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Do you ask that question when you hear Einstein's quote, "God doesn't play dice"? I suspect not, because everyone understands that it's a poetic way of expressi
by pluto9 8y ago
Do you ask that question when you hear Einstein's quote, "God doesn't play dice"? I suspect not, because everyone understands that it's a poetic way of expressing the belief that the universe isn't random. So why do you have such a pedantic and uncharitable interpretation of GP's comment, which obviously uses the word "God" in a similar way?
You seem to be having a knee-jerk reaction to the word "God". Your personal preference for the most secular language possible is not a valid reason to pick apart GP's phrasing.
- stochastic_monk 8y agoFirst, he was wrong, and second, he said that in a very different culture. This isn’t the 1920s.
- pluto9 8y agoWow, this discussion is going nowhere fast. > First, he was wrong I agree. And that's completely and totally irrelevant. I have no idea why you even mention it. Obviously what matters is that his meaning is clear. > Second, he said that in a very different culture. This isn't the 1920s. So your objection to GP's phrasing, in spite of it being completely inoffensive and having a perfectly clear meaning, is "because it's $CURRENT_YEAR".
- akvadrako 8y agoTotally irrelevant but I wouldn’t agree Einstein was wrong. QM without collapse is actually a fully deterministic theory. And it makes sense that the universe doesn’t play dice - because there is no source of randomness available. It’s a functional language.
- pluto9 8y agoYes, I suppose saying Einstein was wrong is too strong. It's more correct to say there's no evidence (so far) that he was right. Quantum collapse certainly appears random, but if we eventually find a deterministic cause, Einstein will be vindicated. It's impossible to prove that a process is random. > there is no source of randomness available I think that's going beyond what we can be sure of. We have no evidence that there is randomness, be we also have no evidence that there isn't. QM may be fully deterministic if we disregard collapse, but as far as I'm aware, we can't do that. Collapse is still something we have to contend with given the current state of our knowledge.
- akvadrako 8y agoI say there is no source of randomness because the universe is a closed system by definition. In this case by universe I mean all of existence. And closed systems cannot create randomness - it always comes from somewhere. I suppose we can't rule out collapse totally, but we also can't rule out fairies pushing atoms around. It's just that there is no evidence for collapse, so it seems we can ignore it.
- pluto9 8y agoThe statement "closed systems cannot create randomness" is only true if you assume those closed systems don't feature random collapse. But if the collapse itself is the source of randomness, then no external input is required, and the system is closed.
- FeepingCreature 8y agoFrom an Occam perspective, a universe with fundamental randomness requires an unbounded amount of arbitrary data to specify. Deterministic theories are thus massively advantaged.
- pluto9 8y agoI don't see how. The amount of information needed to specify the current state of a system (the universe) does not depend on how that state was arrived at. It takes one bit of information to specify that a coin is tails-up, regardless of whether it was placed that way deliberately or got that way as a result of a random coin toss.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- kybernetikos 8y agoIt's possible that a deterministic universe might be specifiable in many fewer bits than the bits required for a complete description of its current state. For example if you know you're in a universe where coins always land tail up then you need 0 bits to store that state.
- stochastic_monk 8y agoI am providing context as to why the statement at the center of this is confusing. It still strikes me as putting an unshared perspective onto a concept in a way that doesn’t make sense to me as well as the person to which you were replying. If you continue to disagree, feel free to, but the core premise makes little sense to me.
- coldtea 8y agoWhether he was wrong or not about the underlying theory is irrelevant, as the discussion here is about whether this was confusing. The date that he said isn't relevant either -- nor the culture at that date, since it doesn't affect whether this is "confusing" or not, and I don't see anything drastically different in our culture to render it so. (Or even to render a reference to God "offensive" or a bad metaphor today, if that was your argument)
- FeepingCreature 8y agoI don't think we know that he was wrong. Deterministic quantum theories do exist. Many-Worlds is deterministic.