Comment by chrischen | Hacker News Reader

Comment by chrischen | Hacker News Reader

Seems like the author is falling into his own trap by having a bias for determinacy. For the same reason he states that observing a blurry photograph does not make the thing blurry, observing classical mechanics as deterministic does not make the world deterministic. Yet he has a bias for determinism simply because it is what he sees, comprehends, and is familiar with.

First, he brushes away the many world's interpretation, which I believe has superceeded the CI in popularity now. It addresses pretty much all of the issues he has with CI including collapse, obersvation mysticism. It even addresses Einstein's issues with CI in that God no longer plays dice.

Second, they've experimentally disproven local hidden variable theory in a quantum interaction like entanglement via disproving bells inequality. In other words scientists have already considered there might be hidden particles and properties at play affecting quantum interactions and they have disproven their existence.

Hey there - author here. Somebody emailed me this thread. I'll just make a couple points:

1. Yes, I am biased toward determinism in this case. But that's largely because of the methodology used by proponents of indeterminism (I don't believe their conclusion necessarily follows from their data. In fact, I think it's an entirely unnecessary conclusion). Determinism is my default, unless a more convincing argument prevents itself.

That being said, if indeterminism is true, I'm fine with that - so long as "superposition" doesn't include mutually exclusive states. If the theory can avoid logical contradiction, then it's possible.

2. I'm fine with the MWI. However, I think it's unnecessary and have difficulty getting around Occam's razor in this situation. If the choice is between a) believing a practically-infinite set of real-universes exist (all requiring explanations) or b) remain skeptical for a more compelling theory preserving the simplicity of one universe, I'll take the latter. (Given enough time, the highest levels of abstraction about reality seem to be universally simple, so I'll hold out a bit longer)

3. I also have a difficult time accepting that there's logical proof that hidden variables don't exist. Mathematical proof (satisfying a particular, non-necessary set of mathematical theories) does not sufficiently qualify as logical proof. And, indeed, Bell's theorem has likely already been proven invalid.

The keyword is "local". Non-local hidden variables is trivial (Bohm's theory) in that we just posit the particles have positions and are guided by the wave function. Hence, particle and wave properties. Simple, clean, clear, mathematically proven to agree with all results, no problem with spin and it leads to insightful derivation of identical particle behavior and even Dirac's equation.

It is a bit embarrassing that the "hidden" part of the theory is particle position seeing that is what we see, after all. The wave is the more hidden part of things, gleaned only via many particle observations of similar states.

Bell's inequality is theory agnostic except for demanding that experiments have results when performed. Thus, the experiments show that either reality is nonlocal or reality is not definite. Many worlds opts for the latter and it can be perfectly well-formulated (think of fuzzy videos overlaid on each other; any particular instance is not discernible, but through evolution you can distinguish which is which). Most presentations of many worlds I have seen is not understandable, but there are versions that are perfectly well-defined and fits the data.

Finally, the issue why people objected to CI is not determinism, but wanting a well-defined theory. Bohm's theory and other interpretations give us that.

Any links to a source to this claim? I was unaware it had became possible to disprove a negative.

If quantum-entangled particles exist (they do) you can use them to coordinate in a way that's impossible within a "hidden variable" model of the universe. You can dig into this by searching for "bell's inequality" or "bell test experiments", there are a few different experiments that have been done many, many times. There's a pretty good Veritasium video that explains one such experiment in non-physicist terms: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZuvK-od647c

http://lesswrong.com/lw/ph/can_you_prove_two_particles_are_i...

>I was unaware it had became possible to disprove a negative.

Can one not prove the positive?

The popularized/simplified version is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_will_theorem . It's logically impossible for local hidden variables to produce results consistent with this experiment; either the hidden variable must be nonlocal (able to affect two spatially separated experimenters at exactly the same time), or the experimenters' actions must be determined ahead of time (and it's not a hidden variable so much as a hidden constant).

You can definitely disprove negative statements - any positive statement can be expressed as its negation (and vice versa), so to the extent that you can prove positive statements, you can disprove their negations.

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