4 ms·

After the first two paragraphs I stopped reading the article seriously. But I love science fiction for the idea's, and this article has a few in them. For exam

After the first two paragraphs I stopped reading the article seriously. But I love science fiction for the idea's, and this article has a few in them. For example her take on / comparison of nuclear war with time war: > After that, I was no longer afraid of nuclear war. The solution was easy. We already knew nuclear war was a risk, we just had to avoid the paths of timelines that would lead to it. > I’m not interested in losing time wars, or winning them. In real life, I think it’s a great idea to avoid them entirely. And on avoiding bad events: > “Time is like a room. If you want to avoid bumping into the chair when walking across the room, you can do that — but you have to know that there is a chair and where that chair is in the room.” > It left me with the clear intuitive feeling that as a species we could work to avoid a particularly bad possible event or move toward a particularly good possible event, but we needed some intelligence about what those possibilities are and where/when they are in spacetime.

madaxe_again 5y ago
I don’t think we need to act as a species, rather we each carve out our own path, choosing which universe we fork off into. We think of it as making decisions and acting, but rather, you could look at it as picking a universe.
ncmncm 5y ago
There are lots of complaints here. But it is refreshing to have a scientist talking about what she, exactly like her colleagues, doesn't know, but in her case hopes to. She leads with pointing out that everything she is saying could be wrong, so complaining about that amounts to petty griping. To my knowledge, there is nothing in physics that says a future event cannot be precognized with perfect reliability, even if the person might act differently as a consequence of the knowledge. Not getting on a plane you are sure will crash is probably a desirable outcome, even if you can't convince anybody else. A mechanism for such communication is a tough nut. Continuity of the individual--in one future, you die, another, you don't--seems to offer a sort of channel, but physics doesn't care whether you are alive or dead. However, if in one scenario your molecules get incinerated and scattered, in the other they continue moving in what we might call "you" formation, that is a physically objective change. If your cells can bounce signals off your past and future selves, and enounter a discontinuity, that could affect your reproductive fitness, so be fodder for evolution. Life is not bound by our preconceptions of how physics ought to work; life explores the space of actual reality, and has often found ways to exploit phenomena we have not noticed, never mind understood. So, what she does might look a lot like woo, but that is not the same thing as actually being woo, and I am glad she is thinking about it, and telling us. You are not obliged to be interested.

madaxe_again 5y ago

I don’t think we need to act as a species, rather we each carve out our own path, choosing which universe we fork off into. We think of it as making decisions and acting, but rather, you could look at it as picking a universe.

ncmncm 5y ago

There are lots of complaints here. But it is refreshing to have a scientist talking about what she, exactly like her colleagues, doesn't know, but in her case hopes to. She leads with pointing out that everything she is saying could be wrong, so complaining about that amounts to petty griping. To my knowledge, there is nothing in physics that says a future event cannot be precognized with perfect reliability, even if the person might act differently as a consequence of the knowledge. Not getting on a plane you are sure will crash is probably a desirable outcome, even if you can't convince anybody else. A mechanism for such communication is a tough nut. Continuity of the individual--in one future, you die, another, you don't--seems to offer a sort of channel, but physics doesn't care whether you are alive or dead. However, if in one scenario your molecules get incinerated and scattered, in the other they continue moving in what we might call "you" formation, that is a physically objective change. If your cells can bounce signals off your past and future selves, and enounter a discontinuity, that could affect your reproductive fitness, so be fodder for evolution. Life is not bound by our preconceptions of how physics ought to work; life explores the space of actual reality, and has often found ways to exploit phenomena we have not noticed, never mind understood. So, what she does might look a lot like woo, but that is not the same thing as actually being woo, and I am glad she is thinking about it, and telling us. You are not obliged to be interested.