2,643 karma · joined August 22, 2013
And, is the actual amount of security provided greater than that amount?
Of course, one could add some sort of daily schedule feature thing so that if one has a different sleep schedule, one can specify that, but that would be more work to implement.
Can one typically determine a user’s timezone in JavaScript without getting permissions? I feel like probably yes?
(I’m not imagining something that would strictly cut the user off, just something that would end messages with a suggestion to go to bed, and saying that it will be there in the morning.)
But also, that’s a different kind of asymmetry?
This is not true-by-definition . It may be true, but not by-definition. If there were an omniscient person, they would be the most informed about everything.
If there is no inside to a box, then knowing everything about how the box interacts with things outside the box, is pretty much everything there is to know about the box, yeah.
The study of physics concerns only that which we can observe/measure. Now, like I implied before, I’m not a scientific materialist, and I don’t claim that all-that-there-is is amenable to understanding through the lens of physics. So, like, I guess the answer is “No, I don’t expect physics to tell us everything I want to know about the nature of the universe, just all of it that is accessible to experiment.”.
Even setting that aside, I wouldn’t expect the state to be an eigenstate for that even if the “value of the field at this location” was an actual observable rather than a like, operator valued measure, so, even then I wouldn’t expect the value to be determinate, no.
If spacetime turns out to be discrete, that would resolve the “the distribution over the values for the field are distribution valued, not valued in genuine functions” issue, (and the other reason for it not having a determinate value is actually normal) but it is hard to see how this would fit with our non-observation of violations of Lorentz invariance.
I don’t know what you are asking for when you ask about a mechanism. Do you mean a classical mechanism? Nature isn’t classical.
“Harm” isn’t the same thing as “pain”.
I would say that when I bite my finger to make a point, I experience pain, but this doesn’t cause me any suffering nor any harm. If something broke my arm, I claim that this is harm to me. While this (“if my arm were broken, that would be harm to me”) might seem like an obvious statement, and I do claim that it is a fact, not just an opinion, I think I agree that it is a normative claim. It is a claim about what counts as good or bad for me.
I don’t think normative claims (such as “It is immoral to murder someone.”) are empirical claims? (Though I do claim that they at least often have truth values.)
A path integral involves an integral of e^{i S/hbar} where S is the action for a given path, with the integral being over the path, and evaluates to the amplitude from the starting state to the ending state.
(Of course, there are some difficulties defining integration over paths, especially if you want to get into QFT. Still.)
If you want to incorporate gravity into this, you probably need to do so within the path integral, with it being incorporated into the action.
But, of course, quantum gravity hasn’t been resolved, so to see why the issue you point to isn’t actually an issue, let me point out that the point you propose applies equally to electromagnetism: say we have an electron, and it goes from one point to another, and nearby we have a positively charged balloon. Replace “mass” with “electric charge” and “gravity” with “electromagnetic force” in your point, and we obtain an argument of the same form. But, QED works extremely well, and doesn’t predict an infinite electric charge in a region when an electron travels from one point to another (for the reason I said: the electromagnetic interaction between the electron and the balloon will appear within the action).
(On the off chance that you were being sincere in your question about mana: no.)
The point I was trying to make by quoting that passage was the necessity of humility. The way the world works doesn’t need our approval. It is above us.
As for how the curvature of spacetime fits with all that, that is an open question that has yet to be resolved. Well, constructing a quantum field theory within a given curved spacetime is fine, but we don’t know how exactly GR and QFT fit together.
I expect that your response is going to be to call these “abstractions” or something, as if this does anything more to discredit them than complaining that any idea is “just an idea”. But these are measurable things. That which can be measured is a real thing.
“what’s the mechanism?”? “[…] but that doesn't tell you what it is. It just tells you how it behaves […]”? A thing is what it does. C.f. the Yoneda lemma.
Again, your complaints sound like dissatisfaction with the fact that the world doesn’t run on stuff that fundamentally resembles substances we have everyday familiarity with.
You speak of “fitting the data”. I say “is compatible with the evidence”.
Also, asking where spacetime is, is a goofy question.
Oh, I see, you are expecting intrinsic curvature to derive from extrinsic curvature? There is no need for that. You could posit a larger (flat) space to allow that, but there is no reason to, as it would be indistinguishable from the simpler alternative.
“ We found out the universe is not amenable to our knowing it with any familiarity.” : You have to remember: it all adds up to normality. Any part of how the world works that seems “weird”, was already like that before you learned of it, and is, in fact, normal.
When I said “take it up with God”, that wasn’t just a figure of speech. Isiah 55:8-9 : “ “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways,” declares the Lord. “As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.”
God’s thoughts, God’s designs, are greater than our own. If how the universe functions offends our sensibilities, it is our sensibilities that need to change.
At the same time, Philippians 4:8 : “ Finally, brothers and sisters, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things.”
You say “ All they'll give us are ways to make better tools.” , but, better tools? This is certainly not my motivation! My motivation is to know truth! And, there is much that is both lovely and true in what you dismiss as “models that fit the data”.
Any countable group is a quotient of a subgroup of the free group on two elements, iirc.
There’s also the concept of “semantic primes”. Here is a not-quite correct oversimplification of the idea: Suppose you go through the dictionary and one word at a time pick a word whose definition includes only other words that are still in the dictionary, and removing them. You can also rephrase definitions before doing this, as long as it keeps the same meaning. Suppose you do this with the goal of leaving as few words in it as you can. In the end, you should have a small cluster of a bit over 100 words, in terms of which all the other words you removed can be indirectly defined. (The idea of semantic primes also says that there is such a minimal set which translates essentially directly* between different natural languages.)
I don’t think that says that words for complicated ideas aren’t like, more complicated?
“It’s claimed that the particle bounces off of vacuum fluctuations” : hm? Like some kind of classical particle bouncing off of something?
“ yet the energy predicted by these fluctuations is way bigger than what we measure” : This is indeed a mystery, one which people are working to resolve. You spoke earlier of wonder. Is this not something to wonder about?
A thing behaves in some way. If you do things, things happen.
One can do certain measurements about how things behave, and then record these measurements.
What would it even mean for a material everything is based in to be magical? If there was some exceptional material that is unlike other things, following different rules, I can understand calling that “magical”. But, the only meaning I can think of for a material underlying everything to be “magical” is that either everyone just, declines to study it, or its behaviors like, depend on the intent of those studying it or something like that.
I also don’t get your statement that “brings a wonder back into it”. Like, do you not experience wonder when contemplating the nature of fundamental fields?
Like, if we set aside the “magical” part, it kinda sounds like your objection is that fields aren’t a substance/material. But, if you just generalize your notion of “material” a bit, why don’t quantum fields satisfy all your requirements? And, if they do, don’t you want to understand how this “magical material” behaves??
You decry these things as “abstractions”, and say that they “make no sense to anyone”. They can certainly be confusing, but they aren’t beyond comprehension, and I don’t see them as any less “material reality”? Macroscopic things just behave differently.
I don’t think I agree with “particles aren’t real” either. Electrons being excitations in the electron field, doesn’t make them “not real” any more than an apple being made of atoms makes it not real, or sound being vibrations in a medium makes sound not real.
Like, buckyballs are clearly “real” (they can act like little cages with something else contained inside), but they also clearly are “particles” like protons are (you can do a double slit experiment with them and get an interference pattern).
Also, I don’t think I’d say the enterprise was ever “What is the universe made of?” so much as “How does the universe work?” ? It is a drive to understand! It is asking “How do initial conditions relate to final conditions?”. The tech is ancillary to this!
Really, what possible answer could you ask for that wouldn’t be of this form?
When you describe an idea sufficiently precisely, you do mathematics; that’s almost what mathematics is.
It feels to me like complaints like yours tend to derive from an unwillingness to believe that things aren’t at their core made of solid objects or fluids or other stuff which behaves like macroscopic objects we have everyday experience with.
Can you describe an explanation that wouldn’t be like that but which (if it were true) you would find satisfying?
If you can’t describe how an explanation could (if it were true) satisfy you without being like that, then, if the universe isn’t like that, you have to be disappointed. And, in that case, again, I have to say, take it up with God.
On the other hand, if you can describe how an explanation (if it were true) could possibly satisfy you without saying “at its core, the universe works based on [behavior that you have plenty of physical intuition for based on your everyday interactions with macroscopic stuff]”, I would very much like to hear it.
The “What path did the photon take?” question is one of those times. The answer to the question is Mu.
Similar to the questions “How much phlogiston is there in iron?” or “Does sulphur have more earth than air, or more air than earth?”.
Maybe you aren’t going to be satisfied with the sort of complicated mathematics which appears to be correct (or, on the right track).
If you have complaints about the aesthetics of how the universe works, take it up with God.
Personally, I think there is a lot of beauty to be found in it.
I’ll admit that there are a few parts that go against my tastes (I don’t like needing to resort to distributions instead of proper functions), but that’s probably just intellectual laziness on my part.
An environment living in Conway’s Game of Life could be quite capable of hypothesizing that it is implemented in Conway’s Game of Life.
like, the part where they get a_i log p_i , well, the sum of this over i is gives the number, but it seemed like they were treating this as… a_i being a random variable associated to p_i , or something? I wasn’t really clear on what they were doing with that.
It very much appears that time evolution is unitary (with the possible exception of the born rule). That’s a linear algebra concept.
Generally, the structure you describe doesn’t match the structure of the comment you say has that structure.
I’m not sure that’s true? Like, perhaps the preference might generalize from the several games one did play as a child to other games which are similar to the ones one played as a child, with the preference still being a result of which games one played as a child.