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Something I've been wondering, and I'm way out of my depth here - would determinism be something that could eventually find an explanation in information theory
by jaylevitt 15y ago
Something I've been wondering, and I'm way out of my depth here - would determinism be something that could eventually find an explanation in information theory?
My layman's argument against determinism was something like: OK, even if my biological self is making my decisions for me, how does it get the inputs that drive those decisions? Imagine a simple exercise study, conducted without face-to-face contact. Half of the participants are told to exercise, and half are told not to. At the end, the half that is told to exercise will have exercised more often than the half that did not. Therefore, if the world is deterministic, what's "sending" that determinism from the study to the participant? My conclusion was: I dunno, information is flowing?
Though I guess that's where quantum mechanics comes in, and I guess there's probably also an information-theoretic aspect to that.
- jessriedel 15y agoNot sure I know what you're asking. If we ignore quantum mechanics, then all of our empirical evidence strongly suggests that the universe is strictly deterministic. (Although this conflicts with our intuition about our own consciousness.) What that means is that if we were to have the position and velocity of every particle at a given moment in time we could (in principle) calculate the position and velocity for any future moment. The important thing is that the known and understood physical "stuff" is just particles, and the only thing that can or need be known about them is their position and velocity. There is no thing-which-is-NOT-made-of-particles which we might call a soul or whatever. In particular, you could in-principle predict what experimental subject Bob would chose based on the configuration of the particles in the universe before he was born. So, is your question "How is that pre-Bob configuration of particles causing Bob's choice?" If so, then you just look to the fundamental laws of classical physics: particles obey certain rules which govern how they move around. Given a certain pre-Bob configuration, we would compute that the particles would all follow certain trajectories which eventually would lead to a configuration where many particles were assembled into Bob himself, and these particles moved in such a way (according to known physics) that Bob (who is composed of the particles) made a certain choice. Or is your question about quantum mechanics?
- jaylevitt 15y agoI guess my question is about "how does that propagate?" I have no physics background, so maybe the answer is obvious, but I have trouble intuiting how, in my thought experiment, the experimenter and the subject have any shared state.
- jessriedel 15y agoOh, ok. That's just a manner of understanding how humans work (when viewed as a machine). The experimenter has some idea in his head which is encoded in the connections between neurons (although no one knows how...which is why it's hard to be totally confident that people are deterministic). This idea is translated into vocal cord vibrations and lip movements, which vibrate air in a certain way to product sound. This sound wave travels to the subject's ears. It is translated into electrical signals traveling on neurons by the ear, leading into the subject's brain. This changes the state of the subject's brain (the connections between the neurons) in such a way that a day later, while going through his normal routine, the subject's brain directs him to exercise.
- jaylevitt 15y agoD'oh. Of course. The state is shared along exactly the same media as the perceived, "intentional" communication. Thanks.