Relativistic Implications for Physical Copies of Conscious States

The possibility of algorithmic consciousness depends on the assumption that conscious states can be copied or repeated by sufficiently duplicating their underlying physical states, leading to a variety of paradoxes, including the problems of duplication, teleportation, simulation, self-location, the Boltzmann brain, and Wigner's Friend. In an effort to further elucidate the physical nature of consciousness, I challenge these assumptions by analyzing the implications of special relativity on evolutions of identical copies of a mental state, particularly the divergence of these evolutions due to quantum fluctuations. By assuming the supervenience of a conscious state on some sufficient underlying physical state, I show that the existence of two or more instances, whether spacelike or timelike, of the same conscious state leads to a logical contradiction, ultimately refuting the assumption that a conscious state can be physically reset to an earlier state or duplicated by any physical means. Several explanatory hypotheses and implications are addressed, particularly the relationships between consciousness, locality, physical irreversibility, and quantum no-cloning.Comment: 11 pages, 2 figures. Replacement to fix minor formatting issue

Interpreting Quantum Mechanics and Predictability in Terms of Facts About the Universe

A potentially new interpretation of quantum mechanics posits the state of the universe as a consistent set of facts that are instantiated in the correlations among entangled objects. A fact (or event) occurs exactly when the number or density of future possibilities decreases, and a quantum superposition exists if and only if the facts of the universe are consistent with the superposition. The interpretation sheds light on both in-principle and real-world predictability of the universe

A Different Sort of Park: Interpreting POW Experiences at Andersonville National Historic Site

Unlike many other historic sites, Andersonville does not fit neatly into any one box. It is not a battlefield, although we still interpret the experience of soldiers and the ideas they fought for. It is not a historic home or building; the only original parts of the site left are earthworks. Andersonville is a Civil War site but tells a story common to every war. Andersonville National Cemetery contains the remains of American soldiers from every American war except for 1812. Unlike any other National Cemetery entrusted to the National Park Service (except for Andrew Johnson National Historic Site) Andersonville is an active cemetery. Andersonville does not have just one story to tell but rather many different narratives throughout different time periods. It quickly becomes difficult to cover this wide range of topics in a relatively short public program

Relativistic Implications for Physical Copies of Conscious States

The possibility of algorithmic consciousness depends on the assumption that conscious states can be copied or repeated by sufficiently duplicating their underlying physical states, leading to a variety of paradoxes, including the problems of duplication, teleportation, simulation, self-location, the Boltzmann brain, and Wigner’s Friend. In an effort to further elucidate the physical nature of consciousness, I challenge these assumptions by analyzing the implications of special relativity on evolutions of identical copies of a mental state, particularly the divergence of these evolutions due to quantum fluctuations. By assuming the supervenience of a conscious state on some sufficient underlying physical state, I show that the existence of two or more instances, whether spacelike or timelike, of the same conscious state leads to a logical contradiction, ultimately refuting the assumption that a conscious state can be physically reset to an earlier state or duplicated by any physical means. Several explanatory hypotheses and implications are addressed, particularly the relationships between consciousness, locality, physical irreversibility, and quantum no-cloning

Quantum Mechanics May Need Consciousness

The assertion by Yu and Nikolic that the delayed choice quantum eraser experiment of Kim et al. empirically falsifies the consciousness-causes-collapse hypothesis of quantum mechanics is based on the unfounded and false assumption that the failure of a quantum wave function to collapse implies the appearance of a visible interference pattern

Don’t be stupid : The role of social media policies in journalistic boundary-setting

This document is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis Group in Journalism Studies on 9 May 2018, available online via: https://doi.org/10.1080/1461670X.2018.1467782 Under embargo until 9 November 2019.Social media are now firmly embedded in professional newsrooms, and policies and guidance within these newsrooms have evolved to include social media activities. These policies articulate and expose the underlying assumptions of the role of these new media within the traditional boundaries of the newsroom. Through thematic analysis of the policies of 17 news organizations, this research identifies and explicates the ways in which professional news organizations have moved and reinforced the boundaries of newswork to both include social media, and to bring social media under its control—to the extent of requiring newsworkers to subsume their personal online identities under their professional ones. The research identifies a number of areas of further research, including analysis of compliance with these policies and resistance to them on the part of newsworkers.Peer reviewedFinal Accepted Versio

The Labour Market Mobility of Polish Migrants: A Comparative Study of Three Regions in South Wales, UK

Since Polish migrants began entering the UK labour market in the post-accession period, there has been a significant amount of case study research focusing on the impact of this large migrant group on the UK economy. However, ten years after enlargement, there is still insufficient information regarding the labour market mobility of Polish migrants residing in the UK for the longer term. The available research on this topic is largely concentrated in urban settings such as London or Birmingham, and does not necessarily capture the same patterns of labour market mobility as in non-urban settings. Using qualitative data collected in three case study locations – urban, semi-urban and rural – in the South Wales region from 2008–2012, this article has two main aims. First, given the proximity of the case study locations, the article highlights the diversity of the Polish migrant characteristics through the samples used. Second, using trajectories created from the data, this article compares the variations among the labour market movements of the Polish migrants in each sample to determine what characteristics influence labour market ascent. Through this comparative trajectory analysis, the findings from this article point to the relative English language competency of migrants as the primary catalyst for progression in the Welsh labour market across all three case study regions. The secondary catalyst, which is intertwined with the first, is the composition of the migrants’ social networks, which enable, or in some cases disable, labour market progression. These findings have significant implications in the national and in the supranational policy sphere regarding the employment of migrants as well as their potential for cultural integration in the future

The impact of an innovative human resource function on firm performance: the moderating role of financing strategy

The current study examined the impact of the human resource function and financing strategy on the financial performance of 104 UK manufacturing firms. Hypotheses are drawn from a resource-based perspective on human resource management and a financial theory perspective on capital structure. Results show that an innovative HR function is significantly related to economic performance. However, the relationship between an innovative HR function and economic performance was moderated by the firm¿s financing strategy. Firms obtained higher returns from an innovative HR function when pursuing a low leveraging (debt) financing strategy, a finding consistent with modern finance theory notions that firmspecific strategic assets provide greatest value when financed primarily through equity as opposed to debt

Synthetism and analytism in the Celtic languages:applying some newer typological indicators based on rank-frequency statistics

This study applies some newer quantitative typological indicators to elucidate relationships and evolution within the Celtic language family. These indicators are distinctive from earlier typological indicators in that they require no morphosyntactic analysis but rely purely on rank-frequency or type-token statistics. Descriptively, the work extends the typological analysis of Tristram (2009) on Celtic, which excluded three of the languages (Manx, Cornish, and Scottish Gaelic)