Izzy

Merry Festivus.

...So you're saying because we can't know what's going on, we CAN predict the future?

Bro what are you talking about? I was quoting the website and rolling my eyes, not agreeing with it. See thread. I agree with you.

Hah. Check it: http://213.251.145.96/cablegate.html

Meh, not liking the government's latest stunt. Some of Wikileaks' latest stuff wasn't admirable, and yes, it may f'uck up foreign relations. However, government, had you done what you were supposed to do in the first place, Wikileaks would have nothing but positive information to post. Consider the exploitation of your cover-ups part of the consequences.

UR's point is that if we can never know everything about a system, we can never predict the future. Back in the day, determinism actually meant what it sounds like: determining the future. Which.. was shown impossible by science way back (which I've stated?). Determinism roughly translates to "lack of free will" in this thread.

Go for it.

Fssjr, and your evidence for this, aside from "lawl bro, God gave us free will!" is..?

So the Wikileaks dude is up for arrest for sex crimes? Part of me can't help but feel it's a bit of government fabrication to shut the dude up. *shrug*

By Bohr? The only book I can remember suggesting you is "Quantum Theory" by Bohm. I still haven't finished it, it isn't exactly an easy read, but it's wonderful where math is concerned. Hmm. I was just skimming through Jim Al-Khalili's "Quantum: A Guide for the Perplexed" which I read maybe three years ago for some terms. I wrote off the sum-over-histories explanation off when I first read this (not sure why). In it, the photon remains as a particle, but explores all possible paths taken simultaneously, however unlikely those paths are. Summed together, all paths cancel each other out leaving just the physical path taken by the photon. But, the way the paths cancel depends on what options are available; if both slits are open, more paths are available and the cancellation is different. The dynamical reduction theory is also briefly mentioned. It doesn't actually say what it is, only that it agrees with all current observations, but needs something further to account for the collapse in wavefunction. I'll look into that and report back after I study for the physics test tomorrow. >_>

If I knew anymore, I'd correct or affirm what you're saying, but I'm in the same boat as you. (This is either a or moment.) But it's acting exactly as I would expect. As I understand particle-wave duality (and I could be totally wrong?), a particle is a chunk of matter with a definite position, like a pen on your desk, that moves as a wave, like a surfer. If I had a board in the ocean with two slits in it for surfers to pass through, I would expect a similiar interference pattern because of the nature of waves. I don't understand why the presence of other possible routes affects the route taken. If I'm Googlemaping something, then yes, but only because I'm a conscious being able to make decisions (deterministic or not). A photon is not. Think of it like me rolling a ball down a hill. Given the bumps, differences in textures, grassier area, and so forth, there are many possible routes down. The ball takes a route, and in that trial, it is unaffected by other routes. If repeated over and over, yeah, other routes will show up in the trials and ones will become more probable than others, but the probability of this doesn't actually change where the ball is going. It's simply where we expect the ball to travel if repeated over time. This will also create some sort of pattern, perhaps not as elegant as one of a particle because it's "probability wave" isn't as cool. For points 2 and 3, *shrug* What you say makes.. sense, ish, but whether or not the world actually works like that I don't know.

But.. 1. This is speculation. There could very well be something else going on that we don't know about. And oh god no, I'm not talking Copenhagen interpretation here. 2. The multi-verse still doesn't actually explain the interference pattern. The photon is carrying out all it's probable locations in other universes, while only one is being carried out here, right? If there was an overlapping of universes, we should be able to see that more than in a single experiment. With the multi-verse, the dual-slit trick is expected to look as if we're observing the photon. 3. The multiverse also doesn't explain why the interference pattern dissapears when the photon is being 'watched'. *EDIT* Btw, one particle doesn't by itself produce an interference pattern. It's only when multiple are fired that it becomes obvious *something* is going on.

The multi-verse doesn't account for why the photon landed in a particular spot in this universe. In reductionism, no randomness is involved where the photon lands. Through predictions, we can only guess where the photon will strike according to its wavefunction. Where it actually lands is determined by its position, velocity, and the forces acting on it. Since we can't know both the position and velocity without acting on it, it logically follows that we can't accurately predict where it's going. Our uncertainty of the system doesn't change the trajectory of the photon. If we knew less about the system, the photons wavecloud (umm, word?) would grow, but the photon still went whichever way it went regardless where we think it could have gone. Instead, if we knew everything about a system, probabilistically speaking, there's only one place it can go. Meaning, that the photon (which doesn't need to know where it's going) could have only gone on place anyway. Since it can only go to one place, there aren't alternative places for it to exist, so alternative universes needn't exist. Sorry if the wording is.. a little confusing. I blame a combination of being exhausted and English not being my native language either. I would love to see the mathematical model for this. Are we just basing it off of probability? We both know randomness doesn't actually exist. Pseudorandom implies predictable, and where it's predictable probability is meaningless. I never used the term 'real'. If multiple universes exist, then they are just as 'real' as this one. However, the evidence is still lacking. (Unless I see something mathematically mind-blowing. ) Well.. particle-wave duality. I thought particles are like.. particles that just move as waves that retain particle properties?

What's the dark side of science, theology? *cough* Yeah, I fully know that my knowledge of the sciences is very limited (my chem teacher likes to call us her 'cute baby chemists' and my physics teachers likes to write problems in which chem students die ), but.. I don't see why not. Maybe not in our lifetime, and maybe not even in the lifetime of our species, planet, or galaxy, but if it's out there, it's observable, and if it's observable, we ('we' includes futuristic alien species >_>) can learn about it.

We do, all the time. However, we admit that it's mostly due to our current (lack of) knowledge of the universe, not necessarily because an answer in indeterminable. I think some day our understanding of the universe will be complete (am I just overly optimistic? ) and the gaps for "negatives" (God, free will, etc.) will disappear. We might not, at this point, be able to disprove negatives, but we can certainly eliminate places for them to hide. So, I don't actually think anything is undecideable forever, just at present.

In what way is an infinite number of universes with infinite more spawning at each infinitely small interval of time simpler than one universe? There may be more than just this universe, but I find the argument for infintiely many with all possibilities carried out weak. I feel like something that major is something we'd have some sort of evidence for by now. *shrug* It would imply free will in at least ONE universe. For simplicity's sake, say a universe with only one particle exists. This particle can either move up, down, or forward. In universe x, this particle decides to continue moving forward, which creates universe y. The particle in universe y now has the option to move up or down. It decides down, but in the universe z that spawns after this, it MUST move up, and no longer has free will. Though, thinking about it further, in universe x, the particle could have not had free will at all and simply HAD to continue moving forward. Meh.

Happy 1000th. Hmm. I recall my history teacher telling us sometime the first week of school (it has him or The Simpsons) that alcohol is why people finally decided to settle. When they discovered it, they had little reason to move around. As trade routes developed, I can imagine it being a popular substance that spread fairly quickly and well. With this distribution, it.. seems possible? From a different perspective, tolerance in substances differs so vastly among humans and animals (elephants are much bigger than mice, but need faaar less LSD to kill them), that it probably wouldn't be a stretch to say it just happened that way? I don't really know.

Hahaha. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Let%27s_trim_our_hair_in_accordance_with_the_socialist_lifestyle

And, since my first post, I have agreed with you on points A and B. But... it isn't extra, which is what I'm trying to say. It's alternative. Extra would be like optional x-ray vision. The detail isn't additional, it's just different. We have the inherent ability to experience things differently - and we do, sometimes. I definitely agree that it's interesting, and yeah, I would consider this a different "perspective", but nothing is filtered out and we're not picking up on anything that we wouldn't have sober. We may pay more attention to details because now we're hunting for them, but that doesn't really count. So, if you're saying only that drugs can offer another perspective, I agree.

Well, true, but I think DXM is more than a dissociative. It has those properties, sure, but OEVs and CEVs *are* hallucinations and it also has some of the audiovisual properties I've described. Hence, dissociative hallucinogen. But yeah, no shrooms or LSD. I'll probably never do DMT because it scares the s'hit out of me. (Not the drug itself. It's just so hard to ensure purity, and a slight f'uck up in the procedure could keel you. It's what most kitchen chemists start with (lol), and I don't want to be on the receiving end of some noob's creation.) Though, these are almost exclusively audiovisual, so why are we confining the discussion to them? "As richly as possible" is totally an opinion, though. I find life, as it is normally, much more detailed with myself able to think much more clearly (unless we're getting into amphetamines). The appeal of psychadelics comes from that being brought to an end and the world becoming a trippy mess where everything seems to defy the laws of physics and nothing makes sense. So, yeah, I totally agree that the material for this is there to begin with. I disagree on restriction. You're still not restricted. You could be experiencing the world like this right now if you wanted, but you're choosing not to (I assume, lol). Unless I'm still totally missing your point? I'm not entirely certain what you mean.

Heh, I agree, I'm not happy about it. It made me realize what the difference between existentialism and nihilism is to me. In nihilism, nothing matters because there's no point, but we go on living because of the meaning we create for ourselves, like having fun. In existentialism, nothing matters because we can't even control ourselves: we're merely victims of circumstance. The latter sucks infinitely more, but meh, we can't exactly do anything. All that the uncertainty principle states is that we can't know everything about a system without disturbing it. This says nothing about the system itself. So yes, determinism in the sense that we can know everything and predict the future was shown impossible by science a quarter of a century ago, but I took determinism to mean "lack of free will" in this thread. But nothing we know about suggests that anything within this universe transcends the laws of physics. Newtonian physics is eugh at best (especially for non-macro particles), and quantum theory is incomplete and not very well understood, but the way particles behave are bound by *some* rules whether we know them or not. If this is true, and it HAS to be otherwise no models of our universe would hold up outside of specific examples, then everything must behave a certain way, and how it behaves (read: moves) is determined by the current state of the world. Every atom only has a certain amount of allowable energy and a specific region where it can move. Well, it isn't a conscious entity, how can it "decide" where to go? Simply: it doesn't, and is moved somewhere by the influence of whatever is acting on it. Since the outside force moved it there, it can't have moved anywhere else. And if this holds true for our brains, *shrug* there is no room for free will. The brain is made up of the same material (well, at a very very micro level ) as the rest of your body and the rest of the world. I agree that consciousness is special (or at least seems so), but that isn't enough to assume it behaves differently.

Well, on that point, again, I must disagree. Bleh, I don't want to sound like a druggie (silly negative connotations, society, I thank you ), but I don't know how to speak from anything aside from personal experience. From what I've been able to ascertain, there is no truth in any of the amazing revelations I've had while high. I have not divided by zero and I have not seen the universe from the outside as much as I feel I have. I don't think people are any more open-minded on drugs than while not on them, they're just more comfortable. I think that stems from anxiety, which is limiting, but arguably more psychological than a physical limitation. Yeah, on drugs we think differently, but that's also because our brain is forced to respond to entirely different stimuli. This is not because we were restricted in the first place, again, we were always fully capable, but because we weren't in an environment that asked for that sort of thinking. So.. I mean.. The mindset is phenomenal, eugh this is hard to phrase. We only *think* we're restricted. Drugs only *seem* eye-opening. If we were given the same tasks sober, I don't doubt that we would respond much the same way. Hmm. This can be shown empirically through a very simple experiment, actually. Give two different groups of people a set of problems and monitor how they solve them.

Just because indeterminism is more appealing doesn't make it true. *shrug* We cannot control how the atoms in our arms decide to move, bond, or grow. Otherwise, we could simply wish away cancer. Why should we believe our brains behave differently if they're bound by the same physical laws?