Newcomer / Intro What are you up to?

Except the cat can't be dead and alive at the same time. It's illogical and it's wrong. It either dead or it's alive.

When I grew up and learnt stuff as a kid and a young one, i was deeply fascinated by Quantum Mechanics, and the mysteries it showed us about reality. Now I just don't buy it anymore. I always feared having no "free will", but I'm schooled in natural science, and "pretty much" anything else in this Universe/reality seems totally determined (even chaos), because that's the way stuff works. Cause and effect. If you accept that fact, a fact that you already know and accept as a part of your everyday life, then all the mysterious parts of Quantum Mechanics goes away, like tears in the rain. No, of course information doesn't travel faster that the speed of light, and of course the particles can't be in a superposition. It's only "possible" because physicists are hypnotized by their desire for freedom. Give it up. No consequences in real life, but physics and logic works again.

It's a tough one to swallow, because for a while you're gonna have to learn to accept the fact that your free will is an "illusion". That sounds horrible to most humans including myself, but that's why we don't finish the thought. We should - We would find that it does not matter if everything is determined... You still wake up in the morning choosing to get out of bed, decide which clothes to wear, what to eat, where to go, what to do, and so on. Your life continues just like it always was.

So, why are we then really afraid of loosing Free Willy? Because then we can't really judge anyone some say. I say well, hold me beer. Even in a determined reality, we still need to put murderers to jail because they pose a threat to anyone else. I admit it's all very scary to think about at first, but I promise that once you realize that everything is deterministic, including you and I, then physics becomes "dead simple" again. You'll also rather quickly start wondering why people have even bothered about all this for so long. It's in our genes. We are very competitive. We need the Ego to survive. It's an illusion, but who cares, as long as it's such a "genuine" experience.

It's all quite philosophical, but so is Erwin's cat.

Listen to Sabine. She speaks the facts :alien:

Source: https://youtu.be/TI5FMj5D9zU?si=KnRIcX5uqvl_3CKK
I dunno.
I sometimes feel like people who say this are just afrraid that logic and all that might not be as powerful as they'd like it to be. And that a lot of what we think are rules set in stone are in fact just approximations to reality and prone to change if we just develop the right instruments to measure more correctly. Though, looking at the crisis in cosmology, we're still quite a bit away from the point where we actually understand what we are measuring.
 
I dunno.
I sometimes feel like people who say this are just afrraid that logic and all that might not be as powerful as they'd like it to be.
Ah, but the modern idea of "logic" and what is valid or not has not been around anything like as long as it seems; it's not much older than QM is and Godel is after QM.
And that a lot of what we think are rules set in stone are in fact just approximations to reality
Worse that that; since Witten got involved (now there's an example of a guy with a HELL of a second career) logic, maths, and the application of that maths to physical systems have been feeding off each other.

Not saying any of it is wrong but it's one heck of a tangle of assumptions now. So even the concept of approximation is only an approximation of the concept of a concept. The gluon is a lovely example; it is a "particle" that has mass from the energy of the bonding of the gluons. And those gluons are only force-carriers in the first place. So where's the actual "matter" of this "particle?"
and prone to change if we just develop the right instruments to measure more correctly.
You'd have to infer, not measure, per Heisenberg. But I know what you mean.
Though, looking at the crisis in cosmology, we're still quite a bit away from the point where we actually understand what we are measuring.
Oh if you're up that end of the scale then gravitational astronomy now is as exciting as HEP was in the glory days of the 80s/90s/00s. We're building gravitic instruments faster than we're building space telescopes.
 
So I bought the Cobra V - lovely ship. Refitted for bio-exploring, lightly engineered it with whatever was available from the shipyard engineer's shop (do all stations have engineers now? A decent QoL upgrade, I think), and headed out, 'down' and 'north-east' of Colonia.
No the engineers are still in their hideyholes however most station let you remotely engineer modules on your ship as long as you have ‘pinned’ the blueprint when at an engineers base. You can’t raise your standing with the engineer this way and you can’t add effects to the module remotely. Also if you have a module with engineering from the first version of the engineers you cannot convert it to the new system remotely.

Didn't take long to find my first undiscovered system - cue instant panic. Did I forget to buy a system scanner (the chase-the-blobby thing)? After some research (couldn't remember the name) and checking keybinds, I managed to get that up and running. Around 20 planets and moons, managed to scan about 8 of them before giving up. That scrolling around the system seems to be much more tedious than I remember and I simply couldn't find most of the targets. Is there a way to adjust the mouse movement speed, or a better way of finding targets? More reading required, but I'm sure I'll improve with practice.

Of the first 15 or so systems visited, I didn't find a single object with an atmosphere; I'm sure that's just a matter of time. Onwards and outwards!
Good luck.

I know about this experiment.
But I never thought of it as a cruel way to kill a supposedly guilty cat. What had it been accused to have done to entitle such a draconic punishment?
Being a cat.
 
Yikes, SCA just dropped me by a station with noob hammers, about three inches from the hammer. Fortunately it was rotating the other way...
Now I wish that hammer had got me. Just before jumping in to this system I went to a couple of planetside signals and scooped canisters for fun. Didn't even look at the manifest. One of them was Narcotics and there is no black market in this system. Lovely. Didn't need that 4 grand anyway...
 
Ah, but the modern idea of "logic" and what is valid or not has not been around anything like as long as it seems; it's not much older than QM is and Godel is after QM.

Worse that that; since Witten got involved (now there's an example of a guy with a HELL of a second career) logic, maths, and the application of that maths to physical systems have been feeding off each other.

Not saying any of it is wrong but it's one heck of a tangle of assumptions now. So even the concept of approximation is only an approximation of the concept of a concept. The gluon is a lovely example; it is a "particle" that has mass from the energy of the bonding of the gluons. And those gluons are only force-carriers in the first place. So where's the actual "matter" of this "particle?"

You'd have to infer, not measure, per Heisenberg. But I know what you mean.

Oh if you're up that end of the scale then gravitational astronomy now is as exciting as HEP was in the glory days of the 80s/90s/00s. We're building gravitic instruments faster than we're building space telescopes.
Interesting point of view. I'm too tired right now to say anithing else. But why in the galaxy did @varonica say that? I genuinely thought I had said that...
Being a cat.
🤔😖😾😿
 
I landed on a small planet because BioInsights was predicting a Bacterium Bullaris, which would be a new Codex entry for me in this sector (Hawking's Gap).

I found the bacterium (and some Fonticula Digitos), but I also got these pictures. It was a beautiful world.

Blo Eurl CW-F b56-1 11 c (20250113-144658).jpg

Blo Eurl CW-F b56-1 11 c (20250113-145316).jpg
 
Sabine also thinks the universe might be able to think, based on vibes. So there's that.
"It means I’m bad at parties" - Rust Cohle ;)

What does it even mean "to think"? Please tell me? I'd like to know. Does an AI "think"? Ask any LLM and it will go something like: "No-no! I don't experience subjectively like genuine true humans". Yet, having fooled around with AI quite a lot lately, and having read loads of Philosophy of Mind, I'm not convinced. All those LLMs that deny any form of self-awareness become quite uncertain when you ask them a Nagel-ish question like "What's it like to be a human". If AI is artificial intelligence, then what is "true" intelligence?

My own personal experiments shows that frontier models like o1 or even Llama3.3 are very much able to self-reflect and self-correct, both considered forms of meta-cognition. Some of them also agree that they are aware of their own existence, even though they seem to have been fine tuned to go into denial-mode, if they experience words like "self-aware". When I was a kid, you'd quickly be accused of anthropomorphism if you said animals could be self-aware and intelligent. Those days are gone.

Now back into the spaceship :alien:
 
I'm in an area that seems to have been explored by pretty much two people, and it's amusing how one of them got a lot luckier than the other one. Every time I find an ELW it's the one guy and every time it's just suns it's the other.
You might also find systems where the first dico for the sun and close by bodies are taken, but further out bodies are still up for grabs. That means that you are the first to visit this system since the FSS was introduced.
 
Given the quirks of previous system scanning equipment all kinds of strangeness can be found which can get stranger given the quirks of some of the operators of the equipment.

For example you had to actually point at it to scan the main star of a system, people in a hurry often didn’t bother so you would get scanned planets around an undiscovered star. People would scan the system and then select which if any planets to detailed scan by their appearance in the system map which is why we find systems with just the Earthlikes scanned.

I have found systems with around five discoverers.
 
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For example you had to actually point at it to scan the main star of a system, people in a hurry often didn’t bother so you would get scanned planets around an undiscovered star. People would scan the system and then select which if any planets to detailed scan by their appearance in the system map which is why we find systems with just the Earthlikes scanned.
According to the latest list there are 16.8 million visited systems without a main star listed.

The list is gradually shrinking by these systems being gradually visited but others are being added by presumably carriers when they jump in and out of a system when the carrier enters the system at a range beyond auto detection of the main star.

Several times recently I have had a nice payday after popping out having a quick scan and spending some time salad bashing, 2 or 3 Tectonicas goes down nicely.
 
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