Sometimes I’m stressed and wish I was a complete vegetable. Other than that, I pretty much always want to know things. Especially scary things like you’re talking about, because reality always collects sooner or later.

PC. I’m just using the web front end, which is decent. It looks like nobody really has an alternative, which is okay, but I do wish I could switch to backup instances more gracefully when there’s downtime.

Ah, sorry it came off that way. They were good suggestions, but I do question if any of it would matter in this context.

If OP were to work NSA dick picks into a related casual conversation, that may very well make some progress. And maybe someone would ask for alternatives, which could go somewhere closer to what they were originally talking about.

Maybe you could vapour-smooth it.

Yeah, nobody says that about me IRL, that’s a bit of a (hurtful) leap from what has been a very short interaction. People find me likeable too, if odd, and I get along pretty well with everyone. Part of that is that I’ve learned to listen, rather than lecture.

I’m pointing out several downer facts, because OP is being a puppy dog, and it reminds me of shit did when I was younger that I cringe at now. I would have wanted someone to warn me, too.

That’s so not my experience. People kind of like a fun fact, and people who actually like learning extensively exist, but most have very different priorities from that. One of the most common ones is ego, which OP might be threatening, and another one is identity, which might be a problem too depending on what OP’s neighbors are like.

Fear can work, but it takes a knack for it.

Whoops, thought you were OP.

I think a lot of proponents of objective collapse would pick a bone with that, haha, although it’s really just semantics. They are proposing extra dynamics that we don’t understand and can’t yet measure.

Relational quantum mechanics interprets particles as taking on discrete states at random whenever they interact with another particle, but only in relation to what they interact with and not in relation to anything else

What’s the definition of interact here? Does it have an arbitrary cutoff like in objective collapse? You can make a non-separable state as big as you want.

This is also the first I’ve heard anything about time-symmetric interpretations. That sounds pretty fascinating. Does it not have experimenter “free will”, or do they sidestep the no-go theorems some other way?

So saying we stick with objective collapse or multiple worlds, what I mean is, could you define a non-Lipschitz continuous potential well (for example) that leads to multiple solutions to a wave equation given the same boundary?

I’ve warned OP now, but this is the kind of thing that will make them seem like they’re condescending as hell. Most people don’t care about computers, and might sit through a basic security lesson if work forces them to. You’re now implying they’re stupid and you’re so great they should spend time just listening to you, and then the thing you’re selling isn’t even something they want or even respect.

Alright, hopefully I’m wrong and it’s great. Are you at least older?

I’m going to caution you to be subtle about this. Appointing yourself teacher is never a great look.

Shit, I missed one method.

I mean, action and reaction aren’t rigorously defined concepts. When a nucleus spontaneously decays, you could just as well say that’s an action with no reaction by that measure, but it happens all over the place. Vacuum polarisation from an electromagnetic field is even closer.

Lock yourself in a cage with only water. Carefully reintroduce food once you’re out as to not get refeeding syndrome.

Get a tapeworm, and suffer the other negative effects of it.

Ozempic.

Gastric surgery.

The only candidate for that ever being observed is the collapse of quantum wavefunctions, and there’s interpretations where that’s not really random either. Everything else we’ve ever measured is definitely totally deterministic.

Wow, I’d never heard of that.

I wonder if there’s a quantum mechanical equivalent you could make. This has the loophole that we don’t live in a purely Newtonian universe.

And even with the loop or eternal universe, you can ask where it came from. Like why is it there, and not nothing?

What do you mean about the black holes?

It’s also worth noting, I think, that the universe might be spatially infinite, which makes “box” a funny way of saying it.

Ah yes, the old Scunthorp problem.

Wow, I’ve never experienced that one.