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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

#71

Post by indutny »

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…

I think photon self-interaction might be thought of as a confirmation of photon's existence. Particle ontology is a tough question, but I don't think there is a reason to exclude photon from the list without excluding all other particles.

Re: Superdeterminism: The path we didn’t take

#72

Post by joycian »

chr1 wrote: post #56
username90 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see superdeterminism as more like breaking the information limit, each particle is aware of the rest of the universe and can thus predict how things will be done everywhere. I don't believe that packing that much information in each particle makes sense, but it shows that superdeterminism doesn't require that a god manually determined the result of each event in the entire history of the universe.

"each particle is aware of the rest of the universe" is non-locality which is the other way of explaining bells inequality.

No, it's called "history". At least that's what the poster means I think.

Re: Superdeterminism: The path we didn’t take

#73

Post by rtpg »

ReadEvalPost wrote: post #20
knzhou wrote: post #7

I've always been mystified at why people take superdeterminism as a good explanation for anything, when it actually acts as a stopsign for thought. For example, suppose I am betting with you on the outcomes of a coin toss. You call heads, the coin comes up tails, you give me some money. You call tails, the coin comes up heads, you give me some more money. This repeats a number of times. The common sense response is t…

I don't really understand what your coin flip metaphor is supposed to mean in the context of the paper. That Superdeterminism could be used in an entirely facile way doesn't really suggest anything about the theory itself. When choosing Superdeterminism as an ontology it suggests different paths for doing research, paths that are unexplored and potentially full of insight. That's what is exciting about it to me.

Superdeterminism boils down to "the universe has baked in all results for all these quantum interactions"

In a dumb "the universe in a computer" metaphor, it's saying that instead of having `do_quantum_thing` be a function taking various physically interesting parameters and then resolving to something interesting (and thus making QM be _about finding that_), we just have a huge array like `result_of_all_quantum_things_ever_to_exist` filled with random garbage.

It's a theory that precludes any notion of predictivity in effects. It's nihilism for physicists.

Re: Superdeterminism: The path we didn’t take

#74

Post by thaumasiotes »

millstone wrote: post #46
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…

I would say it like so: pi has many transcendental neighbors, which are in no way related to pi. But e and pi, despite being numerically distant, are in one sense "close" - related - via Euler's formula. So there's a "local closeness" - the arithmetic difference of pi and its neighbor - but also a "relationship closeness" where pi and e are intimately linked. Perhaps quantum states obey the relationship closeness, no…

> But e and pi, despite being numerically distant, are in one sense "close" - related - via Euler's formula. So there's a "local closeness" - the arithmetic difference of pi and its neighbor - but also a "relationship closeness" where pi and e are intimately linked.

I don't understand how Euler's formula establishes a special relationship. You can compute a function of any two numbers. Where f(a,b) = a^{ib}, then f(e,pi) = -1, but why is that more meaningful than the fact that pi + e = 5.85987... ?

In Euler's formula in particular, the value e cannot be changed -- a complex number is necessarily represented as r * e^{iθ}. (Step one in processing e.g. 3 * 7^{i√2} is to normalize it to 3 * e^{i√2 ln 7}.) Pi is the angle between the vector (1, 0) and the vector (-1, 0). You could change that, and you'd have an equation saying that, if you rotate a unit vector by whatever the new angle is, the result is a complex number of unit magnitude and the angle you specified. For example, e^{2i} = cos(2) + i sin(2) = -0.416 + 0.909i. But I think the claim that this shows a deep, fundamentally special relationship between e and 2 is a hard sell. The cleanness of e^{i * pi} = -1 isn't telling you that pi is related to e -- it's telling you that pi is related to trigonometry.

Re: Superdeterminism: The path we didn’t take

#75

Post by trevyn »

ganzuul wrote: post #64
ncmncm wrote: post #9

I just finished reading her book, today. Rock on, Sabine! Anything that makes believers in Free Will or Consciousness unhappy makes me happy.

I'm super curious about people who make this claim. Are you not conscious? The idea that there are people walking around who look and act like everybody else but behind the eyes there is nothing is terrifying and exhilarating to me. I'm open to the idea that when you observe yourself there is nothing looking back at you, but that doesn't generalize the necessarily subjective experience.

I think “subjective experience” in the everyday human sense is something that we learn / are taught to have — we are taught as children that there is this thing called “me”, how it works, and how to put sensory experiences into its context.

Unlearning that — understanding that this model is one interpretation, but not the only interpretation — is indeed terrifying and exhilarating. I personally wouldn’t call my experience “not conscious”, but it can be a very different experience than what we consider normal everyday waking consciousness.

Re: Superdeterminism: The path we didn’t take

#76

Post by indutny »

indutny wrote: post #71
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…

I think photon self-interaction might be thought of as a confirmation of photon's existence. Particle ontology is a tough question, but I don't think there is a reason to exclude photon from the list without excluding all other particles.

Not to mention that experiments suggest that atoms don't play any special role in the underlying physical structure of reality.

Re: Superdeterminism: The path we didn’t take

#77

Post by [deleted] »

rtpg wrote: post #73
ReadEvalPost wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't really understand what your coin flip metaphor is supposed to mean in the context of the paper. That Superdeterminism could be used in an entirely facile way doesn't really suggest anything about the theory itself. When choosing Superdeterminism as an ontology it suggests different paths for doing research, paths that are unexplored and potentially full of insight. That's what is exciting about it to me.

Superdeterminism boils down to "the universe has baked in all results for all these quantum interactions" In a dumb "the universe in a computer" metaphor, it's saying that instead of having `do_quantum_thing` be a function taking various physically interesting parameters and then resolving to something interesting (and thus making QM be _about finding that_), we just have a huge array like `result_of_all_quantum_thin…

[deleted]

Re: Superdeterminism: The path we didn’t take

#78

Post by throwaway713 »

mberning wrote: post #13

“Should we discover that quantum theory is not fundamentally random” This would be a terrifying revelation on a personal and existential level.

> 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.

Re: Superdeterminism: The path we didn’t take

#79

Post by Strilanc »

repsilat wrote: post #34
gliese1337 wrote: post #12

I find it strange that they claim that QM lacks any explanation for measurement. There are explanations for measurement. Not everyone agrees with any single one of them, but they definitely exist. Superdeterminism is one, but it's not the only one. It is really only the Copenhagen Interpretation of QM that has a measurement problem. Personally, I am on board with the "measurement is just entanglement" solution (it se…

I'm also a Many-Worldser, but I don't quite know how to answer the question "How does the Born Rule work?" That is, if "worlds" branch off with some amplitudes, and there's a "me" on this branch and another on that branch, how does it make sense to talk about the probability of "me me" being this one or that one? Empirically we know how to calculate it from the amplitude, but why is that more reasonable than any othe…

Consider a quantum computer running a classical inference process, specified as a reversible circuit. The inference process is estimating the probability of getting a 1 insead of a 0 from some trial, with trial results provided as a series of inputs into the computation. The output of the process is then written into some specific register. This is meant to be analogous to a human embedded in a quantum world, doing experiments and thinking in classical sort of way and writing down conclusions.

Now go compute what happens when, instead of feeding classical trial results into this computation, you feed in a series of qubits each in the state a|0> + b|1>. You will find that the output register ends up storing a state extremely close to the representation of the probability |b|^2, up to some precision limited by the number of samples made available to the inference process. This indicates that "almost all the branches" must be agreeing on this particular value as the probability. That's the sort of way in which quantum mechanics, minus the Born Rule, predicts that almost all agents embedded in a quantum world will conclude that it follows the Born rule.

Re: Superdeterminism: The path we didn’t take

#80

Post by [deleted] »

mberning wrote: post #29
knzhou wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Terrifying revelations comes for cheap these days. Plenty of people say that the opposite of that is terrifying as well. I figure if I'm going to be terrified either way, I might as well not be!

It seems to me that most people intuitively know that there is a large amount of chance and “unknowns” in life and the universe. The find out the opposite is true would be a very big deal.

[deleted]
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