No, it's the lack of agreement that is the problem. Interpreting classical mechanics is philosophical as well, but there is generally agreement on how to think about it. You rarely see deep philosophical debates around Newtonian mechanics on how to "properly" interpret it. Even when we get into Einsteinian mechanics, there are some disagreements on how to interpret it but nothing too significant. The thing is that something like Newtonian mechanics is largely inline with our basic intuitions, so it is rather easy to get people on board with it, but QM requires you to give up a basic intuition, and which one you choose to give up on gives you an entirely different picture of what's physically going on.

Philosophy has never been empirical, of course any philosophical interpretation of the meaning of the mathematics gives you the same empirical results. The empirical results only change if you change the mathematics. The difficulty is precisely that it is more difficult to get everyone on the same page on QM. There are technically, again, some disagreements in classical mechanics, like whether or not the curvature of spacetime really constitutes a substance that is warping or if it is just a convenient way to describe the dispositions of how systems move. Einstein for example criticized the notion of reifying the equations too much. You also cannot distinguish which interpretation is correct here as it's, again, philosophical.

If we just all decided to agree on a particular way to interpret QM then there wouldn't be an issue. The problem is that, while you can mostly get everyone on board with classical theories, with QM, you can interpret it in a time-symmetric way, a relational way, a way with a multiverse, etc, and they all give you drastically different pictures of physical reality. If we did just all pick one and agreed to it, then QM would be in the same boat as classical mechanics: some minor disagreements here and there but most people generally agree with the overall picture.

This is precisely why I think people shouldn't reify mathematical entities, like spacetime being a literal fabric that "expands" or "curves." When we say space expands we just mean that things that are traveling in a straight line will have their paths curve away from one another. You can imagine two people in a space ship flying next to each other and neither one of them places any pressure on their pilot joystick to turn the space ship, yet over time they find that their paths diverge from each other anyways. This creates a tendency for everything to move away from everything else.

When Einstein first introduced his theory of gravity, it was clear that gravity causes straight lines to curve towards each other, and if you add up all the localized effects of gravity, on a universal scale, the whole universe would on average eventually come together and collapse.

It was believed at the time that the universe is eternally static, so he found a free parameter in theory called the cosmological constant that creates a universal positive curvature (making paths diverge) which if set to just the right value could balance out the totality of the local negative curvatures (making things converge) and give you a static universe.

However, when physicists actually measured the cosmological constant (it's a free parameter like G, you have to measure it) it turns out to be way larger than is necessary just for a static universe.

The decision that your brain's decisions are due to chemical reactions, which itself would be due to chemicals reactions, is self-referential but not circular reasoning.

holocaust deniers should not bother replying because they will just get the instant block

This is why I very much dislike Popperism. Popperites are convinced "science = falsifiability." If I argue that the universe is made of cheese and the mechanism is a wizard that you can only see through a telescope with a special handcrafted ruby lens that I sell at my shop for $4000, should research institutions be expected to take my claim seriously and buy my ruby lens to test it? I mean, it's technically falsifiable, either they will look through the lens and see the wizard and universe of cheese or they will not. If you are a Popperite you have no choice but to admit that it is a legitimate scientific theory.

There should be more to a scientific proposal than it technically being "falsifiable." Penrose's "theory" is quantum mysticism, it is not a scientific theory just because it is in principle testable.

1. He bases it on a claim that Godel's theorem shows certain things are non-computable but we can choose to believe those non-computable things anyways, therefore that proves "consciousness" is non-computable. This is just a comically ridiculous argument. You can program an AI to believe in things it cannot prove as well. It doesn't prove anything.
2. He claims that there is a physical collapse of the wave function, with zero evidence to back it, and it is caused by gravity. His theory is incredibly speculative and not compatible with the predictions of quantum mechanics and not even with special relativity, and all attempts to test it have turned out negative.
3. He claims that since this "collapse" isn't computable and his comically bad argument #1 shows "consciousness" isn't computable, therefore quantum mechanics causes consciousness, and so we should search desperately for anything in the brain that looks vaguely quantum mechanical as "evidence."

It's even more ridiculous when you realize that microtubles are structural, they don't play a role in information processing in the brain, and you have microtubules all throughout your body. Them having quantum effects in them is meaningless. Even if you could empirically demonstrate without a shadow of doubt that microtubules do somehow create coherent quantum states that the brain makes use of, that would just be an interesting fact on its own. It would not prove #1 or #2. Microtubules are not a "mechanism" for #1 and #2, even if they played a role in decision making as if the brain is a quantum computer (they don't), then you cannot derive from this that somehow quantum mechanics explains why people can believe things without proof (why do I even have to say this, it's so stupid!) or that the reduction of the wave function is a physical process caused by gravity.

There is no good argument to believe even #1 or #2 are tied together. Even if you proved there is indeed a non-local physical collapse and overturned all our modern scientific theories, that wouldn't demonstrate #1 or #3 either. None of the claims in the theory have any obvious connections to one another other than spurious, largely incoherent arguments. This is not his domain of expertise. You could argue #2 is within his domain, but #1 and #3 are nowhere near his domain.

Physicists have proposed speculative physical collapse theories before, like GRW, and we forget about them because they were interesting but went nowhere because there is zero evidence "collapse" is a physical process, and treating it as such requires overturning all of modern physics, as it could not be made compatible with special or general relativity nor could it reproduce the predictions of quantum mechanics, requiring you to rewrite all of physics from the ground-up. The reduction of the wave function is a measurement update, it is epistemic, there is no evidence that it is a physical process.

Even then, theoretical physicists speculate about a lot of things that turn out to go nowhere, that itself is par for the course. But Penrose goes above and beyond this and branches into philosophy, biology, and neuroscience and starts using comically bad arguments to try and tie them all together. Those are not his areas of expertise at all. It reminds me of the old essay Natural Science and the Spirit World from the 19th century that documented a lot of renowned scientists who also had completely crazy side projects, like Alfred Wallace, the guy who co-discovered evolution by natural selection, who believed he could also raise spirits from the dead and converse with them.

While the US is pretty old as a state, most societies have a direct continuation from one state to the next. It's not like when France overthrew its monarchy they stopped being France or seeing themselves as French. So they may see their continuous history as much older than the current state, with the Kingdom of France going back to 987.

The US doesn't have a continuous history prior to 1776 because they mostly come from Britain but they denounce their British heritage and they settled in NA but also denounce the heritage of the local peoples there. So the average American sees their entire history as starting at 1776, maybe a little bit further back to include the initial colonies and that's about it.

yes and those are physical things in the real world, not illusions

Let me be clear, I believe everything we experience is illusory

Nope.

"this isn't right vs left, this is right vs left"

uh... okay?

Choosing between parties is arguably less democratic because in many countries with such a system, like the USA, you basically just have corporations/corporate media choosing the candidates, so your "choice" is between corporate candidates, so corporations always win. There is no option to reject the nominee entirely, while in China's system you can reject the nominee. you can just straight up veto candidates.

Westerners often also look at the very end of the process and ignore everything leading up to it. They will say "there's only one candidate on the ballot!" as proof it's undemocratic (even though this happens all the time in the US too...). But this ignores the entire democratic process leading up to how the candidate gets on the ballot in the first place. In Cuba for example, candidates getting on the ballot is a two-year long process resulting from local elections and meetings with mass organizations, but they ignore this entire process and just focus on the final election at the very end.

why's it a problem? why can't information just be lost at a black hole?

Even though China gave up on most communist ambitions post-Dheng

No they haven't.