joigus

Obviously he means quark. And we're not Boltzmann brains. Structure formation in our world is not to do with fluctuations, obviously. The contents of my mind come from events in the past. It obviously cannot be the case that the contents of my mind, and my feeling of them having to do with events in the past both!!! arise from thermal fluctuations. And not everything should be considered. Silly ideas don't have to be considered, when they're silly for obvious reasons.

As far as my understanding goes, emergence --at least in the weak sense S.H. was talking about-- is not about whether or not we can explain something in terms of its parts/constituents, etc. After all, how can we be sure that we can't instead of we haven't been able to just yet? It's rather about whether the properties in question make sense at all for said 'constituents' or 'parts' or 'more elementary' elements. Phase transitions only make complete sense in what's called the thermodynamic limit, ie, infinite number of particles; or, if you will, all extensive --additive-- properties being infinitely large, and therefore scale-independent. A phase transition does not make sense at all for, say 17 molecules. It's not that it becomes fuzzy, so to speak. I wouldn't even know how to start talking about that. It's like trying to talk about a 'shiny atom' or an 'uninhabitable photon'. What would that even mean? It's a property of the collectivity, not of its parts.

I think there are contexts where the "weak emergence" approach is certainly useful, and I would go as far as to say that actually spectacularly so. One such example is how the equation of state for a real gas is inferred by assuming finite volume for each molecule and how molecules repelling each other at short enough distances while attracting each other at longer distances gives you a modification of the ideal-gas law that results in explaining phase transitions, the triple point of water, etc. If that's not emergence in action, I don't know what is. As Hossenfelder says, conductivity and other macroscopic parameters give you other examples. There are other contexts where it's not at all obvious what the level from which the law is inferred might be. Example: People have suggested time could be an emergent property. What more basic level can we postulate so that time is a highly-derived, emergent property? I do see a domain in which it's helpful, and by no means trivial.

It's actually not 137. It's just thereabouts. IOW, why is the electron's charge in dimensionless units what it is? The number is probably not 'trying to tell us' anything, for a reason similar to why the distance Earth-Sun is not trying to tell us anything, despite Kepler spending years and years thinking about numbers like those --planetary distances and periods. We don't have a unified theory, so the number looks quirky. The day we understand interactions as several allowed versions of the same mechanism, we will probably understand these numbers as accidents is some more encompassing/general/ etc. space of states.

GRate answer!

The voiding approach sounds reasonable. I generally brings about great relief.

They aren't. Extra dimensions and/or parallel universes are not mainstream physics. Study some physics before you talk.

Right. Microphenomena cannot be directly observed --eg. an electron going from an excited state to the ground state-- for the very simple reason that observation happens by virtue of thousands upon thousands of microphenomena producing coordinated responses in macroscopic systems. Never mind dust mites or bacteria.

Uncertainty has nothing to do necessarily with observation, as you've been told; although no observational device can overcome its limits. 'Superstate' means nothing in conventional physics. The 'super' in superposition is to do with observables being 'fuzzy' in a way, not with known constrictions on how 'fuzy' --in that particular way-- incompatible observables can be at the same time --also called 'complementarity'. You could think of a world with superposition of states with different expected values for an observable, but without constrictions for pairs of observations. Why not?

So easily confused with extra position [?]= bilocation = "the supposed phenomenon of being in two places simultaneously"

Amen. All of this reminds me of the famous letter from Pauli to Heisenberg:

Nice.

Figured it out?! How?!

A mindless, meaningless, change in coordinates. It's a little bit like asking how much of the girth of the Earth is determined by this or that meridian. The coordinates that determine the FRWL metric (and the 'static' character of g00 ) are simply a matter of convenience.

I hope not. QFT would have to be re-thought from scratch. As said,

GR is invariant under re-scalings of time in particular. So a simple re-scaling of time would give you your desired metric. There is no physical information in this distinction. A universe for which the time re-scales as it passes is totally physically equivalent to one in which it's space that expands by means of a time-dependent expansion factor.

If you can filter information, you essentially have it all.

According to some quantum hype, you could do it with entanglement. Nice trick, @TheVat. +1 I must confess I did need a little bit of algebra. This is a cute little puzzle.

Oxymoron if there ever was one.

Lmgtfy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calculus

I'm glad to learn you're back. And you could certainly do worse than Fiji...

This strongly reminds me of Aristotle's nóesis noéseos, St. Anselm's argument for the existence of God, and many other similar tautological, circular platitudes that lead nowhere. Gravity does not influence the chemical bond, for example. It shapes what it shapes. The shape of the Earth, the course of a river, and so on... It doesn't shape the energy levels of hydrogen, for example.

Interesting. That would have been kinda my guess. Do you have any professional experience with AI, if I may ask?

So, IYO, it would be possible to confuse an AI system by feeding it wrong feedback?

And what determines the first guess, IYO?