Hacker News Reader

Comment by hsienmaneja | Hacker News Reader

Doesn’t quantum mechanics leave open the possibility that our universe is fundamentally probabilistic?

Also, how can we say anything about free will when we have not come to grips with defining the hard problem? Of course, if you want to model biological processes based on deterministic physics then free will does not exist. I’m simply suggesting that the fundamental assumption that are universe is deterministic is flawed.

View on HN

It really doesn’t matter if the laws of nature are deterministic or not. Consider the past. At no time did a die come up both two and five, nor did a photon’s wavelength collapse in two places. Why should the future be considered differently? Events in the future will happen one specific certain way – we just can’t know which way until they actually happen. But we don’t have to be able to (even theoretically) predict future events for those future events to still be fixed in a four-dimensional space-time.

> Doesn’t quantum mechanics leave open the possibility that our universe is fundamentally probabilistic?

Not really. A wave function propogates in a perfectly deterministic manner. There's not anything probabilistic baked into QM.

Probability comes in at what's called the Measurement Problem. Right now, we ad hoc apply the Born rule to project complex amplitudes into probability distributions whenever convenient, but there's actually no good understanding of why the Born rule works at all. It's just sorta tacked onto QM at this point.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com