To those following this discussion and still uncertain of what "the problem" is.

An analogous problem is the idea of a "block universe", which is a hypothesis that arises as soon as we assign a dimension to time that is mathematically the same as our dimensions of space; which you can do in any physics system be it Newton, General Relativity or Quantum mechanics.

When time is treated as a space dimension, one becomes (based on the math) free to imagine that time really is a physical dimension and particles travelling "through time" are "physically" long strands traversing this "space-time" physical substance (in one way or another).

If one describes the whole universe this way, there is nothing logically inconsistent within the math of saying the whole 4 dimensions (or however many dimensions you have in your system) physically exist (in some substance intuition sense) as one 4 dimensional block.

The logical inconsistency arises when we try to reconcile the block-universe view with our experience of time, and that only arises due to being conscious of "one moment to the next".

If a mathematical system describing "the" or just "a" universe was given to a mathematician, and the label "universe" was removed and the dimension of time wasn't labeled "time" then there would nothing in that mathematical structure that would lead our mathematician to hypothesize time. You ask the value (or range of values) of a position labeled as "a,b,c,d" in the mathematical structure, and our friendly mathematician crunches the numbers and gives you the result.

False. That's precisely the point. There are CONSEQUENCES to the wave not being resolved while we're not looking at it. Attach a measuring apparatus to a double slit experiment. Then have an AI recognize whether or not an interference or striped pattern is produced, and connect the AI to a cookie dispenser. If a striped pattern is produced, no cookie, if an interference pattern is produced, dispense a cookie. Start the experiment and go to the cookie dispenser. You will find no cookie. — khaled

This is just not how it works.

Interference patterns disappear, not because of wave collapse, but because of running a different experiment, where phase is not preserved through both slits; and without the same phase going through both slits, the interference pattern does not emerge; this is why there is no interference pattern even if you do not "look" at your experiment until the end.

However, if you put your experiment in the box with Schrödinger's cat, how is it described quantum mechanically? The particles, the detectors, the AI are all in superpositions of the different possibilities of when you open the box.

If we look at the math of quantum physics, there is no logical inconsistency in just letting the wave function propagate indefinitely without any "collapses". The logical inconsistency arises when we look at the world and do not see this wave function, but see definite things with definite values. Now, what we can make of this I think @Wayfarer has been describing very well, so I suggest reading his posts carefully.

Not true. Not even for MWI. MWI is the theory that ALL the possibilities happen. As in a universe where the wave function collapsed to A is created and another universe where the wave function was collapsed to B is created, and so on.... — khaled

You seem to be in a contradiction.

You're saying the MWI solves the problem we're talking about, but somehow the problem doesn't even exist for the proposed solution you are arguing against that "consciousness collapses wave functions".

You say:

False. If you set up a measuring machine and no one looks at the results, the wave function will still collapse. — khaled

If the wave function collapses anyway due to a measuring machine, why the need to postulate multiple worlds?

I think @Wayfarer describes the basic problem well, so I'll just repeat it:

I think that the 'observer problem' or 'measurement problem' in physics is precisely due to the fact that 'the act of observation' has a material effect on the outcome of experiments in quantum physics. This is the origin of the controversy, and the reason there is a problem of interpretation. They don't necessarily refer to consciousness but to the act of observation or registration or measurement. It can be argued that this act of observation can be made by an apparatus, not a person, but that begs the question of why the apparatus existed in the first place, and also whether anything it measures or registers constitutes information until it is interpreted by those who made the apparatus. If you say it does, it simply kicks the can down that road, so to speak; ultimately the information is interpreted by a human being, and whether it exists uninterpreted can only ever be an assumption. — Wayfarer

As I mention in my previous comment, there's nothing "special" about measuring apparatus, other than that we become conscious of their definite states, and, once we do, it is incoherent to continue in the belief that the measuring apparatus is in a superposition of different possible results (which, before we look, is entirely coherent to believe the measuring apparatus is in the superposition of the different measurement outcomes; to "know it's not" we have to look, and only after looking and seeing it definitely says "5" does it become incoherent to persist in the belief that it could be other values other than 5, as it definitely says 5).

Adding a "measuring apparatus" in the box with Schrödinger's cat, doesn't change the thought experiment. There's already the measuring apparatus of the Geiger counter that when activated releases the poison, we ca simply argue it is in a superposition along with the particle it's measuring. We can add into the box as many measuring devices as we like. The particle, the "measuring apparatus" of the Geiger counter, the cat, the air, everything in the box is just particles described by some wave function and there is nothing "logical" that forces us to believe the wave function collapses at any given moment before we check.

The question is what state these measuring devices are in before we look at them? How can we prove any hypothesis? If we're doing science, we have to look to prove our hypothesis, but this defeats the question we are trying to resolve.

When we check, we see one of the potential outcomes; there is no difference between saying we "could have seen one of the potential outcomes since the box was closed" and saying "we could have seen one of the potential outcomes since a series of wave function collapse that have happened since the box has closed", there is no mathematical difference in this second way to imagine things where the "possibility tree" is pruned regularly, just in our minds with imagined wave collapses, as that does not give us any new information in which to predict the state of the box. All we have is the information about the box before we close the lid, so if I just calculate the wave function based on that and let it evolve until the time we open the box to know the probabilities of different box states I may observe, this will be the same as hypothesizing the wave function collapses regularly for some reason.

Yes. Which means it's not the consciousness doing it. If the wave was already collapsed by the time it made it through your eyes, before it got processed in any way by the brain then it's your eyes doing it. Not your mind. — khaled

I'm not sure you're getting it.

We cannot, by definition "observe" when wave collapse happens before an observation.

If you say your eyes cause wave collapse (which already isn't necessarily a coherent use of the word cause), then we'd need an apparatus that makes observations on your eyes to see this eye-wave-collapse phenomenon happening.

If wave collapse happens before observation, we cannot, in principle, observe it. It can always be argued that the cat with the poison is in a super position of different states, and when we open and look, our eyes are in a super position too.

There is nothing in quantum mechanics itself that prevents, in principle, "pan super position" of just setting up the wave function of the whole universe and letting it evolve. If we do this for the big bang or any moment after the big bang, there is nothing in quantum mechanics that forces "observations" to collapse the universal wave function.

It's totally coherent, in principle, to just have a cosmic wave function that then evolves with time and is never "observed" to resolve uncertainties (i.e. collapse the wave function).

What is incoherent in this approach is that we do not (by we I mean my individual consciousness and any like consciousness) observe the wave function of the superposition of all possibilities since the big bang, but we observe one clear possibility.

It's only consciousness that for sure forces us to even come up with wave function collapse in the first place. If you presented the wave function to a mathematician that doesn't know what it's about, they wouldn't be able to find why and when it needs to "collapse" for the math to be coherent. It can evolve in time in it's wavy form indefinitely.

If one sets up a wave function with an "apparatus", the above mathematician would just view it as more particles in the wave function, nothing intrinsically special about the apparatus than the experiment it's connected too.

What makes "apparatus" special is psychics is that we consciously observe the apparatus and so see definite states of the apparatus and not superimposition of states.

This doesn't mean consciousness "causes wave collapse", but "we" cannot "know" about definite states of the universe until we become conscious of those states. What happens before, in principle, we cannot know about unless we look and become conscious of what's happening before (which is now no longer "before" we're conscious of it).

Given all this, it is as reasonable to believe consciousness collapses wave functions as some entropy threshold or the like.

Basically: If we can prove that the eyes cause wave function collapse fully, then it's not consciousness doing it is it? Unless you want to then propose that eyes are conscious. — khaled

This does not seem any different than just experimental apparatus causing wave function collapse, just eyes being apparatus.

The whole point of the question is that "whatever is there" before observation we don't know about until we observe it. Schrodinger's cat in the box.

The paper you cite just goes over the "apparatus" or "external entropy" causes wave collapse arguments. It does not propose an experiment that I can build, turn it on, and be convinced wave collapse has nothing to do with consciousness. An "argument" even in the reputable https://arxiv.org/ does not an experiment make.

Why must we be able to count worlds for it to be science? It's not a real infinity anyways. — khaled

Yes, I thought you would reply this and I had already edited my comment above, but unfortunately not before you already saw it, so here it is again:

(And before you say it's not infinite, just near infinite there's so many: any finite number is totally miniscule compared to infinity; the largest number that can possibly be represented in the entire accessible universe using all available energy and material and building up the most compact way to represent the largest numbers in the axiomatic system of your choice; is a minuscule number incredibly close to zero when compared to infinity). — boethius

If we did an experiment that showed that even without any conscious observers the wave would collapse anyways, — khaled

There is no such experiment proposed, even in principle.

But yes, if there was, it would no longer be pseudoscience but science.

The pseudoscientific beliefs that are unreasonable are the one's contradicted by actual experiments that you can repeat.

By-the-by, no apparatus can count to infinity and so infinite worlds is pseudoscience, not real science. The "popular" physicists that talk about infinite worlds are complete morons. (And before you say it's not infinite, just near infinite there's so many: any finite number is totally miniscule compared to infinity; the largest number that can possibly be represented in the entire accessible universe using all available energy and material and building up the most compact way to represent the largest numbers in the axiomatic system of your choice; is a minuscule number incredibly close to zero when compared to infinity).

Sure. But if one of them is unreasonable it makes the other unreasonable. — khaled

Yeah, I say both are reasonable.

Is reasonable? — khaled

Yes.

What I don't believe is that it is resolvable by experiment, just as whether anyone else is conscious to begin with is not resolvable by experiment (which solves the relativity problems of wave collapse if I'm the only conscious observer, by the by). Again, my belief other people are conscious is pseudoscience.

As a belief you clearly find unreasonable since you call having it being "In denial" — khaled

I said you're in denial it is a pseudoscientific belief, whereas I am not. Two beliefs being "as reasonable to believe" do not make them true. I trust people, even some experts; I think it's reasonable, but I do not think it is therefore true. Some people turn out to be untrustworthy, even if I thought it reasonable to trust them before.

I said as reasonable. Both are claims about consciousness we are unable to verify by experiment. They seem equally reasonable to me in this regard.

I'm not really following you anymore.

I'm pretty sure you don't understand what we've agreed to, but maybe you're feeling lucky.

As reasonable as believing there's some people that have a consciousness made of "expertise" in some way.

Not an experiment. But you manage to do it. I manage to do it in the same way. So does everyone I think. — khaled

It's not an experiment, it's not science. It's pseudoscience with all the same trappings of other pseudosiences: plausible sounding reasoning, anecdotes, unfalsefiable claims.

I'm just not in denial about it. Maybe other pseudoscientific things are reasonable to believe as well.

Right. And all I was saying is that it’s implausible that most experts (from trustworthy institutions that have no motivation to lie about this) saying that consciousness is not required for quantum wave collapse, are gaslighting us. This isn’t even a political issue. There is no reason to lie here. Do you agree with that much? — khaled

Yes, do even know this? Where's the data? And if so, what experiment allows us to distinguish between a "real expert" and not.

As for the subject matter, if someone talking about "science" doesn't have an experiment to backup their claim, it doesn't matter anyway. What you should say (even if you had the above data) is "most experts speculate consciousness is not needed for wave collapse".

But if it's just speculation, who cares?

History (which produces experts), if you bother to look at it, show us "experts" mostly agreeing on a lot of speculations at any given time. Most experts, until recently, nearly all "speculated" the expansion of the universe was slowing down, the question was just how much. Then someone (and it doesn't matter if they're an expert or not) provided evidence that the expansion is actually speeding up. Other groups then independently confirmed this ... maybe; more actual experiments, actually independent maybe needed to increase our confidence to certainty (there could be something seriously wrong with distance measurements, considering the conflict in measuring the Hubble constant may mean we're missing something profound). For now however, "experts" mostly speculate the universe is indeed accelerating in it's expansion.

Point is, what the experts mostly speculated before and what they mostly speculate now doesn't matter, what matters is experiment, independent verification, and the trust (based on feeling) that we place in such verifying experiments (that also extends to ourselves as part of this vaguely trustworthy humanity, as we can also do an experiment ourselves, but do it wrong).

Until recently a lot of "experts" speculated the LHC would give evidence of super-symmetry particles, like they did for previous accelerators; and with good reason, after a good run of discovering new particles with every bigger accelerator there wasn't good reason to assume it would stop. Point is, someone working on theories where the LHC doesn't discover anything more than the Higgs before the LHC results, was not "wrong" because many experts speculated otherwise. Speculation of experts doesn't resolve issues, otherwise no scientific breakthrough would ever happen (as they are almost always fringe ideas when they are first thought of, and would be discarded the moment they are thought of due to "contrary expert speculation").

But you have some confidence in them. Where does that come from? — khaled

I just told you: independent groups I have (for not experimental reasons) reason to believe are really independent and have run the same experiments and confirmed the same results; 2. interacting with technology that must be doing "something" and proposed explanations coherent with that and implausible that (again not due to experimental evidence by my feelings of humanity's trustworthiness) has been made up to gaslight me.

What the hell was that novella then? — khaled

One can always imagine some more complicated scheme fooling oneself in every way. It's an old philosophical exercise. Have you not heard of Descartes? I'm not suprised if you haven't; obviously he has nothing to do with your version of science.

Right, and what do you look at when you make your guesses? Does someone having a PhD or Doctorate improve your chances of trusting them in any way? That would be crazy! — khaled

You haven't bothered to reflect on anything I have said. I've made it clear that expert (to me) is the result of historical process and convention, and not a result of experiment. People get PhD as part of a historical process, not by getting in some box that verifies they are indeed made of "PhD substance" that is distinguishable from "layperson substance". Because I have this view, the credibility of PhD's is related to the political institutions that produce them, and I can doubt more an "expert" in China saying the CCP is like, the bestest or then an "expert" in Nazi Germany saying their race is superior to others. If, however, there's a political system I trust more that also produces experts, I trust those experts more.

Can you put two electrons next to each other yourself? I doubt it. — khaled

I'm not sure when science became just "trust us", but that just so happens to be the exact same epistemological framework of the Catholic church, which science fans are so proud of over throwing with "experiments you can do yourself to convince yourself of what the answer really is rather than just believe what the churchmen tell you".

Yes, things I haven't actually done, like put two electrons together, I have less confidence in than things I have done.

Now, for technology, it's only an argument that supports a "science" used to create it because you can run experiments on the technology yourself. I can run calculations on a computer that satisfy me of it's information processing power and information density.

There's a lot you can do yourself.

You're also forgetting the important step of independent groups confirming results, increasing our confidence we aren't being fooled (experiments "anyone can do" if they want and report to us confirmation or refutation; we can then evaluate their credibility as we wish, but there's no second experiment that actually tells us their credibility ... other than more groups we trust more doing the same experiment, or then ourselves if it means that much to us), rather than just believing experts.

What you can't do is propose an experiment that distinguishes between expert and non-expert.

Of course, maybe independent groups are secretly colluding to fool us. Ultimately, my trust in the reports of others is indistinguishable from my trust in humanity as a whole. Some level of scheming I find implausible, but not due to some experiment I've run but because I don't get "the feeling" the people around me are that duplicitous and I have "the feeling" humanity as a whole is similar. Of course, there's definitely schemes, based on the same feelings about people around me, I find completely plausible, like pretending "experts" backup the idea of selling people a lot of opioids. Essentially by definition I cannot actually verify by experiment exactly how trustworthy people are, I'm forced to make due with guessing and keeping an eye on things. Unless you have such an experiment, then the situation is that the purpose of an expert is that we trust them; it cannot be some experiment that tells us to or not and even less some expert of experts.

Sorry I didn't add the obvious implication of experimental evidence.

Experiments you can do yourself.

When someone tells you electrons are attracted to other electrons, how do you know they're wrong? — khaled

I'm pretty sure they're wrong.

Based on experiments I've actually seen.

Seeing the resume is experimental evidence.

And how do you think they got said features? If not by actually knowing what they're talking about (with maybe a few rare exceptions)? — khaled

Experimental evidence of what?

If I send you my resume with all known PhD diplomas that have ever existed, would you just accept the result of this experiment?

And how do we even know what PhD's diplomas exist you may wonder? Luckily I have a PhD in the history of PhD's on my resume, so you trust my expertise, question settled.

But then, being clever and insightful, you begin to wonder how I was able to accumulate over a million PhD diplomas. You scroll down and see "time travelling arts" and immediately jump to the only available conclusion based on the "experimental evidence" so far, which is I'm an immortal time travelling scholastic.

Still, you want to be sure and case may yet be closed. You see some of my PhD's have been issued recently, rather than centuries in the past or future as with most of them. So, being astute and careful, you call the institutions in question and ask around. What do you get? Pathetically useless anecdotes that don't prove anything at all. You demand experimental evidence to resolve your question! The dean of deans at the end of the line tells you to stop wasting their time and hangs up. You scream into phone that you're just trying to get at the experimental evidence that correctly distinguishes experts from non-experts in the same way we would expect to be satisfied in distinguishing electrons from protons, upon which the entire modern world is built, you mad person! But you hear only silence. You are forced to conclude that these institutions labeled "university" don't take knowledge seriously and can't be trusted.

You start pacing in your room. If there is no experimental evidence that can actually be carried out to distinguish between expert and layperson on a given subject, the whole epistemological foundation of global society may collapse. Bridges may collapse due to improper stressed concrete supervision, planes would fall out of the sky due to mad idiots making critical systems dependent on a single sensor, trump would be president! pandemics unleashed and place us all in lock downs and see the harrying day Westerners wear surgical masks in public like dirty Asians! The damages of an apocalypse of a world run by non-experts would have no realistic bounds; the icecaps could melt, species could go extinct at a rate not seen for tens of millions of years, we could even irrationally start killing the bees with chemicals they really don't like for all we could predict.

You pick up the phone, "give me the president of the United States of America". "President, smart and stable genius at that, speaking". You slam the phone down in horror: It's already begun. You turn on the TV to see the date; it's 2016, you've gone back in time, which doesn't surprise you as you have experimental evidence time travel exists, and you don't doubt the results of your experiments. Suddenly you see a shadowy figure in the corner holding some sort of exotic novelty cane. "It's you," you say. "Yes, it's me Khaled, Boethius from the forum -- which I'm sure you now realize is also the actual historical Boethius who discovered the secrets of time travel by taking a lot of drugs and talking with inter-dimensional muses -- and while you've been confident that experts have some real empirical experimental evidence establishing their expertise, rather than a historical social convention resulting in expertise labels without experiments available to confirm those labels really signify what we want them to signify, and have slept peacefully in your bed confident experts have organized everything in a reasonable way and you have no need to worry or even look our your window -- you need but focus on the extremely narrow area of expertise other experts have shoved your face into -- the world has actually not gone that way, and I've brought you back to 2016, to show you how it all began; the start of the destruction of your civilization because mad fools believed critical thinking could be delegated to experts and is not a collective social responsibility that succeeds or fails together, without any experiments available to convince us at any given time which is actually happening. "Now," I say seriously, "you have two choices: take the red pill, a massive complimentary dose of LSD, and I bring you back to ancient Greece and we do a bunch of orgies together, or take the blue pill, and I bring you back 2021, bring you up to speed on recent history, and you can try to work things out. Blue pill is also a complimentary dose of LSD; you want to do some LSD Khaled, cause that's why I'm here; most of my million PhD involve the psychedelic arts actually". You slam both pills into your mouth. After a long pause of appreciation, "so you're beginning to learn," I tell you.

You mean looking at their resumes? — khaled

You don't seem to be able to extricate yourself from your pseudoscientific beliefs about the world.

We can look at their resumes, I agree. Whether there is some difference between expert and layperson about our empirical world, relating to our state of knowledge as such and not features of society we are told about without experimental evidence, is what I disagree with.

No, it’s a definition. An expert is someone with a PhD or doctorate. We can confirm whether or not someone has this by looking at their resume. What’s so difficult here? — khaled

So much difficulty. See above.

You can't just define experts into existence in any meaningful sense.

Someone with a Phd or doctorate at least. — khaled

We can devise an experiment to resolve who likely has these socially constructed tittles, but to propose an "experiment" that bestows the claims to knowledge we desire, in our version our science today, means we need an experiment and it needs to be done multiple times and be peer-reviewed by existing experts ... but we don't know who's an expert yet, so the experiments cannot be done and pass into our version of science.

And it’s not the domain of science to define what “expert” means. So there is no scientific or pseudoscientific definition. But that’s what I have in mind when I say “expert”. — khaled

If it's a claimed fact about the world, then it's clearly psuedoscience. That proposed empirical facts about the world (we can observe this PhD degree on the wall of this university and agree this person is an expert) can be a state of knowledge neither scientific nor psuedoscientific is itself pseudoscience gobblediegook.

Put another way: There is probably a reason most quantum mechanics interpretations that bring in consciousness are dismissed as pseudoscience nowadays by most experts. — khaled

Ah, but do you have a non-pseudoscientific definition of expert.

Aie, there's the rub. But don't worry! I nominate myself to fill this power vacuum.

I think it's worth explaining the "stakes" in bell's inequality.

A fundamental rule of physics is locality, which just means information doesn't travel faster than the speed of light, which is another way of saying causes don't makes effects at faster than the speed of light. So "information travelling" is the same thing as "causes propagating" in these conversations.

Quantum correlations between distant events, such as a material, say a crystal, that produces pairs of particles going in different directions but when both are measured the pairs always have something correlated, such as opposite spin or polarization or what have you: measuring one particle allows a scientist at detector A predict with 100% certainty a measurement by another scientist at detector B, and A and B can be as far apart as the scientists can do.

So, we "know" something instantaneously about B from observations at A, which on first viewing seems to say information has traveled faster than light. Of course, if we inspect closer we don't "really know" anything about B because we're making the assumption that scientist at B makes a measurement, the device still works, a whole bunch of other assumptions. Rather, we're just predicting something at B based on our knowledge of A; but this isn't unusual. We predict things about other places and times regularly; that we predict the sun rises tomorrow does not mean information has traveled from tomorrow to today to allow us to make that predictions. So, already, with this more careful viewing, we're just predicting and not "exchanging information"; and these sorts of experiments can never be setup in such a way to allow the scientists to communicate faster than light. So locality isn't in trouble.

However, we are still left to wonder if the thing about particles at A and B is determined when the first scientists measures or whether it was "really set" at the crystal or whatever creating the particle pair. It's much simpler to imagine the incoming particle responsible for the key event, hits the crystal and two particles emerged with the correlated features and travel to scientists at A and B already with these values of interest. This intuitive way of looking at it is thus called "hidden variables", as the values we're interested in are there, just hidden from us until we measure them and so know about them.

Quantum mechanics is highly wound up in measurement uncertainty and the logical implications of this; however, for a while one could still wonder if the things being measured really become "definite" when they are measured or are already definite and we then just measure them to know something about this pre-existing definiteness. Just as on our normal human scale we measure a door to find out what it already is, not somehow to make nature take on some value at the same instant we measure it.

If the door is "already a meter" wide before we measure it, then there's some variable of definite value that is hidden from us but revealed to us when we measure it. For doors, this makes sense. However, for particles, quantum mechanics strongly suggests things really are uncertain until measured, that nature only takes on the definite value we are trying uncover in our act of uncovering it, but, if so, then correlated events must somehow "talk" to each other instantaneously; since particle at B cannot know ahead of time what scientist at A will measure and so prepare itself to be measured in the expected way; it is equally uncertain as perhaps scientist B will measure it first and so making B a clear value then forces A to take on the corresponding value when it's measured. Quantum mechanics (for a while) only "suggested" this instantaneous resolution of values at faster than light travel, because the "hidden variables" weren't needed to do quantum mechanics, so if they can be thrown out anyway and quantum mechanics is already quite bizarre, then, once you're "in it", it becomes intuitive to just not care about locality in this case (as it can't be used to communicate anyways, so who cares).

But people did care!

However, for a while, how to resolve the debate of whether there are hidden variables -- which seems question setup to be something in principle that can't be resolved by experiment, similar to resolving if there are ghosts we can't see or ever detect ever around or not by experiment -- had no experimental resolution.

Bells inequality is a proposed way to resolve the debate with experiment and prove the quantum entanglement realm is non-local and correlations are "made to exist" instantaneously without the cause needed for the correlation to happen travelling at slower than the speed of light (as opposed to if the values of the particle are set when the particles are created in an entangled state, then the information travels with them, since they already have the values to be discovered later, slower than light, to the detectors and so our usual visualization of cause remains local). Of course, we can change our intuition of cause to basically exclude these correlations, because scientist A is not able to use this effect to cause anything different to happen at B faster than the speed of light; so if cause is effecting events, then cause remains local and we just don't think about it more than this (the "shutup and calculate" view of physics).

I say "proposed way" because the experiments can involve crazy loopholes if not setup super carefully, and it get crazy complicated, and I'm not sure if there's consensus about what all the loopholes even are and if experiments have closed them all. Generally, new bell inequality experiments aim to close one loophole. If there's a proof about whether all the loopholes are for sure known about, I'm not aware of it. It's not like we're doing something like math and proofs in physics, obviously not: that would be crazy talk.

? — ssu

I say process. We could imagine the Swiss / Nordic experiment as some point in a process towards "withering away of the state".

Living in one Nordic country and knowing all my life the local Social Democracy, I'd say this is not true. — ssu

I too live in a Nordic country, and if I compare to life in the 19th century, there is simply no way to get around the fact a large part of the demands of "socialist agitation" of the 19th century is realized in these countries.

Worker protections, minimum wage, wellfare, healthcare, free day-care, primary, secondary and advance education, subsidized public infrastructure etc.

If you went back to the 19th century and said to people working in mines 80 hours a week, that they could have all these things but it wouldn't be "socialism", that you were advocating these things but not "socialism", they would say you had lost your mind. Capitalist or even just state agents sent to stop your "socialism but not" agitation would not at all care about whatever distinctions you are trying to make.

Living in one Nordic country and knowing all my life the local Social Democracy, I'd say this is not true.

The central government might transfer authority to local communities, but that hardly takes away the role of public authorities, likely it simply increases it on another level. Great, you don't have to ask permission from a central ministry, but your local communal authorities. — ssu

There is nominal power and there is real and effective power. Power is not simply administrative process, power is the ability to effectuate desired change in the real world. In real effective democracies, people effectuate power not only through administrative process and votes, but also through public opinion, strikes, and agitation of all sorts.

If the prime-minister of Finland started using state power in the way Louis 16 understood and used it, two things would happen: first, the immediate realization that there's no way to actually do that, and second, the removal from office nearly immediately. Xi wields effective state power today; the prime minister of Finland is an effective representative of the people on such a scale.

The effective power and who has it in Finland is simply in no way similar to the absolute monarchies of the 18th and 19th century, which is the centralization of authority Marx was critiquing (and then taken over and wielded by the bourgeoisie in much the same way kings did; to protect their property and keep the "little people" in line).

Well, you have no choice but to agree given that the statements are there, black on white. I would recommend you read the articles I suggested because the authors make some very interesting and very strong, in fact irrefutable arguments, in support of their findings. — Apollodorus

Yes, I'll look into them.

To be clear, I would not call myself "a Marxist", and I wouldn't say Marx develops what we would here call "a philosophy" at all, as he never really addresses the question of "why get involved in politics" in the first place.

However, what happens when the thinker doesn't address the issue anywhere else or when the major published works do not support any alternative conclusion? — Apollodorus

I don't think this criticism is fair. Marx has zero clue about the Soviet Union and Pol Pot and co. and is focused on what he thinks is relevant, which is almost entirely critiquing the bourgeoisie. They have the power and he's trying to reveal how that power really works.

As for it "not mattering much", I beg to differ. These are concepts that are central to Marxist theory. — Apollodorus

Depends which Marxist theory. If we're talking about Marx's theory according to Marx, then if he doesn't talk about an issue it's clearly not important to him. Perhaps he should have talked about it, but it clearly doesn't play an important role in his actual theory and writings.

How can you advocate revolution and write thousands of pages justifying it and "forget" to clarify what the actual goal of the revolution consists of, apart from vague statements about "freedom", "equality" and the like? And even these are controversial because on closer scrutiny there are some glaring inconsistencies. — Apollodorus

Though I understand it doesn't "look good" and perhaps the criticism is fair. However, in defense of Marx, if one is advocating "people power", then one doesn't really know what the people are going to do once they have the power. Marx believes people can take a much larger role in determining how their lives are governed, and once that happens he trusts people will make society better (as they live in society); it can be argued as both the apex of foolishness or the summation of wisdom to stay silent about what will actually happen once people "administer their own affairs".

One could say Marx is only showing the door, but that people will need to walk through it.

However, I will need to look into things more carefully. You are asking, to your merit, a more scholarly rebuttal, and so may require not only reading the material you reference but also reading and citing Marx in context, which may take some time.

However, according to some analysts like Andrzej Walicki (Marxism and the Leap to the Kingdom of Freedom) both Marx and his successors like Lenin often use concepts inconsistently and the authors I quoted above, Adamiack and Bender, are of the same opinion. Have you read any of them? — Apollodorus

I don't have time to look into it now, but I will do so.

However, on this topic, I completely agree concepts are used inconsistently. If we want to critique from a modern perspective, Marx's concept of science is fairly rudimentary, but that's common to the intellectual period. And to be fair to Marx, he has a far better conception of science than other important "scientific discipline founders" such as Freud, who has basically no conception remotely in common with modern science and is just basically riffing it.

If we're critiquing a sense of "what mistakes could Marx have avoided", then this is a more historical question.

For example, it is said that “the government of persons is replaced by the administration of things and the state dies (or withers) away" (Anti-Dühring).

But the state can't wither away if is assumes an administrative role, can it? — Apollodorus

For this, I think it's easy to defend Marx. The concept of the state they are working with is the apparatus of the absolute monarchy, the bourgeois start overthrowing the monarch but they keep the state (as, just like the kings they depose, they too are terrified of the "little people" taking their property, and they need the state to protect them).

The state is by definition repressive, because those are the only states that exist.

Our modern definition of the state is inclusive of more-or-less socialist paradises by the standards of the 19th century, but it is anachronistic to put in Marx's conception of the state something like Norway or Switzerland. Norway and Switzerland are far advanced on this road of the state becoming an administrative body genuinely working on behalf of working people.

Another related key concept is the "dictatorship of the proletariat". — Apollodorus

This question I have looked into. For me it's clear "dictatorship of the proletariat" simply means "majority rule" to Marx.

However, when a thinker writes thousands of pages and a phrase only appears once, I think it's also safe to say it doesn't matter much and shouldn't be used to come to any conclusions that are not obviously supported by the major published works. If Marx had Leninist "vanguard" ideas and desire to capture the state and mold people into socialists using state power, I think it's fair to assume he would have wrote about that idea.

Now, both the soviets and their foe the US wanted to attach Marx to statism, so it's an easy phrase to use as pretext and neither side is going to argue with it, but, for me anyways, that Marx provides clear analysis and approval of the Paris commune, the first direct democracy experiment and first "proletariat administrating their own affairs", is pretty clear indication Marx is not a statist.

The problem with Marx for people who don't like Marx, is that he's just extremely tame. He spends most of his time deconstructing (from his point of view) the delusions of the bourgeoisie, in extremely poignant and cutting prose, and very little time planning revolutionary forest squatting.

However, for non-statist Marxists, anarchists and socialists writ large, the state is simply not the main focus of political analysis. Rather, the real arena of politics is the ideas people have: change those ideas and society changes and the state changes. Get the idea into people's heads enough that they are not in anyway "subjects" of the kings of old or the states of new, and the power of the state fades away (just not in the delusional libertarian sense, which is just bourgeois hallucination; any society requires rules and organization etc. and the "bottom up" administrative control called "direct democracy" today is more-or-less "administration" as used by Marx; the people have the power, but they nevertheless need to administer things with administrative councils of some sort nominally similar to state apparatus, but without the oppression which is the essential nature of the state as understood by Marx).

In other words, the sate is centralized power, somehow made possible by "the people" but without any effective influence on this centralized power and in every way their lived dictated from this center. This is in stark contrast to real "people power" who then might nevertheless elect some central authority over certain appropriate tasks. We would call both "a state" in modern political theory, but the second kind simply didn't exist in the remotest sense of the words and to explain that government was possible without oppression nor chaos without rules, the term "administration" as apposed to the state gives a glimpse of this meaning. Otherwise, if what you are talking about has never been seen to exist, it is easy to make the criticism that "we can't function without a state" and everyone having a clear idea of what a state "is", as there's only one kind of example. A similar example is that we might want to stop calling the country the "kingdom" if we aim to not have any kings.

Though I touch on it in the above post, I think it's worth expanding what is meant by "revolutionary" in Marx's writing.

Marx writes well before the Soviet Union and a proliferation of communist insurgencies that bring to mind the idea of the "communist revolutionary" who lives in the forest, wears a beret, and dabbles in post-modernist critique on the side.

The meaning of revolution by Marx is more similar to how we use it today in that pretty much anything can be "revolutionary" in the sense of profound change.

This is made clear in Marx calling capitalism revolutionary and continuously revolutionizing itself with new technology and social changes; what we would call "innovation".

For Marx, real large scale revolutions start well before any political conception of them, in the material changes to the economy. The only reason our capitalist economists don't draw our attention to the material nature of our real economies, but rather stay focused on abstract representation of potential economies that may or may not exists is because A. they are profoundly and willfully stupid as it's their job to be that utterly, relentlessly and irredeemably stupid and B. it would be a segue into discussing whether Marx meant the same thing by materialism (aka. our modern understanding of science as dealing with objective phenomena in the material world).

Once these material changes get underway, it disrupts the old political structures (which could be more-or-less stable for a thousand years and all conception of an alternative basically doesn't exist) because the material interests of people to keep doing what their doing changes and this is impossible to go unnoticed indefinitely. Changes in material processes lead to changes in effective access to power. With new technology, comes new trade, large scale and stable trade that makes the need for "tight nit" and autonomous local political units (aka. fiefs) less needed for survival, and an ascendance of a trading merchant class that, with new found wealth and power and a profound (aka. revolutionary) changes to the real economy, find themselves at odds with aristocratic privilege which is now (for them) standing in the way of further revolutionary changes they are the leaders and masters of. For Marx, humanism and secularism is caused by these material changes in the economy and real wealth and power structures that call for a justifying philosophical framework once this ascending class of merchants and bourgeois factory owners and the like become conscious of their common interest to overthrow the old political order (what Marx calls the superstructure).

There is not really any reason to assume Marx believes there is any shortcuts to this process of the material changes of the economy under bourgeois capitalism in turn creating an ascending class of proletariat that, in a similar way to the bourgeois ascension to power, become conscious of their power and overthrow the superstructure with it. Signs of this ascension to power would be things like literacy.

The analysis always seems quaint because we don't say "bourgeois" or "proletariat", but there's not really any reason to not use Marx's words when discussing his though. However, you can basically read "bourgeois" to mean "investor" and "proletariat" to mean "working class". There are nuances that these substitutions don't pickup (the "bourgeois" have their own distinct culture that, according to Marx, they export everywhere and when the whole world wears blue jeans and suits and watches Hollywood films of damsels in distress in their cute little mansions ... it's a pretty accurate prediction).

So, if we read Marx as meaning processes that could play out over centuries -- just as it took centuries for bourgeois ascendance and consolidation of power in the first-past-the-post representational secular state (free from church and aristocratic interference, in which the working class is easily cajoled into following, if not the right, at least not the wrong, popular politician, be it Obama or Hitler) -- then the "withering away of the state" is perhaps a good way to describe Marx's idea (but of course that would give credit to Proudhon, which Marx would never do, so we may never know).

It seems that the state acquires a prominent position in the socialist phase, but it isn't clear what function it has or what happens to it in the communist phase. — Apollodorus

This is more of a Leninist idea and of course critical to Soviet understanding of Marxism (obviously, Soviet Union believed in an important role of the state).

However, Marx had good things to say about the Paris commune, which was what we'd call direct democracy and what Marx called the proletariat managing their own affairs.

Marx had a fierce dispute with Bakunin, who was essentially the Castro of his time advocating daring revolutionary acts to overthrow states. Marx satirizes Bakunin's idea he needs only 100 revolutionaries to bring about socialism, which, to be clear Bakunin actually says

There need not be a great number of these men. One hundred revolutionaries, strongly and earnestly allied, would suffice for the international organization of all of Europe. Two or three hundred revolutionaries will be enough for the organization of the largest country. — Bakunin, The Program of the International Brotherhood, 1869

So, Marx's view is much more nuanced than just daring acts of what we'd call "communist revolutionaries" in the 20th century, which of course brings up the matter of your OP.

Can anyone explain what is meant by concepts like the “withering away of the state” in Marxist theory? — Apollodorus

This is concept more associated with Proudhon, which Marx doesn't like to credit with anything, so (possibly due to intellectual arrogance) he never makes it abundantly clear he believes the same thing.

But the basic idea as expressed by Proudhon, is that what matters is the beliefs of the people and awareness of the working class of their ability to organize.

The communist manifesto repeats this theme in the idea that the communist is always a friend of the working class and always helping the working class in their struggles of the moment; so, this is very clear incrementalism. At the same time, the communist manifesto makes very bold assertions and talks about revolution a lot, and makes clear that's the goal, so we could interpret this as a call to violent revolution right now or a more mundane "social revolution" as we'd understand our social activists of today (Bernie Sanders sense of "revolution"; profound change but not necessarily immediate or super violent).

Of course, our mundane social activists of today following Bernie Sanders, for example, are only mundane because democracy does actually exist (even in US democratic change is easier than violent revolutionary change, as the Bolshevik style storming of Capital Hill shows us). If we contextualize to Marx's time, politics was of Europe was simply more violent as a matter of fact. So, though we expect from our intellectuals today to condemn violence, it was more just a mundane fact of political life, which Marx, as a political realist, accepts as an unfortunate part of political life and doesn't really advocate against but doesn't really advocate for more of either, as his opposition to Bakunin makes clear.

We can easily interpret the "withering away of the state" as the social democratic process of Europe. Individual citizens in Switzerland and Nordic countries for instance, can genuinely be argued to be free from state oppression and managing their own affairs through fair, or then fair enough, political process. As local awareness increases and local political entities take more active rolls of government management, the "state" becomes less and less relevant to political life; Switzerland's complicated power sharing and power nesting of cities and cantons with direct democratic initiatives possible at every level, that really are effective democratic power, make the Swiss "State" extremely limited in its power and (if you go to Switzerland) no Swiss citizen talks about being repressed by state power.

Of course, Switzerland is wealthy and does have a market, and therefore advanced as a "de facto capitalist success", but this is assuming state capitalist policies maintaining capital's dominance (in opposition to real democratic participation) is the source of Switzerland's wealth in the first place. The counter argument is that real effective democracy brings political stability, little interest in costly wars, good management decisions by the people of "their own affairs" which creates conditions for the accumulation of wealth and an easy time for working class people to, through democracy, ensure decent access to wealth in the form of free education, free health care, good public infrastructure everyone can enjoy, and excellent worker rights to protect against oppression on the job.

If we carry this social experiment of Switzerland, the Nordic's, New Zealand, forward, it is possible to imagine "the State" becoming less and less important, until it is, maybe nominally there as an administrative body of regional issues, but does not and essentially cannot exercise any real oppressive political power. Contrast this, of even the state of affairs of these countries today if you prefer not to speculate about the future, with the French Monarchy, the Tzars, "Communist" China, Nazi Germany, or the Roman Empire for that matter, and it gives a pretty good idea of what "the State" can be in terms of both centralization of power and capacity to oppress. Compared to these states: Nordic countries, Switzerland, and the like essentially don't have states with power over the working class noticeable on any non-logarithmic scale.

Just hmm. Taking these words as expressing what of your thoughts you thought worth presenting, a practice at once necessary, obligatory, correct, and no doubt unjust, it seems to me that if you do not have a whole raft of qualifying thoughts that you might have added, your whole enterprise goes into question. I am going to assume you actually have those qualifying thoughts and just didn't at that moment think them worth including. — tim wood

I think this is very well said and summarizes my own basic question of what the foundational ethical theory is used or implied to justify the transhumanism project.

If there's a framework taken for granted -- such as one of the "big tents" like utilitarianism or kantianism or even Nietzscheism or a variation on post-modernism (none of which, insofar as the label is concerned, might give a clear idea, but it would point in a general direction and terminology) -- it would give some context to the underlying moral or ethical purpose transhumanism is addressing.

Of course, I'd also have no issue with the idea of researching the subject as a technological tool without any moral judgements about its proper use, if any (i.e. just doing the objective scientific investigation), just as a nuclear physicist may say their research does not imply they are making the judgement nuclear bombs or even nuclear reactors should be built, and if so in what context (that the moral and political questions are complex and "science" doesn't take a position on them), but in reading parts of the conversation it definitely seems there is an underlying moral and political project and in clear opposition to specific philosophies (such as the evangelical Christians) "standing in the way of progress". In other words, it's clear what the "others" are that this project is against , but it does not seem clear what this project is really "for".

Not that I am defending the evangelical or otherwise conservative Christians (I criticize them harshly all the time), but if one takes specific and clear issue with one world view, it is my disposition, that one has oneself a clear and specific position from which one makes clear and specific criticisms (if one's criticism are used to justify one's own project, and not just critical thinking for the sake of it without pointing to an alternative "better" position).

As with other posters, the answers to "why is it good?" seem vague.

I listened to one podcast of his where he talks with a physicist if I recall, and he goes into it a bit.

As others have said, nothing has been presented that would be viewed as "a theory" in physics, just some ideas.

From what I understood, his main concern was going back to basics of rulers and protractors to make measurements ... that's pretty much the only thing I understood about his idea. Now, he maybe correct in that popular theories, especially of the time he studied, like string theory aren't "doing it", and some "going back to basics" is a good start.

However, "how to measure things" is already a pretty central part of what physicists do.

Furthermore, nearly all mathematics (especially found in physics) has geometric representation or analogue. Phase-space is simply extending 3 dimensions to 6 dimensions to record both position and momentum of particles, and can be understood in simple geometric terms of vectors in 6 dimensions.

A dimension for time can be added to dimensions of space to represent changes through time as simple geometry. A parabola can represent a literal parabola in space we build, or the arch of an object through space and time. General relativity goes much further than this simple geometric representation of time, and is extremely concerned with measuring geometry locally and how that may change with time and distance if space-time itself is not completely flat but can change, and that, crucially, space and time cannot be completely separated in a fundamental sense at all.

Point being, "geometric unity" can easily be referring to what is already found in physics: lots of geometry analogues and lot's of "measuring things" with protractors and rulers, and that solving the math problems between quantum mechanics and general relativity may involve geometry in some sense.

Not to say these aren't useful intuitions to reflect on, but I think any physicist (of which I am not) will say there's a massive, gargantuan distance to traverse to turn these intuitions into a coherent new physics theory; even more work to do to demonstrate it's really new and not simply equivalent to a theory we already have.

The underlying issue, I would suggest, is that fundamental theoretical physics has been stuck since pretty early days of quantum mechanics and general relativity, and all the promising theories have simply not worked in making new predictions. So, there's clearly something missing, and in the meantime learning the theories that don't work is all that there is to do and publish papers on; but it's not a sort of conspiracy by physicists, they seem to be generally aware that they are clearly missing something and likely "new physics" (new experimental evidence not predicted by either the standard model or general relativity) is the only thing likely to "unstick" the situation (if it is unstickable; some physicists are fine with the idea we just are stuck here more-or-less; we have a theory of small things and a theory of big things, and we'll never be able to unite them into one coherent theory; there is no "reason" our physics must be fully "mathematically coherent"; the universe could present to us a fundamentally "hodgepodge" view of "real reality" of which we can never understand the real functioning fully, and which does
not even correspond to a coherent mathematics we are able to invent at all; i.e. there is no a priori logical reason preventing "god" from making the universe such that our current quantum-general-relativity dichotomy is the absolute best we can ever do; which is, ironically, an obvious possibility to most pure mathematicians, but most physicists insist there is "something" they'll find in pure mathematics that will make everything empirical make sense; but, pure mathematics simply makes no guarantee of describing the world at all, any successes at all in describing the world with mathematics have no pure mathematics reason that they need to be there at all, and are purely coincidence as far as pure mathematics is concerned).

Any sequence of numbers can be described as a sequence of a polynomial function. Not only by one precise, exact and fitting polynomial function, but actually an infinite number of them. — god must be atheist

This isn't prediction though, only retrospectively the numbers in the series so far can fit an infinite number of polynomial functions. If the numbers are generated by a random oracle, then picking the right polynomial function that predicts all next number in the series is simply 1 out of the infinite available; i.e. impossible to predict.

Though, otherwise, I don't really know what this thread is about.

If you want "pure" random numbers (as far as we know) you use radioactive decay. Radioactive elements have some probability of decaying in some span of time, but exactly when is completely random as far as we know and this (and a bit of math) can be used to create random numbers of reasonable certainty.

To give a simplified example, if we have a series of atoms and convert each one in turn to some radioactive element, it will have some half life time. For a single radioactive element the half life is simply when it has 50% chance of decaying already. For each atom, if it decays before the half-life we can mark a 0 and if survives half-life we can mark a 1. You then get a random binary string by repeating the process. Of course, there are weakness in this simple process as maybe the experiment isn't setup perfectly and there's slightly more 1's than 0's or vice-versa, but gets the basic point across. How atoms actually play half-life is a complicated quantum process I can't explain here.

In my view, Marx is best best viewed as a "philosopher-scientist" with strong parallels to the founders of other sciences in the same period, for instance Newton, Darwin and Freud.

Of course, these science founders did not do there work in a vacuum. There's a lot of pieces and concepts floating around, such as various observations and physics formula in the case of Newton, existing theories of evolution in the case of Darwin, and many theories of mind in the case of Freud. What makes these the "founder reference" of their respective fields is they are the first to provide a systemic theory.

Likewise, Marx is aware science requires predictions but lacks, as with all the philosopher-scientists, a clear distinction between metaphysics, retrospective explanation, unfalsefiable-prediction, and falsefiable prediction. We can of course debate if Marx is closer to Newton trying to focus on prediction and ignore the metaphysical questions this brings up (if we ignore the alchemy), or then closer to Darwin whom we can criticize as still mostly doing retrospective explanation lacking a mechanism of evolution (as cell function and reproduction is entirely unknown to him, and so there's no predictive evidence the principle of natural selection is correct compared to competing theories of evolution such as Lamarck, it just rather turns out to be the right one), or then Freud who is mostly doing retrospective explanation as well as unverifiable predictions.

This brings up the question of what science Marx founded. Marx essentially founded social science in a general sense that encompasses what we consider today the separate fields economics, social sciences, and political science.

What makes Marx a founder is in moving from "explanatory theories", found in all precursors to science, to predictive theory of which we understand science to require, or indeed "to be" today.

To give an example of this difference, Smith explains the separate rolls of nail making in a nail making workshop; e.i. specialization. However, Smith provides no theory upon which to predict where we will find specialization in the world, the degree of specialization nor the the social consequence. Specialization is an important concept and explanation for many things we see, but in itself it is not a predictive theory. As the principle appears in Smith, our application of it would simply be "specialization is efficient ... until it isn't". For instance, when my shoes get tied to go outside, I do not observe a specialist tying my shoes; if specialization was more efficient then I should be able to predict that shoe-tying specialists would make our economy more efficient and would be a thing by now, and if not now then certainly will emerge at some point. Obviously, this is not a good prediction and some things are good to specialize and others not, the principle of specialization is efficient in itself is not predictive; it is only sensible as a tautology of being efficient unless it isn't efficient. A predictive theory requires more development.

Marx is the first to bring these principles into some semblance of a predictive theory, relating specialization to technological and social structures that bring it about and predictions of what consequence it has in different configurations. There is of course the physical technological prerequisites that make specialization possible, and of course Smith and other economists of the time are aware of. However, Marx goes much further into this phenomenon, drawing attention to critical aspects of human psychology, that humans are not tools and machines completely compliant in being specialized; that a hammer has no problem being a hammer, whereas a "hammerist" who only hammers all day may develop an aversion to this activity. The phenomena is much more complex than the engineering point of view. So we may draw analogy to Newton's analysis of gravity that brings together many different aspects of the same phenomenon into the first systemic analysis, that Marx is the first to provide a "sufficient enough" systemic analysis of the phenomenon of specialization; that not only are there physical prerequisites, but also prerequisites in social structure and furthermore specialization has complex interactions with human psychology and thus sociological and political phenomena. There is clearly an important element of motivation that needs consideration, the hammerist is motivated by what or for what to hammer, will he or she keep hammering or are there other motivations that result in different observable behaviour: i.e. labour agitation, strike and revolution? Marx also develops the theory further to distinguish different kinds of specialization, that specialization for commodity production organized by stock corporations under capitalism is very different than the specialization of craftsmen organized in guilds under feudalism; resulting in very different "knock-on" social relations.

Of course, we can doubt Marx's predictions (in what exactly the predictions are and whether they happen) or point out they are incomplete in addressing social phenomenon (they predict some observations but not others, just as Newtonian physics predict some physical observations but not others and Newton himself takes the theory to far and makes many bad predictions, for instance in understanding light), and, as with the other "philosopher-scientists" we can point to lot's of concepts that are not, under more careful consideration, predictive science (for instance, Newton's work on Alchemy; which in his defense, likely could not have been systematized into chemistry at the time). We can also go further and make parallels with Freud who is basically not doing science, yet nevertheless provides a systemic enough theory to be a founder of psychology (in analogy with Newton and Darwin), which we can hope is now doing actual science today (I have my doubts). The point here is simply that Marx does provide a systemic analysis of the phenomena and does provide predictions from a "coherent enough" theoretical description.

Of note, Marx predicts Marx won't be mainstream under capitalism, as the elites of a society always promote theories that justify their elitism and power. Therefore, the development of "economics" as we know it today as essentially an apology for capitalism with very little predictive power and essentially denying the moral lives of human capital inputs to productive processes, that those processes are efficient regardless of the human or environmental cost insofar as they are productive according to the standards of efficiency set by the managers of and investors in those processes (i.e. a corporation increasing in value on the stock market is doing something efficient, winning a competition, and therefore the implication is that it is justified, regardless of its impact on society and the environment and whether that impact is a justifiable goal any individual and society as whole does or should have); in other words, the development of economists as an intellectually isolated field from sociology, politics and moral philosophy, that somehow manages to justify capitalism without considering related sociological, political and moral philosophical questions that capitalism, or any organizational system, clearly relates to and cannot possibly be evaluated without; or then, to put it more bluntly, that the modern economists is essentially detached from reality, possessing almost no analytical skills that we can identify as having any worth, and is essentially a source of endless conceptual garbage just as monks and priests prattling on about the divine rights of kings and popes under feudalism and near endless subtle analysis of society based on such a principle of which we have essentially no use of today.

Therefore, if you reject Marx off-hand as not worth your time to study, you maybe correct even without bothering to study the question nor possibly having any adequate analysis, or you maybe a data point in Marx's prediction above and so just another tool. Although this is an aside to the question of how we might classify Marx. Marx also has political agenda, a political bias in his work, but insofar as he takes his moral perspective for granted and conceives of himself as doing objective science ("predicting" communism will come about, rather than admitting his intention is to help bring communism about through his writing about predicting it; a goal we may or may not agree with), then it is best to consider his non-predictive philosophical concepts as part of his scientific effort.

As per the OP, US style conservatism committed to anti-intellectualism starting with Reagan and the "southern strategy".

It's so far down the anti-intellectual path that conservative pundits need to say things like "it isn't true, literally, but it feels true and it's an important truth that's being felt here that speaks to conservatives".

Due to false balance in the media, there's built up the expectation that "there must be just as good arguments for my side as the other side on this issue", but this isn't true, and the expectation that an anti-intellectual movement would create good arguments is just stupid.

Now, does this mean contemporary US conservatives are stupid?

Yes.

What we have witnessed with Bush the Second and a more extreme repeat with Trump is the terminal phase of an anti-intellectual movement in which the leaders of the movement are no longer real intellectuals simply manipulating a bunch of fools to increase their power and wealth, but fully buy the propaganda and can simply no longer manage in a strategically competent way, as they truly do not understand how reality works. That fools follow them despite making zero sense is seen as strength and legitimization of positions that are known to make no sense. One that can repeat a lie and make decisions without justification without consequences is by definition more powerful than one who can't, indeed it's the only proof of real power and the sweetest cocaine of the power hungry. However, reality cannot be managed from a position of effectively arbitrary decisions for any extended period of time.

Wait - you think taxation is capitalist? — StreetlightX

Yes, it's just the free market of ideas that taxing the rich to pay for social programs in Nordic countries that have free health-care and free higher education proves capitalism works. If they have a high quality of life in Nordic countries it's capitalism succeeding, because capitalism is about success, and all success must be due in some vague way to capitalism. That's pretty obvious I think.

This video goes a little deeper into ... basically that we don't know much at this point.

No doubt, mathematical models are projections built upon other numbers, data which originally had reasonable connection to the real world at the time these were collected. But things can change. — magritte

That's what statistics is about: drawing conclusions from available data, which become projections that can change with new data.

I'm not sure you even bothered to read my posts your replying to, as I go to some length in my response to Benkei to explain that a new viral strain becoming dominant in a single region can indeed be due to random variation.

However, if that strain spreads and dominates in every region then it's extremely conclusive that it's more contagious; that's basically the definition of "more contagious": it does better.

Exactly when between dominating in one region and "world domination" we have enough data to calculate the difference in contagiousness is a complicated statistical problem.

Bayesian statistics deals with our limited knowledge about the real world (as opposed to classical statistics which analyse outcome of random processes in which the context is specified and the unknown variables clearly understood). The best way to understand this difference is that the probability of drawing certain hands in poker requires only classical statistics to calculate, but the probability of one being cheated by a sophisticated criminal (who doesn't blatantly violate classical statistics outcomes, such as drawing 5 aces in a hand) requires Bayesian statistical approach. To catch a sophisticated cheat we must have a model of what we expect in a fair game and unfair game, including betting patterns and other behaviour and what we know about the other players, and with every new event we update our model. Of note, there is no solution to this problem with a "sophisticated enough" player who has exactly the same model and simply ensures victory without ever supporting a conclusion of unfair play.

For the subject at hand, what we expect from a more contagious virus strain is that it displaces less contagious virus strains, that's what being more contagious means. Everyday now the events we would expect under the "more contagious" model seem very much to be happening: appearing in new regions and growing faster than existing strains. Numerical models of processes involving the entire globe are extremely crude, so there is not, and cannot be, one agreed methodology, but when different methodologies start supporting the same conclusions we tend to increase our confidence (even if there is "heard bias" of modelers tweaking their models to reflect the same conclusions as existing models as that basically "feels better"; the scientific community could easily solve this issue, but chooses not to; because scientists are mostly pretty stupid people without critical thinking skills; they claim to have critical thinking skills, but don't bother to review this claim critically, resulting in the worst possible and easily identifiable idiots). And the results speak for themselves: the scientific community has failed humanity (the pandemic being one of many examples), and yet they believe it is the other way around. Pure insanity.

Mutations are random and all viable versions of the virus will continue to spread into the foreseeable future. — magritte

This is also a great example of the scientific community failing to both understand and, the ones that do, bother to communicate it to other scientists and society.

The mutation rate you're talking about is an "apples to apples" comparison given equal context, such as the chance of a single infection creating a new strain; a variable that is needed for further analysis. However, change the context, such as far more concomitant infections of one over the other and this changes the mutation rate of what is happening in the real world. In other words, each infection has a certain chance to result in a new strain, but to complete the equation we need the total number of infections. If there are far more Covid infections than that of the flue, the capacity for adaptation can easily surpass the flu. The flu has animal reservoirs critical for it's adaptation success ... but Covid has also passed into animal reservoirs.

From this basic overview, the analysis can go even further. For instance, a high mutation rate in itself does not actually mean a higher capacity for adaptation, there are advantages for a more stable genome in that "what works" is better remembered and transmitted to the next generation.

Indeed, the emergence and domination of DNA based organisms is because the previous RNA based organisms had too high a mutation rate. The disadvantage of too high mutation rate is that the "good new things" are easily lost in early replication chains and, of course, since the vast majority of mutations are a disadvantage this is a large energy cost. The best way to visualize this is that an organism mutates an advantage but then too quickly offspring mutate disadvantages and die out, so the new thing never integrates into the genetic base. Therefore, we cannot assume simply because Covid has a lower mutation rate that it has a lower adaptation rate. If we compare to other coronaviruses, such as cause the common cold, they have been with us a long time demonstrating a good capacity for adaptation (perhaps better than the flu, but just not as lethal so we have been unconcerned about it).

From here, we could analyse the particularities of Covid and the flu and maybe have some reasons to believe Covid cannot, even with larger numbers and some advantages of lower mutation rate, compete with the flu in adaptation.

If one mutation spreads faster then it will become statistically 'dominant' but the others are still around. — magritte

I've already explained that any new strain that has a similar replication rate as the dominant strain, will still grow in number, at the same rate, just not to anywhere close in absolute terms. Both a 1 thousand Euro investment and a 1 billion could both be in the same fund and get the same return in terms of rate of growth, but the 1 thousand investment will be and stay far smaller than the 1 billion Euro investment. The new strain simply continuing to exist and replicate is not in itself evidence it is more contagious; it must start to displace the existing strains if it indeed has a competitive advantage.

However, at some point actual success in the real world we must conclude is due to more successful characteristics. If Player A consistently beats Player B, at some point excuses and whining and irrelevant pedantic analysis and hypothetical considerations no longer form any plausible basis to assume Player B is as good as Player A, no matter how much Player B wants it to be true.

Statistically, perhaps. — magritte

If by "statistically perhaps" you mean "yes I agree" then we agree.

Your bird analogy is dissimilar in some critical regards, as the birds are not growing exponentially, birds are a sexual species, and your only observing your local bird population and not globally.

(And though perhaps you won't make this objection, for the benefit of those that are itching to, all mathematical curves are only followed by natural phenomenon to some approximation over some finite time; nothing "grows exponentially" but nothing grows "linearly", or "logistically" either, other than to some descriptively useful approximation for the time period of interest; all data only follows some curve "for now ... sort of ... enough to make a useful prediction".)

That the strain is not particularly more infectious but mostly the result of lax lock down rules in the UK. — Benkei

The evidence the strain is more infectious is that it displaces the previously dominant strain.

Due to the network-effect, the dominant strain in an area is highly likely to remain the dominant strain with respect to equally infectious strains. I.e. that google displaced yahoo was evidence google had a strong competitive edge over yahoo.

That being said, this is only "likely the case" and so on the scale of the whole world we can expect by pure chance novel yet not-more-infectious strains to take the lead in some regions (if this is 1 in a thousand chance ... well maybe there's a thousand regions we're looking at).

So, if a new stain displaces the dominant strain in many regions and ultimately the world, only then that's conclusive evidence it's more infectious.

Right now, from what I can tell the new strain is appearing in many regions, but it's not yet clear if it's really displacing the dominant in these regions.

It's also expected that new strains still spread and are very unlikely to just fizzle out (once sufficiently large for the law of large numbers to be in play). If they are the same infectiousness as the dominant strain it still means that they should grow just as the dominant strain does (there's just less "principal" to grow, so stays much smaller in absolute terms even if growing at the same rate; and indeed, that a new strain needs to catch up to the dominant strain means it's not only more infectious but much more infectious if it does so rapidly).

So simply detecting the new strain all over the place fits both hypothesises. It's not yet clear if it's really headed towards world domination. The recent spike is adequately explained by cold-season > Christmas shopping season > actual Christmas vacations starting.

However, the new strain is still bad news even if it's not more infectious as it provides a more diverse genetic base to get to something more infectious or then that can defeat the vaccines (which, to be clear, there's currently no evidence the current vaccines will actually reduce the harm of the pandemic, but rather, not even mentioning side-effects and the money and credibility invested, data so far is compatible with zero-reduction in transmission and zero-reduction in hospitalizations and death; vaccines could even increase these though vaccinated--super-spreaders, which have yet to be ruled out, as well as the socio-political effect of the media basically declaring victory way ahead of time, which may have both lead to policy makers believing the vaccines would "solve the issue" and no other policy responses were needed as well as regular people losing the anxiety edge required for effective compliance as "it will all be over soon").

As for the increase in cases generally speaking, I agree with your point it's just stupid people, although I would put the stupid label on the policy makers and not the general public (other than voting for the stupid people in charge). The countries that have contained the virus did so with better policy and not more spontaneous individual efforts.

My money is still on human stupidity but I'm not so sure anymore. — Benkei

What do you mean by this?

Yes, for problems with no immediate symptoms, it can be any number. Literally everyone who gets the vaccine could get cancer and we'd have no way of knowing at this point. If the Gaussian curve of cancer diagnosis is around 10 years from now, the small forward tale would be so small in the next year that it would be impossible to differentiate such cancers with other causes of cancer, but the signal will be unmistakable in 10 years.

I picked 1 in a 1000 simply because it's around the estimated IFR rate, and that even if there are symptoms, unless they are obvious, the signal could easily go unnoticed. It's assumed by many commentators on the internet that whatever risks remain are certainly lower than the risk of Covid as they must be below 1 in 40 000, I am pointing out that assumption is false and explaining how it could be false without us knowing yet.

If it is not reasonable to exchange the health of the young against the health of the old, then many age and risk profiles have far lower risk than the general IFR, the basic problems I'm pointing become even harder and harder to detect and so to prove the policy is morally sound (assuming my moral supposition here).

However, I mean not to do any calculations here, just to outline a framework in thinking that we currently have no data upon which to make a robust conclusion (we have no calculations to make that would resolve the issues, we have only hope upon which the rebellion of the upperclass is based: that, whatever happens, we will do nothing to hold them accountable). The framework of thinking is simply why, before these vaccines, all our medical interventions are supposed to pass fairly long phase 3 and even longer phase 4 trials before we'd consider giving something to hundreds of millions, much less billions of people, and that we haven't magically come up with a substitute for numbers and time simply because our leaders wish it to be true.

The pharmaceutical companies have been racing to oblige, but there is a clear subtext to everything they actually say, which is: we have no idea what will happen but give us the money.