Comments on: A Post about Stubbornness1

By: Greg

Greg — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 03:01:17 +0000

Good eye. But is it really how things work in the strip?

Well gee, if I told you that, it’d ruin all the suspense!

(I suspect we’ll find out eventually, though.)

By: Lupo

Lupo — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 09:23:59 +0000

Ok Greg, thanx, I understand what you mean (and it’s mutual, i swear).

By the way, the way you made the “timetravelling teddy bears” storyline evolve makes me think about tour comment of the 26th…

By: Greg

Greg — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 20:31:05 +0000

Aww, don’t crawl away, Lupo! We still love you!

I mean, not in a creepy way or anything. Just… just enough so you don’t feel bad anymore?

By: Lupo

Lupo — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 09:00:33 +0000

Ok, forget everything, I made the mistake to comment before reading all your comments. I’ve been just redundant.

*crawls out in shame*

By: Lupo

Lupo — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 08:53:35 +0000

Uh, I forgot: you can’t tell to the subject of an experiment that implies choice that you are monitoring the choices he will make. Doing this you make the subject make his choices considering that he’s being monitored.
…f***, this is Heisenberg again!

By: Lupo

Lupo — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 08:47:42 +0000

Well, if the Computer knows everything, probably knows even that Roy will do the opposite of what it says, so the answer to jen question could be “Roy will order “A” but only if you say him I said “B”.

In true reality, the Heisemberg uncertainty principle is the real answer…

By: Greg

Greg — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 21:42:34 +0000

@daniel: Yeah, it’s stuff like this that makes me think that faster-than-light travel is really impossible, or at the least effectively an equivalent to time travel. If you can break the cosmic speed limit, you’ve pretty much tossed causality out the window.

Between this light cone issue and macsnafu’s point about the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, I think we’ve pretty firmly established the impossibility of actually realizing this thought experiment.

By: daniel

daniel — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 10:36:54 +0000

The problem, as already said, is that the computer can’t be part of the universe it is simulating. Or, to be more precise, it can only make 100% accurate predictions for points outside it’s future light cone. Anything placed in the computer’s future light cone could be causally linked to the computer itself and would require the computer to simulate itself.
This shows that computer CAN make 100% accurate predictions about a part of the universe, but anyone influenced by the prediction cannot find that answer before the event actually happens, because the event is outside the computer’s future light cone, so outside any possible means of communication with the computer (the two light cones will eventually intersect, so the answer can be verifiable after the event).

By: macsnafu

macsnafu — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 14:35:04 +0000

Right. In a 100% deterministic universe, knowledge of the future should not allow changes to occur. But suppose, instead, that it’s only *mostly* deterministic, but not completely, say 75-90% deterministic. That is, the larger structure, context, or setting is determined, but smaller details are not. In that case, which item Roy orders may not be predictable, or only a certain probability of his order can be predicted, but without 100% certainty.

I suggest this because I do believe in free will, but nonetheless, there is a certain order to the universe, and not random chaotic-ness.

Looking at the structure of the atom, as a basis, they tell us that the exact location/velocity of an electron in that atom cannot be determined. However, it certainly can be determined that that electron is within a certain orbit at a certain distance around the nucleus of the atom, even if its exact location is not determinable. We know more generally where it is, even if it’s not exact.

By: Greg

Greg — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 14:04:25 +0000

@macsnafu: You’re absolutely right. It’s a really interesting idea, and one that I think is cool from a storytelling perspective. It basically requires the universe to have some sort of hidden machinery that self-rights itself in these situations where causality has gone all funky. In some sense, the universe would somehow have to produce some improbable scenario to keep the paradoxical event from happening. If things worked like this, then you’d be able to produce an improbable event with certainty simply by visiting the future! (Does that make any sense? I think it might, but I could be way wrong about that.)

This talk of generating improbability with great certainty kind of reminds me of Douglas Adams’s famed improbability drive.

@Gary: It’s good to hear that I’m not the only one interested in pondering these geeky things