3) Digital blueprints of preserved brains are made available for anyone to download. Large numbers of simulations are run by kids learning how to use the simulation APIs, folks testing poker bots, web search companies making me read every page on the Internet to generate a ranking signal, etc. etc.
Aleksander
Karma: 168
And even if you do, then the only viewpoint you will have really falsified is one which postulates that (a) the state vector collapse is caused by consciousness, and (b) concludes that therefore any consciousness has to do the trick, even one simulated on a quantum computer. I have met exactly zero physicists who’d treat (a) seriously, but even if you believe in (a), (b) still doesn’t need to follow (someone could believe that only real human brain makes the magic happen).
(I assume you were referring to experiment 3. from Deutsch’s “Three experimental implications of the Everett interpretation in Quantum Concepts in Space and Time.”)
I know quite a lot of people who didn’t, all I’m saying if you do, chances are you might like Fargo as well.
(If on the other hand you preferred The Wire, then you should try True Detective.)
If you enjoyed Breaking Bad, try Fargo. The two are best TV shows I watched in years and in my mind have a certain common flavor.
Military power of EU was not enough to stop or seriously inconvenience Milosevic.
Hey it’s a good question. I’d pick Happiness.
When I was much younger I might have said Truth. I was a student of physics once and loved to repeat the quote that the end of man is knowledge. But since then I have been happy, and I have been unhappy, and the difference between the two is just too large.
Wow thanks, I believed this one until five minutes ago.
I think both questions are informative, they just test a different thing.
To give an analogy from copmputer science, the question about hydrogen atom is similar in spirit to, “Would you be able to implement quicksort?”, whereas the one about Bell theorem is more like, “Would you be able to reconstruct the halting problem proof?” The latter seems like a much higher bar. I’m curious, do you think there exist many people who can actually reconstruct the proof of Bell’s theorem, but who can’t solve the Schrodinger equation for the hydrogen atom?
(I’m assuming that by solving the Schrodinger equation for the hydrogen atom, Daniel meant deriving the energy levels of a hydrogen atom from SE, as opposed to say providing the full basis of eigenfunctions including these for E > 0; the latter is much harder and I wouldn’t expect most people who took even advanced Quantum Mechanics to be able to do it without looking things up).
I liked this short story on that topic, which I believe was written by Yvain: http://raikoth.net/Stuff/story1.html
Freud’s psychoanalysis has been often put in the same category of “Copernican” things as heliocentrism and evolution.
The article makes it even more worse by conflating joy and happiness.
Many articles that talk about happiness do that, including the often cited paper about how supposedly the connection between income and happiness breaks down at a certain level.
I don’t think that means you are smarter than that Harvard professor. He is a very successful person and has reached heights coveted by many very smart people. It just means that the game he is playing is not one where you get ahead by saying things that make sense.
For example, if you listen to a successful politician and spot a false statement he utters, that does not mean that you are smarter than that politician.
This is why we can’t have social science. Not because the subject is not amenable to the scientific method—it obviously is. People are conducting controlled experiments and other people are attempting to replicate the results. So far, so good.
So, you say people are trying the scientific approach. My guess is, the nature of the problem is such that nothing much came out of these attempts. No great insights were gained, no theories were discovered. Real scientists had nothing to show for their efforts, and this is why the these fields are now not owned by real scientists, but by people with other skills.
For an imperfect analogy, say an ancient civilization left a lot of incomprehensible texts. Say a lot of effort went into deciphering these texts, and to everyone’s surprise it was discovered that some of these texts were English encrypted with some cyphers that the cryptographers cracked. So people skilled in the mathematics of cryptography started working on other texts, and many of them were consequently decrypted. But there were some classes of documents that the cryptographers were helpless against. Maybe these texts were really random garbage, or maybe they were encrypted with cyphers which are well beyond the current reach of our technology.
Now imagine a crook comes and says he has found the true meaning of a text. He calls himself a cryptographer and produces an “explanation” which is drivel but which superficially sounds like what the cryptographers say. If he tries that with one of the texts that have been decrypted for real, it will be hard for him to compete with the actual solution. But for the texts that remain a mystery, crooks will be the only game in town.
Motl with his immature style and his political extremism is very easy to mock, but I don’t think he’s intentionally contrarian. When he writes about physics at least his opinions agree with the mainstream view as far as I can tell. Three examples
Some time around 2005 Motl frequently exchanged hostilities with another blogger, Peter Woit of Not Even Wrong (that’s actually how I first heard of LM: I was following NEW which frequently linked to Molt’s blog to mock him). The disagreement was that Woit was a critic of the String Theory whereas Motl was a defender of it. The latter view is much more common in the academia.
In January last year, Motl criticized Sean Carroll’s blog post about the interpretations of Quantum Mechanics. Here again Motl is defending the most popular view.
This is much less clear cut but, if you continue reading despite the political raving (which I realize is not easy), everything he says in this review about discrete and continuous mathematics and how it relates to the foundations of physics is eminently reasonable and what I’d expect to hear from a physicist.
These are not cherry-picked examples, it’s all I recollect reading of Motl about physics, since I don’t follow his blog regularly. In all these cases the vibe I’m getting is not contrarianism, but exasperation with people who pretend they have deep insights into his field when he feels all they have is a nice turn of phrase and the ability to please the audience.
Motl with his immature style and his political extremism is very easy to mock, but I don’t think he’s intentionally contrarian. When he writes about physics at least his opinions agree with the mainstream view as far as I can tell. Three examples
Some time around 2005 Motl frequently exchanged hostilities with another blogger, Peter Woit of Not Even Wrong (that’s actually how I first heard of LM: I was following NEW which frequently linked to Molt’s blog to mock him). The disagreement was that Woit was a critic of the String Theory whereas Motl was a defender of it. The latter view is much more common in the academia.
In January last year, Motl criticized Sean Carroll’s blog post about the interpretations of Quantum Mechanics. Here again Motl is defending the most popular view.
This is much less clear cut but, if you continue reading despite the political raving (which I realize is not easy), everything he says in this review about discrete and continuous mathematics and how it relates to the foundations of physics is eminently reasonable and what I’d expect to hear from a physicist.
These are not cherry-picked examples, it’s all I recollect reading of Motl about physics, since I don’t follow his blog regularly. In all these cases the vibe I’m getting is not contrarianism, but exasperation with people who pretend they have deep insights into his field when he feels all they have is a nice turn of phrase and the ability to please the audience.
I don’t disagree with any of that. Who knows, could be even one and the same experience which people raised in one culture interpret as God’s presence, and in another as enlightenment.
So while the original quotation talked about not thinking at all, your revised version urges that we think as little as possible. How does it qualify as a “rationality quote”?
While we are quoting Perelandra
“How far does it go? Would you still obey the Life-Force if you found it prompting you to murder me?”
“Yes.”
”Or to sell England to the Germans?”
“Yes.”
”Or to print lies as serious research in a scientific periodical?”
“Yes.”
”God help you!” said Ransom.
There are also people who claim that they feel God’s presence in their heart, you know.
Can’t you ask her to tutor you?