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I must be super deterministic as well because the alternative you describe sounds … unuseful to me. If we can have illusions like that then all the conclusion
by otikik 4y ago
I must be super deterministic as well because the alternative you describe sounds … unuseful to me. If we can have illusions like that then all the conclusion you extract from that are also subject to the same effect: it’s not necessarily true that QM can account for it; we could also be “allucinating”collectively that they can account for it. Or, we might not exist at all and all perceptions are all fake.
Once you introduce a malicious devil like that it always goes “full universe”. Say, this religious group knocks on your door, tells you that Earth is 2022 years old. You point to dinosaur fossils. They say the Devil put them there to trick us. But then, you follow, our whole existence might as well be fake. The Devil could have created both of us 5 minutes ago, with fake memories of a life that never existed, just so we could have this conversation. And we will both vanish when I close this door (blam!). The usual counter is that the devil has a very specific amount of power: triceratops head is ok, humans is too much. But even accepting that, how can you know you are a human? It might be the Devil tricking you again, maybe you are a teacup that thinks they are human.
- Koshkin 4y agoWhat is useless is to argue with proponents of subjective (i.e. the true) idealism. Because to them you are an illusion.
- Layke1123 4y agoAgreed. I have to believe that there is magic, because my brain cannot handle never existing. These people are hopeless and we should probably label their beliefs as needing mental health rather than "sincerely held beliefs".
- Schroedingersat 4y agoExcept that's a straw man and not what MW is at all
- foobarian 4y agoI guess the bottom line of it all for me is: can it build me an interstellar space ship (FTL would be nice!) or not? I'm OK if we're all merely sharing the illusion of colonizing nearby stars.
- Viliam1234 4y ago> can it build me an interstellar space ship (FTL would be nice!) or not? Only the "illusions" that obey the laws of physics are allowed. The laws of physics are the only "real" thing; positions and speeds of specific objects are not. So if the laws of physics happen to forbid FTL travel, we will not get such spaceship.
- contravariant 4y agoI find the superdeterministic solution more problematic since on its own it just says that the reason the universe seems to not have local reality is just that it has been predetermined that it should seem that way to us. This is worse to me than our experience being a natural consequence of entangling ourselves with the rest of the universe. It's not an illusion, it's just an admission that our experience is also ruled by quantum mechanics and we cannot observe something without interacting with it.
- planck01 4y agoIn the end I suppose it doesn't really matter to nature if we think how it works is problematic or not. It will just be as it is. Or to quote Bohr:"Stop telling God what to do."
- bufferoverflow 4y agoWe can clearly observe many things without interacting with them. Most of the universe, for example.
- Nevermark 4y agoReceiving a photon of light in your retina is "interacting". Interacting with the photon, and anything the photon is entangled with. You can't sense what you don't interact with.
- GoblinSlayer 4y agoIt's the state of observer that is changed by observation, thus observer becomes entangled with the observed object, and their states become correlated. Noncorrelated state would look blurry, but correlated state looks classical.
- rhn_mk1 4y ago> could have created both of us 5 minutes ago, with fake memories of a life that never existed, just so we could have this conversation This is called "last Thursdayism", by the way.
- lisper 4y ago> we might not exist at all and all perceptions are all fake Yep. That's pretty much the size of it, except that "fake" is putting too negative a spin on it. It's more like virtual reality than "fake". What we perceive as classical reality is a very good approximation to the truth at large thermalized systems like us. But it is not the truth. Just like Newtonian gravity is a very good approximation to the truth in the weak-field case, but it is not the truth.
- Schroedingersat 4y agoMany worlds is not positing any old Descartes' demon though. It's just a trivial combination of things that are considered obvious. 1. Wavefunctions and superpositions objectively exist. 2. Wavefunctions can be entangled with each other, in ways that make parts of them not interact with each other. 3. When interactions have differing outcomes given different parts of a superposition, you find the outcomes depend on a single part of said superposition. If you posit the exact same rules for the lab as the experiment, 'wavefunction collapse' or 'communication' aren't even concepts that apply 3 becomes tautilogical. The only questions are 1. 'why do I find myself observing the world as the experimenter who saw A and not the experimenter who saw B', but the other you is asking the exact same question, and you'll never encounter them. And 2. what is entropy/measurement/why do I observe the world as one experimenter and not both? Superdeterminism goes the other way and throws out free will, information, and randomness. If you do that, you're left with equally large questions about why entropy increases, what is information, and why do we think we have free will? It's a fairly large philosophical step backwards low information explanations for many things have to be replaced with 'just because the universe is arranged precisely in a way that makes it seem that way even though there's no reason it couldn't be arranged differently' Both are far more coherent and less egotistical than copenhagen or bohmian mechanics.