However, I think that the point which you make about the role of the observer, which is recognised in the physics of relativity is extremely important, and I do wonder to what extent this ideas has been incorporated as a basis, or aspect, of the underlying premises of philosophy. — Jack Cummins

Isn't that postmodernism? ;)

While the ontological interpretation of the wavefunction hasn't been much in favour, recent experiments suggest that if you and I prepare a system in a superposition of measurable states, then you measure it, you may collapse the wavefunction for you, but not for me. Indeed, I could perform a measurement that demonstrates the system remained in superposition after you measured it and obtained a singular result. (Disclaimer: Strictly, the experiments suggest that either we have no freedom of choice, or stuff like future events affecting the past is possible, or that reality is observer-dependent. Also the experimental technique remains disputed.) The role of the observer may be important, but only for the observer.

Exactly. Therefore of practical value. Even theology serves a purpose. Meanwhile the lay interest in science is largely diversionary (viz the aforementioned unread copies of A Brief History of Time). Plenty of scope to champion the importance of philosophy.

I am really saying that people may think that they don't need to think about the big questions, but I am not convinced that we have reached that deadend completely. — Jack Cummins

Need for what though, to what end? If that has an answer, that's practical enough. How you think about the world either has an effect on how you interact with it, in which case it's practical in the sense I meant, or it does not, in which case it's merely diversionary. Not to diss the diversionary, but it's harder to argue for the importance of something with no real world impact.

By asymmetric causality, I am referring to either the belief or definition of causality such that causes come before their effects. This is a physically problematic assumption due to the fact that the microphysical laws are temporally symmetric. — sime

:up:

The universe probably does have an origin, as it appears to have starting conditions, but that doesn't veto counterfactual worlds with infinite histories. The key, as you say, is getting past our everyday intuitions based on a universe that did have starting conditions, and in taking relativity seriously.

Spot on. Mass and mind do not seem to be related in this way. As if we could measure the mass of your love for your mother. — Banno

Not sure. A brain that has encoded information about its mother is obviously different from one that has not, a different configuration of neurons. This configuration is part of the state of the brain. Different states either have different energies (non-degenerate) or the same energies (degenerate). For small systems, it's not difficult to discern between different states in principle unless they are degenerate, and even then there's a means to break that degeneracy and figure out which state is _was_ (at least partly) in.

The brain isn't a small system but it's not obvious that the difference between the brain with a concept of its mother (some particular and ideosyncratic configuration) and without is undetectable *in principle*, even if it's technologically and ethical infeasible to do so.

Ayer argues that metaphysics is about speculation, and that is its limitation. He suggests that he is not trying to say that people should not make speculations, or be discouraged from having certain beliefs, such as believing in God, but that they present difficulties in arguing for them as metaphysical realities because they cannot be spoken of as definite facts. I think that his argument does come into play in the whole process of asking metaphysical questions. — Jack Cummins

That's interesting (as is this whole thread). I think I agree with this. I'm probably biased against metaphysics and theology in part because of the reaction of acolytes of both to science: belief, intuition, preference and upbringing appear to be trying to compete with fact. Or, to put it another way, metaphysics studies the realm outside of physics rather than the realm outside of physical science's reach. I'm maybe guilty of the above too, not taking metaphysics sufficiently seriously because, at its best, it is not generally falsifiable or otherwise amenable to empirical testing.

That said, I'm also a bit biased against it because it tends to pose meaningless questions or questions with implicit unjustifiable assumptions, such as most of the examples given by the OP. (E.g. "Is reality fundamentally mental?" or the free will question, or the continuity of identity question which remains a question about language.)

What are the arguments for and against the responsibility that individuals might be thought to bear to accept a Covid 19 vaccine? What are the arguments for and against the right that individuals might be thought to enjoy to refuse a Covid 19 vaccine? — Janus

Anti-vaccination isn't really an individual position: it's a social phenomenon gestated among the paranoid, the insane, and the terminally stupid. Most anti-vaxxers wouldn't be anti-vaxxers if there wasn't a small but thriving anti-vaxxer movement. So it's more like a contract or a club: a group of foam-at-the-mouth right-wing lunatics who agree via the media that they'd rather die than behave with a minimal responsibility toward others cuz that's jus a step shy of communism. And I think we should support their efforts without irony. When the sensible and responsible are all vaccinated, we should oversell tickets to anti-vax and anti-mask rallies and let Darwin handle the rest. ;)

But, I do think that many people, in general, see philosophy as a rather abstract and futile activity, but it would be interesting if someone were able to provide evidence of such opinion and I am not able to do so at present. — Jack Cummins

On the contrary, for the most part it's more practical than science. Okay, philosophy outside of science isn't going to produce agriculture, bridges, boats or space rockets, but neither do most people. These are beyond the day-to-day, whereas a philosophy is something everyone can wear.

Sartre (whom you cited) is hugely important in how I understand something that science can barely approximate at present. My philosophy has moved on somewhat... perhaps Sartre is no longer an overcoat, but he's still a perfectly serviceable vest. Quantum theory (my field) is interesting and creates interesting technologies, but it doesn't have quite the same mundane practicality.

I never get why so many philosophers put science outside of philosophy -- perhaps a reaction to the scant philosophical education of scientists. An anti-scientific philosophy is about as tenable as a geocentric modern astronomy: it is obliged to ignore too many things that are in our world to be feasible. Likewise a fruitful, useful philosophy is going to have to deal with science just as a robust science has to deal with philosophy. Divide and conquer doesn't apply.

Hi, been back in the studio, now blinking at the light of day.

Some of the wonders of science you cite in the OP are also causes of the evils: fossil fuel burning cars and planes and power plants that enable those conveniences.

While the scientific community has its share of loons, crooks and shills, the overwhelming consensus to use science for good and to avert evil is disproportionate to the prevalence of similar views in the lay community, and diametrically opposed to the views of corporations that own and profit from the harmful technologies that apply scientific knowledge and the elites that legislate those usages.

In part by setting itself standards, in (greater) part by an egalitarian attitude toward facts, science incorporates ethics, and that is manifest in the peculiarly ethical character of the scientific community. They do not, in the whole, pick and choose: they know how a combustion engine works, and that it's operation is damaging to the planet. Exxon Mobil picks and chooses.

For me, the measure of science as a good is less in how quickly you can get to the shop and more in how urgently the community asks you to walk instead.

To those that vie that science has a dark side, it certainly does. Nazi scientists attempting to build an atomic bomb to better impose the will of the fuhrer on the world are a tough sell, but then many probably had little choice. Context is important. Science under a totalitarian state has a different ethical character to that preferred and approached by academic institutions in the free world. Similarly, most of the scientists developing vaccines would probably prefer them to be freely available, but they got the best and most useful jobs they could and accept unfair compromises. Again, the ethical character of corporate science is not that of independent academia (though the former impinges on the latter ever more greatly as right-wing governments cut funding to the knowledge-imparting, more ethical academic institutions they resent).

Whether science leads to, or even aims for, good is context-dependent. However science itself has a preferred context: freedom from state interference; freedom from capitalism; international in scope and practice; apolitical; responsive. In short, a context that mirrors scientific standards. The scientific community would have had no problem with burning fossil fuels, until it discovered the harm. That we construct conspiracy theories, fund anti-science, spend millions on propaganda, elect corporate stooges that promise never to do anything to protect the environment "at the expense of the... consumer", and carry on doing the harm ourselves does not speak ill of science, but of the context in which science is performed and exploited. If science in your country has a dark side, you have to question why your country that yields that sort of science. Because, you know, Einstein _was_ important for building the A bomb, but Nazism was too and actually wanted it.

The way to build a better scientific community is to keep it well funded so that the world, rather than the corporate world, owns the knowledge coming out of it, and keep it free from political interference, which means using your vote ethically and not to elect anti-scientific, energy-company--blowing shit-for-brains.

So lock it down! Except for the people that don't eh. That's ok because it would be icky if they lockdown, because that would be an actual lockdown and no one wants to pay the price on that eh.

That is why the lockdown failed and will always fail: Exceptions are made because society is too weak to do it right. therefore, since it will not be done right, there is no purpose doing it at all. Unless the plan is to draw it out unreasonably, then we are on the right path for sure. — Book273

Well no the point of locking down is to minimise people getting sick and dying. That would rather be thwarted by people getting sick and dying due to there being no doctors. As I've just said in my last post on another thread -- which just goes to demonstrate the problem -- extremism is the logic of the dumb.

Three people believed to have been stranded on an uninhabited island in the Bahamas for 33 days have been rescued, the US Coast Guard says.

"Unfortunately we didn't have any fluent Spanish speakers but in my broken Spanish I was able to discern that they were from Cuba and....

...only fled the workers paradise because equality is such a good basis for an economic system, they had become overwhelmed with happiness!

Ya think? — counterpunch

I'm not advocating a socialist utopia. But let's not forget all the medical tourism from the US to Cuba that went on before Obamacare. Cuba was taking care of Americans because Americans couldn't take care of themselves. Suggests a happier medium betwixt, but idiots tend to deal in extremes, in either/or.

That's over with. This is 2021 and you need to move on. — synthesis

I think this is why conservativism is always on the wrong side of history. "Yes, we were wrong in our beliefs about slaves and women and race and sexuality until a few years ago, but we're definitely correct now so no more 'improvements' please."

Are you telling me that you have bought into the narrative that everybody who is successful is so because they were born into it? — synthesis

The example of traders wouldn't fit into that, but there are plenty of examples where that's the case, yes. Look at British politics... A gauntlet of Eton-educated buffoons doing what pater expected of them. Or, for that matter, America's political class, or do you think Trump and Bush Jr got their by their bootstraps?

This isn't 18th and 19th century Europe. — synthesis

That stopped in the 20th century, did it? Did women know this? That's half the population. Ethnic minorities? Homosexuals? What about people just born poor who didn't have the option of Harvard or Oxford?

I've had fun dabbling in simple vector fields in the complex plane, but quantum fields are quite a bit more complicated, even with a modest background in functional analysis. My hat's off to you guys. :cool: — jgill

I didn't have much issue with quantum field theory, at least until perturbation theory which can get a bit hard to keep track of, but classical field theory was hard. Curvilinear coordinates are not, well, straight forward :rofl: especially when you have to do it as a physics undergrad in a mathematics department. Those guys know their mustard!

Another example from the UK: We had a terrible fire in an apartment building a few years ago due to illegal, flammable cladding being used on the external walls. Turns out that use of flammable cladding was pretty widespread and it all has to be removed and replaced.

The buildings were constructed by private interests, they are owned by private interests and the rents are collected by those private interests. So who pays the bill? The taxpayer, naturally.

Once again we have corporations unable to perform their functions without massive cash injections (£3.5 billion) from the state, which again should make us question the propaganda that, left to its own devices, the market is efficient.

It is efficient for short-term decision-making but woefully inept at making long-term decisions well, requiring handouts from taxpayers whenever things don't go perfectly.

I appreciate this culture of a market propped up by the state is very UK-specific. I expect in the US people would have gone to jail rather than been given massive piles of cash, although I also imagine people would have been left in flammable housing.

Doesn't seem odd to me. If you want to do applied physics, do a physics degree. If you want to do theory, do maths. At my uni we had to take our electives in the maths department if we wanted to do advanced theoretical physics.

it really all boils down to time and distance. — Pfhorrest

:up: Yup, with decorative physical constants: in other words, we're measuring it wrong!

Naturalism excludes God as a matter of principle. The mistake is to then believe that science has disproved the substance of such a belief, when in practice it has simply excluded it. — Wayfarer

That is not right. It is empiricism which is at play here, not naturalism. What I said was theory- independent.

You know that when Lemaître initially published his 'Hypothesis of the Primeval Atom', it was widely resisted for a long time because it seemed to suggest a creation from nothing. — Wayfarer

But then again the Bible says nothing of atoms while it does offer a creation myth for the world. The presence of a scientific explanation without God for atoms is neutral, and the Pope's attempt to own it for the church was political. Knowledge of how the universe was created is different, since that does overlap with religious terrain. If the universe was created teleologically, then one might expect some evidence of that and, if evidence were found, there might would be a scientific basis for creation. Since creation myths are all about the divine impacting the physical, the lack of any evidence whatsoever makes belief in creation unjustified... for now.

No, I believe this is common sense. — synthesis

It's common, but no sense involved. Any study you care to look at tells the same story. Another interesting one was Kahneman's study of stock traders. He found no difference between the success rate of wealthier "experts" given better opportunities and those scrabbling at the bottom. The difference was luck, no skill involved. If you get lucky, you're advantaged thereafter. But those lucky traders believed, and their peers confirmed, they had talent.

That's not to say there aren't rags to riches stories irl, but it's a useful, coincidentally sometimes true myth to divert focus from why some people are born into riches and others into rags.

People who are successful are so because they have the motivation to be such. — synthesis

This is just right wing propaganda, though. There's no actual truth to it; it's just something privileged people promote to justify the perpetuation of their privilege. Viz:

https://youtu.be/bJ8Kq1wucsk

Even if you thought it to be advantageous, there is no way to equalize outcome. — synthesis

That's not a reason to perpetuate systematic inequality, though. Minimising something bad isn't pointless just because 0 is unattainable. If you tried to reduce your Covid risk to zero, for instance, you'd be Howard Hughesing it within a week! :rofl:

The more people try, the worse things get. What you can do is maximize opportunity and allow nature to take its course. — synthesis

Maximising opportunity entails maximising the number of people with opportunity, not just maximising opportunity for the already advantaged.

Thinking that any particular outcome should be lands you in the "playing God" category. — synthesis

Any action ever taken impacts one's environment according to how one thinks it should be. Acting according to how you think things should be is inevitable.

Firstly on capitalism: Capitalism is based on supply and demand. The more people who want a specific item the more valuable that item is at X quantity. Should the quantity increase (supply) the value lowers. Should demand (population desiring said Product) increase at a fixed X quantity then again the value increases (cost).

This is actually a negative feedback loop that regulates the price of products. — Benj96

Demand is created, not pre-existing. The demand for Apple products is manufactured by Apple. The demand for fancy hats likewise. Every sweatshop-made tee shirt with a logo on it. Every new perfume or aftershave. So it's not like companies are just responding to external factors. You can make millions of something that no one needs and sell it to the same people not just at an arbitrarily high price, but over and over again.

This is why the following doesn't hold:

Let’s imagine everyone is made middle class (No poor and no rich) then demand greatly increases (because everyone has money to afford something) which increases the value of the product: this value increase leads to capitalising and the reemergence of a wealthy class as well as simultaneously leaving some unable to afford it (poor). — Benj96

It is not just middle class people buying Apple products. It's poor people getting into debt to have the latest groovy piece of tat. And long term Apple want everyone to buy not just one, but one a year. However they'd baulk at paying their staff enough in the short term to afford one, hence the importance of the debt economy.

So I would imagine that is the Global capitalist system escalates then there will be a cultural shift back to local Independent products; think knitting your own clothing, Ceramics, home cultivation of produce, Crafting furniture, buying locally farmed produce, reusing, upcycling, etc in small groups. — Benj96

I'm certainly in that shift, but it's expensive. Supermarkets, for instance, buy in such bulk that they can afford to insist on an extremely small profit margin for farmers. That profit per pint is negligible: it's barely viable for bulk producers and not viable at all for small ones. It's approaching a crisis point in which farmers will just stop doing dairy. Then the price will soar and fewer people will buy it, leading to losses for both retailers and producers. Another example of how short-term profit leads to long-term catastrophe.

How can a diffuse wave interfere with itself to form a single particle on the screen? — Enrique

I'm not sure what you mean by "to form a single particle on the screen". It interferes with itself. Not to do something: that's just what it does anyway.

Unless you just mean "how does it end up as a point on the screen?" That's the measurement problem described in the OP:

How the electron got from a field to a point is called the measurement problem, and different solutions to the measurement problem have yielded different interpretations of quantum mechanics. The oldest successful interpretation was the Copenhagen interpretation which states that, upon measurement, the electron wavefunction collapses probabilistically to a single position, the probability given by the absolute square of the wavefunction (the Born rule).

This idea of the absolute square is important. It is how we get from the non-physical wavefunction to a real thing, even as abstract as probability. Why is the wavefunction non-physical? Because it has real and imaginary components: u = Re{u} + i*Im{u}, and nothing observed in nature has this feature. The absolute square of the wavefunction is real, and is obtained by multiplying the wavefunction by its complex conjugate u* = Re{u} - i*Im{u} (note the minus sign). Remembering that i*i = -1, you can see for yourself this is real. We'll come back to this.

There are other probabilistic interpretations, and also some deterministic ones, such as Bohmian mechanics, wherein the electron always has a single-valued position and momentum (hidden variables), and Many-worlds interpretation in which the wavefunction does not collapse but, thanks to the mathematical rules of entanglement, you can never have a term in the wavefunction in which the electron hit the screen at position y but you observed it at position y′≠y. — Kenosha Kid

Again, there's a difference between creduiity or gullibility and warranted belief. Everyone has beliefs - even (or especially!) those who claim to have no beliefs, because, for them, non-belief becomes a normative guide, but non-belief turns out to have content of its own. — Wayfarer

Sure. My point was just that when he says "vice", I don't think he means doing great evil to others, rather he means being systematically mistaken.

--------------------------------------------------------------

I find this problematic too:

But a belief in God, falling short of certainty, is not open to the same objection. A belief may be reasonable, though false. If two oncologists tell you that your tumour is benign, then your belief that it is benign is a reasonable belief even if, sadly, it is false.

That is true about the tumor, but it's based on the acceptance of the authority of scientific experts. The analogy for God's existence might be, for instance, a cosmologist consensus that the universe was created purposefully.

No such consensus exists, nor any such evidence. It is precisely this point that, for the scientifically-minded, makes belief in God unjustified. Pointing to a justified belief by way of claiming that an unjustified one is in fact justified seems pretty poor to me. I get that he's saying that belief in God *may* be reasonable, not *is* reasonable, but the criteria give a much stricter statement: belief in God is not yet justified. This allows for the possibility of future justification, while observing the fact that no such justification exists or ever has existed, therefore no belief in God to date is justified.

One could argue that a cosmologist consensus is not analogous; on divine matters, it is clerical consensus one seeks since they are the experts on God. But then the basis of the authority of oncologists is not transferred. One cannot equate faith and evidence: it is precisely the necessity of faith -- belief without and despite evidence -- that makes that belief unjustified.

This reliance on "can be" in place of "is" is a cop out imo. Yes, oncologists "can" tell me my tumor is benign, but if that isn't what they're actually telling me, to believe it would be unjustified.

Aye, it's a band of the pattern formed on the back screen. The key result of the paper is that only one electron is diffracted at a time, meaning that the electron wave must be interfering with itself, meaning it must be going through both slits.

I suggest, if you cannot take my word for it, that you read the article I sent you. It's written more for non-experts.

So Dawkins is our target. This is becoming a habit. — Banno

To play my role as Dawkins apologist, which I'm not entirely sure why I do:

Not all fanaticism is religious fanaticism, and I
found unconvincing Dawkins attempt to show that Hitler was a closet Catholic

seems a tad dishonest. In that part of the book, Dawkins is answering the oft-repeated point that the greatest evil comes from atheism, the usual citations being Hitler and Stalin. Dawkins' point was that they weren't evil because they were atheist, but for reasons at best independent of and at worst parallel to religious belief. Which is a sound point. The reference to Hitler's possible Christian sympathies was merely one of several illustrations of why the religious idea of atheism begetting evil is phony. It was not meant as suggesting that Hitler was evil because of his secret Catholicism. Dawkins is imperfect, but he's better than his American Anglican detractors in that respect.

In terms of what it can compel people to do. There have been many evils committed in the name of religion. — Wayfarer

That's interesting. I read it more as a bad habit, an addiction. The first vice he speaks of is "the vice of credulity". I expect he means to use the term consistently.

Probably involves mathematical parameters that are difficult to explain in a simple message board post. Not a physicist, but maybe I'll take a look at it. — Enrique

Ah okay. Basically the interference pattern on the screen is determined by how the wave propagates to it. The pattern is what's called a Fourier transform of the slit setup. For a single slit, this is something like a bump. There's no dark and light bands because there's no positive and negative fields to cancel each other out. The bulk of the wave passes in a straight line between the cathode and the screen, with some spreading out as it passes through the slit.

To get the dark and light bands of the interference pattern, you have to have multiple sources that can reinforce or cancel each other out. You can't get this kind of pattern with a wave and a single slit, and you can't get this pattern with point particles and multiple slits, as these would just produce multiple copies of the same thing you'd get with a single slit.

Putting a detector behind one of the slits basically gets you back to the pattern you'd get with point particles. The wave has to get past the detector or not, so go through one slit or the other. You can't get interference this way. You can only get interference if it goes through one slit *and* the other.

What is the evidence that a single emitted electron is a wave spanning multiple slits, and does this evidence obtain for molecules also? — Enrique

I linked to an article on the paper.

No. I'm talking about actually being certain about one's sense of right and wrong. I'm talking about being certain that A is morally right, and that B is morally wrong. — baker

That's not the same thing as a decision to act. To act is to affect a change in the world. You might act on the basis that belief that the action is correct, but to act in accordance with that belief is still a desire to realise it.

I'm not aware of any direct evidence that the particle travels through both slits simultaneously as a wave, then recombines into a particle. It might be the case for photons while not for much more massive particles — Enrique

The interference pattern is the evidence. That's how they know particles are waves. The single-electron experiment was performed in 2002: https://physicsworld.com/a/the-double-slit-experiment/

what could possibly be the mechanism? — Enrique

Electrons are waves: waves diffract and interfere.

Sorry but I remain unconvinced by your objection. Please bear with me. Which is simpler, a brain or a conscious brain? Doesn't matter if it's physical or not (no petitio principii)? — TheMadFool

I'm not arguing whether p-zombies are simpler (fine) or even whether they exist. I'm arguing that you can't start from assuming physicalism true then conclude they don't exist or else a contradiction if they do. That is to assume a non-physical basis for consciousness.

If physicalism is true and p-zombies exist, all that means is that humans have a physical characteristic that p-zombies don't, or else that all humans are p-zombies. (The former can be rejected by other physical arguments.)

IF physicalism is true THEN p-zombies are impossible. — TheMadFool

The definition of a p-zombie is something that behaves exactly as a human but does not have consciousness. But in physicalism consciousness is physical, so a p-zombie is a physical thing similar to, but lacking one physical feature of, a human. If physicalism is true and p-zombies exist, then both p-zombies and humans are physical.

Starting with "physicalism is true", you can't reach the above conclusion unless you assume that humans have a non-physical consciousness, which violates your own preposition that physicalism is true.

That interpretation doesn't make sense to me. It fails to account for why a detector at one of the double slits only registers a particle half the time, nor the apparent randomness of localized absorber contact amongst even dozens of particles. — Enrique

It's easier to see it in the case of photons. The photon must travel through the undetected slit and not be destroyed or the detected one and be destroyed. There's no possibility in that case of interference.

It's said or the argument goes that if p-zombies are possible physicalism is false. — TheMadFool

P-zombies are simpler than normal humans for they're missing consciousness. That should mean that since humans are not only possible but also real, p-zombies should also be possible. — TheMadFool

Google definition of "complex": consisting of many different and connected parts.. — TheMadFool

A physical system is more complex if it has more parts, yes. But the argument you refer to relies on their being some non-physical element to human consciousness such that, if p-zombies existed, they would not have it. This is why Elliot is right when he says:

But this seems kind of like question begging does it not? — Elliot Fischer

I physicalist doesn't believe in a non-physical aspect to consciousness. This leads to three possibilities:

1. p-zombies are possible, but the assertion that human consciousness is non-physical is false: it would just be that p-zombies lack the physical constitution to have consciousness;
2. p-zombies are not possible: to behave like a human, you have to have human consciousness, which is physically based;
3. we are all p-zombies: the consciousness referred to is a magical thing that doesn't exist. Since p-zombies behave like humans, they are humans, therefore humans are p-zombies.

Okay, now for some fun. Ultimately we want anything we say about flat spacetime to be relevant to the real universe with curved spacetime, and that means cosmology, gravity, and the porn star of pop science: the black hole (actually sounds pornier than I intended and slightly racist, sorry).

Above, I clarified that what we're talking about is superluminal frames, not superluminal motion. But what could cause us to see things from superluminal frames, or to see exotic phenomena that is less exotic when seen from a superluminal frame?

The only two things we know about that can cause objects to move away from each other faster than the speed of light: gravity, and inflation. Spacetime curvature allows objects to move away from each other faster than c without acceleration. In my second thread in this trilogy, I posited that extending the bidirectionality of causality in flat spacetime suggests that gravity and inflation might be two sides of the same coin, with one frame's big bang being another frame's black hole, an old idea that has had reignited interest of late. The spontaneous creation of a universe might just be the deterministic destruction of that universe viewed from a different perspective. I'll run with that idea here.

A better explanation for superposition might be if one's reference frame, or that of which is being observed, is itself in superposition. Why might this be? Well, observers are macroscopic, not point particles, which allows for the possibility of different parts of that macroscopic system to be in different frames at once. The key paper on this is here: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-08155-0 . See Fig. 1 in particular.

The key point is that, when we describe a quantum system in superposition, such as an electron going through two slits in a lab frame that is not in superposition, relativity tells us that there should be a frame in which that electron is in a single location, which puts the lab frame in superposition.

We have indirectly deduced above that something like the uncertainty principle comes about from considering classical subluminal behaviour in a superluminal frame, and that quantum uncertainty in a subluminal frame can appear classical in a superluminal one. With relative motion allowed to be superluminal due to spacetime curvature, and macroscopic systems having parts potentially in multiple frames of reference, we have what we need to derive something like the double slit experiment so long as we can explain the particular origin of the superluminal features.

Consider now the interior to a SDMBH (a super-duper massive black hole). The spacetime curvature within has an extremely high gradient. From an external frame of reference, radially outward light has speed zero at that event horizon and speed c outside it. Inside, radially inward light has a wavefront with speed > c wrt any other point, because each point of the wave closest to the singularity moves toward that singularity faster than the points further away. In massive bodies, we call this spaghettification: everything point is receding from every other point at tremendous, including superluminal, speed without acceleration, just gravity.



If I am just inside the event horizon, I am occupying not one but a continuum of superluminal reference frames at any given time. A point particle some distance away from me is occupying only one at any time, though from any perspective but it's own that frame is changing (speeding up). How will that particle appear to me? Wrt to one neuron in my brain, it would be moving with such and such a speed, wrt another a different speed, wrt a point on my retina a different one again, wrt a point on my eye lens, a different one again. The particle would appear in a superposition of different positions and momenta overall and, from my perspective, I do have an overall view of it.

Because of spaghettification, while local gravitational and chemical effects might keep objects, perhaps as large as galaxy clusters, together for a while, on the whole everything will be pulled apart from everything else, with clusters closest to the singularity being pulled toward it faster than those furthest away. Gravitational lensing would mean that we'd see the same objects from different points in their histories, even their futures, appearing from different angles, the angle and point in history depending on when the light was emitted and how far the trajectory it took. We'd look outside our spiral galaxy and see other apparent spiral galaxies, some older, some younger, from all different angles, the oldest and youngest moving away from us ever faster, and all in fact images of our very own spiral galaxy. We'd look upon our own cradles and our own graves at once.



There's no avoiding the conclusion: We've already fallen into the black hole; we're now just awaiting our violent destruction.

In the textbook example, i.e. in conventional quantum mechanics, each particle goes through every slit, which is why there's an interference pattern. To determine the weighting through each, you'd have to solve the wave equation and take the integral of the absolute square across the area of each slit. It will depend on the distance between the slits.

Success in life is about getting your act together by taking responsibility for your own actions and refusing to engage in the blame game. — synthesis

Success of the market is supposed to follow from the drive toward success of the individuals in it. It is therefore in the market's interest to ensure as many people as possible can do their best. Stark inequality manifest as an unlevel playing ground is not an economically effective way for the society to organise itself. If person A is heavily advantaged to succeed than person B, the market loses out on the potential successes of person B. Likewise if person B cannot afford what person A makes, the market loses out again.

Sorry for late response. Apparently I started it a week ago then forgot to finish. Not really worth a week's wait, is it...

The God delusion is an awful book and is not at all representative of actual atheology. If your interested in real responses to proper formulations of the OA, look towards actual atheist philosophers like Graham Oppy for example. — Elliot Fischer

It wasn't a recommendation, just noting that the argument has been employed before. I have mixed feelings on The God Delusion; aspects of it are compelling, a lot are not. Which makes it better than, say, the Bible. My feeling is that it is less a serious book of secularism and more a cheat sheet for atheists looking for a verbal scrap.

I do think there'd always be a 'right' answer though, but that's perhaps because of the way I'm using 'right'. I'm using it more like in game theory, than in ethics. — Isaac

Yes, I meant more of an unambiguous moral rule.

Let's say two of the people are surgeons who need to get to theatre immediately to save the life of a different child. What is the "right" answer in this case?

This is the sort of ambiguity I (tried to) describe in my natural morality thread, in which I talk about how unfeasible it is to act on every opportunity for altruism, necessitating that we must choose arbitrarily when to act and when to hope that others will act, giving us the possibility of never acting, thus giving us the possibility of being in a society in which hardly anyone acts, which sounds a lot like ours to me.

In the above Beckett scenario, the two best scenarios are: save child A; save child B. If the group opts for surgeon A, child B dies; if they opt for surgeon B, child A dies. If either are possible then, generally, child A dying is permissible and child B dying is permissible, or, to put it another way, it is not twice as difficult to resign oneself to the death of two children as to one. "What's the point in going on?" person C might ask? "We'll not go on then," person D replies. "But we cannot not go on," person E retorts, noting that not acting is an action. "Fine, then we'll go on," person F sighs.

(Reference to some subtext that all six people are the same person here.)

Dualism vs Monism — Gary Enfield

The whole molecular consciousness thing seems to be a part of panpsychism, a retreat of dualism away from homocentrism where the monists hopefully won't find them.

I have also wondered about this, and and if we recognise the mathematical element, and the Deterministic view that this must intrinsically come from the 'chemistry' that it represents, then there is a fundamental question about how chaos, without order and therefore without chemistry, was able to do this? — Gary Enfield

Chaos theory isn't really about disorder. Chaotic systems are completely deterministic, but extremely sensitive to their initial state and any perturbations. If gravity, for instance, was chaotic, an object of 1 gram might happily rest on the surface of the earth while one of .99999999 gram might be catapulted toward the sun.