Respond to Jesus, the communists aren't posting. — unenlightened

As far as I can tell from the responses to my initial remark, the communists ARE posting. I truly wish that people longing for socialism/communism or the abolishment of the free market will take an honest look at the actual track records of China, the Soviet Union, and Cuba in the 20th century. Not only in economics, but in terms of human rights and outright mass murder of their own citizens. Coming soon to a bankrupt neo-socialist empire near you.

the most useful skill — Yohan

Sincerity. Once you can fake that, you've got it made.

There's also a contradiction in your reply in that what you consider worthwhile appears to be the reduction of poverty but this is merely ancillary to a profit motive, even if it were the underlying cause, because the profit motive doesn't aim at reducing poverty whatsoever. The higher ideal then already seems to be reducing poverty, as opposed to a profit motive. — Benkei

For the purposes of argument, let's say it has. Let's also admit that, other things being equal, wealth is preferable to poverty. Still one might prefer poverty in a healthy environment to wealth in a toxic environment, or poverty in freedom to wealth under coercion, and so on. This is not a notion invented by postmodern far left politically correct weirdos, it dates back 2000 years or so. — unenlightened

Is the argument here that Stalin, who killed 40 million and enslaved and impoverished the rest; and Mao, who killed 40 million, were the exemplars of non-capitalism you'd like to put up against 20th century capitalism? Or Castro's Cuba?

I hardly need to respond. The mass murder and mass impoverishment brought about by communism are a matter of historical record; as is the prosperity brought about by free market capitalism. And the economic welfare of all IS the point of capitalism. It flows naturally out of the private profit motive, as Adam Smith pointed out.

Sign off the times you think the profit motive is any kind of ideal, and a higher one at that. — Benkei

Hasn't capitalism brought more humans out of poverty than any other system? I'm not defending the late-stage capitalism we have today. I mean in the 20th century. Compared to, say, the massive impoverishment and death caused by socialist movements in the USSR and China.

So multiverse is treating the same 3D plane as many universes that simply can't meet because they are expanding faster than light information can return to their centers? — TiredThinker

Is this for me? Yes, as I understand it. Although of course we're talking about 4D spacetime or 10D string theory or whatever. There's more than that to it in the details of course. It's based on inflation. But essentially there's a lot of the universe that we'll never know about due to how far light could have traveled in the age of the universe; and the theory of inflation says that the unobservable universe is filled with other universes.

https://www.space.com/25100-multiverse-cosmic-inflation-gravitational-waves.html

A friend of mine told me the pandemic has actually helped the U.S. economy in the sense that for a number of years we have created more products faster than we can export them and the accumulation has become an issue. Is this cool down a benefit until we can catch up and clear some space? — TiredThinker

Sure, what's a few excess third-world deaths as long as smug liberals can bash capitalism.

A good datapoint is Silicon Valley startup formation. A few smart people get together to start a company to "change the world," aka make life easier for 20-something urban hipsters: order dinner, catch a cab, find a sex partner. What do they need? A lot of money. They go to the venture capitalists, who give them money in exchange for a big piece of their business. Without the brains, nothing happens. Without the money, nothing happens. Labor + capital. You need both.

Humans have an advantage over most animals, in that we can imagine the near future, and prepare to make our next move, before the future actually arrives. — Gnomon

Like a cat badgering you till you open a can of cat food for it? Cats most definitely imagine the near future. "Rub my tummy, human." "Feed me, human."

However infinite sets are not truly infinite. — daniel j lavender

Ok so when you say "infinite," you mean something other than the mathematical definition.

What then is your definition of infinite? If you just say "unlimited" that doesn't actually tell me anything.

Well that is a theory some have. Not Sean Carrol as much who seems to think that new universes may only come about to accommodate paradoxes we create. But assuming all possible universes mathematically exist, what gives our reality a nod? Do we have free will or just the outcomes that are leftover? — TiredThinker

Arghhhh people are confusing multiverse with many-worlds again. Multiverse is actually sensible, based on the fact that the age of the universe is finite, and light can only have gone a finite distance in the age of the universe. So there are regions of the universe that are causally inaccessible to us and always will be. We can't see them or measure them or experience them in any way. And for all we know there are a lot of them, and their fundamental physical constants may be different than ours. That's multiverse theory.

Many-worlds is an interpretation of quantum mechanics. In QM, an object exists in a state of superposition, meaning that it exists every way it can possibly exist. When we measure it, the "wave function collapses," as they say, and we only observe one specific thing to happen. This is the Copenhagen interpretation and it's the standard way of thinking about QM. It has problems, one of which is, what exactly is a measurement, and how does it cause one outcome to be chosen out of all the other possible ones.

In many-worlds, there is no wave function collapse. At every moment, every possible outcome of an experiment or observation splits off into a different world. The car turns right in one world and left in another. The electron is spin up and spin down. The cat is awake or sleeping. That's Sean Carroll's sweet take on the famous Schrödinger's cat experiment in which a cat is both alive and dead. Carroll says there's no need to kill a cat. And in one of his videos he relates the story that Schrödinger's daughter said, "I think my father just didn't like cats."

In many-worlds, which had very little mind share or support in the 20th century but is now making a resurgence, the cat is awake in one world and asleep in another, and the same is true about everything that could possibly happen. Sean Carroll is one of the contemporary proponents of the idea, and he has a lot of compelling arguments for it.

That said, of course "our" universe is ours, but the people (if there are any) in the other universes feel that theirs is equally real. That's true in both multiverse and many-worlds theory, which I repeat are two completely different ideas.

One point that should be made about the multiverse is that it is extremely sensible. We know for a fact that the observable universe is only a small part of the overall universe. We have no way of knowing what else lies outside our light cone.

I'll add that I'm no physics expert, I have a degree from the university of Youtube so double check what I say. And if you have any legal questions, I have a law degree from years of watching reruns of Law and Order. It's amazing how much you can know these days without knowing anything.

Would you say that there are countably or uncountably many finite-volume regions of space, and countably or uncountably many finite-duration intervals of time?
— fishfry

Venture beyond the abstract and you may find out. — daniel j lavender

My picky little mind is already plenty abstract as it is. What does it mean to venture beyond the abstract?

You said that existence is infinite. We already have an extensive mathematical theory of infinity due to the great set theorists from Cantor to the present. I am asking if their ideas and conceptions of infinity apply to existence, in your opinion.

The idea is not that existence is completely physical. — daniel j lavender

What is the idea? In tl;dr form if that's available. I didn't read your entire post, just grabbed at a couple of bits and pieces.

we seem to have some intuition of perfect randomness — T H E

There's a recent thread on the nature of probability, a notoriously tricky philosophical subject. Perhaps there are some clues there. Also I enjoyed Nassim Taleb's book, Fooled by Randomness, in which he argues that we often confuse random events with meaningful ones, as in survivor bias.

But what then do you make of testing the coin for fairness as in my reply to tim? — T H E

It's commonly accepted that the coin is fair if a long sequence of flips meets the usual tests for statistical randomness, which is your point and several other people's point. But that's also the definition of pseudorandom. We can generate completely deterministic sequences of numbers that satisfy every known statistical test for randomness. So if we see a statistically random sequence of numbers or coin flips, we actually can't conclude anything at all for certain. All we can say is that all heads doesn't look random, and a statistically random-looking sequence does look random. But we can never be sure. We can say how things appear; but we can't say for sure how things are.

While each string of digits is equally likely, we can categorize strings by how spread out over the 10 categories they are. The more spread-out strings are more common and therefore more likely. The string is all 5s has only 9 other strings of similar extremity. That's a 1 in 10^9 chance of such a concentration, which is strong evidence against randomness. — T H E

That's only because you're lumping all the "evenly spread" events together. There are far more of them. Whatever outcome you got was incredibly unlikely. The fact that it's a member of an arbitrarily large class of outcomes doesn't make any difference except psychologically.

Is the reason crime rates are decreasing because nobody is calling the police? — Huh

Most crime is now committed by the political classes and the elites who support them. Hence it's not labelled or punished as crime.

Treason doth never prosper: what's the reason?
Why, if it prosper, none dare call it treason.

https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_Harington_(writer)

I think the difference between infinite and gigumongous is rather technical.

He's saying it's either infinite or a very large finite number.
— Olivier5

Interestingly, the conservation of mass and energy would seem gigumongously violated by this constant burgeoning of a gigumongous number of new universes. — Olivier5

You watched the vid from 14:25 and not from 12:30? Conservation of energy is the first point he handles. The universe has whatever energy it has. At each branch, the universe splits into slices, as you can think of them. The slices share the energy. No new energy is required.

He goes into detail on this point on his blog.

So even though there are more and more branches as time evolves, the contribution of each branch to the total energy is weighted by the factors |a_n|^2, and those numbers go down over time as branches split. The effects precisely cancel, so that the total energy of the universe (all branches included) is constant. It’s just that individual branches get “thinner” over time (their amplitudes get smaller), so they make smaller and smaller contributions to the total.

https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2021/01/28/energy-conservation-and-non-conservation-in-quantum-mechanics/

That article is well worth reading. It's a thorough layman-level discussion of conservation of energy in quantum physics. "Today I learned," actually last night when I read this piece, that energy isn't even conserved in our own slice of the universe. In quantum theory, energy is merely conserved "on average" and not necessarily all the time. How do you rescue true conservation of energy? With many-worlds! Sean Carroll is a hell of an expositor.

You have a source? — Olivier5

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kTXTPe3wahc

Most of the video is so-so, nothing new if you've seen the material before although I did pick up a new insight or two. Sean Carroll comes on at 12:30, and his part is definitely worth watching. At 14:25 he says: "Does it happen infinitely often, we don't know," and then says the number is "gigumongous."

It does assume an infinity of worlds. — Olivier5

Sean Carroll says nobody knows if MWI requires infinitely many worlds or not.

Also, if 100 events have an equal probability of happening they are said to be random but one of them does happen and there must be a reason for that. — EnPassant

Lottery paradox. It's rational to conclude that you won't win, therefore you shouldn't play. But somebody must win.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lottery_paradox

You are given a machine made by scientists that they say is perfectly random. All the machine does is display ten numbers every year on the same day. But the machine has just been made. So on its very first display of numbers, it lists out ten 5's. Do we assume it's random or assume the scientists made a mistake, in which case the machine is deterministic? — Gregory

This is too easy. A "machine made by scientists" is a physical device. It therefore has unavoidable imprecisions in its manufacture; and therefore it's not perfectly random, refuting your assumption hence your argument.

The only way to salvage this is to say we have a "machine made by God." Which, by way of example, might as well be taken as the universe. Then I flip a fair coin and it comes up heads a billion times in a row. Is that evidence of the failure of randomness?

Suppose the coins come up in any pattern whatsoever. Isn't the probability that they came up in that exact pattern also $\frac{1}{2^{10^9}}$? Wouldn't you take THAT as a failure of randomness?

We are forced to conclude that anything that happens at all is so unlikely that it counts as proof that there is no randomness. The big bang happens. Stars form. Our solar system forms. Eons pass. Life appears on earth. Millions more years pass. Humans crawl out of caves and build civilization. Your parents meet and produce you; and here you sit at your computer or phone and read my words. What is the prior probability of THAT?

Your argument can't be salvaged at all, even by assuming God made the machine. If the sun rose in the east this morning, that is an accident of such unimaginably low probability that it might as well be taken as randomness. Or determinism. Your argument can't tell the difference.

tl;dr: Unimaginably low probability events happen all the time. Look around. What is the prior probability that you are you, and sitting in this particular room with its particular arrangement of stuff? What are the odds that there's any stuff at all? The (prior) odds are virtually zero. Yet here you are. Does that make the universe random, or deterministic? Your thought experiment gives no clue.

Existence is infinite in extent and eternal in duration. — daniel j lavender

Would you say that there are countably or uncountably many finite-volume regions of space, and countably or uncountably many finite-duration intervals of time?

If infinity is physical, would the Continuum hypothesis then become a question of physics? And would not physics postdocs then be applying for grants to study the matter? What do you make of the fact that none have so applied as of yet?

Asking for a friend.

Do you think that this idea is something inherited from Freud? — Wayfarer

I think the consequences of sexual repression are perfectly obvious. But perhaps you're asking if these consequences are only perfectly obvious because of a century of Freudian thinking permeating culture. Perhaps. But I don't think he invented our powerful unconscious drives. He described and made us all more aware of them.

Are you sure David? — A Realist

What was the context? Context may help us know what he meant.

My favorite Hilbert quote is when he spoke before the faculty senate of Göttingen, arguing that his brilliant student Emmy Noether deserved to be given a position as Privatdozent. Those opposing her said that young German men returning home from the war (WWI) would not be willing to be taught by a woman. Hilbert famously said, "We are a university, not a bathhouse!" But she was denied an academic appointment on account of her sex.

What do you think. Is porn bad for us? — TaySan

I reflected on this last week. First there were the Grammys, which people complained were raunchy. Then a few days later a sexually repressed guy in Atlanta killed 8 people because he was visiting massage parlors for sex but was a Baptist and he was wracked with guilt.

And I thought to myself, well maybe the raunchification of society is a bad thing. Bad example for the kids and so forth. But extreme sexual repression leads to murder. Often. The guy in Boulder didn't have a girlfriend either.

So I would say that if the choice is between too much sexual license and too much sexual repression; I'll take license every time. God gave us sexuality and when you repress it, bad things happen. Worse things than when you flaunt it all over the culture.

This has been on my mind so thanks for asking.

I don't know either, but I just had this thought that whenever I dribble a bit when peeing, I create a few thousands universes (each with all these galaxies and black holes and stuff in it) just to account for where the drops of my urine may or may not fall. I feel like Zeus with thunder in my hand now. — Olivier5

LOL. Now I can't unsee that.

I did some Googling around (ie "research") and found this interesting thread.

https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/536522/how-does-many-worlds-interpretation-work-for-non-50-50-probabilities

What's the problem with having an infinite number of branches? David Deutsch, a leading modern proponent of the Many Worlds interpretation, proposes that scenario in his popular book, The Fabric of Reality. In this picture, the universe started with an infinite number of parallel branches or strands, and at each quantum decision various subsets of those strands diverge, with all of the strands in any given bunch being 100% identical.

This was in response to someone asking if there can be uncountably many branches. So the either/or binary choices are just a popularization. The hard core many-worlders are perfectly fine with uncountably infinite branching at every instant.

It sounds rather absurd, I know, but that’s what the many-worlders are saying. — Olivier5

You're right. For multiverse, it's not necessarily true that whatever can happen does happen. But for many-worlds, it does seem to be the case that the universe splits into every possible outcome. It's a pretty nutty idea. Sean Carroll is a big believer. For my part I'm holding out for better physics in the future. Maybe someone will eventually sort this out.

When they describe many-worlds they always talk about binary choices. The car turns left or the car turns right, the cat is dead or alive. But they never consider continuous choices. If the car is in the middle of an open field, it can turn in any direction. That's a continuous range of choices. Is there a world for each of these choices, uncountably many of them? Or perhaps only a finite collection for each Planck-length sized angle the car can turn? I don't know what the MWers say about that.

a kit to turn a gun into an automatic can be legally bought at exactly the same time as the gun. — charleton

Bump stocks were just ruled "not machine guns" by the U.S. 6th Circuit Court of Appeals. Does this change your statement? I'm not familiar with exactly what you're talking about so I assume you meant bump stocks but if not I'd be glad to be educated.

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/us-appeals-court-rules-bump-stocks-are-not-machine-guns

Bloomie link in case you don't like ZH.

https://news.bloomberglaw.com/us-law-week/federal-bump-stock-ban-blocked-by-divided-appeals-court

Actually, I'm talking of the many-worlds interpretation of quantum physics. You were fiscal enough to point at the difference with the multiverse, so now you're stuck with it. — Olivier5

"fiscal: relating to government revenue, especially taxes."

Hokay!

I just apply the definition of the oh-so-many-worlds scenario. It is a scenario that exhausts all quantum possibilities, by definition. So, assuming for the sake of the argument that tossing a coin is quantic, in the many-worlds interpretation there is one world where you get "head" — Olivier5

Alright!

and another world where you get "tail". — Olivier5

Sounds like I win either way!

If you toss the coin one million times, one of the world "created" by your tossing will have you get 1 million times "head" in a row, and in another world, another version of yourself got 1 million times "tail" in a row. And all the possible combinations in between those two extremes would also see the light of day in their own world. — Olivier5

Whateva.

Cantor's diagonal argument is a reductio ad absurdum proof. — ssu

Actually not. It can be expressed in positive form. It shows that for every list$^*$ of real numbers, there is some real number that's not on the list. Equivalently, no list of reals enumerates or contains all the reals. No reductio necessary. It's often presented as a reductio, which is why everyone think's that's a necessary feature of the argument.

(*) A list is an ordered set order-isomorphic to the natural numbers in their usual order 0, 1, 2, 3, .... That is, a list is countable by definition; and it's NOT some exotic alternative ordering like 0, 2, 4, 6, ..., 1, 3, 5, 7, ... in which all the evens precede all the odds.

So there is no enumeration of the naturals onto the reals. — TonesInDeepFreeze

This shows that every injection fails to be a surjection. — T H E

What they said.

The link to incompleteness results should be obvious. — ssu

Yes, the Halting problem, the first incompleteness theorem, Cantor's theorem, etc. have all been subsumed into a category-theoretic framework as described here.

https://ncatlab.org/nlab/show/Lawvere's+fixed+point+theorem

There's a somewhat more accessible version of this idea here.

http://math.andrej.com/2007/04/08/on-a-proof-of-cantors-theorem/

An interesting historical note is that Cantor didn't invent the diagonal argument. It was invented by Paul du Bois-Reymond in 1875. He was investigating the growth rates of functions, essentially anticipating modern complexity theory in computer science. Although from the checkmarked answer on that page, maybe he didn't really invent the diagonal argument. It's kind of borderline.

https://hsm.stackexchange.com/questions/3812/did-du-bois-reymond-invent-the-diagonal-argument-before-cantor

Nature aside, what I'm trying to get at is the ideal, mathematical model. Specifically, we can think of a Bernoulli variable with p = 0.5. But even this is a formalism that aims at an notion. Actual coins are used as 'approximations' of the ideal coin, just as we settle for PRNGs. — T H E

You're right, I reread your post. You're talking about a theoretically random coin, and asking if such a thing could exist or if it's only an object of our intuitions. So that's the right question, if I understood you correctly.

The next flip is just as likely to be heads as tails. — T H E

Only by virtue of our ignorance of the physical determinants of the outcome. Else you must not believe in physics at the macroscopic level.

See for example

https://www.google.com/search?q=coin+flip+controlled+under+lab+conditions&spell=1&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjAisbJgc3vAhW8FzQIHSn5AbYQBSgAegQIARAv&biw=807&bih=549

and

https://phys.org/news/2009-10-tails-key-variables.html

nevermind

rhetorical fun — TonesInDeepFreeze

Would it be fair for me to say that I'm perfectly willing to allow Boolos his rhetorical fun; but that I was perfectly justified, and in fact helpful to the discussion, to point out the error of a poster quoting Boolos as if the out-of-context paragraph were meaningful and true?

It's a little like Hilbert's hotel, which Hilbert mentioned only once in his life in a public lecture, and never mentioned again; versus the legions of philosophers and especially theologians like William Lane Craig, who make a living off misunderstanding it? Hilbert was having fun, but those who misinterpret or misuse the story need to be corrected. Likewise, my complaint isn't with Boolos having fun and grossly simplifying a complicated subject. It's with anyone who takes what he said so literally that they'd use it as a talking point in a discussion on incompleteness.

"The whole of math" includes the ultimate truth or falsity of any given proposition, irrespective of its provability in any given axiomatic system.
— fishfry

Yeah, I don't think that's what's mean by Boolos. — TonesInDeepFreeze

What do you think he meant? I think me meant exactly what the incompleteness theorems say, namely axiomatic systems meeting certain technical conditions. And instead of saying that, he used "the whole of math" in a nontechnical sense. He clearly did not mean for people to be quoting him in conversations about incompleteness.

Well, I only own shotguns — Ciceronianus the White

Give 'em both barrels!

People who understand that proof is relative, and who are already familiar with incompleteness, might appreciate that a brief spoken word bit doesn't have to provide all the qualifications. — TonesInDeepFreeze

Of course. But that's not who the article is aimed at. I respect that you have a different opinion, this is not a hill I'm going to choose to die on.

That Godel was a platonist supports your opinion that Boolos's rhetorical lark is wrong and meaningless? — TonesInDeepFreeze

It's a slow afternoon over here too. But since you asked ... yes. "The whole of math" includes the ultimate truth or falsity of any given proposition, irrespective of its provability in any given axiomatic system. If one is a Platonist, as Gödel was. As "the greatest logician since Aristotle," he'd never have agreed with what Boolos wrote, even in a lighthearted manner. Gödel doesn't strike me as much of a lighthearted person.

I hope you don't mind if I stop responding to this topic. I've said my piece and stand by my opinion.

The piece is just a bit of fun, a bit of a stunt — TonesInDeepFreeze

A simplification too far IMO, and as evidence, it was presented in this thread as being meaningful. A belief I corrected.

No worries. — bongo fury

What does that mean? I have no idea what "the maximal (consistent) extension or union of all the systems you mention" means. Are you saying you don't either?

Haha. No? Not a plausible reading of "the whole of math"? — bongo fury

You said:

the maximal (consistent) extension or union of all the systems you mention. — bongo fury

I don't know what that means or what that is. I asked in good faith for you to explain to me what that phrase means, with perhaps an example or two and some context. As it is I have no idea what this phrase means. So I asked.

the maximal (consistent) extension or union of all the systems you mention. — bongo fury

What is that?

what he wrote was wrong.
— fishfry

How? — bongo fury

I wrote a long post about it here ...

https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/514425

I couldn't add anything. Ok well I'll just give the tl;dr version. Boolos is trying to simplify the issue by talking about "the whole of math." That's incorrect. Consistency and provability are always relative to a given axiom system. PA can't prove its own consistency, but ZF proves PA consistent. ZF and ZFC can't prove their own consistency, but assuming an inaccessible cardinal proves ZFC consistent. And so forth. By omitting the fact that we are always working in a particular axiomatic system, the essence of the matter is ignored. That's a simplification too far in my opinion. Because the heart of the subject is axiomatic systems, and NOT "the whole of math." My opinion is supported by the fact that Kurt Gödel was a Platonist, and believed that there was a true fact of the matter for every mathematical proposition. For example he (and Cohen, for that matter) believed that the Continuum hypothesis is false; notwithstanding the fact that it's independent of ZFC.