What about the fact that the best compression algorithm may be insanely expensive to run? We know the math that describes the behavior of quarks, which is to say, we can in principle generate the results of all possible experiments with quarks by solving a few equations. However doing computations with the theory is extremely expensive and it takes something like 10^15 floating point operations to compute, say, some basic properties of the proton to 1% accuracy.
The_Duck
Karma: 409
I’m pretty sure cost of resurrection isn’t his true rejection, his true rejection is more like ‘point and laugh at weirdos’.
Also for a number of commenters in the linked thread, the true rejection seems to be, “By freezing yourself you are claiming that you deserve something no one else gets, in this case immortality.”
Am I mistaken in thinking that all you’d need to do is build the centrifuge with an angled floor, so the net force experienced from gravity and (illusory) centrifugal force is straight “down” into it?
Sure, this would work in principle. But I guess it would be fantastically expensive compared to a simple building. The centrifuge would need to be really big and, unlike in 0g, would have to be powered by a big motor and supported against Mars gravity. And Mars gravity isn’t that low, so it’s unclear why you’d want to pay this expense.
n/t
The inscription is not in the Latin alphabet.
A big pie, rotating in the sky, should have apparently shorter circumference than a non-rotating one, and both with the same radii.
I can’t swallow this. Not because it is weird, but because it is inconsistent.
There is no inconsistency. In one case you are measuring the circumference with moving rulers, while in the other case you are measuring the circumference with stationary rulers. It’s not inconsistent for these two different measurements to give different results.
You don’t need GR for a rotating disk; you only need GR when there is gravity.
Having dabbled a bit in evolutionary simulations, I find that, once you have unicellular organisms, the emergence of cooperation between them is only a matter of time, and from there multicellulars form and cell specialization based on division of labor begins.
I’m very curious: in what evolutionary simulations have you seen these phenomena evolve?
This looks fun! I will participate.
A computer is no more conscious than a rock rolling down a hill—we program it by putting sticks in the rocks way to guide to a different path.
Careful!--a lot of people will bite the bullet and call the rock+stick system conscious if you put a complicated enough pattern of sticks in front of it and provide the rock+stick system with enough input and output channels by which it can interact with its surroundings.
This doesn’t seem like a good analogy to any real-world situation. The null hypothesis (“the coin really has two tails”) predicts the exact same outcome every time, so every experiment should get a p-value of 1, unless the null-hypothesis is false, in which case someone will eventually get a p-value of 0. This is a bit of a pathological case which bears little resemblance to real statistical studies.
The analogy seems pretty nice. The argument seems to be that, based on the historical record, we’re doomed to collective inaction in the face of even extraordinarily dangerous risks. I agree that the case of nukes does provide some evidence for this.
I think you paint things a little too grimly, though. We have done at least a little bit to try to mitigate the risks of this particular technology: there are ongoing efforts to prevent proliferation of nuclear weapons and reduce nuclear stockpiles. And maybe a greater risk really would provoke a more serious response.
I think the Born rule falls out pretty nicely in the Bohmian interpretation.
What frightens me is: what if I’m presented with some similar argument, and I can’t spot the flaw?
Having recognized this danger, you should probably be more skeptical of verbal arguments.
This is essentially the standard argument for why we have to quantize gravity. If the sources of the gravitational field can be in superposition, then it must be possible to superpose two different gravitational fields. But (as I think you acknowledge) this doesn’t mean that quantum mechanical deviations from GR have to be detectable at low energies.
I’d be interested to know what the correlation with financial success is for additional IQ above the mean among Ivy Leaguers.
I’m pretty sure I’ve seen a paper discussing this and probably you can find data if you google around for “iq income correlation” and similar.
Plus, it’s actually classical: it yields a full explanation of the real, physical, deterministic phenomena underlying apparently quantum ones.
Note that because of Bell’s theorem, any classical system is going to have real trouble emulating all of quantum mechanics; entanglement is going to trip it up. I know you said “replicate many aspects of quantum mechanics,” but it’s probably important to emphasize that this sort of thing is not going to lead to a classical model underlying all of QM.
I read it as saying that people have many interests in common, so pursuing “selfish” interests can also be altruistic to some extent.
every time we discover something new we find that there are more questions than answers
I don’t think that’s really true though. The advances in physics that have been worth celebrating—Newtonian mechanics, Maxwellian electromagnetism, Einsteinian relativity, the electroweak theory, QCD, etc.--have been those that answer lots and lots of questions at once and raise only a few new questions like “why this theory?” and “what about higher energies?”. Now we’re at the point where the Standard Model and GR together answer almost any question you can ask about how the world works, and there are relatively few questions remaining, like the problem of quantum gravity. Think how much more narrow and neatly-posed this problem is compared to the pre-Newtonian problem of explaining all of Nature!
I already have this and it’s horrible.