On 11/04/2010 07:29 PM, Darren New wrote:
> bart wrote:
>> On 11/04/2010 04:59 PM, Darren New wrote:
>>> bart wrote:
>>>> > I think you can be conscious without being self-aware. I'm pretty
>>>> sure
>>>>> that, for example, chickens would be considered conscious, even tho
>>>>> they're probably not self-aware.
>>>
>>>> Yes, it is convenient to think so, but on the other hand they probably
>>>> are.
>>>
>>> No, they probably aren't. You can test such things, you know. Dolphins,
>>> gorillas, a few others probably are, including some birds.
>>>
>>> Chickens and fish probably aren't.
>>>
This is a funny one:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/12/03/clever-chicken-hides-out_n_148133.html

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On 11/4/2010 12:52 PM, Warp wrote:
> Darren New<dne### [at] sanrrcom>  wrote:
>> Warp wrote:
>>>    Time must exist, or else it would be impossible to postulate essential
>>> properties of physics such as the second law of thermodynamics.
>
>> The second law is statistical.
>
>    It still states that the entropy of an isolated system never decreases.
>
>>> You can unambiguously distinguish if a closed system is going forward in
>>> time by measuring its entropy.)
>
>> No you can't, because time is reversible.
>
>    That would mean that entropy is also reversible, which would break the
> second law.
>

Well, in point of fact, Hawkins has proposed that time is an artifact of 
probability, in a sense. I.e., *now* is not a strict result of then, but 
rather than now is a product of all possible "thens" that could have 
produced this moment. This means that time does pass, but the state of 
the universe at any moment is merely the constrained result of the 
statistical probabilities of the prior moment. So.. How do you reverse 
time, if the further back you go, the greater the degree of variance you 
end up with, with respect to what *could have* happened prior, and still 
have the same "now" as a result? Basically, you can't, since you can't 
know what of the N number of possible "exact" conditions existed in the 
last moment, so the farther back you end up, the more likely you are to 
land at a state where the odds or 50/50 that you can get back to now, or 
worse, slightly in favor of *never* getting back to the same point at all.

At least I think that is what he was getting at, but the article 
mentioned the concept in like 2-3 sentences...

Biggest issue though is, there is probably nearly absolute zero 
probability of events, i.e., entropy (since it is one of the constraints 
itself) actually changing in a way that would result in the prior 
moment, instead of the next one. Now.. Whether or not you could create 
some sort of "local" change is another matter, but.. just guessing, you 
might end up with something more like the Stargate SG1 case where some 
guy tried to go back in time using a huge mass of linked gates, and time 
reversed "locally", but only from the perspective of those inside the 
resulting bubble. To change events such that the rest of the universe 
didn't protest the anomaly...

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void main () {

     if version = "Vista" {
       call slow_by_half();
       call DRM_everything();
     }
     call functional_code();
   }
   else
     call crash_windows();
}

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On 11/4/2010 12:27 PM, Darren New wrote:
> bart wrote:
>> >You're trolling, right?
>> Not at all; the question is interesting and
>> I just don't get it why you limit it the the air?
>> We can easily make and hear sounds under water, can't we?
>
> Of course, in which case the sound is made out of water molecules.
>
> I'm not limiting sound to only be in air. I'm making an analogy.
>
Bad one I think. Sound, etc. isn't made up of air, water, or whatever. 
It would be more accurate to say that it is made up of what those things 
are "doing". This is not *that* different than words on a page. The 
words are not ink on paper, they are the arrangement of those things, in 
a specific way, which produces a recognizable pattern. We define that 
pattern. Something that either didn't see it as a pattern, or commonly 
saw similar natural patterns (unlikely, since the point of such patterns 
is to make them distinct enough you *don't* generally see them every 
place), wouldn't recognize them as anything other than random 
arrangements. This is much like sound. White noise, in principle, 
doesn't have any arrangement that we recognize as relevant, while speech 
does, *but* there are nuts that claim to *hear* real things in white 
noise, because sometimes, by shear chance, such noise produces things 
that can be mistaken for recognized patterns, just as you can find a 
letter A in a rock, or entire Chinese concepts, in similar rocks, by 
shear accident. Mind, like the twits hearing "ghost" voices, the odds of 
it being an exact match decreases, the more complex the pattern, to the 
point where you may "see" or "hear" something that less subjective 
analysis shows **isn't there**.

Never quite got why ghosts can "talk to people" via random noise, but 
they never manage to do so in a way that matches "any" computer 
analysis, based on the phonetics, sounds, or patterns in the actual 
language they are supposedly speaking. Apparently, they can only 
communicate with sounds that are **not** used in speech, but that the 
human brain "mistakes" as sounding similar. lol

-- 
void main () {
   If Schrödingers_cat is alive or version > 98 {
     if version = "Vista" {
       call slow_by_half();
       call DRM_everything();
     }
     call functional_code();
   }
   else
     call crash_windows();
}

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Warp wrote:
> Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:
>> Warp wrote:
>>>   Time must exist, or else it would be impossible to postulate essential
>>> properties of physics such as the second law of thermodynamics. 
> 
>> The second law is statistical.
> 
>   It still states that the entropy of an isolated system never decreases.

But that's wrong. It's just very, very unlikely to decrease.

Are you saying it's literally impossible to take a random deck of cards and 
shuffle it and wind up with it in order?

>>> You can unambiguously distinguish if a closed system is going forward in
>>> time by measuring its entropy.)
> 
>> No you can't, because time is reversible.
> 
>   That would mean that entropy is also reversible, which would break the
> second law.

No, it means that entropy is a statistical property.

>> Note that QM has no arrow of time. Reactions going forward are identical 
>> (altho inverted) to reactions going backwards.
> 
>   The sourced wikipedia text seems to disagree with that assessment.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow_of_time

There are lots of "arrows of time". That's the problem.

> "For isolated systems, entropy never decreases. 

This is simply untrue. Entropy is a statistical property, just like the 
electrostatic "force" is.

>>>   Space must exist, or else it would be impossible to postulate essential
>>> properties of physics, such as the Pauli exclusion principle. 
> 
>> The Pauli exclusion principle is not part of GR. It's part of QM. :-)
> 
>   How does that change the claim "space must exist"?

I was saying that you're arguing that in GR space must exist, and using QM 
to prove it, and those are incompatible theories.

>   If you accept the Pauli exclusion principle as one of the fundamental
> laws of nature, then you have to accept space existing (or explain the
> law in question in the case that space does not really exist).

And if you accept general relativity and the identity of acceleration and 
gravity, you have to throw away space as existing.

That's my point. I'm not saying "space doesn't exist."  I'm saying 
"physicists are unable to determine yet if space exists, and that's what the 
GUT is supposed to determine. Does space exist as a separate thing, or is it 
just information?"

I'm saying "it's still up in the air", and you're trying to disprove by 
picking half the arguments that the other half are wrong.

>   Even if spacetime couldn't exist without energy, does that mean that
> spacetime *is* energy?

My understanding is that this is saying that spacetime is the relationship 
between pieces of energy. So space is "information", in some sense.

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   Serving Suggestion:
     "Don't serve this any more. It's awful."

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Warp wrote:
>   If you accept the Pauli exclusion principle as one of the fundamental

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loschmidt%27s_paradox

In other words, I'm saying "It's a paradox", and you're using one half of 
the paradox to argue that the other half of the paradox isn't true.

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   Serving Suggestion:
     "Don't serve this any more. It's awful."

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Patrick Elliott wrote:
> Bad one I think. Sound, etc. isn't made up of air, water, or whatever. 
> It would be more accurate to say that it is made up of what those things 
> are "doing". This is not *that* different than words on a page. 

Yep. And the point is that (as I understand it) according to GR, spacetime 
is made up out of what energy is doing. You got it on the first try.

There's nothing in the universe except energy, and everything else (force, 
space, time, etc) is just what energy is doing.

Whether you want to argue that means there *is* something besides energy is 
arguing over whether sound *is* something besides the atoms and their behavior.

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   Serving Suggestion:
     "Don't serve this any more. It's awful."

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Warp wrote:
> Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:
>> And I'm still not convinced you can actually destroy information. At the 
>> quantum level, time is reversible, which means that information at that 
>> level does *not* get destroyed.
> 
>   I don't understand how time could be reversible, because that would imply
> that an increase in entropy (of an isolated system) would also be reversible,
> which is against the law.

Because the law is statistical, and if you get sufficiently few degrees of 
freedom, then the statistics work out such that the probability *does* 
reverse on occasion.

Take a perfect frictionless billiards table. Rack the balls. Throw one ball 
into the middle. Watch them bounce around a while. Will they ever re-rack? 
No, that's entropy.  Is every interaction reversible?  Yes.  Is it 
*possible* the balls will bounce around enough to eventually come back 
together with exactly the right velocities that they'll all rerack? Certainly.

Take a tank of water. Put two atoms of ink in it. Let them diffuse until 
they're one on each side of the tank. Is it possible they'll ever randomly 
come together to where they're both very close to each other at one corner 
of the tank? Sure.  How long before 10^20 selected atoms of ink do that at 
random? A long, long time. Is it impossible? No.

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   Serving Suggestion:
     "Don't serve this any more. It's awful."

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bart wrote:
> This is a funny one:
> http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/12/03/clever-chicken-hides-out_n_148133.html 

Because obviously the rooster knew he is adorable and the people working at 
McDonalds would take care of him.

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   Serving Suggestion:
     "Don't serve this any more. It's awful."

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>> The second law is statistical.
>
>  It still states that the entropy of an isolated system never decreases.

IIRC the derivation/proof of the 2nd law assumes stuff like an infinite 
amount of matter - so the probability of the entropy increasing is (almost) 
zero.

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Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:
> >>>   Space must exist, or else it would be impossible to postulate essential
> >>> properties of physics, such as the Pauli exclusion principle. 
> > 
> >> The Pauli exclusion principle is not part of GR. It's part of QM. :-)
> > 
> >   How does that change the claim "space must exist"?

> I was saying that you're arguing that in GR space must exist, and using QM 
> to prove it, and those are incompatible theories.

  I never said that in GR space must exist. I said that in this universe
space exists. I don't know why you brought GR into this.

> And if you accept general relativity and the identity of acceleration and 
> gravity, you have to throw away space as existing.

  That statement makes absolutely no sense.

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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