“Should we discover that quantum theory is not fundamentally random” This would be a terrifying revelation on a personal and existential level.
Superdeterminism: The path we didn’t take
81–90 of 209 posts
Re: Superdeterminism: The path we didn’t take
#82I just finished reading her book, today. Rock on, Sabine! Anything that makes believers in Free Will or Consciousness unhappy makes me happy.
In physics free will is just misleading name for fundamental randomness that breaks causality. When you acknowledge this fact, an replace the words, free will discussion is silly when you attach it to people
"People are capable of random actions they can't control so they have full responsibility of their actions."
"Ability to do some action without a cause, but not able to choose that random actions makes me free from the rest of the universe."
Re: Superdeterminism: The path we didn’t take
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm having trouble seeing what any of that has to do with determinism.
The evolution of a manifold under Ricci flow is deterministic as mentioned, and it is also irreversible, ie many manifolds are smoothed to the same manifold. It's also a diffeomorphism, meaning that it preserves all of the topological information of the manifold that it acts on. Furthermore it can act on manifolds which have no normal form, in at least some sense. Because smooth manifolds with no triangulation do ind…
Aren't diffeomorphisms invertible by definition?
Re: Superdeterminism: The path we didn’t take
#84I'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…
>The common sense response is to start suspecting that I am rigging the game, i.e. that the simple model of the coin flips being independent and random is wrong. The superdeterminist response is to say, "no, your guesses have been superdetermined to be all wrong by the initial conditions of the universe -- keep on playing!"
Err, whether you "keep on playing" or not, would also part of it.
Besides, lacking a source of actual randomness (even non superdeterminist QM doesn't provide one), plain on determinism seems plausible even without needing to explain quantum mechanics. Besides if we did had a source of randomness it would still be just randomness.
Where would "free will" come from (it being something different than randomness, essentially an agent non-determined by the prior state of the universe nor one's prior history, making decisions inside one's head).
Re: Superdeterminism: The path we didn’t take
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
You may find this interesting https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9cgBF6BQ2TRB3Hy4E/and-the-wi...
Wait, is MWI compatible with superdeterminism? That is, the sequence above seems to show that MWI is an effective way to calculate, but does not actually rule out superdeterminism underneath it — just like ordinary quantum mechanics is an effective way to calculate in certain domains of applicability but cannot effectively claim to be the “underlying reality”.
This seems to be the correct take.
Edit. Based on Hossfelder's & Palmer's paper I have transitioned from MWI to superdeterminism. I encourage all to read the paper.
Very beautiful clarity of thought, I say.
Re: Superdeterminism: The path we didn’t take
#86Earlier 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…
I think this is a misinterpretation — superdeterminism says that there is no true randomness in the function, not that the function is of any other particular form. The excitement is from the possibility that the function may be very simple (in Kolmogorov complexity terms), yet yield only one possible result for the state of the universe at each point in time. (Much like the process for calculating pi is simple and there is only one value for pi, but without knowing the process, there appears to be a lot of complexity or randomness.)
Re: Superdeterminism: The path we didn’t take
#87I'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…
Is this a proper understanding of superdeterminism?
I may be totally off base but my understanding is the analogy is more like Craps. Two dice with fair odds create an uneven distribution such that 7 is more common. The dice have "conspired" to bring 7 up more often than 2 because their states interact in a non-linear way.
Re: Superdeterminism: The path we didn’t take
#88I'm not sure what exactly the problem is with measurement (Sounds like it is that physically we don't know what it means?) but current quantum categorical logic research usually does have a working definition of what they call measurement.
Re: Superdeterminism: The path we didn’t take
#89I 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.
You don't understand. In their mind they are not special. To a determinist, the way you feel about yourself is exactly how a fully deterministic being would feel because, in this theory, you are deterministic.
Ascribing to new theories doesn't change the world at all, they can only change your understanding of how the world already existed.
Re: Superdeterminism: The path we didn’t take
#90It's my understanding from reading some of Gerard t'hooft's work on superdeterminism that a superdeterministic theory underlying quantum mechanics would mean that quantum computers would be predicted to not have any advantage over classical computers (given equivalent clock-speed, etc) but Google's demonstration of quantum supremacy seems to disconfirm this prediction.