petrichor

Thanks! I am surprised someone actually read all that! I regret to dump yet another, even longer one on you, but I can't help myself! I think you'll f...

Thanks! Thinking about it in terms of rotating, enlarging, and shrinking digital images helps. As I work with digital images a lot, I understand that ...

I want to add to my previous post that I suspect that what makes my phenomenal state have the peculiar character that it has is directly a function of...

I am glad to hear that you are skeptical of conscious robots, at least the sorts of robots we have now. It drives me crazy when I see people claiming ...

In the article by Wolfram (link), he claims that special and general relativity can be easily derived from the behavior of a causal network. If you re...

Thank you! This is helpful. I am not sure I understand though why the space atoms "won't line up with their own space-atom grid that their asserting e...

We are creating robots that sort of look like people, mainly because they have a rubber face made to resemble a person. But they aren't even remotely ...

Thanks for your thoughts. There are a number of approaches to combining general relativity and QM that involve treating spacetime as quantized, often ...

If you are in either of two situations, A and B, and you don't which, but you know that A would make your situation a rare case while B would make it ...

The real reason you shouldn't be surprised to find yourself living now, to find yourself human, to find yourself in a fine-tuned universe, and so on: ...

Why limit the reference class to humans?

I fear that you might be faced with such a situation now. If so, I don't want to tell you what you should think of it.

One of the problems with a dictator is their lack of perfect wisdom and goodness. But to have the world ruled by a perfectly wise and perfectly good a...

Such things have arrived?

You seem to be describing someone with dementia who seems incoherent, and possibly brain-dead, to most, but whose ramblings or gestures might be made ...

When it comes to something as complex, rich, and varied as religion and belief in God, no single explanation can ever suffice. People believe for many...

Depends on the strength of the evidence and resistance to alternative explanations. Describe the scenario you have in mind.

Are you talking about the Libet experiments? Problematic, especially in how they are usually interpreted. The very instructions given to subjects basi...

Some really solid evidence that someone out-of-body is really out and observing something not observable by the body would go a long way. Also, one of...

I listened to the lecture by Arkani-Hamed. Interesting! But mostly over my head! I wonder if anyone can help me understand something he said. At 1:41:...

When you say that I must "be a body" in order to do those things, what do you mean by "body"? Must I have arms and legs? What about eyes and ears? Or ...

You have dreams, right? And while you are dreaming, you believe that what is happening is real, no? Suppose you were to look in a mirror in your dream...

I am a face? To say "point at yourself" assumes that you already know what you are. Maybe what I am can't be pointed at. There are imaginable situatio...

It is amusing but extremely distracting and annoying. It is impossible for me to read and take seriously anything nearby without actually covering it ...

I hear you. Your criticism of Wolfram might be valid, and I am not devoted to any of his ideas. That article I linked to, however, is rather interesti...

You can't exactly model it "however you like", as some models work better than others. It is difficult, for example, to understand why interference pa...

Whatever you want and can do! (don't hurt anyone) The extraordinary thing about us humans is that we are conscious to a degree that permits us to choo...

Thanks for your thoughts. I read some of the paper. I'm cogitating on it. I tend to think space has to be something. And I strongly tend toward a beli...

You, the very experiencer, the subject, that which I refer to as your consciousness, cannot possibly be an illusion. You can doubt the content of your...

That last animated GIF just about sums up my feelings about your annoying tendency to post animated GIFs, especially mockingly-toned ones like the las...

I am an artist (painter, some sculpture) and I find your idea here very bizarre. Hygiene?! What?! You are going to have to explain that one to me. Do ...

I haven't been following this thread, and it is 61 pages long now, so I am not going to read all of it. I apologize if I go over ground already covere...

What I am thinking about here is that most people operate from the assumption that individual humans are discrete selves, sort of disconnected from ev...

Wasted?! Doesn't sound like such a terrible misuse of time to me! I'm in my early 40s and I've been learning guitar, piano, synthesis, computer music ...

Philosophy has taught me that none of us knows what the hell we are talking about! :razz:

All these arguments that hinge on the nonexistence of potential people seem to depend on certain things being true with respect to the problem of pers...

Getting back to the OP, a critical point is that, with regard to superposition, we never actually observe one particle in two places at once. When we ...

What do you make of physicists saying that with Einstein's theory, space acquired its own degrees of freedom? Here is a quote from Andrei Linde, who, ...

I don't think physicists actually think that any bending of space of n dimensions needs to involve a flat spacetime of n+1 dimensions surrounding it. ...

I am no Einstein expert, and I don't pretend to deeply comprehend his theory, but what you are saying runs contrary to the impression I've gotten. Can...

It's long gone.

Oh yeah? Why not?

In this discussion, I think the intuitive image that most of us have of what is actually being disputed is whether two pieces of actual physical matte...

I am puzzled as to why you think acting with kindness and acting ethically in this case are distinct things.

What does it mean, precisely, for two things to be in the same quantum state? Also, when it comes to interference effects, aren't we just adding waves...

You might be interested to read this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_everything

If you are talking about the atoms from one "object" fitting between the atoms in another, you are not actually talking about two actual physical thin...

I'll link again to this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Unified_Theory This is the direction in which physics proceeds. Things once thought disti...

The EM field is probably also just a feature of models we use. In a grand unified field theory, we reduce everything to one. And that's very likely to...

When we talk of objects in a thread like this, asking if they can occupy the same space at the same time, we need to be careful that we are talking ab...