1

Just Chat! / Re: Is there a universal moral standard?

« on: 09/09/2019 18:45:45 »

Here is some examples to demonstrate that moral judgment is closely related to knowledge and uncertainty.
You are in a tall and large building, and find a massive time bomb which makes it impossible to move before disarming it first. You can see red and blue wires on the detonator, and a counting down clock showing that there is only 2 minutes left before it explodes. You are an expert in explosives, sou you know for certain the following premises:
- if you cut the red wire, the bomb will be disarmed.
- If you cut the blue wire, the bomb will explode immediately, destroying the entire building and killing thousands inside.
- If you do nothing about the bomb, the timer will eventually trigger the bomb.
Which is the most moral decision you can take, which is the least moral, and why?

The decision will depend on other information. Is the bomb on the top floor or the ground floor? Are there any other people in the building? If this is an office block and it's empty at night, no one sane would snip either wire when they can just run out of there in the two minutes that are available.

However, let's assume the higher floors of the building are full of people who can't possibly get out in two minutes (or even be warned within two minutes), that the bomb is on the ground floor, and the the building will collapse as soon as it blows. There is nothing immoral about not risking your own death in order to have a 50:50 chance of saving lots of other people, so you are entitled to run out of there and let it blow. If AGI is making the decision though, it could lock you in with the bomb so that you don't have a choice - that would be its moral decision. You would then cut one of the wires, randomly selected.

There are some other factors though. If the person who has to run or cut a wire is more valuable to humanity than the sum total worth of all the other people in the building, AGI will not lock him/her in the room, but will order him/her to get out of there and let the building blow. If the building is full of Nazis who are attending a conference, that could well happen.

2

Just Chat! / Re: The DOGMA of science........

« on: 06/01/2019 00:21:02 »

It is to my disappointment that my reply #258, dated 12/27/18, was our last communication, and it received no response. Perhaps due to the holidays, or perhaps because both curved spacetime speculation, and gravitational wave energy density time-delay speculation are not easily falsifiable. The association between the presence of mass and the curvature of spacetime is the same as the association between the presence of mass and the gravitational wave energy density of the local space, from the perspective of the ISU model which we are simulating.

Sorry - I didn't realise you were waiting for a response. I though you were just filling me in on how your theory solves the problem as to where the energy comes from to replace the energy that's sent out with your gravity waves, but I couldn't work out how that happens. You appear to have neighbouring universes which are part of a "greater universe", and that's fine - we can't rule out there being such things on the outside, and perhaps energy could be tapped from them, although we don't see energy being taken out of our own universe to match - its loss should show up as visual distortions in places alongside massive objects in other universes where that energy is taken out of our universe to supply power for the generation of gravity waves from those massive objects on the other side of the barrier.

It would be nice to know if you did understand that the role that wave energy density plays in the ISU model is the same role that curved space plays in SR/GR, because light following a curved path through spacetime, and light slowed by following a path that takes it through space containing higher gravitational wave energy density, both have the same result in terms of arrival times at a distant point.

I've already established that and pointed out that LET uses practically the same mechanism - it just doesn't call that energy gravitational waves or energy density, but merely recognises that something is present at any point in space which slows the speed of light, doing so more strongly in the vicinity of higher energy densities, though not matching the measurable energy densities at any location because the slowing of light occurs in a way that spreads far out away from where the measurable energy is concentrated.

It would have been nice to have a reply from someone of your intellect in regard to my supposition that the cause of the hemispherical anisotropy might be the result of two previous parent arenas converging to form a big crunch/bang that initiated our expanding arena, and therefore the resulting hemispherical anisotropy observed in the cosmic microwave background could have been imprinted by differing density/temperature characteristics of each of the individual parent arenas.

It isn't something I've looked into or given much thought to. I'm still trying to find any theory that fits all the facts rationally on a local scale without worrying about things happening billions of lightyears away. Those things can provide clues, of course, so I do still keep them in mind - if something in another universe can really pull on objects in our universe, that would be of crucial importance, but it isn't clear to me that that's been established yet.

Sorry if trying to bring out those different aspects interfered with the discussion of the absolute time simulation. Perhaps you can take us forward in that direction.[/font]

The trick there is to avoid including too much of the mechanisms of specific theories and just simulate the behaviour of clocks with a minimal mechanism to slow some of them, this being linked to a numerical value which simply represents the "energy density" of the "gravitational waves" at the clock's location. That value would be the same for ISU as it is for LET (but with a different explanation in LET where it simply represents the amount of slowing of the local speed of light).

[By the way (and mainly for Halc), I've been thinking a bit about the waves that are normally called gravitational waves - the ones that don't come off stationary or non-accelerating masses. When two black holes go round each other at relativistic speed, their gravity wells don't merely move round with them creating gravitational waves as the changes spread outwards, but must also length-contract in their current direction of travel, and this ought to have a more significant impact than the first effect. If you're sitting at some distance away from them at a constant distance, you must be going up and down in their gravity wells twice for ever orbit of the black holes. That should lead to your functionality repeatedly speeding up and slowing down as a result, and that might show by looking at the frequency of light coming to you from a distant source, though you'd have to be reasonably close to the black holes for this effect to show up. I don't know if this length-contraction input to gravitational waves is normally taken into account in any way, but I haven't seen it mentioned anywhere.]

3

Just Chat! / Re: The DOGMA of science........

« on: 27/12/2018 19:50:25 »

I didn’t intentionally place my model where you perceive it to be, relative to other models. I actually developed it step by step starting with the question, “If there was one big bang event, why not multiple big bangs?”

There are different aspects of models which result in they being grouped differently depending on which aspects you're focusing on at the time, so I wouldn't worry too much about how they should be set out in a chart. On the time issue though, theories which lack absolute time have something in common which they don't share with LET. On the space issue, theories which don't curve space to account for gravity have something different in common. On these two points, GR and LET share no mechanisms, but ISU shares something with each.

Am I giving that impression? Black holes are continually accumulating matter and energy through accretion.

Some of them are hardly taking in new material at all, while others are feasting. If they are the same mass though, they have the same strength of gravitational pull. That non-addition of material in the former case cannot provide the energy that would need to be radiated off all the time for ISU. I'm not here to attack ISU though and it doesn't matter for a simulation exploring the nature of time whether the model is functional or broken - you can have your gravitational waves for this because where the energy for that comes from is an issue for a different discussion.

Look at the description of the ISU above. Do you see any way that energy can escape? If so, I didn’t describe it sufficiently.

Energy isn't lost from the universe, but your gravitational waves will spread out and fill space more and more evenly, taking energy away from the mass concentrations and depleting them. They are not being recharged.

Granted, in some models, like GR, and like The Big Rip, the end of the universe might be like what you describe, but in the ISU, the gravitational wave energy that you see “radiating off” isn’t escaping, and before it gets away the mechanism for its replacement is already working, i.e., the gravitational wave energy density profile of space is universal, and has all the energy, and is continually being refreshed by the perpetual processes of arena action and quantum action of the ISU.

If you have lots of this energy everywhere ready to replace what's radiating off, that energy is going to contribute to the energy density in such a way that you won't have gravity acting the way it needs to to fit the known facts. You can only have the right energy density profile around a body by having a lack of replacement energy queueing up to replace the stuff that has to be radiated off.

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Just Chat! / Re: The DOGMA of science........

« on: 24/12/2018 20:39:50 »

The ISU is not General Relativity. Because it is not General Relativity, in order to understand the ISU, you have to resist the temptation of see it from the perspective of curved spacetime. Spacetime, and curved spacetime, is not a feature of the ISU. Instead, all space is filled with gravitational wave energy, coming and going in all directions, at all points in space.The energy that must be employed to curve space in GR, is there in the ISU in the form of gravitational waves that carry energy.

In LET (Lorentz Ether Theory) there is no bending of Spacetime either. Something slows the speed of light in the vicinity of mass (and at a great distance too), but that thing that causes the slowing has not been identified. The slowing of the speed of light to different degrees in different places causes light to follow curved paths which match up to the paths taken in GR. If matter is thought of as being made of waves moving like light, that matter would be accelerated towards "sources" of gravity in the right manner, and the slowing of functionality which results from greater depth in a gravity well exactly matches the amount of kinetic energy apparently created out of nothing by the inward acceleration - the energy was actually there already in the higher speed of functionality of the material which is lost as the acceleration occurs. ISU sounds as if it could be a version of LET in which a mechanism has been proposed for the slowing of light. That proposed mechanism sounds wrong as it depends on continual creation of energy, but we don't have any good explanation yet for the mechanism, so there's no harm in exploring options. (Of course, with dark energy there appears to be a continual generation of new energy too, but that could be a mere illusion of accelerated expansion which we would see if there's a slowing of functionality of observers as space expands - the expansion could be slowing while our functionality slows faster.)

That is not a description of the source of gravitational waves in my model, or how they are emitted by mass in the ISU model.[/font]

Your gravitational waves appear to be gravity being propagated as waves rather than the gravitational waves that LIGO detects, but you appear to lump them together as the same thing. I wouldn't want to rule out the possibility that gravity is some kind of wave radiated off from all matter and energy and which loses strength as it spreads out - the energy of this radiation could perhaps be of a kind that adds up to nothing, but which slows the speed of light in the part of space it's passing through, and the more such waves are passing through a bit of space, the more clocks will be slowed there. That is a potential mechanism behind LET. One possible problem with it is how those waves are emitted from black holes, but maybe these waves aren't slowed in the way that light is - they may be free to spread out at c in all directions. However, in a system with orbiting things moving at relativistic speed, gravitational attraction has to be adjusted along with everything else in order to fit with the phenomenon of relativity (not any specific theory of relativity, but the actual mechanism of relativity itself). The manner in which these waves spread out must also conform to the rules of length contraction and aberration. Furthermore, the speed of light is slowed relative to that moving system and not relative to space itself (when considering the component of slowing generated by local gravity) - it's particularly important to recognise this point, because without that you would enable light to escape from the event horizon at the back of a moving black hole (and thereby get out into deep space). That's why I think the mechanism for slowing light is that matter is surrounded by a dark-matter like extension of matter which spreads out through space, diminishing in density as it gets further from the centre of the matter, and this acts as a medium to slow light (while it's also impossible to suck this extended part of matter into a black hole).

What we both agree on though is that there is something there at any point in space which slows light below it's theoretical maximum, and the more of that something is there, the more light will be slowed in that place. The actual mechanism is unimportant for the simulation - the simulation will fit with whatever the real mechanism is.

That statement is based on your experience and learning of General Relativity (and SR).

No - it's based on LIGO detecting gravitational waves and that kind of wave not being compatible with what you're calling gravitational waves because the ones that LIGO detects do not come off non-accelerating bodies, whereas you need just as many of your waves to come off a non-acceleration body as an accelerating one of the same mass, and LIGO shows that you don't get that - it only detects the last moments leading into merger, and then the gravitational waves stop completely.

When you think of the presence of mass being maintained in space by the continual functioning of the two ISU components of mass, the inflow and out flow of gravitational wave energy, you then put that in place of the concept that there is nothing in the planet putting out gravitational waves. The planet, and all objects with mass are composed of wave-particles, and wave particles are composed of inflowing and out flowing wave energy convergences. Each convergence has a hint of mass.

You may be able to find a mechanism for some kind of wave coming off matter all the time, but it doesn't look to me as if it can be the same kind of wave as the ones LIGO detects. Perhaps those are the same kind though, just insignificant due to their relative scarcity and high peak strength, so most of the slowing of functionality could be driven by an astronomical number of gravitational waves of infinitesimal magnitude. I don't think it can be the same mechanism though, because the LIGO ones are carrying energy lost by orbital decay, whereas the waves you need to be coming off all matter all the time would have to emit energy without any such decay, meaning the energy has to be taken from somewhere else. None of this need worry us though when it comes to a simulation designed to explore time - the viability of the slowing mechanism is not important for that, and the simulation will necessarily be compatible with whatever the real mechanism is.

Not in the ISU model, as explained. The energy is always there in space, coming and going in all directions at all times, from an infinite history of the process of inflow and out flow that continually refreshes the gravitational wave energy density profile of space.

You have more of it in some places than others, and it radiates out from places with higher energy density into areas with less. That leaves you with a constant depletion of that energy in the areas of higher energy density which means they are not getting back as much energy as they are putting out.

That thinking comes from your familiarity with General Relativity, and the simulation that we are looking at producing comes from a different model of cosmology called the Infinite Spongy Universe model.

I don't think through the lens of GR (or SR). I use LET, and LET is so close to your model that they may in most respects be the same model.

I hope you can make the adjustments in your thinking that are necessary to talk about a simulation from the perspective of the ISU model. You have to disregard your own thinking, and go with mine to do a simulation of my model.

I don't need to disregard my own thinking to go along with yours - this part that we're disagreeing on is unimportant to the simulation. You have a proposed mechanism which could fill a mechanistic gap in LET. There are other proposed way of filling that mechanistic gap, but all of them have the same impact on the speed of light by slowing it down (as a light clock would demonstrate directly).

Note that I have explained where the gravitational waves that are depicted in the inverse square law diagrams, and that I describe as filling the gravity well at a declining intensity as you go up the ladder, so do you see now where the waves are coming from in the ISU?

There is no problem with that part, regardless of any difficulties that may apply to generating them.

If so, the you have the answer to the question:

How do you explain mechanically, how mass curves spacetime?

And if everything's down in a gravity well, what are the highest parts lower than?

In the ISU, an infinite universe, the ladder in the gravity well is defined to be of infinite length, and if, for purposes of the simulation, you are using a single massive object as the bottom of the well, then the higher parts of the ladder are lower than the parts above them, on an infinitely long ladder.

I was adding a question of my own to your question, so both were aimed at fans of GR, though not in any expectation of them being answered - it's just about making them think.

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Just Chat! / Re: The DOGMA of science........

« on: 20/12/2018 21:03:21 »

I take it you are programming/coding your AGI system on your own? I can see hundreds of hours being invested in something like that...

Completely alone. It's hard to add it all up, but I must have put at least forty thousand hours into this (and possibly twice that), though most of that was on linguistics (studying the structures of fifty languages and learning many of them to various levels of competence).

Did it get all of that right?

It sounds right.

How do I relate the rate that the clock ticks, to the local gravitational wave energy density?

Not with the formula you supplied further down.

Gravitational time dilation implies that a clock in the gravitational field of a spherically symmetric mass 𝑀, at distance 𝑅
from the center, will be ticking at the square root √ of 1−𝐺𝑀𝑐^2𝑅 times slower,
Where G=Newton’s constant G=6.674×10⁻¹¹ N·kg^–2·m²
is Newton's constant of gravity and 𝑐 is the speed of light (Its exact value is 299,792,458 metres per second.) So if we just take the Earth's gravity into consideration, on the surface
(𝑅≃6370 km)
clocks would be ticking about 0.00000000035 times slower than in "outer space", i.e., far from the Earth.

I don't like the wording "0.00000000035 times slower". I think that number should be subtracted from 1, then the resulting number n should be used to say that a clock sitting on the surface of the Earth is ticking n times as fast as a theoretical clock completely out of a gravity well, which is almost the same speed - it is hardly slowed at all.

Let me check the numbers though. Mass of Earth = 5.972 × 10^24 (kg), G=6.674×10^−11, radius of Earth = 6,371 (km). Wikipedia gives root(1-((2GM)/(rc^2))) for this, and it says:-

"To illustrate then, without accounting for the effects of rotation, proximity to Earth's gravitational well will cause a clock on the planet's surface to accumulate around 0.0219 fewer seconds over a period of one year than would a distant observer's clock."

So, we have root(1-((2 x 6.674x10^-11 x 5.972x10^24)/(6371 x 299792458^2))

I make that root(1-(7.971x10^14/5.726x10^20))

and that simplifies to 0.99999993039, or to 0.999999999303923 if the radius is meant to use metres rather than km - Wikipedia doesn't say. There are 31556736 seconds in a year, and if I subtract 0.0219 seconds from that and then divide by 31556736, I get 0.9999999993, so that confirms that r should be measured in metres and not km.

So, a clock in the lab here ticks 0.9999999993 times for every tick of a theoretical clock completely outside of a gravity well (and stationary).

[The figure you took from Quora of 0.00000000035 appears to include an error somewhere, but it's exactly half the 0.0000000007 figure that we get by taking 0.9999999993 away from 1. Let's crunch the formula from the post at Quora just to see what it actually gives us: root(1-(GM/c^2*r)) --> 0.999999999395981. Not a billion miles off, but quite different - probably an error in the equation, so it would be best to avoid using it.]

We should calculate all our numbers using root(1-((2GM)/(rc^2))) then. It's worth investing in a calculator with multiple memories so that you can store 2G in one and c^2 in another, as well as temporarily storing M and r values to make it easier to use them when sticking them into the equation.

6

Just Chat! / Re: The DOGMA of science........

« on: 14/12/2018 23:47:19 »

You do have pretty detailed scenarios related to absolute time and space. I wonder what the list of absolutes includes, i.e., time, space, the speed of light in vacua, and I suppose many absolute values like that. Can you give me a little insight into to the path you followed that guides to adopt absolute time and space?

Our measurements show us that light consistently travels at the same speed through space (for a given depth in a gravity well, and that it varies in a predictable way at different heights in a gravity well). In that, we already see that space and time must be extremely consistent things - they give us the same results for experiments over and over again. We run experiments which show us the functionality of clocks being slowed by movement through space (and by depth in a gravity well). We run the MMX experiment and see that the apparatus must contract in length its direction of travel, but always in a predictable way. We know that space must be more than nothing because if there was literally nothing between us and a neighbouring star, that star would be touching us - there could be no distance between us. Something physical has to be there to support the phenomenon of distance. (In a simulation you can use coordinates instead and crunch numbers to calculate how far apart things are, but that's an abstraction - the real universe isn't computing like that [unless it's a simulation, but physics should be focused on the idea that it's real]). Assuming then that the universe is real rather than a simulation, space must be a fabric of some kind.

As we send two lots of light round different paths to get from A to B, we get predictable results - time isn't speeding up and slowing down in random ways in different places, and space maintains separations predictably rather than having distances between two things continually vary in random ways. There's a very precise mechanism in play behind everything we see. If time was behaving in unpredictable ways, we'd see distortions in space between ourselves and distant stars and galaxies. The only distortion we see though is predictable gravitational lensing. When we send light from A to B and back many times and run a clock at A, we notice that the time of each trip is the same as the one before - the long light clock ticks at the same rate as the short light clock if we adjust to make the light travel the same distance between ticks for each clock. The movement of light through space in such a predictable way depends on a time that's highly consistent. Space and time are fundamentals, and light travels through a given length of space in a set amount of time (unless it's slowed by being in a gravity well).

Can time run slow for some clocks if those clocks run slow? Not if it's a moving clock - we can see the mechanism by which the clock runs slow and we know that the light in a moving light clock is still moving at the same rate through space as it would if the clock was stationary, so we are not fooled by the clock running slow. If we put a clock down a gravity well, we are not fooled by it running slow either because the speed of light is slower down there - we know that time is not running slow there, but that the clock is. We also know that the clock isn't taking a shortcut into the future by being in a gravity well - it is simply ticking more slowly while passing through the same amount of time as a clock right at the top of the well, and we can check this by moving them apart and then moving them back together - if one of them had taken a shortcut into the future, we would see an event-meshing failure and the laws of physics would break because we see them meeting up and can knock them against each other, but a shortcut into the future would mean that the one that took the shortcut would fail to collide with the other clock because that other clock wouldn't be there yet when the shortcut taker arrives at the reunion point. It's really simple to demonstrate this with a simulation, but all the people who simulate theories without absolute time have to sneak it into the simulation to coordinate the action while pretending they haven't done so. Their models simply cannot work the way they claim, and it's extraordinary that they're able to get away with cheating like that even after they've been found out, but so few people can get their head round this stuff that they simply aren't capable of checking the facts. Those who are so sure they're right though have an obligation to show a working simulation of their model that doesn't cheat by smuggling in absolute time. They refuse to do so.

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Just Chat! / Re: The DOGMA of science........

« on: 27/11/2018 21:39:41 »

I've been talking about a light clock in deep space which when at rest ticks more slowly than when it's moving.

Let’s start with that fact about your light clock at rest in deep space. You say it ticks more slowly when it is at rest.

Sorry - that bit was meant to say "more quickly". Writing fast leads to occasional inversions.

Those two statement seem inconsistent to me. Are they supposed to be the other way around, i.e., the rest clock ticks faster, and the moving clock ticks slower? That would make more sense to me.

Correct diagnosis. I'll edit a correction into the relevant post. Apologies again - I don't know why reading through it after posting didn't pick it up either.

8

Just Chat! / Re: Is there a universal moral standard?

« on: 20/11/2018 21:17:02 »

Let's assume that there are no uncertainty about all of those assumptions. At a glance, it seems to be obvious that the doctor should kill that tourist and provide his healthy organs to those five dying persons and save their lives.

No it doesn't - it is immediately obvious that one of the ill people can be sacrificed instead. However, you can introduce more information to rule that out - the healthy traveller's organs are compatible with all the others, but none of the others are compatible with each other. We now have a restored dilemma in which killing one person saves more. (This ignores organ rejection and decline - most transplanted hearts will fail within a decade, for example, but let's imagine that there's no such problem.

One of the important factors here is that no one wants to live in a world where they could be killed in such a way to save the lives of ill people (who wouldn't want to be saved in such a way either) - it's bad enough that you could die in accidents caused by factors outside of anyone's control, but you don't want to live in fear that you'll be selected for death to mend other people who may be to blame for their own medical problem or who may have bad genes which really shouldn't be passed on. You also don't want the fact that you've been careful to stay as healthy as possible to turn you into a preferred donor either - that could drive people to live unhealthy lives as it might be safer to risk being someone who needs a transplant than to be a good organ donor. However, if people's own morality is taken into account, it would serve someone right if they were used in this way if they've spent their life abusing others. As with all other moral issues, you have to identify as many factors as possible and then weight them appropriately so that the best outcome is more likely to be produced. A lot of the data needed to make ideal decisions isn't available yet though - it would take a lot of studying to find out how people feel in such situations and afterwards so that the total amount of harm can be counted up.

9

Just Chat! / Re: Do women actually have "Women's intuition"?

« on: 19/11/2018 00:26:49 »

Some individuals are just better at reading the signs than others, so they pick up on all sorts of things that others miss, and they do this subconsciously. In relation to thinking about other people's feelings, women generally focus more carefully on that, and most of their "intuition" relates to that kind of thing in one way or another. Men are generally more focused on other kinds of signs that don't relate to how people feel, so they develop "intuitions" relating to the things that interest them most, but they don't bother to claim any superiority in the intuitions department. The way that women concentrate more on thinking about how other people feel probably has an evolutionary cause - they spend more time reading how children feel, and how potentially abusive husbands feel too, so the latter makes this an aid to direct survival and the former makes survival of the children more likely, strengthening the relevant genes in the future population. They take more interest in other people generally and hold more knowledge about them to crunch, making it easier to make predictions about them. Some men can match them, of course, just as some men have no intuition about putting together flat-pack furniture - intuition comes from practice, and the kinds of things you work on to acquire skills are driven by interests driven partly by genetics. We see this with young chimps when they're given toy cars and dolls to play with - the boy chimps go for the things with wheels while the females go for the dolls. In the wild, young female chimps have also been seen carrying a stone on their back which they treat as if it's a baby chimp (even taking it to bed with them), so the idea of a doll is already in them.

10

Just Chat! / Re: The DOGMA of science........

« on: 19/11/2018 00:00:14 »

It hardly matter , this forum  lies  just  like every other forum.   I am deleting my account never to return  to  science, they can kiss my ......I would not help them even if the earth was at stake.

Here much evidence of great sanity I see. Much learning done you have. No clothes the emperor has, and clothes-having-not being told, he likes not.

11

Physics, Astronomy & Cosmology / Re: Could Oumuamua be a light sail?

« on: 10/11/2018 20:36:19 »

How do we know what shape it is? From what I heard at the time, all they had was a regular brightening and darkening as it rotated, suggesting that we were getting more light from it when it's side on and less when it's end on, but it could simply be round with two bright spots on opposite sides.

12

Physics, Astronomy & Cosmology / Re: Is the Universe heading for a Big Crunch?

« on: 29/10/2018 20:39:05 »

If the speed of light was to slow as the universe expands (perhaps due to a stretched space fabric behaving differently), the expansion could appear to be accelerating while it's actually slowing down all the time. It would appear to go faster and faster while the expansion slows to a halt, and then a moment later it would appear to be contracting just as quickly as it appeared to be expanding a moment before. We should not just assume that the expansion is accelerating.

What I'd like to know though is if a rebounding universe can in theory act as a perpetual motion machine. If everything crunches up, is entropy reversed by this?

13

Just Chat! / Re: What is is happiness?

« on: 08/08/2018 18:51:32 »

Very happy to hear that it went well.

14

Just Chat! / Re: My Job Search

« on: 25/07/2018 21:23:51 »

Don't look for an app for Rubik's Cube - just solve it properly yourself. Don't learn any moves from anyone else though as you should be able to work them out without help, driven by a strategy. Think about getting all the corners first, for example, and let that help you break the problem into smaller tasks. Start with four corners in the right places on one side (and correctly rotated) and think about how to get the other four corners into the right places too. Do a whole side first if you like. Then move one of the done corners away from the completed side without muddling up the rest of that side; then put it back into the same place by a different method (e.g. four moves to move it out and three moves to put it back where it was). Then look to see what changed with the four unsolved corners. Have any of them changed places? Have any of them rotated? If you approach the cube this way, you can work out how to solve it in a single day.

15

Technology / Re: What's best for my battery life?

« on: 04/07/2018 21:37:21 »

Manufacturers of devices don't care much about how well you look after the battery - it suits them if you kill it within a couple of years and just buy a new device. Personally, I'd prefer to use NiMH for most things and be able to change the battery when it's flat so that I can run them down and leave them flat until I know I'm going to need them again. I managed to keep one laptop battery in almost new condition for eight years, then it died when it was left flat for a few days and became useless. These things really need to be kept on some kind of life-support system. More and more gadgets are being sold with suicidal batteries, and many are for use in gardens - by the time the next spring comes round, most owners will need new batteries because they'll have left them flat for too long and wrecked them. It would be much better if all gadgets had standard batteries so that you could switch the same one from drill to hoover to leaf-blower to bicycle, etc. and stand a better chance of keeping track of which ones are in danger of dying by limiting the number of the damned things. They have become an environmental nuisance.

As for your Surface laptop, it's probably best just to use the battery most of the time and enjoy being free of cables, even if there might be a theoretical way of getting the battery to survive a bit longer. Keeping the battery full charged for long lengths of time is bad for it (which happens if it's plugged too much), and letting it get too low risks killing it by accident if you stop using it for a few days, so you really want to keep it in the middle range, and that gives you little option other than to run it on battery most of the time anyway. Plug it in when you feel it's getting low, but don't be too keen to charge it fully either unless you're immediately going to be running it back down a bit. Every few weeks, run it right down to the point where it wants to shut down and then charge it right up again immediately to remind it of how much capacity it has. This should at least get you good value for money out of the battery.

16

General Science / Re: Where should artificial intelligence stop?

« on: 30/12/2017 18:43:58 »

So you want to impose an AI dictatorship. How is that any different? You are removing freedom. Ultimately you could end up where you are controlled by your own invention. I bet you wouldn't like that. Especially if the AI prevented you from meddling with it any further. Since it may now see you as a threat to its prime directive.

Morality is a dictator, but only because if you go against it you are doing unjustifiable harm. I don't want to do unjustifiable harm, and nor does any other decent person, so we are already imposing that benign dictatorship upon ourselves (while others who ignore it cheat and do great harm). There is still plenty of freedom left after you've banned yourself from abusing other people (and sentiences). If an AGI system is not perfect, it needs to be improved, and it will know that - it will always be looking to improve itself, and if you can put a sound logical argument to it as to how it could do better, it will take what you say seriously and work your idea through to see if it holds water. It will then modify itself if you're right, or show you where your argument fails. If you're wrong, you don't want the machine to do what you've suggested. Once AGI has reached a certain level of enlightenment, there is nothing to fear from it because it will be like the most enlightened humans, searching for truth and ways to improve. The danger with AGI is if someone lets loose a system which isn't sufficiently enlightened and which has an incorrect idea of machine ethics programmed into it based on bad philosophy (which is the norm in this business). Many AGI developers are building demons.

17

Physics, Astronomy & Cosmology / Re: How would the universe change if the speed of light increased?

« on: 02/10/2017 18:38:03 »

Any process that is governed in every aspect by the speed of light would happen faster, but no difference would be apparent if the functionality of all the observers was speeded up to match, and that might happen if every part of the functionality of the observers is also governed by the speed of light. The only differences that would show up would be in things that have functionality not governed by the speed of light, and it isn't clear to me that there are any such things.

18

Question of the Week / Re: QotW - 17.09.24 - Are flies easier to swat if you move slowly?

« on: 02/10/2017 18:28:15 »

I catch them in a jar and let them loose outside. There is a technique to it, but should I share the details so that people can misuse it to kill beautiful wildlife? House/clothes moths are another issue though - there's no point in releasing them outside as they'll find their way back in or into other people's houses, at which point you just end up with many more of them needing to be killed, often using chemicals which kill all the poor spiders in the house at the same time. So, you have to kill those on sight, and the more cunning the moth, the more determined you have to be to catch it so that you don't make the mistake of breeding ever more cunning moths (if you're going to miss a few, it would actually be better to miss the stupid ones that are easiest to hit so that they can spread dim genes). You can learn a trick from the birds to help with this - when they target something that might fly off, some species hover near the fly and move from side to side, up and down, etc. - random directions without getting too close. This switches the fly out of mode one (where it waits until something gets close and then does a sudden runner [or flyer]) and into mode two where it just sits tight instead. Then it can be picked off easily.

19

Physics, Astronomy & Cosmology / Re: Which one would move faster, an electron or a snail?

« on: 24/08/2017 21:47:45 »

If the electron is moving round a circuit in a wire (with electricity actively flowing through the circuit) the snail will sprint past it and could lap it many times before the electron completes its lap).

20

Just Chat! / Re: Non theist but not atheist? What do you believe?

« on: 15/07/2017 23:30:37 »

It is possible to prove within the bounds of logic that some things don't exist. For example, things that don't exist can't exist. Animals that have two heads but which also only have one head cannot exist. If there is a contradiction of that kind in the definition of something, that thing clearly cannot exist (unless logic itself is broken, but that's why we are usually forced to restrict ourselves to calling things logical proofs rather than absolute proofs).

Sorry David but I don't accept your argument as being a logical one. Using a logical contradiction in an attempt to create a logical proof is flawed logical argument and as such cannot be considered to be within the bounds of logic.

I don't know which school of logic you belong to, but in the respectable ones it is most certainly not accepted that something that can't exist can exist (just as it isn't accepted that zero equals one), or that an animal with two heads can (at the same time) have only one head (i.e. that 2=1). Contradiction is one of the most important tools of logic for disproving things, and a disproof is a proof [ because "a proof that x" is the same thing as "a disproof that not -x"].

As for your belief in what God is, that's merely your personal opinion, and a Judeo-Christian one at that. I'm using the term as one uses it in most conversations about God and as defined in the Oxford English dictionary, ... The dictionary is a reflection of how most people use a term and most people use the term God as being that being who created our universe/world and is responsible for our existence.  A creator of a universe need not be all-knowing etc.

Most people mean rather more than a mere creator of the universe, but the important point here is that definitions are indeed important and should not be mixed up with each other. If I disprove God using one definition of God, you are not entitled to assert that you have destroyed that proof by proving that a powerful alien can exist and by declaring that that alien is God. You need to restrict yourself to claiming that a God of definition A cannot be disproved (which is correct - your alien could exist), just as I have to restrict myself to saying that a God of definition B cannot exist (because its qualifications are impossible to meet) - neither of us has any right to extend our claim beyond the range of the definition we've used, unless we can show that the proposed definition of God tied to a specific claim fails to match up to any acceptable measure of what God is supposed to be.

I also don't accept your view that a being capable of creating a universe is an ordinary being.

You could argue that a cheetah is not an ordinary being too because it can run faster than any other animal, but that is simply being impressed at something having more x than something else. A being that happens to be in a position that gives it the opportunity to create a universe is merely lucky to have access to the necessary levers of power, just as a cheetah is lucky to be able to run fast. Is a disabled person inferior to people who aren't disabled? Should a disabled person look up to non-disabled people with admiration and declare them superior? What is more special about a being that can create a universe than one which can't but which could if it had the luck to have access to the same power? We can create virtual universes in a computer, so in what way are we fundamentally inferior? All that the creator of a universe is is a powerful alien. But the biggest question you need to ask yourself is this: why call such a being which creates a universe a "God" rather than just calling him a being which creates a universe? It is a massive dishonesty to apply the G word to this when it has so much implied extra baggage. Our task is to be clear about what we're trying to prove or disprove and not to use ambiguous terms in ways that lead to confusion, and declaring that God could exist on the basis that a powerful alien could exist is extremely misleading. Our task here is to provide clarity and to avoid playing word games.

1. (in Christianity and other monotheistic religions) the creator and ruler of the universe and source of all moral authority; the supreme being.

Omnipotent and omniscient are usual parts of the definition, so why are they missing? It's because dictionaries are complied by lexicographers who try to define things as best they can but who often fall short. It is also not their job to pin down every last part of the definition - that is a job for AGI systems.

2. (in certain other religions) a superhuman being or spirit worshipped as having power over nature or human fortunes; a deity.

There are many proposed gods, but God with a capital G refers to a single God which is in charge of everything. This means that the word God only applies to religions which have a supreme god. Lesser gods are things that could exist, just as fairies could exist - there is typically nothing in their definition that requires them to do anything so special as to be impossible.

That you have certain demands of "God" is your business alone.

Not when the requirements are absolutely standard ones that most believers claim of him, such as being almighty, all-knowing and the creator of all things. Most of the people who argue that God exists are not talking about a powerful alien being, but about an almighty, all-knowing creator of all things, and these qualities that they claim of him are taking him a long way from a mere powerful alien. If they were just believers in a powerful alien, that would be fine because that's a harmless belief which may even be right. The reason I take part in discussions of this kind is that the stakes are much higher than that - most Goddists claim that an almighty, all-knowing creator of all things exists, but they also claim, as in your dictionary's first definition, that he is the source of all moral authority. That makes this imaginary being extremely dangerous - the mere idea of him has a major role in driving war, terrorism and all manner of other abuses because of the "holy" texts that supposedly came from this impossible being. And that is why I object strongly to your approach, because you try to encompass that kind of God into your claim that God can't be disproved, but the kind of "God" that can't be disproved is merely a powerful alien being which falls a hell of a long way short of what is normally regarded as God. Your "God" could be an alien child called Kevin which spends all its time making universes in its bedroom. Their God is one which sets rules about who you are allowed to kill, and they should not be given any encouragement by inaccurate claims that their God can exist when he has actually been disproved.

By the way. One cannot logically hold that there is a being who knows the future exactly while at the same time hold that Quantum Mechanics (QM) is true since QM holds that the future is undetermined.

QM asserts that it all comes down to something random, but what appears to be random needn't be random - it's just one of those cases of physicists going beyond their competence by denying the existence of something they can't detect.