They are orthogonal variables (ie: dimensions) where space and time are specific examples of what those dimensions could be, but the function isn't dependent on them. The function is abstract, so you can pick any two orthogonal variables.
Both systems would have "known knowns" and "known unknowns", but only the real system would have the "unknown unknowns".
That is absolutely correct, which means you need a reliable way to generate new theory that cannot be extrapolated from existing theory, since anything implicitly true in existing theory (but not explicitly known) will be in the simulation.
I don't care how someone breaks the experiment (or proves it can't be) because doing either would require some sort of discovery about physics and/or reality and/or the process of discovery itself. Whichever anyone does is a win.
That is perfectly true. Ignoring actual hardware failures, there may well be some properties which are inherent in the nature of the system even though they are not present in the simulation that can be observed in some manner. That's what I'm hoping, since that logic isn't platform-dependent and should be usable in the real world to expose aspects of the underlying physics of the universe that currently fall into the realms of theoretical/philosophical as they are not subject to direct experimentation.
That's a fascinating approach. If communication was at fixed time intervals of, say, an hour, or via the external observer, it would be hard to identify who was running slower. However, it is certainly an interesting tactic and not one I'd thought of. Worth playing around with to see if there's a guaranteed way to benchmark the realities.
Classical QM relies on the assumption of particle exchanges being the fundamental unit of activity, which would require (1) to be true for something, since trying to split something would require a particle exchange of something smaller. If nothing smaller exists, no particles exist to be exchanged and you cannot perform an action if you can't exchange particles. I don't like Classical QM.
(3) is the one I'm most interested in. My thought is that you can split matter/energy (including photons, gravitons, electrons, etc) until all you are left with is mathematical systems that can be fused to form particles. There's some evidence that you CAN split properties of electrons into distinct systems that move independently, where those systems are not true particles. But if they're not particles, what are they? If I am correct that they are split into mathematical systems and not physical ones, is it possible to fuse mathematical systems to form other fundamental particles?
Some do, some don't, some probably pour mayonnaise over their student's term papers. I tend to lean towards the rather extreme model of everything being divisible until you reach pure mathematics with no physical form whatsoever, which is a perfectly legitimate model in QM. Mainstream interpretation tends to draw the line a little earlier than that - the Standard Model talks of particle exchanges between fields, for example, but the Standard Model is not the only model that can be considered "mainstream" and there is a lot of ground between truly indivisible particles+fields and truly indivisible sets of equations.
It would need to be high enough that a trivial experiment performed in both would produce the same result AND that the simulated biology would operate successfully (if the simulated brain doesn't form memories in mechanistically the same way as the real brain, the simulation isn't precise enough). However, that is as precise as you would want it.
(If the universe is non-computable OR is continuous, then you can't build the simulation better than that anyway.)
Since we're already at the point where QM is in the realms of philosophy and outside experimental science, you can assume that you know physics to a higher degree than is simulated but that not all of that physics will render an experiment you can directly perform. The key word here is "directly". If you can devise an experiment which allows you to test philosophical aspects of QM by some form of inferential method, then that would indeed tell you which results are "wrong" and therefore which is real. This would be a wonderful result, since once you know how to do this in this thought experiment, you can apply it to the real world itself and perform experiments to test areas of QM that cannot currently be studied at all.
If, however, it can be proven that NO experiment could exist to tell who was real and who wasn't, then all models of QM above what can be experimentally modeled are equally valid. You can pick whatever model works easiest for whatever you're trying to do, they'll produce identical results.
Yes, the real and simulated people both know that one is real and one is simulated. It's basically the Turing Test at the level of physics rather than at the level of intelligence. You know that the simulated person is in a computer and you know Turing's rules on what computers can do, which means that if the real universe is non-computable in any respect whatsoever, then you can conclusively show that the simulation and reality diverge -and- you can falsify the computable universe model all at the same time. However, if the universe IS computable, then tests for computability will produce the same result in each.
True, we don't have that kind of knowledge at present, but that's what makes this thought experiment so great - any series of tests that can linearly separate enough of the different models of reality to identify what is real and what isn't in this experiment can be extended to rigorously and experimentally analyze ANY branch of hard or soft science in which traditional forms of experiments are useless. If you can solve this puzzle, you can infer what knowledge is needed and how to obtain it.
What I'm saying is that we've no good definition of "subjective" or "objective" reality if there is no means for an observer within the system to distinguish one from the other and is forced to arbitrarily label things.
In the experiment, there are three observers - one internal to one system, one internal to a second system, and one that is external to both. An external observer is capable of objective analysis (which is necessary as otherwise the experiment reduces to which copy of the person is the better debater and that's not the objective), but it is unproven as to whether those constrained to their own local systems are.
If there exists a test that can distinguish the two systems, then "objectivity lite" is real and it will be possible to extend that test to objectively classify any system relative to any other system. Those aspects of QM which move out of experimental science and into philosophical science could - in principle - be systematically analyzed without needing to perform direct observations, for example. That's useful.
If there exists a test that can identify which system is a simulation of which, then "objectivity full" is real and it will be possible to extend that test to objectively classify any system in absolute terms.
What you describe as "subjective truth" is more along the lines of "consensual reality", since subjective truths needn't be agreed upon if every person approaches something from a different point of view with no common denominator. Subjective truths are only "consensual reality" when a common denominator exists.
What you're describing would indeed be circular reasoning, but it's a bit cleverer than that.
1. Such a simulation is only indistinguishable if the universe is computable, by definition since the simulation is performed by a computer. Ergo, if the real universe is non-computable, real theory must also be non-computable and therefore the theory in this universe will NOT work in the simulated universe. However, obviously since computers do exist in the real universe, anything that works in the simulated universe will ALSO work in this one. There will therefore be a asymmetry.
2. Such a simulation is only indistinguishable if the universe is quantized on all metrics. Ergo, if the real universe has at least one true continuum, a chaotic system in the real universe will not behave the same as a chaotic system in the simulation, since they're sensitive to initial conditions and you can't represent infinite gradations in a computer with finite representation.
These are unsolved problems in physics. Nobody currently knows if the universe is computable or quantized. Since we don't know what to expect, we don't know how to build an experiment that could perform the test. (If we did know how to build such an experiment, we'd already know the answers.) As such, these two are not helpful in producing a theoretical test but ARE helpful in showing that in certain QM models that such experiments must exist.
Agreed, but it goes a little further. If there exists no test to determine what is real, then your conclusion is absolutely correct.
If, however, there DOES exist a test that allows you to determine if something is real, then you can use that as a starting point from which to derive a more generic test of "realness" that would work between the physical world and the senses, or between any other two candidates for reality.
I'm ok with either possibility, though like I said, I think the first is the more likely. Merely thinking it, though, seems a bit silly if it is possible to logically deduce which must actually be true.
The "correct" strategy would seem to be to combine methods - have one of the fair queueing algorithms (eg: Hierarchical Fair Service Curve) and have a packet-dropping scheme on each queue. That's great for TCP, but UDP takes space too. Fortunately, there are algorithms designed for multimedia traffic (GREEN, BLACK, PURPLE and WHITE) and I'm guessing at least one of these can take care of the UDP side of things.
I would not get too hung up on RED or variants (eg: GRED, WRED) - although it's the most common algorithm out there, Blue and variants (eg: Stochastic Blue) generally does better. The paper was too limited in that it pitted the new algorithm against one known to have problems, rather than to do a fair comparison against several alternatives. Beating the worst of the competing packet dropping schemes (tail drop and RED) isn't a good indicator of merit, especially given the vast number of packet dropping schemes already known to beat both. If the authors didn't have time to do a fair comparison, that's fine, that happens in research, but as full an analysis as possible needs to be done at some point.
Choke points are a problem, yes, but that's what ECN was designed to deal with, back-propagating information to stop any given flow causing problems. If ECN is not fulfilling this role, then replacing ECN would seem the more obvious target.
Sailors heavily relied on the idea the world was a globe (it lets you measure distance on the open seas with no frame of reference) and it's a handy concept to have in deserts for much the same reason. By the middle ages (and even by the Classical era), a lot of art referenced a globe and that means even those with no direct experience or use for a globe would be aware of it by popular cultural reference.
I am not convinced that the particles regarded as fundamental actually are. I'm not even completely convinced that "particles" at that level even exist in the normal sense, since we know interference patterns exist when the gap is in time rather than in space. That makes no logical sense when using a corpuscular model.
It is my suspicion (IANAQMPBTIBO) that in precisely the same way that matter is merely energy that has "condensed" and entangled, particles are merely waves that have "condensed" and entangled. This is based on the fact that fundamental particles of the same type are totally interchangeable and no two particles of the same type are in the same state. To me, that does not appear distinguishable from saying that a single wave appears to be every particle of that type, since that would give you what is observed without having to have any new or excessively complex physics to explain it.
If that is correct, then neither space nor time are particularly important in QM. Which has been theorized by better minds than mine. You would be able to map everything into waveforms and not need spacetime for them to exist in. Rather, spacetime would be one way an observer could interpret those waveforms - it would be subjective, not objective. The waves themselves would be the only "reality". Again, there's a branch of QM based on just such a notion.
To answer your question as to what is "vibrating", in this line of thought there wouldn't be anything TO vibrate, per-se, no time for it to be vibrate in and no space in which the vibrations could take place. You'd simply have a multidimensional waveform where if you made some axis space and another one time, you could treat it as though something was vibrating. In practice, though, it would be a static n-dimensional waveform whose existence was logical rather than physical.
I like this particular branch of QM, as it means physics is a branch of mathematics, a specific group with specific properties and specific operations, and that the universe is a specific set of functions that wholly reside in that group. It makes maths the "ultimate" reality, which means these sorts of philosophical musings about the world can be answered through mathematical analysis (although maths permits that answer to be rigorously undefined).
Try this as a thought experiment. Imagine your brain and your DNA scanned into a computer. This is used to generate a simulated you. This simulated you is placed in a simulated room in which all the known laws of physics are simulated to a high degree of precision.
You are placed in an identical, but real, room. The two rooms are connected via a terminal (or, in the copy's case, a simulated terminal).
You and the simulated you can ask for any scientific equipment that can fit into the room. Both of you can conduct whatever experiments you like. The only requirement is a unanimous agreement between you, your copy and those running the experiment as to which of you is physical and which is virtual.
If no observation, experiment, or set of experiments, exists that can prove which is real, then you cannot prove what is "real" - there'd be nothing so unique to reality that would allow you to unquestionably establish that something belongs to reality and not to something else. If, however, you CAN through experimentation reach a unanimous verdict, then an objective reality is provable.
It is my opinion that it is the first case that would turn out to be true.
I doubt it - I'm left-leaning, a supporter of Keynes-style monetary policy and a believer in maximizing potential by using central authority to raise the baseline uniformly for everyone. These would seem to be everything RP hates and despises.
In a thousand years time, when all that data actually is lost, the 21st century will be classed as a Dark Age. That doesn't mean anything of value would actually have been lost, merely that such services now retain so much of the public knowledge that this will be a forgotten era if that knowledge ever becomes irretrievable.
Well, no it wouldn't, since there are mechanisms for transforming data and storing data in self-describing formats. The companies need change nothing on the internal side, all they'd need is an export plugin. I'm not keen on the reformation part (although I would contend that the current definition of corporations has created States within States that hold powers without obligations and that should be addressed before they go bankrupting the nation again). Regardless of that, though, the technical side of your complaint doesn't hold up as it is. There are problems with the ideas, but not the ones you give.
It's worth noting that there are Japanese companies that have remained in business for prolonged periods, with one (Kongo Gumi) remaining as an independent, operating concern continuously for over 1400 years, by shifting with the times whilst sticking with the core competencies. There's no reason why Google could not do likewise, there's nothing special about Japan that allows for wise strategy and nothing special in America which precludes it. Survival is a choice.
99% of what Paul Rand complains about is neither invasive nor tyrannical, and if anything is too inhibited to maximize the potential for good. I'm only worried about the 1% that IS tyrannical, most of which is stuff Paul Rand supports.
My father used to wager with me who would get through security unquestioned and who would be interrogated. He went on the idea that they stopped people who looked poor, disheveled or working-class (except for US security who also stopped anyone overtly foreign), whether or not they met any kind of rational criteria.
I can buy that. I can see what's happening, based on your first paragraph. I'm approaching this from trying to boost the S/N ratio by reducing noise. ie: Reducing thermal noise is relatively easy, up to a point, and you can subtract cosmic ray noise provided the density of cosmic rays with the shutter open is roughly the same as the density of cosmic rays with the shutter closed. This won't reduce noise to zero but in order to maintain the same ratio you must halve the noise if you halve the signal in order for the ratio to be constant.
Yes, 3CCD will reduce light as some will be absorbed by the prism system. You do not, however, reduce the light by 2/3rds to each CCD as the colour filter used to mask the sensor will only allow the red light through to those pixels that want to see red, etc. So you lose the other frequencies anyway. There IS some difference - if you split the light, then you're probably working with a much narrower band of frequencies than you would with a red filter. However, then you get into the argument over which gives you a cleaner, more accurate representation of colour. That would be an interesting debate to have.
I'm familiar with the advantages of collecting more light (the technique is why reflector telescopes tend to be very big) and the disadvantages (which, you're right, are not computationally solvable if your SNR is not good and can only be computationally solved up to a limit - Shannon's work on signals applies as much to optical data as any other sort).
Yes, a new kind of lens would be useful. It's possible to imagine having a number of CCD devices, each exposed to light for a long period but where there's an offset of a very tiny amount of time for each. However, you're then reducing the light AND have a lot of computational difficulty in synthesizing the frames for each tiny block of time, so that wouldn't work. Using optical interferometry to combine data from an array of small lenses (so your total light is as much as for a large lens, without any loss of depth of vision) would only work for medium-to-long distances and the complexity increase would follow a power law (since everything has to interact with everything else). In short, existing methods are good but won't solve the precise problem being dealt with here.
Lenses can probably improve in quality, but there's only so much you can do. There aren't many imperfections, the ingredients are of reasonably high purity, etc. It's not clear to me that there's much room for improvement there. To improve the mechanical side, I'm not sure the lens is the right place to look. Since the cameras aren't assembled in Clean Rooms, I'm suspecting dust, moisture and similar within the camera impact both the signal and the noise by more than the lens.
So the major variable seems to be the noise. The CCD itself will be triggered by all kinds of sources, but you can subtract some of those by looking at what the CCD records with the shutter closed over the same period of time. ADC conversion is affected by heat (since heat perturbs the signal being measured), and depending on the type of conversion being done, it can also be affected by the stability of the reference voltage (which will also be affected by temperature). Better transfer of heat away from the CCD will therefore reduce noise. I'd need to do the experiment in order to say by how much or whether it would be sufficient. (240 fps vs 24 fps is 1/10th the light so the signal, so you need 1/10th the noise for the ratio to remain unchanged. Would a temperature-controlled camera be able to achieve that kind of reduction?)
Going back to your discussion of overexposure, that one is a good deal tougher. I included a link in my last post to the response patterns of different CCDs and, yes, you're right. They're non-linear. Some are FAR worse than merely non-linear, though, the Kodak 1401e has majorly disturbed response patterns (it looks like it was on drugs) and none of the others were great. The Sony ICX 061 and Sony ICX 205 looks the least bad of a partic
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They are orthogonal variables (ie: dimensions) where space and time are specific examples of what those dimensions could be, but the function isn't dependent on them. The function is abstract, so you can pick any two orthogonal variables.
That is absolutely correct, which means you need a reliable way to generate new theory that cannot be extrapolated from existing theory, since anything implicitly true in existing theory (but not explicitly known) will be in the simulation.
I don't care how someone breaks the experiment (or proves it can't be) because doing either would require some sort of discovery about physics and/or reality and/or the process of discovery itself. Whichever anyone does is a win.
That is perfectly true. Ignoring actual hardware failures, there may well be some properties which are inherent in the nature of the system even though they are not present in the simulation that can be observed in some manner. That's what I'm hoping, since that logic isn't platform-dependent and should be usable in the real world to expose aspects of the underlying physics of the universe that currently fall into the realms of theoretical/philosophical as they are not subject to direct experimentation.
That's a fascinating approach. If communication was at fixed time intervals of, say, an hour, or via the external observer, it would be hard to identify who was running slower. However, it is certainly an interesting tactic and not one I'd thought of. Worth playing around with to see if there's a guaranteed way to benchmark the realities.
Agreed.
Classical QM relies on the assumption of particle exchanges being the fundamental unit of activity, which would require (1) to be true for something, since trying to split something would require a particle exchange of something smaller. If nothing smaller exists, no particles exist to be exchanged and you cannot perform an action if you can't exchange particles. I don't like Classical QM.
(3) is the one I'm most interested in. My thought is that you can split matter/energy (including photons, gravitons, electrons, etc) until all you are left with is mathematical systems that can be fused to form particles. There's some evidence that you CAN split properties of electrons into distinct systems that move independently, where those systems are not true particles. But if they're not particles, what are they? If I am correct that they are split into mathematical systems and not physical ones, is it possible to fuse mathematical systems to form other fundamental particles?
y=sin(x) is a great waveform that requires neither.
Some do, some don't, some probably pour mayonnaise over their student's term papers. I tend to lean towards the rather extreme model of everything being divisible until you reach pure mathematics with no physical form whatsoever, which is a perfectly legitimate model in QM. Mainstream interpretation tends to draw the line a little earlier than that - the Standard Model talks of particle exchanges between fields, for example, but the Standard Model is not the only model that can be considered "mainstream" and there is a lot of ground between truly indivisible particles+fields and truly indivisible sets of equations.
It would need to be high enough that a trivial experiment performed in both would produce the same result AND that the simulated biology would operate successfully (if the simulated brain doesn't form memories in mechanistically the same way as the real brain, the simulation isn't precise enough). However, that is as precise as you would want it.
(If the universe is non-computable OR is continuous, then you can't build the simulation better than that anyway.)
Since we're already at the point where QM is in the realms of philosophy and outside experimental science, you can assume that you know physics to a higher degree than is simulated but that not all of that physics will render an experiment you can directly perform. The key word here is "directly". If you can devise an experiment which allows you to test philosophical aspects of QM by some form of inferential method, then that would indeed tell you which results are "wrong" and therefore which is real. This would be a wonderful result, since once you know how to do this in this thought experiment, you can apply it to the real world itself and perform experiments to test areas of QM that cannot currently be studied at all.
If, however, it can be proven that NO experiment could exist to tell who was real and who wasn't, then all models of QM above what can be experimentally modeled are equally valid. You can pick whatever model works easiest for whatever you're trying to do, they'll produce identical results.
Yes, the real and simulated people both know that one is real and one is simulated. It's basically the Turing Test at the level of physics rather than at the level of intelligence. You know that the simulated person is in a computer and you know Turing's rules on what computers can do, which means that if the real universe is non-computable in any respect whatsoever, then you can conclusively show that the simulation and reality diverge -and- you can falsify the computable universe model all at the same time. However, if the universe IS computable, then tests for computability will produce the same result in each.
True, we don't have that kind of knowledge at present, but that's what makes this thought experiment so great - any series of tests that can linearly separate enough of the different models of reality to identify what is real and what isn't in this experiment can be extended to rigorously and experimentally analyze ANY branch of hard or soft science in which traditional forms of experiments are useless. If you can solve this puzzle, you can infer what knowledge is needed and how to obtain it.
What I'm saying is that we've no good definition of "subjective" or "objective" reality if there is no means for an observer within the system to distinguish one from the other and is forced to arbitrarily label things.
In the experiment, there are three observers - one internal to one system, one internal to a second system, and one that is external to both. An external observer is capable of objective analysis (which is necessary as otherwise the experiment reduces to which copy of the person is the better debater and that's not the objective), but it is unproven as to whether those constrained to their own local systems are.
If there exists a test that can distinguish the two systems, then "objectivity lite" is real and it will be possible to extend that test to objectively classify any system relative to any other system. Those aspects of QM which move out of experimental science and into philosophical science could - in principle - be systematically analyzed without needing to perform direct observations, for example. That's useful.
If there exists a test that can identify which system is a simulation of which, then "objectivity full" is real and it will be possible to extend that test to objectively classify any system in absolute terms.
What you describe as "subjective truth" is more along the lines of "consensual reality", since subjective truths needn't be agreed upon if every person approaches something from a different point of view with no common denominator. Subjective truths are only "consensual reality" when a common denominator exists.
What you're describing would indeed be circular reasoning, but it's a bit cleverer than that.
1. Such a simulation is only indistinguishable if the universe is computable, by definition since the simulation is performed by a computer. Ergo, if the real universe is non-computable, real theory must also be non-computable and therefore the theory in this universe will NOT work in the simulated universe. However, obviously since computers do exist in the real universe, anything that works in the simulated universe will ALSO work in this one. There will therefore be a asymmetry.
2. Such a simulation is only indistinguishable if the universe is quantized on all metrics. Ergo, if the real universe has at least one true continuum, a chaotic system in the real universe will not behave the same as a chaotic system in the simulation, since they're sensitive to initial conditions and you can't represent infinite gradations in a computer with finite representation.
These are unsolved problems in physics. Nobody currently knows if the universe is computable or quantized. Since we don't know what to expect, we don't know how to build an experiment that could perform the test. (If we did know how to build such an experiment, we'd already know the answers.) As such, these two are not helpful in producing a theoretical test but ARE helpful in showing that in certain QM models that such experiments must exist.
Agreed, but it goes a little further. If there exists no test to determine what is real, then your conclusion is absolutely correct.
If, however, there DOES exist a test that allows you to determine if something is real, then you can use that as a starting point from which to derive a more generic test of "realness" that would work between the physical world and the senses, or between any other two candidates for reality.
I'm ok with either possibility, though like I said, I think the first is the more likely. Merely thinking it, though, seems a bit silly if it is possible to logically deduce which must actually be true.
The "correct" strategy would seem to be to combine methods - have one of the fair queueing algorithms (eg: Hierarchical Fair Service Curve) and have a packet-dropping scheme on each queue. That's great for TCP, but UDP takes space too. Fortunately, there are algorithms designed for multimedia traffic (GREEN, BLACK, PURPLE and WHITE) and I'm guessing at least one of these can take care of the UDP side of things.
I would not get too hung up on RED or variants (eg: GRED, WRED) - although it's the most common algorithm out there, Blue and variants (eg: Stochastic Blue) generally does better. The paper was too limited in that it pitted the new algorithm against one known to have problems, rather than to do a fair comparison against several alternatives. Beating the worst of the competing packet dropping schemes (tail drop and RED) isn't a good indicator of merit, especially given the vast number of packet dropping schemes already known to beat both. If the authors didn't have time to do a fair comparison, that's fine, that happens in research, but as full an analysis as possible needs to be done at some point.
Choke points are a problem, yes, but that's what ECN was designed to deal with, back-propagating information to stop any given flow causing problems. If ECN is not fulfilling this role, then replacing ECN would seem the more obvious target.
Sailors heavily relied on the idea the world was a globe (it lets you measure distance on the open seas with no frame of reference) and it's a handy concept to have in deserts for much the same reason. By the middle ages (and even by the Classical era), a lot of art referenced a globe and that means even those with no direct experience or use for a globe would be aware of it by popular cultural reference.
I am not convinced that the particles regarded as fundamental actually are. I'm not even completely convinced that "particles" at that level even exist in the normal sense, since we know interference patterns exist when the gap is in time rather than in space. That makes no logical sense when using a corpuscular model.
It is my suspicion (IANAQMPBTIBO) that in precisely the same way that matter is merely energy that has "condensed" and entangled, particles are merely waves that have "condensed" and entangled. This is based on the fact that fundamental particles of the same type are totally interchangeable and no two particles of the same type are in the same state. To me, that does not appear distinguishable from saying that a single wave appears to be every particle of that type, since that would give you what is observed without having to have any new or excessively complex physics to explain it.
If that is correct, then neither space nor time are particularly important in QM. Which has been theorized by better minds than mine. You would be able to map everything into waveforms and not need spacetime for them to exist in. Rather, spacetime would be one way an observer could interpret those waveforms - it would be subjective, not objective. The waves themselves would be the only "reality". Again, there's a branch of QM based on just such a notion.
To answer your question as to what is "vibrating", in this line of thought there wouldn't be anything TO vibrate, per-se, no time for it to be vibrate in and no space in which the vibrations could take place. You'd simply have a multidimensional waveform where if you made some axis space and another one time, you could treat it as though something was vibrating. In practice, though, it would be a static n-dimensional waveform whose existence was logical rather than physical.
I like this particular branch of QM, as it means physics is a branch of mathematics, a specific group with specific properties and specific operations, and that the universe is a specific set of functions that wholly reside in that group. It makes maths the "ultimate" reality, which means these sorts of philosophical musings about the world can be answered through mathematical analysis (although maths permits that answer to be rigorously undefined).
Try this as a thought experiment. Imagine your brain and your DNA scanned into a computer. This is used to generate a simulated you. This simulated you is placed in a simulated room in which all the known laws of physics are simulated to a high degree of precision.
You are placed in an identical, but real, room. The two rooms are connected via a terminal (or, in the copy's case, a simulated terminal).
You and the simulated you can ask for any scientific equipment that can fit into the room. Both of you can conduct whatever experiments you like. The only requirement is a unanimous agreement between you, your copy and those running the experiment as to which of you is physical and which is virtual.
If no observation, experiment, or set of experiments, exists that can prove which is real, then you cannot prove what is "real" - there'd be nothing so unique to reality that would allow you to unquestionably establish that something belongs to reality and not to something else. If, however, you CAN through experimentation reach a unanimous verdict, then an objective reality is provable.
It is my opinion that it is the first case that would turn out to be true.
The Flat Earth debate only started in the 1800s, until then people had believed in this globe thing.
If you apply fuzzy logic, then it uniformly half-is.
I doubt it - I'm left-leaning, a supporter of Keynes-style monetary policy and a believer in maximizing potential by using central authority to raise the baseline uniformly for everyone. These would seem to be everything RP hates and despises.
In a thousand years time, when all that data actually is lost, the 21st century will be classed as a Dark Age. That doesn't mean anything of value would actually have been lost, merely that such services now retain so much of the public knowledge that this will be a forgotten era if that knowledge ever becomes irretrievable.
Well, no it wouldn't, since there are mechanisms for transforming data and storing data in self-describing formats. The companies need change nothing on the internal side, all they'd need is an export plugin. I'm not keen on the reformation part (although I would contend that the current definition of corporations has created States within States that hold powers without obligations and that should be addressed before they go bankrupting the nation again). Regardless of that, though, the technical side of your complaint doesn't hold up as it is. There are problems with the ideas, but not the ones you give.
It's worth noting that there are Japanese companies that have remained in business for prolonged periods, with one (Kongo Gumi) remaining as an independent, operating concern continuously for over 1400 years, by shifting with the times whilst sticking with the core competencies. There's no reason why Google could not do likewise, there's nothing special about Japan that allows for wise strategy and nothing special in America which precludes it. Survival is a choice.
99% of what Paul Rand complains about is neither invasive nor tyrannical, and if anything is too inhibited to maximize the potential for good. I'm only worried about the 1% that IS tyrannical, most of which is stuff Paul Rand supports.
My father used to wager with me who would get through security unquestioned and who would be interrogated. He went on the idea that they stopped people who looked poor, disheveled or working-class (except for US security who also stopped anyone overtly foreign), whether or not they met any kind of rational criteria.
I can buy that. I can see what's happening, based on your first paragraph. I'm approaching this from trying to boost the S/N ratio by reducing noise. ie: Reducing thermal noise is relatively easy, up to a point, and you can subtract cosmic ray noise provided the density of cosmic rays with the shutter open is roughly the same as the density of cosmic rays with the shutter closed. This won't reduce noise to zero but in order to maintain the same ratio you must halve the noise if you halve the signal in order for the ratio to be constant.
Yes, 3CCD will reduce light as some will be absorbed by the prism system. You do not, however, reduce the light by 2/3rds to each CCD as the colour filter used to mask the sensor will only allow the red light through to those pixels that want to see red, etc. So you lose the other frequencies anyway. There IS some difference - if you split the light, then you're probably working with a much narrower band of frequencies than you would with a red filter. However, then you get into the argument over which gives you a cleaner, more accurate representation of colour. That would be an interesting debate to have.
I'm familiar with the advantages of collecting more light (the technique is why reflector telescopes tend to be very big) and the disadvantages (which, you're right, are not computationally solvable if your SNR is not good and can only be computationally solved up to a limit - Shannon's work on signals applies as much to optical data as any other sort).
Yes, a new kind of lens would be useful. It's possible to imagine having a number of CCD devices, each exposed to light for a long period but where there's an offset of a very tiny amount of time for each. However, you're then reducing the light AND have a lot of computational difficulty in synthesizing the frames for each tiny block of time, so that wouldn't work. Using optical interferometry to combine data from an array of small lenses (so your total light is as much as for a large lens, without any loss of depth of vision) would only work for medium-to-long distances and the complexity increase would follow a power law (since everything has to interact with everything else). In short, existing methods are good but won't solve the precise problem being dealt with here.
Lenses can probably improve in quality, but there's only so much you can do. There aren't many imperfections, the ingredients are of reasonably high purity, etc. It's not clear to me that there's much room for improvement there. To improve the mechanical side, I'm not sure the lens is the right place to look. Since the cameras aren't assembled in Clean Rooms, I'm suspecting dust, moisture and similar within the camera impact both the signal and the noise by more than the lens.
So the major variable seems to be the noise. The CCD itself will be triggered by all kinds of sources, but you can subtract some of those by looking at what the CCD records with the shutter closed over the same period of time. ADC conversion is affected by heat (since heat perturbs the signal being measured), and depending on the type of conversion being done, it can also be affected by the stability of the reference voltage (which will also be affected by temperature). Better transfer of heat away from the CCD will therefore reduce noise. I'd need to do the experiment in order to say by how much or whether it would be sufficient. (240 fps vs 24 fps is 1/10th the light so the signal, so you need 1/10th the noise for the ratio to remain unchanged. Would a temperature-controlled camera be able to achieve that kind of reduction?)
Going back to your discussion of overexposure, that one is a good deal tougher. I included a link in my last post to the response patterns of different CCDs and, yes, you're right. They're non-linear. Some are FAR worse than merely non-linear, though, the Kodak 1401e has majorly disturbed response patterns (it looks like it was on drugs) and none of the others were great. The Sony ICX 061 and Sony ICX 205 looks the least bad of a partic
They can check out any time they want, though.