User talk:XOR'easter

Yapperbot - Uncurrenter

Hi XOR'easter (love the name, btw!) - hope you're doing well :)

Just wanted to drop you a message about my bot, Yapperbot, and its "Uncurrenter" task of removing {{current}} templates from articles that haven't been edited in a significant amount of time, as I'd noticed you'd been undoing the bot's edits on Capital Hill Autonomous Zone.

The bot isn't doing this to say "this event is not current", just that {{current}} is no longer needed on the article. Per the documentation for {{current}}, the template may optionally be used in those extraordinary occasions that many editors (perhaps a hundred or more) edit an article on the same day, for example, in the case of natural disasters or other breaking news. It is not intended to be used to mark an article that merely has recent news articles about the topic; if it were, hundreds of thousands of articles would have this template, with no informational consequence.

I hope that's helpful - please let me know if you have any questions!

Cheers, Naypta ☺ | ✉ talk page | 19:38, 19 June 2020 (UTC)

The event that the article describes is still ongoing and actively developing, on a day-to-day (though probably not hour-to-hour) basis. Moreover, it has been the subject of media disinformation, as the article documents. It is therefore prudent to expect that initial reports of any further developments will be incomplete or biased. The "current event" tag is appropriate, even if editing happens to cool off overnight. XOR'easter (talk) 19:49, 19 June 2020 (UTC)

7quark

Hi,

I hope you are doing well in these days! I have just written the article on heptaquark. It is a stub but still interesting and important. May you please review it?

Best regards! Lamro (talk) 09:38, 23 June 2020 (UTC)

A barnstar for you!

	The Barnstar of Good Humor
	... for this and this. Sign me on! - DVdm (talk) 22:57, 26 June 2020 (UTC)

DS Alert

This is a standard message to notify contributors about an administrative ruling in effect. It does not imply that there are any issues with your contributions to date.

You have shown interest in India, Pakistan, and Afghanistan. Due to past disruption in this topic area, a more stringent set of rules called discretionary sanctions is in effect. Any administrator may impose sanctions on editors who do not strictly follow Wikipedia's policies, or the page-specific restrictions, when making edits related to the topic.

For additional information, please see the guidance on discretionary sanctions and the Arbitration Committee's decision here. If you have any questions, or any doubts regarding what edits are appropriate, you are welcome to discuss them with me or any other editor.

Aman Kumar Goel ^(Talk) 07:23, 2 July 2020 (UTC)

Help needed with List of American Academy of Arts and Sciences members

So I made a page for List of American Academy of Arts and Sciences members. The page was very long and I broke it down into years just like you did for List_of_American_Physical_Society_Fellows. I have got all the data on to Wikipedia. Now I need some help with making wikilinks. Any easy way for this? Can you help in putting the Wikilinks in the article? HRShami (talk) 06:01, 9 July 2020 (UTC)

Hmm, might be a bit tricky. I generated the other list using a Python script that put in the wikilinks to begin with, rather than adding them after. I'll see what I can do, but I'm a bit scatterbrained this week, so it might be delayed. Thanks for letting me know! XOR'easter (talk) 15:16, 9 July 2020 (UTC)

OK, done. XOR'easter (talk) 00:43, 21 July 2020 (UTC)

Key Bus Routes

Sorry, I got confused and my edit summary wasn't right. It's ref 3 that I was thinking of. Ref 1 consistently uses caps for "Key Bus Routes", but that's not what the changes were about, so not so relevant. Dicklyon (talk) 00:03, 19 July 2020 (UTC)

I would count 'Failure' …

a success, thanks to your recent edits! Have enjoyed tag-teaming this one. AleatoryPonderings (talk) 05:18, 20 July 2020 (UTC)

Glad to help! XOR'easter (talk) 05:21, 20 July 2020 (UTC)

Disambiguation link notification for July 21

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List of American Academy of Arts and Sciences members (1994 - 2005)

added links pointing to Richard Hamilton, Christian Wolff, George Papanicolaou, Chen Yi, George Mitchell, James Wright, Charles Johnson, William Kennedy, Tim O'Brien, John Browne, Michael Lynch, Jay Wright, David Ward, John Reid, Charles Wright, Peter Nicholas, David Walker, Richard White, Mervyn King, Joshua Cohen, James Carroll, James A. Johnson, Peter Evans, John Walsh, Donald Graham, Mark Morris, Nancy Hopkins, Michael Levine, Gary King, Jonathan Brown, James Webster, Michael Woodford, Peter Carey, Michael Wood, Thomas Crow, Thomas Spencer, Michael Friedman, John H. Baker, Martin Saunders, Jan de Vries, Susan Stewart, David Ferry, Richard Rose, Ann Douglas, David Collier, William Fulton, Niels Hansen, Robert Israel, Richard Kramer, Thomas Bender, John Aldrich, Frederick Cooper and David Ginsburg

List of American Academy of Arts and Sciences members (2006 - 2019)

added links pointing to Kathleen Kennedy, Robert Wilson, John Clarke, Johan van Benthem, James Wood, Mary Beard, James McBride, Tod Williams, Bill Brown, John Broome, Karen Davis, David Hare, Michael McCormick, David de Rothschild, James Leach, Robert Rosenthal, Philip Fisher, Vladimir Rokhlin, David Baker, Diana Taylor, Elizabeth Alexander, Mark Gertler, Leif Andersson, Jonathan Gruber, Joy Williams, John Guy, Richard Durbin, Mark Johnston, Gerhard Wagner, Daniel Rose, Adam Roberts, Kathleen McCartney, Jack Knight, Luigi Rizzi, John E. Jackson, Jonathan Levin, James Clifford, Stanley Fields, Eiichi Nakamura, Alan Gilbert, Rakesh Agrawal, Michael Snyder, James A. Robinson, Desmond King, Heinrich von Staden, Tom Curran, Debraj Ray, Mark Rosenzweig, Melissa Moore, David Fitzpatrick, Michael Blackwood and Michael Kearns

List of American Academy of Arts and Sciences members (1953 - 1993)

added links pointing to George Putnam, Julius Adler, Robert Campbell, Michael Cole, Jack Lewis, Samuel Preston, Neil Harris, Robert Bird, Thomas Dunne, William Browder, Sigurdur Helgason, Marc Davis, Peter Brooks and Denis Donoghue

(Opt-out instructions.) --DPL bot (talk) 06:13, 21 July 2020 (UTC)

I don't see it.

Talk:Howard B. Meek/GA1 to me reveals 2.0% on Earwig. The article became a Did You Know back on 27 August 2017. It is the same article. Do you have suggestions on what would be correct phrasing for The school grew to an alumnus of three thousand that respected Meek as a hotel professor)? Thanks. --Doug Coldwell (talk) 10:37, 22 July 2020 (UTC)

Where are you seeing 2.0%? I'm seeing 51.9%, copied from a document written in 1969. XOR'easter (talk) 15:55, 22 July 2020 (UTC)

Nope, not copied! Take a closer look at the Earwig reading and you will see all the other comparisosn are 2% or less. What's showing up in the PDF is similar information as what I have written, because the PDF is a biography. Check all the red lines and you will see they are all titles and names. That's something you can't prevent because you have to use the SAME exact name or title. Now what is more important is that the article was a Did You Know on 27 August 2017. It's the same article with the same wording of those names and titles. That important because it has been looked over by many top editors during this Did You Know process. They all realized this about the same name/title and have approved the article as having a 2% Earwig reading. If there was the slightest thing wrong with that they would have spoken up in 2017 long BEFORE it came out on Wikipedia's main page. It was viewed by a thousand people and nobody said a thing wrong about it. I have created 500 Did You Knows and 50 Good Articles, so have an idea how this goes. Would you reconsider reviewing the article to see what it takes to become a Good Article? Thanks.--Doug Coldwell (talk) 17:06, 22 July 2020 (UTC)

Yes, copied. Phrases like internationally known as the leading educator in the hospitality industry are far too long, specific and opinionated to be rote facts that don't admit much variation. You're welcome to ask someone else for a second opinion, but mine stands. XOR'easter (talk) 17:27, 22 July 2020 (UTC)

O.K. I'll ask someone else to do the Good Article review. I'll renominate it. Please don't interfere and just let another editor do it on their own with their own opinion. I'm willing to take my chances with a random editor selection (whoever is next). Thanks for your cooperation. --Doug Coldwell (talk) 18:28, 22 July 2020 (UTC).

Well, I looked back at my Talk page and saw your reply after adding some clarification tags. Hopefully they at least make clear what I think needs making more clear. Good luck. XOR'easter (talk) 18:50, 22 July 2020 (UTC)

Links to DAB pages

It would be helpful if you could check your bluelinks before posting. It has taken me three hours spread over two days to repair the best part of a hundred in List of American Academy of Arts and Sciences members (1994 - 2005). Narky Blert (talk) 16:09, 22 July 2020 (UTC)

Sorry for making more work for you — I had hoped that the number of dab links introduced wouldn't be too large, and that I could get to them in the next few days. There isn't really a way to identify which text strings point to dab pages without making them into links, that I know of, so the amount of time necessary to fix them up probably can't be reduced too far. XOR'easter (talk) 17:38, 22 July 2020 (UTC)

Believe me, there are plenty of more problems with those lists, inherited from the source material — erratic inclusion of initials, typos, duplications, etc. — and manual checking is unhappily unavoidable. I'll be taking thwacks at that for a while. Sorry again! XOR'easter (talk) 17:55, 22 July 2020 (UTC)

Disambiguation link notification for July 28

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List of American Academy of Arts and Sciences members (2006 - 2019)

added links pointing to Robert Wilson, John Clarke, Johan van Benthem, James McBride, John Broome, David Hare, Michael McCormick, Vladimir Rokhlin, John Guy, Richard Durbin, Mark Johnston, Gerhard Wagner, Daniel Rose, Adam Roberts, Kathleen McCartney, Jack Knight, Luigi Rizzi, Jonathan Levin, Stanley Fields, Alan Gilbert, Rakesh Agrawal, Michael Snyder, James A. Robinson, Desmond King, Tom Curran, Debraj Ray, Mark Rosenzweig, Melissa Moore, David Fitzpatrick and Michael Kearns

(Opt-out instructions.) --DPL bot (talk) 06:26, 28 July 2020 (UTC)

Review

Hi

I hope you are doing well in these days. May you please review the following short articles: minimon, maximon, and paraphoton? I have translated them from the Russian wiki and added many sources to support notability.

Best regards from sunny Moscow! 07:52, 28 July 2020 (UTC)

Too much talking?

I was hoping to use the latest push-back at Planck units as a clear-cut example of failing the last three of the four bulleted abilities at WP:CIR, but with the continued interaction the lack of conciseness of the example may make an admin's assessment more difficult. —Quondum 00:28, 22 August 2020 (UTC)

@Quondum: I was thinking of making a reply to the effect that in Gaussian units, capacitance is measured in centimeters, but we still don't use capacitors as rulers. Or, less flippantly, the units of action (energy × time) are the same as those of angular momentum (mass × length × velocity), but we can't just treat any arbitrary quantity of angular momentum as an action or vice versa. But I've given up hope of having a productive conversation, or even that any interesting physics will be touched upon tangentially. I get the feeling that if I say something brief, they'll say I didn't provide enough detail, whereas if I leave a lengthy comment, I'll be told that I'm deviating from the point. I will probably say nothing, unless I am prompted further in a serious way, and even then I might wait a while. (Plenty of other writing tasks are on my plate.) So, do what you feel is best. XOR'easter (talk) 01:40, 22 August 2020 (UTC)

I think your implicit logic is flawed. I see a complete imperviousness to logic, which means that any attempt at explanation is futile, and I was wondering what you were hoping to achieve by your ongoing replies. I was thinking of asking an admin to block them as not displaying the necessary competencies. I've seen this done before. —Quondum 01:55, 22 August 2020 (UTC)

Oh, I always let pointless conversations go on too long. (Well, maybe not "always", but definitely too often.) It's a character flaw on my part. I suppose it's a subset of my more general inability to manage my time very well! Sometimes I feel like I have to explain things for people who might be lurking without commenting, and sometimes I just end up writing more than I need while thinking a point through, and I post it instead of filing it away for a more productive occasion. I have to shake myself and remember that nobody lies on their deathbed wishing they'd spent more time arguing about Planck units. XOR'easter (talk) 02:09, 22 August 2020 (UTC)

Wow, they're still at it. And of all the accusations to make, a lack of willingness to engage in a discussion is perhaps the most absurd — the discussion has already gone on for pages too long! The physics of their text is also wrong; for example, saying This is the most extreme example possible of the uncertainty principle confuses the actual uncertainty principle with generalizations/modifications thereof. I'd definitely call their actions WP:OWN behavior by this point. XOR'easter (talk) 17:07, 23 August 2020 (UTC)

You must be the most laid-back person ever – a master of understatement, levels of patience that I would never expect from a human, wry humour... Let's wait to see whether my (none-too-coherent) request will be answered.

Unrelated: from your insider viewpoint, how do you think the collapse/noncollapse quantum interpretation splits amongst well-qualified physicists whose expertise includes quantum physics? I perceive the one crowd to be more vocal on WP. —Quondum 19:25, 23 August 2020 (UTC)

The other day, when my schedule started filling up, I made a deliberate choice that if I had Wikipedia time, I'd spend as much of it as possible working on starting new biography articles. That way, I can feel like I'm making constructive contributions rather than just squabbling behind the scenes. And, if I'm in a better mood overall, then maybe my contributions behind the scenes won't be too snippy — that's the hope, anyway!

On your unrelated question: my very informal sense is that the more knowledgeable the people are, the less agreement you'll find among them. Within quantum foundations, the people who are seriously into no-collapse interpretations each have their own way of (for example) deriving the Born rule, and the people who advocate a interpretation with collapse have their own particulars to disagree about. (And when "collapse" is part of the story, it's something akin to a Bayesian update of statistical information about a system, not a psychic influence on properties of the system itself.) Quantum gravity has a larger proportion of no-collapse advocates than quantum information or the quantum foundations community, but also more people willing to say that quantum mechanics must itself be modified in some way. Bohmian mechanics is more popular among philosophers than among physicists. All very informal impressions, of course! XOR'easter (talk) 20:25, 23 August 2020 (UTC)

I would suggest confining your time where it is most rewarding (and valuable) – a lot of the negative stuff can be left to proceed in the wrong way for a while.

I was hoping to hear otherwise about quantum experts – that the more rational group had greater consensus about an interpretation. But it fits with my belief in human irrationality. I guess I have my own views (firmly with Everett), but I'm neither trained nor, in all likelihood, any more rational than the next guy. Ah, well, I'm digressing. —Quondum 21:22, 23 August 2020 (UTC)

Observer QM

@XOR'easter: Hey there. I'm seeking to improve the observer QM page by representing both sides of the debate about observers. There is a sizable minority of physicists who hold the view that observers must be conscious. I'd like to work with you to put this into the appropriate language and synthesize the original article with the additions I've made. Looking forward to working with you! — Preceding unsigned comment added by Dienekles (talk • contribs)

Hi. It sounds like what you are trying to do is to write an essay that presents an original synthesis, which is not what Wikipedia is for. In addition, you are blending together proposals that are actually very different; for example, Donald's "many minds" interpretation is explicitly Everettian, which is diametrically opposed to Fuchs' QBism. Likewise, one should not unquestioningly propagate the idea that there is a single, unified, well-defined "Copenhagen interpretation" [1][2][3]. Cheers, XOR'easter (talk) 15:45, 23 August 2020 (UTC)

@XOR'easter: You are correct on the essay. I wanted to get all the material down in one place and then work with the community to slim it down to the key points. I'd say I'm guilty of undue weight also, but this is not a synthesized position. This a legitimate minority viewpoint held by the academic community. To represent it as merely "a number of new-age religious or philosophical views" is highly preferential. This material should be presented as it is: a minority position which also has formalisms and experimental data supporting it. Perhaps in the "criticism" section, it could be noted that the legitimate work done by physicists regarding the models of "consciousness causes collapse" has been co-opted by "new-age religious and philosophical" thinkers to include many conclusions not drawn by physicists themselves. However, the whole issue should not be dismissed out of hand a just being the viewpoint of a bunch of crackpots. That's entirely inaccurate.

@XOR'easter: So, can we work together to change the language and include the legitimate academic material on this topic? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Dienekles (talk • contribs)

I'd agree that the article as it currently stands is not in outstanding shape, but your proposed changes are, it seems to me, starting from a flawed premise. You are combining ideas that are not the same in order to advance a position. That's synthesis. For example, QBism is very very different from "consciousness causes collapse" as attributed to von Neumann and Wigner. Likewise, Rovelli's relational quantum mechanics does not have a distinguished role for conscious observers; in Rovelli's view, any physical system can be an "observer" of any other. (To quote Bas van Fraassen's review of it, "Observer" does not have connotations of humanity or consciousness here—each system provides its own frame of reference relative to which states and values can be assigned.) Nor are experimental demonstrations of (possibly counterintuitive) quantum phenomena evidence of a role for human consciousness specifically.

In the future, please sign your comments by typing four tildes (~~~~), which automatically inserts your user name and the timestamp of your contribution. Cheers, XOR'easter (talk) 19:35, 23 August 2020 (UTC)

(Pinging Jasper Deng, who also reverted your changes and who might have comments.) XOR'easter (talk) 19:53, 23 August 2020 (UTC)

@XOR'easter: This is good feedback. We still have the P.A.U. by JA Wheeler, QBism, and Many Minds. There are also several opinion pieces and excerpts from books by mainline physicists which were inclined to the consciousness causes collapse model.

On QBism, the update in knowledge only occurs on the part of a subjective observer. "Quantum Bayesianism (QBism) [...] treats the wave function as a description of a single observer’s subjective knowledge." https://www.quantamagazine.org/quantum-bayesianism-explained-by-its-founder-20150604/

Dr. Matthew Donald has a Ph.D. in Mathematics, or more specifically, a Ph.D. in the mathematical models in quantum field theory. He is currently residing at Cambridge University as a professor. His Many Minds hypotheses is similar: "Observations are relative to individual observers. ‘Worlds’ are distinguished at the level of the minds of individual observers. Alice has her observations and Bob has his. Avoiding solipsism requires that we assign consciousness (or reality) to everyone we could meet who is sufficiently similar to ourselves. So Alice should assign reality to each of Bob's possible futures, and, by symmetry, to each of her own.” http://people.bss.phy.cam.ac.uk/~mjd1014/

Also, we have this article arguing for a mind-only universe written by Dr. Henry Stapp (a theoretical physicist at the University of California's Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, with a PhD in the mathematical and logical foundations of quantum mechanics) and Dr Menas C. Kafatos (a highly distinguished Ph.D. in Physics from the MIT): “One of the keys to our argument for a mental world is the contention that only conscious observers can perform measurements.” We can cite blogs, as long as it is clear that it is the opinion of that authors: https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/coming-to-grips-with-the-implications-of-quantum-mechanics

So, this isn't just an opinion held by "new-age religious believers". Dr. Andrei Dmitriyevich Linde is a Russian-American with a PhD in theoretical physics. He is the Harald Trap Friis Professor of Physics at Stanford University. Linde is one of the main authors of the inflationary universe theory, as well as the theory of eternal inflation and inflationary multiverse. In one of his books he adds: “The universe and the observer exist as a pair. I cannot imagine a consistent theory of the universe that ignores consciousness.” Biocentrism Pg. 178

Dr. Robert Dicke, an American astronomer and physicist with a PhD in nuclear physics - an Albert Einstein Professor in Science at Princeton University for 10+ years - who made important contributions to the fields of astrophysics, atomic physics, cosmology and gravity had this to say:“If you want an observer around, and if you want life, you need heavy elements. To make heavy elements out of hydrogen, you need thermonuclear combustion. To have thermonuclear combustion, you need a time of cooking in a star of several billion years. In order to stretch out several billion years in its time dimension, the universe, according to general relativity, must be several years across in its space dimensions. So why is the universe as big as it is? Because we are here!” https://futurism.com/john-wheelers-participatory-universe

So, I'm not making this up nor synthesizing this. This is a legitimate opinion held within the community. On evidence for the above. We also have Delayed Choice experiments, which would be supportive of P.A.U via Wheeler, from both 2007 & 2017. That's not a synthesis. They directly say it is confirmatory of Wheeler's ideas:

1. https://science.sciencemag.org/content/315/5814/966

2. www.cosmosmagazine.com/physics/light-bounced-off-satellites-confirms-quantum-weirdness/

On the Wigner's Friend paradox, there is now an experimental rebuttal that this is actually a paradox. This was significantly debunked in 2020: “Now Tischler and her colleagues have carried out a version of the Wigner’s friend test. By combining the classic thought experiment with another quantum head-scratcher called entanglement—a phenomenon that links particles across vast distances—they have also derived a new theorem, which they claim puts the strongest constraints yet on the fundamental nature of reality. Their study, which appeared in Nature Physics on August 17, has implications for the role that consciousness might play in quantum physics—and even whether quantum theory must be replaced.” https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/this-twist-on-schroedingers-cat-paradox-has-major-implications-for-quantum-theory/

So, the claim that there is no experimental evidence is now out of date as well. That's not a synthesis either. I'm not claiming all these people are saying the exact same thing in terms of their overall theoretical constructions - which would be a synthetic position - but they are saying that consciousness causes collapse. Dienekles (talk) 18:15, 25 August 2020 (UTC)

A laboratory implementation of a delayed-choice experiment is not the same thing as confirming Wheeler's most speculative speculations about its implications. The (drastically overhyped) implementation of a Wigner's-friend variation used photons to stand in for the friends and says nothing directly about consciousness. To quote the Scientific American story you cited, “We don’t want to overclaim what we have done,” [Tischler] says. The key for future experiments will be scaling up the size of the “friend,” adds team member Howard Wiseman, a physicist at Griffith University. [...] “I don’t think I will live to see an experiment like this,” Wiseman says. Matthew Donald says that "many minds" interpretations are "no collapse" interpretations [4]. His website declares up front, Many-minds interpretations of quantum theory are many-worlds interpretations in which it is argued that the distinction between worlds should be made at the level of the structure of the individual observer. And many-worlds interpretations are by their very nature interpretations where "collapse" is only apparent, not actual. Dicke's statement is about the apparent fine-tuning of physical constants, a whole kettle of fish unto itself, and drawing any connection between that and wavefunction collapse is synthesis (Futurism is a random website, not a peer-reviewed academic publication, so its mentioning them together is not meaningful). If you dig up the original source of the Linde quotation, it's from a 2002 article in Discover magazine that says Wheeler believed consciousness was not necessary:

Wheeler likes to use the example of a high-energy particle released by a radioactive element like radium in Earth's crust. The particle, as with the photons in the two-slit experiment, exists in many possible states at once, traveling in every possible direction, not quite real and solid until it interacts with something, say a piece of mica in Earth's crust. When that happens, one of those many different probable outcomes becomes real. In this case the mica, not a conscious being, is the object that transforms what might happen into what does happen. The trail of disrupted atoms left in the mica by the high-energy particle becomes part of the real world. [emphasis added]

As for QBism, luckily, I have at hand my copy of Chris Fuchs' Coming of Age with Quantum Information. He writes,

To think that it would first require a theory of consciousness before we could do quantum cosmology (or any physics at all) in the Bayesian style is just a bunch of malarkey. That's no more true than saying we would need a theory of consciousness before we could open a gambling house in the state of New Mexico.

And, elsewhere,

You're right, I never do refer to "consciousness." [...] I don't even really have an interest in what it means. So I would hope that I'm not trying to build a picture of the world based on it—I don't think I am.

Fuchs also writes that he is willing to take "measurement" as a primitive of quantum theory but downplays the specialness of humankind, saying that artificially intelligent Dell laptop computers would be among the entities that could use wavefunctions. Granted, most of the material in Coming of Age dates back to a time before the development of QBism proper, but nothing since that point has made QBism sound any more like the "consciousness causes collapse" notion attributed to Wigner. As I mentioned in the section above, there's a drastic difference between something akin to a Bayesian update of statistical information about a system, and a psychic influence on properties of the system itself.

Cheers, XOR'easter (talk) 19:55, 25 August 2020 (UTC)

First, you didn't address all my points. You addressed a very small number of my points. The main point - again - is that this is a valid, minority opinion within the scientific community and not simply the purview of "new age religious people". Second, on the 2020 experiment, "Not wanting to overstate..." is one thing, but they also unequivocally state "has clear implications for the role of consciousness" and may required "rewriting" QM. So, once again, it seems like your bias against the idea is the thing dictating the conclusion here and not the statements of the authors themselves.

On Fuchs, the point is that he doesn't exclude the possibility of consciousness causes collapse from QBism based on his formalism. He specifically says that he doesn't need to "define consciousness" to continue on with his theory - not that consciousness doesn't cause collapse. The 2015 interview I posted above is more recent than his book. He explicitly doesn't exclude this possibility, but rather just carries on with the math. Further, even on a "no collapse" view of Many Minds, minds are given the role of the only true observers of physical phenomena, but "worlds" are distinguished at the level of Minds where Minds are the "fundamental" property and not physical things. So, once again, I'm not trying to say that these are all saying the same thing but they are mainstream views within the community.

Finally, when you take the other PhD's above - making unequivocal statements about it - you can see there is support in the community for these ideas. So, on this basis, I want to change the language in the article and included quotes from both sides, without giving undue weight to the ideas nor dismissing them as fringe "new age" nonsense. Dienekles (talk) 20:38, 25 August 2020 (UTC)

You wrote, There are also several opinion pieces and excerpts from books by mainline physicists which were inclined to the consciousness causes collapse model. QBism is not "the consciousness causes collapse model". Donald's "many minds" interpretation is not "the consciousness causes collapse model". The Linde quotation is a bit of disconnected vagueness extracted from a longer passage about what he believes a future theory should eventually address — too vague to be called support of a particular "model" at all. The quotation from Dicke isn't actually a quotation from Dicke. It's a quotation from John Wheeler, misattributed by a sensationalist website, and as noted above, Wheeler himself did not demand a role for consciousness per se. There's no "mainstream view" here, just scattered examples of opinionating that physics should get around to saying something about consciousness eventually. (For example, Hans von Baeyer's 2016 book on QBism brushes past the topic of "consciousness" with a brief note to the effect that a physicist who was not among the founders of QBism speculated that a future evolution of physics might have some relevance to explaining consciousness, perhaps generations down the line.) Making these opinions sound more similar than they actually are is not encyclopedic presentation, and leaning further in to primary sources and breathless pop-science media pushed online mere days ago is not the way to give anything due weight. XOR'easter (talk) 21:26, 25 August 2020 (UTC)

Oh, I see where the confusion is here. I didn't mean say that they were all "consciousness causes collapse" models. I was in a hurry to reply. The point is that these views, opinions, and models are held and articulated by mainstream physicists - both in academic journals and in scientific publications. Using such publications is not against the rules here on Wiki, as long as we cite it as the author's opinion, which is fine. The article as it stands says that these opinions, views, and models boil down to "new-age religious or philosophical views give the observer a more special role, or place constraints on who or what can be an observer. There is no credible peer-reviewed research that backs such claims." That's entirely inaccurate.

What I'm attempting to show is that there are models which do partially and fully give consciousness a special status: Wheeler's Participatory Anthropic Universe, Many Minds, and, to a degree, QBism. QBism isn't a hill I would die on. Also, there are several strains of the Copenhagen interpretation to consider. We have van Newmann to consider. The conscious observer in von Newmann certainly has a special status. The refinement of von Newmann by Dr. Menos C. Kafatos is also up there: “[Retrocausality or time-like engagement ...] implies that there is a ‘Conscious Observer’, who is able to evaluate and interpret and differentiate the structured information content from ‘random information’. And since this Conscious Observer is able to interpret in a time independent way [...] the Conscious Observer has to be outside space-time, i.e., non-local.” https://arxiv.org/abs/1608.06722

However, this doesn't all perse entail or support "consciousness causes collapse". That's entirely fair. It's also entirely beside the point. If the "We are here!" quote is Wheeler rather than Dicke, then Wheeler is clearly giving special status to conscious observations, right? Let's be fair here. Arguably, QBism is giving special status to "subjective knowledge", but if you think it's unacceptable, I'll do a further review.

Many Minds is using "minds" as the fundamental substrate of the universe rather than physical things. This is a radically "special status" for consciousness. Further, on no experimental evidence, the evidence cited above is the evidence supporting these views. That's what they claim for themselves. If critics do not agree, then cite the critics also. That's fine, but do not censor the views, opinions, and models of particular physicists because they don't agree with your personal opinion of the subject nor the academic majority.

These views, opinions, and models which give consciousness a special status do in fact exist, as a valid minority opinion, with evidentiary support. So, let's see how to language this to fairly represent, with the appropriate weight, a scholarly minority of opinions, views, and models. So, let's work together to language this into its appropriate position.Dienekles (talk) 22:59, 25 August 2020 (UTC)

I have no interest in "censoring" anything. For my own part, I have sentimental attachments to all sorts of offbeat scientific ideas; I just advocate for them in places other than Wikipedia.

As best as I can tell, the citations to Kafatos are few in number, in the most marginal of venues, and mostly by Kafatos. In the absence of secondary or tertiary sources evaluating his claims, it is not Wikipedia's place to address them. (The arXiv post to which you pointed is in conference proceedings, which in physics are the lowest tier of peer review if they are reviewed at all, so it fails the WP:RS standard. And at the risk of being crass, he's literally coauthored with Deepak Chopra in NeuroQuantology, so I wouldn't hold my breath. Self-proclaimed revolutions in our understanding of quantum physics aren't even a dime a dozen, and nobody's lining up to write review articles or textbooks that cover Chopra's fellow-travelers.) The same goes for anyone who claims that an experiment whose results agree with the predictions of textbook quantum mechanics is necessarily evidence in favor of their particular take on quantum mechanics.

If the "We are here!" quote is Wheeler rather than Dicke, then Wheeler is clearly giving special status to conscious observations, right? Since the quote is about what's necessary in order to have carbon-based life, no, I wouldn't say so. XOR'easter (talk) 00:12, 26 August 2020 (UTC)

As an outsider to this debate, I have an observation that may be relevant: The topic of the article Observer (quantum physics) is, and should be, about what is meant by "an observer" in quantum physics. This is a well-used term. It is not about interpretations or the philosophies of quantum mechanics. As such, as the article (or stub) stands its reference to specifics of the debate about how this impacts interpretations are misplaced, and would belong in articles dealing with these topics. A simile: this is akin to an article Colour devoting space to the debate about whether insurance companies increase premiums for red cars: it is completely the wrong place. I have other observations about the argument here on what is appropriate in WP article space, but these seem to be irrelevant given my observation here. —Quondum 17:17, 26 August 2020 (UTC)

Revision of template - please consider changing your !Vote

Hello!

you are involved in the templates for discussion deletion of:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Templates_for_discussion/Log/2020_September_1#Template%3AFermi_paradox

I have revised the template, please consider changing your !Vote. Thank you very much! Moscowdreams (talk) 19:01, 1 September 2020 (UTC)

Barnstar

		The Barnstar of Diligence
		You deserve something like a dozen barnstars, but let this stand for your latest and greatest editorial work. Thank you for working to keep Wikipedia less bad than it would otherwise be. jps (talk) 01:11, 2 September 2020 (UTC)

Proving proof that POH Brotherhood set up POP Brotherhood

I was a 20 year member of POH, NJ and a member of the Brotherhood. I have photographic evidence of our NJ leaders at POP meetings, and we did indeed set up "Brotherhood" organizations in other Covenant Community areas where their members could support them. Providing proof of what secretive groups do, isn't easy, but would that suffice ? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Mjdon67 (talk • contribs) 01:37, 1 October 2020 (UTC)

Wikipedia does not publish Original Research. If I understand you correctly, it sounds like you should be contacting a journalist. Cheers, XOR'easter (talk) 14:42, 1 October 2020 (UTC)

RfA

I'm a bit too new at the moment to nominate you, I think, but I wanted to note that I think you'd be an excellent admin and to suggest that you consider seeking the tools at some point. Hoping there might be some talkpage stalkers who agree with me :) AleatoryPonderings (talk) 16:30, 9 October 2020 (UTC)

Well, that's very kind of you to say! I'll give it a good thinking-over and see if anyone else chimes in. :-) XOR'easter (talk) 17:01, 9 October 2020 (UTC)

Hi I wanted to come here to thank you, not only for your recent help with An Exceptionally Simple Theory of Everything, but for all the previous times you've helped out. You have been polite, hard working, knowledgeable, and very helpful. While I am not much of a stocker, I second the comments above and would be happy to nominate you, if you'd like. I am quite confident you are a perfect candidate. Footlessmouse (talk) 21:32, 12 October 2020 (UTC)

Alert to a vote on Biden–Ukraine conspiracy theory

As you have edited the article, Biden–Ukraine conspiracy theory, I am alerting you to a vote. You can vote Here. Elijahandskip (talk) 16:19, 16 October 2020 (UTC)

Relational quantum mechanics

You removed the paragraph bringing in Mermin's "Ithaca Interpretation" (I agree that it was a good idea to remove it), but forgot to remove the corresponding references at the end of the article (in https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Relational_quantum_mechanics&diff=956554421&oldid=956425428). As a reader, this was quite confusing for me, and in the end made me browse through the history of that article to clear my confusion. Can you please also remove the now unused references (to articles by Mermin, N.D.) at the end of the article, in case you agree with me that they should be removed. --Jakito (talk) 11:35, 18 October 2020 (UTC)

Jakito, thank you for bringing this to my attention. I have removed the two references by N. David Mermin. In future such cases, you are welcome to make the desired changes yourself; the worst that can happen is that someone will disagree and undo your change, and then a conversation can happen on the associated Talk page to sort it out. XOR'easter (talk) 17:14, 18 October 2020 (UTC)

A request

FBI, DOJ agree Hunter Biden emails were not Russia disinformation https://news.yahoo.com/fbi-doj-agree-hunter-biden-225219943.html Please stop posting disinformation.208.88.4.211 (talk) 01:02, 21 October 2020 (UTC)208.88.4.211 (talk) 01:03, 21 October 2020 (UTC)