Whereas, I'm inclined to say that it is of the nature of concepts to mediate these apparently-separate domains in such a way that they're not separate. — Wayfarer

Yes, I agree. Concepts such as reference frames help us understand the (seeming) external world. But what does the concept of Winnie the Pooh mediate? (And Tigger too, of course.) :rofl:

indeed, before you enter into a discussion with Meta, do take a look at the 0.999... = 1 thread. — Banno

Yeah I've read it. Del Santo's definition pertains to a finite number of decimal points, however large. 0.999... has an infinite number of decimal points, and so is identically 1.

Wha....we went from the conflict of consciousness being explainable by materialists or unexplainable by idealists, the fallacy in support of the latter being “science has not explained consciousness --> science cannot explain consciousness --> consciousness is unphysical”, to.......(gasp).....morality?? Can I get a great big fat.....HUH?!?!? — Mww

Oh yeah. I will go there!

So....why would Kant run afoul of something by not allowing knowledge to justify morality? — Mww

Can you justify the distinction between a fallacious a priori position on consciousness and a valid a priori position on morality, without committing the same fallacy? The justification for Kant's insistence that moral issues must be treated a priori comes down to God, not an absence of experience. As the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy puts it:

Kant’s insistence on an a priori method to seek out and establish fundamental moral principles, however, does not always appear to be matched by his own practice. The Metaphysics of Morals, for instance, is meant to be based on a priori rational principles, but many of the specific duties that Kant describes, along with some of the arguments he gives in support of them, rely on general facts about human beings and our circumstances that are known from experience.

Even for Kant, who insists on a moral universe hidden from experience to give God his due, actually cannot avoid experience in his philosophy of morality. And rightly so, because any useful metaphysics... etc.

Gold has never seemed profound to me either! — Risk

Different strokes for different folks, of course. I dare say that anyone who fails to see the profundity of natural selection probably has a qualitatively different idea of what profundity means.

Opposingly I don't find science profound at all. Science by its very nature is methodic and determinate. — Risk

You're talking about the process of doing science. It is a tool, like a pick, but like a pick can unearth gold.

Perhaps if you’re so inclined, you’d elaborate on how you think he did. — Mww

By denying that knowledge can justify morality. I think the extent to which a moral claim can be justified at all, it can be justified by knowledge. The extent to which it can't, it is not justifiable. I should start a thread on this at some point, as I appear to keep derailing other threads with this view. :o

Knowledge is everything to Laplace's demon. If such a state of knowledge is impossible in some circumstances, Laplace's demon couldn't function as described in those circumstances. We already know it is impossible in most circumstances. — fdrake

True, but the whole point of Laplace's demon is that it knows what we cannot necessarily know. Our uncertainty doesn't imply its uncertainty. Ours is a technological limit. The demon is constrained by ontological. Otherwise there's no point considering it in the first place.

If we were to observe that process, the measurements would come from the sampling operator, not from the deterministic evolution of the distribution. — fdrake

Yes, the trajectory I was describing would be the trajectory of the distribution, not the line joining the measurements. This is akin to the Many World interpretation of QM, wherein a particular (non-deterministic) measurement does not change the (deterministic) trajectory of the body under consideration (minus the fact that the probability of a given future measurement does not depend on your measurement history, which is a statement about you rather than the trajectory).

The many-valued, deterministically-evolve state I had in mind was like the distribution, not the measurements which are discrete in time (I presume). however, we can be quite sure that physics isn't like that. If a body is falling from a tower of height T and we measure it first at height 0.9T then later at 0.5T, we can be quite sure that a third measurement won't be at 0.7T, for instance, unless something other than gravity was acting.

As he concludes, the value of the article is in showing that there is an alternative to determinism within classical physics; not in showing that it is true. — Banno

Yeah that's fine, and it's interesting from Sec. III onwards. I have no issue with it. I'll be mulling it over for a while, so thanks for bringing it to our attention.

Science can explain consciousness, if science discovers empirical principles under which an iteration of consciousness manifests empirically. The only way for science to be necessarily unable to explain consciousness is for consciousness to be proven with apodeitic certainty NOT to be an empirical condition, which, to date, has not been accomplished, at least with peer review. — Mww

I think this illuminates the misunderstanding. I am not of the opinion that science cannot explain consciousness: the exact opposite. The idea that science has not yet fully explained consciousness is far from justification that science cannot explain it. (Indeed, I'd say the ability to make progress puts the odds well in favour of, if not complete explanation, sufficient explanation.) I was essentially parodying metaphysical discussions in which precisely that fallacy is evident. I think you may have taken me to endorse viewpoints I was in fact deriding. My fault, of course: insufficient winkyfaces.

Consciousness is a good example. Lumping materialists and physicalists together for the sake of argument, the conflict is between consciousness being a physical state or process and it being unphysical, i.e. undetectable and not a "thing" existing in space. The justification for the latter is typically the above fallacy: science has not explained consciousness --> science cannot explain consciousness --> consciousness is unphysical. This is true even if, in fact usually when, the actual position is ab initio.

I wasn't strictly saying that Kant fell foul of this fallacy (although I think he did), rather that people employ it to establish false knowable/unknowable dichotomies for the sake of metaphysical land-grabs.

There is no dualist science, dualist empiricism, dualist phenomenology. Any progress that is made within dualism is a) within metaphysics alone and b) utterly indistinguishable from a lack of progress. On the physicalist side of the metaphysics-of-consciousness coin, while it is in itself, as 180 Proof said, a metaphysical position, it isn't a metaphysical problem, i.e. the progress is made in cognitive psychology, psychobiology, neuroscience, etc. Hence: any useful metaphysics always becomes something else.

That determinism of implication doesn't hold for almost every phenomenon because we know it's practically impossible to completely specify the input state that lead to its emergence. — fdrake

Isn't that covered by 'if'? Laplacian determinism also tells you that if you cannot know the initial state to infinite precision, you aren't guaranteed to know the final state to infinite precision.

What remains of Laplace's demon as an ontological thesis when it's rendered merely a hypothetical? We can't feed almost every system into its defining implication. So what systems are left? — fdrake

But epistemology isn't everything. That we may never know the initial state of a system does not prevent it from having a well-defined value ontologically. The use, I think, is illustrated not by removing epistemological certainty but by removing ontological certainty. Laplace's demon still holds: it's just that the condition is always false. The extent to which QM predicts very different kinds of results to classical mechanics is the extent to which the ontological thesis seems substantiated to me.

But if the point is only that it was wrong in hindsight, well... yes! Or, at least, maybe. Ontological uncertainty isn't specifically anti-deterministic. The difference is that states corresponding to some measurement (e.g. momentum) are multi-valued, which means that trajectories through phase space are also multi-valued. So long as you don't then insist on a way of making it single-valued (e.g. wavefunction collapse), everything is deterministic (i.e. the Schrodinger equation is deterministic), and that seems to me the likely mistake.

This is different from the game illustrated in the OP. We cannot predict where the ball will go at any point if there is any epistemological uncertainty in the initial conditions. However we can visibly see that the actual trajectory is fairly well-defined as it falls. (Not infinitely precisely, but we can see the narrow range of possible trajectories consistent with the uncertain path.)

why assume that we could have infinite information about our measurement... — Banno

I'm more sympathetic to his alternative, operational definition of classical physics, not least because history has moved on and we understand how deterministic macroscopic behaviour emerges statistically from non-deterministic fundamental behaviour, and indeed exact values of e.g. momentum are, in the initial conditions of a quantum system, modified by complex numbers in weighted sums, i.e. are not real in phase space.

It was more the "Has physics ever been deterministic?" question I'm feeling isn't really addressed in his treatment. Redefining epistemological certainty in such a way that the answer to a question that was previously "Yes" is now by definition "No" isn't so profound.

The idea of a trajectory through phase space does not depend on infinite epistemological precision anyway, and I feel he equates two statements that aren't equivalent. I can define a trajectory z(t) = y(t) = x(t)=t for t>=0. I can't specify to infinite precision in decimal or rational format the position at t=pi, but I can specify it precisely at any t that is representable in decimal or rational format, so yes I can specify points in phase space to infinite precision. But it's not a real trajectory of a real object! he might say. No it's not: it's ideal. If his argument applies only to real trajectories, he cannot generalise to ideal ones as he does.

Real-valued epistemological uncertainty, rather than ontological uncertainty, is already incorporated into statistical physics, ensemble QM, and others. What he seems to be proposing is a different way of doing it, and the measure of that is in its usefulness I think.

I'm not sure if it's that profound, although I confess I haven't finished it yet. But looking at his definition of infinite precision, it disallows infinite epistemological precision. When a classical physicist says the initial conditions can be known in principle, she means zero epistemological uncertainty in principle. This is a practically unattainable limit, but that's what "in principle" is understood to mean.

Del Santo's definition, all his own afaik, is that infinite epistemological precision means that the number of of decimal points has no finite lower bound, but may not be infinite. This is equivalent to saying that the error may be arbitrarily small, but not zero, which, to me, says it cannot be arbitrarily small. His infinite precision is that attained by infinite technological progress which always approaches, but never reaches zero uncertainty. It is in itself a reasonable definition, but he is using different language to cast doubt on determinism rather than using argumentation within the same language.

If you couple this arbitrarily small but nonzero uncertainty to a chaotic time-evolution, it is true you cannot predict the outcome of an event. But it is true because you could not specify the initial conditions exactly. I'm at a loss as to what can we learn from this?

Be that as it may, for Kant the unknown is contingently so, possibly reducible by experience, the unknowable is necessarily so, regardless of experience. But the unknowable can still be thought, which tends to make “metaphysics of the gaps” a Kantian non-starter. — Mww

Not at all. It is a gap in what we can know as asserted by Kant, analogous to a gap in what we can know, e.g. about the emergence of consciousness as asserted by dualists. There is no difference, other than when Kant asserts it, we take it more seriously. The assertion of a dualist is not that science can in principle explain consciousness but has not yet, therefore dualism. Dualists may be wrong, but they're not that wrong. It is that science cannot explain consciousness, therefore dualism.

I don't have access to the actual paper. — Banno

Preprint here: https://arxiv.org/abs/2003.07411#:~:text=A%20tradition%20handed%20down%20among,certainty%2C%20independently%20of%20any%20interpretations.

I don't have access to the actual paper. — Banno

Cheers, I'll take a look around. Although I guess there's no guarantee of finding it without determinism. :wink:

It's not subject to empirical validation, it's still philosophy rather than an objective science. — Wayfarer

No, I can empirically verify it myself right now. Pass me an orange...

Kant wasn’t concerned with the unknown, as much as the unknowable, and the ultimate unknowable, the unconditioned, this alone being the backdrop for pure reason, the speculative, the theoretical or the practical. — Mww

The explicit assumption of any -of-the-gaps argument is that the unknown thing in question is unknowable to e.g. science. That was my point. If you're saying that's illogical, I agree.

The notion that the universe is determined fails. — Banno

The notion that a competent physicist could predict the outcome of a single ball drop fails if there is any uncertainty, however small, of the initial state of the ball. But chaotic systems are nonlinear (sensitive to initial conditions) deterministic systems. The outcome is knowable in principle but not in practise (technological limit).

The same distribution above is also seen in the electron single-slit experiment. In that instance, even if the initial wavefunction were known perfectly, the outcome of where the electron ends up is unpredictable. Depending on your interpretation, that is non-deterministic.

No experimental evidence required — Wayfarer

He invites the reader to compare sensation with memory of sensation or idea. This is a perfectly experimental approach.

Nothing to do with Kant, other than a misreading. — Wayfarer

It has everything to do with Kant, no misreading required. There are some philosophers who claim the entirety of postmodernism comes from this. (I'm not agreeing with them.)

Though, it may be difficult to say in what manner spacetime is not substantive because if spacetime truly is emergent or reductive to other fundamental properties then it's perhaps truly non-existent in an eliminativist sense. — substantivalism

I wouldn't go that far. Spacetime is at least well-defined, indeed a lot of mathematics depends on it, so I think at worst emergent.

One thing that popped into my head was that in non-relativistic QM, position is an operator (a thing you physically measure) and time is a parameter (a thing you specify). There are time operators but they do not enter into the evolution of the wavefunction.

In relativity, space and time are on equal footing, so in relativistic QM, position is demoted from an operator to a parameter. One could read that as meaning that spacetime is less physical in relativity than Newtonian mechanics perhaps.

You've just met the most unreflexive guy on the forum. Was it fun? — Benkei

Purely educational, honest! :joke:

Just to be clear, your only arguments are straw men. Is that because you think you’re clever, or because you have no other argument? — NOS4A2

That was all faithful to your responses. That your argument lacks any degree of coherence, only you are to blame.

There is nothing to obey. There is no requirement. They can live and gather as they wish in an open society. And they can do so without disrupting anything. — NOS4A2

Okay, so just to be clear then. Your anti-black-lives-matter position is that you are troubled by the support networks you say they are not putting in place to disrupt a nuclear social requirement you say doesn't exist. :up:

My concern comes when out of this campaigning emerges a certain unbalanced worldview that implies that white people are the biggest threat to black men and that the way to solve this is more black nationalism. — BitconnectCarlos

I think BLM thinks of itself as international, not nationalistic. Any campaign against a specific thing is going to be, by your definition, unbalanced. No campaign can be expected to be exhaustive. Racist violent crime by white people is an existential problem for black Americans. The ghettoisation of black people that underlies black gang culture is another existential problem with similar reasons of structural racism, e.g. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12111-012-9212-7

I never mentioned "who is to blame" for black gangs. I'm solely concerned here with what is actually killing black men if we're talking about violence. I'm just looking at the numbers; it's not hard to see. — BitconnectCarlos

Right, so you want them to prioritise sorting out black-on-black violent crime before anyone does anything to stop white police officers murdering black men, I get it. But of course they have no recourse to functioning law enforcement which is part of the reason crime is so rife, so Catch-22.

No, it's not. A part of the problem is just the name: Black Lives Matter. If you want to call it blacks against state violence that's fine, but there's a disconnect with the name BLM when you have many black victims being ignored and others deified. — BitconnectCarlos

But there isn't a disconnect, is there? The name is perfectly in keeping with the aims of the movement, given that the tolerance of murder of black people by racists is a testimony that black lives don't actually matter compared to whites. If the group was called Stop All Crime Immediately and refused to address black gang culture, that would be a disconnect.

Which just returns us to the idea that a campaign can not be specific and therefore effective: it has to be exhaustive, and therefore inactionable, if it is to be anything. I just wonder how many of your rights you'd happily cede on the basis that your gaining them did not solve the biggest problems facing your people at the time. Would you, for instance, cede habeus corpus until all crime ceases, on the grounds that it protects you only from wrongful arrest while real crime is happening all around you?

This is why the change of subject is so racist: you lay the responsibility of black gang culture on a group of people legitimately campaigning against a very real threat from their own law enforcers on the basis of what? They have the same skin colour as the black gangs. If you were consistent in this and laid responsibility for any white crime on every white campaigner against a different injustice, fair enough. It would be illogical but fair.

BLM doesn't even address crime right now. It is focused only on certain forms of violence towards black folks - namely, state violence and vigilante groups. If you read the BLM "what we believe" statement there are 0 mentions of crime or gang violence which claim far more black lives than cops or George Zimmerman or the KKK. — BitconnectCarlos

So your view is: if there exists a bigger problem than X, we should not expect or campaign for justice with regards to X. Is that accurate?

Though your metaphysics (positivism) is showing, a handy and insightful synopsis. — 180 Proof

Haha, yes, the metaphysics of rejecting metaphysics. I'm actually closer to postpositivism. All knowledge is pending post hoc invalidation. But I'm a practical positivist: if our ignorance today is less damning than yesterday, then what we're doing is useful.

If the laws we see in the universe are the only laws that a universe can have this gives fuel to the deterministic philosophy in which things have to/ will occur a certain way rather than completely by chance. — Benj96

There may always be universal laws which we do not know about, or only understand approximately. It is important to distinguish our current or best future impressions of physical law from the actual laws apparently governing our universe.

As to why the universe obeys rules at all, there are several possibilities. One is that the laws are properties of universes generally. Another is that laws are variable, and its just blind luck that tgis universe has these laws, a statistically feasible scenario since the universe was created once. Another is that there are many universes so one like ours was likely. Another is that universes procreate via black holes, giving rise to selection criteria for laws.

All of these possibilities assume universes to have laws though. Most laws pertain to certain symmetries or assymetries in the universe. For instance, conservation of energy and momentum (basically Newton's laws) are due to their being no special places or times in the universe. However even this is only correlates such laws: it doesn't explain their origin. (It is as true to say that it doesn't matter where or when an event occurs because of Newton's laws.)

It's worth imagining what a universe would be like without laws. Things could just vanish or appear, in violation of conservation of energy and information. Things would move around for no reason, in violation of conservation of momentum. Anything could turn into anything else at a moment's notice. It would be like dreaming, but more extreme, and not possible because you wouldn't exist. It's also a bit comparable to the quantum vacuum, where things really can pop into and out of existence. Maybe at root, order is just the thing that ordering minds can perceive within a universe that is more pluralistic. Maybe it's all just a dream.

Sorry, this is really strong weed.

It isn't an equation. There's no = anywhere.

The other problem is the demand for bad media, and is totally on us. — Wheatley

There is a feedback loop, with media adjusting content to what sells the most copy, and consumers voting with their cash for the content they like to see. Consumers might not know what kind of content they want to see in advance, and vendors might not know that something is going to sell in advance. Ultimately it's a conspiracy between consumers and capitalists to produce content that is like the content those consumers want.

An example in my country is the development of an entire media dedicated to the fantasy that the middle class is under constant attack. This sort of fantasy, while obviously appealing to a surprising majority of middle class English suburbanites with delicious victimisation complexes, can be very easily hijacked by the political interests of the owners and their affiliates.

If, for instance, it were politically expedient for such owners to get the ball properly rolling on climate change action, they would cast resistance to such action as an attack on the middle class from both sides: the laziness of the working and unemployed classes expecting the middle classes to suffer for their inaction; the cynicism of the financial elite class letting the world burn in the knowledge that they can always buy themselves into a safety zone. However, while the trend is shifting toward this (in a Who can we blame? sort of way), the current editorial stance is to resist climate change action, since it tends to impact other interests the owners have (since they are capitalists). As such, climate change action is an attack of the middle classes by virtue of them footing the bulk of the bill through government spending on wasteful solutions to unproven climate concern and hikes in utility bills targeted at them, the majority of bill-payers. The stance fulfils the full gamut of the paranoid consumers: they are being robbed by literally everyone, and they are being lied to about it.

So it's a two-way street. Such readers are believing what they are told because of who is telling them. And the vendors are creating content that such readers have endorsed in the past.

You are right, though, such readers are absolutely free to choose media that has no vested political interest or financial affiliations, and they typically do not. Ultimately, the game is only played this way because they insist on playing it, therefore do deserve the lion's share of the blame.

However, as many have pointed out, exactly the same can be said for the book at the end of which this passage appears. — Wayfarer

It can be said, but only falsely, since An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding does indeed "contain experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence", such as the verifiable difference between the experience of ideas and the experience of externally existing things via sensation.

Another reason to always be on guard. — Wheatley

:up:



I would define metaphysics as follows: anything left over that won't be explained by more rigorous fields. To the extent that it has value, the field of being and content has been removed from metaphysics by physics, phenomonology, etc. To the extent that it has value, the field of causation and origins has been stolen by science generally and cosmology and evolutionary biology in particular. To the extent that they have value, the constants of nature have been annexed by physics. If any idea in metaphysics is found to have any value, it ceases to be metaphysics and becomes something else. Metaphysics is then all of the ideas that will never be found to have any value. I'd put them in the following groups:

• Metaphysics of the gaps: This Kantian metaphysics relies on things being unknown, such as having an incomplete picture of how mind arises from physical constituents and processes.
• Metaphysics of the unfalsifiable: This relies on the outside chance that an unjustifiable idea might be true, such as the existence of God.
• Metaphysics of ignorance: This relies on the metaphysician not knowing or pretending to not know how something is so they can continue on the basis that it is not, such as the evolution of species or the arrow of time (although some metaphysical questions regarding the arrow of time fall under MotG). The difference between this and MotG is that the latter claims justification via the gaps, whereas this tends to insist on purely metaphysical (i.e. not useful) approaches to well-understood problems.
• Metaphysics of the impossible: This relies on considering only scenarios that are logically impossible or factually untrue, such as the "do otherwise" scenario of anti-determinist free will formulations.

You can do metaphysics then by picking one of the above, say: that the root cause of the creation of the universe is unknown. Despite the fact that everything we do know about the start of the universe comes from astronomy, cosmology, particle physics and the like, the next step is to disregard all of this and insist on a completely useless framework for understanding how it might occur. When asked to justify the framework, you can do so in any of the above four ways: claim that there is no hard evidence for an alternative solution; claim that your solution cannot be disproven; claim that any reference to non-metaphysical knowledge is out of scope, inferior, or invalid for epistemological reasons; and finally claim that anything that follows from your proposal that seems invalid doesn't matter because it's ab initio, therefore independent of how things are or can be in reality.

At least, this has been my overwhelming impression of metaphysics. I have only ever had these four metaphysics discussions or combinations thereof, and have yet to encounter a metaphysics problem that doesn't fall into one of those categories or the remit of a more rigorous approach. Most of the best metaphysics problems seem to be epistemology, or sometimes aesthetics. The worst tend to be nothing more than weakly-disguised theology and/or an unshiftable (i.e. knowledge-independent) belief in mind-body duality.

The car on the other side of the RH is what cannot be represented in the Rindler frame of the accelerating car. It cannot be keeping up with the accelerating (but stationary) car in the ARF. (Please tell me if any of these acronyms are confusing. I tire of typing the full words). — noAxioms

The Rindler horizon's similarity to the event horizon is only insofar as any light travelling from the negative x direction cannot reach the x=0 worldline. That seems to be the entire basis for your argument that the space the photon travels in does not exist in the Rindler frame. This is exactly the same as saying the car behind does not exist in the frame of the car in front because it can never reach it. It's the same argument.

Yes, and the math says the acceleration cannot be finite at the RH — noAxioms

Except for the x=0 (light-like) worldline, yes. But...

which is why I said the length of my object extended almost 1 to the rear, but not all the way, because I wanted to avoid the infinite acceleration required there, with yes, infinite time dilation, just like at the EH of a black hole. — noAxioms

But you don't have to do this. If the acceleration of the leftmost part of the ship is finite at T=t=0, it will not follow the x=0 worldline (the light-line) but one of the x>0 ones. Infinite acceleration is the only way to follow the x=0 worldline. The leftmost end and rightmost end will not have the same horizon in the Minkowski frame, i.e. the horizon is proper-frame--dependent.

Two observers having the same proper acceleration (Bell's spaceships). They are not at rest in the same Rindler frame, and therefore have different Rindler horizons — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell%27s_spaceship_paradox

(I am thinking of changing my username to BornRigid but I might get banned.)

As per Bell's paradox, there exists an inertial frame of reference in which we can arrange for the acceleration of the ship to be the same at both ends. As per Wiki:

Consider two identically constructed rockets at rest in an inertial frame S. Let them face the same direction and be situated one behind the other. If we suppose that at a prearranged time both rockets are simultaneously (with respect to S) fired up, then their velocities with respect to S are always equal throughout the remainder of the experiment (even though they are functions of time). This means, by definition, that with respect to S the distance between the two rockets does not change even when they speed up to relativistic velocities. — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell%27s_spaceship_paradox

This ship would break apart because each section of it would be length contracted while maintaining its distance from the adjacent section, but the take-home of this is that it doesn't matter where the two ends are. One can always construct another inertial frame at rest wrt the first in which either end is zero or both non-zero. There is nothing special about the initial coordinate of each end of the ship because each end has its own Rindler horizon in its proper frame.

When we choose one of the proper frames, the worldlines of each end will be constrained by the Rindler horizon of the proper frame we choose (either to stay to the right or to the left of it depending on whether the initial position of the other end is to the left or the right of the light-line. Let's take the rightmost end as the proper frame. In its frame, it is not moving, and the left end is moving away from it. To see this, refer again to:



choose the point on the worldline to the right where t=1, and follow the t=1 line back to the other end of the ship. If the leftmost ship is still at x=0 (because it started at X=0), it is still at T=0 in the Minkowski frame, and its velocity is therefore zero: no length contraction occurs at the leftmost end because it is not yet moving. (Length contraction is a function of velocity, not acceleration.)

This ship would break apart in the proper frame of the rightmost end because parts to the left are moving away from the rightmost part with increasing acceleration. The leftmost part's coordinate still exists in the rightmost part's proper frame (indeed, we just traced to that coordinate with our finger).

As I said before, if the length of the ship in the proper frame of the rightmost part is infinite and the leftmost part is at X=x=0 at T=t=0 and the rightmost part has a finite X at some time T, then yes, in the Minkowski frame there will be infinite length contraction fitting the infinite length of the ship into the finite length between the x=0 worldline and X, because in the proper frame of the rightmost part of the ship (at infinity), the leftmost part of the ship is receding away at infinite acceleration. But since this is a physical impossibility, don't worry about it. For all finite lengths, the length contraction is zero or finite everywhere except at t=infinity.

What I am getting out of your claim is that the will has the possibility of choosing; but also does not because it will always choose the same decision for a given set of information it receives. — Samuel Lacrampe

This is of course not a practical concern. Circumstances don't truly repeat themselves. I might find myself in the same situation, but in a different emotional state, in a different mental state, or having learned from experience of last time, or having access to a different subset of my options if the decision is urgent.

For me and my situation to be absolutely identical would be equivalent to reversing time back to the start of the situation and replaying. I think almost all of us would expect the situation to play out in exactly the same way and, because of that, almost all of us are determinists deep down.

If on the other hand, for a given set of information, the will can choose between two decisions, then it can choose between two decisions. — Samuel Lacrampe

:up: And it usually can choose between many.

What I don’t agree with is to do so to disrupt the “Western-prescribed nuclear family structure requirement”. — NOS4A2

Can you explain how they can possibly implement the extended family model while obeying the nuclear family structure requirement? Again, you seem to be contradicting yourself, twice in this case.

Spacetime is fundamental in string theory still, that is to say that string theory is an N-dimensional theory, with N depending on which flavour of string theory you prefer. The continuum of spacetime in LQG is emergent from networks but spacetime is if anything more substantive, being compromised of atomistic bits. It is the quantized spacetime of general relativity.

Can women even rape a man where you guys are? Here you have to have a penis. Bloody British patriarchy, can't even rape unless you're male.

@BitconnectCarlos, Black Lives Matter only exists because certain white people with power (state power, power in numbers, power to act unjustly) act like black lives don't matter. A point of contact might be men campaigning to have men-on-men rape taken seriously as an issue, and indeed that is happening in the same countries where BLM operates. By comparing BLM to a campaign on an issue that matters less than another unchampioned issue, when in fact that issue is championed in the real world, makes it sound like black lives don't matter as much, which I'm sure is not your view. The actual analogy for the women-on-men rape cause is... White Lives Matter, which does campaign hypocritically for the visibility of lesserproblems while not just ignoring but opposing campaigns around greater ones.

Also, you might disagree with Benkei and BLM that poverty is a correlate of local violent crime, but it would be dishonest to say that therefore BLM are not concerned with the issue. I'm pretty sure hydrogen is the right approach to low-carbon vehicles rather than electric, but I'd be lying to say that therefore electric car manufacturers are uninterested in the problem.

As I'm sure you are aware, changing the subject to black-on-black crime when people want to talk about the state-sanctioned murder of black people is a common trope, and probably not one you'd want to associate with. The extent to which BLM does not, in your view, sufficiently cover local violent crime is not an extent to which people should shut up about nationwide white-on-black violence, particularly when that violence is not at the hands of some local gang away from oversight but at the hands of the actual law enforcers in plain sight who are supposed to protect people from violent crime, and particularly when they have the approval and encouragement of their Head of State.

Time is infinitely dilated, and there is no light cone if there is zero time for light to get anywhere.
...
Nothing can ever get closer to it in its own proper frame. That's what I've been repeating in the last several posts. — noAxioms

Yes, I know. And this is why your argument is incorrect. You seem to think that somehow, in the accelerating observer's frame, the distance from x=0 to x>0 is infinite in the proper frame because nothing from x<0 can reach x=0, akin to saying that if two cars were travelling in the same direction at the same speed, the car behind can't be represented in the rest frame of the car in front because it cannot reach it.

This is quite incorrect except, as I've mentioned several times, when the accelerating body reaches a velocity of c, which it cannot. For all finite accelerations within finite times, there is no infinite time dilation, no infinite length contraction, and any light approaching from the negative x-direction is getting closer, even if it cannot intersect the accelerating body's worldline in finite time. None of this is new: you can do all of the math in standard SR.

Do you accept that the accelerating object is always stationary in its own frame? — noAxioms

If you'd read me carefully, I not only accept it, I asserted it. This is all x=0 is in the rest frame of the moving body: a coordinate of the origin of that frame. It is not a singularity by any definition.

Maybe you could address my points instead of just repeating your own. — noAxioms

The problem is you don't understand the framework you're trying to use to make your point, so don't understand why your point is invalid. I can't address your points in the way you'd like because your conception of Rindler coordinates is wrong, not just incidentally but fundamentally. I am trying to explain what any book on non-inertial motion will explain and frankly I would rather you'd just read one because I do appreciate that you're not going to take correction from a randomer on the internet claiming to be a former relativity lecturer. You have to do the legwork, not just try and jump to the crazy conclusions of some impossible edge cases and mistake that for the theory as a whole.

I think everyone should help one another. It’s a brilliant idea. — NOS4A2

Great. So you support BLM's "supporting each other as extended families and ‘villages’ that collectively care for one another" at least in principle, even if you disagree that it exists in practise?

Again, no one has a dim view of “helping one another”. That would be what is known as a lie where I’m from. — NOS4A2

So you support a network of black people helping one another now?

Because I believe it is a bad idea. I’m not going to stop them or impede their choices, but I’m not going to support them either. — NOS4A2

That doesn't sound like "troubling". It sounds like "irrelevant to me".

It’s a rotten lie that I cast “helping one another as a sin”. — NOS4A2

You said you found it "troubling" and that part of the reason is it's a bit "commie". Perhaps "sin" is too conotative a word in parts of the world where communism and black people helping one another are things to be troubled about. What's a better word to describe the dim view taken of people who help one another where you're from?

When you bring in quantum mechanics perhaps such a situation is much more amenable to the relationist position. . . depending on whether you adopt a background dependent or independent theory and the interpretation that follows from both camps. — substantivalism

Indeed, relationism (of state rather than intervals) is gaining traction among quantum theorists following the recent Wigner's friend experiments, yet, even as a quantum theorist myself, I don't have much of an ontological position on it. Relativity is much more compelling in that regard but it isn't really an argument for substantivism, more a framework for working with models of a substantive-seeming spacetime.

Even within that framework, there's no obvious reason why the spacetime picture need be fundamental. This is not a counter-argument in itself, but I'm reminded of the holographic principle in which the informational content of a volume, including the entire universe, can be encoded on its surface. (There are theoretical phenomena for which this cannot be true, and it still relies on the existence of a lower-dimensional spacetime.) When one opens the door to the idea that spatial dimensions can arise from more fundamental structures, one struggles to argue that the apparent spacetime we observe is substantive.