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Does quantum theory imply the universe is preordained?

nature.com

131–140 of 180 posts

Re: Does quantum theory imply the universe is preordained?

#131

I always see references to free will when certain people start talking about quantum mechanics. Why do people care if free will exists or not? 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 d…

I think you would like ‘Determined’ by Robert Sapolsky (mentioned in the article), an endocrine neurobiologist and ethologist. He talks about predeterminism from a biological point of view, as well as implications on responsibility and justice systems in the absence of free will.

Re: Does quantum theory imply the universe is preordained?

#132
post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> [If] they are predetermined to, the decision to rob the bank happened in their head. 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.

If I build an AI that is biased toward creating malware, is it the AI's fault? 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.

the difference between toy and the Ai model is intent.

Re: Does quantum theory imply the universe is preordained?

#133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know, there's many stories of modern soldiers doing terrible things, coming back to the civilized world and living horrible lives due to PTSD and not being able to parse what they did. 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 famil…

I'm familiar with Milgram experiments. To refer to recent facts, hundreds of thousands of Russians fled the country after the start of the war in Ukraine [1] Reasons vary but I think both of us remember the wave of male migrants when Russia called for mobilization in October 2022. Some of them probably didn't want to get killed, others didn't want to kill people. I'm not merciful about this: the people of a country a…

Somehow I can’t blame the people of North Korea for the crimes of Kim Jung Un. Fill in the country and leader of your choice there.

Re: Does quantum theory imply the universe is preordained?

#134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many worlds is really just another form of determinism. If everything that can happen does, no one in any of the individual universes has free will.

Unless awareness is independent of the universe and traverses the branching worlds through observation and free will.

Does that imply that I have free will and the rest of you all are zombies?

Re: Does quantum theory imply the universe is preordained?

#135
> Describing the precise positions and momenta of all the particles involved requires so much information that any statement of the initial condition is too complex to be a law.

>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.

Re: Does quantum theory imply the universe is preordained?

#136

I always see references to free will when certain people start talking about quantum mechanics. Why do people care if free will exists or not? 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 d…

> I always see references to free will when certain people start talking about > quantum mechanics. Why do people care if free will exists or not?

> 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.

Re: Does quantum theory imply the universe is preordained?

#137
post #125

I always see references to free will when certain people start talking about quantum mechanics. Why do people care if free will exists or not? 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 d…

> [If] they are predetermined to, the decision to rob the bank happened in their head. 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.

Our natural languages are just too confusing to talk about this topic.

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.

Re: Does quantum theory imply the universe is preordained?

#138
post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do infusorias make choices? They don't even have brains.

How does a flame decide what to burn?

By consuming that which maintains its identity, like all things. Otherwise it would cease to be a flame like we cease to be people when we stop consuming that which keeps us from becoming dirt.

Re: Does quantum theory imply the universe is preordained?

#139

> Describing the precise positions and momenta of all the particles involved requires so much information that any statement of the initial condition is too complex to be a law. >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 conditi…

Pretty sick sci fi novel plot in there at the least

Re: Does quantum theory imply the universe is preordained?

#140

I always see references to free will when certain people start talking about quantum mechanics. Why do people care if free will exists or not? 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 d…

Free will is a very useful heuristic that lets you quickly determine when to stop looking for the root cause of events that interest you.

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.

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