tsimionescu

Survivor is the opposite of how real human societies work - especially the tribal ones that thes show is aping. Real tribal societies are stable forever, and they are almost entirely related people (especially if we're talking about smaller tribes). You're reputation for helpfulness is crucial in any such society, so the kind of backroom dealing and betrayals the show is known for are almost entirely out of the question: if you are found out as a schemer, you don't get to go home to your real family, you risk being ostracized for the rest of your life.

But you can pick those other values as basis vectors, and they are just as good a choice as alive/dead. The only reason that you can say "the cat's brain doesn't experience those other states" is that you've presupposed a classical cat, that has some preferred basis. But this is just begging the question. We only get classical behavior when the wavefunction gets entangled with a classical object, but the math predicts you should also have non-classical "half-here" objects that would experience non-classical "half states" - and those are actually infinitely many.

So how did the classical world arise? Or how come we happen to be in the classical world, when there are infinitely many other non-classical observers? And note that the anthropic principle doesn't help here - all of the real laws of physics are the same for those other observers, you get the same chemistry etc, it's just the classical approximations that fail.

Specifically, decoherence provides a mathematical reason why we don't see self-interference and similar quantum phenomena on classical objects. It doesn't on its own explain why the single classical world arises from the infinitely many solution pairs to any quantum equation.

> There's no component of the wave function in which Schrodinger's cat experiences anything other than being alive or being dead.

The problem is that this is not what Schrodinger predicts, though. If |alive> and |dead> are valid solutions to the Schrodinger equation of some system, then so is any linear combination of them whose norm is one, such as 1/sqrt(2) |alive> + 1/sqrt(2) |dead>. So the math of QM predicts that there should be infinitely many cats that should feel partly alive and partly dead, many times more than the one live cat and the one dead cat. And yet you don't find this in any classical experiment.

Sure, but that has nothing to do with Kolmogorov complexity anymore, or with music enjoyment as a search for a patter - which was my original point.

Well, when we set an experiment up, we can measure in any basis we like, and get the corresponding results as probabilities per the Born rule, so I don't think there are any constraints on this. Plus, local interactions can't explain why the same classical basis arises globally - after all, when we investigate a distant star, it's never detected as being in some other basis then the local area.

Mostly a note, but the game was released 2 weeks ago. We'll see how well it sells, but it seems to be getting good reviews on Steam so far.

> Many worlds is just the Schrödinger equation without the wave function collapse.

It is not, it is the Schrödinger equation plus an extra rule that says that classical observers are only certain kinds of quantum states. There's no explanation in the MWI for why a device never reads out that a particle is 1/sqrt(2) |here> + 1/sqrt(2)|there>, even though that is exactly as probable a state as being |here>. And it turns out that this is exactly equivalent to positing wave function collapse / the Born rule.

And no, decoherence has nothing to do with this. Decoherence explains why there is no observable interference at the classical level between these states, not why you can only observe some states.

This is known as the preferred basis problem, for anyone who wants to read more about it.

While this might explain certain aspects of music, it doesn't explain the strong emotional reaction that music produces, even without lyrics. Kolmogorov complexity can't explain why Ode to Joy evokes so different feelings from Requiem, and why these feelings generally persist if you play the same notes with the same timings on very different instruments.

I imagine they might mean more like either early video game music (the kind produced by the same synthesizer the BIOS uses to emit beeps) and the style that mimics that, or extreme minimalism experiments in various musical disciplines.

There are some fundamental differences between liquids like water and gases like the air, they're not a continuum - moving from a liquid state to a gaseous state is a phase change, and comes with a huge, and measurable, energy cost (getting 1 kg of liquid water from 0C to 100C takes as much energy as converting that water entirely into water gas at 100C). Note that evaporation is different - it's just tiny bits of liquid water flying away.

Also, any atmosphere can carry any sound wave for at least some distance. It takes more or less energy to do so, and if the medium attenuates rapidly, you have to start with higher frequencies so that the right frequency reaches your audience, but that's it. You need different instruments to play in different atmospheres, sure, but not different music. And electrical instruments actually work exactly the same regardless of the medium.

Musical notes are pretty well defined sound frequencies. The medium which carries that sound wave is irrelevant. You can even get yourself a pair of bone conduction headphones, which would work for listening to music even if you were in a vacuum - since ultimately what matters is the sound wave hitting your ear bones, thr air is just the most common way for it to happen.

Of course, the sound that non-electrical instruments make is indeed dependent on the atmosphere in which they are played, assuming the same motions etc. You could probably make a violin produce the exact same sounds that it does on Earth playing it on Mars, but you'd have to play it differently than you do here. But even this doesn't apply to electrical instruments - Jimi Hendrix would sound the same if he could somehow play on the surface of Mars.

The English name of the country of ایران is Iran, pronounced "eye-ran", there's nothing wrong about that. Just like the English name of the country which calls itself Deutchsland is Germany. And the French name of the country that calls itself England is Angleterre, and the Japanese name for China is 中国 (chuugoku).

There is nothing wrong or weird about exonyms. Sometimes they happen to be relatively close to the endonym, sometimes they are not.

Oooops... I have no idea why I was certain they're from somewhere in Germany...

Neverwinter Nights 2 was made by Obsidian, not Bioware.

And I would argue Obsidian was the better studio anyway. Besides NWN2, and moreso its fantastic expansion, Mask of the Betrayer, they also made the excellent Knights of the Old Republic 2, Fallout: New Vegas, and their own original franchises, Pillars of Eternity 1 and 2, and Tyranny.