Thanks, that's useful. It confirms my interpretation that when you evoke "a sea of U1 photons", you are talking about the unreachable limits between which time and the universe happen.

I wrote above that "we must think of time as a complex function of something else rather than a straight line from -inf. to +inf." What you are saying is that time is a function of different things moving at different speed. Otherwise there isn't any meaning to the notion of time, if all there is is photons/electromagnetic waves moving at a uniform speed C.

Makes a lot of sense to me. In fact I find it quite deep.

my vision may improve in my search for distant turtles. — Scemo Villaggio

Ciao Scemo. I'm new here too.

I agree that our collective vision may improve in our search for distant turtles. That's the best we can do.

That's true, we must think of time as a complex function of something else rather than a straight line from -inf. to +inf. But in my mind it doesn't follow that "time is an illusion."

Thanks for the detailed explanation, although the technicalities are largely wasted on me, I'm afraid. The way I understand your take, this perfect simplicity at at begining and end of time is still an unreachable limit, a state of affairs that never actually happened at any point in time. In other words, time and space and "the universe" is what happens between these two extreme, unreachable limits.

I don't think time is real in the sense it exists outside of our minds. Assume time has a beginning, call it point X. We can always ask for any point like X the question, "what time was it before X?", implying time extends to infinity in the past. Yet, if the past is infinite, how on earth did we reach this point in time? Since the paradox arises because we assume time to be something as real as space, we must discard the idea of time being real. :confused: — TheMadFool

The begining of time (your X, or t=0) could be another mathematical limit, like what happens when the function 1/x gets close to zero. In this idea, there's no time before X because the universe never actually was at time X. And the reason the universe managed to reach this point in time is because at (almost) "start" everything happened (almost) infinitily fast.

I find it hard to think of time as limitted.

Of course you could go Zeno on me — TheMadFool

Ah, good point: there is a mathematical limit in terms of mass to infinite spliting, a limit that is equal to 0 mass, just as there is a solution in the form if a mathematical limit in Zeno's paradox.

This limit may be what apokrisis called a "sea of U1 photons", though i'm unclear about the U1 part.

[in practice,] we may not be able to actually subdivide particles of extremely small size. — TheMadFool

Given our current technology we can only go so far, but technology can and does evolve.

As others have pointed out, I’m talking about atomism, and how it served us well to assume that matter was « made of » some basic elements called « atoms ». The word means « unbreakable » and yet once we discovered what we now call “atoms », we also discovered they could be broken down in « sub-atomic particules » which themselves can be broken down (or up) into quarks... So the basic premisse of atomism is false: matter is not technically made of some basic elements. Instead, some forms of matter are stable in certain conditions, and break down in other conditions.

Matter has no “bottom”, no “foundation”. It’s turtles all the way down.

Meh!

most importantly, there's a sense of a limit where this will go - I suppose an ultimate final level of particulate matter is expected beyond which it doesn't make sense to ask what that particle is made up of? — TheMadFool

That's exactly the point of the thread: is there a limit to how fine we can "grind" matter?

By the time you get to quarks, saying that something is "made of" quarks means very little. — SophistiCat

I'm not saying something is "made of quarks". Only that something can be broken down into quarks. There's a difference.

What reasons do you have to believe that a proper theory of consciousness would unite QM and the rest of physics?

Fair enough, there is a slight difference, but you get the point of the metaphor nevetheless.

Physics has shown that material particles only "break down" as far as their simplest possible symmetry states. — apokrisis

Until it proves otherwise, of course.

So putting aside the technicalities, physics has flipped the whole issue. The mathematics of symmetry tell us what is the simplest possible ground state of material being. The nearest to a vanilla nothingness. A cosmic sea of U1 photons. The problem becomes more about how any complexity in the forms of higher level crud, such as quarks, or Higgs fields, manages to survive, and thus give us a materiality that needs describing in the fashion of turtles stacked high. — apokrisis

Okay, I get it. But what are the pathways and "steps" from a cosmic sea of U1 photons to, say, a quark, a proton, or an atom (or several)? Do we have all the "steps" plotted? Or does it look more like an infinite series of intermediary states between the U1 photon sea and an atom?

I just think that "measurement" is nothing an amoeba can't do. All this talk about human measurement determining wave functions is just pre-Darwinian religious talk. All animals process information, cats included. There must be something else that collapses that darn wave function...

Why consciouness, of all things?
— Olivier5
Because we are talking about consciousness when talking about making observations and measurements. — Harry Hindu

This doesn't mean consciousness has some magic pan-universe powers. It's only a tool we are using.

Schrodinger still sees a wavefunction. — InPitzotl

Actually, in this mind experiment, Schrodinger sees a box. Not a wavefunction for what could potentially be a box.

And Schrodinger only proposed this mind experiment to show how absurd the Copenhagen interpretation is, with its magic thinking about observers.

The cat in the box is an observer too. If one really believes that observers collapse wave functions, then any cat can do so, including Schrodinger's.

In fact, even a bacteria does some observing... so I guess bacterias collapse wave functions too... :-)

Let's agree that a lack of certainty is not a problem.

The experiments at CERN and other particle accelerators seem to show that the size of the pieces one can get (or observe) is a function of the amount of energy one can summon in ever larger accelerators.

Conceptually, anything can be broken down into smaller pieces.

So i guess it's perfectly possible that it's particles all the way down.

It's a meaningful objection to the idea that CERN will find the answer to "could it be particles all the way down?" anytime soon, as Banno seemed to imply.

It's not my problem. I am fine with the idea that science will never reach certainty on much.

Hence my point that QM and classical physics need to be unified - kind of like how genetics and the theory of evolution by natural selection are unified micro and macro theories that support each other, not contradict each other like QM and classic physics. The glue to unify them, IMO, would be a proper theory of consciousness. — Harry Hindu

Why consciouness, of all things?

The good people in CERN haven't reached certainty quite yet.

scientists will poke and prod the see if there are indeed tulles, and even try to show that it's not turtles all the way down. — Banno

Okay but until they do, do you think "particles all the way down" is possible?

It should also be reduced in North America and Europe. A few ideas:

- ban private funding of election campaigns or cap it to a certain low maximum
- get the state to reimburse election campaign costs within a certain treshold, for all candidates getting at least 5% of expressed votes.
- set up dedicated anti-corruption units in the judiciary to fast-track high-level corruption, and isolate such units from political pressure.
- for petty corruption (mainly) set up a dedicated phone line to report corrupt officials, cops, etc.
- force all elected officials to declare and itemize their wealth, prior and after their turn, in a verifiable manner.

now explain how Descartes is able to prove, in your own words, "beyond the shadow of a doubt," that the voice he can hear is his? — Kaarlo Tuomi

It doesn't matter. Something exists that hears voices. By convention this something is called "I" in English. You can call it Tartenpion if you want to.

While the cat is in the box, it is in a superposition between dead and alive. The state is described as a wavefunction. — InPitzotl

I think the cat would disagree with that.

What effects do uncaused quantum events have on the macro-scale world? — Harry Hindu

The world is one; it's not neatly divided into micro and macro scales. E.g. radioactivity, a quantic phenomenon, is an important cause of genetic mutations, which are an important driver of evolution.

A simpler version of the same experiment:

Imagine a steel wedge on a table or floor, with a sharp hedge pointing upward ( like ^ ).

Drop vertically a light steel ball on the wedge edge. Sometimes the ball will end up falling right of the edge, sometimes left. If you drop the ball right on the edge each time, and long enough, logic dictates that it will fall on both sides a near equal number of times, 50-50.

Can anyone predict where the ball will fall next?

Does anyone suppose the ball could EVER bounce on top of the edge several times before settling there, in equilibrium exactly on top of the edge? Intuitively this seems impossible, and yet... if it were a perfectly round and homogenous ball falling exactly on a perfect wedge, that's exactly what the math says the ball will do...

But so long as the exact same starting conditions still give the exact same outcome always, it’s still deterministic. — Pfhorrest

Unfortunately, this claim is not testable, and thus determinism is not a scientific theory.

My thermodynamic courses are far too ancient for me to contribute meaningfully, but there is a whole family of concepts related to entropy, including, well, work itself, which you might wish to check as one may already have been crafted for what you are talking about.

I propose the definition of a property of such physical work, called "productivity", which is the property of reducing the entropy of the system upon which the work is done. — Pfhorrest

I believe the concept already exists and is called negentropy.

Edit: sorry, I note that Pantagruel already mentioned it.

Okay, maybe my formulation is a bit simplistic, but to my defense I nuanced it with "as much or more than vice versa".

My go-to example for this sort of thing is the theory of evolution. It is one of the most powerful and influential scientific theories that we have ("Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution" - Theodosius Dobzhansky), and it is not reductionist, it is a systems theory. — A Raybould

Excellent example! I totally subscribe to the idea that one can understand an element only by looking at how this element fits in the big picture. E.g. the idea that "selfish genes" drive evolution is simply wrong. Genes are just the ink and paper on which the story is written down. They are not the story. The story is about organisms and species.

Life in general is systemic. It is information bossing matter around, as much or more than vice versa.

I contend that hazard is no illusion, and that we all know this, intuitively. We often say things like"Shit happens", or "Nobody can know what the future will bring", etc.

Considerations of some mysterious "onthological certainty" are useless, because we humans will never be able to access this magic realm of "things in themselves". We're better off assuming hazard exist, because for all intent and purpose, it does exist for us. It's part of our condition.

If you really need to think in terms of what hypothetical demons and gods do, consider that if God exists, He could well have made his creation open, evolutive and able to surprise even Him. Otherwise what's the fun of creating anything?

Consider that any demon predicting the whole future would also need to predict what he himself will think in the future (assuming the demon is part of the universe)... and that if he does so, he will think it now and not in the future!

Anyone proposing that the whole history of the universe was exactly 'determined' at the time of the Big Bang + 1 second -- including me writing this sentence from a Roman bar today -- better try and prove it, because that's quite an extraordinary claim...

He makes the argument that classical physics are non derterministic in The Open Universe: An Argument for Indeterminism” (a compendium of articles written in the 70s)

the philosophical community is beset by a fantasy of determinism. — Banno

The belief in determinism is not universal among philosophers. Ever read Karl Popper?

Russel's parafox is simply a proof by the absurd that sets cannot contain themselves.

Understanding, as it appears to be, is probably a complex phenomena, nevertheless computable. That's what I mean when I said "I don't know why people make such a big deal of understanding - it's very simple. Very simple in the sense of being reducible to logic, something computers are capable of. — TheMadFool

Computers as we know them are not aware of the world around them, and that means they cannot realy understand anything, because they don't know that there exists referents out there for words like "trees" or "water".

Let me take your own example to illustrate the point. Here is how, as a human being, I understand the proposition "trees need water": it means to me "IN ORDER TO STAY ALIVE, trees need TO ABSORB SOME MINIMUM AMOUNT OF water PER UNIT OF TIME".

STAY ALIVE: Evidently, dead trees don't need water for anything. The need is related to life and its maintenance.

ABSORB: Evidently, trees don't need water that they can't absorb. They absorb water usually though their root system, so if you just place a glass of water standing next to a tree, you're not providing for its need.

SOME AMOUNT... PER UNIT OF TIME: Evidently their water needs are not infinite. If you don't water to a tree for a day or two, it will be fine. And if you place a tree under water (or water-log its root system) it may well die. So they need SOME water, and some trees require more water than others.

So your seemingly simple proposition, "trees need water" cannot be properly understood by a machine who has no clue about trees and their biology.

A p-zombie is defined as a human without consciousness. If it is equal to a human with consciousness, then either consciousness is equal to nothing, or p-zombies must be self aware in order to be able to behave as normal humans, and therefore true p-zombies cannot exist.

I think it's obvious that they cannot possibly exist. Mind you, they don't actually exist. They are just a mind experiment designed to probe the nature of consciousness.