warrenpj's comments

How can we know if something has yet to be explained, or is in fact inexplicable? Obviously, we can't.

To declare that something is inexplicable is equivalent to saying it's supernatural.

Naturalism is the philosophy that everything is ultimately governed by physical laws and is therefore explicable.

Quoting Wikipedia:

>In Buddhism, the term anattā (Pali) or anātman (Sanskrit) refers to the doctrine of "non-self", that there is no unchanging, permanent self, soul or essence in phenomena.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anatta

I don't see the distinction.

The context is

>computers are not people or jews

Jews are a subset of people.

My understanding is that young people are at lower risk of severe symptoms, but they can still get infected and transmit the virus to others.

I read the privacy policy before using it. I guess it doesn't upload anything. Is it naive to trust the privacy policy stated here? https://github.com/noahlevenson/stealing-ur-feelings/blob/ma...

> The information is processed locally in your browser and is never transmitted or stored externally.

The phrase "Multiverse" has become overloaded. Max Tegmark thinks that there are at least four different kinds of "Multiverse", which he organizes into levels. This article corresponds to level 2: post-inflationary bubbles. The four levels are:

1. Space beyond the cosmic horizon. 2. Post-inflationary bubbles (this article). 3. Quantum multiverse, i.e. Many Worlds interpretation. 4. Platonic multiverses. i.e. Other mathematical structures that "are" universes.

It helps to know about the idea of different kinds of multiverse, and how they are not mutually exclusive, when reading articles like this which use the term Multiverse without disambiguating it.

See: http://space.mit.edu/home/tegmark/crazy.html

An obvious use case for this API is to allow native games that use Vulkan to be ported to the Web without a proprietary abstraction layer. (The abstraction layer would be in the emscripten standard library rather than the game engine.) But is this a legitimate use case that someone actually needs?

I can see two views here. Firstly, that as the open standard, Vulkan should have a privileged position and be supported from the Web side, to make the Vulkan -> Web -> Native abstraction layer standard, small and efficient. As a developer you would just implement the necessary algorithms for your application once, using Vulkan.

The alternative view is that Vulkan is just too low level and doesn't fit in the web security model. Then, the purpose of WebGPU is not to implement Vulkan in Javascript. Instead, it's another target in addition to the existing three: Apple, Microsoft, Kronos, and web. To get maximum performance, developers must write an application-specific, high level platform abstraction layer, and implement that interface for each supported platform.

It seems to me that this article is of the latter view, especially as it doesn't put Metal in a strategically weaker position than Vulkan.

If you don't need state of the art or original rendering techniques and algorithms, I think there is already a high level abstraction which is compatible with the web: OpenGL ES 2, and soon OpenGL ES 3. (WebGL & WebGL 2).

> To the best of my knowledge, mainstream quantum mechanics assumes continuous spacetime, so the argument that the primary reason it can't be reconciled with general relativity is continuity seems pretty specious to me.

Your criticism is right and that is a bad argument. The real reasons they are hard to reconcile are technical (see for example [1]), and not mentioned in the source I referred to.

The article only says that a discrete theory of spacetime "might be essential" for the reconciliation; the arguments for this are philosophical - it would be beautiful and historically completing. Read the article if you're interested in the arguments, which aren't included in my comments.

> And it's possible to come up with a model where the universe is infinite but the visible universe is finite. In fact, I believe FLRW is one such a model, and is supported with high accuracy by the latest experimental observations.

I agree with you that the universe could be infinite, but that doesn't contradict my previous comment. I explained that I was talking about local (causally connected to us) space-time, only. I admit this is a bit of a trick, but the parent comment used the term "real space" which I interpreted in such a way to favour an argument for finite space.

> So again, your argument doesn't seem that compelling to me.

I've given reasons but I think it might be helpful to restate what I am actually claiming. I admit I don't know that space and time are discrete. The source I gave is a poetic and philosophical argument that it might be. I think it's established fact that energy and matter are, and that time is finite in the past, so the visible universe is finite. I think it's possible that the future is finite too.

I don't know what FLRW is. My best guess is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedmann–Lemaître–Robertson–W...

[1] http://www.theory.caltech.edu/people/jhs/strings/str115.html

There was a post here two weeks ago discussing this exact problem. [1] It starts by explaining Democritus' reasoning that matter must be made of discrete atoms. The main point of the article is that a similar logic applies to the future theory of quantum gravity; space and time too must be discrete.

From the article:

> Importing the atomic philosophy of Democritus into modern physics might be essential for reconciling general relativity (which assumes a continuous reality) with quantum mechanics (which very much does not).

As far as infinite vs finite space: because there is a fixed rate of information propagation, we only need to show that time is finite in extent, and it follows that space is also finite. We know that the visible universe is finite (by looking in the sky) and we can explain why: the big bang happened at a finite time in the past.

We don't know if the universe will have a finite future, but it might be the case. One possible cause of a finite future could be accelerating expansion of the universe due to dark energy. [2]

Of course there are other interpretations of "real space", but this one (causally connected) seems parsimonious to me.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13466254

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultimate_fate_of_the_universe

The phrase "both in-person and around the globe" is ambiguous. It could mean either that there were more witnesses in person, and more witnesses around the globe, or it could mean that the total number of witnesses, anywhere, was the largest ever. This is the (terrible) beauty of it: a supporter can believe the former, while the administration needs only to defend the latter.

The phrase "alternative facts" too is ambiguous and, in the way it was used by Conway is classical doublethink. Doublethink involves two actions: a public lie and wilful self-delusion. One interpretation (without context) of the phrase "alternative facts" is that the facts are merely unknown and up for debate. But one merely needs to look at a photo of the inauguration to see that the facts are that Obama had higher attendance in 2009. [1] To claim otherwise is a lie.

Another is that the _true_ facts are known, but Conway is explicitly stating: these are the facts which I am telling you to believe. This is the wilful self-delusion.

From 1984:

And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed – if all records told the same tale – then the lie passed into history and became truth. "Who controls the past," ran the Party slogan, "controls the future: who controls the present controls the past." And yet the past, though of its nature alterable, never had been altered. Whatever was true now was true from everlasting to everlasting. It was quite simple. All that was needed was an unending series of victories over your own memory. "Reality control," they called it: in Newspeak, "doublethink."

[1] http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-38716191

How would one convey the scientific method in a single sentence?

What about the motto of the Royal Society: Nullius in verba; Take nobody's word for it.

The Golden Rule is flawed, as the Wikipedia article explains in the criticism section. Your comment bought to mind this quote from Deutsch:

"The Golden Rule (treat others as you would wish to be treated) has the same fatal flaw as future-is-like-the-past inductivism: it justifies anything and nothing, depending on what attributes of the other person you choose to imagine yourself having. And so, like induction, it only seems to yield some specific moral conclusion if you had already reached that conclusion by other means." - David Deutsch.

Here, "other means" is just the scientific method (conjecture, criticism) generalised to morality. So I'd say that the scientific method, (and a good epistemology in general), is a more valuable concept than the Golden Rule.

https://twitter.com/DavidDeutschOxf/status/25231910520029593...

Of course you would be touching a real thing. What else could you touch?

However, on closer inspection (such as taking a bite) you would be able to tell that it wasn't a banana: the theory that the object is a banana is falsifiable. If, on the other hand, the machine can produce a simulated banana that is indistinguishable from a real one in all respects, then we can say that the object _is_ a banana.

Your point can be generalized to Descartes' evil demon, or the simulation argument. Imagine a machine that can provide arbitrary sensory inputs to the brain by simulating your body as well as the universe it inhabits.

The simulator has complete control over all reality, so that all perceptions are illusions; there is no "physical" reality, only a simulated one.

To me, this is a reduction to absurdity. If a simulated universe is indistinguishable from a real one, then we (as inhabitants of the simulated universe) should say that it is a real universe, as the simulation theory is unfalsifiable.

(If we discovered that we are in fact living inside a simulation because the simulation code was buggy and we hacked it from inside, then a Simuluation Argument Believer could just say that the "real" universe is also just another level of the simulation. This is why the _metaphysical_ Simulation Argument is unfalsifiable.)

Similarly, if a machine can produce a perfect copy of a real banana, then the copy is also actually a banana. And if a banana feels solid, then it actually is a solid object, and we aren't touching "nothing". It is irrelevant whether the feeling is produced by electromagnetic forces, or some special Platonic "solid" surface that doesn't actually exist.

Edit: for further context see Scientific realism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_realism

What would it be like to touch "something", rather than mere electro-magnetic forces? Isn't this just a game of words? When we touch electro-magnetic forces, we are in fact touching solid things.

> that there is no point of view, just local chemical storage of information.

You have just restated the problem of consciousness, except as an assertion that it doesn't exist.

The problem of reductionism is that it doesn't stop; just as there aren't really points of view, there aren't really any chemicals, and there isn't really such a thing as (classical, let's say) information. All of these things are "just" emergent phenomena.

The explanations which made "aether" and "miasma" obsolete are beautiful, unexpected at the time (in a trivial sense), and of course, not supernatural.

I agree with you about the afterlife. However consider this: if the universe is infinite, isn't it likely that there will be copies of you which arise spontaneously, in all conceivable circumstances? The older you get, the less likely you are to be in a place or time that is causally connected to your birth, because most causal chains involve your death. (This is just a specific case of a Boltzmann Brain[1])

Of course, this sort of nonsense thought experiment runs afoul of the Measure Problem [2]. But this is precisely the kind of problem that I hope the explanation of consciousness would help to resolve.

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

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Measure_problem_(cosmology)

The problem with this language is that the very word "illusion" implies an observer.

To whom is it an illusion? And, what are the properties of this illusion? Can we make artificial minds that are also suffering from the same illusion?

The very fact that there is (let's suppose) such an illusion requires an explanation. Suppose the brain has somewhere encoded the idea of consciousness, but no "actual" consciousness. Why do we require the extra step of "actual" consciousness rather than mere "illusory" consciousness?

Of course the real explanation of consciousness will be both profound (beautiful, unexpected) and mundane (non supernatural).

This seems suspicious to me, like you're playing a game with words that I'm not able to precisely identify.

Isn't this conflating objective reality (which we can only theorize about) with objective knowledge about reality (which can improve over time but never be perfect)?

The theory of the luminiferous aether "caused" the Michelson-Morley experiment, the outcome of which was inconsistent with the luminiferous aether actually existing. The theory of atoms "caused" many experiments, the outcome of which was consistent with atoms actually existing.

What causes theories to exist? Conjecture and criticism motivated by logical and empirical problems. The problems are "caused" by objective reality, of which atoms are one part (at a certain level of explanation, anyway).

An account of the development of scientific knowledge should explain the development of these problems, the conjectured solutions, and criticism made to them, and why the current explanations are the best available in light of this history. At no point do we need to claim that the current explanations are the best possible, but they are still objective knowledge.

What other personality traits are correlated with political ideology? Are these studies worth taking seriously?

For example, according to the (corrected) study [1] conservatives are higher in "social desirability and neuroticism", while liberals are higher in "psychoticism".

[1] http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/ajps.12216/epdf

Related article: http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/436424/presenting-one-m...

If the amount of computation that can be done is finite, then subjective time is also finite. (And vice-versa if the amount of computation is infinite.)

What does infinite time mean in a universe where nothing happens?

I hope I live to see a grand unified theory of physics which explains how space-time emerges from the quantum scale, but also how consciousness emerges from computation. Maybe in the future, when these theories are developed, we can have infinite consciousness, infinite subjective time.

I also acknowledge that I may be confused entirely and the previous paragraph has no meaning.

There is "Quirk" by Craig Gidney, a Quantum Circuit Simulator.

http://algorithmicassertions.com/quirk