A quasi-Moorean argument for time travel

[Drawmack]

Sure it would.

Think about it for a minute.
If we turn the light on and off at 15 second intervals, and we see the nueral pattern indicating the decision to raise the arm at those same intervals then we can reasonably conclude the subject has made the decision before the light came on.

There will be a 5 second interval when there should be no such pattern shown.

A ‘ready state’ that you describe would show, but could be defeated with random patterns in the light.

No it wouldn’t, the person would know the light was going out at some point. So the brain could make the decision to raise the left hand, when a hand needs to be raised. If these pre-processing impulses only last for 10 seconds then they would need to be renewed every ten seconds. This could line up with 10 seconds before the person raises their hand, but it doesn’t have to.

Furthermore, if the light is being turned on and off at 15 second intervals then the person would begin to predict the pattern. As a matter of fact even so called random patterns are actually only pseudo-random and do have a pattern. The trick to making them seem random is to make the pattern so complex and so long to a repetition that the brain can’t figure it out or it doesn’t repeat for the course of the experiment. This is why number generators are called pseudo-random and not random.

It would not show precognition. You ask me to think about it, how about you read about it?

 

[vz71]

No it wouldn’t, the person would know the light was going out at some point. So the brain could make the decision to raise the left hand, when a hand needs to be raised. If these pre-processing impulses only last for 10 seconds then they would need to be renewed every ten seconds. This could line up with 10 seconds before the person raises their hand, but it doesn’t have to.

Furthermore, if the light is being turned on and off at 15 second intervals then the person would begin to predict the pattern. As a matter of fact even so called random patterns are actually only pseudo-random and do have a pattern. The trick to making them seem random is to make the pattern so complex and so long to a repetition that the brain can’t figure it out or it doesn’t repeat for the course of the experiment. This is why number generators are called pseudo-random and not random.

It would not show precognition. You ask me to think about it, how about you read about it?

If in fact there is a command, followed by another, followed by another, until the light comes on there will be a pattern of constant ‘wait state’ commands shown.
After all, the claim is that they can detect the command.
Since they can, then they would see the constant string of commands.

But that is not what is indicated in what has been written.
Instead they show a single command correlating to the arm rising…not some string of commands.

I know well the capabilities of a computer to generate random (or if you would like, psuedo-random) numbers. And if there is some mathmatical savant as the subject, they may be able to discern the pattern. But most human beings cannot.

I am simply suggesting that we tie this to an external command to raise the arm.

 

[fosio]

The issue of rngs is irrelevant. One can if that is a concern, make the randomness be influenced by something truly random such as radioactive decay. Even ordinary rngs may poll the internal physical fluctuations of the computer. One could always simply pregenerate a random string by laboriously rolling a die or mapping values based on radioactive decay or observations of electron spin.

If people really could discern cyrptographically secure random strings, then all commerce on the internet would ground to a halt.

 

[fosio]

No it’s not, you’d have to test for the existence of tachyons and see if they showed up in conjunction with the decision being made. We cannot test inside someone’s head for tachyons so your hypothesis cannot be tested.

This is bad reasoning. We cannot test directly for black holes but we can test indirectly for them. The same goes for tachyons in the head. If need be the hypothesis can be generalized to be about some backward time traveling particle or other (perhaps positrons, perhaps tachyons, perhaps both, or perhaps some other)