Not something I've heard said, but I guess any microstate is a unique collection of information. If that microstate has a probability of p, then the probability of you learning that precise set of information is also p (if you look). It would be a peculiar definition of 'message', which entails intentional _transmission_ of information, not just storage (intentional or otherwise).

In terms of quantum mechanics, entropy is the number of degenerate (equal energy) or near-degenerate microstates a system with a given energy may occupy and explore. Things that increase energy tend to increase entropy: heat it up, stir it, shake it shake it shake it baby... (Sorry, been listening to Tom Waits.) Doing these things changes the configuration of particles such that there are more permutations of each configuration available.

I'm not sure what either have to do with the OP; perhaps you can expand?

Where the hell is the left wing QAnon for the polluters and the policymakers who subsidize and legislate for them, in exchange for their "speech"? — hypericin

:rofl: Exactly!

My eldest now works with criminals and psychopaths... not sure what that says about my parenting skills. — Isaac

Ha!

Agreed. Do you think we can get this done within the lifespan if a single generation though, seems like a big project? — Isaac

I don't think we're even inclined toward it as a society. If we were, sure. Things like this can be little nudges or sudden paradigm shifts. In the UK, we went from not really paying paedophiles much mind beyond a "stay away from Mr Davis" to hating them more than anything else thanks to the tabloid press. Look how quickly Trump raised an army of millions against democracy and the free press in America. We need that, but for polluters.

Sorry Andrew, I missed your post. I'll have a re-read when I get a mo, but iirc the friend records that a measurement had taken place but remains unentangled with Wigner because no communication occurs. If I'm wrong about that, and Deutsch insists that the two friends can communicate and remain uncorrelated, then yes I'd disagree with him. He'd essentially be saying you could put a person into quantum superposition (branching) but treat him as a classical object (remain factorisable after exchanging particles).

Mmm. Hence "You never notice what I'm wearing" being a common complaint of wives and girlfriends. People tend to know people much like themselves: I probably am more likely to know men who aren't very interested in fashion (since I'm not); you're probably more likely to know men who are (since you are), giving one or both of us a skewed perspective. In my perspective, the fewer clothes the better, and that is extremely tied to sexuality. Also in my perspective, gushing over women's clothes is, in the words of the great Derren Brown, "mostly for women and gays". But I would buy that that's changing. As men become more obsessed with their appearance, it would make sense that they become more critical and admiring of the appearance of others. I don't think this is a particularly good thing tbh, although it might be something of an equaliser.

I was doing you the credit of assuming yours would be better than average, — Isaac

I have been known to try to influence the youngest towards slightly higher aspirations, although his real dad is trying to make an anti-vax conspiracy theorist out of him. The eldest has passed her driving theory on the 12th attempt. Neither, with love, pleading, threats or bribes, can be compelled to not leave every light in the house on all day. I don't think that:

Step-parent or adopt two kids and then bring them up to be Gandhi and MLK. — Isaac

is in the offing, but who knows?

Maybe there's a good argument for not having kids if you're not that bothered (we don't need a massive population to do the repair work), or if you're a dick (always applies). But if you're even a little above average in niceness then your kids (adopted, step, or otherwise) are going to be just the sort of people the next generation need to help reduce the harm already done by the previous one. — Isaac

I do think that having fewer children would have a more positive effect than trying to slop out a Martin Luther King. Being serious for a moment (just for a moment), hoping to breed an army of social justice warriors is a casino approach: sure, I may be more likely than Nos to raise a kid who's conscientious, but I'm still more likely to produce yet another mindless consumer because it's me versus pretty much everything else in the world (including their other parent).

I think a more responsible approach is for our generations to forge the superstructures that future generations will in part adhere to and in part improve upon, to set the laws, morals and social conventions -- the hereditary socialisations -- that will anchor them. At the moment, that anchor point is "Do what you want, f*** everybody else." We need to be at the point where our kids see their friends' dads driving SUVs and think "What a c***" because that's the society they've been raised in, rather than "I'll get one one day."

Also, doesn't good fashion bring a smile to your face? Maybe you come into work early in the morning and you see a woman in a beautiful coat, isn't that nice? There's so many different styles and colors. — K Turner

You know _I'm_ not gay, right? ;) Very occasionally the way someone is dressed will knock me off my socks, but no, generally it's face, particularly eyes, and personality. And legs. Lovely, long... You see, now I'm horny. There's just no differentiation there.

Btw I have never observed any correlation between attentiveness to appearance and any creative skill. In fact, I'd posit an inverse correlation if Instagram were anything to go by, but in reality there's probably no correlation.

What makes you think you'd bring up 'just another consumer'. Don't do yourself down. I'm sure you've the potential to bring up the next Ghandi, or MLK, wouldn't that be better than no one? — Isaac

How did that work out for them in the end? :wink: The options aren't my spawn or no one though: if there's one thing I'm sure of, it's that by the time there's a shortage of humans, it'll be too late anyway.

I am a stepfather to two kids. It pains my parents because I'm an only child myself, but I don't feel like having selfish genes is a good reason to reproduce. If I had none, I would have liked to adopt.

I have to admit, I went from really looking forward to fatherhood to totally going off it, pretty much on this basis. I find it hard to rationalise how another consumer could help matters.

|Wigner>|friend>|spin up>|I've observed a definite outcome>

The above is what MWI (and unitary QM) predicts. — Andrew M

As someone whose job it was to calculate exact solutions to the many-body wave equation for simple, symmetric systems, I can tell you that is not true. Communication between two subsystems like this does not permit the factorisation of those subsystems. Wigner would have been communicating with an already branched friend so would be entangled within-branch. This is what MWI would predict too.

If there was truly zero entanglement prior to and throughout the experiment until Wigner made his own measurement, then he ought to see interference effects as Deutsche originally intended. However by communicating with his friend, e.g. by exchange of photons or electrons, directly or indirectly, after his friend had branched, he would see no such interference effects. It just isn't possible to separate Wigner out of the wavefunction the way you think we can.

I would love to surround myself with confident, awesome women who have an amazing sense of fashion because something that like speaks to her creativity and artistic eye. — K Turner

Do you find that such women are generally creative in other ways, like writing fiction or playing saxophone? Because otherwise that's rather a bootstrapped explanation.

:rofl: Sorry
:rofl: :up:

It makes sense that men are more easily aroused with respect to gamete asymmetry and the cost of resources involved. Males are not burdened with carrying to term which gives them incredible leverage/power between sexes. Easier arousal plays a role in competition for the fairer sex.

The drive to impregnate is on average stronger than the drive to be impregnated. — Nils Loc

I don't think that can be right. The cost-of-egg+birthing v cost-of-sperm disparity is common across almost all mammals: the fetishization of the female form doesn't appear to be. In fact, in tournament species, the male's appearance is far more important, since all men really have to offer is good genes.

Our attitudes toward women seem to me characteristically cultural, and attempts at naturalistic explanations always have a whiff of rationalising the alleged necessity of the status quo.

By "apes" I wasn't talking about anything relating to body hair. — K Turner

Nor was I. My example was:

as my partner was saying just this morning, it's taken me decades just to start running a comb through my hair. — Kenosha Kid

which was more about self-image generally.

Men usually don't go out of their way to be warm or inviting or dress pretty like women do. — K Turner

Yeah, I got this from your last post, but I'm intrigued -- and there's no reason you'd necessarily be able to answer this -- why care about that? It sounds like you're far more interested in how women dress than I am, which isn't unusual in my experience. Sorry for the third degree, I'm just interested, ignore it if you want.

First of all, I think this child has bad luck because he is raised in a very backwards house. We have to do something with this kid because is our duty. — javi2541997

Agreed, but not uncommonly bad. The kind of hate and violence we both despise has a strong (I'd argue dominant) culturally-propagated aspect. I'm not sure what the answer is to that beyond cultivating a culture in which such hate is seen as shameful and low, the way, say, communism is seen in America. If teaching Taoism might help with that, great, but it's no panacea imo. Ultimately you're expecting a very dead guy in a book to hold more sway than a father, a brother, a gang, or a neighborhood.

Exposure to more considered ideas is helpful, but considered ideas often don't have the same kind of influence on children that deranged, paranoid, hateful ideas to. Unrelated to hate and violence, but my stepson's father is somewhat mentally unstable and is truly down the vaccination conspiracy theory rabbit hole. My stepson is a very intelligent lad, very good at school, but his father has got him parroting some of this deranged crap. What I find is that reasoning doesn't help very much. That which is learned without reason cannot be defeated by reason. Or something. I can't be bothered checking the quote.

Point being, hateful and violent behaviour is typically associated with irrational notions that are immune to reason, empirical counter-evidence, etc., rather are mediated by other things like rhetoric, lies, force of opinion, peer pressure and fear of contradiction. I'd be more optimistic about teachers identifying antisocial behaviour in children and intervening than teaching them about better ethics and hoping to convert a few. Although I don't have much faith in that either.

Thanks K. I'm probably not best placed to understand that: as my partner was saying just this morning, it's taken me decades just to start running a comb through my hair. My body image problem is shocking myopia; I'm very much the ape end of the spectrum. But heterosexual men are increasingly less ape-tastic in this respect. If what you say is more general, I wonder if we'll see a more prominent sensualisation of men as a result, likewise divorced from sexuality. It's very post-.

That said, it's not like we have a control study somewhere in which a generation of gay men grew up without the heterosexual male gaze dominating media every day. Do you think that plays any role? I'm also in 100% agreement with:

Because hairy hanging gonads aren't attractive to anyone. — Hanover

Ah, why do I bother. — baker

Genuinely, I don't know, and, while one part of me wishes you didn't, another has a morbid curiosity.

You got from your inability to follow your own argument to me being a Trump supporter?! As I said, a one-person race to the bottom.

I'm saying that the gender differentiation in sensuality biased toward the female form isn't nearly as pronounced as you claim it is. — baker

I made no claim; I expressed an interest in someone else's point of view. You weren't particularly on my radar before but I find you replying to all of my posts with the most ill-thought-out and random nonsense all of a sudden, like the internet's most confused stalker. Something going on?

That's about as random and pointless as you're training me to expect. You're a one-person race to the bottom.

I've nothing particularly against it, but I'm just wary of the instinct to reach for an old book when societal problems occur. As I said, I'm aligned with you on education being put to better use, to reverse away from this notion of making children good workers and focusing on making them good, well-rounded humans.

But let's say you have some kid whose father is a MAGA-maniac who hates black people, whose older brother would actually beat him up for not joining in a violent racist assault, and who lives on an estate where every rare black family unlucky enough to wind up there has been demonised and persecuted... Is a lack of Taoism in this kid's life really the thing pushing him toward following a similar path to his father, brother and neighbours?

The popular perception of incest is what this thread is about. — baker

I was responding to this:

So in the face of that, it can be hard to believe in the principle that incestuous couples are more likely to produce genetically defective offspring. — baker

This is not a statement about popular opinion. I know you're not the sharpest knife in the drawer, but you should at least be able to follow your own contribution to a conversation.

Clearly, you don't have enough female friends/don't spend enough time with them. — baker

Completely missing the point and drawing an incorrect conclusion... This seems to be your MO. I stopped reading at this point.

Ah okay, so you don't want children taught a particular ethics, rather taught _about_ that ethics as part of a broader education? That seems reasonable, I'd prefer a less vocational, more philosophical education system too (a big part of that would be critical thinking). I just don't see a correlation between teaching children about Confucius and children growing to be more social (not sociable or socialist or however you took the term).

We should never forget these old theories — javi2541997

Agreed, but that's no reason to indoctrinate children with them. (There may be better reasons to do just that.)

Probably but being antisocial not necessarily drive us on being violent or having aggressive attitude. To be honest with you, I consider myself as antisocial but this doesn’t cause on me have the feeling or ambition to fight against another one or being involved in a riot... — javi2541997

By social here, I mean empathetic, altruistic, egalitarian.

Hatred is certainly better organised - we can thank social media for that one. — Tom Storm

Hmmm. Depends. A lot more death threats. Far fewer actual deaths.

It's a truism to say that people's bad behaviour is because of their (lack of good) ethics. But I agree, consideration and reciprocity should be fostered.

I think we need to look principally to the present problem and future solutions more than picking a past philosophy though. We need to understand what makes people antisocial. It's not any more inherent than what makes people social. My question recently was: can we have an egalitarian, reciprocal but delayed-return society? A good follow up to that would intersect with your thread: how do we build an egalitarian, reciprocal society starting from _where we are now_? Infrastructure and culture, not dead men. And, yes, education is a huge part of both, but I don't think brainwashing kids with a particular philosophy is warranted. Rather, look to what _promotes_ the already present capacity for altruism in children.

Intelligence and consciousness are two totally different things.

The only thing that I can say with some certainty is that they seem to be proportional. — Alkis Piskas

That would suggest they are related and therefore not totally different.

'Consciousness' is one of those words that takes its meaning by the hole it fills in a belief system. At bare minimum, your talking of phenomenal consciousness: consciousness of things. You describe your friends as being conscious of things that are not real, or do not accord with your understanding of reality. Is this what "more" or "less" conscious means to you: a measure of fidelity?

Otherwise people are usually speaking of self-consciousness or access consciousness, which is what we can account for. If your friend has a mistaken phenomenal consciousness but can describe it with high fidelity, then he is perfectly conscious in this sense, right? However he could have perfect phenomenal consciousness but his access consciousness is low fidelity. An example of the latter might be the author of a detective novel who, after a brain injury, thought he was the character in the novel. Nothing wrong with his perceptions, he just held, or at least talked about, mistaken facts about himself. This is more autobiographical, and not something that would necessarily show up on an intelligence test, whereas mistaken phenomenal consciousness likely would.

What I meant was that the sample-of-one argument doesn't stand up. Even within humanity, it's not necessarily the case that self-destruction would arise, merely that, if it begins, it's hard to stop. Genes are largely about capacities, less about tendencies. Environment plays a bigger role, not just in refining or transforming the genome through natural selection, but also in what that genome is, how it behaves, which of its characteristics are more important. Chance plays a role. But our self-destruction seems to me mostly a matter of memetics. Certainly its dominance is mediated more through culture than, say, having opposable thumbs.

If humans had been the second mature intelligent species on Earth, we probably wouldn't have been allowed to go on as we have, in fact we probably wouldn't have tried our luck in the first place.

It seems to me perfectly likely that there would be intelligent dominant life out there, be it past, present, or future, that isn't as cancerous as we are, and even perfectly possible that we are anomalous among intelligent species. We'd need to meet some to find out so we can do proper stats and that seems unlikely, but we can't take ourselves to be the norm in their absence.

I'm actually quite interested in this. Binged a ton of Pedro Almodovar recently and he is OBSESSED with women's bodies, to the extent that, if this was the 90s and Pedro was straight, we might expect a review to say something like "his camera makes love to them". As a raving heterosexual with mostly like-minded friends, this divorce between gendered sensuality and gendered sexuality is slightly mysterious to me.

Irrelevant to the point I made had you read the entire post — Harry Hindu

Oh, I wasn't responding to you or your broader point per se, hence not linking to your post, I was just pointing out for the broader board that Republicans actually do have a fully worked out and successful approach for punishing the corrupt in politics. I was uninterested in the rest of your post which was, as standard, wide of the mark.

On the other hand, if a dozen branches of the tree of life are headed toward technological maturity and the first one that gets there destroys its own environment, we might not see the other branches mature. The presence of one such species may obfuscate the potential for others.

This is a great exemplification of the _weirdness_ of anthropocentricity: we don't seem to be able to consider life elsewhere in the universe without making it about us, which isn't remotely close to the most interesting questions we could ask.

Trump ran on fighting corruption

And, like Nixon, he succeeded beautifully. Nothing guarantees a mass locking up of politicians and their affiliates than the President drawing attention to how particularly corrupt he is, not just for a President, but for a human being.

Public opinion about a topic isn't based on statistics, but on what comes through as the most vocal. — baker

I think you've rather confused yourself there, as this is not relevant to your previous reply. The statistical likelihood of degeneration through inbreeding is obviously a statistical matter, and is not a function of popular opinion.

Yes, this is what I meant regarding separability. In reality, it's not that clean: if you have two atoms, say, correlated by exchange of a photon, you cannot evolve them independently: it's a single many-body wavefunction describing the whole system, and the exchange and correlation parts of that are not trivial.

The formalism above necessarily neglects the fact that Wigner and his friend are entangled anyway. Previously an argument for this was the classical limit. However if we're in the regime of seeing macroscopic bodies in superposition (if!), we're not in the classical limit anymore and that approximation doesn't obviously follow.

What we should see in MWI is each branch evolving independently as if it were the whole universe. As I mentioned above to Pfhorrest, this result, if consistent with scale, leads to odd contradictions in which the friend can indirectly observe his other branches.

People who claim that the there is but one cat are suffering from — magritte

quantum mechanics.

I'm not going to argue the science, but both the alive and dead cat evolve from the pre-experiment cat continuously. No matter is added to make another cat, for instance. So I think you need a more complete answer before you tell anyone they're confused ;)

So in the face of that, it can be hard to believe in the principle that incestuous couples are more likely to produce genetically defective offspring. — baker

Because one couple didn't? This is doing statistics wrong.

Simply that everything physical that happens is encoded in the wavefunction. There is no additional physical mechanism such as probabilistic collapse. In that sense, MWI is taking the physics first.

Observation y depends on the value of x. — magritte

As in:

"The cat is dead" is true for Wigner's friend but not for Wigner. — Kenosha Kid

Note the quotes: the statement is "The cat is dead". The truth value of that depends on who you ask.

Well deserved, sir.

Oh my god, I have almost 3000 likes!!! :love:

In fairness, the deterministic part of the wavefunction is the only thing that encodes any physics. So Everett was, to this extent, taking the physics seriously.

The point of this discussion is precisely the ramifications of the lab _not_ being an isolated experiment by virtue of the fact that Wigner and his friend are exchanging information. On which...

Wigner and his friend don't become entangled because the friend is sending exactly the same piece of information to Wigner from both branches, i.e., that a definite result has been obtained. — Andrew M

If this was just a story about the friend telling Wigner that the measurement has been done by, say, sending a photon, ignoring everything else, even that the measurement was a quantum one, would you say that this process of sending a photon from one system to another didn't entangle the two systems? Because that doesn't appear right. This is a three-body problem and will be correlated. The point here is that this entanglement is occurring after branching, and what's going on in each of these branches is independent.

I think perhaps the correct MWI answer is that this entanglement has already branched the wavefunction. It's not that entanglement hadn't occurred, it's that any entanglement pertinent to the the uncertainty in the signal has already decohered, making Wigner effectively separable from the lab across branches because the signal is the same in all of them.

In reality, that kind of separability isn't realistic. Maybe for a macroscopic Wigner and friend, but not for the quantum observers of the experiment.

Does not every observation, as an interaction, cause entanglement? (Leaving room still for partial observation; see below). — Pfhorrest

Sorry Pfhorrest, I missed this. Yes, but not the other way around: not every entanglement is an observation. Entanglement occurs when two bodies or systems communicate or share a history. This doesn't have to involve a measurement. Indeed, something like the EPR paradox is about an entangled, unmeasured spin pair.

Is this while Wigner and his friend are already entangled? — Pfhorrest

Should be, yes: Wigner and his friend are exchanging information. But yes the experiment shows that Wigner still observes interference effects, which suggests he is not entangled with his friend. Which is tricky because every branch his friend is communicating with him in should be completely independent.

I’m getting the sense that this new evidence is of the possibility of SOME information from inside the box being communicated to the friend without it being enough of the right information to collapse the wavefunction — Pfhorrest

Yes, and maybe this is what Andrew had in mind too. It's worth remembering that from the friend's point of view, his branch is an independent universe and he is in contact with Wigner before branching has occured for Wigner. His universe should go something like:

| Wigner before update > | Friend measured alive > | Alive cat >

to

| Wigner updated > | Friend measured alive > | Alive cat >

This is reality in his branch, and it's completely independent of the existence of any other branch. But Wigner can assuredly tell his friend that Wigner has detected the other branch:

| Wigner detects superposition > | Friend measured alive > | Alive cat >

This is weird, no? There is definitely evidence in the friend's branch that another branch exists.