Superdeterminism: The path we didn’t take
backreaction.blogspot.com
Superdeterminism: The path we didn’t take
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Re: Superdeterminism: The path we didn’t take
#2Direct link to the paper this post sets up: https://arxiv.org/abs/1912.06462
Always been a fan of Superdeterminism, happy to see actual physicists working on it.
Re: Superdeterminism: The path we didn’t take
#3Hopefully this doesn't make me seem like a crank, but it seems to me that the path forward on superdeterminism is to use uncomputability.
1: Untriangulable smooth manifolds exist.
2: The manifolds can be smoothed via Ricci flow in a manner similar to how Perelman solved the Poincare conjecture.
3: This smoothing, applied to an untriangulable manifold, is irreversible, deterministic, and yet somehow must not converge to any triangulable manifold.
Re: Superdeterminism: The path we didn’t take
#4Hopefully this doesn't make me seem like a crank, but it seems to me that the path forward on superdeterminism is to use uncomputability. 1: Untriangulable smooth manifolds exist. 2: The manifolds can be smoothed via Ricci flow in a manner similar to how Perelman solved the Poincare conjecture. 3: This smoothing, applied to an untriangulable manifold, is irreversible, deterministic, and yet somehow must not converge…
I'm having trouble seeing what any of that has to do with determinism.
Re: Superdeterminism: The path we didn’t take
#5Hopefully this doesn't make me seem like a crank, but it seems to me that the path forward on superdeterminism is to use uncomputability. 1: Untriangulable smooth manifolds exist. 2: The manifolds can be smoothed via Ricci flow in a manner similar to how Perelman solved the Poincare conjecture. 3: This smoothing, applied to an untriangulable manifold, is irreversible, deterministic, and yet somehow must not converge…
I'm having trouble seeing what any of that has to do with determinism.
Cranks to the left of me, jokers to the right, here I am, super determined with you...
Even the comments on the blog post seem exceedingly cranky. I can imagine it's very hard to work in such an area, with such a noisy peanut gallery.
Re: Superdeterminism: The path we didn’t take
#6Hopefully this doesn't make me seem like a crank, but it seems to me that the path forward on superdeterminism is to use uncomputability. 1: Untriangulable smooth manifolds exist. 2: The manifolds can be smoothed via Ricci flow in a manner similar to how Perelman solved the Poincare conjecture. 3: This smoothing, applied to an untriangulable manifold, is irreversible, deterministic, and yet somehow must not converge…
I'm having trouble seeing what any of that has to do with determinism.
Because Perelman.
I mean he wrote Perelman’s name so he must be onto something.
Re: Superdeterminism: The path we didn’t take
#7I've always been mystified at why people take superdeterminism as a good explanation for anything, when it actually acts as a stopsign for thought.
For example, suppose I am betting with you on the outcomes of a coin toss. You call heads, the coin comes up tails, you give me some money. You call tails, the coin comes up heads, you give me some more money. This repeats a number of times.
The common sense response is to start suspecting that I am rigging the game, i.e. that the simple model of the coin flips being independent and random is wrong. The superdeterminist response is to say, "no, your guesses have been superdetermined to be all wrong by the initial conditions of the universe -- keep on playing!"
You can use superdeterminism to explain literally anything (not merely a lot, but actually, literally everything) while gaining precisely zero insight into what is actually going on, and precluding any future insight. Sure, it fixes a few philosophical problems, but so does saying you're a brain in a vat; in both cases you throw out all of science as a side effect. While their paper does address some philosophical objections, it doesn't even mention this scientific objection, which seems far more severe to me.
Re: Superdeterminism: The path we didn’t take
#8I find this Quora answer convincingly reflects my thinking as to why Superdeterminism can't possibly be correct given Bell’s theorem[1]
Skimming the actual paper[2] I'm not really seeing a convincing explanation, this in particular just strikes me as hard to believe / failing Occam's razor:
The belief that such tests tell us something about (the implausibility of) Superdeterminism goes back, once again, to the idea that a state which is intuitively “close” to the one realized in nature (eg, the wavelength of the light from the distant quasar was a little different, all else equal) is allowed by the laws of nature and likely to happen. However, in a superdeterministic theory what seems intuitively like a small change will generically result in an extremely unlikely state; that’s the whole point. For example, in a superdeterministic theory, a physically possible counterfactual state in which the wave-length of the photon was slightly different may also require changes elsewhere on the past hypersurface, thereby resulting in the experimenter’s decision to not use the quasar’s light to begin with.
"Reality is a giant deterministic conspiracy" is more plausible than abandoning local realism? They do (kinda?) propose an experiment at least?
[1] https://www.quora.com/Why-do-some-crackpot-scientists-go-aft... [2] https://arxiv.org/pdf/1912.06462.pdf
Re: Superdeterminism: The path we didn’t take
#9I just finished reading her book, today. Rock on, Sabine!
Anything that makes believers in Free Will or Consciousness unhappy makes me happy.
Re: Superdeterminism: The path we didn’t take
#10I just finished reading her book, today. Rock on, Sabine! Anything that makes believers in Free Will or Consciousness unhappy makes me happy.
Consciousness is not premised on or bound to free will. One can accept the mystical nature of consciousness while also disregarding free will.