nancyleb

Comment Threads

• Bellinghman commented on Roko's Basilisk wants YOU
  Because the simulation is so perfect, so exact, that it actually is you. Yeah, I know, this involves measuring you here and now at atomic accuracy, to a level that not only breaks the Heisenberg Uncertainty principle but that drives a coach and horses over the fragments and then gathers the splinters up and uses them as tinder for building a bonfire. But ignoring those petty practicalities, it's going to happen because, well, because someone could imagine it happening and therefore it must be inevitable....
• paws4thot commented on Roko's Basilisk wants YOU
  I'd say that this imagining tells us more about the imaginer's lack of understanding of Quantum Mechanics than about how much we should or shouldn't care about it happening....
• Jocelyn Ireson-Paine commented on Me, talking
  What I am really trying to get at is that if we organized our societies in a different way (in my eyes, a better way), we could back these efforts more. And yes, under the currently existing system, pouring effort into one area would deprive another. But what if organized society so that we poured efforts into all good research areas? Yes, that means spending a lot more on education and paying a lot of scientists and researchers and teachers instead of having them become lawyers or bankers on the one hand or not getting a proper education on the...
• Jocelyn Ireson-Paine commented on Me, talking
  Third, for philosophers, there's a few reasons for hoping it's impossible. I once read an Analog short story about the irreparable damage that one kind of faster-than-light travel might do to the Universe. It's called An Ever-Reddening Glow, and Google tells me that it's by David Brin and there's a copy here. Perhaps, at least for the purposes of science fiction, quantum-foam wave power might cause similar damage....
• dmytryl commented on Roko's Basilisk wants YOU
  Ahh, we are essentially in agreement then. I don't see though how locality would affect any exact interpretation in so much as locality can at all be inferred (sounds like an attempt to prove absence). If there was a non local interaction, it would knock the support from under everything that's motivated by locality, though. The way I see it, any new physics necessitates different laws of physics from what we know, with different set of interpretations, some of which can resemble current interpretations of QM; and some of current interpretations of QM may end up having no interpretations of...