91–100 of 180 posts
I have not heard a convincing explanation of how the universe could produce the Monorail episode of The Simpsons merely by a certain configuration of energies in the first moment of the big bang, and the consequences of thereof. The most obvious argument is that the Monorail episode of The Simpsons is not only possible in at least one of the infinitude of quantum, deterministic universes, but inevitable, and that the…
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…
In fact, this is precisely the shuttlecock analogy in the Nature article, even though that analogy is talking about the quantum Universe initial boundary state, as opposed to the hemisphere example in classical Newtonian mechanics.
I guess the shuttlecock analogy isn’t that useful after all, since it fails to set apart quantum Universe theory from Newtonian mechanics, in that the latter can also have no boundary.
[1] The Dome: A Simple Violation of Determinism in Newtonian Mechanics
Earlier quoted context omitted.
i think for physical systems this might hold true in some way, though, i am not a physics person at all. it just 'feels' that way to me. however, life is also there, and life doesnt nessesarily follow such rules, as actually most of (intelligent?) life is not physical. (emotions, thought etc.) but does have impact / effect on the physical. i dont think non physical things are so determenistic. (maybe they are, but it…
For classical physics it's basically true[1]; see Laplace's demon. I recall also independently inventing determinism as a kid after I realized how easily I'd been swayed by external factors into buying one toy over another. For non-physical things, such as emotions and thought... well, we have no actual proof they're anything but physical. We just don't have proof that they're entirely physical, either. But the simpl…
The physical world may or may not exist out there entirely independent of mind phenomena but the physical laws are a mental model in order to understand the world, the physical laws arise out of the interaction between the physical world and the mind.
The operating order is like this: there is mind -> mind perceives world -> mind makes mental model that presupposes the perceive world is independent of mind -> mind tries to determine its own origin within that presupposition.
If you simplify to the most extreme degree you're not left with "the physical laws", you're left with "there is mind". As such, the burden of proof is on the side of the presupposition that the external world is entirely independent of the mind that perceives it.
Unless physics is totally noise-free, with zero randomness, there is indeterminism. There are so many chaotic processes that amplify randomness that any randomness at all will cause wide divergence in outcomes.
Whether or not noise and free will are the same thing is a question for theologians. Rudy Rucker addressed that question in passing in one of his SF novels.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Very well put! > I don't necessarily see science as trivial pursuit because of our human limitations Me neither, quite the opposite, but the problem you are describing has always been a problem when discussing metaphysics, as it is commonly called. Science is aware of its limitations, that's what makes it science. But sometimes, people tend to conflate a materialistic world view (maybe even strong determinism) with b…
> But sometimes, people tend to conflate a materialistic world view (maybe even strong determinism) with believing in the scientific method. I would say more than sometimes. It seems that if you're not like that, you're immediately labeled religious.
It doesn't seem to affect anything I can think of.
- It feels like it exists; it feels like I'm making my decisions. Even if my whole life is a series of decisions calculated by me in some inevitable way, the calculations still had to happen in my head, and the experience of deciding was part of that. Therefore I own my decisions either way.
- For that reason, a criminal is just as guilty of their crime, whether they spiritually willed themselves to rob the bank, or whether they are predetermined to. The decision to rob the bank happened in their head.
- Punishment for a crime makes just as much sense either way and for the same reason. Seeing criminals get punished will affect the calculations happening in nearby brains, possibly lowering the chances they will in turn decide to rob the bank. Removing errant decision-making matrices from society should reduce the amount of badness.
- All of the opposite things are also true for rewarding good behavior.
What would you do with a CPU that can do nothing but churn out malware due to a design flaw? What if it's a CPU that only does amazing things? Or if it's some mix of both? It seems very similar to how we'd treat people who behave differently.
Appealing to quantum theory to defend free will does not make sense. If the quantum randomness is fundamental, and reality is stochastic at heart, that makes it non-deterministic, but it doesn't make it any less mechanical. It's in the name, after all: Quantum mechanics . If there is any guiding light to the randomness, any pattern to how the random choices come out, then it's not really random, is it? So, if you thi…
Not sure if this is just a moot point, but I'll say it because I'm genuinely curious to hear what people have to say. Anytime I hear theories like this, I feel wary of accepting it as an air-tight reliable outlook because of human limitations. Like, our understanding of quantum physics and all natural laws come from what we can percieve and measure, but there's bound to be phenomena which we can't percieve or measure…
To my mind the very concept of free will is nonsense; as soon as you make a sincere effort to pin it down it breaks down. Yes, there is no absolute proof that it's impossible, but like the second law of thermodynamics, I would be much more surprised to see it violated than, IDK, finding a real magnetic monopole.
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.
If it looks like randomness and quacks like randomness, it's randomness, right? We've experimentally verified these things to dozens of decimal places. Asking whether it's "truly" randomness is meaningless without a measurable way to distinguish what's "truly" random or not.
> how do we know there isn't another (earlier) way to observe the result in some fashion.
Bell's inequalities.
> All the observed complexities can be regarded as partial descriptions of a simple fundamental reality: the Universe’s wavefunction. As an analogy, a perfect sphere can be cut into many chunks with complicated shapes, yet they can be put back together to form a simple sphere. As another analogy, the 100-bit lambda calculus term (λ 1 1) (λ (λ λ λ 1 (2 (λ λ λ 3 1 (2 (λ 2)))) (3 (λ 4 (λ 4 (2 1))))) (1 1)) (λ 1) is a bi…