Some of the other responses have been more eloquent, and refer to established philosophies/systems of though, but after burning my brain for a few years on such matters, I basically came to the conclusion that it wasn't worth worrying about.
If I really can't tell whether my reality is a "deception" or not, then it's a completely useless behavior to treat reality like a deception. As long as it looks/feels/tastes/sounds/smells like reality to me, I'll treat it as reality.
Now if I start discovering things that don't match my expections of what I think is reality, like stage lights falling from the sky (without a plane in sight), discovering a ceiling when I climb a mountain, completely unexpected "adjustments" of physical things ala the Matrix, etc., then I'll have to reevaluate my perception of reality taking those new observations into account. Of course, in most cases, applying Occams' Razor to the situation would probably just lead me to the conclusion that I was going insane:-).
So far, as long as I don't expect too much out of reality (like expecting that a Divine Being will make me incredibly rich or smite my enemies if I pray & believe strongly enough), my expectations of reality have been admirably fulfilled.
All they have to do then is to go in casinoes and do spot-check on some machines; all they do is plug a special diagnostic box which looks at the firmware and calculates the MD5 checksum, then compares it with the official checksum.
Geez, what a useless check. How does the gaming commission discover if the slot machine manufacturer has programmed their diagnostics interface to spoof the checksum they gave to the commission, regardless of what the firmware actually is? Answer: they don't, unless the gaming commission is thoroughly involved with & can monitor closely the design & construction of each machine. I sure hope they have a more secure system for authenticating slot machine behavior than the inadequate system you've described.
Frankly though, I don't think the slot machine manufacturers need to or would really want to risk getting caught breaking the law by rigging their machines, since they & the casinos will make ridiculous amounts of money even following legal gaming limits, but rigged voting machines can result in potentially huge societal damage if corrupt incompetents get into power.
many astute students will realize that a more fundamental question exists: how can I recognize reality if I ever happen to encounter it?
Followed the ultimate realization of _really_ astute students: "Why am I pondering such a stupid question? What a complete waste of my time!". This thought then leading to inner peace & happiness.:P
The problem now is that many patents are overly-broad; they protect ideas, not implementations as patents originally were meant to protect.
Any system based on suppressing the activity of others will almost inevitably end up in a similar state, as the users of the system keep pushing the envelope as to what can be brought under their control.
If society wants a mechanism to encourage innovation, then it should encourage innovation directly (for example, hiring people to do the R&D that will benefit society but which is not cost-effective for private entities to finance), not use a backwards, half-assed mechanism which is designed to suppress the kind of activity that society wants to encourage.
The fundamental mechanism of the patent system is to allow a patentholder to selectively suppress the constructive activity of others. _Any_ system implemented using this kind of mechanism is going to end up suppressing the overall economic activity of society.
patent rights might motivate somebody to actually make a product we could use in a shorter time frame.
Patents are more likely to discourage somebody from making a product because they wouldn't be able to make anything without violating a half a dozen stupid patents.
At that point you should be able to determine that light only moves at 0.001c in one direction and 1.999c (relative to you) in the other, since light moves at c in an absolute frame of reference.
You are misremembering your speed-of-light concept. Light (in a vacuum) will always appear to be traveling at c, no matter what frame of reference you are using. Even if you are traveling at 0.999c, your laser beam will travel at c going forward, and c going backward (and all other directions too).
The thing that Einstein observed, and what led his theory to predict all the weird time effects, is that someone who watches YOU (the guy going at 0.999c) will STILL observe your laser beam going at c, although it will have a much different frequency coming and going (ala Doppler Shift effect).
I could see a niche for this arrangement where a company like Microsoft or maybe a hardware manufacturer provides free or cheap "embedded" PCs (where all of the equipment is completely integrated, with no expansion slots, and the OS gets booted off non-volatile memory, etc) to parts of society that wouldn't normally have access to their own PCs.
You can't arbitrarily assume a viewpoint in some higher number of dimensions, because such a viewpoint would be meaningless.
If we're talking about the potential viewpoint of a "Supreme Being", it is certainly relevant to assume that the being exists in some n-dimensional space which allows it to exhibit all of its "Supreme" qualities. To me, it seems like you keep trying to apply the physical limits that we can observe in our own universe to the theoretical "Supreme Being".
No - much of chaos theory is far more than this. It is more than just fitting data to models. It helps define the limits of knowledge.
I think you're lumping too much under the label "Chaos Theory". From Wikipedia: "In mathematics and physics, chaos theory deals with the behavior of certain nonlinear dynamical systems that (under certain conditions) exhibit the phenomenon known as chaos, most famously characterised by sensitivity to initial conditions (see butterfly effect). As a result of this sensitivity, the observed behavior of physical systems that exhibit chaos appears to be random, even though the model of the system is 'deterministic' in the sense that it is well defined and contains no random parameters."
This matches what I remember about my studies about Chaos Theory in college. If you try and attach much more meaning to this field of study, then you are entering the realms of philosophy, not physics (or metaphysics in the cases we are arguing).
I think we're about reaching the limits of this discussion - it seems to me that we have both reached some personal fundamental assumptions about this issue that we are not likely to change. It's been fun though, thanks for the discussion.
I assume you are talking about how experiments have shown that the Bell Inequality's are violated (e.g., by quantum entanglement). Haven't studied the Bell Inequality like quantum mechanics or general relativity, but from the Wikipedia entry, I saw this statement: "They [the various theories labeled under Bell Inequality] all make the same assumptions about local realism -- that a quantum-level object has a well defined state which accounts for all its measurable properties and that distant objects do not exchange information faster than the speed of light."
Since a multi-dimensional clockwork universe is not necessarily limited to exchanging information between its bits at the speed of light (since as a whole it doesn't have follow the same physical laws that we can observe in our bit of the universe), Bell's Theorem (or its negation) is irrelevant when discussing the ultimate nature of such a clockwork mechanism.
No, it is not about mathematical models. It is about the behaviour of real objects, and the lack of use of even infinite precision.
I think this view is incorrect. At its root, Chaos Theory is all about describing characteristics of systems that can be modeled only by highly-nonlinear calculations. The models may be based on what we can observe of "real" objects, but the models themselves are purely mathematical and Chaos Theory is being applied to those models, not the "real" objects. (Actually, this would be true about any set of mathematical techniques being applied to a physical model.)
The only connection Chaos Theory has with "reality" is when we take the results from applying Chaos Theory to the models & try to figure out what that would look like in our universe. Since we can only make models that fit what we can observe, and what we observe seems random, any conclusions that we reach by applying Chaos Theory to all of our physical models will have the implicit assumption that the universe is random.
There is a lot of theological thinking that implies that any supreme being is indeed going to have limitations
I said that the Supreme Being wouldn't have any of _our_ limitations, not that it wouldn't have some limitations. I think we have to assume that things which are not logically possible aren't possible by any being no matter how powerful, since if we aren't using basic logic to buttress our arguments, then trying to reach any kind of conclusion is pretty much useless.
I think you're assuming too much about quantum mechanics being a fundamental description of the ultimate nature of reality. Bear in mind that quantum mechanics is simply a "best" model-to-date that fits what we can observe from our perspective in the universe.
It is quite possible that the universe is not random at all, but from the right dimensional perspective is a completely predictable clockwork mechanism. From our perspective as an extremely limited part of the universe, however, we will _never_ be able to "see" enough of that clockwork mechanism to be able predict anything (unless we somehow figure out a way to transcend our own limited dimensionalness:-). A "Supreme Being" would have no such restriction, and would therefore be able to comprehend the entire existence of the universe, including all of its motion through some multidimensional concept of "time".
Since our models are only a reflection of what we can see and observe, our current best model is one that describes randomness, but you cannot logically conclude that the fundamental nature of the "metaverse" is random just from what we can observe.
Similarly, chaos theory is merely a field of study that says that the behaviour of certain mathematical models is beyond our ability to calculate with absolute accuracy. A "Supreme Being" would have no such limitation.
In the final analysis, of course, even if the universe IS such a clockwork mechanism, it might be impossible for us to be able to ever observe such predictability since it is impossible for us to transcend our participation in the mechanism. From our perspective, the universe will ALWAYS appear to have randomness. A truly "Supreme Being" is not going to have any of _our_ limitations, however, and might truly be able to perceive & understand the full state of the mechanism throughout its entire existence.
Dunno if there's much more to discuss - I consider myself agnostic, so talking about the potential characteristics of a Supreme Being is somewhat like discussing how pretty the color middle-C-flat smells. You can go 'round and 'round in circles, but without any solid evidence, the end result is pretty much useless and irrelevant to your everyday life.
You simply can't, even with perfect knowledge, kick of a universe like ours and be able to have any idea of how things will go.
Well, you're using a different definition of "perfect" than I am. My definition of "perfect" would include complete & utter knowledge of the entire state of the universe (including all of the relevant quantum states) throughout all of its existence, not just a "perfect" snapshot of knowledge at the creation of the universe. If there is any situation where the Supreme Being does not know what the state of the universe might be, then the Being's knowledge is by definition not "perfect" (and that being might not be quite as Supreme as we are giving it credit for:-)
Of course, as you point out, a Supreme Being who can meet the "perfect" definitions of omnipotence & omniscience runs into some logical-existence problems ala the "ultimate stone" question.
There is also the possibility that the universe really IS a clockwork mechanism-type universe in some kind of meta-dimensional space, and we _have_ to model it as based on randomness merely because we are incapable (and never will be capable) of seeing all the pieces that we would need to be able to predict things via calculation.
Quantum mechanics and chaos theory means that the universe is not 'in tune' with anything.
It is useless to try to apply quantum mechanics & chaos theory to a Supreme Being. _We_ have to use such models since we, by definition, will never have perfect knowledge of the universe. There is no such constraint on a Supreme Being.
Openoffice has an adjustment curve, it's quite steep for people who can barely use MS office.
The people who can _barely_ use MS Office have a steep learning curve no matter what software suite they're using, including MS Office itself. After watching some computer illiterates trying to learn how to use basic Microsoft Word functionality (including taking classes), I don't have any doubts that for those people, OpenOffice or MS Office will be equally hard to learn, and they wouldn't be able to see any differences in the basic functionality between the suites.
It's the people who are quite experienced at using MS Office that will experience the most pain adjusting to another software suite.
2) I pay my corporation to break in to your computer, plant a virus... I'll never see legal proceedings because I'm not liable for what the corporation did.
Corporations supposedly only provide a shield for CIVIL litigation, not for criminal. The line seems to have gotten quite fuzzy in today's legal environment, however.
Slashdot Mirror
Some of the other responses have been more eloquent, and refer to established philosophies/systems of though, but after burning my brain for a few years on such matters, I basically came to the conclusion that it wasn't worth worrying about.
:-).
If I really can't tell whether my reality is a "deception" or not, then it's a completely useless behavior to treat reality like a deception. As long as it looks/feels/tastes/sounds/smells like reality to me, I'll treat it as reality.
Now if I start discovering things that don't match my expections of what I think is reality, like stage lights falling from the sky (without a plane in sight), discovering a ceiling when I climb a mountain, completely unexpected "adjustments" of physical things ala the Matrix, etc., then I'll have to reevaluate my perception of reality taking those new observations into account. Of course, in most cases, applying Occams' Razor to the situation would probably just lead me to the conclusion that I was going insane
So far, as long as I don't expect too much out of reality (like expecting that a Divine Being will make me incredibly rich or smite my enemies if I pray & believe strongly enough), my expectations of reality have been admirably fulfilled.
Geez, what a useless check. How does the gaming commission discover if the slot machine manufacturer has programmed their diagnostics interface to spoof the checksum they gave to the commission, regardless of what the firmware actually is? Answer: they don't, unless the gaming commission is thoroughly involved with & can monitor closely the design & construction of each machine. I sure hope they have a more secure system for authenticating slot machine behavior than the inadequate system you've described.
Frankly though, I don't think the slot machine manufacturers need to or would really want to risk getting caught breaking the law by rigging their machines, since they & the casinos will make ridiculous amounts of money even following legal gaming limits, but rigged voting machines can result in potentially huge societal damage if corrupt incompetents get into power.
Anyone willing to post the home phone number of a few big spammers or telemarketing CEOs? :P
Followed the ultimate realization of _really_ astute students: "Why am I pondering such a stupid question? What a complete waste of my time!". This thought then leading to inner peace & happiness. :P
Any system based on suppressing the activity of others will almost inevitably end up in a similar state, as the users of the system keep pushing the envelope as to what can be brought under their control.
If society wants a mechanism to encourage innovation, then it should encourage innovation directly (for example, hiring people to do the R&D that will benefit society but which is not cost-effective for private entities to finance), not use a backwards, half-assed mechanism which is designed to suppress the kind of activity that society wants to encourage.
Yeah, right up to the point where some demagogue convinces them to give up their rights "for Christ". Sheep are sheep, no matter what their color.
That's why I consume so many mutagens, so that over time their files on me will no longer be any good.
I don't agree.
The fundamental mechanism of the patent system is to allow a patentholder to selectively suppress the constructive activity of others. _Any_ system implemented using this kind of mechanism is going to end up suppressing the overall economic activity of society.
Patents are more likely to discourage somebody from making a product because they wouldn't be able to make anything without violating a half a dozen stupid patents.
A threat without willingness or means to carry through is a pretty damn useless action.
It would be nice, and would set a nice historical precedent, if we could collectively figure out a way to HAVE that revolution without the guns...
That seems to be more of a problem with you than the content of the story :P
You are misremembering your speed-of-light concept. Light (in a vacuum) will always appear to be traveling at c, no matter what frame of reference you are using. Even if you are traveling at 0.999c, your laser beam will travel at c going forward, and c going backward (and all other directions too).
The thing that Einstein observed, and what led his theory to predict all the weird time effects, is that someone who watches YOU (the guy going at 0.999c) will STILL observe your laser beam going at c, although it will have a much different frequency coming and going (ala Doppler Shift effect).
How long can your wristwatch go without having to replace the battery?
Then it's not a viable product, at least as far as selling it as a product in a free market is concerned.
Isn't the Washington Times owned by the Moonies cult leader?
I could see a niche for this arrangement where a company like Microsoft or maybe a hardware manufacturer provides free or cheap "embedded" PCs (where all of the equipment is completely integrated, with no expansion slots, and the OS gets booted off non-volatile memory, etc) to parts of society that wouldn't normally have access to their own PCs.
If we're talking about the potential viewpoint of a "Supreme Being", it is certainly relevant to assume that the being exists in some n-dimensional space which allows it to exhibit all of its "Supreme" qualities. To me, it seems like you keep trying to apply the physical limits that we can observe in our own universe to the theoretical "Supreme Being".
I think you're lumping too much under the label "Chaos Theory". From Wikipedia: "In mathematics and physics, chaos theory deals with the behavior of certain nonlinear dynamical systems that (under certain conditions) exhibit the phenomenon known as chaos, most famously characterised by sensitivity to initial conditions (see butterfly effect). As a result of this sensitivity, the observed behavior of physical systems that exhibit chaos appears to be random, even though the model of the system is 'deterministic' in the sense that it is well defined and contains no random parameters."
This matches what I remember about my studies about Chaos Theory in college. If you try and attach much more meaning to this field of study, then you are entering the realms of philosophy, not physics (or metaphysics in the cases we are arguing).
I think we're about reaching the limits of this discussion - it seems to me that we have both reached some personal fundamental assumptions about this issue that we are not likely to change. It's been fun though, thanks for the discussion.
You're kidding, right? All that "pork" must be my imagination.
I assume you are talking about how experiments have shown that the Bell Inequality's are violated (e.g., by quantum entanglement). Haven't studied the Bell Inequality like quantum mechanics or general relativity, but from the Wikipedia entry, I saw this statement: "They [the various theories labeled under Bell Inequality] all make the same assumptions about local realism -- that a quantum-level object has a well defined state which accounts for all its measurable properties and that distant objects do not exchange information faster than the speed of light."
Since a multi-dimensional clockwork universe is not necessarily limited to exchanging information between its bits at the speed of light (since as a whole it doesn't have follow the same physical laws that we can observe in our bit of the universe), Bell's Theorem (or its negation) is irrelevant when discussing the ultimate nature of such a clockwork mechanism.
I think this view is incorrect. At its root, Chaos Theory is all about describing characteristics of systems that can be modeled only by highly-nonlinear calculations. The models may be based on what we can observe of "real" objects, but the models themselves are purely mathematical and Chaos Theory is being applied to those models, not the "real" objects. (Actually, this would be true about any set of mathematical techniques being applied to a physical model.)
The only connection Chaos Theory has with "reality" is when we take the results from applying Chaos Theory to the models & try to figure out what that would look like in our universe. Since we can only make models that fit what we can observe, and what we observe seems random, any conclusions that we reach by applying Chaos Theory to all of our physical models will have the implicit assumption that the universe is random.
I said that the Supreme Being wouldn't have any of _our_ limitations, not that it wouldn't have some limitations. I think we have to assume that things which are not logically possible aren't possible by any being no matter how powerful, since if we aren't using basic logic to buttress our arguments, then trying to reach any kind of conclusion is pretty much useless.
I think you're assuming too much about quantum mechanics being a fundamental description of the ultimate nature of reality. Bear in mind that quantum mechanics is simply a "best" model-to-date that fits what we can observe from our perspective in the universe.
:-). A "Supreme Being" would have no such restriction, and would therefore be able to comprehend the entire existence of the universe, including all of its motion through some multidimensional concept of "time".
It is quite possible that the universe is not random at all, but from the right dimensional perspective is a completely predictable clockwork mechanism. From our perspective as an extremely limited part of the universe, however, we will _never_ be able to "see" enough of that clockwork mechanism to be able predict anything (unless we somehow figure out a way to transcend our own limited dimensionalness
Since our models are only a reflection of what we can see and observe, our current best model is one that describes randomness, but you cannot logically conclude that the fundamental nature of the "metaverse" is random just from what we can observe.
Similarly, chaos theory is merely a field of study that says that the behaviour of certain mathematical models is beyond our ability to calculate with absolute accuracy. A "Supreme Being" would have no such limitation.
In the final analysis, of course, even if the universe IS such a clockwork mechanism, it might be impossible for us to be able to ever observe such predictability since it is impossible for us to transcend our participation in the mechanism. From our perspective, the universe will ALWAYS appear to have randomness. A truly "Supreme Being" is not going to have any of _our_ limitations, however, and might truly be able to perceive & understand the full state of the mechanism throughout its entire existence.
Dunno if there's much more to discuss - I consider myself agnostic, so talking about the potential characteristics of a Supreme Being is somewhat like discussing how pretty the color middle-C-flat smells. You can go 'round and 'round in circles, but without any solid evidence, the end result is pretty much useless and irrelevant to your everyday life.
Well, you're using a different definition of "perfect" than I am. My definition of "perfect" would include complete & utter knowledge of the entire state of the universe (including all of the relevant quantum states) throughout all of its existence, not just a "perfect" snapshot of knowledge at the creation of the universe. If there is any situation where the Supreme Being does not know what the state of the universe might be, then the Being's knowledge is by definition not "perfect" (and that being might not be quite as Supreme as we are giving it credit for :-)
Of course, as you point out, a Supreme Being who can meet the "perfect" definitions of omnipotence & omniscience runs into some logical-existence problems ala the "ultimate stone" question.
There is also the possibility that the universe really IS a clockwork mechanism-type universe in some kind of meta-dimensional space, and we _have_ to model it as based on randomness merely because we are incapable (and never will be capable) of seeing all the pieces that we would need to be able to predict things via calculation.
It is useless to try to apply quantum mechanics & chaos theory to a Supreme Being. _We_ have to use such models since we, by definition, will never have perfect knowledge of the universe. There is no such constraint on a Supreme Being.
The people who can _barely_ use MS Office have a steep learning curve no matter what software suite they're using, including MS Office itself. After watching some computer illiterates trying to learn how to use basic Microsoft Word functionality (including taking classes), I don't have any doubts that for those people, OpenOffice or MS Office will be equally hard to learn, and they wouldn't be able to see any differences in the basic functionality between the suites.
It's the people who are quite experienced at using MS Office that will experience the most pain adjusting to another software suite.
Corporations supposedly only provide a shield for CIVIL litigation, not for criminal. The line seems to have gotten quite fuzzy in today's legal environment, however.