I'm sure no one is disputing that.
What about metrics designed to correlate with perception (an example is this)? Specifically, would you agree with the statement that in theory it is possible to perform a set of measurements that fully encompasses, as you say, 'all that is audible'?
Them's fightin' words! 🙂
Konnichiwa,
The gentleman abbreviated the same way as the current US prezs, seemingly does.
What about it? It still measures one aspect only and much of the reasoning behind this has been known since the 1950's and has been ignored since then.
As I take the position (fundamentally) that practically EVERYTHING is possible, absolutely yes. Or in other word I believe that all audible phenomenae are caused by physical processes that can be qualified and quantified. However, the establishment and defenders of the orthodoxy seem more interrested in pelicanising any observation countering their FR & THD is all that matters Mantra than in actually qualifying and quantifying things beyound thei simple and utterly stupid dogma.
Sayonara
Prune said:
The gentleman abbreviated the same way as the current US prezs, seemingly does.
Prune said:
What about it? It still measures one aspect only and much of the reasoning behind this has been known since the 1950's and has been ignored since then.
Prune said:
As I take the position (fundamentally) that practically EVERYTHING is possible, absolutely yes. Or in other word I believe that all audible phenomenae are caused by physical processes that can be qualified and quantified. However, the establishment and defenders of the orthodoxy seem more interrested in pelicanising any observation countering their FR & THD is all that matters Mantra than in actually qualifying and quantifying things beyound thei simple and utterly stupid dogma.
Sayonara
I say that's crazy talk. Hell, even theoretically not everything is possible. Might I suggest Impossibility: The Limits of Science and the Science of Limits by John D. Barrow, and specifically about the limits of our own minds, both from information theory and physics:
A Refutation of Penrose's Godelian Case Against Articial Intelligence
Why I am not a Super Turing Machine
Cognition and the Computational Power of Connectionist Networks
Turing vs Super-Turing
Universal Limits on Computation
Fundamental Physical Limits on Computation
Undecidability Everywhere
On the Computational Capabilities of Physical Systems
(These apply since the mind is what the brain does, and the brain is part of the physical universe; the laws of physics are computational and therefore any computer with a sufficient memory capacity can simulate any physical system to whatever degree of precision is necessary, and BTW this degree is not infinite as time/space are not infinitely differentiable, see The World According to Quantum Mechanics on the LANL preprint archive at xxx.lanl.gov
I can do proper citations, or email pdfs if anyone requests.)
Anyone care to comment on the James Randi "dare" phenomena? In case I haven't been clear enough, it is readily apparent that Mr. Randi's challenge has been misapplied to phenomena not covered by the challenge in the first place.
Prune, would you happen to know if Mr. Randi is aware that his thesis has been misappropriated by these knuckleheads? If so, do you know what he thinks about the practice? I apologize if my earlier comments were construed as casting aspersions on Mr. Randi. This truly was not my intent. My aspersions are intended only for those misappropriating Mr. Randi's challenge.
Prune, would you happen to know if Mr. Randi is aware that his thesis has been misappropriated by these knuckleheads? If so, do you know what he thinks about the practice? I apologize if my earlier comments were construed as casting aspersions on Mr. Randi. This truly was not my intent. My aspersions are intended only for those misappropriating Mr. Randi's challenge.
Prune said:
Prune,
I disagree that the physical world can be simmed to any required precision if you have enough computing power and memory. The physical universe is decidedly unpredictable because of fundamental uncertainty limits (see Heisenberg). The first line in the quote fragment above also refers to it.
Jan Didden
You are mistaken, as QM indeterminism doesn't change a thing in that regard.
You misunderstood my argument, which is understandable as I squeezed it into a line. The thing is that quantum uncertainty merely brings randomness into the equation, and that does not increase the information processing (including mental) capability of any physical system. Penrose explains that well in Shadows of the Mind (though he then goes to present other arguments against computational mind, though they have been formally refuted as per the article whose title I posted above). Any random sequence possible can be reproduced by a computer (the issue that a truly random sequence is uncompressible and must be encoded in the program/data is irrelevant to the argument here, as the goal is not to predict exactly which of these sequences will occur; that is impossible anyway). The point is that any possible set of quantum states and their time revolution can be encoded as a computer program, and thus any physical system is computational. I have no choice but to summarize here; check out some of the articles I named for a more detailed view (especially the second and third).
From information theory, there is no difference between the capabilities of deterministic and non-deterministic Turing machines. Indeed, we as well as actual computers are even more limited than Turing machines, as we do not have arbitrarily large memory -- we are merely finite automata.
Super-Turing automata can be conceptualized mathematically, but it is due to QM exactly that they cannot be physically implemented -- they need arbitrary precision real numbers, which are not at all 'real' (sorry, I just had to pun this).
You misunderstood my argument, which is understandable as I squeezed it into a line. The thing is that quantum uncertainty merely brings randomness into the equation, and that does not increase the information processing (including mental) capability of any physical system. Penrose explains that well in Shadows of the Mind (though he then goes to present other arguments against computational mind, though they have been formally refuted as per the article whose title I posted above). Any random sequence possible can be reproduced by a computer (the issue that a truly random sequence is uncompressible and must be encoded in the program/data is irrelevant to the argument here, as the goal is not to predict exactly which of these sequences will occur; that is impossible anyway). The point is that any possible set of quantum states and their time revolution can be encoded as a computer program, and thus any physical system is computational. I have no choice but to summarize here; check out some of the articles I named for a more detailed view (especially the second and third).
From information theory, there is no difference between the capabilities of deterministic and non-deterministic Turing machines. Indeed, we as well as actual computers are even more limited than Turing machines, as we do not have arbitrarily large memory -- we are merely finite automata.
Super-Turing automata can be conceptualized mathematically, but it is due to QM exactly that they cannot be physically implemented -- they need arbitrary precision real numbers, which are not at all 'real' (sorry, I just had to pun this).
Konnichiwa,
It is even possible that you yourself are merely a figment of my imagination.
I repeat, EVERYTHING IS POSSIBLE (though not necesarily within the context of this MEST Universe).
Now possibility is not the same as certainty. I am reasonably certain that NOT ALL tweaks (expense does not come into it the least) operate on Placebo. Some likely do and some likely don't.
I believe you make again the same fundamental logical mistakes so common among the objectivists....
Namely the position "It's expensive and I don't understand how it works, hence it must not work and anyone saying different is a fraudster stealing the pee-pulls money. And the pee-pull must be protected as they are to stupid to take care of themselves."
It should be noted that that position shows severe dishonesty, both intellectually and ethically. First, expense and efficiacy are unrelated subjects.
Someone who sells expensively something that is very cheap to make (regardless if efficient or not) is a businessman operating within the confines and according to the rules of the socalled free market. If you feel that operating thusly is morally wrong, why not start with the really big businesses who operate like that?
Now the efficiacy of a given "tweak" may be debated, evaluated, ABX tested, denied, accepted, prooven or even disprooven, however the cost on the market does not come into it.
Neither case as such has even a moral dimension (at least not within a society where he who sells expensively to others what is cheap to him is considered a shrewed business man) one has an economincal one and the other a scientific one.
If you insert a moral dimension that does not exist you in turn insert emotionality. If you argue emotionally you argue from a point that is indefensible.
So, in area 1) the tweak may or may not give a customer an item of a value comensurate with what he has paid or not. If too many customers feel they got poor value for their money the product will become unpopular and the company will go out of business.
In are 2) the tweak may or may not a difference which is reliably audible to a few, some, many or all or it may make no difference at all.
However if you mix one with the other you are arguing from a mistaken and precarious emotional viewpoint aquired due to the application of the ridiculous concept of moral conventions onto spheres in which they do not operate (Morals operate neither in comerce nor in science).
Sayonara
TNT said:
It is even possible that you yourself are merely a figment of my imagination.
I repeat, EVERYTHING IS POSSIBLE (though not necesarily within the context of this MEST Universe).
Now possibility is not the same as certainty. I am reasonably certain that NOT ALL tweaks (expense does not come into it the least) operate on Placebo. Some likely do and some likely don't.
I believe you make again the same fundamental logical mistakes so common among the objectivists....
Namely the position "It's expensive and I don't understand how it works, hence it must not work and anyone saying different is a fraudster stealing the pee-pulls money. And the pee-pull must be protected as they are to stupid to take care of themselves."
It should be noted that that position shows severe dishonesty, both intellectually and ethically. First, expense and efficiacy are unrelated subjects.
Someone who sells expensively something that is very cheap to make (regardless if efficient or not) is a businessman operating within the confines and according to the rules of the socalled free market. If you feel that operating thusly is morally wrong, why not start with the really big businesses who operate like that?
Now the efficiacy of a given "tweak" may be debated, evaluated, ABX tested, denied, accepted, prooven or even disprooven, however the cost on the market does not come into it.
Neither case as such has even a moral dimension (at least not within a society where he who sells expensively to others what is cheap to him is considered a shrewed business man) one has an economincal one and the other a scientific one.
If you insert a moral dimension that does not exist you in turn insert emotionality. If you argue emotionally you argue from a point that is indefensible.
So, in area 1) the tweak may or may not give a customer an item of a value comensurate with what he has paid or not. If too many customers feel they got poor value for their money the product will become unpopular and the company will go out of business.
In are 2) the tweak may or may not a difference which is reliably audible to a few, some, many or all or it may make no difference at all.
However if you mix one with the other you are arguing from a mistaken and precarious emotional viewpoint aquired due to the application of the ridiculous concept of moral conventions onto spheres in which they do not operate (Morals operate neither in comerce nor in science).
Sayonara
Prune said:
It is not just a matter of randomness, it is a matter (pun intended) of unpredictabiliy and uncertainty. The act of observing itself changes reality, so it is impossible to know the outcome of something: the moment you look at it, it changes as a result of your 'looking'. You cannot know what it was before you 'looked'. By extension, that also means you cannot simulate it, as it involves modeling the physical universe which needs an observation and hence changes it even before you can start.
Jan Didden
Quantum Mechanics
Exactly--that is the essence of the Uncertainty Principle. The observed and the observer are interconnected in such a way that the former cannot exist without the latter. The observed, for example a photon of light, does not actually exist in QM until it has struck the observational apparatus (or a human retina). QM goes even further and stipulates that the photon does not travel from point A to point B, but is merely created at point A and observed at point B.
From this it should be obvious to any die-hard Newtonian physicist (such as Prune) that the universe is 1) spontaneous and 2) incapable of being computed, other than in a general form using probability equations. This is not just a contentious argument on my part--it has been repeatedly confirmed by experiment. All abstract conjecturing about whether the universe could be rendered in numbers, given a big enough computer, are simply not in accord with reality as understood by present-day physics.
Exactly--that is the essence of the Uncertainty Principle. The observed and the observer are interconnected in such a way that the former cannot exist without the latter. The observed, for example a photon of light, does not actually exist in QM until it has struck the observational apparatus (or a human retina). QM goes even further and stipulates that the photon does not travel from point A to point B, but is merely created at point A and observed at point B.
From this it should be obvious to any die-hard Newtonian physicist (such as Prune) that the universe is 1) spontaneous and 2) incapable of being computed, other than in a general form using probability equations. This is not just a contentious argument on my part--it has been repeatedly confirmed by experiment. All abstract conjecturing about whether the universe could be rendered in numbers, given a big enough computer, are simply not in accord with reality as understood by present-day physics.
Re: Quantum Mechanics
Diehard Newtonian?! Quit talking out of your @$$. Not to mention that your comment's whole first paragraph is an interpretation of QM, and just one of many; it is not something that follows from the equations; moreover you are playing with semantics of the word 'exists' here, which looses meaning in such a context.
There is nothing Newtonian about what I said, but I can easily see that as you apparently did not actually read what I wrote. Did I say anything against uncertainty? Simply that it is irrelevant to the argument, as had been pointed out by Penrose (who is the Rouse Ball professor of mathematics at Oxford, and on the level of, say, Stephen Hawking, if we are going to play this game!). Let me quote myself:
I have posted references to back up what I have written, yet all I've gotten in response is name calling and laymen's descriptions of QM uncertainty.
Diehard Newtonian?! Quit talking out of your @$$. Not to mention that your comment's whole first paragraph is an interpretation of QM, and just one of many; it is not something that follows from the equations; moreover you are playing with semantics of the word 'exists' here, which looses meaning in such a context.
There is nothing Newtonian about what I said, but I can easily see that as you apparently did not actually read what I wrote. Did I say anything against uncertainty? Simply that it is irrelevant to the argument, as had been pointed out by Penrose (who is the Rouse Ball professor of mathematics at Oxford, and on the level of, say, Stephen Hawking, if we are going to play this game!). Let me quote myself:
Which part of that don't you understand? This argument doesn't rest on the ability of someone trying to actually measure some system and then simulate it. I never claimed that we can take a physical system and simulate it and get the exact same results as occur in real life. Not that you need to -- as the laws of physics are computational, any part of the universe is its own computer (interaction with the outside of the part is an issue that can be dealt with because the past light cones of the set of states you are looking at bound the system). Not to mention that a result of black hole thermodynamics is that there is a maximum density of information that can be stored in any region of space.
I have posted references to back up what I have written, yet all I've gotten in response is name calling and laymen's descriptions of QM uncertainty.
Down the drain? I thought I answered rather well in my previous post.
I cannot belive you missed what I was trying to say twice already, arguing against something that was not said at all.
I cannot belive you missed what I was trying to say twice already, arguing against something that was not said at all.
This is what you said:
..and that is what we are taking issue with.
But, you know I get sick of people who start to badmouth and throw negative adjectives around at the first sign of non-agreement. I have had enough of that the last few days.
I wish you good day.
Jan Didden
Prune said:
..and that is what we are taking issue with.
But, you know I get sick of people who start to badmouth and throw negative adjectives around at the first sign of non-agreement. I have had enough of that the last few days.
I wish you good day.
Jan Didden
Are you serious? I was not the first to badmouth.
As for what you are taking issue with, that demonstrates that you are reading what I'm saying the wrong way, which may be partially my fault in expressing myself, so let me try to restate it.
Consider the quantum state of a physical system. You cannot measure it due to uncertainty. However, the information content of such a system is finite, because a) we are considering a finite region of space and time, and b) there is a maximum possible information density in any region of space (this is an established result in physics, and discussed in one of the references I mentioned). That means that a computer can hold this information -- in theory; that you can't measure it and program it in practice is irrelevant. An initial state does not allow the computer to predict the final state, due to QM randomness. However, now consider that in theory any given random sequence can be produced by a computer -- you simply encode it in the program. That you can't predict it beforehand is irrelevant. The point is that given any physical system over a period of time, it is possible to map it to a discrete finite encoding, i.e. something that can be produced by a finite automaton.
Penrose messed up when he couldn't accept the limitations implied by minds implemented in computational physics, and he proposed that some yet undiscovered non-computational physics are instead the basis of our thought. This was completely destroyed by the critics. The theoretical limitations (think Goedel and Turing) of computational systems bound human thought, like it or not.
I took great offense to that, and had no choice but to retort in kind.
As for what you are taking issue with, that demonstrates that you are reading what I'm saying the wrong way, which may be partially my fault in expressing myself, so let me try to restate it.
Consider the quantum state of a physical system. You cannot measure it due to uncertainty. However, the information content of such a system is finite, because a) we are considering a finite region of space and time, and b) there is a maximum possible information density in any region of space (this is an established result in physics, and discussed in one of the references I mentioned). That means that a computer can hold this information -- in theory; that you can't measure it and program it in practice is irrelevant. An initial state does not allow the computer to predict the final state, due to QM randomness. However, now consider that in theory any given random sequence can be produced by a computer -- you simply encode it in the program. That you can't predict it beforehand is irrelevant. The point is that given any physical system over a period of time, it is possible to map it to a discrete finite encoding, i.e. something that can be produced by a finite automaton.
Penrose messed up when he couldn't accept the limitations implied by minds implemented in computational physics, and he proposed that some yet undiscovered non-computational physics are instead the basis of our thought. This was completely destroyed by the critics. The theoretical limitations (think Goedel and Turing) of computational systems bound human thought, like it or not.
I'd take issue with that, too. But it's waaaaaay off topic. If you guys want to chat about QM, non-linear dynamics, and determinacy, start a thread about it.
SY's Rule: Consider a one-dimensional particle in a box of width "a", i.e., the potential energy is infinite at all x<0 and all x>a. Within the box, the potential energy is linear, i.e., it's 0 at x=0, some value Eo at x=a, and varies linearly at intermediate values. What is the form of the eigenfunctions of the Hamiltonian? If you cannot answer this, I cannot take your opinions on QM or modern physics very seriously.
SY's Rule: Consider a one-dimensional particle in a box of width "a", i.e., the potential energy is infinite at all x<0 and all x>a. Within the box, the potential energy is linear, i.e., it's 0 at x=0, some value Eo at x=a, and varies linearly at intermediate values. What is the form of the eigenfunctions of the Hamiltonian? If you cannot answer this, I cannot take your opinions on QM or modern physics very seriously.
Looks like I reedited my post at the same time you posted...
Just for the record, I'm not a physicist (so I cannot answer your question), but then I'm not stating my opinions either, but the, er, combined opinion of the pieces I named above. In any case, the argument I presented doesn't rely on QM uncertainty, because it doesn't change anything. It relies on information theory and formal automata (the computational powers of deterministic and non-deterministic FSA (or TM) are equivalent; see Chomsky hierarchy), which should be very apparent
Anyway, I did not mean to threadjack. janneman, if you have something to say about this, pm me.
BTW I don't see why you mentioned nonlinear dynamics. What's that got to do with this?
Just for the record, I'm not a physicist (so I cannot answer your question), but then I'm not stating my opinions either, but the, er, combined opinion of the pieces I named above. In any case, the argument I presented doesn't rely on QM uncertainty, because it doesn't change anything. It relies on information theory and formal automata (the computational powers of deterministic and non-deterministic FSA (or TM) are equivalent; see Chomsky hierarchy), which should be very apparent
Anyway, I did not mean to threadjack. janneman, if you have something to say about this, pm me.
BTW I don't see why you mentioned nonlinear dynamics. What's that got to do with this?
Prune said:
OK, I think I follow that.
Prune said:
But to map it you must establish a relationship from 'where you come from' to 'where you go to'. And you can only establish such a relationship if you look at 'where you come from'. That then changes it, so your mapping is incorrect: you cannot map it! Mapping, predicting, simulating: they all need to know the initial condition to go from there. And that is impossible.
Jan Didden
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