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bascule

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Everything posted by bascule

  1. Well, you convinced me to bust out OmniGraffle and diagram the thing. Here's my version. BS is the beam splitter, DC is the down converter, and WPD is the "which path detector", which can be selectively toggled by a person at A. In this diagram, A consists of the two beams leaving the down converters plus the "which path detector." C would consist of the blue screen and the two white mirrors/prisms/whatever directing the beams onto the screen. B consists of the lasers, the beam splitter, and the down converters. Hope this helps in understanding the idea.
  2. As a firm believer in causal determinism, the (frustratingly inseperable) probabilistic nature of quantum always irked me. I had always relegated the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle to a strictly observational problem and thought of the Schrodinger Equation as an observational abstraction which provided a model for generating probabilistic distributions to account for unobservable information. I recently read a paper by Gerard 't Hooft of Utrecht University (http://www.phys.uu.nl/~thooft) entitled How Does God Play Dice? (Pre-)Determinism at the Planck Scale (PDF). There's also an accompanying presentation. He asserts an "information loss" hypothesis for non-determinism in QM which meshes quite well with my intuitive feeligs about the matter, but I'm afraid I don't fully comprehend his explanation, so I thought I'd link it here and see if anyone else was interested.
  3. http://informationweek.com/story/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=163104221 Here's Cornell's news release complete with lots of cool pictures: http://www.news.cornell.edu/stories/May05/selfrep.ws.html
  4. The problem with that diagram is the position of the down converters. Each down converter should fire one beam at A and one beam at C, such that the two beams fired in opposite directions are comprised of entangled photons. If we have DC #1 and DC #2 attached to the two output paths of the beam splitter, DC #1 fires beam W at A and beam X at C, DC #2 fires beam Y at A and beam Z at C. C redirects beams X and Z so that they cross and interfere. A can selectively flip on and off a "which path" detector for either beams W or Y, which will destroy the interference pattern observed at C when active or allow it to occur when disabled.
  5. *PLENTY* of info available on these at: http://www.googlesightseeing.com/2005/05/12/ufo
  6. Isn't this what MIRACL (a terrestrial megawatt laser) was for anyway? Perhaps the Air Force just has penis envy of the Navy
  7. That's exactly the scenario Tom Clancy described in his book Executive Orders, where a terrorist group weaponized Ebola Zaire. They placed small aerosol pumps at a variety of locations. The real secret, of course, is avoiding a quarantine for as long as possible, and there are several ways to effectively do that. If you wish to target an airport, target busses and shuttles headed towards the airport, don't attempt to deploy an aerosol pump in the middle of a crowded airport where there are security guards and cameras. Remember, Ebola has an incubation period of 2-21 days, so as long as you hit something in an undetectable manner and leave no record of doing so, it will be at least 2 days before the CDC catches on to the problem. Hit airports, subways, bus terminals, train stations, whatever major transportation thoroughfares you can think of all over the country simultaneously, and the CDC will find itself with a major, uncontainable outbreak on its hands.
  8. Or perhaps particles exhibit particle-like behavior when interacting with other particles and wave-like behavior when they're not. Consciousness really has nothing to do with it; a "which path" detector will destroy the interference pattern exhibited by the double slit experiment regardless of if there is a conscious entity there to observe it or not.
  9. I think it's fairly obvious that consciousness is nothing more than the sum of your sensory inputs plus the collective unconsciousness/a priori information we were born with. Is there really anything in your head that isn't sensory information, an extrapolation upon it, or something you were born with? The data you accumulate is used to make decisions which in turn alter which new data you accumulate, and so forth and so on. Unless you've been taken captive, you are the ultimate arbiter of what you put into your consciousness.
  10. He first stated the traditional fatalist position that a determistic universe and therefore a material and mechanistic consciousness/soul doesn't count as free will. As a compatibilist I take offense, think he's begging the question of what truly defines free will, and setting himself up for irrational Cartesian Dualism.
  11. Perhaps it merely answered everyone's questions so there was no need for further discussion
  12. What he's saying will eventually happen as consciousness and not chaos becomes the dominant force in the universe. In fact, it may happen Real Soon Now, but it sure isn't happening yet.
  13. Consciousness is a mechanistic process of the brain. This seems like a vain attempt at Cartesian Dualism, which Daniel Dennett debunks extensively in Consciousness Explained.
  14. Something like Gaia/Galaxia from Foundation, yes, but I think Asimov didn't really think through how powerful the collective conscious effect would be.
  15. Daniel Dennett described evolution as a ratchet with which we can do some very heavy lifting. Provided that an ambiogenic event is responsible for life on earth, it explains how a mechanical, blind, and purposeless system could have spat out sentient life. But where is evolution going to take us in the future? I've seen a number of articles dealing with the evolutionary stagnation of humanity from a biological standpoint, wondering in which direction humanity will evolve biologically. But I think that's such a naive view, as human evolution is increasing at an unprecedented rate, but in a societal and technological manner rather than a biological one. Animal life is, at the base level, about being an anticipater/avoider. You anticipate potential dangers and avoid them, at least long enough to have lots and lots of offspring. As our knowledge of the universe increases we are becoming increasingly better anticipater/avoiders, to the point that we have begun anticipating some rather enormous future problems that will happen billions or trillions of years in the future, such as the sun going supernova or the entire Milky Way galaxy eventually being sucked into a black hole. And while we certainly don't yet have a mechanism for avoiding these problems, we can anticipate them, at that's the first step towards fixing them. The amount of matter and energy under conscious control is going to increase exponentially, and more and more of that is going to be put towards predicting the future. Our system of knowledge is going to grow increasingly more persistent, communicatable, structured, and interconnected. As this happens, the number of this consciousness can't do will decrease exponentially. The natural limit of this process, as time approaches infinity, is for consciousness to eventually control all matter and energy (to the extent that it possibly can) and for it to transcend every barrier that nature has placed in its way (to the extent that it possibly can). We certainly can't say what those limits will or will not be given our rather puerile understanding of the universe, but simply put things that seem impossible to us today will be entirely possible for a conscious entity in such a position. Once an entity has transcended every possible barrier within its ability to do so, what really seperates it from a God?
  16. Dennett had an awesome quote: "Yes, we have a soul, but it's made of tiny robots" Of course I'm more apt to believe that our soul is the sum of the impacts we have upon the material universe, which cascade and reverberate and have a greater and greater impact upon the future the farther down the line you go (unless mitigated by a powerful event which returns all the order you have constructed throughout your lifetime to chaos) The bottom line is this: Free will is about making decisions. The decisions we make are based upon what possible outcomes we can predict happening. There's no way to avoid outcomes we can't predict, and therefore we can't decide to do something which our knowledge structure doesn't know is possible. All our decisions are based on our world view and the predicitions we make from that view. Does materialist causal determinism say that there's only one possible future, an unavoidable destiny which will happen no matter what we do? Of course it does. Can we change that future? No, it's impossible, because any decisions we make have significance upon the outcome. No matter what we do, the future will happen the way it will and it's been destined to do so since the dawn of time.
  17. One would hope that the central archive of knowledge would be extensively audited and ranked so relevant information would become increasingly connected and trusted within the structure and irrelevant, misleading, or otherwise false information would be weeded out. I think the collective consciousness is the natural outgrowth of the evolutionary process. Evolution naturally favors the better problem solvers and the end of the biological process seems to have been the production of the universal problem solver (consciousness). Since then we've been working on increasing the persistency and communicability of knowledge, and evolution of our species has continued on societally and technologically instead of biologically. The reason physics can't model the global consciousness is because it acts at such a high level. To model it would require the unification of several disparate fields: history, physics, sociology, psychology, philosophy/cognitive science, biology, etc. Once we have a persistent knowledge structure anyone can access at the speed of thought, the gaps seperating these fields will become increasingly filled in, and once they are unified and their combined effect can be seen, the global consciousness will essentially become self-aware for the first time.
  18. The laser would generate a constant stream of photons which the beam splitter seperates and the down converters split. In cases where A has a detector on for its photon streams, the photons will exhibit particle-like behavior and the interference pattern on the other side will be destroyed. In cases where A has no particle detector, the photons should effectively take "both paths" through the beam splitter simultaneously (exhibiting wave-like behavior) and the interference pattern would appear. The down converters are located at B, the midpoint between A and C. You can't move the down converters because otherwise the photons wouldn't arrive at A and C simultaneously. The whole setup is too confusing, so perhaps I should phrase the question more generically... Is it possible for A to use entanglement to "toggle" the interference pattern on and off at C's side if entangled particles emitted at B arrive at A and C simultaneously?
  19. So it seems to me that relativity of simultaneity in GR really speaks to the irrelevance of actual simultaneity as opposed to a true sense of events occuring simultaneously as the causal structure of reality, at least within GR models, is bounded by the speed of light. But the immeasurability of simultaneity aside, haven't things like quantum entanglement and the Aspect experiment shown us that through non-locality things can be causally linked which aren't bound by the speed of light? Wouldn't that paint a picture of a universal 'now' in which events are truly simultaneous throughout all frames of reference, and that the apparent effect of relative simultaneity is merely due to maximum velocity and thus propagation of events through the causal structure, in most instances, being bound to c? That's not to say that QM doesn't appear to undermine causal determinism in other ways (although I don't believe it does through any other means than incomplete understanding), but relativity of simultaneity appears to me more to be a problem of observation and not an inherent property of the universe itself... Or perhaps I'm just scared to discard the idea of "now"
  20. Well, regardless, be afraid, be very afraid...
  21. When the probability waves aren't collapsed they can interfere with each other, as evidenced by the infamous double slit experiment...
  22. 300 are dead from Marburg in Angola. And now 8 are dead in Congo from Ebola. With terrorists itching to acquire weapons of mass destruction, why aren't they racing to Angola or the Congo to collect samples of the virus for weaponization?
  23. Unless the universe is curved and therefore closed and therefore simply wraps back upon itself. But this is rather hard to visualize, which makes it counterintuitive...
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