5 ms·

That's why physicists are so opposed to super determinism because like you say it would make life 'utterly meaningless' (I dont agree, a bit dramatic). Super d

That's why physicists are so opposed to super determinism because like you say it would make life 'utterly meaningless' (I dont agree, a bit dramatic). Super determinism is the unpopular answer that solves many problems in quantum mechanics and relativity. It also makes a lot of sense if you think of the universe as pre-rendered, just like you would a CGI movie. Determine where all the particles land upfront throughout time and then play it back like a movie. Life can still be fun even it is pre-rendered. Like a movie you don't know what's going to happen next anyways. It could be like an atheist's version of God, taking in comfort in knowing whatever happens was going to happen anyways. Enjoy the ride.

MattPalmer1086 5y ago
Physicists don't largely choose physical theories on whether they make life meaningful or not. I think you're thinking of religious people.
- trixie_ 5y ago
  I'm not. Otherwise why would physicists support the concept of free will so strongly without any evidence for it. It is borderline religious. The video I posted above says as much.
  - MattPalmer1086 5y ago
    IANAP, but the actual definition of Bell's free will argument is a bit more nuanced, and was probably an unfortunate term to use to describe it. The reason that super determinism is rejected is because (in the usual understanding) that it requires that the initial state of the universe is set up incredibly precisely to make all subsequent measurements appear to violate Bell's inequality, even though reality isn't actually like that. So if we set up a quantum measurement and make a decision based on photons of light emitted from distant stars, the experimenter deterministically chooses to make just the right measurement that would make the universe look like it was violating the inequality. Including all the matter between us, and the atoms in the neurons in the experimenters brain, and the photons that were emitted before any of that existed. This is why super determinism is rejected. It would mean that we are not "free" to choose the experiments and measurements we perform. The universe would be essentially conspiring to deceive us at all levels, including what science we do, the results we receive and the conclusions drawn from it. Which is why it would invalidate the scientific method itself. We couldn't trust anything we thought we knew. Sabine has a different take from what I can tell. If you allow backwards causality, the measurement act is not independent of the thing being measured. See this blog entry and the comments: http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2019/07/the-forgotten-solution-superdeterminism.html http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2019/07/the-forgotten-solut...
  - eigenket 5y ago
    Physicists essentially like "free will" because it is essential to do physics in a meaningful way (*). If you have something like superdeterminism then everything can be set up to make it look like your experimental results mean something, but while you're not looking anything could be happening, since your choice of what experiment to do can be correlated with the system you're observing without you knowing it. For example you can have a system with two possible states, A and B. My decision to do experiments some superdeterministic setup is correlated with the state of the sytem so I only do experiments when the state of the system is A. I conclude that A is a physical law, but I'm completely wrong, its quite often B but I am only "choosing" to do experiments when it A. (*) this is my opinion and the opinion of many, but absolutely not all physicists
    - MattPalmer1086 5y ago
      Yes. Although it's technically a valid loophole, the likelihood the entire universe is set up to consistently give misleading results is extremely hard to believe. The universe could still be entirely deterministic, in that your choice of experiment and measurement to make was fixed at the moment of creation. But you still believe that the results you are getting are a fair and accurate reflection of how the universe actually works. Free will (in the philosophical sense) is irrelevant. Your choice of measurement is only influenced by what is happening locally to you at that time. The game isn't rigged to produce misleading results from the very moment of creation for all time.
- EMM_386 5y ago
  > Physicists don't largely choose physical theories on whether they make life meaningful or not. I think you're thinking of religious people. I disagree, I think quite the opposite. Physicists often seem to adhere to a "religion" of sorts, that being atheism. Anything to get rid of the "God problem". It's not all so cut and dry. > “I believe in Spinoza's God, who reveals himself in the lawful harmony of the world, not in a God who concerns himself with the fate and the doings of mankind.” - Albert Einstein I'm not religious.
  - MattPalmer1086 5y ago
    There are many religious physicists. I won't get into the argument about whether atheism is a sort of religion. But even if fervent atheist physicists are trying to remove the God Problem, how does that mean they are selecting physical theories to make life meaningful?
  - alecst 5y ago
    In my physics PhD a meaningful portion of the department was religious. Had more to do with country of birth than the thing they were studying.
- MattPalmer1086 5y ago
  Not sure why this was downvoted. I'm not attacking religious people, so apologies if I gave any offence. Just observing that historically religion tends to select theories of the physical world that align with its moral and religious belief.
astrange 5y ago
Note, I don't think Sabine's theory in this video actually is "superdeterminism" even though she called it that. It's rather "retrocausality", which is still magical but more limited. However, there isn't an explanation for why it's limited - seems like if the partial case could happen then the whole thing could happen too. (there's a long argument about this in the comments of Scott's post)
EMM_386 5y ago
> Life can still be fun even it is pre-rendered. Like a movie you don't know what's going to happen next anyways. What if my life isn't "fun"? A lot of people live out lives of complete suffering. Childhood cancer? Poverty? Disease? Genetic mental health issues? Inbreeding? Childhood trauma? That list goes on and on. That isn't a movie I signed up for. Does determinism think this is supposed to be a lesson of some sort?
- ninkendo 5y ago
  Nothing about superdeterminism says you can't find ways out of suffering... to use the movie example, the movie may play out such that your life gets better! Or it won't... superdeterminism just says that those frames are already printed on the film, we just don't know what they look like yet because we can't perceive the future.
  - EMM_386 5y ago
    > Nothing about superdeterminism says you can't find ways out of suffering Actually it does. Your movie is going to play out the way it plays out, regardless of whatever you do. Throw your feet up in the recliner or struggle for that next promotion, doesn't matter. Brain cancer. I just find this rubbish.
    - trixie_ 5y ago
      Religious people would say brain cancer was just part of gods plan. Determinism basically is the same plan just no god involved. Why is that rubbish? Because you don’t like it?
    - ninkendo 5y ago
      Do you find it rubbish because you don’t want to believe it’s true? Or because there’s holes in the logic? You rejecting superdeterminism, deciding that your fate is up to you, and making positive decisions to improve your life, is great. Do that. It may be though, that those positive decisions and deciding your fate is up to you, etc, was already printed on the film. Or if instead you just throw your feet up on the recliner and decide to do nothing, then that would have already been printed on the film as well. If in a trillion years the universe ends and there’s a complete story to tell about everything that happened, and some external observer were to watch that story, they’d see you making whatever decision you made and your life turning out in a particular way. But they wouldn’t expect that if they rewound the film that things would somehow turn out differently.
HotHotLava 5y ago
But superdeterminism in the sense that Scott uses it doesn't just mean life is completely predetermined (I think that would be a fairly unobjectionable theory), it means that specifically the whole universe is predetermined in a way that just happens to cause human experimenters to choose measurement settings that accidentally reproduce the the values predicted by Bell's inequality. It's that mind-blowingly unlikely coincidence with no explanation that scientists object to.
- astrange 5y ago
  It's true that he uses it that way, but I think Sabine claims that's not the case and her theory is actually different. Other people with similar theories call it "retrocausal". Scott doesn't believe it's possible for them to be different though.

MattPalmer1086 5y ago

Physicists don't largely choose physical theories on whether they make life meaningful or not. I think you're thinking of religious people.

trixie_ 5y ago
I'm not. Otherwise why would physicists support the concept of free will so strongly without any evidence for it. It is borderline religious. The video I posted above says as much.
- MattPalmer1086 5y ago
  IANAP, but the actual definition of Bell's free will argument is a bit more nuanced, and was probably an unfortunate term to use to describe it. The reason that super determinism is rejected is because (in the usual understanding) that it requires that the initial state of the universe is set up incredibly precisely to make all subsequent measurements appear to violate Bell's inequality, even though reality isn't actually like that. So if we set up a quantum measurement and make a decision based on photons of light emitted from distant stars, the experimenter deterministically chooses to make just the right measurement that would make the universe look like it was violating the inequality. Including all the matter between us, and the atoms in the neurons in the experimenters brain, and the photons that were emitted before any of that existed. This is why super determinism is rejected. It would mean that we are not "free" to choose the experiments and measurements we perform. The universe would be essentially conspiring to deceive us at all levels, including what science we do, the results we receive and the conclusions drawn from it. Which is why it would invalidate the scientific method itself. We couldn't trust anything we thought we knew. Sabine has a different take from what I can tell. If you allow backwards causality, the measurement act is not independent of the thing being measured. See this blog entry and the comments: http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2019/07/the-forgotten-solution-superdeterminism.html http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2019/07/the-forgotten-solut...
- eigenket 5y ago
  Physicists essentially like "free will" because it is essential to do physics in a meaningful way (*). If you have something like superdeterminism then everything can be set up to make it look like your experimental results mean something, but while you're not looking anything could be happening, since your choice of what experiment to do can be correlated with the system you're observing without you knowing it. For example you can have a system with two possible states, A and B. My decision to do experiments some superdeterministic setup is correlated with the state of the sytem so I only do experiments when the state of the system is A. I conclude that A is a physical law, but I'm completely wrong, its quite often B but I am only "choosing" to do experiments when it A. (*) this is my opinion and the opinion of many, but absolutely not all physicists
  - MattPalmer1086 5y ago
    Yes. Although it's technically a valid loophole, the likelihood the entire universe is set up to consistently give misleading results is extremely hard to believe. The universe could still be entirely deterministic, in that your choice of experiment and measurement to make was fixed at the moment of creation. But you still believe that the results you are getting are a fair and accurate reflection of how the universe actually works. Free will (in the philosophical sense) is irrelevant. Your choice of measurement is only influenced by what is happening locally to you at that time. The game isn't rigged to produce misleading results from the very moment of creation for all time.
EMM_386 5y ago
> Physicists don't largely choose physical theories on whether they make life meaningful or not. I think you're thinking of religious people. I disagree, I think quite the opposite. Physicists often seem to adhere to a "religion" of sorts, that being atheism. Anything to get rid of the "God problem". It's not all so cut and dry. > “I believe in Spinoza's God, who reveals himself in the lawful harmony of the world, not in a God who concerns himself with the fate and the doings of mankind.” - Albert Einstein I'm not religious.
- MattPalmer1086 5y ago
  There are many religious physicists. I won't get into the argument about whether atheism is a sort of religion. But even if fervent atheist physicists are trying to remove the God Problem, how does that mean they are selecting physical theories to make life meaningful?
- alecst 5y ago
  In my physics PhD a meaningful portion of the department was religious. Had more to do with country of birth than the thing they were studying.
MattPalmer1086 5y ago
Not sure why this was downvoted. I'm not attacking religious people, so apologies if I gave any offence. Just observing that historically religion tends to select theories of the physical world that align with its moral and religious belief.

astrange 5y ago

Note, I don't think Sabine's theory in this video actually is "superdeterminism" even though she called it that. It's rather "retrocausality", which is still magical but more limited. However, there isn't an explanation for why it's limited - seems like if the partial case could happen then the whole thing could happen too. (there's a long argument about this in the comments of Scott's post)

EMM_386 5y ago

> Life can still be fun even it is pre-rendered. Like a movie you don't know what's going to happen next anyways. What if my life isn't "fun"? A lot of people live out lives of complete suffering. Childhood cancer? Poverty? Disease? Genetic mental health issues? Inbreeding? Childhood trauma? That list goes on and on. That isn't a movie I signed up for. Does determinism think this is supposed to be a lesson of some sort?

ninkendo 5y ago
Nothing about superdeterminism says you can't find ways out of suffering... to use the movie example, the movie may play out such that your life gets better! Or it won't... superdeterminism just says that those frames are already printed on the film, we just don't know what they look like yet because we can't perceive the future.
- EMM_386 5y ago
  > Nothing about superdeterminism says you can't find ways out of suffering Actually it does. Your movie is going to play out the way it plays out, regardless of whatever you do. Throw your feet up in the recliner or struggle for that next promotion, doesn't matter. Brain cancer. I just find this rubbish.
  - trixie_ 5y ago
    Religious people would say brain cancer was just part of gods plan. Determinism basically is the same plan just no god involved. Why is that rubbish? Because you don’t like it?
  - ninkendo 5y ago
    Do you find it rubbish because you don’t want to believe it’s true? Or because there’s holes in the logic? You rejecting superdeterminism, deciding that your fate is up to you, and making positive decisions to improve your life, is great. Do that. It may be though, that those positive decisions and deciding your fate is up to you, etc, was already printed on the film. Or if instead you just throw your feet up on the recliner and decide to do nothing, then that would have already been printed on the film as well. If in a trillion years the universe ends and there’s a complete story to tell about everything that happened, and some external observer were to watch that story, they’d see you making whatever decision you made and your life turning out in a particular way. But they wouldn’t expect that if they rewound the film that things would somehow turn out differently.

HotHotLava 5y ago

But superdeterminism in the sense that Scott uses it doesn't just mean life is completely predetermined (I think that would be a fairly unobjectionable theory), it means that specifically the whole universe is predetermined in a way that just happens to cause human experimenters to choose measurement settings that accidentally reproduce the the values predicted by Bell's inequality. It's that mind-blowingly unlikely coincidence with no explanation that scientists object to.

astrange 5y ago
It's true that he uses it that way, but I think Sabine claims that's not the case and her theory is actually different. Other people with similar theories call it "retrocausal". Scott doesn't believe it's possible for them to be different though.