Comments

  • Temporality in Infinite Time
    would such a progression of linear time to a conscious being allow them to understand its infinite nature though not being able experience infinity itself due to their limited timespaninvicta

    What are your criteria for understanding in this case? You have experienced living for N number of years. Can you understand the duration of N+1 years despite not having personally experienced it? You have seen a limited number of things in your life. Would this fact be an obstacle to you understanding some thing - a rock, a tree - that you have never seen and may never see?

    You will impatiently respond with "yes, of course!" to these questions and then tell me that your question is different because infinity, etc. But this is why it is crucial to first understand - and be able to explain - what it is that you are asking. In philosophy this is the most - and often the only - important thing.

    So, what sort of "understanding" are you after? What would satisfy you that you "understand" infinite time?
  • What is a good definition of libertarian free will?
    In a paper I wrote on the topicPierre-Normand

    I would be interested in reading it - it sounds like an interesting take. I lean towards compatibilism, but I am sympathetic to some libertarian perspectives, particularly agent-causal.
  • Dilemma
    I see this as a Sartrean-type dilemma where the ethical thing to do is to simply choose and take responsibility for our choice rather than try to justify it by any particular theory that would abstract us away from such responsibility and in any case could provide nothing more than arbitrary grounds for judgement when considered meta-ethically.Baden

    :up:

    This highlights how we all choose selfishly every day based on proximity rather than ethics.Baden

    The only thing I disagree with is this opposition of "selfish" vs. "ethical." If you do as you say above - choose responsibly - that means you do what you think is the right thing to do (why else would you choose that course of action?) And that, by definition, is the ethical thing to do, theory or no theory. I don't see what selfishness has to do with that.

    Hiya Paul!
  • The Past Hypothesis: Why did the universe start in a low-entropy state?
    The problem with putting initial conditions off limits is that virtually everything we observe in the universe is dependant on initial conditions.Count Timothy von Icarus

    If that is how the theory is structured, yes. But that's a feature, not a bug. You could alternatively explain initial conditions in terms of later features - that is essentially what anthropic explanations do.

    That is, of the set of all physically possible things we could see, we shouldn't expect to see one universe more than the other. Thus, if we come to see "Christ is King," "Zeus wuz here," "Led Zeppelin rules!," scrawled out in quasars and galaxies at the far end of the cosmos, this shouldn't raise an eyebrow? Because, provided the universe is deterministic, such an ordering would be fully determined by those inscrutable initial conditions.Count Timothy von Icarus

    I am not sure what this fantastical hypothetical is supposed to argue.
  • The Past Hypothesis: Why did the universe start in a low-entropy state?
    When you think of the Big Bang, you just mean inflation, right? You're not adding a singularity to it, are you?frank

    Historically, the so-called Big Bang theory came first, and theor(ies) of inflation were developed later, around 1980s. Inflation pushes the Big Bang chronology a little further back, introduces some new theoretical posits, but in return it rather neatly explains some of the later features of the early universe.

    As I was saying earlier, the informal name Big Bang is variously attached to different theories, periods and events. Sometimes it is even used to refer to the entire cosmological timeline, going back to time zero (which historically has been called "Big Bang singularity," although few believe in an actual singularity.)

    In the context of the Past Hypothesis, again for historical reasons, we can take the initial state to be after the hypothetical inflation, perhaps somewhere around the beginning of nucleothynthesis, when hydrogen and helium ions formed. The precise cutoff is not important, because the same considerations can be extended to earlier periods.

    shn4sglrle2xfyy2e1kgfj9lu3lh15k.png

    The difficulty of applying 19th century equilibrium thermodynamics to the early universe becomes even more severe in earlier periods, however, because they are extremely brief and thermodynamically unstable.
  • Exploring the artificially intelligent mind of GPT4
    Yes, I was going to post that. The really amazing thing is that the program provided fake references for its accusations. The links to references in The Guardian and other sources went nowhere.T Clark

    I am surprised that they haven't addressed the fake links issue. ChatGPT-based AIs are not minimalistic like AlphaChess, for example, where developers hard-code a minimal set of rules and then let the program loose on data or an adversarial learning partner to develop all on its own. They add ad hoc rules and guardrails and keep fine-tuning the system.

    A rule to prevent the AI from generating fake links would seem like a low-hanging fruit in this respect. Links are clearly distinguished from normal text, both in their formal syntax and in how they are generated (they couldn't be constructed from lexical tokens the same way as text or they would almost always be wrong). And where there is a preexisting distinction, a rule can readily be attached.
  • The Past Hypothesis: Why did the universe start in a low-entropy state?
    Historically, the line of reasoning has gone in the opposite direction. One of the most compelling arguments for the Big Bang was that, in an eternal universe of the sort people thought existed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the conditions we observed in the universe seemed highly unlikely based on statistical mechanics. That is, we accept such a starting point for observable existence, in part, because of arguments about the likelihood of entropy levels in the first place. An eternal universe could produce such phenomena, it just is unlikely too.Count Timothy von Icarus

    The Big Bang theory grew out of General Relativity, which allowed it as one of its general solutions, and astronomical observations that made it increasingly likely, until there was little room for alternatives. That this also solved the problem of entropy was a welcome bonus. But the plausibility of the theory was not evaluated by entropy calculations of the kind that are performed to justify the thesis about the improbability of the initial state.

    Before GR and Big Bang, in the Newtonian cosmology of the day, the most natural scientific picture of the world was that of an infinite, past-eternal universe. (Not because of some anti-religious bias, as some claim, but simply because it's hard to justify or even imagine a Newtonian universe whose timeline abruptly ends for no apparent reason some finite time in the past.) But that presented a challenge as people came to realize that many, if not all things in this world could not be past-eternal. The Sun, for example, which was thought to be a burning ball, could not have an infinite supply of fuel. Same for all the other stars in the sky. Who was lighting them up for all eternity?

    The development of thermodynamics posed that problem especially acutely. Clearly, in a closed universe that is not in thermodynamic equilibrium entropy must have had a minimum a finite time in the past. This is where Boltzmann came up with the idea of a gigantic entropy fluctuation giving rise to the observable universe. In an infinite, eternal universe such a fluctuation would be almost inevitable, so its improbability was not an issue as such. However, brilliant man that he was, Boltzmann also thought of a worrying problem with this conjecture: the one we now know as the Boltzmann Brain. And even now, as you noted further on, as updated versions of Boltzmann fluctuation conjecture are being proposed to explain the origin of Big Bang, that problem still keeps cosmologists awake at night.

    Anyway, all this is irrelevant to the question of the "probability" of the true initial state of the Big Bang universe, i.e. a state that comes with no known history and no theory of its origin. Boltzmann's entropy fluctuation was posited not as an initial state (that would be a contradiction of terms) but as an event in a Newtonian universe. In that context the calculation of probability can be meaningfully performed. Not so for a true initial state.

    I'm still not quite sure what your objection was because my original point was that claiming that there is no reason to think the universe would have low entropy (agreeing that it appears to be unlikely), and then invoking the anthropic principle to fix that issue, reduced explanations to the triviality that all possible things happen and so whatever is observed MUST occur. If you don't think the Past Hypothesis or Fine Tuning Problem needs an answer then there is no reason to invoke the Anthropic Principle in the first place.Count Timothy von Icarus

    Anthropic reasoning and fine tuning worries arise in the context of the origins of the universe, when theories such as Eternal Inflation are discussed. Such theories must explain the Past Hypothesis as a matter of course (or they would not match observations), but they raise other questions. Absent a theory though, worrying about the "specialness" or "improbability" of the initial state makes no sense, in my view.
  • TPF Quote Cabinet
    You fight your superficiality, your shallowness, so as to try to come at people without unreal expectations, without an overload of bias or hope or arrogance, as untanklike as you can be, sans cannon and machine guns and steel plating half a foot thick; you come at them unmenacingly on your own ten toes instead of tearing up the turf with your caterpillar treads, take them on with an open mind, as equals, man to man, as we used to say, and yet you never fail to get them wrong. You might as well have the brain of a tank. You get them wrong before you meet them, while you're anticipating meeting them; you get them wrong while you're with them; and then you go home to tell somebody else about the meeting and you get them all wrong again. Since the same generally goes for them with you, the whole thing is really a dazzling illusion empty of all perception, an astonishing farce of misperception. And yet what are we to do about this terribly significant business of other people, which gets bled of the significance we think it has and takes on instead a significance that is ludicrous, so ill-equipped are we all to envision one another's interior workings and invisible aims? Is everyone to go off and lock the door and sit secluded like the lonely writers do, in a soundproof cell, summoning people out of words and then proposing that these word people are closer to the real thing than the real people that we mangle with our ignorance every day? The fact remains that getting people right is not what living is all about anyway. It's getting them wrong that is living, getting them wrong and wrong and wrong and then, on careful reconsideration, getting them wrong again. That's how we know we're alive: we're wrong. Maybe the best thing would be to forget being right or wrong about people and just go along for the ride. But if you can do that—well, lucky you. — Philip Roth, American Pastoral

    Just finished that book :heart:

    And now, after an abortive foray into another book that I didn't really like...

    Call me Ishmael.

    :)
  • Ukraine Crisis
    Kremlin rhetoric regarding NATO expansion has been all over the place. To start with, NATO expansion was presented to the West as the main excuse for going to war. Putin's war ultimatum issued in the run-up to the Ukraine invasion demanded the roll-back of NATO to the Soviet-era status quo, and when these impossible demands were not accepted, that was given as a casus belli in his war speech. Later, when Finland and Sweden announced their intention to join NATO, while Russia's war against Ukraine was floundering, Putin sheepishly brushed that aside as nothing to worry about. All that hysterical rhetoric about NATO missile flight time was already forgotten. Now they aren't sure how to react. Peskov mumbles: oh noes, NATO expansion not good. Putin just pouts.
  • The Past Hypothesis: Why did the universe start in a low-entropy state?
    Thermodynamics isn't the only global asymmetry either. There is wave asymmetry in electromagnetism, the jury is out on of this reduces to the thermodynamic arrow; there is radiation asymmetry, etc.Count Timothy von Icarus

    As an aside, if you mean the retarded/advanced wave asymmetry, @Kenosha Kid had a thread here about Cramer's Transactional Interpretation of quantum mechanics, which eliminates this asymmetry.

    Not to mention there is an overarching microlevel problem. Observed wavefunction collapse only happens in one direction. This is a fundemental level asymmetry that is probably the most vetted empirical results in the sciences.Count Timothy von Icarus

    The usual formulations of quantum mechanics are indeed time-asymmetric, but QM can be equivalently formulated in a time-neutral manner, so that any time asymmetry is a matter of interpretation.

    It doesn't seem like thermodynamics can be exactly what we mean by time because if the thermodynamic arrow were to reverse, it doesn't seem like it would throw time in reverse.Count Timothy von Icarus

    I never said that thermodynamics is what we mean by time; rather, what we mean by phenomenal time asymmetry (the so-called arrow of time) is explained by the thermodynamic asymmetry on a large scale, which in turn is explained by the asymmetry of boundary conditions. The forward direction of time tracks the direction of increasing entropy in our observable universe. But I am not sure what you mean by the thermodynamic arrow reversing.

    If time reversed when the thermodynamic arrow reversed, we should expect that, when the very last area of the universe that is out of equilibrium and not contracting reaches equilibrium, particles should suddenly have their momentum reverse and begin backtracking.Count Timothy von Icarus

    You lost me here.

    Indeed, we can well imagine sticking an observer in a tank with a Maxwell's Demon and having them watch the isolated system they sit in reduce in entropy over time. Global entropy would reduce, but that says nothing about the observer subsystem and how it experiences time.Count Timothy von Icarus

    If your region of the universe that undergoes a uniform thermodynamic evolution is large enough, you won't notice anything, because your perception of time will track the direction of increasing entropy. Talking about biological arrow of time, you will always remember entropy being lower in the "past," and you will not remember the "future."
  • The Past Hypothesis: Why did the universe start in a low-entropy state?
    If nothing can be said about likeliness vis-á-vis the early universe how do you vet any scientific theories about it? How can you say "this explanation is more likely to be the case than this one?"Count Timothy von Icarus

    The same way we vet all other theories? All theories have some brute facts, some givens in them: equations, constants, boundary conditions. There is nothing special about the initial conditions of the Big Bang theory in that respect.

    As you point out, it is now commonly accepted that a period of cosmic inflation preceded the Big Bang.Count Timothy von Icarus

    Yes, but you are now talking about a different theory, or rather an extension of the Big Bang theory. What is taken to be the initial state in Big Bang is no longer the initial state in Inflation. Inflation leads up to the hot Big Bang, thus giving it a causal explanation, but raising questions of its own. (I think the Banks paper deals with those questions, but like I said, I cannot follow it.)

    A major piece of evidence in favor of inflation is that patterns of light from the early universe are consistent with proposed inflation and unlikely under other existing models.Count Timothy von Icarus

    Yes, and that (the bolded parts) is just like the Big Bang theory, and every other scientific theory, gets its justification.

    But you said it yourself: likely or unlikely under some model. The Big Bang theory doesn't model its own initial conditions - how could it? So to talk about the likelihood of Big Bang's initial state by converting dubious entropy into bogus probability makes little sense. You can talk about Big Bang's initial state in the context of the Inflation theory, and if you find that it predicts those conditions with a low probability, then that's a problem for Inflation.

    This seems as much of a mixup to me as when people claim "nothing can come before the Big Bang because time and cause are meaningless past that point."Count Timothy von Icarus

    If there is a mixup here, it is a mixup of terminology. When people say Big Bang, they can mean t = 0 in the Big Bang chronology (the theoretical singularity in the classical relativistic model on which Big Bang theory is based), or they can mean the earliest period where the Big Bang theory is applicable, which comes a little bit after t = 0 (and which would be preceded by Inflation), or they can even mean the entire period from there till now and beyond (the Big Bang universe). The worry about time ending or becoming physically meaningless as it approaches t = 0 is not unfounded, for although we know little about that earliest period, there is reason to think that physical clocks that give time its meaning beyond a mathematical formalism may no longer work there.

    If the universe did not expand after the Big Bang, it would have stayed as it was shortly after the Big Bang: a hot, dense, uniform plasma.SophistiCat

    Sure, but this is speculative. It implies that you can get the "Big Bang," under highly different conditions.Count Timothy von Icarus

    And that's my point. When you ask why something is this way and not the other way - for example, why the Big Bang universe has a time asymmetry - the implication is that it could have been otherwise. That is obviously problematic with things like laws, constants and boundary conditions, unless we already have a reductive theory in mind. If that is not available, then all we can do is imagine an alternative world. We can't say anything more, and we can't attach probabilities to these imaginary alternatives, because that would imply that we know more than we actually do.


    I don't have time now to discuss thermodynamics and the arrow of time, but I'll try to get back to this later.
  • Blurring the Moral Realist vs. Anti-Realist Distinction
    One can choose to be moral or immoral, but one cannot chose what is moral and what is immoral.unenlightened

    Is there a difference in your mind between choosing and deciding? Are you associating choice with something arbitrary or capricious? That's not how we generally make choices, especially about things that we deem to be important.
  • The Past Hypothesis: Why did the universe start in a low-entropy state?
    The beginning of time had to be an entropy minimum, since entropy can only increase. That's the least surprising thing here - we've known this since the 19th century. As for Big Bang being an entropy fluctuation, that was actually an idea first proposed by Boltzmann. It is still speculative though.
  • The Past Hypothesis: Why did the universe start in a low-entropy state?
    I think the important point made there is about the relation between entropy and the direction of time ("the arrow of time"). Time on the global scale owes its existence to the fact that the entropy of the universe on a large scale increases, and the forward direction of time tracks the direction of that entropy increase. If the universe did not expand after the Big Bang, it would have stayed as it was shortly after the Big Bang: a hot, dense, uniform plasma. There would be no large-scale changes - only microscopic, time-symmetric changes as particles bump into each other. (Well, there would be helium synthesis for a while, but eventually that process would saturate and reach equilibrium.) Therefore, time arrow as a global direction of change would not exist; time would not have a preferred direction. Things would look pretty much the same if you rolled time forwards or backwards.
  • The Past Hypothesis: Why did the universe start in a low-entropy state?
    Yeah, I had a look, but as one might expect from such a vid, it has just a short soundbite concerning the topic under discussion here.
  • The Past Hypothesis: Why did the universe start in a low-entropy state?
    Yes this I don't understand then I suppose, because isn't equilibrium necessarily maximum entropy... If entropy always increases, it can only be in equilibrium if max entropy has been reached no?ChatteringMonkey

    Yes, entropy reaches its maximum at equilibrium. But the universe was never actually at equilibrium, because it was and still is quickly expanding. ("Quickly" has a technical meaning here: if it was expanding slowly enough - quasi-statically - then the maximum entropy would stay the same. Expansion as such does not increase entropy, but irreversible expansion does.) Still, if you consider very short timespans at which expansion can be neglected, then you could say that the early universe was indeed at its maximum entropy.

    The space that is currently occupied by the observable universe was at a much lower entropy 14 billion years agoSophistiCat

    The space or the matter in that space is at lower entropy? That is what is confusing to me. How can space itself be measured entropically. Isn't that just the condition that sets the degrees of freedom for matter in that space to be in, determining the range of entropy?ChatteringMonkey

    Sorry, yes, I meant the matter encompassed by that space.

    Yes unlikely by definition maybe isn't true for initial conditions, I can see the reasoning there. It still is an observation (and a condition for our universe to like it is) that the universe was in a low entropic state, it could have been otherwise I suppose...ChatteringMonkey

    Yes, but could have been otherwise can mean many things. It could have been a bowl of petunias, for all we know! There is just no sensible way to ask a question in ignorance.
  • The Past Hypothesis: Why did the universe start in a low-entropy state?
    The relationship with the Past Hypothesis is that it is exceedingly combinatorically unlikely to have a low entropy universe. Borrowing Penrose's math, to observe a universe with our level of entropy is to observe a system that is occupying 1/10^10^123 of the entire volume in phase space (possible arrangements of the universe). It's like standing in a room full of coherent texts in the Library of Babel.

    https://accelconf.web.cern.ch/e06/papers/thespa01.pdf

    Or also relevant for the summary: https://arxiv.org/pdf/hep-th/0701146.pdf
    Count Timothy von Icarus

    I read the Penrose paper up to that oft-quoted 10^10^123 number and the discussion of gravitational degrees of freedom; I don't know enough to understand the rest. (The Banks paper is too advanced for me to follow.) I don't get Penrose's point. He is comparing the entropy of a region in the early universe with the entropy of a black hole with the same number of baryons. Why? How is this comparison relevant? The universe in the first few minutes after the Big Bang was a hot, dense plasma, so energetic as to preclude gravitational clustering. Lumping a gigantic black hole into the same macrostate makes no sense: that state was not accessible to the early universe (indeed, to the best of our knowledge, it is not a possible state of the universe at any time after the Big Bang). The same goes for the so-called gravitational degrees of freedom, which he infers prospectively from the later emergence of stars and galaxies. To treat those clumpy states, which only become available after the universe has cooled and expanded, as unused gravitational degrees of freedom in the early universe, one must treat the entire block universe as one timeless macrostate, which also makes no sense.

    More to the point - and this is the question to which I keep returning - what is the meaning of whatever magic number that you calculate for the initial state of the universe? What does it mean to say that it was special or improbable? For it to be special there has to be some generic way for it to be. Whence the idea of the generic initial state? For it to be improbable there has to be a stochastic model of the initial state, which for the present purposes we do not consider.

    By contrast, here is an example where such notions make good sense. The generic state for the air in your room is to be uniformly distributed throughout the room, as opposed to, for example, being condensed in one corner. That is easy to understand, given that in a stable environment air molecules have plenty of time to cycle through myriads of configurations. Only a tiny fraction of those configurations correspond to special states, which means that seeing those special sates is generically unlikely on human timescales. But that reasoning is inapplicable to the initial state. There is nothing generic about the initial state. It is unique. It has no history and no mechanism of formation.

    I am not sure what criticisms to the Principle of Indifference you are referring too. The ones I have seen are arguments about model building and the need to implement Bayesian methods when there is not a case of total stochastic ignorance , which is not the case vis-á-vis the Past Hypothesis.Count Timothy von Icarus

    It's not the criticisms of the PoI as such (although there are some, e.g. Norton, "Ignorance and Indifference") but of its thoughtless or even nefarious application. In hypothesis testing we are supposed to compare the predictions of the new and improved theory to the current consensus - the null hypothesis. Picking unrealistic distributions as representing the null hypothesis amounts to strawmaning.

    In the case of the Past Hypothesis the situation is even worse, because there is nothing even to strawman. We do have stochastic ignorance if we bracket out theories that go beyond the established Big Bang theory, such as Inflation, since that is the context in which the question was originally posed.

    If you encounter a phenomenon of which you have no previous knowledge, what are you supposed to do?Count Timothy von Icarus

    It depends - see my previous reply.
  • The Past Hypothesis: Why did the universe start in a low-entropy state?
    Right. So did the expansion take place in order to facilitate the evolutionary process? Or was the initial state itself actually metastable? Perhaps the idea of a closed system is inapplicable?Pantagruel

    The initial state was unstable due to the structure of spacetime - that's how the theory goes. The universe was set to expand from the get-go. It is (assumed to be) causally closed, but the interesting thing about relativistic spacetime is that as it expands, its energy content increases. This is a point of disanalogy with the expanding vessel.
  • The Past Hypothesis: Why did the universe start in a low-entropy state?
    I am wary of elaborate analogies given in lieu of an argument. Give me the argument straight, then illustrate it with an analogy if you like, and I'll be the judge of how relevant and helpful the analogy is. So, I'll be honest, I skipped to the end first to see what the moral of that analogy was supposed to be, and then went back to read it.

    My problem with this is that it consigns areas begging for inquiry to the bucket of things we just accept for the trivial reason that it is clearly possible for what we observe to exist. Our aliens might never figure out they are seeing a language, let alone what the messages they observe mean, but I certainly think they can find something out about these "brute facts," which presupposes that they be analyzable using probabilities.Count Timothy von Icarus

    And... I am afraid I am still not getting your point, even after reading the alien story.

    A puzzling phenomenon found in the world is not a good parallel to what we have been discussing. Such a thing would invite the same sort of analysis as we apply to everything else: that is to say, we would try to put it in the context of our accumulated knowledge about the world and try to reduce it to some aspects of that knowledge. (I am loath to get into an argument over an analogy, but briefly, one problem with it is that it biases the story by stipulating that the phenomenon is literally "out of this world" and causally inexplicable. But your hypothetical aliens would have no reason to assume that.)

    By contrast, the initial conditions of the Big Bang universe are necessarily inexplicable within the context of the Big Bang theory. Note that I am not saying that they are necessarily inexplicable tout court. It's just that if you have a causal theory, then the very structure of the theory dictates that it unspools backwards from the present observations into the past, and its initial conditions (or conditions at infinity, as the case may be) are where the theory runs up against its limits. Here be dragons. Here be the explanatory terminus. Here be brute facts.

    A theory that goes beyond the Big Bang (and we have several candidates, starting with Inflation, which by now is almost as established as the Big Bang) would explain the Big Bang conditions, but it would in turn run up against its own limits.

    You could also posit an explanatory terminus somewhere besides the structure and its boundary conditions. Indeed, you could posit the existence of observers as an explanation of some features of the structure and the boundary conditions, rather than the other way around, as in a traditional causal theory. This approach has an idealist ring to it: our own existence is the one thing we are most certain about, so why not put that at the foundation? I do not endorse this approach, but I think it has a right to exist.

    Would it be fair here for the aliens to assume that the arrangement they observe is extremely unlikely barring some sort of underlying logic to the portal's outputs?Count Timothy von Icarus

    I don't see how. Under the "null hypothesis" that the symbols are drawn randomly with a uniform probability from a pool that includes all and only the symbols that they have observed - yes. But what would be the reason to posit this null hypothesis? (Don't say "principle of indifference" - that's an epistemic technique, not a scientific or a metaphysical principle.) And yes, I am aware that in experimental science significance testing often resorts to positing a uniform distribution as the null hypothesis, but this practice is justly criticized.

    I mean, I get the underlying intuition: you observe patterns, as opposed to chaos - you hypothesize a causal mechanism that would neatly explain your observations and integrate that explanation at a minimal cost into your noetic structure. That's how science generally works. OK, so how does this relate to the Past Hypothesis?

    There are all sorts of interesting things to consider here. Given the aliens can never know the origin of the patterns, that they are separated from that knowledge by an epistemic (and maybe ontological) barrier, would it be fair for them to assume said patterns are just brute facts?Count Timothy von Icarus

    That's not really a question, is it? The answer is given in the premise.

    Would it be justifiable to posit that the observed phenomena was some sort of language?Count Timothy von Icarus

    You could hypothesize this, sure. A computational linguist could probably say more.

    I used that thought experiment because I think it's a neat idea. More to the point though, there are tons of areas where we essentially have no clue what sort of frequency we should expect for variables. The early universe is in no way epistemicaly unique here. Keynes was thinking of just this sort of scenario when he developed the principle, and Jayne's was thinking of similar cases we he expanded on it with the Principal of Maximum Entropy.

    Maybe someone will pull a Quine on these ideas, but these seem grounded in mathematical logic, not the particularities of any particular observation. So, I would apply the concept here.
    Count Timothy von Icarus

    OK, can you say more - specifically, in relation to the Past Hypothesis? What is the meaning of probability in this context? What conclusions could we draw from it?
  • Ukraine Crisis
    Russia has been and one can argue is still a colonizer: there are parts that it annexed through force in the 19th Century just as other European colonizers were doing (starting with Chechnya, that was occupied as late as 1859). China has had some ports colonized, but never has been colonized (the Mongol Horde didn't have colonies).ssu

    Russia has been an empire since before there was The Russian Empire, and through all its name changes. It continued expanding its domain through 1940s, when it swallowed up some lands to the west and effectively colonized others. And then the empire collapsed in 1980s-1990s, when first the Warsaw Pact countries broke off, followed by the Soviet Union republics. (It should be noted that Russia, led by Yeltsin, was the main driver of the Soviet Union's demise. But that sentiment didn't last, and soon ressentiment prevailed.)

    Now Russia is fighting a classic imperialist war of aggression. Empire nostalgia is rife in the Russian public sphere, and Putin likes to compare himself (favorably) to Catherine and Peter, and revels in his territorial conquests.

    I remember seeing a broadcast of Putin at some meeting answering questions from his fawning underlings. One of them, a retired prosecutor, had a rather long and convoluted question with a self-serving proposal wrapped inside. Putin, looking bored and distracted, obviously wasn't paying attention. But he perked up at the mention of "new territories," and when it came his turn to speak, he latched on to that. With a twinkle in his eye, he remarked how the Sea of Azov was now Russia's inner sea, an achievement that eluded even Peter the Great.
  • The Past Hypothesis: Why did the universe start in a low-entropy state?
    From a systems perspective, subsystems leech energy (negentropy) from their parent systems. So if entropy were ever at a "universal maximum" it would be theoretically impossible for any subsystem ever to emerge. Since cosmic evolution is manifestly systemic evolution (concurrent with the emergence of new dominant laws) entropy would have to be at an initial minimum. Either that, or the entropy of the universe would have to change over time.Pantagruel

    Here is a rough analogy from school thermodynamics. Consider an insulated vessel filled with gas at a thermal equilibrium. This system will remain stable forever and nothing interesting will happen there, as you rightly note (barring Boltzmann brains and such). Now suppose that the walls of the vessel expand outward. The vessel is no longer at equilibrium, even though it started out in an apparent equilibrium state (that is, if we don't take expansion into account).
  • The Past Hypothesis: Why did the universe start in a low-entropy state?
    You seem to be disagreeing with the past hypothesis, in that it wasn't low entropy, but maximum entropy?ChatteringMonkey

    I am not disagreeing with the low(er) entropy part. The space that is currently occupied by the observable universe was at a much lower entropy 14 billion years ago (it had better be!) Was it at a maximum entropy? That's a trick question. I would say that, in a limited sense, it was.

    I guess the question is not whether it was likely or not, but whether it was low entropy or not (low entropy is unlikely by definition)ChatteringMonkey

    Ah, see, I actually don't agree that "low entropy is unlikely by definition." That is true of closed systems that have been evolving for some time. As per the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics, the entropy of such systems should be increasing over time. But we are talking about the initial state, which does not have a history. In response to this @Count Timothy von Icarus invoked the principle of indifference. I object that we cannot get a free lunch from the principle of indifference: it cannot teach us anything about the physical world. And conclude that statements about how probable/special/surprising the early universe was are not meaningful absent a theory of the universe's origin that would inform our expectations.

    Added to that, (as also notes), the fact that, in absolute terms, the entropy of the early universe was much lower than it is now doesn't tell us all we need to know: there are other factors to consider. And the elephant in the room is that, although we typically assume that the universe is thermodynamically closed, the undisputed fact is that it was never stable: it has been constantly expanding. And that changes everything.

    And if it was the first case (the universe itself explanding) than the past hypothesis isn't "matter was in a low entropy configuration", but "the universe was small". Is a small universe likely or unlikely, without another frame of reference, who knows... so I guess I would agree with you. Probabilities only make sense if you have relevant information. And since we don't, it doesn't. What is the likelihood of drawing the ace of spades out of an undefined amount of cards and with undefined types of cards in the deck?ChatteringMonkey

    :up:
  • Ukraine Crisis
    And if it was as Hersh says it was, it's really a panicky bad choice for Biden to make: Germany wasn't going to go for Nordstream gas anyway as there was no energy Armageddon or even one blackout in Germany this winter.ssu

    By that time Germany had already reduced its dependence on Russian gas from ~50% to ~9% and was on course to eliminate it entirely. And it wasn't getting any gas from Nord Stream anyway, since the Russians had already shut it down indefinitely in an apparent attempt to cause as much pain for Europe as they could before they lost their leverage entirely.
  • The Past Hypothesis: Why did the universe start in a low-entropy state?
    You are correct about the nature of the Past Hypothesis; that's a fine answer, but it isn't the argument I get frustrated with. By definition, there are more ways to be in a high entropy state than a low entropy state. Perhaps there is indeed a mechanism at work in the early universe that makes a later low entropy state counterintuitively more likely than a high entropy one. But, barring support for that fact, we are left with the principal of indifference, and this suggests that we weight all options equally, combinatorially if there are a finite number of states. That is, giving equal likelihood to all potential universes of X mass energy existing in an early state with all possible levels of entropy, the high entropy universes outnumber the low entropy ones, barring some other sort of explanation. Appeals to the Anthropic Principle don't address this. The same issue comes up with the Fine Tuning Problem; if we don't know the likelihood of values for constants, indifference should prevail.Count Timothy von Icarus

    I am not sure that the principle of indifference can lend us any insight here. When tossing a coin, we assume that the coin has equal chances of landing heads or tails, because we are very familiar with coins and the behavior of objects of that sort. When we cannot assume that for some reason, then all that the principle of indifference does is describe the state of our ignorance: since I know nothing except that there are two possibilities, I have no greater expectation of heads than of tails. But note that, although in the latter case we have derived the same 50% probability, the meaning of this probability is not the same. We did not learn that the coin is fair through the application of the principle of indifference! All we did is learn how to bet in order to avoid Dutch Book-style exploits.

    How does this help us understand the origin of the universe? It's a one-off event against the background of complete ignorance, and the outcome of this event is already known. What more can we learn from the principle of indifference? What does "the probability of this event is such and such" even mean in this case?

    Positing some as of yet not understood mechanism by which this is not the case is fine, after all, we have empirical evidence that the entropy of the early universe was low (counterintuitively despite being near equilibrium, wrapping your head around negative heat is a doozy).Count Timothy von Icarus

    (My emphasis.) We haven't really talked about the Past Hypothesis itself, so let's do that now. If you take the currently observable universe and compare its entropy with the entropy of the same region of space as it was shortly after the Big Bang, you will find that the entropy is indeed much larger now (at least if we restrict ourselves to very short time horizons in each case, in which the universe can be considered quasi-static as per classical thermodynamics, because otherwise the meaning of entropy and how it should be calculated becomes unclear). And yet the universe after the Big Bang is typically described as a very uniform "particle soup." It wasn't at equilibrium, because it was quickly expanding, but if, counterfactually, there was no expansion, then the universe would have already been at its maximum entropy (and on very short time scales, during which expansion could be neglected, it was). Expansion added bucketloads of additional degrees of freedom, thus lifting the ceiling on the maximum entropy - and this is how we find ourselves, 14 billion years later, at a much higher entropy and still far from equilibrium. All thanks to the dramatic expansion of space during the time between then and now.

    So, was the (relatively) low-entropy state of the early universe very special and unlikely (whatever that might mean)? Frankly, I don't see how.
  • The role of observers in MWI
    As opposed to what? A world at thermodynamic equilibrium?SophistiCat

    Yes. Since there are more ways to be high entropy than low entropy we should have more worlds with high entropy than low. So why are we in a low entropy world if it is very statistically unlikely?

    Some version of the past hypothesis, right? But then seeing a world where the past hypothesis is true is vanishingly unlikely, even if it occurs with probability 1, according to MWI derivations of the Born Rule.
    Count Timothy von Icarus

    I am surprised that you went for this explanation, given what you said above about frequentist explanations. This is a textbook case where statistics does not apply because it simply does not exist.

    Your reasoning applies to an ergodic system that has been evolving for a long time, or an equivalent ensemble. But the early universe is nothing like that. If there is no explanation for the past hypothesis (we don't have a good theory of the universe's origin), then it makes no sense to talk about how likely or unlikely it is, because the universe was and still is far from ergodic, it hadn't been evolving for a long time (ex hypothesi), and we don't have an ensemble (unless some kind of a multiverse theory is true, but that is still very speculative, so we can't take it as given).

    It seems to me that either low probability events should always be surprising and make us ask questions or they never should, not a too cute mix of both. Just bite the bullet and say the Born Rule is meaningless, a total illusion, in that case.Count Timothy von Icarus

    Eh, surprise is a tricky thing. There have been some detailed analyses of surprise in the literature, both from the purely epistemological standpoint and specifically in the context of issues like the multiverse and fine-tuning. But I find that in the latter case the arguments get too far afield. They start from some careless analogies (e.g. Leslie's firing squad) and then get bogged down in the arguments over the analogies. Given that our everyday intuitions are not trained for such exotic scenarios as multiverses, we probably shouldn't put too much stock in them.
  • Ukraine Crisis
    Maybe he is not lying just making false claims. Anyways, talking about OSINT, I was aware of Oliver Alexander's review of Hersh's article: https://oalexanderdk.substack.com/p/blowing-holes-in-seymour-hershs-pipe

    Or are you referring to somebody else?
    neomac

    I read something else, less comprehensive. And one can find more with a quick google. For my part, I wasn't all that interested in fact-checking Hersh's story, because I didn't take it seriously in the first place. But I knew that it would make a splash, especially in far-right/left circles. I think the real story here is not in what Hersh wrote, but in how it was received.

    But I take your point. We can't take it for granted that he made up all or some of the story himself. He may have just laundered the story that he was handed by his "anonymous source" without doing any of the things that are routinely done in the corrupt western mainstream media - you know, like doing his own research and fact-checking. But my guess is that he at least contributed his own embellishments.
  • The role of observers in MWI
    I have never seen a satisfactory explanation of why we should find ourselves in the world that has increasing entropyCount Timothy von Icarus

    As opposed to what? A world at thermodynamic equilibrium?

    And what do you mean by explanation here? We are bound to find ourselves in one world or another. How could you explain the fact that the world that we find ourselves in is this one? Explain in terms of what?
  • Ukraine Crisis
    Well, the real issue here

    ...is just what those peace terms are. Russia simply should exit from Ukraine, including Crimea, and respect the territorial integrity of the country what it has accepted starting when the country became independent.

    Having any problem with that?
    ssu

    Well, at least China doesn't. This is #1 in their recent position statement:

    1. Respecting the sovereignty of all countries. Universally recognized international law, including the purposes and principles of the United Nations Charter, must be strictly observed. The sovereignty, independence and territorial integrity of all countries must be effectively upheld. All countries, big or small, strong or weak, rich or poor, are equal members of the international community. All parties should jointly uphold the basic norms governing international relations and defend international fairness and justice. Equal and uniform application of international law should be promoted, while double standards must be rejected.China’s Position on the Political Settlement of the Ukraine Crisis

    China never officially acknowledged Russian territorial acquisitions, including annexation of Crimea. (Of course, they weren't thinking about Ukraine when they were writing this - they were thinking about Taiwan.)
  • Ukraine Crisis
    BTW Hersh too candidly admits to lie in his profession whenever he thinks he has a good reason to (https://nymag.com/nymetro/news/people/features/11719/).neomac

    In most cases, Hersh attaches a caveat—such as “I’m just talking now, I’m not writing”—before unloading one of his blockbusters, which can send bloggers and reporters scurrying for confirmation.Sy Hersh Says It’s Okay to Lie (Just Not in Print)

    Sy Hersh no longer confines his lies to talks. His latest "blockbuster" has been fact-checked using OSINT and found to be lacking in some crucial details.. I won't be digging that up, but here is an example of just how brazen and stupid his lies can be:

    Today, the secretary general of NATO is Jens Stoltenberg, a committed anti-communist, who served as Norway’s prime minister for eight years before moving to his high NATO post, with American backing, in 2014. He was a hardliner on all things Putin and Russia who had cooperated with the American intelligence community since the Vietnam War.How America Took Out The Nord Stream Pipeline

    Vietnam War: 1955 - 1975
    Jens Stoltenberg: 1959 -
  • How should we define 'knowledge'?
    So what is the perfect definition of knowledge?Cidat

    How should we define knowledge? In context.Fooloso4

    The first question to ask is: what do you what from your definition? Do you want it to reflect current use in ordinary language? That is what dictionary definitions do, so the obvious thing would be to consult a good English dictionary. Or do you want a specialized definition for something specific? Then you should be asking a more specific question.

    Generally, just inquiring after a definition out of context is not very productive. Words are tools, and as with all tools, we fashion them for a reason.

    (This is just to expand what @Fooloso4 said.)
  • Ukraine Crisis
    Russia too has means, the right amount of hawkishness and a history of false flag operations to directly or indirectly support such operation.neomac

    And Russia is the only player (that I know of) that has actually done this before. Possibly more than once. But those Georgia incidents made a lot more sense at the time. With Nord Stream it's not obvious.
  • Ukraine Crisis
    Yeah, all of a sudden there's a flood of murky intelligence leaks in media. What's up with that?

    New York Times: Intelligence Suggests Pro-Ukrainian Group Sabotaged Pipelines, U.S. Officials Say
    Washington Post: Intelligence officials suspect Ukraine partisans behind Nord Stream bombings, rattling Kyiv’s allies
    Die Zeit: Nord-Stream-Ermittlungen: Spuren führen in die Ukraine
    The Times: West kept quiet about Nord Stream attack to protect Ukraine

    I'm not jumping to any conclusions. Technically, anything is possible, I suppose. The sea is very shallow there, so a diving crew operating off a boat could get to the pipes. The pipelines were not secured or actively monitored in any way. That patch of the sea was heavily trafficked, including by numerous boats that were turning off their tracking devices.

    Motive remains difficult to understand though, especially given the timing.
  • Ukraine Crisis
    Stupidity has always been dangerousWolfgang

    This is the one thing that you said that even makes any sense. The rest is a confused, ungrammatical mess.
  • To what Jazz and Classical Music are you listening?
    Listening to some jazz for a change: J.D. Allen

    https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCAHNJvwXuaSzTliSAmna2TA

    Sonny Rollins said about him: "He’s got a nice, big, fat sound, and he’s got a lot of ideas. He doesn’t sound like he’s ever wanting to find something to play."
  • Bernard Gert’s answer to the question “But what makes it moral?”
    As you know, what morality descriptively ‘is’ and what morality normatively ‘is’ are separate questions. In traditional moral philosophy, an extreme version of this idea is that “science has nothing to offer moral philosophy”, implying that what is descriptively moral is irrelevant to what is normatively moral.

    Gert contradicts this view by claiming that the "lessening of harm" component of what is descriptively moral (a subject within science's what 'is' domain) is also normatively moral by his criterion “what all rational people would put forward”.
    Mark S

    No, he does not. Nowhere does Gert claim that the imperative of lessening of harm is (a) descriptively moral and (b) scientifically justified.

    Also, I disagree that for something to even be recognized as a moral code, it has to be acceptable by all moral agents ("rational people"). That is much too restrictive for a definition. It would mean that any rule that may not be universally endorsed is "not even wrong": it does not belong to the category of things that could be morally right or wrong, and if you use it in such a way, your interlocutors would not understand you. (Or worse yet, one would have to disqualify all dissenters as moral agents!) That is clearly not the case. Rational people can have moral (as opposed to merely definitional) disagreements.

    In putting forward the normative definition of morality as "the behavioral code that... all rational persons, under certain specified conditions, would endorse," Gert identifies those who accept it with moral realists, and those who think that no code would meet this definition with moral skeptics. I don't think that is right either. A moral realist is not necessarily committed to the principle that all universal ethical truths are uncontroversial.
  • Bernard Gert’s answer to the question “But what makes it moral?”
    He does give a definition of morality (at 15:28) as "An informal public system applying to all moral agents that has the goal of lessening of harm suffered by those who are protected by this system".Banno

    Are any of you wondering how Gert’s morality can be so concrete?

    He can be concrete because his subject in the video is what morality ‘is’ – the same subject as Morality As Cooperation Strategies (MACS). I don’t hear him making direct claims about what morality we somehow imperatively ought to follow (the standard focus of traditional moral philosophy).
    Mark S

    This formulation departs from the meta-ethical question of "what morality is". Stating that the goal of moral precepts is "lessening of harm" tells us what we imperatively ought to follow: we ought to lessen harm. It is morally good to lessen harm and morally bad to increase it.

    As a nonexhaustive moral imperative, "lessen harm" is uncontroversional, but that doesn't make it any less of a moral imperative. Then making it the be-all, end-all of all morality means putting forward a moral theory (known as negative utilitarianism).
  • The Hard Problem of Consciousness & the Fundamental Abstraction
    Declaring the failure of reductionism seems premature.Fooloso4

    When the OP first started posting on this forum a while ago, I was driven by curiosity to quick-read some sort of paper or book chapter that he shared. I remember being struck by the breathtaking ease with which he solved long-standing problems of philosophy. He proved the existence of God in one short paragraph, then went on as if that question was now settled once and for all. He established the truth of determinism even more simply: by quoting Laplace's famous maxim (Laplace's demon). Later he did think it necessary for some reason to revisit the question of determinism in light of the challenge supposedly posed by quantum mechanics, but dismissed it right away with a reference to Bohm's pilot wave theory - thus settling, in passing, the problem of the interpretation of quantum mechanics.
  • Bernard Gert’s answer to the question “But what makes it moral?”
    As pointed out, you probably misunderstood that passage, which comes from the very beginning of the introduction. What you quoted is not a definition as such. Gert is outlining two broad senses of morality: descriptive and normative, and the formulations are intentionally broad and vague, so as to encompass most, if not all definitions in each category. The specifics that you are asking are what an actual definition would be expected to clarify, and the article touches upon them.

    To what extent can well-informed, mentally normal, religious people be rational about their religion-based moral beliefs?Mark S

    "Rational" here is intended in a very broad sense:

    In the normative sense, “morality” refers to a code of conduct that would be accepted by anyone who meets certain intellectual and volitional conditions, almost always including the condition of being rational. That a person meets these conditions is typically expressed by saying that the person counts as a moral agent. — Gert

    (Emphasis in the original.) So, basically, "rational" in the original formulation means anyone who "counts as a moral agent."

    Seems to me, in the context of the article, that Gert is not offering a definition of morality, but giving reasons why such a thing is bothersome.Banno

    Well, that's what you generally find in overviews of philosophical topics, such as those in the SEP. You get into the weeds practically as soon as you set out (the very next subchapter in Gert's article on the definition of morality questions the very possibility of defining morality...) You leave with more questions than answers, which probably frustrates some people, but that's the way I like it.