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A delightful quirk of relativity theory

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Re: A delightful quirk of relativity theory

#71
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rescuing free-will from the jaws of spacetime would be cool! Free will does not exist. It is logically inconsistent. Either your choice is some function of your current state and the environment you are in, then the choice is not free, or it is independent of your current state and the environment you are in, then it is not your choice in any meaningful way, it is just the result of a coin flip. You can do some menta…

>call it free if the choice is not computable in advance Is it not essentially equivalent to "actual" free will? I am perfectly happy with just this.

You are free to call this free will, I would not. For a good hash function there is no way of predicting the output for a given input besides executing the hash function. But I don't see why I would call the output free. If there is no better way to figure out what you will do than letting your brain go through its internal calculations, fine, your behavior is unpredictable, but how is it free?

Re: A delightful quirk of relativity theory

#73

This would be more fun in a blog post. Twitter is a fucking horrible format for a complex analysis of special relativity. That aside, my favourite quirk from relativity is this: "The more you move in space, the less you move in time." Like relativity in general, it sounds simple enough, but it's consequences are profoundly shocking. (That is, if you take the time to understand it, and don't leap to the conclusion tha…

If you think about this in the quantum-mechanical framework, it appears to contradict this free-will problem. In relativity, reality is a solid block, and future events are as immutable as past (no free-will). But in QM this statement would be expressing a level of certainty which violates the measurement problem and Heisenberg's Uncertainty principle. In Penrose's recent book he posits an interesting hypothesis on the Big Bang based on this. Roughly... stuff in the observable universe appears to be slowing down, getting colder, and further away from each other. Things start hot and energetic, and slowly lose energy, slow down and disperse. So, taking this model of the universe and winding it back, you get to the Big Bang, when the universe was infinitely hot and dense. Winding the model forward, you eventually reach a state when the universe is infinitely cold and empty. This is the heat death of the universe, a state of oblivion where there is absolutely no interaction, and no stuff.

This violates Heisenberg, but QM is the map, not the territory, right? So maybe, in practice, reality has a way of beating Heisenberg? Thanks to technology, we have been able to probe this question quite recently. Scientist tried to create a near-perfect vacuum, with all the energy and stuff removed, and isolated from the rest of the universe. Inside the vacuum they created an electrical circuit fed to a computer. The circuit was broken by two floating polished plates, separated by an incredibly small gap, roughly the size of a short wavelength of light. So in this test chamber photons of all sizes could exist around the two plates, but between the plates only the smallest photons could fit. If any large photons enter the chamber they would create positive pressure around the plates, pushing them together, closing the circuit and registering a result. As the scientists pushed the vacuum closer and closer to a perfect vacuum, would Heisenberg get in the way? Maybe the experiment is not powerful enough to push the vacuum close enough to really challenge him?

The experiment was a success. As the vacuum increased, eventually large photons showed up outside of the plates and pushed them together. Photons where appearing out of thin air to ensure that no perfect vacuum could be attained. We call these Virtual Particles. They usually annihilate themselves before becoming "real" and observable, but if local conditions are just right, like near a black-hole, some virtual particles are lucky enough to get pulled and stretched, and this process lends them enough energy to materialize. The virtual particles are of course random, and this apparatus is actually used now to generate proper random values. You can actually tap in to the vacuum energy with an API to get your source of entropy!

  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casimir_effect
  
  Vacuum energy quantum RNG: https://qrng.anu.edu.au/
Back to Penrose... when the universe approaches this infinitely cold empty state, it turns out to be the same, mathematically, as the hot dense state. With everything being so distant and disconnected, the universe sort of forgets that it is big and empty. Then all it takes is the enough quantum fluctuations and virtual particles to appear in some small region of space, that they pull on each other and become real. This might, according to Penrose, trigger another Big Bang.

What does this have to do with relativity and free will? If it is true that nature, at the smallest level, is fundamentally random, then the block universe containing a predetermined future cannot be real. So free will is safe? Not quite. If the Andromeda people are anything like us, their brains are subject to same laws. The electrical activity in the firing synapses, that we call thinking, must also be subject to the random fluctuations of quantum mechanics. How can they have free will, when the electrical impulses driving that will are fundamentally random and unpredictable?

Weird, eh?

Re: A delightful quirk of relativity theory

#74
The way I think of it is we're always moving at the speed of light, through the time axis. Any normal 3d motion is orthogonal to the time dimension, so the time component shrinks ever so slightly as you move faster.

Photons move only in the 3 dimensions, thus never experience time.

Re: A delightful quirk of relativity theory

#75
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rescuing free-will from the jaws of spacetime would be cool! Free will does not exist. It is logically inconsistent. Either your choice is some function of your current state and the environment you are in, then the choice is not free, or it is independent of your current state and the environment you are in, then it is not your choice in any meaningful way, it is just the result of a coin flip. You can do some menta…

If your definition of free will existed, how would you prove it?

Exactly. Free will (or lack thereof) is an untestable theory, better categorized as a thought experiment or philosophical debate.

Re: A delightful quirk of relativity theory

#76

More readable formatting: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1482811504424542211.html

Am I crazy, in that I actually like Twitter threads for this sort of thing--at least in the hands of a capable author? When threaded correctly (as this one is), its easy to follow. And the requirement to condense and split thoughts into tweet-sized chunks creates natural breaks to pause and consider the content before continuing. I find the cadence of "each thought is a tweet" provides a nice rhythm.

Sure, you can do this with paragraphs in a blog post. But Twitter works equally well in my mind!

Re: A delightful quirk of relativity theory

#77
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, I don't bother by the stupidly repeated usernames and dates. I just want to read the damn thing. But it is literally unreadable to me. I couldn't finish reading the thread and had to find an alternative way out of twitter. Fist trial, using my android phone with fennec fox. There is a modal that hides the content asking me to "log in"; if I close the modal I go back to the twitter homepage. Thus unreadable becaus…

I got it now. Yes, Twitter is a walled garden, even if it has large windows to see most of things, there is definitely a wall there. The tricky part is that if this was published in a static html page it would be less likely that it would reach us (even if the page was linked in the thread). Distribution is hard. A good compromise I think is keeping the thread but having a link to a blogpost with the same content in…

> The tricky part is that if this was published in a static html page it would be less likely that it would reach us

But this is an orthogonal issue. Twitter could have exactly the same terms of service, but still serve a single, static, small, html page that would load instantly on all devices. But instead, they choose to serve a bloated mess that does not work in many browsers, and is slow everywhere. Just to display a few lines of text.

Re: A delightful quirk of relativity theory

#78
post #42

This would be more fun in a blog post. Twitter is a fucking horrible format for a complex analysis of special relativity. That aside, my favourite quirk from relativity is this: "The more you move in space, the less you move in time." Like relativity in general, it sounds simple enough, but it's consequences are profoundly shocking. (That is, if you take the time to understand it, and don't leap to the conclusion tha…

Rescuing free-will from the jaws of spacetime would be cool! Free will does not exist. It is logically inconsistent. Either your choice is some function of your current state and the environment you are in, then the choice is not free, or it is independent of your current state and the environment you are in, then it is not your choice in any meaningful way, it is just the result of a coin flip. You can do some menta…

A few issues with the “free will” debate.

1) Define “free”

2) How do you test your hypothesis?

You’re trying to apply logic to an untestable philosophical debate. If you believe free will doesn’t exist, you can’t design an experiment that would invalidate that belief. And if your theory is untestable and unfalsifiable, then what good is it other than a creative exercise?

However, we do know from Quantum Mechanics that the universe is probabilistic and not deterministic:

https://www.thegreatcoursesdaily.com/quantum-universe-fundam....

So, we do know that the universe is not pre-determined and cannot be calculated in advance, but if you want to believe in humans as fully deterministic (or some other definition of no free will) inside of a non-deterministic environment, I haven’t heard anyone propose an experiment that could test that, at which point the debate of “free will” is relegated to the realm of thought experiments rather than science.

So, perhaps the better question is: Does it serve you better to believe there is free will or no free will? And leave it at that.

Re: A delightful quirk of relativity theory

#79
post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Unpredictable" is imprecise to the point of being meaningless. If a black box is fully deterministic to the point that you can construct a model that is entirely accurate, then there's nothing "free" about it. What you're modelling has no agency. For the notion of "free will" to have any meaning at all, it doesn't need to be "unpredictable" in the sense that it keeps confounding someone trying to predict it all the…

> What you're modelling has no agency I see no reason to think that just because something is predictable it is not free. That seems like such a strange constraint to me that I can only assume that we have different understandings of what it means to be free. If I know someone well, I might predict that when offered a free choice between an ice cream and a brussels sprout they will choose the ice cream. The fact that…

I understand why you would call your offer a free choice, the are no constraints attached to the options that could obviously influence the decision, for example picking the ice cream also requires paying a million. Different people with different preferences would make different choices.

But pick one specific person, why would you call their pick a free choice? There choice might not be influenced by your offer but it will be by their preferences. Let them choose, rewind the universe a minute or two, let them choose again. They will make the same choice over and over and over again.

Maybe not if there is true randomness in the universe and this choice happens to be influenced by some random event.

Re: A delightful quirk of relativity theory

#80

This would be more fun in a blog post. Twitter is a fucking horrible format for a complex analysis of special relativity. That aside, my favourite quirk from relativity is this: "The more you move in space, the less you move in time." Like relativity in general, it sounds simple enough, but it's consequences are profoundly shocking. (That is, if you take the time to understand it, and don't leap to the conclusion tha…

Two alternatives for 4D spacetime: - Julian Barbour argues for timeless physics in his book...Timeless Physics. No spacetime but you don't get back free will. - David Deutsch will get you free will back, if you are willing to go along with the many-worlds interpretation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_Barbour https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Deutsch

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