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Possible... but I don't have a gorilla torso soo questionable.really if very small quantum particles have a degree of random probability that randomness would only add up more and more the more macro you get. This would explain the dream I had about walking on the moon.Or you're a member of the Umbrella Academy and had your memory wiped by the one that hears all the g$+&!+n rumors.
Yet. The day's just begun!
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Lil tyke wakes up at 330, he gets to go on morning run. That’ll learn him
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Yet. The day's just begun!Possible... but I don't have a gorilla torso soo questionable.really if very small quantum particles have a degree of random probability that randomness would only add up more and more the more macro you get. This would explain the dream I had about walking on the moon.Or you're a member of the Umbrella Academy and had your memory wiped by the one that hears all the g$+&!+n rumors.
Ibbley bibbley zibbley zawso,
Give Vidmaster7 a GORILLA'S TORSO!!!There you go.
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Sometimes I hate the internet. Too easy to get into Bones V kickstarter with a late pledge. But...PIRATES.
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Sometimes I hate the internet. Too easy to get into Bones V kickstarter with a late pledge. But...PIRATES.Reaper minis good for game.
Reaper minis bad for wallet.
Truth.
Not as rough as DF, but more like a death of a hundred cuts as each time I visit their website (or in this case the pledge manager), I spend more.
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Sometimes I hate the internet. Too easy to get into Bones V kickstarter with a late pledge. But...PIRATES.Reaper minis good for game.
Reaper minis bad for wallet.Truth.
Not as rough as DF, but more like a death of a hundred cuts as each time I visit their website (or in this case the pledge manager), I spend more.
*looks at huge pile of unpainted minis*
Uhuh.
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You know what's really frustrating?
Being extremely careful about COVID-19: Never leaving the home without a mask, washing your hands every time you get home, minimizing interactions with other human beings...
...and still managing to catch a cold!!!!
Both Impus Minor and I have been sick for the last couple of days. We're 99.9% sure it's not COVID; the symptoms don't match at all, so it's not a particular concern. Except... how the heck did we get sick when we're working so hard to isolate ourselves!?!?!?!?
My off-the-cuff guess is surface transmission: From everything I've read, COVID-19's surface transmission rate is virtually nonexistent. Other diseases are far more surface-transmissible. But still, you have to ask, "How the heck did I catch something?!?!"
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...and, first major fail of the year for the school.
Fridays are "asynchronous learning" days, where there aren't any formal classes, but teachers may assign additional work during designated hours. Impus Minor takes advantage of the schedule to sleep in.
Except... last week his Spanish teacher decided to give students their first exam on Friday. So he slept in, missed the exam, got a dead-up 0, and so far she's not allowing make-ups.
We'll see how it proceeds. But if neither I nor my son were aware that you had a "show up or get a 0" exam on Friday (I check his homework every day), then you get an F in communication...
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I'm right with you on the catching something NH. I'm 99% sure my current cough is allergy related rather than infection, but it still has me nervous and wondering how the heck I got exposed to anything.
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So I found this fox capering in the grass in Ghost of Tsushima, so I followed it, it went capering up to this waterfall and lightly skipped across the rocks and sat down on the other side, looking at me expectantly. So I try skipping across myself. And fall to my death. Which I do three more times just to be an a*~@@%~. Then I find the rocks you can climb up by pressing R2 and then lightly skip across the rocks at the top of the waterfall and climb down more rocks on the other side so I can bow with the fox at this shrine.
I'm pretty sure he was laughing at me.
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I also was forced to sneak up and assassinate someone from behind, which is apparently a big no no in Samurai culture, which forced me to have flashbacks and then I got over it and assassinated another six mongols before going all samurai sword on the leader.
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So I get having a drive thru cheese festival or a drive thru taste of Madison.
But, a drive thru Bloody Mary festival just sounds like a bad idea from every angle.
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Sometimes I hate the internet. Too easy to get into Bones V kickstarter with a late pledge. But...PIRATES.Reaper minis good for game.
Reaper minis bad for wallet.Truth.
Not as rough as DF, but more like a death of a hundred cuts as each time I visit their website (or in this case the pledge manager), I spend more.
*looks at huge pile of unpainted minis*
Uhuh.
*Also looks at huge pile of unpainted minis*
Damn it, we got the wrong house!!
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Wow! And today someone named Amuran logged into my Facebook account so I should click the link to secure my account immediately!
Who knew I was so bad at securing my stuff?
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...I've been listening to the Philosophize This! podcast, and I'm feeling particularly philosophical today so I google-drew a flowchart of how (I think) will, choice, and consequences work.
I'm sure many of us are aware that two of the perennial questions of philosophy are (1) In what sense are our wills free or deterministic, and (2) If they're deterministic, how can we justify holding each other responsible for our choices?
And to detour into theology,
** spoiler omitted **So anyway, feel free to take a look and tell me to keep my day job!
Interestingly enough, for me, taking quantum physics resolved any issue of free will.
If you measure the momentum and velocity of a muon traveling through space to the best of your ability, and you have the computing power to predict every single interaction and influence that that muon will experience in the next billion years, there's still a significant chance you'll be wrong about its final position. Quantum mechanics says so. Heck, you can't even tell me whether or not it'll decay in that time span.
So if fundamental particles can't be entirely deterministic, how can the human brain be so?
I've always been skeptical of considering quantum mechanics with regards to will, because:
1) Do very tiny particles truly have a degree of spontaneity, or is our current understanding of them simply incomplete? Or does our current technology simply lack the fine precision necessary to predict deterministic behavior at that scale? Admittedly I've never taken quantum physics, so maybe these questions have been answered.
2) Even if very tiny particles do have a degree of true spontaneity, does that really matter on the scale of our brains' chemistry and electrical signals? To make an analogy, we can't practically predict a single water molecule's
1. I read a couple articles to try once again to wrap my head around the uncertainty principle. (The wikipedia page is incomprehensible, though probably much more exhaustive.) As I understand it, Heisenberg's says that our ability to precisely know location and momentum of a particle is limited, not that there is inherent spontaneity in particle behavior. In other words, our observations are practically limited so particles sometimes appear to act erratically, but there may be some underlying deterministic mechanism that we're simply not aware of. Am I mistaken?
2. I did a little research, and from my calculations even a single neuron firing means hundreds of billions of electrons moving across a synapse. So even if once in a while an electron goes haywire and leaps to a nearby neuron, that might be...a momentary itch in my toe? I remain skeptical.
Loving this conversation though!
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Sure, Woran and others may have piles of unpainted minis; I do too. But, do you ALSO have piles of unpainted (and sometimes unassembled) molded dungeon pieces?
Also, to paraphrase Lucile Bluth: "I don't CARE much for D&D 5e"
The game was... meh. The people are fun. The actual system just made me feel like an old 2e game with kits all over again... which is to say, reminded me why I went to 3x and beyond for systems that allowed me to BUILD a character from the ground up and have a tad more agency/expectations if my GM said they're running by RAW.
I won't bother you all with a rant. Suffice it to say, PF 1e still feels like my "safe place" in TTRPGs. Used to be Marvel Super Heroes, for a brief time it was Werewolf, then 3x and now PF for like, 10 years.
Also also… why do some DM's have such an issue with player agency? This is now the third DM I've had who basically sits on a throne and leads the party by the nose. I grudgingly accept such a playstyle if we're running an AP but he bragged about this being a homebrewed adventure and setting.
There weren't clues for us to follow; there was no choice in the matter. Elder guy in the village is sick; our starting characters aren't from said village so we have no stake in the fight other than to be dogooders; paladin uses lay on hands/cure ANY disease, fails. Rando in the room says "there's a healing font in a cave past some ruins. You'll go there now to save the elder" and boom; we're on the job.
Anyway... please GUIDE your players unless they ask to be led like sheep. That's my commentary.
The sheer amount of minis that I have and do not use has made it easier not to start 3D tarrain of any kind. Just sticking to flat maps.
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Sure, Woran and others may have piles of unpainted minis; I do too. But, do you ALSO have piles of unpainted (and sometimes unassembled) molded dungeon pieces?
Also, to paraphrase Lucile Bluth: "I don't CARE much for D&D 5e"
The game was... meh. The people are fun. The actual system just made me feel like an old 2e game with kits all over again... which is to say, reminded me why I went to 3x and beyond for systems that allowed me to BUILD a character from the ground up and have a tad more agency/expectations if my GM said they're running by RAW.
I won't bother you all with a rant. Suffice it to say, PF 1e still feels like my "safe place" in TTRPGs. Used to be Marvel Super Heroes, for a brief time it was Werewolf, then 3x and now PF for like, 10 years.
Also also… why do some DM's have such an issue with player agency? This is now the third DM I've had who basically sits on a throne and leads the party by the nose. I grudgingly accept such a playstyle if we're running an AP but he bragged about this being a homebrewed adventure and setting.
There weren't clues for us to follow; there was no choice in the matter. Elder guy in the village is sick; our starting characters aren't from said village so we have no stake in the fight other than to be dogooders; paladin uses lay on hands/cure ANY disease, fails. Rando in the room says "there's a healing font in a cave past some ruins. You'll go there now to save the elder" and boom; we're on the job.
Anyway... please GUIDE your players unless they ask to be led like sheep. That's my commentary.
F#&@ YEAH
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Sure, Woran and others may have piles of unpainted minis; I do too. But, do you ALSO have piles of unpainted (and sometimes unassembled) molded dungeon pieces?
Also, to paraphrase Lucile Bluth: "I don't CARE much for D&D 5e"
The game was... meh. The people are fun. The actual system just made me feel like an old 2e game with kits all over again... which is to say, reminded me why I went to 3x and beyond for systems that allowed me to BUILD a character from the ground up and have a tad more agency/expectations if my GM said they're running by RAW.
I won't bother you all with a rant. Suffice it to say, PF 1e still feels like my "safe place" in TTRPGs. Used to be Marvel Super Heroes, for a brief time it was Werewolf, then 3x and now PF for like, 10 years.
Also also… why do some DM's have such an issue with player agency? This is now the third DM I've had who basically sits on a throne and leads the party by the nose. I grudgingly accept such a playstyle if we're running an AP but he bragged about this being a homebrewed adventure and setting.
There weren't clues for us to follow; there was no choice in the matter. Elder guy in the village is sick; our starting characters aren't from said village so we have no stake in the fight other than to be dogooders; paladin uses lay on hands/cure ANY disease, fails. Rando in the room says "there's a healing font in a cave past some ruins. You'll go there now to save the elder" and boom; we're on the job.
Anyway... please GUIDE your players unless they ask to be led like sheep. That's my commentary.
"Rulings, not rules" /s
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People that act like driving an hour one way on busy interstates is no big deal, or it isn't very hard piss me off.
When society falls (in mid November) they'll be the first I hunt. Purely out of spite.
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1. I read a couple articles to try once again to wrap my head around the uncertainty principle. (The wikipedia page is incomprehensible, though probably much more exhaustive.) As I understand it, Heisenberg's says that our ability to precisely know location and momentum of a particle is limited, not that there is inherent spontaneity in particle behavior. In other words, our observations are practically limited so particles sometimes appear to act erratically, but there may be some underlying deterministic mechanism that we're simply not aware of. Am I mistaken?
2. I did a little research, and from my calculations even a single neuron firing means hundreds of billions of electrons moving across a synapse. So even if once in a while an electron goes haywire and leaps to a nearby neuron, that might be...a momentary itch in my toe? I remain skeptical.
Loving this conversation though!
(1) Heisenberg's just the tip of the iceberg, and the one most people relate to. "We can't even measure where something is with perfect precision!"
The other relevant one is particle decay: Every second of existence, a particle may or may not decay. Space isn't "empty", it's a vast sea of particles spontaneously appearing and just as spontaneously disappearing. In a single cubic meter of space you'd have trouble measuring it, but across the vastness of space the entire cosmos is eternally "frothing" with creation and destruction. At the macroscopic level, everything's predictable and measurable to any degree of precision you'd care to apply. Even something as small as a DNA molecule is unlikely to be affected by any quantum effect. You have to get much, much smaller, down to the scale of electrons to even have a hope of detecting this eternal random nonsense. Here's a nice BBC article on it.(2) Next, we get to the most-overhyped theory ever developed in Mathematics (though it was actually a weather forecaster who found it): The Butterfly Effect. Short (and probably off by a bit) story: A forecaster was running the same simulation over and over again to measure different things. Growing tired, he omitted a decimal place, putting in something like 275 instead of 275.1. The entire predicted weather pattern changed, and a whole new branch of mathematics (chaos theory) was born: In extremely complicated situations, a teensy change to the starting conditions leads to massive differences in the final outcome.
So, you see where I'm going here. By quantum noise, nothing is absolutely deterministic; there is always an iota of chance, and if you put the same exact person in the same exact starting position making the same exact decision, their starting state will not be exactly the same as it was before; it's impossible. And even if you did, there's a finite probability that quantum physics would go ahead and mess up your "perfect state", because why not?
Now you have the human brain, an incredibly complex decision-making machine, firing millions of neurons to make a single decision. If the starting conditions were off by even the slightest amount, a different decision might arise.
So in the realm of physics and mathematics, I see nothing preventing free will. And I'm no theologian.
Though one of my best lower-division teachers was a rabbi teaching logic...
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Fantasy NPC: Sygyn Fhial, keeper of orphans.
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There are experimental results that are consistent with particles being in multiple positions at the same time. Those results would be impossible if the particle was merely hard to pin-point.
Is quantum physics counter-intuitive? Yes. It doesn't mean it is not true. Being counter-intuitive is really meaningless when it comes to science because human intuition is, to say it bluntly, crap. It's a messed up chimera of social conditioning and neurological short-cuts that is barely tuned to handle a minuscule fraction of the universe surrounding us. It's primary function is to be overly cautious of potential threats, increasing chance of survival long enough to raise progeny. And it doesn't even handle that all that well, because human brain doesn't really grasp probability, and has no sense of scale or orders of magnitude.
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I should have been more specific.
It's not easy to unload two pallets of 40-60 pound slabs (20 to a row, ten rows), drive an hour on the interstate, pick up two more pallets, and then drive an hour back on the interstate.
And it's really annoying when the person that's been twiddling on their phone for two and a half hours while you do this expects you to be all gung ho for unloading another two pallets of 40-60 pound slabs (two sizes one 60 pounds the other 40 pounds).
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I know the feeling. Having to unload an entire house's worth of furniture during those three years is a pain in the ass. The driving was a welcome reprieve to me.
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So in the realm of physics and mathematics, I see nothing preventing free will. And I'm no theologian.
It's hard for me to grasp what free will would actually look like. In my life, I have been exposed both consciously and unconsciously to various stimuli. Is it my prior experiences/influences leading me to make a decision in the now or am I truly making a decision 100% of my own free will? I don't think so, but I honestly don't think it matters anyway.
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Ah, we have arrived at 'random bloody nose season'.
Whom had you hit in the face and why?
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Loving this conversation though!(1) Heisenberg's just the tip of the iceberg, and the one most people relate to. "We can't even measure where something is with perfect precision!"
The other relevant one is particle decay: Every second of existence, a particle may or may not decay. Space isn't "empty", it's a vast sea of particles spontaneously appearing and just as spontaneously disappearing. In a single cubic meter of space you'd have trouble measuring it, but across the vastness of space the entire cosmos is eternally "frothing" with creation and destruction. At the macroscopic level, everything's predictable and measurable to any degree of precision you'd care to apply. Even something as small as a DNA molecule is unlikely to be affected by any quantum effect. You have to get much, much smaller, down to the scale of electrons to even have a hope of detecting this eternal random nonsense. Here's a nice BBC article on it.(2) Next, we get to the most-overhyped theory ever developed in Mathematics (though it was actually a weather forecaster who found it): The Butterfly Effect. Short (and probably off by a bit) story: A forecaster was running the same simulation over and over again to measure different things. Growing tired, he omitted a decimal place, putting in something like 275 instead of 275.1. The entire predicted weather pattern changed, and a whole new branch of mathematics (chaos theory) was born: In extremely complicated situations, a teensy change to the starting conditions leads to massive differences in the final outcome.
So, you see where I'm going here. By quantum noise, nothing is absolutely deterministic; there is always an iota of chance, and if you put the same exact person in the same exact starting position making the same exact decision, their starting state will not be exactly the same as it was before; it's impossible. And even if you did, there's a finite probability that quantum physics would go ahead and mess up your "perfect state", because why not?
Now you have the human brain, an incredibly complex decision-making machine, firing millions of neurons to make a single decision. If the starting conditions were off by even the slightest amount, a different decision might arise.So in the realm of physics and mathematics, I see nothing preventing free will. And I'm no theologian.
Though one of my best lower-division teachers was a rabbi teaching logic...
1. I understand that Heisenberg's isn't just about the effect of observation on quantum particles -- although I did at first think so, thanks to that classic electron/photon example. Very misleading.
Anyway, what I'm getting at is: I'm not reading anything which rules out the possibility of some deterministic mechanic(s) underlying that quantum 'noise.' What I'm reading is "Quantum particles sometimes act in unexpected ways, and currently we can't explain why."
2. Likewise, the butterfly effect doesn't have anything to say about our topic -- it just says that minute differences can deterministically cause huge effects.
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Random fun fact:
Recently reviewed documents show that there was a real Cold War-ear British spy named James (Albert) Bond. He was a secretary in UK Embassy in Warsaw in 1964-65 and the Polish counter-intelligence of that time noted he was quite interested in women.
If it is a fake, then a well made one.
Or it could be a joke or fake done by the counterintelligence agents themselves at that time. By the time he was supposed to be in Poland, the books and even movies were well known.
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1. What I'm reading is "Quantum particles sometimes act in unexpected ways, and currently we can't explain why."
No. We have concrete proof that it is truly non-deterministic. It's not that *we* can't explain why. It's that these things are, at their core, non-deterministic. Physicists have dedicated their lives to proving and re-proving this result. It's as significant as Godel's Incompleteness Theorem was in math: He proved that you cannot prove everything.
The premise of lack of free will involves determinism: Given an initial state and enough computing power, you can predict any future state. Quantum mechanics says, "No, you cannot determine the initial state that accurately."
It's a provable law reproduced by physics students in labs around the world on an annual basis, not a lack of knowledge.
1. What I'm reading is "Quantum particles sometimes act in unexpected ways, and currently we can't explain why."2. Likewise, the butterfly effect doesn't have anything to say about our topic -- it just says that minute differences can deterministically cause huge effects.
Statement 1 indicates we cannot accurately determine the initial conditions. Statement 2 states that if the initial conditions vary even by the tiniest minutiae, we can get vastly different results.
Determinism is shot out the window by a cannon. Free will is possible.
EDIT: It all starts with the photoelectric effect studied by Einstein that proved quantization of electrons (hence "quantum mechanics"). Once you show that there's a minimum allowable unit in the universe, everything else follows pretty quickly (and crazily). But every college kid repeats the experiment. I did it. Shiro's son is doing it now. One of those fundamental, "Change the universe" experiments that you can do in any college physics lab.
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And this entire conversation has left out Hawking radiation, those particles that come out of a black hole. There is no causal connection to the matter that went in; they just show up randomly and then speed off into the universe in a random fashion.
With their initial condition effectively erased and replaced with randomness, there are trillions of particles with their initial condition erased floating throughout the cosmos. This means even if you know the initial conditions completely (an impossibility, as NH said), it still might not let you predict with 100% certainty the outcome.
As Hawking supposedly asked, "Can there be a future if a black hole swallows the past?"
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Aww, crap. This is not what I wanted to read in place of Sword Interval update... Its creator had to leave his house because of Oregon fires and it (the house) burned down. There is a (quite successful) GoFundMe campaign to help him and his wife.
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Hasbro.
*sigh*
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Yet. The day's just begun!Possible... but I don't have a gorilla torso soo questionable.really if very small quantum particles have a degree of random probability that randomness would only add up more and more the more macro you get. This would explain the dream I had about walking on the moon.Or you're a member of the Umbrella Academy and had your memory wiped by the one that hears all the g$+&!+n rumors.Ibbley bibbley zibbley zawso,
Give Vidmaster7 a GORILLA'S TORSO!!!There you go.
*COUGH COUGH* hck I think you used the wrong spell...
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There's a reason as to why I can't stand hackers.Wow! And today someone named Amuran logged into my Facebook account so I should click the link to secure my account immediately!
Who knew I was so bad at securing my stuff?
Is it because they just can't HACK it?
Oh I guess it would be the opposite actually.
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Mark, the reason some GMs hate player agency is they wrote a novel plot, not an interactive game, and you can't hear their novel if you don't get aboard the railroad.
Good sandbox GMing is not at all like writing a novel. It's an outline, a bunch of possible threads, and a LOT of improv.