Not quite the same, but you may enjoy the following from The Onion, where April Fools Day is a year-round event: “Buoyant Force On Area Object Equal To Weight Of Water Displaced”
LazyDave
Kasparov competed against Deep Blue to steer the chessboard into a region where he won—knights and bishops were only his pawns
Were you trying to mix the literal and metaphorical here? Because I think that just his pawns were his pawns :)
″ ‘God made me pregnant’ sounded a tad more likely in the old days before our models of the world contained (quotations of) Y chromosomes. ”
I don’t know about that; the whole point about the “virgin birth” was that it was miraculous, i.e. physically impossible. Had they known about DNA, the story would have included God creating some DNA for “his” side of the deal. Saying that knowledge of DNA would have made the virgin birth less believable is like saying greater knowledge of classical physics would have made people more skeptical of Jesus walking on water. Impossible == Impossible.
Eli—As you said in an earlier post, it is not the testability part of MWI that poses a problem for most people with a scientific viewpoint, it is the fact that MWI came after Collapse. So the core part of the scientific method—testability/falsifiability—gives no more weight to Collapse than to MWI.
As to the “Bayesian vs. Science” question (which is really a “Metaphysics vs. Science” question), I’ll go with Science every time. The scientific method has trounced logical argument time and time again.
Even if there turns out to be cases where the “logical” answer to a problem is correct, who cares if it does not make any predictions? If it is not testable, than it also follows you can’t do anything useful with it, like cure cancer, or make better heroin.
I haven’t read Chalmers book, so I am just going by what I read here, but at the beginning of the post you promise to show the zombie world as logically impossible, but never deliver; you show that it is improbable enough to be perhaps be considered practically impossible, but since we are just dealing with a “thought experiment,” that is irrelevant. For example, I do not think that everyone around me is a zombie. In fact, I’d bet all the money I have that they aren’t. But I still don’t KNOW they aren’t, the way I KNOW that I am not.
On another note, I’m surprised at some of the ad hominem-type statements on this thread (people that don’t agree with are like creationists, people that don’t agree with me just don’t want to see the truth). On most blogs, it’s expected, but it is interesting to see it here.
(I can’t find the “rerun” version of this page, so am posting my questions here).
For all these types of experiments, how do they “aim” the particle so it hits its target from far away? It would seem that the experimenters would know pretty much where the particle is when it shoots out of the gun (or whatever), so would not the velocity be all over the place? In the post on the Heisenberg principle, there was an example of letting the sun shine through a hole in a piece of paper, which caused the photons to spread pretty widely, pretty quickly.
Does the polarization vector change as the photon moves along? It seems to be very similar to a photon’s “main” wave function, as it can be represented as a complex number (and is even displayed as an arrow, like Feynman uses). But I know those Feynman arrows spin according to the photon’s wavelength.
Finally—and this is really tripping me up—why can we put in the minus sign in the equation that you say “we will need” later, instead of a + sign? If you have two blobs of amplitude, you need to add them to get the wave function, yes? If that is not the case, I have SEVERELY misunderstood the most basic posts of this sequence.
The a priori argument that using money is important doesn’t stand up under closer >examination. If you are incapable of generalizing from in-game currency to dollars, you >won’t be capable of generalizing from poker to other activities. And player behavior >does not seem to be grossly different—take for example the fact that prediction markets >work the same with real money or fake money.
It may not be much different for prediction markets, but it is VERY different for online poker. Even if you play exactly the same with or without money, your opponents will not, and therefore you will be “training” on different data than you think. This applies especially to NL games; risking 1,000 points on one bet is a lot different than risking 1,000 dollars.
OK, I may have misunderstood his meaning. I thought he was saying that there were things he would never mention, as it would alienate people, as opposed to just not mentioning it in this post.
I suspect it is because the main post refers to quotes being “voted up/down separately,” i.e. it puts it in people’s minds that they are supposed to vote on the quotes. I do find it funny that I got 12 karma points for cutting/pasting a quote; C.S. Lewis deserves the karma points, not me (as evidenced by the fact that I have gotten a grand total of 1 point from my own original posts). If one wanted to game the karma system, posting pithy quotes is the way to go.
I know this is just re-iterating what Caledonian and Ben Jones said, but too have meaningful discussion on this subject you have to taboo “free will” and come up with a specific description of what you are trying to figure out. The most basic concept of free will is “being able to do what you desire to do,” and that is not affected one whit by determinism, or MWI, or God knowing what you are going to do in advance, etc. I know there are a lot of other more sophisticated-sounding discussions regarding this (“ah, but can you choose to desire something else”, etc) but I have yet to hear of a meaningful definition of “free will” that is affected at all by such things as MWI.
BTW, it drives me nuts when people say “well if we do not have free will, why punish criminals?” (or “we pretend free will exists so that we can punish criminals”, etc). We punish criminals so that fewer crimes happen. Whether you think those criminals have “free will” has nothing to do with the results we get by punishing them.
“ME”—I’ve noticed that people on this forum seem to label ANYTHING that has to do with conditional probability “Bayesian”. I’m not quite sure why this is; I have a hard enough time figuring out the real difference between a “frequentist” and a “Bayesian”, but reading some of these posts I get the feeling that “Bayesian” around here means “someone who knows basic logic”.
Considering the vast number of non-human animals compared to humans, the probability of being a human is vanishingly low. Therefore, chances are that if I could be an animal, I would be.
I do not really think you need an anthropic argument to prove that “you” couldn’t be an animal; it is more a matter of definition, i.e. by definition you are not an animal. For example, there is no anthropic reason that “I” couldn’t have been raised in Alabama, but what would it even mean to say that I could have been raised in Alabama? That somebody with the same exact genes and parents was raised in Alabama? In that case, it is the same as saying I have an identical twin that was raised there. The fact of the matter is that when I say “I”, I am referring to someone with all of the same genes and experiences I have. To say that “I” could have been some other human is nonsensical; to say that “I” could have been a bat is even more so.
This may be a bit pedantic, but isn’t the A->C relationship wholly contained in the A->B and B->C relationship? In other words, the only way A->C works is via B; there is no “extra” information in the A->C relationship.
I guess it would seem to me that what gets “overwritten” is the (now invalid) knowledge of where Y is, and what it is overwritten with is the new, valid position of it. I’ll have to chew on it for a while.
By the way, sort of unrelated, but I’ve always wondered why gravity acting on things is not considered a loss of entropy. For example I can drop a bowling ball from multiple distances, but it will always end up 0 feet from the ground:
B4 → B0
B3 → B0
B2 → B0
etc.
The only thing I can think of is that, when the ball hits the ground the collision creates enough heat (i.e. entropy) to balance everything out. Is that correct?
When the movie Bob Roberts came out, I was pretty conservative in my politics, but I still found the movie incredibly funny. This is a testament to how good the movie was; my enjoyment/agreement ratio was quite high.
On a related note, I think that is why I have so much appreciation for this blog; I have never found a site that I disagree with so much yet still sincerely enjoy. Again, my enjoyment/agreement ratio is through the roof.
Wow, I find that really surprising; I am hardly in tune with the “proper” terms one should use these days, but the flight attendant thing has been second nature to me for at least 10 years, and thought it was for everybody. I’d be really curious as to why you only became aware of it recently; do you not fly very often? I want to stress that I am not criticizing you or anything, my curiosity is just piqued.
And another quantum-related question. - In The Fabric of the Cosmos by Brian Greene (p. 196), he describes a setup of the two slit experiment where half of the particles have their “which way” information recorded, thus causing decoherence and not showing an interference pattern, and the other half of the particles are not measured, and thus do show an interference pattern. After the fact one can look at which photons were not measured, and these do indeed form the interference pattern.
However, he then goes on to explain an identical setup, with the difference that the decision as to whether to measure the 1⁄2 of the particles can be made many (light) years after the photons register on the screen, and only later, when the person making this decision light years away comes and tells you whether they measured or not, do you see if the unmeasured photons make an interference pattern.
This would all make sense to me IF there was no way to distinguish a totally non-interfering pattern, and a non-interfering pattern overlaid with an interfering one. Intuitively it seems like one WOULD be able to distinguish this, with a pretty high degree of confidence, by subtracting an “average” non-interfering pattern from the total pattern. Is this not the case?
BTW, I have been re-reading the QM sequence every 6 months or so since it was first posted, and get a bit more out of it each time. I am AMAZED at how it has explained things that, before reading it, seemed so freaky and inexplicable to me that it bordered on the supernatural.
So I guess I get how this works in theory, but in practice, doesn’t a particle going from A-B have SOME kind of effect that is different than if it went from B-C, even without the sensitive thingy? I don’t know if it would be from bouncing off other particles on the way, or having some kind of minute gravitational effect on the rest of the universe, or what. And if that is the case, shouldn’t the experiments always behave the as if there WERE that sensitive thingy there? Or is it really possible to set it up so there is literally NO difference in all the particle positions in the universe no matter which path is taken?
Cool! I am REALLY looking forward to this. Even if I don’t end up grasping QM after this series, at least you are taking an honest shot at it. I can’t stand it when I try to ask someone (that allegedly knows this stuff) about QM and they come back with, “it is so strange you can’t even try to understand it, but here are the results of various QM experiments”.
I have met people who exaggerate the differences [between the morality of different cultures], because they have not distinguished between differences of morality and differences of belief about facts. For example, one man said to me, “Three hundred years ago people in England were putting witches to death. Was that what you call the Rule of Human Nature or Right Conduct?” But surely the reason we do not execute witches is that we do not believe there are such things. If we did-if we really thought that there were people going about who had sold themselves to the devil and received supernatural powers from him in return and were using these powers to kill their neighbours or drive them mad or bring bad weather, surely we would all agree that if anyone deserved the death penalty, then these filthy quislings did. There is no difference of moral principle here: the difference is simply about matter of fact. It may be a great advance in knowledge not to believe in witches: there is no moral advance in not executing them when you do not think they are there. You would not call a man humane for ceasing to set mousetraps if he did so because he believed there were no mice in the house.
-C.S. Lewis