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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
by 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 agoYou'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.
- perl4ever 7y agoI'm definitely not distinguishing between determinism and superdeterminism. The wikipedia page on superdeterminism starts out: "In quantum mechanics, superdeterminism is a hypothetical class of theories that evade Bell's theorem by virtue of being completely deterministic" Logically, something that is "completely deterministic" would have to be...deterministic, no? Does superdeterminism go to 11?
- knzhou 7y agoSuperdeterminism is determinism, plus a radically different way of thinking about experimental results. To continue with the coin flip analogy, consider a classical world where a coin flip is perfectly deterministic, given the initial conditions. In the usual way we think about determinism, it's still possible to test whether a coin is fair. Just flip it a bunch of times, a little differently each time, and see if you get a ratio close to 50/50. That's standard science. In the superdeterministic view, you don't admit this kind of explanation. Instead you say that whatever outcome happened was determined by the initial conditions of the entire universe. If you get all heads, you can't say anything about the coin -- we merely conclude that your hands were predetermined to give it the kinds of initial conditions that would have led to that outcome. Now imagine repeating an explanation like this for every experiment ever performed. It's on the level of answering "God did it" to every question. We don't do that in science because it kind of defeats the whole point.
- username90 7y ago> It's on the level of answering "God did it" to every question. And saying that it is random with "God rolled a dice" isn't? The entire universe could have used a fixed random seed and our experiments and thoughts would have been exactly the same for all we know, determinism doesn't have the effects you talk about. We perform trials and do statistics when we don't know the exact workings of things, not because we believe that the thing is inherently random.
- knzhou 7y agoAgain, it's not about randomness vs. determinism. Both are perfectly compatible with science, just as you said, and no scientist bats an eye at using either type of model. Superdeterminism is a big step beyond determinism that explicitly is like saying "because God did it".
- username90 7y agoI see superdeterminism as more like breaking the information limit, each particle is aware of the rest of the universe and can thus predict how things will be done everywhere. I don't believe that packing that much information in each particle makes sense, but it shows that superdeterminism doesn't require that a god manually determined the result of each event in the entire history of the universe.
- perl4ever 7y ago