Posts by bohm

i keep hearing demands for equal rights but don't understand what rights they are missing exactly.. normally a march is to show the support (and potential votes) for a cause, but ... votes for what?

... and the election happened already.. is anyone else confused?

bohm

1) The country is now run by a sexist pig who bragged about grabbing women by their genitals

2a) According to intelligence services, the election was influenced by a hostile government who waged a propaganda war in favor of trump.

2b) The president and key members of the cabinet have deep financial ties to Russians and have hinted changes to foreign policy that would severely benefit Russia. Let that sink in.

3) The president is an anti-vaxer and global-warming denialist.

4) The president is a conman (Trump U. and many failed business ventures.

But by all means let's have a discussion about the real issues, like feminism, or liberals being unkind, or that stupid thing someone said at a student union, somewhere

75

The Trump Era commences

by ZAPPA-ESQUE in

jw
friends

.

bohm

start treating Middle America with more respect,

The same kind of respect Trump et. al. is treating liberal America?

39

Why the resurrection must be true

by slimboyfat in

okay i was thinking about it.

and it is a transhumanist argument and nothing new, i do realise that before anyone points it out.

but it struck me afresh today that the resurrection must happen.. firstly, to state the obvious, a rational materialist conception of reality seems to exclude resurrection.

The main issue I bring up is made worse by quantum mechanics but will also be present using purely classical mechanics. I think it is easier to discuss it using classical mechanics so let's just suggest there are no quantum effects and nature is 100% deterministic:

Plus my very rudimentary understanding of chaos versus classical mechanics suggests there is a problem with your suggestion that uncertainty at a micro-level due to chaos theory is multiplied as you go up. As I understand it, classical mechanics largely "works" precisely because this chaotic feature of reality is not multiplied up the scale, but tends to be cancelled out at the macro-level. The macro level at which human beings exist and function.

The problems I have outlined above are a fundamental consequence of how the laws of nature works. You can show in general that many equations will exhibit chaotic behavior, i.e. small perturbations in the initial state of the system grows exponentially as the system evolves. That is true about most interesting systems on earth including the atmosphere. The rate of exponential growth is governed by what is known as the Lyapunov exponent:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lyapunov_exponent

You can of course ask if this theory applies to a decomposing body, however the question would be yes unless the body is frozen: The problem is the atoms in the body would interact with known chaotic systems, weather that is groundwater percolating through the earth or the air, both obviously chaotic systems.

This conclusion can only be altered if steps are made to preserve your body like freezing it.

On the other hand, if you are saying the universe is deterministic in itself but we can never measure it well enough for it to divulge its secrets, I am still left wondering how do you know?

The problem is not that we can't measure the universe well enough *at any given point*, but that to predict the past (or future) increases the level of precision required exponentially: I know that because it is build into the laws of nature and can be demonstrated mathematically. It is the fundamentals of chaos theory (see the wikipedia page).

That creates all sorts of issue for the resurrection like the simple fact QM puts an upper limit to how well you can measure things (Heisenbergs uncertainty principle) or that some information is bound to get lost (photons emitted to space).

75

The Trump Era commences

by ZAPPA-ESQUE in

jw
friends

.

bohm

Donald Trump has already fixed climate change:

https://thinkprogress.org/white-house-deletes-climate-change-from-website-b424fcc25af8#.r312byr08

It is important to remember how we got here: by making Hillarys "emails" and supposed alignment with "the feminists" the main talking point during the campaign while ignoring the obvious flaws in trumps person as well as the ongoing propaganda campaign by Russia.

Next test will be the elections in France, Germany.

75

The Trump Era commences

by ZAPPA-ESQUE in

jw
friends

.

bohm

USA is now at war with Euroasia (Muslims) & he is preparing who to blame (foreigners, the establishment).

39

Why the resurrection must be true

by slimboyfat in

okay i was thinking about it.

and it is a transhumanist argument and nothing new, i do realise that before anyone points it out.

but it struck me afresh today that the resurrection must happen.. firstly, to state the obvious, a rational materialist conception of reality seems to exclude resurrection.

bohm

SBF:

bohm according to the video above about how physical cloning is not possible, it says that an extremely close approximation is theoretically possible but that quantum mechanics prevents an exact physical clone without destroying the original in the process of retrieving the information. A resurrection does not involve replicating or destroying one original, but extrapolating from numerous points in the past to recreate a being which resembles multiple point but may not be exact to any given one.

My point is that the problems with chaos theory are much more severe. I am with you that we don't need an exact clone, but an approximate clone too is impossible. I suggest we keep quantum mechanics completely out of it as I think it is just confusing the real problem:

Let's suppose "you" consist of just 100 atoms in a completely empty room with perfect walls. Let's assume for simplicity the atoms are atoms of gas and when you are "alive" that corresponds to the atoms being in a ball in the middle of the room.

That you "die" means the atoms evolve according to the rules of classical mechanics -- they fly apart and begin to bounce off the walls of the room. This is not a poor model if you are cremated.

An alien civilization could then look at the configuration of atoms at a later time (where they would be distributed evenly in the room), measure the location/velocity of all atoms, and use the rules of classical mechanics to re-construct you (and an approximate reconstruction will do). That seems pretty simple and nothing in physics prevent this (let's assume we are dealing with classifical physics).

Here is the problem: Let's suppose we look at you just after you "die" and focus on one of the atoms. Suppose we know the location, velocity of that atom to a tremendous precision, except we are just ever so slightly uncertain about the location of the atom (assume we know it to the width of an atomic nuclei). Suppose in one case we know the exact location of all atoms, and in another case we know the exact location of all atoms except this one where we get the location wrong by the width of a nuclei. atom, and in another case we know

The problem is that this atom will eventually hit another atom, and that small uncertainty will affect the angle the two atoms then scatter (both atoms). As time progress that means the location both the atoms will become more and more different in the two cases. Then two two atoms hit two other atoms and now there are four atoms that are affected by that initial uncertainty. Then these four atoms hit four others and then there are eight and up we go exponentially until all atoms are affected. My point is that this idea holds for all atoms: Affect one atom and you affect them all.

But it gets worse: Since the uncertainty affecting each atom involved in the collisions keeps growing too, at some point the uncertainty affecting any of the atoms reaches the width of an atom at which point it might miss a collision --- that this collision happens or not will eventually affect all atoms, in other words you get a completely, different configuration of atoms just because you changed the location of one atom by the width of an atomic nuclei. This is known as the butterfly effect. Are you with me so far?

This thought-experiment was about what happens as you decompose and time moves forward, but the same holds if we assume we measure the location at a future time and tries to predict the past: Time dynamics are reversible.

So if you measure the location of a single atom wrong (by the tiniest amount), that will mean your conclusion of the past will become completely random: you will conclude the atoms that make up "you" were not actually formed as a spherical ball in the past, but as a random configuration in the room -- i.e. a gas.

There is another way to phrase this: The precision at which you need to know the present to predict the past grows exponentially.

We can continue this thought process a bit. Atoms are not static but absorbs and emits photons. When they emit a photon, that photon will carry momentum and thereby to know the exact momentum of the atom originally, you have to measure the momentum of the photon as well (and remember we do need to measure the momentum exactly because of the above problems).

This is not a problem in the room where we can put photo detectors on the wall, but in real life some of those photons will shoot into space and fly away at the speed of life. Since the alien civilization can't measure those photons that creates an inherit uncertainty in their ability to reconstruct the past. In other words the project becomes impossible.

39

Why the resurrection must be true

by slimboyfat in

okay i was thinking about it.

and it is a transhumanist argument and nothing new, i do realise that before anyone points it out.

but it struck me afresh today that the resurrection must happen.. firstly, to state the obvious, a rational materialist conception of reality seems to exclude resurrection.

bohm

lSBF: There are still two issues: Let's suppose that your grand-grand-..-grandchildren decide to resurrect you in 200 years. To do that they need to know their present state of matter to conclude what state you were in when you died so they take the entire earth apart and measure the location of all atoms in the earth. The first problem is that a lot of information is totally gone: You were cremated so most of your information about you is found in the atmosphere where it (subtly) affects how light bounces off atoms -- since that information is then sometimes found in electromagnetic radiation, and a large fraction of that radiation escapes from earth never to be seen again, that means they are fundamentally going to be missing information needed to reconstruct you (unless they can somehow travel faster than the speed of light).

The second problem is about quantum uncertainty (as I mentioned). As time progress, small perturbations in a system are increased exponentially, meaning you need exponentially better ability to measure the present state of the system to reconstruct it's past state (to some fidelity). That exponential growth is really what's important: To even conclude that most of the atoms that make up you were together at some point (nevermind their configuration as a body --- just that you were not spread out in the atmosphere) will eventually require knowledge of all atoms at an extreme precision.

When that precision reaches quantum level Heisenbergs uncertainty principle kicks in (remember this is saying that there is a minimal limit to how well you can know a particle's position and momentum) and so you can't perform the reconstruction, even approximately, unless you can get around quantum mechanics.

39

Why the resurrection must be true

by slimboyfat in

okay i was thinking about it.

and it is a transhumanist argument and nothing new, i do realise that before anyone points it out.

but it struck me afresh today that the resurrection must happen.. firstly, to state the obvious, a rational materialist conception of reality seems to exclude resurrection.

bohm

The problem here is in step 4.

According to chaos theory where small changes in initial configuration magnify exponentially as the system evolves. This means that you need to measure (with exponentially increasing) precision the present state of the system in order to predict it's initial configuration -- i.e. you before you died.

At some point that precision reaches the quantum level at which point Heisenbergs uncertainty principle will mean you cannot know both the position and velocity of the particles: at that point the resurrection is impossible even if you are Laplaces demon.