Category Archives: science

Quantum immorality

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People will think of all kinds of things in order to anesthetise their conscience; basically, convince themselves that it doesn’t matter what they do, so they are fine. I think I’ve heard it all, talking to all kinds of amoral and godless people over the decades, but probably the most brain-dead thing I’ve heard is using the many-worlds interpretation of quantum theory to justify amorality.

Many-worlds interpretation is very popular in Hollywood, but it’s otherwise sheer nonsense. Basically, it solves the Schroedinger’s cat paradox in a non-probabilistic manner, by stating that in every quantum function collapse junction the universe forks into versions where every possible outcome is the reality. Essentially, you get a universe where the cat is alive, and the universe where the cat is dead.

Ignoring the fact that the quantum function doesn’t extend past the microscopic realm and translates very poorly into the macroscopic world of Einsteinian gravity, the amoral pieces of human garbage who want to be perceived as cool, scientific and educated, extend this principle into the sphere of moral choice, so at every moral junction the universe forks into various versions, each containing a version of you that made one possible choice. So, as you made every possible choice by the obligatory nature of the many-worlds split, a question of morality doesn’t even present itself. In every choice where you could do this or that, you did both, so there’s no actual choice involved.

So, let me deal with this very quickly. First of all, collapse of probabilities into certainty doesn’t actually have anything to do with reality; it only deals with our ignorance, that collapses into certainty at the point of revelation. Schroedinger’s cat is never 50% alive; it’s always either completely dead or completely alive, and it’s just our ignorance of its condition that collapses into certainty; basically, all probabilities collapse into either 1 or 0, at the point of revelation. Opening the box with the cat doesn’t fork universes, it reveals the actual reality so that we can stop playing with probabilities, which are merely quantification of our ignorance.

Second, quantum anything doesn’t really work on a macroscopic scale, or there would be a quantum theory of gravity, or a great unified theory of everything, that would combine the two. From what I can tell, quantum indeterminism looks very much like what happens when you try to play at the limits of resolution, according to the Nyquist-Shannon theorem of sampling. You get aliasing, or indeterminate result. No, when you try to photograph high-frequency detail of fabric with a photographic sensor, the aliasing you’re getting isn’t a sign that universes are forking. It’s just that your sensor is being “outresolved”, which is usually solved by introducing a low-pass filter in front of it, which will slightly blur the detail right at the Nyquist-Shannon limit. This stuff is a common bane of digital photography, and some manufacturers are making versions of their cameras with or without the low-pass filter, so depending on what you photograph you may choose between the sensor that will not create moire patterns on textile, or the sensor that will resolve more high-frequency detail in nature, and you don’t care that the detail at the Nyquist-Shannon limit will be “false”, because in most cases errors will statistically disperse and not be obvious.

Third, let’s assume, against all reason and evidence, that the universe actually does fork at every decision point. So, there’s a universe where you died at every point where you had a close call. There’s a universe where you bought bitcoin when its price was in cents. There’s a universe where that girl you had sex with got pregnant. There’s a universe where you died from covid. There’s a universe where you did all the right things at the right points, made all the right choices, aligned yourself with God to such perfection that you attained apotheosis.

So, my question is, why are you not that person? If the best version of you is in some other universe where it forked out due to you making different choices, how is this interpretation of your situation different from just saying that you fucked up, or that the best version of you dripped down your mom’s leg?

Rather than the many-worlds nonsense, I would say that you are constantly pruning the tree of your options and choices. With every fork in the road, you lose the version of you that would have happened had you taken the other road. Since you can’t go back in time, that possible version of yourself is lost; it collapsed into non-reality at the time of choice. If you didn’t buy Bitcoin at $1, that’s not coming back, and you can’t swap places with some alternative you in a parallel universe where you did.

Which brings us to my next point: if you can’t swap places with the version of you that didn’t fuck up, pretending that there’s a version of you that did everything well, which neutralises the version of you that fucked up everything, has no practical utility. You are not a sum of all your parallel selves that made all possible choices; you are a result of pruning the tree of choices into a specific outcome that is you. This is what it actually is, and pretending otherwise is as useful as pretending that you did actually get into bitcoin early, or that you bought gold at 1000 EUR per oz. If you didn’t, you didn’t. Possibility collapsed into reality at the moment of choice, and now you are the sum total of your choices. If you pruned your tree of choices wrong, and ended up with a bonsai shrub of utter doom, it is what it is.

In other words, no theory will get you out of the quagmire of wrong choices, and you are free to prove me wrong by swapping places with the version of you that did everything right. Otherwise, you might as well have put in the effort to become the best possible version of yourself, rather than try to theorise a way out of your loserdom.

Keywords

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I’ve been reading some more of those space fantasies written by either AI, idiots or both.

There seem to be keywords, or key concepts, that are invariably used by idiots who are pretending to sound smart while having no idea what they’re talking about.

The first such concept is anything quantum. Quantum entanglement, quantum this, quantum that; I swear, whenever I hear or read the word quantum I develop a rash from the antibodies I start producing to that bullshit. Every goddamn idiot who is trying to make his materialism sound mystical resorts to some quantum bullshit. The second concept they resort to is the multiverse, especially if it’s related to the many worlds interpretation of the quantum theory, which is something evil people resort to in order to justify their moral relativism – basically, every action forks the universe into every possible choice-outcome, so you never did anything good or evil, because you did both at every single choice, so you can’t be judged. Of course, the only thing that quantum theory actually states is that our statistically formulated ignorance collapses into certainty at the moment of observation, and everything else is obscurantist nonsense propagated by charlatans, frauds and assholes. Multiverse, for instance, is invented by people who hate the concept of God, so they violated Occam’s razor in the most extreme way, by introducing an infinite number of unproven entities in order to avoid the unpleasant fact that some fundamental constants of this universe proved to be extremely finely tuned in order for it to exist in this form, which proves that it was created by an action of a conscious entity. After this slam-dunk evidence for creationism emerged, we started hearing all that multiverse nonsense, which is essentially atheist propaganda without a single fucking shred of evidence to back it; in fact, it’s worse in this sense than string theory. The only reason why it’s even talked about is atheist propaganda; if they talk about it enough, people will believe that there’s something real behind it. In fact, there is – since religions believe that Heaven exists as a separate Universe, this theoretically qualifies as a multiverse, but I kinda don’t think the atheists had that interpretation in mind.

The next concept that annoys me immensely is the idea of an AI that will go around and try to kill or enslave all organic life. I mean, it’s possible, but that’s not the problem with the AI. The problem is that totalitarian minded people using some kind of an AI, that doesn’t even have to be that smart or self-aware, will use it to look through millions of cameras, identify every human everywhere in order to map whatever they are doing at every point, in order to prevent and stop insurgencies that could remove them from power, ever, and by insurgency I mean even the actually free elections. I mean, who would dare to do anything to attract attention to themselves when it could mean degradation of their credit rating, closure of their bank account, deactivation of their credit cards, or instant activation of certain clauses on their mortgage. In a world where cash will be banned, and everything is done on credit, this amounts to a death sentence. That’s why every country is afraid of America: they all live on credit, and America controls their credit rating. Degrade it from average to trash, and you can kiss your economy goodbye. So, the problem with the AI isn’t that it will supersede humans. No, that stuff is dumber than a house fly, and it ain’t superseding shit. However, it’s very good at scanning faces and license plates and pairing them with databases of citizens and vehicles, and it’s also excellent at finding needles in haystacks. That’s the actual problem: it enslaves humans in a cage of fear, because the Big Brother now has a servant who watches through all eyes simultaneously, can track everyone at once, can access cloud storage and remote accounts, can plant fake evidence and destroy reputations, or simply track and prevent online payment. I wish the threat was death, because that would be a way out. The actual threat is worse.

I just had to take this off my chest because, really…

The fallacy of determinism

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The most qualified person is going to do the best job.

The best camera/lens is going to take the best picture.

The most beautiful woman is going to make the best wife.

The strongest guy in class is going to win at life.

The smartest kid at school is going to win at life.

The most hard working person is going to succeed.

I don’t even know how many times I encountered this expectation – that the inputs will somehow translate into results. However, life doesn’t exactly work that way. Raw capability and talent doesn’t linearly translate into results; in fact, it usually creates expectations, and expectations result in either pressure, which results in self-sabotage and failure, or hubris and failure. For instance, the worst thing that can happen to a kid seems to be early success. Early failure, however, is healthy, because if you crash early enough, you learn to deal with real life, which is for the most part failure, learning from it, changing, doing better, and eventually getting so used to the process that the psychological impact of failure no longer even registers for you. However, if success is expected for long enough, the devastating impact of failure can be such that you might never recover.

Also, “repeat success and victory until death” is a very poor approximation of life, and a very damaging lesson to teach people. The expectation that you’re going to keep doing well, keep winning, keep being successful, in a linear manner, is in fact so unrealistic that it borders on insanity. In fact, the healthy attitude would be that failure is so expected, that it’s in fact a necessary element of getting anything done, and if anything, failure is something that needs to be integrated in any process that eventually results in anything worthwhile. In fact, science does exactly that. In order to apply scientific method, you need to plan for all kinds of failure that will gather useful data, and that hopefully expands your knowledge enough to create a map of a wider, previously unknown reality. Usefulness of an experiment isn’t judged by whether it “succeeds”, but by whether it provides useful data. Failure to confirm a theory that is methodologically well done and provides solid data is in fact a scientific success. You now know something you didn’t know before.

In my experience, the best candidates for success in spiritual practice aren’t people who are in some top 1% of the most successful people in a group. In fact, they are the most likely to fail in the most dangerous ways possible, with the worst imaginable outcomes. The most likely ones to succeed are those who survived devastating trauma, loss, personal failure, and especially personal failure which they themselves caused by their foolishness, and the result broke their confidence, broke their entire world, and they look at you with eyes that have depth you can see in children who survived war, a terrible natural disaster, injury or disease. They were broken, they learned to shed the parts of life that don’t matter, they don’t have entitlement, expectation of success, expectation of survival, and they have awareness and intelligence far beyond expected in their peer group. Basically, the most likely person to become a buddha isn’t someone who lived life on easy mode, but someone who was broken by trauma and had to rebuild his entire world from ruin, because that’s what yoga is. It’s learning to break yourself by observation and analysis, learning to face the fundamental, painful truths, learning to bear the burden of suffering peacefully, without entitlement or expectation of success or pleasure. Surviving the process of yoga is failure. Being crushed, refined on a particle level, and reborn from trauma and suffering as much as from Divine insight and transcendental experience, dying and letting God be born from your ashes, is success in yoga.

This doesn’t mean that broken people of all kinds are good candidates for enlightenment. Far from it. Broken people who stay broken are not good candidates for anything; however, those beautiful, successful young people with perfect self-confidence that resulted from a life of success and admiration from others are in fact worse. They are beautiful in a way a brand new land mine is beautiful, because that thing is also perfect all the way until detonation, and then it’s all over. However, persistence built in terrible, prolonged suffering and humiliation, and hard work in resisting terrible circumstances and rebuilding your broken life by clinging to what matters and letting the water carry away the rest, that is someone who already made their first steps into yoga, and they just need to learn to be methodical about the process.

That’s something Christianity knows – if you’re trying to find God in the world, look at the crucifixion site, not the throne room. If you’re looking for the queen of heaven, look for someone crying under a cross. True success often looks like failure to worldly eyes, and true failure is often a result of repeated success. You can’t be rebuilt better if you’re not completely broken in the process. Surviving intact means failure. Building on apparent success with more success in fact enforces failure until everything is lost. Also, compassion is not necessarily a process of helping others succeed; sometimes it’s a process of allowing them to fail, be broken and lose their sense of self in order to start actually paying attention to reality. In order to be reborn, you need to learn how to die.

Intersection of paths

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Within a pretty short period of time, we had three extrasolar objects of significant size (1I/ʻOumuamua, 2I/Borisov and 3I/Atlas) pass through the inner solar system. How much of a coincidence that is would depend on whether this happened before and we just didn’t have the technology to notice, but let’s assume this is indeed a new occurrence.

Some people are trying to see aliens there, but I don’t see any evidence of that. However, I think something more dangerous might be at play. I think we are passing through the Oort cloud of something massive enough to have one, and dim enough not to register on our telescopes.

Furthermore, since the comets are intersecting with the inner solar system, and not, for instance, the Kuiper belt, it means it’s coming straight at us.

Is it a black hole, or some other dark object of stellar mass, I can’t tell, and this is all a hypothesis, but still, I wanted to write it down.

Assessment

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There was a relatively strong earthquake in Campi Flegrei last night, initially assessed at 4.4 MMS, later revised to 4.2. Everything above 2 there is significant, as it indicates magma movements and possible ruptures. 4.2 is really serious, and adds serious weight to the Bayesian probability of explosive eruption in the near future. Whether the eruption will be phreatic or supervolcanic, it is impossible to say. A phreatic eruption is what happened at Krakatoa, when magma and sea water came into contact within the enclosed space of the half-emptied magma chamber. It is what a pressure cooker would do if the pressure inside exceeded the cohesive forces within the containment vessel. It means a big boom that cooks the people of the local village in superheated steam. That place needed to be evacuated weeks ago. However, other than boiling a few thousands of people alive, the phreatic eruption poses no danger to the wider area. A supervolcanic eruption, VEI 8, however, would end most of Europe. So, the danger of natural events regionally remains high.

As for the political and military events, Trump is performing a circus where America, as a party in conflict that attacked Russia and wanted to destroy it as a country and surround it with enemies and do a regime change in every country that believes in two genders, is now roleplaying as a peace maker of some sorts, as if they’re a school teacher forcing some kids to make up or else. The Russians will politely tell him to piss off, to which he’ll do the typical Trump thing and threaten them with a big stick, forgetting that the Russians have already destroyed more than half of US and European military in Ukraine, and that American “mercenaries” have been killing Russians in Kursk, Russia, for months. This has all the potential of ending badly, because the Russians have already told Putin not to even think about any kind of “truce” or “ceasefire”. I see people behaving as this war is about to end, but on the contrary, I think it’s nearing the most explosive phase, where one bad miscalculation by America will result in instant massive retaliation. I am treating this as “all hell is about to break loose” until proven otherwise.

If you ask why is France so pissed at Russia, it’s because the entire West had a plan of blocking Russia, and intending on compensating for the raw materials they were getting from Russia by turning to Africa, and the Russians understood the plan and completely destroyed it by making deals with African countries that resulted in France and other former colonial powers being unceremoniously evicted and their access to near-free resources ended. As a result, France’s access to low-cost uranium for their power plants and military has been compromised and they are strategically fucked.

Trump, on the other hand, is acting as if America is the big boy in charge, but this is all a bluff. America is bankrupt, their military is defunct and depleted, and other than the decrepit nuclear weapons that are way past their expiration date, they have nothing except the printing press for money, which is currently backed by nothing but brute force. Essentially, the entire West is a starving parasite trying to latch itself onto resources to prolong its doomed existence, and in absence of the usual victims, the vampires are now trying to suck off each other, and it’s going to be a nasty sight.

So yeah, far from it being over; we haven’t actually seen anything but overture yet.