Board 8 > Everything is predetermined.

(+) Yeah! (+)

My theory is whatever you have COMPLETE scientific understanding of, can be predicted. You can start as simple as predicting that if you clap your hands, it will make a sound. You can expand that to any level, to even levels beyond human capability.

WHAT DO YOU THINK??

How high are you right now?
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I don't care

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it literally is but thats not how we perceive it so it doesnt matter

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it literally isn't because quantum mechanics exists* and is non-deterministic
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to hell with your theoretical physics its all a simulation anyway

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hell yeah it is brother
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It is, but our ape brain wants to feign a sense of will, so you can't expect the poll to go any other way than "It is not."
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I don't think that's what people mean when they say predetermined.

I remember years ago 2-3 people trolling that "you don't have free will" and we're basically pre-programmed biorobots, that even your decision what to have for dinner on a particular night has been pre-programmed before you were born, and not something you could have possibly chosen differently. Is that what you mean?
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NFUN posted...

it literally isn't because quantum mechanics exists* and is non-deterministic

Could you explain this more (or point me in a direction)? I love this shit

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Free will is an illusion
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Maybe, but in order for society to function we need to act as if things are not predetermined
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Major life spoilers

God isn't real
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Yes, and free will exists.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/compatibilism/
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If every little particle and pieces of existence can be measured and predicted, I guess everything is predetermined. You were always going to make this post because of the way the big bang exploded and I was always going to stare at my cubicle wall for 6 seconds thinking about it.
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XIII_rocks posted...

NFUN posted...

it literally isn't because quantum mechanics exists* and is non-deterministic

Could you explain this more (or point me in a direction)? I love this shit

Basically, things down to the atomic level act like billiard balls on a universal scale, so you could theoretically predict how everything will end up given infinite time to plot it all out across the universe

But things smaller than atoms dont work that way. They dont adhere to Newtonian physics. You cant predict their behaviors based on how other things interact with them. They exist in multiple places at once (a superposition), and dont become fixed until someone observes them.

Our brains function on a quantum level, or so I understand
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Joelypoely posted...

Yes, and free will exists.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/compatibilism/

This is just sad
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Jakyl25 posted...

But things smaller than atoms dont work that way. They dont adhere to Newtonian physics. You cant predict their behaviors based on how other things interact with them. They exist in multiple places at once (a superposition), and dont become fixed until someone observes them.

Our brains function on a quantum level, or so I understand

Doesn't that just mean they operate on principles we don't yet understand?
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I don't have Jakyl blocked but I can't see his posts in this topic but I see them in other topics, so he is like superposition to me right now? what is going on
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iirc, quantum mechanics is deterministic* in the sense that a given particle's wavefunction is a well-defined function that can--in principle--be precisely known/predicted at all points in time. However knowledge of a particle's wave function doesn't necessarily tell you what the particle's position/speed at any given time is--it only gives a probability distribution describing what positions/velocities might be obtained if the quantity were measured. (And in the classical limit, these probability distributions become extremely sharply peaked delta functions which results in the Newtonian physics we are intuitively more familiar with)

Whether or not this distinction matters to you I don't know.

*Whether or not this actually means quantum mechanics is "deterministic" in any meaningful sense is also an open question, but I don't really care about the semantics argument associated with that.
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neonreaper posted...

I don't have Jakyl blocked but I can't see his posts in this topic but I see them in other topics, so he is like superposition to me right now? what is going on

He quoted XIII_Rocks who quoted NFUN.

Do you have NFUN ignored? There's a new option in the advanced settings that's "Hide ignored quotes" - which hides posts if someone quotes someone you ignored. I did not know about this and reported it as a bug but got a reply regarding this setting.
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azuarc posted...

Jakyl25 posted...

But things smaller than atoms dont work that way. They dont adhere to Newtonian physics. You cant predict their behaviors based on how other things interact with them. They exist in multiple places at once (a superposition), and dont become fixed until someone observes them.

Our brains function on a quantum level, or so I understand

Doesn't that just mean they operate on principles we don't yet understand?

nah, back in the 60's through Bell inequalities it was demonstrated that local hidden variable theories can't describe quantum mechanics. what that essentially means is that there's no information that we can't see that can iron out the weird stuff in QM like superposition. either the quantum realm is non-real ("reality is that which continues to exist even when you're not looking at it), non-local (effects can be transmitted faster than the speed of light, violating causality) or non-free (superdeterministic, which would agree with the topic's supposition but causes its own problems and has essentially no adherents). What's generally favored is the non-local interpretation, which is where you'll hear terms like "quantum entanglement" thrown about.

and jakyl, I thought you believed in Many Worlds
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Yeah qm throws out the entirely deterministic world.

Also there's probably no way we'll ever be able to calculate the entire universe so to us free will is a useful concept.
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When I said that, I meant I hope the real answer is Many Worlds, in much the same way I hope UFOs are actually aliens visiting us.

I have zero level of knowledge that would allow me to actually support either supposition
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Jakyl25 posted...

XIII_rocks posted...

NFUN posted...

it literally isn't because quantum mechanics exists* and is non-deterministic

Could you explain this more (or point me in a direction)? I love this shit

Basically, things down to the atomic level act like billiard balls on a universal scale, so you could theoretically predict how everything will end up given infinite time to plot it all out across the universe

But things smaller than atoms dont work that way. They dont adhere to Newtonian physics. You cant predict their behaviors based on how other things interact with them. They exist in multiple places at once (a superposition), and dont become fixed until someone observes them.

Our brains function on a quantum level, or so I understand

My intuition leads me to think that even things like superposition have a cause, even if we're not able to grasp it. If that means I'm using "deterministic" wrong that's fine I like doing that
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superposition has a cause but its exact effect is unknown and unknowable. it's not semantics to say that if something is deterministic that you can calculate the result if you know the exact nature of the cause; that's the definition. in quantum mechanics, you can have as perfect as physically allowed information about a system, the wavefunction, and be unable to know exactly what the result would be. it's like if you had a die and were only allowed to know how many sides it had and no information about how it was thrown. you'd only be able to give probabilities for results, with two identical scenarios potentially yielding two different outcomes. non-deterministic
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Jakyl25 posted...

Our brains function on a quantum level, or so I understand

All of the theories about human brains being more quantum than other large objects are pretty much bullshit (it could be true, but there is zero experimental evidence for that claim. Its just a bunch of people pulling stuff out of their ass at the moment).

(Quantum mechanics does describe everyday objects, but at that scale everything is effectively deterministic and any substantial deviation from the most likely outcome is obscenely unlikely to happen).

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Many worlds breaks the Gordian knot of "deterministic" wave function in theory vs "probabilistic" measurements in reality by asserting essentially that the probabilistic nature of quantum mechanics is identical to the probabilistic nature of experiments where a bunch of clones of experimenters are created.

To give an illustrative, but not quantum mechanical example, imagine you see a house with two rooms, one with an arrow pointed left and one with an arrow pointed right. Then you're knocked out, your brain + body split exactly in half + the missing half cloned (such that there's no question on which one is the "original"; if you can come up with an objection just pretend the splitting is even more fine grained or pretend that you literally can't tell) and each version of you is placed into the room.

So even though there was a deterministic thing going on (a single house that exists, and two versions of you), the chance that you wake up and see a left arrow is 50% (and same with right arrow).

In this case, the analogy corresponds to solving the wave function with two results being discovering the house has two rooms and the case of measuring the result being waking up and seeing what room you're in. Many world's asserts that this set of observations is commiserate with having split versions of you.

(There's more complicated ways that you can explain this by talking about entangled states / actually weird quantum experiments like the delayed choice quantum eraser, but the intuition behind many worlds I think is much easier to explain.)

Note that I haven't talked about some other objections against like the "basis problem" (where some people protest that there's no "objective" way to split the universe) or the "people who don't understand many worlds or occam's razor talk about occam's razor" problem (where, if you believed that many worlds is more complicated than one world, you goddamn well better explain how "many atoms" is simpler than "four elements")

I don't think many worlds addresses this specific concern any better than Copenhagen, it just shifts the issue somewhere else. The true answer to the question of which way an electron's spin will point it "both", but not in a way that's relevant to a given world. In one world the cat lives and in another it dies, and an observer in either can't predict where that it would've turned out that way for them by then retroactively looking at their information about the scenario before an observable result was yielded.

Only superdeterminism really gives an answer in the other direction, and superdeterminism is blech
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I'm not attempting to answer the philosophical question of determinism (incidentally, I'm a compatibilist), just trying to explain what people mean when they say that many world's is on the side of determinism.

NFUN posted...

superposition has a cause but its exact effect is unknown and unknowable. it's not semantics to say that if something is deterministic that you can calculate the result if you know the exact nature of the cause; that's the definition. in quantum mechanics, you can have as perfect as physically allowed information about a system, the wavefunction, and be unable to know exactly what the result would be. it's like if you had a die and were only allowed to know how many sides it had and no information about how it was thrown. you'd only be able to give probabilities for results, with two identical scenarios potentially yielding two different outcomes. non-deterministic

There was never any chance that you werent gonna post this
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Nothing is real

Everything is permitted
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plays strawberry fields at jb

MasaomiHouzuki posted...

Many world's asserts that this set of observations is commiserate with having split versions of you.

This is essentially the semantics the question comes down to. Is the randomness part of the input to the system, or a side effect?

Quantum mechanics proves particles fundamentally non deterministic (even if we don't fully understand them), but if each particles wave function collapsing result is part of the definition of the universe, part of the input to the calculation, then.... the universe is obviously deterministic.

The only question is whether there's some insanely huge record of quantum particle measurement results that is driving the quantum interactions in the universe, or whether it's truly randomly determined in real time, unbeknownst to anything.
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LaPlace's Demon is dead

foolm0r0n posted...

Quantum mechanics proves particles fundamentally non deterministic (even if we don't fully understand them), but if each particles wave function collapsing result is part of the definition of the universe, part of the input to the calculation, then.... the universe is obviously deterministic.

The only question is whether there's some insanely huge record of quantum particle measurement results that is driving the quantum interactions in the universe, or whether it's truly randomly determined in real time, unbeknownst to anything.

At the highest levels, this is what the question is asking, which is sort of the fun thing about philosophy.

You can attempt to answer this question with virtually no knowledge of the topic at hand.

But even as you accrue knowledge and build a more completely picture and get a precise idea of what exactly is being asked...you still end up arguing about it in almost the exact same manner as the novice and along many of the same lines of division.

For my part I believe in a 'hard but un-usefully opaque' determinism, much like the one presented by foolmo in the highlighted statement.
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Eddv posted...

foolm0r0n posted...

Quantum mechanics proves particles fundamentally non deterministic (even if we don't fully understand them), but if each particles wave function collapsing result is part of the definition of the universe, part of the input to the calculation, then.... the universe is obviously deterministic.

The only question is whether there's some insanely huge record of quantum particle measurement results that is driving the quantum interactions in the universe, or whether it's truly randomly determined in real time, unbeknownst to anything.

At the highest levels, this is what the question is asking, which is sort of the fun thing about philosophy.

You can attempt to answer this question with virtually no knowledge of the topic at hand.

But even as you accrue knowledge and build a more completely picture and get a precise idea of what exactly is being asked...you still end up arguing about it in almost the exact same manner as the novice and along many of the same lines of division.

For my part I believe in a 'hard but un-usefully opaque' determinism, much like the one presented by foolmo in the highlighted statement.

no we know the answer to that, unless our entire understanding of quantum mechanics is wrong

there are no valid local hidden variable theories. either we have to dramatically rethink our understanding of the structure of the universe and accept that the speed of light is a suggestion and that the universe operates non-locally, or that there aren't deeper equations and information that would describe the results of seemingly non-deterministic phenomena

or you could believe in superdeterminism and that not only is the entire history and future of the universe precisely mapper out, but its quantum inhabitants effectively "know" what they're going to do ahead of time
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NFUN posted...

or you could believe in superdeterminism and that not only is the entire history and future of the universe precisely mapper out, but its quantum inhabitants effectively "know" what they're going to do ahead of time

Yes exactly.

Like that's the entire basis of the argument.

Events are either random or they aren't.

Cause and Effect and Free Will are two things that seem very real and yet are incompatible and Quantum mechanics don't really offer you a way out of making the same determination just on a different scale.
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You can choose a ready guide in some celestial voice
If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice.

You can choose from phantom fears and kindness that can kill
I will choose a path that's clear, I will choose free will.
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The thing is that basically no physicists believe in superdeterminism. It has the "super" prefix for a reason--it's not just "all effects have a cause, and therefore by knowing the causes you can know the effects". It's, well, super.

I've mentioned Bell inequalities before. What they are is basically just a mathematical derivation about the existence of quantum entanglement and its consequences. If you know what entanglement is, you can probably skip this summary. In his example, if you had two electrons created or emitted together, they'd have opposite spins according to conservation laws. By measuring one electron, you get its spin and thus immediately know the other electron's spin, even if it's far away and you'd expect that its "wavefunction hasn't collapsed"; despite being a probability distribution of possible spins because it hasn't been touched, it'd assume a specific value upon the measurement of one particle that would always be detected when actually measured. Alice measures electron A and sees it has a positive spin, and thus she knows that Bob's electron on the other side of the Universe will have a negative spin. If Bob measures his electron after Alice does (which is a weird phrase from a general relativistic point of view because simultaneity is subjective in it), it will indeed be negative, even though it should have a chance of being positive or negative. through math about correlations about the settings of the detectors and their results he proved that non-local hidden variables don't exist like i've been harping about blah blah blah. if you take the perspective that the particles aren't "real", then it doesn't make sense to talk about their properties before measuring them (copenhagen). if you take the perspective that they're nonlocal, then some kind of information (even if we can't harness it) has been transmitted faster than the speed of light.

Superdeterminism avoids these possibilities by saying that there's no choice at all. Electron B knows to be negative when Electron A is found to be positive not by being ephemeral or communicating with its partner at a speed faster than light, but because it was always going to be negative and A was always going to be positive. But Bell found that the hidden variable theories that Einstein and friends created to avoid quantum weirdness are impossible. There's no secret data that the electrons have that we don't that determine their spin. Either the particles knew in advance how the experiment would unfold, that time is a pre-written book and we're the laughingstock of the Universe because we can't read it, or that the way that Alice will calibrate and conduct her experiment is compensated for by how Bob does it; Alice makes decision 1 and Bob makes decision 2 such that they get the violation of the inequalities expected by Bell's math. An incredible coincidence that keeps happening because, not only was it always going to be this way, but it was going to be this way in a specific manner that only makes it seem like the particles are communicating. Cause and effect are not only correlated: they're super-correlated. it's a whole nother flavor of pasta sauce

in any case, superdeterminism is not only weird and inherently unprovable, but in an important way makes all of science a sham. it's a weird foray into philosophy that we don't have a good reason to believe because it's even worse than the problems it would avoid.
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yeah humans are pretty funny. time is a mountain range. you can look across it and see the whole thing. everythings already decided including its inescapable death i dont know why you people cant see that

mostly unrelated: does anybody know of a book that has "counterfactual" as kind of an arc phrase? i think i remember reading something like that and it's driving me crazy not remembering what it is
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NFUN posted...

no we know the answer to that, unless our entire understanding of quantum mechanics is wrong

Yeah wouldn't it be just wild if all of the best minds in the scientific community were collectively wrong about something? Unprecedented!

Sarcasm aside, I don't have an informed opinion I just find it amusing how we are doomed to eternally debate subjects we can never fully understand. Oh humans. Silly us.

i take your point, but quantum mechanics is weird. partly weird because it's so weird, but mostly weird because despite how weird it is, it works really really well. everybody hates it in some way and plenty of people, especially einstein, desperately want it to be replaced but we're stuck with it because it's basically the most accurate scientific theory ever developed despite nobody having any good idea how literally it actually describes reality
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if you take the perspective that they're nonlocal, then some kind of information (even if we can't harness it) has been transmitted faster than the speed of light.

This is not what bell's equality says or does. You cannot transmit information faster than the speed light.

It's instead saying that if you interpret the Born Rule as a consequence of some sort of hidden variable theory, then you lose local realism. You can always just assume that quantum mechanics is quantum mechanics instead of a classical theory with hidden variables (which is what the EPR paper originally suggested).

Like, superdeterminism is what happens when you don't take the equations seriously, then wonder why nothing makes sense when reality obeys what the equations say rather than your intuitions. Of course you'd be confused when you pretend your confusion is a part of reality.

I'll point out that obviously you couldn't have gotten this insight from philosophy, but from actually understanding the physical facts on the ground / experiments that have been performed which differentiate different predictions from each other.


there are no valid local hidden variable theories. either we have to dramatically rethink our understanding of the structure of the universe and accept that the speed of light is a suggestion and that the universe operates non-locally, or that there aren't deeper equations and information that would describe the results of seemingly non-deterministic phenomena

like, locality not being true has a bunch of observable consequences in a bunch of observations that wouldn't even be hard to check. For example, the 1/r^2 dropoff in both the EM and gravity forces *is* essentially an ironclad statement of locality (if we had non-local interactions, then the surface area over which the force works wouldn't be proportional to 1/r^2ed, so you essentially have to repeatedly pile epicycle after epicycle to explain why *only* information propagates faster, not to mention how both special relativity and general relativity would be derived *at all* essentially because Einstein just assumed locality and then pushed as hard as he could on that assumption). At this point, you're not just beheading yourself with occam's razor, but bewilderingly stumped at why cutting yourself is so painful.

If something seems confusing and wrong, at least entertain the possibility that it is confusing and wrong because a wrong assumption got made somewhere.

Sarcasm aside, I don't have an informed opinion I just find it amusing how we are doomed to eternally debate subjects we can never fully understand. Oh humans. Silly us.

You are confusing the ignorance of people who don't even understand the basics of what is even happening (pop quiz, what's the difference between superpositions and the derivation of the born rule? if you aren't even aware that quantum mechanics actually talks about two conceptually independent types of randomness, then it's hard to see how you make *actual* sense of things like the delayed quantum choice eraser or the actual original experiment for bell's theorem.) This isn't a statement that these problems shouldn't be discussed at all, but pretending your own confusion has physical consequences is naturally going to stop actual new information from clearing up the confusion.

Quantum mechanics proves particles fundamentally non deterministic (even if we don't fully understand them), but if each particles wave function collapsing result is part of the definition of the universe, part of the input to the calculation, then.... the universe is obviously deterministic.

This is essentially false. Solve Schroedinger's equation, and not only do you get accurate results, but also get explanations of why a wave function looks like a particle at classical energy / time scales. The question isn't "is the particle deterministic" so much as "why is what we see the born rule instead of the waves themselves like in EM".

And to point out, like, wave function collapse is essentially the worst of all philosophical and physical worlds. Because that's proposing that there is a 1) non-unitary (i.e. not probability preserving) transformation that happens every single time a measurement is made, despite nothing in the equation or experiments indicating this happens (decoherence / entanglement happens on a gradual scale and have basically been confirmed up to larger and more energetic systems all the time and 2) time asymmetric, which like, is essentially the unitary point but you're also violating CPT symmetry at this point, which once again is like hyper confirmed. I dare someone who believes in wave function collapse to give a coherent account of what happens to the wave function in the delayed choice quantum eraser experiment.

The universe is stochastic
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NFUN posted...

in any case, superdeterminism is not only weird and inherently unprovable, but in an important way makes all of science a sham

It actually does the opposite, validating all of science by being left on the table until it is actually disproven. It is still entirely possible that it is the reality of our universe, and so it must remain a scientific possibility.

It's not a big deal at all, really, unless you have some naive pride in our current, young ideas of quantum mechanics.

MasaomiHouzuki posted...

CPT symmetry

Also simply not disproven yet.
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