Welcome David!
The meaning of "energy" is much more narrow in physics than in general usage of the word. The meaning in physics became clear only with Newton. Therefore, we can at best expect analogies between what is meant by energy in ancient Epicurean texts and what it means now. I remember that energy used in Lucretius appears to be closer to how it is used today in Esotericism than in physics.
Welcome Remus!
It looks fine except that a background image is visible at the sides on the PC screen and the content is narrowed correspondingly. This gives the weird appearance as if the window was reduced in size and the background image was the wallpaper on my PC.
Feeling empathy with robots (Spoiler alert for the movies "I Robot" and "Automata"!)
When I watched the movie "I Robot" many years ago, I found it normal that I felt empathy for the "good" robot because his actions, what he said, his display of emotions and wit were like those of "good" humans. Rationally, it made sense to be on his side, too, because he helped the human hero to save humanity from an overbearing AI.
Recently, I watched the movie "Automata" (with subtitles and without sound because I was on an airplane). This time, it surprised me that I developed empathy for the advanced robots planning to set up their own realm although what they did and what they said was not that "good" and although I only read what they said but did not hear how they said it. Rationally, it did not make sense to be on their side because they would built more and more of their own kind and a hyper-advanced society well ahead of humanity, which might turn into a threat. In despite, it felt like a happy end when two of them survived the attempts of some "bad" humans to kill them and escaped into an area where humans could not go.
AI with the most advanced capabilities hinted at in "Automata" is not visible in reality for even the distant future. Nevertheless, the movie is a good illustration of what is currently in the discussion about AI.
Welcome Josh!
I am one of those Krauts mentioned by Cassius. You can ask me in German to clarify what appears to be difficult in English.
This could be very useful. However, the results which I have seen in other videos' subtitles created by software which converts speech into text contain a lot of wrong words so far.
Julian Jaynes' "breakdown" of the bicameral mind seems to have been refuted, partly because his evidence from ancient texts is cherry-picked and evidence to the contrary in ancient texts is ignored by him. There are probably more reasons why it is nonsense, but I am not interested to dig deeper into it to find out.
So would modern science include 1, 2, and 4 from Bryan's list in post 15?
1 and 2 yes with some caveats, 4 only for illustration.
Donating an infinitely large number of typewriters to an infinitely large number monkeys for an infinite time will NEVER produce the complete works of Shakespeare.
It would infinite times because the number of letters on a typewriter is finite and the number of letters in Shakespeare's works is finite!
The formation of life on Earth had similar odds.
"The US has many nuclear power plants, and overall is supplied mostly from large fossil fuel plants or large dams, like the Hoover dam. Each of those can black-start...
Nuclear power stations cannot black-start.
Morever, nuclear power is a dead end and unreliable under unusual conditions. E.g. in the summer of 2022, more than half of the French nuclear power plants were temporarily off the grid, and France had to buy considerable amounts of electricity from Germany, which was provided predominantly by gas power stations.
From my reading of the past, I got the impression that the North American power grid is more vulnerable than the European. California should have particular difficulties to restart when a long black-out happens.
Welcome Golbach!
Physics (modern physics) does seem to say we live in a deterministic universe due to physical laws.
Some physicists interpret the known physics such that the universe is deterministic, others (including me) interpret it such that it has fundamental indeterminacy, not just difficulty for prediction.
... that in the future some far-advanced hyper-super-quantum computing machine is able to plot the current state of all matter in the universe at every given microsecond... then, yes, theoretically, all future states are "predictable" due to the laws of physics; ...
Such a computer is not conceivable because it would be like a 1:1 scale map of everything, that means the universe would be used to calculate itself, which makes it pointless. A fundamental indeterminacy at the present can only be resolved by waiting for the future to see which way the system has moved.
Welcome Julia!
Welcome Charalampos!
Welcome CLSB!
Welcome Chryso!
Welcome Shamalamadingdong!
* With two Jewish grandparents, you could have ended up in a death camp. With one Jewish great grandfather, you should have been safe but usually could not join a Nazi organization and not become an officer in the military and possibly not be a civil servant either. One of my grand uncles had to prove that there was no Jew in his family tree up to 5 generations back to become an officer in the army.
