Leaderboard
Popular Content
Showing content with the highest reputation on 03/19/22 in all areas
-
Ethics is a branch of philosophy. What did you expect? It seems the "mumbo jumbo" you dislike the least is people pointing out where your logic breaks down. That's not their fault. It isn't anyone's job here to be convinced by fallacy ridden arguments or to hold your hand to the finish line. You can base your opinions about philosophy on non-philosophers if you would like, but it isn't a convincing appeal to authority. Especially when pragmatism is a philosophy and all science is born of natural philosophy. Right now, I want to know why you believe that your moral views must be within the majority in western democracies and why this assumption is correct? Could you torture someone as a job? If everyone else tells you that you had no choice, that you did the right thing, will that do anything to actually stop you from remembering everything you did to the person? Their screams and cries, the feeling of the flesh and bones being damaged by you. Would being morally correct stop you from feeling shame or guilt? Would it stop you from feeling like an innocent person yourself? Let's imagine another scenario, you are accused of one of these horrible crimes, somebody wants to torture you for information but you are innocent. You are tortured mercilessly for hours on end; by the time they realize you are innocent, you've been horribly disfigured and will likely live with pain the rest of your life and you gave a false confession just to make the pain stop. How would you feel about torture then? Here is a question you might not have considered; is choosing not to torture someone, even if someone might die if we don't, morally wrong? Ethics is not easy. Doing what is right; isn't always going to make you feel good. Sometimes, our choices are all so dire, that ultimately none of them are good ones, but some might be less bad than others. In the end, we have to be able to live with ourselves, with our choices and actions. If evil exists, and we fight it, we must take a care not to become something worse than the monsters we want to keep at bay. I'm not without some sympathy for your situation. Philosophers have a habit of sounding pretentious and condescending and we argue in a very different way than others, but you need to understand that our studies involve a lot of the terminology and theory about argumentation, logic and debate explicitly. Learn more philosophy. This isn't meant as an attack but is a sincere suggestion. Knowledge is power. Ultimately none of us really know enough to know whom is right. Learning philosophy at least, helps you figure out how to argue for your own views more convincingly but also helps you figure out how to question and consider your own and others views on things. I can send you some useful links on that front. You seem like an intelligent person who could stand to benefit a lot from learning this stuff.3 points
-
https://phys.org/news/2022-03-scientists-stephen-hawking-black-hole.html Scientists may have solved Stephen Hawking's black hole paradox Researchers may have solved Professor Stephen Hawking's famous black hole paradox—a mystery that has puzzled scientists for almost half a century. According to two new studies, something called "quantum hair" is the answer to the problem. In the first paper, published in the journal Physical Review Letters, researchers demonstrated that black holes are more complex than originally thought and have gravitational fields that hold information about how they were formed. The researchers showed that matter collapsing into a black hole leaves a mark in its gravitational field—an imprint referred to as a "quantum hair." In a follow-up paper, published in a separate journal, Physics Letters B, Professor Xavier Calmet from the University of Sussex's School of Mathematical and Physical Sciences and Professor Stephen Hsu from Michigan State University said quantum hairs resolve Hawking's Black Hole Information Paradox. more at link................... the paper: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0370269322001290?via%3Dihub Quantum hair and black hole information: Abstract It has been shown that the quantum state of the graviton field outside a black hole horizon carries information about the internal state of the hole. We explain how this allows unitary evaporation: the final radiation state is a complex superposition which depends linearly on the initial black hole state. Under time reversal, the radiation state evolves back to the original black hole quantum state. Formulations of the information paradox on a fixed semiclassical geometry describe only a small subset of the evaporation Hilbert space, and do not exclude overall unitarity.1 point
-
Sensei, get a life 🙂 . Don't do your banking, or other sensitive activities on your phone, or computer. Go down to your local bank and greet the lovely tellers working there. More importantly, don't invade another country using cell phones as communication/command.1 point
-
While there is much truth there regarding TFGs competence, I fear you may underestimate the power of an angry monkey with a big box of wrenches that it can hurl into a large delicate piece of machinery. Appointment of incompetent and/or corrupt cabinet members, larding science-based agencies with partisan kooks and science deniers, tilting the balance of federal courts and (as @swansontnoted) the SCOTUS, ripping up carefully wrought treaties and other overseas relationships, abandoning Green programs and initiatives that need multi term momentum to succeed, etc. (a very short sampling of governance mayhem) While I agree more competent sabotage could be worse (as @iNow suggested), and RWers like DeSantis or Rick Scott (google his mean-spirited Rescue American Plan) are fearsome to contemplate in the Oval, TFGs flailing around could be pretty disastrous. And next time around, there might not be a Mark Milley or a James Mattis to step in at key moments and deflect those tossed wrenches.1 point
-
@Ghideon and @joigus Thank you both for a useful continuing scientific conversation. +1 apiece. There doesn't seem much else scientific going on here at the moment. I think Shannon entropy is specified and calculated on the basis of 'ideal' computers devoid of earthly defects, including the need for power sources. This is nothing new and continues the Ancient Greek tradition of abstracting perfect circles, squares etc as 'ideals'. We have carried this tradition on thoughout history in both Philosophy, Engineering and more recently Physics. In particular physical (ie thermodynamic) entropy and other thermodynamic properties are calculated on the basis of 'perfect' or ideal processes. Ghideon's comment about time applies if he doesn't already know this as the equations are almost all derived on the basis of infinitely slow (ideal) processes called reversible ones. thermodynamics doesn't care how long it takes to get there. One difference is that the thermodynamic statement "Ideal entropy cannot decrease" is defined for a cyclic process. It does not forbid entropic decrease within a cycle and this actually happens in some practical situations. Computing processes are not, in general 'reversible' in the same way.1 point
-
Thanks for your input. I'll try to clarify by using four examples based on my current understanding. Information entropy in this case means the definition from Shannon. By physical entropy I mean any suitable definition from physics*; here you may need to fill in the blanks or highlight where I may have misunderstood** things. 1: Assume information entropy is calculated as per Shannon for some example. In computer science we (usually) assume an ideal case; physical implementation is abstracted away. Time is not part of the Shannon definition and physics plays no part in the outcome of entropy calculation in this case. 2: Assume we store the input parameters and/or the result of the calculation from (1) in digital form. In the ideal case we also (implicitly) assume unlimited lifetime of the components in computers or unlimited supply of spare parts, redundancy, fault tolerance and error correction so that the mathematical result from (1) still holds; the underlaying physics have been abstracted away by assuming nothing ever breaks or that any error can be recovered from. In this example there is some physics but under the assumptions made the physics cannot have an effect on the outcome. 3: Assume we store the result of the calculation from (1) in digital form on a real system (rather than modelling an ideal system). The lifetime of the system is not unlimited and at some future point the results from (1) will be unavailable or if we try to repeat the calculation based on the stored data we may get a different result. We have moved from the ideal computer science world (where I usually dwell) into an example where the ideal situation of (1) and (2) does not hold. In this 3rd case my guess is that physics, and physical entropy, play a part. We loose (or possibly get incorrect) digital information due to faulty components or storage and this have impact on the Shannon entropy for the bits we manage to read out or calculate. The connection to physical entropy here is one of the things I lack knowledge about but I'm curious about. 4: Assume we store the result of the calculation from (1) in digital form on an ideal system (limitless lifetime) using lossy compression****. This means that at a later state we cannot repeat the exact calculation or expect identical outcome since part of the information is lost and cannot be recovered by the digital system. In this case we are still in the ideal world of computer science where the predictions or outcome is determined by computer science theorems. Even if there is loss of information physics is still abstracted away and physical entropy plays no part. Note here the similarities between (3) and (4). A computer scientist can analyse the information entropy change and the loss of information due to a (bad) choice of compression in (4). The loss of information in (3) due to degrading physical components seems to me to be connected to physical entropy. Does this make sense? If so: It would be interesting to see where control parameters*** fits into "example 3 vs 4" since both have similar outcome from an information perspective but only (3) seems related to physics. *) assuming a suitable definition exists **) Or forgotten, it's a long time since I (briefly) studied thermodynamics. ***) feel free to post extra references; this is probably outside my current knowledge. ****) This would be a bad choice of implementation for this example in a real case, it's just used here to illustrate and compare reasons for loss of information. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lossy_compression1 point