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A delightful quirk of relativity theory

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Re: A delightful quirk of relativity theory

#121

I like this, but it doesn't completely remove the "unintuitivenes" of relativity. For example, why do we measure in fractions of light speed? What happens when we are already rotated all the way to light speed and then fire another bullet? I guess there are other ways to reason about this, but it still doesn't feel intuitive to me.

Lightspeed has infinite rapidity, so when you add on the rapidity of a bullet you just get lightspeed again

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapidity

That's amazing, and it was well explained in 1908! Yet students today are learning a horrific bastardized version of it. Physics is absolutely terrible when courses and books try to to remove the "complicated" math, and in its place they put something more complicated and ambiguous.

Teach the math!

It's like Greenspun's Tenth Rule, but for math:

"Any sufficiently complicated scientific theory contains an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Complex Analysis."

Re: A delightful quirk of relativity theory

#122
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Take the case of two people on Earth, one stationary and one travelling past in a car. They each have a different reference frame, and a different set events which make up their present. Now imagine that there is an alien government in Andromeda debating a possible invasion of Earth. In the reference frame of the person on Earth who is moving, the debate is still going on. But, in the reference frame of the station…

The reason the scenario posits an invasion from so far away is that that's about how much distance it takes for a small speed difference here to translate into a day long time difference there.

So as I'm driving, the debate is going on, but as soon as I slam on my brakes, it's already happened! They're already on their way! Oh but now the squirrel is out of the road and I'm late so I speed way back up and the debate hasn't even started yet now.

No. The only thing that is "happening right now" on Andromeda from my point of view is the causality wave (light) that is hitting me right now. It's nonsense to talk about anything happening "right now" if its causality wave hasn't reached me yet.

Re: A delightful quirk of relativity theory

#123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference between quickly getting to a point where you can't forecast the weather, and the fact that you can't predict wavefunction collapse at all, is significant on a more than metaphysical level. Figuring out which bucket human beings fall in to is a legitimate question.

> the weather > wavefunction Which of these are commonly accepted (or even argued by a sizable minority) to have free will in a metaphysical sense? > Figuring out which bucket human beings fall in to is a legitimate question. That may be true, but it doesn't seem like it has anything to do with the ill-defined notion of "free will". I'm also not familiar with anyone who views human behavior to be anything like a coll…

>Which of these are commonly accepted (or even argued by a sizable minority) to have free will in a metaphysical sense?

Of the two that would be the wave functions, some of which are people, and people are what's argued to have free will.

>That may be true, but it doesn't seem like it has anything to do with the ill-defined notion of "free will".

Nondeterminism in physics is the space that free will is allowed to fill, and if there was none, there would be no room for free will.

>I'm also not familiar with anyone who views human behavior to be anything like a collapsing wave form

Human beings are physical systems, quite chaotic at that. It is possible that deep inside your brain, decisions turn on molecular events that are uncertain due to quantum mechanics. Evidence for free will? Not really, but it's a hole in determinism that makes false the statement, "physics leaves no room for free will."

Re: A delightful quirk of relativity theory

#124
post #113
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rescuing free-will from the jaws of spacetime would be cool! Free will does not exist. It is logically inconsistent. Either your choice is some function of your current state and the environment you are in, then the choice is not free, or it is independent of your current state and the environment you are in, then it is not your choice in any meaningful way, it is just the result of a coin flip. You can do some menta…

> Either your choice is some function of your current state and the environment you are in, then the choice is not free This is as free as you can get and I don't think anyone ever posited "free will" as something other than this.

This is as free as you can get and I don't think anyone ever posited "free will" as something other than this.

I would not call this free, it's a choice completely determined by you and the environment. Same situation, same resulting choice. Every single time. And people have certainly used free will to mean many different things.

Re: A delightful quirk of relativity theory

#125
post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given the same starting state, either you get the same outcome every time, or there's randomness involved, that is the point. I challenge you to describe a selection process that is not fully deterministic but where the lack of determinism is caused by something other than randomness. That is what you need to be able to come up with to define free will in a way that isn't smoke and mirrors. There's no agency. Nothing…

> There's no agency. Nothing but automatons. Only if you define 'agency' as requiring magic. If you think that there's no conflict (as I do) between being an automaton and having agency, then there's no problem here.

Yes, if I argue that "free" means "not free" there's no problem there, I agree. Which is why I keep asking those who believe in free will here to actually define it. People almost never even try, because once you do it very quickly becomes clear that it's incredibly hard to the point that you'd have a theory named after you and get taught in university philosophy courses if you managed to come up with something that isn't obviously broken.

The point being that if you start asking questions to determine what people think free will means, you'll find most will argue an automaton can not have free will. In which case to "rescue" free will you need to come up with a way in which entities with supposed free will are not automatons.

So, sure, it is possible to posit an infinite set of theories of "free will" that are true. But I'd claim that nobody has so far managed to come up with one that is both true and that most people will agree fits the woolly concept of "free will" the way most people use it.

The concept is almost religious in the sense that most proponents of it are unwilling to try to nail down specific definitions that might give rise to testable hypotheses, and those who do tend to come up with definitions that are so far from the common understanding as to be meaningless.

Re: A delightful quirk of relativity theory

#126

This would be more fun in a blog post. Twitter is a fucking horrible format for a complex analysis of special relativity. That aside, my favourite quirk from relativity is this: "The more you move in space, the less you move in time." Like relativity in general, it sounds simple enough, but it's consequences are profoundly shocking. (That is, if you take the time to understand it, and don't leap to the conclusion tha…

There is no room for free will in physics, period . All processes are completely deterministic. Even quantum processes might appear to be probabilistic if you look at individual particles, but the statistics are nevertheless completely deterministic: if you look at enough particles, a predictable shape will emerge. The future is set in stone and not only is there no way to change it, but the concept of changing the f…

Quite the opposite: physics is predicated on the idea of free will in the experimenter. That is: their decision to use X machine to perform Y experiment at Z time is essentially an independent, or at least fully random, "choice" on their part. If the experimenter does not have free will, then you run into the possibility of their decision to run the experiment as being somehow entangled with the results. See "Superdeterminism"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superdeterminism

But otherwise I agree that "free will" is basically just a silly argument over the definition of an undefinable term, or a way to explain away loopholes in theology.

Re: A delightful quirk of relativity theory

#127
post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There's no agency. Nothing but automatons. Only if you define 'agency' as requiring magic. If you think that there's no conflict (as I do) between being an automaton and having agency, then there's no problem here.

Yes, if I argue that "free" means "not free" there's no problem there, I agree. Which is why I keep asking those who believe in free will here to actually define it. People almost never even try, because once you do it very quickly becomes clear that it's incredibly hard to the point that you'd have a theory named after you and get taught in university philosophy courses if you managed to come up with something that…

I think free will is the feeling of being a choice making agent in the absence of unreasonable external constraints. This isn't original or unique with me, and I've held this view for quite a large number of years (e.g. this comment from 6 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11740316). It fits pretty well with what people mean when they say 'free will' or 'free choice' in normal every day life (i.e. if you have a gun to your head, you don't have free will, but in lots of other cases you do).

Your definition of it being entirely nonsensical is clearly even worse than this definition for being accepted the way most people use it, since your view implies that there is nothing people mean when then say 'free will', while the fact that almost everyone can tell the difference between someone robbing a bank of their own free will and someone robbing a bank because their loved one is being held hostage tells you that it really does have meaning.

Re: A delightful quirk of relativity theory

#128

More readable formatting: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1482811504424542211.html

Am I crazy, in that I actually like Twitter threads for this sort of thing--at least in the hands of a capable author? When threaded correctly (as this one is), its easy to follow. And the requirement to condense and split thoughts into tweet-sized chunks creates natural breaks to pause and consider the content before continuing. I find the cadence of "each thought is a tweet" provides a nice rhythm. Sure, you can do…

I agree with you. I can understand why a theoretical physicist would find this format frustrating to read. For a layman, the forced tempo of threads helps me understand each point before I move on.

Re: A delightful quirk of relativity theory

#129
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rescuing free-will from the jaws of spacetime would be cool! Free will does not exist. It is logically inconsistent. Either your choice is some function of your current state and the environment you are in, then the choice is not free, or it is independent of your current state and the environment you are in, then it is not your choice in any meaningful way, it is just the result of a coin flip. You can do some menta…

Free will implies agency, and isn't disproved by predictability. I love pizza and hamburgers, and just because you can predict that I will eat either pizza or hamburgers with 95+% likelihood, that does not imply that I did not actively choose one of the two. I had the freedom to choose tofu, I just decided not to because I hate it.

[deleted]

Re: A delightful quirk of relativity theory

#130
post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, if I argue that "free" means "not free" there's no problem there, I agree. Which is why I keep asking those who believe in free will here to actually define it. People almost never even try, because once you do it very quickly becomes clear that it's incredibly hard to the point that you'd have a theory named after you and get taught in university philosophy courses if you managed to come up with something that…

I think free will is the feeling of being a choice making agent in the absence of unreasonable external constraints. This isn't original or unique with me, and I've held this view for quite a large number of years (e.g. this comment from 6 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11740316 ). It fits pretty well with what people mean when they say 'free will' or 'free choice' in normal every day life (i.e. if y…

Try probing what people think having free will actually means, and you'll quickly see that people tend to react very strongly if you suggest that they don't have some vague undefined ability to take actions that are not defined merely by the state of their brains and inputs.

To me what you describe does not at all match what I've observed people try to defend as free will whenever you peer beneath the vague veneer of external coercion.

> Your definition of it being entirely nonsensical is clearly even worse than this definition for being accepted the way most people use it, since your view implies that there is nothing people mean when then say 'free will', when there clearly is something that is meant.

That is not at all what I meant by calling it nonsensical. I am very sure that people do mean "something" and my experience is that this "something" includes a very strongly held belief that peoples actions can't be predicted based purely on the state of their brains and inputs. Try to suggest to people that maybe they're effectively just machines, and you'll find a lot of people balking at it, because it e.g. would imply no soul or anything to set us apart.

What I meant by calling it nonsensical is that when you start probing into why people hold beliefs like that, you'll find it evaporate as you probe. You'll find people can't put up arguments for, but more critically few can even describe a version of free will that fits their beliefs.

You've given a definition, and that's great, but it's a definition that defines away the problem under discussion - nobody who argues against free will would disagree with you that there exists a feeling of being a choice making agent. We disagree with those who claim that we are choice making agents other than in the same way that an automaton can be.

So you are right in the sense that free will by the definition you have given exists. But that's not the kind of free will most people here who are denying free will are debating.

If anything, the definition you have given tends to be an important answer to those who believe in "hard free will" to disambiguate them for why you should keep making choices if you don't have free will: Because whether or not it is an illusion, we do have that feeling, and whether or not we have control over the choices made, if we don't make any choices we still suffer the consequences. So the only logical choice, illusory or not, is to still make choices as if you have free will whether or not you think we have "hard free will".

That said, once one decides that "hard free will" doesn't exist, it tends to have a significant effect on personal beliefs. E.g. punishment (as opposed to rehabilitation, or incarceration for protection) becomes cruel if you accept that "hard free will" is an illusion - a person may believe they have free will, but if it's an illusion we're punishing people for things they didn't have an actual choice in. (Note that this does not really affect the issue of coercion - a person threatened with a gun to take your example might still be due different treatement than one who did something bad without being threatened, because the latter is still more likely to be a risk to others; but there's a difference between risk mitigation/protection/rehabilitation and vengeance - if it was a truly free choice based on "hard free will" vengeance might well be morally justified, while without "hard free will" vengeance is morally horrendous)

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