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Once. They do not have the ability to learn or adapt on their own. They are created by humans through “deep learning”, but that is fundamentally different from continuously learning based on one’s own actions and experiences.

We are prediction machines, but nothing like chatgpt. Current AI has no ability to learn, adapt, or even consider the future.

Obligatory sinophobia. Every thread.

Not to mention the problem of what life is even supposed to do beyond a certain point of development. The depressing fact is that there is a finite amount of knowledge to be gained, a finite amount of resources to harvest, a finite diversity of life to contend or thrive alongside with. Once a pocket of life in this massive universe begins to run out of things to do and stagnates, then what? What is there to think about; to feel; to experience?

There’s little point in exploring space if one know how this universe works. One knows the rules, knows all the ways it can play out, and there’s no surprise waiting on the other end of any venture one can imagine embarking on.

That’s my theory. The Great Filter is just depressive boredom. We don’t see other life because by the time a civilisation is able and ready to spend thousands of years travelling through deep space, they’ll have already lost any motivation they might have had to do so.

I suspect that there’s at best a very short window wherein a species is both knowledgeable enough to dream of space exploration and technologically capable of sending any significant amount of artificial constructions out there.

Not to mention that anything an alien species might send into interstellar space is unimaginably unlikely to be recorded exactly at precisely the moment they pass another lump of matter - especially if the window is as short as I fear.

This comment tells me that you do not fully understand reversible computing, thermodynamics, nor what I am trying to say. The snark does not motivate me to be patient or pedagogical, but I’ll still give it a shot.

By interfering with a closed system as an entity outside of that system (for example by extracting information by performing a measurement on any of its component subsystems such as the position or momentum of a particle), you are introducing a dependency of that formerly closed system’s state on your state and that of your environment. Now, by state I mean quantum state, and by interfering I mean entangling yourself (and your environment) with the system, because our reality is fundamentally quantum.

Entanglement between an observer and a system is what makes it appear to the observer as if the wave function of the system collapsed to a (more) definite state, because the observer never experiences the branching out of its own quantum state as the wave function of the now combined system describes a superposition of all possible state combinations (their (and their environment’s) preceding state × the system’s preceding state × the state of whatever catalyst joined them together). The reason an observer doesn’t ever experience “branching out” is because the branches are causally disconnected, and so each branch describes a separate reality with all other realities becoming forever inaccessible. This inaccessibility entails a loss of information, and this loss of information is irreversible.

So there you have it. You can never extract useful work from a closed system without losing something in the process. This something is usually called “heat”, but what is lost is not merely “heat”: it is the potential usefulness of the thing of interest. But it really all boils down to information. Entropy increases as information is lost, and this is all relative to an observer. Heat dissipation represents “useless information” or “loss of useful/extractable energy” as it concerns an entity embedded in a quantum wave function.

Reversible computing can not work around it because one simply can not extract information without irreversibly affecting the system. This is a fundamental constraint due to how, in quantum mechanics, once an observer entangles themselves with a system they can never unentangle themselves. I believe that from that single fact one can derive the impossibility of reversible existence.

A partial answer to your question is that there’s a minimum amount of heat necessarily radiated when doing computation, given by the Landauer principle.

Furthermore, I also do not think that we will detect dyson spheres, because if a civilisation wishes to hide, they won’t radiate heat uncontrollably by extracting all possible energy, but rather send that energy elsewhere, for example by dumping it into a black hole. But I could be wrong and such a civilisation might care more about energy than remaining undiscovered.

Maybe what they’re trying to describe is a torus

The interference disappearing from measurement is not really because the instrument alters the state. Or, at least, putting it like that occludes the more fundamental reason.

Fundamentally, measurements are subject to the uncertainty principle, which dictates that one can not define precisely the values of two complementary observables at the same time. Position and momentum of any quantum object are such complementary observables, so measuring one – for example position – requires that the other (momentum) becomes less defined.

When the position of a particle is narrowed down to a pixel on a detector screen, its momentum becomes very uncertain and we must talk about all the possible paths for it to have arrived at that point.

The probability of a particle being measured at any given pixel is given by the probability of all possible paths combined^[1], with this important quirk: when combining possible quantum states, they interfere with each other, constructively or destructively. Repeated measurements of positions give you what appears to be wave-like interference due to the way the probabilities of all paths interfere.

By checking which slit a particle passes through, you exclude all the possible paths through the other slit and end up not observing the same pattern because the two slits simply do not interfere.

I suspect it was a joke. Can’t be sure though.

I have no idea what that is so I’ll just go with yes, probably!

Because they have no basis on which to decide where to go. It’s like buying toothpaste but there are hundreds of options, none of which you know anything about, so you get whichever seems most popular. It minimises the risk of ending up with something which is unpopular for good reasons.

It isn’t “looking” that is meant by “observation”. “Observation” is meant to convey the idea that something (not necessarily sentient) is in some way interacting with an object in question such that the state(s) of the object affects the state(s) of the “observer” (and vice versa).

The word is rather misleading in that it might give the impression of a unidirectional type of interaction when it really is the establishment of a bidirectional relationship. The reason one says “I observe the electron” rather than “I am observed by the electron” is that we don’t typically attribute agency to electrons the way we do humans (for good reasons), but they are equally true.

Edit: a way of putting it is that the electron can only be said to be in a particular state if it matters in any way to the state of whomever says it. If I want to know what state an electon is in, it must appear to me in some state in order for me to get an answer. If I never interact with it, I can’t possibly get such an answer and the electron then behaves as if it was actually in more than one state at once, and all those states interfere with each other, and that looks like wavelike patterns in certain measurements.

Edit 2: just to be clear, I used an electron as an example, but it’s exactly the same for anything else we know of. Photons, bicycles, protons, and elephants are all like this, too. It’s just that the more fundamental particles you involve and the more you already know about many of them, the fewer the possible answers are for any measurement you could make.

Is no one going to comment on the font rendering

Oh and a big problem is also that, in the process of making weakly founded assumptions and working with those, the more you work with them, the more they blend in with all the other heuristics you’ve accumulated in your life until you no longer remember they’re even there - much less questionable.

I find it hard. I really try to check my assumptions and state my reasoning where I think it’s relevant but if I am to draw a conclusion about anything then I have to make a lot of necessary assumptions first. Some I am more confident about, others less so, but they are almost always given the same status in a statement in the interest of brevity.

I make an unthinkable number of implicit assumptions every time I communicate any information to anyone, and considering the problem of infinite regress I don’t even know where or if ever the assumptions end.

Some people are better at not coming across as assertive or arrogant (my partner, for one), and I admire that. I’m more the kind to throw a statement out there after thinking about it for a while and error correct if my assumptions are being challenged. The downsides to that method are many; unintentionally spreading misinformation being a major one, but also that people are frustratingly bad at criticising premises and instead often attack the conclusion itself and assume ill intent, or at best just disagree without further explanation.

We don’t know what we don’t know. Maybe 5 minutes is all it takes to understand the essence of a problem. Maybe several lifetimes. There are examples of people who have studied something for a long time yet have come to more incorrect conclusions than someone who reads a single paper on the subject might. (There are physicists who believe consciousness is “real” but “unphysical”, biologists who think life must has been created and nurtured by a god, and healthcare specialists who think vaccines are bad.)

That doesn’t justify being arrogant and naive or dismissive of people more knowledgeable in a subject matter, but it enables someone to decide that a person they’re arguing with is one such example because “the truth is bloody obvious”.

It’s painful to read people’s takes on things you know something about. At the same time, most of us do the exact same thing whenever we share our take on something we don’t know as much about because we think we don’t need to.

Each line needs its own >

One of the last things I remember is Oberyn getting his mind blown

I was thinking “three ridges” first 😅 (I imagined the sand running between the four fingers of my semi-closed fist)