Kingcrusader
The King of the Crusades
- Location
- Tennessee
Yeah, alternate dimensions is like that of them travel, there will be things being messed up, and I kind of don't like multiverses as much as the next guy.
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Unpopular opinions we have on fiction
- Thread starter Sarissa
- Start date
Arthur Frayn
Fake God by Occupation, Magician by Inclination
- Location
- Land of Do As You Please
- Pronouns
- They/Him
Broke: Literally fucking yourself instead of just metaphorically
Woke: Literally fighting yourself instead of just metaphorically
Forget fucking myself in the ass I want to finally be able to kick my own ass
DoobleDeeDooble
Please read me again sometime.
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- She/Her
No, that isn't true. Human brains are too macroscopic, and decisions are large things. Maybe, maybe there's a series of quantum events where as a result I might take take action different than what I would willfully do... but for all but the most petty things I would think "Wait why the fuck did I just do that", and quite possibly that this was some involuntary phenomena, not my choice. And honestly, I'm kind of skeptical of even that being possible very often? Even single neurons are still pretty big, relatively. It's not just that this would thus require an utterly massive quantum coincidence—that's irrelevant, every possible quantum coincidence happens somewhere in MW—but I just don't know if such a thing is possible or if it would get fuzzed out by its non-QM interactions with surroundings.
Vyslanté
The self is a prison
- Location
- European Union
I feel like that depends on what the "choices" used to make the branches are — like, yeah, sometimes you'll see completely ridiculous, "out of character" things, but "hey remember that morning when you ate pancakes? well in that universe you ate waffles and things kinda snowballed from there" can be amusing, I think.
Is 'not possible' actually a thing, though?
"Every coincidence occurs" is stronger than the 'there's a whole lot of time and space in the future of the universe' that leads to Boltzmann Brains seeming mathematically plausible, isn't it? Is there any hard cap on quantum coincidences? I would have thought it's just 'we're so deep in the law of large numbers that there's no point worrying about it' and that cutoff doesn't apply if mapping the total multiverse.
DoobleDeeDooble
Please read me again sometime.
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I personally don't imagine it is physically possible for a very highly complex low-entropy macroscopic arrangement to near-spontaneously transmogrify into a macroscopic patch of extremely-high-entropy quantum foam, and then that quantum foam to near-spontaneously transmogrify into a different highly complex low entropy thing. Much less for it to happen without the foam middle step.
Admittedly I could be wrong about that. But then it would turn out the first law of thermodynamics is entirely contingent on which universe you're in, and so the multiverse would be very, very weird, because the laws of physics can effectively arbitrarily vary across space and time. Which would be cool, but just doesn't feel plausible to me.
Admittedly I could be wrong about that. But then it would turn out the first law of thermodynamics is entirely contingent on which universe you're in, and so the multiverse would be very, very weird, because the laws of physics can effectively arbitrarily vary across space and time. Which would be cool, but just doesn't feel plausible to me.
- Location
- Outside the Box
- Pronouns
- She/Her
It's kinda like time travel. If the kind of time travel depicted in fictional works was possible, it would be infinitesimally unlikely that we'd exist in a world where there's no real evidence of time travel shenanigans. Therefore, time travel isn't real, or if it is, it doesn't work the way most of us think it would. Same with fictional multiverse and quantum nonsense.
DoobleDeeDooble
Please read me again sometime.
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- She/Her
Admittedly if the first law of thermodynamics is purely statistical and arbitrarily-entropy-decreasing events are possible if enough independent quantum events line up, then there would be a pretty strong a priori probability that an arbitrary region of spacetime in an arbitrary branch of MW would largely have thermodynamic entropy tending to increase; ironically (or the opposite?) those configurations would probably be high-statistical-entropy in the space of possible configurations of spacetime regions of possible universes. (Because there are probably a lot fewer configurations of quantum events that lead to those big spontaneous thermodynamical entropy shifts than there are configurations that don't do that, given an initial state all those configurations are potential evolutions of.)
And to the extent this sort of fluctuation could allow for utterly chaotic and seemingly physically nonsensical events, well, life forms like us are less likely to exist (for long) and observe an outside reality, and so you could make some gesture towards an anthropic principle type idea as an extra reason we observers are observing a universe that seemingly doesn't do that.
The third option is that we are in one of the highly 'unlikely' regions and that's what quantum entanglement (or dark energy, or turbulence, or your choice of other weird physics thing) is.
And to the extent this sort of fluctuation could allow for utterly chaotic and seemingly physically nonsensical events, well, life forms like us are less likely to exist (for long) and observe an outside reality, and so you could make some gesture towards an anthropic principle type idea as an extra reason we observers are observing a universe that seemingly doesn't do that.
The third option is that we are in one of the highly 'unlikely' regions and that's what quantum entanglement (or dark energy, or turbulence, or your choice of other weird physics thing) is.
- Pronouns
- Any/All
I thought the general understanding of the first law was exactly that? Is there an interpretation where it's not just a matter of statistics?
- Pronouns
- He/Him
ma'am can i have an eli5
Axslashel
I am a pessimist not a realist.
- Location
- Land of the Midnight Sun
I am pretty sure you are all talking about the second law of thermodynamics. That is the one dealing in entropy. The first just says energy needs to be preserved.
The Last One
Here because reasons
Why would you travel through time to watch something boring like the assassination of Caesar when you could travel to when your avocado was perfectly ripe?
Alternatively, the reason we see no evidence of time travellers is because they're all stuck in time loops trying to get Taylor Swift tickets.
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DoobleDeeDooble
Please read me again sometime.
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I am a fool, oops! Thank you for the currection. Correction. Leaving that because my brain is just not working today. I should go eat something...
But yeah the current understanding of the second law of thermodynamics is statistical; the part I was more doubting was "arbitrarily-entropy-decreasing events are possible if enough independent quantum events line up". But when getting into the weeds of "Maybe we're fundamentally wrong about thermodynamics" it felt worthwhile to put in a caveat for the possibility that there's some extra not-just-statistical element to it, an extra damper on entropy. There's stuff going on with information theory as it relates to QM that's beyond my specific ken, maybe there already is something like that posited by somebody.
You know how when you do stuff, friction and such makes heat? You can do stuff with that heat energy, but only if you have something colder. Entropy of a system is basically how much of the energy around is usable for doing stuff, and how much is trapped as heat of the coldest thing in that system. If things can on a large scale spontaneously rearrange in a way that turns waste heat back into usable energy then our physics are wrong, because we say that can't happen. But maybe it's just really unlikely to happen, because it requires a billion coincidences of quantum mechanics.
If Many Worlds is true then there's a universe where any of those coincidences all happen, because each QM 'coin flip' actually splits the universe where each outcome happens on one of the branches. So then it's in question why we haven't seen any of that. But there are so many fucking more ways for the quantum things to go that aren't That Specific Coincidence; the unlikeliness of it corresponds to the small proportion of universes with it in the multiverse.
The anthropic principle thing is that we shouldn't be surprised that the universe is one that can support observers, because we couldn't be observing a universe that wasn't, now could we*? It's a bit of a weird application of probability and people argue about if it actually says anything. But if one thinks it makes sense, you could plausibly argue that a similar thing helps explain why the branch of the universe we're seeing is pretty tame, and there aren't weird coincidences spontaneously rearranging people into coconuts or causing the Earth's core to quantum tunnel out into space, because then observation is a bit more difficult.
*People actually argue we could, and that in fact that would be more likely, because in a whole universe where stuff is chaotically forming and falling apart constantly, everywhere, forever, you'd get a lot brains popping into existence, thinking a thought or two and then falling apart, and that would make gazillions more 'observers' than universes that support life. Boltzmann Brains are fun.
The last comment is that one could say that we're in one of the weird branches where highly specific coincidences happen and make stuff happen that screws with the usual physical laws, and picking commonly confusing/vexing things as scapegoats. (Turbulence was in there because turbulence is really super complicated and hard to understand, even though you probably wouldn't think it would be.)
But yeah the current understanding of the second law of thermodynamics is statistical; the part I was more doubting was "arbitrarily-entropy-decreasing events are possible if enough independent quantum events line up". But when getting into the weeds of "Maybe we're fundamentally wrong about thermodynamics" it felt worthwhile to put in a caveat for the possibility that there's some extra not-just-statistical element to it, an extra damper on entropy. There's stuff going on with information theory as it relates to QM that's beyond my specific ken, maybe there already is something like that posited by somebody.
You know how when you do stuff, friction and such makes heat? You can do stuff with that heat energy, but only if you have something colder. Entropy of a system is basically how much of the energy around is usable for doing stuff, and how much is trapped as heat of the coldest thing in that system. If things can on a large scale spontaneously rearrange in a way that turns waste heat back into usable energy then our physics are wrong, because we say that can't happen. But maybe it's just really unlikely to happen, because it requires a billion coincidences of quantum mechanics.
If Many Worlds is true then there's a universe where any of those coincidences all happen, because each QM 'coin flip' actually splits the universe where each outcome happens on one of the branches. So then it's in question why we haven't seen any of that. But there are so many fucking more ways for the quantum things to go that aren't That Specific Coincidence; the unlikeliness of it corresponds to the small proportion of universes with it in the multiverse.
The anthropic principle thing is that we shouldn't be surprised that the universe is one that can support observers, because we couldn't be observing a universe that wasn't, now could we*? It's a bit of a weird application of probability and people argue about if it actually says anything. But if one thinks it makes sense, you could plausibly argue that a similar thing helps explain why the branch of the universe we're seeing is pretty tame, and there aren't weird coincidences spontaneously rearranging people into coconuts or causing the Earth's core to quantum tunnel out into space, because then observation is a bit more difficult.
*People actually argue we could, and that in fact that would be more likely, because in a whole universe where stuff is chaotically forming and falling apart constantly, everywhere, forever, you'd get a lot brains popping into existence, thinking a thought or two and then falling apart, and that would make gazillions more 'observers' than universes that support life. Boltzmann Brains are fun.
The last comment is that one could say that we're in one of the weird branches where highly specific coincidences happen and make stuff happen that screws with the usual physical laws, and picking commonly confusing/vexing things as scapegoats. (Turbulence was in there because turbulence is really super complicated and hard to understand, even though you probably wouldn't think it would be.)
LunaMoth
Wings of Kynareth is my comfort song...
This is my favorite kind of alt timeline stuff, not complicated just there's a universe where x happened instead and x eventually leads to a different choice than what happened in other timelines.
It's still free will if an alt universe you, decides to do different things one day because they looked outside when you didn't or something, really there's no need to overcomplicate it. The pop culture version of the butterfly effect is entirely alright for fiction.
I don't think the anthropic principle has any relevance here, given that multiple unlikely probabilities multiply, having one person turn into a coconut would just be a one time event in the whole history of the universe ever type deal, and so you can't use that to say we are in a universe where that can't happen.
Though, even if we lived in a universe / MW branch where such things had often happened before, they can at any point abruptly stop happening as we reenter the "common" set of branches/future probabilities.
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BethofDeath
Girls just wanna have pun
- Location
- Sector ZZ9 Plural Z Alpha
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Plot twist: All the time travel already unhappened itself's going to have been happening as of tomorrow.
As for "free will": that's not a thing. Information doesn't appear out of nowhere, and the programs that fucked their way into existence over a billion years are running on computers made of meat. That meat is bound by all the laws of physics the rest of the universe is, and all its experiences that have shaped it, and so is entirely constrained in what can be willed.
We have a very brief moment to override impulses arising from various parts of that meat computer, aka "free won't". Those impulses can be suppressed by the part of the meat computer responsible for that... once it develops sufficiently. That's as close as we get. And the most annoying part is that, even if someone's told that and doesn't believe it, it still leads to them making more sociopathic decisions for a bit as if they did believe that meant they weren't responsible for their actions.
...at least, that's what apparently was tested without that mention of it causing worse outcomes? Been a while since I listened to The Great Courses lectures on Free Will vs Determinism, but I don't think they mentioned the experiments adding on a bit testing whether telling people it did or didn't alter behavior had any effect. 🤔
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DoobleDeeDooble
Please read me again sometime.
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There's also compatibilism, where you believe that deterministic machines made of meat can have free will. Like, yeah, my actions are constrained; I'm constraining them, that's the whole thing will is, I pick what I do, and don't do the things I don't pick. And you can say physics constrains my behavior; you can explain it all as just consequences of the arrangements of atoms and subatomic particles and energy, and the laws that govern the behavior of matter and energy. But, like, when you do that, part of what you're considering is this big me-shaped blob of matter. The physics isn't an external constraint on my choosing, it's just describing the same event, me choosing things, from a different perspective. It doesn't change what the thing is.
This is clearly a consideration that makes all the difference for a huge proportion of people but I really cannot understand it very well. I remember when I was told about the determinism/free will debate, it was by my Chemistry teacher in the tenth grade, and my fourteen-year-old self just couldn't see what the problem was supposed to be at all. It's like everybody is seeing these two things as different when they are, to me, the exact same thing. And I get when mind-body dualists do that, but other materialists do it too! I really don't understand the intuition, and don't think I ever will.
I understand the arguments people make, because the topic is a bit of an interest of mine, but on a basic level it feels to me like people are making an extremely basic mistake; I can't fathom the idea without imagining that people are thinking "Well, the universe isn't me, so if the universe controls my behavior, I don't control my behavior" even though part of the universe is you. Because if you look at the rest of the universe, which is external to you, that... isn't enough to explain everything that will happen! The stuff happening in you is a real causal factor. I don't, and I don't think I ever will or even can, understand why the fact that the stuff that happening in you can be explained by physics disqualifies it from being you; even when it's the stuff happening in you that corresponds to your conscious thought and decision process and behavior.
Which isn't to say everyone else is wrong. For all I know, I'm the weirdo wrong one here. To try and wrap back around to the topic, though, it makes the fact that most fiction which deals with the question of free will takes incompatibilist stances super frustrating and alienating to me?
(I've been getting off-track with this stuff a lot, lately. Anybody know a thread it might fit in I should go to instead to more productively channel the rambling? Well, I'll look myself, tomorrow.)
This is clearly a consideration that makes all the difference for a huge proportion of people but I really cannot understand it very well. I remember when I was told about the determinism/free will debate, it was by my Chemistry teacher in the tenth grade, and my fourteen-year-old self just couldn't see what the problem was supposed to be at all. It's like everybody is seeing these two things as different when they are, to me, the exact same thing. And I get when mind-body dualists do that, but other materialists do it too! I really don't understand the intuition, and don't think I ever will.
I understand the arguments people make, because the topic is a bit of an interest of mine, but on a basic level it feels to me like people are making an extremely basic mistake; I can't fathom the idea without imagining that people are thinking "Well, the universe isn't me, so if the universe controls my behavior, I don't control my behavior" even though part of the universe is you. Because if you look at the rest of the universe, which is external to you, that... isn't enough to explain everything that will happen! The stuff happening in you is a real causal factor. I don't, and I don't think I ever will or even can, understand why the fact that the stuff that happening in you can be explained by physics disqualifies it from being you; even when it's the stuff happening in you that corresponds to your conscious thought and decision process and behavior.
Which isn't to say everyone else is wrong. For all I know, I'm the weirdo wrong one here. To try and wrap back around to the topic, though, it makes the fact that most fiction which deals with the question of free will takes incompatibilist stances super frustrating and alienating to me?
(I've been getting off-track with this stuff a lot, lately. Anybody know a thread it might fit in I should go to instead to more productively channel the rambling? Well, I'll look myself, tomorrow.)
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Kingcrusader
The King of the Crusades
- Location
- Tennessee
Cussing should be fine to do on TV, especially for adult TV shows. No bleeping at all. Just let them cuss on tv. That's it.
(I don't know if this is even unpopular, but it might be more of a unknown opinion if anything.)
(I don't know if this is even unpopular, but it might be more of a unknown opinion if anything.)
BethofDeath
Girls just wanna have pun
- Location
- Sector ZZ9 Plural Z Alpha
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- She/Her
Fuckin' motherfuckers fuckin' cussing a goddamn blue shitstreak gets fucking annoying really bloody-damn quick-like, and honestly there's limits in creativity hit pretty quickly in a single local language being cursed in by a thousand different writers in various writers' rooms.
Not everyone's Skidmark, after all.
This is something I feel the rating systems are actually pretty reasonable about, at least in the USA. Makes them (ideally) have to pick a good choice to slip in a stealth naughty-word in the best place. If done right, 60% of the time it's missed every time, until commercial break hits and they get up to stop by the fridge.
Or whatever the streaming service ad break is like nowdays. I don't do that -- I am not going to pay for inferior video quality AND the privilege of having the show I paid to see yanked out from under me mid-season. To say nothing of how HD re-releases sometimes get ruined (cough Buffy the Vampire Slayer cough), or the SD streams are the lowest-quality option around (dunno if they fixed Xena: Warrior Princess to the video from the older DVD set since I was researching pre-purchase of the entire seven seasons, but I saw reports it was the worse newer DVD's video track).
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Morganite
Happiness is a large book.
- Location
- Dynamis - Firefly Alley
I mean, you'd think, but when I see people talking about this type of fiction they seem obsessed with the cosmic implications and sometimes it sounds like there isn't even a current material relevance.
But I admit to being outsider-looking-in here and it could be there's something I'm missing.
-Morgan.
Kingcrusader
The King of the Crusades
- Location
- Tennessee
Hey now, I'm not fucking saying they should just fucking cuss every god damn second they talk, I'm just saying they should be a allowed to cuss without being bleeped, but I do hate it when characters are written to cuss extensively.
They do that in movies most of the time, though it's usually the word "shit" then anything.
It is outright a definition problem. You're interpreting other people's arguments using your definition of free will instead of theirs and then complaining that their argument doesn't make sense after the substitution.
The non-compatibilist definition of free will is not not fully dictated externally to oneself, it is actually capable of changing one's path.
Which, yeah, doesn't actually make sense unless you put the "will" at least partly outside of causal determination itself. Which in turn is why you get the determinists who use that definition and conclude that free will doesn't exist.
(Interestingly, it looks like this argument is identifiable back to antiquity.)
BethofDeath
Girls just wanna have pun
- Location
- Sector ZZ9 Plural Z Alpha
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Which is weird to me, because people can never seem to agree on whether it's "shit" or "crap" that's the cuss word, and which is the non-cuss word. And then there are those who say both are cussin' and to cut the malarkey.
And not even fecestiously!