Climate Change

I’m talking about Quantum Mechanics. The deterministic hidden variables that would show that reality is simply objective have never been found as of yet, unfortunately for you. You just haven’t dived deep enough into this realm yet, it’s clear.

 

Seems a pretty subjective field to me, especially that bit that I posted earlier about the computer models.

 

No, I don't think anybody is saying that. But the science seems to be giving us danger signs that it makes sense to take seriously. The scientists are taking measurements and putting two and two together. You seem to be saying that since nothing is certain we should take no action. There's a professor at Oxford, Nick Bostrom, who seriously believes our reality is a Matrix-style computer simulation. He earns a lot more than I do, but I'd hesitate to base my life on that assumption. As Philip K. Dick put it, “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.”

 

How Climate Deniers Try to Sow Confusion

‘Case closed’: 99.9% of scientists agree climate emergency caused by humans | Climate crisis | The Guardian

Meanwhile, Nobel Prize winning Clauser just got cancelled by the IMF for trying to hold a conference on questioning this “settled Science”.

“There's a professor at Oxford, Nick Bostrom, who seriously believes our reality is a Matrix-style computer simulation. He earns a lot more than I do, but I'd hesitate to base my life on that assumption.”

But according to you, he’s an expert, and the experts need to be listened to.

 

I think the case that is closed is the consensus of climate scientists. Science is always tentative and they could all be wrong, but as a betting man, I think the odds are in their favor. According to me he's one expert, in a non-resistant field. Clauser is also an expert, or expert emeritus--in his own field. Bostrom's field is philosophy--more specifically, technology, futurism and ethics. And he has made useful contributions in those areas, especially on existential risks to humanity's future prospects. His ideas fostered the longtermist movement which has been criticized for leaving humanity’s future up to an elite. He's also expressed concerns about dysgenic pressures as an existential threat to our survival--the fear that the less intelligent of our species will outbreed the more intelligent--which borders on eugenics. Recently, he's been in trouble for a 1990s letter in which he suggested that blacks would be in the former category. In other words, he's a source of interesting speculations, but not the kind I'd want to bet the farm on.

 

It’s pretty funny that it hasn’t fully dawned on you both yet that by revealing your underlying beliefs about reality to me a little bit, that is the idea of an objective reality, you have now trapped yourselves, since deterministic hidden variables are now considered to be a minority position to hold in Quantum Mechanics.

That would be because John Clauser came up with a method of testing an ingenious theorem of John Bell’s that finally puts to the test the EPR debate devised by Einstein.

Alain Aspect tested this further in the early 1980s.

The results have shown repeatedly and with increasing refinement that there doesn’t seem to be any evidence of deterministic hidden variables.

Einstein said, “I would like to believe that the Moon is really there when I’m not looking at it.”

This is another way of him insisting that there must really be deterministic hidden variables at the Quantum level, which is why the EPR paper was written.

In other words, reality must have an objective existence, says Einstein.

The problem is that these hidden variables have never been found.

 

The matrix guy is an expert in his field. You’re questioning his expertise from outside of his field. According to you and MeAgain, you shouldn’t be questioning an expert from the outside. You’re not an expert in his field.

 

The matrix guy is one guy--director of Oxford's Future of Humanity Institute and a philosopher who made a name for himself on matters involving existential risk and predicting the impact of trends, especially in technology. He's the go to guy on AI, which he thinks is a greater threat to us than climate change. He does think that the majority of future existential risks to humanity are anthropogenic, meaning that they arise from human activity. And he thinks the risks are huge. "We are going to introduce entirely new risk factors in this century through our technological innovations and we don't have any track record of surviving those."

One of his concerns is that the "Director" of our simulated reality (God?) could get bored watching us and switch the simulation off. I don't lose sleep over that one, cuz it's beyond human control--unless we can figure out more ways of making ourselves more entertaining. Food for thought, but not really scientific consensus. Climate is something we maybe can do something about. for better or for worse.. Meanwhile, I note that drought in Panama is creating problems for shipping in the canal. I guess the simulation director has come up with another challenge for us !

 

Isaac Newton was also one guy. Copernicus was also one guy. Same with Galileo. Quantity of people shouldn’t be relevant to our discussion.

Anyway, I would completely agree with the sentiment that AI is a much much bigger threat to humanity than Climate Change.

 

I prefer approaching it from a Scientific standpoint these days, although I’m still interested in Spirituality. But I prefer Science since it is valued more as an arbiter of Truth.

 

Then why is climate science based on computer models being created looking for patterns that are based on the underlying beliefs of the scientists creating the models?

 

And are either of you an expert in Simulation Theory? If not, then according to your own argument, it’s not a sound debating technique for you or others to question an expert if it’s not yours or others’ field of expertise.

 

Take it up with the Quantum Physicists. I don’t make the rules on the fabric of reality.



I have come to empathize over time with the idea that there must be something objective about Reality, and Einstein would have agreed.



But the experimental facts point to otherwise.

Particles seem to be aware of when you are or aren’t measuring them. In the double-slit experiment, this has been demonstrable for nearly a Century.

It’s spooky for sure. That’s why Einstein referred to it as “spooky action at a distance”. But it’s the way it is.

The idea of “objective reality” is a comforting belief for the ordinary Logical mind, but the Science indicates otherwise.

 

But it is. Newton, Copernicus and Galileo were brilliant, but only when their ideas came to be accepted and confirmed by others or by replicable procedures could the rest of us have confidence in them. Today, lots of geniuses may share their views on the internet, along with cranks and charlatans, but we expect scientists to submit their work to peer review in scholarly journals.

I'll let Meagain speak for himself, but I don't think any "expert" is beyond question if their views are rejected by other experts. Remember (post # 430), appeal to authority is a fallacy when there is no agreement among experts in the area of knowledge under consideration.

Sabine Hossenfelder, a German theoretical physicist, makes a case that simulation theory is pseudoscience. Sabine Hossenfelder: Backreaction: The Simulation Hypothesis is Pseudoscience She argues that this is just a kind of sexed-up space age monotheism reformulated in scientific jargon. The simulation hypothesis "assumes there is another level of reality where someone or some thing controls what we believe are the laws of nature, or even interferes with those laws." Bostrom's thesis rests on the notion that "If there are a) many civilizations, and these civilizations b) build computers that run simulations of conscious beings, then c) there are many more simulated conscious beings than real ones, so you are likely to live in a simulation." As an AI expert, he assumes it is possible to simulate human-like consciousness. But our understanding of human consciousness is far from scientific certainty. More problematic is his assumption that all our observations can be reproduced not by the known laws of science but by "a different, underlying algorithm, which the programmer is running...(A)ttempts to algorithmically reproduce natural laws are usually incompatible with the symmetries of Einstein’s theories of special and general relativity". Bostrom doesn’t explain how this works. "What kind of computer code can actually do that? What algorithm can identify conscious subsystems and their intention and then quickly fill in the required information without ever producing an observable inconsistency." She notes the contrast between this and climate change models which are able to get it approximately right because climate scientists "have observations which they can use to check whether their approximations work. If you only have a simulation, like the programmer in the simulation hypothesis, you can’t do that."

George F.R. Ellis, a cosmologist thinks "[the hypothesis] is totally impracticable from a technical viewpoint" and that "protagonists seem to have confused science fiction with science. Late-night pub discussion is not a viable theory." Simulation hypothesis - Wikipedia Whether or not that's true, there are practical reasons for proceeding as though our material reality is real. The simulation hypothesis is neither verifiable nor refutable empirically, which makes it unscientific. So far, we seem to be able to get through life by assuming that physical reality is real. On the other hand, Elon Musk believes it, so it there's that.

 

In that case, all your concerns about the sinister unknown elite that's using climate change to control us may be unwarranted. It's all in your mind, or your computer programming.