The Benghazi attack, where terrorists and a violent mob of rioters killed Americans, and where cries for assistance were met with a hand wave. — NOS4A2

Oh I thought you were referring to the protests that's happening right now, since that for some reason is so much more of a concern for you folks instead of the 200K dead.

I wager they would still be alive had Trump been in charge. — NOS4A2

And I'd wager that 100K+ people would still be alive today if Trump weren't in charge. Your point?

Um I said Benghazi, not a "mob of murderous rioters" but I suppose the death count from both is similar. Indeed it's foolish to compare these events to COVID since the US death toll from that is way way worse, but for some reason the right gets all up in arms about one but not the other.

You're right. It's not like those 200K deaths are easily preventable if not for the intentional downplaying of certain politicians...

Since you mentioned political footballs, if you want to get a better idea of what 200K deaths means, it's around 50,000 Benghazis.

And you'll probably say the same about the hundreds of thousands of COVID deaths I'm sure.

This could be so far reaching though, with a bigger conservative majority on the supreme court, they may vote to stop the counting of mail in ballots and hand the presidency to Trump. Will be like Bush all over again. — MSC

Bush v. Gore was an incredibly close election which the supreme court leaned in to favor the GOP. If the conservative justices decided to just hand the election over to Trump with the mail in ballots heavily favoring Biden in such an obviously undemocratic way then that will be the end of the United States as a country. The SCOTUS might as well just call off the election entirely and name Donald "God Emperor of Trumpland" or something if they'd go that far.

Sure buddy. If as many people attended in 2017 as they did in 2009 then I'd doubt that they would be scared off by a small group of protesters like that. Or (just a thought) it could be the case that the guy who lost the popular vote by 3 million just didn't attract as big a crowd as Obama did. Oh wait, I forgot, those 3 million votes were all illegal according to people like you and went entirely for Clinton despite the lack of evidence. I guess that was another thing I wasn't aware of either. Like I said, I don't do conspiracy theories.

Nah I don't do wacky conspiracy theories.

He didn’t have professional agitators and anarchists blocking the entrance and threatening attendees. — NOS4A2

LOL you guys just have an excuse for everything huh?

And at the risk of being called a Trumpet, I would like to point out that he added he does not want to create a panic. — Derukugi

In the stock market.

Trump has no problem scaring people about imaginary caravans carrying strong men who are up to no good and diseases like he did in 2018. Oddly enough we have them now in 2020 but they're not coming from Mexico and alot of them are carrying MAGA flags .

The toilet paper runs were bad enough as they were. — Derukugi

Oh well that justifies the 200K now dead then.

If had created a panic, the media would bash hin for that. Orangemanband if you do, orangemanbad if you don´t. — Derukugi

Nice to know that Mr. Macho Alpha Male is so scared of what people may say about him that he'd let 200K people die like that. Real sign of a good leader.

Woodward book: Trump says he knew coronavirus was ‘deadly’ and worse than the flu while intentionally misleading Americans — Michael

At the risk of being accused of TDS... I think that this is a not good thing.

In other news 190K people now died from COVID, Trump still politicizing masks for some reason.

They are blaming Trump for encouraging voter fraud when in fact he’s encouraging us to make sure our vote is counted. — NOS4A2

I'll be sure to use that kind of excuse next time I try to rob a bank. "I'm not trying to steal money, I'm just testing the security system to make sure it works! I also told a bunch of my buddies to do the same but there's certainly nothing wrong with that right?"

It’s hilarious too because they are now admitting the potential for fraud after months of claiming there was none. — NOS4A2

Wait I thought the whole issue of fraud had to do with mail in voting exclusively? Also wasn't in person voting supposed to be secure? Why is Trump asking his supporters to vote multiple times and commit the fraud they are afraid of in order to "make sure their vote is counted" if in person voting is supposed to be "safe" (you know, apart from the pandemic and all that)?

Honestly I don't understand the concern over what Trump might say, or with anticipating or pre-empting the right's disingenuous arguments. They're going to call Dems/the left radical anti-cop socialists irrespective of what the facts are, so why worry about it? — Enai De A Lukal

I've been hearing this type of argument from progressives, but I feel like it misses the point of the moderate's position (BTW, I'm a progressive too). Of course the republicans are gonna call the democrat candidate a "socialist", they would say, but there's a difference between nominating someone who's pretty much a right wing politician in Biden, and someone who's known to be a "radical" like Bernie. Having the latter run in the general gives some credibility to the right's accusations making their attacks more effective where they would otherwise fall flat on their face. Of course one could argue that Bernie isn't really the radical communist that everybody paints him to be (and I would agree that he isn't like that), but the fact that that needs to be a conversation instead of something that is rejected out of hand as obviously ridiculous would be problematic.

This is sort of analogous to saying that our political opponents would paint us as "rapists" anyways no matter who we nominate to run against them, so why not pick the guy who's an accused sex offender? The problem here is less about what the other side would say, but rather how people would react to it.

Trump offered federal support, only to be denied. Days after Wheeler rebuked the president’s offer a protester is killed. Once they asked for federal support in Wisconsin, and received it, the riots subsided. Imagine that. — NOS4A2

He's brought in troops without their consent which made things worse in places like Portland. When he took them out there was a decrease in violence until Trump's caravan of supporters rolled in and started shooting teargas and paintballs at people. He didn't give a damn about what local governments thought before, so why blame them now?

I honestly do not see what his election message is on this. "Reelect me and I will stop the riots as president"? He's already president so either he is ineffective or he's just a liar. Of course he could also say that "If you elect Biden the riots will be worse", but that would seem to admit that the current situation is the best he can do which of course is gonna certainly persuade those who want the riots to quiet down.

These are democrat-run cities now burned to the ground and I think the voters are now realizing this. — NOS4A2

Cities in a republican-run country with a republican president if you want to play that game. It's kind of hilarious to be honest to hear talks that this is "Biden's America" when Trump is literally the one in office right now with these crises happening under his watch.

Not really new compared to the other posts, but yeah, ditching religion was the biggest change in my understanding of the world. Back when I first encountered atheism in elementary I tried whatever I could in order to hold on to my pre-existing religious beliefs, playing something of an apologist for a time. Eventually though, I found that the whole idea of the Catholic religion was indefensible, full of holes and contradictions that made it impossible for me to defend to the point where I eventually gave up and became a deist. Though I later switched to atheism, and finally agnosticism, that initial jump came with a liberating feeling that I still remember vividly, of not being weighed down by a set of doctrines that you were simply told to accept which is what began my journey of thinking for myself.

Good to know, thanks. Again it's nice having an expert around to keep us philosophers in check :smile: .

Thanks for your input as always. What are your thoughts on the general idea that black holes preclude a global slicing of spacetime? I always assumed it was just closed timelike curves would make them impossible but noAxioms apparently thinks otherwise.

My point was that in an inertial frame, light can reach location A from B given enough time, and thus such a model is not a model of our universe. — noAxioms

I don't see how that is a consequence of a global inertial frame. Light may not reach us for other reasons unrelated to it, one possibility being the cosmic expansion of the universe being faster than light.

If there is a boundary to an inertial frame, then event outside that boundary do not exist in that frame. — noAxioms

You seem to be mixing up the boundary of the observable universe with the "boundary" of an inertial frame, the latter of which I don't really understand. They are both not the same.

There are indeed ways to do it with a single black hole, but you must assume the black hole is at some kind of privileged location. So consider 3 events: A clock is dropped into a black hole. Event A is that clock 1 second (measured on that clock) after passing the event horizon. The black hole is big enough that it survives at least one second. The rock is dropped from a hovering location outside, which shines light down on the dropped clock. At some point the last light is emitted from this location that will catch up to the dropped clock before it hits the singularity. Event B is that hovering location 1 second after that last light goes out.
Event C is at the location of the former black hole after it has evaporated.
Yes, you can come up with various schemes to order these three events, but do any of those schemes order all of spacetime? OK, C occurs after B since it is in the future light cone of B. That's easy. Not so easy with event A.

I'm not suggesting retrocausality anywhere. Event A is not causally connected with either B or C, so no objective ordering scheme is going to produce a contradiction unless B is in A's future but C is in A's past. — noAxioms

I don't really have the expertise to properly address this (hopefully someone like @Kenosha Kid can chime in here and give his input). My understanding is that it is mainly spacetimes with closed timelike curves that preclude the existence of global hypersurfaces, but I haven't heard anything about black holes doing the same.

For example, the current inertial frame of Earth won't do: There are objects beyond our event horizon (events from which light can never reach us even in infinite time). If such objects existed in our inertial frame, light from them would reach us in finite time, so these objects don't exist in that frame, and thus the frame doesn't foliate all of spacetime. — noAxioms

I don't get this. Why would they have to reach us? The light will never reach us because of cosmic expansion whether they exist or not, so the fact that we don't see them doesn't mean they don't exist.

That coordinate system works great for large distances, but completely fails where there is large curvature of spacetime: black holes. Any such non-local foliation does not cover the events within the black hole, and thus do not constitute a foliation of all spacetime. — noAxioms

I'm not sure about that. As far as I know, any spacetime that doesn't allow for closed timelike curves is open to being sliced into global hypersurfaces so they should be allowed in universes with black holes. At least, all the discussions I've seen about the idea of an absolute present in GR seem to mention closed timelike curves as being problematic for the concept, but nothing about black holes precluding them.

In other words, time travel is problematic for presentism (who knew right?), so it would be a problem for them if we lived in a world where time travel is possible, but I don't think they should lose sleep over their possibility since closed timelike curves have a number of other wild consequences to them (such as retrocausality) which make their existence unlikely.

Oh sorry, I wasn't saying that Greene introduced the concept of 4-velocity, but rather it's description as "speed through spacetime" (or at the very least he seemed to have popularized this way of understanding it). As you can probably tell through my own questions about it, it's can be pretty confusing to implicitly define a second concept of "motion" and apply that to things like time, and from what I can tell for physicists it's not very helpful as a description either. However as you can also tell from Benj96's comments, for the purposes of popularizing science it also sounds cool to describe things that way, sort of like how the Higgs Boson was described as the "God particle" that grants mass even though that isn't really the case.

Thanks, though from looking at the opinions of other physicists on the matter these past few hours, it doesn't seem like the whole concept of "speed through spacetime" is a popular way of describing things, with alot of people blaming Brian Greene for the concept.

This leads to the interpretation that any restful body is not actually at rest but is moving through time at the speed of light. So in that sense everything moves through spacetime at velocity c, but photons can only move through space, hence no time passes for a photon. — Kenosha Kid

Can you clarify what "movement" means here? Certainly can't mean change in spatial location with respect to time since we are talking about "motion" through time. Of course one can define it in terms of a fifth dimension which objects move with respect to, but there are none beyond those of spacetime that I am aware. It seems like you're using it in a different sense than is normally used.

It is valid within quantum field theory models, yes. — Kenosha Kid

Okay that settles that then.

Plus, as I said, individual Feynman diagrams don't necessarily have physical meaning. These are really mathematical tools, not analogies to reality. When you work in QFT, it is helpful to think of these as physical processes, but that isn't guaranteed. Destroying a particle and creating an almost identical one is equivalent to the particle changing state. There are quite a few ontological degrees of freedom in quantum theory. That's where philosophers should come in :) — Kenosha Kid

Well, you can say that about any scientific theory really. Varying interpretations aren't just unique to quantum mechanics (though it is uniquely infamous for having alot of them). For instance relativity theory, contrary to popular opinion, is also open to interpretations which allow for an absolute time for instance (like the Lorentz ether theory that preceded special relativity), but of course those are less well known.

That is to say that there is no such thing as a purely scientific ontology of the world. If you want to attach a particular world view to a model you're gonna have to dip your toes in philosophy to a certain extent and make arguments that go beyond the science. That or you could shut up and calculate.

Ok, I wasn't right, but still 24% is absolutely massive and I simply cannot understand how rational people can sustain such a crazy idea. I wouldn't be shocked if a guy on heroine said that, but stating that we are bot conscious is not only crazy, but also anti-scientific. To do science, you need to be consciouss! How could one trust science so nuch if they doubt their own existence? For me, this is just absurd! — Eugen

Isn't the concept of philosophical zombies one that was introduced by the dualists to argue for non-materialism? One of it's greatest champions is David Chalmers, a staunch dualist, versus Dennett, who considers them impossible. So much as there are people who believe in p-zombies then, they're most likely not gonna believe that we ourselves are zombies.

First off, thanks for responding to Pfhorrest's request for comment. It's nice to have an expert chime in just to clear things up.

As a Feynman diagram, it looks like eL+heL+h becomes eR+heR+h, so it's valid to say that the electron in this term is destroyed and a new one with opposite isospin is created. — Kenosha Kid

Okay, I don't really take issue with that sort of description, but is it also valid to say that the Higgs field is absorbing and emitting things like electrons and quarks then? That was what I was hung up about earlier in our conversation.

Likewise, all the other "fundamental" particles with mass, except IIRC the neutrinos, which don't couple with the Higgs field and so whose tiny mass is still unexplained (because in the Standard Model, all particles should by default be massless, unless interaction with some field is slowing them down and converting some of their kinetic energy to rest-mass, which was my main point). — Pfhorrest

Oddly enough, apparently the Higgs Boson (which is also a fundamental particle) itself has mass that is not fully accounted for by the Higgs field, at least going off of this helpful source that I've been reading: https://profmattstrassler.com/articles-and-posts/particle-physics-basics/the-known-apparently-elementary-particles/the-known-particles-if-the-higgs-field-were-zero/.

Even if I were to grant such a description, again I wouldn't call that the Higgs field "absorbing and re-emitting" fundamental particles like quarks, which was what I initially took issue with.

Thanks for the links. I am still not sure where the absorption and emission aspect of your description comes in. What was described in the video was a particle being constantly bombarded by the Higgs field and converting into two distinct states. That is not the same as the reason why light moves slower in a medium.

I'm not a physicist either, so I am just going off of what I've heard on the topic as a layperson. The usual explanation describes the Higgs field as some kind of field of molasses which slows some particles down, and the fact that your description sounded similar to the explanation of why light travels more slowly in a medium is what gave me the idea that you're overlapping them. Perhaps you have a source that you can provide that can clear things up?

Fundamentally all particles travel at the speed of light always: apparent slowness is just a particle being rapidly absorbed and re-emitted (by the Higgs field if nothing else), and that slowing-down also manifests as rest mass. — Pfhorrest

Hmm, I don't think I've heard of that description before, of the HIggs field absorbing things like quarks and stuff like that (and for that matter, I don't think that quarks are absorbed and produced either like force carriers are). I think you're mixing up two different explanations here, one for why light moves slower than c in a medium, which does involve photons being absorbed and re-emitted, and how some particles acquire mass through the Higgs field.

It's unclear why the stages are parallel to me. Aren't they stages of me? — Luke

Because they are different versions of "you" in the same way that different parallel reality versions of you are different versions of "you". Eternalism is a view that treats the fourth dimension of time functionally like space. It isn't hard to consider the block universe as essentially a multiverse of sorts, one that has a bit more organization and structure than your usual multiverse of cosmology.

Also, does this imply that each individual stage is on eternal repeat, replaying over and over again?

Or alternatively that they just stay where they are. We are talking about a static view after all.

Is there an account of why we experience time sequentially instead?

For the record, I only brought up the stage view as a way to account for the limited contents in our experience. Less accounting for what we do experience, but more about what we don't. I'll leave it to the eternalists in general to address that question.

Does this imply that there's a stage of you, e.g. tomorrow, that is having its experience now (from our perspective here today)? Or do we need to wait until tomorrow for that stage of you to 'light up', i.e. to have its experience? — Luke

You can think of stages like counterparts of yourself who experience their own moment parallel to yours. Since there are infinite instants in your life, then there are infinite versions of "you" so to speak.The stages don't light up, nor will you become those other stages via. the passage of time, for obvious reasons.

Eternalism does not suggest that every state of a person along his worldline experiences every time in the worldline. That would be empirically quite different, wouldn't it? — noAxioms

Well I just gave an alternative idea for eternalists in the stage theory. Though apart from that, I wasn't suggesting you were saying that I am experiencing every moment of my life at every part of myself. You were suggesting that I as a whole am experiencing every moment of my life, which is obviously false cause I am not experiencing every moment of my life.

Ouch. Under eternalism, we beings are worldlines, and experience every moment along that worldline. — noAxioms

Or alternatively we are stages which are located at a single instant and experience only that one instant of time while other counterparts experience the others. You know, cause experiencing every moment has the whole obviously wrong thing going on with us experiencing only one moment.

More Sanders voters voted for Clinton in 2016 than Clinton voters did in 2008 for Obama. I imagine the same will happen this time around given the stakes. Trump is right now plunging the country into a health and economic crisis through his carelessness and incompetence. I can't imagine that that would be easy to ignore.

2 is more of a comfort to believe, particularly considering the relativity of time, and the uncertainty it lends to our notion of reality. In my opinion, it is 2 that’s a cop-out, and 1 lines up better with quantum relativity as I understand it (Carlo Rovelli’s ‘The Order of Time’ outlines this quite well). — Possibility

It all depends on how you choose to interpret both theories. 2) has trouble if you understand quantum mechanics as being inherently indeterministic as it is traditionally understood, but there are other interpretations that don't involve fundamental chance. Similarly 1) has trouble with the traditional interpretation of relativity, but that isn't the only way to interpret the theory and there are versions of the theory that incorporate an absolute order of time.

All this is just to say that the science is unclear when placed in a philosophical context. Hence why I roll my eyes when people talk about "science vs. religion", as if there is only one religion and one scientific way of looking at the world.

I did and my understanding hasn't changed.

So people who don't agree with you aren't really thinking it through? Sounds pretty bigoted.

1 seems like a cop-out, as if refusing to really consider the question. But, perhaps I have it backward: maybe the refusal to consider the question springs from having 2 as an intuition, and not the converse. — Pneumenon

Care to elaborate on this some more? I'm not sure what question you think 1) is avoiding.