19 ms·

Superdeterminism: The path we didn’t take

149 points by chmaynard 7y ago

zyxzevn 7y ago
Since we are looking at an alternative interpretation: Max Planck's Loader Model - the simplest interpretation that is never looked at. In the Loader Model atoms have a hidden and random energy state, and a detectable state. The energy of light is spread evenly as waves. And when the energy reaches a threshold the detectable state changes. Photons do not exist. What we see are just detectable jumps of the energy states. I never heard of it, until I found an experimenter that claimed to find evidence for it. With higher levels of energy than normal light, he found that (more often) two or more atoms can reach a next state, when one quantum of energy is emitted. Other experimenters classify these double-quanta as "noise". Occham's razor? Because it is the simplest interpretation, I would like to see more research into this. Maybe there is something to it, or maybe it can reveal some hidden variables in the detectors. See: www.threshodmodel.com Note: the experimenter is not a very good communicator and it took me some time to understand what he was explaining.
- arnoooooo 7y ago
  The simplest interpretation is that there is no such thing as matter. Physicists are studying consciousness. It is actually the only explanation that is consistent with experience, since there is no experience outside of consciousness.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - arnoooooo 7y ago
    I wished people offered a rebuttal instead of just downvoting. I understand Einstein himself entertained the idea.
  - eloff 7y ago
    This is a new agey woo kind of idea that comes probably from a layman's interpretation of the effect of the observer on changing the quantum system being measured. However, it does not scale to macro systems. As Sam Harris put it when debating this idea with Deepak Chopra, the moon does not disappear when we're not looking at it. The universe was before consciousness and will continue to be afterwards.
    - amanaplanacanal 7y ago
      > As Sam Harris put it when debating this idea with Deepak Chopra, the moon does not disappear when we're not looking at it. That’s a silly statement. How do we know that, if we aren’t looking at it?
      - homonculus1 7y ago
        Because we have object permanence. People like Deepak Chopra select magical assumptions specifically because they can't produce any verifiable predictions, and waste everybody's time promoting meaningless nonsense.
        arnoooooo 7y ago
        I'm not sure Deepak Chopra is the best representative for such ideas. Donald Hoffman or Bernardo Kastrup make a much more serious case. But still, the number one unverifiable prediction is that there is a thing called matter that exists outside consciousness and that somehow, consciousness emerges out of it. Nobody can prove matter exists, nobody has ever had a direct experience of it, and nobody has any idea how consciousness could come out of it, yet it's still the default hypothesis…
      - eloff 7y ago
        Object permanece is a silly statement? On the contrary it's the mainstream view. Anyone wanting to challenge it has the burden of proof on them to demonstrate otherwise.
        7y ago
  - AnimalMuppet 7y ago
    Perhaps there is no experience outside of consciousness (depending on exactly what you mean by that). I take it to mean that consciousness is the only thing that we (directly) experience. Fine. But that doesn't mean that "studying consciousness" is the only explanation that is consistent with "no experience outside of consciousness". It's the only explanation that's limited to that. A real external world is perfectly consistent with us not experiencing anything outside of consciousness, that is, that our consciousness is how we experience what we experience. There's still something out there - an external world - that we experience, though. The alternative way of taking your words - that there is no external world at all, that all we are is consciousness, that we aren't actually experiencing a real world - is the total death of science, because there's nothing actually there to study.
    - arnoooooo 7y ago
      "It's the only explanation that's limited to that." Indeed, and that's what makes it the simplest explanation. People posit matter, which nobody has ever had a direct experience of, then can't find a way to explain how consciousness comes out of it. Starting with consciousness is much in line with experience and solves the problem. I think it's reasonable to assume that an "external" world exists, but it doesn't mean that it's not all consciousness : as Donald Hoffman posits, what we perceive is the combined output of other conscious agents. I don't see how that means the death of science. I suppose you meant physics, which could indeed be seen in this context as a rather convoluted way of studying consciousness, but I'm not so sure : it would become a study of the regularities of consciousness.
- indutny 7y ago
  I think photon self-interaction might be thought of as a confirmation of photon's existence. Particle ontology is a tough question, but I don't think there is a reason to exclude photon from the list without excluding all other particles.
  - indutny 7y ago
    Not to mention that experiments suggest that atoms don't play any special role in the underlying physical structure of reality.
  - zyxzevn 7y ago
    Photons can also be seen as waves. And waves can also influence each other, in non-linear situations. Because the experiments and theory are so simple, I think it is the most scientific approach, to at least test this Loader model more thoroughly. Even if I don't agree with it. ;-)
- thicknavyrain 7y ago
  I haven't heard of the Loader model, but as an (ex-) Particle Physicist, I should point out that photons are just one example of the more general phenomenon of gauge bosons. In terms of the particle content associated with nature (and the predictions the _existence_ of those particles imply as emergent phenomena from "gauge theories" in quantum field theory), the photons of electrodynamics as well as their counterparts, the weak bosons of the weak force and the gluons of quantum chromodynamics, all make very specific predictions about how certain particles ought to behave and the strength with which they should do so. In that light, photons (and to a lesser extent, the other gauge bosons) play a significant role in theoretically calculating the dipole moment of the electron (how strong the electron interacts electromagnetically) which has been calculated to about 12 decimal places theoretically and experimentally measured to roughly the same precision. And the prediction fits _beautifully_, I believe it is the most (numerically) accurate prediction in all of science. So at the very least, photons are meaningful descriptions of some kind of quantum field oscillation whose existence is, implicitly, extraordinarily well determined. Typing this in a rush, but just to say, photons are a very specific kind of energy quanta, and I don't think the loader model really replaces them in that sense.
  - zyxzevn 7y ago
    I think the Loader Model is a more direct path to what you are describing. In most cases it does not break with any observations that I saw. The "accuracy" is probably the same, depending on how the experiment is setup. Even a standing clock can give the accurate time, once a day. ;-) But, the experiment that are directed towards detecting this variant, show that the Loader model is valid... due to double detections of quanta, when there should only be one. According to the experimenter that I linked to, with easy-to-repeat experiments. So Occham's razor tells me to look into it, before starting more complicated theories. It is not my favourite theory, but I am a scientist. I had a small discussion setup here. Feel free to add a comment. https://saidit.net/s/Physics/comments/18rz/nullhypothesis_quantum_mechanics_shows_that_there/ https://saidit.net/s/Physics/comments/18rz/nullhypothesis_qu... (saidit is a friendly community for open discussions)
ReadEvalPost 7y ago
Direct link to the paper this post sets up: https://arxiv.org/abs/1912.06462 https://arxiv.org/abs/1912.06462 Always been a fan of Superdeterminism, happy to see actual physicists working on it.
- comboy 7y ago
  If you've always been a fan then maybe you have some more recommended reading for me? Title of the paper seems to be a bit over the top, it just seems to counter some straw man arguments against Superdeterminism.
ouid 7y ago
Hopefully this doesn't make me seem like a crank, but it seems to me that the path forward on superdeterminism is to use uncomputability. 1: Untriangulable smooth manifolds exist. 2: The manifolds can be smoothed via Ricci flow in a manner similar to how Perelman solved the Poincare conjecture. 3: This smoothing, applied to an untriangulable manifold, is irreversible, deterministic, and yet somehow must not converge to any triangulable manifold.
- ajkjk 7y ago
  I'm having trouble seeing what any of that has to do with determinism.
  - sdenton4 7y ago
    Cranks to the left of me, jokers to the right, here I am, super determined with you... Even the comments on the blog post seem exceedingly cranky. I can imagine it's very hard to work in such an area, with such a noisy peanut gallery.
    - vanderZwan 7y ago
      If you click through to the lecture she links by Tim Palmer[0]it becomes clear that he's got to deal with this on an even worse level, because he works on both this topic and on the physics of climate change. The comments there are just painful to read. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w-IHJbzRVVU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w-IHJbzRVVU
  - AlEinstein 7y ago
    Because Perelman. I mean he wrote Perelman’s name so he must be onto something.
  - ouid 7y ago
    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 indeed exist. The manifold cannot, in whole, as a result of this, get "simpler" or even maintain the same amount of simplicity, it must somehow get more complex, which would require information to be generated. The primary problem with deterministic models, at least as I understand it, is that there's no obvious way for deterministic processes to get more complex.
knzhou 7y ago
I'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 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!" You can use superdeterminism to explain literally anything (not merely a lot, but actually, literally everything) while gaining precisely zero insight into what is actually going on, and precluding any future insight. Sure, it fixes a few philosophical problems, but so does saying you're a brain in a vat; in both cases you throw out all of science as a side effect. While their paper does address some philosophical objections, it doesn't even mention this scientific objection, which seems far more severe to me.
- sysbin 7y ago
  Your example given with the conclusion to follow doesn't make sense. I'm a hard determinist, I've known others like myself and nobody leaps to the thought, "the initial conditions of the universe means this is all meaningless" and we do try to observe every possibility such as the game being rigged. I don't necessarily think superdeterminism can explain literally anything or that if it did explain something there would be no gain of insight. That just seems like you're postulating.
  - knzhou 7y ago
    You're not distinguishing between determinism and superdeterminism. Determinism is perfectly compatible with science, as it admits the idea of controlled and reproducible experiments. (For example, if you believe in determinism, you could grab the coin out of my hand and run some tests on it yourself.) The whole point of superdeterminism is to go further and deny this.
    - 7y ago
themgt 7y ago
I find this Quora answer convincingly reflects my thinking as to why Superdeterminism can't possibly be correct given Bell’s theorem[1] Skimming the actual paper[2] I'm not really seeing a convincing explanation, this in particular just strikes me as hard to believe / failing Occam's razor: The belief that such tests tell us something about (the implausibility of) Superdeterminism goes back, once again, to the idea that a state which is intuitively “close” to the one realized in nature (eg, the wavelength of the light from the distant quasar was a little different, all else equal) is allowed by the laws of nature and likely to happen. However, in a superdeterministic theory what seems intuitively like a small change will generically result in an extremely unlikely state; that’s the whole point. For example, in a superdeterministic theory, a physically possible counterfactual state in which the wave-length of the photon was slightly different may also require changes elsewhere on the past hypersurface, thereby resulting in the experimenter’s decision to not use the quasar’s light to begin with. "Reality is a giant deterministic conspiracy" is more plausible than abandoning local realism? They do (kinda?) propose an experiment at least? [1] https://www.quora.com/Why-do-some-crackpot-scientists-go-after-super-deterministic-theories-when-Bells-theorem-has-proved-that-local-realism-is-false https://www.quora.com/Why-do-some-crackpot-scientists-go-aft... [2] https://arxiv.org/pdf/1912.06462.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1912.06462.pdf
- corporate_shi11 7y ago
  Bell's theorem gives us a clear path forward in understanding the universe. Local realism must be discarded.
  - Simon_says 7y ago
    Realism is the axiom to give up, not locality. Just accept MWI as the current best guess and get on with your life.
    - selestify 7y ago
      There’s no evidence MWI is the best guess compared to other interpretations
ncmncm 7y ago
I just finished reading her book, today. Rock on, Sabine! Anything that makes believers in Free Will or Consciousness unhappy makes me happy.
- corporate_shi11 7y ago
  Consciousness is not premised on or bound to free will. One can accept the mystical nature of consciousness while also disregarding free will.
- ganzuul 7y ago
  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.
  - trevyn 7y ago
    I think “subjective experience” in the everyday human sense is something that we learn / are taught to have — we are taught as children that there is this thing called “me”, how it works, and how to put sensory experiences into its context. Unlearning that — understanding that this model is one interpretation, but not the only interpretation — is indeed terrifying and exhilarating. I personally wouldn’t call my experience “not conscious”, but it can be a very different experience than what we consider normal everyday waking consciousness.
    - ganzuul 7y ago
      The root of this puzzle is described by Descartes' "I think, therefore I am." 'Thinking' here does not need to be rational thought. Perhaps it does not even need to be the ability to form new memories. It is hard to say anything meaningful about the dichotomy of one's personal existence but for the purpose of my question it should not matter. In altered states of awareness such as dissociation or 'ego death' this conscious 'eye' which observes one's experiences remains unchanged. It is not the idea of the self described by "I am I", but the self which only asserts its own existence as "I am".
gliese1337 7y ago
I find it strange that they claim that QM lacks any explanation for measurement. There are explanations for measurement. Not everyone agrees with any single one of them, but they definitely exist. Superdeterminism is one, but it's not the only one. It is really only the Copenhagen Interpretation of QM that has a measurement problem. Personally, I am on board with the "measurement is just entanglement" solution (it seems intuitively obvious to me, but then I'm sure superdeterminism seems intuitively obvious to those who believe in it as well), which makes superdeterminism unnecessary.
- knzhou 7y ago
  While I lean the same way, the measurement problem is definitely harder than you say. If it's just entanglement with an external system, you still have to answer how that superposition ends up with you personally observing only one result.
  - MrEldritch 7y ago
    you are a large, warm object, and as such you decohere basically instantaneously. (In any case, far faster than the milliseconds required for you to perceive anything.) As such, the state-in-which-you-perceive-result-A is completely unable to causally influence the state-in-which-you-perceive-result-B, and vice versa.
  - gliese1337 7y ago
    Because you are part of the entangled system. You can only know that a measurement apparatus is in a definite state because you interacted with it, so your own mental state is partially dependent on it. You, however, being a large, warm thing decohere rather rapidly, even if the formal measurement apparatus can be made not to. Your consciousness is a classical phenomenon, so you can only perceive one possible classical outcome. If you believe in Many Worlds (which is the most natural interpretation to pair with this resolution of the measurement problem, but is not absolutely forced), then there are other versions of you out there in different parts of state-space which perceive different outcomes, and may even be observable as elements of a superposed-you in principle if not ever in practice, but there is no means of transferring information between any of these different versions of you. EDIT: To whomever downvoted the parent... why? It is, after all, a perfectly reasonable question, especially (although I do not presume that knzhou personally holds this view) in light of the reasonably common assumption that consciousness is somehow quantum in nature itself.
mberning 7y ago
“Should we discover that quantum theory is not fundamentally random” This would be a terrifying revelation on a personal and existential level.
- sysbin 7y ago
  How so, can you expand on what would be terrifying on a personal and existential level for you? I've encountered a few people that will cite quantum theory when it comes to discussions about questioning if one has free will. I cannot even imagine how quantum theory gives a us true free will and without one's will just being the outcome of the system we reside in.
  - mberning 7y ago
    I am OK with the thought that the the universe sprang into existence, and through some form of randomness or chance, things played out on this planet that allowed for life and for me to exist on it. Now go back to step one and assume that, even on an atomic level, there is no chance, no randomness. Given all of the preconditions, we get this outcome every single time. Then I have to reconsider why is there even the illusion of choice. Why should I even write this comment. It’s crazy.
    - sysbin 7y ago
      > Then I have to reconsider why is there even the illusion of choice. Why should I even write this comment. I think the answer is society conditions us to assume we have choice by how society is structured and how society functions. You writing the comment is just me being an external force upon you and triggering it from all the previous external forces that made you eventually react the way you did. Even if everything isn't random, a lot of what people like to wish for & believe, can in fact come true but it's hard for me to rationalize it. Other than an outside our universe deterministic observer needing to exist.
    - outlace 7y ago
      How would random motion of atoms give you any more free choice than deterministic motion of atoms? Personally, fundamental randomness is more disturbing to me because it implies a-causality, i.e. that at the smallest scales things happen for no reason at all and would be unexplainable in principle.
philip142au 7y ago
I believe strongly that everything is deterministic. As a programmer, that means all is purely functional.
- ajkjk 7y ago
  What does it matter what you believe? The universe is evidently somewhat probabilistic, what's left is explaining the details.
  - philip142au 7y ago
    No its deterministic, but it appears to be probabilistic to you. Which it can be.
acqq 7y ago
Argh. Reading the announced paper on arxiv https://arxiv.org/abs/1912.06462 https://arxiv.org/abs/1912.06462 In the introduction: "Most importantly, we will discuss how it may be possible to test this hypothesis in an (almost) model independent way." Most. Importantly. Then in the paper, under "Experimental Test": "This means concretely that one should make measurements on states prepared as identically as possible with devices as small and cool as possible in time-increments as small as possible. This consideration does not change much if one believes the hidden variables are properties of the particle after all. In this case, however, the problem is that preparing almost identical initial states is impossible since we do not know how to reproduce the particle’s hidden variables. One can then try to make repeated measurements of non-commuting observables on the same states, as previously laid out in [36]." And finally: "[36] S. Hossenfelder, “Testing super-deterministic hidden variables theories,” Found. Phys. 41, 1521 (2011) [arXiv:1105.4326 [quant-ph]]." So after the "most" qualified introduction, eventually just a reference to her 2011 paper. "Most importantly" "good" ... joke?
beamatronic 7y ago
It’s humbling to me that there are 7 billion people on this planet. Many of them are highly educated. And we are running up against problems we can’t understand. The fundamental nature of the universe.
- ganzuul 7y ago
  I think the problem is anthropocentrism. It's much like the IMO preposterous and archaic idea that a deity has to resemble us. People who study the fundamentals of quantum mechanics complain that philosophy is seen as useless. From my understanding this stems from how in detail the Copenhagen 'interpretation' took hold in particulary U.S. institutions; and it is entirely non-scientific. Copenhagen is an engineering discipline, and not a scientific theory. In natural philosophy we have to account for our position compared to the object we study. We are not separate from nature. Philosophy has many ideas which help us deal with our physical reality and they need to be taken seriously.
otabdeveloper4 7y ago
God is a "He", not a "She". Humanity is "She".
dchichkov 7y ago
A nice and compelling argument in that paper: "The classical Liouville equation is linear in the probability density due to conservation of probability. But this linearity says nothing whatsoever about whether the dynamics of the underlying system from which the probability density derives is also linear. Hence, for example, chaotic dynamical systems, despite their nonlinear dynamics, obey the same linear equation for probability density. To us, this close formal similarity between the two equations strongly suggests that quantum physics, too, is only the linear probabilistic description of an underlying nonlinear deterministic system." But, similarities in equations surely can be misleading ;)
- tomxor 7y ago
  > linear probabilistic description of an underlying nonlinear deterministic system. The math is way over my head, but this sub-statement resonates with me deeply and has been my crude but overarching view of the physical world and our interpretations of it for a long time - except applied more broadly - as a description of the interaction between multiple layers of abstractions of reality (whether the things behind those designated abstractions are natural or human made, e.g transistors for digital logic, a "deterministic" quantized layer created atop a non-deterministic one). It is layered because each deterministic one is only effectively deterministic by being predictable "enough" in a highly uniform way. The next layer then often becomes viewed from a probabilistic perspective again due to chaotic interactions of the previous one (often computationally irreducible). The lack of access to massive initial state and in-feasibility to compute prediction based on the underlying mechanisms are the only reason we switch back to the probabilistic view at these non-fundamental levels of abstraction. Now I understand quantum physics is not supposed to be such a layer, because we didn't start out with an existing working concept of what's underneath it in the way we know whats underneath equations for some statistical mechanics for example - but from the perspective of a complete amateur the idea of superdeterminism seems quite natural! - yet at the same time I can't help wonder if there is yet another probabilistic layer underneath :)
iaoat2d 7y ago
Tim Palmer (the other author of the paper) has a talk[1] on youtube titled "What Physics Needs is Not So Much a Quantum Theory of Gravity As a Gravitational Theory of the Quantum" in which he discusses Superdeterminism. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GqeTTAFjDYY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GqeTTAFjDYY
mikorym 7y ago
I'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.
- GoblinSlayer 7y ago
  In most interpretations measurement is interaction, it's difficult to retain the rest of Copenhagen interpretation with the definition.
outlace 7y ago
It'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.
mikorym 7y ago
> doesn’t exactly make me feel optimistic about my prospects of getting someone to listen to me Show, don't tell. I don't know how things work in physics (maybe they need a grant) but in mathematics, if you make a ruckus without any actual mathematics, then people ignore you. If you have a proof or text that does something substantial, then people do ignore you at first but in the long run the best mathematical base of knowledge takes preference.
wsy 7y ago
Superdeterminism looks like metaphysics to me. It seems an attempt to postulate a fundamental truth about the world, but without empirical foundation. Which experiment would falsify the superdeterminism hypothesis?
- gliese1337 7y ago
  The one proposed in the paper: looking for time-dependent correlations in the measurements of quantum states that are prepared to be as identical as possible.
- akvadrako 7y ago
  Nothing can falsify superdeterminism in general. If you proposed one specific model of that, that might be falsified.
matt_morgan 7y ago
"There are only three people in the world who understand Superdeterminism" ... thinking people would agree with you if they only understood better what you were saying is a pretty classic rhetorical problem.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
77544cec 7y ago
> But Tim Palmer turned out to not only be a climate physicist with an interest in the foundations of quantum mechanics, he also turned out to be remarkably persistent. He wasn’t remotely deterred by my evident lack of interest. Indeed, I later noticed he had sent me an email already two years earlier. Just that I dumped it unceremoniously in my crackpot folder. Worse, I seem to vaguely recall telling my husband that even the climate people now have ideas for how to revolutionize quantum mechanics, hahaha. > Cough. My favourite crackpot sent her his theory about gravity because she published a bimetric model of gravity a decade earlier. She accused him of plagiarism. Full story (french, bad subtitles): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CKWqh75ErNI&t=40m54s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CKWqh75ErNI&t=40m54s Also she made a few music-videos (the music is her own it seems): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NrswlFxEiV4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NrswlFxEiV4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FDkfXCMDzZs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FDkfXCMDzZs
viach 7y ago
But where all the information came from then?
okpatil 7y ago
I am just going to put it here. This wikipedia article is about an ancient Indian school of thought which believed that everything is composed of atoms, but the aggregation and nature of these atoms was predetermined by cosmic forces. They also believed in absense of "Free Will". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C4%80j%C4%ABvika https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C4%80j%C4%ABvika

149 points by chmaynard 7y ago

Since we are looking at an alternative interpretation: Max Planck's Loader Model - the simplest interpretation that is never looked at. In the Loader Model atoms have a hidden and random energy state, and a detectable state. The energy of light is spread evenly as waves. And when the energy reaches a threshold the detectable state changes. Photons do not exist. What we see are just detectable jumps of the energy states. I never heard of it, until I found an experimenter that claimed to find evidence for it. With higher levels of energy than normal light, he found that (more often) two or more atoms can reach a next state, when one quantum of energy is emitted. Other experimenters classify these double-quanta as "noise". Occham's razor? Because it is the simplest interpretation, I would like to see more research into this. Maybe there is something to it, or maybe it can reveal some hidden variables in the detectors. See: www.threshodmodel.com Note: the experimenter is not a very good communicator and it took me some time to understand what he was explaining.

arnoooooo 7y ago
The simplest interpretation is that there is no such thing as matter. Physicists are studying consciousness. It is actually the only explanation that is consistent with experience, since there is no experience outside of consciousness.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- arnoooooo 7y ago
  I wished people offered a rebuttal instead of just downvoting. I understand Einstein himself entertained the idea.
- eloff 7y ago
  This is a new agey woo kind of idea that comes probably from a layman's interpretation of the effect of the observer on changing the quantum system being measured. However, it does not scale to macro systems. As Sam Harris put it when debating this idea with Deepak Chopra, the moon does not disappear when we're not looking at it. The universe was before consciousness and will continue to be afterwards.
  - amanaplanacanal 7y ago
    > As Sam Harris put it when debating this idea with Deepak Chopra, the moon does not disappear when we're not looking at it. That’s a silly statement. How do we know that, if we aren’t looking at it?
    - homonculus1 7y ago
      Because we have object permanence. People like Deepak Chopra select magical assumptions specifically because they can't produce any verifiable predictions, and waste everybody's time promoting meaningless nonsense.
      - arnoooooo 7y ago
        I'm not sure Deepak Chopra is the best representative for such ideas. Donald Hoffman or Bernardo Kastrup make a much more serious case. But still, the number one unverifiable prediction is that there is a thing called matter that exists outside consciousness and that somehow, consciousness emerges out of it. Nobody can prove matter exists, nobody has ever had a direct experience of it, and nobody has any idea how consciousness could come out of it, yet it's still the default hypothesis…
    - eloff 7y ago
      Object permanece is a silly statement? On the contrary it's the mainstream view. Anyone wanting to challenge it has the burden of proof on them to demonstrate otherwise.
      - 7y ago
- AnimalMuppet 7y ago
  Perhaps there is no experience outside of consciousness (depending on exactly what you mean by that). I take it to mean that consciousness is the only thing that we (directly) experience. Fine. But that doesn't mean that "studying consciousness" is the only explanation that is consistent with "no experience outside of consciousness". It's the only explanation that's limited to that. A real external world is perfectly consistent with us not experiencing anything outside of consciousness, that is, that our consciousness is how we experience what we experience. There's still something out there - an external world - that we experience, though. The alternative way of taking your words - that there is no external world at all, that all we are is consciousness, that we aren't actually experiencing a real world - is the total death of science, because there's nothing actually there to study.
  - arnoooooo 7y ago
    "It's the only explanation that's limited to that." Indeed, and that's what makes it the simplest explanation. People posit matter, which nobody has ever had a direct experience of, then can't find a way to explain how consciousness comes out of it. Starting with consciousness is much in line with experience and solves the problem. I think it's reasonable to assume that an "external" world exists, but it doesn't mean that it's not all consciousness : as Donald Hoffman posits, what we perceive is the combined output of other conscious agents. I don't see how that means the death of science. I suppose you meant physics, which could indeed be seen in this context as a rather convoluted way of studying consciousness, but I'm not so sure : it would become a study of the regularities of consciousness.
indutny 7y ago
I think photon self-interaction might be thought of as a confirmation of photon's existence. Particle ontology is a tough question, but I don't think there is a reason to exclude photon from the list without excluding all other particles.
- indutny 7y ago
  Not to mention that experiments suggest that atoms don't play any special role in the underlying physical structure of reality.
- zyxzevn 7y ago
  Photons can also be seen as waves. And waves can also influence each other, in non-linear situations. Because the experiments and theory are so simple, I think it is the most scientific approach, to at least test this Loader model more thoroughly. Even if I don't agree with it. ;-)
thicknavyrain 7y ago
I haven't heard of the Loader model, but as an (ex-) Particle Physicist, I should point out that photons are just one example of the more general phenomenon of gauge bosons. In terms of the particle content associated with nature (and the predictions the _existence_ of those particles imply as emergent phenomena from "gauge theories" in quantum field theory), the photons of electrodynamics as well as their counterparts, the weak bosons of the weak force and the gluons of quantum chromodynamics, all make very specific predictions about how certain particles ought to behave and the strength with which they should do so. In that light, photons (and to a lesser extent, the other gauge bosons) play a significant role in theoretically calculating the dipole moment of the electron (how strong the electron interacts electromagnetically) which has been calculated to about 12 decimal places theoretically and experimentally measured to roughly the same precision. And the prediction fits _beautifully_, I believe it is the most (numerically) accurate prediction in all of science. So at the very least, photons are meaningful descriptions of some kind of quantum field oscillation whose existence is, implicitly, extraordinarily well determined. Typing this in a rush, but just to say, photons are a very specific kind of energy quanta, and I don't think the loader model really replaces them in that sense.
- zyxzevn 7y ago
  I think the Loader Model is a more direct path to what you are describing. In most cases it does not break with any observations that I saw. The "accuracy" is probably the same, depending on how the experiment is setup. Even a standing clock can give the accurate time, once a day. ;-) But, the experiment that are directed towards detecting this variant, show that the Loader model is valid... due to double detections of quanta, when there should only be one. According to the experimenter that I linked to, with easy-to-repeat experiments. So Occham's razor tells me to look into it, before starting more complicated theories. It is not my favourite theory, but I am a scientist. I had a small discussion setup here. Feel free to add a comment. https://saidit.net/s/Physics/comments/18rz/nullhypothesis_quantum_mechanics_shows_that_there/ https://saidit.net/s/Physics/comments/18rz/nullhypothesis_qu... (saidit is a friendly community for open discussions)

ReadEvalPost 7y ago

Direct link to the paper this post sets up: https://arxiv.org/abs/1912.06462 https://arxiv.org/abs/1912.06462 Always been a fan of Superdeterminism, happy to see actual physicists working on it.

comboy 7y ago
If you've always been a fan then maybe you have some more recommended reading for me? Title of the paper seems to be a bit over the top, it just seems to counter some straw man arguments against Superdeterminism.

ouid 7y ago

Hopefully this doesn't make me seem like a crank, but it seems to me that the path forward on superdeterminism is to use uncomputability. 1: Untriangulable smooth manifolds exist. 2: The manifolds can be smoothed via Ricci flow in a manner similar to how Perelman solved the Poincare conjecture. 3: This smoothing, applied to an untriangulable manifold, is irreversible, deterministic, and yet somehow must not converge to any triangulable manifold.

ajkjk 7y ago
I'm having trouble seeing what any of that has to do with determinism.
- sdenton4 7y ago
  Cranks to the left of me, jokers to the right, here I am, super determined with you... Even the comments on the blog post seem exceedingly cranky. I can imagine it's very hard to work in such an area, with such a noisy peanut gallery.
  - vanderZwan 7y ago
    If you click through to the lecture she links by Tim Palmer[0]it becomes clear that he's got to deal with this on an even worse level, because he works on both this topic and on the physics of climate change. The comments there are just painful to read. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w-IHJbzRVVU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w-IHJbzRVVU
- AlEinstein 7y ago
  Because Perelman. I mean he wrote Perelman’s name so he must be onto something.
- ouid 7y ago
  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 indeed exist. The manifold cannot, in whole, as a result of this, get "simpler" or even maintain the same amount of simplicity, it must somehow get more complex, which would require information to be generated. The primary problem with deterministic models, at least as I understand it, is that there's no obvious way for deterministic processes to get more complex.

knzhou 7y ago

I'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 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!" You can use superdeterminism to explain literally anything (not merely a lot, but actually, literally everything) while gaining precisely zero insight into what is actually going on, and precluding any future insight. Sure, it fixes a few philosophical problems, but so does saying you're a brain in a vat; in both cases you throw out all of science as a side effect. While their paper does address some philosophical objections, it doesn't even mention this scientific objection, which seems far more severe to me.

sysbin 7y ago
Your example given with the conclusion to follow doesn't make sense. I'm a hard determinist, I've known others like myself and nobody leaps to the thought, "the initial conditions of the universe means this is all meaningless" and we do try to observe every possibility such as the game being rigged. I don't necessarily think superdeterminism can explain literally anything or that if it did explain something there would be no gain of insight. That just seems like you're postulating.
- knzhou 7y ago
  You're not distinguishing between determinism and superdeterminism. Determinism is perfectly compatible with science, as it admits the idea of controlled and reproducible experiments. (For example, if you believe in determinism, you could grab the coin out of my hand and run some tests on it yourself.) The whole point of superdeterminism is to go further and deny this.
  - 7y ago

themgt 7y ago

I find this Quora answer convincingly reflects my thinking as to why Superdeterminism can't possibly be correct given Bell’s theorem[1] Skimming the actual paper[2] I'm not really seeing a convincing explanation, this in particular just strikes me as hard to believe / failing Occam's razor: The belief that such tests tell us something about (the implausibility of) Superdeterminism goes back, once again, to the idea that a state which is intuitively “close” to the one realized in nature (eg, the wavelength of the light from the distant quasar was a little different, all else equal) is allowed by the laws of nature and likely to happen. However, in a superdeterministic theory what seems intuitively like a small change will generically result in an extremely unlikely state; that’s the whole point. For example, in a superdeterministic theory, a physically possible counterfactual state in which the wave-length of the photon was slightly different may also require changes elsewhere on the past hypersurface, thereby resulting in the experimenter’s decision to not use the quasar’s light to begin with. "Reality is a giant deterministic conspiracy" is more plausible than abandoning local realism? They do (kinda?) propose an experiment at least? [1] https://www.quora.com/Why-do-some-crackpot-scientists-go-after-super-deterministic-theories-when-Bells-theorem-has-proved-that-local-realism-is-false https://www.quora.com/Why-do-some-crackpot-scientists-go-aft... [2] https://arxiv.org/pdf/1912.06462.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1912.06462.pdf

corporate_shi11 7y ago
Bell's theorem gives us a clear path forward in understanding the universe. Local realism must be discarded.
- Simon_says 7y ago
  Realism is the axiom to give up, not locality. Just accept MWI as the current best guess and get on with your life.
  - selestify 7y ago
    There’s no evidence MWI is the best guess compared to other interpretations

ncmncm 7y ago

I just finished reading her book, today. Rock on, Sabine! Anything that makes believers in Free Will or Consciousness unhappy makes me happy.

corporate_shi11 7y ago
Consciousness is not premised on or bound to free will. One can accept the mystical nature of consciousness while also disregarding free will.
ganzuul 7y ago
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.
- trevyn 7y ago
  I think “subjective experience” in the everyday human sense is something that we learn / are taught to have — we are taught as children that there is this thing called “me”, how it works, and how to put sensory experiences into its context. Unlearning that — understanding that this model is one interpretation, but not the only interpretation — is indeed terrifying and exhilarating. I personally wouldn’t call my experience “not conscious”, but it can be a very different experience than what we consider normal everyday waking consciousness.
  - ganzuul 7y ago
    The root of this puzzle is described by Descartes' "I think, therefore I am." 'Thinking' here does not need to be rational thought. Perhaps it does not even need to be the ability to form new memories. It is hard to say anything meaningful about the dichotomy of one's personal existence but for the purpose of my question it should not matter. In altered states of awareness such as dissociation or 'ego death' this conscious 'eye' which observes one's experiences remains unchanged. It is not the idea of the self described by "I am I", but the self which only asserts its own existence as "I am".

gliese1337 7y ago

I find it strange that they claim that QM lacks any explanation for measurement. There are explanations for measurement. Not everyone agrees with any single one of them, but they definitely exist. Superdeterminism is one, but it's not the only one. It is really only the Copenhagen Interpretation of QM that has a measurement problem. Personally, I am on board with the "measurement is just entanglement" solution (it seems intuitively obvious to me, but then I'm sure superdeterminism seems intuitively obvious to those who believe in it as well), which makes superdeterminism unnecessary.

knzhou 7y ago
While I lean the same way, the measurement problem is definitely harder than you say. If it's just entanglement with an external system, you still have to answer how that superposition ends up with you personally observing only one result.
- MrEldritch 7y ago
  you are a large, warm object, and as such you decohere basically instantaneously. (In any case, far faster than the milliseconds required for you to perceive anything.) As such, the state-in-which-you-perceive-result-A is completely unable to causally influence the state-in-which-you-perceive-result-B, and vice versa.
- gliese1337 7y ago
  Because you are part of the entangled system. You can only know that a measurement apparatus is in a definite state because you interacted with it, so your own mental state is partially dependent on it. You, however, being a large, warm thing decohere rather rapidly, even if the formal measurement apparatus can be made not to. Your consciousness is a classical phenomenon, so you can only perceive one possible classical outcome. If you believe in Many Worlds (which is the most natural interpretation to pair with this resolution of the measurement problem, but is not absolutely forced), then there are other versions of you out there in different parts of state-space which perceive different outcomes, and may even be observable as elements of a superposed-you in principle if not ever in practice, but there is no means of transferring information between any of these different versions of you. EDIT: To whomever downvoted the parent... why? It is, after all, a perfectly reasonable question, especially (although I do not presume that knzhou personally holds this view) in light of the reasonably common assumption that consciousness is somehow quantum in nature itself.

mberning 7y ago

“Should we discover that quantum theory is not fundamentally random” This would be a terrifying revelation on a personal and existential level.

sysbin 7y ago
How so, can you expand on what would be terrifying on a personal and existential level for you? I've encountered a few people that will cite quantum theory when it comes to discussions about questioning if one has free will. I cannot even imagine how quantum theory gives a us true free will and without one's will just being the outcome of the system we reside in.
- mberning 7y ago
  I am OK with the thought that the the universe sprang into existence, and through some form of randomness or chance, things played out on this planet that allowed for life and for me to exist on it. Now go back to step one and assume that, even on an atomic level, there is no chance, no randomness. Given all of the preconditions, we get this outcome every single time. Then I have to reconsider why is there even the illusion of choice. Why should I even write this comment. It’s crazy.
  - sysbin 7y ago
    > Then I have to reconsider why is there even the illusion of choice. Why should I even write this comment. I think the answer is society conditions us to assume we have choice by how society is structured and how society functions. You writing the comment is just me being an external force upon you and triggering it from all the previous external forces that made you eventually react the way you did. Even if everything isn't random, a lot of what people like to wish for & believe, can in fact come true but it's hard for me to rationalize it. Other than an outside our universe deterministic observer needing to exist.
  - outlace 7y ago
    How would random motion of atoms give you any more free choice than deterministic motion of atoms? Personally, fundamental randomness is more disturbing to me because it implies a-causality, i.e. that at the smallest scales things happen for no reason at all and would be unexplainable in principle.

philip142au 7y ago

I believe strongly that everything is deterministic. As a programmer, that means all is purely functional.

ajkjk 7y ago
What does it matter what you believe? The universe is evidently somewhat probabilistic, what's left is explaining the details.
- philip142au 7y ago
  No its deterministic, but it appears to be probabilistic to you. Which it can be.

acqq 7y ago

Argh. Reading the announced paper on arxiv https://arxiv.org/abs/1912.06462 https://arxiv.org/abs/1912.06462 In the introduction: "Most importantly, we will discuss how it may be possible to test this hypothesis in an (almost) model independent way." Most. Importantly. Then in the paper, under "Experimental Test": "This means concretely that one should make measurements on states prepared as identically as possible with devices as small and cool as possible in time-increments as small as possible. This consideration does not change much if one believes the hidden variables are properties of the particle after all. In this case, however, the problem is that preparing almost identical initial states is impossible since we do not know how to reproduce the particle’s hidden variables. One can then try to make repeated measurements of non-commuting observables on the same states, as previously laid out in [36]." And finally: "[36] S. Hossenfelder, “Testing super-deterministic hidden variables theories,” Found. Phys. 41, 1521 (2011) [arXiv:1105.4326 [quant-ph]]." So after the "most" qualified introduction, eventually just a reference to her 2011 paper. "Most importantly" "good" ... joke?

beamatronic 7y ago

It’s humbling to me that there are 7 billion people on this planet. Many of them are highly educated. And we are running up against problems we can’t understand. The fundamental nature of the universe.

ganzuul 7y ago
I think the problem is anthropocentrism. It's much like the IMO preposterous and archaic idea that a deity has to resemble us. People who study the fundamentals of quantum mechanics complain that philosophy is seen as useless. From my understanding this stems from how in detail the Copenhagen 'interpretation' took hold in particulary U.S. institutions; and it is entirely non-scientific. Copenhagen is an engineering discipline, and not a scientific theory. In natural philosophy we have to account for our position compared to the object we study. We are not separate from nature. Philosophy has many ideas which help us deal with our physical reality and they need to be taken seriously.

otabdeveloper4 7y ago

God is a "He", not a "She". Humanity is "She".

dchichkov 7y ago

A nice and compelling argument in that paper: "The classical Liouville equation is linear in the probability density due to conservation of probability. But this linearity says nothing whatsoever about whether the dynamics of the underlying system from which the probability density derives is also linear. Hence, for example, chaotic dynamical systems, despite their nonlinear dynamics, obey the same linear equation for probability density. To us, this close formal similarity between the two equations strongly suggests that quantum physics, too, is only the linear probabilistic description of an underlying nonlinear deterministic system." But, similarities in equations surely can be misleading ;)

tomxor 7y ago
> linear probabilistic description of an underlying nonlinear deterministic system. The math is way over my head, but this sub-statement resonates with me deeply and has been my crude but overarching view of the physical world and our interpretations of it for a long time - except applied more broadly - as a description of the interaction between multiple layers of abstractions of reality (whether the things behind those designated abstractions are natural or human made, e.g transistors for digital logic, a "deterministic" quantized layer created atop a non-deterministic one). It is layered because each deterministic one is only effectively deterministic by being predictable "enough" in a highly uniform way. The next layer then often becomes viewed from a probabilistic perspective again due to chaotic interactions of the previous one (often computationally irreducible). The lack of access to massive initial state and in-feasibility to compute prediction based on the underlying mechanisms are the only reason we switch back to the probabilistic view at these non-fundamental levels of abstraction. Now I understand quantum physics is not supposed to be such a layer, because we didn't start out with an existing working concept of what's underneath it in the way we know whats underneath equations for some statistical mechanics for example - but from the perspective of a complete amateur the idea of superdeterminism seems quite natural! - yet at the same time I can't help wonder if there is yet another probabilistic layer underneath :)

iaoat2d 7y ago

Tim Palmer (the other author of the paper) has a talk[1] on youtube titled "What Physics Needs is Not So Much a Quantum Theory of Gravity As a Gravitational Theory of the Quantum" in which he discusses Superdeterminism. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GqeTTAFjDYY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GqeTTAFjDYY

mikorym 7y ago

I'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.

GoblinSlayer 7y ago
In most interpretations measurement is interaction, it's difficult to retain the rest of Copenhagen interpretation with the definition.

outlace 7y ago

It'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.

mikorym 7y ago

> doesn’t exactly make me feel optimistic about my prospects of getting someone to listen to me Show, don't tell. I don't know how things work in physics (maybe they need a grant) but in mathematics, if you make a ruckus without any actual mathematics, then people ignore you. If you have a proof or text that does something substantial, then people do ignore you at first but in the long run the best mathematical base of knowledge takes preference.

wsy 7y ago

Superdeterminism looks like metaphysics to me. It seems an attempt to postulate a fundamental truth about the world, but without empirical foundation. Which experiment would falsify the superdeterminism hypothesis?

gliese1337 7y ago
The one proposed in the paper: looking for time-dependent correlations in the measurements of quantum states that are prepared to be as identical as possible.
akvadrako 7y ago
Nothing can falsify superdeterminism in general. If you proposed one specific model of that, that might be falsified.

matt_morgan 7y ago

"There are only three people in the world who understand Superdeterminism" ... thinking people would agree with you if they only understood better what you were saying is a pretty classic rhetorical problem.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

77544cec 7y ago

> But Tim Palmer turned out to not only be a climate physicist with an interest in the foundations of quantum mechanics, he also turned out to be remarkably persistent. He wasn’t remotely deterred by my evident lack of interest. Indeed, I later noticed he had sent me an email already two years earlier. Just that I dumped it unceremoniously in my crackpot folder. Worse, I seem to vaguely recall telling my husband that even the climate people now have ideas for how to revolutionize quantum mechanics, hahaha. > Cough. My favourite crackpot sent her his theory about gravity because she published a bimetric model of gravity a decade earlier. She accused him of plagiarism. Full story (french, bad subtitles): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CKWqh75ErNI&t=40m54s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CKWqh75ErNI&t=40m54s Also she made a few music-videos (the music is her own it seems): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NrswlFxEiV4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NrswlFxEiV4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FDkfXCMDzZs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FDkfXCMDzZs

viach 7y ago

But where all the information came from then?

okpatil 7y ago

I am just going to put it here. This wikipedia article is about an ancient Indian school of thought which believed that everything is composed of atoms, but the aggregation and nature of these atoms was predetermined by cosmic forces. They also believed in absense of "Free Will". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C4%80j%C4%ABvika https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C4%80j%C4%ABvika