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This piece is a bit of a meandering mess. The author uses jargon to obfuscate rather than clarify, makes assertions without proof as he jumps between thought-e

by JackFr 5y ago

This piece is a bit of a meandering mess. The author uses jargon to obfuscate rather than clarify, makes assertions without proof as he jumps between thought-experiments and descriptions of the universe. > These freebits also have to be quantum in nature. Why? > That means they are also “qubits”—the version of plain old 1 and 0 bits that applies to objects and systems exhibiting quantum behavior. They are fuzzy, undetermined things until called upon and snapped into focus. That’s a complication that I’m going to avoid really dealing with, because it will really make our heads hurt. Hmmm. I've got plenty of Advil. Try me. What are you possibly trying to say here > Suppose you want to track back the chain of events that led to a specific incident—something interesting in a physics experiment, or a chicken crossing the road. For some incidents there will be a chain that goes all the way back to the original freebits. For some incidents? Shouldn't literally everything have a chain going back to the original freebits? By all accounts the author seems like a really bright guy, and I can only hope this is a half-assed condensation of a portion of his latest book because this is not good.

mensetmanusman 5y ago
Not the author, but maybe some thoughts: ‘> These freebits also have to be quantum in nature. Why?’ Maybe the author is assuming there are no elements in the universe that don’t follow quantum mechanics? ‘ > Suppose you want to track back the chain of events that led to a specific incident—something interesting in a physics experiment, or a chicken crossing the road. For some incidents there will be a chain that goes all the way back to the original freebits. For some incidents? Shouldn't literally everything have a chain going back to the original freebits?’ It seems like everything should have a chain of causality back to some thing. Except there has to be at least one uncaused causes, or else it’s just an infinite regression and not meaningful.
- ageofzfarm 5y ago
  > Maybe the author is assuming there are no elements in the universe that don’t follow quantum mechanics? Exactly, the author is assuming the universe is a quantum Turing machine. > It seems like everything should have a chain of causality back to some thing. Except there has to be at least one uncaused causes, or else it’s just an infinite regression and not meaningful. It's not necessarily so. Models that aim to describe the universe before the Planck epoch are speculative. There are known theories that does not include uncaused causes as a necessary condition while being internally-consistent. They are often self-referential solutions to the Wheeler-deWitt equation. e.g.: The Hartle-Hawking state and some interpretations of Carlo Rovelli's QLG
derbOac 5y ago
I agree it was meandering and a mess in that sense, but I still enjoyed reading it. Normally I'd be bothered due a sense of wasted time but I think these issues are worth thinking through, and even if not everything ties together in the essay I think they're relevant to one another topically. Sometimes I'm ok with many loose ends. For me, the Knightian uncertainty was interesting to think about in the context of free will and predictability, but it seemed as if the connection wasn't there in the way the author wanted it to be. At some point the author suggests that if Knightian uncertainty holds, "instead of being predictably unpredictable it is simply unpredictable, and cannot be described by straightforward mathematical probabilities. Instead it reflects the free will of a human being." Isn't Knightean uncertainty more reflective of an epistemological state of an observer/modeler? I mean, you can still assign probabilities to an event even if your model is wrong or extremely simple. Events that are truly random will still have probabilities assignable to them. I'm also deeply uncomfortable with the argument that seems to be creeping in in this essay and in elsewhere that unpredictability seems to be equated with free will. I do not see them as the same. Just as example, say your decision between A and B is replaced with a truly random event with 30-70% probabilities. Does that mean free will? I would say no. Free will has some other element associated with it, an element I haven't heard articulated very well yet.

by JackFr 5y ago

mensetmanusman 5y ago

Not the author, but maybe some thoughts: ‘> These freebits also have to be quantum in nature. Why?’ Maybe the author is assuming there are no elements in the universe that don’t follow quantum mechanics? ‘ > Suppose you want to track back the chain of events that led to a specific incident—something interesting in a physics experiment, or a chicken crossing the road. For some incidents there will be a chain that goes all the way back to the original freebits. For some incidents? Shouldn't literally everything have a chain going back to the original freebits?’ It seems like everything should have a chain of causality back to some thing. Except there has to be at least one uncaused causes, or else it’s just an infinite regression and not meaningful.

ageofzfarm 5y ago
> Maybe the author is assuming there are no elements in the universe that don’t follow quantum mechanics? Exactly, the author is assuming the universe is a quantum Turing machine. > It seems like everything should have a chain of causality back to some thing. Except there has to be at least one uncaused causes, or else it’s just an infinite regression and not meaningful. It's not necessarily so. Models that aim to describe the universe before the Planck epoch are speculative. There are known theories that does not include uncaused causes as a necessary condition while being internally-consistent. They are often self-referential solutions to the Wheeler-deWitt equation. e.g.: The Hartle-Hawking state and some interpretations of Carlo Rovelli's QLG

derbOac 5y ago

I agree it was meandering and a mess in that sense, but I still enjoyed reading it. Normally I'd be bothered due a sense of wasted time but I think these issues are worth thinking through, and even if not everything ties together in the essay I think they're relevant to one another topically. Sometimes I'm ok with many loose ends. For me, the Knightian uncertainty was interesting to think about in the context of free will and predictability, but it seemed as if the connection wasn't there in the way the author wanted it to be. At some point the author suggests that if Knightian uncertainty holds, "instead of being predictably unpredictable it is simply unpredictable, and cannot be described by straightforward mathematical probabilities. Instead it reflects the free will of a human being." Isn't Knightean uncertainty more reflective of an epistemological state of an observer/modeler? I mean, you can still assign probabilities to an event even if your model is wrong or extremely simple. Events that are truly random will still have probabilities assignable to them. I'm also deeply uncomfortable with the argument that seems to be creeping in in this essay and in elsewhere that unpredictability seems to be equated with free will. I do not see them as the same. Just as example, say your decision between A and B is replaced with a truly random event with 30-70% probabilities. Does that mean free will? I would say no. Free will has some other element associated with it, an element I haven't heard articulated very well yet.