Editing Philosophical Research:MDem/5.1r/1112 least-action

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[cr. 2025-04-12T07:22:23Z]

mathematicians remark on the unreasonable effectiveness of principle of least action   [*q2]
strange, isn't it, how there seems to be an Occam's razor for physics equations you can use to find the right equation

quantum physicists then found something much stranger: a superposition of all the possible things that could happen appears to collapse according to the principle of least action.   [*q1]
not every single event that ever happens will happen "perfectly" of course, through the most efficient route,
but at the same time, what events are unlikely at a large scale comes from what events are unlikely at the small scale,
and the distribution of all possible futures for a given system leads up to what the future of any defined system is most likely to be
I think this is because of the definition of physics. that in a certain sense it couldn't be any other way. physics is defined by its limitations, like an object having to send a boson to influence another object, or there only being so many particles in an object to engage in processes, so the limitations of all the parts of the system constrain how it is possible for it to move and what at any given moment its possible futures are   [*s]


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[cr. 2025-04-12T07:56:48Z]

there's not just a relativity answer to the Trunks paradox   [*t]
there's also a principle of least action answer.
if everything was going toward every possible path in spacetime with no particular preference and at the small scale the only thing that could stop events from being probable was that they were harder — that is, higher action —
then there doesn't need to actually be a many-worlds model in reality for there to be the effects of a many-worlds model

if there's a many-worlds universe, then there will be ten timelines going at once and Goku can be on timeline A and Trunks can be on timeline B, and he can step over to timeline A and fix it. in a certain sense Trunks is generated by having more worlds and being able to search more worlds; if Trunks exists in one possible world he exists in all possible worlds.   [*g]
if there is _not_ a many-worlds universe, first of all you shouldn't expect Trunks to appear, because every single event that happens every second is not spawning new histories and potentially producing Trunks. there is not an inherent mechanism for there to be an alternate future which is not the same future 

second of all, the same effect of improbable and possibly lifesaving events still happens. it just happens out of the total array of things that physically exist, such as all the particles in the world, or all the world's countries.
the way we should be looking at Marxism is not that _Third-World countries_ produced workers' states purely because they were Third-World countries, but also because _there were more countries to try_, _containing more people_, and even if being a Third World country increases the likelihood, it also increases if there physically exist more Third World countries.
if _Dragon Ball_ were not using the many-worlds interpretation you'd expect that somebody like Trunks would show up from another country, because in actuality, the histories of countries function almost _like_ parallel timelines. this is the consequence of general relativity on history: the history of every object is separate unless it is not.

this is how the notion of timelines interacts with the real-world principle of least action:
Schrödinger's cat does exist, every day. the thing physicists didn't anticipate when this thought experiment was proposed is that it doesn't exist today, it exists _tomorrow_. if a regular, ordinary cat is old enough there can very easily be an uncertainty on whether tomorrow will be the day it dies, or yet another day it lives. Schrödinger's cat seems exotic in the present, but is just a totally regular day in the future. the moment the future stops being the future and becomes the present is the moment the mathematical superposition of future trajectories of large objects collapses.
if we take every country to be a kind of spacetime, and every neighborhood to be a kind of spacetime, superpositions emerge from all the objects interacting and going into the future
but as time goes on, the interactions do actually happen, collapsing the superposition into a particular future
at the same time, particular futures happen according to a certain set of rules. if we take any particular slice of spacetime, there is a kind of minimum action which determines which proposed mechanisms for reality to operate are materially possible and which ones are too unlikely to actually happen
of course, not every single unlikely event is literally impossible. some unlikely events slowly become more likely over the entire range of samples taken as a whole as there are more and more chances for that event to possibly happen. this will not necessarily hold true _temporally_, as every card drawn out of a shuffled deck of cards of the same size still has the same probability one second that it does the next second. however, it can be claimed to hold true _spatially_, as when there are 100 equally-sized decks of cards and someone draws a card from each one at about the same time, the total probability of all of the decks together drawing a particular card is greater.

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[cr. 2025-04-13T07:09:53Z]

zooming way out, if we want an improbable thing to happen, such as a decent theorist or organizer showing up, the mechanism of that event happening has to do with the collapse of superpositional futures over large areas of space.
Marxists want to believe that the events that lead up to functioning workers' movements are probable events, but the first strike to happen in a great wave of strikes is actually going to be very improbable, as is finding a useful figure like Marx or Lenin.
in some ways, success is about catching all these "initiating" improbable events and connecting them across space before they subside

Trotsky's fallacy in proposing international permanent revolution is actually rather subtle
if success is about catching falling sparks, why wouldn't it be possible to catch improbable events across multiple countries at the right time and be more successful?
this has to do with the number of "falling spark" events that actually occur. Trotsky is assuming there will be a bunch of falling-spark events per country in every country, while in reality, something about the principle of least action is greatly reducing the number of falling-spark events to the point 1 country out of 100 will barely experience one. there are simply not enough falling-spark events to sustain Trotskyism.   [*ti]

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[cr. 2025-04-12T21:26:41Z]

I swear you could start making historical-materialist analogies by fanfictioning a game of _Magic: the Gathering_.
that's almost literally the analogy here. we're talking about the chances of drawing a particular person out of a deck of people in order to get some historical conflict between groups of people to go right, even if _Magic_ tends to portray something like national armies and does not tend to portray one of those groups of people as being the proletariat

incidentally, this _is_ kind of the idea of IronShard, that it's a card game or card-based RPG based around the notion of getting the best historical events to happen being improbable but once they happen getting them to spatially line up being easier


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[cr. 2025-04-12T07:22:50Z, ed. 2025-04-13T07:15:24Z]

I feel like something either very funny or frankly groundbreaking will happen when I do the thing I always do of taking everything and throwing Trotskyism into it
what happens when you throw a genuine attempt to create a hypothetical Trotskyism into the principle of least action?
we've already covered world Trotskyism, so next up would be the case of molecular Trotskyism in one country at a time


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[cr. 2025-04-12T08:30:41Z, ed. 2025-04-12T21:47:08Z]

when you think about movements
the interior of a movement, molecularized and understood according to principles of human physics, has a particular principle of least action as far as what the _least impossible way_ to achieve any particular goal is
but at the same time, the universe exterior to the movement also has a particular principle of least action for what are the least impossible ways or the easiest ways for _it_ to operate
it's like for any particular molecularized movement you need to overcome this double set of improbabilities, where first of all you need your movement not to collapse under its own internal physics and to successfully know the characteristics of its own realized civilization, and second of all you need to survive the impending physics of everything external to the movement, immediately-material or societal.

if you are determined to join all the people in the world into one civilization, then if that is possible there are only certain ways in which it is possible. at the same time, there is a conflict between the most possible internal physics for world Trotskyism and all the most likely forms of physics for biological and human life on earth. if the window of impossibility for life on earth overshadows the full window of possibility for world Trotskyism then it is likely impossible. to speak of it being possible is, in general, to speak of a counterfactual reality.   [*Lu]

in the case of socialism in one country the discussion has often been clouded by First-World countries marking out the wrong definitions of movement-internal and movement-external without realizing they are doing this. a First-World country will try to assert the impossibility of Bolshevism but does not understand that because it is predicating this impossibility on the relative ease of globalization it is actually asserting the impossibility of _China or Russia_. inasmuch as it exists, the broad subpopulation of workers and proletarian allies is inherently intertwined with populations themselves, so to tear apart whatever that majority subpopulation is doing from outside the population is also to tear apart the population.
to correctly evaluate the physics of whether "Communism will never work", we have to focus on the country itself as a localized system and oppose the subpopulation of working class allies to the subpopulation of bourgeois allies. if this is done, we begin to realize that this is almost the only sensible way for a country to form.
at any given moment people are being pulled out of towns or being pulled all the way into other countries to go wherever the capitalists are. the assumption of primitive Existentialism is that the falling-spark events required to build a civilization have to be thrown together by individuals spontaneously running over to them.
however, this is a potentially disastrous assumption. there is always a chance any particular falling-spark event will not become correctly caught by all the individuals who are supposed to catch it. there is always a chance separate falling-spark events will not line up, and all of them will be wasted. there is always a chance the constant stream of new falling-spark events required to replace the old ones will dry up. a capitalist civilization is like one giant flash in the pan.
on the other hand, if a population is structured based on common things rather than rare things, this particular kind of instability does not exist. if every falling-spark event around a capitalist or Careerist is replaced with a group of workers who simply want to live somewhere and stay there, suddenly the constellation of falling sparks looks more like a constellation of stacks of matchboxes. the road to building a civilization starts to look simple and obvious: make use of falling sparks in the early days, then replace each "brilliant genius" with a Machine of workers who can reliably produce the same things (an industrial _ektirion_). if there prove to be problems with a corporate structure, you call on a bank of what would have been Careerists to redesign the basic product idea and rebuild the ektirion.  [*m]  do this, and people should be able to have a reliable income and build communities around the people they want to live with. the means of production truly consists of the socially-linked graph of workers able to produce some product while connected to various locations that buy that product; what capitalists truly own and conflate themselves with is not buildings and exclusive tools, but the ability to arrange people into social graphs.

for some reason the United States has an absolute fascination with not actually forming ektirions. capitalists effectively abandon the towns they once lived in and constantly let businesses fail and replace each other all because they are obsessed with "not being absorbed into the big guy". there is an underlying kind of Existentialism that rules both the behavior of capitalists and Careerists. they insist on not working for "the big guy". they abandon individual practices to become Careerists all because "the big guy" was particularly nice instead of mean. they abandon the proletariat to become Artisan types because "the big guy" was mean. they boast about being "the little guy" and never becoming "the big guy", unaware that only "the big guy" actually has any chance of paying for social-democratic programs or insurance plans, and that effectively they are slowly generating a population of reactionaries who will never ever want to use their tiny amount of productivity to pay for healthcare or retirement funds. you have to generate "the big guy" if you want to end homelessness by uniting people with incomes. but nobody wants to. despite all the rhetoric from capitalists that business owners can be nice and we shouldn't hate them, nobody actually believes it will ever be safe to generate "the big guy".

the class struggle going on in the United States is really weird. despite seeming easy to understand once you spell it out like this, it doesn't neatly reduce down to "the bourgeoisie versus the petty bourgeoisie" or capitalists versus Artisan types. it's as if the struggle is not a matter of actual owning individuals belonging to an owning class, and instead it's outright about whole business structures themselves struggling against each other. big business _structures_ don't want to form. nobody wants to form them. small business _structures_ keep trying to form because everyone who is currently in any class would rather form them. it might be argued that the owners of the biggest businesses don't want to form small business structures, but in reality, some of the biggest businesses actually consist of services to showcase small businesses. Amazon prides itself on supposedly offering access to small businesses, as does eBay. YouTube thrives on unleashing a bunch of small businesses to fight each other for viewers' attention, many of which are so small they don't even get paid. microblog platforms quickly fill up with people promoting small businesses. the biggest businesses believe that the falling sparks lie in catching all the small businesses and blatantly perpetuating the spatial slot hierarchy where some will keep existing and some will disappear because they presume that is exactly what people want.
given a very large thing which fails once, and a thing which is intentionally composed of a million separate failures, which may or may not be encouraging the whole world to section itself into billions more tiny failures, which thing has failed more? if every single individual who has "given up on their dreams" or had a failing business was considered an instance of capitalism failing through an underlying process of primitive Existentialism failing, the score would not look good.



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[*m] these are Machines in the schizoanalyst sense of any specific series of parts. one could also analogize each of these Machines to a living cell with a winning genome, although this metaphor would get awkward when one realizes this renders economic planning a form of intelligent design of all these forms of "biological life".
it's quite the contradiction that the United States has even one creationist when there are practically no creationists who would not defend the economic equivalent of Darwinism.

=> youtube.com/watch?v=Q10_srZ-pbs  *q1. The Closest We've Come to a Theory of Everything ;
=> youtube.com/watch?v=qJZ1Ez28C-A  *q2. Something Strange Happens When You Trust Quantum Mechanics ;
;
=> 1743656980  *s. v5.2 revision scraps/ defining Shenlong by limitations           ; 1111 AE shenlong
=> 1734899681  *t. v5.2 revision scraps/ Starlight Glimmer paradox, Trunks paradox  ; 1111 N starlight-paradox
=> 1730427600  *g. v5.2 revision scraps/ The Saiyan Revolution / quantum goku       ; 1612 I undertale
=> 1703637804  *ti. v4.3/ All Trotskyisms / probability of multiple countries       ; 4441 All-Trotskyisms
=> 1690622090  *Lu. v5.2/ The last unicorn and the first dragon                     ; 1018 Last-Unicorn
;
:: cr. 2025-04-12T07:22:23Z
;      1744442543
:: t.  v5-1_1111_least-action
:: t.  v5-1_1112_least-action
;      v5.1r/ principle of least action defines physics & the future
; very important to post this one
; this might go after epistemic possibility?
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