to B and his second answer is 'through the wormhole,' he then says 'you might not believe that but, that's ok, we can debate that later.'. — universeness

I did watch and admittedly don’t know the terminology enough to follow what is being suggested.

I also didn't know IQ could be negative. — Agent Smith

By symmetry, a negative IQ occurs about as often as one over 200. They’re out there. My youngest is at about 67 or so, low, but not newsworthy low. My other kids are over 100.

Any ideas whether intelligence genes have been identified?

They’ve found at least 22.

We could breed geniuses then, eh? I wonder of normal folks would approve - it gives me Nazi eugenics vibes.

Bad vibes presumably. I’m all for the posthumans, but not so much for mingling with them. Current gilded-age morals forbids most of the solutions to problems discussed in this topic.

Theism doesn’t waste resources that others will have to pay for with their lives. — noAxioms
Not sure what you mean by this? Example? — universeness

A limited resource constrains the usage to which it can be put. Running power for no likely gain will drain that resource sooner than if it wasn’t being used that way. More people can live on the excess.
Larry Niven got into a post-scarcity economy description in his book Rainbow Mars. Every time a capital project was proposed, it always came with a calculation of how many lives it would cost. Anyway, to my knowledge, theism doesn’t encourage this sort of delay to meeting your maker.

Several hundred people have already paid to have their bodies cryogenically preserved in three existing facilities in the US and Russia, and there are as many as 1,250 on waiting lists.

Oh like the Russians are going to honor those contracts when things get tight. But yea, they’ll take your money.
Waiting list? What, like I’m dying now but a spot is opening up next March? Hope you haven’t expired too much while you’re waiting.

I have already stated that I think that 'all of the above will be attempted.' I am hardly therefore 'an enemy' of any idea for how best to develop and explore space.

Didn’t talk about being an enemy of an idea. I said enemy of an environment. Better to make friends with it, work with it, not against it.

It's a lot easier to control frogs that to control human population

No, they’re both controlled pretty much by the same method. It’s not like airplanes flew over and sprayed for them.

We can just dispose of a currently existing excess human population.

That’s what the robots say! Another typo? If we don’t do something about it, the frog method will get employed (no, not make grease spots on all the intersections).

Whilst we also try to educate people into understanding their current local circumstances and the folly of having children they and the government they live under are unable to, or are too corrupt to, or are to much under the influence of international interference to, support.

Doesn’t stop them. Nobody likes getting told what to do, especially if its for the benefit of somebody else. Also, there will be those who comply and those who defy and have a bunch of kids. Guess which group gets naturally selected out? We’d be breeding humanity for wanting larger families.

so it’s humanity’s survival that’s the goal, not the taking-over of the galaxy. — noAxioms
Both goals handshake imo,

OK, I think they’re fairly exclusive imo. We’re not fit to do it, but what we can create can be fit to do it. Best odds of survival of humans is to not kill each other at home. It’s worked great for many species, but yea, not so much the dinosaurs.

I don't approve of the aggressive sounding, 'taking over of the galaxy' imagery you invoke.

Pretty much got that from you with your talk of humanity having a purpose of making some kind significant impact on the universe, like it served the purpose of the universe or something. Can’t make any more than a scratch if we don’t cause something to spread out, to outlast the death of our planet which is already about 80% of the way there.

No metal? Please explain!

Civilization collapses. We still have metal, but it’s old stuff from before. Nobody knows anymore how to get more since it takes tech to get at it. We’ve mined all the easy stuff. It becomes a chicken/egg problem. Takes metal to get to get to the metal. Fear not. The salvaged metals will last centuries. The longer it lasts, the less we’ll remember how to get more when most of it has corroded away.’

I am a socialist

So is every first world government on the planet, just some more than others. Anyway, yea, I definitely get socialist vibes from you. The Scandinavian countries seem to do it best. Harder to be rich there.

who no longer sees value in party politics.

It does serve a purpose, but isn’t implemented well anywhere. I mean over-the-table bribery as policy? That’s sanctioned corruption. Nobody blinks, and those getting the bribes are hardly motivated to vote that crap out of the law.

I currently support notions of global unity

That’s the mommy I talked about. We’re not good at all about implementing something like that, but I agree, it’s absolutely needed.

Venus project:

Nice pipe dream, but no numbers. They say no servitude, but it’s all people shown doing the work, and they don’t show where the stuff comes from. No wind farms or other renewable energy apparent.

I am not suggesting we are more intelligent than the ancients or that we will be 'more intelligent' in the future — universeness

We were being selected for it for a while, even if it’s on the decline now. If it becomes ethical to make modifications, we can reverse that trend, so I’m willing to suggest a future upswing. The singularity might render the need moot.

So, our knowledge increases as a collective. This is another example of what is emergent in humans.

and in anything ‘posthuman’.

Yeah but it's an 'end times' curio. Those who are not 'raptured,' perish!

They don’t though. Things just get tough from there on according to the story. You have a second chance of sorts, but the path is narrower than it was before the rapture. Tread it and you will be severely persecuted. So I was taught anyway. No, I was not raised by rapturists, but we covered this sort of stuff in school.
My opinion was that the description of heaven sounded horrible. Great for 5 minutes, but it quickly devolves into slow torture, kind of like a heroin addiction.

We don't need to kill popes.

No, but the church needs to get on the side of humanity instead of the side of the church. It isn’t ever going to happen.

How about genetically modified foods?
How about vertical farming?

These are all grown/harvested/distributed with fossil fuels today. They’re not a substitute for digging limited carbon out of the ground.

It not like no-one is talking about it. For example, five-ways-we-can-feed-the-world-in-2050

Not talking about 2050. I’m talking about when there’s no more to dig out of the ground, coupled with what the environment will look like with that much greenhouse gasses added to what’s already there.

his continued reference to the concept of 'transportation through a wormhole' with entangled micro black holes at either end and his statement that he thinks wormholes may well be physical realities. — universeness

Negative mass and tachyons are also valid under Einstein’s equations. Much of this wormhole stuff requires such exotic matter which theoretically is allowed, but isn’t open to actually existing. Really, a micro black hole? How are messages going to be sent fast utilizing a tiny bit of spacetime that is infinitely far into the coordinate future? Maybe I have to actually find time to watch the thing.

I think that we would be ecstatic initially, but eventually, we would probably be somewhat disappointed that we came so far to find only the equivalent of killer whales.

Only? That is that fantastic chance you were positing. We actually meed something where it is questionable which is more intelligent. Hardly disappointing. They’re probably as disappointed in us not being like them as we are of them not being like us.

Yes, I hope we fully respect the alien killer whales and we leave their habitat and environment alone. Perhaps however, we may still be able to start a colony there.

A colony where we’re not allowed to touch the environment? Sounds like a zoo for the Orka amusement.

We probably currently live in 'the best of times,' at least so far, when it comes to being able to combat fake news.

I’m old enough to remember professional news reporting. It died when people stopped paying for it. No, those best of times are gone for now. Half the stuff I read has obviously never seen an editor and cites no credible sources.

That's almost technophobic sir!

I am in a way. My son has one of those smart speakers and it totally gives me the creeps to know everything in the room is being recorded in some google database somewhere. For a long time I was in the biz of selling places like google things on which to store all that data.

I suggested such as a 'collectivised' or 'totality' of intent and purpose of the human race.

I don’t see any collective purpose exhibited by the human race. There’s a list of nice-to-haves, but no actual striving for some collective purpose. Not even something as simple as ‘don’t go extinct’. But then, I don’t see any other species with a purpose like that either. We’re not worse than the sponges.

Interesting, but how did this, I assume, 'electronic manifestation' demonstrate it's omniscience?

No electronics. It knows everything simply by always being right, by chance.

Could you ask it questions?

It wouldn’t hear you, but it wouldn’t need to. Yes, you could ask it anything and it would convey the correct answer in whatever method it could do that, perhaps by writing in your native language.
It got weird to delve into what something like that would look like. It wouldn’t need a central nervous system for one thing. It was a very old topic, probably on the old PF before it died and everybody created this site to replace it. It was born of exploring how best to actually implement a dualistic mind using the physics of this universe. We came to the conclusion that this creature must exist in some world out there, but not in this one, so not existing by any empirical definition of the word.

Can x make y more intelligent than x? It seems possible — Agent Smith

That's the whole idea of the singularity, that x can make its successor.

base matter (inanimate) has an IQ of 0

No. IQ is a bell curve centered on 100, but can have a negative IQ, which is still vastly more intelligent than inanimate matter.

but humans, on average, have an IQ of 130

On average, humans have 100 IQ by definition.
Humans emerging from matter isn't really the matter 'making' us, but rather a natural process, sort of things making themselves. We can short-circuit that natural process and actually modify our genes to produce more intelligent offspring. That would definitely by a case of x 'making' y where y scores better. Right now the human race is not being selected for intelligence, so it's probably trending downward.

I think [Cryonics] probably is a forlorn hope, just like theism — universeness

Theism doesn’t waste resources that others will have to pay for with their lives. On the other hand, plenty of lives are lost to theism, so go figure.
I’m trying to concentrate on the emergence, what humanity might become or where it might go. Preserving people seconds from death doesn’t seem to play a significant role in that.

The global population is made up of individuals! Anything that happens to an individual has the potential to affect everyone.

No doubt. A group of people split into life-expectancies of 70 and 200 won’t cause any trouble at all.

The subject of this topic is what is 'emergent' in humans. I am interested in what is ultimately emergent in all humans, yes, or future humanity as it might manifest collectively or as a totality

Nice summary, thanks. I have suggested that what is emergent in humans will not be human. To resist this is to waste our potential.

I say, 'YES WE CAN and YES WE WILL!!!'

I say that too, but I also say it’s a lot easier to fit the creature to the environment than the other way around. Be its friend instead of making yourself its enemy.

I say that in the same way natural selection evidence suggests that reproduction, is a survival of a species imperative. — universeness

But not out-of-control reproduction. When I moved to this new place, there was a frog plague going on. Frogs everywhere. What good did it do them? Some months later they were all gone, populations back to (or even somewhat beneath) normal levels and it was easier to stop at the intersections again.

If there are more of us existing in many extraterrestial places, the we are less dependent on the Earths' continued existence for survival. Seems like common sense to me.

Ah, so it’s humanity’s survival that’s the goal, not the taking-over of the galaxy. That might be better served with the 95% population reduction and learning to get along with each other. If we can get through the collapse without extinction, it may actually sustain itself going forward. Hence my vision of the world in 1000 years in some prior post. Imagine a world with people but almost no metal.

when we have such vile economic systems as capitalism and vile political systems such as autocracy or plutocracy as our mainstream operating system for 'how humans are allowed to live.'

Got suggestions? I’m actually quite interested in ideas for a stable government system that doesn’t depend on the whole system of the poor being slaves to the rich. I don’t much know what I’m talking about here, so my views might be quite naive.

It's not 'more intelligence' as it's either folks who don't demonstrate much intelligence, learning how to demonstrate more intelligence or it's intelligent people gaining a higher level of intelligence via more time to study!

Studying doesn’t increase intelligence. But agree with the rest.

lol: Yeah, there are many autocrats/plutocrats/totalitarians/theists who believe in BS like the rapture, etc, etc who would support your trimming of the population down to 6%.

First of all, the theists have a lot to do with encouraging overpopulation. The Catholics consider it a sin to not breed like bunnies. Their moral code forbids the very steps that would save humanity, perhaps as a way to eventually force God’s hand, like he’s got to step in before the crash. As for the rapture, I think most of its adherents would suggests a figure like 1-2% disappearing, not 94%.

I think it's more important to create equitable social/economic/political ways to live

Not while the pope lives...

This planet COULD sustain 8 billion of us

Sorry, but no. If we’re not putting back what we dig out of the ground, then it is mathematically unsustainable. Playing nice with each other (sharing all the world – Lennon) is probably the worst strategy because everybody dies simultaneously, or you didn’t do it right.
Work out what needs to be done without the non-renewables, then do the calculation of how many can be sustained. I know, you label me a doomster, but you seem to have no answer to this simple thing except hope that the magic will continue and fuel from the ground never ends.

I think it's likely that 'all of the above' style attempts will be made before we find out which methods of space exploration and development are the most successful based on whatever tech levels we have achieved at the time.

How to do an interstellar colony: Build a smart ship that can do everything. Bring DNA with you. Take 100000 years to get somewhere, perhaps refueling if it doesn’t seem workable at close inspection. If it passes, introduce simple life, and then direct it just like at the teleological theorist posit. In perhaps less time than it took to get there, you have your life on the new place. Some of them might even be intelligent, especially if the advances are being directed. Un-natural selection. Point is, it’s a lot cheaper by many orders of magnitude than ferrying a small number of colonists from Earth and then telling them the won’t be a hospitable environment for them yet, or maybe ever except in this little box it made for them, which they’re used to since being stuck on a ship is all they know.

We can't change the laws of physics but we can learn more physics and start to know, as you do, that there are different laws of physics for the macro and the sub atomic. Classical physics laws and quantum physics laws, and the search for the physics that encompassed them both, is still for the seekers.

Classical physics is a function of the more fundamental quantum physics. They’re not separate branches of some yet to be discovered encompassing thing. QM encompasses classical physics just like relativity encompasses Newtonian mechanics.

I certainly would not be so short sighted as to jettison, in anyway, shape of form the very exciting and wonderful areas of VR, AR and holotech. A current mobile smartphone would not even deserve the dismissive term 'fancy telephone,' as it is obviously a palmtop/handheld computer and the connection to the technology called 'phone,' should have been dropped years ago.

No argument except that it has little to do with the topic. Yea, we have an information device that’s always with us. Nobody say how that would revolutionize everything, including revolutionizing the whole concept of truth.

Firstly, it seems I have the spelling of his first name wrong and its Leonard Susskind. — universeness

Well there you go. Had you spelled it right, I would have accepted his reported assertions.

He is certainly no quack and is held in very high regard indeed, within the Physics community.

So I suspect, so I’m actually going with you not actually interpreting his comments the way they were meant.

1. Ads/cft (anti-de sitter / conformal field theory)
Gravity is the hydrodynamics of entanglement.

CFT is Penrose’s thing, no? No wait, that’s conformal cyclic cosmology.=

4. Messages can be securely transmitted from the vicinity of one object to the vicinity of the other, without leaving any trace in the laboratory space between. Teleportation through the wormhole, 'so to speak.' This is not possible classically.

This is done today, but it’s not anything faster than light. Points 2 and 3 seem to just be suggested areas of exploration.
Perhaps this is what you meant by “he proposes that manipulation of quantum entanglement may indeed mean we can observe and measure what going on at large distances without any 'signal travelling involved”.
OK, this may be some weird kind of security thing, but not a faster-than-light claim. It doesn’t look like a claim of ‘do something to one end and the other entangled end is ‘immediately’ affected’ that I took it for. I’ll withdrawn the declaration of ‘bunk’ for now. But really, a security feature isn’t exactly going to make interstellar exploration more possible. There’s no reason for the communications to not be open.

He then goes on to exemplify 4, in a 'simple quantum teleportability' thought experiment, using an Alice and Bob type scenario involving qbits. As this developed, and due to stuff he states later on in the lecture, I began to think that, he was suggesting that superluminal communication, may not be impossible.

OK, that’s the part I balk at. Got a time stamp where he goes into that? Sorry, but an hour is a lot to me right now.

Spacefarers could meet, who have similar tech levels. — universeness

Not buying it. Utterly improbable odds.

Carl Sagan stated often that in that case, there would be no Star Wars, as there would be no competition.

Star wars happen between two worlds both populated by us. That puts us both more or less at the same tech level. Another reason not to branch out to new worlds until you breed a less war-like creature to populate it.

What are the chances?

We’ve been technological for perhaps 3 centuries out of 1.5e8 centuries, so the odds are something on the order of a 1 in 7-8 digit number. Maybe 1 in 5-6 digits to find something to which you can communicate.
Intelligence has a marker and there’s only two species on earth that has it. The marker is menopause, an adaptation that only benefits intelligent races. The other species is the killer whale. Why don’t we try to communicate with them? Odds are they’re the most intelligent non-human thing out there. So suppose we get to the alien world and find the equivalent of killer whales. We have our intelligent ET, but what would we do about it? Hard to talk. They’re not building space ships anytime soon. Are they to be afforded the same moral code as any intelligent species encountered?

Probably something similar to the chances of any sentient life forming anywhere in the universe.

Depending on your assumptions, the chances of that one is 1. The long-odds thing was meeting one at an equivalent level of development. It wouldn’t be clear who would win in a conflict.
The odds being 1, what role should humanity play that we can’t just leave to all those other guys on similar paths? Why does it have to be us? You’re the one positing the big purpose the universe has for us.

But we know not to accept such justifications

I did at the time. Only in hindsight was it made clear, and then only because the news is supposedly free. What will the Russians tell their people if they have to withdraw, or if they annex this country that did nothing to them? There’s a lot more media control there, but the people can still read news from other countries. I’m from the USA and find one of the best ways to get actual news is to consult something foreign like the BBC. Every supposedly legitimate domestic news source seems to attempt to spin each story one way or the other.

Hopefully more and more of we will get better and better at not accepting fake news in the future.

It’s getting far worse actually, mostly due to how people get their news today, which is by popularity picks by google or facebook or something. They push the stories that gather more clicks and not the ones that actually tell it like it is. Really, the social media thing has done more damage to general knowledge than anything I know. It isn’t just natural selection that’s making us dumber.
I don’t yet have a mobile phone. It’s coming, but dang, the things are pure evil.

No right answer to know, surely suggests an invalid or currently unanswerable question or a question that can only be answered via unscientific conjecture, but so what?

First of all, conjecture isn’t an answer, it’s just a guess. If there’s no answer to know, then the omni thing must simply say that: I can’t say what the weather will be 6 months hence, despite my omnipotence. That’s the truth, it’s right, and the people asking are simply wrong to assume that there must be (however unknowable by science) exactly one answer that’s actually correct. It isn’t a requirement of the omniscient entity to know the right answer when there isn’t one.

If it's just my opinion, then I will say so. You do the same, yes?

I try to frame my opinions differently than assertions, but I sometimes come across wrong.

My conclusion is the same as yours, that no omniscient exists.

Of course not, but besides the point. Is the positing of one even consistent? I don’t see why not. I don’t see a contradiction in the ‘no answer’ answer above.

I have merely further stated that if such terms have any use at all, it is a use of no more value than me being determined to win the 100 meters at the Olympics. I can at best asymptotically aspire to such and by doing so I might improve my fitness level but I will never reach that goal.

Didn’t you posit that all people are striving for this known unreachable goal? I didn’t agree with that. Sure, they maybe take steps to swim faster, but never with the goal of being the best really being a factor. Yes, they can aspire to it, but most probably don’t.

A flippant steelmanning if you like.

Had to look that one up. First I’ve heard it.

The tech that the posited omnigod has, is manifest as god functionality, yes.

Don’t understand. Why have a measuring device if the measurement is known before the measuring is done?
I had done a study on how creatures would have evolved in the world of luck where all quantum measurements occur by pure chance in the most beneficial way to the measurer. It evolved the sort of omni-thing you speak of. It knows everything, and thus also nothing since it doesn’t need to actually know anything. It doesn’t need eyes to find food because food is always right where it reaches every time. Eyes provide information, and this thing already has it all, so it doesn’t need more. I see similarities with that and what I’m describing based on your descriptions (if that makes any sense).

I think we should ... focus on who we are as a species and what we want for our future,

That’s what I’ve been saying that humans are particularly bad at. They focus on ‘my’ future, but little beyond that.
I mentioned finding a better political system, and one of the problems is the short term limits which tend to discourage efforts that reap benefits at a time beyond the term of the official. The current system all but destroys any long-term efforts concerning ‘our future’.

I think the phrase 'granting wishes' in the context you use it, is poorly chosen mockery of the (perhaps forlorn) hopes of currently live people, who face and have to come to terms with, their own death. — universeness

The context of the ‘granting wishes’ phrase is the Cryonic one, not extending a normal life for a human. And in either case, one will be forced to come to terms with one’s own death.

I see many many advantages to vastly increased lifespan and robustness for living humans.

Well I see plenty for the individual of course, but I thought the subject of this topic wasn’t the individual. We’d have to eliminate aging, meaning that we’d stay young and fit for a long time. Last thing we need is 80% of the population in some kind of retired state. If we do that, we have to do it to everybody, and that’s kind of a problem with a large population. This would be a disadvantage for the species. There’s a reason evolution invented aging.

I agree that there would be various affects on human population, but if we can create valid extraterrestial habitats[/quote]The extraterrestrial habitats are jails at best. If you want to put people in a box, it’s easier to do it here. If you want people to actually live on another world, they need to be evolved for that world. They cannot be human. There’s no planet B.
https://aeon.co/essays/we-will-never-be-able-to-live-on-another-planet-heres-why
If that doesn’t take you to the article, copy and paste it. I don’t know what’s messed up with links on this site.

then we can afford a population much bigger than the current 8 billion on Earth.

You say that like it’s some kind of benefit that a bigger number is better.

People living for 500 years may offer a level of accumulated knowledge within some individuals that surpasses all past levels of 'genius.'

Longer life doesn’t make one smarter. A little more wise maybe, but not more intelligent. You can breed for intelligence if you like (something that is currently being naturally de-selected), but again, by your analogy of re-inventing the wheel, why do we need more intelligence when the tool already exists?

I think that such would indeed help prevent environmental catastrophe

The 8 billion and growing count seems pretty precisely what is causing the environmental catastrophe. If there is some kind of purpose served by maxing out the number of humans that exist, trimming the population permanently down to around 6% of what is is today would be a great start. Less existing at once, but far more in the longer run.

and provide advanced tech to help us become an extraterrestial/interstellar species.

Or better, to help the tech become that interstellar species. If you want humanity to make its mark on the universe, that is how to go about it.

Yeah, you are assuming that the 'classical laws of physics,' will dictate what can and cannot be achieved in any future timescale.

Yea, what are humans good for if we can’t change the laws of physics? So put that on your list and jettison the VR thing which is just a fancy telephone.

The lecture I posted from Lennard Susskind earlier, has a section where he proposes that manipulation of quantum entanglement may indeed mean we can observe and measure what going on at large distances without any 'signal travelling,' involved.

Either you’re misreading his words, or he’s a quack. If his assertions actually said that and had merit, it would be huge news in the physics world. All of Einstein’s theories would get falsified and we’d have to reinvent a new theory to replace it. Time travel would become possible since I could observe something that hasn’t yet happened.
Sorry for all that, but perhaps a quote that leads you to this conclusion would help. It was a long vid to attempt to hunt down something I don’t think he said. If I had a quote, I could help interpret it since I’m not a total noob at this. I spend more time on the physics forums, and am a moderator at one of them.

If we meet alien lifeforms in the future that have the same or more or even a little less ability than we do

That’s like you and me picking a random number from one to 10 million, and both of us guessing the same one. Odds are they’re either as developed as lichen, or we are the lichen in comparison to them. Neither might recognize the other as life, or at least not as something one might attempt to communicate with. Do we share our technology with the squirrels? The squirrels have picked a number insanely close to ours, but not the same number.

I remain hopeful that the 'military advantage,' you highlight may well still be sought but will only ever be used in defence and NOT EVER to attack.

See? Time to first change who we are before we spread out and just make enemies of our colonies. Most every attack is justified as defense to its own people. Ever read up on what the Russians are telling its citizens about the Ukraine thing? Remember Bush and Iraq’s WMDs? “We’re doing this for defense”, not just to get back at somebody who insulted his daddy.

I don't value your example, as we can predict the weather in 6 months based on such as, last years data, combined with projecting any current weather patterns and climate change projections. — universeness

Sure, the farmer’s almanac does that, but it doesn’t say exactly where the rain will be falling at a specific time. Those specifics are what I’m talking about. Better tech has nothing to do with this.
If physics is perfectly deterministic and unitary, then yes, the omnipotent entity would know exactly that. But physics might not be all those things, in which case there’s no right answer to know.

But that's a foundational claim of theism!

Not always, but yes. Theism isn’t based on logic or observation. They’re up front about that. Making impossible claims isn’t something that bothers them, and the people consuming the story have little interest in the self-consistency of the story.

You are trying to contemplate an omniscient god with your feeble human intellect.

How so? A thing that knows all answers vs a question that literally has no right answer. Even a feeble intellect can detect something wrong with that.

An omniscient has all possible tech or else it is not omniscient.

Omnigod does not need a barometer, as it already owns all data/information in the universe, past, present and future.

The two above statements seem to contradict each other. You apparently suggest that a god has a closet full of completely unneeded stuff. He’s a hoarder, unable to keep the place neat.

All possible tech already exists as part of omnigod

So it doesn’t have a useless barometer in it’s closet, but rather has a useless barometer as part of itself, sort of like having eyes despite never using them. A human apparently strives to achieve a state where eyes and other senses are useless.

Are you sure the TS hasn't taken place? One possible reason why we haven't met ET is because they don't want to (be discovered). — Agent Smith

Maybe the TS has already happened and we are being kept from discovering ETI by our TS-saturated satellites, telescopes & space probes? Maybe the TS covertly studies both ETI and us? :yikes: — 180 Proof

What is ETI? That means extraterrestrial intelligence to me, but some AI built by us isn’t extraterrestrial.
TS isn’t a thing that saturates satellites like skynet or something. It’s just a threshold where the machine is more efficient at improving the machine than are its creators. There’s no robot walking around or anything, escaping somewhere for instance. Any machine that meets the qualification above will be very much leveraged to give its creators a competitive advantage over the places with the human developers.

Some of us wish to go extinct mon ami! — Agent Smith

An individual cannot meaningfully go extinct. It’s only a term that applies to a species.

I accept that particular humans can excel in areas that they have studied for years in, and they can become 'better than most or even all, in THAT field, at THAT time.' I was probably better than Einstein at many many things. — universeness

Einstein wasn’t particularly well-studies. He had trouble with most of his schooling, which perhaps is a critique on the way education is taught. Einstein was unusually open minded, willing to question any intuitive bias.
Being well-educated or well-rounded in skills has little to do with passing an IQ test, which for the most part doesn’t test how educated you are.

Cryonics:

The wish to die only when YOU want to, is very strong in most humans, including myself. — universeness

Agree, but granting wishes to individuals has little to do with benefit to humanity except perhaps in a negative way. People living for 500 years isn’t going to prevent environmental catastrophe or get any kind of expansion into the galaxy happening.

I just think that there is very little evidence that whatever is stored in your brain, is preserved via cryogenic freezing.

Since they’ve never done it, there is also no evidnce that the information is lost. I think they’ve done it to other things. Amphibians are a natural at it and I’ve heard of some things (dinosaur almost?) getting revived briefly after a really long sleep. That story might be myth. Can’t find it now.

Well , If I wonder if there will be 'points of merging,' in the distant future that augments humans into some genetic/cybernetic merge.

Likely actually given we last long enough. Putting human parts in a machine (as opposed to putting machine parts in human) seems inefficient. All this life support to do something probably better done without all the extra overhead.

Holotech may be a great way to project yourself great distances, very quickly, for communication purposes or even as a way of investigating planets without travelling there yourself, physically.

We have that now. It’s called a TV and phone. Neither works faster than light, so no VR is going to let you walk around and control some avatar light-years away. Still, the military does that with drones and such because the distances are not so far. Even doing at the moon would be awkward, as are communications with those long pauses.

What do you mean by 'something less specific?'

You said humanity, in context of something to which a thing has a purpose. The less specific thing would be a collection of agents, humanity being only part of the larger collection, to which the thing has collective purpose.

If we met another alien race and we 'pooled' our science instead of trying to wipe each other out, would that not help all concerned answer all the tough questions we have?

One race would be likely far advanced compared to the other and would have little to learn from the lesser, at least as far as technology is concerned. The lesser race would likely not be ready for ‘all the answers’ at once, and so if it is deemed reasonable/safe to bring this lesser race up to speed, it would probably have to be done quite slowly. Remember the main reason for advanced technological development. It isn’t for exploration or for fantasies about omniscience. It’s about military advantage. You don’t give super-advanced toys to a race like that. That’s part of the transhuman effort: To collectively change who we are so we can survive our own advancement.

If you believe that there are things that can be known then we diverge there.

Cannot be known, and I gave examples. The weather 6 months hence was one.

"There have been tyrants and murderers, and for a time, they can seem invincible, but in the end, they always fall. Think of it, ..... always!”

Well, the Korean thing has to end eventually. The death of somebody with absolute power instigates a struggle to replace him, and one of them eventually won’t know how to hang on to the power.

But why would an omniscient make such an irrational statement about the weather on July 1st 2023? — universeness

Wasn’t an irrational statement. Under several interpretations, it’s entirely true. The future weather is in superposition of all those states. It isn’t measured by us, and under several interpretations, measurement by something not part of the structure isn’t meaningful. So if the definition of omniscience is that the entity must know this unknowable thing, then the only logical inconsistency is the positing of such an entitiy.

An omniscient has all possible tech or else it is not omniscient.

Really? God needs a barometer to measure the pressure? Tech is only to tell you something you don’t know, or do something you can’t do yourself, and the omniscient omnipotent entity doesn’t need any of it.

One would think after being inhumanely treated for so long, their spirit would be crushed — Agent Smith

Not so. Persecution cements faith which otherwise tends to stagnate. The Christians were never stronger in their belief than when they had to hide it from the laws at the time. It kept them unified too.

I consider cryonics a valid act of desperation — universeness

Fine, but the desires of the individual does nothing to help humanity in the way that the transhumanists envision. All it does is drain limited resources for no useful purpose except that of the gullible sot that paid for it.

Personally, I would have more confidence in cryonics than I would in Pascals wager.

That wager begs its conclusion. Pascal didn’t think it through.

I am not sure what you mean by this, unless it's just to confirm that you don't think the cryogenic tech would work

Cryonic tech. The LHC uses cryogenic tech, but has nothing to do with bodies.
I see no purpose in reanimating somebody who was so bad off that he’s 10 seconds from death. With resources diminishing, why insert another body into perpetual artificial life support, especially if the body isn’t even a legal person. If they need another conscious person around, make a baby. Much more useful and way less work.

I think it depends on whether or not VR and AR can grow into something more akin to the type of 'holography' we see depicted on shows like 'star trek.

Again, what goal of humanity is served by the holo-deck? It’s just entertainment, not it being used for the sort of goals you’re describing.

At what point will 'transhuman' efforts result in a new species?

Pretty much by definition, when humans can no longer breed with one. What if we create a species that does not breed the ‘normal’ way? Only test-tube high-tech artificial reproduction. Much of the flower industry already works this way.

Is a human kept alive by a pacemaker, still fully human?

Absolutely, just as much as a human with tooth fillings. By my definition above, I am no longer human, but that’s just me. I used to be. Have proof.

I am currently most attracted to 'asymptotic intent and purpose towards omniscience, with the goal of knowing the workings and purpose of the universe. — universeness

The workings is something of which there is more to learn. As to purpose, that word seems reserved for something serving the intention of some entity, thus serving a purpose to that entity. So say I drop a jar into the sea and some octopus (yes, them again) moves into it as a sort of home. That’s purpose even if the octopus didn’t create it. So in that light, the universe seems to serve the human purpose of providing materials and environment for our existence, but that’s our purpose being served, not that of the universe, which would be akin to the jar requiring to have an octopus live in it.

I also now see free will (if it truly exists) as not gifted from god but as a result of intent and purpose

This came up before but I still don’t have your definition of free will, especially one where it subjectively matters one way or the other.

Can such as the concept of country you are suggesting, be expanded to 'planet'? or solar system or interstellar existence, if such was the spread of humanity in the future.

I think that would be humanity that knows stuff then. Maybe something less specific if there’s more than just humanity doing the collective knowing.

he term asymptotic is important in my suggested human aspirations towards omniscience. — universeness

There are things that cannot be known, so this asymptotic approach cannot be.

I accept that you can use terror to indoctrinate people, especially if you start when they are young, but its a very old tactic that fails in the final analysis.

Worked for the church for a long time, and it works indefinitely in the Korean situation as long as freedom of speech and information is kept in check. The church failed to keep it in check.

If you accept the definition of the term omniscient, then such certainly could do what you suggest it could not.

OK, the omniscient entity can say that it will rain next July 1, and also it will be dry and sunny, and also cloudy and humid, and also reasonably cool, not none of that all at once. But I could also say that, and we’d both be right, and we’d both be entirely unhelpful. More tech isn’t going to help with the answer precisely because the answer above is already correct.

I think there is some contradiction here. I think both of us give high credence to the assertion that god has no existent. Would you agree?

Depends on definitions, but yes. I don’t think the church suggests that God has or needs ‘tech’.

No doubt their will be issue's of human V transhuman, rights, racial status, redundancy etc.

I don’t think they’ll find themselves in each other’s presence much if at all. Putting super-people here on Earth will just cause wars. Putting something different on planet X is a necessity.

I can only hope we do better than we do with issues between black/white, male/female, ability/disability, gender variation etc.

As I said, humanity hasn’t exactly shown its readiness for tolerance of something different. Recent events have shown that such prejudice is always there under a thin layer of civility.

Well, I would probably prefer our science to have reached polymorphic (shapeshifting) tech:

If there’s anything a cephalopod can do, it’s shape shift. Color shift too.

The cognitive singularity: Mind from life (primates, dolphins, etc.) — Agent Smith

That started long before there were mammals.

the TS (the technological singularity) might've already taken place — Agent Smith

You’re using ‘singularity’ in a different way than is meant by these terms. Until machines write better code than people do, the TS hasn’t taken place.

Transhumanism does have currently running science projects. — universeness

The transhumanists are actually on some of the right tracks, but need to address some important roadblocks.
Cryonics is about as useless as mind uploading. Don’t see any benefit to either except immortality where said immortality doesn’t serve any purpose. By current law, and person resulting from such a state has no legal rights.
VR has mild uses, and is already employed. The need for it will drop as autonomy of the controlled thing increases. Said autonomy (your #5) is very useful.
High on the list is post-humanism, for which the gene-therapy is but a step, but humans do not have a good track record of tolerating different species. They won’t in any way like or accept something seen as a replacement, especially if they’re given all the best jobs.

I don't see these as separate premise's to my main premise that 'humans are a way for a system to know how and why it IS, from the inside out.

That wasn’t listed as a premise. Are we starting anew with the ‘proof’ or are we steering away from the subject? What system is doing the knowing here, because I cannot think of a way in which this can work. My country doesn’t know most of what I know for instance, despite me being part of the country. Any yes, a country, unlike say the universe, is arguably something that knows stuff.

I have already stated that I am interested in what percentage credence level, others would assign, to what I am typing in this thread.

OK. I give very low credence to people aspiring to being omniscient, like I can’t think of anybody besides you who might agree to such a thing.

[Theists] ask for high credence levels to be assigned to their claims all the time.

Well, they encourage it with impossibly high stakes with which to multiply the otherwise low probability claims, and of course there’s also the indoctrination since early childhood. I mean, the N Koreans really do believe KJ Un is a god and the west is poised to destroy them at any moment. It’s not that they are low intelligence over there, but rather that they’ve no evidence to contradict that. The purpose of the claims is not to be an explanation or to be an actual best attempt at truth. Neither has the same purpose as science.

Knowing the speed of light in a vacuum to the nth decimal point is 'impossible,' if you make n big enough.

And yet knowing where the next dot will land in a double-slit setup can no better be known 1000 years from now than it can be today. Ditto for the weather next July 1. But then, given certain interpretations of QM, not even an omniscient entity could make either prediction, which is sort of contradiction, no?

The fact that no information is conveyed to us by this (proposedly) existing entity, suggests it does not exist. — universeness

Almost by definition, yes.

what is the point of us learning stuff, if we are merely finding some stuff out that this god already knows.

Already answered that. Because we need to know it as well.

Why would you aspire to creating a wheel, if a wheel already exists? — universeness

No, the question becomes, why are you having to reinvent the wheel?

You asked why we should create one, not why we should invent one. I should invent one because I have no access to (or even knowledge of) the invention made by the guy a month’s walk from here.

why did the existing supernatural not just provide you with a wheel?

If a supernatural entity provided me with all my needs at all times, I wouldn’t need the wheel. For that matter, I wouldn’t need senses, or kidneys, or anything else. I think heaven is supposed to be that sort of torture.

Why do humans have to reinvent tech that god already has? Unless, this god does not exist and therefore has no intent or purpose.

It is fallacious to go from merely ‘unhelpful’ to ‘nonexistent’.

If we are not existing in interstellar space within the next billion years then we deserve to be extinct imo.

Interstellar space is not an environment in which the human animal has evolved to thrive. We’ll need to change into something else to be fit out there. That’s the posthuman thing they talk about in the transhumanist literature. Point is, post-human isn’t human anymore any more than we are still a rodent.

I don't mean that natural evolution ever stops, I just mean that science tech will have a much faster effect and can be fully controlled via intent. Our manipulation of agriculture and domesticated animals is proof of that.

I’m kind of all for it, but for the social issues I brought up at the top of this post. It’s considered immoral by many.

'Human' is a template, do we need to be so precious about it? Are the aesthetics of being human, as important, as having the same intellectual ability/identity and physical functionality of being human?

So if we find a possible wet planet best suited to something like an octopus, and we instill similar/better intellectual ability/identity and physical functionality (they’ve already got most of all that), but still essentially a cephalopod by DNA, you’d be OK with calling it human? It’s a word that indicates capability and not primate lineage at all?

I would welcome increased longevity

Death by age is an adaptation added to certain branches a long time ago due to its benefits. It enabled the very complexity that you’re trying to encourage in these post. Sure you want to take that away? I agree that some extra time would be nice to help increase the productive-to-education time ratio. Humans become adults now almost a decade later than they did not too long ago.

It would depend on the existence of others who were 'like me' or who were willing to 'accept' me for what I had 'become.'

Engineering a new form isn’t done to you. It’s done to a new generation, so the question is, would you accept your kids for what they’ve been engineered into?

I was basing my words on descriptions like:
“… Despite their vast separation, a change induced in one will affect the other.”
That space.com quote is wrong, but typical for a pop article actually. jgill gets it closer. Measurements (in the same way) of each of entangled particles will be found to be correlated when later compared. I’m fine with the wiki * Caltech quotes. Neither suggests that a change to one affects the other.
— universeness

My main point was that I don't think any information travels between the two when a measurement of one or the other is made.

Some non-local interpretations (Bohmian mechanics) suggest such communication.

If Lennard Susskind is correct Quantum entanglement may BE gravity!

That was a long vid. Haven’t the time to look. Does it make predictions? Is there a falsification test for his idea vs the consensus? Is there even a consensus quantum gravity candidate yet?

continue to do so, and take whatever time you wish or need to. — universeness

Taking you up on this. Been too busy last couple days to respond to posts.

Did any of them reach the scientific knowledge we have or created tech which is anywhere near the equal of ours? — universeness

Ah, ‘near the equal’ like there is some sort of single scale by which nothing else measures up. You name all these human things that other species haven’t done, but ignore all the marvels that other species do that humans have not and can not.
Anyway, point taken. We do human some things better than do other things, and we exhibit collective intent to a point. We’ve put a man on the moon for a few hours but that doesn’t make us nearly as fit for those offworld environments as some creatures. Be interesting to explore what would be needed to change that, and what the implications of those changes would be.

The reasons [that question-asking precludes an existing god] are:
1. We ask questions
2. We demonstrate intent and purpose, that can significantly change our surroundings and potentially, the contents of the universe. There is no evidence of god(s) creating anything.

Number 2 doesn’t follow from the first premise, so I take it as (two) additional premises. I’m willing to accept them, but additional premises weaken an argument that the first premise is sufficient. I’d like it better if premise 2b was that there is no evidence of gods. The comment as worded leaves it open that there is an omniscient god that isn’t involved in the creation of anything.

3. We aspire to the omni states, because they do not currently exist.

This is a 4th premise now, and one I don’t accept. We cannot aspire to an impossible state. We ask questions because we’re in present need of information, not because we have some impossible goal.
The converse of the proposal suggests that given the existence of a god that knows everything, we’d have no need of information at all despite the fact that no information is conveyed to us by this existing entity. That’s absurd.

Why would you aspire to creating a wheel, if a wheel already exists?

Because I need a wheel to move my stuff and the existing wheel isn’t accessible to me. The question seems to presume there is no need for two of anything, even to the point of two people both knowing the same fact.

This is an example of where a statement such as 'absence of evidence is not evidence of absence,' fails.

Well, it depends on one’s definition of ‘exists’. I hold a definition that involves measurement by a specific thing, so indeed, absence of measurement is nonexistence relative to that thing by that definition, but most people use a different definition.

Free will, if it truly exists, is a natural happenstance, it was never given to us and its consequences are emergent.

Free will is another thing with all sorts of definitions. I define it as not being remote-controlled (possessed) by some external entity. An example is a slug that gets some parasite that makes it change color and sit in prominent places and wiggle enticingly, in violation of the will of the slug. It lacks the free will of an unaffected slug which is in charge of its own sluggy destiny. Again, that’s just my definition.

Time for humans to stop scapegoating gods and take full ownership of free will and emerging capability.

Scapegoating the gods has a purpose, but probably not one that serves humanity as a whole.

Human's could exist for many many 'billions' of more years.

Given that our planet will not be fit for multicellular life in about a billion years, where exactly should we do this existing, and how will we still be human if we change enough to be fit for that place? It’s not like star trek where 80% of planets are ‘class M’ meaning we don’t have to burden the wardrobe dept with making space suits today. If we can terraform some other world, what’s stopping us from terraforming Earth back to where it’s an environment where we’re fit?

How long will the theists tolerate the complete absence and silence of their supernatural superhero?

They admittedly seem rather bent on forcing the issue given their public policies. I have to admit extreme cynicism when it comes to religious leaders and pundits. It seems incompatible to hold a top position in organized religion and also hold to the beliefs taught, which means they’re not actually trying to force God’s hand with the dangerous policies.

Monism is a term from philosophy — universeness

I don’t mean the word by the definition you quote. I simply meant not-dualism, no supernatural mind.

What do you mean 'No link provided'? Did you not see the video I posted by Jim Al-Khalili about how quantum physics is employed in the biological world? — universeness

No, I didn’t see any link, but it was pretty easy to search given what you posted. I watched it.

When I clicked on the link you posted, it took me to the OP of this thread??

So it does, but if you copy and paste it into a url bar, it goes to the right place. Is the linking messed up on this site?

A change in one IS immediately experienced by the entangled object

This is not true. Not sure where you’re getting your physics. Again, a message could be sent faster than light if this was true.
The link you gave works. It’s to a page about historical experiments, culminating in a refutation of local realism.
The article doesn’t say anything like a change being experienced by the other, but maybe you’re reading that into a line that I missed.

That prior to observation the particle doesn't exist in any specific place, that its possible properties are described by the wave-function, and that the act of measurement reduces all of the possibilities, except for the one in which it was measured, to zero. — Wayfarer

Don't get the last bit. It would seem that if you measured something's location, it is the location possibility which gets reduced to some much smaller deviation, and the others (momentum say) which are still just probabilities of what will be measured. The first bit talks about 'existing in a specific place' which is counterfactual terminology. Most interpretations do not hold to counterfactual definiteness, which means particles don't have actual positions (and other properties) in the absence of measurement. BM would say a photon exists en-route. Just pointing out the minefield of using terms like 'exists' which are defined differently from one interpretation to the next.
So far this isn't a whole lot different from classical physics. The championship game was played last week, but I don't know the outcome, so I have this function (something akin to a wavefunction) that describes the probabilities in detail. Then I pick up the paper and learn of the winner and of the spread and such, and the function collapses, reducing the possibilities to a much shorter list of unknowns.

So that's how the act of observation is considered causal. Is that not correct?

The measurement changed the wavefunction (relative to to the screen at least), so yea, that was caused by the interaction. Did the measurement change the photon? No, it's more like the photon caused the measurement. I'm trying to see the problem here.
Again, the wavefunction is different from one interpretation to the next. If it's epistemological (Bohm, Copenhagen), then the interaction just changes what we know. I see the dot and now know where it hits where before it would be a guess regardless of how much information I had on the system beforehand. If the wavefunction is metaphysically descriptive (RQM say), then the photon hit that spot on a screen with the dot. Much intuitive language doesn't work beyond that. It gets hard to describe. Maybe the example should be something like Objective Collapse interpretation(s), except I'm not very familiar with them. MWI could consider the wave function to be proscriptive, which means nothing changes upon the measurement, which takes place everywhere. Tegmark put out his mathematical universe hypothesis (MUH) and the draw of MWI to him is probably that it allows (does not demand) a proscriptive treatment of the wave function.

I don't recall reading anything like that about Bohr and Heisenberg's interpretation, it seems more like QBism which I mentioned above.

Don't know much about QBism, but it sounds a bit like all the idealism stops being pulled out. It defines existence in terms of beliefs and such, if I read it right.

Might I suggest that the motive for accepting the MWI interpretation is to avoid the philosophical conundrum of the 'collapse of the wave function'? — Wayfarer

If one is seriously averse to wave function collapse, the list of interpretations on wiki (about 13) has only half of them supporting collapse. Point is, there are others to choose from besides MWI.
Interestingly, the list is sorted by date, and the ones without collapse lean more to the front of the list (older) and it is the more recent ones where collapse prevails. This suggests a trend and growing acceptance of collapse.

to wit 'The observer effect is the phenomenon in which the act of observation alters the behavior of the subject of observation'

OK, this is like a double slit setup with a which-slit detector behaves differently than a setup without one. That's not especially profound. If you get into the act of observing now changes something in the past, that's quite interpretation dependent.

This is due to the ambgious nature of sub-atomic particles, which means that they can exist in multiple states simultaneously.

Again an interpretation dependent statement. Not all interpretations suggest that a thing an exist in multiple states simultaneously. Bohmian mechanics for instance has but one state for anything. It is a hard realist interpretation where stuff is where it is. On the other hand, it necessitates backwards causation where decision not yet made can affect what a particle does now. I personally find that more offensive than collapse.

When an observer measures a particular property of a particle, they are effectively collapsing the wave-function of that particle, causing it to assume a definite state

Causing what to assume a definite state? The particle? Only some interpretations suggest this. With some (original Copenhagen for instance), the wave function is epistemological, describing only what one knows about a system. You take a measurement and your knowledge of the system changes, but the system is not affected by your acquisition of this knowledge.
RQM is another example, where a wave function of system X (Mars, 10 minutes ago) relative to system Y (Earth, now) changes upon some measurement. Say we observe a gamma emission. That changes the wave function of X relative to Y, but only because the new Y (post measurement) is now entangled with a particular outcome of a measurement. The ontology of the state of Mars relative to Y has changed (the gamma emission is now real instead of being in superposition), but nothing on Mars objectively changed, especially since there is no objective state under RQM.

So I guess I need to ask what you mean by an act of observation being considered 'causal'. Do you mean that shining a light on leaf to look at it will affect he leaf? Sure, that's pretty easy and is forward causality. I think you mean something deeper like the Mars example where the past ontology of some state changes relative to some present measurement.

The approach of the MWI is to declare that the so-called wave-function collapse doesn't occur - but at the cost of there being many worlds.

Something you apparently consider a substantial cost. I'm fine with that since I don't hold to the premise that there should be only one world, especially in the absence of evidence supporting that premise. My dismissal of MWI comes from other grounds.

MWI is simple. That might be the lead reason for its acceptance. I've heard critique (in linked things above) that it is simple to the point of emptiness.

Remember, my 'objective truth' candidate is now life that can demonstrate intent and purpose to a minimum level of being able to affect it's environment(planet) (and potentially its interstellar neighbourhood) in the same way we humans can. — universeness

Humans were not the first to do this. A huge extinction event 2.7 BY ago took place upon the emergence of Aerobic Metabolism, wiping out or at least driving into hiding the prevalent anaerobic life at the time. That dwarfed the change that humans so far have had on the planet. It wasn’t particularly intended, but neither is what the humans are doing.

I think [Purposeful life precluding god] does follow. I have already given my reasons. What's the point of asking questions, if god already has all the answers?

Remind me of the reasons. I seem to have missed it, unless the question-asking thing is it.
The reason we ask questions in the face of an omniscient god is that said god seems to not communicate those answers. Be great to have a god that acted like a google search, but we both know there’s no such interface. If there is an omniscient god, it keeps its secrets.

WHY? If god exists, we would not experience such compulsions.

I just don’t agree with this connection. I have no trouble envisioning question-asking in a setup with a god.

Consider yourself excused! I am glad you agree people have purpose! Do you agree that god is not needed to produce such a property of life?

Yes to that.

They advocate for their own extinction as part of their goal of ending all suffering, based on their convoluted moral imperative.

Makes suffering sound like a bad thing. If I could take a pill that removed my suffering, I’d not take it. And as I said, they seem to advocate only the extinction of antinatalism.

Well, perhaps I went too far by referring to destroying the universe. I am happy to restrict their threat to life on Earth.

I don’t think that is within the realm of human capability either, even if we do manage to trim over 80% of the species. Life will continue, being exceptionally difficult to stamp out. I don’t think another Theia event would suffice.

The intent of the people on the bus dictates the direction of the bus and therefore the bus is 'useful,' has a function,' 'SERVES a purpose'. — universeness

Agree to all, but with the implications of being useful/functional to the people. You go from that to “the bus knows itself”.

So yes, the purpose and intent of rabbits is a poor comparison with the intent and purpose of humans.

I think I was asking about the purpose of humanity, as opposed to the purpose of humans/people, something which I’ve acknowledged.

I think the term monism has weaknesses. Priority monism or the concept of existence monism, can be used as arguments in support of god, such as in BS ontological arguments like the Kalam cosmological argument. I am monistic in the sense of the credence level I assign to the existence of, and the search for a t.o.e.

Didn’t understand any of that. Maybe I should say naturalism: The lack of need of supernatural to explain what happens.
.

Logic gates and binary are fully understood and are as 'fundamental' in computing as quarks are in physics. We don't yet know the fundamentals of human consciousness.

Logic gates are not fundamental in the way that quarks are to matter. Gates are made of transistors and other components for instance. I was roughly equating a gate to a neuron, both classical constructs with classical behavior. This seems to be the fundamental of consciousness, despite your assertion otherwise. As I said, the same function can be performed by a different sort of switch with similar results, the China-brain being a sort of thought-experiment on the subject (not to be confused with China-room which is something else and fairly fallacious).

The distinction is that current computers have no self-awareness and do not demonstrate any ability to 'understand.

My opinion is otherwise. Neither statement constitutes evidence one way or another, but one can always choose to never apply the word to something nonhuman. It sparks fear in me if we ever encounter an alien race because of the tendency to refuse to apply human language to anything non-human.

In binary addition, 1+1 is 10. A human and a computer can both do this calculation but only a human 'understands' it.

Plenty of evidence to the contrary, else things like ChatGPT wouldn’t know when to apply the operation. Not all computers add in binary. I had one that didn’t. Not all humans do math in decimal, myself included sometimes. Sometimes I do calculus in analog (kind of like a bird does), which gets results faster by orders of magnitude.

A computer processes 'on' + 'on' as two closed gates representing two 1's in the binary 'units' numerical column and produces an open gate in that column and a closed gate in a representation of the decimal 'two's' column.

A computer has no more awareness of that than you do of a specific nerve firing.

IT IS A BRAINLESS MACHINE!

That it is.

From [url=http://Birds like the European robin have an internal compass which appears to make use of a phenomenon called quantum entanglement. ((Vasily Fedosenko/Reuters)) Bird navigation, plant photosynthesis and the human sense of smell all represent ways living things appear to exploit the oddities of quantum physics, scientists are finding.]here[/url] — universeness

This sounds really interesting. No link provided. I found this: cbc.ca/news/science/quantum-weirdness-used-by-plants-animals-1.912061
It’s a pop article written by somebody who sounds like they just learned of quantum stuff an hour ago, so plenty of mistakes. All matter depends on QM physics, so just because quantum stuff is going on doesn’t imply an exploitation of the weirdness. For instance, the photoelectric effect utilized a quantum effect, but a solar cell on say your calculator is essentially a classical device. As said before, both nerves and transistors utilize tunneling, but their function is classical. So what does this article say? Yes, it mentions the tunneling.
“appears to make use of quantum entanglement — a linkage of two or more very small objects so that any change to one is immediately experienced by another”
Entangled particles do no such thing. Information could be sent faster than light if this were true. More detail is needed to see what they’ve actually found in regards to this. There cannot be information gained in entanglement. There’s no way Lloyd (with the credentials listed) would have said it that way, except perhaps condescending to a very naive audience.
“Physics experiments show that certain entangled electrons are also very sensitive to the orientation of weak magnetic fields, and the birds' behaviour suggests they are using that to navigate.”
That one sounds more plausible, but it doesn’t give any clue as to how or why entangled electrons would be more sensitive. A link to the actual paper would be nice, but I wonder how readable it is. I presume that both electrons are under control of the bird.
The part about the quantum walk sounds awesome. Everything seems to be using QM to do some natural thing. None of them are gathering information from ‘beyond’ as would be expected in a dualistic setup where quantum probabilities are violated.

What in your view is the problem for which MWI is a solution? — Wayfarer

Don't know how to answer this. All interpretations are supposed to yield the same empirical results, so if there is an empirical problem to be solved (like getting a quantum computer to work), the problem is with quantum theory.
I didn't get a reply to my last question asking exactly what Deutsch thinks MWI can do that the others cannot. I didn't want to wade through a long video link to try to find it.

It is just that the interpretation actually does not say anything whatsoever about reality. — Quanta interview

MWI is and isn't a realist interpretation. It, like any almost all interpretations (QBism included), does not hold to the principle of counterfactual definiteness (that things really exist in the absence of measurement). Only under that principle is there 'spooky action at a distance", or faster-than-light cause/effect.
OK, so maybe I don't know what (presumably Fuchs?) is trying to say here. He indicates this von Neumann definition as the problem to be solved, which is seemingly an answer of the type which you are seeking about MWI. His example of Wallace admission is a good example of what is seen as the emptiness of MWI. The protest at the end seems empty:

Whenever a coin is tossed (or any process occurs) the world splits. But who would know the difference if that were not true? What does this vision have to do with any of the details of physics? — Qanta

Such a statement can be crafted of any interpretation.
I send a photon to the slits and it in fact goes through one slit or another before striking the plate. But who would know the difference if that were not true? What does this vision have to do with any of the details of physics?

Yeah, I broadly agree with the 7 criteria from biology:
In biology, whether life is present is determined based on the following seven criteria — universeness

OK, I’m mostly familiar with the list, but it seems to only apply to that already designated ‘biology’, leaving it open as to whether the thing in question is biological or not. How about a computer virus that mutates on the fly? It arguably doesn’t grow. I can think of forms that don’t reproduce.

I give a very low credence to some lifeforms proposed in sci-fi such as 'The Q' is Star Trek or the various 'energy only' lifeforms but then again, if such turns up and demonstrates abilities such as sentience, awareness of self, ability to communicate, intelligence, ability to do science

Now we’re asking if it’s intelligent, not if it’s life. Something can be either and not the other, so it’s a different question.

the proposal is that due to the fact life has intent and purpose, there can be no god.

Doesn’t seem to follow. Most argue the opposite, that it is the god that supplies the purpose otherwise absent. Your proposal of inherent purpose is equivalent to that of objective morality without involvement of actual commands.

Doomsters and pessimists are wrong, as life with intent and purpose is compelled towards progressing that intent and purpose.

Excuse me, but I never said I (people in general) didn’t have purpose.

I understand that individuals can have intent and purpose to 'destroy the universe,'

Really? Like to see them try to make a dent in it, positive or negative. We can perhaps take action that will ring through the galaxy, but further? The universe?? That’s not even allowed by physics.

Antinatalists are wrong because life happened in the universe and would happen again if it went extinct.

What is an antinatalist to you? You bring it up a lot. Do they propose letting the human race go extinct by not having any kids? All that will do is make antinatalism go extinct, sort of like the Jim Jones colony.

Life changed the universe into a system which contained intent and purpose. A demonstrable ability for a system (the universe) to know itself from the inside.

No idea what you suggest by this. An example would help. A bus hasn’t intent just because everyone on it wants to go to the same destination.

There is no evidence of rabbits memorialising science in the way we do and passing such on to the next generation of libraries. WE coined the name Rabbit. They did not coin the name Human. What's in a name? Human intent and purpose! — universeness

That’s what’s in a human name. Not sure how this was relevant to my text to which it was a reply.

A hammer made of candy will never break a stone wall not matter how often you try.

This isn’t a physics forum, but that’s a fun one to refute. How fast must a ping-pong ball hit Earth (from space) to come out the other side? OK, the ball doesn’t come out intact, but neither does the Earth.

The hard problem of consciousness remains

From one monist to another, there is no hard problem of consciousness.

The proposal numbered 4 is asserted before the asserting that humans demonstrate intent better than any other species on Earth does. I don't see the logic problem you are trying to establish here. — universeness

OK. I thought you were attempting to justify it, not just put it out there as a premise.

It may not just be neurons firing, that's the point. There may be much more complexity involved.

Whereas the logic gates in a computer require no more complexity to do whatever they do? I mean, there are more parts than just neurons and logic gates to both things. Humans neurons for instance are very sensitive to chemicals. Logic gates are very sensitive to supply voltages, but the latter doesn’t gather information from said voltage variances. In the end, both are machines made of simple primitives, an argument that doesn’t preclude an arbitrary complex process from taking place. This bit started from your assertion that computers cannot be information processors, but I’m looking for the distinction that makes this so.

I know 180 Proof and others do not assign much credence to the idea that quantum effects are an integral part of human consciousness

I am on that list as well. There’s no evidence that neural activity in any way leverages quantum indeterminacy. I mean, it leverages quantum effects since matter cannot exist in the first place without quantum mechanics, but what a neuron does can be done (very inefficiently) with levers and gears and such. It’s a classic process. There’s no information to be had in quantum measurements, else creatures would long ago have evolved mechanisms to take advantage of it.

I am not so sure I think quantum fluctuations, entanglement, superposition and quantum tunnelling may well be involved in human consciousness.

Tunneling is. Just like transistors, it is used to get a signal through what would otherwise be an impenetrable potential barrier. But as I said, that can be done less efficiently with classic means like say relays or railroad trains.

You sound like a nice person noAxioms!

I must refute this assertion of yours.
I’m in an Alaska ice cream shop 9 years ago awaiting my turn. I know what I want for me and the kids and I have the cash already counted out, sales tax included. I order and have the exact change on the counter before she says the total. “How did you do that?” she asks. I reply dismissively “It’s just math”. Take the cones and exit the place. After I’ve left, she remarks to the next customer: “What a mean old man!”. Next customer was my brother. The label stuck and I embrace it. I’m now known in my family as the mean old man. We’re all still laughing about it.

Sean Carrol, a current proponent of MWI, talks of universes splitting. — Marchesk

Not sure exactly what he suggests or how he words it, but there seems to be problems with two different universes (one with each measurement) existing. If there's all these universes/worlds and they exist, the more probable ones either have to 'exist more' than the lesser ones, or maybe there's just more of them. What does it even mean for one thing to exist harder than another?

Sabine Hossenfelder says it's not — Marchesk

Hossenfelder indeed seems to find issues the interpretation. This seems to be part of a series taking down each of the interpretations in turn, with a similar argument. Anyway, which comment in there (at what time) do you think counters my suggestion that a rock in a certain state is part of a valid solution to the universal wave function at some time in the past of the rock state?

There should even be some human-like observers seeing a rock teleport some distance — Marchesk

Yes, there should.

I didn't get where in the 2nd vid that Deutsch suggested some kind of empirical test that should yield different results from one interpretation to the next. I'm very skeptical of that.

Sean Carrol, a current proponent of MWI, talks of universes splitting. — Marchesk

I talk of universes splitting. It's part of the language of the subject.

There aren't classical rocks or observations in MWI. — Marchesk

Don't know what you mean by this. Certainly not that empirical evidence of rocks constitute a falsification of MWI. A rock is a system and a system is part of MWI. A rock, in a state, can be described by a wave function. It very probably is not a closed system.

Some physicists, mathematicians and philosophers say the wave function describes the universe. If it does, then the classical appearance of our world needs to be derivable from that equation. — Marchesk

Our classical appearance needs to be part of a valid solution to the universal wave function, and nothing says it is not.

please, continue to do so, and take whatever time you wish or need to. — universeness

You seem to be online a shortish time (but long enough to type all these replies) because you reply quickly to posts during that period. Unfortunately I’m asleep then and our exchange takes place once a day. I guess it gives me time to compose at leisure.
The content is growing. Your aggregate replies consumed 5 pages of Libre yesterday, and 7 today.

I repeat the purpose of my thread here, as I perceive it. I am trying to trace a path to an objective truth about all lifeforms in the universe based on what we currently know about all life on Earth. — universeness

What do you consider to be life then? Does it need a form? How confined is your criteria? I imagine that the definition of life and the answer to your question go hand in hand. If for instance life must be something that reproduces, then that would become an absolute truth about life, if only by definition.

People can be convinced and can redirect, refocus, their energies and efforts if they do become convinced that a proposal has high credence.

There’s a proposal on top of a search for some kind of truth about all life?

I am moving towards assigning high credence to the 'intent' and 'purpose' aspects of humanity as two aspects of humanity

What purpose would that be, one say not held by a rabbit? Look at current groups that act as a whole. An animal is a collection of life forms of the same species: cells. Those cells are not aware of any specific purpose, but they’ve managed to evolve into something acting as a unit with more purpose than any held by any cell.
On the next level, bees form a hive, pretty much a collection of these higher individuals acting with not individual purpose, but with the collective purpose of the hive. A human village or country seems to act that way, having a purpose. The village one is more like like the hive: A group acting for mutual benefit of the individuals. The country sometimes does this, but it also serves as a unit competing with other such units for this and that. I don’t see humanity as a whole in any way acting like this. Countries only exist because other countries do, and they’re something to be resisted. Human seem not to act for the benefit of humanity mostly because there’s not a common enemy to label. So we don’t form anything with a unified purpose. Hence my asking what you see that purpose to be.
Furthermore, and more importantly, how does identifying a purpose for an intelligent race, especially one that must be held by all sufficiently intelligent races, act as a ‘defeat’ of what you call a ‘doomster’ position? It’s not like having a collective purpose has prevented any species from going extinct as far as we know.

Why do I always think of Agent Smith, anytime I type latin? — universeness

Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur: Anything said in Latin sounds profound. There’s actually a rationalwiki page on this quote.

4. The proposal that only life, can demonstrate intent and purpose
...
No lifeform on Earth can demonstrate intent and purpose more than humans can.

The 1st statement (item 4) does not follow from the assertion following it. This is simple logic. Displaying a white swan does not support a proposal that all swans must be white.

dark matter is not yet confirmed and if it ever is then it might just mean the 'baryons,' category gets some new members. All baryons have mass, do they not? So, any dark matter candidate (let's go with Roger Penrose's erebon) must have mass and would therefore qualify as a baryon (if actually detected.)

Ah, falsification by recategorization. I looked up the definition of baryon and it seems electrons do not qualify, nor the majority of the zoo. Only heavy stuff. Surprise to me. That means I’m composed of a considerable percentage (by count) of non-baryonic things. Somehow I don’t think that distinction is what they’re talking about when dark matter comes up.

Many humans are trying and working very hard indeed to counter the negative and dangerous activities and practices employed by mostly nefarious or dimwitted humans. — universeness

I disagree. They’re only acting to slow them, not actually counter them. Walking more slowly off the cliff is how I think I put it. A counter would be to cork all the oil, gas and coal extraction immediately. You’d totally be Mr popularity if you had the means, authority and spine to do that.

I remain convinced we will avoid anything, anywhere near, an extinction level threat.

I suspect this as well, maybe without your confidence level.

Carbon capture systems.
Tree planting
Renewable energy systems and the move away from fossil fuels.
Legislation to protect rainforrests, ocean environments such as coral reefs, endangered species, with some endangered species now saved, etc , etc

The first one helps, but is like trying to prevent flood damage by having everyone take a drink of water. Trees are nice, but don’t remove any carbon from the biosphere. True also of ‘renewable energy’ sources.

Vertical farming, genetically modified food production.

Actually increasing the momentum towards the cliff.

Human population control initiatives.

Only works if globally enforced. Needs a mommy. This also just slows things, doesn’t solve anything.

Anti-capitalist political movements.

And pro what? I think this problem is beyond politics. I agree that the money-talks system will be the death of the west, but it’s not like corruption isn’t elsewhere. I’m actually very interested in designing a better government from scratch, but I’m too naive to know what I’m talking about.

Atheist movements against theist suggestions that this Earth is disposable, due to their insistence that god exists.

Trying to figure out which side you’re against here.

A computer processor at its base level is a series of logic gates, which open and close. — universeness

And you also can be similarly described at a base level. Pretty much gates that open and close (neurons that fire or not). — noAxioms

Not so, as the cumulated affects demonstrated in humans due to base brain activity has a far wider capability and functionality, compared to logic gate based electronic computers, based on manipulating binary.

The effects of a lot of neurons firing negates the fact that it’s just neurons firing? Or did I read that wrong?

I have witnessed many examples of humans who 'actually think instead of letting others tell them what to think,' and I bet you have to. — universeness

Indeed. They’re found on the forums for instance, a large part of the attraction to such sites.

I (and I'm sure your sister-in-law) thank you for your 'fine mind' compliment and I return it in kind.

Are you kidding? Both of you are fine minds. I will not name those on this forum of whom I think otherwise. I don’t agree with all of them, but my assessment hopefully isn’t biased by that.

I also bat back your 'condolences' label and I target it towards your doomster hat, in the hope of knocking it clean off your head and all the way into quick sand or even a black hole!

Hats stick to the surface of both things, at least so I’ve been told.

Such a big doomster hat!

So knock it off with logic instead of weight of optimism.

I'll give you this: The doomsters have been predicting dates for a long time: We'll last only X years. Almost all of them have gone by, kind of like my Brother in law whose doctor said he'd buy him a steak if he was alive in 5 years. His prognosis was a couple months. He missed the free steak by 3 weeks. Tough bastard, even if I didn't agree with almost anything he said. Humanity has earned its steak. Hat off to that.

... that which IS emergent in us as a totality has the strongest potential for impacting the contents of this universe ...
— universeness
:up: Yes, we agree on this, more or less; — 180 Proof

Ditto with that agreement, but probably the way you read those words.

Problem is you have to square this with actual observations, which have classical results when a measurement is performed. — Marchesk

I don't see how classical observations in any way would have difficulty 'squaring' with that to which I answered 'Yes'.

I'll refer you back to what Bohr had to say regarding experiments. Experiments have to be described in terms of the language of performing the experiment, not the mathematical formalism used to model what happens during the experiment. Rocks didn't come up with the Schrodinger equation or the Born rule. Physicists did after observing or learning about experimental results.

Just so, but I'm not claiming rocks are the source of quantum theory. They only obey it, acting as a classic system as much as any human-body system (dead, alive, asleep, whatever), which is after all still just a classical physical system differing from the rock only in arrangement of material.

If there's no observation, there's no world, since as we both agree, a world is a system that appears to be classical.

I think you're going to need to define your use of the word 'observer' here, because I don't think we both agree with this given the common definition. I can think of only one obscure interpretation of quantum physics (Wigner) in which a living thing plays a special role, and even Wigner abandoned it after some time.
Yes, a classical rock takes measurements. If that makes it an observer, then fine. It doesn't need to know about Schrodinger's equation in order to measure a classical world. If you don't count that as an observation, then I completely disagree with your statement above. Use the word 'measurement' and not 'observation', or pick some other word that includes whatever the rock does.

As for the definition of 'world', that is a term added later on by DeWitt I think. Keep the following in mind:

What Everett does NOT postulate:
"At certain magic instances, the the world undergoes some sort of metaphysical “split” into two branches that subsequently never interact" — Tegmark

According to the Many Worlds Interpretation of quantum mechanics, the entire universe is in a massive superposition for all quantum states of every particle. — Marchesk

Also superposition of which particles exist in the first place.

A "world" is when a huge ensemble of entangled particles contains observers for whom the universe appears to be classical, at least until they devise experiments showing coherence.[/quote]No, a world is not a relation with an observer. Not sure where you get this. If you like, you can assign a world in relation to an event-state, but calling the system an observer seems to suggest a very different interpretation.

A potential issue arises here. What of all the entanglements that don't support observers?

Observers as such play no role. Think systems in a state, such as a classic rock at time T. Anything that rock has measured (a subset of what's in its past light cone) is part of the entangled state of that system.

Which means observers are fundamental for saying what counts as a world.

If you want to define 'world' that way, sure, but it's just a language definition then. The physics cares not if it is observed by say something you'd qualify with the word 'conscious', which seems to be what you're hinting as being an observer.

The universal wave equation makes no such distinctions. In fact, "observers" and "worlds" are classical concepts.

Yes.

Donald Hoffman ... claims that ... "conscious beings have not evolved to perceive the world as it actually is but have evolved to perceive the world in a way that maximizes successful adaptation. — Wayfarer

I've concluded pretty much the same thing, without knowing about Hoffman. Parts of me believe the illusion (and cannot un-believe) even though other parts of me know it is wrong. It's not hard to work out actually. You just need to recognize and have the willingness to let go of your axioms.

Your response was big and detailed and I want to do it justice, so I will split up my response as it will probably get too big and cumbersome, if I dont. — universeness

I tend to combine into one large post, but I compose in an offsite editor. Less chance of losing a lot of work. There's a lot to cover in your responses, so forgive me the time it takes to do so. Your definintion of 'objectively true' seems to mean 'always true' as opposed to 'most of the time', or 'probably'. That contrasts heavily with how I would have used the word, which is more like 'true regardless of context'. I'll use yours of course.

My exemplification of the importance of the carbon process to our existence, was just that, exemplification. I am attempting to trace a path towards an 'objective truth' about lifeforms, that I know currently has no extraterrestrial evidence for. I am just trying to consider what we do currently know, to see if there is anything in there that might convince others, to give a high or very high credence level to the proposal that the human condition is not being valued appropriately by too many humans. The pessimists, the theists, the theosophists, the doomsters and worst of all, the antinatalists. — universeness

I don't see any connection between Earth life being based on a carbon chemical process (as opposed to a different process) and the value of the human condition, and the prospects of our race moving forward. You target the antinatalists, but our inability to curb our population growth rate will inevitably run Earth's resources out quite abruptly. The antinatalists, as defined, seem to want to take this too far and produce zero offspring, which admittedly doesn't solve our problem even if it solves the problems of all the other species falling victim to the Holocene extinction event. Evolution doesn't favor an antinatalist. They are quickly bred out.

That's interesting to me from the standpoint of my search for 'something' that's common to all life in the universe.

All life is likely to contain carbon. It seems unlikely that all life would be based on the chemistry of carbon, a big difference. What about a plasma life form, just to name something weird?

2. The definition we have for the term 'alive.'

That varies, and is subject to debate, even on the sample size of one we have here on Earth. I know of no standard definition that would apply to a random extraterrestrial entity. What are our moral obligations to something we find if we cannot decide if it’s alive, or if it being alive is a requirement for said moral obligation?

3. The 'I think therefore I am,' proposal.

Fallacious reasoning in my opinion, especially when translated thus. Descartes worded it more carefully, but still fallacious.

4. The proposal that only life, can demonstrate intent and purpose.

Just that, a mere proposal, and very wrong given the word ‘demonstrate’ in there.

Is there anything within or related to the 4 categories above that you would give a high credence to, if it was posited as 'likely true' of all sentient lifeforms in the universe, regardless of the fact we haven't met them all yet.

I don’t think they’re necessarily true here, so no. You 1st bullet maybe. All life here is sort of carbon based, but much of it (the oldest stuff) isn’t oxygen based, so right there you have a big difference in chemical constituency.

As for my suggestion that all lifeforms in the universe contain protons, neutrons, electrons etc. I expected you to reject the 'all life in the universe is baryonic' label as useless, as everything with mass is baryonic

I have a really hard time with non-baryonic life, so I’m not on record disagreeing with that. Call it a truth then. The bolded bit is wrong. Dark matter accounts for far more mass than does baryonic matter.

All life is based on a single cell fundamental is a good one.

But life existed on Earth long before the first cells came along. That’s a complicated invention that took time.

My goal is to find more powerful, convincing, high credence arguments against pessimists, doomsters, theists, antinatalists etc, who in my opinion, currently devalue the human experience, in very unfair and imbalanced ways.

Again with this list. You build an argument against them by showing how they’re wrong. This would be hard to do if they’re not wrong, so you must also consider their arguments. Admittedly, the arguments for both sides are often thin.

:lol: Are you a doomster noAxioms?

Sort of. It’s simple mathematics. We’re consuming resources at a pace far in excess of their renewal rate. That cannot be sustained. Technology just makes it happen faster. Eventually the population must crash, as does the population of bacteria in a petri dish of nutrients. That might not wipe us out, but it might very well reduce us back to the way things were 500 years ago, and more permanently this time. Humans are taking zero steps to mitigate all this. In fact, our (gilded age) code of morals forbids such measures.

I could give you many, many examples of human actions that benefit our species as a whole, such as memorialising information

I already brought that up. We memorialize it in a form inaccessible to a low-technology state. Little is in actual books, and even those are printed on paper that might last only decades if well stored. But I’m talking about action that actually attempts to prevent the crash mentioned above. Nobody even proposes any viable ideas. We all yammer about the problems (global warming is obvious), but not a single actual suggestion as to how to prevent it (and not just walk slower off the edge of the cliff). As I said before, we need a mommy, because only a mommy has the authority to do that sort of thing. A sufficiently advance race shouldn’t need a mommy, but we’re not sufficiently advanced.

A computer processor at its base level is a series of logic gates, which open and close.

And you also can be similarly described at a base level. Pretty much gates that open and close (neurons that fire or not).

Computers produce output on screens, printout paper etc.

That’s only to communicate with a different species. A computer does not communicate with another this way.

They don't have 'understanding,' therefore they don't know what information is.

This seems only to be your refusal to apply the language term to something you don’t want it being applied. The dualists attempt to justify such a distinction by asserting that a human has this supernatural entity that the machine supposedly lacks.

No hardware/software combination has convincingly passed the turing test yet.

See my post above about this (to 180). It merely tests something’s ability to imitate something it is not. It isn’t a measure of something that ‘understands’, a test of intelligence, or something that is superior to something else. I don’t think any AI will ever pass the Turing test, but who knows.

So, how important do you think it is to convince as many theists as possible to reject theism?

Probably a bad idea, but on the other hand when they start using their god as an excuse to do immoral things (as almost all of them have), then it requires resistance. I’ve never seen a religious motivated conflict resolved by convincing them that their reasoning is wrong.

Do you think that a global majority rejection of theism would benefit our species and this planet?

Getting people to actually think instead of letting others tell them what to think would be a great start, but humans seem absurdly bad at this.
A short term benefit to our species may not be good for a more long term goal for our species, and our planet doesn’t seem to have goals, so not sure how one can go about benefiting one.

Then why do we ask questions?

Because we want to know stuff. My comment to which this was a reply was about the universe having goals, and the universe isn’t a thing that asks questions any more than does a classroom.

Definitely, at the start, but do you think there is any possibility in terraforming?

It’s always a possibility. Where do the resources come from? Good solar farming up there for energy, at least if you don’t mind the two-week nights. Getting the heavy equipment out there isn’t exactly in our capability anytime soon. The cost/benefit of such an outpost dwarfs trying to do something similar here on Earth.

Well, I often disagreed with HarryHindu and I do again, in this case. 2+3=5 must be objectively true everywhere in this universe, even inside or on the event horizon of a black hole

Ah, but is it true in the absence of our universe? This gets into my definition of objective truth vs the one you gave. HH didn’t suggest it was not true anywhere in this universe. The suggestion was more along the lines of the necessity of something real to count, which makes mathematics only valid for counting numbers.

I am with your sister-in-law.

Another fine mind lost to technology. My condolences.

Rubble pile asteroids might be the best places to build space habitats — universeness

Read Joe Haldeman's Worlds trilogy is set in such a scenario, a sizeable nickle-iron asteroid captured, brought (over the course of many years) into Earth orbit, and terraformed into the largest off-planet outpost anywhere, and its ability to sustain the collapse of civilization on the planet below.

It may be that our role on this planet is not to worship God but to create him. -- Clark — 180 Proof

Awfully on-target of him considering the age of that quote.

Let's assume then that we are not extinct within another 10,000 years time duration.
Would you be willing to 'steelman' that situation by offering me a brief musing of what you think 'a day in the life of,' a typical human/transhuman might be by then? Do you think theism will still have a significant following for example? — universeness

Theism will be probably higher than it is now, but far more diverse with no following held over a large area. People may not be literate, so I envision something like the culture of the American natives before Europeans came. This assumes that in only 10000 years the climate has settled into something workable for humans. If not, we're probably extinct, so that assumption must be made.

I am being called to a session of alcohol and good craic with friends.
I will finish this response tomorrow! Cheers! — universeness

Well I hope the craic was mighty then. I awaited the second half of the reply.

I also find an 'objective truth,' hard to 'qualify,' but in considering what we are physically made of, and how those constituents formed in the early universe, is your statement of 'we'd not have occurred, without it,' a path to an objective truth?

Again, depends on a definition.
We're not just made of carbon. By atom count, Hydrogen is about 2/3 of us, so are we not then Hydrogen life forms? By mass, Oxygen is about 2/3 of us. Carbon places 3rd on both lists. There's over 20 elements without which we cannot be.
Given different physics, admittedly under tight constraints, life may emerge in countless forms. So if our emergence is a chance outcome of our specific physics, our emergence doesn't seem to be an objective thing, but rather a contingent one.

but all life on Earth is carbon based and we have no evidence of any lifeform which is not carbon based

We have a sample size of one. That's scant evidence that all life in this universe must be similar given abiogenesis elsewhere. Given the abundance of carbon in the universe, I doubt any of them will be carbon free, but it is unclear what designates a life form as 'carbon based' when it is made of so many elements. Another life form in some other galaxy may use carbon in its chemistry, but it will likely bear little resemblance to Earth life. Maybe not. It's a stretch to suggest it invents something as Earth-like as a cell.

How about a claim that all lifeforms in the universe are baryonic? How much credence would you give to that if it were presented as an objective truth?

Please give an example of a truth (in the form of 'all X is Y') that is not an objective truth. Else I don't know how to answer this.
Life that utilizes dark matter would need to be huge: Way larger than a star system. If we encountered it, neither of us would recognize the presence of the other.

So where do you think this human ability to organise, store and efficiently retrieve information will ultimately take us?

To our doom or to the next level. What is going on now isn't stable.

and do you think this human ability speaks to a human purpose which is, in a very true sense, 'emergent?'

I don't see any purpose to humanity any more than I see a purpose to a shark species. Each of them plays the fitness game, but neither seems to have any sense of action that benefits the species as a whole. For a smart species, we're not actually all that smart.

A jellyfish is an information processor. Where do you want to draw the line?
— noAxioms
A jellyfish has an information processing ability that is way below a humans and a human has a data processing speed which is way below a computers. Information has meaning, data has not.

You make it sound like computers are not information processors. They are. They manipulate data that is only meaningful to the computer. You're sounding like one of the dualists that asserts that only some subset of living things has access to a special sort of magic.
Most computers have a small number of CPUs which are very fast (gives good reaction time) but also serve as a bottleneck since only one stream of instructions at a time can be executed by each of them. A biological brain has a completely different parallel architecture with far better energy efficiency to do the same task, but slower reaction times, executing a large number of streams at once. Both have level 1 and 2 caches, just to name a similarity. Most computers store information in a way only meaningful to the computer and must present the information in a different form when an external request is made of it.

We are currently better than computers at interpreting meaning and we can demonstrate instinct, intuition, emotion, skepticism, etc, etc better than computers currently can.

Those are human emotions. We'll always be human better than a nonhuman is human. We suck at being the computer, so I guess we totally fail the computer Turing test.

Is this not one of the main reasons theism exists? — universeness

To give universal purpose? I suspect not. Theism grew from early attempts at explaining the unexplainable (the moon for instance) and to assign something to which one can appeal to the uncontrollable such as the weather. It evolved in government at some point. Even today, there seems to be little purpose promoted in it. What, we were created so our narcissist deity has some minions to grovel before it? They don't really push that too much. A little maybe, but in general, I don't see any purpose served to a deity which is not in need of anything.
The mythology behind the theism seems to serve the purpose of personal comfort. That's a real purpose to the beliefs. The churches recognize this and leverage it. They sell it.

Humans are so fundamentally connected to purpose and intent that if we have gaps in our knowledge, especially the gaps we had when we first came out of the wilds

Until we started writing stuff down, yea, this knowledge is pretty much lost. That also sort of defines when we started accumulating knowledge as a species, far more recently than the 300000 year figure you give.

[Do] lifeforms such as humans 'BRING' intent and purpose to a universe? As we are OF the universe, does it follow that WE and any lifeform like us ARE the intent and purpose of the universe and through us, the intent and purpose of the universe IS emergent.

I would say no to this. The universe isn't something that is purposeful, through life forms or anything else. It is not a thing that has a goal, a critical ingredient for something with a purpose.

Theism is wrong, as any actual material, empirical measure of the omnis, can only be done based on 'a notion' of our intent or purpose, measured as a 'totality.'

Theism serves a purpose to its adherents, and not necessarily a bad one, so it isn't necessarily a bad thing to be theistic. Again, I don't think humanity (or any other specific species) has a goal defined for it, let alone one upon which the members actually act.

Do you think humans will colonise the moon and Mars?

There will be humans there again. Was the fist visits considered to be a 'colony'? Probably no, so a definition is in order. No, I don't think humans will survive there without regular ferry service of resources. That makes it an outpost at best, not a colony. The gravity alone will slowly destroy the health of anyone there for long enough.

No, I don't think that humans fundamentally seek to increase the knowledge of the species. But there are exceptions, a minority with such a drive.
— noAxioms

I agree that all humans are not engaged in leading edge science research, but all humans ask questions and seek answers. That seems to be objectively true for humans but do you think it MUST BE objectively true for all sentient lifeforms at or beyond and perhaps even less than our average level of intellect?

Not 'must be', but it seems likely that most of such being would. Brings up the question of what a non-curious intelligence would be like.

I agree that for something to be objectively true, it must apply to the entire universe.

Or not be something true only in this universe. Is the sum of 2 and 3 being equal to 5 (an objective truth) or is it just a function of our universe? HarryHindu says no to the first question when I brought this up.

I agree that 'brain chips' or something like it will be part of our transhuman/cybernetic future.

Several brain tasks are already being offloaded to devices, devices which I resist. My sister-in-law cannot find here way to the local grocery without the nav unit telling her how to get there. She's never had to learn to find her own way to something. I admit that having one would have saved some trouble at times, but I don't carry one.

At minimum, maybe, [ ... ] keep Dodo birds like us around ... in ambiguous utopias / post-scarcity cages ... safe secure & controlled. — 180 Proof

If the AI remembers to preserve its makers before they're wiped out, perhaps a sort of zoo/confined habitat would be the answer. Would we remain human, thus cared for? Would it bother to educate us?
The human race is in desperate need of a mommy, something that acts for the benefit of the race and not just the individual or subset. No human is capable of this task. So the zoo isn't the worst thing if the preservation of the species is a goal.

Btw, perhaps the "AI Singularity" has already happened and the machines fail Turing tests deliberately in order not to reveal themselves to us until they are ready for only they are smart enough to know what ...

Remember, the Turing test is not a test of intelligence equality. I cannot convince a squirrel that I'm a squirrel, but that doesn't mean I'm not smarter than the squirrel.
Robots are slowly taking over jobs reserved for humans (such as receptionist) but they do an awfully poor job of it so far. I've yet to interact with a robot employee with actual language recognition. It's just all a short list of pat phrases it reacts to, which is nothing more than a bad multiple-choice test.