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Charles Babbage against Organ Grinders.
In response to
The "Scary problem of Qualia"
Which is to say that whenever there is (a physical arrangement with) a logical structure that matches (is transitive with) the logical structure of consciousness - then there would be consciousness.
Um, no? Why on Earth does that follow? We postulate that there is something about the physical properties of carbon atoms arranged as a human brain that causes, or is, consciousness. The physical properties of your line on paper aren't anything like that.
If it's a pencil line then it's got carbon atoms ;-)
In response to
[LINK] AI-boxing Is News, Somehow
Whatever happened with that (Russian?) movie based on the idea?
In response to
Firewalling the Optimal from the Rational
But of course this whole post is really about playing Go... ;-)
See the comments on How Many Worlds? for why introducing the graph metaphor is confusing and negatively helpful to beginners.
Well, true, a graph implies a discreteness that does not correlate closely to a continuous configuration space. I actually think of it as the probability of finding yourself in that volume of configuration space being influenced by "significant" amplitudes slowing from more than one other volume of configuration space, although even that is not a great explanation as it suggests a ticking of a discrete time parameter. A continuously propagating wavefront is probably a much better analogy. Or we can just go into calculus mode and consider boxes of configuration space which we then shrink down arbitrarily while taking a limit value. But sometimes it's just easier to think "branches" ;-)
In response to
[SEQ RERUN] On Being Decoherent
Does anybody else not like the general phrasing "The system is in the superposition STATE1 + STATE2" ?
The way I'm thinking of it there is no such thing as a superposition. There is simply more than one configuration in the (very recent) past that contributes a significant amount of amplitude to the "current" configuration.
Have I got this wrong?
'Handwaving' describes vagueness. Yet, just how much vagueness qualifies as 'handwaving' is not well-defined!
I don't disagree? I'm making essentially an aesthetic point.
I thought I qualified how much vagueness was acceptable -- there is vagueness that is pedagogically useful, and there is vagueness that is not pedagogically useful, and my accusation of handwaving is isomorphic to saying that the vagueness with Feynman paths here is not pedagogically useful.
This builds on the result of 'joint configurations', which is that for interference to occur, everything needs to line up. EVERYTHING. Otherwise, it's offset in some dimension or other, and not really in the same 'place' at all. With that in place, this is a short step to take.
I can't follow this explanation at all. Too many ambiguous pronouns. But this is okay; the goal isn't to explain it to me -- I have all the training in quantum mechanics that I care to have.
"Everything needs to line up" is the key point, and it once you understand it it's really quite simple. It just means that there is more than one way to get to the same configuration state. Think about history seeming to branch out in a tree-like way, as most people tend to imagine. But if two branching paths are not far apart (e.g. differing by just a single photon) then it is easy for then to come back together. History changes from a tree to a graph. Being a graph means that some point has two history paths (actually every point has an infinite amount of ancestry but most of it cancels out). When you more than one history path both constructive and destructive interference can take place, and destructive means that the probability of some states goes down, i.e. some final states no longer happen (you no longer see a photon appearing in some places).
Is this making it clearer or have I made it worse? ;-)
In response to
What is life?
It seems to me that both a genotype and phenotype is needed to qualify for labelling something as alive. It's difficult to see how any form of natural selection could operate on inheritance and variation without a genotype. So that would rule out crystals and so forth.
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Relying on a small number of strong arguments (or even one) has a clear drawback. Change. A new discovery can invalidate a single argument that seemed very strong in that past. Many weaker arguments have more stability.