kawa

Their starship was bullshit. On earth they needed a big Saturn 5 like rocket to bring it into space and later they fly into orbit like it's nothing.

If the planets they visited had much lower gravity then earth this may be possible, but this wasn't noticeable or talked about. And even on Mars you need much more fuel to get into orbit than could be stored in their tiny ship.

> What determinism do you argue does truly fall out in the end?

Mechanics is fully deterministic. The question is if there is some kind of "QM random generator" which mixes into this, making things nondeterministic in the end. But it's possible to separate both and the "big clumps of matter" part is fully deterministic then because decoherence generally happens so fast that it doesn't matter. You need to prepare systems quite carefully to mix quantum randomness into it (like in Schroedingers cat for example).

> In that case, we have two different interpetations that yield the exact same outcomes

Only for "harmless cases". SR allows lots of strange stuff, especially if combined with gravity. Closed timelike curves for example.

But if time is absolute and only slowed down for objects moving against this background, then closed timelike curves couldn't exit. Also the trick with Kruskal–Szekeres coordinates wouldn't work anymore because switching time and space would by unphysical. This way we wouldn't have to care about the singularity (at least in Schwarzschild BHs) anymore, because space would cease to exists behind the horizon of a BH and there would be no Singularity.

> You can do all that today, by specifying a reference frame that you want to consider

But that wouldn't work with measurement of entangled object, because there would be no way to define an absolute frame in which the change of the wave-function into an eigenstate happens, it would always depends on the frame of the observer. QM requires that the change happens simultaneously, but SR doesn't allow simultaneous events.

Of course the problem with all of this is, that in the moment I can't see a way to do experiments which decides if there is absolute time or if the SR is correct.

(Spoilers) I think that the part about the guy who's brain traveled to the Trisolarians and communicated back by telling a fairy-tale may be a story about the author himself: He's also in an authoritarian regime and unable to tell things face value, so he communicated by telling a "fairy-tale" (SF in his case) full of metaphors which needs to be decoded by the reader first to get the real meaning.

Ok, maybe I'm reading to much into it, but if it was to obvious, Liu would get intro trouble, so plausible deniability is important. But I think that the books are much more political as many think. But you need to decipher it first...

> Just because a system is randomized doesn't mean it's not predictable

That's of course true (In fact I tend to also believe in a non-deterministic universe "at the core").

But if determinism falls out in the end, it's still a hint that there may also be deterministic effects at the root. Current observation can't rule that out, it's just our model which assumes pure randomness. But there are lot's of possibilities how randomness can sneak in into QM which doesn't contradict obserservation.

And unless we solve the measurement problem in QM (by finding a unified theory from which both Schoedingers equations and Borns rule can be derived), it's still an open question. So considering it solved today is quite premature.

> ... chaotic systems ...

That's still deterministic. Sure, there may be some influence from quantum effects which then are amplified, but the dynamic of the chaotic system itself is still deterministic.

> (SR) ... predicting an identical speed of light for all observers

That's not really true. "identical speed of light for all observers" is an observation which was replicated quite often. SR is a way to explain this observation, but there before SR Lorenz already had a different model explaining it too. SR won, because Lorenz used an (at the time) unobservable "ether" and Einstein argued that its better to use Occams Razor and throw this "ether" away.

But Einstein didn't now about QFT, the Big-Bang and the microwave-background - which all contradict Einsteins assumptions: QFT uses an "ether-like" vacuum, the Big-Bang created a "T=0" for the universe and with the microwave-background also an absolute reference frame for an absolute time. This in all contradicts SR, so maybe SR is really wrong on a global level.

Which in turn would allow a non-local, realistic interpretation of quantum measurements because without SR simultaneity could be back on the table.

> Sure, but there's absolutely nothing to suggest that it will be some kind of deterministic computation underneath

The universe behaves very deterministically if we look at "clumps of matter". Why is it this way when this determinism isn't already part of the "base"? For me that's at least a "suggestion". Not a proof of course, but still a hint.

> ... because of general relativity.

General relativity doesn't fits together with QM, so either one is (or both are) "wrong" (in the sense that they only approximate reality to a certain degree).

I'm even sceptical about special relativity: It's a good model and works well in most occasions, but it may still be wrong on a fundamental level. Most of the assumptions under which Einstein proposed SR (no QM, static universe) don't hold anymore.

> The best models

Yes, models. But a model doesn't need to be "real", it just models something real to a certain extent. But models tend to break down if you look close enough, and I think this may also happen to QM at some point.

Bell's Theorem doesn't rule out determinism, it only rules out hidden variables. If the universe is non-local, Bell's theorem fits well with determinism.

> We don't live in a billiard ball universe

We do - at least as long we look at clumps of matter. The billiard ball universe breaks down if we look at the constituents of matter but somehow it re-remerges if we put enough of those constituents together. It's probably the biggest riddle in Physics why this happens. But it does.

"Thou" sounds very similar to german "du" which is the current informal form. In older german the second person plural ('Ihr', similar to "vous" french from which "you" may come) was also the formal form, but it's out of fashion for a few centuries now.

An "unpure FP" is a procedural programming language, because "unpure functions" are generally called "procedures".

But people tend to avoid the name "procedural" at all cost - which is bad because procedural programming really has it's advantages and should be clearly separated from FP which also has certain advantages.

Lisp is not a FP. It's a "List processing language" with some features based on Lambda calculus.

Real FP means referential transparency and that started with languages like Miranda and later Haskell.

What many people consider "FP" today is in fact just procedural programming with higher order procedures and lexical closure.

It's a little hyperbole but in principle it's true, especially in Germany. Of course you can like the concept of redistribution of income and wealth, but that doesn't makes it "blatantly wrong and reactionary".

Yes, it's quite complicated now (but it's getting better).

But it's not as easy as replacing it with something simpler. If you do, you will discover all the things you can't do with it. So you start to improve it, add features, etc. And after a short time, it's probably even more complex as html/css and still not as flexible and powerful.

There's violence and there is violence. While I can enjoy an action movie or an UFC match, watching images from the Holocaust still makes me sick.

While people are of course more alike to each other than, for example humans and cows, there are still a lot of differences between single persons. People tend to assume that other think as they do, but that's one of the most common sources for misunderstandings.

There are people who can torture a child to death without feeling the smallest amount of guild (maybe they even find it funny or satisfying), others who could do it with the right amount of indoctrination, others who would only do it if their life is in danger (and would feel horrible afterwards) and others who would rather die than doing it.

And it's not possible to shift a person people into all of those categories, it's mostly inborn (like sexual orientation, hair color, etc).

Sure, all those people have lots of other "basic imperatives" in common, but the small difference that some could inflict as much pain as possible to others without feeling even a little bit guilty is a difference with should have quite severe consequences for society as a whole.

So if we try to understand why there is so much violence in the world, it would be quite an oversight to not take those kind of differences into account.

If someone tries to explain stuff based on the "human psyche", it's important to understand that people aren't the same. If someone talks about "we" or "humanity" as a whole, he/she doesn't takes this into consideration - which makes the whole argument questionable.

An estimated 2-5% of all humans are so called "psychopaths", people without the ability to feel empathy for other peoples pain. Those people are at the same time overrepresented as inmates in jails as well as in holders of executive positions. It's totally possible that most violence in human history is a result of those kind of people while the remaining 95-98% are simply victims of those people.