[HN Gopher] Superdeterminism could reconcile quantum and relativity
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       Superdeterminism could reconcile quantum and relativity
        
       Author : billytetrud
       Score  : 12 points
       Date   : 2021-05-13 18:17 UTC (4 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.frontiersin.org)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.frontiersin.org)
        
       | dia80 wrote:
       | Wouldn't it be funny if it were established no one had any free
       | will, in a strict sense, all along. We'd still feel like we had
       | it but know that we didn't.
       | 
       | From this layman's emotional point of view I never really liked
       | "many worlds" and that sort of thing. I'd be quite accepting if
       | the answer turns out to be super-determinism.
        
         | BeKindAndLearn wrote:
         | I would argue that it's pretty obvious nobody has free will in
         | the sense that there's some kind of "soul" controlling your
         | thoughts and actions.
         | 
         | Your brain is a biological computer. You zap parts and it makes
         | you move. You give it some chemical inhibitors or promoters and
         | your mood changes. You give it drugs and it hallucinates and
         | thinks differently.
         | 
         | The brain isn't supernatural and there is zero evidence that
         | supports the concept of spiritual will influencing it. Just
         | like there's zero evidence of psychics, magic wands, or
         | physics-violating miracles. It's all make believe.
        
           | teilo wrote:
           | If you think it is that simple, then you do not quite
           | understand superdeterminism and the hard problem of
           | consciousness. Also, your examples are not entirely accurate,
           | as it has been repeatedly demonstrated that zapping a part of
           | the brain cannot consistently override the will, and the
           | correlation to, for example, the motion of a limb to the
           | activity of the brain does not stay consistent, but
           | disappears when the subject under experimentation resists.
        
         | ithkuil wrote:
         | Many worlds (by which I mean the Everett interpretation, not
         | sure which you mean) is 100% deterministic.
         | 
         | The impact that apparent world branching has to domain of the
         | free will question is purely due to the "amplification effects"
         | that a complex control system like our brain can have in
         | reaction to something perceived as a "measurement" result.
         | 
         | We cannot sense a superposition state directly. The moment we
         | probe a particle, our instruments and us (the environment)
         | becomes entangled with the observed particle. The instrument
         | and later we the observers of the instrument are ourselves a
         | quantum system with a well defined quantum stats, and a third
         | observer not yet entangled with us can treat as still in a
         | superposition state.
         | 
         | The idea is that everything evolves according to the
         | Schrodinger equation. The wave function never really collapses.
         | The illusion of wave function collapse springs out of the way
         | that a control system like a brain or a mechanical automaton
         | processes it's inputs while being in an entangled state with
         | the thing they observe and thus react to it's state differently
         | in the different superimposed states. This difference becomes
         | amplified. A control system like a brain is not necessary; just
         | pure macroscopic environments are enough to diverge the
         | apparent state of the systems so that it's useful to think in
         | terms of "world splitting"; but it's just a useful fiction;
         | very useful because that's all we'll ever witness.
         | 
         | The amplification effect of control systems makes it easy to
         | concoct extreme thought experiments. Let's imagine that spin up
         | means you fire off a rocket and go to Mars and spin down means
         | you stay put. All we did is that we managed to amplify the
         | effect of this single superimposed state of one particle, into
         | a macroscopic superposition of a rocket being on earth or on
         | mars
        
           | meowface wrote:
           | Superdeterminism is very different from determinism, and IMO
           | would be a much more shocking revelation than Everettianism
           | (or Sean Carroll's so-called "mad-dog Everettianism").
        
       | billytetrud wrote:
       | Sabine Hossenfelder rethinks Superdeterminism and explains in
       | very accessible terms why Superdeterminism should be taken
       | seriously and has been unfairly characterized in the past. She
       | says that violating statistical independence is the only way to
       | solve the measurement problem in a way that is compatible with
       | relativity.
        
         | 1980phipsi wrote:
         | "very accessible" relative to what?
        
       | johnklos wrote:
       | She has some good videos, too:
       | 
       | https://www.youtube.com/c/SabineHossenfelder/videos
        
       ___________________________________________________________________
       (page generated 2021-05-13 23:01 UTC)