21–30 of 180 posts
I have yet to see a subscriber of superdeterminism not look both ways before crossing the road.
Why would belief that we are just agents responding predictably to stimuli imply that one would not respond predictably to stimuli?
The fact that ones behavior does not change when one acknowledges that all behavior is deterministic and predetermined seems evidence in favor not against that hypothesis.
"Random" is a property of your mind, not of the world. If I shuffle a deck of cards in a way that you don't know about, then the next card I pull is "random" to you even though, obviously, if one were to turn the cards face up nothing would have changed about the order of the cards, but now the next card would be fully deterministic. I could likewise sort the deck with an algorithm completely unknown to you. I could…
Limited information about the initial state is one source of randomness but not necessarily the only one. Whether there is true randomness in the universe is at very least an open question.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
A good quip, lol. But of course they would, because they must, because the feeling of control (that is: the unconscious belief in control) is just as intrinsic as the actual absence of control.
which in other words makes superdeterminism unfalsifiable, because any attempt to do so can be met with "it must have been that way"
"Random" is a property of your mind, not of the world. If I shuffle a deck of cards in a way that you don't know about, then the next card I pull is "random" to you even though, obviously, if one were to turn the cards face up nothing would have changed about the order of the cards, but now the next card would be fully deterministic. I could likewise sort the deck with an algorithm completely unknown to you. I could…
"Random" is a property of your mind, not of the world. Limited information about the initial state is one source of randomness but not necessarily the only one. Whether there is true randomness in the universe is at very least an open question.
Can you also give an example where "true randomness" would differ from the randomness I describe on the actions a human would take? That is to say, if a my internal model of the world tells me a coin landing on heads is 50/50 how does "true randomness" or not of the resulting coin toss impact how I should gamble on coin tosses?
imho the idea of "randomness" separate from our own internal state of belief is a nonsensical concept, but would appreciate examples to the contrary.
This does make me wonder: how do we know that random quantum processes are truly random? This gets philosophical very quickly. But for our purposes: independent, uniform, etc. But how do we know there isn't another (earlier) way to observe the result in some fashion.
1. locality (no backwards causation / FTL information transfer)
2. determinism
3. counterfactual definiteness (unperformed measurements still have single definite results: we can talk meaningfully about what we would have seen had we done a different experiment)
4. QM gives correct predictions.
Everett (the badly misnamed "many-worlds" interpretation) rejects 3: "measurement" is just what unitary evolution looks like from the inside, and from that perspective always has multiple outcomes.
Superdeterminism rejects 4: QM is wrong, but the initial conditions of the universe were for some reason set up in such a way as to prevent us from carrying out any experiments that would demonstrate that.
When I was a teenager I had an idea: If you rolled marbles down a hill, assuming that identical starting conditions were applied each time, then the marbles' paths and final position would be the same each time. This also implies that if you know the starting conditions, you could calculate the state of any point in time from there. It made me curious whether you could apply this same logic to our universe -- though…
If the path of the marbles were to be determined by some sort of gate in the path that would open or close depending, via a Geiger detector, on whether some uranium atom had decayed, then, as far as we know, the path would be truly unpredictable.
That is to say, the closer you get to the atomic behavior of atoms, the harder it is to make "deterministic" descriptions of what is going to happen.
We often describe this in terms of "coin flips" as you can make a decent discussion over what you will see on 1000 coin flips, but you cannot make such a statement over what you will see over 1.
When I was a teenager I had an idea: If you rolled marbles down a hill, assuming that identical starting conditions were applied each time, then the marbles' paths and final position would be the same each time. This also implies that if you know the starting conditions, you could calculate the state of any point in time from there. It made me curious whether you could apply this same logic to our universe -- though…
To look at it another way, the entropy of a system is always increasing, so you don't have enough information when the marble is at the top of the hill to know the exact outcome when it's at the bottom (on a quantum scale, or over a long enough period of time).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Random" is a property of your mind, not of the world. Limited information about the initial state is one source of randomness but not necessarily the only one. Whether there is true randomness in the universe is at very least an open question.
Can you clarify what "true randomness" means out side of the context of human agency and perception? Can you also give an example where "true randomness" would differ from the randomness I describe on the actions a human would take? That is to say, if a my internal model of the world tells me a coin landing on heads is 50/50 how does "true randomness" or not of the resulting coin toss impact how I should gamble on co…
Measure the spin of an electron along two different axis, to the best of our knowledge - or maybe just my - the result of the second measurement is not predictable by anything. Of course only until it turns out that hidden variables is the correct interpretation and that the hidden variables can be measured, then this also becomes the other kind of randomness.
"Random" is a property of your mind, not of the world. If I shuffle a deck of cards in a way that you don't know about, then the next card I pull is "random" to you even though, obviously, if one were to turn the cards face up nothing would have changed about the order of the cards, but now the next card would be fully deterministic. I could likewise sort the deck with an algorithm completely unknown to you. I could…
And I think those have been ruled out by Bell's Theorem, or at least implies other very counterintuitive things have to be true instead.
"Random" is a property of your mind, not of the world. If I shuffle a deck of cards in a way that you don't know about, then the next card I pull is "random" to you even though, obviously, if one were to turn the cards face up nothing would have changed about the order of the cards, but now the next card would be fully deterministic. I could likewise sort the deck with an algorithm completely unknown to you. I could…
I believe what you're saying is that there is indeed a superdeterministic hidden variable that would allow us to know before the value is defined what it will be. For simplicity let's assume the Many Worlds interpretation... this variable would tell us which world we're in.
The issue with this explanation is that we're not in that World yet, because our current World is only the result of past quantum events. When this next undefined value becomes defined, our single world splits into Many more Worlds, each of which has ours as a parent, so how could one of those be more or less intrinsically ours? Each is equally our World, and if we back up a single "step", our World contains all of the supposed hidden variables that say which child World is which. So I find that Many Worlds seems to invalidate superdeterministic hidden variables.
With other, single-World interpretations, the hidden variables make more sense. What you say would be true. But single-World interpretations are already more complicated than Many Worlds, with or without hidden variables and superdeterminism.