I’ve used LLMs quite a few times to find partial derivatives / gradient functions for me, and I know it’s correct because I plug them into a gradient descent algorithm and it works. I would never trust anything an LLM gives blindly no matter how advanced it is, but in this particular case I could actually test the output since it’s something I was implementing in an algorithm, so if it didn’t work I would know immediately.

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Putting aside the fact that you cannot “experimentally prove” anything as proof is for mathematics, claiming you can experimentally demonstrate fundamental uncertainty is, to put it bluntly, incoherent. Uncertainty is a negative, it is a statement that there is no underlying cause for something. You cannot empirically demonstrate the absence of an unknown cause.

If you believe in fundamental uncertainty, it would be appropriate to argue in favor of this using something like the principle of parsimony, pointing out the fact that we have no evidence for an underlying cause so we shouldn’t believe in one. Claiming that you have “proven” there is no underlying cause is backwards logic. It is like saying you have proven there is no god as opposed to simply saying you lack belief in one. Whatever “proof” you come up with to rule out a particular god, someone could change the definition of that god to get around your “proof.”

Einstein, of course, was fully aware of such arguments and acknowledged such a possibility that there may be no cause, but he put forwards his own arguments as to why it leads to logical absurdities to treat the randomness of quantum mechanics as fundamental; it’s not merely a problem of randomness, but he showed with a thought experiment involving atomic decay that it forces you to have to reject the very existence of a perspective-independent reality.

There is no academic consensus on how to address Einstein’s arguments, and so to claim he’s been “proven wrong” is quite a wild claim to make.

“[W]hat is proved by impossibility proofs is lack of imagination.” (John Bell)

Quantum immortality is crackpot quantum woo pseudoscience.

Economics isn’t supposed to make sense, it’s just meant to justify the prevailing system for the time. It is like theology back when we used to live under religious monarchies. It treats itself as “academic,” has universities and degrees, very serious “scholarly” debate, entire textbooks written on it, all its adherents will insist that it is a genuine scholarly enterprise and anyone who disagrees just “doesn’t understand it,” but it is ultimately not a genuine scientific program but merely exists to justify the prevailing order at the time.

Nah, they’re right, it is fantasy. I think some people have in their heads that particles spread out like waves in 3D space and Many Worlds is just like an objective collapse model where it collapses back into a particle when you look at it, but where all outcomes happen in a different branch of the multiverse rather than just having one outcome.

The reality is that it is only actually possible to consistently map quantum waves to 3D space when you have a single particle. The moment you introduce two or three, it quickly breaks down because the number of quantum waves grows exponentially. If you have 3 spin-1/2 particles then you would describe their state with 8 waves. You cannot consistently break apart 8 into 3. You end up quickly finding that it is actually impossible to assign the waves to any location at all in space or time, so you cannot think of them as something like a propagating field mode or anything like that.

These are waves made of nothing that do not exist anywhere and nobody can see them. One of the weirdest things about quantum mechanics I do not think people appreciate enough is how you evolve something that seems to have no relationship at all to the real-world system and yet it can predict its behavior statistically.

Most other interpretations see the waves as playing some role in determining where the particle in 3D space actually shows up. This is where MWI begins to make no sense: it denies that there ever even is a particle at all and physical reality is just the invisible waves. It does not actually posit that when an observation is made, the wave is reduced to an eigenstate on two different branches of a multiverse. It denies that there is ever a reduction at all.

Imagine a photon hits a beam splitter and has a 50%/50% chance of being reflected/transmitted, and you have two detectors on either side. At the end of the day, you will detect one or the other. But MWI denies that you will detect one or the other. It does not actually posit that the universe literally splits into two branches where you detect one or the other, because if all that exists is the quantum state and the quantum state also never reduces to anything, then neither detectors actually ever enter into an eigenstate where you can say a detection was made.

If you take MWI seriously, then what it is literally doing is denying the entirety of the reality that we observe. Everything we observe is just a lie, and true reality merely consists of a single giant infinite-dimensional wave that exists nowhere, is made of nothing, and nobody can ever see it. But clearly that is not what we perceive in the real-world, so MWI proponents have to claim what we perceive is an “illusion” created by “consciousness,” and then will just kick the can down the road and say that the mystery of why what we perceive is nothing like “true” reality is caught up in the “mystery of consciousness” and when we solve that then we will also understand how the “illusion” is created. It doesn’t really “solve” anything but just shifts one loaded topic under the umbrella of another.

Tim Maudlin has a good lecture on this problem in particular.

MWI proponents also constantly misrepresents the state of MWI to make it seem more “proven” than it actually is, such as repeatedly making the false claim that it is “simpler” because it deletes the Born rule. The Born rule was not added because it is funny, it was added because it is necessary rule to actually make predictions with the theory, to tie the quantum waves back to what we actually observe. If you delete it, you are left without any ability to derive probabilities, at least without adding another assumption.

Lev Vaidman did a survey of all the attempts to derive the Born rule in the literature and found every single one of them ends up introducing some additional assumption somewhere. They always at some point need to take on an assumption as arbitrary as the Born rule itself. Sean himself published a paper where he tries to develop a “quantum epistemic separability principle” to derive it which is based on doing a partial trace on the universal wave function and treating the diagonal entries in the reduced density matrix as probabilities, yet Richard Dawid and Simon Friederich pointed out in a response paper that there is no coherent justification for his ESP-QM other than it simply being proposed for the purpose of deriving the Born rule, and there is no justification that the diagonals of a reduced density matrix even tell you anything about probabilities unless you’re already assuming the Born rule.

You can derive the Born rule through Gleason’s theorem, but Gleason’s theorem relies on one of its assumptions the idea that the quantum state actually translates to classical probabilities across classical measurement devices. This is obviously something denied in MWI as there are no classical measurement devices, and so Gleason’s theorem cannot be used to justify the Born rule for MWI.

There is also an issue with locality. The EPR paper is basically a no-go theorem against local psi-complete interpretations of quantum mechanics. You cannot have a local psi-complete interpretation. MWI proponents may try to say it is “local” in Hilbert space, but this is rather meaningless as locality refers to position in 3D space. Something that is nonlocal is superluminal, it moves through space faster than light, but quantum waves do not “move.” They have no position. The concept of locality is hardly relevant to them. If you actually look at the behavior of particles in 3D space, then MWI is manifestly nonlocal. I am not even claiming it being nonlocal is inherently a flaw, but more that they always claim it is local when you just look at the mathematics and it is not meaningfully local in any sense.

Sean also likes to say misleading statements like MWI is just “taking the Schrodinger equation seriously.” This plays into a myth pushed by David Deutsch, which I constantly see this fallacy repeated by MWI believers, which is that the only two interpretations are MWI, which says things always evolve according to the Schrodinger equation, or objective collapse models, which say they do not, and since it’s trivial to prove that objective collapse models are not mathematically consistent with quantum mechanics, therefore if you just “take the Schrodinger equation seriously” then you must believe in MWI.

But this is fallacious because objective collapse models are incredibly niche and hardly anyone buys into objective collapse models anyways, except maybe Penrose and his crew these days, but it’s literally like <1% of academics. No interpretation is an objective collapse model, because objective collapse models necessarily make different predictions, so they fall under the category of a whole different theoretical model. There are like a couple dozen interpretations in the literature and they all “take the Schrodinger equation seriously.” Even Copenhagen does not claim that there is literally a physical collapse but treats it as merely epistemic.

Indeed, all interpretations treat the “collapse” as an epistemic measurement update in some way, including even MWI (as you are merely “realizing what branch you’re on”). When it actually comes to interpretations, MWI’s competition is other interpretations, not objective collapse theories. Poking holes in objective collapse theories doesn’t somehow provide evidence that MWI is correct.

Quantum mechanics does not have much to do with consciousness.

Interesting you get downvoted for this when I mocked someone for saying the opposite who claimed that $0.5m was some enormous amount of money we shouldn’t be wasting, and I simply pointed out that we waste literally billions around the world on endless wars killing random people for now reason, so it is silly to come after small bean quantum computing if budgeting is your actual concern. People seemed to really hate me for saying that, or maybe it was because they just actually like wasting moneys on bombs to drop on children and so they want to cut everything but that.

So many skibidi vibes here man, it was all vibes rizzing up this place and until I came and unvibed everything. The vibes are so joever vro I was just mogged. 😔

Do you even need quantum mechanics to make that argument, then? You’re basically saying weak emergence is evidence of being in a simulation because you can approximate nature much simpler when “zoomed out.” It seems like even if we did not have quantum mechanics you could still make that argument.

Why would an optimization make things more complicated? The point of optimizations in any simulation is to simplify the complexity of the computation. The entire reason why there is a multi-billionaire industry to research quantum computers is because they are exponentially more difficult to simulate than classical physics, so they are not practical to simulate on a classical computer. Seems weird to me that a simulator would “optimize” things by making them enormously more complex.

I wouldn’t, I’d just live there. Get to know the people and culture, get married, grow to old age and die. Just like almost everyone there, and most people in any country. I’d survive just like I’d survive in any other country: go to work every day to get income needed to eat, repeat the process ad infinitum until my body withers away from old age.

Yeah, the jacket is very different as well if you look at the front chest area. While people do say maybe he just changed his clothes, the problem is if he also changed his backpack, he couldn’t have just put the clothes in the backpack, meaning he would’ve had to have left them somewhere and there would’ve been a trail that probably would’ve been found by now. It doesn’t really add up for them to be the same person.

Ah yes, crying about “privilege” while you’re here demanding that people shouldn’t speak out against a literal modern day holocaust at the only time when they have the political power to make some sort of difference. Yeah, it’s totally those people who are “privileged” and not your white pasty ass who doesn’t have to worry about their extended family being slaughtered.

Good. That’s when Democrats should be criticized the most, because that is the only time you have the power to exercise any leverage over them. Why would you refuse to criticize them when you actually have a tiny bit of leverage and wait until you have no power at all and your criticism is completely irrelevant and will be ignored? That is just someone who wants to complain but doesn’t actually want anything to change.

We don’t know what it is. We don’t know how it works. That is why

If you cannot tell me what you are even talking about then you cannot say “we don’t know how it works,” because you have not defined what “it” even is. It would be like saying we don’t know how florgleblorp works. All humans possess florgleblorp and we won’t be able to create AGI until we figure out florgleblorp, then I ask wtf is florgleblorp and you tell me “I can’t tell you because we’re still trying to figure out what it is.”

You’re completely correct. But you’ve gone on a very long rant to largely agree with the person you’re arguing against.

If you agree with me why do you disagree with me?

Consciousness is poorly defined and a “buzzword” largely because we don’t have a fucking clue where it comes from, how it operates, and how it grows.

You cannot say we do not know where it comes from if “it” does not refer to anything because you have not defined it! There is no “it” here, “it” is a placeholder for something you have not actually defined and has no meaning. You cannot say we don’t know how “it” operates or how “it” grows when “it” doesn’t refer to anything.

When or if we ever define that properly

No, that is your first step, you have to define it properly to make any claims about it, or else all your claims are meaningless. You are arguing about the nature of florgleblorp but then cannot tell me what florgleblorp is, so it is meaningless.

This is why “consciousness” is interchangeable with vague words like “soul.” They cannot be concretely defined in a way where we can actually look at what they are, so they’re largely irrelevant. When we talk about more concrete things like intelligence, problem-solving capabilities, self-reflection, etc, we can at least come to some loose agreement of what that looks like and can begin to have a conversation of what tests might actually look like and how we might quantify it, and it is these concrete things which have thus been the basis of study and research and we’ve been gradually increasing our understanding of intelligent systems as shown with the explosion of AI, albeit it still has miles to go.

However, when we talk about “consciousness,” it is just meaningless and plays no role in any of the progress actually being made, because nobody can actually give even the loosest iota of a hint of what it might possibly look like. It’s not defined, so it’s not meaningful. You have to at least specify what you are even talking about for us to even begin to study it. We don’t have to know the entire inner workings of a frog to be able to begin a study on frogs, but we damn well need to be able to identify something as a frog prior to studying it, or else we would have no idea that the thing we are studying is actually a frog.

You cannot study anything without being able to identify it, which requires defining it at least concretely enough that we can agree if it is there or not, and that the thing we are studying is actually the thing we aim to study. We should I believe your florgleblorp, sorry, I mean “consciousness” you speak of, even exists if you cannot even tell me how to identify it? It would be like if someone insisted there is a florgleblorp hiding in my room. Well, I cannot distinguish between a room with or without a florgleblorp, so by Occam’s razor I opt to disbelieve in its existence. Similarly, if you cannot tell me how to distinguish between something that possesses this “consciousness” and something that does not, how to actually identify it in reality, then by Occam’s razor I opt to disbelieve in its existence.

It is entirely backwards and spiritualist thinking that is popularized by all the mystics to insist that we need to study something they cannot even specify what it is first in order to figure out what it is later. That is the complete reversal of how anything works and is routinely used by charlatans to justify pseudoscientific “research.” You have to specify what it is being talked about first.

we need to figure out what consciousness is

Nah, “consciousness” is just a buzzword with no concrete meaning. The path to AGI has no relevance to it at all. Even if we develop a machine just as intelligent as human beings, maybe even moreso, that can solve any arbitrary problem just as efficiently, mystics will still be arguing over whether or not it has “consciousness.”

Edit: You can downvote if you want, but I notice none of you have any actual response to it, because you ultimately know it is correct. Keep downvoting, but not a single one of you will actually reply and tell us me how we could concretely distinguish between something that is “conscious” and something that isn’t.

Even if we construct a robot that fully can replicate all behaviors of a human, you will still be there debating over whether or not is “conscious” because you have not actually given it a concrete meaning so that we can identify if something actually has it or not. It’s just a placeholder for vague mysticism, like “spirit” or “soul.”

I recall a talk from Daniel Dennett where he discussed an old popular movement called the “vitalists.” The vitalists used “life” in a very vague meaningless way as well, they would insist that even if understand how living things work mechanically and could reproduce it, it would still not be considered “alive” because we don’t understand the “vital spark” that actually makes it “alive.” It would just be an imitation of a living thing without the vital spark.

The vitalists refused to ever concretely define what the vital spark even was, it was just a placeholder for something vague and mysterious. As we understood more about how life works, vitalists where taken less and less serious, until eventually becoming largely fringe. People who talk about “consciousness” are also going to become fringe as we continue to understand neuroscience and intelligence, if scientific progress continues, that is. Although this will be a very long-term process, maybe taking centuries.

westoid media isn’t allowed to admit China does anything good, so they have to frame everything negatively. Alternative possible headline would also be, “China’s EV boom makes a dent in fossil fuel consumption, but at what cost?”

When I was younger I would play X-Wing Alliance on my PC with an actual like pilot joystick controller with all the lights turned off. That game is a Star Wars game where you fly space ships and fight other space ships, but it’s all in first-person, so you see out of the pilot cockpit.

The space mechanics was definitely one of the great things about that game, in my opinion. Most space games when you land you just press a button and it plays an animation. Having to land manually with a landing camera is very satisfying. When you crash and parts of your ship break and you have to float outside to fix it, that was also very fun. I feel like a lot of space games are a bit lazy about the actual space mechanics, this game did it very well.