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[GreatWyrmGold]

That's actually not a question of "why". Being able to support life is implied by our universe being ours.

A teacher walks in on four kids making a huge mess of her classroom. She asks the kids to explain themselves. The first kid begins rambling incoherently. He seems to be saying the mess is real but he isn't, although it's hard to be sure. The second kid starts a monologue about the role of consciousness in observation, but the teacher cuts him off mid-sentence. Meanwhile, the third kid has closed its eyes, cupped its ears, and starting chanting "I can't hear you." Desperate, the teacher turns to the last kid. "I can't explain anything," he admits, "but I did come up with a mathematical model to describe it all".

This is paraphrased from a story told to me by a physics professor espousing the virtues of the "shut up and calculate!" approach. My own takeaway was that there's no interpretation of quantum mechanics that explains the relationship with classical mechanics. The only real difference is how they avoid actually explaining it.

With a sufficient number of universes, the anthropic principal makes sense. With one universe with unvarying laws? Nope.

And Mr. Frog, I thought the question was answered before we started discussing our favorite quantum mechanical theories.

[Mr Frog]

@Wyrm:

Yup, that was a huge fail on my part. My bad I vaguely considered just nuking the post, but I just struck it out and left a note so people could see the fruits of my piss-poor reading comprehension and laugh.

[TruePikachu]

Now the goal is to get two artifacts to have images of each other. Maybe easiest with a pair of planepackeds.

I also assume that, as a result of the delay in content generation, you need to read the description before it gets added to the history (if unrevealed)?

Do images on artifacts interact with the likes/dislikes of dwarves? Like if Urist McMayor detests flies and the artifact is a statue of a dwarf, will Urist like the statue until you read the description which makes it be covered with images of flies?

Does the same mechanic for artifact descriptions also apply to general statues and possibly engravings?

These are the _current_ questions. Note that you buried them under cat corpse [12].

[muzzz]

With a sufficient number of universes, the anthropic principal makes sense. With one universe with unvarying laws? Nope.

It's not about making sense, it's about logic. Any physical theory that attempts to explain our universe must imply our existence. Our universe, through our observations, dictates physics. Not the other way around.

Once you go beyond that boundary, you've veered off into philosophy.

Now the goal is to get two artifacts to have images of each other. Maybe easiest with a pair of planepackeds.

I also assume that, as a result of the delay in content generation, you need to read the description before it gets added to the history (if unrevealed)?

Do images on artifacts interact with the likes/dislikes of dwarves? Like if Urist McMayor detests flies and the artifact is a statue of a dwarf, will Urist like the statue until you read the description which makes it be covered with images of flies?

Does the same mechanic for artifact descriptions also apply to general statues and possibly engravings?

These are the _current_ questions. Note that you buried them under cat corpse [12].

I did a little testing on a handful of regular statues. As far as I can tell, a their description is fixed before you view it. If there's any delayed generation at all, I'm guessing it happens when you first view the "statue of" string.

[GreatWyrmGold]

With a sufficient number of universes, the anthropic principal makes sense. With one universe with unvarying laws? Nope.

It's not about making sense, it's about logic. Any physical theory that attempts to explain our universe must imply our existence. Our universe, through our observations, dictates physics. Not the other way around.

Once you go beyond that boundary, you've veered off into philosophy.

I prefer a theory in which our existence is all but inevitable over one in which it is all but impossible. Does that count as philosophy? If so, I'm a philosopher. I think that it doesn't make a difference, because both the many-worlds theory and the Copenhagen interpretation are pretty much impossible to prove or disprove at the moment, AFAIK, what with their inherent invisibility.

Now the goal is to get two artifacts to have images of each other. Maybe easiest with a pair of planepackeds.

I also assume that, as a result of the delay in content generation, you need to read the description before it gets added to the history (if unrevealed)?

Do images on artifacts interact with the likes/dislikes of dwarves? Like if Urist McMayor detests flies and the artifact is a statue of a dwarf, will Urist like the statue until you read the description which makes it be covered with images of flies?

Does the same mechanic for artifact descriptions also apply to general statues and possibly engravings?

These are the _current_ questions. Note that you buried them under cat corpse [12].

I did a little testing on a handful of regular statues. As far as I can tell, a their description is fixed before you view it. If there's any delayed generation at all, I'm guessing it happens when you first view the "statue of" string.

I am somewhat certain that the decorations on artifacts are generated when you first look at them. Maybe that's true with other images, too.

[muzzz]

I tried a handful of engravings. But again, the descriptions turned out the same each time.

With a sufficient number of universes, the anthropic principal makes sense. With one universe with unvarying laws? Nope.

It's not about making sense, it's about logic. Any physical theory that attempts to explain our universe must imply our existence. Our universe, through our observations, dictates physics. Not the other way around.

Once you go beyond that boundary, you've veered off into philosophy.

I prefer a theory in which our existence is all but inevitable over one in which it is all but impossible. Does that count as philosophy? If so, I'm a philosopher. I think that it doesn't make a difference, because both the many-worlds theory and the Copenhagen interpretation are pretty much impossible to prove or disprove at the moment, AFAIK, what with their inherent invisibility.

Yeah, that's philosophy. Physics isn't really about preferences . But as for mine, I've always like the idea of a single but cyclical universe. Takes care of the statistics, and it avoids the heat death of the universe as well. Which is, literally, the saddest thing ever.

[GreatWyrmGold]

With a sufficient number of universes, the anthropic principal makes sense. With one universe with unvarying laws? Nope.

It's not about making sense, it's about logic. Any physical theory that attempts to explain our universe must imply our existence. Our universe, through our observations, dictates physics. Not the other way around.

Once you go beyond that boundary, you've veered off into philosophy.

I prefer a theory in which our existence is all but inevitable over one in which it is all but impossible. Does that count as philosophy? If so, I'm a philosopher. I think that it doesn't make a difference, because both the many-worlds theory and the Copenhagen interpretation are pretty much impossible to prove or disprove at the moment, AFAIK, what with their inherent invisibility.

Yeah, that's philosophy. Physics isn't really about preferences . But as for mine, I've always like the idea of a single but cyclical universe. Takes care of the statistics, and it avoids the heat death of the universe as well. Which is, literally, the saddest thing ever.

Where physics can't really prove themselves and laymen can't quite understand any evidence for or against each theory, I'll go with the one that doesn't seem to be trying to hide itself.

[muzzz]

I'm still not sure why you keep insisting that many-universes doesn't "try to hide itself" as much as single-universe theories. As far as I can tell, you brought it up in response to a statement about quantum decoherence. But decoherence is a model based on the assumption that the wavefunction is real. And that assumption is more common in many-universes theories than in single-universe theories.