>In Buddhism, the term anattā (Pali) or anātman (Sanskrit) refers to the doctrine of "non-self", that there is no unchanging, permanent self, soul or essence in phenomena.
The phrase "Multiverse" has become overloaded. Max Tegmark thinks that there are at least four different kinds of "Multiverse", which he organizes into levels. This article corresponds to level 2: post-inflationary bubbles. The four levels are:
1. Space beyond the cosmic horizon.
2. Post-inflationary bubbles (this article).
3. Quantum multiverse, i.e. Many Worlds interpretation.
4. Platonic multiverses. i.e. Other mathematical structures that "are" universes.
It helps to know about the idea of different kinds of multiverse, and how they are not mutually exclusive, when reading articles like this which use the term Multiverse without disambiguating it.
An obvious use case for this API is to allow native games that use Vulkan to be ported to the Web without a proprietary abstraction layer. (The abstraction layer would be in the emscripten standard library rather than the game engine.) But is this a legitimate use case that someone actually needs?
I can see two views here. Firstly, that as the open standard, Vulkan should have a privileged position and be supported from the Web side, to make the Vulkan -> Web -> Native abstraction layer standard, small and efficient. As a developer you would just implement the necessary algorithms for your application once, using Vulkan.
The alternative view is that Vulkan is just too low level and doesn't fit in the web security model. Then, the purpose of WebGPU is not to implement Vulkan in Javascript. Instead, it's another target in addition to the existing three: Apple, Microsoft, Kronos, and web. To get maximum performance, developers must write an application-specific, high level platform abstraction layer, and implement that interface for each supported platform.
It seems to me that this article is of the latter view, especially as it doesn't put Metal in a strategically weaker position than Vulkan.
If you don't need state of the art or original rendering techniques and algorithms, I think there is already a high level abstraction which is compatible with the web: OpenGL ES 2, and soon OpenGL ES 3. (WebGL & WebGL 2).
> To the best of my knowledge, mainstream quantum mechanics assumes continuous spacetime, so the argument that the primary reason it can't be reconciled with general relativity is continuity seems pretty specious to me.
Your criticism is right and that is a bad argument. The real reasons they are hard to reconcile are technical (see for example [1]), and not mentioned in the source I referred to.
The article only says that a discrete theory of spacetime "might be essential" for the reconciliation; the arguments for this are philosophical - it would be beautiful and historically completing. Read the article if you're interested in the arguments, which aren't included in my comments.
> And it's possible to come up with a model where the universe is infinite but the visible universe is finite. In fact, I believe FLRW is one such a model, and is supported with high accuracy by the latest experimental observations.
I agree with you that the universe could be infinite, but that doesn't contradict my previous comment. I explained that I was talking about local (causally connected to us) space-time, only. I admit this is a bit of a trick, but the parent comment used the term "real space" which I interpreted in such a way to favour an argument for finite space.
> So again, your argument doesn't seem that compelling to me.
I've given reasons but I think it might be helpful to restate what I am actually claiming. I admit I don't know that space and time are discrete. The source I gave is a poetic and philosophical argument that it might be. I think it's established fact that energy and matter are, and that time is finite in the past, so the visible universe is finite. I think it's possible that the future is finite too.
There was a post here two weeks ago discussing this exact problem. [1] It starts by explaining Democritus' reasoning that matter must be made of discrete atoms. The main point of the article is that a similar logic applies to the future theory of quantum gravity; space and time too must be discrete.
From the article:
> Importing the atomic philosophy of Democritus into modern physics might be essential for reconciling general relativity (which assumes a continuous reality) with quantum mechanics (which very much does not).
As far as infinite vs finite space: because there is a fixed rate of information propagation, we only need to show that time is finite in extent, and it follows that space is also finite. We know that the visible universe is finite (by looking in the sky) and we can explain why: the big bang happened at a finite time in the past.
We don't know if the universe will have a finite future, but it might be the case. One possible cause of a finite future could be accelerating expansion of the universe due to dark energy. [2]
Of course there are other interpretations of "real space", but this one (causally connected) seems parsimonious to me.
The phrase "both in-person and around the globe" is ambiguous. It could mean either that there were more witnesses in person, and more witnesses around the globe, or it could mean that the total number of witnesses, anywhere, was the largest ever. This is the (terrible) beauty of it: a supporter can believe the former, while the administration needs only to defend the latter.
The phrase "alternative facts" too is ambiguous and, in the way it was used by Conway is classical doublethink. Doublethink involves two actions: a public lie and wilful self-delusion. One interpretation (without context) of the phrase "alternative facts" is that the facts are merely unknown and up for debate. But one merely needs to look at a photo of the inauguration to see that the facts are that Obama had higher attendance in 2009. [1] To claim otherwise is a lie.
Another is that the _true_ facts are known, but Conway is explicitly stating: these are the facts which I am telling you to believe. This is the wilful self-delusion.
From 1984:
And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed – if all records told the same tale – then the lie passed into history and became truth. "Who controls the past," ran the Party slogan, "controls the future: who controls the present controls the past." And yet the past, though of its nature alterable, never had been altered. Whatever was true now was true from everlasting to everlasting. It was quite simple. All that was needed was an unending series of victories over your own memory. "Reality control," they called it: in Newspeak, "doublethink."
The Golden Rule is flawed, as the Wikipedia article explains in the criticism section. Your comment bought to mind this quote from Deutsch:
"The Golden Rule (treat others as you would wish to be treated) has the same fatal flaw as future-is-like-the-past inductivism: it justifies anything and nothing, depending on what attributes of the other person you choose to imagine yourself having. And so, like induction, it only seems to yield some specific moral conclusion if you had already reached that conclusion by other means." - David Deutsch.
Here, "other means" is just the scientific method (conjecture, criticism) generalised to morality. So I'd say that the scientific method, (and a good epistemology in general), is a more valuable concept than the Golden Rule.
To declare that something is inexplicable is equivalent to saying it's supernatural.
Naturalism is the philosophy that everything is ultimately governed by physical laws and is therefore explicable.