I think, regretably, I'm going to have make a conscious decision to bow out of this discussion soon simply because I'm not getting anything else done. But it's been interesting. I'll read any further replies with interest, but I may not make another of my own (and I will be forcing myself not to spend any more time thinking about the problem!).
I still feel that, somehow, the summed experiences of all species that will ever live simply cancel out and it all sums to nothing, leaving the argument with no actual predictive power.
If I wake up one morning to find myself in a line with 10 people ahead of me, and not able to look behind me, it might be the best assumption (if I have to pick a single number) that there are 20 people in the line. But if I know nothing about the possible length of the line, and I consider all other possible line lengths and their probabilities, I get the feeling it just all cancels out, or divides by zero, or something, and leaves me with something like "the probable length of this line is N, where N is the length of the line (but I don't know what is is)".
And that's without getting into the fact that the line analogy doesn't really work, because I wasn't just randomly planted in a line. In reality I'm actually the product of all the people and events in front of me in the line. This is my place, because (and thus) I'm in it. There was 0 probability that I'd have ended up in position 20, because that's number 20's place. I am my place in the line. I am a number. I am not a free man!
I'm not sure what you mean by that. We are product of space AND time, both future and past. The future affects the total number of ponderers.
But it can't affect the ponderings of the "lonelies," or the fact they must have existed at some time. Whether or not the population will continue to increase, there will always have been someone in each and every one of those "early" positions.
And the argument can be proposed by anyone, at any position, making it meaningless.
"Why are there only 500 people on the planet with me? We'll probably die out soon." "Why are there only 7,000,000,000 people on the planet with me? We'll probably die out soon."
And so on. The problem, again, is the "me." There's no reason to hold my reasoning above that of anyone else in any other position.
We are product of space AND time, both future and past. The future affects the total number of ponderers.
I was fairly sure it had been pretty firmly established that causality only appears to work in one direction, although I believe it's still something of an open question as to why this should be.
That's the point! There's nothing notable about us, either.
Incorrect. We appear to be "early" and "lonely", i.e. at an unusual position (if we assume our future and/or the universe is highly populated.)
There's nothing unusual about us. The position may be "unusual," but some species must be in that position. Some member of that species will wonder why, and have discussions on their version of Slashdot where someone else will come along and point out that there's nothing unusual about it, and that someone must be in that position...
Imagine 999,999 blue hats and one white hat being distributed among a million people. The guy who gets the white hat might consider himself "lucky" but he has no reason to assume he was anything other than that. He has no reason to posit that the distribution was rigged to ensure he got a white hat.
It's just that Occam's Razor says it's more likely that something limits the future population of ponderers rather than we HAPPEN to be the early birds.
No it doesn't. As I've said, we weren't sprinkled into this universe from the outside, to occupy by chance one of a finite number of species "slots". We emerged from inside the universe at whatever position in the list of intelligent species we are at. We couldn't "happen to be" first or last or in the middle or anywhere other than where we are.
If you shuffle a deck of cards, and you find the previously-unspecified Jack of Spades in the first 5 cards, you don't start looking for esoteric explanations for this fact because it's obviously just random chance. There was nothing special about the Jack of Spades before the cards were shuffled (no-one marked it for special notice) and there was/is nothing special about the human race before we came into being at the specific time and place that we did.
Run a bunch of little simulations of different scenarios and you will eventually agree with me.
What could a simulation possibly show me? I could label up a bunch of species - human, klingon, vulcan, romulan, ferengi, and so on - shuffle them up and... what? The humans will only come out first a small percentage of the time. But so what? What's special about humans that I should only be looking at where they end up?
We could play a game where I give you one thousand white marbles and one black marble. Your job is to discard a number of white marbles, then show the remaining marbles to me one at a time. If you show me a black marble within the first three marbles, then I could reasonably assume, with a high (but not definite) probability, that you had discarded most of the white marbles. The trouble with applying this to species and universes, however, is that there is no black marble.
You might as well stand in a field and fret over why one particular blade of grass is here and not there.
But we've never actually seen a bear, so it might as well be a mutant chicken.
Presumably we've never seen this "mutatnt chicken" thing either. So why don't we just call whatever we find a bear, since it will probably have the properties we're expecting (makes bear tracks, leaves bear poop);.
The best proof we have for it so far is that if it isn't there the model [which we have created based on our observations of the universe] we use doesn't work.
The average ponderer will NOT be at the edges of the curve.
No, but the ponderer at the edge the curve MUST be at the edge of the curve, otherwise he wouldn't be pondering what he's pondering. It's a circular - and therefore not very useful - definition.
True, but it's UNLIKELY that "someone" is us
It's as likely to be us as it is to be anyone else.
No, because most likely "that card" has nothing notable about it.
That's the point! There's nothing notable about us, either.
We're here, now. It's a fait accompli. Wondering how unlikely it is gets you nowhere. It was literally bound to happen to someone, no matter what the future distribution of species (about which we don't and can't have any information). It couldn't not happen.
We can't. "We" are on the wrong side of the problem to do so, just as the hypothetical individual in the doomsday argument is.
In the doomsday argument, that person says to themselves, "I was born in the 1st/5th/21st* century. But if the human race is going to survive billions of years, that's too unlikely - I'd be more likely to be born later. It's more likely that the human race will die out soon." This is rubbish because the person in question is inextricably a product of the very time they were born in, and they are not special. "They" could not be born in the 40th Century, because then "they" would not be "them" at all. It's also nonsense because every single other person of the billions upon billions who has previously or might eventually exist could make exactly the same statement (*), which in a way cancels it all out to nothing.
1. We are "special" (among the very first)
But there is nothing "special" about being among the first intelligent species. Someone has to be. That argument is like shuffling a deck of cards, pulling out a card and saying "Wow! What are the chances of me picking that card? Amazing!"
Whether there will eventually be a billion intelligent species in the galaxy or only two, or just one, we are still here, now, looking up at the sky and wondering why it's so empty. Because that's who "we" are. "We" are the species who lived on this planet, at this time. We didn't get "dropped" in here by chance from outside. And even if we had, and we'd ended up someone more "average," whoever ended up in our "place" would be having the same thoughts.
2. We are roughly average in time and something about the future limits the population of intelligent beings (or at least self-pondering individuals).
This would apply whether we had no neighbours (as appears to be the case), ten neighbours, or thousands of neighbours. No matter how many alien species you could see around you, you could always ask "why aren't there more than this right now?" and then come to the erroneous conclusion that something in the future must limit it. So your precondition effectively eradicates itself and all you're left with is "Something about the future limits the population of intelligent beings" as a statement independent of all data, which is as meaningless as declaring that "In the future, all pants will be green."
Or, alternatively, understand that you're effectively saying we're lonely now because of something that happens in the future, and consider what's wrong with that.
Yes, I am aware that I ramble. This is my mental workout.
We're not so early that we wouldn't expect a lot of other civilizations. Something on the order of 1 out of every 13 civilizations should've been born by now, in theory.
it's unlikely that we are the earliest or latest: the chance of being on the edges of the bell curve is low (or even a roughly rectangular curve). We are more likely to be approximately in the middle.
If the future were about humans spreading and populating the universe, we'd more likely be one of those mass spreaders (as a randomly selected intelligent being in space and time). We are not. (Hell, we may not even survive ourselves, let alone aliens.)
That sounds similar to the oft-debated but clearly ridiculous doomsday argument.
Why would we be first when we're more likely to be in the middle? If we're first, we're first because we're first. Somebody had to be. If it wasn't us, we'd be in the middle not wondering about it because we'd be surrounded by neighbours, and the Glarxians would have been the ones looking up in the sky endlessly discussing the Tff'Plaxon paradox instead.
Slashdot Mirror
And you spend all your spare time and spend all your spare money on feeding the homeless, I assume?
I think, regretably, I'm going to have make a conscious decision to bow out of this discussion soon simply because I'm not getting anything else done. But it's been interesting. I'll read any further replies with interest, but I may not make another of my own (and I will be forcing myself not to spend any more time thinking about the problem!).
I still feel that, somehow, the summed experiences of all species that will ever live simply cancel out and it all sums to nothing, leaving the argument with no actual predictive power.
If I wake up one morning to find myself in a line with 10 people ahead of me, and not able to look behind me, it might be the best assumption (if I have to pick a single number) that there are 20 people in the line. But if I know nothing about the possible length of the line, and I consider all other possible line lengths and their probabilities, I get the feeling it just all cancels out, or divides by zero, or something, and leaves me with something like "the probable length of this line is N, where N is the length of the line (but I don't know what is is)".
And that's without getting into the fact that the line analogy doesn't really work, because I wasn't just randomly planted in a line. In reality I'm actually the product of all the people and events in front of me in the line. This is my place, because (and thus) I'm in it. There was 0 probability that I'd have ended up in position 20, because that's number 20's place. I am my place in the line. I am a number. I am not a free man!
Lots of little coffins.
Oh, no, that's just sad. And a bit creepy.
I misread before, please ignore previous comment.
I'm not sure what you mean by that. We are product of space AND time, both future and past. The future affects the total number of ponderers.
But it can't affect the ponderings of the "lonelies," or the fact they must have existed at some time. Whether or not the population will continue to increase, there will always have been someone in each and every one of those "early" positions.
And the argument can be proposed by anyone, at any position, making it meaningless.
"Why are there only 500 people on the planet with me? We'll probably die out soon."
"Why are there only 7,000,000,000 people on the planet with me? We'll probably die out soon."
And so on. The problem, again, is the "me." There's no reason to hold my reasoning above that of anyone else in any other position.
We are product of space AND time, both future and past. The future affects the total number of ponderers.
I was fairly sure it had been pretty firmly established that causality only appears to work in one direction, although I believe it's still something of an open question as to why this should be.
Well that's silly. If we nail the lid shut we won't be able to put anything else in there.
That's the point! There's nothing notable about us, either.
Incorrect. We appear to be "early" and "lonely", i.e. at an unusual position (if we assume our future and/or the universe is highly populated.)
There's nothing unusual about us. The position may be "unusual," but some species must be in that position. Some member of that species will wonder why, and have discussions on their version of Slashdot where someone else will come along and point out that there's nothing unusual about it, and that someone must be in that position...
Imagine 999,999 blue hats and one white hat being distributed among a million people. The guy who gets the white hat might consider himself "lucky" but he has no reason to assume he was anything other than that. He has no reason to posit that the distribution was rigged to ensure he got a white hat.
It's just that Occam's Razor says it's more likely that something limits the future population of ponderers rather than we HAPPEN to be the early birds.
No it doesn't. As I've said, we weren't sprinkled into this universe from the outside, to occupy by chance one of a finite number of species "slots". We emerged from inside the universe at whatever position in the list of intelligent species we are at. We couldn't "happen to be" first or last or in the middle or anywhere other than where we are.
If you shuffle a deck of cards, and you find the previously-unspecified Jack of Spades in the first 5 cards, you don't start looking for esoteric explanations for this fact because it's obviously just random chance. There was nothing special about the Jack of Spades before the cards were shuffled (no-one marked it for special notice) and there was/is nothing special about the human race before we came into being at the specific time and place that we did.
Run a bunch of little simulations of different scenarios and you will eventually agree with me.
What could a simulation possibly show me? I could label up a bunch of species - human, klingon, vulcan, romulan, ferengi, and so on - shuffle them up and... what? The humans will only come out first a small percentage of the time. But so what? What's special about humans that I should only be looking at where they end up?
We could play a game where I give you one thousand white marbles and one black marble. Your job is to discard a number of white marbles, then show the remaining marbles to me one at a time. If you show me a black marble within the first three marbles, then I could reasonably assume, with a high (but not definite) probability, that you had discarded most of the white marbles. The trouble with applying this to species and universes, however, is that there is no black marble.
You might as well stand in a field and fret over why one particular blade of grass is here and not there.
Minutes are a measure of time. They'll have to move the HQ into the past or future.
the planet is disintegrating under the star's gravitational pressure
I'm guessing that's not the actual scientific term for whatever's happening to it. So what is? Is it a tidal forces thing?
But we've never actually seen a bear, so it might as well be a mutant chicken.
Presumably we've never seen this "mutatnt chicken" thing either. So why don't we just call whatever we find a bear, since it will probably have the properties we're expecting (makes bear tracks, leaves bear poop);.
Because the defining characteristic of science is that you test your crazy ideas and figure out which ones might be true.
By rejecting the ones that can't be true.
And that's exactly what's happened. One of dark matter's competitors has been tested and is now in the "can't be true" box.
Yeah, I think that's pretty much what I said ;)
New Hubble Release Puts Another Nail In the Coffin of Dark Matter's Competitors
Well that's a gloomy spin on it. What about "New Hubble data advances scientific understanding of the universe. Go science!"?
The best proof we have for it so far is that if it isn't there the model [which we have created based on our observations of the universe] we use doesn't work.
So... that'd be like... science, then?
The average ponderer will NOT be at the edges of the curve.
No, but the ponderer at the edge the curve MUST be at the edge of the curve, otherwise he wouldn't be pondering what he's pondering. It's a circular - and therefore not very useful - definition.
True, but it's UNLIKELY that "someone" is us
It's as likely to be us as it is to be anyone else.
No, because most likely "that card" has nothing notable about it.
That's the point! There's nothing notable about us, either.
We're here, now. It's a fait accompli. Wondering how unlikely it is gets you nowhere. It was literally bound to happen to someone, no matter what the future distribution of species (about which we don't and can't have any information). It couldn't not happen.
Well, apply Occam's Razor:
We can't. "We" are on the wrong side of the problem to do so, just as the hypothetical individual in the doomsday argument is.
In the doomsday argument, that person says to themselves, "I was born in the 1st/5th/21st* century. But if the human race is going to survive billions of years, that's too unlikely - I'd be more likely to be born later. It's more likely that the human race will die out soon." This is rubbish because the person in question is inextricably a product of the very time they were born in, and they are not special. "They" could not be born in the 40th Century, because then "they" would not be "them" at all. It's also nonsense because every single other person of the billions upon billions who has previously or might eventually exist could make exactly the same statement (*), which in a way cancels it all out to nothing.
1. We are "special" (among the very first)
But there is nothing "special" about being among the first intelligent species. Someone has to be. That argument is like shuffling a deck of cards, pulling out a card and saying "Wow! What are the chances of me picking that card? Amazing!"
Whether there will eventually be a billion intelligent species in the galaxy or only two, or just one, we are still here, now, looking up at the sky and wondering why it's so empty. Because that's who "we" are. "We" are the species who lived on this planet, at this time. We didn't get "dropped" in here by chance from outside. And even if we had, and we'd ended up someone more "average," whoever ended up in our "place" would be having the same thoughts.
2. We are roughly average in time and something about the future limits the population of intelligent beings (or at least self-pondering individuals).
This would apply whether we had no neighbours (as appears to be the case), ten neighbours, or thousands of neighbours. No matter how many alien species you could see around you, you could always ask "why aren't there more than this right now?" and then come to the erroneous conclusion that something in the future must limit it. So your precondition effectively eradicates itself and all you're left with is "Something about the future limits the population of intelligent beings" as a statement independent of all data, which is as meaningless as declaring that "In the future, all pants will be green."
Or, alternatively, understand that you're effectively saying we're lonely now because of something that happens in the future, and consider what's wrong with that.
Yes, I am aware that I ramble. This is my mental workout.
But there's also the remaining 61% of hilarious clumsy quadruped videos still to be made.
We're not so early that we wouldn't expect a lot of other civilizations. Something on the order of 1 out of every 13 civilizations should've been born by now, in theory.
So maybe there will only ever be 13.
it's unlikely that we are the earliest or latest: the chance of being on the edges of the bell curve is low (or even a roughly rectangular curve). We are more likely to be approximately in the middle.
If the future were about humans spreading and populating the universe, we'd more likely be one of those mass spreaders (as a randomly selected intelligent being in space and time). We are not. (Hell, we may not even survive ourselves, let alone aliens.)
That sounds similar to the oft-debated but clearly ridiculous doomsday argument.
Why would we be first when we're more likely to be in the middle? If we're first, we're first because we're first. Somebody had to be. If it wasn't us, we'd be in the middle not wondering about it because we'd be surrounded by neighbours, and the Glarxians would have been the ones looking up in the sky endlessly discussing the Tff'Plaxon paradox instead.
I mean, you can simulate the observable, macro-scale behavior of the sun without actually figuring out the position of every quark inside it.
So right now, "up there," there's a conversation going something along these lines...
"Dammit, my universe is running slow."
"Lemme look. Ah, there's your problem - it's the Dutch, poking particles again."
We're lucky we don't get rebooted when we fire up the LHC.
Or maybe we do...
That's Mr. Pal to you. Now get back on that time machine and act!
You missed out the best bit:
"Seven and a half..."
"What, not til next week?"
"...million years."
Anything is possible.
So it's impossible for anything to be impossible?
0x07.
Intel is planning to integrate this new OpenSWR project with Mesa to deploy it on the Linux desktop
What hardware do I need?
* Any x86 processor with at least AVX (introduced in the Intel
SandyBridge and AMD Bulldozer microarchitectures in 2011) will
work.
* You don't need a fire-breathing Xeon machine to work on SWR - we do
day-to-day development with laptops and desktop CPUs.
TL:DR; it's for whoever wants to use it on whatever hardware they want to use.