14 ms·

Superdeterminism could reconcile quantum and relativity

24 points by billytetrud 5y ago

billytetrud 5y ago
Sabine Hossenfelder rethinks Superdeterminism and explains in very accessible terms why Superdeterminism should be taken seriously and has been unfairly characterized in the past. She says that violating statistical independence is the only way to solve the measurement problem in a way that is compatible with relativity.
- 1980phipsi 5y ago
  "very accessible" relative to what?
  - billytetrud 5y ago
    Relative to like 99% of writing by phycists.
- nobodyandproud 5y ago
  I like her analogies. For laymen who has followed determinism vs non-determinism (I’m a fan of the latter camp; Bell never ruled out determinism), this article is on the cusp of comprehensible. There are definitely paragraphs that aren’t, but it’s still a good read. The exciting point, though, is that super determinism isn’t merely an interpretation of QM. Given time, one expects these theories to be testable.
johnklos 5y ago
She has some good videos, too: https://www.youtube.com/c/SabineHossenfelder/videos https://www.youtube.com/c/SabineHossenfelder/videos
dia80 5y ago
Wouldn't it be funny if it were established no one had any free will, in a strict sense, all along. We'd still feel like we had it but know that we didn't. From this layman's emotional point of view I never really liked "many worlds" and that sort of thing. I'd be quite accepting if the answer turns out to be super-determinism.
- BeKindAndLearn 5y ago
  I would argue that it's pretty obvious nobody has free will in the sense that there's some kind of "soul" controlling your thoughts and actions. Your brain is a biological computer. You zap parts and it makes you move. You give it some chemical inhibitors or promoters and your mood changes. You give it drugs and it hallucinates and thinks differently. The brain isn't supernatural and there is zero evidence that supports the concept of spiritual will influencing it. Just like there's zero evidence of psychics, magic wands, or physics-violating miracles. It's all make believe.
  - teilo 5y ago
    If you think it is that simple, then you do not quite understand superdeterminism and the hard problem of consciousness. Also, your examples are not entirely accurate. It has been repeatedly demonstrated that zapping a part of the brain cannot consistently override the will, and the correlation to, for example, the motion of a limb to the activity of the brain does not stay consistent, but disappears after multiple attempts when the subject under experimentation resists. That doesn't prove that the will is independent from the brain, but so far, no one has found where the will expresses itself in the brain. Right now it is just taken on faith that it does so somehow. And then there is perception. We can find general correlations for areas of the brain that respond to shape, color, smell, and kinesthetic sense, but nowhere where the various senses are assimilated and correlated into a cohesive perception. We can alter mood, and induce hallucinations, but again, have no model as to how either translates to perception and self-awareness. Before we can determine whether the will is free, we first need to define what the will and perception and self-awareness even is, and how it arises. And we don't have a clue where to start.
    - billytetrud 5y ago
      > for example, the motion of a limb to the activity of the brain does not stay consistent That makes sense tho, because the motion of your limbs are controlled in part by neurons (and other things) that are not in your brain. Muscle memory, for example, isn't just a metaphor, you literally have neurons in your foot that have memory which allows you to react faster than it takes for signals to reach your brain, eg if you step on a bed of hot coals. > no one has found where the will expresses itself in the brain Why does there have to be one place? Your "will" is the combination of interactions between not only all parts of your brain, but all parts of your body. > nowhere where the various senses are assimilated and correlated into a cohesive perception. This is the part that gets me. I have a cohesive cognitive experience where I can sense and think many things simultaneously. I don't understand any reductionist explanation for the existence of my experience. It seems like an impossible thing for a collections of atoms in the brain to create. That hard problem of consciousness is really and truely hard. However, "free will" to me seems easy by comparison. Your brain (and body) acts based on its structure. You are the structure, and the structure determines what you decide to do. You have some starting conditions, you use those starting conditions to decide to do things (go to school, find a job, cross the street) and at the end of it, you've changed the structure of your brain such that you'll make different decisions now. I think that's as free as free will gets really, despite the fact that we may live in a deterministic universe.
lostmsu 5y ago
On retrocasuality: I find it interesting, that not only people tend to outright reject the notion that future events can be causes for present or past events, but they also are wrong about assuming they are doing it (e.g. rejecting) consistently. For example, common sayings such as "nothing ventured, nothing gained" or "today's seed - tomorrow's harvest" are actually casually bidirectional, especially the second one.
dekhn 5y ago
I would so love for this to be true, but it's far outside my area of expertise. The important thing, though, is there have to be useful experimental predictions. The only reason I could ever reconcile my understanding of reality with QM is that it's an extremely good theory for making predictions.
- jfengel 5y ago
  QM interpretations don't really make predictions. They all use the same underlying math. They just rearrange the terms so that some of them correspond to something familiar, with the hopes of minimizing the confounding effects of the others. They're all like trying to fold a map onto a globe: somewhere, something isn't going to fit. You just try to squeeze it into the parts you don't care as much about. Except somebody always cares. It may be that somebody will discover one that's so effective that we declare it to be Correct. That's much like what we went through with heliocentrism. Geocentrism plus epicycles is also a perfectly valid interpretation, but it's vastly more complicated and less elegant. Even so it's incredibly useful and actually remains the dominant interpretation for a lot of activities. It would be great if one such reformulation helped us reconcile with relativity, but I'll admit that I'm skeptical. I suspect that any unified theory will be so radically different in structure as to require a completely different interpretation, totally unrelated to any of the low-energy QM approximations. I doubt any of them will be helpful -- especially superdeterminism, which I view as shoving the weirdness from "All events are decided randomly and then distributed FTL" to "All events were decided at the beginning but locked away so you can't know them until you get there". Neither one really gives us access to anything new -- which is to be expected.
  - dekhn 5y ago
    I didnt mean quantum interpretations (which are boring to me). I mean: transisitor theory is quantum theory and we wouldn't have developed the transistor to the point we have if QM wasn't a great model for solid state physics. Nobody thinks event outcomes are distributed FTL, that's the whole point of QM.
    - 5y ago

24 points by billytetrud 5y ago

Sabine Hossenfelder rethinks Superdeterminism and explains in very accessible terms why Superdeterminism should be taken seriously and has been unfairly characterized in the past. She says that violating statistical independence is the only way to solve the measurement problem in a way that is compatible with relativity.

1980phipsi 5y ago
"very accessible" relative to what?
- billytetrud 5y ago
  Relative to like 99% of writing by phycists.
nobodyandproud 5y ago
I like her analogies. For laymen who has followed determinism vs non-determinism (I’m a fan of the latter camp; Bell never ruled out determinism), this article is on the cusp of comprehensible. There are definitely paragraphs that aren’t, but it’s still a good read. The exciting point, though, is that super determinism isn’t merely an interpretation of QM. Given time, one expects these theories to be testable.

johnklos 5y ago

She has some good videos, too: https://www.youtube.com/c/SabineHossenfelder/videos https://www.youtube.com/c/SabineHossenfelder/videos

dia80 5y ago

Wouldn't it be funny if it were established no one had any free will, in a strict sense, all along. We'd still feel like we had it but know that we didn't. From this layman's emotional point of view I never really liked "many worlds" and that sort of thing. I'd be quite accepting if the answer turns out to be super-determinism.

BeKindAndLearn 5y ago
I would argue that it's pretty obvious nobody has free will in the sense that there's some kind of "soul" controlling your thoughts and actions. Your brain is a biological computer. You zap parts and it makes you move. You give it some chemical inhibitors or promoters and your mood changes. You give it drugs and it hallucinates and thinks differently. The brain isn't supernatural and there is zero evidence that supports the concept of spiritual will influencing it. Just like there's zero evidence of psychics, magic wands, or physics-violating miracles. It's all make believe.
- teilo 5y ago
  If you think it is that simple, then you do not quite understand superdeterminism and the hard problem of consciousness. Also, your examples are not entirely accurate. It has been repeatedly demonstrated that zapping a part of the brain cannot consistently override the will, and the correlation to, for example, the motion of a limb to the activity of the brain does not stay consistent, but disappears after multiple attempts when the subject under experimentation resists. That doesn't prove that the will is independent from the brain, but so far, no one has found where the will expresses itself in the brain. Right now it is just taken on faith that it does so somehow. And then there is perception. We can find general correlations for areas of the brain that respond to shape, color, smell, and kinesthetic sense, but nowhere where the various senses are assimilated and correlated into a cohesive perception. We can alter mood, and induce hallucinations, but again, have no model as to how either translates to perception and self-awareness. Before we can determine whether the will is free, we first need to define what the will and perception and self-awareness even is, and how it arises. And we don't have a clue where to start.
  - billytetrud 5y ago
    > for example, the motion of a limb to the activity of the brain does not stay consistent That makes sense tho, because the motion of your limbs are controlled in part by neurons (and other things) that are not in your brain. Muscle memory, for example, isn't just a metaphor, you literally have neurons in your foot that have memory which allows you to react faster than it takes for signals to reach your brain, eg if you step on a bed of hot coals. > no one has found where the will expresses itself in the brain Why does there have to be one place? Your "will" is the combination of interactions between not only all parts of your brain, but all parts of your body. > nowhere where the various senses are assimilated and correlated into a cohesive perception. This is the part that gets me. I have a cohesive cognitive experience where I can sense and think many things simultaneously. I don't understand any reductionist explanation for the existence of my experience. It seems like an impossible thing for a collections of atoms in the brain to create. That hard problem of consciousness is really and truely hard. However, "free will" to me seems easy by comparison. Your brain (and body) acts based on its structure. You are the structure, and the structure determines what you decide to do. You have some starting conditions, you use those starting conditions to decide to do things (go to school, find a job, cross the street) and at the end of it, you've changed the structure of your brain such that you'll make different decisions now. I think that's as free as free will gets really, despite the fact that we may live in a deterministic universe.

lostmsu 5y ago

On retrocasuality: I find it interesting, that not only people tend to outright reject the notion that future events can be causes for present or past events, but they also are wrong about assuming they are doing it (e.g. rejecting) consistently. For example, common sayings such as "nothing ventured, nothing gained" or "today's seed - tomorrow's harvest" are actually casually bidirectional, especially the second one.

dekhn 5y ago

I would so love for this to be true, but it's far outside my area of expertise. The important thing, though, is there have to be useful experimental predictions. The only reason I could ever reconcile my understanding of reality with QM is that it's an extremely good theory for making predictions.

jfengel 5y ago
QM interpretations don't really make predictions. They all use the same underlying math. They just rearrange the terms so that some of them correspond to something familiar, with the hopes of minimizing the confounding effects of the others. They're all like trying to fold a map onto a globe: somewhere, something isn't going to fit. You just try to squeeze it into the parts you don't care as much about. Except somebody always cares. It may be that somebody will discover one that's so effective that we declare it to be Correct. That's much like what we went through with heliocentrism. Geocentrism plus epicycles is also a perfectly valid interpretation, but it's vastly more complicated and less elegant. Even so it's incredibly useful and actually remains the dominant interpretation for a lot of activities. It would be great if one such reformulation helped us reconcile with relativity, but I'll admit that I'm skeptical. I suspect that any unified theory will be so radically different in structure as to require a completely different interpretation, totally unrelated to any of the low-energy QM approximations. I doubt any of them will be helpful -- especially superdeterminism, which I view as shoving the weirdness from "All events are decided randomly and then distributed FTL" to "All events were decided at the beginning but locked away so you can't know them until you get there". Neither one really gives us access to anything new -- which is to be expected.
- dekhn 5y ago
  I didnt mean quantum interpretations (which are boring to me). I mean: transisitor theory is quantum theory and we wouldn't have developed the transistor to the point we have if QM wasn't a great model for solid state physics. Nobody thinks event outcomes are distributed FTL, that's the whole point of QM.
  - 5y ago