Subhuman lemmy posters: “We are spending way too much!!! $0.5m on scientific research!!! Outrageous!”

Me: “Bro we spend billions killing children around the world who tf cares there are other places you should be concerned about budget.”

Subhuman lemmy posters: “Errrm actually stfu stop bringing that up, we want to cut everything but that!”

kys you people are freaks, this place is just as bad as reddit, entirely comprised of genocidal US ultranationalist sociopaths. I need to go to a forum that is not English-speaking.

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.

that’s only like, as much as a couple dozen of the 45,000+ of bombs we’ve dropped on babies in gaza

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.

I always assumed that was because the shield was failing and so to maintain it they have to divert excess power to it, which fries their systems. Or, another interpretation is that impacting the shields causes a power feedback which drives excess power to it unintentionally, and again leads it to frying/sparking.

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.

It is ultimately a philosophical choice not demanded by the mathematics to actually interpret reality as oscillating waves. Erwin Schrodinger for example argued against the notion that particles really “spread out” as waves and instead argued that the particle just kind of hops from interaction to interaction without having meaningful existence in between interaction. If you go this route, then the wave function doesn’t “describe” anything, but rather predicts where particles would hop to during an interaction.

The reason Schrodinger argued in favor of this is because he said treating particles as actually spreading out as waves contradicts with the fact we only measure particles, so you need an additional postulate that says these waves suddenly collapse back into particles the moment you try to measure them, and he did not see why “measurement” should play a fundamental role in the theory. This is sometimes called the “measurement problem” and Heisenberg’s formulation and interpretation does not have this problem.

If you mean, can you get rid of the wave function entirely, the answer is also yes. When quantum mechanics was first formulated, it was formulated using Heisenberg’s matrix mechanics, which make all the same predictions but does not use the wave function. The wave function is a result of a particular mathematical formalism. There is another formulation of quantum mechanics called the path integral formulation, and yet another called the ensemble in state space formulation.

The probability of finding an electron or any other particle at one point or another can be imagined as a diffuse cloud, denser where the probability of seeing the particle is stronger. Sometimes it is useful to visualize this cloud as if it were a real thing. For instance, the cloud that represents an electron around its nucleus indicates where it is more likely that the electron appears if we look at it. Perhaps you encountered them at school: these are the atomic ‘orbitals’.

This cloud is described by a mathematical object called wave function.The Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger has written an equation describing its evolution in time. Quantum mechanics is often mistakenly identified with this equation. Schrödinger had hopes that the ‘wave’ could be used to explain the oddities of quantum theory: from those of the sea to electromagnetic ones, waves are something we understand well. Even today, some physicists try to understand quantum mechanics by thinking that reality is the Schrödinger wave.

But Heisenberg and Dirac understood at once that this would not do. To view Schrödinger’s wave as something real is to give it too much weight – it doesn’t help us to understand the theory; on the contrary, it leads to greater confusion. Except for special cases, the Schrödinger wave is not in physical space, and this divests it of all its intuitive character. But the main reason why Schrödinger’s wave is a bad image of reality is the fact that, when a particle collides with something else, it is always at a point: it is never spread out in space like a wave. If we conceive an electron as a wave, we get in trouble explaining how this wave instantly concentrates to a point at each collision.

Schrödinger’s wave is not a useful representation of reality: it is an aid to calculation which permits us to predict with some degree of precision where the electron will reappear. The reality of the electron is not a wave: it is how it manifests itself in interactions, like the man who appeared in the pools of lamplight while the young Heisenberg wandered pensively in the Copenhagen night.

— Carlo Rovelli, “Reality is Not what it Seems”

Of course, you might say that this is still not “macroscopically similar to ours” because in our classical world we do not need to treat objects as if they only exist in the moment of interaction. There is always a tradeoff in quantum mechanics. It’s not a classical theory. There will always be some differences, so it really depends upon what differences you find the most intuitive/acceptable. If you find the oscillating wave picture to be too bizarre then you can think of them just as particles, with the tradeoff that they only exist relative to what they are interacting with in the moment.

I don’t really understand why reddit pretty much succeeded in killing off all other forums. People love the format of reddit so much that even after killing off all the supporting apps it hasn’t really done much at all to cause people to go back to traditional forums. I’ve personally always found reddit far worse than a traditional forum because of the like system. This place has it as well, although I’m not sure how it compares to reddit’s in terms of algorithm.

Traditional forums did not have it. You just saw posts sequentially. There was also no character limit. This meant on traditional forums everyone’s position was not only presented equally but you could also go into as much detail as you wanted. If the topic is complex you could write basically an essay if you wanted, which in reddit you have to break up into multiple posts. Reddit’s like system also tends to facilitate echo chambers because popular opinions show up first while unpopular opinions show up last and can even be hidden, and it encourages people to misrepresent you and not act in good faith because they’re looking for an “own” to farm likes rather than a real discussion.

Sure, there might be sometimes when a person’s opinion is so out there and disingenuous you don’t even want to take it seriously and have a real discussion, but I’ve never once in my entire history of using reddit had a decent conversation with someone. Even things as benign as like /r/nintendo, I say I enjoyed a game and I got a bunch of people shitting on me calling me a bad person for liking a particular game. No matter how benign and non-serious the topic is, people always find ways to turn it into an attack to “own” you to farm upvotes.

Complex numbers are just a way of representing an additional degree of freedom in an equation. You have to represent complex numbers not on a number line but on the complex plane, so each complex number is associated with two numbers. That means if you create a function that requires two inputs and two outputs, you could “compress” that function into a single input and output by using complex numbers.

Complex numbers are used all throughout classical mechanics. Waves are two-dimensional objects because they both have an amplitude and a wavelength. Classical wave dynamics thus very often use complex numbers because you can capture the properties of waves more concisely. An example of this is the Fourier transform. If you look up the function, it looks very scary, it has an integral and Euler’s number raised to the negative power of the imaginary number multiplied by pi. However, if you’ve worked with complex numbers a lot, you’d immediately recognize that raising Euler’s number to pi times the imaginary number is just how you represent rotations on the complex plane.

Despite how scary the Fourier transform looks, literally all it is actually doing is wrapping a wave around a circle. 3Blue1Brown has a good video on his channel of how to visualize the Fourier transform. The Fourier transform, again, isn’t inherently anything quantum mechanical, we use it all the time in classical mechanics, for example, if you ever used an old dial-up model and wondered why it made those weird noises, it was encoding data as sound wave by representing them as different harmonic waves that it would then add together, producing that sound. The Fourier transform could then be used by the modem at the other end to break the sound back apart into those harmonic waves and then decode it back into data.

In quantum mechanics, properties of systems always have an additional kind of “orientation” to them. When particles interact, if their orientations are aligned, the outcome of the interaction is deterministic. If they are misaligned, then it introduces randomness. For example, an electron’s spin state can either be up or down. However, its spin state also has a particular orientation to it, so you can only measure it “correctly” by having the orientation of the measuring device aligned with the electron. If they are misaligned, you introduce randomness. These orientations often are associated with physical rotations, for example, with the electron spins state, you measure it with something known as a Stern-Gerlach apparatus, and to measure the electron on a different orientation you have to physically rotate the whole apparatus.

Because the probability of measuring certain things directly relates to the relative orientation between your measuring device and the particle, it would be nice if we had a way to represent both the relative orientation and the probability at the same time. And, of course, you guessed it, we do. It turns out you can achieve this simply by representing your probability amplitudes (the % chance of something occurring) as complex numbers. This means in quantum mechanics, for example, an event can have a -70.7i% chance of occurring.

While that sounds weird at first, you quickly realize that the only reason we represent it this way is because it directly connects the relative orientation between the systems interacting and the probabilities of certain outcomes. You see, you can convert quantum probabilities to classical just by computing the distance from 0% on the complex plane and squaring it, which in the case of -70.7i% would give you 50%, which tells you this just means it is basically a fair coin flip. However, you can also compute from this number the relative orientation of the two measuring devices, which in this case you would find it to be rotated 90 degrees. Hence, because both values can be computed from the same number, if you rotate the measuring device it must necessarily alter the probabilities of different outcomes.

You technically don’t need to ever use complex numbers. You could, for example, take the Schrodinger equation and just break it up into two separate equations for the real and imaginary part, and have them both act on real numbers. Indeed, if you actually build a quantum computer simulator in a classical computer, most programming languages don’t include complex numbers, so all your algorithms have to break the complex numbers into two real numbers. It’s just when you are writing down these equations, they can get very messy this way. Complex numbers are just far more concise to represent additional degrees of freedom without needing additional equations/functions.

ngl I blame physicists who communicate to the public for this

Notice how you always see a lot of nonsense mysticism around quantum mechanics like “quantum healing” but you never see anything along the lines of like “general relativity healing” or “inflation theory healing.”

The difference is that often it is the physicists themselves who choose to communicate to the public who paint quantum mechanics in a mystical light. Indeed, this is not even something unique to the physicists who communicate to the public, you can sometimes even run into it in peer-reviewed publications painting QM as a theory that somehow puts conscious observers front and center and questions the existence of objective reality, or whatever rubbish philosophy people try to imbue onto some linear algebra.

The ones who communicate to the public just are often worse because they don’t tell you QM as it really is, they usually tell you some personal theory they have. For example, rather than just describing how QM works, one of these science communicators might tell you their personal theory about how there’s a grand multiverse, or that “consciousness” plays some sort of role, and that explains why QM works. They do not just present the theory, but their own personal speculation as an underlying explanation for it.

Because physicists themselves promote all this mysticism around a bunch of linear algebra, you end up with mystics and charlatans who realize that they can take advantage of this by talking about mystical nonsense like “quantum healing.” Sure, it might be nonsensical rubbish, but the person who hears about “quantum healing” also heard a real PhD physicist tell them about multiverses and “consciousness,” so they think there must be something to it as well. It gives the mysticism an air of legitimacy.

We like to kid ourselves that the mysticism is just promoted by your Deepak Chopra types or laymen who have no idea what they’re talking about. But if you actually look at what a real academic philosophy department publishes, there is mysticism all throughout academic philosophy. These philosophers have also had a big impact on physicists, who often adopt these mystical attitudes they learn from the philosophy department into their own discussion, and sometimes even into their own publications.

If you actually talk to the laymen who are deeply enthralled by those quantum mystic pseudoscience charlatans, they usually can point you to multiple real academics who back their beliefs, people with legitimate credentials. This is a problem nobody seems to address and it annoys the hell out of me. Everyone paints either the charlatans or the laymen as the bad guy here, but nobody wants to talk about the elephant in the room which is the rampant mysticism in academia.

I literally argued with a PhD physicist the other day who was going around preaching to people that quantum mechanics proves that there is no physical reality and we all live inside of a “cosmic consciousness.” I did not get very far with him because he just insulted me and pointed to academic philosophers who agreed with him and said I’m stupid for even questioning his claims, and then wouldn’t address my criticisms.

Yep. Technically you could in principle use Grover’s algorithm to speed up cracking a symmetrical cipher, but the size typically used for the keys is too large so even though it’d technically be faster it still not be possible in practice. Even with asymmetrical ciphers we already have replacements that are quantum safe, although most companies have not implemented them yet.