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Superdeterminism: The path we didn’t take

backreaction.blogspot.com

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Re: Superdeterminism: The path we didn’t take

#141

Post by ganzuul »

trevyn wrote: post #113
ganzuul wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The root of this puzzle is described by Descartes' "I think, therefore I am." 'Thinking' here does not need to be rational thought. Perhaps it does not even need to be the ability to form new memories. It is hard to say anything meaningful about the dichotomy of one's personal existence but for the purpose of my question it should not matter. In altered states of awareness such as dissociation or 'ego death' this con…

In my mind, once you strip down “I am” to “There appears to exist a repeating neural process that is creating a compressed embedding and record of sensory inputs”, it’s just not very mysterious or worthy of much further philosophical analysis. So these other humans in the world are probably just deterministic robots just like me, that may or may not feel like they have magic conscious aliveness. But my personal exper…

That's an absolutely fascinating thing to claim... Your description sounds like what I have very recently read about research into artificial neural networks, which would have vast implications for the future of the field.

I have not ever seriously considered the ability to turn consciousness on and off at will. In my experience consciousness is absolute and once deep in reverie when I happened upon a mental switch to turn seemingly everything off I instead experienced a brief 'no-mind' blank state and a moment later my mind basically 'rebooted'. During no-mind, "I am" was definitely there but there was no thought to reflect this fact. There was an observer with nothing to observe. Normally, the only interruption to consciousness that I experience is for the time between wakefulness and dream and for this period I have no recollection.

Is this no-mind state what you mean by turning off consciousness?

Re: Superdeterminism: The path we didn’t take

#142

Post by ukj »

themgt wrote: post #8

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…

>this in particular just strikes me as hard to believe / failing Occam's razor

Reality owes us nothing - not even simple laws of physics.

Occam's razor is a pragmatic (human) bias - reality needs not adhere to it.

In fact, if reality adheres to Hickam's dictum then Occam's razor is an outright error.

Re: Superdeterminism: The path we didn’t take

#143

Post by AnimalMuppet »

arnoooooo wrote: post #108
zyxzevn wrote: post #55

Since we are looking at an alternative interpretation: Max Planck's Loader Model - the simplest interpretation that is never looked at. In the Loader Model atoms have a hidden and random energy state, and a detectable state. The energy of light is spread evenly as waves. And when the energy reaches a threshold the detectable state changes. Photons do not exist. What we see are just detectable jumps of the energy stat…

The simplest interpretation is that there is no such thing as matter. Physicists are studying consciousness. It is actually the only explanation that is consistent with experience, since there is no experience outside of consciousness.

Perhaps there is no experience outside of consciousness (depending on exactly what you mean by that). I take it to mean that consciousness is the only thing that we (directly) experience. Fine. But that doesn't mean that "studying consciousness" is the only explanation that is consistent with "no experience outside of consciousness". It's the only explanation that's limited to that.

A real external world is perfectly consistent with us not experiencing anything outside of consciousness, that is, that our consciousness is how we experience what we experience. There's still something out there - an external world - that we experience, though.

The alternative way of taking your words - that there is no external world at all, that all we are is consciousness, that we aren't actually experiencing a real world - is the total death of science, because there's nothing actually there to study.

Re: Superdeterminism: The path we didn’t take

#144

Post by amanaplanacanal »

slashdev wrote: post #140
arnoooooo wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The simplest interpretation is that there is no such thing as matter. Physicists are studying consciousness. It is actually the only explanation that is consistent with experience, since there is no experience outside of consciousness.

This is a new agey woo kind of idea that comes probably from a layman's interpretation of the effect of the observer on changing the quantum system being measured. However, it does not scale to macro systems. As Sam Harris put it when debating this idea with Deepak Chopra, the moon does not disappear when we're not looking at it. The universe was before consciousness and will continue to be afterwards.

> As Sam Harris put it when debating this idea with Deepak Chopra, the moon does not disappear when we're not looking at it.

That’s a silly statement. How do we know that, if we aren’t looking at it?

Re: Superdeterminism: The path we didn’t take

#145

Post by homonculus1 »

amanaplanacanal wrote: post #144
slashdev wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a new agey woo kind of idea that comes probably from a layman's interpretation of the effect of the observer on changing the quantum system being measured. However, it does not scale to macro systems. As Sam Harris put it when debating this idea with Deepak Chopra, the moon does not disappear when we're not looking at it. The universe was before consciousness and will continue to be afterwards.

> As Sam Harris put it when debating this idea with Deepak Chopra, the moon does not disappear when we're not looking at it. That’s a silly statement. How do we know that, if we aren’t looking at it?

Because we have object permanence. People like Deepak Chopra select magical assumptions specifically because they can't produce any verifiable predictions, and waste everybody's time promoting meaningless nonsense.

Re: Superdeterminism: The path we didn’t take

#146

Post by tsimionescu »

YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #97
tsimionescu wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I mean, the limitation of light speed is something that exists to make a consistent theory, not something that somehow has value in itself...? The limitation of causation to a constant speed is well proven in experiments, and seems to be a fundamental aspect of the universe at large scales. If this same limitation doesn't hold at small scales then either: 1. There must be some cutoff between large scale and small s…

Thanks for the explanation. It really is non-intuitive and hard to get especially just from informal texts. What I don't get at all is the bit about quantum entanglement not carrying any information. Apparently, that has to do something with the fact that the collapse of the wave function is a random process? But, if you have probability then you have information, yes? What's the explanation?

I don't know the full maths behind it, but the most important aspect is that you can only perform one measurement on the superposition state - after your first measurement, the particle acquires a definite state, and any subsequent measurements are guaranteed to show that same state. If you are the first one to measure the state of any of the pair of entangled particles, your measurement will cause both particles to take on a definite state.

But even if you are the second one to do the measurement, and the particle has already acquired the definite state because of the other measurement, you can't tell that your measurement result was already guaranteed, since you can't perform another one on the same state to compute the distribution.

Re: Superdeterminism: The path we didn’t take

#147

Post by yyyk »

lmm wrote: post #122
yyyk wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But it has no good explanation for why the Born rule applies at all. The current attempts are IMHO very unconvincing, since I see no reason why rational choice theory should apply at all. A much more detailed way of saying about the same thing as the above sentence: https://backreaction.blogspot.com/2019/09/the-trouble-with-m...

> it has no good explanation for why the Born rule applies at all. Indeed it doesn't, but the Born rule is much smaller and simpler than the notion of collapse that other approaches rely on. > A much more detailed way of saying about the same thing as the above sentence: https://backreaction.blogspot.com/2019/09/the-trouble-with-m... . This post doesn't seem to understand many-worlds. There is no concept of a privile…

>Indeed it doesn't, but the Born rule is much smaller and simpler than the notion of collapse that other approaches rely on.

First, not all of the other approaches have a collapse. e.g. Bohm and a few lesser known others don't have it. Second, it's not clear Born is 'smaller and simpler' than the collapse of some other interpretations. e.g. in QBism collapse arises naturally from the theory and it would be weird if collapse didn't happen.

" This post doesn't seem to understand many-worlds... anything else you might measure with obeys the normal rules of physics"

Her point is that what MWI tries to derive everything from the Schrödinger equation alone, but it still needs to solve its equivalent of the measurement problem (why can we only get certain results on the evolution of this branch?), but that can't be done since Schrödinger is linear and the equivalent problem is not.

Re: Superdeterminism: The path we didn’t take

#148

Post by gtr32x »

harmoat wrote: post #118
throwaway713 wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This would be a terrifying revelation on a personal and existential level. Why is that? I believe the universe is fully deterministic (i.e., no such thing as "true" randomness), yet I also don't think that rules out free will. Free will and determinism aren't necessarily incompatible.

> Free will and determinism aren't necessarily incompatible. How?

If "free will" is only a subjective feeling and not an objective state

Re: Superdeterminism: The path we didn’t take

#149

Post by gliese1337 »

edna314 wrote: post #126
lmm wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Entanglement is a well-understood part of QM, and even Copenhagenists agree on how it applies to elemental particles. (They just think something strange and different happens to macroscopic objects).

If it is well understood, could you tell me how it works? I know the mathematics of entanglement just as I know the the mathematics of a collapse of a wave function, so I wouldn't take any mathematical argument as a valid answer.

The math is the description of how it works. If you are not willing to accept any mathematical argument as a valid answer, you better explain what kind of answer you would accept as an alternative, 'cause it's not at all obvious that any other explanation could even exist.

Re: Superdeterminism: The path we didn’t take

#150

Post by gliese1337 »

wsy wrote: post #98

Superdeterminism looks like metaphysics to me. It seems an attempt to postulate a fundamental truth about the world, but without empirical foundation. Which experiment would falsify the superdeterminism hypothesis?

The one proposed in the paper: looking for time-dependent correlations in the measurements of quantum states that are prepared to be as identical as possible.
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