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Does quantum theory imply the universe is preordained?

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Re: Does quantum theory imply the universe is preordained?

#141
post #100
post #54

> All the observed complexities can be regarded as partial descriptions of a simple fundamental reality: the Universe’s wavefunction. As an analogy, a perfect sphere can be cut into many chunks with complicated shapes, yet they can be put back together to form a simple sphere. As another analogy, the 100-bit lambda calculus term (λ 1 1) (λ (λ λ λ 1 (2 (λ λ λ 3 1 (2 (λ 2)))) (3 (λ 4 (λ 4 (2 1))))) (1 1)) (λ 1) is a bi…

Fascinating - familiar with basic lambda calculus, but trying to wrap my head around this. Can you link to anything that explains more about how this works?

A more readable form of the program is given at [1]. The tree contains all combinators built up from the single point basis A = λxλyλz. x z (y (λ_.z)), which is encoded as bit 0 (left branch), while bit 1 (right branch) encodes prefix application.

[1] https://github.com/tromp/AIT/blob/master/ait/allA.lam

Re: Does quantum theory imply the universe is preordained?

#142

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 came to a very different conclusion on criminality in the absence of free will: compassion and understanding. How often do children do shitty things, and then say "I don't know" when asked why they did it? I have personally had problems lashing out in anger and not even understanding why. Our brains put a lot of effort into keeping us away from painful thoughts and memories. All of that is to say that you don't hav…

I am not a huge fan of justice-as-punishment, but the argument for punishment is straight-forward:

The deterrent effect of punishment does not require free will to work.

Re: Does quantum theory imply the universe is preordained?

#143

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 came to a very different conclusion on criminality in the absence of free will: compassion and understanding. How often do children do shitty things, and then say "I don't know" when asked why they did it? I have personally had problems lashing out in anger and not even understanding why. Our brains put a lot of effort into keeping us away from painful thoughts and memories. All of that is to say that you don't hav…

> But if there is no free will in the choices we make, what's the point of punishing people

What's the point of hitting a ball to score a goal if the ball had no free will and it was moving deterministically?

You punish people in order to provide incentives for people that would align with society's goals.

Human being, having the input and knowledge that they would get punished, would make them avoid doing certain things.

"Deserves" is just a way to provide some idea of a framework on what is the behaviour expected from people for society to perform at its best, together.

Re: Does quantum theory imply the universe is preordained?

#144
If anything, it seems like QM existing makes a pretty good case free will also exists looking at more recent tech developments.

We have virtual worlds that could be described deterministically, such as with procedural generation and a seed function.

Often, these functions are theoretically continuous.

But also often, there's a mechanism by which the continuous function converts into discrete units.

Why?

In order to track state changes to what would otherwise be deterministic by free agents (i.e. players changing stuff).

That reality goes from continuous behavior to discrete upon interactions with free agents, and then goes back to continuous if the persistent information about those interactions is erased, looks a lot like what we might expect from a universe that needed to keep track of changes by free agents in an optimized manner (such that information erasure resets behavior back to functionally defined continuous behavior and not tracking discrete units).

Interestingly, this was predicted by the earliest philosophers thinking about quantized matter being solely governed by natural laws. They reasoned that if the laws of motion governing quanta were singular outcomes, that free will could not exist, thus given their belief in free will they hypothesized that quanta had variable outcomes which they likened to a 'Swerve' moving in a different direction suddenly from the other option. Over 2,000 years before we had experimental evidence that not only was matter made up of quantized parts, but that those parts were best described as moving probabilistically with variable outcomes.

That the behaviors of these quantized parts is time reversible seems less indicative of determinism and more like they serve the function of state tracking for interactions.

Re: Does quantum theory imply the universe is preordained?

#145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I came to a very different conclusion on criminality in the absence of free will: compassion and understanding. How often do children do shitty things, and then say "I don't know" when asked why they did it? I have personally had problems lashing out in anger and not even understanding why. Our brains put a lot of effort into keeping us away from painful thoughts and memories. All of that is to say that you don't hav…

I am not a huge fan of justice-as-punishment, but the argument for punishment is straight-forward: The deterrent effect of punishment does not require free will to work.

That's assuming that the deterrent effect is a major cause of crime reduction, which is questionable.

Re: Does quantum theory imply the universe is preordained?

#146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Of course the longer they have been brainwashed the less they have matter to think about. North Korea is an edge case now but we have plenty of countries with a forever president. Once it gets to 20 years it got so much time to shape the country to ensure further 20 years of power that's basically over. People had chances to change the president before. Some of those countries have periodic rebellions, other are silent. Even North Korea had less than 20 years of a Kim at a certain point. It was coming from a destructive war, etc, and yet...

I think that the USA have a good balance with their two 4 years presidential terms. If one of their next presidents asks to raise it to 3 terms, be prepared to get a forever president there soon and all that it means.

Re: Does quantum theory imply the universe is preordained?

#147

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 you don't believe in free will, you become fatalist, and that's harmful for decision making. Hard determinists also often think in absurdist way, and losing ability into logic is very dangerous. The popular take how to use free will to punish everyone in most cruel way or how to evade such punishment by pretending to be a piece of inert matter is very dumb if not outright malicious and ignores the whole point that free will is primarily needed for the agent himself for survival and isn't needed for most cruel punishments at all. If you really want to cruel, just be cruel for no reason.

Re: Does quantum theory imply the universe is preordained?

#148
post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find the idea of computational irreducibility useful for rescuing a type of free will in a fully determined world. Computationally irreducible programs are perfectly deterministic, yet you can't predict the output before you run them, and nor are there any shortcuts to get there before running them for the first time. The program running in our brains for 'free will' can be computationally irreducible in this way.…

This interpretation is very interesting to me. Do you know of any other philosophical or scientific research into the relationship between computational complexity / reducibility and free will?

Stephen Wolfram's discussion of free will in his book A New Kind of Science is the most relevant:

https://www.wolframscience.com/nks/p750--the-phenomenon-of-f...

Daniel Dennett's book Consciousness Explained comes at the problem from a similar angle.

Re: Does quantum theory imply the universe is preordained?

#149

Not sure if this is just a moot point, but I'll say it because I'm genuinely curious to hear what people have to say. Anytime I hear theories like this, I feel wary of accepting it as an air-tight reliable outlook because of human limitations. Like, our understanding of quantum physics and all natural laws come from what we can percieve and measure, but there's bound to be phenomena which we can't percieve or measure…

>especially with how easily theories of predeterminism tend to enable unproductive, nihilistic outlooks

That's an essential claim, not doubt. First, you're wrong that determinism is a synonym for predeterminism, science doesn't support it, because predeterminism contradicts the second law of thermodynamics. Next you're wrong that nihilism is bad. Is it a dogma? What if you're wrong? Especially since you know yourself your knowledge about nihilism is fragmentary and you spent only microscopic amount of effort to understand it and can't make grand conclusions about it. Then you also imply that delusion is somehow more constructive than truth. That's counterintuitive and needs proofs.

Re: Does quantum theory imply the universe is preordained?

#150
post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disbelief in specific magical thinking of ancient people and belief in the magical thinking of ancient peoples are not all that similar. Though I see how they can look that way when you intentionally omit details about the claims of either side, as human discourse is reduced to Tweet size comments of negligible value.

Nowadays there's many believers of simulation theory, which is pretty much magical thinking.

And like religion that belief is based on social memes, not on science.
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