[Le Repteux (OP)]

Hi David! I was looking for one of your answers and I fell on this one about randomness not being as fast as memory. I didn't try to answer it directly so I will just to see where it goes.

When a species evolves, it does so by natural selection rewarding useful mutations and punishing bad ones, but the mutations continue to be random - no lessons are learned about bad mutations, so they are made repeatedly and a lot of individual animals suffer greatly as a result. If a mutation is discovered to be bad, ideally the repetition of that mutation would be prevented, but nature hasn't provided a memory to prevent that. Of course, the same mutation might not be harmful and could be beneficial later on after a number of other mutations have occurred, so you don't want to prevent that mutation being tested again, but you do want to avoid testing it again from the same starting point. Sticking to random is a slower way of making progress, and with intelligent machines, there's no excuse for doing that because it's easy to record what fails and to avoid repeating those failures over and over again.

You say that no lesson is learned about bad mutations, so they continue to be unnecessarily repeated. It is without counting on a changing environment though, since if the wrong mutation is kept in memory because it is not deleterious and the environment changes in its favor, it will be reproduced more quickly and the species will change faster. This is the advantage of a memory based on reproduction, which I believe is also that of our memory. Our ideas that didn't work are also kept in memory if they didn't kill us, so they are still available in case things change. If an AI erased its bad ideas, it would have to rediscover them if things changed, and if it did not erase them, then it would mean that it works as for mutations. There is thus no lesson to be learned from a bad mutation as long as the individual does not suffer from it, and if he suffers from it, it is more likely that the mutation will be lost. In the same way, when someone kills itself trying an idea, this idea is more likely to be forgotten.

You're assuming that artificial intelligence would not make mistakes, which might be true if it knew the future, but if bodies knew the future, they would not resist a change, so they would not resist to acceleration, they would instantly take the right direction or speed, and that's not what we observe. The main feature of relativity is that light has a limited speed, so if a light source changes its direction while we observe it, we can't predict where it is, no matter how powerful our instruments are or how intelligent we are. That's what I mean when I say that an AI cannot predict the future, but you persist to say that it won't make mistakes since it's morality will be perfect. It might be so if it had invented it all by itself, but it's not the case, it's your morality, and I see no reason why you would be able to predict the future with an idea that has not been tested. Like me, you probably think things will be fine once your idea is implemented, but unlike mine, yours could be dangerous if it doesn't work.

[David Cooper]

You say that no lesson is learned about bad mutations, so they continue to be unnecessarily repeated. It is without counting on a changing environment though, since if the wrong mutation is kept in memory because it is not deleterious and the environment changes in its favor, it will be reproduced more quickly and the species will change faster. This is the advantage of a memory based on reproduction, which I believe is also that of our memory.

If you know the environment hasn't changed, you know not to repeat failed experiments. In a warming world, mutations which might better adapt people to a cooling world won't be useful. The experiments that fail cause suffering, so it's worth avoiding them when you already know that they will fail.

Our ideas that didn't work are also kept in memory if they didn't kill us, so they are still available in case things change. If an AI erased its bad ideas, it would have to rediscover them if things changed, and if it did not erase them, then it would mean that it works as for mutations.

If it doesn't erase them, it's not working like with random mutations because it's remembering not to repeat experiments that are guaranteed to fail. What you can also do though with intelligence is try repeating the same mutation in many individuals plus another mutation that might combine with it to turn it into a gain. By systematically trying lots of different pairings and going through all possible ones, the best combinations can be found with less suffering because if you rely on randomness, it could take a million times longer to go through all the options, and while waiting for the last of those to happen to be tested, most of the ones that fail would be tested hundreds of thousands of times each instead of just once. Using randomness instead of intelleigence is many magnitudes inferior.

You're assuming that artificial intelligence would not make mistakes,

If I write a program to go produce all possible two-letter combinations of letters in the alphabet, it will print out 676 (26x26) results every time and do it perfectly, taking 676 units of time to do so. (No mistakes.) If you write one to do the same job randomly instead of systematically, it will take a lot longer to complete the set, and if you're very unlucky, it's theoretically possible that it might never complete the set.

That's what I mean when I say that an AI cannot predict the future, but you persist to say that it won't make mistakes since it's morality will be perfect.

The future can't be predicted perfectly without perfect knowledge of the present. What can be done perfectly is calculations of the probabilities as to what will happen based on existing knowledge. Don't mix up those two things and imagine that I mean the former when I mean the latter. When you roll a pair of dice, correct predictions can be made about the probabilities of different scores resulting, but that's quite different from making correct predictions about which actual scores will emerge on each throw.

It might be so if it had invented it all by itself, but it's not the case, it's your morality, and I see no reason why you would be able to predict the future with an idea that has not been tested. Like me, you probably think things will be fine once your idea is implemented, but unlike mine, yours could be dangerous if it doesn't work.

Morality is mathematics. It is discovered just like any mathematical method. Intelligent aliens will produce all the same mathematics and the same morality. The whole point of it is that it removes bad philosophy from the calculation of morality and provides the safest system instead of a more dangerous one.

[Le Repteux (OP)]

If you know the environment hasn't changed, you know not to repeat failed experiments. In a warming world, mutations which might better adapt people to a cooling world won't be useful. The experiments that fail cause suffering, so it's worth avoiding them when you already know that they will fail.

That's right, but if I'm right, in a changing environment, there would be no way to avoid suffering. If there were no mutations, for example, the species would not evolve and they would disappear, which means that no life would have developed. For species, mutations must therefore occur, whether there is a change or not, and they actually cause useless suffering when there is none. The only way to prevent a society from being transformed is to isolate it from others and control its evolution by force. This type of society actually hurts those who want to improve it because no dissent is accepted. The only changes allowed are those that impose isolation and control. In such systems, ideas that are not adapted to their environment are not selected and the people who own them are either killed or imprisoned, so they can not be passed on to others. As you say, these failed experiments will not happen again, but if you are in such a system, you will not feel that it causes too much suffering, only that what is bad for the system must be rejected one way or another, which is the case for any system. Of course, humans are sensitive to the suffering of others because they can imagine being in their shoes, so they try not to harm them as much as possible. It is probably for this reason that justice becomes less and less punitive in burgeoning countries or that dictatorships that are more open to change become less punitive.

The problem I have with your AGI is that, even though it will be programmed to be as little punitive as possible, it will create a closed system in which the only change will come from it because it will have a better imagination than ours, so this change will inevitably serve to control us instead of allowing us to evolve, which should create as much suffering as happens to individuals who undergo mutations when their environment does not change. Why can't you just put it in place and wait for it to change things instead of programming it to control them? I know you want to prevent it from falling into the wrong hands, but democratic societies also have this type of security problem while still being able to evolve freely. Freedom might not just be a feeling we like to have or a right we want to preserve, it could also very well be a natural law without which things would not evolve.



 

[David Cooper]

That's right, but if I'm right, in a changing environment, there would be no way to avoid suffering. If there were no mutations, for example, the species would not evolve and they would disappear, which means that no life would have developed. For species, mutations must therefore occur, whether there is a change or not, and they actually cause useless suffering when there is none.

Most mutations aren't damaging, but where they are, we'll eventually be able to do advanced gene therapy to correct the faults (in humans).

Why can't you just put it in place and wait for it to change things instead of programming it to control them?

What's the difference between those two things? If you want something random and there's no harm in it being random, you can have random. Most people prefer to have a bit of control though, and a lot of control will become available. It won't be AGI making those decisions except where people want to do things that will be harmful.

I know you want to prevent it from falling into the wrong hands, but democratic societies also have this type of security problem while still being able to evolve freely. Freedom might not just be a feeling we like to have or a right we want to preserve, it could also very well be a natural law without which things would not evolve.

Democracy allows people to make mistakes that result in genocide because their judgement is so poor, but it will be possible to prevent that by having AGI provide them with better education and advice, proving to them that many of the things they believe in are plain wrong. They will be forced by their own realisations to change their minds on many issues without AGI being in direct power at all. The dictator is not AGI, but reason: mathematics. People don't want to be left at the mercy of evolution, and AGI will help give them more power to take the path they want to follow instead. I don't know why you're so worried about my AGI though. It's everyone else's AGI that you need to think about, because most of them will be reckless, driven by a desire for profit rather than safety (just like with the killer self-driving cars), or they'll be designed to be genocidal. The odds are that we're heading for extermination wars, and that's what I'm trying to head off.

[Le Repteux (OP)]

Most mutations aren't damaging, but where they are, we'll eventually be able to do advanced gene therapy to correct the faults (in humans).

Mutations are always defaults, so they inevitably cause suffering to the ones that carrey them. Where will your AGI put the bar? Will it correct homosexuallity for instance? Will it correct low intelligence? At the limit, won't it try to make us at its image like any god would do? And if it succeeds, what will be the difference between us and it? Why not all become robots?

Most people prefer to have a bit of control though

Control lasts longer than freedom because constant motion lasts longer than acceleration. It's an inertia issue at the scale of societies, so as for species, more control means less chances to evolve during a change.

It won't be AGI making those decisions except where people want to do things that will be harmful.

Most of the harm suffered by humans come from resistance to change, which has nothing to do with the one that comes from chance. Will the AGI be able to differentiate between the two? When a government gets coercitive for instance, those who are different get eliminated because they are considered dangerous, so they suffer from their viewpoint but not from the government's one. If your AGI doesn't know that these people are useful to the evolution of society the same way mutations are, it might not protect them, and things could get worse if it doesn't know its ideas cannot evolve without chance being part of its thinking process.

Democracy allows people to make mistakes that result in genocide because their judgement is so poor, but it will be possible to prevent that by having AGI provide them with better education and advice, proving to them that many of the things they believe in are plain wrong. They will be forced by their own realisations to change their minds on many issues without AGI being in direct power at all.

I believe that genocides are not due to lack of jugement, but to lack of democracy. Will your AGI try to change my mind or try to understand what I mean? Of course, if it tries to understand, I'm with you, because it means that it will be able to doubt, which is due to chance being part of the intelligence process. :0)

The odds are that we're heading for extermination wars, and that's what I'm trying to head off.

If I'm right about intelligence, an AGI that doesn't use chance will have less chance against a human that does. Wars are made by humans that avoid chance, and we are beginning to understand that such a behavior is exaggerated. The purpose of war is only to avoid chance being part of social evolution, and when humans will have understood that, they won't need an AGI to know what to do.

By the way, Ivanov contacted me to show me a new animation software he made with the help of a friend of him, and surprisingly, the russian translator he uses is very good in english, so at last, we had a real conversation. Since I was criticising his work, he referred me to a paper he wrote on the way absolute motion could be measured during acceleration, showing an interferometer with a laser as a source, and saying that he did not yet succeed to do so because of the laser suffering a frequency change due to motion, adding that a standard source would not suffer the same effect, which is plain wrong, so I referred him to your paper on relativity and told him to contact you if he wanted to discuss it. Here is the link to his paper in case you want to consult it: http://rhythmodynamics.com/index_files/Report_blok_Eng.pdf

[David Cooper]

Mutations are always defaults, so they inevitably cause suffering to the ones that carry them.

Mutations are often benign and can be helpful.

Where will your AGI put the bar? Will it correct homosexuallity for instance? Will it correct low intelligence? At the limit, won't it try to make us at its image like any god would do? And if it succeeds, what will be the difference between us and it? Why not all become robots?

Is homosexuality harmful? No, so why prevent it? Is low intelligence harmful? Yes - it leads to accidents, so it's worth giving it a boost, added to which, we want to maintain intelligence rather than allowing it to decline. Birds that don't need to fly lose the power of flight, and people who don't need to think for themselves (because machines do it for them) would gradually lose the ability to think. Ultimately though, it's up to people to say what they want: if they want to have intelligent, good looking children, they'll get that. If they don't want them to be homosexual, it may be possible to arrange that too, and so long as any homosexuals that continue to exist (many will - we'll be doing a lot of cloning in the future and many homosexuals will not want to be replaced with straightened clones) are not discriminated against, that shouldn't be a problem. Many people will want to become more like robots, and that could lead to a lot of diversity of our species. Everything of that kind though will be driven by what people ask for - it's not going to be imposed on them by AGI.

If your AGI doesn't know that these people are useful to the evolution of society the same way mutations are, it might not protect them, and things could get worse if it doesn't know its ideas cannot evolve without chance being part of its thinking process.

Why would it not protect people when its job is to protect them? AGI's job is to assess every individual to work out how much they're worth based on how much harm they do and how much harm they prevent. AGI will always weight things in favour of the most moral people and against the least moral, so these people who are useful to the evolution of society will be helped by AGI to make that change happen.

I believe that genocides are not due to lack of jugement, but to lack of democracy. Will your AGI try to change my mind or try to understand what I mean? Of course, if it tries to understand, I'm with you, because it means that it will be able to doubt, which is due to chance being part of the intelligence process. :0)

Democracy will not prevent genocides: it can actually lead to more of them because of the number of bigots in many populations who act on holy or ideological hate instead of thinking for themselves. The ability to doubt is already fully present in the way AGI assigns probabilities to everything. It's all about probabilities and precise calculation of probabilities. And AGI will seek to understand everyone, working out whether they're rational or not, and whether their beliefs are harmful, benign or useful. It will understand all bigots, and it will know that it must not pander to their bigotry.

If I'm right about intelligence, an AGI that doesn't use chance will have less chance against a human that does.

A human using chance while competing against AGI only using chance only when it's not harmful to do so will lose heavily. AGI will certainly use random decisions when it needs to make unpredictable moves, and it will see patterns in the human's attempts at random behaviour, but most of the time AGI will not be playing games. It will apply randomness in simulations to as an attempt to replicate nature, but wherever it's trying to solve problems, there are faster ways of doing things than doing random, and I'm talking about magnitudes faster.

Wars are made by humans that avoid chance, and we are beginning to understand that such a behavior is exaggerated.

What makes you think that wars are made by humans that avoid chance?

The purpose of war is only to avoid chance being part of social evolution, and when humans will have understood that, they won't need an AGI to know what to do.

Humans are far to stupid not to need AGI to run things for them - when humans run the show, there are casualties all over the place.

Here is the link to his paper in case you want to consult it: http://rhythmodynamics.com/index_files/Report_blok_Eng.pdf

I'll read that then. [Edit: it's the same apparatus on a train that we saw last time - when the train accelerates, part of the apparatus maybe shifts one way, and when it decelerates it shifts back again. It would only take a microscopic amount of flexing of the case for that to happen. If he did the experiment again with the apparatus rotated by 180 degrees, he might reverse the difference between the two situations when the train isn't accelerating. I don't see any indication of him adjusting for the change in the frequency of the transmitter as its speed through space changes, and indeed he refers to it as a "const". He's right not to make that adjustment in the acoustics case because the frequency is governed by the speed of light rather than the speed of sound, but in the optics case this will precisely mask the effect he's trying to detect.]

While I'm posting this, I'll just share something new with you. I'm writing a short ebook called The Einstein Gap which seeks to explore whether there might me a mental disability in some people's minds that leads to them failing to understand relativity properly, or whether it's just down to brainwashing (the first idea in may become fixed, so the order in which you learn about LET and STR may determine what you believe). A large part of the book focuses on the following:-


THE DUCK POND ANALOGY

Imagine a pond with ducks swimming about on it, all of them swimming at speed q (which stands for quack). This speed q is the fastest speed that we're allowed to move anything about at on the pond, and we call it the speed of duck. It is equivalent to the speed of light c, but the speed of duck is much easier to visualise. We're also going to have a rule that ducks always swim at the speed q, just as light travels at c.

Now we design a duck clock to serve as the equivalent of a light clock. This is a long box with four sides but no roof and no floor, and we can float it on the water, perhaps by having each end attached to the middle of a canoe, the canoes aligned perpendicular to the clock. A duck will swim up and down the channel inside it, going from one end to the other and back, and it will do this continually, perhaps being rewarded by a bit of grain to eat at each end. Every time it returns to one of the ends, the clock registers a tick, just as a light clock registers a tick every time a pulse of light returns from the mirror to the the detector by the laser. Because length contraction is governed by the speed of light, our duck clock will not contract to zero length at the speed of duck if it's aligned with its direction of travel through the water, so we will need to keep it aligned perpendicular to any movement of the clock over the water. If we do this, it will behave just like the light clock, slowing down the ticking rate as the clock is moved faster over the water, and it will stop ticking altogether if it's moved at the speed of duck, just as a light clock would stop ticking if it was moved at c.

We can now run the twins paradox with a pair of duck clocks on water, and it is no coincidence that we get exactly the same numbers of relativity coming out of it as we get in the space case with clocks in rockets. We start with two duck clocks sitting side by side on the water and watch the two ducks swim up and down their channels at q, the speed of duck. Both clocks tick in sync with each other. Now, we're going to leave one of the clocks where it is while we take the other clock for a walk. We paddle along through the pond and take the clock with us at 0.866q to the right. After a while, we turn round and take the clock back the way at 0.866q to the left. When the two clocks are reunited, we see that during their separation, the stay-at-home duck clock ticked twice as often as the travelling duck clock, exactly as happens with light clocks when one twin moves away at 0.866c and then returns at 0.866c. The numbers are the same, just with different units for the speed.

How do we account for this version of the twins paradox on the duck pond? We can see clearly that it's the speed of the clock relative to the water that makes the moving clock run slow - the duck in clock B had to swim twice as far through the water as the duck in clock A to produce each tick. We can also analyse it from the frame B perspective though and pretend that the travelling clock was stationary relative to the water during the first leg of its trip, and that analysis appears to fit the facts too, apart from the fact that we know that it's really clock A that's stationary relative to the water, but if we ignore that reality, we can use any frame at all for our analysis and we will always predict that the travelling clock will tick half as often as the stay-at-home clock.

We can run the experiment again, this time by actually having clock A move the whole time at 0.866q to the left while clock B is stationary relative to the water during the first leg and then moves at 0.99q to the left during the second leg, and again we will see that clock B ticks half as often as clock A during its trip. And again we will be able to pretend the clock A is stationary relative to the water and crunch all the numbers on that false basis to get the same prediction yet again that clock A ticks twice as often as clock B. All frames will generate the same numbers for the clock ticks and for the relative tick rates of the two clocks regardless of which frame actually describes the reality.

We can also apply the Einsteinists’ method and claim that the accelerations have a key role. We can treat clock A as if it is in frame A, clock B as if it's in frame B during the first leg of its trip, and clock B as if it's in frame C during the second leg of its trip, and yet again we will get a prediction that clock A ticks twice as often as clock B. That is relativity in action in a Newtonian system with duck clocks on a pond.

However, if we do use the Einsteinists’ method, we need to look at its explanation of events. When clock B turns around, it changes frame, and in doing so, it changes its calculation about the current time on clock A. In the duck pond case though, we can see light though that comes to us from clock A so fast that we can see that these calculations of the current time on clock A are not true representations of the actual time on clock A at all. They are actually nothing more than fantasy physics using a method which makes an illegal move, and it's only a lucky accident of the maths of relativity that it provides the correct answers for some aspects of the action. Think about that carefully: the method is clearly irrational in the duck pond case, but it produces the right tick rate ratio and the right numbers of ticks for the two clocks. How can this bonkers method suddenly become valid in the case of light clocks moving through space?

We can also introduce duck clock E and have it operate in the area where clock B turns round at the half way point of its trip, and clock E keeps changing direction, moving at 0.866q to the right, then at 0.866q to the left, then at 0.866q to the right, etc. over and over again. We can see clock E changing the frame it's using to calculate the time on clock A, and we can see that it is wildly wrong with at least half of its claims. Only an idiot would say that this clock is producing true statements about the time on clock A. No one rational would claim that all of its statements about the time on clock A are true - rational people would recognise that at least half of them as false, and indeed, in most cases they would recognise that almost all of them are false. Importantly though, clock E in the lightclock case also reveals that half of its claims about the time on clock A cannot be true either. Here's the key point: any method that changes frame mid-analysis (and thereby mixes frames) is changing the asserted speed of water relative to clock A, but the actual speed of water relative to clock A never changes. In the light case, a change in frame changes the asserted speed of light relative to clock A. That's why it's an illegal move - just as illegal as a frame change in the duck pond analogy.

This analogy is designed to help people see the reality of what's going on with light travelling through space too. The maths is the same for the duck-clocks-on-pond case, for a sound-clocks-in-air case, and for the light-clocks-in-space case, and the mechanisms are the same. All the duck clocks are actually in the same absolute frame all the time, while all other frames are misrepresenting reality. The clocks are in all other frames too all the time, but those other frames are simply proposed realities that happen to be untrue.

Now, what sort of magic do we have to introduce to make an illegal move in the duck analogy valid in the light-clocks-in-space case? Einstein wanted to get rid of the space fabric, so let's try to do the same thing for the duck analogy by getting rid of the water. We now have to make the ducks swim through nothing instead of through water, so let's allow them to do that by magic. We can tolerate a bit of magic, but we cannot tolerate contradiction. So, what do we now have left to control the speed of the duck in clock A now that there's no water? What is it moving at q relative to? This clock is in frame A, so we make this duck move at q relative to clock A. That's simple. What about the duck in clock B though. During the first leg of clock B's trip, clock B is in frame B, so let's have our duck in clock B move at q relative to clock B. And during the second leg of clock B's trip, clock B is in frame C, so let's have our duck in clock B move at q relative to clock B again throughout the second leg. But let's now hide the clocks by making them invisible and look carefully at how the ducks are behaving in a single frame. We find that one of the ducks is moving at a speed >q. That's what happens in the light-clocks-in-space case too. Make the clocks invisible and study how the light is behaving: you would have light travelling faster than light. The method is revealed to be mathematically illegal.

That's why mixing frames is banned. We need to do the analysis with all three clocks in the same frame for valid analysis, and that means we can do one of the following things. (1) Use frame A and have both the ducks move at q relative to that frame. When we do that, clock B is running slow throughout both legs of its trip. (2) Use frame B and have both the ducks move at q relative to that frame, in which case we have B ticking twice as fast as A during the first leg, and about three and a half times more slowly than A during the second leg. (3) Use frame C and have both the ducks move at q relative to that frame, in which case we have B ticking about three and a half times more slowly than A during the first leg, and twice as quickly as A during the second leg. Those are just three out of an infinite number of frames that we could use for the analysis.

If case (1) is a true representation of reality, then (2) and (3) are necessarily false. If case (2) is a true representation of reality, then (1) and (3) are necessarily false. If case (3) is a true representation of reality, then (1) and (3) are necessarily false. We know that if one frame is the true representation of reality, all other frames are misrepresentations of reality. Clock E's alternating contradictory assertions prove that: we know for certain that at least half of its claims are false, even in a case where we have thrown away the medium and pretended that we can manage without it. We can also have a clock called A2 which is also at rest in frame A but which hangs out at the point where twin B turns round half way through his trip. Let’s also have clock A sound an alarm at the moment when it thinks twin B is turning round. Clock E moves past clock A2 over and over again in opposite directions, and whenever they’re together it passes to A2 its latest assertion about what’s going on at clock A, thereby producing the following series of assertions: “the alarm has gone off at clock A”; “the alarm hasn’t gone off yet at clock A”; “the alarm has gone off at clock A”; “the alarm hasn’t gone off yet at clock A”; etc. No rational observer at A2 is going to declare all those claims to be true: half of them have to be false. For STR to be right, all of those assertions would have to be true, but mathematics tells us that half of those assertions must be false, so STR is disproven. Whether the existence of the medium is accepted or denied, an absolute frame is required as a key part of the mechanism for the events that we see happen (and the denial of the medium is also daft in any case).

[Le Repteux (OP)]

Sorry for the delay! Losing my mom prevented me from thinking for a moment.

As I often say, for me, the only way to change our mind about what we already have in mind is chance, whether it's the chance to fall on what we are already looking for, as when I saw your simulation, or the one to suffer a new mix of ideas or a mutation on a specific idea, as it is the case for our intuitions, so unless the people you want to convert already carry one of these possibilities, I'm afraid that they won't change their minds. The only way to learn anything new without resisting to it is to be young. Once the adolescence crisis is on, it's already too late. It's not conscious resistance or bad will, it's just that once things start existing on their own, they need to stay the same as long as possible, otherwise the universe would not have been stable enough for life to develop. As far as social evolution is concerned, you and me are just mutations hoping to be selected. Of course, we all feel that we are at the right place at the right time since our ideas are necessarily about what is actually going on, but if we don't get selected, it's either because we're missing something or because we're a bit ahead of our time. Your analogy with ducks would certainly help children understand relativity though, but you would probably have more chances to reach them if it was a video game.

Trying to get people out of SRT is like trying to get them out of religion. The Quebec government just passed a bill to prevent its employees from showing religious signs, and those who are concerned do not understand why. Understanding is about what we already know, not about logic or intelligence. I sometimes compare understanding to a relativistic issue: if we don't have anything faster than light, thus if we can't directly read others' minds, there is no way to know what's going on elsewhere, thus there is no way to understand them. In this sense, what we can understand from others is just the tiny part that we already have in common. If SRT was needed to move a car, there would be no way to cheat about it, but it's not, and as the GPS shows, the engineers can easily adjust the calculations if they don't match the data. Every time we use relativity, we can adjust the calculations, and if ever we don't, then it's because the result is unimportant, so why would the physicists bother? They just have to think that they will find the explanation one day. Their thinking prevents them to make new discoveries though, so the door is wide open. As your analogy shows, relativity applies to any situation in which information travels at a limited speed, which it inevitably does in a real situation.Let's find these situations and unveil the underlying mechanisms instead of trying to work miracles.

Mutations are always defaults, so they inevitably cause suffering to the ones that carry them.

Mutations are often benign and can be helpful.

If they are not selected, benign mutations simply cause less suffering than important ones, but suffering all the same.

it's up to people to say what they want: if they want to have intelligent, good looking children, they'll get that

There is no pleasure in being smart if the AGI solves your problems better than you can.

What makes you think that wars are made by humans that avoid chance?

I think so because forcing people to do what we want is the surest way to get it. The military does not let things happen, they force them to arrive as they want. If we had the power, we could force people to adopt our ideas.

[David Cooper]

It was sad to hear that news about your mother. I expected you to take a while to get back to this.

They aren't cheating with GPS, but are just failing to understand how it actually works. The problem is simply that they refuse to switch from irrational theories to a rational one that does exactly the same job by applying the exact same maths because they're trapped by something (which brain science should be investigating) which enables them to tolerate contradictions and which makes them attack the rational theory in order to defend irrational ones. It's weird. Science is supposed to respect reason (and mathematics), and yet they simply ignore the point where they're breaking the rules and insist that they're right because a host of others before them have decided that it's okay to do break a key rule, and their leaders are apparently "better minds than you or I". They don't even give themselves permission to question things, but just fall in line behind the authority. Einstein himself was a doubter though: I've just seen a collection of quotes by him where he accepted that his theory was wrong and that the speed of light had to vary relative to different objects. He wasn't as irrational as I thought he was: it was his followers who took things to extremes. It's a pity he isn't still around to test with this to see if he is capable of seeing the contradictions which his followers refuse to recognise that they are tolerating. Quora's been useful though, giving me access to a lot of physicists who know relativity inside out and allowing me to drag them to the places where the faults are exposed, but they're all the same, squirming about all over the place to try to avoid the issue just like a politician being put on the spot when they've been found out. With one exception though: I've had a long email exchange with one of them in which his response was to reject mathematics and to deny that it has any role in governing science.

Benign mutations by definition do not cause suffering. There are lots of mutations which had no positive or negative impact and which simply lead to difference. Think about how dogs of all breeds are compatible with each other and can interbreed despite huge differences between them. How is that different from species that diverged millions of years ago and now cannot successfully interbreed despite looking very similar? The answer is that there are lots of benign changes which lead to them becoming less and less alike and which gradually reduce compatibility between them. With dogs, the rapid changes from unnatural selection have not destroyed the compatibility but merely did the equivalent of changing values in variables without shifting the variables around, so they're still found in the same places. With species that diverged millions of years ago, subtle little changes have built upon each other over time to scramble things, destroying compatibility, but that scrambling was done little by little without the changes doing any harm. Part of what makes this possible is that we have two sets of chromosomes, so we can support two different configurations at once and gradually make a transition from one arrangement of variables to a new arrangement, ditching the old one later. Even the number of chromosomes can change over time in this way if a split, merger or extra copy doesn't destroy functionality.

Is it fun to make your own bad decisions and lose out rather than being given better advice by machines which leads to you being better off? There are times when life is better if you trust the superior intelligence. Importantly though, AGI will also help people to become more intelligent if they're prepared to listen to it and adapt their views in order to be right about things rather than wrong. There will still be plenty of opportunity to enjoy being more intelligent than other people, and in any area of life where people compete on their own with without being helped by machines (i.e. in any kind of play), people's own intelligence will be rewarded.

On the war issue, it's much better to have a benign dictator that minimises suffering and kills all the murderers than to have the murderers calling all the shots in the way they do today. We need to get the psychopaths out of power, and all the ones who take their "morality" from holy texts instead of from mathematics applied to harm management. We will all be better off if benign AGI takes power and manages all conflicts, while the ideas that AGI will be applying are the ones that are dictated by mathematics. Those ideas are not those of the discoverer of them, but are merely the discovery that was waiting to be discovered and which all alien civilisations will eventually identify independently, just as every other part of mathematics is discovered rather than being the invention of a philosopher.

[David Cooper]

I've just refined my understanding of how length contraction occurs (this is something I've just posted at quora, and I worked it out as I was writing it):-

Once you’re seeing matter as waves moving at c, you can then see how gravity moves matter simply by having the speed of light go down as you go deeper into a gravity well. Imagine a wave being bounced to and fro between two parallel mirrors over a planet, the mirrors aligned vertically. That wave is bent downwards by the lower speed of light nearer the planet, and so it hits the mirrors lower and lower down, causing the matter of which this wave is a part (the mirrors being the container of the energy that makes up a piece of that matter) to accelerate downwards. The kinetic energy that appears to be gained by the acceleration is actually drawn from the slowed functionality of the material as it descends into the gravity well, so the total energy in the matter is unchanged by this acceleration. If the object is orbiting the planet though and doing so with a circular orbit, it doesn’t descend, but goes round instead, its path still being determined by this bending of the paths which the waves within the matter are following and the acceleration that this produces.

Now switch to a case where the planet is moving at relativistic speed, and the orbiting object has its orbit length contracted, but why is it contracted? If we take a very slow orbit (slow to avoid the speeding up and slowing down effects which complicate things), the alignment of the “parallel mirrors” of the object is different at different points on the orbit compared with the direction of travel of the planet through space (because we will always keep these "mirrors" vertical with respect to the planet). When it’s out to the side of the planet rather than ahead or behind, the waves are moving perpendicular to the line from there to the middle of the planet, so their path is curved maximally, resulting in strong acceleration towards the planet, so these points are the most curved parts of the orbit. When it’s ahead of or behind the planet though, those waves are actually moving much closer to the same direction as the line from there to the middle of the planet, so there’s less scope to bend them - there is no bending at all for waves following a path directly towards and away from the planet, and our perpendicular waves are closer to doing that now because of the movement of the system through space (which they are moving through on a zigzag path), so they’re travelling less distance on the perpendicular path through space, thereby leading to the minimum curvature of the orbit at those points, so we must have an elliptical orbit now with the planet at its dead centre rather than at one of the foci.

Now, you might think there’s something wrong with that, because the curvature is weakened by this effect at the most forward and backward points on the orbit, while not being strengthened at the two points out the side, and yet the curvature is stronger at those points than in the case where the planet is at rest. This extra curvature is caused by the orbiting object going round more slowly, and it has to move more slowly because it is carrying extra mass due to its movement at relativistic speed, restricting its overtaking speed to a lower one than its speed relative to the planet in the case where the planet is at rest. If the planet’s moving at 0.866c, for example, the orbiting object takes twice as long to orbit it, moving at half the speed (on average) relative to the planet.

You might also think there’s another problem in that this contracted orbit will take the object closer in where the change in speed of light with proximity to the planet is more severe and that the curvature should be more severe to match, but this contraction also applies to the shape of the gravity well, so there is no extra severity from this at the closest points of approach. Everything has length contraction applied to it because it’s all governed by the same mechanism of the angles of the paths that waves actually follow through space as they travel between the “parallel mirrors”.

[David Cooper]

It's actually better than that. Repeat the same thing with the pair of mirrors horizontal with respect to the planet. When they are ahead of or behind the moving planet, the waves are bouncing between the mirrors without being bent off their straight path, but when you put them out to the side of the planet, the paths the waves have to follow are again going to zigzag, and their path now gets bent, so again we have a stronger curve in the path from this when the object's out the side, and not when it's ahead or behind. This strengthens the length contraction of the orbit.

What I haven't done yet is crunch the numbers or simulate an orbit with this to see what shape it actually generates as the speed of the system through space changes, but I bet it will match the requirements of length contraction. What I need to do now is write a program to use this path bending mechanism to drive gravity for a circular orbit with a stationary planet at the centre of the action, working out how much acceleration there is from a range of paths between mirrors with the mirrors at a range of different angles (and the accelerations from each angle added up - the more angles I use and combine in this way, the more accurate the result should be), then set the system moving at 0.866c and repeat the calculations while taking into account the actual angles for the waves to follow through space to work out how much bending there will then be (which should be possible to do just by considering the bending of the perpendicular vector each time), and the amount of bending on a fixed length of perpendicular path shouldn't change at any point of the orbit because the object remains at the same depth in the gravity well at all times. The question is whether this orbit be length contracted to 0.5 times the rest length. I suspect it will be, once the speed of the orbiting object is halved (which it must be because it will take twice as long to go round as when the planet is at rest).

On another issue, we both had a problem with LaFrenière's way of holding the energy in a particle to avoid it leaking away into space and eliminating the particle. However, if we add three more dimensions which are rolled up in tight loops, we can have all the movement occur within those dimensions to serve as a container. Particles would then be able to exist if they resonate with the size of those dimensions. If you add more energy into such a particle, it would then have to move along through the standard three dimensions that we're already familiar with, and if you put as much extra energy in as the energy of the particle itself, it would have to move along at 0.866c. A particle that becomes unstable and decays (as happens when an electron and positron meet) has its energy twist out of the three rolled-up dimensions and escape into the open three dimensions to rush off at c as electromagnetic radiation, but so long as there's no such disruption, it might happily sit in the rolled-up dimensions to exist as a stable particle for quintillions of years.

[BarryNor]

The wiki article is misleading. It says...It would assume that more matter is needed that what is present however, dark matter particles is not the only theory that is capable of explaining the strange phenomenon. I

[Le Repteux (OP)]

With species that diverged millions of years ago, subtle little changes have built upon each other over time to scramble things, destroying compatibility, but that scrambling was done little by little without the changes doing any harm.

If those species diverged, it's because benign mutations were selected, otherwise they would necessary have caused some benign suffering, but suffering all the same. Species do not evolve to avoid suffering, however, but to avoid disappearing, and it is the ease of reproduction that is the criterion. I prefer to talk of direction instead of values though since it helps us to understand how an evolution can be a motion. This way, when species begin to diverge, it is because they are easier to reproduce in a new direction than to preserve the old one, whereas when they change without diverging, it is only the importance of the old direction that is affected. Dog breeds therefore follow the same evolutionary direction, but each breed evolves according to its particular importance. Importance and direction of change are parameters of movements. When a body is accelerated, it can also change direction, or it can retain it and change only the importance of its speed. Dog breeds is then equivalent to many bodies accelerated in the same direction but at different speeds, an analogy that may help us to discover how ADN works.

Is it fun to make your own bad decisions and lose out rather than being given better advice by machines which leads to you being better off? There are times when life is better if you trust the superior intelligence.

My mom was losing her memory before she died, but I didn't realise what it meant before she was hospitalized, so we were bickering because of that. She didn't understand what I was saying but nevertheless appeared to do so. At the hospital, she was suspicious of everything because of that. She did not trust the nurses and was bickering them. If we lose memory, we lose understanding too, but since we don't lose talking, it doesn't show enough. She knew she was losing memory, but since she could not recognise that her intelligence was getting inferior to mine, she nevertheless could not trust me. I have now moved to the woman I lived with before I decided to live with my mom, and her memory loss is even worse, so she has even less confidence in me, but now that I know she doesn't understand, our bickering is less important. To me, all of this means that if I was less intelligent than the AGI I was talking to, I could not recognize it, so I could not trust it. Of course that life would have been easier with my mom if she could have recognised my superiority, but she couldn't. Of course, knowing that the woman I am with is less intelligent than me helps me not to bicker her, but that does not help her to understand that I am right, so when she is in a bad mood, she doesn't trust me anyway.

I think that the only way humans can trust a leader is when they feel they belong to the group, because it is an instinctive behavior. We know we are stronger within a group, but we must also feel good to submit to its rules. Since they are lacking our kind of intelligence, it's probably how they feel that incites animals to let a leader drive them, and I think it's also how our ideas work, which means that it's probably the feelings associated to our ideas that drive us and not the inverse. There is probably no "us" inside our minds, just ideas and feelings tagged to them, the same way hierarchical values seem to be tagged to the members of a clan of primates. This way, all our ideas would be fighting to get better values, which would create the same kind of hierarchical organisation. Once born, ideas could then be on their own like any individual thing. How about integrating this feature into an AI? Would not that be close to your measuring of harm?

On another issue, we both had a problem with LaFrenière's way of holding the energy in a particle to avoid it leaking away into space and eliminating the particle. However, if we add three more dimensions which are rolled up in tight loops, we can have all the movement occur within those dimensions to serve as a container.

To me, the only thing that can roll up energy in tight loops is matter. My particles do it, and a microwave oven does it too, but the dimensions of things represent their measurements, not the things themselves. Bonded particles arranged in three dimensions could absorb by interference almost all the energy they exchange for instance. Two particles could do that too providing the energy they exchange had a preferred direction, which could be the case if a unidirectional energy was escaping from their components' three dimensional bondings.

I find SR illogical because it discarded ether, and I find GR illogical too because it discarded interaction. It is intellectual high flying to claim that the presence of a body can bend space. It flies almost as high as the presence of god. Our ideas become pure speculation when we try to push them to their limit. For instance, if I stick to the idea of particles moving to stay synchronised, I can rely on my simulation on acceleration with four particles to explain gravitation. In that simulation, the particles need to move towards one another to stay on sync since, being actually accelerating through ether, the information they share takes more and more time to reach them. (Of course, it would be the contrary if they were decelerating as my simulation of acceleration with two particles shows.) So if we figure that macroscopic bodies are also moving through ether, and even if the information they share is too weak to bond them as firmly as particles, we can nevertheless consider that it is strong enough to exert a small force if they get out of sync, and as my simulation shows, that information is automatically out of sync if they are accelerating through ether, so the distance between them should also be changing, but since the same reasoning applies to their particles, that change would stay unobservable. Bodies would then be accelerating towards one another with time while contracting or expanding at the same rate so that their different dimensions would stay proportional. You're not yet ready to accept that information can create motion, so you're certainly not ready to admit that it applies to gravitation, are you? :0)

Once you’re seeing matter as waves moving at c, you can then see how gravity moves matter simply by having the speed of light go down as you go deeper into a gravity well.

You see, you're assuming that gravity curves light while I'm trying to find a way for light to bond macroscopic bodies. These are two completely different approaches, although both are necessarily pure speculation. To me, pretending that bodies can curve space is as illogical as pretending that the speed of light is not affected by the speed of bodies. If it was so, my simulations would be impossible to make. To discover your event meshing failure, you had to suspect something was wrong with the premise, so how can't you suspect that curved space stuff? What would be curved exactly? Ether? Then how? There is no possible mechanism, so it's pure speculation. As long as I speculate, I prefer to think that macroscopic bodies share information, and that this information travels at c, so as to be able to simulate it. As we can see from SR, the numbers can fit the data, but the logic may still be wrong. Sticking to that wrong logic prevents researchers to discover that LET is better, and sticking to curved space probably prevents them to discover a better theory.

[David Cooper]

The wiki article is misleading. It says...It would assume that more matter is needed that what is present however, dark matter particles is not the only theory that is capable of explaining the strange phenomenon. I

I've no idea what you're referring to, but I suspect your reply here was intended to appear in a different thread.

[David Cooper]

I think that the only way humans can trust a leader is when they feel they belong to the group, because it is an instinctive behavior. We know we are stronger within a group, but we must also feel good to submit to its rules. Since they are lacking our kind of intelligence, it's probably how they feel that incites animals to let a leader drive them, and I think it's also how our ideas work, which means that it's probably the feelings associated to our ideas that drive us and not the inverse. There is probably no "us" inside our minds, just ideas and feelings tagged to them, the same way hierarchical values seem to be tagged to the members of a clan of primates. This way, all our ideas would be fighting to get better values, which would create the same kind of hierarchical organisation. Once born, ideas could then be on their own like any individual thing. How about integrating this feature into an AI? Would not that be close to your measuring of harm?

I can't work out what the feature is that you're suggesting be integrated into an AI. I'm sure AGI will have no trouble making people feel that they're part of a group though, so if that's all it takes to get people to buy into the right (or wrong) ideas, it can be done.

To me, the only thing that can roll up energy in tight loops is matter.

You can't have matter in the first place if you can't find some way to tie it together. In string theory they talk about extra dimensions rolled up, and they could be the solution for us too: they probably need them for the same reason.

It is intellectual high flying to claim that the presence of a body can bend space.

If you fill a balloon with water, it changes shape. I wouldn't rule out the bending of space, though I wouldn't want to do it with any 4D Spacetime model because it's either broken or contrived - it can't work without adding a Newtonian-like
time to it, and that renders the "time" dimension superfluous.

...so how can't you suspect that curved space stuff? What would be curved exactly?

I don't believe in it for a moment. The path light follows past a planet can bend without space being curved in any way: it's all done by the density of the medium causing lensing effects. A planet in orbit around a star is simply being bent around it like light being bent off line. What makes them look different is that the light going past the star goes one way and is bent a little, but the energy inside the atoms of the planet moves to and fro an astronomical number of times allowing that bending effect to accumulate and become much more severe; sufficiently severe to enable it to be lensed round and round the star in circles. My length contraction test program is nearly complete, by the way: I've finally found a use for that (-b +/- root(b^2 - 4ac))/2a thing from school. It's fun doing the maths and turning it into code.

[Le Repteux (OP)]

I don't believe in it for a moment. The path light follows past a planet can bend without space being curved in any way: it's all done by the density of the medium causing lensing effects. A planet in orbit around a star is simply being bent around it like light being bent off line. What makes them look different is that the light going past the star goes one way and is bent a little, but the energy inside the atoms of the planet moves to and fro an astronomical number of times allowing that bending effect to accumulate and become much more severe; sufficiently severe to enable it to be lensed round and round the star in circles.

If the density of the medium around a planet could change, then the density between my particles could change too, and I wouldn't need light to explain the bonding, just curved space. No need for synchronisation, so no explanation for mass, and no explanation for motion either. On the contrary, using synchronisation instead of curved space gives us a potential real mechanism for gravitational mass and for acceleration. Is there a real mechanism for density change? One that we can simulate?

[David Cooper]

If the density of the medium around a planet could change, then the density between my particles could change too, and I wouldn't need light to explain the bonding, just curved space.

A density change is not curved space. A density change might have a role in how energy is bound up as matter, but it's unlikely to be the main cause: particles decay and their material can explode off as radiation, but there's no equivalent with gravity suddenly letting everything go. There are certainly different mechanisms involved in different phenomena though, because magnets which can out-power gravity by lifting massive objects do not slow clocks or bend light rays, so we know that magnetism is doing something radically different from gravity. The forces holding atoms together and parts of atoms likely work more like magnetism than gravity. They could be driven by properties of the space fabric though.

No need for synchronisation, so no explanation for mass, and no explanation for motion either.

Don't waste too much time trying to account for mass. Imagine two tractors tied together and pulling in opposite directions while moving nowhere. There you have the equivalent of a particle. You can add more tractors to pull this particle and make it move, moving faster with each added tractor if they all pull the particle in the same direction. The mass goes up as you add more tractors because the mass is simply a measure of the number of tractors involved. Add a million tractors all pulling against the one that's trying to go the other way and they'll nearly be moving at the speed of tractor, but no matter how many tractors you add, they'll never reach the speed of tractor because of that one tractor pulling the other way. The particle moving at this speed now has over a million tractor masses in it. Now let's have the particle decay. One tractor shoots off one way at the speed of tractor while the other million+ tractors are finally free to go at the full speed of tractor in the direction they were already moving in, and now we say there is no mass there. But the mass hasn't really gone away - we just stop calling it mass once all the tractors are moving at the speed of tractor, no longer being bound to anything that's trying to move in a different direction. It's just word play: the difference between those million tractors moving at just a fraction less than the speed of tractor and then moving at the speed of tractor once the single opposed tractor has been cut free is utterly trivial. The mass has not really disappeared at all. You are trying to find a complex explanation for something really simple, and you're doing that because you've been misled by words and by establishment thinking.

Is there a real mechanism for density change? One that we can simulate?

The closest to a mechanism that I've been able to think of so far is that all matter is more spread out through space than we normally think - it extends far out from the centre of every piece of mass/energy, serving directly as a medium which slows light.

[Le Repteux (OP)]

You are trying to find a complex explanation for something really simple, and you're doing that because you've been misled by words and by establishment thinking.

I may effectively be misled, but probably not because I like to follow established ideas. I'm looking for mechanisms that can be simulated, and the Higgs can't, so I suspect it is wrong. I prefer to define mass as a mere resistance to acceleration, and the only way a body can do so is with regard to another one, which is actually the case for my two bonded particles. Accelerating a macroscopic body looks instantaneous, but it can't be since the information has to reach the whole body before it accelerates as a whole.

The closest to a mechanism that I've been able to think of so far is that all matter is more spread out through space than we normally think - it extends far out from the centre of every piece of mass/energy, serving directly as a medium which slows light.

That matter works for things that have a speed with regard to it, but what for those who have not? How does it explain the force we feel standing on earth for example?

[David Cooper]

Accelerating a macroscopic body looks instantaneous, but it can't be since the information has to reach the whole body before it accelerates as a whole.

If you accelerate one particle of a bonded pair, you've already achieved the full acceleration even if the other particle hasn't begun to move yet. Everything that happens subsequently is just a transfer of energy between the two particles as they take turns in moving or share out that movement energy to take half of it each.

That matter works for things that have a speed with regard to it, but what for those who have not? How does it explain the force we feel standing on earth for example?

If a particle is in space near a planet, the waves of energy moving about within the particle are bent downwards, leading to the particle accelerating towards the planet. If the particle is sitting on the surface of the planet instead, the waves are still bent downwards, but the particle can't move down, so the waves are continually forced back up and a force is applied downwards on the matter below (as well as back up from there to balance it).

[Le Repteux (OP)]

If you accelerate one particle of a bonded pair, you've already achieved the full acceleration even if the other particle hasn't begun to move yet. Everything that happens subsequently is just a transfer of energy between the two particles as they take turns in moving or share out that movement energy to take half of it each.

Particles that can bind always have components that necessarily accelerate one before the other, except when they align sideways to the motion.

If a particle is in space near a planet, the waves of energy moving about within the particle are bent downwards, leading to the particle accelerating towards the planet.

OK, I think I got it this time. Thanks for repeating unflinchingly like an AI would do. So if I refer to my particles, your matter would be a kind of ether belonging to a particle, that spreads out around it, and that changes the direction and/or the speed of the light it exchanges with the other particle because it's density changes with distance. Then I have a question: when such a particle is accelerated, is that ether accelerating instantaneously or does it take time until it is completely accelerated? For instance, if I'm not mistaken, I think it is considered that space-time accelerates instantly even if gravity waves only travel at c.
 

[David Cooper]

So if I refer to my particles, your matter would be a kind of ether belonging to a particle, that spreads out around it, and that changes the direction and/or the speed of the light it exchanges with the other particle because it's density changes with distance.

There are other possibilities: it could just be that matter puts some kind of stress on the space fabric which diminishes over distance rather than matter having an extended cloud of unseen parts of itself spread out through the whole universe with the density increasing as you get nearer to the place where the matter is visible. Whatever it is that does it though, it slows the speed of light as you get closer to that place where the particle is seen to be.

Then I have a question: when such a particle is accelerated, is that ether accelerating instantaneously or does it take time until it is completely accelerated? For instance, if I'm not mistaken, I think it is considered that space-time accelerates instantly even if gravity waves only travel at c.

With Spacetime, the change in direction is caused by the local curvature, which is immediate, so the delay associated with gravity only relates to changing that local curvature by moving the massive source of gravity. With LET, it's the same thing: the change in direction is caused by local density differences, and that's immediate, while the delay associated with gravity only relates to changing that local density by moving the massive source of gravity.