Any randomness could in principle be predetermined. God could have rolled the dice ahead of time.
If the universe gets cloned one time every second that would still be a huge claim.
A million times every nanosecond is even a bigger claim.
Now imagine how many states the universe can be in, and how many times a second can be meaningfully divided.
If you can solve the "one clone every second" then I would be satisfied.
I feel that assuming that the nature of how the universe is computed matches up with our first intuition feels a bit like the assumption in geocentrism that the universe matches up with our intuition of Earth being the center and the most significant body.
Even if you accept the basic premise of the universe being a simulation, there are still many ways it could work with MWI. The simulator's universe needn't have classical physics; the simulation could be running on quantum computers or something more advanced. Or the simulator's universe could be classical with a classical computer doing the simulation at exponentially-decreasing speeds as it has to simulate the increasing number of branches. It wouldn't make any difference to us how long the simulation takes to compute us, as long as the simulating machine doesn't break down and succumb to entropy. The simulator's universe could be something like Conway's game of life, and the simulation is running on a turing machine pattern which will never decay or break down. (I might be borrowing more than a few ideas from Permutation City here.)
When I was younger and had most interest in non-useful things (in a boring sense) I came to "the theory" that each time observation or logical induction is performed, the universe splits into many variants ahead of time and these variants that produce "oops" in terms of contradiction simply disappear. Each time you see something weird but real, it is oops that survived, because you didn't see something contrary yet (and now you cannot, because only one thing has to be remaining).
That made me sad, because we could come to hyperdrives and FTL journeys to alien worlds, but some people in 20th century made few observations and conclusions that now prevented fun forever. Magic things were easy before the technology, now they are physics-hard. Our universe is spoiled in a very wrong way.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell%27s_theorem#Bell_inequa...
EDIT: tone.
Not everyone agrees on what is "reasonable". I have no problem giving up locality, but "true" randomness (i.e., information generated without an algorithm) seems like a philosophical cop out.
Note that something can also be globally deterministic but indeterministic from the perspective of a subsystem. In this sense, the universe would appear random as far as we're concerned, but not random to whoever is simulating the universe (this is often called superdeterminism, but I think that's a silly word—the universe is either deterministic or it isn't).
Would you agree that something is determined iff its probability is zero or one? I'm guessing the disagreement is here - what definition would you use?
For anything that exists outside of a light-cone around the first electron, a measurement of the second electron will be truly random from the measurer's perspective.
One concerns a lack of knowledge, like in your cards example. In that case, the probability is an expression of your state of understanding of the deck, and is not a property of the deck itself. The physical details of the deck and the situation it is part of could be entirely deterministic and we could still talk about this kind of probability. In this case your knowledge is independent of whether it is probabalistic or not.
The other is whether the universe contains fundamental randomness, such that you could say it is literally "probabalistic". And in this case whether that is true or not is independent of our knowledge of the probabilities.
http://lesswrong.com/lw/jlb/logical_and_indexical_uncertaint...
I would say, not. There's no actual randomness from an objective point of view, it's just a lacking in your understanding of things.
I think that map/territory confusions are the source of so many problems and should be rigourously avoided. I think it would be a map/territory confusion to consider it a kind of actual randomness.
Even though it makes perfect sense to apply probability theory to it? We found a perfect coin, one that we know that you can't predict in advance even in principle, and you want to avoid considering it a kind of randomness? Why does the mechanism by which the universe implements randomness -- in this case via determinism -- matter?
So, does indexical randomness fit your definition of "fundamental" randomness? And what did you mean when you said "a coin that may well actually be random" if it wasn't the indexical kind of coin?
No, it does not. MW is determinsitic. The fact that you don't know which universe you will observe is a limit on your knowledge. It does not make the things actually random.
There are other interpretations of QM where there is literal randomness, independent of an observers knowledge.
What is the chance that you're shot? Is it 1/6? What about if you open it up and look in the barrel to see if there's a bullet there?
Are you suggesting this example somehow shows that changing knowledge/probabilities determine whether what's going on there is deterministic or not, as is the issue under discussion?