Hacker News Reader

What are we supposed to do with this? Did you intend to stimulate discussion? Or are you asserting your views in the hope that others will buy into them just because you happen to be first commenter?

Last time I checked HN was still interested in rational and scientific discourse. Most of your "True/False/Maybe" assertions are nothing of the sort.

I say "most" because for #2, #3, #4, #11, #12, #13 there is room for scientific falsifiability so we could set up experiments to support or invalidate your hypotheses. From there rational discussion is possible.

For the rest... about #1, #6: there's no way you can know this for sure. As another commenter says these theories are untestable. So it's just your beliefs speaking.

About #8 and #9: the Beginning of Infinity you cite is also fiction with little to no scientific support. I can't see how you can support an assertion with this reference.

I can specifically address #5, #7, #8, #9 as I have studied this stuff: all I can say is that your statements amount to a big optimistic wish for the future. There is in our current world and recent history no evidence whatsoever that we can escape the cyclical rise and fall of civilizations. All exponential laws supporting your wishes (Moore's law, economic growth etc) are not really "laws" but simply models of recent history built in hindsight. The real question to be asked is: what are the enabling factors that make this model accurate until now, and will these enabling factors continue to exist for 80 more years?

Of course it boils down to 1) USA supremacy in world politics, a mere historical incident due to WWII and 2) fossil fuels.

For all we know at this time, infighting and China will probably make #1 disappear within <20 years, and finite supply will take care of #2 within <50 years. Then what? Your belief there will be a magic way can save the energy and politic stability is just that -- belief.

(This is where HN turns into Reddit or 4chan. A series of sci-fi statements cited from a blog, with the commenters assertions next to them with no justification whatsoever. Not cool.)

Did you intend to stimulate discussion?

Yes.

the Beginning of Infinity you cite is also fiction with little to no scientific support

WTF? BoI is not fiction.

> 1. Many times each day, your mind permanently splits into different versions that live in different worlds. True.

The many-worlds interpretation is nonsense. It's not even science. It makes no testable predictions that differ from any of the other interpretations. I've never understood the weird fascination with "many-worlds". Quantum mechanics provides a very clear set of postulates that allow the prediction of various phenomena through mathematical equations -- that's as far as I read into it.

QM provides a clear set of equations that govern how wavefunctions evolve, but some versions also include the notion that wavefunctions collapse when an observation is made, but there are no equations or even firm rules for when this collapse is supposed to happen. Many-worlds is founded on the observation that the equations governing wavefunctions are sufficient in and of themselves to explain the observations that originally led people to believe that waveforms collapse, and that therefore the collapse postulate ought to be discarded as redundant. And because it's spooky action at a distance.

> ... but there are no equations or even firm rules for when this collapse is supposed to happen

That's why it isn't science ;)

Maybe when QM was being developed "collapse" was a debated concept; I'm not too familiar with its history. Currently though, modern QM predicts that ensembles of identically prepared systems select an eigenstate of the linear operator corresponding to whatever observable it is you're measuring. Each of these eigenstates has a probability that can be calculated for it, and the mean value of these measurements is given by <Ψ|A|Ψ>, where A is the operator. I see no implications of collapse with this -- just probabilities of what values you will obtain in experiment.

> I see no implications of collapse with this -- just probabilities of what values you will obtain in experiment.

Not exactly, your statement is correct for single states, however it breaks down for entangled states. When one wavefunction describes two or more particle a measurement on one particle can be thought of collapsing the two particle wavefunction, which then forces the other particle into a well defined state.

Edit, I am not arguing in favour many worlds theory, only that the 'collapse' of the wavefunction is a well developed and useful idea in quantum physics.

I guess I just view the wavefunction as an inherently multiparticle function on a configuration space. The concept of approximating single-particle states seems peculiar to me; it seems simpler just to have one state for an entire system (and the corresponding probabilities of what measurements you'll get on that system, regardless of how the system is distributing spatially). Then again, we're coming from different research backgrounds so we probably have a different way of looking at it ;)

Quantum entanglement doesn't seem to be particularly unusual any more so than the fact that electron-electron correlation must be taken into effect when computing energy levels with some kind of QMC. All particles within a quantum system are correlated, so entanglement just kind of falls naturally out of that; I'm not assuming any kind of locality. I suppose what you're saying is that collapse is defined as the process of "fixing" these correlations?

  >  I've never understood the weird fascination with "many-worlds".

In addition to the parsimony/redundancy argument already brought up, our weird fascination with "many worlds" should be utterly obvious from a psychological perspective. It's a powerful, potentially soothing thought: anything that could have been has been, in some strange way.

Thinking about the "what if" constitutes a deeply human tendency (or weakness, if you will). The notion that all our missed chances, fantasies, dreams, ideas, etc. may be actual as opposed to potential -- that's way too attractive a thought to ignore.

All our fears, too.

From the standpoint of Metaphysics it makes sense and provides a solution for the problem: What is a cause? If B follows A, and in another world B follows not A, then we can say that A is the cause of B.

This theory does not claim to be Science as it uses a different model to find answers.

Maybe there's an infinity of worlds, forked from ours, where the many worlds hypothesis is testable... :-)

Quantum mechanics provides a very clear set of postulates that allow the prediction of various phenomena through mathematical equations -- that's as far as I read into it.

Science is about explaining the world/universe, not merely making predictions.

Could you give an example of a case where science explains something without making a testable prediction?

No, I can't. Scientific theories should be testable, but they should also be explanations, not merely predictions.

This came up at Galileo's trial. The Church was happy to accept his theories as mere predictions of astronomical observations. What they wouldn't accept was that the earth actually DID move around the sun. But Galileo was adamant on explaining what as actually out there. "According to popular legend, after recanting his theory that the Earth moved around the Sun, Galileo allegedly muttered the rebellious phrase And yet it moves." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/And_yet_it_moves‎)

There's a five percent chance I live in a "future" computer simulation as I write this. False - to run simulate sentient beings with so much suffering would be cruel.

So you mean the chance is much higher?

I mean that as time goes on and we get better at making technology, we also get better at making moral decisions. For instance, most people in the world today think slavery is wrong. Even 200 years ago, this wasn't the case.

> False - to run simulate sentient beings with so much suffering would be cruel.

I see you've never searched youtube for "The Sims".

I didn't realize the Sims were sentient.

Maybe whoever is running the simulation isn't aware you are, either.

That's interesting to ponder on and all, but we know the Sims characters are not aware.

Are you sure? Since version 1, they can recognize themselves in a mirror.

We are programmers here, let's not attribute simple tricks to sentience.

What ever civilization that runs our simulation could have drawn a distinction culturally/legally between their real sentience and sentience in their simulation. Linking and granting rights to a simulated sentience isn't a guaranteed step after all.

First of all, sentience of beings is not a necessary condition for the simulation to be borderline unethical. No other species on our planet is sentient, yet many people don't consider hurting these for fun to be moral.

I was joking of course, the joke being that ability to recognize itself in the mirror is a common test of self-awareness used by biologists. And Sims can (sort of) do that.

But! You mention "simple tricks", and it reminded me of Dan Dennett lecture on "Magic and Consciousness": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3jBUtKYRxnA

His point is exactly that maybe the consciousness is just a collection of "simple tricks", which, to us, give the illusion they are not so simple.

> 6. There's a five percent chance I live in a "future" computer simulation as I write this. False - to run simulate sentient beings with so much suffering would be cruel.

This, along with most arguments based on morality just doesn't hold water, it assumes both that the Simulators (those running the simulation) hold the same moral values as us and that our suffering is deemed unnecessary.

The first also assumes that every member of a Simulator level race is perfectly moral on top of assuming they share the 'suffering = cruel' moral bullet point because at some point all member of a society would likely have the ability to create and run UniverseSimulator.exe.

Today we do tons of cruel things for science or to learn who's to say that the Simulator runners wouldn't make a similar valuation or draw a distinction between their real existence and our simulated existence?

"For any issue, there is an objective truth of the matter, and if people care enough to find out the truth, they should eventually find a theory/explanation of the issue that no has an issue with, at least for a while"

This is called Logical positivism [1], well-known in the world of philosophy, and there are many criticisms. I'm not sure the matter is as self-evident as you present it to be.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logical_positivism

Isn't logical positivism the idea that "any idea that can't be scientifically tested is meaningless"? By that criteria, logical positivism itself is meaningless.

"If we keep writing down common sense datums until 2100, we can make computers as smart as people."

Worth noting that this approach has already been tried:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyc

"Commonsense reasoning" has been around for a long time as an AI topic - like many AI topics it appears straightforward but is actually full of complexity.

Two other approaches, a bit messier but with bigger coverage:

* ConceptNet (http://conceptnet5.media.mit.edu/), I think the first major attempt at a "messier" crowdsourced commonsense-facts database. Not a carefully designed hierarchical ontology like Cyc, but rather a large set of lightly curated statements about natural-language nouns and verbs. Has the pros and cons you might expect: better coverage, and easier to use, but less precision and a lot of ambiguity due to polysemy.

* CMU's "Read the Web" (http://rtw.ml.cmu.edu/rtw/) and U. Washington's "Open IE" (http://openie.cs.washington.edu/), both projects that combine a shallow-parsing fact-extractor with web-scale crawling. They are truly gigantic, but the accuracy is not very high.

Cool - it's a long time since I paid much attention - I did research on commonsense qualitative models of engineering domains and that led to a personal interest in the wider issues of commonsense reasoning but at that time (early 90s) I ended up deeply skeptical of the approaches that were common then (in my case mostly various qualitative/sorted/temporal logics).

2. [...] The "extra" spending in medicine drives innovations so we have better drugs & procedures etc.

That's what many doctors (also in Europe) argue. An argument against that could be based in Ben Goldacre's Bad Pharma depressing review of the flow of money in relation to how medical trials are used to decide what's better.

> If we allowed complete freedom of contract, law could be privatized, to our common benefit.

This Anarcho-Capitalist ideal has never come to pass in any scenario where it could have happened: That is, there have been multiple scenarios where the established government has broken down entirely, and nobody's ever created this system with government-by-contract or anything like it.

We can argument-from-fiction this to death, and many people have, but if it can only happen if it's set up by some external agency it doesn't look like it's ever going to happen, so why bother?

> If even a few of us honestly sought truth, we would not disagree with each other.

Only if everyone starts from the same premises.

For example, does every example of Homo sapiens sapiens count as a human being? If no, then arguing against some plan because those supposed 'non-humans' would be made unhappy by it is worthless. You might as well argue against a plan because gneiss would be put out by it: In the minds of the people you're arguing against, it would be a total non sequitur.

A lesser, but more important, version of this is "Does every human matter equally as much?" Again, if you're arguing against people who hold as axiomatic that some matter more than others (due to tribalism, "racial realism", etc.), certain arguments aren't going to work.

Maybe we'll have to kill everyone who holds those ideas so we can stop having wars. (Your task: Am I being serious?)

>This Anarcho-Capitalist ideal has never come to pass in any scenario where it could have happened: That is, there have been multiple scenarios where the established government has broken down entirely, and nobody's ever created this system with government-by-contract or anything like it.

A collapsed society isn't really a good example of anything. There are some good examples of private law systems here http://youtu.be/o0TBE-pcEi0.

>Only if everyone starts from the same premises.

Only if you are talking about subjective things like values or definitions of words or something like that.

If you are debating actual facts like "I expect X to happen tomorrow with 30% probability" or "if I do this experiment I will get this result" or even "this event happened in the past" (like debating whether someone is guilty of a crime for example.)

Given all the same information and arguments, 2 perfectly rational agents should always come to the same conclusion on these things.

How could 4 be maybe and 5 be true?

Maybe important parts of our personality are in the nerves of our spines and guts. Also, maybe important information in the brain is lost during freezing. Otherwise, yes, #4 is true.

Just because you brain is frozen doesn't necessarily mean that it will stay that way for long enough, or that it will remain in a readable state.