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>(which are all
>
>entirely composed
>
>of quantum particles) behave.

What are quantum particles composed of then? sorry don't know if the question makes sense

I'm not sure if it's still worth to answer your question, since you may have finished the essay, but in any case, for the discussion itself, well, AI probably will have rights.

I think there are 3 points of comparison that makes the topic clearer.

1st: the rights of animals.

There are a bunch of rules that are basically about preservation of life. Some places may go further, some may not, but still this is the point in consideration. In my country if someone poisons or runs over an animal, if it is discovered, you have to at least pay something (and in running over, you get bad points in your driving license).

2nd: the rights of the owner, also just like pets.

One thing is to own something in nature; another one is on society. Owning on society means you need to have rights to guarantee that if it is taken from your, or if there's such a risk, you have the possibility to get back or avoid the problem. So rights to avoid breaking, stealing and so on.

3rd: patents and copywrights.

Specially if you're considering only the software, not the robot itself, this is pretty much the thing. As a software, it's like any other. So there will have the rights of protecting from being hacked, copied, modified without your permission and so on. We don't have a right about modifying the DNA of your pet, because it makes no sense more than "you have to steal the cat first", and that's illegal. But you can modify the "DNA of the software" without touching it directly. So there certainly will have eventually laws for this type of protection.

I hope it helps.

Do you guys know a work that talks about Plato's dialogues as a colection of techniques of thought?

I know this may sound kind of obvious, but, for instance,

- Hippias Major is the attempt to define something from what we know, but then showing the limit, hence we have to abandon the knowledge and restart later with more knowledge.

- Phaedrus has some techniques, but as I recall one of the main ones is the idea of, from an single object (argument) realizing the group in which it is part (the technique of argumentation, sophistry) and then studying the nature of this group by subdividing it in categories. [this is, by the way, what I'm trying to do with the dialogues themselves]

and so on.

I'm still pretty new on this, so I just read some dialogues. I do read philosophy, but I hadn't have the chance to read studies about them.

So, would you guys recommend me something on that line of investigation?

The analogy of metaphysical vs epistemic certainty to the Heisenberg uncertainty principle is a woah dude moment. I'll be chewing on this for a while.

Thanks for your contributions to this thread, they were all so illuminating!

Thanks for the tip

Either the inventors choose to sell a patent, in which case it's mutually beneficial relationship where inventor essentially pays (or rather gives up portion of their cut) to have someone else manage the business side of the things. That's clearly their choice, because they see it as better than keeping the patent. It's also completely reasonable, inventor's goal is to invent, which translates to creating a patent. When they sell their patent, they get paid for their job. What's not generally their job is to manage licensing, legal side of the things, business, marketing, etc., so it's understandable that's left to someone else, who obviously gets paid for that.

The other possibility is that the invention was made under a company and patent automatically belongs to them. Again, this is just the inventor doing the inventing and getting paid for it, while the company provides necessary resources, assumes both the risk and possible reward, in turn providing stable income to the inventor.

In either case, the existence of the patent is why the inventors get paid.

They do, and a lot of great philosophers have thought about it. Descartes famously said "I think, therefore I am" and his work is dedicated on constructing a rational explanation of how reality works by abandoning even the most basic assumptions that philosophers before him took for granted. That quote basically says that the only thing we can be certain of is that since we are thinking, then we must exist, as we are doing that thinking.

Another weird philosophy branch in that area is called solipsism, which makes the unprovable (but also undisprovable) claim that everything we perceive is just our imagination, our brains playing illusions on us. Clearly the brain interprets the world by electrochemical stimulation coming from our senses. So if it were possible to send a brain in a jar the same signals your brain is currently receiving, then the brain in a jar would basically be perceiving the same "reality" you currently are, rather than its own (sitting in that jar).

If you really want to go down that hole, you should also check out the concept of Boltzmann brains.

If you end up liking it when you're done with it, I'd recommend An Introduction to the Philosophy of Time by Sam Baron and Kristie Miller. I read both, and I think they go together well.

The latter hints at a different conclusion and is more exhaustive (for better and for worse) but just The Order of Time left me feeling like there were some things left unexplained.

Introduction to the Philosophy of Time definitely explained things.

Oooh, ok. Now that you mention it, I may have seen her talk before. I'm always surprised when I see serious philosophers making hard statements about philosophy they're clearly not familiar with. Like, I felt foolish in undergrad when I realized that people meant something more like "personality" by self, and not "sentience" like I thought... I get that a lot of layperson wouldn't know that panpsychism is about sentience and not sapience, but if you're out there writing papers and giving talks about the topic... Good Lord, how can you be out there publishing about it when you don't have even the most basic grasp of what the theory says?! How do you even get away with it??? And I see that particular error a lot. Makes me feel like maybe I'm not doing so bad after all, lol.

Lol, really? You wanna redefine Utopia because its official definition is too "pedantic" for you?

I know how awful it can be when you plan a weekend trip based on the speed of light being one thing and accidentally miscalculating by a few orders of magnitude. Totally throws off the estimated gas mileage in the starship.

I just published a book developing new frameworks of meaning and value informed by our most advanced cosmology and physics.

Without being presumptuous, I'd love feedback. It's available for free in a variety of formats at https://singletruth.org

I like the idea of waves gallivanting around the universe.

Don’t be pedantic

Physicists recently confirmed that the Standard Model is broken. I see little reason not to conclude that QM is also "broken" somehow.

Yeah. "Are numbers real?" is the most intriguing question ever, and if you are satisfied with any answer for it, you don't actually understand it, as far as I'm concerned.

>I’m not arguing that physicists can’t make mistakes or harbor some misconceptions, but negligibly few will make the mistake you’re claiming.

You're building a strawman here. The nature of the issue is broader than just that one word. The metaphysical perspective that results in non-physicists over-interpreting that word does in fact infest the thinking of physicists, as well, in their interpretation if not their scientific efforts.

>Which words, exactly, are you referring to?

The ones I used, which is why I said that. I'll leave it for you to obsess over which ones exactly.

>This year’s Nobel prize has its roots in the very conversations you’re claiming these physicists — the foremost experts of the subject at the time — weren’t qualified to have.

Nah. The prize related to the "shut up and calculate" parts of the science, not their interpretations and conversations.

>This misconception is very easy to dispel simply by having a careful talk about the meaning of words, and that tells me it’s the words that are the main problem.

LOL. Yes, you misunderstand the problem. You are what I refer to as a neopostmodernist. By that I mean that you don't realize that compared to the meaning of words, quantum mechanics is downright trivial. If only something as simple as Bell's Theorem could be used to sort out language, consciousness, and existential truth.

Totally agree. That line between philosophy and mathematics/physics fascinates the fuck outta me.

>Is the related to Descartes’ work in philosophy?

That's the trillion dollar question.

Yes, your philosophy professor was trying to explain metaphysical uncertainty. My point was that it isn't actually limited to quantum mechanics. QM just makes it more obvious that it is fascinating and will send you into an existential crisis if you think about it too much. Physicists have the luxury to "shut up and calculate", but philosophers deal with the hard problems.

Outside the system, obviously. And that makes the claim trivial. Even in Newtonian mechanics you couldn't see the whole universe at once, let alone to perfect precision. But if you're outside the system looking at some accessible representation of it, then it doesn't matter whether it's quantum or classical - a god's eye view is possible. I've done simulations of (simple) quantum systems and it was totally possible for me to see all outcomes from an event that would normally cause decoherence and make coherent superposition impossible. That we can't do that for the universe is just a matter of our being in it.

>“We don’t know where something is until we measure it, but it is somewhere, waiting for us to spot it.”

>QM is not that normal.

Well, I hope you won't mind if I try to interpret what you're trying to say. Before I do that, though, I feel that I should point out that isn't a quotation from me, nor does it adequately characterize what I did say. But I understand why you presumed that you were actually paraphrasing my position, when you weren't.

Accepting the 'location' metaphor you have set up, I don't think "we don't know where something is" but it is "waiting for us to spot it". Quite the opposite; there is either a location, amd we simply look at what is there, or we only measure whatever we spotted, and then try to figure out from that what and where it is. In that way, QM is perfectly normal: it is simply physics. The fact that it provides results that are startlingly unexpected and seem to be more contrary to our intuitions doesn't make that any less true. In fact, it makes it more true, just in a surprising way because we've become so used to believing (falsely) that we understand why physical objects behave the way they do. But let's not forget that all science is, to some degree or other, contrary to our expectations. Intuition led us to believe that heavier objects fall faster than lighter ones. Intuition led us to believe that aether must exist, that the Sun orbited the Earth, and that mice arose from dirty rags. QM is more exceptional because it defies the expectations of conventional physics, not because it is unintuitive. Heck, most people don't quite understand how the speed of light could limit the propagation of gravity, so the fact that entanglement could (theoretically!) allow instantaneous information transfer is only notable because scientists previously (but only recently) insisted that instantaneous information transfer was impossible, not because it is "unintuitive".

>It’s as if Nature waits to decide where a particle is until we ask.

You just repeated the very error the article did. In spades. I understand, your intention was to point out that quantum indeterminacy is distinct and more profound than more mundane ignorance-based indeterminacy. But you've done it by invoking a problematic metaphor of agency and recycling the notion of location to resuscitate determinism; as if the particle is just 'elsewhere' until "Nature" wishes to reward us for looking for it. The "asking" is indeed what 'causes' the particle to have a discrete location. That only seems confusing if you try to imagine the particle as an object, like the moon. So DDTT.

>quantum measurement almost gives us the same results as if our measurement just tells us where the particle was all along.

Your interpretation of my description is mistaken, again. I believe what I actually said (and none of your points actually disputes, although I understand why you find my perspective to lack the requisite mystified exacerbation of quantum weirdness you're used to) is that "quantum measurement" isn't a special thing, it is just measurement. And no matter how spooky, uncanny, weird, mystifying, and confusing the mechanisms of quantum systems get, somehow or other they do result in the behavior of the material objects our intuitions are informed by. Quantum particles aren't objects, they never have been, they don't have locations, they simply have localization determined by the necessity of their local effect, regardless of whether that is a measurement by a physicist or any other quantum particle interacting with it. People are rightfully confused and bemused by "spooky action at a distance". Why is that? Because it isn't an effect that is analogous to how larger objects (which are all entirely composed of quantum particles) behave.

>But they kept coming up with the results QM predicted all along.

That has been the case since the discovery of QM. Many of the greatest advancements in quantum physics have been the result of someone trying to disprove quantum physics, and successfully failing to achieve that goal.

Please point to the part of that article that you think supports your claim. Yes, it provides a description of the physical properties of nature at the scale of atoms and subatomic particles, and those things make up macroscopic systems. You can recover all of Newtonian mechanics from quantum mechanics.

The properties of a rock are determined by the properties of the things that makes up the rock, and how they interact with each other, and all of those are quantum mechanical. Macroscopic systems can absolutely demonstrate quantum mechanical behavior. I even gave you an explicit example already. A macroscopic system would be represented in quantum mechanics by a very high dimensional density matrix, but a density matrix nonetheless, no different in principle from the density matrix representing a pair of entangled electrons.

No. A person, a rock, a chunk of dirt, etc. do not hold superpositions, do not entangle states, or any other quantum phenomenon. Quantum physics only describes the behavior of atomic and sub-atomic particles at an atomic and sub-atomic scale.

>Quantum mechanics is a fundamental theory in physics that provides a description of the physical properties of nature at the scale of atoms and subatomic particles.[2]: 1.1  It is the foundation of all quantum physics including quantum chemistry, quantum field theory, quantum technology, and quantum information science.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_mechanics

Then that doesn’t make any sense… Macroscopic phenomena are explained and underpinned by quantum mechanics. Whatever metaphysics surrounds quantum mechanics also necessarily applies to macroscopic phenomena. That it’s not usually noticeable is another matter.