2025 new p99 Gold server

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Originally Posted by Jimjam [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

That reminds me of Feyman’s many paths but on a larger scale.

Are you talking about Feynman diagrams?

I've never made that connection, but now that you mention it I certainly see it. Have you read his book QED? I think you'd really like it.

I came across this idea in an absolutely insane book, Time's Arrow by Huw Price. The argument goes something like this. Imagine a shoebox filled with white and black stones. If you first place all the white stones on the left side and the black stones on the white side, after you shake it up they'll all end up jumbled. If you shake it again it'll stay jumbled. This is kinda what entropy is: ordered arrangements of matter tend towards becoming disordered over time. It's possible that if you shake the box it'll end up sorted with all white on one side and black on the other, but it's very unlikely.

This is what we mean by the "arrow of time": certain things tend to become more disordered in the future, and more ordered in the past. You'll never see a broken egg on the floor leap up and reform whole in your hand, even though it's physically possible for that to happen. Price's argument rests on the fact that our brains are physical arrangements of matter, and our memories are stored in that matter. Since it's vanishingly unlikely that the arrangement of matter could ever be as ordered as it was in the past, it could actually be more likely that the random perturbations of matter somehow formed such that we have a memory of a well-ordered past than that the well-ordered past actually happened.

Originally Posted by Cecily [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Kinda neat but simulation theory also feels like a secular version of religious escapism. Why I'm a big fan of nihilism to occam's razor all that shit into it does not fucking matter.

Yeah, I feel similarly. If a theory doesn't make any useful predictions that can actually prove or disprove the theory, it's not really worth spending too much time on. Can be fun to think about but in the end doesn't really matter.