Does it bother anyone else that the world doesn’t even decompose uniquely into physical objects?
Ramana Kumar
It’s not the law of the excluded middle that’s the problem, it’s the jester’s assumption that the entire statement “either this …, or this..., but not both” is true. The jester reasons correctly under his assumptions, but fails to realize that he still has to discharge those assumptions before reaching reality.
Canberra, Australia, too.
What are the dimensions of thingspace?
Are “number of sides”, “IQ”, “age”, and “font” all dimensions?
And what are the points in thingspace? It sounds like they include anything that is somewhat “mother” and anything that is somewhat “robin”. (And I should think thingspace is a point in thingspace too.)
I think this post makes some good points, the main one, for me, being that words are centers of (indefinitely extending) clusters rather than boundaries of sets. But I think the notion of thingspace rests on shaky foundations: it assumes the world is broken down into things and those things have attributes.
We don’t all share the same thingspace do we?
Is there a page for “how to use this website” somewhere that I’ve missed? For the most part, it is intuitive. But I got a bit worried when I clicked “Report” on some spam and it asked me “Are you sure?”. No I’m not sure—I’m just guessing what “Report” means and what it does...
I’d also be interested in knowing how Karma works, who (if anyone) is notified about my comments, what Voting does, etc… Just a general overview of how the website works. And if this information isn’t all in one place already maybe it should be.
But the way physics really works, as far as we can tell, is that there is only the most basic level—the elementary particle fields and fundamental forces.
To clarify (actually, to push this further): there is only one thing (the universe) - because surely breaking the thing down into parts (such as objects) which in turn lets you notice relations between parts (which in turn lets you see time, for example) -- surely all that is stuff done by modelers of reality and not by reality itself? I’m trying to say that the universe isn’t pre-parsed (if that makes any sense...)
Even if there is only one type of thing ‘x’, our reality (which is, above all, dynamic) seems to require a relationship and interaction between ‘x’ and ′ ~x’. I’d say, logically, reality needs at least two kinds of things.
Logic can only compel models.
You seem to be saying “Let x denote the universe. ~x is then a valid term. So ~x must denote something that isn’t x, thus there are two things!” There are surface problems with this such as that x may not be of type boolean, and that you’re just assuming every term denotes something. But the important problem is simpler: we can use logic to deduce things about our models, but logic doesn’t touch reality itself (apart from the part of reality that is us).
What do you mean by “reality is dynamic”? Have you read Timeless Physics?
an algorithm is a model in our mind to describe the similarities of those physical systems implementing it
a number is a model like that as well, right? (may be relevant to the comments below)
Indeed, what would it mean for reality to be multi-leveled? (This would address tcpkac’s comment too.)
For Polymath the kind of desired result of collaboration is clear to me: a (new) (dis-) proof of a mathematical statement.
What is the kind of desired result of collaborating rationalists?
From the talk about prediction markets it seems that “accurate predictions” might be one answer. But predictions of what? Would we need to aggregate our values to decide what we want to predict?
The phrase in Robin’s post was “join together to believe truth”, so perhaps the desired result is more true beliefs (in more heads)? Did you envision making things that are more likely to be true more visible, so that they become defaults? In other words, caching the results of truth-seeking so they can be easily shared by more people?
It makes sense to humans (modelers), who can recognize hands, to say “this hand is implemented using quarks”, and “that hand is implemented using sand (which, incidentally, is implemented using quarks)”. But when we say “quarks fully describe a hand” I think part of the meaning is an acknowledgment that reducing to quarks gets you closer to the territory. (Hands are only in our maps.)
Do you take the real universe to be the (single) point in the universal QM configuration space, along with the single complex value of the universal wavefunction?
No, the universe is an (evolving) amplitude distribution over configuration space.
I’m not what “superposition state” means, but my guess is that the answer to “Are these superposition states not fundamental?” is “Yes they are”.
I’d also love to know the answer to Peter’s question… A similar question is whether we should expect all worlds to eventually become mangled (assuming the “mangled worlds” model). I understand “world” to mean “somewhat isolated blob of amplitude in an amplitude distribution”—is that right?
Is “the world is full of people” an example of the mind-projection fallacy? (Compare to “we can both recognize the pattern ‘person’ at a high-level in our multi-leveled models of levelless reality”)
Then I’m still unclear about what a world is. Care to explain?
Does the “world” in “many worlds” refer to the same thing as “blob” in this post?
Eliezer gave a simpler answer to my question: “yes”. (I’m still not sure what yours means.)
Back to Peter’s question. What makes you say decoherence doesn’t happen on the Planck time scale? Can you explain that further?
I have a question similar to Nate’s. How does a half-silvered mirror work? More specifically, what is it about light or about half-silvered mirrors that means there are two paths for a photon out of a half-silvered mirror (compared to a full mirror, for example)? My guess at the moment is that the answer might start “light doesn’t actually travel in straight lines...”...
You can’t explain yourself? I followed your link. It looks like part of why half-silvered mirrors “work” for the purpose of seeing someone without them seeing you is that one side is kept brightly lit while the spying side is kept dark. I think “beam-splitter” is possibly a more accurate term for my question, which I looked up and found
Another design is the use of a half-silvered mirror. This is a plate of glass with a thin coating of aluminum (usually deposited from aluminum vapor) with the thickness of the aluminum coating such that part, typically half, of light incident at a 45 degree angle is transmitted, and the remainder reflected.
(Wikipedia) Of course, this doesn’t actually explain anything—why should there be a thickness of aluminum such that part of the light is reflected while the remainder is transmitted?
Would a beam-splitter still work if the silvered and non-silvered parts were much larger (i.e. a chunky block pattern)? If you fired a single photon at that would it still make sense to calculate amplitude as you do in this post (considering the two outward paths and multiplying one by i, the other by 1)? Perhaps the distance between a silvered part and a non-silvered part needs to be close to the wavelength of the photon?
“Trace it back to the “real” world, and you find that to have one object plus another of the same object (but distinct) requires subtle physical conditions.”
Are there objects and this notion of “same but distinct” in the “real” world? I think if you stop at objects, you haven’t traced back far enough. (By the way has there been much/any discussion of objects on LW that I’ve missed?)