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Are Physical Laws Inevitable?

math.columbia.edu

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Re: Are Physical Laws Inevitable?

#21

Post by ithkuil »

yters wrote: post #12
ithkuil wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What would the implication be? Do you assume that it's absurd to consider that a conscious being is really no different than any other memory equipped machine and thus can be in a superposition state like anything else without necessarily "feel" anything special about it?

Considering no machines are conscious, yes, it is absurd.

No machines _we know of_ _in the present_ are conscious. Our ignorance about whether that's possible or not is not a proof it's not possible.

Besides, why would it matter if the observer is conscious or not?

Our psychology is biasing our reasoning about these thing, leading us to attribute something magical to the process that make us "us". It's understandably utterly disconcerting to lose the ground under the sense of self that we inhabit, but that's not a reason to discard, a priori, a line of questioning reality. I know it's hard to shake this uneasy feeling off, even for non-religious people.

But let's imagine for a moment that whatever the substance of our consciousness actually is, it can be forked/cloned into copies of itself that no longer share the identity after having been cloned, yet retain the memory of past events (external or internal to itself). I realize this is a bold assumption, but arguably less contentious to accept than whether machines can ever become conscious (perhaps because it sidesteps our innate aversion for outgroups, non-biological entities being extremely outgroup).

Now, imagine you fall asleep and get cloned in two, and the two resulting persons are put, still asleep, in two rooms (room 0, and room 1). After an hour they wake up. They both have copies of your memories and both have a copy of whatever-the-thing-that-holds-consciousness is (soul, matter, different kind of "stuff", not really relevant, as long as it's not incompatible with the "cloning postulate"), so in a way, they both think they are _you_; they feel a direct continuity with what they were before falling asleep and getting cloned. They'd have no way to tell which of the two entities they are though.

Imagine now being one of them. You get out of the room and peek at the room number on the outside of the door. Which number will you see?

Re: Are Physical Laws Inevitable?

#22

Post by djaque »

conistonwater wrote: post #13
djaque wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Be careful with her videos. While she does have some good content, Sabine has an agenda to push with respect to big science and I've seen at least a few of her articles on projects I'm familiar with that are well within conspiracy theory territory. See, for example, her blog post and video on LIGO where she makes it seem like the researchers committed fraud and fabricated the whole detection of gravitational waves. M…

> her video comments are full of climate deniers Not commenting on the rest because I don't know much about it, but saying that the quality of youtube comments under a video says something about the quality of the video is, I think, quite unreasonable.

It wasn't one or two comments that caught my eye, it was the overwhelming anti-science sentiment of the audience in those videos.

Judge ideas for the ideas themselves, but this is a clear red flag and points to the type of community she is building.

Re: Are Physical Laws Inevitable?

#23

Post by conistonwater »

djaque wrote: post #22
conistonwater wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> her video comments are full of climate deniers Not commenting on the rest because I don't know much about it, but saying that the quality of youtube comments under a video says something about the quality of the video is, I think, quite unreasonable.

It wasn't one or two comments that caught my eye, it was the overwhelming anti-science sentiment of the audience in those videos. Judge ideas for the ideas themselves, but this is a clear red flag and points to the type of community she is building.

No, that's just what youtube comments are like, you get so much garbage on pretty much anything. It's not like the author vets the comments, or even reads them. Like I said, I don't think it supports your argument.

Re: Are Physical Laws Inevitable?

#25

Post by perl4ever »

yters wrote: post #12
ithkuil wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What would the implication be? Do you assume that it's absurd to consider that a conscious being is really no different than any other memory equipped machine and thus can be in a superposition state like anything else without necessarily "feel" anything special about it?

Considering no machines are conscious, yes, it is absurd.

I think people have thought the thought that perhaps everything is conscious.[1] If so, then it doesn't seem that odd to think of a machine being conscious.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panpsychism

Re: Are Physical Laws Inevitable?

#26

Post by swiley »

There are physical laws but if you watch people they always find ways around it given enough money and time. Space travel via rockets is a nice example of that. Even the rocket equation itself has been circumvented via solar sails and magnetic propulsion.

You might think you can rely on something as simple as thermodynamics but if you are you’re going to have to be absolutely anal about where you draw the system boundary. People are really really good at getting work out of nearly anything. Don’t forget the planet is warmed by the sun and that you can just walk outside and use that for work.

Re: Are Physical Laws Inevitable?

#27

Post by perl4ever »

ithkuil wrote: post #21
yters wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Considering no machines are conscious, yes, it is absurd.

No machines _we know of_ _in the present_ are conscious. Our ignorance about whether that's possible or not is not a proof it's not possible. Besides, why would it matter if the observer is conscious or not? Our psychology is biasing our reasoning about these thing, leading us to attribute something magical to the process that make us "us". It's understandably utterly disconcerting to lose the ground under the sense…

Why would a shared past equal a shared future? I mean, you don't treat twins as though they are a single person, right?

Re: Are Physical Laws Inevitable?

#28

Post by perl4ever »

swiley wrote: post #26

There are physical laws but if you watch people they always find ways around it given enough money and time. Space travel via rockets is a nice example of that. Even the rocket equation itself has been circumvented via solar sails and magnetic propulsion. You might think you can rely on something as simple as thermodynamics but if you are you’re going to have to be absolutely anal about where you draw the system boun…

It seems to me that you are not talking about violations of physical laws, but violations of the rough, but wrong, approximations of physical laws that people use in some contexts.

It doesn't seem startling or interesting that people continually find ways around rules that are not rules.

Re: Are Physical Laws Inevitable?

#29

Post by swiley »

perl4ever wrote: post #28
swiley wrote: post #26

There are physical laws but if you watch people they always find ways around it given enough money and time. Space travel via rockets is a nice example of that. Even the rocket equation itself has been circumvented via solar sails and magnetic propulsion. You might think you can rely on something as simple as thermodynamics but if you are you’re going to have to be absolutely anal about where you draw the system boun…

It seems to me that you are not talking about violations of physical laws, but violations of the rough, but wrong, approximations of physical laws that people use in some contexts. It doesn't seem startling or interesting that people continually find ways around rules that are not rules.

Right they’re not violated, but my point is that they’re almost never the impassible barrier that people make them out to be.

It’s not that the rough approximations are wrong it’s that people focus too much on one or two ways of doing things (using atmospheric air as a reaction mass to fit my first example) until someone creative and knowledgeable enough finds a new way to do them (rockets then.)

Re: Are Physical Laws Inevitable?

#30

Post by wallace_f »

baddox wrote: post #10
wallace_f wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What agenda in particular are you accusing her of, here? Are you suggesting it is particular to LIGO, or is it a more general, political agenda? Also, what is wrong with people who question the politics and alarmism around climate change? Isn't the ability to question something fundamental to scientific reasoning? I don't think your dismisal of people as "deniers" is very reassuring of scientifc reasoning in that con…

I think when people express concern over climate change denial, the concern usually isn't over the fact that climate change denial is physically and legally possible. The concern is usually more about the consequences of denial and the fact that denial seems to have a disproportionate influence over political outcomes.

Part of what I was trying to articulate in my comment is that I don't even know what you are accusing these people of denying. So I guess the first part to trying to communicate my comment's meaning is to understand that as far as I can tell, it just comes across as a smear.
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