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A growing number of scientists are convinced the future influences the past

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Re: A growing number of scientists are convinced the future influences the past

#381

Post by lupire »

richardw wrote: post #167

Honestly it’s been staring us in the face for 100 years. Light doesn’t experience time. We’ve known this for so long. Light is created and destroyed in the same instant - across billions of light years it happens instantly. For that to be true, what else must be true? Must. There is no photon. There is just a wave. The interaction probably (definitely?) depends on features of both the emitting electron and absorbing…

I don't think there are any logical arguments against superdeterminism, except spirituality. Even non-super determinism and Penrose quantum consciousness just pushes the superdeterminism into a unobservable metaphysical corner.

Re: A growing number of scientists are convinced the future influences the past

#382

Post by lupire »

andrewfromx wrote: post #19

“It’s important to emphasize at this point in time, whatever that means, that retrocausality is not the same as time travel.” The funny line there is at this point in time. The whole article is about how the future influences the past so… at some point in time retrocauslity will be the same thing?

Retrocausality is like time being cooked spaghetti instead of dry. Or even macaroni. The world line is not "parallel" to the time line. Like the One Electon Universe idea ofositrons as time-reversed electrons. The article doesn't define time travel precisely, but presumably they mean discretely jumping ahead or back without passing through interventing moments.

Re: A growing number of scientists are convinced the future influences the past

#383

Post by lupire »

layer8 wrote: post #128
marcus_holmes wrote: post #37

Interesting because it messes with the school of thought that everything is determined already and we're just following a sequence of actions that arise from the starting conditions of the universe. If causality is broken then maybe we have free will?

The compatibilist view is that there is no contradiction between free will and determinism, because free will refers to macro states and determinism refers to micro states. In addition, in the many-worlds view of quantum mechanics, we don’t follow just a single sequence of events, but all physically possible sequences of events, where the points where sequences branch off each other can correspond to different decisi…

Where exactly might the free will be, then?

Compatibilism is a fancy way of saying "free will so much does not exist that what determists call free will isn't even a valid definition to use as a starting point for investigating an answer." It's not an answer to the question, it's a denial of it.

Another, simpler interpretation of Compatibilism is "if free will doesn't exist, then believing it exists or not has 0 effect on anything, because our beliefs are predetermined, and so at human scales the answers Yes and No are equivalent in all observable ways".

Re: A growing number of scientists are convinced the future influences the past

#384

Post by lupire »

marcus_holmes wrote: post #312
electrondood wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Causality isn't broken; the universe is "simultaneously causal and teleological," because it's superdetermined. There also isn't any free will, because there isn't actually any agent who could have it. Actions we perceive as volitional actually arise in the brain up to 7s before we "choose" them. The sense of a "me" is a post hoc add-on that claims credit for everything, in order to unite the disparate phenomena that…

Again this seems like a "God of the gaps" thing - if this universe isn't strictly deterministic then it's superdetermined by a meta universe, and so on

What if the "so on" is infinite?

Re: A growing number of scientists are convinced the future influences the past

#385

Post by dTal »

sdwr wrote: post #192
TechBro8615 wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This thought experiment implies that humans, or conscious agents, represent a highly concentrated source of entropy, currently (mostly) confined to planet Earth. Meanwhile, in the vastness of space, most of the mass has settled into some relatively deterministic equilibria, with no conscious agents to alter the course of its future. Yet we're down here on the blue planet messing everything up. Coupling this thought w…

My guess is it would conserve entropy/processing on Earth to match the increased cost. But there's a difference between "screaming into the void", like broadcasting radio waves, that presumably have 0 effects, and other things.

0 effects on what? For whose benefit is this simulation? The thought experiment implicitly privileges the observer.

Re: A growing number of scientists are convinced the future influences the past

#386

Post by lupire »

electrondood wrote: post #240
marcus_holmes wrote: post #37

Interesting because it messes with the school of thought that everything is determined already and we're just following a sequence of actions that arise from the starting conditions of the universe. If causality is broken then maybe we have free will?

Causality isn't broken; the universe is "simultaneously causal and teleological," because it's superdetermined. There also isn't any free will, because there isn't actually any agent who could have it. Actions we perceive as volitional actually arise in the brain up to 7s before we "choose" them. The sense of a "me" is a post hoc add-on that claims credit for everything, in order to unite the disparate phenomena that…

And yet doesn't it defy probability that such raw physical determinism would lead to us having this discussion? And if not, is it not amazing that simple subatomic physical applied to a gaseous soup leads to us discussing these questions?

Re: A growing number of scientists are convinced the future influences the past

#387

Post by didericis »

mikewarot wrote: post #343
didericis wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This comment will probably give you hives, but the inability to interpret things like QM literally and the inability of the left brain to process things holistically seems relevant to the interpretability problem. See Iain McGilchrist's "The Matter with Things". (I promise it's less woo-woo than it appears)

I started watching an interview with McGilchrist about the work in question, there was no physics, just a boatload of philosophy. It turns out I don't need physics to be interpretable, just a workable predictive tool.

Fair enough. According to his thesis, the metaphysics/philosophy aspect of this stuff is in a right hemisphere bucket. While there may be reason to meditate on that if you’re a researcher wanting to gain better intuition, if you want to use physics as a tool, the aspects useful to the left hemisphere are all you need/the thesis is irrelevant.

Re: A growing number of scientists are convinced the future influences the past

#388

Post by stametseater »

B1FF_PSUVM wrote: post #316
jakzurr wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the links. Is it bad to upvote an article on HN, just because I think the comment quality is enlightening? Philosophers professing to be scientists has been troubling me more and more the past few years. Also, gotta say many of the top comments are pretty interesting here.

https://existentialcomics.com/comic/447 "There's nothing more annoying than people believing the same thing you do for dumb reasons", ouch ...

The only thing more annoying than that is when you pick a fight with them about their reasons and they insist on believing that you must disagree with their conclusions.

Re: A growing number of scientists are convinced the future influences the past

#389

Post by stametseater »

K0balt wrote: post #254
photochemsyn wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's difficult to see how such a hypothesis could be tested either experimentally or observationally. Sounds more like metaphysics? Stars shine until they run out of fuel, and the age of a star - the status of its fuel, the buildup of fusion products - happens as time passes. Life on planets taps into the flow of sunlight from the star (and/or the flow of heat and chemical energy from the a hot planetary core) to gen…

I think that one thing to keep in mind is that we are only capable of observing the passage of time along one vector because our perception relies upon entropic biological processes. We cannot observe in any subset of possible universes where entropy is not present or is working backwards-Ergo those possibilities are wholly out of our direct perception. That does not mean that causality cannot run in reverse, however…

Biology has nothing to do with it. We can't construct any manner of machine that measures time going in the other direction.

Re: A growing number of scientists are convinced the future influences the past

#390

Post by stametseater »

yyyk wrote: post #203
Notatheist wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Time moving in one direction actually has decent reasoning and is not a superstition. It's just we can't detect time moving backwards with now-current instruments. As soon as instruments allow, humanity will change rather quickly.

The problem with the comparison is what it's used to imply. The popular understanding* is that scientists believed in religious dogma, and that led them to 'unscientific' geocentrism and believing that time has only one direction. It's a backhanded accusation of superstition, and that's unfair towards both current scientists and past scientists. (On a personal note, I'm actually sympathetic to the article's retrocasu…

It seems to me that the popular understanding is influenced by grossly misleading 20th century anti-religious propaganda. The geocentric model is not something the Catholic Church plucked out of the bible; they got it from Ptolemy and other 'heathen' classical thinkers, whom the Catholic Church considered meritorious despite not being Christians. Sure, they then found some biblical citations to back themselves up in this, but the idea was never their own in the first place.
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