On 6/19/2018 6:42 AM, Jason Resch wrote:
On Tue, Jun 19, 2018 at 12:01 AM, Brent Meeker <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
On 6/18/2018 3:31 AM, Jason Resch wrote:
Block time plus MWI means universes aren't created,
they're all already there.
*Seems like super-determinism to me. You're making a
distinction with no difference. AG
*
Superdeterminism says you and a remote partner could decide to
use the digits of Pi to pseudorandomly select angles of
measurement in a Bell experiment, then decide to use the digits
of Euler's number. Yet somehow, the universe knew you and your
friend had this agreement to use these digits of these constants,
You keep anthropomorphizing the universe to make super-determinism
sound ridiculous. It's nothing more that taking determinism
completely seriously, no free will by experimenters. The choice
of you and your friend was determined by the past. That's all
determinism means.
It's not just me. The first person who proposed this loophole around
Bell also immediately discarded it as ridiculous. If
super-determinism means the same thing as determinism, why add the
"super-" qualifier?
Here is a write up
<https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/critical-opalescence/does-some-deeper-level-of-physics-underlie-quantum-mechanics-an-interview-with-nobelist-gerard-e28099t-hooft/>
in scientific american about t'Hooft's idea:
*The dramatic version is that free will
<https://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=quantum-physics-free-will> is
an illusion. Worse, actually. Even regular determinism–without the
“super”–subverts our sense of free will. Through the laws of
physics, you can trace every choice you make to the arrangement of
matter at the dawn of time. Superdeterminism adds a twist of the
knife. Not only is everything you do preordained, the universe
reaches into your brain and stops you from doing an experiment
that would reveal its true nature. The universe is not just set up
in advance. It is set up in advance to fool you. As a conspiracy
theory, this leaves Roswell and the Priory of Sion in the dust.*
Yes, they explain that the "super" means Alice and Bob cannot make
independent spacelike decisions because their decisions are the product
of common events in the (distant) past and that product is /*determined*/.
I've taken it one step further. By using the digits of Pi or Euler's
number, it's not just reaching into your brain, since our brain did
not determine those digits. It requires a universe setup in advance to
know the digits of Pi,
Why is that a problem? The digits are determined and the choice to use
them is determined. Bruno's theory requires "the universe to know" the
solutions to sets of Diophantine equations.
and to take into account the knowledge that you are using the digits
of Pi to pseudorandomly set the angles of the measurement devices, and
produce statistics (that were super determined at the time of the big
bang) to fool you by reproducing the quantum statistics with
super-determined hidden variables.
Again with the anthropomorphizing. The universe is just following its
deterministic laws; it's not fooling anybody.
If you see super-determinism as nothing more than determinism I think
you are missing something. This is a pre-established harmony of the
highest order, requiring a massive information content per particle
interaction
No, it certainly requires no more information than required to define a
block universe and potentially much less since all results flow from the
past, and being deterministic means it's reversible, so the information
content is fixed (as it is for SWE).
(each particle has to contain knowledge, presumably up to and
including all other knowledge about the entire universe up to that
point). For example:
1. Take the deep-field image from Nasa, or the CMB data from all 360
degrees.
2. Use that as a seed to the Hash-DRBG (NIST defined deterministic
random bit generator)
3. Use the output of the Hash DRBG to select the angles for each
iteration of a Bell experiment
Now each particle has to be aware of the entire arrangement of remote
galaxies in a particular direction looked at by the Hubble Telescope,
in order to properly establish a hidden variable at the time of its
creation.
Nonsense. To use your form, the universe knew that's what you were
going to do and so only had to provide the seed, and it knew the random
bit generator and it's state, so it knew the angles that would be selected.
The article I linked says only 3 people take the idea seriously. I
don't imagine this number to grow because it means giving up on any
hope of scientific progress (the same excuse can be used to avoid
having to take seriously the result of any experiment). At its best
it is saying "God made it that way", at its worst it is saying "God is
trying to fool us".
It's like any other deterministic theory. If you can discover it's law
of evolution and an initial state you can predict everything.
I think t'Hooft's issue is he likes locality so much he is willing to
adopt a completely strange theory to preserve it, but for some reason
doesn't like many-worlds, or doesn't see (or believe) that locality
can be preserved under it.
In the article, t'Hooft also doesn't seem very confident in his own
ideas, it sounds more like he knows he is just playing with ideas,
rather than strongly defending them. Again from the article:
*"I’m asking questions all the time. One of the questions I’m
asking all the time is: Are we doing things right? Am /I/ doing
things right? The books that I read, are they correct? Maybe
/I’m/ wrong in some basic way. I know that I’m not entirely
correct because I haven’t got the correct theory. But I continue
asking questions."*
In my view, a priori super-determinism fails on statistical grounds.
The number of possible super-determined universes is so much smaller
(exponentially so over time) than the set of "regularly determined"
universes, that the probability we are living within a super
determined universes is effectively zero.
Why would it be any smaller? In MWI every "world" is traceable back
deterministically UNLESS you allow tracing over the reduced density
matrix, which is equivalent to collapsing the wave function.
such that when it generated single pairs of photons, those
photons would have just the right properties for QM statistics to
not be violated. Also, the universe knew when you would decide to
switch to use Euler's number, which perhaps was decided by the
closing price of the stock market, all this information the
universe knew and took into account when generating paired
photons and embedding a single hidden variable with that photon.
Yes, because all those things were determined by what came before
them.
By what means do you propose that the closing price of the stock
market or the hash of an image produced by NASA factor into the
creation of a particle pair?
t'Hooft (not me) proposes them having a common cause in the distant past.
This is what Superdeterminism implies. Superdeterminism is very
different from regular/plain "determinism", which every physical
theory is (with the sole exception of wave function collapse).
All other physical theories assume that experimenters can make
free choices independent of the past history of the world.
Science relies on a universe that doesn't try to fool us and allows
for repeatable results when you repeat the same experiment.
Super-determinism requires giving up both of these.
It is an abandonment of science as a means of progressing.
That's what they say about "everything happens" theories too.
Brent
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