31–40 of 209 posts
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Bell's theorem gives us a clear path forward in understanding the universe. Local realism must be discarded.
Realism is the axiom to give up, not locality. Just accept MWI as the current best guess and get on with your life.
I find it strange that they claim that QM lacks any explanation for measurement. There are explanations for measurement. Not everyone agrees with any single one of them, but they definitely exist. Superdeterminism is one, but it's not the only one. It is really only the Copenhagen Interpretation of QM that has a measurement problem. Personally, I am on board with the "measurement is just entanglement" solution (it se…
While I lean the same way, the measurement problem is definitely harder than you say. If it's just entanglement with an external system, you still have to answer how that superposition ends up with you personally observing only one result.
You, however, being a large, warm thing decohere rather rapidly, even if the formal measurement apparatus can be made not to. Your consciousness is a classical phenomenon, so you can only perceive one possible classical outcome. If you believe in Many Worlds (which is the most natural interpretation to pair with this resolution of the measurement problem, but is not absolutely forced), then there are other versions of you out there in different parts of state-space which perceive different outcomes, and may even be observable as elements of a superposed-you in principle if not ever in practice, but there is no means of transferring information between any of these different versions of you.
EDIT: To whomever downvoted the parent... why? It is, after all, a perfectly reasonable question, especially (although I do not presume that knzhou personally holds this view) in light of the reasonably common assumption that consciousness is somehow quantum in nature itself.
I 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 t…
My problem is probably not just a lack of math, but a lack of taste.
I find it strange that they claim that QM lacks any explanation for measurement. There are explanations for measurement. Not everyone agrees with any single one of them, but they definitely exist. Superdeterminism is one, but it's not the only one. It is really only the Copenhagen Interpretation of QM that has a measurement problem. Personally, I am on board with the "measurement is just entanglement" solution (it se…
That is, if "worlds" branch off with some amplitudes, and there's a "me" on this branch and another on that branch, how does it make sense to talk about the probability of "me me" being this one or that one?
Empirically we know how to calculate it from the amplitude, but why is that more reasonable than any other answer (if any answer is reasonable)?
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Your example given with the conclusion to follow doesn't make sense. I'm a hard determinist, I've known others like myself and nobody leaps to the thought, "the initial conditions of the universe means this is all meaningless" and we do try to observe every possibility such as the game being rigged. I don't necessarily think superdeterminism can explain literally anything or that if it did explain something there wou…
You're not distinguishing between determinism and superdeterminism. Determinism is perfectly compatible with science, as it admits the idea of controlled and reproducible experiments. (For example, if you believe in determinism, you could grab the coin out of my hand and run some tests on it yourself.) The whole point of superdeterminism is to go further and deny this.
The wikipedia page on superdeterminism starts out:
"In quantum mechanics, superdeterminism is a hypothetical class of theories that evade Bell's theorem by virtue of being completely deterministic"
Logically, something that is "completely deterministic" would have to be...deterministic, no? Does superdeterminism go to 11?
"Most importantly, we will discuss how it may be possible to test this hypothesis in an (almost) model independent way."
Most. Importantly.
Then in the paper, under "Experimental Test":
"This means concretely that one should make measurements on states prepared as identically as possible with devices as small and cool as possible in time-increments as small as possible.
This consideration does not change much if one believes the hidden variables are properties of the particle after all. In this case, however, the problem is that preparing almost identical initial states is impossible since we do not know how to reproduce the particle’s hidden variables. One can then try to make repeated measurements of non-commuting observables on the same states, as previously laid out in [36]."
And finally:
"[36] S. Hossenfelder, “Testing super-deterministic hidden variables theories,” Found. Phys. 41, 1521 (2011) [arXiv:1105.4326 [quant-ph]]."
So after the "most" qualified introduction, eventually just a reference to her 2011 paper. "Most importantly" "good" ... joke?
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I don't really understand what your coin flip metaphor is supposed to mean in the context of the paper. That Superdeterminism could be used in an entirely facile way doesn't really suggest anything about the theory itself. When choosing Superdeterminism as an ontology it suggests different paths for doing research, paths that are unexplored and potentially full of insight. That's what is exciting about it to me.
While I can think of exciting questions sparked by many different interpretations of quantum mechanics, I can't think of any for superdeterminism, for exactly the reasons I said -- it's scientifically dead from the start. Other ideas have limits, superdeterminism doesn't. Do you have a good example?
If we found hidden variables to control when a radioactive isotope will decay we could possibly have much safer handling of fission materials, depending on what these hypothetical hidden variables are.
* I don’t have an opinion on Superdeterminism, I’m just thinking about hypotheticals out loud.
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You're not distinguishing between determinism and superdeterminism. Determinism is perfectly compatible with science, as it admits the idea of controlled and reproducible experiments. (For example, if you believe in determinism, you could grab the coin out of my hand and run some tests on it yourself.) The whole point of superdeterminism is to go further and deny this.
I'm definitely not distinguishing between determinism and superdeterminism. The wikipedia page on superdeterminism starts out: "In quantum mechanics, superdeterminism is a hypothetical class of theories that evade Bell's theorem by virtue of being completely deterministic" Logically, something that is "completely deterministic" would have to be...deterministic, no? Does superdeterminism go to 11?
To continue with the coin flip analogy, consider a classical world where a coin flip is perfectly deterministic, given the initial conditions. In the usual way we think about determinism, it's still possible to test whether a coin is fair. Just flip it a bunch of times, a little differently each time, and see if you get a ratio close to 50/50. That's standard science.
In the superdeterministic view, you don't admit this kind of explanation. Instead you say that whatever outcome happened was determined by the initial conditions of the entire universe. If you get all heads, you can't say anything about the coin -- we merely conclude that your hands were predetermined to give it the kinds of initial conditions that would have led to that outcome.
Now imagine repeating an explanation like this for every experiment ever performed. It's on the level of answering "God did it" to every question. We don't do that in science because it kind of defeats the whole point.
I'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 t…
The paper replies with the following argument: in super-determinism, statistical independence is an emergent property which holds at macro scales, so classical experiments do enjoy statistical independence. In your hypothesis - yeah, the game is rigged!
But superdeterminism comes into play at the quantum scale where we know things are already kind of fucked, which is why we're talking about this at all.
The idea is that God places Her thumb on the quantum scale alone. You might try to foil Her with an experiment exquisitely sensitive to a quantum measurement: the cat lives or dies according to the millionth decimal place of some measurement. But actually "cat lives" and "cat dies" might be very close in state-space - in the sense that two arbitrary real numbers might have some arithmetic relationship which cannot be proven (Chaitin's incompleteness theorem).
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Terrifying revelations comes for cheap these days. Plenty of people say that the opposite of that is terrifying as well. I figure if I'm going to be terrified either way, I might as well not be!
It seems to me that most people intuitively know that there is a large amount of chance and “unknowns” in life and the universe. The find out the opposite is true would be a very big deal.