Delta1212

And even then, the definition of "simple" being used is atypical. It's actually the explanation with the fewest assumptions that is most likely to be correct. You can have a quite complex explanation, but if it rests on fewer assumptions than a "simpler" explanation, then it is more likely to be correct.

How are we defining instinct in this discussion?

Fundamentally, they are just presenting a seemingly insurmountable obstacle to your goal of not being asked that same god damn question one more time.

Anger is what we feel towards perceived obstacles to what we want that we can't figure out a way to get around. If you want someone to understand you, or to admit that you are right, or just agree with you, and they refuse to do so despite your best efforts, they become an obstacle to that goal that you can't seem to get past. The trick to avoiding getting angry is either to divorce yourself from attachment to that articular goal (if you talk yourself out of caring whether someone else understands what you are talking about, there is no longer anything to get angry with) or else focus on other ways that you can try to reach your goal. Anger is what you hit when you've exhausted all other avenues that you can think of. If you are good at thinking of other avenues, or even just at convincing yourself that other avenues to your goal will eventually open up if you just wait long enough, then anger becomes superfluous and is easier to control.

This is, of course, what I meant, but it's good to be specific, so thank you for making that distinction clearer than I did.

Yep, no problem. Asking questions is always a good thing.

And that introduces some new wrinkles, because unlike with the time dilation we've been talking about that arises as a consequence of special relativity, gravitational time dilation is not reciprocal because a gravitational reference frame is non-inertial. If you are at the bottom of a very strong gravity well, you can tell that you are and that you are the one that time is dilating for. You wonMt see the rest of the universe also being dilated like they see you. In fact, you'll see the outside universe going by in a sort of fast-forward. A bit loathe to use movie physics in an example, but they got this part more or less right so: On the planet, it had only been a few minutes or hours since the first person landed when they arrived despite years going by in the outside universe. So if the person had still been alive on the surface, they would have been able to look up and watch all the years pass in that brief amount of time. So while fourteen billion years may not have passed on the planet, a person on the planet would still be able to see that much time as having passed in the universe at large.

Yes, that sounds about right. While I realize that xyzt again doesn't always present things in strictly the most helpful fashion, he is right about the problem that trying to imagine a scenario with instantaneous travel presents. Let's imagine that we're on Planet Bob, and the planet that we're traveling to is Planet Bill. We leave Planet Bob when it is one year old and instantly travel to Planet Bill in order to measure the age of the universe as seen by Planet Bill. Well, on Planet Bob, we measure Planet Bill as being six months old when our Planet Bob is 1 year old. So when we arrive there, it will still be 6 months old and the universe will appear six months younger right? Well, from Planet Bill's perspective, Planet Bob is one year old when Planet Bill is two years old. So now when the people of Planet Bill determine that Planet Bob is 1 year old and we are then teleporting to Bill, we should arrive when Planet Bill is two, and the universe is older than it was from the place we left. To find out what is going on "right now" at a place, you have to be there. To be there, you have to physically travel there. "Right now" loses its meaning over significant distances, and if you cut out the travel time to try to determine what is going on "right now" at another place, you can get literally any answer you want depending on how you set up the problem. Since you can't actually do it, you can't pick one of those set ups and say that is the correct one. They are all equally valid (or invalid).That's why you can't really do that.

xyzt is pretty knowledgeable and generally knows what he's talking about but isn't always the most polite about it. Don't take it personally. For the sake of allowing me to skip having to actually do a lot of math, mind if we use 86% of light speed rather than 95%? The numbers come out a little rounder and I already know what they are that way. The answer to your question, and ultimately the trick to the problem you are having with the rest of this, is that it depends on whose frame you are looking at this from. From Bob's perspective on Earth, when he is 30 years old, Bill is 15 and everything you just described applies. From Bill's perspective on the spaceship, you can look at the spaceship as being stationary while the Earth flies by at 86% the speed of light. From Bill's frame of reference, when he is 30 years old, Bob is 15. Everything that you just described as the experience on the spaceship from Earth's perspective is what the spaceship sees as happening on Earth from the spaceship's perspective. Now, how can Bill be 15 when Bob is 30 and Bob be 15 while Bill is 30? The answer to that is something called relativity of simultaneity. It turns out that not only is speed relative to your frame of reference, but so is what events you measure as being simultaneous. Observers in different frames will not necessarily agree on whether distant events happen simultaneously, or what order certain events happen in. This requires a bit more math, but it does work out so that nobody is going to observe causally linked events happening in the wrong order, like someone dying before they are born. But it does mean that Bill and Bob can't agree on a "same moment" at which to compare their ages. Let's say that after one year on Earth, when Bob's parents see Bill as being 6 months old, they send a signal to the spaceship. From there perspective, when Bob is 1 year old, the spaceship is is 0.86 light years away. So they send the signal and, since the spaceship continues to move away at 86% the speed of light, it takes an additional 6 years (and change) to catch up to the spaceship, during which time Bill has aged another 3 years. So Earth sees Bill receive the signal sent on Bob's 1st birthday (when they saw Bill as being 6 months old) when Bill is a little over 3 and a half. From the spaceship's perspective, Earth still sends the signal on Bob's first birthday, but Bill is two. The Earth, having been receding from the spaceship at 86% of the speed of light for two years at this point, is a little over a light year and a half away. So it takes a bit over a year and a half from the time the Earth sends the signal to reach the spaceship (according to the spaceship's frame) and it was sent when Bill was two (again, according to the spaceship), so Bill receives it when he is a bit over 3 and a half years old. So everyone agrees on all of the events (a signal was sent from Earth on Bob's first birthday and arrives at the spaceship when Bill is just over 3 1/2), but they disagree on what moment was simultaneous with each event in the other's frame and how long the light signal took to reach its destination from the time it was sent. Earth thinks that they sent the message when Bill was six months old, and that it took six years for the signal to get there. The spaceship thinks that the signal was sent when Bill was two and that it took a year and a half. The only way to reconcile the discrepancies is to bring the frames back together, but to do that, either the Earth or the spaceship have to turn around in order to come back to the same location and be in the same frame as the other, and that requires someone to accelerate, breaking the symmetry and making one or the other "right" in their interpretation. Edit: started this before other people posted.

I swear to God I thought that picture and every one that came up in a GIS was photoshopped until I looked for video of it. That seriously might be the single strangest thing I have ever seen.

I think the problem here is the assumption that modern knowledge is somehow qualitatively more sophisticated than ancient knowledge. Modern scientific knowledge is a high-energy, nutritious fruit located in the highest branches of a tall tree. It is harder to obtain than the scant berries in the bush at the base of the tree, and is a richer source of food for the effort you put in, but once you have it, it doesn't take any special kind of mouth to eat. The one that works on the berries works just as well on the tree fruit. Nor does eating the fruit mean that you have a sharper or more sophisticated sense of taste than someone who has not. Yes, you will have experienced a taste that they will not have, but that doesn't mean they are incapable of experiencing it, just that nobody has given them a piece of the fruit that would lead them to experience that taste. The same brain that can figure out migration patterns of prey animals can figure out quantum physics. The latter takes more work and has different applications, but knowledge is knowledge. The brain revolved to work out patterns and store information. What those patterns are and what the knowledge can be used for is somewhat irrelevant. Out whole advantage is that we evolved to be able to learn how to deal with diverse and changing environments, which means we needed to be able to learn whatever would prove useful in unpredictable situations, that's what got selected for, and what has allowed us to figure out a lot of things that wouldn't have been immediately relevant to our ancestors. But by that same token, our ancestors were, past a certain point, just as mentally sophistacted as we are, they were just dealing with a different set of circumstances and working with a different set of base assumptions and accumulated knowledge than we are now. We know how to do more complex things but that doesn't say anything about the complexity of the thoughts themselves.

You try things out until you find something you're good at. People enjoy doing things they're good at. You hear about the ones that are especially good at whatever they do. You don't hear about the ones that never tried the things they would have been really good at.

How are you defining a "more complex" thought?

I think the mistake you are making is about how the brain is utilised. The brain is an information sponge. It pulls in any information that it flags as important and hunts for patterns. Now hunting is no more or less of a skill than mathematics. A very knowledgeable farmer is no more or less ignorant than a physicist, they just know about different things. One of humanity's biggest advantages is our ability to communicate and share knowledge, and since knowledge can be passed down, it will of course accumulate. But the major advantage there isn't really that we know more, it's that we can spend more time learning what other people have already determined works, and a lot less timing learning things that don't. I know a little bit about how lightbulb filaments work. I know a lot less about how well the materials that people tried unusuccessfully to use as filaments work other than not well. Being on the cutting edge of a field means that you know a lot more detail about what isn't working and why it doesn't work than your successors are likely to when they start building on your successes. They can spend the time that you spent trying out your first wrong idea learning about the idea that finally worked, and then spend the rest of their time figuring things out from there. The brain also evolved to take things in efficiently. You don't have the time or energy to remember every little thing that you see or hear, so the brain has to be able to figure out what is important to retain. Part of that is repetition, for example. Knowing that, and learning other things about how we learn, has helped us to develop strategies for maximizing our retention of information we want to know. If you make good use of those strategies, you might know more than someone who doesn't, but in general everybody has the same amount of life experience at the same age. The person who stays in studying doesn't know more or less than the person who goes out partying. One just knows more about physics and the other knows more about what happened at the party last night. The long and short of it is, people 20,000 years ago didn't know less, on an individual level, than we do. I know more physics, but I also know a bit less about what berries will and won't kill me, the best way to find water if I'm lost and how to effectively track and kill something that is bigger, stronger and faster than I am. Because I didn't have to learn any of that as part of my daily life, I had time to learn other things. We as a society might consider the things I learned instead to be more useful and/or 'advanced', but the brain doesn't really make a distinction. 20,000 years ago, people were using their brains to their full potential (more or less, some people I'm sure make better use of them then and today than others, but in general there isn't that much difference), they were just applying them to different problems and knowledge than we do today.

You've asked some interesting questions that deserve answers, but first I want to call out one point: Do you think you have a more complex mind than that of a modern Chinese farmer?

If we didn't already know that the height of a floater changed with the raising and lowering of the surface level, we wouldn't have flush toilets. That's how they work.

Would this be what you're intending? Because most of the examples I've seen so far don't strike me as doing anything actually wrong other than complaining: You have a delivery person that you need to drive a package somewhere (X). He can't do it because he locked his keys in the car (W). You inform him that there is a spare key somewhere in the back (Y). He says that he can't possibly waste time looking for a spare car key while he has a package that needs delivering.

As far as we can tell, there's no real physiological difference between a person from 20,000 years ago and one alive today, so yes. They'd have been just as capable of thinking as you are.

Assuming you are doing so at a constant speed in a single direction, you aren't doing work while it's moving. But since it didn't start moving and since it isn't moving at the end, you have to have an acceleration to get it moving and then to stop it. That most certainly requires energy, yes.

I find it a little funny that you have told actual physicists to find a single physicist that agrees with them, but maybe that is just me.

But that's not the same thing. That's a single piece being moved between the two positions. You need to demonstrate the attached set up, which doesn't have the same behavior for the reasons I outlined. The video you have shows it always displacing the same amount of water with the height changing because the water levels are different. The animation for the "perpetual motion machine" based on this concept breaks this. It shows the set up displacing a different amount of water depending on whether the weight is on the left or right side of the set up, which doesn't work and is not at all what your video shows.

Yes, because it's only in one position at a time. If you had two that were attached such that they moved as one unit, they would settle at the average height of the two, and moving pieces from one to the other would have no effect on whether they went up or down. The one in the capillary would push the other higher than it would otherwise go, and the one outside the capillary would pull the other lower than it would normally float. It moves lower because it is displacing a different amount of water outside of that column than in it. If it is displacing water from both at once, the height isn't going to change because it will already be at equilibrium with the volume of water that mass is displacing. Here, I reworked the animation to show something more like what would actually happen:

Ok, it took me a few minutes staring at that animation and rereading the explanation (thanks for the opportunity to practice my German) to figure out what was wrong with it. The major, and significant, difference between that animation and the video that you showed is the connection between the two floaters. They are rigidly tether together, rendering them effectively one object. That object is going to displace a volume of water with an equal mass to its own. Moving a floater from one column to another doesn't change the mass of the object. Removing the floater from the column on the left will cause the whole system to rise (as you are decreasing the mass and thus the volume of water that can be displaced) and placing it on the other column will then cause the whole thing to sink back to the same level it was at before the floater was originally removed. It will not sink below that level. The column on the right will be slightly buoyed by its attachment to the column on the left floating in the raised section of water, and the column on the left will be slightly weighed down by its attachment to the column on the left. If you were to severe the connection at its resting state, the one on the left would go float a bit higher and the one on the right would sink a bit lower. In short, this doesn't actually work the way that the animation says that it does.

I think michel is saying that the alien isn't looking at a billion-year-old Earth because Earth currently occupies "now" and something else is now located at the place and time a billion years ago that billion-year-old Earth occupied. Which, just...

I'd assume it should rise up on the outer edge, as the cup is accelerating towards the center. It's effectively the same result you'd get by sliding the cup quickly across the table and having the tea slosh backward over your hand. Am I missing something about this set up that causes a non-obvious result?