On 8/16/2020 5:52 AM, John Clark wrote:
On Sat, Aug 15, 2020 at 6:27 PM 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List
<[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
> /Why not adopt ultra-determinism. Since Everettians insist on
strictly determinist evolution/
Superdeterminism postulates two things, determinism and one specific
initial condition; the problem I have with it is not the determinism
part it's the initial condition. Although there are an infinite number
of initial conditions the universe could have started in
Superdeterminism says that for no particular reason (that is to say
because of nondeterminism) the universe started out in the one and
only initial condition that, after billions of years of deterministic
evolution, would result in our being fooled by every single one of our
scientific experiments into thinking that things were nondeterministic
when they were really deterministic, even though there was no reason
the universe started out in that state, and thus the entire scientific
enterprise is a complete waste of time.
How so? Do you think Newton and Laplace saw science as a waste of
time? If the world is deterministic, then obviously it is determined by
the past (and the future) and the task of science is to determine the
state at some time and the law of evolution. Of course we can't
determine the state at some time because the finite speed of light means
that we keep being influenced by parts previously outside our past light
cone. The Everttian's (who are common on this list) insist that
evolution of the universe is deterministic.
Your dismay with superdeterminism is the flip side of objections to
randomness in QM. When it was first proposed as fundamental by Born and
Bohr, physicists like Schroedinger and Einstein were dismayed that
randomness would make science impossible.
Brent
So the universe has conspired to make fools of us all, in fact it
would be more than just a conspiracy, if Super determinism was true it
would not be out of place to say the entire purpose of the universe is
not 42 as the Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy says but instead the
ultimate answer to the question of life the universe and everything is
to make us look stupid.
I find this all a bit hard to swallow.
John K Clark
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