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> Why would belief that we are just agents responding predictably to stimuli imply that one would not respond predictably to stimuli? This is determinism, not

by nyssos 3y ago

> Why would belief that we are just agents responding predictably to stimuli imply that one would not respond predictably to stimuli? This is determinism, not superdeterminism. Superdeterminism claims that the state of any system you measure is always already correlated with the measurements you perform on it: photons emitted a billion years ago encode information about where someone is going to choose to point a telescope tomorrow. Not because of any interaction between the two, but because the initial conditions of the early universe just happened to be set up that way.

simiones 3y ago
Sure, but superdeterminism implies determinism. That is, if the world is superdeterministic, it is certainly deterministic, so living agents definitely react to stimuli in a theoretically predictable manner. Interestingly, it's actually very hard to define what it would mean to believe in determinism, but not superdeterminism. Ultimately if the universe is deterministic, that must mean that everything that happens is predictable from the initial conditions of the universe.
- nyssos 3y ago
  > Ultimately if the universe is deterministic, that must mean that everything that happens is predictable from the initial conditions of the universe. This is still not superdeterminism. The superdeterminist claim is a statistical one: your choice of measurement is not even approximately conditionally independent of the state of the thing you're measuring. Ever. There are plenty of deterministic processes that nonetheless wipe out most correlations over the long-term: thoroughly mixing two fluids will do it. Preserving a strong correlation between the future state of your brain and the exact luminosity of a star a billion light years away at one particular moment, over the whole history of the universe is incomprehensibly unlikely. And superdeterminists claim that this happens every single time.

by nyssos 3y ago

simiones 3y ago

Sure, but superdeterminism implies determinism. That is, if the world is superdeterministic, it is certainly deterministic, so living agents definitely react to stimuli in a theoretically predictable manner. Interestingly, it's actually very hard to define what it would mean to believe in determinism, but not superdeterminism. Ultimately if the universe is deterministic, that must mean that everything that happens is predictable from the initial conditions of the universe.

nyssos 3y ago
> Ultimately if the universe is deterministic, that must mean that everything that happens is predictable from the initial conditions of the universe. This is still not superdeterminism. The superdeterminist claim is a statistical one: your choice of measurement is not even approximately conditionally independent of the state of the thing you're measuring. Ever. There are plenty of deterministic processes that nonetheless wipe out most correlations over the long-term: thoroughly mixing two fluids will do it. Preserving a strong correlation between the future state of your brain and the exact luminosity of a star a billion light years away at one particular moment, over the whole history of the universe is incomprehensibly unlikely. And superdeterminists claim that this happens every single time.