"[Note that the Everett interpretation does _not_ provide determinism about events in our future."
not so fast.. the essence of determinism is that all events in the future determine by the past. here's a quote from the guys at Stanford.. "The quantum state of the Universe at one time specifies the quantum state at all times."
and heres the link for the rest of the article.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qm-manyworlds/#ProbUnce
yes very thick indeed and fatter than fat but wrong article
"[Note that the Everett interpretation does _not_ provide determinism about events in our future."
not so fast.. the essence of determinism is that all events in the future determine by the past. here's a quote from the guys at Stanford.. "The quantum state of the Universe at one time specifies the quantum state at all times."
and heres the link for the rest of the article.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qm-manyworlds/#ProbUnce
You can't always trust philosophers on real science.
If that claim were true, this would include a large array of Bell's experiments where effectively random choices of measurement are made. Unfortunately, the statistics of the results of such an array of Bell's experiments are inconsistent with the existence of _ANY_ predetermined outcomes.
The only way to try to save the claim would be if the Universe was such as to make effectively random choices of measurement impossible in an utterly implausible way - i.e. measurement choices at the two ends of a Bell's apparatus are always forced to be made so as not to reveal the fundamental indeterminism of quantum mechanics.
Given that these choices of measurements can be made by such things as the decay of nuclei (or the least significant bit of the variation in the CMB from a random direction), this would require that unconnected sources of natural variation at space-like relative locations are forced to occur in such a special way that when those decays are (by a priori arbitrary rules) used to select the observations made in the different arms of a Bell's experiment, they happen to select ones that don't expose the indeterminism of quantum mechanics.
Let me stick my neck out here. This ain't our Universe. Ours is one where effectively random choices can be made based on arbitrary rules using unconnected sources of natural variation. In this Universe, determinism is falsified.
Just because some ex-physicist (Lev Vaidman) writes for the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy does not make him more reliable on such a matter than physicists in general.
Took me quite a while to realise you were (very unclearly) probably referring to a quote in Bercher's post in what appears to be a reply to me (but may be actually a continuation of the post to Bercher. Please strive to be clear! (Eg if a post is not to the previous poster, it needs to either quote someone else or explicitly name them).
opti, if you reject the Everett all together is your choice, but if you accept it, you have to accept it for what it is, otherwise its circular. all the other branches are real as much as galaxies outside our observable are real.
elroch, if i had to choose between the experts and an online random.. my choice is clear. just a quick look at wiki, also classified the Everett as "rigid determinism"
the "randomness" you're complaining about, is not some conspiracy to fool an agent sitting on a branch, but just a consequential feature of the the system as a whole.
more important is that "your randomness" is just pseudo randomness. think about it this way.. if you could change the dial of time backwards and forward, everything will happen exactly the same. this is getting boring.
opti, if you reject the Everett all together is your choice, but if you accept it, you have to accept it for what it is, otherwise its circular. all the other branches are real as much as galaxies outside our observable are real.
While I like to think like that, from the point of the scientific method they are just part of the model. All that matters scientifically is the predictions the model makes. This is important because objective questions about such things can never be answered.
Likewise the global determinism of the model is a feature of the model, not a feature of the Universe - i.e. observable behaviour - and not testable. Far more important to real world physics (and engineering!) is the lack of determinism in the scientific sense.
elroch, if i had to choose between the experts and an online random.. my choice is clear. just a quick look at wiki, also classified the Everett as "rigid determinism"
the "randomness" you're complaining about, is not some conspiracy to fool an agent sitting on a branch, but just a consequential feature of the the system as a whole.
more important is that "your randomness" is just pseudo randomness. think about it this way.. if you could change the dial of time backwards and forward, everything will happen exactly the same. this is getting boring.
With all due humility, I have considerable experience of working with randomness in statistics, physics, information theory and AI. I also took leading expert (and now quantum technology researcher) Prof Valerio Scarani's excellent course on randomness "https://www.classcentral.com/course/randomness-736" and am not aware of anyone who got a higher mark on it.
"if you could change the dial of time backwards and forward, everything will happen exactly the same" is not a proposition that has any valid status. It starts with a wild hypothetical that clearly can't be implemented and then leads to a supposed consequence of that hypothetical. There is no way to deduce the conclusion or empirically derive it.
As it happens, physics is not time reversible. The exact way in which some interactions (involving the weak force) are not time symmetric remains incompletely understood and a developing part of physics. (Intriguing to me is that time symmetry is associated with energy conservation through Noether's theorem, so what does lack of time symmetry imply? Has it any relationship to the fact that neutrino mass eigenstates are not the same as neutrino flavour eigenstates?)
elroch:"Far more important to real world physics (and engineering!) is the lack of determinism in the scientific sense."
If this thread was about engineering, you would be correct. because Everett imply intrinsic pseudo randomness to all observers. but this pseudo randomness has nothing to do with determinism. is that what you have in mind?
and what are you even saying down there. you think that because you took a class in randomness it makes you the authority in QM philosophy, and you can just wave off all the experts? really? you try to go on wiki and edit the entry for either interpretation to be less then 100% deterministic and see what happen.
even Bell himself wouldn't agree with you because he was a determinist and a fan of the pilot wave if i remember correctly.
you're trolling!
free will works if u let it
Please strive to be clear!
opti, i never deep dived into the topic of free will to speak about it with confidence, so maybe i'm wrong. with that said, i never heard anyone (naturalists it is) claim that free will exit. this is regardless if they believe in determinism or randomness.
well.. some claim that we do have it. but then they move on to speak with both sides of their mouth, playing some sort of semantics or another. i have no idea for their motivation, maybe its to address the issue of laws, and responsibility in criminology.
the only exception im aware of is Sara walker. and if i can find something simplistic real quick about her opinion, ill post it next.
as for the everett.. you have a good reasoning, but cant we say the same thing about all the other interpretations? (forgive me if i don't get back to it.. got my hands full with a new project as of now)
I observe that Lex Fridman goes wrong when at the start he suggests a conflict between causality and free will. I got the impression he meant determinism. Causality has a very clearly distinct meaning in relativistic physics (related to a slightly simpler notion in Galilean physics.
I feel John Conway et al got it right when they identified free will as the unpredictable (i.e. random) part of human behaviour. Some may find it awkward that this means everything has a degree of free will, but that's reality for you!
opti, i never deep dived into the topic of free will to speak about it with confidence, so maybe i'm wrong. with that said, i never heard anyone (naturalists it is) claim that free will exit. this is regardless if they believe in determinism or randomness.
well.. some claim that we do have it. but then they move on to speak with both sides of their mouth, playing some sort of semantics or another. i have no idea for their motivation, maybe its to address the issue of laws, and responsibility in criminology.
the only exception im aware of is Sara walker. and if i can find something simplistic real quick about her opinion, ill post it next.
as for the everett.. you have a good reasoning, but cant we say the same thing about all the other interpretations? (forgive me if i don't get back to it.. got my hands full with a new project as of now)
Thankyou for your post, Bercher, & I have this to say about free will. You can decide to jump off the top of a very tall building, which will give you a few seconds to reflect on your decision. If you regret the decision, you can always pretend that there's no free will & so you had no choice. What won't happen, though, is to will that you can fly and it happens. Well, it's unlikely and would be due to some physical phenomenon, such as a violent updraught. Sorry about my English spelling but I have free will in that regard. I could spell it the American way or the English way. Someone could make the argument that I spell it the way I'm conditioned to spell it but I don't think I would buy that. I assume free will exists and that if you disagreed with it, you'd have to prove you were right. Each side likes to think that the default belongs to them.
Incidentally, you won't get anywhere arguing with Elroch. He blocked me for standing up for myself against his aggression and personal attacks. He's really a troll.
Tut tut for your deceit. You posted about 20 consecutive off topic posts before you got blocked to stop the disruption.
You should read the chess.com rules and policies and avoid posts that infringe them, such as that one.
Optimissed & Elroch,
Knock it off guys or I will have to ask both of you to refrain from future posts.
Really low down on my subjective list. The picture makes no sense to me. But I am told it can be used to get the right predictions, so I acknowledge it is a valid interpretation.
It could be that my negative view is due to never having been motivated to study how it works in detail (I just have an informal description of it).
if you acknowledge that, than we should be able to say that objectively speaking we are in agreement that determinism is a valid proposition. right?
No.
Science deals with the real world (we really should be able to agree on that definition!).
Determinism in the real world says that events are determined by past information. (Again there should not be any disagreement about this).
This contradicts ALL INTERPRETATIONS of quantum mechanics (because they have the same real world predictions), and this key property of quantum mechanics has been increasingly well-tested over several decades.
So real-world determinism is falsified.
Coming up with some other unscientific (because untestable) form of definition of determinism (attractive as it may be - remember I like the Everett interpretation and its elegant simplicity as a model), relating to a vast unobservable multiverse makes no difference to this fact. Saying we can forget about the empirical truth of real world indeterminism because of such thinking is wilful blindness to a fact about the world we live in.
[Note that the Everett interpretation does _not_ provide determinism about events in our future. It says that in the Everett model, different things happen in different branches and we will find ourselves in one branch. It is the latter part that is key].