Boaz Nash

Yes, thank you, @atrupar.com. He allows us to get a clear sense of what's going on today in this massively messy and mostly ugly political time without having to put our entire lives into that activity. Combined with @hcrichardson.bsky.social and a few others, we can still find narratives to trust.

How about we stop the idea of a global technology competition and work together to ease climate change and figure out how to live together on this planet?

I think this was intentionally introduced to attack Israel and the Jewish people rhetorically and historically. As @dhistoryman.bsky.social says, "war crimes" is probably more appropriate to most of the situations where "genocide" is being used re. Gaza and the Palestinians.

Photo of the ship of Theseus

Thing that really gets my goat is the way people are eager to fund this bullshit but you need eleven layers of analysis and a ton of collateral if you want to open a small grocery store in a food desert.

The US has done this terrible stuff before, but most people weren't aware of it. Let's hope that now that it's all so obvious and out in the open greed and corruption (mostly for the benefit of one man), Americans won't accept it.

Here's Sean Carroll trying to justify the picture of reality suggested by the Many Worlds interpretation
www.youtube.com/watch?v=2bZi...

Kastner quoting Heisenberg on p. 14 of the article linked above

"The MWI is an exuberant attempt to rescue the “yes/no” by admitting both of them at once. But in the end, if you say everything is true, you have said nothing."
www.quantamagazine.org/why-the-many...

@philipcball.bsky.social Oct 18, 2018
Quanta Magazine

I only know a little myself. Here's a wikipedia page on it:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potenti...

I've been following a thread related to Process philosophy, some of which wants to bring back concepts from Plato and Aristotle.

See also Ruth Kastner and her possibilist Trans Int
arxiv.org/abs/0906.1626

I've been interested in the idea that quantum mechanics is telling us that we need to bring back possibilities in a real way, as Aristotle and earlier times took them.
Maybe Many Worlds is another way of looking at the same idea. The branches are real in the sense that possibilities are real.

I see. So the ontology is vectors in Hilbert space, but certain vectors are conscious or classical and others aren't.
I'm not sure how compelling a picture of being classical or being conscious this gives, but I see the structure you are working with.

I've taken MWI to mean that there are essentially no classical states, only quantum states. But maybe that's not how advocates think about it.

Firstly, this doesn't seem to me a great theory of consciousness. If I examine my own experience, it doesn't seem very similar to an evolving subset of a symplectic manifold.
And secondly, we're then in something like Copenhagen, since we have both classical and quantum objects interacting.

But if we take MWI seriously, then there don't exist any classical states. And if there do exist classical states, we are left with the usual conundrum of determining this "infamous boundary" between quantum & classical.
Basically, we have to address the "ontology question" as Norsen frames it.

Whitehead has the concept of "prehension" and Gendlin the concept of "implying" as more basic predecessors of consciousness. Looking at how consciousness develops out of more simple concepts seems more promising to me to combine with a theory of micro-physics.

The way you framed the question asked what "we" would experience in a many worlds scenario. Whatever account one gives for consciousness, people are bound to be on the more complex, developed end of the spectrum. I'd think it'd be easier to imagine what a single cell experiences under MWI.

If one follows this path in quantum foundations, one requires a full blown theory of consciousness. It seems more likely to me that we learn about what consciousness is via engagement with quantum theory. This is Whitehead's "bifurcation of nature" where we've completely separated these phenomena.

I'm reading "The KAM story" by H Scott Dumas, who I met here in Albuquerque.
www.worldscientific.com/worldscibook...

It brings me back to old questions about non-linear dynamics in accelerator physics and beyond.

I hope I might connect it to atomic physics for quantum computing & sensing as well.

I've been enjoying taking a break from following the news. I just have to start reading my bluesky feed to see what a complex mess is going on. The flurry or corruption is hard to follow. It takes some substantial effort to catch up and see what's important amidst the chaos...

We also made this wine holder from pine wood today at Fuse Maker space. We used a chopper saw, a band saw, a planer, a lathe and several sander tools.

Learning to mill!

"But Severance does operate like a literalization of workism, an idea increasingly explored by sociologists that see people looking for near-spiritual fulfillment from the workplace."
commongoodmag.com/what-is-seve...

276 emails. Finally starting to catch up. Hopefully I'll get back to being organized again this weekend.

I need to get myself a new copy of Travis Norsen’s textbook (lost in a fire, sadly). I liked the way he laid out the “Measurement Problems”, and even more importantly, the way he identifies the closely-related “Ontology Problem”.

scholar.google.com/citations?vi...

I get people having varied opinions on AI, but I do not understand this post at all. AI tools absolutely do not make us more independent from big business. Literally the largest businesses in the world are AI companies.

Glad to hear it. Of course, we want accountability, and we want the grand criminal himself out.

I’m still interested in the transactional interpretation that says that a measurement occurs when a particle is absorbed by a bound state. I don’t know if it can be made general to all conceivable interactions, but it seems to me on the right track.

I’m so glad this terrible person is being questioned. Can our country survive long enough that justice will be served? Let’s get through the midterm elections everyone.

I'm watching the Severance series, partly because Adam Scott was my step sister's first boyfriend, and also because it's kind of grabbed me. But it's putting me in a weird mood, like the world is out to get me, and imposing a kind of unreality on everything, with this odd life time in Albuquerque.