RE: The situation at Fukushima appears to be deteriorating
From: everything-list@googlegroups.com [mailto:everything-list@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of John Clark Sent: Wednesday, February 26, 2014 9:39 AM To: everything-list@googlegroups.com Subject: Re: The situation at Fukushima appears to be deteriorating On Tue, Feb 25, 2014 at 1:53 PM, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: Well let's see, my car has 306 horsepower, one horsepower is equal to 746 watts so my car needs 228,276 watts. On a bright day at noon solar cells produce about 10 watts per square foot, so my car would need 22,827 square feet of solar cells, that's not counting the additional air resistance caused by the 151x151 foot rectangle mounted on the car's roof. And how do I get to work at night or on cloudy days You're car engine needs to generate that 306hp when it's going about 150mph. My car can't go 150mph or even come close to it, my car uses 306 horsepower when it needs to accelerate to highway speed in the on-ramp of a expressway or when I need to pass a slower car on a 2 lane road. In normal highway use it's probably making about 30hp. So now you need to make the solar cells adjustable so that the giant square welded to the roof of my car can shrink gown from 151x151 feet to 48x48 feet. However air resistance still might be a bit of a problem and I'm still going to have to put a WIDE LOAD sign on the back of the car. Solar PV cells can't power rocket ships either - so what? You raise a straw man argument. No one is suggesting that, but you who have raised it - with the suggestion that because PV cannot DIRECTLY power your vehicle, that it is therefore of no value whatsoever as a power source. Could your car run - again directly -- on coal. or nuclear energy? By your same logic these energy sources are therefore worthless. As I said.. A classic straw man argument. Chris John K Clark -- 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/groups/opt_out.
RE: The situation at Fukushima appears to be deteriorating
From: everything-list@googlegroups.com [mailto:everything-list@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of John Clark Sent: Wednesday, February 26, 2014 9:54 AM To: everything-list@googlegroups.com Subject: Re: The situation at Fukushima appears to be deteriorating On Wed, Feb 26, 2014 at 12:40 AM, Chris de Morsella cdemorse...@yahoo.com wrote: The prices for PV keeps coming down as well; in fact it has dropped an amazing 99% in the past quarter century. That's very nice, but even if the price dropped to zero it wouldn't be enough to completely take over from nuclear and fossil fuel because it would still be too dilute and too unreliable and unpredictable for many, perhaps most, applications. So say you. and yet just this year alone - 2014 - it is projected that between 40 to 50 Gigawatts of new solar PV capacity will be installed on a place called planet earth. another way of picturing the huge amount of solar capacity this represents is that this is well over 300 square kilometers of solar PV collection surface. What you don't seem to get is that it is taking over and will increasingly take over as the most important source of electric generation. The prices will continue to fall - and though in the world you seem to live in the cost of something means little or nothing - in this world cost drives decisions. You harp on dilute. well I have news for you - the food you eat, that you need in order to survive, it is a dilute source as well, and yet - we have managed somehow to grow food. So what if solar is dilute - as you put it. Does the appliance in your house, sucking electrons down from the grid and dumping them to ground care what created the current? You make much of something that does not really matter in the long run. In the near term there is going to be dislocation of vested industries and outmoded ways of doing things, but after five or so decades people will wonder how the world ever functioned without ubiquitous solar PV. The grid will adapt, becoming adaptive, and beginning to act more like a true network; battery (and other utility scale energy storage systems) will - and are in fact evolving. Some of the new utility scale flow batteries coming to market that use environmentally benign and low cost reactants are promising. All electric cars - which were I live are becoming quite common - are also driving [pardon the pun] the evolution of high power density batteries, and in addition are becoming a nascent distributed power storage network that in its aggregate could scale up to as big as the all-electric fleet grows. Solar PV - IMO - is poised for a new wave of next generation multi-junction, multiple band gap, layered cells that can exploit the solar flux at many more wave-lengths, including down into the infrared range (meaning they would still produce some power - even on hazy and light cloudy days). -Chris John K Clark -- 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/groups/opt_out.
RE: The solar example of a town in Germany
It produces 4X the energy it needs just from the solar PV on the roofs of its buildings.. Isn't it amazing what you can accomplish with such dilute sources of energy. I include the link because the pictures are pretty cool, and illustrate what a solar city could look like. http://inhabitat.com/sonnenschiff-solar-city-produces-4x-the-energy-it-needs / What can I say - I have an architecture kick, especially when it is sustainable and low footprint. Chris -- 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.
Re: Alien Hand/Limb Syndrome
On 26 February 2014 23:58, Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.com wrote: The alien hand syndrome, as originally defined, was used to describe cases involving anterior corpus callosal lesions producing involuntary movement and a concomitant inability to distinguish the affected hand from an examiner's hand when these were placed in the patient's unaffected hand. In recent years, acceptable usage of the term has broadened considerably, and has been defined as involuntary movement occurring in the context of feelings of estrangement from or personification of the affected limb or its movements. Three varieties of alien hand syndrome have been reported, involving lesions of the corpus callosum alone, the corpus callosum plus dominant medial frontal cortex, and posterior cortical/subcortical areas. A patient with posterior alien hand syndrome of vascular aetiology is reported and the findings are discussed in the light of a conceptualisation of posterior alien hand syndrome as a disorder which may be less associated with specific focal neuropathology than are its callosal and callosal-frontal counterparts. - http://jnnp.bmj.com/content/68/1/83.full This kind of alienation from the function of a limb would seem to contradict functionalism. If functionalism identifies consciousness with function, then it would seem problematic that a functioning limb could be seen as estranged from the personal awareness, is it is really no different from a zombie in which the substitution level is set at the body level. There is no damage to the arm, no difference between one arm and another, and yet, its is felt to be outside of one's control and its sensations are felt not to be your sensations. This would be precisely the kind of estrangement that I would expect to encounter during a gradual replacement of the brain with any inorganic substitute. At the level at which food becomes non-food, so too would the brain become non-brain, and any animation of the nervous system would fail to be incorporated into personal awareness. The living brain could still learn to use the prosthetic, and ultimately imbue it with its own articulation and familiarity to a surprising extent, but it is a one way street and the prosthetic has no capacity to find the personal awareness and merge with it. This example shows that if there is a lesion in the neural circuitry it affects consciousness. If you fix the lesion such that the circuitry works properly but the consciousness is affected (keeping the environmental input constant) then that implies that consciousness is generated by something other than the brain. -- Stathis Papaioannou -- 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.
Re: Tegmark and UDA step 3
On 27 February 2014 00:49, Jason Resch jasonre...@gmail.com wrote: I came upon an interesting passage in Our Mathematical Universe, starting on page 194, which I think members of this list might appreciate: It gradually hit me that this illusion of randomness business really wasn't specific to quantum mechanics at all. Suppose that some future technology allows you to be cloned while you're sleeping, and that your two copies are placed in rooms numbered 0 and 1 (Figure 8.3). When they wake up, they'll both feel that the room number they read is completely unpredictable and random. If in the future, it becomes possible for you to upload your mind to a computer, then what I'm saying here will feel totally obvious and intuitive to you, since cloning yourself will be as easy as making a copy of your software. If you repeated the cloning experiment from Figure 8.3 many times and wrote down your room number each time, you'd in almost all cases find that the sequence of zeros and ones you'd written looked random, with zeros occurring about 50% of the time. In other words, causal physics will produce the illusion of randomness from your subjective viewpoint in any circumstance where you're being cloned. The fundamental reason that quantum mechanics appears random even though the wave function evolves deterministically is that the Schrodinger equation can evolve a wavefunction with a single you into one with clones of you in parallel universes. So how does it feel when you get cloned? It feels random! And every time something fundamentally random appears to happen to you, which couldn't have been predicted even in principle, it's a sign that you've been cloned. Jason I remember this pointr being made on this list in the late 90's when quantum immortality was a new and mindblowing idea for me, James Higgo was still alive, and Jacques Mallah was calling everyone a crackpot. Fond memories! -- Stathis Papaioannou -- 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.
Re: The situation at Fukushima appears to be deteriorating
To be honest with you, I don't think we are 'up against it' from a AGW point of view. This is why the professionals of climate change are sounding panicked because the climate is not behaving as they have always claimed. We should always do research in the hopes of giving us options. We may not ever achieve solar, or fusion, as a primary source. I am a bit more confident about deep geothermal using co2 as a working fluid. Please remember, the Green-Reds and the Billionaires want a shut-down of the 'dirty' right now! Look at Germany's reaction to Fukushima, 3 years ago.* They hate shale gas, and make up reasons why its harmful to human health, so there is no practical alternative, none! That's what promotes my statement of works or not. *They ended up firing up old coal plants to replace the shutdown u235 plants, and pumped megatons of US coal into Germany's air as a result. -Original Message- From: LizR lizj...@gmail.com To: everything-list everything-list@googlegroups.com Sent: Wed, Feb 26, 2014 6:52 pm Subject: Re: The situation at Fukushima appears to be deteriorating On 27 February 2014 12:08, spudboy...@aol.com wrote: Well, Liz, not to be a nattering nabob of negativism, but its too diffuse. It's not like hydroelectric, we can gather up at one 'choke point' and then draw in to spin turbines, Its spread all over the surface of the Earth (the target zone). Therefore, engineers are so up o on getting PV cells efficiencies up. Then there's the great need for a power source to run 7 x 24 and this has been a problem. On the other hand Freeman Dyson estimated that the Sun produces in 1 second the same amount of ergs that human beings produce in one year. It turned out to be 33 trillion times what we use. But I have given up on solar and fusion, because it either works now or it doesn't. Color me too impatient. Do you mean you think this is the proverbial it - if we don't have an alternative power source up and running right now, we're stuffed? You may be right, of course, but I think we should keep trying. -- 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/groups/opt_out.
Re: The situation at Fukushima appears to be deteriorating
Stop right there. You complain about the Koch's but say zero about George Soros, and about other Dem suppliers like Gates, Zuckerberg, Warren Buffet, the Blackstone Group, Hollywood billionaires, which end up being not a technical answer to a technical problem of clean energy, but rather, the ideology of a world movement of Neo-Stalinists. Billionaires which support the State, connected with a Vanguard Proletariat of power hungry academics, unions, Billionaire elitists, and the willful underclass. Solar either works it doesn't. Engineering and physics have no ideology. Enemies? You mean those organizations like Retake America thatclaimed to be charitable organizations not engaging in any politicalactivity in order to conceal their donors? And the FBI is goingafter who? The Koch brothers? Rev. Hagee? Rush Limbaugh? Theycan't seem to find anyone guilty of anything in the housing bubbledebacle, but they can sure bust some medical marijuana sellers inSeattle. -Original Message- From: meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net To: everything-list everything-list@googlegroups.com Sent: Wed, Feb 26, 2014 10:23 pm Subject: Re: The situation at Fukushima appears to be deteriorating On 2/26/2014 3:22 PM, spudboy...@aol.com wrote: Here in the States, we have theexecutive branch using the IRS and the FBI to go afterenemies of the progressives. Enemies? You mean those organizations like Retake America that claimed to be charitable organizations not engaging in any political activity in order to conceal their donors? And the FBI is goingafter who? The Koch brothers? Rev. Hagee? Rush Limbaugh? Theycan't seem to find anyone guilty of anything in the housing bubbledebacle, but they can sure bust some medical marijuana sellers inSeattle. You have the vast expansion of theNSA spying on the American people and indeed peopleworldwide. Which was proposed under Reagan and implemented under W. A statement by the head of NSA wasthat We are not spying to halt terrorists.. So what arethey spying for, our benefit? BHO has tried to pick techwinners but he cannot change physics nor economics. ThinkSolyndra. How about think Detroit. You simply trust too much, or despisenon Statists too much. People want clean energy, there isjust no new tech to the dirty. And you're just an ideologue government hater dreaming of Galt'sGulch. 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/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/groups/opt_out.
Is information physical?
http://edge.org/conversation/constructor-theory I don't recall if the list has discussed these ideas of David Deutsch recently. The link is to an Edge interview in which he discusses his view that mathematicians are mistaken if they believe that information or computation are purely abstract objects. He says that both are in fact physical, but to justify that assertion we may need deeper principles of physics than the existing ones. He proposes constructor theory as a candidate. Implications for comp (or anything else for that matter)? 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/groups/opt_out.
Re: Alien Hand/Limb Syndrome
On Wednesday, February 26, 2014 11:17:31 AM UTC-5, David Nyman wrote: On 26 February 2014 12:58, Craig Weinberg whats...@gmail.comjavascript: wrote: The alien hand syndrome, as originally defined, was used to describe cases involving anterior corpus callosal lesions producing involuntary movement and a concomitant inability to distinguish the affected hand from an examiner's hand when these were placed in the patient's unaffected hand. In recent years, acceptable usage of the term has broadened considerably, and has been defined as involuntary movement occurring in the context of feelings of estrangement from or personification of the affected limb or its movements. Three varieties of alien hand syndrome have been reported, involving lesions of the corpus callosum alone, the corpus callosum plus dominant medial frontal cortex, and posterior cortical/subcortical areas. A patient with posterior alien hand syndrome of vascular aetiology is reported and the findings are discussed in the light of a conceptualisation of posterior alien hand syndrome as a disorder which may be less associated with specific focal neuropathology than are its callosal and callosal-frontal counterparts. - http://jnnp.bmj.com/content/68/1/83.full This kind of alienation from the function of a limb would seem to contradict functionalism. ? AFAICS it wouldn't even *seem* to contradict functionalism. If functionalism identifies consciousness with function, then it would seem problematic that a functioning limb could be seen as estranged from the personal awareness, is it is really no different from a zombie in which the substitution level is set at the body level. There is no damage to the arm, no difference between one arm and another, and yet, its is felt to be outside of one's control and its sensations are felt not to be your sensations. I think it is generally understood that the relevant disruption to function is that of brain tissue, not that of the limb; hence the references in the passage to lesions in the corpus callosum and other areas of the *brain*. If the function of brain tissue is disrupted, then it would be consistent to expect some concomitant disruption of consciousness, per functionalism. Of course, but how is the particular disruption - that the hand appears to function normally as far as outside observers are concerned, yet there is some extra ingredient from that function which is now missing that makes it seem 'alien'. This would be precisely the kind of estrangement that I would expect to encounter during a gradual replacement of the brain with any inorganic substitute. It's clear that's what you would expect, but to infer this much, purely on the basis of the passage you quoted, is grasping at straws. Actually it's not even that - it's a completely unsupported inference. You're paying attention to a part of the example that isn't relevant. If we did not know about the brain, and we sought a substitution level which only emulated the activity of the body, then something like alien hand syndrome would not be detectable from the outside (as long as the emulation chose to keep their knowledge of their condition to themselves). At the level at which food becomes non-food, so too would the brain become non-brain, and any animation of the nervous system would fail to be incorporated into personal awareness. The living brain could still learn to use the prosthetic, and ultimately imbue it with its own articulation and familiarity to a surprising extent, but it is a one way street and the prosthetic has no capacity to find the personal awareness and merge with it. I don't see how starting from an unsupported inference helps your case. In fact, if you are proposing this as an example of the strength of your position in general, it can only serve to weaken it. Right, you don't see it. The underlying thesis of functionalism and mind-brain identity theory is that the proprietary sense of self is nothing other than function itself. To me, what AHS does is call that into question as it potentially implicates self-familiarity as a superfluous feeling which has no function. The assumption from the functionalist side has been that if we identify the correct level of substitution, we can reproduce human consciousness on any substrate, but here we see that at least the physiological (rather than neurological) level of substitution, it is possible to have a disidentification without a change in function. AHS, while not proof of neurological zombies is, like blindsight, proof of the possibility of non-functional qualia. In other words, why, in a functionalist/materialist world would we need a breakable program to keep telling us that our hand is not Alien? When you start by assuming that I'm always wrong, then it becomes very easy to justify that with ad hoc straw man accusations.
Re: Alien Hand/Limb Syndrome
On Thursday, February 27, 2014 4:13:22 AM UTC-5, stathisp wrote: On 26 February 2014 23:58, Craig Weinberg whats...@gmail.comjavascript: wrote: The alien hand syndrome, as originally defined, was used to describe cases involving anterior corpus callosal lesions producing involuntary movement and a concomitant inability to distinguish the affected hand from an examiner's hand when these were placed in the patient's unaffected hand. In recent years, acceptable usage of the term has broadened considerably, and has been defined as involuntary movement occurring in the context of feelings of estrangement from or personification of the affected limb or its movements. Three varieties of alien hand syndrome have been reported, involving lesions of the corpus callosum alone, the corpus callosum plus dominant medial frontal cortex, and posterior cortical/subcortical areas. A patient with posterior alien hand syndrome of vascular aetiology is reported and the findings are discussed in the light of a conceptualisation of posterior alien hand syndrome as a disorder which may be less associated with specific focal neuropathology than are its callosal and callosal-frontal counterparts. - http://jnnp.bmj.com/content/68/1/83.full This kind of alienation from the function of a limb would seem to contradict functionalism. If functionalism identifies consciousness with function, then it would seem problematic that a functioning limb could be seen as estranged from the personal awareness, is it is really no different from a zombie in which the substitution level is set at the body level. There is no damage to the arm, no difference between one arm and another, and yet, its is felt to be outside of one's control and its sensations are felt not to be your sensations. This would be precisely the kind of estrangement that I would expect to encounter during a gradual replacement of the brain with any inorganic substitute. At the level at which food becomes non-food, so too would the brain become non-brain, and any animation of the nervous system would fail to be incorporated into personal awareness. The living brain could still learn to use the prosthetic, and ultimately imbue it with its own articulation and familiarity to a surprising extent, but it is a one way street and the prosthetic has no capacity to find the personal awareness and merge with it. This example shows that if there is a lesion in the neural circuitry it affects consciousness. If you fix the lesion such that the circuitry works properly but the consciousness is affected (keeping the environmental input constant) then that implies that consciousness is generated by something other than the brain. Paying attention to the circuitry is a red herring. What I'm bringing up is how dissociation of functions identified with the self does not make sense for the functionalist view of consciousness. How do you give a program 'alien subroutine syndrome'? Why does the program make a distinction between the pure function of the subroutine and some feeling of belonging that is generated by something other than the program? Craig -- Stathis Papaioannou -- 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.
Re: The situation at Fukushima appears to be deteriorating
Guys, David Koch can't be all bad since he is a major financial supporter of the PBS 'Nova' programs. His name appears in the opening credits of all of them... Edgar On Thursday, February 27, 2014 8:10:33 AM UTC-5, spudb...@aol.com wrote: Stop right there. You complain about the Koch's but say zero about George Soros, and about other Dem suppliers like Gates, Zuckerberg, Warren Buffet, the Blackstone Group, Hollywood billionaires, which end up being not a technical answer to a technical problem of clean energy, but rather, the ideology of a world movement of Neo-Stalinists. Billionaires which support the State, connected with a Vanguard Proletariat of power hungry academics, unions, Billionaire elitists, and the willful underclass. Solar either works it doesn't. Engineering and physics have no ideology. Enemies? You mean those organizations like Retake America that claimed to be charitable organizations not engaging in any political activity in order to conceal their donors? And the FBI is going after who? The Koch brothers? Rev. Hagee? Rush Limbaugh? They can't seem to find anyone guilty of anything in the housing bubble debacle, but they can sure bust some medical marijuana sellers in Seattle. -Original Message- From: meekerdb meek...@verizon.net javascript: To: everything-list everyth...@googlegroups.com javascript: Sent: Wed, Feb 26, 2014 10:23 pm Subject: Re: The situation at Fukushima appears to be deteriorating On 2/26/2014 3:22 PM, spudb...@aol.com javascript: wrote: Here in the States, we have the executive branch using the IRS and the FBI to go after enemies of the progressives. Enemies? You mean those organizations like Retake America that claimed to be charitable organizations not engaging in any political activity in order to conceal their donors? And the FBI is going after who? The Koch brothers? Rev. Hagee? Rush Limbaugh? They can't seem to find anyone guilty of anything in the housing bubble debacle, but they can sure bust some medical marijuana sellers in Seattle. You have the vast expansion of the NSA spying on the American people and indeed people worldwide. Which was proposed under Reagan and implemented under W. A statement by the head of NSA was that We are not spying to halt terrorists.. So what are they spying for, our benefit? BHO has tried to pick tech winners but he cannot change physics nor economics. Think Solyndra. How about think Detroit. You simply trust too much, or despise non Statists too much. People want clean energy, there is just no new tech to the dirty. And you're just an ideologue government hater dreaming of Galt's Gulch. 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-li...@googlegroups.com javascript:. To post to this group, send email to everyth...@googlegroups.comjavascript: . 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/groups/opt_out.
Re: Block Universes
Jesse, I haven't answered those questions out of any disrespect or rudeness but because I was working on a new explanation which I think does specifically address and answer all of them which I present in this post. I will be happy to answer any of your questions if you think they are still relevant after reading this post which I think solves the 1:1 age correlation to your satisfaction. If you find any of the terminology confusing please let me know what you think it SHOULD be rather than just saying it's wrong. Twins A and B start at the same location in deep space. No acceleration, no gravitation. Their ages are obviously the same, and their age clocks are running at the same rate. They exchange flight plans and embark on their separate trips according to those flight plans. Now the only effects that will alter the rates of their age clocks are acceleration or gravitation. But each twin can continually measure the amount of acceleration or gravitation he experiences with a scale. So each twin can always calculate how much his age has slowed relative to what his age WOULD HAVE BEEN had he NOT experienced any gravitation or acceleration. Let's call that his 'inertial age', the age he WOULD have been had he NOT experienced any acceleration or gravitation. So each twin always knows what inertial age corresponds to his actual age. And because each twin has the exact flight plan of the other twin, he also can calculate what inertial age corresponds to the actual age of the other twin at any point on his trip because the flight plan tells him what all accelerations and gravitational effects will be. Thus it is a simple, frame independent matter for both twins to get a 1:1 correspondence between their respective actual ages in terms of their inertial ages since their inertial ages will always be the same. If A is age a' when his inertial age is I', and B is age a'' when his inertial age is I', then A will be actual age a' when B is actual age a'', and we can always establish such a 1:1 correspondence of actual ages for any actual age of either. And both twins will always AGREE on this 1:1 correlation of their actual ages. Note it is not even necessary to exchange flight plans. Each twin can just continually transmit a light signal to the other giving his current actual age in terms of his inertial age. That again allows both twins to correlate their actual ages. So this gives us a frame independent way for any two observers who initially synchronize their inertial ages to the same arbitrary value to always establish an UN-ambiguous, AGREED 1:1 correlation of their actual ages. Do you agree? Edgar On Wednesday, February 26, 2014 10:45:51 PM UTC-5, jessem wrote: On Wed, Feb 26, 2014 at 8:52 PM, Edgar L. Owen edga...@att.netjavascript: wrote: Can you agree to this at least? To repeat what I said in my second-to-last post: 'If you continue to ask me Do you agree? type questions while ignoring the similar questions I ask you, I guess I'll have to take that as a sign of contempt, in which case as I said I won't be responding to further posts of yours. Any response is better than just completely ignoring questions, even if it's something like I find your questions ambiguous or you've asked too many questions and I don't have time for them all right now, please narrow it down to one per post.' If you decide to treat me with the same basic level of respect I have treated you, rather than making a show of asking me questions while you contemptuously ignore my requests that you address mine, then I will keep going with this. If not, I have better things to do. 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/groups/opt_out.
Re: Turning the tables on the doctor
On 24 Feb 2014, at 17:31, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Monday, February 24, 2014 9:13:26 AM UTC-5, David Nyman wrote: On 24 February 2014 02:43, Craig Weinberg whats...@gmail.com wrote: How do you turn your desire to move your hand into the neurological changes which move them? The neurological change is the expression of what you actually are. These primitive levels of sense are beyond the question of 'how', they are more in the neighborhood of 'how else?' But we cannot be content to let how else? stand as mere rhetoric, can we? Yes, in this case, we absolutely can. Otherwise you enter into a regress of having to ask 'how does asking how' work? If you follow the unavoidably more mathematical thread (which exploits the link between computationalism and theoretical computer science) you might eventually understand how a machine can explain its entire 3p functioning (and with chance: at its correct 1p substitution level). Like a tiny part of arithmetical truth can already explain why normal universal numbers get in awe in front of the gap between proof and truth. We don't have to ask how it works, nor must there be an answer which could satisfy such an expectation. But we *can* ask, isn't it? We might never find the correct answer, but we can find better and better theories. Advantage of comp? We can easily do science. The whole idea of 'how' is a cognitive framing of sensible comparisons. Sure, it seems very important to the intellect, just as air seems very important to the lungs, but that doesn't mean that 'how' can refer to anything primordial. Comp is a banal theory, in the sense of being believed (consciously or not) by many people, mainly materialist . Few computationalists today are aware that it put theology and physics upside down, yet in a simple elementary interpretations capable to be understood by any universal machine. It's like asking an actor in a movie asking how they got into a projection on a screen. Bad analogy, misused. You beg the question. You just can't compare authentic self-referentially correct machines, amenable to mathematical studies, with dolls. Study the movie graph argument, and you will see that you are almost correct here, but this only by reifying mind and/or matter in a way where in comp it becomes a problem in math. 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/groups/opt_out.
Re: Alien Hand/Limb Syndrome
On 27 February 2014 14:02, Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.com wrote: In other words, why, in a functionalist/materialist world would we need a breakable program to keep telling us that our hand is not Alien? When you start by assuming that I'm always wrong, then it becomes very easy to justify that with ad hoc straw man accusations. I do not in fact start with that assumption and, if you believe that I do, I suggest you should question it. I do find however that I am unable to draw the same conclusion as you from the examples you give. They simply seem like false inferences to me (and to Stathis, based on his comment). If you have a compelling argument to the contrary, I wish you would find a way to give it in a clearer form. I can't see that what you say above fits the bill. You seem to regard rhetorical questions beginning why would we need..? as compelling arguments against a functional account, but they seem to me to be beside the point. They invite the obvious rejoinder that AHS doesn't seem in principle to present any special difficulties to functionalism in explaining the facts in its own terms. You recently proposed the example of tissue rejection which invited a similar response. None of this is to say that I don't regard functional / material accounts as problematic, but this is for a different reason; I think they obfuscate the categorical distinctions between two orthogonal versions of the facts: at the reduced level of function and at the integrated level of sensory awareness / intention. Comp, for example, seeks to remedy this obfuscation by elucidating principled correlations between formal notions of reduction and integration via computational theory. Hence, per comp, the principle of digital substitution is not the terminus of an explanation but the starting point for a deeper theory. ISTM that alternative theories cannot avoid a similar burden of explanation. 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/groups/opt_out.
Re: Tegmark and UDA step 3
On Wed, Feb 26, 2014 at 2:49 PM, Jason Resch jasonre...@gmail.com wrote: I came upon an interesting passage in Our Mathematical Universe, starting on page 194, which I think members of this list might appreciate: It gradually hit me that this illusion of randomness business really wasn't specific to quantum mechanics at all. Suppose that some future technology allows you to be cloned while you're sleeping, and that your two copies are placed in rooms numbered 0 and 1 (Figure 8.3). When they wake up, they'll both feel that the room number they read is completely unpredictable and random. If in the future, it becomes possible for you to upload your mind to a computer, then what I'm saying here will feel totally obvious and intuitive to you, since cloning yourself will be as easy as making a copy of your software. If you repeated the cloning experiment from Figure 8.3 many times and wrote down your room number each time, you'd in almost all cases find that the sequence of zeros and ones you'd written looked random, with zeros occurring about 50% of the time. In other words, causal physics will produce the illusion of randomness from your subjective viewpoint in any circumstance where you're being cloned. The fundamental reason that quantum mechanics appears random even though the wave function evolves deterministically is that the Schrodinger equation can evolve a wavefunction with a single you into one with clones of you in parallel universes. So how does it feel when you get cloned? It feels random! And every time something fundamentally random appears to happen to you, which couldn't have been predicted even in principle, it's a sign that you've been cloned. While reading, do you get a sense that he points towards how this might potentially weaken digital physics/functionalism in their strong sense? That digital physics implies comp, which implies vast non computable parts of reality, which rules out stronger forms of interpreting digital physics/functionalism? Because in this quoted passage he just references the teleportation ambiguity, as many have. I'd want to know if he dug a bit deeper. PGC Jason -- 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/groups/opt_out.
Re: MODAL 5 (was Re: Better Than the Chinese Room)
On 24 Feb 2014, at 23:04, LizR wrote: On 24 February 2014 07:57, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: About [](A - B) - ([]A - []B), let me ask you a more precise exercise. Convince yourself that this formula is true in all worlds, of all Kripke multiverses, with any illumination. Hint: you might try a reductio ad absurdum. try to build a multiverse in which that law would be violated. [](A - B) - ([]A - []B) OK. For a disconnected universe this is t - (t - t) or t - t which is true. And for a Leibniz universe, I'm fairly sure this is also true. So that leaves {alpha R alpha} and {alpha R beta} and so on, for any number of universes + relations. Maybe I can come back on this one. Sure. Me too. (I will myself be plausibly slowed down, as I have two weeks of teaching, take your time, just try to not forget what you learn, by having good summary, that you can read from time to time). Well, does an illuminated Kripke universe effectively act as a Leibniz universe? In both you need the notion of all illuminations to have the notion of law for a multiverse. In the realm of the Kripke multiverse, the Leibnizian one are the much more particular one characterized by having their relation being equivalence relation (they are reflexive, symmetric, and transitive). Indeed, in Leibniz, []p is true if true in all universes, no matter how accessible their are or not. It is like their are all equivalent with respect to accessibility. Brent, Liz, here is my gift from the 24th February: an exercise! Below. If so this is definitely true (OK I try to jump in quickly here...) You do good work, but I am not sure if you have good notes. That is not grave, but not helpful to you. Yes, I know - about the notes, I mean. (Maybe I just need to search the list for []p to find some...) You will get too many, and it is only in writing the information, that you will maximize the ability to integrate them, and develop some familiarity. Never hesitate to ask for any definition or recall. Thank you, don't worry I will :) And Liz-Washington said I don't know if I am the one from Washington I drunk to much whisky and I lost the diary! And Liz-Moscow said I don't know if I am the one from Moscow, I drunk too much vodka and I lost the diary. The modal logic part is not the real thing. The real thing will be the interview of universal and Löbian machines, and some modal logics will just sum up infinite conversations we can have with them, notably on predictions and physics. Yes, that is where it all happens! But I feel like I am quite a way from that. I told you we have to empty the ocean with a tea spoon. Don't worry, modal logic, here, will be a powerful tool. Take it easy, I know that studying this is time consuming. I hope you will see the main line. Keep in mind that the reversal physics/number-theology is justified in UDA, AUDA just translates it more constructively in arithmetic, and give the comp arithmetical quantizations. It is an open problem if they emulate or not a quantum computer. Bruno -- 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. 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/groups/opt_out.
Re: Alien Hand/Limb Syndrome
On Thursday, February 27, 2014 9:47:33 AM UTC-5, David Nyman wrote: On 27 February 2014 14:02, Craig Weinberg whats...@gmail.com wrote: In other words, why, in a functionalist/materialist world would we need a breakable program to keep telling us that our hand is not Alien? When you start by assuming that I'm always wrong, then it becomes very easy to justify that with ad hoc straw man accusations. I do not in fact start with that assumption and, if you believe that I do, I suggest you should question it. I do find however that I am unable to draw the same conclusion as you from the examples you give. They simply seem like false inferences to me (and to Stathis, based on his comment). You are unable to draw the same conclusion because you aren't considering any part of what I have laid out. I'm looking at CTM as if it were true, and then proceeding from there to question whether what we observe (AHS, blindsight, etc) would be consistent with the idea of consciousness as a function. What I conclude is that since the function of the limb is not interrupted, there is no plausible basis for the program which models the limb to add in any extra alarm for a condition of 'functional but not 'my' function'. AHS is the same as a philosophical zombie, except that it is at the level where physiological behavior is exhibited rather than psychological behavior. If you have a compelling argument to the contrary, I wish you would find a way to give it in a clearer form. See above. Hopefully that is clearer. I can't see that what you say above fits the bill. I don't see that criticism without any details or rebuttals fit the bill either. Whenever the criticism is It seems to me that your argument fails', it only makes me more suspicious that there is no legitimate objection. I can't relate to it, since as far as I know, my objections are always in the form of an explanation - what specifically seems wrong to me, and how to see it differently so that what I'm objecting to is not overlooked. You seem to regard rhetorical questions beginning why would we need..? as compelling arguments against a functional account, but they seem to me to be beside the point. That's because you are only considering the modus ponens view where since functionalism implies that a malfunctioning brain would produce anomalies in conscious experience, it would make sense that AHS affirms functionalism being true. I'm looking at the modus tollens view where since functionalism implies that brain function requires no additional ingredient to make the function of conscious machines seem conscious, some extra, non-functional ingredient is required to explain why AHS is alarming to those who suffer from it. Since the distress of AHS is observed to be real, and that is logically inconsistent with the expectations of functionalism, I conclude that the AHS example adds to the list of counterfactuals to CTM/Functionalism. It should not matter whether a limb feels like it's 'yours',* functionalism implies that the fact of being able to use a limb makes it feel like 'yours' by definition*. This is the entire premise of computationalist accounts of qualia; that the mathematical relations simply taste like raspberries or feel like pain because that is the implicit expression of those relations. They invite the obvious rejoinder that AHS doesn't seem in principle to present any special difficulties to functionalism in explaining the facts in its own terms. It does present special difficulties though (see above). AHS doesn't make much sense for functionalism, particularly combined with blindsight, and all of the problems with qualia and the hard problem/explanatory gap. You recently proposed the example of tissue rejection which invited a similar response. None of this is to say that I don't regard functional / material accounts as problematic, but this is for a different reason; I think they obfuscate the categorical distinctions between two orthogonal versions of the facts: at the reduced level of function and at the integrated level of sensory awareness / intention. Comp, for example, seeks to remedy this obfuscation by elucidating principled correlations between formal notions of reduction and integration via computational theory. Hence, per comp, the principle of digital substitution is not the terminus of an explanation but the starting point for a deeper theory. ISTM that alternative theories cannot avoid a similar burden of explanation. They can if they begin by accepting that what we cannot explain about consciousness is unexplainable for a good reason, namely that consciousness cannot be made any more or less plain than it is. Consciousness is what makes all things plain, so it is circular to expect that it could be subject to its own subjugation. Craig David -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the
Re: Block Universes
On Thu, Feb 27, 2014 at 9:25 AM, Edgar L. Owen edgaro...@att.net wrote: Jesse, I haven't answered those questions out of any disrespect or rudeness but because I was working on a new explanation which I think does specifically address and answer all of them which I present in this post. I will be happy to answer any of your questions if you think they are still relevant after reading this post which I think solves the 1:1 age correlation to your satisfaction. That's the problem, you continually come up with new arguments and explanations that you think resolve the questions I asked and therefore mean you don't need to address them, but inevitably I disagree. Please just respect my judgment about what's relevant TO ME, and answer the questions that I ask ALONGSIDE any new arguments or explanations you might want to supply. You say above I will be happy to answer any of your questions if you think they are still relevant after reading this post, so I will hold you to that by repeating a question I'd like you to answer at the end of this post. If you find any of the terminology confusing please let me know what you think it SHOULD be rather than just saying it's wrong. Twins A and B start at the same location in deep space. No acceleration, no gravitation. Their ages are obviously the same, and their age clocks are running at the same rate. They exchange flight plans and embark on their separate trips according to those flight plans. Now the only effects that will alter the rates of their age clocks are acceleration or gravitation. But each twin can continually measure the amount of acceleration or gravitation he experiences with a scale. Let's consider just the issue of accelerations in flat SR spacetime for now, since it's simpler. The problem with this statement is that although it's true each twin can measure their proper acceleration, there is no FRAME-INDEPENDENT equation in relativity for how a given acceleration affects the rates of their age clocks, the only equations dealing with clock rates and acceleration in SR deal with how changes in coordinate velocity (determined by acceleration) affect the rate a clock is ticking relative to coordinate time in some specific coordinate system. So each twin can always calculate how much his age has slowed relative to what his age WOULD HAVE BEEN had he NOT experienced any gravitation or acceleration. Let's call that his 'inertial age', the age he WOULD have been had he NOT experienced any acceleration or gravitation. I see no way to define this in any frame-independent way. The only version of this that relativity would allow you to calculate is what your age would have been at a PARTICULAR COORDINATE TIME if you had remained inertial, and you can compare that to what your age is at that SAME COORDINATE TIME given your acceleration history. But this comparison obviously gives different results in different coordinate systems. So, I don't agree with your subsequent conclusion that this allows two twins to define a 1:1 correlation in their ages in a frame-independent way. There are a number of questions I asked in the last few posts that none of your answers have addressed, but I'll restrict myself to repeating one for now: 'Also, do you understand that even for inertial observers, the idea that an observer's own rest frame can be labeled his view or taken to describe his observations is PURELY A MATTER OF CONVENTION, not something that is forced on us by the laws of nature? Physicists just don't want to have to write out in the observer's comoving inertial frame all the time, so they just adopt a linguistic convention that lets them write simpler things like from this observer's perspective or in his frame as a shorthand for the observer's comoving inertial frame. Physically there is no reason an observer can't assign coordinates to events using rulers and clocks that are moving relative to himself though, lots of real-world experiments involve measuring-instruments that move relative to the people carrying out the experiment.' Do you agree with the above paragraph? Jesse On Wednesday, February 26, 2014 10:45:51 PM UTC-5, jessem wrote: On Wed, Feb 26, 2014 at 8:52 PM, Edgar L. Owen edga...@att.net wrote: Can you agree to this at least? To repeat what I said in my second-to-last post: 'If you continue to ask me Do you agree? type questions while ignoring the similar questions I ask you, I guess I'll have to take that as a sign of contempt, in which case as I said I won't be responding to further posts of yours. Any response is better than just completely ignoring questions, even if it's something like I find your questions ambiguous or you've asked too many questions and I don't have time for them all right now, please narrow it down to one per post.' If you decide to treat me with the same basic level of respect I have treated you, rather than making a show of asking me questions while you
Re: 3-1 views (was: Re: Better Than the Chinese Room)
On 26 Feb 2014, at 07:21, chris peck wrote: Hi Bruno Yes, it is the common confusion between 1 and 3 views. There is no such confusion. I haven't seen anyone confusing these. Read the posts by John Clark. I made clear that the first person expectation are what is confimred or not in the pesronal diaries of the copies, that is the 1-views, and it systematically describes only the 3-1- views, which is nice and correct, but not asked for. She should have said: whatever she knows she will see, she should expect (with certainty!) to see SOMETHING definite. But, If she had of said that you'd both be wrong! ? I am in H, I predict I will see something definite, meaning W or M, but not a fuzzy superpostion of both. I push on the button. I open the door, I see Washington. Well defined old Washington. I can only write W in my diary, and assess my prediction I will see something definite, meaning W or M, but not a fuzzy superposition of both. The same for the I opening the door and seeing the well defined old Moscow. he too sees something definite, and assess the prediction. By definition of the 1p, it is on that personal confirmation or refutation that bears the indeterminacy. And in the 1p it is obvious she will never see both outcome. You need to stop confusing what is seen with what can be expected to be seen. But I can only use what is seen, to refute or assess the prediction, that is what can be expected to be see. The 1/3 distinctions makes it possible to handled in 3p description only (making a logical derivation of the argument looking like a play with word). I think that's the source of many of your mistakes. She can expect to see each outcome without being committed to the view that either future self sees both. Of course, but this is the 3-1 view, and we have agreed on that. In that case, she can also consider that from both it will looks like they got freely one bit of information, and that is the FPI. All that 1p,3p,3-1p,1-3p stuff is a rubbishy smoke screen to divert attention from the simple error you make here, isn't it? The contrary. It is needed to avoid the ambiguities. And the 1p/3p relations is really an important part of the computionalist, or not, mind-body problem, so your remark seems awkward. In AUDA, the translation in arithmetic, the 3p and 1p will correspond to different arithmetical modal logic related to self-reference. The rubbishy smoke screen, is the very subject matter. I submit a problem, and partial solutions, testable, and up to now tested (thanks to both Gödel and QM). Bruno All the best Chris. From: marc...@ulb.ac.be To: everything-list@googlegroups.com Subject: Re: 3-1 views (was: Re: Better Than the Chinese Room) Date: Wed, 26 Feb 2014 05:26:02 +0100 On 25 Feb 2014, at 07:31, Quentin Anciaux wrote: Greaves rejects subjective uncertainty. With respect to spin up and spin down pay special attention to the point in section 4.1 where, in discussion of a thought experiment formally identical to Bruno's step 3, he argues: What ... should Alice expect to see? Here I invoke the following premise: whatever she knows she will see, she should expect (with certainty!) to see. So, she should (with certainty) expect to see spin-up, and she should (with certainty) expect to see spin-down. That's nonsense, and contrary to observed fact. Yes, it is the common confusion between 1 and 3 views. She should have said: whatever she knows she will see, she should expect (with certainty!) to see SOMETHING definite. And in the 1p it is obvious she will never see both outcome. 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/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/groups/opt_out. 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
Re: 3-1 views (was: Re: Better Than the Chinese Room)
On 26 Feb 2014, at 07:44, chris peck wrote: Hi Bruno Of course, and my point is that comp aggravates that problem, as only extends the indterminacy from a wave to arithmetic. Personally, I don't think it makes a difference what the underlying substrata of reality consists of, So we might work on different subject. No problem. You are the one saying that there was a mistake. be it sums or some fundamental 'matter-esq' substance. What causes the problem is just the fact that in any TofE all outcomes are catered for. In such a theory genuine probabilities just vanish and subjective uncertainty can only exist as an epistemic measure. Very good. That is what happen in arithmetic with comp. In versions of MWI it can exist when a person is unable to locate himself in a particular branch. ie. in earlier versions of Deutsch where infinite numbers of universes run in parallel one might not know whether one is in a spin up or spin down universe. Or in your step 3, subjective uncertainty can exist after duplication but before opening the door. Do you agree that if today, I can be certain that I will find myself in front of something indeterminate, then I am now indeterminate about that future outcome? If you agree, then you are playing with words. If you disagree then explain. These people are unable to locate and that lack of knowledge translates into subjective uncertainty. Which was easily predictable (you just did), and so the guy in H can understand what we are talking about, and in which sense W v M is the best prediction, and W and M the worst. Even if correct in some different views. They can assign a probability value between 0 and 1 to possible outcomes. And the next step ask if a delay of reconstitution changes the expectations. But crucially, where all relevant facts are known, the only values available must be 1 or 0. Well, after the experience. But the question is asked before. That just follows from the fact that all outcomes are catered for. And it seems to me that H guy in step 3 has all these relevent facts. Indeed, but that is the very reason he can be sure of one thing: he cannot be sure where he will be in an iteration of self-duplication. The epistemic probabilities gives a normal distribution, in that protocols. So, whilst the duplicates before opening the door would assign 0.5 to M or W, prior to duplication H guy would assign 1. 1 to what events? No, that's the shift in the 3-1 again, using a non relevant principle, see above. This is why I have accused you in the past of smuggling probabilities in from the future which strikes me as very fishy. Insulting is not valid argumentation. Up to now, I see play word and hand waving to avoid a simple consequence of logic and mechanism. OK, I appreciate the work, but they don't address the mind-body problem. Still less the computationalist form of that problem. But they get the closer view of the physical possible with respect to both comp, and the mathematical theory (comp+Theaetetus). Im not arguing that these people have a complete or even coherent theory. My guess is that they don't, I mean who does? It is the object matter of this list. It seems like everyone but me thinks they are in direct contact with the one and only truth, but its all just hubris. It might well be the case that your theory fairs better than theirs on the mind-body problem and much else besides but so what? They do far better when it comes to probability assignment and subjective uncertainty, imho. My point is that if we assume comp, we have to extend Everett to a larger part, in arithmetic. And by doing this from self-reference, we get the communicable quanta and the non communicable qualia. I think. With their rich mathematics. Bruno All the best Chris From: allco...@gmail.com Date: Wed, 26 Feb 2014 07:33:21 +0100 Subject: Re: 3-1 views (was: Re: Better Than the Chinese Room) To: everything-list@googlegroups.com 2014-02-26 7:31 GMT+01:00 chris peck chris_peck...@hotmail.com: Hi Liz I meant changed from our everyday definition, in which we normally assume there is only one you, which is (or is at least associated with) your physical structure. Which we generally assume exists in one universe. We lose that definition just by stepping into the realm of MWI don't we? Its not as if we can have use of it in MWI until we want to argue that we will always see 'spin up'. MWI forces upon us either the complete abandonment of any notion of personal identity over time, or the equal distribution of it through all the branches in which 'we' appear. That's where your wrong... that would mean all branches have equal measure, where it must not, if MWI must be in accordance with QM. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qm-manyworlds/#PRPO All the best Chris. From:
Re: Turning the tables on the doctor
On Thursday, February 27, 2014 9:38:05 AM UTC-5, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 24 Feb 2014, at 17:31, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Monday, February 24, 2014 9:13:26 AM UTC-5, David Nyman wrote: On 24 February 2014 02:43, Craig Weinberg whats...@gmail.com wrote: How do you turn your desire to move your hand into the neurological changes which move them? The neurological change is the expression of what you actually are. These primitive levels of sense are beyond the question of 'how', they are more in the neighborhood of 'how else?' But we cannot be content to let how else? stand as mere rhetoric, can we? Yes, in this case, we absolutely can. Otherwise you enter into a regress of having to ask 'how does asking how' work? If you follow the unavoidably more mathematical thread (which exploits the link between computationalism and theoretical computer science) you might eventually understand how a machine can explain its entire 3p functioning (and with chance: at its correct 1p substitution level). The only mathematical thread I would be interested in following is one which exploits the link between computationalism or theoretical computer science and aesthetic realism. Like a tiny part of arithmetical truth can already explain why normal universal numbers get in awe in front of the gap between proof and truth. Why would the gap between proof and truth cause awe? What arithmetic function does awe server? We don't have to ask how it works, nor must there be an answer which could satisfy such an expectation. But we *can* ask, isn't it? We might never find the correct answer, but we can find better and better theories. We can ask, sure, but its a mistake. We can ask who matter is made of also, or where arithmetic is, but they don't lead to better theories, they lead to confusion. Advantage of comp? We can easily do science. Sure, it makes sense that theories that are made from science instead of reality would be easier to manage with science. The whole idea of 'how' is a cognitive framing of sensible comparisons. Sure, it seems very important to the intellect, just as air seems very important to the lungs, but that doesn't mean that 'how' can refer to anything primordial. Comp is a banal theory, in the sense of being believed (consciously or not) by many people, mainly materialist . Few computationalists today are aware that it put theology and physics upside down, yet in a simple elementary interpretations capable to be understood by any universal machine. I have no problem with that. I'm never talking about materialist physics, only the physics of computation and how it supervenes on deeper, non-arithmetic participation. It's like asking an actor in a movie asking how they got into a projection on a screen. Bad analogy, misused. You beg the question. You just can't compare authentic self-referentially correct machines, amenable to mathematical studies, with dolls. I compare them with dolls only as opposed to zombies. Dolls are 3D machines which perform a very limited range of behaviors. Dolls that can cry or walk add some 4D behavioral capabilities, but they are still 3D dolls doing 4D playback of a 4D recording. Talking about self-referentially correct machines is an order of magnitude more sophisticated, obviously. These are 4D dolls doing 5D meta-playbacks of 4D recordings. They not only play back their program on cue, they have a program to store and evaluate cues in a progressive way. Despite appearances to the contrary, I am not dismissing the significance of this, nor am I failing to take into account that your view of machines includes even more persuasive evidence...perhaps the UM or Lobian machine qualifies as a 5D or 6D masterpiece, and I don't deny that. What I deny is that it makes any fundamental difference to the impersonal, rootless vantage point of any possible program. Consciousness is not entirely dimensional, it creates dimensionality. What computational theory produces is not mind, but rather mentalism - cardboard cut outs of beliefs and intensional references through which a kind of cychic cold-reading can be deduced, but there is no feeling, no aesthetic content necessary for this to occur. Study the movie graph argument, and you will see that you are almost correct here, but this only by reifying mind and/or matter in a way where in comp it becomes a problem in math. I've looked at the MGA before. I don't see that it addresses any of the issues that I keep bringing up. Craig 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
Re: Turning the tables on the doctor
On 25 Feb 2014, at 18:36, meekerdb wrote: On 2/25/2014 7:00 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: admitting simply that indexical notion are modal notion, and thus don't need to obey to Leibniz identity rule. I don't understand that remark. Are you saying that there is some modal notion that makes identity of indiscernibles wrong? I think of indexical predicates as being ostensive. I am saying that here: W = H M = H But only in the 3-1 view it make sense (locally) to say that M = W. In the 1-view M ≠ W. yet, in the 1-view, W = H, and M = H. There is nothing paradoxal. It comes from the fact that we agree surviving in both place, but are aware we can see only one of them, from the 1p view. Now, provability, and even more provability--truth provide intensional predicates, their numerical extension have a secondary role. From []A, and A - B, it does not follow that []B. You need [](A - B). Bruno 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/groups/opt_out. 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/groups/opt_out.
Re: Turning the tables on the doctor
On 25 Feb 2014, at 18:44, meekerdb wrote: On 2/25/2014 7:15 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 23 Feb 2014, at 20:38, meekerdb wrote: On 2/23/2014 4:35 AM, David Nyman wrote: Not my consciousness, no. I'm just suggesting that CTM ultimately relies on some transcendent notion of perspective itself. IOW, the sensible world is conceived as the resultant of the inter-subjective agreement of its possible observers, each of which discovers itself to be centred in some perspective. Is the sensible world of *possible* observers supposed to include the whole world. I'm always suspicious of the word possible. Does it refer to chance, i.e. many events were possible, I might have had coffee instead of tea this morning, but only a few are actual? Does it refer to anything not prohibited by (our best theory of) physics: It's possible a meteorite might strike my house? Or is it anything not entailing a contradiction: X and not X? Possible in the large sense, is the diamond of the modal logic. But is just a symbol that we use with certain rules of inference. To be applied it requires some interpretation. That's the point. Mathematical semantics provides then the math for describing a lot of them, including sound and complete in their characterization of some modal theory. There are as many notions of possibility than there are modal logics, and there are many. I appreciate that you put in your enumeration the possible in the sense of the consistent (not entailing A ~A, or not entailing f). David used possible observers as part of a definition. I don't know what it would mean for an observer to not entail f. So I think he had some other meaning (nomological) in mind. But in that case his definition is somewhat circular. I will interview correct rational machine, and I will say that a machine believes A is she asserts A. To say that they do not assert f means that they are consistent. Bruno Brent That one, consistency, can be defined in arithmetic for all arithmetically correct machine(~beweisbar('~(0=0)')), and it happens also that such a definition entails different logics for the philosophical or physical variant of it, and this choose the different modal logics from machines self-references. Bruno PS my p-time seems to be delayed, I am still in the 23 february, gosh! -- 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. 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/groups/opt_out.
Re: The situation at Fukushima appears to be deteriorating
On Wed, Feb 26, 2014 at 4:50 PM, LizR lizj...@gmail.com wrote: Why bother with all these other power sources when you have a fusion reactor in the astronomical backyard? Because the energy density decreases with the square of the distance and the fusion reactor is 93 million miles away, and because the energy drops to zero for at least half the time. John K Clark -- 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.
Re: Turning the tables on the doctor
On 25 Feb 2014, at 23:30, Craig Weinberg wrote: 0 doesn't = 0 in my theory. I was beginning suspecting this. 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/groups/opt_out.
Re: The situation at Fukushima appears to be deteriorating
On 26 Feb 2014, at 00:05, meekerdb wrote: On 2/25/2014 2:52 PM, LizR wrote: On 26 February 2014 11:18, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 2/25/2014 1:23 PM, LizR wrote: The great thing about using an energy grid is you can plug in new components (i.e. different types of generators - nuclear etc) and everything continues to work the same way downstream. This is why I'm keen on the idea of extracting CO2 from the air and making petrol, if possible. No change is required to the energy infrastructure, as there would be with say hydrogen or electric cars, but it's carbon neutral. We'd get a closed cycle in which the atmosphere was just a temporary reservoir for the materials needed to make the fuel. Presumably we'd eventually be able to extract CO2 at a rate that even reduced the amount of GHGs in the air. That's essentially what the research on hydrocarbon producing algae and bacteris is trying to do. Well, that's good. I wonder if there is any more efficient way of doing it (or do we have to wait for nanomachines which can grab passing molecules and stick them together?) Dunno, but nano-machines are what algae and bacteria are - and self manufacturing to boot. Algae, bacteria, but also us, I guess. So I'd try for some genetic engineering to improve their efficiency, rather than trying to make nanobots from scratch. Invest in both. Bruno 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/groups/opt_out. 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/groups/opt_out.
Re: Is information physical?
Deutsch cites the discovery of the neutrino as an application of energy conservation, but he doesn't seem to notice that energy conservation is simply a consequence of requiring that our theories by time-translation invariant. It's exactly the kind of impossibility restriction he hopes to get from constructor theory and the example shows it is a restriction we impose, because we don't want theories tied to specific times. Brent On 2/27/2014 5:34 AM, David Nyman wrote: http://edge.org/conversation/constructor-theory I don't recall if the list has discussed these ideas of David Deutsch recently. The link is to an Edge interview in which he discusses his view that mathematicians are mistaken if they believe that information or computation are purely abstract objects. He says that both are in fact physical, but to justify that assertion we may need deeper principles of physics than the existing ones. He proposes constructor theory as a candidate. Implications for comp (or anything else for that matter)? 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/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/groups/opt_out.
Re: The situation at Fukushima appears to be deteriorating
Why trust any of these billionaires?? Why trust the Koch's if you don't trust Soros (like me)? Let us call the US system what it is-a plutocracy. Run from the law firms on K-street in Washington, DC. Technically, its a corporatism form of government. Because somebody likes NOVA is no reason to embrace the Ruling Class, axiomatically. -Original Message- From: Edgar L. Owen edgaro...@att.net To: everything-list everything-list@googlegroups.com Sent: Thu, Feb 27, 2014 9:07 am Subject: Re: The situation at Fukushima appears to be deteriorating Guys, David Koch can't be all bad since he is a major financial supporter of the PBS 'Nova' programs. His name appears in the opening credits of all of them... Edgar On Thursday, February 27, 2014 8:10:33 AM UTC-5, spudb...@aol.com wrote: Stop right there. You complain about the Koch's but say zero about George Soros, and about other Dem suppliers like Gates, Zuckerberg, Warren Buffet, the Blackstone Group, Hollywood billionaires, which end up being not a technical answer to a technical problem of clean energy, but rather, the ideology of a world movement of Neo-Stalinists. Billionaires which support the State, connected with a Vanguard Proletariat of power hungry academics, unions, Billionaire elitists, and the willful underclass. Solar either works it doesn't. Engineering and physics have no ideology. Enemies? You mean those organizations like Retake America thatclaimed to be charitable organizations not engaging in any politicalactivity in order to conceal their donors? And the FBI is goingafter who? The Koch brothers? Rev. Hagee? Rush Limbaugh? Theycan't seem to find anyone guilty of anything in the housing bubbledebacle, but they can sure bust some medical marijuana sellers inSeattle. -Original Message- From: meekerdb meek...@verizon.net To: everything-list everyth...@googlegroups.com Sent: Wed, Feb 26, 2014 10:23 pm Subject: Re: The situation at Fukushima appears to be deteriorating On 2/26/2014 3:22 PM, spudb...@aol.com wrote: Here in the States, we have theexecutive branch using the IRS and the FBI to go afterenemies of the progressives. Enemies? You mean those organizations like Retake America that claimed to be charitable organizations not engaging in any political activity in order to conceal their donors? And the FBI is goingafter who? The Koch brothers? Rev. Hagee? Rush Limbaugh? Theycan't seem to find anyone guilty of anything in the housing bubbledebacle, but they can sure bust some medical marijuana sellers inSeattle. You have the vast expansion of theNSA spying on the American people and indeed peopleworldwide. Which was proposed under Reagan and implemented under W. A statement by the head of NSA wasthat We are not spying to halt terrorists.. So what arethey spying for, our benefit? BHO has tried to pick techwinners but he cannot change physics nor economics. ThinkSolyndra. How about think Detroit. You simply trust too much, or despisenon Statists too much. People want clean energy, there isjust no new tech to the dirty. And you're just an ideologue government hater dreaming of Galt'sGulch. 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-li...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everyth...@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/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/groups/opt_out.
Re: The situation at Fukushima appears to be deteriorating
On Thu, Feb 27, 2014 at 3:55 AM, Chris de Morsella cdemorse...@yahoo.comwrote: even if the price dropped to zero it wouldn't be enough to completely take over from nuclear and fossil fuel because it would still be too dilute and too unreliable and unpredictable for many, perhaps most, applications. So say you... and yet just this year alone - 2014 - it is projected that between 40 to 50 Gigawatts of new solar PV capacity will be installed And it wouldn't be 1% that big without tax breaks and solar had to compete against other energy sources on merit alone. You harp on dilute... well I have news for you - the food you eat, that you need in order to survive, it is a dilute source as well Food energy is not all that dilute, a 1000 calorie jelly doughnut has about as much chemical energy as a hand grenade. So what if solar is dilute So it takes a great deal of land to produce anything worthwhile, so environmentalists will start screaming bloody murder that it's harming some desert lizard few have ever heard of. The grid will adapt, becoming adaptive, and beginning to act more like a true network; battery (and other utility scale energy storage systems) will and are in fact evolving. That is one hell of a lot of hand waving! Imagine how big and how expensive a battery would have to be to power your big screen living room TV for 36 days, or your iPhone for 20 years; well one gallon of gasoline has enough energy to do that and it only costs about $4. Can you find a $4 battery that can do that? Lithium batteries are the most energy dense batteries in use today and also the most expensive, they can store .72 megajoules per kilogram, gasoline stores 44 megajoules per kilogram; so gasoline is 61 times more energy dense than the best batteries and is far far far cheaper. I'm not saying batteries can't get better and cheaper someday, but making them will be a much bigger challenge than putting a thorium reactor online. Solar PV - IMO - is poised for a new wave of next generation multi-junction, multiple band gap, layered cells that can exploit the solar flux at many more wave-lengths How well do they work at night? John K Clark -- 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.
Re: Block Universes
Jesse, First the answer to your question at the end of your post. Yes, of course I agree. Again that's just standard relativity theory. However as you point out by CONVENTION it means the observer's comoving inertial frame which is the way I was using it. Now to your replies to my post beginning with your first paragraph. Certainly there are equations that do what you say they do, but I don't see why what I say isn't correct based on that. Why do you claim it is impossible to just take proper acceleration and calculate what my age would have been if there was not any proper acceleration? An observer knows what his proper acceleration is, and he knows how much various accelerations are slowing his proper time relative to what it would be if those accelerations didn't happen. He has a frame independent measure of acceleration. He knows that particular acceleration will slow his proper time by 1/2 so he can define and calculate an 'inertial time' whose rate is 2x his proper rate. You seem to think it would be necessary to MEASURE THIS FROM SOME FRAME for the concept to be true. It's not an observable measure, it's the CALCULATION of a useful variable. Therefore there is NO requirement that it's measurable in any frame because it's a frame independent concept, a calculation rather than an observable. Therefore I don't see any reason to accept your criticism in this paragraph. If you disagree, which I'm sure you will, then explain why this concept of inertial time is not frame independent and valid. Perhaps a clear example would help? Another way to approach this is do you deny that if we drop a coordinate grid on an area of EMPTY space that the coordinate clocks at the grid intersections all run at the same rate? And if not, why? And don't start making up other frames on me here. Just compare the proper times of those coordinate clocks. Do they all run at the same rate or not? Edgar On Thursday, February 27, 2014 11:56:08 AM UTC-5, jessem wrote: On Thu, Feb 27, 2014 at 9:25 AM, Edgar L. Owen edga...@att.netjavascript: wrote: Jesse, I haven't answered those questions out of any disrespect or rudeness but because I was working on a new explanation which I think does specifically address and answer all of them which I present in this post. I will be happy to answer any of your questions if you think they are still relevant after reading this post which I think solves the 1:1 age correlation to your satisfaction. That's the problem, you continually come up with new arguments and explanations that you think resolve the questions I asked and therefore mean you don't need to address them, but inevitably I disagree. Please just respect my judgment about what's relevant TO ME, and answer the questions that I ask ALONGSIDE any new arguments or explanations you might want to supply. You say above I will be happy to answer any of your questions if you think they are still relevant after reading this post, so I will hold you to that by repeating a question I'd like you to answer at the end of this post. If you find any of the terminology confusing please let me know what you think it SHOULD be rather than just saying it's wrong. Twins A and B start at the same location in deep space. No acceleration, no gravitation. Their ages are obviously the same, and their age clocks are running at the same rate. They exchange flight plans and embark on their separate trips according to those flight plans. Now the only effects that will alter the rates of their age clocks are acceleration or gravitation. But each twin can continually measure the amount of acceleration or gravitation he experiences with a scale. Let's consider just the issue of accelerations in flat SR spacetime for now, since it's simpler. The problem with this statement is that although it's true each twin can measure their proper acceleration, there is no FRAME-INDEPENDENT equation in relativity for how a given acceleration affects the rates of their age clocks, the only equations dealing with clock rates and acceleration in SR deal with how changes in coordinate velocity (determined by acceleration) affect the rate a clock is ticking relative to coordinate time in some specific coordinate system. So each twin can always calculate how much his age has slowed relative to what his age WOULD HAVE BEEN had he NOT experienced any gravitation or acceleration. Let's call that his 'inertial age', the age he WOULD have been had he NOT experienced any acceleration or gravitation. I see no way to define this in any frame-independent way. The only version of this that relativity would allow you to calculate is what your age would have been at a PARTICULAR COORDINATE TIME if you had remained inertial, and you can compare that to what your age is at that SAME COORDINATE TIME given your acceleration history. But this comparison obviously
Re: Block Universes
On Thu, Feb 27, 2014 at 2:38 PM, Edgar L. Owen edgaro...@att.net wrote: Jesse, First the answer to your question at the end of your post. Yes, of course I agree. Again that's just standard relativity theory. However as you point out by CONVENTION it means the observer's comoving inertial frame which is the way I was using it. Thanks, it seemed like you might have been suggesting there was some natural truth to calculations done in the comoving frame of two obserervers at rest relative to each other, even though they could equally well agree to calculate things from the perspective of a totally different frame. Now to your replies to my post beginning with your first paragraph. Certainly there are equations that do what you say they do, but I don't see why what I say isn't correct based on that. Why do you claim it is impossible to just take proper acceleration and calculate what my age would have been if there was not any proper acceleration? I don't claim it's impossible, just that it can only be done relative to a particular frame. I can make statements like I am now 30, but in frame A, if I hadn't accelerated I would now be 20 and I am now 30, but in frame B, if I hadn't accelerated I would now be 25. An observer knows what his proper acceleration is, and he knows how much various accelerations are slowing his proper time relative to what it would be if those accelerations didn't happen. Slowing his proper time only has meaning relative to a particular frame, there is no frame-independent sense in which clocks slow down (or speed up) due to acceleration in relativity. He has a frame independent measure of acceleration. He knows that particular acceleration will slow his proper time by 1/2 so he can define and calculate an 'inertial time' whose rate is 2x his proper rate. Given the exact same proper acceleration, there may be one frame A where at the end of the acceleration his clock has slowed by 1/2 (relative to the time coordinate of that frame), and another frame B where it has slowed by 1/3, and even another frame where it has *sped up* by a factor of 10. Do you disagree? You seem to think it would be necessary to MEASURE THIS FROM SOME FRAME for the concept to be true. It's not an observable measure, it's the CALCULATION of a useful variable. Therefore there is NO requirement that it's measurable in any frame because it's a frame independent concept, a calculation rather than an observable. Calculations are always calculations of the values of particular numerical quantities, like the rate a clock is ticking. So, what matters is whether the quantity in question is frame-dependent (like velocity, or rate of clock ticking) or frame-independent (like proper time at a specific event on someone's worldine), there is nothing inherent in the notion of calculations that make them frame-independent. Also, *all* calculated quantities in relativity can also be observables--it's straightforward to observe frame-independent quantities like proper time (just look at the clock the observer carries), and frame-dependent ones can also be observed if you have a physical grid of rulers and coordinate clocks as I have described before (for example, to find the rate a clock is ticking relative to a coordinate system, you look at the time T1 it reads as it passes next to a coordinate clock that reads t1, and the time T2 it reads as it passes next to another coordinate clock that reads t2, and then you can just define the average rate over that interval as [T2 - T1]/[t2 - t1], and if the difference between T2 and T1 approaches 0 this approaches the *instantaneous* rate at T1). Therefore I don't see any reason to accept your criticism in this paragraph. If you disagree, which I'm sure you will, then explain why this concept of inertial time is not frame independent and valid. Perhaps a clear example would help? If you disagree with my statement above that different frames can disagree on the amount that a clock slowed down (or sped up) after a given proper acceleration, I can give you a numerical example. Another way to approach this is do you deny that if we drop a coordinate grid on an area of EMPTY space that the coordinate clocks at the grid intersections all run at the same rate? And if not, why? Are you talking about an inertial coordinate grid of rigid rulers, or an arbitrary non-inertial coordinate grid where we can imagine different grid points connected by rubbery rulers that can stretch and compress over time? In the simpler case of an inertial grid, obviously all inertial coordinate clocks tick at the same rate relative to any other inertial coordinate system, though not necessarily relative to an arbitrary non-inertial system. And the clocks of an arbitrary non-inertial coordinate system need not tick at a constant rate relative to inertial systems. And don't start making up other frames on me here. Just compare the proper times of those
Re: The solar example of a town in Germany
From: spudboy...@aol.com spudboy...@aol.com To: everything-list@googlegroups.com Sent: Thursday, February 27, 2014 10:01 AM Subject: Re: The solar example of a town in Germany Can you do the same with London in the UK? Yes Can you produce 4 times more than it consumes Tokyo? Yes Can you do this at night, and can you do this during times of rain and snowstorms? Electric energy can be stored. Utility scale electric energy storage is advancing very rapidly. So, yes. The article wasn't clear. A coal plant or a uranium plant can do quite a bit of this also, and transmit the excess electricity to other towns and cities, on a 7 x 24 basis. If, for any reason, we cannot do this with solar, then..? Also, what is the cost per kilowatt. I have heard that solar has made great progress in the last several years with with efficiency and cost-price. The cost per kilowatt -- for complete installed systems -- is starting to get close to parity with the cost for electricity from coal. In ten years from now solar will be far less expensive than coal electricity. -Original Message- From: Chris de Morsella cdemorse...@yahoo.com To: everything-list everything-list@googlegroups.com Sent: Thu, Feb 27, 2014 4:07 am Subject: RE: The solar example of a town in Germany It produces 4X the energy it needs just from the solar PV on the roofs of its buildings…. Isn’t it amazing what you can accomplish with such dilute sources of energy. I include the link because the pictures are pretty cool, and illustrate what a solar city could look like. http://inhabitat.com/sonnenschiff-solar-city-produces-4x-the-energy-it-needs/ What can I say – I have an architecture kick, especially when it is sustainable and low footprint. Chris -- 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/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/groups/opt_out.
Re: The solar example of a town in Germany
Chris, if this is all true and available today, or very, soon, Japan, which experienced the core meltdown at Fukushima, has not pursued a crash program of PV farms.?all over to replace nuclear. I read energy stuff all the time, as you must, and have seen a PV farm at sea, proposal. But I don't see this as more than the normal RD. I hope you are correct. There's a radiation leak, in the American Southwest, at the plutonium waste storage facility. -Original Message- From: Chris de Morsella cdemorse...@yahoo.com To: everything-list everything-list@googlegroups.com Sent: Thu, Feb 27, 2014 3:39 pm Subject: Re: The solar example of a town in Germany From: spudboy...@aol.com spudboy...@aol.com To: everything-list@googlegroups.com Sent: Thursday, February 27, 2014 10:01 AM Subject: Re: The solar example of a town in Germany Can you do the same with London in the UK? Yes Can you produce 4 times more than it consumes Tokyo? Yes Can you do this at night, and can you do this during times of rain and snowstorms? Electric energy can be stored. Utility scale electric energy storage is advancing very rapidly. So, yes. The article wasn't clear. A coal plant or a uranium plant can do quite a bit of this also, and transmit the excess electricity to other towns and cities, on a 7 x 24 basis. If, for any reason, we cannot do this with solar, then..? Also, what is the cost per kilowatt. I have heard that solar has made great progress in the last several years with with efficiency and cost-price. The cost per kilowatt -- for complete installed systems -- is starting to get close to parity with the cost for electricity from coal. In ten years from now solar will be far less expensive than coal electricity. -Original Message- From: Chris de Morsella cdemorse...@yahoo.com To: everything-list everything-list@googlegroups.com Sent: Thu, Feb 27, 2014 4:07 am Subject: RE: The solar example of a town in Germany It produces 4X the energy it needs just from the solar PV on the roofs of its buildings…. Isn’t it amazing what you can accomplish with such dilute sources of energy. I include the link because the pictures are pretty cool, and illustrate what a solar city could look like. http://inhabitat.com/sonnenschiff-solar-city-produces-4x-the-energy-it-needs/ What can I say – I have an architecture kick, especially when it is sustainable and low footprint. Chris -- 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/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/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/groups/opt_out.
Re: Block Universes
Jesse, Remember we are talking ONLY about PROPER TIMES, or actual ages. These DO NOT HAVE any MEANING IN OTHER FRAMES than that of the actual frame of the observer in question. So your comments that an observer's age will be measured differently in other frames, while obviously true, is NOT the observer's PROPER AGE or PROPER TIME. Every observer has one and only one proper age, that is his proper age to himself, NOT to anyone else, not in any other frame. That holds for all your comments about age effects of acceleration being different in different frames. Of course they can be but that is NOT PROPER ACTUAL AGE. So I have to disregard all those comments because they don't apply to PROPER TIMES OR ACTUAL AGES. Proper time is ONLY one's reading of one's own clock, NOT one's own clock viewed from some other frame. Correct? Now a very basic question. Do you agree or disagree that all PROPER TIMES run at the same rate unless some effect causes them to run at different rates? Again this is NOT how clocks appear to run in any other frames but their OWN. If you do not agree then please explain why not and please PROVE to me that PROPER TIMES do not run at the same rate unless there is some actual effect that causes them to run at different rates. Edgar On Thursday, February 27, 2014 3:07:41 PM UTC-5, jessem wrote: On Thu, Feb 27, 2014 at 2:38 PM, Edgar L. Owen edga...@att.netjavascript: wrote: Jesse, First the answer to your question at the end of your post. Yes, of course I agree. Again that's just standard relativity theory. However as you point out by CONVENTION it means the observer's comoving inertial frame which is the way I was using it. Thanks, it seemed like you might have been suggesting there was some natural truth to calculations done in the comoving frame of two obserervers at rest relative to each other, even though they could equally well agree to calculate things from the perspective of a totally different frame. Now to your replies to my post beginning with your first paragraph. Certainly there are equations that do what you say they do, but I don't see why what I say isn't correct based on that. Why do you claim it is impossible to just take proper acceleration and calculate what my age would have been if there was not any proper acceleration? I don't claim it's impossible, just that it can only be done relative to a particular frame. I can make statements like I am now 30, but in frame A, if I hadn't accelerated I would now be 20 and I am now 30, but in frame B, if I hadn't accelerated I would now be 25. An observer knows what his proper acceleration is, and he knows how much various accelerations are slowing his proper time relative to what it would be if those accelerations didn't happen. Slowing his proper time only has meaning relative to a particular frame, there is no frame-independent sense in which clocks slow down (or speed up) due to acceleration in relativity. He has a frame independent measure of acceleration. He knows that particular acceleration will slow his proper time by 1/2 so he can define and calculate an 'inertial time' whose rate is 2x his proper rate. Given the exact same proper acceleration, there may be one frame A where at the end of the acceleration his clock has slowed by 1/2 (relative to the time coordinate of that frame), and another frame B where it has slowed by 1/3, and even another frame where it has *sped up* by a factor of 10. Do you disagree? You seem to think it would be necessary to MEASURE THIS FROM SOME FRAME for the concept to be true. It's not an observable measure, it's the CALCULATION of a useful variable. Therefore there is NO requirement that it's measurable in any frame because it's a frame independent concept, a calculation rather than an observable. Calculations are always calculations of the values of particular numerical quantities, like the rate a clock is ticking. So, what matters is whether the quantity in question is frame-dependent (like velocity, or rate of clock ticking) or frame-independent (like proper time at a specific event on someone's worldine), there is nothing inherent in the notion of calculations that make them frame-independent. Also, *all* calculated quantities in relativity can also be observables--it's straightforward to observe frame-independent quantities like proper time (just look at the clock the observer carries), and frame-dependent ones can also be observed if you have a physical grid of rulers and coordinate clocks as I have described before (for example, to find the rate a clock is ticking relative to a coordinate system, you look at the time T1 it reads as it passes next to a coordinate clock that reads t1, and the time T2 it reads as it passes next to another coordinate clock that reads t2, and then you can just define the average rate over that
Re: Is information physical?
On Thu, Feb 27, 2014 at 01:34:32PM +, David Nyman wrote: http://edge.org/conversation/constructor-theory I don't recall if the list has discussed these ideas of David Deutsch recently. The link is to an Edge interview in which he discusses his view that mathematicians are mistaken if they believe that information or computation are purely abstract objects. He says that both are in fact physical, but to justify that assertion we may need deeper principles of physics than the existing ones. He proposes constructor theory as a candidate. Implications for comp (or anything else for that matter)? When I last took a look at constructor theory, it wasn't much of a theory. I know David's been working on it, when he's not doing the chat show circuit, but hadn't heard any major development in it announced, so haven't taken another look. Do you have any papers on it? AFAICT, physical information is really talking about the fact that information has physical consequences, such as heat dissipation and entropy change. But if you consider that statistical physics can be completely formulated in terms of information theory, that is not surprising. But in terms of micro-physics, ie the reversible stuff described by classical, unitary quantum or relativistic physics, concepts such as entropy and information are meaningless. And once you do add these concepts, all you are doing is expanding physics to describe observers, the process of observation, and abstract things like semantics. -- Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) Principal, High Performance Coders Visiting Professor of Mathematics hpco...@hpcoders.com.au University of New South Wales http://www.hpcoders.com.au -- 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.
Re: Tegmark and UDA step 3
On Thu, Feb 27, 2014 at 04:09:42PM +0100, Platonist Guitar Cowboy wrote: While reading, do you get a sense that he points towards how this might potentially weaken digital physics/functionalism in their strong sense? That digital physics implies comp, which implies vast non computable parts of reality, which rules out stronger forms of interpreting digital physics/functionalism? Because in this quoted passage he just references the teleportation ambiguity, as many have. I'd want to know if he dug a bit deeper. PGC AFAICT, Tegmark has never acknowledged Bruno's result. -- Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) Principal, High Performance Coders Visiting Professor of Mathematics hpco...@hpcoders.com.au University of New South Wales http://www.hpcoders.com.au -- 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.
Re: Block Universes
On Thu, Feb 27, 2014 at 4:05 PM, Edgar L. Owen edgaro...@att.net wrote: Jesse, Remember we are talking ONLY about PROPER TIMES, or actual ages. These DO NOT HAVE any MEANING IN OTHER FRAMES than that of the actual frame of the observer in question. No, you couldn't be more wrong about that last statement. Any physics textbook will tell you that the proper time between two events on a worldline is a frame-independent quantity that can be calculated in ANY frame, in fact this is one of the most important frame-independent quantities in both special and general relativity (for example, in general relativity the curvature of spacetime is defined in terms of the metric which gives proper time along all possible timelike worldlines in the spacetime, and proper distance along all possible spacelike worldlines). A simple example: say in Alice's rest frame, there are two markers at rest in this frame 20 light-years apart, and Bob moves inertially from one marker to the other a velocity of 0.8c in this frame. What is the proper time on Bob's worldline between passing the first marker and passing the second? In Alice's frame we could calculate this by first noting it should take 20/0.8 = 25 years of coordinate time in this frame for Bob to get from one to the other, and then the time dilation equation tells us that if he's moving at 0.8c his clock should be slowed by a factor of sqrt(1 - 0.8^2) = 0.6 in this frame, so Bob's own clock should tick forward by 25*0.6 = 15 years between passing the first marker and the second. That is BOB'S PROPER TIME, AS CALCULATED IN ALICE'S REST FRAME. You could of course calculate the proper time in Bob's rest frame too. In this case, you have to take into account length contraction--the markers are moving at 0.8c relative to Bob's frame, so if the distance between them was 20 light-years in their own rest frame, in Bob's frame the distance between them is shortened by a factor of sqrt(1 - 0.8^2) = 0.6, so in Bob's frame the second marker is 20*0.6 = 12 light-years away at the moment he is passing the first marker. Thus, if the second marker is moving towards him at 0.8c, it will take 12/0.8 = 15 years of coordinate time in this frame to reach him after the first marker passed him. And since he is at rest in this frame, his clock ticks at the same rate as coordinate time, so his clock should also tick foward by 15 years between passing the first marker and passing the second. That is BOB's PROPER TIME, AS CALCULATED IN BOB'S REST FRAME, and you can see that we get exactly the same answer as when we calculated his proper time using Alice's rest frame. After looking over this example, please tell me if you AGREE or DISAGREE that in relativity the proper time between two specific events on a worldline can be calculated using any frame we wish (in the manner above), and we'll always get the same answer regardless of what frame we use. So your comments that an observer's age will be measured differently in other frames, while obviously true, is NOT the observer's PROPER AGE or PROPER TIME. Every observer has one and only one proper age, that is his proper age to himself, NOT to anyone else, not in any other frame. Every observer has a proper age at any specific event on their worldine, like the event of Bob passing one of the markers in my example above. But this proper age is not associated with any particular frame, it's a frame-independent quantity that can be calculated in whatever frame you wish, and no matter what frame you use to perform the calculations you'll always get exactly the same answer. That holds for all your comments about age effects of acceleration being different in different frames. Of course they can be but that is NOT PROPER ACTUAL AGE. But you are not pointing to a specific event on his worldline and asking his proper age at that point, you are asking what his age *would* have been if he hadn't accelerated. This involves looking at TWO worldlines--one of the actual person who had done some acceleration, and another hypothetical worldline he would have had if he had not accelerated (this need not be purely hypothetical, you could imagine he had a twin who was moving alongside him before he accelerated, but continued to move inertially when he accelerated). And you're asking which event on the second inertial worldline lines up with some specific event on the worldline that experienced acceleration (like the event of his accelerometer first showing that he has stopped accelerating and is experiencing 0 G-force once again). It's impossible to answer that question in relativity without picking a specific frame with a specific definition of simultaneity, which allows us to match up the event on the non-inertial worldline with some specific event on the inertial worldline, and then calculate the age on the inertial worldline at that event. So I have to disregard all those comments because they don't apply to PROPER TIMES OR ACTUAL
Re: Is information physical?
Not to be a dick, but is not information or data perforations, and pulses, in mater and energy? This is how we recognize information from background noise, correct? Is there a third state of reality that is not matter or energy? -Original Message- From: Russell Standish li...@hpcoders.com.au To: everything-list everything-list@googlegroups.com Sent: Thu, Feb 27, 2014 4:28 pm Subject: Re: Is information physical? On Thu, Feb 27, 2014 at 01:34:32PM +, David Nyman wrote: http://edge.org/conversation/constructor-theory I don't recall if the list has discussed these ideas of David Deutsch recently. The link is to an Edge interview in which he discusses his view that mathematicians are mistaken if they believe that information or computation are purely abstract objects. He says that both are in fact physical, but to justify that assertion we may need deeper principles of physics than the existing ones. He proposes constructor theory as a candidate. Implications for comp (or anything else for that matter)? When I last took a look at constructor theory, it wasn't much of a theory. I know David's been working on it, when he's not doing the chat show circuit, but hadn't heard any major development in it announced, so haven't taken another look. Do you have any papers on it? AFAICT, physical information is really talking about the fact that information has physical consequences, such as heat dissipation and entropy change. But if you consider that statistical physics can be completely formulated in terms of information theory, that is not surprising. But in terms of micro-physics, ie the reversible stuff described by classical, unitary quantum or relativistic physics, concepts such as entropy and information are meaningless. And once you do add these concepts, all you are doing is expanding physics to describe observers, the process of observation, and abstract things like semantics. -- Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) Principal, High Performance Coders Visiting Professor of Mathematics hpco...@hpcoders.com.au University of New South Wales http://www.hpcoders.com.au -- 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/groups/opt_out.
Re: Is information physical?
On Thu, Feb 27, 2014 at 05:01:51PM -0500, spudboy...@aol.com wrote: Not to be a dick, but is not information or data perforations, and pulses, in mater and energy? This is how we recognize information from background noise, correct? Is there a third state of reality that is not matter or energy? Only when interpreted by an observer. An electrical circuit has only voltages and currents, not bits. To an observer, a voltage on a data line might be interpreted as 1 if it is greater than 3V, and zero if it is less than 1V. In between those two thresholds, the voltage might be determinate, but the information is not. The third state, as you call it, is a semantically different picture where things are described in terms of whether some physical state is the same as, or different from, some other physical state, according to the interpretation of an observer. From that, comes bits, and all the other information-based quantities. -- Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) Principal, High Performance Coders Visiting Professor of Mathematics hpco...@hpcoders.com.au University of New South Wales http://www.hpcoders.com.au -- 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.
Re: Is information physical?
On 2/27/2014 1:35 PM, Russell Standish wrote: On Thu, Feb 27, 2014 at 01:34:32PM +, David Nyman wrote: http://edge.org/conversation/constructor-theory I don't recall if the list has discussed these ideas of David Deutsch recently. The link is to an Edge interview in which he discusses his view that mathematicians are mistaken if they believe that information or computation are purely abstract objects. He says that both are in fact physical, but to justify that assertion we may need deeper principles of physics than the existing ones. He proposes constructor theory as a candidate. Implications for comp (or anything else for that matter)? When I last took a look at constructor theory, it wasn't much of a theory. I know David's been working on it, when he's not doing the chat show circuit, but hadn't heard any major development in it announced, so haven't taken another look. Do you have any papers on it? AFAICT, physical information is really talking about the fact that information has physical consequences, such as heat dissipation and entropy change. But if you consider that statistical physics can be completely formulated in terms of information theory, that is not surprising. But in terms of micro-physics, ie the reversible stuff described by classical, unitary quantum or relativistic physics, concepts such as entropy and information are meaningless. And once you do add these concepts, all you are doing is expanding physics to describe observers, the process of observation, and abstract things like semantics. An expansion not to be sneezed at. :-) 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/groups/opt_out.
Re: Block Universes
On Thu, Feb 27, 2014 at 4:49 PM, Jesse Mazer laserma...@gmail.com wrote: A simple example: say in Alice's rest frame, there are two markers at rest in this frame 20 light-years apart, and Bob moves inertially from one marker to the other a velocity of 0.8c in this frame. What is the proper time on Bob's worldline between passing the first marker and passing the second? In Alice's frame we could calculate this by first noting it should take 20/0.8 = 25 years of coordinate time in this frame for Bob to get from one to the other, and then the time dilation equation tells us that if he's moving at 0.8c his clock should be slowed by a factor of sqrt(1 - 0.8^2) = 0.6 in this frame, so Bob's own clock should tick forward by 25*0.6 = 15 years between passing the first marker and the second. That is BOB'S PROPER TIME, AS CALCULATED IN ALICE'S REST FRAME. You could of course calculate the proper time in Bob's rest frame too. In this case, you have to take into account length contraction--the markers are moving at 0.8c relative to Bob's frame, so if the distance between them was 20 light-years in their own rest frame, in Bob's frame the distance between them is shortened by a factor of sqrt(1 - 0.8^2) = 0.6, so in Bob's frame the second marker is 20*0.6 = 12 light-years away at the moment he is passing the first marker. Thus, if the second marker is moving towards him at 0.8c, it will take 12/0.8 = 15 years of coordinate time in this frame to reach him after the first marker passed him. And since he is at rest in this frame, his clock ticks at the same rate as coordinate time, so his clock should also tick foward by 15 years between passing the first marker and passing the second. That is BOB's PROPER TIME, AS CALCULATED IN BOB'S REST FRAME, and you can see that we get exactly the same answer as when we calculated his proper time using Alice's rest frame. Incidentally, for two events E1 and E2 on the worldline of an inertial clock (like the events of Bob passing each marker), there is also a simple formula for calculating the proper time the clock ticks between those events, using the coordinates of any frame you like. That is: (proper time between E1 and E2)^2 = (coordinate time between E1 and E2)^2 - (1/c^2)*(coordinate distance between E1 and E2)^2 Or using more common notation, dtau^2 = dt^2 - (1/c^2)*dx^2 If you use units where c = 1, like years for time and light-years for distance, this reduces to: dtau^2 = dt^2 - dx^2 For example, in Alice's frame we have dt = 25 years, and dx = 20 light-years, so dtau^2 = 25^2 - 20^2 = 625 - 400 = 225, so dtau is the square root of 225, or 15. Likewise, in Bob's frame we have dt = 15 years (which you could derive using the Lorentz transformation if you knew the coordinates of passing each marker in Alice's frame), and dx = 0, which again gives dtau^2 = 225 and therefore dtau = 15. This formula is the spacetime analogue of the Pythagorean formula in Euclidean geometry, which tells you that if you have a line segment that has some length ds that you want to calculate, then if you use any cartesian coordinate system to define the x and y coordinates of its endpoints, so you can find dx and dy between the endpoints, then ds^2 = dx^2 + dy^2. Just as the length of a line segment will have an answer that is the same regardless of how you orient your Cartesian coordinate axes (dx and dy may change depending on the axes, but ds will always be the same), so the proper time between two events on a worldline has an answer that is the same regardless of what inertial frame you use (dx and dt can vary, but dtau will always be the same)--both are coordinate-independent quantities, and both are understood to reflect the geometry of the space/spacetime in which they are defined. 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/groups/opt_out.
Re: Block Universes
Any attempt to separate out time from space-time and remain within the context of special relativity is bound to fail, because SR is the unification of space and time. In Newtonian theory there was absolute space and absolute time. In SR there is only absolute space-time (in the sense of invariant distances through space-time). In SR, time is relative, and lunch time doubly so. -- 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.
Re: Tegmark and UDA step 3
I have just received Max's book from Amazon. I've read the first page or two. So far he has been killed by a truck in (I think) 1975. I eagerly await developments. -- 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.
Re: The solar example of a town in Germany
Why does it matter if London can produce 4x the energy it uses? This is why we have national grids (which would be helped even more by being linked up across national borders...oh hang on they already are, aren't they?) This is why there are people in power stations keeping an eye on the load and bringing different sources online as needed. If you have all rooftops covered in PV then you *will* need to burn less fossil fuel, even if you have to fill in the gaps with coal or oil or hydro or nuclear. I can't see the point of this it has to be all or nothing argument. -- 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.
Re: Turning the tables on the doctor
On Thursday, February 27, 2014 12:52:41 PM UTC-5, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 25 Feb 2014, at 23:30, Craig Weinberg wrote: 0 doesn't = 0 in my theory. Identity isn't self contained in MSR. All identity is leased within some perspective. The more common the perspective, the longer the lease, and the more 'seems like' or 'has a similar quality' appears stabilized as 'is equal'. Craig I was beginning suspecting this. 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/groups/opt_out.
Re: The situation at Fukushima appears to be deteriorating
On 28 February 2014 06:43, John Clark johnkcl...@gmail.com wrote: On Wed, Feb 26, 2014 at 4:50 PM, LizR lizj...@gmail.com wrote: Why bother with all these other power sources when you have a fusion reactor in the astronomical backyard? Because the energy density decreases with the square of the distance and the fusion reactor is 93 million miles away, and because the energy drops to zero for at least half the time. It still delivers thousands of times more energy to earth than human civilisation uses. Let's do a quick back of the envelope calculation. Human civilisation uses approx 150 x 10^15 watt/hours per year according to wikipedia The Sun delivers about 1000 W/m^2 on average at Earth's orbital distance (1360 actually but obviously some is scattered, etc) So treating the Earth as a disc for purposes of intercepting sunlight, the total possible insolation available is around 40 x 10^15 W Or around 320 x 10^18 watt/hours per year That's about 2000 times the energy requirements of our civilisation. It can be knocked down a lot by clouds, falling on the sea, running the weather, inefficiencies in collection, etc, of course, but I'd say there's still a bit of room for ramping up how much solar we use. -- 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.
Re: Block Universes
Jesse, My understanding of the first part of your reply is though proper time is ONLY one's reading of one's own clock (as I stated) it IS possible for any other observer to calculate that proper time and always come up with the same answer. Is that correct? If so that's precisely what I've been claiming all along! That it's always possible for any observer to calculate any other observer's PROPER TIME. Why did I get the strong impression you were claiming that wasn't so from your previous replies? That is precisely the whole crux of my case, and precisely what I've been claiming In my view that is exactly what is necessary to establish a 1:1 correlation between proper times. If everyone can always calculate everyone's proper times including their own in an UNAMBIGUOUS INVARIANT WAY then why isn't it possible to establish a 1:1 correlation between them? Please give me a clear and simple proof that it's not I'm not sure whether it's necessarily relevant here but note that the event markers that define proper ages are already actual physical worldline event points defined by the earth's orbit and rotation. So the very definition of a proper age is already IN TERMS OF worldline markers. We don't have to specify new markers to make things work. Proper time is ALREADY NECESSARILY defined in terms of event markers such as physical clock ticks. We don't need any new ones. As for your last question about what I meant by proper times all running at the same rate unless something causes them to run at different rates just strike that and let me ask another instead. Do you also agree that proper time RATES are calculable by other observers and invarian? Not just the times, but the rates as well? Thanks, Edgar On Thursday, February 27, 2014 4:49:17 PM UTC-5, jessem wrote: On Thu, Feb 27, 2014 at 4:05 PM, Edgar L. Owen edga...@att.netjavascript: wrote: Jesse, Remember we are talking ONLY about PROPER TIMES, or actual ages. These DO NOT HAVE any MEANING IN OTHER FRAMES than that of the actual frame of the observer in question. No, you couldn't be more wrong about that last statement. Any physics textbook will tell you that the proper time between two events on a worldline is a frame-independent quantity that can be calculated in ANY frame, in fact this is one of the most important frame-independent quantities in both special and general relativity (for example, in general relativity the curvature of spacetime is defined in terms of the metric which gives proper time along all possible timelike worldlines in the spacetime, and proper distance along all possible spacelike worldlines). A simple example: say in Alice's rest frame, there are two markers at rest in this frame 20 light-years apart, and Bob moves inertially from one marker to the other a velocity of 0.8c in this frame. What is the proper time on Bob's worldline between passing the first marker and passing the second? In Alice's frame we could calculate this by first noting it should take 20/0.8 = 25 years of coordinate time in this frame for Bob to get from one to the other, and then the time dilation equation tells us that if he's moving at 0.8c his clock should be slowed by a factor of sqrt(1 - 0.8^2) = 0.6 in this frame, so Bob's own clock should tick forward by 25*0.6 = 15 years between passing the first marker and the second. That is BOB'S PROPER TIME, AS CALCULATED IN ALICE'S REST FRAME. You could of course calculate the proper time in Bob's rest frame too. In this case, you have to take into account length contraction--the markers are moving at 0.8c relative to Bob's frame, so if the distance between them was 20 light-years in their own rest frame, in Bob's frame the distance between them is shortened by a factor of sqrt(1 - 0.8^2) = 0.6, so in Bob's frame the second marker is 20*0.6 = 12 light-years away at the moment he is passing the first marker. Thus, if the second marker is moving towards him at 0.8c, it will take 12/0.8 = 15 years of coordinate time in this frame to reach him after the first marker passed him. And since he is at rest in this frame, his clock ticks at the same rate as coordinate time, so his clock should also tick foward by 15 years between passing the first marker and passing the second. That is BOB's PROPER TIME, AS CALCULATED IN BOB'S REST FRAME, and you can see that we get exactly the same answer as when we calculated his proper time using Alice's rest frame. After looking over this example, please tell me if you AGREE or DISAGREE that in relativity the proper time between two specific events on a worldline can be calculated using any frame we wish (in the manner above), and we'll always get the same answer regardless of what frame we use. So your comments that an observer's age will be measured differently in other frames, while obviously true, is NOT the observer's PROPER AGE or PROPER
Re: The situation at Fukushima appears to be deteriorating
On 28 February 2014 07:11, spudboy...@aol.com wrote: Why trust any of these billionaires?? Why trust the Koch's if you don't trust Soros (like me)? Let us call the US system what it is-a plutocracy. Run from the law firms on K-street in Washington, DC. Technically, its a corporatism form of government. Because somebody likes NOVA is no reason to embrace the Ruling Class, axiomatically. Well, you have kept the right to bear arms in your constitutin *specifically* so you can do something about having oppressive rulers. Not that I'm advocating violence, of course, but they might be more amenable to changing their ways if, say, some protestors occupied Wall Street... Oh wait, they already did! How did it go? -- 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.
Re: The situation at Fukushima appears to be deteriorating
On 28 February 2014 07:47, John Clark johnkcl...@gmail.com wrote: Food energy is not all that dilute, a 1000 calorie jelly doughnut has about as much chemical energy as a hand grenade. You have 1000 calorie jelly doughnuts??? (What's that in metric units?) -- 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.
Re: The situation at Fukushima appears to be deteriorating
On 28 February 2014 07:47, John Clark johnkcl...@gmail.com wrote: Lithium batteries are the most energy dense batteries in use today and also the most expensive, they can store .72 megajoules per kilogram, gasoline stores 44 megajoules per kilogram; so gasoline is 61 times more energy dense than the best batteries and is far far far cheaper. Are you talking about the real costs here or just the cost at the pump (which is of course subsidised massively by ignoring its environmental effects) ? I mean the real cost MAY be cheaper but you have to factor in saving the Earth... -- 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.
Re: The situation at Fukushima appears to be deteriorating
Well if you can store 61 times more energy, that just means there's room for improvement in the existing batteries... Good news, if nature was able to do it so can we I hope. Le 28 févr. 2014 00:50, LizR lizj...@gmail.com a écrit : On 28 February 2014 07:47, John Clark johnkcl...@gmail.com wrote: Lithium batteries are the most energy dense batteries in use today and also the most expensive, they can store .72 megajoules per kilogram, gasoline stores 44 megajoules per kilogram; so gasoline is 61 times more energy dense than the best batteries and is far far far cheaper. Are you talking about the real costs here or just the cost at the pump (which is of course subsidised massively by ignoring its environmental effects) ? I mean the real cost MAY be cheaper but you have to factor in saving the Earth... -- 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/groups/opt_out.
Re: Block Universes
On Thu, Feb 27, 2014 at 6:43 PM, Edgar L. Owen edgaro...@att.net wrote: Jesse, My understanding of the first part of your reply is though proper time is ONLY one's reading of one's own clock (as I stated) it IS possible for any other observer to calculate that proper time and always come up with the same answer. Is that correct? For a given clock C, it is possible for any observer to calculate the proper time between events ON C'S OWN WORLDLINE, and everyone will get the same answer (it is frame-invariant). But what is NOT frame-invariant is the answer to a question like what is the proper time on that distant clock RIGHT NOW, at the same moment that my own clock shows some specific time T--in that case you aren't talking about a specific event on C's worldline, you're talking about a specific event on your worldline (the event of your clock showing time T), and asking which event on C's worldline is simultaneous with that. Since simultaneity is frame-dependent in relativity, there is no frame-invariant answer to this second type of question. If so that's precisely what I've been claiming all along! That it's always possible for any observer to calculate any other observer's PROPER TIME. Why did I get the strong impression you were claiming that wasn't so from your previous replies? That is precisely the whole crux of my case, and precisely what I've been claiming In my view that is exactly what is necessary to establish a 1:1 correlation between proper times. If everyone can always calculate everyone's proper times including their own in an UNAMBIGUOUS INVARIANT WAY then why isn't it possible to establish a 1:1 correlation between them? Please give me a clear and simple proof that it's not By unambiguous invariant way, which of these do you mean? 1. If they all agree to use a particular reference frame to define frame-dependent things like simultaneity and velocity, then they can agree on which proper times on each worldline are simultaneous, giving a 1:1 correlation. 2. They have a way to define a 1:1 correlation between proper times that does NOT depend on agreeing to use any particular reference frame. Please tell me whether you would select 1 or 2 (or some third option that is somehow different than either one). I'm not sure whether it's necessarily relevant here but note that the event markers that define proper ages are already actual physical worldline event points defined by the earth's orbit and rotation. But we have been discussing scenarios involving observers zipping around in space, so events on Earth would not be at the same point in spacetime as events on their own worldlines. So the very definition of a proper age is already IN TERMS OF worldline markers. We don't have to specify new markers to make things work. Proper time is ALREADY NECESSARILY defined in terms of event markers such as physical clock ticks. We don't need any new ones. I agree that clock ticks can count as markers, but sometimes you're dealing with problems where you want to calculate what a clock reading at a point on some observer's worldline will be without knowing it in advance. If you have a network of coordinate clocks, you can also use readings on coordinate clocks at the moment the traveling observer passes right next to them as event markers, and ask questions like what is this observer's proper time at a coordinate time of t, i.e. at the moment the coordinate clock he's right next to at that moment reads t. Do you also agree that proper time RATES are calculable by other observers and invarian? Not just the times, but the rates as well? No, there is no frame-invariant notion of clock rate in relativity. The only way to talk about rates is to look at the rate a clock is ticking relative to coordinate time in some coordinate system, and obviously this can differ from one coordinate system to another. Jesse On Thursday, February 27, 2014 4:49:17 PM UTC-5, jessem wrote: On Thu, Feb 27, 2014 at 4:05 PM, Edgar L. Owen edga...@att.net wrote: Jesse, Remember we are talking ONLY about PROPER TIMES, or actual ages. These DO NOT HAVE any MEANING IN OTHER FRAMES than that of the actual frame of the observer in question. No, you couldn't be more wrong about that last statement. Any physics textbook will tell you that the proper time between two events on a worldline is a frame-independent quantity that can be calculated in ANY frame, in fact this is one of the most important frame-independent quantities in both special and general relativity (for example, in general relativity the curvature of spacetime is defined in terms of the metric which gives proper time along all possible timelike worldlines in the spacetime, and proper distance along all possible spacelike worldlines). A simple example: say in Alice's rest frame, there are two markers at rest in this frame 20 light-years apart, and Bob moves inertially from one marker
Re: MODAL 5 (was Re: Better Than the Chinese Room)
On 28 February 2014 05:29, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: And Liz-Washington said I don't know if I am the one from Washington I drunk to much whisky and I lost the diary! And Liz-Moscow said I don't know if I am the one from Moscow, I drunk too much vodka and I lost the diary. GASP! How did you know? -- 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.
Re: The situation at Fukushima appears to be deteriorating
On Fri, Feb 28, 2014 at 12:47:05PM +1300, LizR wrote: On 28 February 2014 07:47, John Clark johnkcl...@gmail.com wrote: Food energy is not all that dilute, a 1000 calorie jelly doughnut has about as much chemical energy as a hand grenade. You have 1000 calorie jelly doughnuts??? (What's that in metric units?) Actually, a calorie _is_ a metric unit (it is defined as the amount of heat needed to raise 1 gramme of water by 1 degree Celsius (or Kelvin)), but it is not an SI unit. Actually, there are two different definitions of calorie, a small calorie (as defined above) and a large calorie (equivalent to 1000 small calories) which is commonly used in dieter's books. To convert from calorie to SI units, you need to use the specific heat of water, which is about 4200 J/kg, meaning that 1 cal is about 4.2 Joules, or 1 Cal is about 4.2 kJ. What do they teach in schools these days? Cheers -- Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) Principal, High Performance Coders Visiting Professor of Mathematics hpco...@hpcoders.com.au University of New South Wales http://www.hpcoders.com.au -- 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.
Re: Turning the tables on the doctor
On 28 February 2014 12:36, Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.com wrote: Identity isn't self contained in MSR. All identity is leased within some perspective. The more common the perspective, the longer the lease, and the more 'seems like' or 'has a similar quality' appears stabilized as 'is equal'. What is a perspective, and how would I construct or discover or recognise one without using any underlying theory of identity? -- 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.
Re: Alien Hand/Limb Syndrome
On 28 February 2014 01:05, Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.com wrote: On Thursday, February 27, 2014 4:13:22 AM UTC-5, stathisp wrote: On 26 February 2014 23:58, Craig Weinberg whats...@gmail.com wrote: The alien hand syndrome, as originally defined, was used to describe cases involving anterior corpus callosal lesions producing involuntary movement and a concomitant inability to distinguish the affected hand from an examiner's hand when these were placed in the patient's unaffected hand. In recent years, acceptable usage of the term has broadened considerably, and has been defined as involuntary movement occurring in the context of feelings of estrangement from or personification of the affected limb or its movements. Three varieties of alien hand syndrome have been reported, involving lesions of the corpus callosum alone, the corpus callosum plus dominant medial frontal cortex, and posterior cortical/subcortical areas. A patient with posterior alien hand syndrome of vascular aetiology is reported and the findings are discussed in the light of a conceptualisation of posterior alien hand syndrome as a disorder which may be less associated with specific focal neuropathology than are its callosal and callosal-frontal counterparts. - http://jnnp.bmj.com/content/68/1/83.full This kind of alienation from the function of a limb would seem to contradict functionalism. If functionalism identifies consciousness with function, then it would seem problematic that a functioning limb could be seen as estranged from the personal awareness, is it is really no different from a zombie in which the substitution level is set at the body level. There is no damage to the arm, no difference between one arm and another, and yet, its is felt to be outside of one's control and its sensations are felt not to be your sensations. This would be precisely the kind of estrangement that I would expect to encounter during a gradual replacement of the brain with any inorganic substitute. At the level at which food becomes non-food, so too would the brain become non-brain, and any animation of the nervous system would fail to be incorporated into personal awareness. The living brain could still learn to use the prosthetic, and ultimately imbue it with its own articulation and familiarity to a surprising extent, but it is a one way street and the prosthetic has no capacity to find the personal awareness and merge with it. This example shows that if there is a lesion in the neural circuitry it affects consciousness. If you fix the lesion such that the circuitry works properly but the consciousness is affected (keeping the environmental input constant) then that implies that consciousness is generated by something other than the brain. Paying attention to the circuitry is a red herring. What I'm bringing up is how dissociation of functions identified with the self does not make sense for the functionalist view of consciousness. How do you give a program 'alien subroutine syndrome'? Why does the program make a distinction between the pure function of the subroutine and some feeling of belonging that is generated by something other than the program? I don't know why you distinguish between a function such as moving the hand and identifying the hand as your own. Both of these depend on correctly working brain circuitry, which is why a brain lesion can cause paralysis but can also cause alien hand syndrome. -- Stathis Papaioannou -- 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.
Re: Alien Hand/Limb Syndrome
On 28 February 2014 03:02, Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.com wrote: In other words, why, in a functionalist/materialist world would we need a breakable program to keep telling us that our hand is not Alien? Or contrariwise, why do you need a breakable programme to tell you that it's your hand? Maybe it isn't always obvious that it's my hand... I believe the brain has an internal model of the body. I guess without one it wouldn't find it so easy to control it? A body's quite complicated, after all... -- 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.
Re: MODAL 5 (was Re: Better Than the Chinese Room)
On 2/27/2014 4:27 PM, LizR wrote: On 28 February 2014 05:29, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be mailto:marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: And Liz-Washington said I don't know if I am the one from Washington I drunk to much whisky and I lost the diary! And Liz-Moscow said I don't know if I am the one from Moscow, I drunk too much vodka and I lost the diary. GASP! How did you know? But losing the diary is no problem, if you're drunk on whisky you're from Washington, if you're drunk on vodka you're the one from Moscow. 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/groups/opt_out.
Re: The situation at Fukushima appears to be deteriorating
On 2/27/2014 4:38 PM, Russell Standish wrote: On Fri, Feb 28, 2014 at 12:47:05PM +1300, LizR wrote: On 28 February 2014 07:47, John Clark johnkcl...@gmail.com wrote: Food energy is not all that dilute, a 1000 calorie jelly doughnut has about as much chemical energy as a hand grenade. You have 1000 calorie jelly doughnuts??? (What's that in metric units?) Actually, a calorie _is_ a metric unit (it is defined as the amount of heat needed to raise 1 gramme of water by 1 degree Celsius (or Kelvin)), but it is not an SI unit. Actually, there are two different definitions of calorie, a small calorie (as defined above) and a large calorie (equivalent to 1000 small calories) which is commonly used in dieter's books. Which led to an amusing fad of eating ice to lose weight in the 60's. At 80cal/g just to melt the ice and another 30cal/g or so to raise it to body temperature it appeared that just eating some ice cubes could completely cancel out a big meal. 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/groups/opt_out.
Re: The situation at Fukushima appears to be deteriorating
On 28 February 2014 13:38, Russell Standish li...@hpcoders.com.au wrote: On Fri, Feb 28, 2014 at 12:47:05PM +1300, LizR wrote: On 28 February 2014 07:47, John Clark johnkcl...@gmail.com wrote: Food energy is not all that dilute, a 1000 calorie jelly doughnut has about as much chemical energy as a hand grenade. You have 1000 calorie jelly doughnuts??? (What's that in metric units?) Actually, a calorie _is_ a metric unit (it is defined as the amount of heat needed to raise 1 gramme of water by 1 degree Celsius (or Kelvin)), but it is not an SI unit. Actually, there are two different definitions of calorie, a small calorie (as defined above) and a large calorie (equivalent to 1000 small calories) which is commonly used in dieter's books. I remain confused. How many grammes of water can a jelly doughnut heat through 1 degree? And does it really have the same energy as a hand grenade? (This could make food fights more, er, interesting...) To convert from calorie to SI units, you need to use the specific heat of water, which is about 4200 J/kg, meaning that 1 cal is about 4.2 Joules, or 1 Cal is about 4.2 kJ. What do they teach in schools these days? The above, actually, as I happen to know from helping my son with his physics homework. Except they never mentioned calories (or kCal) just joules. -- 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.
Re: The situation at Fukushima appears to be deteriorating
On 28 February 2014 14:07, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: Which led to an amusing fad of eating ice to lose weight in the 60's. At 80cal/g just to melt the ice and another 30cal/g or so to raise it to body temperature it appeared that just eating some ice cubes could completely cancel out a big meal. Cool! -- 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.
Re: MODAL 5 (was Re: Better Than the Chinese Room)
On 28 February 2014 14:03, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 2/27/2014 4:27 PM, LizR wrote: On 28 February 2014 05:29, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: And Liz-Washington said I don't know if I am the one from Washington I drunk to much whisky and I lost the diary! And Liz-Moscow said I don't know if I am the one from Moscow, I drunk too much vodka and I lost the diary. GASP! How did you know? But losing the diary is no problem, if you're drunk on whisky you're from Washington, if you're drunk on vodka you're the one from Moscow. Waking up the following morning in Washington or Moscow might be a clue, too. Unless you've been kidnapped by philosophers while drunk and had your brain put in a vat, of course. (I suppose the next question is whether it's a vat of whisky or vodka...) -- 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.
Re: Alien Hand/Limb Syndrome
On Thursday, February 27, 2014 8:03:15 PM UTC-5, Liz R wrote: On 28 February 2014 03:02, Craig Weinberg whats...@gmail.comjavascript: wrote: In other words, why, in a functionalist/materialist world would we need a breakable program to keep telling us that our hand is not Alien? Or contrariwise, why do you need a breakable programme to tell you that it's your hand? Sure, that too. It doesn't make sense functionally. What difference does it make 'who' the hand 'belongs' to, as long as it performs as a hand. Maybe it isn't always obvious that it's my hand... I believe the brain has an internal model of the body. I guess without one it wouldn't find it so easy to control it? A body's quite complicated, after all... Why should the model include its own non-functional presence though? Craig -- 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.
Re: Alien Hand/Limb Syndrome
On Thursday, February 27, 2014 7:54:53 PM UTC-5, stathisp wrote: On 28 February 2014 01:05, Craig Weinberg whats...@gmail.comjavascript: wrote: On Thursday, February 27, 2014 4:13:22 AM UTC-5, stathisp wrote: On 26 February 2014 23:58, Craig Weinberg whats...@gmail.com wrote: The alien hand syndrome, as originally defined, was used to describe cases involving anterior corpus callosal lesions producing involuntary movement and a concomitant inability to distinguish the affected hand from an examiner's hand when these were placed in the patient's unaffected hand. In recent years, acceptable usage of the term has broadened considerably, and has been defined as involuntary movement occurring in the context of feelings of estrangement from or personification of the affected limb or its movements. Three varieties of alien hand syndrome have been reported, involving lesions of the corpus callosum alone, the corpus callosum plus dominant medial frontal cortex, and posterior cortical/subcortical areas. A patient with posterior alien hand syndrome of vascular aetiology is reported and the findings are discussed in the light of a conceptualisation of posterior alien hand syndrome as a disorder which may be less associated with specific focal neuropathology than are its callosal and callosal-frontal counterparts. - http://jnnp.bmj.com/content/68/1/83.full This kind of alienation from the function of a limb would seem to contradict functionalism. If functionalism identifies consciousness with function, then it would seem problematic that a functioning limb could be seen as estranged from the personal awareness, is it is really no different from a zombie in which the substitution level is set at the body level. There is no damage to the arm, no difference between one arm and another, and yet, its is felt to be outside of one's control and its sensations are felt not to be your sensations. This would be precisely the kind of estrangement that I would expect to encounter during a gradual replacement of the brain with any inorganic substitute. At the level at which food becomes non-food, so too would the brain become non-brain, and any animation of the nervous system would fail to be incorporated into personal awareness. The living brain could still learn to use the prosthetic, and ultimately imbue it with its own articulation and familiarity to a surprising extent, but it is a one way street and the prosthetic has no capacity to find the personal awareness and merge with it. This example shows that if there is a lesion in the neural circuitry it affects consciousness. If you fix the lesion such that the circuitry works properly but the consciousness is affected (keeping the environmental input constant) then that implies that consciousness is generated by something other than the brain. Paying attention to the circuitry is a red herring. What I'm bringing up is how dissociation of functions identified with the self does not make sense for the functionalist view of consciousness. How do you give a program 'alien subroutine syndrome'? Why does the program make a distinction between the pure function of the subroutine and some feeling of belonging that is generated by something other than the program? I don't know why you distinguish between a function such as moving the hand and identifying the hand as your own. Because there is nothing that functionalism could allow 'your own' to mean other than 'it is available to be used by the system'. The alien hand is available to be used, but that is perceived to be irrelevant. That is consistent with consciousness being a set of aesthetic qualities and direct participation, but not consistent with consciousness being a complex set of generic skills. Both of these depend on correctly working brain circuitry, which is why a brain lesion can cause paralysis but can also cause alien hand syndrome. The fact that the circuitry is damaged is irrelevant. The point is that functionalism could never allow consciousness to become separated from the functions of something else. Dis-ownership of yourself or parts of yourself doesn't make sense if the function is still there. Craig -- Stathis Papaioannou -- 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.
RE: The situation at Fukushima appears to be deteriorating
even if the price dropped to zero it wouldn't be enough to completely take over from nuclear and fossil fuel because it would still be too dilute and too unreliable and unpredictable for many, perhaps most, applications. So say you. and yet just this year alone - 2014 - it is projected that between 40 to 50 Gigawatts of new solar PV capacity will be installed And it wouldn't be 1% that big without tax breaks and solar had to compete against other energy sources on merit alone. A case of the talking point that refuses to die. Sure solar PV benefits form tax breaks; news flash - so does oil, gas, coal, nuclear, hydro, ethanol, wind.. You name it. Selectively harping on about the tax breaks (feed in tariffs. and all forms of subsidy) that solar and wind enjoy; while conspicuously ignoring the vastly larger subsidies given to nuclear, oil, gas or coal is not being fair with the facts. As I pointed out earlier the nuclear sector in the US just got a more than eight billion dollar loan guarantee from the feds, without which that project in Georgia would never be able to get funding. Can we please keep it honest? You harp on dilute. well I have news for you - the food you eat, that you need in order to survive, it is a dilute source as well Food energy is not all that dilute, a 1000 calorie jelly doughnut has about as much chemical energy as a hand grenade. False analogy.. The doughnut is the end product not the source. That calorie bomb's dough was made from wheat that had to be grown in a field somewhere; the oil it is saturated with also was squeezed from seeds that had to be grown somewhere; as was the sugar it is covered with. As I said, you present a false; analogy; by that token I should speak of the awesome all electric acceleration from 0-60 mph in 3.7 seconds of the Tesla roadster - whose battery packs had been charged from solar PV sources. The Tesla is an equivalent all electric bomb that compares very favorably with your doughnut (I know which one I would rather have). Either compare source to source; or end product to end product. So what if solar is dilute So it takes a great deal of land to produce anything worthwhile, so environmentalists will start screaming bloody murder that it's harming some desert lizard few have ever heard of. You don't seem to like environmentalists do you? I gather seeking to preserve for future generations the benefit of a living planet is something you find offensive and worthy of derision. Nice man. As I previously pointed out - practically every metro area on the planet has enough viable areas located within its urban fabric (such as south facing roofs, walls, road, parking lot and other non-green/water surfaces) to provide for all of its electricity requirements 24X7X365 from solar PV alone (if adequate energy storage of some form is available). We are very far from this, of course, and the current grid could absorb somewhere between 25% - 35% of wind/solar electric energy without needing any major retrofits or improvements - and that includes any major new sources of energy storage. In reality energy has always been a basket of sources - and will continue to be so. I can foresee natural gas turbines existing far into the future - utilized as spinning reserve and powered increasingly by synthetically produced biogas. What will happen and is happening is that solar PV is going to capture a growing share of this mix. The continuing rapid decline in its per unit cost will guarantee this. The grid will adapt, becoming adaptive, and beginning to act more like a true network; battery (and other utility scale energy storage systems) will and are in fact evolving. That is one hell of a lot of hand waving! Imagine how big and how expensive a battery would have to be to power your big screen living room TV for 36 days, or your iPhone for 20 years; well one gallon of gasoline has enough energy to do that and it only costs about $4. Can you find a $4 battery that can do that? You seem to misunderstand the requirements for utility scale battery systems, which are quite different form the unique requirements of a car or portable electronic devise (in which energy density is very much critical) Utility scale energy storage batteries are stationary installations. If you are going to argue something it helps to clearly understand the requirements of the system one is arguing about. Either we are talking about iPhones or we are talking about grid scale electric energy storage systems (which by the way can be many things, such as pumped storage for example - Japan has huge pumped storage capacity for example) -- so which is it? Lithium batteries are the most energy dense batteries in use today and also the most expensive, they can store .72 megajoules per kilogram, gasoline stores 44 megajoules per kilogram; so gasoline is 61 times more energy dense than the best batteries and is far far far cheaper. I'm not saying batteries can't
RE: The situation at Fukushima appears to be deteriorating
Well if you can store 61 times more energy, that just means there's room for improvement in the existing batteries... Good news, if nature was able to do it so can we I hope. Zinc-air batteries, which combine atmospheric oxygen and zinc metal in a liquid alkaline electrolyte to generate electricity with a byproduct of zinc oxide; and when re-processed – that is re-charged - the process is reversed and oxygen and zinc metal are regenerated. These battery types are attractive, because zinc is cheap and abundant and because they have much higher energy density than lithium-ion batteries – the current high density leaders; Zinc air batteries ware also non-flammable unlike lithium ion (which is nice). Zinc air offers about twice the gravimetric density (Wh/kg) and three times the volumetric density (Wh/L) of Li-ion technology. Lithium air has a theoretical specific energy of 11,140 wh/kg (lithium metal is around 45 Mj/kg) – you could fly an all-electric turbine jet with that kind of energy density. Le 28 févr. 2014 00:50, LizR lizj...@gmail.com a écrit : On 28 February 2014 07:47, John Clark johnkcl...@gmail.com wrote: Lithium batteries are the most energy dense batteries in use today and also the most expensive, they can store .72 megajoules per kilogram, gasoline stores 44 megajoules per kilogram; so gasoline is 61 times more energy dense than the best batteries and is far far far cheaper. Are you talking about the real costs here or just the cost at the pump (which is of course subsidised massively by ignoring its environmental effects) ? I mean the real cost MAY be cheaper but you have to factor in saving the Earth... -- 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 mailto:everything-list%2bunsubscr...@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/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/groups/opt_out.
RE: Is information physical?
On Thu, Feb 27, 2014 at 05:01:51PM -0500, spudboy...@aol.com wrote: Not to be a dick, but is not information or data perforations, and pulses, in mater and energy? This is how we recognize information from background noise, correct? Is there a third state of reality that is not matter or energy? Only when interpreted by an observer. An electrical circuit has only voltages and currents, not bits. To an observer, a voltage on a data line might be interpreted as 1 if it is greater than 3V, and zero if it is less than 1V. In between those two thresholds, the voltage might be determinate, but the information is not. The third state, as you call it, is a semantically different picture where things are described in terms of whether some physical state is the same as, or different from, some other physical state, according to the interpretation of an observer. From that, comes bits, and all the other information-based quantities. Perhaps one could say it is a meta-system that exists upon an underlying system (more like a truly vast assemblage of such discreet systems). The information exists only for those observers able to interpret the meaning of the current state of this set of nodes comprising the system. An observer who ignored, or was ignorant of the meaning encoded by the pattern would perceive no information. Only the sub-set of observers who could interpret the meta-significance of the particular ordering and sequence of states would be able to access this meta-system existing on top of a (potentially dynamic) pattern of states encoded in some underlying system. Chris -- Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) Principal, High Performance Coders Visiting Professor of Mathematics hpco...@hpcoders.com.au University of New South Wales http://www.hpcoders.com.au -- 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.
RE: The situation at Fukushima appears to be deteriorating
From: everything-list@googlegroups.com [mailto:everything-list@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of LizR Sent: Thursday, February 27, 2014 3:42 PM To: everything-list@googlegroups.com Subject: Re: The situation at Fukushima appears to be deteriorating On 28 February 2014 06:43, John Clark johnkcl...@gmail.com wrote: On Wed, Feb 26, 2014 at 4:50 PM, LizR lizj...@gmail.com wrote: Why bother with all these other power sources when you have a fusion reactor in the astronomical backyard? Because the energy density decreases with the square of the distance and the fusion reactor is 93 million miles away, and because the energy drops to zero for at least half the time. It still delivers thousands of times more energy to earth than human civilisation uses. Let's do a quick back of the envelope calculation. Human civilisation uses approx 150 x 10^15 watt/hours per year according to wikipedia The Sun delivers about 1000 W/m^2 on average at Earth's orbital distance (1360 actually but obviously some is scattered, etc) So treating the Earth as a disc for purposes of intercepting sunlight, the total possible insolation available is around 40 x 10^15 W Or around 320 x 10^18 watt/hours per year That's about 2000 times the energy requirements of our civilisation. It can be knocked down a lot by clouds, falling on the sea, running the weather, inefficiencies in collection, etc, of course, but I'd say there's still a bit of room for ramping up how much solar we use. Besides which, solar is and will be part of a mix of energy sources. Energy supply will never be provided from a single source. So the argument that unless it could provide 100% of all of the energy needed it is of zero value and interest is specious. Chris -- 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/groups/opt_out.
If it's all math, then where does math come from?
Personally the notion that all that exists is comp information - encoded on what though? - Is not especially troubling for me. I understand how some cling to a fundamental material realism; after all it does seem so very real. However when you get right down to it all we have is measured values of things and meters by which we measure other things; we live encapsulated in the experience of our own being and the sensorial stream of life and in the end all that we can say for sure about anything is the value it has when we measure it. I am getting into the interesting part of Tegmark's book - I read a bit each day when I break for lunch - so this is partly influencing this train of thought. By the way enjoyed his description of quantum computing and how in a sense q-bits are leveraging the Level III multiverse to compute every possible outcome while in quantum superposition; a way of thinking about it that I had never read before. Naturally I have been reading some of the discussions here, and the idea of comp is something I also find intuitively possible. The soul is an emergent phenomena given enough depth of complexity and breadth of parallelism and vastness of scale of the information system in which it is self-emergent. Several questions have been re-occurring for me. One of these is: Every information system, at least that I have ever been aware of, requires a substrate medium upon which to encode itself; information seems describable in this sense as the meta-encoding existing on some substrate system. I would like to avoid the infinite regression of stopping at the point of describing systems as existing upon other and requiring other substrate systems that themselves require substrates themselves described as information again requiring some substrate. repeat eternally. It is also true that exquisitely complex information can be encoded in a very simple substrate system given enough replication of elements. a simple binary state machine could suffice, given enough bits. But what are the bits encoded on? At some point reductionism can no longer reduce.. And then we are back to where we first started.. How did that arise or come to be? If for example we say that math is reducible to logic or set theory then what of sets and the various set operations? What of enumerations? These simplest of simple things. Can you reduce the {} null set? What does it arise from? Perhaps to try to find some fundamental something upon which everything else is tapestried over is unanswerable; it is something that keeps coming back to itch my ears. Am interested in hearing what some of you may have to say about this universe of the most simple things: numbers, sets; and the very simple base operators -- {+-*/=!^()} etc. that operate on these enumerable entities and the logical operators {and, or, xor} What is a number? Doesn't it only have meaning in the sense that it is greater than the number that is less than it less than the one greater than it? Does the concept of a number actually even have any meaning outside of being thought of as being a member of the enumerable set {1,2,3,4,. n}? In other words '3' by itself means nothing and is nothing; it only means something in terms of the set of numbers as in: 234. n-1n And what of the simple operators. When we say a + b = c we are dealing with two separate kinds of entities, with one {a,b,c} being quantities or values and {+,=} being the two operators that relate the three values in this simple equation. The enumerable set is not enough by itself. So even if one could explain the enumerable set in some manner the manner in which the simple operators come to be is not clear to me. How do the addition, assignment and other basic operators arise? This extends similarly to the basic logic operators: and, or, xor, not - as well. Thanks -- 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.