6 ms·

From a brief stint in Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superdeterminism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superdeterminism), Superdeterminism looks like it

by ColanR 7y ago

From a brief stint in Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superdeterminism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superdeterminism), Superdeterminism looks like it better satisfies Ockhams' Razor than the standard QM interpretation. All we have to give up is free will, and why should science try to defend that?

6gvONxR4sf7o 7y ago
Superdeterminism means that a hugely macro level decision like which measurement to take is tightly coupled with teeny tiny micro level outcomes. It would mean that the physical predictions are really really complicated. I'd say Occam's Razor points the opposite direction.
- Frost1x 7y ago
  Satisfying Occam's Razor is not a necessity, it's more a rule of thumb. Based on Occam's Razor alone, modern DNN based models are complete garbage because of the amount of complexity involved in their models, yet they still hold useful predictive power. Sometimes we have to throw out these general rules of thumbs and test the waters outside when we hit walls we can't seem to get around. Interest and pursuit in the philosophy of science is something too largely brushed aside that, IMHO, needs an adrenaline shot these days. Unfortunately, few want to pursue that work because it doesn't pay the bills.
  - 6gvONxR4sf7o 7y ago
    Totally agree. I was just countering the parent comment that said "occam's razor points this way" with "nah it points the other way." I don't intend to say we necessarily should follow it in either direction.
lisper 7y ago
Because free will is supported by some pretty overwhelming evidence. Every human who has ever lived has had the experience of making a free choice. That experience is every bit as real as the experience of, say, seeing the moon. If you're going to seriously entertain the possibility that there is no free will then you need to be ready to entertain with equal seriousness that the moon does not exist because both are supported by similar bodies of evidence.
- baseballdork 7y ago
  That seems more like evidence that humans believe they have free will than evidence that they actually have it.
  - narag 7y ago
    What really seems a mirage to me is mistaking free will for unpredictability. That's like saying that your mind needs to be outside the physical world ("a soul") to make "real decisions", which is absurd.
- temppsychonaut 7y ago
  The moon does not exist in the exact same sense that free will does not exist. The moon is a concept that only exists in living minds. From an ultimate perspective there is no moon and there is no free will. This is a straightforward consequence of physicalism.
- lukifer 7y ago
  I think free will is fundamentally a bad term/model, independent of the truth value of what everyone means by that label. That said, I think you might be somewhat conflating free will and consciousness; it's perfectly cogent, for instance, that a provably deterministic robot might have subjective experience; and that after executing each pre-determined binary instruction, would be programmed to have a feeling of "I chose that instruction". I do think those who have a bias for materialism are overly eager to discard fuzzier subjectivities like free will, consciousness, even religious experiences and mystical states. There is obviously a sense in which Harry Potter is not real; but there is also a sense in which Harry Potter is more real than an arbitrary rock or tree, because as an ephemeral memeplex, that being altered planetary culture and created billions of dollars of economic activity. Just because a phenomenon lacks affordances for empirical measurement does mean it is necessarily absent from reality altogether. For an opposing view to naive materialism which is still firmly nested in rationalist thinking, see Donald Hoffman's "The Case Against Reality": https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-evolutionary-argument-against-reality-20160421/ https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-evolutionary-argument-aga...
- 7y ago
lukifer 7y ago
Free will is a terrible name for it, and arguably inherently contradictory, like "involuntary fasting": it's a synonym for an uncaused cause. What's lost in the process of burning that strawman, is that we can't ever have perfect knowledge of our environment or our nervous systems; and in a seeming paradox of determinism, a being who believes they have agency will behave differently than one who does not. Even if one accepts the model that we merely rationalize our subconscious choices (an imperfect model with some non-zero truth), the data from the outcome of that choice still feed into one's neural network and influence future choices, making the "free will software stack" a potentially valuable psycho-technology. As a practical matter, I'm intrigued by the model that what we experience as consciousness, and the feeling of agency, really only has one knob to turn: what tiny fraction of our massive neural information network we orient the spotlight of our attention towards. That singular "decision" point, navigating what Buddhist cognitive scientist John Vervaeke calls the "salience landscape", has incredible potency on its own, iterated moment after moment for the entirety of a human lifespan.
- perl4ever 7y ago
  "the data from the outcome of that choice still feed into one's neural network and influence future choices" It seems to me that any time you have a process that feeds the output into the input, then you can easily have a divergence of trajectory whose precision exceeds anything that could be explicitly stored in a finite universe. So it seems to me that free will must exist in the sense that a simple system, let alone a brain, can produce information from somewhere that can't come from the limited universe we seem to inhabit. Like, take the Mandelbrot set as a simple proof of concept. It may not have all the things in it that are in the universe, but it seems to have more resolution, more components, than can exist in reality. So if you used it to feed a process, it can add something to the universe as it affects reality.
jfengel 7y ago
The problem isn't so much the lack of free will (that's accomplished by plain old determinism), but by the extraordinary lengths that the universe has to go through in order to make the super part happen. In a Bell test experiment, it's not just that the outcomes were predetermined, but that the brains of two experimenters, and their experimental setups, were configured in a very precise way to make them choose measurements that would yield compatible results. That is, it's not so much that you didn't really get to make a choice, but that it took such a complicated configuration in order to bring about a fairly simple result. And since you can't know the entire configuration of a brain, you've really just replaced the randomness with a mystery box. Instead of "John chose freely to set the experiment to up/down", all you get is "John was fated from the beginning of time to set the experiment to up/down -- a thing I learned by watching John set the experiment to up/down". Instead of randomness or free will, all you get is a sage nod after the fact, "Yes, so was it foreordained in the before-times." It's not impossible. I'm not even really sure it's implausible. It's just that it doesn't seem to inform anything.
- mehrdadn 7y ago
  Layman here, but one thing I never understood: if we are to believe everything occurred started in a Big Bang, then why shouldn't we expect everything in the universe to be entangled quantum-mechanically? I feel like I'd be surprised if that weren't the case.
  - K0SM0S 7y ago
    Entanglement is not a stable mode for particles afaik, it takes effort not to break apart. Note that it's not limited to two particles, so you have a point, but the effects would be vastly more limited in time, at least in the first degree of causality. If you however mean that any entire observable universe¹, if cosmic super-inflation is true, must be causally related and thus "pre"-determined, which may be qualified as "super"-determined in a way, then I agree (layman too). -- [1]: Should we keep -c² as the metric of spacetime, i.e. no causality beyond the light boundary (function of time, in space).
    - 7y ago
nwallin 7y ago
Superdeterminism requires a ludicrous amount of complexity. It's not a simpler theory, it's a vastly, vastly more complex one. It implies that the universe is fine tuned to such a degree that everyone who's ever done an experiment which might disprove QM ever arrived at their n-sigma result did so by random chance. The only way it could make even a lick of sense is if we're living in a simulation, and there's a little green man who's job it is to ensure we never disprove quantum mechanics.
Strilanc 7y ago
The thing that makes superdeterminism hard to believe is the same thing makes time travel plots where destiny is fixed hard to believe. The level of coincidence and orchestration required to make things play out in just the right way, despite determined humans trying to make them come out another way, becomes ridiculous. The angle settings in a Bell test can come from basically anywhere. For example, you can point telescopes at opposite sides of the universe, feed the frames into a cryptographic pseudo random number generator, and use the output to decide the angles. For superdeterminism to be true, that would mean the initial state of the universe had to be such that millions of years later billions of stars on opposite sides of the universe would be in just the right configuration to make the SHA1 hash of a picture of them come out in a way that correlated in a simple way with the polarization angle of the photons you were generating locally. And then they'd also correlate for the next one. And the next one. And the next trillion after that. And also it has to be just right for all the other ways you can set up the angle selection. I won't say it's literally impossible to satisfy that many constraints. There's a lot of degrees of freedom to work with, and only finitely many constraints before heat death. But it seems really really contrived to me. Like explaining why someone has rolled five hundred natural 20s with "Oh that's just how things were always going to play out" instead of "that seems suspicious. Let me see that die."

by ColanR 7y ago

6gvONxR4sf7o 7y ago

Superdeterminism means that a hugely macro level decision like which measurement to take is tightly coupled with teeny tiny micro level outcomes. It would mean that the physical predictions are really really complicated. I'd say Occam's Razor points the opposite direction.

Frost1x 7y ago
Satisfying Occam's Razor is not a necessity, it's more a rule of thumb. Based on Occam's Razor alone, modern DNN based models are complete garbage because of the amount of complexity involved in their models, yet they still hold useful predictive power. Sometimes we have to throw out these general rules of thumbs and test the waters outside when we hit walls we can't seem to get around. Interest and pursuit in the philosophy of science is something too largely brushed aside that, IMHO, needs an adrenaline shot these days. Unfortunately, few want to pursue that work because it doesn't pay the bills.
- 6gvONxR4sf7o 7y ago
  Totally agree. I was just countering the parent comment that said "occam's razor points this way" with "nah it points the other way." I don't intend to say we necessarily should follow it in either direction.

lisper 7y ago

Because free will is supported by some pretty overwhelming evidence. Every human who has ever lived has had the experience of making a free choice. That experience is every bit as real as the experience of, say, seeing the moon. If you're going to seriously entertain the possibility that there is no free will then you need to be ready to entertain with equal seriousness that the moon does not exist because both are supported by similar bodies of evidence.

baseballdork 7y ago
That seems more like evidence that humans believe they have free will than evidence that they actually have it.
- narag 7y ago
  What really seems a mirage to me is mistaking free will for unpredictability. That's like saying that your mind needs to be outside the physical world ("a soul") to make "real decisions", which is absurd.
temppsychonaut 7y ago
The moon does not exist in the exact same sense that free will does not exist. The moon is a concept that only exists in living minds. From an ultimate perspective there is no moon and there is no free will. This is a straightforward consequence of physicalism.
lukifer 7y ago
I think free will is fundamentally a bad term/model, independent of the truth value of what everyone means by that label. That said, I think you might be somewhat conflating free will and consciousness; it's perfectly cogent, for instance, that a provably deterministic robot might have subjective experience; and that after executing each pre-determined binary instruction, would be programmed to have a feeling of "I chose that instruction". I do think those who have a bias for materialism are overly eager to discard fuzzier subjectivities like free will, consciousness, even religious experiences and mystical states. There is obviously a sense in which Harry Potter is not real; but there is also a sense in which Harry Potter is more real than an arbitrary rock or tree, because as an ephemeral memeplex, that being altered planetary culture and created billions of dollars of economic activity. Just because a phenomenon lacks affordances for empirical measurement does mean it is necessarily absent from reality altogether. For an opposing view to naive materialism which is still firmly nested in rationalist thinking, see Donald Hoffman's "The Case Against Reality": https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-evolutionary-argument-against-reality-20160421/ https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-evolutionary-argument-aga...
7y ago

lukifer 7y ago

Free will is a terrible name for it, and arguably inherently contradictory, like "involuntary fasting": it's a synonym for an uncaused cause. What's lost in the process of burning that strawman, is that we can't ever have perfect knowledge of our environment or our nervous systems; and in a seeming paradox of determinism, a being who believes they have agency will behave differently than one who does not. Even if one accepts the model that we merely rationalize our subconscious choices (an imperfect model with some non-zero truth), the data from the outcome of that choice still feed into one's neural network and influence future choices, making the "free will software stack" a potentially valuable psycho-technology. As a practical matter, I'm intrigued by the model that what we experience as consciousness, and the feeling of agency, really only has one knob to turn: what tiny fraction of our massive neural information network we orient the spotlight of our attention towards. That singular "decision" point, navigating what Buddhist cognitive scientist John Vervaeke calls the "salience landscape", has incredible potency on its own, iterated moment after moment for the entirety of a human lifespan.

perl4ever 7y ago
"the data from the outcome of that choice still feed into one's neural network and influence future choices" It seems to me that any time you have a process that feeds the output into the input, then you can easily have a divergence of trajectory whose precision exceeds anything that could be explicitly stored in a finite universe. So it seems to me that free will must exist in the sense that a simple system, let alone a brain, can produce information from somewhere that can't come from the limited universe we seem to inhabit. Like, take the Mandelbrot set as a simple proof of concept. It may not have all the things in it that are in the universe, but it seems to have more resolution, more components, than can exist in reality. So if you used it to feed a process, it can add something to the universe as it affects reality.

jfengel 7y ago

The problem isn't so much the lack of free will (that's accomplished by plain old determinism), but by the extraordinary lengths that the universe has to go through in order to make the super part happen. In a Bell test experiment, it's not just that the outcomes were predetermined, but that the brains of two experimenters, and their experimental setups, were configured in a very precise way to make them choose measurements that would yield compatible results. That is, it's not so much that you didn't really get to make a choice, but that it took such a complicated configuration in order to bring about a fairly simple result. And since you can't know the entire configuration of a brain, you've really just replaced the randomness with a mystery box. Instead of "John chose freely to set the experiment to up/down", all you get is "John was fated from the beginning of time to set the experiment to up/down -- a thing I learned by watching John set the experiment to up/down". Instead of randomness or free will, all you get is a sage nod after the fact, "Yes, so was it foreordained in the before-times." It's not impossible. I'm not even really sure it's implausible. It's just that it doesn't seem to inform anything.

mehrdadn 7y ago
Layman here, but one thing I never understood: if we are to believe everything occurred started in a Big Bang, then why shouldn't we expect everything in the universe to be entangled quantum-mechanically? I feel like I'd be surprised if that weren't the case.
- K0SM0S 7y ago
  Entanglement is not a stable mode for particles afaik, it takes effort not to break apart. Note that it's not limited to two particles, so you have a point, but the effects would be vastly more limited in time, at least in the first degree of causality. If you however mean that any entire observable universe¹, if cosmic super-inflation is true, must be causally related and thus "pre"-determined, which may be qualified as "super"-determined in a way, then I agree (layman too). -- [1]: Should we keep -c² as the metric of spacetime, i.e. no causality beyond the light boundary (function of time, in space).
  - 7y ago

nwallin 7y ago

Superdeterminism requires a ludicrous amount of complexity. It's not a simpler theory, it's a vastly, vastly more complex one. It implies that the universe is fine tuned to such a degree that everyone who's ever done an experiment which might disprove QM ever arrived at their n-sigma result did so by random chance. The only way it could make even a lick of sense is if we're living in a simulation, and there's a little green man who's job it is to ensure we never disprove quantum mechanics.

Strilanc 7y ago

The thing that makes superdeterminism hard to believe is the same thing makes time travel plots where destiny is fixed hard to believe. The level of coincidence and orchestration required to make things play out in just the right way, despite determined humans trying to make them come out another way, becomes ridiculous. The angle settings in a Bell test can come from basically anywhere. For example, you can point telescopes at opposite sides of the universe, feed the frames into a cryptographic pseudo random number generator, and use the output to decide the angles. For superdeterminism to be true, that would mean the initial state of the universe had to be such that millions of years later billions of stars on opposite sides of the universe would be in just the right configuration to make the SHA1 hash of a picture of them come out in a way that correlated in a simple way with the polarization angle of the photons you were generating locally. And then they'd also correlate for the next one. And the next one. And the next trillion after that. And also it has to be just right for all the other ways you can set up the angle selection. I won't say it's literally impossible to satisfy that many constraints. There's a lot of degrees of freedom to work with, and only finitely many constraints before heat death. But it seems really really contrived to me. Like explaining why someone has rolled five hundred natural 20s with "Oh that's just how things were always going to play out" instead of "that seems suspicious. Let me see that die."