How do we even know that’s the killer? The person who shot was wearing a mask. For all we know it wasn’t even a man, some women are flat chested it’s possible. They should probably just call off the investigation since there’s no clues for anything.
Ah yes, crying about “privilege” while you’re here demanding that people shouldn’t speak out against a literal modern day holocaust at the only time when they have the political power to make some sort of difference. Yeah, it’s totally those people who are “privileged” and not your white pasty ass who doesn’t have to worry about their extended family being slaughtered.
No, the point is that bacteria can produce toxins in between a company packaging a product and a person receiving it and then boiling it themselves. Companies have to kill the bacteria prior to shipping it. It’s similar to canned foods for example, they put it in the can then heat up the can to kill the bacteria, then ship it, so it shouldn’t have any harmful bacteria in there to begin with.
Good. That’s when Democrats should be criticized the most, because that is the only time you have the power to exercise any leverage over them. Why would you refuse to criticize them when you actually have a tiny bit of leverage and wait until you have no power at all and your criticism is completely irrelevant and will be ignored? That is just someone who wants to complain but doesn’t actually want anything to change.
Boiling things isn’t guaranteed to make it safe, because sometimes bacteria produce toxins as a byproduct that are heat-stable, so if you kill the bacterial you can still get food poisoning if you drink it.
I am an American and i own an electric kettle and use it frequently. I switched to an electric kettle after accidentally turning my microwave into a smoke bomb when I put instant ramen in there and forgot to add the water. Now I only make instant ramen with hot water from a kettle or on the stove.
fumo is a basic human need
I don’t really understand why reddit pretty much succeeded in killing off all other forums. People love the format of reddit so much that even after killing off all the supporting apps it hasn’t really done much at all to cause people to go back to traditional forums. I’ve personally always found reddit far worse than a traditional forum because of the like system. This place has it as well, although I’m not sure how it compares to reddit’s in terms of algorithm.
Traditional forums did not have it. You just saw posts sequentially. There was also no character limit. This meant on traditional forums everyone’s position was not only presented equally but you could also go into as much detail as you wanted. If the topic is complex you could write basically an essay if you wanted, which in reddit you have to break up into multiple posts. Reddit’s like system also tends to facilitate echo chambers because popular opinions show up first while unpopular opinions show up last and can even be hidden, and it encourages people to misrepresent you and not act in good faith because they’re looking for an “own” to farm likes rather than a real discussion.
Sure, there might be sometimes when a person’s opinion is so out there and disingenuous you don’t even want to take it seriously and have a real discussion, but I’ve never once in my entire history of using reddit had a decent conversation with someone. Even things as benign as like /r/nintendo, I say I enjoyed a game and I got a bunch of people shitting on me calling me a bad person for liking a particular game. No matter how benign and non-serious the topic is, people always find ways to turn it into an attack to “own” you to farm upvotes.
What is it then? If you say it’s a wave, well, that wave is in Hilbert space which is infinitely dimensional, not in spacetime which is four dimensional, so what does it mean to say the wave is “going through” the slit if it doesn’t exist in spacetime? Personally, I think all the confusion around QM stems from trying to objectify a probability distribution, which is what people do when they claim it turns into a literal wave.
To be honest, I think it’s cheating. People are used to physics being continuous, but in quantum mechanics it is discrete. Schrodinger showed that if you take any operator and compute a derivative, you can “fill in the gaps” in between interactions, but this is just purely metaphysical. You never see these “in between” gaps. It’s just a nice little mathematical trick and nothing more. Even Schrodinger later abandoned this idea and admitted that trying to fill in the gaps between interactions just leads to confusion in his book Nature and the Greeks and Science and Humanism.
What’s even more problematic about this viewpoint is that Schrodinger’s wave equation is a result of a very particular mathematical formalism. It is not actually needed to make correct predictions. Heisenberg had developed what is known as matrix mechanics whereby you evolve the observables themselves rather than the state vector. Every time there is an interaction, you apply a discrete change to the observables. You always get the right statistical predictions and yet you don’t need the wave function at all.
The wave function is purely a result of a particular mathematical formalism and there is no reason to assign it ontological reality. Even then, if you have ever worked with quantum mechanics, it is quite apparent that the wave function is just a function for picking probability amplitudes from a state vector, and the state vector is merely a list of, well, probability amplitudes. Quantum mechanics is probabilistic so we assign things a list of probabilities. Treating a list of probabilities as if it has ontological existence doesn’t even make any sense, and it baffles me that it is so popular for people to do so.
This is why Hilbert space is infinitely dimensional. If I have a single qubit, there are two possible outcomes, 0 and 1. If I have two qubits, there are four possible outcomes, 00, 01, 10, and 11. If I have three qubits, there are eight possible outcomes, 000, 001, 010, 011, 100, 101, 110, and 111. If I assigned a probability amplitude to each event occurring, then the degrees of freedom would grow exponentially as I include more qubits into my system. The number of degrees of freedom are unbounded.
This is exactly how Hilbert space works. Interpreting this as a physical infinitely dimensional space where waves really propagate through it just makes absolutely no sense!
i’d agree that we don’t really understand consciousness. i’d argue it’s more an issue of defining consciousness and what that encompasses than knowing its biological background.
Personally, no offense, but I think this a contradiction in terms. If we cannot define “consciousness” then you cannot say we don’t understand it. Don’t understand what? If you have not defined it, then saying we don’t understand it is like saying we don’t understand akokasdo. There is nothing to understand about akokasdo because it doesn’t mean anything.
In my opinion, “consciousness” is largely a buzzword, so there is just nothing to understand about it. When we actually talk about meaningful things like intelligence, self-awareness, experience, etc, I can at least have an idea of what is being talked about. But when people talk about “consciousness” it just becomes entirely unclear what the conversation is even about, and in none of these cases is it ever an additional substance that needs some sort of special explanation.
I have never been convinced of panpsychism, IIT, idealism, dualism, or any of these philosophies or models because they seem to be solutions in search of a problem. They have to convince you there really is a problem in the first place, but they only do so by talking about consciousness vaguely so that you can’t pin down what it is, which makes people think we need some sort of special theory of consciousness, but if you can’t pin down what consciousness is then we don’t need a theory of it at all as there is simply nothing of meaning being discussed.
They cannot justify themselves in a vacuum. Take IIT for example. In a vacuum, you can say it gives a quantifiable prediction of consciousness, but “consciousness” would just be defined as whatever IIT is quantifying. The issue here is that IIT has not given me a reason to why I should care about them quantifying what they are quantifying. There is a reason, of course, it is implicit. The implicit reason is that what they are quantifying is the same as the “special” consciousness that supposedly needs some sort of “special” explanation (i.e. the “hard problem”), but this implicit reason requires you to not treat IIT in a vacuum.
Bruh. We literally don’t even know what consciousness is.
You are starting from the premise that there is this thing out there called “consciousness” that needs some sort of unique “explanation.” You have to justify that premise. I do agree there is difficulty in figuring out the precise algorithms and physical mechanics that the brain uses to learn so efficiently, but somehow I don’t think this is what you mean by that.
We don’t know how anesthesia works either, so he looked into that and the best he got was it interrupts a quantom wave collapse in our brains
There is no such thing as “wave function collapse.” The state vector is just a list of probability amplitudes and you reduce those list of probability amplitudes to a definite outcome because you observed what that outcome is. If I flip a coin and it has a 50% chance of being heads and a 50% chance of being tails, and it lands on tails, I reduce the probability distribution to 100% probability for tails. There is no “collapse” going on here. Objectifying the state vector is a popular trend when talking about quantum mechanics but has never made any sense at all.
So maybe Roger Penrose just wasted his retirement on this passion project?
Depends on whether or not he is enjoying himself. If he’s having fun, then it isn’t a waste.
The only observer of the mind would be an outside observer looking at you. You yourself are not an observer of your own mind nor could you ever be. I think it was Feuerbach who originally made the analogy that if your eyeballs evolved to look inwardly at themselves, then they could not look outwardly at the outside world. We cannot observe our own brains as they only exist to build models of reality, if our brains had a model of itself it would have no room left over to model the outside world.
We can only assign an object to be what is “sensing” our thoughts through reflection. Reflection is ultimately still building models of the outside world but the outside world contains a piece of ourselves in a reflection, and this allows us to have some limited sense of what we are. If we lived in a universe where we somehow could never leave an impression upon the world, if we could not see our own hands or see our own faces in the reflection upon a still lake, we would never assign an entity to ourselves at all.
We assign an entity onto ourselves for the specific purpose of distinguishing ourselves as an object from other objects, but this is not an a priori notion (“I think therefore I am” is lazy sophistry). It is an a posteriori notion derived through reflection upon what we observe. We never actually observe ourselves as such a thing is impossible. At best we can over reflections of ourselves and derive some limited model of what “we” are, but there will always be a gap between what we really are and the reflection of what we are.
Precisely what is “sensing your thoughts” is yourself derived through reflection which inherently derives from observation of the natural world. Without reflection, it is meaningless to even ask the question as to what is “behind” it. If we could not reflect, we would have no reason to assign anything there at all. If we do include reflection, then the answer to what is there is trivially obvious: what you see in a mirror.
That’s actually not quite accurate, although that is how it is commonly interpreted. The reason it is not accurate is because Bell’s theorem simply doesn’t show there is no hidden variables and indeed even Bell himself states very clearly what the theorem proves in the conclusion of his paper.
In a theory in which parameters are added to quantum mechanics to determine the results of individual measurements, without changing the statistical predictions, there must be a mechanism whereby the setting of one measuring device can influence the reading of another instrument, however remote. Moreover, the signal involved must propagate instantaneously, so that such a theory could not be Lorentz invariant.[1]
In other words, you can have hidden variables, but those hidden variables would not be Lorentz invariant. What is Lorentz invariance? Well, to be “invariant” basically means to be absolute, that is to say, unchanging based on reference frame. The term Lorentz here refers to Lorentz transformations under Minkowski space, i.e. the four-dimensional spacetime described by special relativity.
This implies you can actually have hidden variables under one of two conditions:
The first view is unpopular because special relativity is the basis of quantum field theory, and thus contradicting it would contradict with one of our best theories of nature. There has been some fringe research into figuring out ways to reformulate special relativity to make it compatible with invariant hidden variables,[3] but given quantum mechanics has been around for over a century and nobody has figured this out, I wouldn’t get your hopes up.
The second view is unpopular because it can be shown to violate a more subtle intuition we all tend to have, but is taken for granted so much I’m not sure if there’s even a name for it. The intuition is that not only should there be no mathematical contradictions within a single given reference frame so that an observer will never see the laws of physics break down, but that there should additionally be no contradictions when all possible reference frames are considered simultaneously.
It is not physically possible to observe all reference frames simulatenously, and thus one can argue that such an assumption should be abandoned because it is metaphysical and not something you can ever observe in practice.[4] Note that inconsistency between all reference frames considered simulatenously does not mean observers will disagree over the facts, because if one observer asks another for information about a measurement result, they are still acquiring information about that result from their reference frame, just indirectly, and thus they would never run into a disagreement in practice.
However, people still tend to find it too intuitive to abandon this notion of simultaneous consistency, so it remains unpopular and most physicists choose to just interpret quantum mechanics as if there are no hidden variables at all. #1 you can argue is enforced by the evidence, but #2 is more of a philosophical position, so ultimately the view that there are no hidden variables is not “proven” but proven if you accept certain philosophical assumptions.
There is actually a second way to restore local hidden variables which I did not go into detail here which is superdeterminism. Superdeterminism basically argues that if you did just have a theory which describes how particles behave now but a more holistic theory that includes the entire initial state of the universe going back to the Big Bang and tracing out how all particles evolved to the state they are now, you can place restrictions on how that system would develop that would such that it would always reproduce the correlations we see even with hidden variables that is indeed Lorentz invariant.
Although, the obvious problem is that it would never actually be possible to have such a theory, we cannot know the complete initial configuration of all particles in the universe, and so it’s not obvious how you would derive the correlations between particles beforehand. You would instead have to just assume they “know” how to be correlated already, which makes them equivalent to nonlocal hidden variable theories, and thus it is not entirely clear how they could be made Lorentz invariant. Not sure if anyone’s ever put forward a complete model in this framework either, same issue with nonlocal hidden variable theories.
i use one of those trackball mice with the ball on top. first time i tried it i never went back, no need to worry about having a proper surface or desk space for a mouse ever again. if you reach the side of your desk using an optical mouse, you have to pick the mouse up and move it all the way to the other side of the desk, while is a proper ball mouse (a good one without too much resistance) when you flick the ball it can continue spinning a bit even as you release it, so you can flick it to the side and then bend your wrist slightly to then flick it again, and the mouse cursor will just continue moving without stopping, which in games you can do this to have endless turning around, when turning is always stuttery on an optical mouse due to hitting the end of the desk. it takes a little bit to get used to, but at least a good one with limited resistance and a large ball, you can easily get just as accurate as an optical mouse as well. the only downside i find is that i do have to take the trackball out and clean it like the ones on the bottom.