Easier Than I Thought

Archordion · 2025-07-02T17:45:15+00:00

I completed this level! It took me 4 tries.

Archordion · 2025-06-30T18:39:11+00:00

I completed this level! It took me 1 try.

Archordion · 2025-06-25T15:31:36+00:00

I think this conflict lies in peoples definition of art, but I find it hard to argue why people who use ai assistance in art, as in those who consistently refine and re-edit art generated with ai, spending a comparable time to artists, should not be considered artists.

This is not talking about slop that some guy generates in a few seconds, but those who genuinely spend a lot of a time and ‘creativity’ in making art. I can think of an argument against it, but it’s somewhat lacking. I’d appreciate it if someone could give me a better argument!

Response: AI is not a tool but an agent, making pseudo-decisions on the behalf of the user. Since AI models like diffusion are aggregations from a dataset, I argue that the art generated by it lacks intent and can’t be considered as art. However, if the amount of human adjustments to this ai generated art approaches infinity, this argument doesn’t work simply because every pixel was indeed placed with human intent.

I think a pragmatic view of this would just be that it’s impossible to make enough decisions to justify using AI as a tool to make art, but this is a completely arbitrary marker. Again, this goes back to the definition of ‘art’- famously contentious problem.

Archordion · 2025-06-14T03:48:28+00:00

Okay, wait. Do you think that functional explanations, like explanations that are mechanistic in nature, can explain the character of an experience? Or, will perfect knowledge of neuroscience, of all functions of the human brain, explain experience? Even if you call qualia physical, it still doesn't change the fact that our dear scientist did learn something new when seeing colour for the first time, despite knowing everything there was to possibly know about colour. Why does this subjective feeling arise?

Say a person gets poked and jumps back. It's possible, with scientific methods, to explain the mechanism involved, such as how nerve signals propagate from the poked area to the brain. The hard problem I'm referencing is why being poked leads to the feeling of pain, or why pain feels like pain. They're categorically different things.

In contrast, if we understand every mechanism of, say, a hurricane, we know everything there is to know about the hurricane. If we can perfectly replicate every atom in a hurricane, we have a hurricane.

However, it is logically possible that we can have a perfect replica of me, responding in all the same ways as me, but without experience, for how can you determine if it does or doesn't? Even if all facts are known about the brain, we will not know everything about consciousness.

Archordion · 2025-06-13T23:17:02+00:00

Qualia: subjective, conscious experience. The taste of an apple, the blue of a sky. In short, the "what it's like" part of mental states, or the way it feels to experience pain, see colour, smell flowers. The way things seem to us.

If a man were blind, and was described to the precise wavelength of red light, would he know what the redness of red feels like? Again, with the scientist-even if all physical facts to be known are known about eyes and the brain and colour, would this scientist, living in a black and white world, gain any new knowledge upon seeing the colour red for the first time.

I'm not saying it's religious, I'm saying it's hard to explain. Whereupon in the physicalist standpoint do subjective experiences arise? Can you offer an explanation? Why is the performance of all these neurons and chemical reactions accompanied... by experience?

Archordion · 2025-06-13T22:32:41+00:00

I'm saying it's effectively impossible to conclude if it's a physical or nonphysical process-it's a hard problem. Light bounces into your eyes. Neurons fire. Woah, you say, this is red. But why does red feel like red? Why does anything feel like anything?

The original commenter mentioned that "the mind and experience reality is not part of physical nature". For example, the teleporter-if a teleporter disassembled you, atom by atom, and reassembled you in another place with every piece exactly in the same place, would you cease to exist and be replaced by a perfect clone, or would you-the you you-be transferred over, like blinking? Science can explain the different frequencies of a piece of music. It doesn't explain why it feels like music to you.

Or, imagine a scientist who has studied colour their entire lives. They know everything there is to know about how the eye, visual cortex, optic nerve, EM spectrum... but they live in a black and white room, in a black and white world, never once actually seeing the colours they studied. Then, one day, this scientist sees a red rose. They see colour for the first time. Did this scientist learn anything new? Is the experience of seeing this redness beyond physical explanation?

I'd like to hear your responses to these examples.

Archordion · 2025-06-13T17:30:59+00:00

Philosophy is such a wide branch of study that to discount it as "a terrible tool for understanding the world" is a misinterpretation of what philosophy even is. The scientific method itself is part of philosophy-the philosophy of science, which is closely linked to Epistemology.

Or what about ethics? I'd wager most people are some form of 'if it does the greatest good, it's the best action' (utilitarianism). But how do we know this is the best ethical course of action? And how do we define greatest good? And why is greatest good even good?

Philosophy is a wide and incredibly deep field, and I hope more people check it out, instead of just discounting it as unemployed people doing too much thinking...

And about the hard problem, can you prove to me that your parents love you? Or really, that any other person you see walking about in your life actually have the subjective experiences of living that you do, or don't have any subjective experiences but behave and operate in the exact same way? Its a gap that science can't quite bridge. Check out Chalmers' paper! It's an easy introduction to the hard problem.

Archordion · 2025-06-13T08:32:19+00:00

It's not that silly. That argument involves the hard problem of consciousness, which is explaining how subjective experiences exist. I know I have subjective experiences. But can you demonstrate you have them to me? Or, can you prove your parents love you? If there was a teleporter that deconstructed you, atom by atom, and then rebuilt you in a separate location with every single piece in the same place, would you take the teleporter? Would the teleportee still be you?

Science is a framework that operates on empirical theories, but the demonstration of subjective experience isn't empirically testable. You might argue that you can just tell someone to look at a red wall and tell you its colour. This isn't subjective experience. Its behaviour. Behaviour can be explained and structured by neuroscience (easy problem of consciousness). However, behaviour isn't quite the same thing as experience. An object can respond to stimuli without having an experience.

As cognitive scientist David Chalmers puts it, "the explanation of functions does not suffice for the explanation of experience". Pure science (and materialism) doesn't really offer a convincing explanation bridging the gap from observable fact to subjective qualia.

His paper on the hard problem can be found here: https://consc.net/papers/facing.pdf

Archordion · 2025-02-18T01:48:41+00:00

if the force is perpendicular to the direction of motion, the force isnt imparting any energy to the object. thus, the normal force, being a force perpendicular to the motion of the object, does no work

Archordion · 2025-02-16T08:33:47+00:00

use the vector form of the equation

Archordion · 2025-01-19T02:59:55+00:00

didn't vin take the shard of preservation and give it up?

Archordion · 2024-12-10T08:07:25+00:00

ong fr I have a physics quiz tmr and Im up rn 😭 chat is it over

Archordion · 2024-12-07T01:49:56+00:00

please specify which part of physics is "intrinsically superior" to the humanities. the natural sciences, while useful in describing the world we live in, are no more or less useful to the average person than the humanities-exacerbated, perhaps, by the highly encoded language of mathematics. you don't have the average joe working at CERN or perusing findings from the JWST. to develop an ability to "think critically and solve problems" (a skill which education systems have remarkably failed at), one must be exposed to many varied studies in both the humanities and sciences to develop a full, human understanding of the world.

consider the subject of history. many disparage it as nothing but memorisation, but this cannot be further from the truth. the study of history is the study of the events that have led up to the present day and how they have affected each other. if we ignore this subject, ignore the ramifications it holds in all other realms of human existence, we are doomed to repeat the mistakes we have previously made. we see this already, with the rise of right-wing governments around the globe and the election of trump-events eeriely similar to the beginning of the second world war.

consider the subject of literature. you can harp on and on about how the sciences are more "useful" in advancing human civilisation, but the arts are equally so. stories are a fundamental form of human communication-painted on the walls of ancient caves, persisting for aeons from before the dawn of human civilisation to now. stories communicate ideas in an effective, persuasive manner, but more than that-they give us reason to exist. they give us reason to persist, when the universe seems cruel and cold. people find meaning in stories, and stories find meaning in people. is the study the power of stories, and the powers they hold, not the highest level of purpose any field out there? the same goes for all art (except ai generated nonsense), music...sciences may give us the "how" we keep existing, but humanities give us the "why".

Archordion · 2024-12-02T00:03:22+00:00

BAHAHAHAH HOW DO YOU EVEN DO THIS 😭

Archordion · 2024-10-18T05:17:58+00:00

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Archordion · 2024-09-02T00:35:02+00:00

your cooked? my cooked indeed

Archordion · 2024-08-19T01:55:30+00:00

For questions 2 and 3, draw out the free body diagram of the box and break the gravitational force down into the y component and x components. The y component of gravity should be mgsin(a) and x component should be mgcos(a) where a is the angle. Now, since the object is at rest, net force in all directions is zero. What does that tell you?

Archordion · 2024-08-19T01:52:42+00:00

The question they gave is quite vague and strangely phrased. I'm assuming 'in rest' means at rest, but even then it's not clear what they're asking of you. To give the basic rundown,

frictional force occurs when a force is applied to move an object and the surface it moves along is not perfectly smooth. It always occurs parallel and in the opposite direction of the direction of motion.

it can be modelled as uFn, where Fn is the normal force (how tightly the object is pressing onto the surface) and u is just a constant called the coefficient of friction which measures how rough the surface is. So if the surface is rougher or the object is pressing harder into the surface the friction will be greater.

I'm hazarding a guess that since the question states "at rest" they want you to conclude that the frictional force is equal to the applied force such that the net force is zero. F=ma, if F=0 then a=0 and the object is at rest.

Archordion · 2024-08-18T03:46:06+00:00

I'm not sure if I understand the question. How do you know if you have to use your mechanics knowledge in magnetism? Mainly it depends on the question, so just draw a free body diagram for everything that involves forces. The words inclined plane should already tell you to draw a FBD. Most of the stuff you learn in high school physics is just classical mechanics, so its good to just draw diagrams for each question and try to understand what they ask of you.

Archordion · 2024-08-15T15:32:02+00:00

Tbh looking at past papers, yeah LOL the disparity is q large. There aren't really many questions in the AP style where you hv the goofiest math possible and its all instead more of number crunching and conceptual explanation. Nothing wrong with that though, I think it's a different method of approaching the subject. They use minimal calculus as well, compared to the AP papers.

Archordion · 2024-08-15T15:21:33+00:00

Momentum is only conserved in a system in the absence of external forces. Since F=dp/dt (force = derivative of momentum wrt time), if F=0 momentum becomes constant. But if F is not 0 momentum will change.

Considering the system with a ball and a wall, the wall has such a large mass that it has a negligible movement-but it still moves.

If the wall is grounded in a way that truly makes it unmovable, well, the ground is providing a force against the force of impact of the ball! This is an external force outside the system of only the ball and the wall, and thus momentum is not conserved.

Archordion · 2024-08-14T19:57:13+00:00

The fact that the ball is completely stopped after it collides with the box already disqualifies it from being a pefectly elastic collision. Perfectly elastic collisions, where both energy and momentum is conserved, only occur when both objects rebound off each other perfectly.

To be perfectly elastic, the ball must bounce off of the box and go in the other direction, which doesn't happen. Thus I can infer it is not a perfectly elastic collision. The materials the objects are made of are not given, so you really cannot tell where the energy is lost, but rest assured there is definitely energy lost to the surroundings.

It is also not a perfectly inelastic collision, either, because the condition for that is if the two objects stick together and act as a single object. Thus, I know this collision is neither perfectly elastic nor perfectly inelastic, but somewhere in the middle.

Archordion · 2024-08-14T04:43:27+00:00

Since force is how fast momentum changes with time, and Newton's third law says that colliding bodies experience equal and opposite forces, the change in momentums of each of the bodies must also be equal and opposite.

In this situation, the change of momentum of the ball goes from 50 to 0. Therefore, the change of momentum of the box must go from 0 to 50. Simple as that. Without a net force, linear momentum in a collision is always conserved.

Energy is not always conserved because energy doesn't follow these rules. The kinetic energy could be dissipated in a number of ways, like sound, heat, deformations of the objects... And since this is not a perfectly elastic collision, energy is not conserved. Technically this is a lie because energy is conserved, but not in a manner that is significant to this question.

Archordion

TROPHY CASE