rationalskepticism.org

SafeAsMilk wrote:

John Platko wrote:

SafeAsMilk wrote:God, do you ever get tired of hearing your own bullshit? That's the most meaningless pile of drivel I've seen you write this week, and you've made some doozies. It's like Deepak Chopra on crack.

Do you ever consider the potential benefit of saying something simple like: John, I'm not quite sure what you meant by that, could you explain more about _________________?

I do when someone says something I don't understand. But even if I hadn't done reading on your current bullshit inspirer, this constructor business, it's pretty easy to see when someone's just talking bullshit. Sure, I don't know everything about the jumbled mess of quantum bullshit Deepak Chopra likes to blather on about, but it's obvious from the second you start reading it that it's complete nonsense, snippets of things strung together in a meaningless way. It's so obvious, you don't need a PhD to see it. This sort of thing features heavily in your posts. I appreciate that you can consistently play a character that is blissfully unaware of how bullshitty their posts are, but it doesn't really fool me and I doubt it fools many others either. I do enjoy pointing it out, though.

So I said:

But experts like me know that beyond the limits of what is possible and impossible, i.e. beyond "the laws" that define the possible transformations for a constructor, lies the supernatural domain where the angles live. Where that which the "the laws" make impossible can never-the-less still effect transformations that are possible. Perhaps a picture will help. The angels, residing in supernatural space are shown in yellow on the last plot of this post. They are beyond, what another member might call, "the horizon of optimization" but they can still play a roll in the optimization.

From CT we learn that possible tasks of a constructor are defined by what is possible and what is impossible. That part is pretty straight forward. However, Deutsch points out an interesting aspect that constructors may have where - well here's how he explains it:

3.3 Impossible states

Similarly, impossible substrates, or impossible states of substrates, are those that are forbidden by laws of nature. The task of transforming a possible state into an impossible one is of course impossible, but impossible states may nevertheless appear in the formalism of subsidiary theories, and transforming one impossible state into another may well be a possible task. For example, Maxwell’s electrodynamics denies the existence of magnetic monopoles, but also predicts how, if they existed, they would interact with electromagnetic fields. This allows the construction of monopole-detecting instruments, which are constructors capable of testing the prediction that no monopoles exist. 3

Those two underlined parts are the key to understanding this. In the example I linked to, blues licks, the general evolution of states proceeds by applying possible transition tasks that result in a new state that is not impossible. More specifically, two existing licks might produce an offspring which is a piece of the beginning of one lick and the ending of another lick. This offspring will be viable if it fits the requirements of what is possible. If not, that offspring might be tossed in the bit bucket, or it might be placed in a special domain for impossible states. Then, at a later time, that offspring may be mated with another lick and create a new viable offspring that that is a possible state. In that way, an impossible state is transformed into, or helps in the transformation of, another possible state.

You're just taking the part of the impossible one that is possible and merging it with the same in another. While that might be meaningful for science, it's deepity as you've applied it.

You can't just slap frameworks on whatever the fuck you want and pretend it's gold. That's what Deepak Chopra does. In terms of your blues licks your limits are basically arbitrary, and in terms of angels and supernatural they reek of unevidenced wishful thinking.