Does quantum theory imply the universe is preordained?
nature.com
nature.com
It doesn't seem to affect anything I can think of.
- It feels like it exists; it feels like I'm making my decisions. Even if my whole life is a series of decisions calculated by me in some inevitable way, the calculations still had to happen in my head, and the experience of deciding was part of that. Therefore I own my decisions either way.
- For that reason, a criminal is just as guilty of their crime, whether they spiritually willed themselves to rob the bank, or whether they are predetermined to. The decision to rob the bank happened in their head.
- Punishment for a crime makes just as much sense either way and for the same reason. Seeing criminals get punished will affect the calculations happening in nearby brains, possibly lowering the chances they will in turn decide to rob the bank. Removing errant decision-making matrices from society should reduce the amount of badness.
- All of the opposite things are also true for rewarding good behavior.
What would you do with a CPU that can do nothing but churn out malware due to a design flaw? What if it's a CPU that only does amazing things? Or if it's some mix of both? It seems very similar to how we'd treat people who behave differently.
> Punishment for a crime makes just as much sense either way and for the same reason. Seeing criminals get punished will affect the calculations happening in nearby brains,
This could be a local maxima. I'm not sure there is a reason (other than us having arrived at it, which does count for something) why blaming, and particularly hating/attributing evilness to people for performing a certain act while operating under an imagined agency is more effective than some alternative.
It's possible that there could be a means of dissuading others from the behaviour without that illusion/emotional baggage.
It could arrive at the same conclusion (incarceration, for example) but more compassionately. Does that matter? For the bigger picture arguably not, but for the human experience maybe.
Edit: now that I think about it, this way of thinking might actually predispose us to try debugging first.
These moments of "what if it wasn't like this?" always tend to lead me to ESS and fizzle out. The status quo which I called a local maxima is likely much less well defined and homogeneous than I speculated and where we find ourselves is just what you get when you mix hate / compassion / firewall / dispose / debug in today's specific concentrations
The reason to praise or condemn is because these are the pre determined things we are bound to do because it increases our odds of survival.
How often do children do shitty things, and then say "I don't know" when asked why they did it? I have personally had problems lashing out in anger and not even understanding why. Our brains put a lot of effort into keeping us away from painful thoughts and memories. All of that is to say that you don't have to invoke determinism or quantum mechanics to demonstrate that people aren't always consciously in control of their actions.
Some people are far more capable of compassion and forgiveness in the face of tragedy when they can see that a genuine accident occurred, or when they understand the generational trauma that laid the ground work for unthinkable choices. Why not take it one step further and recognize that we're all stuck on this involuntary ride and we all deserve a little grace because none of us could have chosen any differently?
Does this mean we expect the aggrieved to forgive the perpetrator? No. Does that mean we cease handing out jail sentences for dangerous crimes? No again. But if there is no free will in the choices we make, what's the point of punishing people? I get that people who hurt other people should feel remorse, and people who are dangerous should be isolated, but how can you say anyone deserves punishment when their actions are predetermined?
The deterrent effect of punishment does not require free will to work.
What's the point of hitting a ball to score a goal if the ball had no free will and it was moving deterministically?
You punish people in order to provide incentives for people that would align with society's goals.
Human being, having the input and knowledge that they would get punished, would make them avoid doing certain things.
"Deserves" is just a way to provide some idea of a framework on what is the behaviour expected from people for society to perform at its best, together.
And I think the argument for punishment as deterence falls down in a few ways:
1) Absence of punishment does not mean absence of consequences. I'm still in favor of incarceration for violent offenders to protect society, but I think that people should be treated with dignity and respect while inside. I think incarceration is deterrence enough.
2) Disenfranchisement plays a role in why people commit crimes. If they distrust or resent the system, punishment only serves to reinforce their perception that the system isn't designed to help them, so why should they help the system?
3) People need to be led by example. What example does it set when COs use violence to control or punish, or turn a blind eye to violence between inmates?
I always find it funny the way people see leadership and authority as license to put people in their place and punish those who do wrong, and then they are surprised when the subjects of said leadership aren't pleasant, peaceful people. People raise their kids to thank their parents, but then they never thank their children. They say things like "I'm not going to thank someone for doing their job" and then wonder why their kids never say "thank you". It's because they weren't leading by example, they were just barking orders.
The point is, punishment is almost always misguided, free will or no. It is a bad motivator and a bad example. The less charitable among us could still reason that "bad" people still "deserve" punishment, but realizing that we aren't ultimately in control of our own actions just underscores the point that nobody actually "deserves" anything other than understanding and compassion for being on a ride that none of us actually asked for.
If everything is determenistic, there is no "you" and "you" aren't doing anything.
What happened always was the only possible outcome. There is nothing to worry about. If someone eats someone else it was predetermined. If we don't punish the cannibal - well, that was predetermined as well.
There's ever lasting power balance within a group, where group will perform well if everyone does well for the group, leading to this prisoner's dilemma situation where a sole bad actor could still outperform everyone in the group that otherwise works together, so these incentives must be set in such a way that it wouldn't be beneficial for bad actors to take advantage of the rest of the group.
With humans specifically, there is ALWAYS an asshole. Always.
There is always someone that will see a community, think those people are idiots, marks, suckers, etc. and will do whatever they can to take things from them, like their property, or their lives, because they look different, worship a different god, talk differently, etc. In other cases, it's a power thing. They will lie about whatever they need to, so assume control, then shit on everyone around them, for their own "betterment".
Humans will always be the absolute worst enemy of humans.
Again, I wish we lived in a world where your idea could work. It would be a much, much better place.
That's nonsense. If they're predetermined, then the decision happened _outside_ their head. You might otherwise describe a river as its own source and tributary.
I say "maybe" because the calculations are performed by the AI, you say "maybe not" because of the creators' influence, but it still makes sense to me that we should debug/firewall/shut down that AI.
I think GP meant that when we say that a decision happens "inside the head" it means that the brain performs a computation where it combines all the "training* the brain got during its life so far and the perceptions of the current events and produces stimuli for muscles that will act on the world.
In order to produce the right kind of stimuli for the muscles the brain performs a modeling of what the future will look like after the muscles have been moved.
Imagine a scenario where you're walking with a child on the side of a road with some car traffic. You hold the child's hand.
The brain constantly asses the sensorial input of pressure in your hand and gauge what will happen if the child hand slips from yours. The brain computes the possible outcomes of that particular child veering off in the traffic and weighs in the horror of an accident that might happen into the decision making of whether to move the muscle of your hand just a little bit more so that the child's hand doesn't slip away.
This computation, the imagining of the accident happening and your reaction may or may not reach your awareness (i.e. feel conscious). It involves an enormous amount of assumptions about how the world works and about the things you value in life, your past experience, your expectations of torment in the case something bad happened while the child was under your watch.
This "computation" is determined by millions of factors that we colloquially smuggle under a single deceivingly simple word: "you"
All those parameters, what it means to be "you", is constantly changing based on what happens every single second to you. Everything that makes you you is based on this constant flux of input your brain processes, since the day you were born. The structure of your body as built by your genes also affects this since it produces the very machinery that processes these inputs and reacts to them causing new inputs to be fed, since the day you were born.
This incredibly complex mechanism, that involves constant imagining and predicting the future, weighting different predicted outcomes and reaping the rewards of correct ones and suffering the consequences of bad ones happens continuously in your head without any "agency" on your part. This very mechanism is your agency.
Whether each little step in this cascade of events that implements your "agency" is "deterministic" it doesn't change the fact that the computation that defines that agency must happen for the agency to have effects on the real world.
A deterministic evolution of a system still requires the system to exist. When you predict the exact movement of a billiard ball hitting other balls and the walls of the table you don't say "ah since I know exactly where the ball will go this means that the other balls and the table are useless, I'll just place the ball I care about in the final position and call it a day, since it's all predetermined anyway*. You don't say that because the positions of the other balls after the action will matter for the next actions.
Similarly, even if the underlying laws of physics are deterministic and can be in principle used to predict the behaviour of a complex system like brain, the act of predicting it must perform at the very least the same computation that the brain is doing (and much more, since that one brain constantly reacts to other things including many other brains making their own action/reaction loops?)
Even if we all lived in a simulation it would make sense to say that your brain makes the decisions. Because that's a useful way of talking about what this organ does.
It's a useful way to coarse grain reality in systems and environment. It's compatible with another way of looking at the overall simulated system from the POV of the simulator. Those two points of view can coexist and are equally real.
In practice our real world is so complex that even if in principle the laws of physics are deterministic, you need a pretty special being, (a laplacian deamon) with enormous compute power to carry out the predictions of the whole system. This being would have to be external to the system it is predicting and better have to effect on it otherwise it would have to simulate itself too.
Whether a laplacian daemon exists, or whether the underlying laws are indeed deterministic, doesn't change the fact that it's useful to describe individual agents in the system and talk about them in terms of what these agents so based on their local inputs and outputs.
Both views are "compatible" with each other. In the same way as the view of a gas being made of molecules that move and bump to each other each with their own position and momentum is compatible with the way of talking that the gas has a temperature and a pressure.
> It doesn't seem to affect anything I can think of.
Most of the time, we don't care actually. Only in philosophical discussions similar to this one, we talk about free will.
To me, it seems that it's really an unnecessary assumption. In my everyday life I just don't care whether someone has free will or not. It's more about a meaningful interaction or to get something accomplished together.
I guess we need to separate simulations about the real world happening in our brains from the actual reality. Actual reality is based on quantum mechanics. Of course our brains developed as an organ that supports survival of the organism. So there's not really a reason to reflect an accurate picture of physical reality.
When a stone hits you - you want to attack the person that threw it at you and not the stone or that person's ancestors. So you divide the world into agents with free will and objects without. And stop asking "why" when you encounter the first agent in the root-cause chain.
It's a very effective heuristic, so people are strongly persuaded it's real.
However, penalizing a crime for the purpose of retribution makes no sense if there is no conscious free will. The criminal's consciousness experiences the harm of the punishment, but didn't cause the actions that constituted the crime. This is patently unfair.
I don't think conscious free will exists. One of the reasons I care is that, if most people shared that belief, we would talk and think about crime so differently that our approach to crime would change in the direction of becoming more humane.
For example, given the news of SBF's conviction for fraud, no one would be happy about the fact that he will likely experience many years in prison. We might be happy that the harm his actions caused has been stopped, and we may feel a kind of dutiful satisfaction in the knowledge that the system is working to deter and prevent this kind of harm. However, these emotions would be tempered by regret that a young man is going to lose part of his life, and we would be questioning whether there's any way to achieve the same level of harm prevention without inflicting such serious harm on one person.
> I don't necessarily see science as trivial pursuit because of our human limitations
Me neither, quite the opposite, but the problem you are describing has always been a problem when discussing metaphysics, as it is commonly called.
Science is aware of its limitations, that's what makes it science.
But sometimes, people tend to conflate a materialistic world view (maybe even strong determinism) with believing in the scientific method.
The "belief" I mean here is strongly tied to assigning the appropriate role in ones thinking to scientific facts.
Proving an all-encompassing scientific world view is a logical paradox.
I would say more than sometimes. It seems that if you're not like that, you're immediately labeled religious.
Though I see how they can look that way when you intentionally omit details about the claims of either side, as human discourse is reduced to Tweet size comments of negligible value.
That's doubtful, source?
>QM says that the entire universe evolves as one entity, that QM calls the wave function.
It's local, but mystics expect nonlocal one.
There is no "ultimate truth" or airtight reliable outlook at which we can stop and say we know everything there is to know -- that would be a dogmatic assertion, and it is false.
Yet there's the prevalent sense of "this time we're getting it right".
Are you suggesting every one of those soldiers for example, go out to war with the intent of killing children? Are you not open to the idea that the sense of normalcy can be shifted by the environment and context? Are you familiar with the milgram experiments?
I'm not merciful about this: the people of a country are responsible for who governs them, sense of normalcy notwithstanding.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_emigration_following_t...
I think that the USA have a good balance with their two 4 years presidential terms. If one of their next presidents asks to raise it to 3 terms, be prepared to get a forever president there soon and all that it means.
To my mind the very concept of free will is nonsense; as soon as you make a sincere effort to pin it down it breaks down. Yes, there is no absolute proof that it's impossible, but like the second law of thermodynamics, I would be much more surprised to see it violated than, IDK, finding a real magnetic monopole.
That's an essential claim, not doubt. First, you're wrong that determinism is a synonym for predeterminism, science doesn't support it, because predeterminism contradicts the second law of thermodynamics. Next you're wrong that nihilism is bad. Is it a dogma? What if you're wrong? Especially since you know yourself your knowledge about nihilism is fragmentary and you spent only microscopic amount of effort to understand it and can't make grand conclusions about it. Then you also imply that delusion is somehow more constructive than truth. That's counterintuitive and needs proofs.
If the quantum randomness is fundamental, and reality is stochastic at heart, that makes it non-deterministic, but it doesn't make it any less mechanical. It's in the name, after all: Quantum mechanics. If there is any guiding light to the randomness, any pattern to how the random choices come out, then it's not really random, is it?
So, if you think that a deterministic reality is devoid of free will, then you must equally think that a Copenhagen-interpretation fundamentally stochastic reality is devoid of free will.
Well, yeah, that's the point. By definition, a deterministic model of reality means there is no room for a free agent to make decisions: things couldn't have worked out another way.
But a mechanism that appears random provides at least the potential for a free agent, since randomness is exactly what it looks like when you cannot predict system outputs purely from system inputs.
It's really a semantic issue. It's not that it's a source of randomness that we're after in order for free will to be possible, but rather non-causality, and quantum mechanics does provide some potential in that regard.
For me, this kind of free will is enough, though it is rather deflationary when compared to some kind of godlike non-causal free will. I think that if we search for non-causal free will, we lose any hope of explanation or understanding: presumably if it's non-causal, then anything can happen, for no reason.
https://www.wolframscience.com/nks/p750--the-phenomenon-of-f...
Daniel Dennett's book Consciousness Explained comes at the problem from a similar angle.
Or a hundred such persons?
The calculation itself may be irreducible, but what is the implication for consciousness and agency if, midway through the calculation, you fork the process? What about a quarter of the way, or three quarters?
Whilst this feels unsatisfactory, it is the only way I can see of talking about agency without invoking decision-making processes that disobey the laws of physics, or rely on randomness. And unless a supernatural version of free will appeals, I think this is the best kind of free will available: governed by rules, but nevertheless fundamentally unpredictable. The only other option would be to rely on complete randomness as a basis for decisions, which seems worse.
Just because our perception prevents us from predicting outputs from inputs in a way that appears random does not mean that it is just a chaotic system. This is part of the question posed by the original article: does quantum theory provide certain mechanisms that could permit non-deterministic agents to intervene in causal ways that are not predictable? Or would we have to appeal to the supernatural / mystic / divine in order for such a thing to even be possible?
Certain interpretations (e.g., the "Many Worlds" interpretation of QM) are more conducive to this possibility than others.
Generally, "free will" is simply stated as "the freedom to do otherwise". Returning to the "simulated brain" example -- if the computer simulation is faster than the "squishy brain" agent, then it has already predicted the outcome, and the "squishy brain" agent has no "freedom to do otherwise": the outcome is pre-determined.
> Generally, "free will" is simply stated as "the freedom to do otherwise".
In the Many Worlds interpretation, as I understand it, everything that can happen, does happen (as it would in a single universe of infinite extent). So no matter what you choose to do in one universe, the multiverse-wide outcome is predetermined: copies of you always make all choices not forbidden by the laws of physics.
I think this just pushes the problem of determinism out to the multiverse as a whole.
At the same time, I also can't ignore the large number of very famous and accomplished physicists which take determinism very seriously.
[1] Referring to cosmological natural selection as a theory of the "fine-tuned" universe: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmological_natural_selection (a fun favorite of mine but not looking likely)
I think one lead we can have is that simulations are called simulations because they try to emulate the real world (the one simulations are running). By observing from inside the simulation what kind of input and reaction the "God" people has when we output something, we might be able to understand the "real" world better. It's like the "people" in the Sims game -- given they are of their own mind, they can figure out some rules of our world.
But then how can we jump out of simulation to really really figure it out?
It seems strange that a superdeterministic universe constrains certain kinds of phenomena to statistical distributions for no obvious reason.
Free choice is a completely different issue, and I'm not even sure it requires quantum theory. Clearly we have the illusion of free choice, but just as obviously our choices are very heavily constrained. In fact the constraints pretty much determine personality. And there's plenty of evidence from psychology that if you you have an accurate model of personality you can manipulate someone's choices without them being aware of it.
So I'm not seeing what quantum theory adds to this. It seems to assume consciousness is quantum and works back from there. Which is a weak argument (IMO).
Unless physics is totally noise-free, with zero randomness, there is indeterminism. There are so many chaotic processes that amplify randomness that any randomness at all will cause wide divergence in outcomes.
Whether or not noise and free will are the same thing is a question for theologians. Rudy Rucker addressed that question in passing in one of his SF novels.
Odd that the article didnt mention Heisenberg.
"Anyone who considers arithmetical methods of producing random digits is, of course, in a state of sin." - Von Neumann
As another analogy, the 100-bit lambda calculus term
(λ 1 1) (λ (λ λ λ 1 (2 (λ λ λ 3 1 (2 (λ 2)))) (3 (λ 4 (λ 4 (2 1))))) (1 1)) (λ 1)
is a binary tree containing all (infinitely many) closed lambda terms at its leaves. Thus including representations of all possible data and all programs.
We have virtual worlds that could be described deterministically, such as with procedural generation and a seed function.
Often, these functions are theoretically continuous.
But also often, there's a mechanism by which the continuous function converts into discrete units.
Why?
In order to track state changes to what would otherwise be deterministic by free agents (i.e. players changing stuff).
That reality goes from continuous behavior to discrete upon interactions with free agents, and then goes back to continuous if the persistent information about those interactions is erased, looks a lot like what we might expect from a universe that needed to keep track of changes by free agents in an optimized manner (such that information erasure resets behavior back to functionally defined continuous behavior and not tracking discrete units).
Interestingly, this was predicted by the earliest philosophers thinking about quantized matter being solely governed by natural laws. They reasoned that if the laws of motion governing quanta were singular outcomes, that free will could not exist, thus given their belief in free will they hypothesized that quanta had variable outcomes which they likened to a 'Swerve' moving in a different direction suddenly from the other option. Over 2,000 years before we had experimental evidence that not only was matter made up of quantized parts, but that those parts were best described as moving probabilistically with variable outcomes.
That the behaviors of these quantized parts is time reversible seems less indicative of determinism and more like they serve the function of state tracking for interactions.
More generally, there are strings with Kolmogorov complexity of at least the length of the string but for which the conditional Kolmogorov complexity is very small given some other string.
In this sense, it’s quite possible that quantum mechanics is fully deterministic and there is a hard limit on our ability to predict the future (so for all intents and purposes, quantum mechanics is at some level indistinguishable from true randomness to us despite there being no randomness whatsoever in the laws of physics). In fact, I think the former actually implies the latter:
Consider a completely classical, deterministic universe (or at least imagine a high fidelity molecular dynamics simulation of our lightcone of the universe). Then all of the actions that humans take in an attempt to predict future observations are fully pre-ordained. Why should it be the case that these actions just so happen to lead to output that describes another subsystem’s behavior to arbitrary precision? That would be a strange coincidence to have for whatever set of laws describes the time evolution of this hypothetical universe. Mathematically, how many universes like that are even possible? What sort of bizarre initial conditions would there have to be for this to be the case?
My take is pretty simple: 1) the universe is fully deterministic and 2) quantum mechanics appears inherently random to us because we are inescapably part of the system we are trying to study and predict.
So now the interesting question: is there is an experiment that can distinguish between the case of a fully deterministic universe and one with non-deterministic processes, given that the two would seem to appear the same as far as human observation is concerned?
That's verification, not falsification. Many worlds can be falsified by demonstrating that the Schrodinger equation is nonlinear, which dynamic collapse research program tries to do.
Being unfalsifiable doesn't mean it's not true, just that it isn't a scientific theory.
And I'm sure sometimes, some of them don't look both ways for the same reason.
Superdeterminism implies that you don't really have a choice as to whether you look both ways.
Why would belief that we are just agents responding predictably to stimuli imply that one would not respond predictably to stimuli?
The fact that ones behavior does not change when one acknowledges that all behavior is deterministic and predetermined seems evidence in favor not against that hypothesis.
This is determinism, not superdeterminism.
Superdeterminism claims that the state of any system you measure is always already correlated with the measurements you perform on it: photons emitted a billion years ago encode information about where someone is going to choose to point a telescope tomorrow. Not because of any interaction between the two, but because the initial conditions of the early universe just happened to be set up that way.
Interestingly, it's actually very hard to define what it would mean to believe in determinism, but not superdeterminism. Ultimately if the universe is deterministic, that must mean that everything that happens is predictable from the initial conditions of the universe.
This is still not superdeterminism. The superdeterminist claim is a statistical one: your choice of measurement is not even approximately conditionally independent of the state of the thing you're measuring. Ever. There are plenty of deterministic processes that nonetheless wipe out most correlations over the long-term: thoroughly mixing two fluids will do it. Preserving a strong correlation between the future state of your brain and the exact luminosity of a star a billion light years away at one particular moment, over the whole history of the universe is incomprehensibly unlikely. And superdeterminists claim that this happens every single time.
If you rolled marbles down a hill, assuming that identical starting conditions were applied each time, then the marbles' paths and final position would be the same each time.
This also implies that if you know the starting conditions, you could calculate the state of any point in time from there.
It made me curious whether you could apply this same logic to our universe -- though I get the feeling it's not quite as simple a system as marbles on a hill.
In essence, is this a universe where a version of Maxwell's Daemon could conceivably exist, or is it a universe that even a god-like being would find random?
There seems to be no reason to believe that it's not.
On the contrary it seems most plausible that everything, including emotions, thoughts, decisions, are just chemical and electrophysical reactions. Thus deterministic.
For non-physical things, such as emotions and thought... well, we have no actual proof they're anything but physical. We just don't have proof that they're entirely physical, either. But the simplest explanation is actually that they are completely physical processes and just as deterministic as everything else (which is to say, possibly not at all, depending on how QM is resolved).
[1] "Basically true" here means it's not strictly true (by that I mean it's not true in all possible cases) - but classical physics itself is not strictly true, thus relativity and QM... which are themselves not strictly true. We're still trying to find the theory that accurately describes all of physics.
Not the atoms of the neuron configuration etc., but the plane of existence where you place the red ball.
If we understood exactly where or how this plane exists and for whom, we could arbitrarily place objects and ideas in this plane. Eg force someone to think of a red ball bouncing, or pull imagined objects forcefully out of the plane.
Indeed: put them in a sensory-deprivation tank and show them a video of a (possibly simulated) ball bouncing. Their existing network of neurons will do the rest.
As I already said, though, that doesn't mean we should assume there's something metaphysical going on. When I think of a red ball neurons fire. We have no reason to believe there is anything else going on because we have no evidence one way or the other. The experience of thinking of a red ball is not evidence that there's anything supernatural going on.
Probably.
The physical world may or may not exist out there entirely independent of mind phenomena but the physical laws are a mental model in order to understand the world, the physical laws arise out of the interaction between the physical world and the mind.
The operating order is like this: there is mind -> mind perceives world -> mind makes mental model that presupposes the perceive world is independent of mind -> mind tries to determine its own origin within that presupposition.
If you simplify to the most extreme degree you're not left with "the physical laws", you're left with "there is mind". As such, the burden of proof is on the side of the presupposition that the external world is entirely independent of the mind that perceives it.
Though it's just the beginning of a very deep rabbit hole, possibly unending.
Here is a link: https://www.dailymotion.com/video/xv1j0n
That is to say, the closer you get to the atomic behavior of atoms, the harder it is to make "deterministic" descriptions of what is going to happen.
We often describe this in terms of "coin flips" as you can make a decent discussion over what you will see on 1000 coin flips, but you cannot make such a statement over what you will see over 1.
To look at it another way, the entropy of a system is always increasing, so you don't have enough information when the marble is at the top of the hill to know the exact outcome when it's at the bottom (on a quantum scale, or over a long enough period of time).
In fact, this is precisely the shuttlecock analogy in the Nature article, even though that analogy is talking about the quantum Universe initial boundary state, as opposed to the hemisphere example in classical Newtonian mechanics.
I guess the shuttlecock analogy isn’t that useful after all, since it fails to set apart quantum Universe theory from Newtonian mechanics, in that the latter can also have no boundary.
[1] The Dome: A Simple Violation of Determinism in Newtonian Mechanics
>Hartle suggested that quantum mechanics can solve this complexity problem. Because a quantum object’s wavefunction is spread out across many ‘classical’ states (cat alive or cat dead, for instance), you could propose a simple initial condition that includes all the complexities as emergent structures in the quantum superposition of these states.
So the one theory I have that I have absolutely no backing for and I recognize is not really falsifiable is that the purpose of humanity is to build general intelligence…
general intelligence is then supposed to build Laplace’s demon
Laplaces demon actually counting all the things would look like a giant condensation aka slowing down and “freezing” because there is no more entropy left and everything is pulled together which is the event that kicks off the next iteration of the universe, a.k.a. “the big bang” which then redistributes everything back out again (not sure why)
Again: I do not endorse this as what actually happened it’s just a crazy idea that feels right to me.
This gets philosophical very quickly. But for our purposes: independent, uniform, etc. But how do we know there isn't another (earlier) way to observe the result in some fashion.
1. locality (no backwards causation / FTL information transfer)
2. determinism
3. counterfactual definiteness (unperformed measurements still have single definite results: we can talk meaningfully about what we would have seen had we done a different experiment)
4. QM gives correct predictions.
Everett (the badly misnamed "many-worlds" interpretation) rejects 3: "measurement" is just what unitary evolution looks like from the inside, and from that perspective always has multiple outcomes.
Superdeterminism rejects 4: QM is wrong, but the initial conditions of the universe were for some reason set up in such a way as to prevent us from carrying out any experiments that would demonstrate that.
Bricmont has continued to write/expound upon these ideas ever since and more recently "come out" as a non-local hidden variables proponent of the de Broglie/Bohm variety which rejects your (1. locality) for which you left out an example. :-)
Sometimes people refer to giving up "locality" in this context with the mouthful "a preferred fundamental foliation of spacetime". { "fundamental" here does the work to block the Cosmic Microwave Background / "average rest frame" which people have no trouble treating as a preferred inertial reference frame that is "merely contingent" not "fundamental", although Ernst Mach might have begged to differ, but that is further afield. :-) }
Similarly all paths to the future are taken and the present must agree with boundary conditions in the future.
This is true but it's not really what's meant by backwards causation here. The specific thing you need is for what happens from times (-ε, ε) to depend on what will happen at times (1-ε, 1+ε) even after conditioning on the intervening times (ε, 1-ε).
Action principles are still local: maximizing the integral of the Lagrangian L(x(t)) over time (by, for instance, taking the shortest path) is equivalent to satisfying dL/dx = d/dt dL/d(dx/dt).
> by (virtually) taking all of them.
This is a superficially appealing analogy but very misleading. Even if you take Feynman diagrams literally, which you shouldn't, the "path" integral runs over field configurations. The classical notion of a particle following some path simply breaks down here.
If it looks like randomness and quacks like randomness, it's randomness, right? We've experimentally verified these things to dozens of decimal places. Asking whether it's "truly" randomness is meaningless without a measurable way to distinguish what's "truly" random or not.
> how do we know there isn't another (earlier) way to observe the result in some fashion.
Bell's inequalities.
If we cannot do that, I am not even sure what the point is of discussing the concept. It is like some box we are told lies sealed in a distant continent, and we argue about what is in the box. Why? We'll never know, and the answer doesn't seem to change anything.
If I shuffle a deck of cards in a way that you don't know about, then the next card I pull is "random" to you even though, obviously, if one were to turn the cards face up nothing would have changed about the order of the cards, but now the next card would be fully deterministic.
I could likewise sort the deck with an algorithm completely unknown to you. I could perfectly predict the next card pulled because I know the algorithm, and yet the next card would still be random for you.
Heisenberg uncertainty principle is more a statement about the limits of knowledge than about "God throwing dice". Randomness often has a supernatural property in the popular mind, but is really just a statement about how much information we have about an event.
The famous Bayesian philosopher ET Jaynes refereed to this tendency to confuse the randomness as a property of the world rather than our mind as the "Mind Projection Fallacy" [0]
Limited information about the initial state is one source of randomness but not necessarily the only one. Whether there is true randomness in the universe is at very least an open question.
Can you also give an example where "true randomness" would differ from the randomness I describe on the actions a human would take? That is to say, if a my internal model of the world tells me a coin landing on heads is 50/50 how does "true randomness" or not of the resulting coin toss impact how I should gamble on coin tosses?
imho the idea of "randomness" separate from our own internal state of belief is a nonsensical concept, but would appreciate examples to the contrary.
Measure the spin of an electron along two different axis, to the best of our knowledge - or maybe just my - the result of the second measurement is not predictable by anything. Of course only until it turns out that hidden variables is the correct interpretation and that the hidden variables can be measured, then this also becomes the other kind of randomness.
Depending on your Interpretation of QM, randomness is a fundamental aspect of reality. How does a quantum superposition of two states resolve? The canonical view is wavefunction collapse, which is ultimately random, and attempts to find some pattern underneath it all generally fail. Look at the Bell Inequalities, which demonstrate that any theory which attempts to reproduce the successful predictions has to either be non-local, or non-realistic, and must be incompatible with local hidden variables.
Now does that mean nature is random? I don't know, no one does, because we're sure that QM isn't a complete theory. It is a really good theory though, in some domains such as QED it's been tested to more than 11 decimal places and found to hold. The difficulty of making a new theory that matches that precision and represents a paradigm shift can't be overstated. The result is that a lot of time is spent on those aforementioned Interpretations, you've probably heard of some, such as "The Many Worlds Interpretation" aka parallel universes. After all if everything happens, and we just happen to only perceive a part of it, then there is no randomness... no hidden variable. When a quantum state collapses, part of it doesn't just vanish, it's just out of our site.
The problem with that is... there's no evidence to support it, probably no way to even test it. Anyway, the bottom line is that maybe there is real randomness, and maybe there isn't, we just don't know.
Certainly the dual slit experiment makes hidden variables very hard to preserve.
Additionally several tests have shown that hidden variables don't work to explain quantum mechanics, there aren't possible coins the allow the kind of probabilities we see.
It's pretty simple. If the world is fundamentally deterministic, then you should only gamble with someone who you believe doesn't possess knowledge you don't. If an advanced alien or an angel offers to call a coin toss, you shouldn't take their bet, since they might know how to determine the result of the coin toss based on the weather and the color of the coin tosser's pants.
On the other hand, if the universe is fundamentally random at every turn, then you can safely take the bet: nothing they know could give them more information than you have about the result of the coin toss.
This is very similar to the difference between pseudo-random number generators (PRNGs) and sources of true randomness in a computer. There is no test you could do on the outputs of an RNG to determine if it is a (good, cryptographic-grade) PRNG or if it is a "true" RNG. However, if you're gambling based on the results of a PRNG, you should try to find out if the one you're gambling against doesn't happen to know the seed (in which case they can predict with 100% certainty what the next number will be).
And I think those have been ruled out by Bell's Theorem, or at least implies other very counterintuitive things have to be true instead.
Non locality seems less weird to me than any of the other interpretations of quantum mechanics. But I feel like I'm in a small minority with this. Besides, what we think about it isn't really relevant.
I believe what you're saying is that there is indeed a superdeterministic hidden variable that would allow us to know before the value is defined what it will be. For simplicity let's assume the Many Worlds interpretation... this variable would tell us which world we're in.
The issue with this explanation is that we're not in that World yet, because our current World is only the result of past quantum events. When this next undefined value becomes defined, our single world splits into Many more Worlds, each of which has ours as a parent, so how could one of those be more or less intrinsically ours? Each is equally our World, and if we back up a single "step", our World contains all of the supposed hidden variables that say which child World is which. So I find that Many Worlds seems to invalidate superdeterministic hidden variables.
With other, single-World interpretations, the hidden variables make more sense. What you say would be true. But single-World interpretations are already more complicated than Many Worlds, with or without hidden variables and superdeterminism.
In the most popular "simple" many worlds interpretation, the whole universe is a QM system described by the universal wavefunction. The "worlds" are just "branches" of the wavefunction that are not entangled with one another.
The Schrodinger equation (and the more advanced QFT versions) are fully deterministic differential equations: the state of the universe at time T is fully determined by the state of the universe at time T-x, for any x. This remains true even if x is negative: there is no "arrow of time" in QM, there is no distinction between the past and the future in any QM equations.
The only "non-determinism" in Many Worlds is thus of the knowledge kind: you don't know which "world" you happen to be in, so you don't know which result you'll notice. But this is like being spun around a coin: you don't know which face you'll end up looking at, but you know both faces actually exist. All the possible outcomes of any QM event are realized in "some world", there is 0 uncertainty.
This isn't what physicists believe though, Heisenberg uncertainty principle is about a wave not having both a well defined position and velocity. They either drift apart (undefined velocity) or they are spread apart (undefined position). Then the wave collapse keeps the wave together over time by randomly removing parts of it, we have no theory where that isn't random even "many world" means you randomly select one of the branches to follow.
We do know for sure that particles are waves that spread out and exist in all of those parts, it isn't just that it represent a point particle with unknown location. And we know for sure that those waves under certain circumstances withdraw from parts and just keep other parts, ie wave collapses. Both of those are easily observed in experiments and not up for debate.
Heisenberg uncertainty as it exists in QM today is not a statement about your knowledge, it is a statement about the possible interactions between particles. It tells you that if a particle collides with another at a specific point in space, then their trajectories after that collision can't depend on the momentum of either particle, for example, because that would violate the inequality.
This indeed does not necessarily imply randomness per se. But it is much more than a statement about precision of measurements at a human scale: it is a statement about the possible interactions at even the lowest scales.
It has nothing to do with measurement, knowledge, randomness or even our physical reality at all. It is a much more fundamental mathematical phenomenon [0] that always occurs when you switch representation between time and frequency domains and it tells you how you can arrange information in such mixed representations.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncertainty_principle#Signal_p...
The whole idea actually originated in wholly mistaken idea that Newtonian mechanics implied that the universe was a big clockwork, unfathomably complex but still predetermined. This rests on the false philosophic view that Newtonian mechanics are the only form of causality (or more broadly, that the laws of physics are the only form causality.)
Free will is a type of causality emerging from a particular kind of entity. It in no way violates any other type of causality, and vice-versa. Free will can't violate physics; you can't say "I have free will, therefore I can throw this ball to 50% of light speed." It pertains to an entity with free will making a choice among certain finite possible choices at any given time.