Does True Randomness Actually Exist? ( ^&*#^%$&#% )

Is that William Wagglestick?

'I believe that Einstein won a Nobel prize and yet he dismissed the new physics that was emerging as a load of nonsense'

last year i read a book titled "What is real" by Adam Becker and according to him the statement above is no more then a folk-history myth (in his words)

in the following video he present his research in a comical way by telling history twice..  first the folk-history, and then again the true history.

@ 19:30 the folk-history myth that was repeated to us
@ 25:35 the factual history according to his research

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=2&v=u2K9Mobldtw&feature=emb_logo

Sean Carroll points out that a many world interpretation of quantum mechanics can be globally deterministic (because the evolution of the multiverse is deterministic with everything that could possibly happen at every instant happening in a separate branch. However, this is where precise definition is important. From our point of view, we only ever see one branch of the multiverse and the lack of determinism is the impossibility of predicting what branch we will see. This is why Sean Carroll points out that the "deterministic" Multiverse (I add quotes because the meaning of deterministic in the Multiverse is distinct to that in our Universe) says that the derived scientific theory that explains what we observe is non-deterministic quantum mechanics, and this is the sense in which almost all physicists say that physics is fundamentally not deterministic.

"The other way to go is many-worlds, which says that the ordinary deterministic evolution of the Schrödinger equation is all that ever happens. The problem there is comporting such a claim with the reality of our experience — we see Schrödinger’s cat to be alive or dead, not ever in a live/dead superposition as QM would seem to imply. The resolution is that “we” are not described by the entire quantum state; rather, we live in one branch of the wave function, which also includes numerous other branches where different outcomes were observed. This approach (which I favor) restores determinism at the level of the fundamental equations, but sacrifices it for the observational predictions made by real observers. If I were keeping a tally, I would certainly put this one in the non-determinism camp, for anyone interested in questions of free will."

Another article about Sean Carroll's book drew my attention to the fact that he likes an idea that I have recently become very attracted to. This is that pure quantum mechanics (as for example expressed from a Hilbert space viewpoint) may be able to explain curved space-time as an emergent phenomenon originating from entanglement. If this is possible (and presently, it appears to be  so, based on analysis of simpler analogs), it is so elegant as to be screaming out to be true.

See https://physicstoday.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/PT.3.4366

Brownian Motion can certainly be *considered* pseudorandom, especially by those who believe that no randomness exists.

I often wonder about coin flips myself but I somehow doubt that I developed the expertise to be able to guess ten flips correctly in a row, when I decided to demonstrate such an ability to others. That's only 1 in 2^10 of course. It's nothing.

Look, I really do apologise for this. I promise I did try to listen to him but the guy is a complete bore and he doesn't say anything relevant at the points you pointed to. I did hear him talk about the "Copenhagen Interpretation" and I think that itself is a misnomer, since in my understanding, Copenhagen is simply a description, mainly of Young's Experiment. I suppose we can accept the idea of "waveform collapse" as a kind of interpretation but it's only a pseudo-interpretation, since according at least to my own thoughts on quantum physics, the idea of waveform is entirely ambiguous in itself. Put very simply, it can imply a real waveform or a statistical or notional one and this actually makes the idea meaningless. It might even be a complex, reflux combination of the two. We have to decide what we're talking about before it becomes an "interpretation".

Regarding his idea of Einstein rejecting the New Physics being a folk myth, well, I did write this, inserted at the relevant place, but I became so completely irritated by his waffle that I switched him off and then found I'd switched off Chess.com by mistake. I had saved it on my mouse though, and this is what I wrote.

Well, he's in the minority there and the evidence seems strong that he would be completely wrong if he really did think that way. It's important to look for a diversity of opinion and to try to discover why people thought (and think) the way they did (do). Sooner or later, one edges towards a clearer view of what is really happening. All history is shrouded in mythology and it seems pretty clear that this Adam Becker is busy creating more of it.

I am pretty clear, having looked at this over the years using different sources, that Einstein rejected QM and more or less feuded with its exponents. I think it was ten to fifteen years too late when he finally did start to take it seriously. But I admit to being completely prejudiced against Einstein due to his extremely bad treatment of his wife, Mileva Maric, who most probably did much of the work towards gaining him his Nobel Prize. My father was a source, in a way, for this "bad news" about Einstein, since he knew a number of people who worked with Einstein.

i agree that his attempts to be funny are confusing, but i have no reason to discredit him. do you?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_Becker

the following link will skip the comedy and take you directly to the results of his research.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u2K9Mobldtw&feature=youtu.be&t=1538

(I like your your choice of coloring.. so much better than the angry red : )

Sean Carroll- This approach (which I favor) restores determinism at the level of the fundamental equations, but sacrifices it for the observational predictions made by real observers. If I were keeping a tally, I would certainly put this one in the non-determinism camp, for anyone interested in questions of free will."

elroch- From our point of view, we only ever see one branch of the multiverse and the lack of determinism is the impossibility of predicting what branch we will see

i understand that you cannot predict in which branch you'll end up, but its seem much worse since you dont get to chose either? (what kinda free will is that?) lets forget predicting power for a moment and just follow causality. if you need to take a decision, say choosing spaghetti or rice for a meal. according to many worlds you always choose both right? you just get the illusion that you chose say rice since you end up in an isolated "rice branch".

meanwhile your other copy in the "spaghetti branch" get the illusion that you chose spaghetti? and if so.. as far as free will.. isnt that just an illusion of choice while no choice was actually taken? instead.. all the possibilities were executed? and each one feels like our own.. without ever making them?

king, why removed the soothing photo? all this text make me dizzy!

Oh, here ya go..

At the time I switched off at 27:15. I just let it run a little longer, to the point where he makes assumptions about why Bohr was critical of Einstein's thought experiments.

Note that he showed us a picture of Einstein's thought experiment #1 for approx two seconds. No doubt I could have frozen the video at that point but the impression was very clear .... of someone who is full of himself, not all that bright and not about to present the discussion in a neutral light. He just wants us to believe him and I'm not about to. I have been referred to so many videos of second rate people with doctorates in physics talking crap, over the past 15 years on Facebook that I switch them off the moment they show that they don't have good minds.

Sorry. You're entitled to make whatever assumption you want to about my mind.

There is a notional multiverse of hypothetical possibilities and that is all. If choice were not real, then a real multiverse would occur. But choice (or difference) is real and hence there is no real multiverse. There is a number of potential reasons why "multiverse" is believed in by people. One is that, unconsciously, people desire replacements for the idea of overwhelming greatness that they may have rejected in another form. Then again, logical positivism has retained a strong hold even though it's a hangover from the pre-quantum-physics age. Logical positivism and quantum physics do clash and Einstein was, at heart, a dinosaur from the old world: not of the new age at all. He couldn't stand uncertainty and he wanted everything to be determined. Perhaps it was a reflection of his own, very controlling mentality. In the multiverse we have a hypothetical picture of a universe where everything really exists. It's the perfect playground for the most ingenuous aspects of naive realism, perhaps.

The notion of "choosing" is a misleading intuitive one, associated with the idea that there is a sort of separate non-physical person that pulls the strings, something that was widely believed in the past (presumably it would make the neurons fire and pick up information - don't ask me how -  from neurons that are associated with senses and thinking, and so on). It is generally agreed among neuroscientists that there is no evidence for such a separate entity, and the materialist hypothesis (that all of the behaviour of a person is emergent from the behaviour of the matter that they are made of) is accepted as a never falsified hypothesis, or simply an accepted fact.

Thus the choices that a person makes result from the (fundamentally) quantum behaviour of all of the atoms that make up the molecules that make up the subcellular structures that make up the cells and is non-deterministic to at least some extent because of this. This is the best that reality has to correspond to our intuitive notion of free will, and it is the meaning used when discussed in scientific papers (notably Conway et al's "Free will theorem").

[It should be noted that the intuitive notion of some entity that freely makes choices doesn't offer anything more, unless you add further entities to pull its strings, and so on. If you make a choice, what made you make that choice rather than another? Either it was the one you wanted to make (in which case it was uniquely determined by your preference and there was no real choice) or it was random. There is nothing else].

sound like you dont believe in free will. at least not in the sense that common people define it. (the ability to make free choices)
anyways, you derailed from the essence of my dilemma which is specific to the splitting process in the many-worlds and why Sean Carroll put this one in the non-deterministic camp as related to free will.
he explained that at the fundamental level many-words is absolutely deterministic, but then he moved on to say that for the lack of prediction power he will put this in the nondeterministic camp as related to freewill.

to me this seem wrong, and my rice vs spaghetti choice lol meant to illustrate why this doesn't make any sense to me and why its seem to me as absolutely deterministic at any level.

well, that's unless we go back to semantics and redefine determinism as the ability to predict the future or something of this sort rather than the common definition

opti, you made it clear that you dislike both Einstein and Becker on personal level so unless you want to present some conflicting evidence from a source that is fluent both in the history of the time and physics, lets just agree to disagree : )

An argument that I worked out goes like this. This is the condensed form.

If determinism were true then the inability to make real choices would mean that the evolution of the brain would be absolutely impossible. Consequently, New Earth Creationism would have to be true.

But yet again, we come up against censorship, so this cannot be discussed.

OK, thankyou and that's fine and I appreciate your good-natured reply. The thing is, I don't rely on sources. I simply use them. My attitude is that if someone cannot discuss these things directly with me, or doesn't have the ability to do so, then trying to convince them using sources or quotations is pointless. Why should I wish to convince anybody of something by using anything other than a good or clever argument? You could consider the argument I gave above, though?>>>


On TV today, on BBC, there was a selection of talks given over the past year. The first two I watched were given by Englishmen. One was a well-regarded journalist on the history of the effect of the EU on mainstream UK politics. It was excellent, impartial and extremely informative, even though I'm sure I differ politically with the gentleman in question. His knowledge was superb. The second was by a leading economics professor on the political and economic legacy of the Great War (WWI). He spoke very fast, was difficult to keep up with but I was alone in the room and I absorbed a tremendous amount of information in ten minutes. He was simply superb and had complete command over his subject. The third was a female, young, South Asian professor, possibly of politics. Again, thoroughly enjoyable. She  talked well and with great intelligence.

The fourth was an American. I think he was a professor of some kind. He had a white, goatee beard and looked rather distinguished. He spent some time discussing what hat he was going to wear. Figuratively, I assume, since he didn't put one on. Then he waffled about something else. He seemed as if he was trying to warm himself up, verbally. After three minutes he had said nothing interesting and now he was trying to butter up the audience. I switched him off. I came to the conclusion he was rather stupid .... or maybe he was having a bad day. Or maybe his game really was as bad as your friend, Becker. But I was no longer interested.

I don't dislike Becker on a personal level. He's probably a nice person or whatever. I just thought he was useless as a speaker. He didn't interest me and the evidence seemed to be that he had nothing useful to say on the subject he was attempting.

I think you aren't considering the determined nature of *some* of our thoughts and apparent choices, Elroch. Determinism is the doctrine that no choice and not even any randomness is possible.

I think we live in a world/universe where most macro events are determined by cause and effect but where real randomness exists, at least to the point where we can safely say that it would be absolutely impossible to trace event causality in the micro, and where free will actually does exist, although it perhaps isn't such a common occurrence as some might suppose; many of our mental reactions being conditioned. But still, the brain must act in such a way as to be isolated from direct, external causality. I did develop an hypothesis on how this comes about.

We could assert that we live in a complex reality of mixed or compound links between events. This is our universe and logically it is the only universe, or we must consider it so, since proof of "another universe" is absolutely impossible, so that the hypothesis does not belong in the realm of science.

"It's a bit difficult to get a clear impression of exactly what is supposed to be allowed here and a lot of people think that the censorship goes too far, but where does it actually end?"

well, i was hoping this to be self explanatory but since you ask me to spell it out...

anything friendly, educational, attractive, and positive is welcome
anything abusive, provocative, and negative is not.

Religion and politics do not necessarily fall into any of these categories. however, they tend to be emotionally charged and rub people the wrong way, therefore better avoided all together. direct or indirect. indirect is somewhat worse because it indicate intent.
in short... I dont have the time or the will to police, moderate, and frankly kinder garden... I have my own problems. lol
anyways , in my experience, zero tolerance is the easiest way to keep a strait line... to confirm that we are on the same page kindly delete #332. thank you.

Well, my point was that there is no consensus among physicists about determinism. maybe among those that subscribe to the Copenhagen interpretation. however, safety in numbers never impressed me because after all people do have a herd mentality.

and again, from my stand point the idea of determinism sux. but is not obsolete.

if i remember correctly Gerard said something about Bells assumption may be wrong. i didnt really understood if he meant that time itself may be reversal, or just mathematically so. something about correlation.

as far as Carroll and multi verse... i always regarded it as a bad joke for whatever reason, and never took the time to look into it. now that you point out that its Sean Carroll pet interpretation, I will have to look at it more closely.
how do all these universes pack up? or is it just like a computer simulation?
I have a memory of Elon musk saying... "all evidence indicate that we live in a simulation" (or a similar line) at the time i thought that he is just goofing around, maybe that's what he meant.

I like to think that its our ignorance about the world that give birth to this sort of ideas. saying that materialism wasn't falsified is meaningless in my opinion. think if you were living in 19'th century and someone would talk about quantum... you would laugh at them.
same thing with Darwin, and many other advances. even simple things like a cellphone. two people can be on different side of the planet and talk simultaneously over the air... insane no?

I wouldn't even consider living my life as if i don't have true free will... its somewhat sad to even think this way when your mind and body gives you every indication of an independent individual.

its somewhat silly actually. like a self destructing belief.