Jim Pivarski

11mo

I've been thinking about some maybe-undecidable philosophical questions, and it occurred to me that they fall into some neat categories. These questions are maybe-undecidable because of the absolute claims they want to make, while experimental measurements can never be certain, or the terms of the claim are hard to formulate as a physical experiment. Nevertheless, people have opinions on them because they're foundational to our view of the universe: it's hard to not have opinions on them. Even defaulting to a null hypothesis that could, in principle, be overturned is privileging one view over another.

I'm calling the first category the "Leapfrogging Terminus" because it has to do with absolute beginnings, extents, or... (read 3851 more words →)

Replying toWhy I’m not a Bayesian

Jim Pivarski1y

Why I’m not a Bayesian

This sounds like it's using Russell's theory of descriptions, in that you're replacing "Colorless green ideas do Y" with "For all X such that X is a colorless green idea, X does Y." Not everyone agrees that this is a correct interpretation, in part because it seems that statements like "Dragons are attacking Paris" should be false.

I think it would be reasonable to say that "colorless green ideas" is not just a set of objects in which there are no existing members, but meaningless (for two reasons: "colorless" and "green" conflict, and ideas can't be colored, anyway). I think that was Chomsky's intention—not to write a false sentence, but a meaningless one.

Replying toEnvironmentalism in the United States Is Unusually Partisan

Environmentalism in the United States Is Unusually Partisan

I'm surprised that Scott Alexander's blog post didn't go for what I think is a more obvious connection between conservatism and conservationism: religious fundamentalism.

The way man acts these days... [shakes head, downcast] forswears a God-given charge to protect this God-given Earth. The way he chokes the air with smokestacks, plunders the oceans of her fishes, and paves the green hills flat with concrete—it sickens me. Gets me [thumps chest with mic] right through the heart. His vainglorious pride to try to change the natural order of things, the intricate tapestry of birds and deer, trees, antelopes, and groundhogs, from the mighty whale down to the humblest anthill—modern man thinks he knows better

There is way too much serendipity

This is both interesting and (I think) an important thing to know about science: plans and strategies are systematic, but discoveries sometimes are and sometimes aren't. In particle physics, the Omega baryon and Higgs boson were discovered in deliberate hunts, but the muon and J/psi were serendipitous. The ratio might be about half-and-half (depending on how you count particles).

Thinking about this, I have two half-answers, which may be leads as to why sweetener discovery might be discovered by serendipity, even though there are systematic searches for new drugs.

Discovery depends, to a great degree, on your detector, and I don't think there's a better detector of sweetness than the ones in our mouths.

... (read more)

Replying toNuclear consciousness

This story from the perspective of the Thing did get into the notion of what it would be like to be an amorphous consciousness (and how odd it is that Earthlings aren't). It's still a little different, though, from the trajectory of being human and then realizing what it's like to be multi-human. A version with Pod People would be a different kind of story...

Replying toNuclear consciousness

Cool! I'll read that one, too, thanks!

What I was thinking about with the pod people was their group mentality. (After all, it has long been considered a metaphor for communism.) I'd like to see someone imagine—or do it myself—the poddified people not as soulless outer shells of their former selves, but as themselves, "melted" into a group consciousness. As an example of something similar, the Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode, "The Wish" did an excellent job showing characters who remained themselves, but as evil versions of themselves, as vampires.

In the Invasion of the Body Snatchers and its remakes, the reason the poddified people are hard to distinguish from their former selves is... (read more)

Replying toThe goal of physics

The goal of physics

But if that observer is in the universe, then there's more in the universe than just the circle.

I was examining this universe from the outside. We can't actually do that, though we act as though we do in the physical sciences. (One idea in the physical sciences that takes seriously the fact that experimenters are a part of the universe they observe is superdeterminism, and it's one of the possible loopholes for Bell's Inequality.)

The goal of physics

In grad school, I was a teaching assistant for a course called, Why the Sky is Blue. It was a qualitative introduction to physics for non-majors, covering a lot of the same topics as Physics I, such as forces, conservation of energy and momentum, electric charges and magnetic fields, in less detail, with not much math. The actual question about why the sky is blue was saved for the end. As the course dragged on and the students (who expected no math, rather than not much math) started to complain, "Are we ever going to find out why the sky is blue?" I watched the schedule slip and wondered the same thing.

We... (read 1279 more words →)

Replying toNuclear consciousness

Panpsychism! (Sort of!) But I guess that makes sense, since panpsychism is trying to make sense of divisibility of consciousness, too.

Replying toNuclear consciousness

I will read it, thanks!

Having a headache and not having a headache

A passage from Mark Twain's Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court has been stuck in my head since I read it some 35 years ago:

As for me, all that I think about in this plodding sad pilgrimage, this pathetic drift between the eternities, is to look out and humbly live a pure and high and blameless life, and save that one microscopic atom in me that is truly me: the rest may land in Sheol and welcome for all I care.

That "one atom that is truly me"!

I recognize that there are parts of my body that I wouldn't consider "me," such as my hair or fingernails, or even substantial parts of my... (read 3313 more words →)

Answer to a question: what do I think about God's communication patterns?

Yesterday at 9am, I had a headache. I tried to put it out of mind and focus on other things, and I guess I was successful because the next time I thought about it, it was 10am and I didn't have a headache. (I'm simplifying and making up times that are approximately right.)

So it went away, but when did it go away? Did it end at 9:10am and I just didn't notice until 50 minutes later, or did it end at 9:50am? In physics-speak, it was an unobserved variable between the two measurements.

Taking the word "head-ache" literally, I didn't have a headache at all from 9:01am through 9:59am because I wasn't noticing... (read 671 more words →)

Reality and reality-boxes

This started as a comment on Book Review: How Minds Change, but it got so long and off the original topic that I felt it didn't belong in that comments feed. People would have to scroll past a large block of text that doesn't have much to do with the original article.

For context, I was responding to jaspax,

(Sorry, it doesn't look like the conservatives have caught on to this kind of approach yet.)

Actually, if you look at religious proselytization, you'll find that these techniques are all pretty well-known, albeit under different names and with different purposes. And while this isn't actually synonymous with political canvassing, it often has political spillover effects.
If you

... (read 2223 more words →)

What kind of place is this?

We depend on our words... Our task is to communicate experience and ideas to others... The word "reality" is also a word, a word which we must learn to use correctly.
— Niels Bohr, Philosophy of Science Vol. 37 (1934), p. 157

While trying to write about some of the new things that have been bothering me, I kept coming back to this old one, since it seems so fundamentally important. Anything else I might say would have to refer to it, so I decided to write it up in a way that I can point to it with a link, the way that other topics on this site are so efficiently dealt with.

The... (read 6185 more words →)