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[silverspawn]

Ah yes, I wanted to follow up on this

My tentative feeling on this that I think similarly about it, but I tend to believe that information is lost when passing from consciousness to matter, so it's impossible to reconstruct everything from looking at matter.

So this would be why you don't think physics are complete, right? But it seems not mandated by the theory -- like we've basically concluded that Objective Idealism isn't actually different from panpyschism, it just cares about different things. Both agree with the corresponds-to diagram.

So if that's true, then..., well, why? What's the reason for believing information is lost?

[silverspawn]

Speaking of incompetence (with respect to the Russia comment, ok that's a really loose connection, basically it's just a separate comment, please ignore the terrible attempt to tie it into anything), while dealing with websites the following happened:

domain.com just having a bug where lots of people (like me) can't login, and this has been around for at least a few months and isn't fixed

gixhosting has its servers full and is no longer offering new deals, but they didn't bother to update their interface, so you can still go there, order a service, and then it will get stuck at the step where you pay. after a ~2 day delay, the support person informed me that their servers are full and also renewals are canceled.

[silverspawn]

There is no way that this can happen if resources are properly allocated. It's such a massive deal for customer experience that's probably quite easy to fix. I think these kinds of massive inefficiencies are just not uncommon.

I think if you have some very annoying interface thing that bothers you about something, in general it's not justified to assume there's some deep reason for this, it's just that the company isn't allocating any resources toward this extremely low hanging fruit. I mean it could be that you are unusual in disliking the design choice, but it's also totally possible that it bothers everyone.

[silverspawn]

If this is roughly true it could explain why popular programs sometimes just fade out. For example, why is no-one using ICQ anymore? That was the big instant messaging app, and it ought to be hard to replace something this entrenched. But if memory serves their service just sort of degraded.

[silverspawn]

in the comments of my still-anonymously-published-webnovel, two people are currently having a debate about whether the main character, who is modeled after myself (with some modifications, but  basically the same ethics) is or is not an evil psychopath.

However this doesn't actually upset me since if you think utilitarianism is evil, then sure you're going to think the main character is evil. She's about as much of a utilitarian as you can ever get.

[silverspawn]

I'm really just happy people are commenting again, maybe this will motivate me to finally get on with this bloody rewrite.

[silverspawn]

person who thinks she's evil said they think switching the trolley in the trolley problem is evil, so the rest is pretty straight-forward.

[silverspawn]

I would kind of like to understand the perspective of someone who thinks you shouldn't switch the trolley, but this person doesn't strike as a clean thinker so I don't think they can articulate it well.

[silverspawn]

Not that I think there is any chance it will shift my ethical views, but knowing what I'm up against is useful for other reasons

[silverspawn]

This actually begs another question. Suppose you could prove beyond any doubt that the pleasurableness (=valence)  of a moment of experience is a precisely and objectively measurable quantity. Does this matter for ethics? faust?

[LaLight]

so I am learning Python, as you may know, and today I have spent 4 hours doing and polishing a very short but in my opinion quite cool game of Pokemon. It's a text game (for now)

I have used dictionaries, loops, import, basically every thing I have learned. And I just want to brag about my decisions in it, so I'm going to attach it here and if you have time and want to comment it, go ahead, that would be cool (i can't attach .py, so I attach txt and hope it'll work as intended)

[silverspawn]

Nice I beat a sandshrew and a rattata on the first try :-)

[LaLight]

Nice I beat a sandshrew and a rattata on the first try :-)

cool cool! There are some accuracy checks as well. Funny story is that when I was testing I assigned accuracy of 50% to Tackle and I have lost 5 times in a row due to the fact I need to hit Tackle twice to defeat rattata

[silverspawn]

Note that you can compile python code online if you don't have anything set  up on your pc:

Fwiw I also didn't see anything particularly wrong with the code except that it's not commented. If you got this far in a few days, you've certainly outpaced the standard learning speed.

[silverspawn]

(that was addressing anyone else who wants to try it.)

I guess e detail is that you would probably use max(0,x) instead of (abs(x) + x)/2 to round negative numbers up to zero.

[LaLight]

Note that you can compile python code online if you don't have anything set  up on your pc:

Fwiw I also didn't see anything particularly wrong with the code except that it's not commented. If you got this far in a few days, you've certainly outpaced the standard learning speed.

I have mac, I don't need a compiler as far as I'm concerned

[LaLight]

Note that you can compile python code online if you don't have anything set  up on your pc:

Fwiw I also didn't see anything particularly wrong with the code except that it's not commented. If you got this far in a few days, you've certainly outpaced the standard learning speed.

oh also I did get this far, but 3 or 4 years ago I passed the whole "Python for beginners" course on Coursera and I still remember... I'd call it the set of mind that I need to code on Python.

[LaLight]

oh yeah, and the fact that nowadays I learn for 10-11 hours a day.

[silverspawn]

the greatest video ever made:

[faust]

So this would be why you don't think physics are complete, right? But it seems not mandated by the theory -- like we've basically concluded that Objective Idealism isn't actually different from panpyschism, it just cares about different things. Both agree with the corresponds-to diagram.

So if that's true, then..., well, why? What's the reason for believing information is lost?

No, I don't think that in general objective idealism mandates a position on whether physics are closed one way or the other.

As to the reason for my position, well... I could of course ask "What's the reason for believing information isn't lost?" Most transformations lose information; oftentimes that a feature, not a bug. Even the example you gave with the polyhedron was an information loss.

But there are more concrete reasons for me to hold that position. First, I feel that as we explore the world in more detail, we seem to reach some limitations. It wasn't too difficult to come up with the laws of mechanics, but it seems to me that the further we delve into quantum physics, the more we asymptotically approach a barrier beyond which new insight cannot be gained.

The second reason comes from an analogy to math. Here we have Gödel's incompleteness theorem which tells us that there are questions to be asked about math that will always remain impossible to answer. Physics is a model that includes arithmetics, so the same would hold here.

[faust]

This actually begs another question. Suppose you could prove beyond any doubt that the pleasurableness (=valence)  of a moment of experience is a precisely and objectively measurable quantity. Does this matter for ethics? faust?

I'm not sure I understand the premise. What exactly are we measuring? The current impact on the individuals' emotions? All ramifications of it throughout time on human (or also non-human?) experience?

If it's more the former, then I wouldn't say it matters a great deal. If it's the latter, well then we apparently have a way to definitively predict the future, and surely that has wide-ranging ethical implications.

[faust]

I would kind of like to understand the perspective of someone who thinks you shouldn't switch the trolley, but this person doesn't strike as a clean thinker so I don't think they can articulate it well.

Plot twist: I think the trolley problem itself is evil.

[silverspawn]

Even the example you gave with the polyhedron was an information loss.

*Regular* Polyhedrons do *not* have information loss in this transformation, do they? Only general polyhedrons do. (Or rather, regular ones do not if the spaces only contain regular ones, obviously a regular one in the general space does as well.)

[silverspawn]

Why assume physics is closed? Because it seems a hell of a lot more elegant to have a bijection than a function that's 99.999% injective or whatever lower bound we can determine based on the current model of physics. And elegance -- or rather, simplicity, measured by length of the shortest program that implements the model -- is everything.

[silverspawn]

The second reason comes from an analogy to math. Here we have Gödel's incompleteness theorem which tells us that there are questions to be asked about math that will always remain impossible to answer. Physics is a model that includes arithmetics, so the same would hold here.

But Gödel's completeness theorem says that every valid statement is also provable. The incompleteness is only about the difficulty of nailing down the standard model.