Hi

Hey Hangdawg13, welcome back.

You have been gone a while.

You thank EvC for helping to resolve some issues for you. If you care to share, in the years you have been away what else has changed in your world view? Who is Hangdawg13 today?

No problem with religion.

Ahem.

Religion does have its detractors ... in some places. Not everyone is enthralled with religion's intolerant bloody abhorrent evil history toward humanity since forever and are now intolerant of its continued existence.

Major, major problems with religion ... in some places.

We have considered going to a church again just to make connections with people who have some decent values as well as to introduce our children to the religion we knew growing up, but honestly the thought of returning to church now and trying to fit in kind of turns my stomach a bit.

No, please no. You have come all this way to rid yourself of such a fantasy world, to let your mind be free to know life in all its pains and glories, to know reality. Seems you still have fond thoughts from being poisoned. Vestiges of your acculturation in irrationality remain. Fight it, Brother! We're with you!

For the love of god, Hangdawg, please do not expose your children to church. They are going to get saturated with religious symbology and irrational thought all too soon and all too often. Give them a fighting chance to escape the woo of religious thought. The thought that supermajik is somehow real will ruin their minds forever. Please spare them this abuse by the priests.

OK, for those of us who may have been napping what is GAN?

Where in this thread was the acromion first used and defined?

So, adaptive neural nets. The advances continue. Is there something special about this tech, and what does this have to do with your dog and blades of grass? Are you positing a simulation hypothesis or one of the pills from the Matrix? The green one? I always hoped the Matrix remakes would introduce a green pill. It wouldn’t do anything except freshen your breath with a nice icy wintergreen.

Thank you for the links. I am somewhat familiar with neural nets. In another life I worked on propagation networks back in the 80’s. Been out for so long but I’m not surprised by anything these guys do.

As far as your discussion with jar about the past being stored, quantum theory already says that. It is a hard and fast rule in QFT that information is never lost but is encoded in the fields’ quantum states. The present state is the result of all interactions the particle experienced throughout its existence. Most of our equations have no preferred time component, therefor they work equally well in either direction. If you reversed time then interactions would undue themselves restoring past quantum states. The past, theoretically, can be uncovered intact by reversing the arrow of time. That’s not so easy to do in this universe.

But this is not what jar seems to be addressing. The past is some number of time clicks in reverse and unless you reverse time throughout the entire universe it is inaccessible. As jar said, "It is real and immutable because it did happen, and we cannot now change what did happen."

In your Message 35

quote:

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If it is not recorded or retrievable somehow - if it is truly gone forever - then the past is not fixed because there are an infinite number of pasts that could have led to this particular present.

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Evidence of past quantum values is here encoded in the present values. The past is here with us always. One demonstrable past with a single unalterable chain of causality. You just can’t get to it.

Or so my read on what our present science says. All subject to change with more data.

Edited by AZPaul3, : No reason given.

Would this be analogous to blockchain where you can "rewind" transactional history to see every transaction ever made?

I don’t see the analogy. Blockchain history is retrievable in extreme detail at any time now or in the future. The past is irretrievable in any practical sense. It did happen and its effects are always with us but unlike blockchain you cannot select any specific past time to see what happened and with blockchain you don’t have to destroy later blocks in the chain to get back to the one you want. When you reverse the arrow of time you have to destroy the future quantum information to get back to the target timeframe. I don’t see it.

Stephen Wolfram: Complexity and the Fabric of Reality

Please be careful with Wolfram. He’s a genius, as he himself will gladly testify. His ego is quite large and for good reason. He is, after all, a genius.

He has developed some very useful systems for sure, however his new science has not lived up to the continued hype with actual development. His automata systems have not replaced mathematics as the platform of choice for modeling systems. He may be right, but right now no one seems to understand his stuff enough to replace the utility math produces.

I caution skepticism on Wolfram’s claims until he can actually do something with them.

So in your understanding of QFT, information is not lost. But haven't there been some experiments like the Quantum Eraser or others that seem to indicate "the past" is really determined by our current observation of present states?

“Which way” information on a double slit experiment and attempts to erase that information (delayed choice) in the experimental apparatus doesn’t change the past. There is no erased “which way” information since the equations of state, the wave function, the Schrödinger equation, applies to the system as a whole and not just the function at one slit or one detector. The wave function is set for the entire system and includes the observer. The result is an observation that is in keeping with the wave function probabilities.

With a double slit you see the interference pattern. Add detectors and the pattern (appears) to go away. Yes that is weird.

Now set up your eraser and note that the interference pattern returns. Except there is an issue with the set up. At each of the eraser detectors you get the expected interference pattern. Combining those patterns creates the original non-interference pattern. Nothing has actually been erased. There was no delayed choice.

This is a YouTube video that explains the above. Dr. Sabine Hossenfelder explains better than I.

The Delayed Choice Quantum Eraser, Debunked

Could there be an "event horizon" beyond which an essentially infinite variety of initial conditions could have resulted in the present state?

I’m sorry, I don’t even know what that means. If our present cosmological models are right there could only be one initial condition (exceptionally low entropy) at the beginning. An infinite number of initial conditions would mean infinitely high entropy. To the best of our knowledge starting a universe with infinite high entropy produces nothing.
Can you clarify?

Edited by AZPaul3, : No reason given.

The random vacuum fluctuations combined with chaos theory mean that you can only go back so far in time before there is a horizon where initial condition(s) are unknowable and a practically infinite variety of initial conditions could have lead to the same present.

Can you show any reasoning for this conjecture? I read the words vacuum fluctuation and chaos theory and think buzzwords without any connection.

How do vacuum fluctuations (after you define them, please) alter the reality of the past? How does chaos theory (after you define what that is) alter the uber-determinist reality of the past?

How can either one or both change a fait accompli and destroy causality? Show your mechanism.

If the past is inferred from the present and the future is unknowable, then the future could entirely change your inferred notion of the contents of the past such that the past is also unknowable.

And if Eleanor Roosevelt had wings …

The past is not inferred by the present. The past is the creator of the present. That is the basis of causality from the arrow of time.

And no, you cannot show any instance in reality where the past was changed by any future event. Not even the most bombastic quantum erasure setup can show any such thing without completely misunderstanding and misusing the concept of the wave function and its role in quantum systems.

Another way to think of it... the present moment could be a superposition of all possible pasts …

Except it isn’t. We know with a great deal of certainty from observation that no one has shown a causality violation in any system we have seen. Violations that your "superposition" scheme would rittle throughout all of spacetime. Quite the opposite, we are highly confident that the chain of causality from the past has not been altered by any mechanism at any time. And we can take that all the way back to the beginning. No one can show otherwise.

the interference pattern could be thought of as a superposition of possible pasts,

Only if you are trying to force a prior conclusion on the system. The interference pattern is, in fact, a hard and fast observable result based on the spread of the wave function from the apparatus, including the observer. It is not a superposition of anything. You misuse the concept and apply it inappropriately.

Your math would have to be way twisted to show any superposition of past events. The phenomena is a superposition of wave functions. Wave functions are resolutions to the Schrödinger equation. What happens when two electrons careen off each other? The Schrödinger equation tells you the probable results. The wave functions give you the probability of finding, upon observation, specific quantum attributes that result from an interaction.

How do you apply Schrödinger to a static past event with no moving parts? There are no interactions to observe. Your use of superposition is bogus. You have no idea what the concepts you use so freely actually are or how they work.

You are spouting bullshit.

Why the fantasy conjecture? What are you trying to justify? Trying to justify your god's majik? Some other religionist wet dream?

Edited by AZPaul3, : No reason given.

Just trying to refine my map to include all the data points and features I've encountered.

Causality violations, an indeterminate variable past, are a few of your false data points already. More like fantasy data points.

Have you encountered gods? Majik? Supernatural beings? Demons, devils, unicorns or garden fairies?

Just curious ... what color is the sky?

Chaos theory as I understand it just means that some deterministic systems of equations result in regions of indeterministic output because miniscule adjustments to initial conditions result in wildly diffierent results...

Actually, the result of chaotic systems is very deterministic. Sensitivity to initial conditions. In practice we do not have all the information we need. But with enough information chaotic systems a very much predictable.

And it seems to me that in pursuit of the initial condition of any deterministic system you can trace every causal chain back to random vacuum fluctuations.

What vacuum fluctuations? Where? Under what conditions?

What do you think vacuum fluctuations are? How do they work? By what criteria do you trace all causality to vacuum fluctuations? Can you give an example?

Can you access the past directly to confirm? Can you rewind the tape and make sure it hasn't changed? And even if you could... you'd be viewing the tape of the past in the NOW. For all you know, you've been in existence for 1 second and all your memories of the past were loaded up 1 second ago creating the illusion of the past.

Ahh, yes. Solipsism. It's bullshit.

There is an objective reality that can be physically discerned. We have the physics. We know, in extreme detail, how these things work. There is no justifiable reason to entertain any flavor of solipsistic notion. There is nothing in this universe to hint such a thing. It has no more efficacy than any other pulled-from-the-ass wishful fantasy like fiat creation or flat-earthism or the existence of unicorns on Enceladus.

If this IS the matrix then it is so perfect as to be, in actuality, our reality. And we can objectively discern this reality regardless of the woo-woo protestations to the contrary.

I reject, as does all science, this solipsist delusion.

Regarding causality violation... how about presentiment experiments? Feeling the future: A meta-analysis of 90 experiments on the anomalous anticipation of random future events

Controversial study promoting psychic ability debunked Yes, it's talking about your cited study. Rips it apart.

A rock might have a very long causal chain leading back to the vacuum fluctuation, but the billions of neurons with their action potentials determining when or when not to fire have relatively short causal chains leading back to the vacuum fluctuation.

Vacuum fluctuations. Where? You are talking Quantum fluctuations, right?

So this pepperoni pizza set of neurons that is about to fire in you brain is anchored in a vacuum fluctuation somewhere? Is that vacuum fluctuation inside your head? That might explain some things.

Edited by AZPaul3, : No reason given.

Given that you did not constrain me to a time, location, direction, zoom level, type of equipment, etc, I can name any color I choose and be correct.

OK, now you're talking my language. Good show.

I've personally experienced a few things in the Psi department that seem "anomalous" to me, but to a true believer like yourself they wouldn't crack your faith and would only invite derision.

The derision is just for fun. The science rules.

PSI has been studied for centuries with real believers, professors, scientists, lots of $$$, dozens of universities and for all this there is nothing. Anything and everything that might have sparked an interest has been debunked over the decades. PSI has nothing to justify a seat in the science hall. It's still outside looking for data.

Supernatural beings? No. But it is not unreasonable to consider there could be entities with "administrator access" to this reality which would appear to us to be "gods"...

Hangdawg13, yes it is exceptionally unreasonable to consider any unevidenced emotional wet dream as even a potential reality in this universe. Just because you can think it and it makes someone feel good does not make it real. Religion has been doing this for millennia upon millennia with nothing but bloodshed and war to answer the trivial differences in their various wet dreams.

Yes, it is exceptionally unreasonable, logically vacuous and downright dangerous to even contemplate considering emotional wishful dreams among our reality.

Edited by AZPaul3, : No reason given.

Edited by AZPaul3, : No reason given.

it is not unreasonable to consider the idea that our reality is something entertaining to these beings who are also watching... perhaps this is who the Navy Pilots have been encountering... Perhaps this is the origin of angel and demon stories.

OK. You're a nut job. Got it.

Can I ask again about your sky?

I think you're misunderstanding what I was saying... I'm saying one way to think about it is that the present moment is an ever evolving set of constraints. When something is "known" that is a constraint on what the present moment can be.

I'll differ. NOW is the inevitable product of the past. Your NOW is set in concrete by that past. It is already part of the past. The next moment yet to come is what is heavily constrained by what is known limiting what outcomes are possible. NOW is the initial condition constraining all possible futures. And there is no vacuum fluctuation necessary.

Edited by AZPaul3, : No reason given.

To know anything for sure with the scientific method, the thing you want to know for sure must reliably repeat.

A whole lot of the phenomena science analyses are one-off events never to be repeated again. Science does not depend on repeatability of an event, though this is the ideal.

Repeatability, however, is still necessary.

Science depends on the evidence and the logical reasonable interpretation of that evidence. And in non-repeating events scientific repeatability is in the form of peer review of the analysis. In science, reproducibility is key. If not the event itself, then reproducibility of the analysis to achieve the same conclusion, is required. Like Chicxulub, it took two generations of scientists looking at the same evidence and arguing, heatedly, before a scientific consensus was reached.