Buried alive posted:

Incidentally, it was one of those talks that tipped me over from agnosticism into atheism.

Something can't come from nothing!
Well, actually...

WhitemageofDOOM posted:

And Information in the scientific sense has nothing to do with things like words in a books, you are thinking of meaning.

Jazerus posted:

information must be able to both detect and respond to its environment.

McDowell posted:

What is the body of christ but the church - a material, social institution/bureaucracy? Eternal life that is promised isn't literal - but living on in the memory of subsequent generations who maintain the institution, performing the rituals. The lesson we have to learn is that a basic standard of living and managed reproduction must become the institution.

Jazerus posted:

thanks for your stellar input

Could you elaborate?

McDowell posted:

It is a personal interpretation of Christianity (and other faiths - especially Islam) as frameworks in human social evolution. The need is for a universal, secular morality. Recall the creation myth - humans ate from the tree of knowledge but were denied immortality. Right now our species will at best live as long as our star - and that is okay.

McDowell posted:

Maybe we will become interstellar and God will start bugging us again - like Battlestar Galactica

Jazerus posted:

the organism is the relationship between the objects. The information.

Trent posted:

Lol.

I'm an extremely optimistic person, but there are a mind boggling number of challenges on that road.

I hope so, but certainty? Pff

Zas posted:

actually op i read that only death is certain

Ytlaya posted:

You're making the completely illogical assumption that, because we've discovered how to do a lot of things, it must therefore be possible to do literally anything as long as we have enough time to research it. This doesn't make sense. There are probably many things that really aren't possible for humans to do in this universe. And when it comes to space travel specifically, there have been very few advancements after we initially figured out how rockets work (and the other stuff required for our early space exploits). We solved a bunch of engineering problems, but we aren't even the tiniest bit closer to something like interstellar travel.

If you wanted to graph out "our progress towards interstellar travel", it would be something like a line (whether linear, expontential, etc, it doesn't matter) going up and then just planing out. We're not on some huge upward trend in that field.

The fact that we've made all this progress over such a short time actually hurts your argument significantly. It would be more convincing if humans continued to make huge technological advances over 10,000 years, but it's entirely possible that everything we've learned over the past few hundreds years has been the equivalent of grabbing all the low-hanging fruit after making a few key discoveries.

WhitemageofDOOM posted:

Well we have real valid understandings of the light speed barrier and why it is impassable.

The Larch posted:

No, we have a pretty solid understanding of why the light speed barrier exists and that it's impassable.

quote:

The second part is not the result of anything moving faster than light. It's the result of the space between the two objects expanding while they move. This gives the appearance of FTL travel.

The Larch posted:

I'm not knowledgeable enough about this subject to talk about the first bit, but as to the second, the observer could only observe the object moving FTL relative to another object, not to the observer themself.

LookingGodIntheEye posted:

You can't directly measure two objects move away from each other FTL.

ftfy

LookingGodIntheEye posted:

The essential idea seems to be that the two galaxies seen by the observer are not in the same reference frame because the space between them is expanding at an accelerating rate. Because they are not in the same reference frame, there is no speed of light restriction.

LookingGodIntheEye posted:

The significance is that the frames are not moving, the space between them is expanding. There is a difference. Nothing is actually moving FTL.

Commie NedFlanders posted:

I need some equations to describe how this poem causes my spirit to move

blowfish posted:

actually it's good

determinism ftw

blowfish posted:

i know but both are cool

Blurred posted:

Point 1) - that the values of the universe are independent - implies that a hypothetical, omnipotent being might be able to change one value of the universe (let us say, the speed of light) without changing any of the others. I question if that's a valid assumption. To use an analogy from geometry, we cannot change the value of the length of the hypotenuse of a right-angled triangle without altering either the length values of the remaining two sides, or the value of the angle that connects them. These values are co-dependent. When we have a circle, the values of one the diameter or the circumference of the circle may be arbitrarily set, but the value of the other must be adjusted to retain the ratio of pi, or else to distend the shape into something that is no longer a circle. Again, these values are co-dependent. Now, imagine if I said, ""The value of pi has been calculated beyond the millionth decimal place. If the value of pi were to have been off by just the smallest fraction of a percent, then many features of the universe - including the elliptical orbits of the planets, and their roughly spherical shape - would be completely impossible. For the value of pi to have been so precisely set so as to allow for the orbital paths and shapes ochance. The odds of pi being exactly the value that it is, down to the millionth decimal place, are unimaginably huge. The only reasonable explanation is a divine creator who chose the value of pi so as to make round shapes in our universe possible". Does that sound like a reasonable explanation? Of course not. The value of pi is fixed by a certain ratio, and would be the same in all possible universes.

Blurred posted:

Point 2) - that the values of the universe are capable of variation - implies that it is at least hypothetically plausible that the values may have turned out differently, and that it is therefore valid to ask why they arbitrarily possess this or that value as opposed to any of the potentially infinite number of other values that they might have otherwise possessed. In addition to what I said before about the possibility of certain values being co-dependent and therefore fixed in the form of certain ratios (e.g. the length of the hypotenuse of a right-triangle is not arbitrary, but a fixed ratio of the other two sides - and vice versa) there is also the problem that, on the quantum level, phenomena don't exhibit gradual variations, but rather "jump" from one value to another (in fixed gradations) that do not permit intermediate values. Two pick just a couple of examples:

Blurred posted:

• First, the spin of elementary particles. These can only exist in gradations of 1/2, e.g. : 0, ½, 1, 1½ and so on. It's incoherent to ask what a fermion with a spin of 1.736 would look like, just as it would be incoherent to ask what a universe with a pi value of 4 would look like. Similarly, if we were to arbitrarily change the spin of a given particle (let us say, from 1 -> 1½) we would not just be changing this value independently, we would also be changing fundamentally the kind of particle it is (in this case, if I understand correctly, from a boson to a fermion), and thus all its other properties at the same time. Hence, the spin value of a particle is not variable.
  

Blurred posted:

• Second, there is the concept of Planck length. Zeno asked what would happen if Achilles were to talk an infinite series of steps, each half as long as the last - what would happen? Well, quantum physics tells us this would be possible until he arrived at Planck length, at which point the exercise would have to cease. It's impossible to take a step equivalent to half of Planck length (roughly 1.6^-35m) because it is impossible to distinguish between two locations that are a shorter distance that that apart. I raise this example because it shows that even something which appears to be capable of infinite variation - in this case length or distance - is actually constrained by this shortest permissible length. Every length, as I understand it, must be some exact multiple of this Planck length, and it is in principle impossible for the length of anything to vary beyond the 36th decimal point of a metre.

waitwhatno posted:

lmao, I'm done with this poo poo. gently caress D&D, it's like trying to explain quantum mechanics to some guy with no short or long term memory.

McDowell posted:

This is getting off the topic of the thread - but I'm suggesting a kind of 'open source' holism. You make software for every citizen to have a personal profile that is used for education, voting, and employment. States and Nations can adopt and modify it for their own uses. Within the USA there must be the highest standard for human rights and justice. You can have a minimum income by letting people earn the right to procreate.

Zodium posted:

no no, it only works if you don't tell me up front that the rope is a rope. you're supposed to accurately predict that I'll fall back on a heuristic and mistake something not-stupid for something stupid or the other way around, so that my self evidently not-even-wrong responses will reveal my bluff. i'll give you a mulligan if you want to try again.

e: so what you should have done is take that definition, but add in a nonsense word or something and see if I still agreed. this is dumb.

Dazzling Addar posted:

this thread has convinced me, science is actually fake and god is real and cool

minasole posted:

Additionally, sometimes they can mislead us..For instance, mathematical models cannot fully represent true biological phenomena because they don't account for the spatial factor. They only assume that all chemicals can react with each other without accounting for spatial factors. Additionally, they don't account for inhibitory events, etc....Some scientists (even legit ones) introduced some kind of these supposed models into computers, played with complexity and supposedly got some incredible results, such as bacteria, flowers, animals, etc...
Now i think this is an example how wrong initial assumptions, when used in wrong ways, can lead us to monstruously misleading conclusions.
Its like if you are asked to combine 1,2, 5, 8, 5689 and you say: Eureka!!! Its 1+2=15*5=3000*8=5689

McDowell posted:

Everyone in the world has been shaped, consciously or unconsciously, by theories/models like Social Darwinism and Game Theory. There needs to be a new ideology that everyone can consciously engage with and shape the world- but maybe I'm just the scientist from the beginning on 'Dawn of the Dead'. The people aren't going to leave their homes and give up bodies for immediate cremation.

waitwhatno posted:

blowfish posted:

i mind go do decide for against proposition is

waitwhatno posted:

entropy dictates that all of the possible states will be populated over time, right?

waitwhatno posted:

nah, man. you gonna have to come up with something better than that. state entropy is minimized when all chemical systems/chemicals in the ensemble are in a single state and it is maximized when the probability to encounter each state is exactly the same. THAT much i can remember from school. (this is all talking about the microcanonical ensemble, obviously)

waitwhatno posted:

well, the first perception-action state got populated, or otherwise we would not be here. do you really disagree here?

waitwhatno posted:

yeah, sorry, but i'm not gonna read a 30p paper right now. maybe later. what exactly is your point? all i'm saying is that a microcanonical ensemble with all particles in the same state will move to a system-state with all particles spread out over all possible states and that this is due to entropy. where do you disagree?

if you are trying to say that the transition probability between two states in a real system is not always the same, than i totally agree. but that doesn't really change the argument. while the more complex states and the states with a higher gibbs energy are less likely to be populated, this doesn't matter if you assume an idealized system with infinite time and particles.

waitwhatno posted:

a microcanonical ensemble with all particles in the same state will move to a system-state with all particles spread out over all possible states and that this is due to entropy.

The Belgian posted:

https://books.google.be/books?id=GJ...urrence&f=false

waitwhatno posted:

aaaaaah, now i get what you are saying and i totally and absolutely agree with you here. some bio-chemical processes have an insanely low reaction rate and it is obvious that something more complicated is at play here. the actual processes that allows for these reactions to happen can be extremely sophisticated, from a statistical mechanics point of view. i totally agree. (on an unrelated note, i remember reading a paper of someone doing qm simulations of protein folding processes and publishing it, so it's not even clear whether biochemistry is a purely classical process yet)

yeah, obviously most life processes are non-equilibrium processes, which only reach equilibrium under idealized conditions. gonna read your paper when i have some time.

waitwhatno posted:

i'm not sure what your point is here exactly, it has been long established that nature uses an huge amount of tricks to make all the necessary biochemistry occur at reasonable timeframes. with the right chaperone you can probably get through that deck of cards in no time ...

waitwhatno posted:

the chaperone example was meant metaphorically

i'm not sure why you are so hung up on your card example or why it's interesting. IRC, there are something like 10e30 bacteria lifeforms on earth, so give each one a tiny, itzy-bitzy card deck and let them draw permutations. i bet this speeds up the whole thing to only a couple of universe lifetimes. problem solved!

SHISHKABOB posted:

So it seems to me that you're saying that not all of the states are gone through, and that somehow specific ones appear to be strongly preferred.

waitwhatno posted:

I think you have completely misunderstood the point, that I was trying to make. There is no "preference". For example, take a rubber band aka "the entropic spring". A fully stretched, ideal rubber band has only a single possible configuration, while a relaxed rubber band has an enormous amount of possible configurations. So, as soon as you stop stretching it, it will quickly go to one of the relaxed states by itself. But this is not due to "preferring" to move there, it's just state entropy in process and the relaxing is a result of that.

Soooo ... a rubber band system moves randomly into all possible states, without concerns or preferences and only assumes a relaxed state due to state entropy. Live "mutates" into all possible(and feasible) states, without concerns or preferences and only reaches important bottleneck transition states due to state entropy.

Jazerus posted:

Some states are preferred because they assist in self-replication. Such states are propagated through time by the replication process itself. There is a drive toward perception because it is, by definition, the only way to correlate action with the current environmental context. A self-replicator - even something as simple as an RNA molecule - which randomly acquired a useful perception-action mechanism would be at a tremendous advantage over randomly acting self-replicators and quickly dominate, even if the perception was only weakly correlated with the full state of the environment and the action thus only barely appropriate.

Perception is at the very core of life, right beside self-replication. The information received through perception is what narrows the state space by restricting possible actions. That's what perception does, on a mechanical level; allows or disallows certain internal states based on interaction with the external state.

SurgicalOntologist posted:

SurgicalOntologist posted:

Yes, Swenson is a crackpot. His websites are an embarrassment. I didn't realize the link I gave was to another of them, ugh. FWIW, he hasn't been involved for a long time, and the scientists who are are well-respected in their fields. For example, Kondepudi, who's textbook on thermodynamics you may have used in undergrad.

The modern literature on the topic is probably more rigorous, but alas it is behind paywalls. Nevertheless I feel that the Swenson article is more accessible, given that he goes deeper into the background and history than any of these:
http://www.tandfonline.com/toc/heco20/24/1
http://www.tandfonline.com/toc/heco20/24/3

I'm disappointed to hear that those figures are inaccurate. However, he didn't come up with data out of thin air, he does give references. The second one isn't even his figure. And the correct version of the first that you posted seems perfectly consistent with the idea that evolution has tended toward a state of greater O2 concentration. I'm assuming that spike that he missed was some extinction event.

It's too bad you find these inaccuracies to preclude even continuing to read the paper. To me they don't seem damning of the entire enterprise. I'm sure there's plenty more you could pick apart.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extremal_principles_in_non-equilibrium_thermodynamics

Swenson probably should have latched onto on the of these rather than trying to forward his own formulation, but it's not like he's the first or the last to do so.

Juffo-Wup posted:

I'm not sufficiently fluent in the jargon (this is why I have been avoiding for the most part the other discussion in this thread) to offer a substantive response here, but my sense is that we are dangerously close to confusing the model with the phenomenon it models.

quote:

Edit - Though I can offer this response at least: your hypothetical here is an empirical question. Until someone can explain/predict economic events with statistical mechanics, there's no particular reason to think the reduction will be successful.

Juffo-Wup posted:

My initial sense was that the statistical mechanics model only relates to a small range of the events that a mature science might try to cover, so there's no reduction in any strong sense, because we don't end up with a sparser ontology by the end of the process.

But I guess that wasn't the point in the first place from what you're saying now. So, okay, I guess.

blowfish posted:

It's kind of very handwavy, but I would call features superficially similar if they are similar (in higher order terms) to each other, i.e. to people waving your contactless credit card over the till is similar to handing over cash, but physical processes underlying the two may be very different and only be related by sharing one of their outcomes (the shop ends up with the same amount of additional cash in the bank).

waitwhatno posted:

The rubber band moves into all possible states. The fact that you are unlikely to encounter it in a fully stretched state at room temperature, is only due to the boltzmann factor(not considering the entropic argument here). The boltzmann factor also explains why you can find the rubber band exclusively in the one stretched state, at very low temperatures.

Can I ask you, if you ever had any formal education in statistical mechanics?


The rubber band will move through an enormous amount of micro states and at high temperatures it can access most of its phase space.


Again, nothing drives perceptors. Are there more possible organisms with perception, than without perception? Yes? Then the organisms without perception are your stretched rubber band analogy, all the organisms with perception are your relaxed rubber band analogy. The very first state between fully stretched and fully relaxed is your analogy of the very first perception-capable organism. There is nothing special about that one state and nothing drives the rubber band towards it.

Preemptively: Yes some biological process are extremely complex and have a low reaction rate. Yes, most biological processes are non-equilibrium processes. This has absolutely nothing to do with this argument.