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Comment by danbmil99 | Hacker News Reader

There is no way to prove that a supposedly random source of information is not effectively a PRNG. Similarly, the Born rule must apply unless and until we learn that there is some deterministic process that QM reduces to, and even then, unless we know how the PRNG was 'seeded', we must progress _as if_ the process was in fact random.

The deep point here is, arguably, randomness is in the eye of the observer.

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I'm not sure what you mean by "effectively" a PRNG, but the big objection here is the EPR paradox. A true RNG can be stateless, but a PRNG necessarily requires state. So where is that state?

It's not in the wavefunction, so we must introduce new axioms: non-local variables, or super-determinism, etc. Yuck!

The MWI program is eliminating the objectionable "part two" of QM: probabilistic measurements and wavefunction collapse. But it's no progress if the replacements are even worse!

"non-local variables, or super-determinism, etc. Yuck!"

All of these things are less philosophically objectionable to me than the idea that all outcomes (in some sense) "occur" or that the true substance of the universe is an inaccessible, linearly evolving, quantum mechanical wave function.

I mean seriously - the latter is an enormous enlargement and modification of our ontology. Non-locality and super-determinism are actually much less objectionable. Indeed, before quantum mechanics, we were essentially _certain_ that determinism would win the day.

And we only need to jettison one of them, of which non-locality seems the most plausible. In that view, spacetime emerges from some underlying non-local dynamics. This isn't particularly hard to imagine (see a Smolin paper called "Nonlocal beables" or something like that).

Thanks for calling out how the Canon interpretations of QM do not not actually save us from much of the problems that are objected to in other interpretations. Sometimes I feel like everyone just repeats what they heard as a student. Smolin's work looks interesting, thanks for the recommendation.

I knew the Phd would come in handy eventually.

> There is no way to prove that a supposedly random source of information is not effectively a PRNG.

Maybe no practical way. But a finite state PRNG will be periodic while a true RNG won’t. And the length of the non observed period gives you an estimate of the minimal size of state.

What would be the period of a 4096 bit pseudo-random number generator iterating at a time scale commensurate with the plank length?

I haven't done the math, but the answer is, a long, long, long time.

It can be periodic but unbounded.

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