Indeed! The question is, "How do you tell?" The "how do neurons work" research has gotten down to the level where the decision-making seems to involve quantum phenomena where we can't take the lid off and peek inside. Theoretical physicists wonder if there are more than just four dimensions, but haven't nailed down anything concrete. We can sort of see back to the beginning of our universe, but not into anything that may have been before it or beside it or anything like that.
You can definitely say it's "not outside our universe," wh...
There are indeed multiple ways it could work. And it may be tough to decide how to draw any boundaries. Is it some totally separate realm that only interacts with ours in the one area? Or is it something that's simply a little outside of the four dimensions we can normally perceive and it's tied in everywhere in subtle ways and our cognition is merely the only spot where we easily notice it? We might try to model it in a number of different ways depending on exactly what we find. But we're almost certainly going to have proble...
Well, the question is whether our thoughts are deterministic or not. If you reset the universe to the same point multiple times, would everyone necessarily do exactly the same things? Or might there be variation? There being an extra-universal influence on our thoughts that wouldn't get reset gives the possibility of non-determinism, even if there is some ability to predict what it might do in known circumstances.
Actually running that test though would be... difficult. We only get to see one of the runs, so we have nothing to ...
Thing is, there are quite a few questions about our universe which simply cannot be definitively answered using only information from within our universe.
Take "free will" for example. Does our thinking arise entirely from natural phenomenon, or is there some extra-universal component to it? Well, if it is the latter, then the only way for us to find out from inside the universe is if the universe is built in a way to make it obvious. If there's some discontinuity between cause and effect with regard to thinking or similar.
But if there is ...
Why? If the answer is "no" then applying a proper punishment causes the nebulous whatsit in charge of the person's free will to change their future behaviour.
If the answer is "yes" then applying a proper punishment adjusts the programming of their brain in a way that will change their future behaviour.
The only way a "yes" makes it harder to justify punishing someone is if you overexpand a lack of "free will" to imply "incapable of learning".
The chemical stuff could be explained by alterations to thermal expansion. Less expansion would cause less pressure, and spiking pressure is a critical part of getting an actual detonation. Would also reduce the amount of wind though, so the climate would possibly change substantially.
Electronic stuff failing is rather more difficult to figure out without wrecking people's brains, compasses, etc. He probably should have left that alone and just let the electronics fade away since without gas expansion generating electricity to run them would be impractically expensive.
It may well be a "tightly-laced reality". It's just not this one. Perhaps the answer to a match not working in the world the hero is transported to is that the fundamental chemistry of the universe is different and our protagonist's body has obviously been modified to match. Or else the difference is some specific alteration where human metabolism can still work, and yet phosphorous can't generate a high enough temperature to ignite cellulose. The fact that he still has a match after transportation to such a different world where probably...
If you interpret it strictly, an answer of "yes" puts you in the space of "I used to beat my wife, but I have stopped." An answer of "no" puts you in the ambiguous space of "Either I used to beat her, and I still do, or I never have and therefore can't have stopped."
The question is which of those two possibilities people will assume. Which will depend on the context and what they already think of both you and the person asking.
There are quite a few ways it can go wrong other than just central planning. Ultimately most of them come back to some special interest group attempting to forcibly subvert the economy to favor their own preferences.
High extraction ratios aren't inherently problematic economically speaking since it's not like the extracted resources simply vanish, and market forces tend to bring the extraction ratio down over time until it reaches the lowest level anyone's willing to do the job for. But, high extraction ratios do make a tempting target for non-economic actions designed to preserve the lucrative ratio against the actions of the market.
From the economics side of things, individual nodes having massive amounts of locally useful information, but it being very difficult to determine exactly which pieces of that information are globally relevant and it being completely impractical to ship and process every piece of that information at the global level is the fundamental problem that most "command economies" tend to run into.
I'm afraid I haven't collected a definite list. I just notice when it pops up in the wide variety of materials I tend to read. For example, traffic studies showing better flow rates and safety when drivers are allowed more individual discretion. You'll probably also find some stuff in Austrian economics with regard to how more freedom of choice allows for better optimization by making fuller use of the processing capability of each individual. And there have been a few references to it in business management studies about why microm...
Such a low-ranking solution as "Everyone have as many kids as possible, then cannibalize the girls" would not be generated in your search process.
Like... "A Modest Proposal"? I would suggest that low-ranking solutions are very often generated and are simply discarded without comment in the vast majority of cases. The only way "efficiency" enters into it comes from the way we start our search for solutions by considering how to adapt already known solutions to similar problems.
This does, in fact, show up in evolution as well. Adaptin...
Personally I think I actually tend to anthropomorphize more as a result of my ability to guess what others are thinking being learned rather than instinctive. Because I really am using the same circuitry for comprehending people as I do for comprehending car engines and computers and using it in essentially the same way.
But I may not be typical. Best guess is that my particular quirks are mostly the result of a childhood head injury rather than anything genetic.
A lot of the things that ancient cultures attributed to God are this kind of thinking.
If you see a dead pig on the side of the road with no signs of violence, stay the heck away from it. You don't have to know which specific disease it died of, or even what a disease is. People have just noticed that anyone who goes near such a thing tends to die horribly later and maybe takes half the tribe with them. The precise intermediate steps are largely irrelevant, just the statistical correlation.
There are two failure modes to watch out for.
The f...
If there weren't people who had a strong desire, not just for sex, but to actually have a child, and a willingness to go to extreme measures to do so, then sperm banks wouldn't be a thing.
Given the number of people who specifically, and openly desire to make babies, postulating a subconscious desire that might push them to "forget" their contraception isn't unreasonable. Especially given that cycle timing and coitus interruptus have been staples of human sexual behaviour since... Well... At least as far back as we have any records about s...
I would submit that most other species on the planet, were they to rise to our level of intelligence, would not bother inventing condoms. In most other species, the females generally have no particular interest in sex unless they want babies.
Humans though, are weird. Because of our long phase of immaturity, and the massive amount of work involved in raising a child, we need really strong social bonds. Evolution, being a big fan of "The first thing I stumble across that gets the job done is the solution" repurposed sex into a pair-bonding ...
Personally I think the Inquisitor has a much better case than the Phlogiston theorist.
If humans have an immortal soul, then saving that soul from an eternity of torment would easily justify nearly anything temporarily inflicted on the mortal body in the same manner that saving someone's life from a burst appendix justifies slicing open their belly. While brutal, the Inquisitor is self-consistent. Or, at least, he could be.
Magnesium gaining weight when burned, however, has to be special-cased away to fit with Phlogiston theory. Ther...
Reminds me of one of the early AI research projects using some variety of optimization algorithm to try to "learn" the ability to solve a wide variety of problems in a single program. Genetic algorithm I think, random mutation and cross-pollination of the programs between the best performers, that kind of thing.
After a while, they noticed that one of the lines that had developed, while not the best at any of the test problems, was second-best at all of them.
Yet when they tried to make it the base of all their next generation... it didn't work.....
Hard to say if politics was the entire reason... We are also endurance hunters and trap layers and both of those require being able to predict what your intended prey will do many steps in advance...
Question is, which came first?
And really, evolution didn't come up with a general intelligence to solve ape politics. Pay attention when you're thinking about things. How often do you reflexively think of inanimate objects as "wanting" or "happy"? You're probably modeling plants and animals and machines and complex physics as though it w...
'I say "evolutions", plural, because fox evolution works at cross-purposes to rabbit evolution, and neither can talk to snake evolution to learn how to build venomous fangs.'
Interestingly, as we're getting better at analyzing genomes, we're discovering that this isn't strictly true. Rabbit and fox cross-pollinating with snake would be a bit of a stretch maybe, but there are actually a number of what we once thought to be entirely separate lines of evolution which genetic testing has revealed to be true-breeding hybrids between a set of nearby species...
Sure. Your cells have two methods for copying DNA. One of them is fast and highly accurate. The other is quite slow and makes mistakes several times more often.
The chemical structure of the accurate method is basically an order of magnitude more complex than the inaccurate one. It seems likely that the inaccurate method is the remnant of some previous stage of development.
The inaccurate method has stuck around because the error checking on the accurate method also causes the process to stall if it hits a damaged segment. At wh...
Go visit any machine shop. You'll find tools there like lathes and mills which, given a supply of raw materials, can be used to manufacture another machine shop.
And yet... Where did the first lathe and mill come from if all lathes and mills are made using other lathes and mills? Obviously God created the first ones and gifted them to us, because nobody even knows how to make the high-precision slides and rods and threads needed for lathes and mills without lathes and mills to use for tools...
Oh... Wait... The first ones were m...
The poisons are variations on digestive enzymes, only turned up to 11 potency-wise. Lots of enzyme producing organs have bladders to store their output until needed, so that likely would have copy-pasted in at the same time, and there are several species of reptiles which are venomous, but don't have fangs. There seems to be a progression of teeth near the venom entry point becoming longer and grooved, eventually culminating in fangs.
Digestion first, then pre-digestive saliva (your saliva has digestive enzymes too for that matter) then more pot...
Intermediate mutations don't necessarily need to provide any benefit at all, they just need to not have any detrimental effects.
As I recall, a rattlesnake's rattles are formed more-or-less by its skin failing to shed perfectly cleanly. That costs practically nothing and is exactly the kind of weird mutation that can crop up in an isolated segment of the population where it doesn't take long for genes to stabilize.
Then the isolation ends, and it turns out that the weird new trait has some amount of benefit over the population at large, so it spreads.
An interesting choice since horses are one of the few other animals on the planet that sweat and, therefore, are one of the hardest to run down.
Interestingly, the ability to sweat also coincides with the ability to run oneself to death. Other creatures use panting as their primary cooling mechanism, and, as a result, when they become too warm, they cease to be able to take in sufficient oxygen to maintain their exertion and have to stop. Non-sweaters will drop from exhaustion, but it's rarely fatal.
Horses use their extreme running ability to get away from predators. Humans use it to be predators. When we finally teamed up we became nearly unstoppable. :D
That is a reasonable possibility, although if it only interacts with normal matter via gravitation, which is relatively weak, then I'd expect to see its dispersal lag significantly behind, say, a supernova. And that lag would seem likely to result in such events skewing the distribution over time.
Unless we're also going to postulate that dark matter has its own energy, chemistry, and physics which resemble those of normal matter so closely that such things happen in both realms at the same time...
Measurement error and/or gravity having some kind of p...
I would say that the non-nerds can't save the human race either though. Without nerds our population never exceeds what can be supported by hunting, gathering, and maybe some primitive agriculture.
Which isn't much. We'd be constantly hovering just short of being wiped out by some global cataclysm. And there's some evidence that we've narrowly missed just that at least once in our history. If we want to survive long-term we need to get off this rock, and then we need to find at least one other solar system. After that we can ta...
One thing that occurs to me while reading this is that for most people, their religion consists nearly entirely of cached beliefs. Things they believe because they were told, not because they derived the result themselves.
This makes any truly critical examination of one's religious beliefs rather a daunting task. To start with, you're going to have to recompute potentially thousands of years of received wisdom for yourself. That's... A lot of work. There's a reason we cache beliefs, otherwise it would take a lifetime just to b...
So I grew up around Jesuits and, while I obviously can't speak for all of them, I'd say that they probably qualify as proto-rationalists, if not rationalists. To the point where a large portion of other Christian sects denounce them as atheists because they refuse to wallow in mysticism like everyone else.
A core principle of the Jesuit philosophy is that God gave us our intellect specifically so that we could come to better understand him. You won't find them trying to quibble about "micro" vs "macro" evolution or any of the other silliness tha...
The odds are long because all the obviously good ideas with no risk of failure are immediately snapped up by everyone.
The key is to learn to spot those so you can move on them first, and also to keep a sane estimate with how much you're gambling vs the potential reward so that your net expected payout remains positive.
It depends on what you want to exercise really. Breath-hold exercises won't make your muscles get stronger faster or anything, but they will improve your ability to go extended times without air, which is a useful talent in itself and improved lung function is helpful for maintaining higher rates of exertion for longer.
So... Exercise what you want to be able to do I guess?
Two of the three little pigs got eaten. The grasshopper starved to death. Little Red Ridinghood and her grandmother both got eaten with no miraculous rescue. The boy who cried wolf got eaten, along with all his sheep. The little mermaid didn't get the prince and was cursed to walk the world in agony for the rest of her days. Several other stories, the central "villain" does something wrong (or maybe even just rude or inconsiderate) and the protagonist of the story kills them and all their family and burns their house down.
The ...
The most common Christian answer to that contradiction, when translated into modern parlance, is that God is the hardware on which the universe runs. Not only can he know both the position and speed of a particle at any given time, but he, in fact, must know it at all times or it would cease to exist.
The fact that some philosophers could figure this out over a thousand years ago is impressive. The fact that the majority of "believers" just blink in incomprehension and then go right on thinking of God as just a slightly mutated human who lives in the sky is disheartening. Especially now that we routinely fly above the blue and know that what's "up there," in the physical sense, is just more sky.
We played it with thrown balls, and the target had to stand there until someone missed. But every time someone hit the person the throwing distance was increased by a step.
I totally agree about it being practice for handling pain and finding out what the limits are in a safe manner. You'll see baby animals doing the same thing as they play, slowly ramping up the level of roughness until somebody squawks.
Unfortunately, it's also a way to reinforce an in-group if you can get some out-group players involved. I only played it once since it didn't take me long to notice that, somehow, I was the only one who ever got actually hit with the ball whenever I was involved.
The hard part is that it's one of those mental skills that can't really be taught. You can tell people about it, but they have to learn it for themselves. Because, even once you know about it intellectually, what it "feels" like when your brain is deliberately not thinking about something is almost certainly a subjective experience that will be different for everyone.
So, like Zen, you'd have to work out a large set of training scenarios that put a person in a situation where it'll happen and then draw their attention to it, and plan on having to run most people through quite a few of them before they grok.
Christian groups are usually pretty hit-or-miss. If you tear the religion down, crack open its bones, and scoop out the marrow, you'll find a lot of the same lessons as are discussed here. It's old, often obtuse, and it's obvious that the writers and compilers weren't sure why it was this way, only that it is. Jordan Peterson, for example, has some excellent dissections of various parts of Christianity and what it tries to achieve as viewed through the lens of modern psychology, and it's hard to look at any of the pieces and say that they...
I wouldn't say the business world is relentlessly honest in all things, but when the rubber meets the road, business either provides what the consumers want, or gets shouldered aside in favor of someone who does. This keeps them marginally more honest than in the educational system where the consumer who pays for it is generally not the student and they're generally left free to pursue whatever absurd fantasies they please in the name of demonstrating how "intellectual" they are.
Because, once the child had said it and everyone was laughing, it was too late. Everyone knows the emperor is an idiot now, his authority is pretty well broken. If he gets violent at that point his head will be on a spike by sundown.
Which... Not all emperors in real history have been that smart. So it could be a fitting end for the story nonetheless.
Just to point it out, even the term "denialist" was designed to be a loaded word that biases everyone who hears it against the position. Which doesn't make them any more or less likely to be correct, but it does let you know that the whole debate has gone political and scoring points against the opposing side has become more important than finding the truth.
Which doesn't actually add any evidence to either side being correct, because the universe doesn't really care about what we think, but it does tell you to watch out, because the mainstream voices...
Science very much isn't a religion. (At least, it's not supposed to be. The whole initial point of the system was to get thinking divorced from religious attachment to old ideas so progress would be quicker.)
But there are very much people for whom it has become their religion. Just listen. Any time you hear somebody talking about "the science" as though the mere fact that scientists have said something makes it true, that's religious thinking.
And it pops up all over the place. The climate change debate is a perfect example. &n...
The problem with arguing over words in this manner is that each side is attempting to "win" by picking a definition that lets them shut down the other side entirely, rather than finding common meaning so they can use the linguistic token for further communication. It's a contest of social dominance, not a search for truth. If you've ever tried to have an honest discussion with someone doing that you know exactly what I mean. You let them have their definition of the word and just pick a different word for the purposes of the discussion to...
I wouldn't say Bacon's scientific method is the only great idea that both promised and delivers on being massively beneficial to all mankind.
There are certain social principles that crop up again and again as well. For example, the idea that free people making their own decisions and setting their own goals are, in the long run, vastly more efficient at practically everything than top-down, centralized control.
It works surprisingly well wherever it's tried, consistently out-performs the predictions of the centralizers, and, at this point, we'r...
Yeah, "dark matter" really bothers me. Which seems more likely?
That there are massive quantities of invisible matter in the universe that only interacts via gravitation? And happens to be spread around in about the same density distribution as all the regular matter?
Or that our estimate for the value of the universal gravitational constant is either off a little bit or not quite as constant as we think?
The former sounds a little too much like an invisible dragon to me. Which doesn't make it impossible, but exotic, nigh-undetectable forms of matter just doesn't seem as plausible as observation error to me.
I'd say "artificial" is probably the wrong word for describing the intelligence demonstrated by corporations. A corporation's decision calculations are constructed out of human beings, but only a very small part of the process is actually explicitly designed by human beings.
"Gestalt" intelligence is probably a better way to describe it. Like an ant-hill. Human brains are to the corporation what neurons are to the human brain.
I doubt one could say with any confidence that they are universally "smarter" or "dumber" than individual humans. &...
They're not as smart as they seem. Humans having separate data storage for physical structure vs mental layout in no way precludes sharing of both.
Not that they aren't correct, at least in general (there are a few physical mechanisms by which thought-sharing could plausibly happen under perfectly ideal circumstances, but so far as we can tell it at least doesn't occur in humans often enough to be distinguishable from noise) but they kind of jumped to conclusions there.
Especially where the archive dump would have the contradictions of scientific liter...
Placing it on an empirical foundation would be an enormously difficult task, but fortunately it's not particularly necessary since, like geometry, you can put it on an a priori foundation stemming from some basic observations about human nature.
Human beings tend to prioritize according to some simple, general rules, and natural selection ensures that those few who throw too big a curveball don't propagate. So you can take those rules and extrapolate them into a description of how a group of human beings will react to various economic pressures.
"Man, ... (read more)