3 ms·

Some context: t' Hooft the man is treated with great reverence among physicists for his many impressive accomplishments and deep physical insight, but the overw

Some context: t' Hooft the man is treated with great reverence among physicists for his many impressive accomplishments and deep physical insight, but the overwhelming majority think he is dead wrong on quantum mechanics. Even among the small number of nonconformists who would describe their primary work as on the foundations of quantum mechanics, his position is a distinctly minority one.

trevyn 7y ago
Einstein also personally believed in complete determinism and lack of free will, but did not formulate a solid argument before he decohered. See also superdeterminism: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superdeterminism https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superdeterminism It’s interesting that it’s possible for there to be unfalsifiable theories that are nevertheless true, widely believed, and inform how we might approach everyday problems. While not able to be “proved”, it still may be possible one day to come up with large amounts of evidence in favor of such a theory; Stephen Wolfram’s work and ideas seem like they could be in the right direction, even if it is only the very first initial steps: “If the rules are simple enough, one might be able to do something that seems quite outrageous: just search the universe of all possible rules, and find our own physical universe.” - https://blog.wolfram.com/2007/09/11/my-hobby-hunting-for-our-universe/ https://blog.wolfram.com/2007/09/11/my-hobby-hunting-for-our... While the scientific method is extraordinarily effective for questions in its domain of applicability, there are questions that exist out of that domain on which we can nevertheless make progress.
- kittiepryde 7y ago
  (I'm new to this concept) Does free will in the context mean, people's actions could be predicted? Is it just referring to particles as having free will? If it's people, is it generally considered that if a person could be accurately modeled and predicted, then they have no free will?
  - trevyn 7y ago
    Superdeterminism implies that people’s actions are fully determined for their entire lives, but we would likely not be able to predict them in any meaningful way even if we had access to all the necessary information, because the computation would be too large to handle. (The “you need a computer more powerful than the universe to compute the universe faster than the universe computes itself” argument.) In the PDF book linked elsewhere in these comments, t’ Hooft makes the argument that what we mean colloquially by “free will” is more of an emotional definition, and he proposes a rigorous scientific definition that may be more productive. (Of course, given certain neural data from a person, we can predict certain actions on the order of 100’s of ms in advance of the person’s conscious awareness of choice, so...)
ngcc_hk 7y ago
Any summary of the key difference. As long as it opinion with some ground, it would be nice to see competition of ideas not just one voice
- jessriedel 7y ago
  If I recall, t' Hooft thinks that at very short distances nature is described by something like a (local) cellular automata. This is in tension with Bell's inequality, so I think he postulates superdeterminism. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superdeterminism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superdeterminism

trevyn 7y ago

Einstein also personally believed in complete determinism and lack of free will, but did not formulate a solid argument before he decohered. See also superdeterminism: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superdeterminism https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superdeterminism It’s interesting that it’s possible for there to be unfalsifiable theories that are nevertheless true, widely believed, and inform how we might approach everyday problems. While not able to be “proved”, it still may be possible one day to come up with large amounts of evidence in favor of such a theory; Stephen Wolfram’s work and ideas seem like they could be in the right direction, even if it is only the very first initial steps: “If the rules are simple enough, one might be able to do something that seems quite outrageous: just search the universe of all possible rules, and find our own physical universe.” - https://blog.wolfram.com/2007/09/11/my-hobby-hunting-for-our-universe/ https://blog.wolfram.com/2007/09/11/my-hobby-hunting-for-our... While the scientific method is extraordinarily effective for questions in its domain of applicability, there are questions that exist out of that domain on which we can nevertheless make progress.

kittiepryde 7y ago
(I'm new to this concept) Does free will in the context mean, people's actions could be predicted? Is it just referring to particles as having free will? If it's people, is it generally considered that if a person could be accurately modeled and predicted, then they have no free will?
- trevyn 7y ago
  Superdeterminism implies that people’s actions are fully determined for their entire lives, but we would likely not be able to predict them in any meaningful way even if we had access to all the necessary information, because the computation would be too large to handle. (The “you need a computer more powerful than the universe to compute the universe faster than the universe computes itself” argument.) In the PDF book linked elsewhere in these comments, t’ Hooft makes the argument that what we mean colloquially by “free will” is more of an emotional definition, and he proposes a rigorous scientific definition that may be more productive. (Of course, given certain neural data from a person, we can predict certain actions on the order of 100’s of ms in advance of the person’s conscious awareness of choice, so...)

ngcc_hk 7y ago

Any summary of the key difference. As long as it opinion with some ground, it would be nice to see competition of ideas not just one voice

jessriedel 7y ago
If I recall, t' Hooft thinks that at very short distances nature is described by something like a (local) cellular automata. This is in tension with Bell's inequality, so I think he postulates superdeterminism. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superdeterminism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superdeterminism