RE: The situation at Fukushima appears to be deteriorating

2014-02-27 Thread Chris de Morsella
 

 

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

 

 

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RE: The situation at Fukushima appears to be deteriorating

2014-02-27 Thread Chris de Morsella
 

 

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

 

 

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RE: The solar example of a town in Germany

2014-02-27 Thread Chris de Morsella
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

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Re: Alien Hand/Limb Syndrome

2014-02-27 Thread Stathis Papaioannou
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

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Re: Tegmark and UDA step 3

2014-02-27 Thread Stathis Papaioannou
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

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Re: The situation at Fukushima appears to be deteriorating

2014-02-27 Thread spudboy100

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.



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Re: The situation at Fukushima appears to be deteriorating

2014-02-27 Thread spudboy100

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
  

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Is information physical?

2014-02-27 Thread David Nyman
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

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Re: Alien Hand/Limb Syndrome

2014-02-27 Thread Craig Weinberg


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

2014-02-27 Thread Craig Weinberg


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 


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Re: The situation at Fukushima appears to be deteriorating

2014-02-27 Thread Edgar L. Owen
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
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Re: Block Universes

2014-02-27 Thread Edgar L. Owen
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


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Re: Turning the tables on the doctor

2014-02-27 Thread Bruno Marchal


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/



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Re: Alien Hand/Limb Syndrome

2014-02-27 Thread David Nyman
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

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Re: Tegmark and UDA step 3

2014-02-27 Thread Platonist Guitar Cowboy
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

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Re: MODAL 5 (was Re: Better Than the Chinese Room)

2014-02-27 Thread Bruno Marchal


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






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Re: Alien Hand/Limb Syndrome

2014-02-27 Thread Craig Weinberg


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


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Re: Block Universes

2014-02-27 Thread Jesse Mazer
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)

2014-02-27 Thread Bruno Marchal


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/




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Re: 3-1 views (was: Re: Better Than the Chinese Room)

2014-02-27 Thread Bruno Marchal


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

2014-02-27 Thread Craig Weinberg


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



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Re: Turning the tables on the doctor

2014-02-27 Thread Bruno Marchal


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

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Re: Turning the tables on the doctor

2014-02-27 Thread Bruno Marchal


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!



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Re: The situation at Fukushima appears to be deteriorating

2014-02-27 Thread John Clark
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

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Re: Turning the tables on the doctor

2014-02-27 Thread Bruno Marchal


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/



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Re: The situation at Fukushima appears to be deteriorating

2014-02-27 Thread Bruno Marchal


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

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Re: Is information physical?

2014-02-27 Thread meekerdb
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
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Re: The situation at Fukushima appears to be deteriorating

2014-02-27 Thread spudboy100

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
  

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Re: The situation at Fukushima appears to be deteriorating

2014-02-27 Thread John Clark
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

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Re: Block Universes

2014-02-27 Thread Edgar L. Owen
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

2014-02-27 Thread Jesse Mazer
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

2014-02-27 Thread Chris de Morsella





 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
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Re: The solar example of a town in Germany

2014-02-27 Thread spudboy100
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


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Re: Block Universes

2014-02-27 Thread Edgar L. Owen
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?

2014-02-27 Thread Russell Standish
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


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Re: Tegmark and UDA step 3

2014-02-27 Thread Russell Standish
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.

-- 


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Principal, High Performance Coders
Visiting Professor of Mathematics  hpco...@hpcoders.com.au
University of New South Wales  http://www.hpcoders.com.au


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Re: Block Universes

2014-02-27 Thread Jesse Mazer
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?

2014-02-27 Thread spudboy100
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.



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Visiting Professor of Mathematics  hpco...@hpcoders.com.au
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Re: Is information physical?

2014-02-27 Thread Russell Standish
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.

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University of New South Wales  http://www.hpcoders.com.au


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Re: Is information physical?

2014-02-27 Thread meekerdb

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

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Re: Block Universes

2014-02-27 Thread Jesse Mazer
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

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Re: Block Universes

2014-02-27 Thread LizR
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.

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Re: Tegmark and UDA step 3

2014-02-27 Thread LizR
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.

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Re: The solar example of a town in Germany

2014-02-27 Thread LizR
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.

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Re: Turning the tables on the doctor

2014-02-27 Thread Craig Weinberg


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/





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Re: The situation at Fukushima appears to be deteriorating

2014-02-27 Thread LizR
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.

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Re: Block Universes

2014-02-27 Thread Edgar L. Owen
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

2014-02-27 Thread LizR
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?

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Re: The situation at Fukushima appears to be deteriorating

2014-02-27 Thread LizR
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?)

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Re: The situation at Fukushima appears to be deteriorating

2014-02-27 Thread LizR
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...

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Re: The situation at Fukushima appears to be deteriorating

2014-02-27 Thread Quentin Anciaux
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...

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Re: Block Universes

2014-02-27 Thread Jesse Mazer
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)

2014-02-27 Thread LizR
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?

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Re: The situation at Fukushima appears to be deteriorating

2014-02-27 Thread Russell Standish
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


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Re: Turning the tables on the doctor

2014-02-27 Thread LizR
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?

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Re: Alien Hand/Limb Syndrome

2014-02-27 Thread Stathis Papaioannou
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

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Re: Alien Hand/Limb Syndrome

2014-02-27 Thread LizR
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...

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Re: MODAL 5 (was Re: Better Than the Chinese Room)

2014-02-27 Thread meekerdb

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

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Re: The situation at Fukushima appears to be deteriorating

2014-02-27 Thread meekerdb

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

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Re: The situation at Fukushima appears to be deteriorating

2014-02-27 Thread LizR
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.

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Re: The situation at Fukushima appears to be deteriorating

2014-02-27 Thread LizR
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!

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Re: MODAL 5 (was Re: Better Than the Chinese Room)

2014-02-27 Thread LizR
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...)

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Re: Alien Hand/Limb Syndrome

2014-02-27 Thread Craig Weinberg


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
 


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Re: Alien Hand/Limb Syndrome

2014-02-27 Thread Craig Weinberg


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 


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RE: The situation at Fukushima appears to be deteriorating

2014-02-27 Thread Chris de Morsella
 

   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

2014-02-27 Thread Chris de Morsella
 

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...

 

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RE: Is information physical?

2014-02-27 Thread Chris de Morsella

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

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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


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RE: The situation at Fukushima appears to be deteriorating

2014-02-27 Thread Chris de Morsella
 

 

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

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If it's all math, then where does math come from?

2014-02-27 Thread Chris de Morsella
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

 

 

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