4 ms·

Thanks for the reply! > When your friend makes their measurement of particle B, they entangle > themselves with it in the same way. So when you meet up with y

by jlebar 12y ago

Thanks for the reply! > When your friend makes their measurement of particle B, they entangle > themselves with it in the same way. So when you meet up with your friend, > your wavefunctions are in (anti)phase; the universe as a whole is an equal > superposition of the world where you measured up and your friend measured > down, and the world where you measured down and your friend measured up. If we take this perspective, are we still able to rule out possibility (1)? That is, our assumption was that what my friend did couldn't affect my experiment; we used this fact to rule out the possibility that the order of my friend's measurements affected my result. But if in some sense my experiment doesn't "occur" until I meet up with my friend, then this assumption seems not to be true any longer. Which is to say, we could explain this whole thing without requiring any "free will" / "true randomness" on the part of our particles.

lmm 12y ago
From a many-worlds point of view there's not the same nondeterminism in the physics. There's nondeterminism in our subjective experience, but it's a surface phenomenon rather than something fundamental. So I guess we've sidestepped the question the "theorem" is aimed at, because by adopting this viewpoint we're already assuming that humans don't have any kind of physical nondeterminism (or "free will", if you insist). Personally I think the idea was stupid as stated; having a set of dice inside your head doesn't make you any more likely to have "free will" than if you didn't, and that's all that quantum nondeterminism really means. But I guess some philosophers really did claim that this was support for the notion of free will, so it's worth refuting that as directly as possible. So I guess you're right: if anything, a many-worlds interpretation gives more support to the idea that quantum nondeterminism has something to do with free will, because it means the nondeterminism only comes in when we look at a human's subjective observations. So yes, I think we really do sidestep the claim this way.

by jlebar 12y ago

lmm 12y ago

From a many-worlds point of view there's not the same nondeterminism in the physics. There's nondeterminism in our subjective experience, but it's a surface phenomenon rather than something fundamental. So I guess we've sidestepped the question the "theorem" is aimed at, because by adopting this viewpoint we're already assuming that humans don't have any kind of physical nondeterminism (or "free will", if you insist). Personally I think the idea was stupid as stated; having a set of dice inside your head doesn't make you any more likely to have "free will" than if you didn't, and that's all that quantum nondeterminism really means. But I guess some philosophers really did claim that this was support for the notion of free will, so it's worth refuting that as directly as possible. So I guess you're right: if anything, a many-worlds interpretation gives more support to the idea that quantum nondeterminism has something to do with free will, because it means the nondeterminism only comes in when we look at a human's subjective observations. So yes, I think we really do sidestep the claim this way.