pcalau12i

I always think articles like this are incredibly stupid, honestly. Political parties exist to push a particular ideology, not to win elections. If the communist party abandoned communism and became a neonazi party to win the election, and they did succeed in winning, did the communist party really "win"? Not really. If you have to abandon your ideology to win then you did not win.

It's pretty rare for parties to actually abandon their ideology like that. The job of a political party is not to merely win, but to convince the population that their ideology is superior so people will back them. They want to win, yes, but under the conditions that they have won because the people back their message so that they can implement it.

This is why I always find it incredibly stupid when I see all these articles and progressive political commentators saying that the Democrats are a stupid party for not shifting their rhetoric to be more pro-working class, to be anti-imperialist, etc. THE DEMOCRATS ARE NOT A WORKING CLASS PARTY. It would in fact be incredibly stupid for them to shift to be more left because doing so would abandon their values. The Democrats' values are billionaires, free market capitalism, and imperialism. These are not "stupid" decisions they're making for supporting these things, THESE ARE THE FUNDAMENTAL BELIEFS OF THE PARTY.

In normal countries if you dislike a party's ideology, you support a different party. But Americans have this weird fantasy that Democrats should just be "reasonable" and entirely abandon their core values to back their own values, and so they refuse to ever back a different party because of this ridiculous delusion. Whenever the Democrats fail to adopt working-class values, they run these stupid headlines saying the Democrats are being "unreasonable" or "stupid" or have "bad strategy" or are "incompetents" or whatever and "just don't want to fight."

Literally none of that is true. The Democrats are extremely fierce fighters when it comes to defending imperialism and the freedoms of billionaires. They aren't fighting for your values because those are not their values, and so you should back a different party.

On the surface, it does seem like there is a similarity. If a particle is measured over here and later over there, in quantum mechanics it doesn't necessarily have a well-defined position in between those measurements. You might then want to liken it to a game engine where the particle is only rendered when the player is looking at it. But the difference is that to compute how the particle arrived over there when it was previously over here, in quantum mechanics, you have to actually take into account all possible paths it could have taken to reach that point.

This is something game engines do not do and actually makes quantum mechanics far more computationally expensive rather than less.

So usually this is explained with two scientists, Alice and Bob, on far away planets. They’re each in the possession of a particle that is entangled with the other, and in a superposition of state 1 and state 2.

This "usual" way of explaining it is just overly complicating it and making it seem more mystical than it actually is. We should not say the particles are "in a superposition" as if this describes the current state of the particle. The superposition notation should be interpreted as merely a list of probability amplitudes predicting the different likelihoods of observing different states of the system in the future.

It is sort of like if you flip a coin, while it's in the air, you can say there is a 50% chance it will land heads and a 50% chance it will land tails. This is not a description of the coin in the present as if the coin is in some smeared out state of 50% landed heads and 50% landed tails. It has not landed at all yet!

Unlike classical physics, quantum physics is fundamentally random, so you can only predict events probabilistically, but one should not conflate the prediction of a future event to the description of the present state of the system. The superposition notation is only writing down probability amplitudes of the likelihoods of what you will observe (state 1 or state 2) of the particles in the future event that you go to the interact with it and is not a description of the state of the particles in the present.

When Alice measures the state of her particle, it collapses into one of the states, say state 1. When Bob measures the state of his particle immediately after, before any particle travelling at light speed could get there, it will also be in state 1 (assuming they were entangled in such a way that the state will be the same).

This mistreatment of the mathematical notation as a description of the present state of the system also leads to confusing language like "it collapses into one of the states" as if the change in a probability distribution represents a physical change to the system. The mental picture people say this often have is that the particle literally physically becomes the probability distribution prior to measuring it---the particle "spreads out" like a wave according to the probability amplitudes of the state vector---and when you measure the particle, this allows you to update the probabilities, and so they must interpret this as the wave physically contracting into an eigenvalue---it "collapses" like a house of cards.

But this is, again, overcomplicating things. The particle never spreads out like a wave and it never "collapses" back into a particle. The mathematical notation is just a way of capturing the likelihoods of the particle showing up in one state or the other, and when you measure what state it actually shows up in, then you can update your probabilities accordingly. For example, if you the coin is 50%/50% heads/tails and you observe it land on tails, you can update the probabilities to 0%/100% heads/tails because you know it landed on tails and not heads. Nothing "collapsed": you're just observing the actual outcome of the event you were predicting and updating your statistics accordingly.

Any time you do something to the particles on Earth, the ones on the Moon are affected also

The no-communication theorem already proves that manipulating one particle in an entangled pair has no impact at al on another. The proof uses the reduced density matrices of the particles which capture both their probabilities of showing up in a particular state as well as their coherence terms which capture their ability to exhibit interference effects. No change you can make to one particle in an entangled pair can possibly lead to an alteration of the reduced density matrix of the other particle.

I don't think solving the Schrodinger equation really gives you a good idea of why quantum mechanics is even interesting. You also shouldstudy very specific applications of it where it yields counterintuitive outcomes to see why it is interesting, such as in the GHZ experiment.

There is no "consciousness." False belief in "consciousness" is a product of Kantianism, which itself was heavily inspired by Newtonian physics (Kant was heavily inspired by Newton), which we have changed some categories over the years but the fundamentals have not and have become deeply integrated into western psyche in how we think about the world, and probably in many other cultures as well.

Modern day philosophers have just renamed Kant's phenomena to "consciousness" or "subjective experience" and renamed his "noumena" to "matter." Despite the renaming, the categories are still treated identically: the "consciousness" is everything we perceive, and the "matter" is something invisible, the true physical thing-in-itself beyond our perception and what "causes" our perception.

Since all they have done is rename Kant's categories, they do not actually solve Kant's mind-body problem, but have just rediscovered it and thus renamed it in the form of the "hard problem of consciousness," which is ultimately the same exact problem just renamed: that there seems to be a "gap" between this "consciousness" and "matter."

Most modern day philosophers seem to split into two categories. The first are the "promissory materialists" who just say there is a real problem here but shrug their shoulders and say one day science will solve it so we don't have to worry about it, but give no explanation of what a solution could even possibly look like. The second are the mystics who insist this "consciousness" can't be reconciled with "matter" because it must be some fundamental force of reality. They talk about things like "consciousness fields" or "cosmic consciousness" or whatever.

However, both are wrong. Newtonian physics is not an accurate represent of reality, we already know this, and so the Kantian mindset inspired from it should also be abandoned. When you abandon the Kantian mindset, there is no longer a need for the "phenomena" and "noumena" division, or, in modern lingo, there is no longer a need for the "consciousness" and "matter" division. There is just reality.

Imagine you are looking at a candle. The apparent size of the candle you will see will depend upon how far you are away from it: if you are further away it appears smaller. Technically, light doesn't travel at an infinite speed, and so the further away you are, the further in the past you are seeing the candle. The candle also may appear a bit different under different lighting conditions.

A Kantian would say there is a true candle, the "candle-in-itself," or, in modern lingo, the material candle, the "causes" all these different perceptions. The perceptions themselves are then said to be brain-generated, not part of the candle, not even something real at all, but something purely immaterial, part of the phenomena, or, in modern lingo, part of "consciousness."

If every possible perception of the candle is part of "consciousness," then the candle-in-itself, the actual material object, must be independent of perception, i.e. it's invisible. No observation can reveal it because all observations are part of "consciousness." This is the Kantian worldview: everything we perceive is part of a sort of illusion created within the mind as opposed to the "true" world that is entirely imperceptible. The mind-body problem, or in modern lingo the "hard problem," then arises as to how an entirely imperceptible (non-phenomenal/non-conscious) world can give rise to what we perceive in a particular configuration.

However, the Kantian worldview is a delusion. In Newtonian physics, if I launch a cannonball from point A to point B, simply observing it at point A and point B is enough to fill in the gaps to say where the object was at every point in between A and B independently of anything else. This Newtonian worldview allows us to conceive of the cannonball as a thing-in-itself, an object with its own inherent properties that can be meaningful conceived of existing even when in complete isolation, that always has an independent of history of how it ends up where it does.

As Schrodinger pointed out, this mentality does not apply to modern physics. If you fire a photon from point A to point B and observe it at those two points, you cannot always meaningfully fill in the gaps of what the photon was doing in between those two points without running into contradictions. As Schrodinger concluded, one has to abandon the notion that particles really are independent autonomous entities with their own independent existence that can be meaningfully conceived of in complete isolation. They only exist from moment to moment in the context of whatever they are interacting with and not in themselves.

If this is true for particles, it must also be true of everything made up of particles: there is no candle-in-itself either. It's a high-level abstraction that doesn't really exist. What we call the "candle" is not an independent unobservable entity separate from all our different perceptions of it, but what we call the candle is precisely the totality of all the different ways it is and can be perceived, all the different ways it interacts with other objects from those objects' perspectives.

Kant justified the noumena by arguing that it makes no sense to talk about objects "appearing" (the word "phenomena" means "the appearance of") without there being something that is doing the appearing (the noumena). He is correct on this, but for a different reason. We should not use this to justify the noumena, but it shows that if we reject the noumena, we must also reject the phenomena ("consciousness"): it makes no sense to treat the different instances of a candle as some sort of separate "consciousness" realm, or some sort of illusion or whatever independent of the real material world as it really is.

No, what we perceive directly is material reality as it actually is. Reality is what you are immersed in every day, what surrounds you, what you are experiencing in this very moment. It is not some illusion from which there is a "true" invisible reality beyond it. When you look at the candle, you are seeing the candle as it really is from your own perspective. That is the real candle in the real world. The Kantian distinction between noumena-phenomena (or between "matter" and "consciousness") should be abandoned. It is just not compatible with the modern physical sciences.

But I know no one will even know what I'm talking about, so writing this is rather pointless. Kantianism is too deeply ingrained into the western psyche, people cannot even comprehend that it is possible to criticize it because it underlies how they think about everything. This nonsense debate about "consciousness" will continue forever, in ten thousand years people will still be arguing over it, because it's an intrinsic problem that arises out of the dualistic structure in Kantian thinking. If you begin from the get-go with an assumption that there is a division between mind and matter, you cannot close this division without contradicting yourself, which leads to this debate around "consciousness." But it seems unrealistic at this point to get people to abandon this dualistic way of thinking, so it seems like the "consciousness" debate will proceed forever.

You have not made any point at all. Your first reply to me entirely ignored the point of my post which you did not read followed with an attack, I reply pointing out you ignored the whole point of my post and just attacked me without actually respond to it, and now you respond again with literally nothing of substance at all just saying "you're wrong! touch grass! word salad!"

You have nothing of substance to say, nothing to contribute to the discussion. You are either a complete troll trying to rile me up, or you just have a weird emotional attachment to this topic and felt an emotional need to respond and attack me prior to actually thinking up a coherent thing to criticize me on. Didn't your momma ever teach you that "if you have nothing positive or constructive to say, don't say anything at all"? Learn some manners, boy. Blocked.

Time to switch to HarmonyOS.

They are incredibly efficient for short-term production, but very inefficient for long-term production. Destroying the environment is a long-term problem that doesn't have immediate consequences on the businesses that engage in it. Sustainable production in the long-term requires foresight, which requires a plan. It also requires a more stable production environment, i.e. it cannot be competitive because if you are competing for survival you will only be able to act in your immediate interests to avoid being destroyed in the competition.

Most economists are under a delusion known as neoclassical economics which is literally a nonphysical theory that treats the basis of the economy as not the material world we actually live in but abstract human ideas which are assumed to operate according to their own internal logic without any material causes or influences. They then derive from these imagined "laws" regarding human ideas (which no one has ever experimentally demonstrated but were just invented in some economists' armchair one day) that humans left to be completely free to make decisions without any regulations at all will maximize the "utils" of the population, making everyone as happy as possible.

With the complete failure of this policy leading to the US Great Depression, many economists recognized this was flawed and made some concessions, such as with Keynesianism, but they never abandoned the core idea. In fact, the core idea was just reformulated to be compatible with Keynesianism in what is called the neoclassical synthesis. It still exists as a fundamental belief to most every economist that completely unregulated market economy without any plan at all will automagically produce a society with maximal happiness, and while they will admit some caveats to this these days (such as the need for a central organization to manage currency in Keynesianism), these are treated as an exception and not the rule. Their beliefs are still incompatible with long-term sustainable planning because in their minds the success of markets from comes util-maximizing decisions built that are fundamental to the human psyche and so any long-term plan must contradict with this and lead to a bad economy that fails to maximize utils.

The rise of Popperism in western academia has also played a role here. A lot of material scientists have been rather skeptical of the social sciences and aren't really going to take arguments like those based in neoclassical economics which is based largely in mysticism about human free will seriously, and so a second argument against long-term planning was put forward by Karl Popper which has become rather popular in western academia. Popper argued that it is impossible to learn from history because it is too complicated with too many variables and you cannot control them all. You would need a science that studies how human societies develop in order to justify a long-term development plan into the future, but if it's impossible to study them to learn how they develop because they are too complicated, then it is impossible to have such a science, and thus impossible to justify any sort of long-term sustainable development plan. It would always be based on guesswork and so more likely to do more harm than good. Popper argued that instead of long-term development plans, the state should instead be purely ideological, what he called an "open society" operating purely on the ideology of liberalism rather getting involved in economics.

As long as both neoclassical economics and Popperism are dominate trends in western academia there will never be long-term sustainable planning because they are fundamentally incompatible ideas.

You did not read what I wrote, so it is unironic you call it "word salad" when you are not even aware of the words I wrote since you had an emotional response and wrote this reply without actually addressing what I argued. I stated that it is impossible to have an very large institution without strict rules that people follow, and this requires also the enforcement of the rules, and that means a hierarchy as you will have rule-enforcers.

Also, you are insisting your personal definition of anarchism is the one true definition that I am somehow stupid for disagreeing with, yet anyone can just scroll through the same comments on this thread and see there are other people disagreeing with you while also defending anarchism. A lot of anarchists do not believe anarchism means "no hierarchy," like, seriously, do you unironically believe in entirely abolishing all hierarchies? Do you think a medical doctor should have as much authority on how to treat an injured patient as the janitor of the same hospital? Most anarchists aren't even "no hierarchy" they are "no unjustified hierarchy."

The fact you are entirely opposed to hierarchy makes your position even more silly than what I was criticizing.

All libertarian ideologies (including left and right wing anarchism) are anti-social and primitivist.

It is anti-social because it arises from a hatred of working in a large groups. It's impossible to have any sort of large-scale institution without having rules that people want to follow, and libertarian ideology arises out of people hating to have to follow rules, i.e. to be a respectable member of society, i.e. they hate society and don't want to be social. They thus desire very small institutions with limited rules and restrictions. Right-wing libertarians envision a society dominated by small private businesses while left-wing libertarians imagine a society dominated by either small worker-cooperative, communes, or some sort of community council.

Of course, everyone of all ideologies opposes submitting to hierarchies they find unjust, but hatred of submitting to hierarchies at all is just anti-social, as any society will have rules, people who write the rules, people who enforce the rules. It is necessary for any social institution to function. It is part of being an adult and learning to live in a society to learn to obey the rules, such as traffic rules. Sometimes it is annoying or inconvenient, but you do it because you are a respectable member of society and not a rebellious edgelord who makes things harder on everyone else because they don't obey basic rules.

It is primitivist because some institutions simply only work if they are very large. You cannot have something like NASA that builds rocket ships operated by five people. You are going to always need an enormous institution which will have a ton of people, a lot of different levels of command ("hierarchy"), strict rules for everyone to follow, etc. If you tried to "bust up" something like NASA or SpaceX to be small businesses they simply would lose their ability to build rocket ships at all.

Of course, anarchists don't mind, they will say, "who cares about rockets? They're not important." It reminds me of the old meme that spread around where someone asked anarchists how their tiny communes would be able to organize current massive supply chains in our modern societies and they responded by saying that the supply chain would be reduced to just people growing beans in their backyard and eating it, like a feudal peasant. They won't even defend that their system could function as well as our modern economy but just says modern marvels of human engineering don't even matter, because they are ultimately primitivists at heart.

I never understood the popularity of libertarian and anarchist beliefs in programming circles. We would never have entered the Information Age if we had an anarchism or libertarian system. No matter how much they might pretend these are the ideal systems, they don't even believe it themselves. If a libertarian has a serious medical illness, they are either going to seek medical help at a public hospital or a corporate hospital. Nobody is going to seek medical help at a "hospital small business" ran out of someone's garage. We all intuitively and implicitly understand that large swathes of economy that we all take advantage of simply cannot feasibly be ran by small organizations, but libertarians are just in denial.

Anarchism thus becomes meaningless as anyone who defends certain hierarchies obviously does so because they believe they are just. Literally everyone on earth is against "unjust hierarchies" at least in their own personal evaluation of said hierarchies. People who support capitalism do so because they believe the exploitative systems it engenders are justifiable and will usually immediately tell you what those justifications are. Sure, you and I might not agree with their argument, but that's not the point. To say your ideology is to oppose "unjust hierarchies" is to not say anything at all, because even the capitalist, hell, even the fascist would probably agree that they oppose "unjust hierarchies" because in their minds the hierarchies they promote are indeed justified by whatever twisted logic they have in their head.

Telling me you oppose "unjust hierarchies" thus tells me nothing about what you actually believe, it does not tell me anything at all. It is as vague as saying "I oppose bad things." It's a meaningless statement on its own without clarifying what is meant by "bad" in this case. Similarly, "I oppose unjust hierarchies" is meaningless statement without clarifying what qualifies "just" and "unjust," and once you tell me that, it would make more sense you label you based on your answer to that question. Anarchism thus becomes a meaningless word that tells me nothing about you. For example, you might tell me one unjust hierarchy you want to abolish is prison. It would make more sense for me to call you a prison abolitionist than an anarchist since that term at least carries meaning, and there are plenty of prison abolitionists who don't identify as anarchist.