u/objectnull

I'm listening to the Ross Douthat interview and am not sure I'm going to continue because he just presented an argument that Alex should have known was scientifically incorrect and pushed back on. Instead, Alex just agreed with him.

Ross is talking about different ways people can come to religious belief, here's the transcript:

>ROSS: So that's one movement you could make another movement is through um the you know highly provisional but also highly suggestive things that we observe in the you know the weird zones of modern science, right? In quantum physics in particular, right? In the apparent evidence that is highly contested and debatable but sort of there nonetheless, right? that there is some kind of interaction between consciousness and matter where the observer the sort of perception measurement and sort of conscious awareness seems to collapse contingencies into actualities.

>ALEX: Yeah.

>ROSS: Right. Which is certainly not something that scientists in 1847 or 1877 would have confidently expected and very smart scientists have been trying to wrestle their way out of that interpretation.

>ALEX: Yeah.

>ROSS: But that's there. It's it's interesting, and again it is the kind of thing you would expect if mind were sort of important primary and meaningful. Um and it connects you again to religion and religious arguments in various ways.

This interpretation of the double slit experiment is completely wrong. It has aways been wrong. Waveform collapse has only ever been tied to consciousness by people who misunderstood what the scientist who studied this phenomenon were saying. It's mind-blowing to me that Ross doesn't know this since he's literally using it as an argument for how observing nature can lead us to God. And apparently Alex is unaware of this as well!

For anyone interested, here's how the "conscious observer" idea got started and then rejected by the very person who first considered it.

• 1801: Thomas Young conducts the first double slit experiment. He concludes that light is a continuous classical wave. It passes through both slits simultaneously. It physically interferes with itself. No collapse or measurement problem exists.
• 1927: Physicists like Niels Bohr introduced the concept of wavefunction collapse. They stated that the quantum wavefunction collapses due to the physical act of measurement by a macroscopic apparatus.
• 1932: Mathematician John von Neumann showed mathematically that the entire physical measurement apparatus also obeys quantum laws. This created a chain of interactions that technically doesn't collapse until it interacts with the external environment.
• 1960s: Physicists like Eugene Wigner speculated that a conscious mind is what ultimately breaks this chain and forces a collapse. Wigner later rejected this idea.

The overwhelming consensus among physicists is that physical interaction, causes the wave pattern to disappear. No mind is required. In fact, this has always been the scientific consensus.

It saddens me that so many people, even well read ones, are confused about this. I blame whoever first coined the term "observer" in this context, since it seems to have confused a great number of people for many decades now. But people like Ross and Alex should know better, especially if they're going to espouse these ideas and use them as the foundation for arguments.

I've primarily been a shortform editor for most of my career but now I'm working on longer programs that are historical, so we have LOTS of assets, and it feels closer to making a doc.

The problem I'm running into is, most assets don't fit neatly into one category, there's often a Venn diagram of subjects they fall into. So, how do I figure out what folder/subject to put the footage into if it could go into 3 different ones?

One thing I was considering is keeping the folders vague and large but tagging the footage in Premiere with all the subjects that pertain to them. Does anyone work this way? Are there downsides or things to consider if I do this? I haven't done this yet since I typically like the keep the folder structure in Premiere and Explorer the same for simplicity's sake. Let me know what you think.

There's a lot of people that think Trisolarians are extremely small in size. The main argument I've seen for this has to do with their ability to be dehydrated and rehydrated back to life. This makes sense. As far as we know, only small creatures can do this, like brine shrimp, tardigrades, or nematodes. The problem I foresee with Trisolarians being this small though is the size of their brains.

For example, here are the approximate neuron counts for different species on earth:

Organism	Approx. Neuron Count	Primary Intelligence Type
Human	86,000,000,000	Abstract reasoning / Conscious awareness
Ant	250,000	Complex social behavior / Swarm logic
Brine Shrimp	~5,000 – 10,000	Advanced Navigation / Motor Coordination
Tardigrade	1,000	Sensory-motor "hard-wired" subroutines

The limit of intelligence for an individual organism is a limit of information density. Physics essentially requires organisms be over a certain size in order to achieve a certain level of intelligence, and for our discussion, we talking about a space faring species that can unfold a proton in 10 dimensions. I don't think organisms at the size of Tardigrades could ever be as intelligent as the Trisolarians are.

One thing we do know about the Trisolarians is that they can essentially see the thoughts of other Trisolarans. However, this isn't magic, so there are limits to how this works. This isn't telepathy, and it isn't society wide, meaning a Trisolarian can only know the thoughts of other Trisolarians they are in the vicinity of (or have sight of).

Side note: I forget exactly how this is described in the book. I think I remember it requiring line of sight and that it transmits very fast and very far so, I always thought of it as pulses of light. Kind of like morse code with light.

While this is a very fast way of communicating I still don't think something at the size of a Tardigrade could achieve the level intelligence the Trisolarians have. I assume they would need to be, at least, the size of ant. However, ants far outnumber humans on earth but even the largest colonies collective intelligence amounts to nothing more than larger anthills. So, I would further assume that some Trisolarians would need to be bigger, and more intelligent, than others in order to organize the workers into collective action that amounts to building things they can't individually conceive of, like thinking machines and spaceships.

I haven't read the Redemption of Time so maybe some of these ideas are discussed there? I don't plan on reading it so feel free to post spoilers if they address any of my speculations about the limits of intelligence based off information density in that book.