memes

I took it to mean fighting against a descent into nihilism.

The truth of determinism is relevant to the most popular conception of free will. That's why this comes up repeatedly. People seem to want themselves to be free from causality itself, because being bound by it makes you not "free", and just going through the motions.

The problem here is the definition of free will itself . Rather than demanding from the universe that your mind be inexplicably free form causality, why not just accept a more useful definition of free will? Such as the ability to make decisions without undue coercion. Vague as that is, it's at least a workable definition.

And what organ told you that, hmm?

According to our current model, we would probably observe un-collapsed quantum field waves, which is a concept inaccessible from within the universe, and could very well just be an artifact of the model instead of ground truth.

It so strange to me that this is the popular way people think about quantum mechanics. Without reformulating quantum mechanics in any way or changing any of its postulates, the theory already allows you to recover the intermediate values of all the observables in any system through retrospection, and it evolves locally and deterministically.

The "spreading out as a wave" isn't a physical thing, but an epistemic one. The uncertainty principle makes it such that you can't accurately predict the outcome of certain interactions, and the probability distribution depends upon the phase, which is the relative orientation between your measurement basis and the property you're trying to measure. The wave-like statistical behavior arises from the phase, and the wave function is just a statistical tool to keep track of the phase.

The "collapse" is not a physical process but a measurement update. Measurements aren't fundamental to quantum mechanics. It is just that when you interact with something, you couple it to the environment, and this coupling leads to the effects of the phase spreading out to many particles in the environment. The spreading out of the influence of the phase dilutes its effects and renders it negligible to the statistics, and so the particle then briefly behaves more classically. That is why measurement causes the interference pattern to disappear in the double-slit experiment, not because of some physical "collapsing waves."

People just ignore the fact that you can use weak values to reconstruct the values of the observables through any quantum experiment retrospectively, which is already a feature baked into the theory and not something you need to add, and then instead choose to believe that things are somehow spreading out as waves when you're not looking at them, which leads to a whole host of paradoxes: the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen paradox, the Wigner's friend paradox, the Frauchiger-Renner paradox, etc.

Literally every paradox disappears if we stop pretending that systems are literally waves and that the wave-like behavior is just the result of the relationship between the phase and the statistical distribution of the system, and that the waves are ultimately a weakly emergent phenomena. We only see particle waves made up of particles. No one has ever seen a wave made up of nothing. Waves of light are made up of photons of light, and the wave-like behavior of the light is a weakly emergent property of the wave-like statistical distributions you get due to the relationship between the statistical uncertainty and the phase. It in no way implies everything is literally made up waves that are themselves made of nothing.

Now, can the universe be fully predicted from the outside ? Who cares ! What is outside the universe, by definition, cannot affect it, so the question is irrelevant, again by definition.

What if our universe is a simulation?

I guess the only part that’s actually important is whether your memories are “real”, in the sense that they relate to real events. Remembering things that didn’t actually happen could cause a few problems.

Also, if I was functionally immortal and ageless, I’d probably like to know ! But I guess you eventually notice regardless.

And of course, the main problem is how synths get there, which is by murdering the person they were modeled after. That part is definitely a problem 😅

In the case of Fallout 4, the big deal is that if you were a synth, that means all your memories and experiences prior to a certain point of your existence are almost assuredly made up. They are a fabrication. Maybe you never actually lived in the pre-war era. You never had a wife. You never had a child.

It would have been better from a story-telling point if that wasn't added in a DLC long after most people played the main game through. It fits better if you do Far Harbour before ever finding Shaun so that you are forced to wonder if Shaun is even real.

Occam's razor is a rule of thumb not an absolute rule of the universe.

If you go with Cogito Ergo Sum, I think that's the stance Mickey is taking. You only know for sure of your own consciousness, everything else could be a delusion of the senses. You know, like shadows on a cave wall or whatever.

“Cogito ergo sum” reaches too far. Discarding Occam’s razor, all we can truly state 100% is that thinking exists. Does it need a thinker ? No, the “thinker” may be an emergent property of the thoughts instead of their basis, thus an illusion too.

That’s not what I believe personally, but I think it’s a valid argument.

There is no burden of proof. There is only the experience of the here and the now. Everything else is stories.

I think the usage of the word absurd in this context entails the third definition of the word here: