Re: Interesting Google tech talk on QM
Mermin doesn't start too promisingly... My complete answer to the late 19th century question “what is electrodynamics trying to tell us” would simply be this: *Fields in empty space have physical reality; the medium that supports them does not. * Having thus removed the mystery from electrodynamics, let me immediately do the same for quantum mechanics: *Correlations have physical reality; that which they correlate does not. * In my opinion this isn't doing the same thing. Doing the same thing would involve electrodynamics telling us that space doesn't exist. The aether turned out to be superfluous, but fields still have space to propagate in. Having correlations between non-existent things is a whole bigger step into the abstract. Still, onwards... -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: Interesting Google tech talk on QM
On the plus side, this only correlations idea reminds me of the idea that fundamental particles don't actually exist but are really only the binding energy holding them together... :-) On 23 April 2014 20:48, LizR lizj...@gmail.com wrote: Mermin doesn't start too promisingly... My complete answer to the late 19th century question “what is electrodynamics trying to tell us” would simply be this: *Fields in empty space have physical reality; the medium that supports them does not. * Having thus removed the mystery from electrodynamics, let me immediately do the same for quantum mechanics: *Correlations have physical reality; that which they correlate does not. * In my opinion this isn't doing the same thing. Doing the same thing would involve electrodynamics telling us that space doesn't exist. The aether turned out to be superfluous, but fields still have space to propagate in. Having correlations between non-existent things is a whole bigger step into the abstract. Still, onwards... -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: Interesting Google tech talk on QM
Hi Liz, The billions make sense to me, to be honest. Even before the earth, we still didn't exist. It sounds like poetic liberty for a mind blowing amount of time. Cheers Telmo. On Wed, Apr 23, 2014 at 4:23 AM, LizR lizj...@gmail.com wrote: I was just a bit surprised at his use of billions rather than millions which in context seems rather extravagant. Actually google indicates that I am not alone in wondering this. http://www.telecomtally.com/blog/2006/12/did_mark_twain_1.html Wikiquote http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Mark_Twainalso agrees with me :-) I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it. - Quoted in Dawkins, Richardhttp://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Richard_Dawkins(2006). A Much Needed Gap?. *The God Delusion*. Bantam Press. p. 354. ISBN 0-618-68000-4http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Special:BookSources/0618680004 ., but no source is given. *Note that during Twain's life the Age of the Earth http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_the_Earth was thought to be measured in tens of millions not billions of years.* -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: Interesting Google tech talk on QM
On Tue, Apr 22, 2014 at 2:03 AM, Pierz pier...@gmail.com wrote: Just came across this presentation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dEaecUuEqfc It's a bit long, but I'd be interested to hear anyone's thoughts who is knowledgeable on QM. I don't follow the maths, but I kind of got the gist. What intrigued me was his interpretation of QM and I'm wondering if anyone can throw any more light on it. He makes a lot of jumps which are obviously clear in his mind but hard to follow. He says that MWI is supportable by the maths, but that he prefers a zero universes interpretation, according to which we are classical simulations in a quantum computer. I'm not sure I follow this. I mean, I can follow the idea of being a classical simulation in a quantum computer, but I can't see how this is different from MWI, except by the manoeuvre of declaring other universes to be unreal because they can never practically interact with 'our' branch. I guess what interested me was the possibility of a coherent alternative to MWI (because frankly MWI scares the willies out of me), but in spite of what he said, I couldn't see what it was... Thanks Pierz, I really enjoyed this talk. Maybe because of the speaker's background in computer science, I feel he speaks my language more than the real physicists. My naive impression, also influenced by Bruno's comp, is like you say that I don't see the difference between MWI and zero universes. I tend to think that the worlds in MWI are the first-person views, and that there is only one mind, ultimately. On the other hand, I heard about the transactional interpretation of QM for the first time, which is also intriguing. Best, Telmo. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: Interesting Google tech talk on QM
On 23 April 2014 22:29, Telmo Menezes te...@telmomenezes.com wrote: Hi Liz, The billions make sense to me, to be honest. Even before the earth, we still didn't exist. It sounds like poetic liberty for a mind blowing amount of time. Sure, but I think at the time millions of years was a mind-blowing amount of time - actually it still is - and it would appear the comment doesn't have any known source. So although I'd be happily proved wrong on this, it just feels a bit anachronistic for Samuel Clemens. Maybe just my personal bias. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: Interesting Google tech talk on QM
Oh, and to really stick my neck out, I think the phrase billions and billions became a cliché through Carl Sagan using it in the TV programme Cosmos so I suspect (but have zero proof) that this quote is attributed to Sam Clemens but is in fact either made up or misquoted. My theory is that someone either invented it or altered it from an original quote which didn't include that phrase, and that they did so more recently than the original broadcast of Cosmos which I think was in the 1980s... :-) Just a hunch, my dear Watson. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: Interesting Google tech talk on QM
Actually Sagan may not have used the phrase billions and billions but it (too?) may have been a misquote that came to be associated with him (like play it again, Sam and beam me up, Scotty!) On 23 April 2014 23:16, LizR lizj...@gmail.com wrote: Oh, and to really stick my neck out, I think the phrase billions and billions became a cliché through Carl Sagan using it in the TV programme Cosmos so I suspect (but have zero proof) that this quote is attributed to Sam Clemens but is in fact either made up or misquoted. My theory is that someone either invented it or altered it from an original quote which didn't include that phrase, and that they did so more recently than the original broadcast of Cosmos which I think was in the 1980s... :-) Just a hunch, my dear Watson. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: Interesting Google tech talk on QM
On Wed, Apr 23, 2014 at 1:16 PM, LizR lizj...@gmail.com wrote: Oh, and to really stick my neck out, I think the phrase billions and billions became a cliché through Carl Sagan using it in the TV programme Cosmos so I suspect (but have zero proof) that this quote is attributed to Sam Clemens but is in fact either made up or misquoted. Good point! The billions and billions thing is interesting, because Sagan never actually used that precise idiom, although it became very popular. He discusses this in The Demon-Hunted World. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Sagan#Phrase_.27billions_and_billions.27 Another similar example is Play it again, Sam!, which surprisingly is never said in that precise from in Casablanca. I have a friend who researches the propagation of cultural fragments like this, and it's quite fascinating. My theory is that someone either invented it or altered it from an original quote which didn't include that phrase, and that they did so more recently than the original broadcast of Cosmos which I think was in the 1980s... :-) Just a hunch, my dear Watson. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: Interesting Google tech talk on QM
On Wed, Apr 23, 2014 at 1:19 PM, LizR lizj...@gmail.com wrote: Actually Sagan may not have used the phrase billions and billions but it (too?) may have been a misquote that came to be associated with him (like play it again, Sam and beam me up, Scotty!) Oops, sorry for stepping on your toes :) I didn't know that beam me up, Scotty! was also a misquote (!) I will have to agree with John Lydon: the written word is a lie! On 23 April 2014 23:16, LizR lizj...@gmail.com wrote: Oh, and to really stick my neck out, I think the phrase billions and billions became a cliché through Carl Sagan using it in the TV programme Cosmos so I suspect (but have zero proof) that this quote is attributed to Sam Clemens but is in fact either made up or misquoted. My theory is that someone either invented it or altered it from an original quote which didn't include that phrase, and that they did so more recently than the original broadcast of Cosmos which I think was in the 1980s... :-) Just a hunch, my dear Watson. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: Interesting Google tech talk on QM
On Tuesday, April 22, 2014 11:12:53 PM UTC+10, Brent wrote: On 4/22/2014 4:54 AM, Pierz wrote: Thanks Brent. I read Mermin and am both wiser and none-the. It seems to me in this paper he is chickening out by saying that QM shouldn't really think about the conscious observer, because that leads to the fairy tale of many worlds. Instead it should consider consciousness to reside outside the competent scope of a physical theory. I don't think he means that. He just means that it's a separate question from the interpretation of QM and that it's a mistake to mix them together. It's kind of like his answer is to say don't ask those questions. And he explicitly repudiates the notion that it's all in your head or that a quantum state is a summary of your knowledge of the system. The correlations are objective. What I liked about the paper though was the notion of correlations without correlata (which Garrett invokes) - the idea that quantum theory is about (and only about) systemic relationships makes a lot of sense. To take the answer to what is QM telling us? just a little further philosophically than what Mermim is prepared to, I'd say it's telling us (for one thing) that we've hit the limits of atomism. We're bouncing off the boundary of the reductionistic epistemology. Anyway, sadly I haven't yet seen anything that could supply a cogent alternative to MWI. I'll move on to the other papers tomorrow night... :) Chris Fuchs is the main proponent of quantum Bayesianism, which also takes the wave-function to just be a summary of one's knowledge of the system - and so there is nothing surprising about it collapsing when you get new information. Of course another alternative is an objective collapse theory like GRW. I'm just now reading a book by Ghirardi,Sneaking a Look at God's Cards which surveys the experiments that force the weirdness of QM on us and the various interpretations. Of course he devotes a special chapter to GRW theory, but he is very even handed. I'm not sure why you're worried about MWI though. Is it because you read Divide by Infinity? I don't think that's what MWI really implies. No I never read that, but hell yeah, MWI worries me! Doesn't it worry you? I mean I know at one level that in a very real sense it doesn't matter whether it's true or not, since the other universes can never affect me, but at another the reality that everything happens to me that I can imagine is just plain terrifying. And the 'me' isn't just the versions of me that are still called by my name, I can't escape the conclusion that I am everyone and everyone is me and that *everyone's* experience is my experience at some level. If MWI ever does become the accepted conception of reality, we have a huge amount of philosophical reorientation ahead of us. For instance, if I take some risk (like drink-driving, a relevant topic on another thread), and 'get away with it', MWI suggests I am still responsible for other realities in which I crashed and injured or killed myself and/or others. My whole approach to risk management becomes quite different if all outcomes are realised. It no longer makes sense to think about if something will happen to me in the future. I have to accept that it all will happen, it's just that all those future mes won't know about the other ones, so they will all have the impression of a single outcome. It's a disorienting and disturbing thought. Of course it should't lead to fatalism, since one's choices are part of the deterministic system that determines the 'weight' of certain futures - and I suppose it should actually lead to a kind of 'radical acceptance'. There's no point thinking why me? or what bad luck, since your experiencing this, and indeed everything, is inevitable. But then I console myself by thinking that any human-level qualitative interpretation of this level of reality is mistaken, a kind of confusion of levels. And still it horrifies me... (But like Bruno, my dedication to truth keeps me from rejecting it purely because I hate it. The logic is very compelling.) Brent On Tuesday, April 22, 2014 3:36:16 PM UTC+10, Brent wrote: Read Mermin who has written some popular papers on The Ithaca Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics, e.g. http://arxiv.org/pdf/quant-ph/9801057.pdf and the paper by Adami and Cerf, which is where Garrett gets his talk, arxiv.org/pdf/quant-ph/0405005** They take an information theoric approach to the quantum measurement problem and show that a measurement can only get you part of the information in the quantum state. From the MWI standpoint this 'other information' is in the other world branch. Mermin and Adami and also Fuchs (http://arxiv.org/pdf/1003.5209.pdfhttp://www.google.com/url?q=http%3A%2F%2Farxiv.org%2Fpdf%2F1003.5209.pdfsa=Dsntz=1usg=AFQjCNESAnRXSOhSA3Y_kMt1kkshVPgd_w) take a more instrumentalist approach in
Re: Interesting Google tech talk on QM
On Wednesday, April 23, 2014 6:48:09 PM UTC+10, Liz R wrote: Mermin doesn't start too promisingly... My complete answer to the late 19th century question “what is electrodynamics trying to tell us” would simply be this: *Fields in empty space have physical reality; the medium that supports them does not. * Having thus removed the mystery from electrodynamics, let me immediately do the same for quantum mechanics: *Correlations have physical reality; that which they correlate does not. * In my opinion this isn't doing the same thing. Doing the same thing would involve electrodynamics telling us that space doesn't exist. The aether turned out to be superfluous, but fields still have space to propagate in. Having correlations between non-existent things is a whole bigger step into the abstract. Still, onwards... I disagree. It might not be doing the exact same thing, but it is doing something analogous. The Newtonian physicist could not imagine empty space being able to support waves without there being some material there, some stuff. That was eventually proved unnecessary and people got used to physical reality being less stuff-y than they'd thought. The jump to correlations without correlata is quite analogous. It's saying only relationships are real, that there are no underlying things that exist purely in and for themselves. That is very much in tune with a Buddhist understanding of the lack of intrinsic existence of things. The idea of things (including teeny weeny things like particles) is in my view a kind of cognitive evolutionary hang-over of being tool-using apes. We like things to be thing-y and stuff-y because we can then get a grip on them and use them. But QM is telling us that reality, whatever that is, does not hold the same bias, and doesn't in fact even understand what we are talking about. That one idea is really the point of the paper and it just strikes me intuitively as being right on. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: Interesting Google tech talk on QM
On Wed, Apr 23, 2014 at 7:08 AM, LizR lizj...@gmail.com wrote: On 23 April 2014 22:29, Telmo Menezes te...@telmomenezes.com wrote: Hi Liz, The billions make sense to me, to be honest. Even before the earth, we still didn't exist. It sounds like poetic liberty for a mind blowing amount of time. Sure, but I think at the time millions of years was a mind-blowing amount of time - actually it still is - and it would appear the comment doesn't have any known source. So although I'd be happily proved wrong on this, it just feels a bit anachronistic for Samuel Clemens. Maybe just my personal bias. The people at the snopes board did some looking around for the quote at http://message.snopes.com/showthread.php?t=81874 and couldn't find any appearances before 2002, so it's probably not a real quote. However, they did turn up the following quote from Twain's autobiography which the fake quote was probably a paraphrase of: Annihilation has no terrors for me, because I have already tried it before I was born—a hundred million years—and I have suffered more in an hour, in this life, than I remember to have suffered in the whole hundred million years put together. see http://harpers.org/blog/2008/03/no-terrors-for-me/ for confirmation. Jesse -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: cannabis, cancer and mechanism, and climate.
On 22 Apr 2014, at 05:27, 'Chris de Morsella cdemorse...@yahoo.com' via Everything List wrote: At some level, there is only that, which is personally experienced... each has to know God on their own, by their own way, in their own heart. No one can - beyond, perhaps pointing out the way to some extent -- teach or lead anyone down this path. A spiritual quest is quintessentially a personal quest. Yes, truth is in our head, and with comp, it means we can also search it in the head of any (reasonable) machine. Spiritual quest is personal, but yet, might concern everybody. Some buddhist said that it is enough that one man is enlightened for all men being enlightened, and some bodhisattva said that the genuine bodhisattva will go to heaven only after every one has. Of course this leads to some problems in case there are two bodhisattvas, but buddhism is not afraid of those little technical difficulties. It can even cultivate them, to help people not taking them too much literally, like with the zen koans. Spiritual quest is personal, but the result are often described as anti-personal, like killing the ego, merging with the one, becoming god, realizing the unity/unicity of consciousness, etc. Love also is personal, and cannot be enforced. There are many things like that. The definition by Theaetetus of the notion of knowledge, when applied to Gödel's arithmetical provability predicate ([]A), and its intensional variants, suggests many such annuli, where truth not only extends the machines abilities to communicate rationally, but where the attempts to communicate them only forces or builds the counter- example(*). The notion of god maximizes the gap between use and mention. Somehow, it looks like only the devil dares the mention of god, especially in normative statements. With comp god is creative and god is destructive. Lao-tseu seems right: the foolish talks, the wise stays mute. Sound rich machines say already something similar: t - ~[]t. (t = ~[]f ) Bruno (*) There are three important most obvious annuli: G* \ G, Z* \ Z, and X* \ X, and their computationalist 1 variants (with p - []p for the atomic sentences). Amazingly, for knowledge itself, the annuli is empty: S4Grz* \ S4Grz is empty (and S4Grz1* \ S4Grz1 too). http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: Interesting Google tech talk on QM
On 23 Apr 2014, at 13:33, Pierz wrote: On Tuesday, April 22, 2014 11:12:53 PM UTC+10, Brent wrote: On 4/22/2014 4:54 AM, Pierz wrote: Thanks Brent. I read Mermin and am both wiser and none-the. It seems to me in this paper he is chickening out by saying that QM shouldn't really think about the conscious observer, because that leads to the fairy tale of many worlds. Instead it should consider consciousness to reside outside the competent scope of a physical theory. I don't think he means that. He just means that it's a separate question from the interpretation of QM and that it's a mistake to mix them together. It's kind of like his answer is to say don't ask those questions. And he explicitly repudiates the notion that it's all in your head or that a quantum state is a summary of your knowledge of the system. The correlations are objective. What I liked about the paper though was the notion of correlations without correlata (which Garrett invokes) - the idea that quantum theory is about (and only about) systemic relationships makes a lot of sense. To take the answer to what is QM telling us? just a little further philosophically than what Mermim is prepared to, I'd say it's telling us (for one thing) that we've hit the limits of atomism. We're bouncing off the boundary of the reductionistic epistemology. Anyway, sadly I haven't yet seen anything that could supply a cogent alternative to MWI. I'll move on to the other papers tomorrow night... :) Chris Fuchs is the main proponent of quantum Bayesianism, which also takes the wave-function to just be a summary of one's knowledge of the system - and so there is nothing surprising about it collapsing when you get new information. Of course another alternative is an objective collapse theory like GRW. I'm just now reading a book by Ghirardi,Sneaking a Look at God's Cards which surveys the experiments that force the weirdness of QM on us and the various interpretations. Of course he devotes a special chapter to GRW theory, but he is very even handed. I'm not sure why you're worried about MWI though. Is it because you read Divide by Infinity? I don't think that's what MWI really implies. No I never read that, but hell yeah, MWI worries me! Doesn't it worry you? I mean I know at one level that in a very real sense it doesn't matter whether it's true or not, since the other universes can never affect me, but at another the reality that everything happens to me that I can imagine is just plain terrifying. And the 'me' isn't just the versions of me that are still called by my name, I can't escape the conclusion that I am everyone and everyone is me and that *everyone's* experience is my experience at some level. If MWI ever does become the accepted conception of reality, we have a huge amount of philosophical reorientation ahead of us. For instance, if I take some risk (like drink-driving, a relevant topic on another thread), and 'get away with it', MWI suggests I am still responsible for other realities in which I crashed and injured or killed myself and/or others. That reminds me on a difference that someone made between, I think, catholic and protestant (say). - A catholic go to heaven if and only if he do only good, or at least not bad, things during his life. (of course this can lead to unfairness, as some people can do the bad only due to contingent factors in their life, like a war, or a trauma, etc.) So, apparently: - A protestant go to heaven if and only if he do only the good in his life but also in all its lives. It is easy to do only the good when you get an happy family, in a economically working society so that you get a nice job, and a nice love partner and nice kids, and when you can drink and smoke what you want, even drink raw milk! Apparently some God want to examine closely what you would do in a world with catastrophic family, in perverse economy where eventually you can't even drink raw milk! My whole approach to risk management becomes quite different if all outcomes are realised. It no longer makes sense to think about if something will happen to me in the future. I have to accept that it all will happen, it's just that all those future mes won't know about the other ones, so they will all have the impression of a single outcome. It's a disorienting and disturbing thought. Of course it should't lead to fatalism, since one's choices are part of the deterministic system that determines the 'weight' of certain futures - OK. and I suppose it should actually lead to a kind of 'radical acceptance'. But then you have to accept the non-acceptance too. It is where we can get close to inconsistency, if not insanity. There's no point thinking why me? or what bad luck, since your experiencing this, and indeed everything, is inevitable. But then I console myself by thinking that any
Re: Interesting Google tech talk on QM
On Wed, Apr 23, 2014 at 6:10 PM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: On 23 Apr 2014, at 13:33, Pierz wrote: On Tuesday, April 22, 2014 11:12:53 PM UTC+10, Brent wrote: On 4/22/2014 4:54 AM, Pierz wrote: Thanks Brent. I read Mermin and am both wiser and none-the. It seems to me in this paper he is chickening out by saying that QM shouldn't really think about the conscious observer, because that leads to the fairy tale of many worlds. Instead it should consider consciousness to reside outside the competent scope of a physical theory. I don't think he means that. He just means that it's a separate question from the interpretation of QM and that it's a mistake to mix them together. It's kind of like his answer is to say don't ask those questions. And he explicitly repudiates the notion that it's all in your head or that a quantum state is a summary of your knowledge of the system. The correlations are objective. What I liked about the paper though was the notion of correlations without correlata (which Garrett invokes) - the idea that quantum theory is about (and only about) systemic relationships makes a lot of sense. To take the answer to what is QM telling us? just a little further philosophically than what Mermim is prepared to, I'd say it's telling us (for one thing) that we've hit the limits of atomism. We're bouncing off the boundary of the reductionistic epistemology. Anyway, sadly I haven't yet seen anything that could supply a cogent alternative to MWI. I'll move on to the other papers tomorrow night... :) Chris Fuchs is the main proponent of quantum Bayesianism, which also takes the wave-function to just be a summary of one's knowledge of the system - and so there is nothing surprising about it collapsing when you get new information. Of course another alternative is an objective collapse theory like GRW. I'm just now reading a book by Ghirardi,Sneaking a Look at God's Cards which surveys the experiments that force the weirdness of QM on us and the various interpretations. Of course he devotes a special chapter to GRW theory, but he is very even handed. I'm not sure why you're worried about MWI though. Is it because you read Divide by Infinity? I don't think that's what MWI really implies. No I never read that, but hell yeah, MWI worries me! Doesn't it worry you? I mean I know at one level that in a very real sense it doesn't matter whether it's true or not, since the other universes can never affect me, but at another the reality that everything happens to me that I can imagine is just plain terrifying. And the 'me' isn't just the versions of me that are still called by my name, I can't escape the conclusion that I am everyone and everyone is me and that *everyone's* experience is my experience at some level. If MWI ever does become the accepted conception of reality, we have a huge amount of philosophical reorientation ahead of us. For instance, if I take some risk (like drink-driving, a relevant topic on another thread), and 'get away with it', MWI suggests I am still responsible for other realities in which I crashed and injured or killed myself and/or others. That reminds me on a difference that someone made between, I think, catholic and protestant (say). - A catholic go to heaven if and only if he do only good, or at least not bad, things during his life. (of course this can lead to unfairness, as some people can do the bad only due to contingent factors in their life, like a war, or a trauma, etc.) So, apparently: - A protestant go to heaven if and only if he do only the good in his life but also in all its lives. It is easy to do only the good when you get an happy family, in a economically working society so that you get a nice job, and a nice love partner and nice kids, and when you can drink and smoke what you want, even drink raw milk! Apparently some God want to examine closely what you would do in a world with catastrophic family, in perverse economy where eventually you can't even drink raw milk! My whole approach to risk management becomes quite different if all outcomes are realised. It no longer makes sense to think about if something will happen to me in the future. I have to accept that it all will happen, it's just that all those future mes won't know about the other ones, so they will all have the impression of a single outcome. It's a disorienting and disturbing thought. Of course it should't lead to fatalism, since one's choices are part of the deterministic system that determines the 'weight' of certain futures - OK. and I suppose it should actually lead to a kind of 'radical acceptance'. But then you have to accept the non-acceptance too. It is where we can get close to inconsistency, if not insanity. There's no point thinking why me? or what bad luck, since your experiencing this, and indeed everything, is inevitable. But then I console myself by
Re: Interesting Google tech talk on QM
On 23 Apr 2014, at 13:08, LizR wrote: On 23 April 2014 22:29, Telmo Menezes te...@telmomenezes.com wrote: Hi Liz, The billions make sense to me, to be honest. Even before the earth, we still didn't exist. It sounds like poetic liberty for a mind blowing amount of time. Sure, but I think at the time millions of years was a mind-blowing amount of time - actually it still is - and it would appear the comment doesn't have any known source. So although I'd be happily proved wrong on this, it just feels a bit anachronistic for Samuel Clemens. Maybe just my personal bias. Samuel Clemens? Was is not Mark Twain? I missed a post perhaps. Do someone know the estimate of the age of the universe at the time of Mark Twain? Einstein though it was infinite, and I thought that many physicists (including believer in Big Bang(s)) don't exclude that. (And if we are digital machine, we have to take *all* true sigma_1 sentences, not just the e^iH, and their linear superpositions, and that is *very* big). cf On 23 April 2014 11:37, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: I do not fear death, in view of the fact that I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it.' --- Mark Twain -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
RE: Interesting Google tech talk on QM
From: everything-list@googlegroups.com [mailto:everything-list@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Bruno Marchal Sent: Wednesday, April 23, 2014 9:26 AM To: everything-list@googlegroups.com Subject: Re: Interesting Google tech talk on QM On 23 Apr 2014, at 13:08, LizR wrote: On 23 April 2014 22:29, Telmo Menezes te...@telmomenezes.com wrote: Hi Liz, The billions make sense to me, to be honest. Even before the earth, we still didn't exist. It sounds like poetic liberty for a mind blowing amount of time. Sure, but I think at the time millions of years was a mind-blowing amount of time - actually it still is - and it would appear the comment doesn't have any known source. So although I'd be happily proved wrong on this, it just feels a bit anachronistic for Samuel Clemens. Maybe just my personal bias. Samuel Clemens? Was is not Mark Twain? I missed a post perhaps. Mark Twain was the pen name of the author Samuel Clemens - so one and the same. Do someone know the estimate of the age of the universe at the time of Mark Twain? Einstein though it was infinite, and I thought that many physicists (including believer in Big Bang(s)) don't exclude that. Didn't most people still subscribe to that English or Scottish Bishops calculation based on bible verse that concluded the earth and the universe was some 6000 or so years ago in 4400 BC? There are far too many, in this country at least - who still do believe in this fairy tale. Chris (And if we are digital machine, we have to take *all* true sigma_1 sentences, not just the e^iH, and their linear superpositions, and that is *very* big). cf On 23 April 2014 11:37, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: I do not fear death, in view of the fact that I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it.' --- Mark Twain -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: Interesting Google tech talk on QM
On 23 Apr 2014, at 13:56, Pierz wrote: On Wednesday, April 23, 2014 6:48:09 PM UTC+10, Liz R wrote: Mermin doesn't start too promisingly... My complete answer to the late 19th century question what is electrodynamics trying to tell us would simply be this: Fields in empty space have physical reality; the medium that supports them does not. Having thus removed the mystery from electrodynamics, let me immediately do the same for quantum mechanics: Correlations have physical reality; that which they correlate does not. In my opinion this isn't doing the same thing. Doing the same thing would involve electrodynamics telling us that space doesn't exist. The aether turned out to be superfluous, but fields still have space to propagate in. Having correlations between non-existent things is a whole bigger step into the abstract. Still, onwards... I disagree. It might not be doing the exact same thing, but it is doing something analogous. The Newtonian physicist could not imagine empty space being able to support waves without there being some material there, some stuff. That was eventually proved unnecessary and people got used to physical reality being less stuff-y than they'd thought. The jump to correlations without correlata is quite analogous. It's saying only relationships are real, that there are no underlying things that exist purely in and for themselves. That is very much in tune with a Buddhist understanding of the lack of intrinsic existence of things. Yes, but we have to be careful, because if this is applied to person, the boss can replaced you by someone else, or by a machine, and the functionality of the industry is preserved, but you see things differently (you lost your job). You might take a look on category theory, which defines objects of certain type entirely by their relation with objects of similar type. That leads to a rather abstract theory, which still introduces an amazing structure reflecting many mathematical construction. The idea of things (including teeny weeny things like particles) is in my view a kind of cognitive evolutionary hang-over of being tool-using apes. We like things to be thing-y and stuff-y because we can then get a grip on them and use them. But QM is telling us that reality, whatever that is, does not hold the same bias, and doesn't in fact even understand what we are talking about. That one idea is really the point of the paper and it just strikes me intuitively as being right on. Physicists are fuzzy about what exists. In first order analysis the real number exist, but there are no definable natural numbers. You can't really see the difference between 0 and the many 0.0. But in first order real or complex trigonometry you get the natural numbers (by sin(2*pi*x)), and Turing universality. I think Mermin and even Fuch are right, but they talk only on the physical, which might indeed be purely relational, and should be if comp is true. It is more a many relative state, or relative computational state theory. The 3p extensions are relational, OK, but some 1p intensions are not purely relational, or only so in god's eye, so they have relation with absolute token-like thing, inevitably true and known, although not necessarily recognizable as such, nor rationally justifiable, nor even definable (like a headache, to give an example, or some bliss, or the glee of the right guitar tone at the right time, or just after). Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: Interesting Google tech talk on QM
On 23 Apr 2014, at 14:42, Jesse Mazer and Liz wrote: snip Annihilation has no terrors for me, because I have already tried it before I was born--a hundred million years--and I have suffered more in an hour, in this life, than I remember to have suffered in the whole hundred million years put together. Want to be reminded? Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: Interesting Google tech talk on QM
On 23 Apr 2014, at 14:42, Jesse Mazer wrote: On Wed, Apr 23, 2014 at 7:08 AM, LizR lizj...@gmail.com wrote: On 23 April 2014 22:29, Telmo Menezes te...@telmomenezes.com wrote: Hi Liz, The billions make sense to me, to be honest. Even before the earth, we still didn't exist. It sounds like poetic liberty for a mind blowing amount of time. Sure, but I think at the time millions of years was a mind-blowing amount of time - actually it still is - and it would appear the comment doesn't have any known source. So although I'd be happily proved wrong on this, it just feels a bit anachronistic for Samuel Clemens. Maybe just my personal bias. The people at the snopes board did some looking around for the quote at http://message.snopes.com/showthread.php?t=81874 and couldn't find any appearances before 2002, so it's probably not a real quote. However, they did turn up the following quote from Twain's autobiography which the fake quote was probably a paraphrase of: Annihilation has no terrors for me, because I have already tried it before I was born--a hundred million years--and I have suffered more in an hour, in this life, than I remember to have suffered in the whole hundred million years put together. see http://harpers.org/blog/2008/03/no-terrors-for-me/ for confirmation. Thanks, and Mark Twain indeed seems to remember the bright side, (which was unclear out of context) and obviously: the end: It is understandable that when I speak from the grave it is not a spirit that is speaking; it is a nothing; it is an emptiness; it is a vacancy; it is a something that has neither feeling nor consciousness. It does not know what it is saying. It is not aware that it is saying anything at all, therefore it can speak frankly and freely, since it cannot know that it is inflicting pain, discomfort, or offense of any kind. -Mark Twain, Is very funny. == Annihilation has no terrors for me, because I have already tried it before I was born-a hundred million years-and I have suffered more in an hour, in this life, than I remember to have suffered in the whole hundred million years put together. There was a peace, a serenity, an absence of all sense of responsibility, an absence of worry, an absence of care, grief, perplexity; and the presence of a deep content and unbroken satisfaction in that hundred million years of holiday which I look back upon with a tender longing and with a grateful desire to resume, when the opportunity comes. It is understandable that when I speak from the grave it is not a spirit that is speaking; it is a nothing; it is an emptiness; it is a vacancy; it is a something that has neither feeling nor consciousness. It does not know what it is saying. It is not aware that it is saying anything at all, therefore it can speak frankly and freely, since it cannot know that it is inflicting pain, discomfort, or offense of any kind -Mark Twain Bruno Jesse -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: Interesting Google tech talk on QM
On 23 Apr 2014, at 18:29, Platonist Guitar Cowboy wrote: On Wed, Apr 23, 2014 at 6:10 PM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: On 23 Apr 2014, at 13:33, Pierz wrote: On Tuesday, April 22, 2014 11:12:53 PM UTC+10, Brent wrote: On 4/22/2014 4:54 AM, Pierz wrote: Thanks Brent. I read Mermin and am both wiser and none-the. It seems to me in this paper he is chickening out by saying that QM shouldn't really think about the conscious observer, because that leads to the fairy tale of many worlds. Instead it should consider consciousness to reside outside the competent scope of a physical theory. I don't think he means that. He just means that it's a separate question from the interpretation of QM and that it's a mistake to mix them together. It's kind of like his answer is to say don't ask those questions. And he explicitly repudiates the notion that it's all in your head or that a quantum state is a summary of your knowledge of the system. The correlations are objective. What I liked about the paper though was the notion of correlations without correlata (which Garrett invokes) - the idea that quantum theory is about (and only about) systemic relationships makes a lot of sense. To take the answer to what is QM telling us? just a little further philosophically than what Mermim is prepared to, I'd say it's telling us (for one thing) that we've hit the limits of atomism. We're bouncing off the boundary of the reductionistic epistemology. Anyway, sadly I haven't yet seen anything that could supply a cogent alternative to MWI. I'll move on to the other papers tomorrow night... :) Chris Fuchs is the main proponent of quantum Bayesianism, which also takes the wave-function to just be a summary of one's knowledge of the system - and so there is nothing surprising about it collapsing when you get new information. Of course another alternative is an objective collapse theory like GRW. I'm just now reading a book by Ghirardi,Sneaking a Look at God's Cards which surveys the experiments that force the weirdness of QM on us and the various interpretations. Of course he devotes a special chapter to GRW theory, but he is very even handed. I'm not sure why you're worried about MWI though. Is it because you read Divide by Infinity? I don't think that's what MWI really implies. No I never read that, but hell yeah, MWI worries me! Doesn't it worry you? I mean I know at one level that in a very real sense it doesn't matter whether it's true or not, since the other universes can never affect me, but at another the reality that everything happens to me that I can imagine is just plain terrifying. And the 'me' isn't just the versions of me that are still called by my name, I can't escape the conclusion that I am everyone and everyone is me and that *everyone's* experience is my experience at some level. If MWI ever does become the accepted conception of reality, we have a huge amount of philosophical reorientation ahead of us. For instance, if I take some risk (like drink-driving, a relevant topic on another thread), and 'get away with it', MWI suggests I am still responsible for other realities in which I crashed and injured or killed myself and/or others. That reminds me on a difference that someone made between, I think, catholic and protestant (say). - A catholic go to heaven if and only if he do only good, or at least not bad, things during his life. (of course this can lead to unfairness, as some people can do the bad only due to contingent factors in their life, like a war, or a trauma, etc.) So, apparently: - A protestant go to heaven if and only if he do only the good in his life but also in all its lives. It is easy to do only the good when you get an happy family, in a economically working society so that you get a nice job, and a nice love partner and nice kids, and when you can drink and smoke what you want, even drink raw milk! Apparently some God want to examine closely what you would do in a world with catastrophic family, in perverse economy where eventually you can't even drink raw milk! My whole approach to risk management becomes quite different if all outcomes are realised. It no longer makes sense to think about if something will happen to me in the future. I have to accept that it all will happen, it's just that all those future mes won't know about the other ones, so they will all have the impression of a single outcome. It's a disorienting and disturbing thought. Of course it should't lead to fatalism, since one's choices are part of the deterministic system that determines the 'weight' of certain futures - OK. and I suppose it should actually lead to a kind of 'radical acceptance'. But then you have to accept the non-acceptance too. It is where we can get close to inconsistency, if not insanity. There's no point thinking why
Re: Interesting Google tech talk on QM
On 23 April 2014 17:25, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: Samuel Clemens? Was is not Mark Twain? I missed a post perhaps. Same guy, different name. David -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: Interesting Google tech talk on QM
On 4/23/2014 3:29 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote: Hi Liz, The billions make sense to me, to be honest. Even before the earth, we still didn't exist. It sounds like poetic liberty for a mind blowing amount of time. Cheers Telmo. It makes sense, but millions makes sense too and I think Liz is right that when Twain said it (if he did) the Earth and the solar system were thought to be only tens of millions of years old based on a calculation of how long the Sun could radiate from gravitational energy. On the other hand the universe might have been assumed to be static and infinitely old. It's possible that Twain said millions and it later got changed to billions. Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: Interesting Google tech talk on QM
On 4/23/2014 4:23 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote: On Wed, Apr 23, 2014 at 1:19 PM, LizR lizj...@gmail.com mailto:lizj...@gmail.com wrote: Actually Sagan may not have used the phrase billions and billions but it (too?) may have been a misquote that came to be associated with him (like play it again, Sam and beam me up, Scotty!) Oops, sorry for stepping on your toes :) I didn't know that beam me up, Scotty! was also a misquote (!) I will have to agree with John Lydon: the written word is a lie! It's not unusual for a famous author to have said something which later gets slightly changed in a way that makes it even more memorable. Churchill said, I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears, and sweat; a nice example of parallelism blood-tears, toil-sweat. But it is now commonly quoted as blood, sweat, and tears; all bodily fluids. I liked to quote Daniel Dennett from his book Elbow Room: You can avoid responsibility for everything if you just make yourself small enough. The trouble was he never wrote exactly that although he expressed the thought in slightly less succinct terms several times. But I had a solution. I emailed Dennett and asked him to use the phrase as I had quoted it - and he did in his reply. So now I can quote it and cite private communication. :-) Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: Interesting Google tech talk on QM
On 23 Apr 2014, at 18:49, 'Chris de Morsella cdemorse...@yahoo.com' via Everything List wrote: From: everything-list@googlegroups.com [mailto:everything-list@googlegroups.com ] On Behalf Of Bruno Marchal Sent: Wednesday, April 23, 2014 9:26 AM To: everything-list@googlegroups.com Subject: Re: Interesting Google tech talk on QM On 23 Apr 2014, at 13:08, LizR wrote: On 23 April 2014 22:29, Telmo Menezes te...@telmomenezes.com wrote: Hi Liz, The billions make sense to me, to be honest. Even before the earth, we still didn't exist. It sounds like poetic liberty for a mind blowing amount of time. Sure, but I think at the time millions of years was a mind-blowing amount of time - actually it still is - and it would appear the comment doesn't have any known source. So although I'd be happily proved wrong on this, it just feels a bit anachronistic for Samuel Clemens. Maybe just my personal bias. Samuel Clemens? Was is not Mark Twain? I missed a post perhaps. Mark Twain was the pen name of the author Samuel Clemens - so one and the same. Damned! The morning/evening stars strike again! You solved a mystery. Thanks. Do someone know the estimate of the age of the universe at the time of Mark Twain? Einstein though it was infinite, and I thought that many physicists (including believer in Big Bang(s)) don't exclude that. Didn't most people still subscribe to that English or Scottish Bishops calculation based on bible verse that concluded the earth and the universe was some 6000 or so years ago in 4400 BC? There are far too many, in this country at least - who still do believe in this fairy tale. What percentage? Are there catholic among them? I guess no but do a quick research. Ah: In 1996, Pope John Paul II stated that, New findings lead us toward the recognition of evolution as more than a hypothesis, Creationism concerns some evangelical christians. We should do studies to understand how that is possible. I think that again, like with cannabis, it is based on an exploitation of the A-in-B, and B-in-A confusion. Scientology and all sects does that, and well, some government on some matter. Everyone does that confusion often, including myself, but that is why we have to be vigilant. There is nothing wrong in interpreting wrongly the evidences, if it can be revised later. I ask myself: do those evangelical christians really believe in the fairy tale? Scientology has also weird beliefs. In Europa you can be considered as a Sect with such beliefs. I am OK with this, because if we allow parents to teach contradiction (not just superstition) we build future catastrophes. Of course, strictly speaking, here John Paul II commit *the* error. Evolution is and remain an hypothesis. Like the sun and the moon, and earth. If not it becomes a religion (a pseudo-religion). He should have said instead simply that there are thousand of evidences for evolution on a long period, and simply none for creation in less than 6000 years. There are as many scientific evidences for creation in less than 6000 years than for the 'big danger' of cannabis. Testimonies but 0 facts. Bruno Chris (And if we are digital machine, we have to take *all* true sigma_1 sentences, not just the e^iH, and their linear superpositions, and that is *very* big). cf On 23 April 2014 11:37, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: I do not fear death, in view of the fact that I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it.' --- Mark Twain -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: Interesting Google tech talk on QM
On 4/23/2014 4:33 AM, Pierz wrote: On Tuesday, April 22, 2014 11:12:53 PM UTC+10, Brent wrote: On 4/22/2014 4:54 AM, Pierz wrote: Thanks Brent. I read Mermin and am both wiser and none-the. It seems to me in this paper he is chickening out by saying that QM shouldn't really think about the conscious observer, because that leads to the fairy tale of many worlds. Instead it should consider consciousness to reside outside the competent scope of a physical theory. I don't think he means that. He just means that it's a separate question from the interpretation of QM and that it's a mistake to mix them together. It's kind of like his answer is to say don't ask those questions. And he explicitly repudiates the notion that it's all in your head or that a quantum state is a summary of your knowledge of the system. The correlations are objective. What I liked about the paper though was the notion of correlations without correlata (which Garrett invokes) - the idea that quantum theory is about (and only about) systemic relationships makes a lot of sense. To take the answer to what is QM telling us? just a little further philosophically than what Mermim is prepared to, I'd say it's telling us (for one thing) that we've hit the limits of atomism. We're bouncing off the boundary of the reductionistic epistemology. Anyway, sadly I haven't yet seen anything that could supply a cogent alternative to MWI. I'll move on to the other papers tomorrow night... :) Chris Fuchs is the main proponent of quantum Bayesianism, which also takes the wave-function to just be a summary of one's knowledge of the system - and so there is nothing surprising about it collapsing when you get new information. Of course another alternative is an objective collapse theory like GRW. I'm just now reading a book by Ghirardi,Sneaking a Look at God's Cards which surveys the experiments that force the weirdness of QM on us and the various interpretations. Of course he devotes a special chapter to GRW theory, but he is very even handed. I'm not sure why you're worried about MWI though. Is it because you read Divide by Infinity? I don't think that's what MWI really implies. No I never read that, but hell yeah, MWI worries me! Doesn't it worry you? The form presented in Divided by Infinity is kind of frightening, but I don't think that's how it works. I mean I know at one level that in a very real sense it doesn't matter whether it's true or not, since the other universes can never affect me, but at another the reality that everything happens to me that I can imagine is just plain terrifying. And the 'me' isn't just the versions of me that are still called by my name, I can't escape the conclusion that I am everyone and everyone is me and that *everyone's* experience is my experience at some level. Except you are a fairly coherent series of experiences tied to together by memories and continuity of perceptions. That was the point of my Twain quote. If you're worried about whether you will continue indefinitely into a less and less familiar future, just reflect on the fact that you don't continue into the past before about age 3. If MWI ever does become the accepted conception of reality, we have a huge amount of philosophical reorientation ahead of us. For instance, if I take some risk (like drink-driving, a relevant topic on another thread), and 'get away with it', MWI suggests I am still responsible for other realities in which I crashed and injured or killed myself and/or others. My whole approach to risk management becomes quite different if all outcomes are realised. It no longer makes sense to think about if something will happen to me in the future. I have to accept that it all will happen, it's just that all those future mes won't know about the other ones, so they will all have the impression of a single outcome. I don't see that it requires any difference in decision theory. You take a risk now knowing that there is probability of a bad outcome, but you balance that against something good you want. It doesn't matter whether the probability is a potentiality or a measure on an ensemble. It's a disorienting and disturbing thought. Of course it should't lead to fatalism, since one's choices are part of the deterministic system that determines the 'weight' of certain futures - and I suppose it should actually lead to a kind of 'radical acceptance'. There's no point thinking why me? or what bad luck, since your experiencing this, and indeed everything, is inevitable. But then I console myself by thinking that any human-level qualitative interpretation of this level of reality is mistaken, a kind of confusion of levels. And still it horrifies me... (But like Bruno, my dedication to truth keeps me from rejecting it purely because I hate it. The logic is very
Re: cannabis, cancer and mechanism, and climate.
Yes, in a sense. The Chinese do the virtuous because the must, because their cities are choking. Along with looking out strictly for themselves, by installing better tech, the AGW carbon cycle can ease, although there is much more to do, its still a step. And, no gestapo governments needed to order brown-outs, or people drive circus kiddy cars while the rich and their owned politicians drive in limos and fly in private liners. If we decide to get serious about the tech, there is much to look forwards to. This won't occur if the commissars are in charge. -Original Message- From: 'Chris de Morsella cdemorse...@yahoo.com' via Everything List everything-list@googlegroups.com To: everything-list everything-list@googlegroups.com Sent: Tue, Apr 22, 2014 11:10 pm Subject: RE: cannabis, cancer and mechanism, and climate. -Original Message- From: everything-list@googlegroups.com [mailto:everything-list@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of spudboy...@aol.com Understood, but China is not pursuing a policy of eliminating AGW, but reducing smog in its cities. Its not a kumbaya moment now for anything nowbin east asia as you hsve noticed, regarding china. The best way then to reduce carbon emissions is to develop clean energy generators, that can be installed quickly, reliably, abundantly, and china will follow, because it will be cleaner then coal, and quicker and cheaper thsn nukes. But it must be available to buy or steal from us, so if the chinese do this, it will help us never the less. And yet... APAC countries are forecast to install more than 23 gigawatts (GW) of solar PV in 2014, which is around half of the expected world total for new installed capacity for this year and is a 35% annual growth over last year's total for the APAC region. Almost all of this new capacity (95%) is getting installed in just five (APAC) countries: China, Japan, India, Australia, and Thailand. The Chinese Bureau of Energy recently announced an aggressive target of 12 GW for 2014, with 8 GW to be installed on rooftops, and the remaining 4 GW located on the ground. It has set itself a goal of having 35 gigawatts of installed solar power capacity by the end of 2015. This is an aggressive move to transition away from a carbon based energy towards a system increasingly based off of harvesting the natural and FREE solar flux. Again I think you are a little confused on the facts here. This is not just a smog reduction program -- though it will certainly contribute to reducing smog -- this is moving aggressively on a large scale towards solar power. China is very rapidly overtaking the US -- which already lags behind Germany and Italy -- in terms of its installed solar PV base. What most Americans and also Europeans are not aware of is that China also has (in 2012) an installed base of 250GW of rooftop solar water heaters, and leads the world in solar hot water heating by a huge margin. Americans and Europeans mostly burn natural gas to heat their water. Following? Or is that actually leading? The next largest country is Germany with about 30GW, followed by Italy with about 20GW (nice but not in the same league as China's 250GW) The US by comparison has less than 5 GW. Oh and by the way more than 80% of PV modules produced globally will be made in Asia -- lead again by China. Is this what you meant by a smog reduction program? Chris -Original Message- From: LizR lizj...@gmail.com To: everything-list everything-list@googlegroups.com Sent: Tue, Apr 22, 2014 7:37 pm Subject: Re: cannabis, cancer and mechanism, and climate. I think you'll find China is trying to cut its pollution, particularly* air pollution, and succeeding to some extent. Basically it has to, because the problem is so bad that it's severely impacting health and production. http://www.greenpeace.org/eastasia/specials/gpm04/fierce-fight-gdp-air/ *an environmental pun, what next? On 23 April 2014 09:04, spudboy...@aol.com wrote: Yeah, it will be costly whether we live or die. It's better to focus on a techno fix rather than social engineering by red-greens, and the uber rich. If we want to reduce heating, then reduce CO2, methane, water vapor. Easier said then done, but what isn't? The military industrial complex was a feature on both sides of the old cold war, and china, for example has not renounced its weapons expansion, nor pollution. Peace, by behavior, has to be a two way street. One side cannot do peace while the other pursues war. Look no further than the Putin grab of the Ukraine for a timely example. Your values, are not Putin's values, which is why we have war. Probably, if people get focused on intermediate rewards that are greater than what war brings, we could have peace. But those rewards better occur, otherwise its revolution and war. You sound confused. By tax payer funded gravy train did not seem to be focusing in on the more or less permanent state of war
Re: Interesting Google tech talk on QM
On 4/23/2014 9:49 AM, 'Chris de Morsella cdemorse...@yahoo.com' via Everything List wrote: Do someone know the estimate of the age of the universe at the time of Mark Twain? Einstein though it was infinite, and I thought that many physicists (including believer in Big Bang(s)) don't exclude that. Didn't most people still subscribe to that English or Scottish Bishops calculation based on bible verse that concluded the earth and the universe was some 6000 or so years ago in 4400 BC? There are far too many, in this country at least -- who still do believe in this fairy tale. Chris In the late 1800's William Thompson (Lord Kelvin) estimated the age of the Sun and he finally settled on a value of 20 to 40 million years. This was based on gravitational energy - nuclear fusion was unknown. Darwin noted that this was to short a time for evolution to have taken place, and so in a sense Darwin used an anthropic inference to postulate nuclear energy. Twain would have known Thompson's estimate and so might have said millions based on it. But, aside from the Abrahamic superstitions, educated people like Twain generally assumed the universe was static and eternal. In which case he might well have said billions. Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: Interesting Google tech talk on QM
On 4/23/2014 11:22 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: == Annihilation has no terrors for me, because I have already tried it before I was born--a hundred million years--and I have suffered more in an hour, in this life, than I remember to have suffered in the whole hundred million years put together. There was a peace, a serenity, an absence of all sense of responsibility, an absence of worry, an absence of care, grief, perplexity; and the presence of a deep content and unbroken satisfaction in that hundred million years of holiday which I look back upon with a tender longing and with a grateful desire to resume, when the opportunity comes. It is understandable that when I speak from the grave it is not a spirit that is speaking; it is a nothing; it is an emptiness; it is a vacancy; it is a something that has neither feeling nor consciousness. It does not know what it is saying. It is not aware that it is saying anything at all, therefore it can speak frankly and freely, since it cannot know that it is inflicting pain, discomfort, or offense of any kind --Mark Twain Bruno Twain also recognized the human tendency to worry: I've experienced many terrible things in my life, a few of which actually happened. --- Mark Twain Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: Interesting Google tech talk on QM
On 24 April 2014 00:42, Jesse Mazer laserma...@gmail.com wrote: On Wed, Apr 23, 2014 at 7:08 AM, LizR lizj...@gmail.com wrote: On 23 April 2014 22:29, Telmo Menezes te...@telmomenezes.com wrote: Hi Liz, The billions make sense to me, to be honest. Even before the earth, we still didn't exist. It sounds like poetic liberty for a mind blowing amount of time. Sure, but I think at the time millions of years was a mind-blowing amount of time - actually it still is - and it would appear the comment doesn't have any known source. So although I'd be happily proved wrong on this, it just feels a bit anachronistic for Samuel Clemens. Maybe just my personal bias. The people at the snopes board did some looking around for the quote at http://message.snopes.com/showthread.php?t=81874 and couldn't find any appearances before 2002, so it's probably not a real quote. However, they did turn up the following quote from Twain's autobiography which the fake quote was probably a paraphrase of: Annihilation has no terrors for me, because I have already tried it before I was born—a hundred million years—and I have suffered more in an hour, in this life, than I remember to have suffered in the whole hundred million years put together. Thank you. I thought he wouldn't have used billions and billions - it just wasn't in the public consciousness, and would have sounded, at best, either childish or pretentious. A hundred million is about what people could grasp at the time, when the age of the Sun (calculated from then-known processes of energy generation) was in the tens of millions of years. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: Interesting Google tech talk on QM
On 24 April 2014 04:25, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: Samuel Clemens? Was is not Mark Twain? I missed a post perhaps. Oops. They are the same person (Twain was Clemens' pseudonym). I thought it was common knowledge, perhaps because I read the Riverworld series by Philip Jose Farmer. Do someone know the estimate of the age of the universe at the time of Mark Twain? Einstein though it was infinite, and I thought that many physicists (including believer in Big Bang(s)) don't exclude that. I think it was considered perhaps infinite, in that no one knew how long it had gone on and there was no obvious evidence of cosmological change - telescopes weren't good enough to even resolve stars in galaxies outside the Milky Way, I believe - but there was also no idea of processes lasting billions of years. Hence Twain's hundred million was about the largest size anyone could grasp, so it was in a sense akin to him saying infinity. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: cannabis, cancer and mechanism, and climate.
On 24 April 2014 08:52, spudboy...@aol.com via Everything List everything-list@googlegroups.com wrote: Yes, in a sense. The Chinese do the virtuous because the must, because their cities are choking. Along with looking out strictly for themselves, by installing better tech, the AGW carbon cycle can ease, although there is much more to do, its still a step. And, no gestapo governments needed to order brown-outs, or people drive circus kiddy cars while the rich and their owned politicians drive in limos and fly in private liners. If we decide to get serious about the tech, there is much to look forwards to. This won't occur if the commissars are in charge. I agree, except that you don't seem to have noticed that the commisars ARE in charge - in the USA, and probably in most places. Government by the 1%, of the 1%, for the 1%. http://billmoyers.com/2014/04/21/government-protection-racket-for-the-1-percent/ 35% of the nation's wealth owned by 1% of the population. How much more commisar-like can you get? -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
RE: Interesting Google tech talk on QM
From: everything-list@googlegroups.com [mailto:everything-list@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of meekerdb Sent: Wednesday, April 23, 2014 2:09 PM To: everything-list@googlegroups.com Subject: Re: Interesting Google tech talk on QM On 4/23/2014 9:49 AM, 'Chris de Morsella mailto:cdemorse...@yahoo.com cdemorse...@yahoo.com' via Everything List wrote: Do someone know the estimate of the age of the universe at the time of Mark Twain? Einstein though it was infinite, and I thought that many physicists (including believer in Big Bang(s)) don't exclude that. Didn't most people still subscribe to that English or Scottish Bishops calculation based on bible verse that concluded the earth and the universe was some 6000 or so years ago in 4400 BC? There are far too many, in this country at least - who still do believe in this fairy tale. Chris In the late 1800's William Thompson (Lord Kelvin) estimated the age of the Sun and he finally settled on a value of 20 to 40 million years. This was based on gravitational energy - nuclear fusion was unknown. Darwin noted that this was to short a time for evolution to have taken place, and so in a sense Darwin used an anthropic inference to postulate nuclear energy. Twain would have known Thompson's estimate and so might have said millions based on it. But, aside from the Abrahamic superstitions, educated people like Twain generally assumed the universe was static and eternal. In which case he might well have said billions. It was 1897 when he formulated that age estimate - so technically still in the 1800's by a thin margin. Amazing that so recently (1897 is just a mere 117 years ago) our knowledge of our universe was still so limited. Mark Twain -- aka Samuel Clemens - was quite a free thinker from what I have learned of his life and work, so I would not be surprised in the least, if he thought along the lines you suggest. The average person of that era was probably more likely to believe in the Abrahamic fairy tale of the universe - again this is an opinion I have not done the research. Chris Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: Interesting Google tech talk on QM
The Time Machine gives an instight into what the educated person of the time thought. The time traveller first visits the year 800,000 or thereabouts, when various features of the present day are still in evidence (e.g. humans, evolved into Eloi and Morlocks), then journeys to a point where the Sun is dying, about 30 million years in the future. These are the sorts of timescales one would expect to be mentioned by anyone contemplating the far past or future at that time (for example in the work of William Hope Hodgson). On 24 April 2014 15:02, 'Chris de Morsella cdemorse...@yahoo.com' via Everything List everything-list@googlegroups.com wrote: *From:* everything-list@googlegroups.com [mailto: everything-list@googlegroups.com] *On Behalf Of *meekerdb *Sent:* Wednesday, April 23, 2014 2:09 PM *To:* everything-list@googlegroups.com *Subject:* Re: Interesting Google tech talk on QM On 4/23/2014 9:49 AM, 'Chris de Morsella cdemorse...@yahoo.comcdemorse...@yahoo.com' via Everything List wrote: Do someone know the estimate of the age of the universe at the time of Mark Twain? Einstein though it was infinite, and I thought that many physicists (including believer in Big Bang(s)) don't exclude that. Didn’t most people still subscribe to that English or Scottish Bishops calculation based on bible verse that concluded the earth and the universe was some 6000 or so years ago in 4400 BC? There are far too many, in this country at least – who still do believe in this fairy tale. Chris In the late 1800's William Thompson (Lord Kelvin) estimated the age of the Sun and he finally settled on a value of 20 to 40 million years. This was based on gravitational energy - nuclear fusion was unknown. Darwin noted that this was to short a time for evolution to have taken place, and so in a sense Darwin used an anthropic inference to postulate nuclear energy. Twain would have known Thompson's estimate and so might have said millions based on it. But, aside from the Abrahamic superstitions, educated people like Twain generally assumed the universe was static and eternal. In which case he might well have said billions. It was 1897 when he formulated that age estimate – so technically still in the 1800’s by a thin margin. Amazing that so recently (1897 is just a mere 117 years ago) our knowledge of our universe was still so limited. Mark Twain -- aka Samuel Clemens – was quite a free thinker from what I have learned of his life and work, so I would not be surprised in the least, if he thought along the lines you suggest. The average person of that era was probably more likely to believe in the Abrahamic fairy tale of the universe – again this is an opinion I have not done the research. Chris Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: Films I think people on this forum might like
I also recommend the short story Tonight the sky will fall by Daniel F Galouye (in the collection Space Opera edited by Brian Aldiss) On 9 February 2014 13:47, LizR lizj...@gmail.com wrote: Not sure if that's a recommendation or just a chance to let off steam but anyway - thanks, I will try to get hold of that. On 9 February 2014 13:34, freqflyer07281972 thismindisbud...@gmail.comwrote: I've been following this thread with some interest, waiting for one movie to be invariably mentioned among this crowd, and surprised that it hasn't been yet: Waking Life by Richard Linklater. Not only would members of this list like this movie, they would also be reminded of the different kinds of conversations that go on here. It could even be interpreted as a kind of visualization of the QIT. The only person on this list who might not like it is John Clarke, since it is filled with references to so many useless, deadbeat, unproductive and non-contributing philosophers and one of the many pre-occupations of the film is that utterly meaningless ASCII sequence/noise free will (blech, I threw up a bit in my mouth just typing those nine characters, that's how abhorrent and senseless the notion is). Also, it is a cartoon, and I'm pretty sure he would have stopped watching anything so stupid since Grade 6, or when he was 12, or something. And most importantly, it didn't win any awards and was not on anyone's top ten list, at least, not anyone who counts as having valuable opinions about quality movies. But for the rest of you, I strongly recommend you check it out! -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
