The Nature of Contingency: Quantum Physics as Modal Realism

[Brent Meeker]

This should be of interest to all the everythingists on this list.  I'd especially like to hear what Bruno thinks of it.  It's a bit expensive, so I may wait for more reviews before I take it up.

Birmingham-based philosopher Alastair Wilson has taken up the Herculean task of putting modal realism and many-worlds quantum theory together into a coherent, unitary view of reality. The results of this effort have been presented in several papers in recent years, and are now assembled in this thought-provoking book. While, as we will see, questions remain, Wilson has no doubt managed to come up with ingenious new hypotheses and has proposed solutions to existing problems and, more generally, with a powerful new modal realist view. The resulting perspective will certainly be of interest in the coming years, especially for naturalistically inclined philosophers, demanding that metaphysical hypotheses be made as continuous with our best science as possible.

https://ndpr.nd.edu/reviews/the-nature-of-contingency-quantum-physics-as-modal-realism/

From the review I take it that Wilson has missed the intermediate kind of possibility, namely computability which is between logical possibility and nomological possibility.

Brent

[spudb...@aol.com]

Lewis's Modal realism is just different verbiage for (as the bibliography on the article) a more rigorous analysis started by High Everett, and its further work by Bryce DeWitt & and nobelist, John Archibald Wheeler.  Until someone figures out how to view our world splitting off, or see's some cosmological evidence its' just one very big place out there. 

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[Brent Meeker]

Wheeler never got a Nobel.

I got a reply from Wilson essentially saying he's not interested the deriving QM from anything, he regards it as fundamental and is seeking to "rebuild the world as we know it from there".

Brent

[spudb...@aol.com]

My view is that knowing how the Nobel committee does science awards that Wheeler, or how the committee knifed Fred Hoyle's work on CNO physics is another reason for outsiders to de-rate the Nobel's celebrity. Harumph, as we chide in the hinterlands. 

[Tomas Pales]

I am not sure what is new here. Many-worlds interpretation of QM is obviously an example of Lewis' modal realism in the context of QM. As was discussed here some time ago, it may not even involve splitting of worlds. That is, all the quantum parallel worlds may be distinct worlds (objects) even before a measurement; they are just exactly the same before the measurement (exact copies of each other) and they start to differ at the measurement event. A regularity in the multiverse of these quantum worlds manifests in the fact that the worlds start differing in proportions given by the Born rule, based on the (same) state of the worlds at the moment of measurement.

More generally about possible worlds or objects, I still see no difference between a world that is logically possible (consistent) and a world that "exists". A logically possible world is a world that is identical to itself, that is, it has the properties it has and does not have the properties it does not have. If two worlds have all the same properties except the property of existence (one exists and the other doesn't) what does it even mean? So I see no alternative to modal realism.

If we want to go into more details we may ask what properties a world or object may have and based on that we may differentiate between different kinds of worlds or objects, for example spatiotemporal worlds versus worlds that don't have a temporal or spatial structure. An important kind of property is relations between objects (relational properties), and the most general kind of relation is similarity, which holds between any two objects and thus is a necessary kind of relation. It just means that two objects have certain common properties and certain different properties. Mathematics as the most general study of relations explores the similarity relation as morphism in category theory and has reduced it to the set membership relation in set theory. Set theory is interesting to me in that it grounds mathematics in concrete worlds made of collections (sets), as opposed to abstract relations like numbers, functions, symmetries etc.

But if all mathematically (structurally) and consistently characterized worlds/objects exist, it seems surprising that we live in a world with quite stable laws of physics that persist in time (along the time dimension of spacetime). Since reality is a mess of everything possible we might expect that the regularities (laws) of our world may change or disappear any second, which apparently doesn't happen. Hume put it as "the constant conjunction between causes and effects." The fact that the laws of physics in our world have been stable for billions of years may be explained by the anthropic principle: we could have evolved only in a world with such a long term stability. But it may not be obvious why such a stability would continue into the future.  In fact, it may seem that such a stability in the future is very unlikely because there are many ways our world could be in the future but only one way in which it would be a deterministic extension of the world it has been until now. Maybe the future stability can be explained by Solomonoff induction, which seems to imply the opposite: it is more likely that laws of physics will continue to hold. Why? Because given the way our world has been until now, this world is more simple if its regularities (such as laws of physics) continue than if they are discontinued, and more simple worlds are more likely (more frequent in the collection of all possible worlds) than more complex worlds. (A simpler set of properties is instantiated in more possible worlds than a more complex set of properties.) Such a deterministic world is fully defined by some initial conditions and laws of physics, while a world whose regularity is discontinued at some point would need an additional property that would define the discontinuation and thereby make the world more complex. Solomonoff induction deals only with computable sequences, I don't know if it can be generalized to uncomputable sequences. If it can't, it may indicate that conscious beings of our kind can only exist in a world with such a computable feature (or else we would likely see the stability of laws of physics disappear any second from now). I don't understand the mathematical details of Solomonoff induction and it seems to be a rather unfamiliar explanation for why we should expect the laws of physics to remain stable.

https://arbital.com/p/solomonoff_induction/

[Brent Meeker]

On 2/27/2022 8:43 AM, Tomas Pales wrote:

On Thursday, February 24, 2022 at 4:45:11 AM UTC+1 meeke...@gmail.com wrote:

This should be of interest to all the everythingists on this list.  I'd especially like to hear what Bruno thinks of it.  It's a bit expensive, so I may wait for more reviews before I take it up.

Birmingham-based philosopher Alastair Wilson has taken up the Herculean task of putting modal realism and many-worlds quantum theory together into a coherent, unitary view of reality. The results of this effort have been presented in several papers in recent years, and are now assembled in this thought-provoking book. While, as we will see, questions remain, Wilson has no doubt managed to come up with ingenious new hypotheses and has proposed solutions to existing problems and, more generally, with a powerful new modal realist view. The resulting perspective will certainly be of interest in the coming years, especially for naturalistically inclined philosophers, demanding that metaphysical hypotheses be made as continuous with our best science as possible.

https://ndpr.nd.edu/reviews/the-nature-of-contingency-quantum-physics-as-modal-realism/

From the review I take it that Wilson has missed the intermediate kind of possibility, namely computability which is between logical possibility and nomological possibility.

Brent

I am not sure what is new here. Many-worlds interpretation of QM is obviously an example of Lewis' modal realism in the context of QM. As was discussed here some time ago, it may not even involve splitting of worlds. That is, all the quantum parallel worlds may be distinct worlds (objects) even before a measurement; they are just exactly the same before the measurement (exact copies of each other) and they start to differ at the measurement event. A regularity in the multiverse of these quantum worlds manifests in the fact that the worlds start differing in proportions given by the Born rule, based on the (same) state of the worlds at the moment of measurement.

More generally about possible worlds or objects, I still see no difference between a world that is logically possible (consistent) and a world that "exists".

Really?  It is logically possible that you don't exist.  So would the world without you have no difference from this world?

A logically possible world is a world that is identical to itself, that is, it has the properties it has and does not have the properties it does not have. If two worlds have all the same properties except the property of existence (one exists and the other doesn't) what does it even mean?

That only shows that a given world must either exist or not exist.  Maybe only worlds with Tomas Pales in them exist.  That's a different property.

So I see no alternative to modal realism.

If we want to go into more details we may ask what properties a world or object may have and based on that we may differentiate between different kinds of worlds or objects, for example spatiotemporal worlds versus worlds that don't have a temporal or spatial structure. An important kind of property is relations between objects (relational properties), and the most general kind of relation is similarity, which holds between any two objects and thus is a necessary kind of relation. It just means that two objects have certain common properties and certain different properties. Mathematics as the most general study of relations explores the similarity relation as morphism in category theory and has reduced it to the set membership relation in set theory. Set theory is interesting to me in that it grounds mathematics in concrete worlds made of collections (sets), as opposed to abstract relations like numbers, functions, symmetries etc.

But if all mathematically (structurally) and consistently characterized worlds/objects exist, it seems surprising that we live in a world with quite stable laws of physics that persist in time (along the time dimension of spacetime). Since reality is a mess of everything possible

"Possible" is a rather ill defined concept and "everything possible" is even worse.  "Logically possible" doesn't fix the problem.  Logic is about language and propositions.  What is logically possible depends on what rules of logic one adopts.  Is it logically possible that Sherlock Holmes companion is both John Watson and James Watson?  Does a contradiction imply everything?

we might expect that the regularities (laws) of our world may change or disappear any second, which apparently doesn't happen. Hume put it as "the constant conjunction between causes and effects." The fact that the laws of physics in our world have been stable for billions of years may be explained by the anthropic principle: we could have evolved only in a world with such a long term stability. But it may not be obvious why such a stability would continue into the future.  In fact, it may seem that such a stability in the future is very unlikely because there are many ways our world could be in the future but only one way in which it would be a deterministic extension of the world it has been until now.

This world is not deterministic.

Maybe the future stability can be explained by Solomonoff induction, which seems to imply the opposite: it is more likely that laws of physics will continue to hold. Why? Because given the way our world has been until now, this world is more simple if its regularities (such as laws of physics) continue than if they are discontinued, and more simple

Some of the laws of physics (maybe all of them) are simple because physicist insist on it.  If it's too complicated we hand it off to biology or geology and declare it mere historical accident.  :-)

Brent

[John Clark]

On Sun, Feb 27, 2022 at 2:50 PM Brent Meeker <meeke...@gmail.com> wrote:

<"Possible" is a rather ill defined concept and "everything possible" is even worse. 

I would say a useful definition of "possible" is the set of things or relationships that do not produce contradictions. I would also say it's easier to describe everything than to describe a particular smaller subset of the possible, for example less information is required to describe all the infinite digits of π than to describe only the first trillion digits of π and no more.  And nobody knows if the laws of physics that are different from those that we observe (such as by having different fundamental constants) produce contradictions or not, nobody knows if that's possible.

John K Clark    See what's on my new list at  Extropolis

gco

[Tomas Pales]

On Sunday, February 27, 2022 at 8:50:02 PM UTC+1 meeke...@gmail.com wrote:

On 2/27/2022 8:43 AM, Tomas Pales wrote:

On Thursday, February 24, 2022 at 4:45:11 AM UTC+1 meeke...@gmail.com wrote:

This should be of interest to all the everythingists on this list.  I'd especially like to hear what Bruno thinks of it.  It's a bit expensive, so I may wait for more reviews before I take it up.

Birmingham-based philosopher Alastair Wilson has taken up the Herculean task of putting modal realism and many-worlds quantum theory together into a coherent, unitary view of reality. The results of this effort have been presented in several papers in recent years, and are now assembled in this thought-provoking book. While, as we will see, questions remain, Wilson has no doubt managed to come up with ingenious new hypotheses and has proposed solutions to existing problems and, more generally, with a powerful new modal realist view. The resulting perspective will certainly be of interest in the coming years, especially for naturalistically inclined philosophers, demanding that metaphysical hypotheses be made as continuous with our best science as possible.

https://ndpr.nd.edu/reviews/the-nature-of-contingency-quantum-physics-as-modal-realism/

From the review I take it that Wilson has missed the intermediate kind of possibility, namely computability which is between logical possibility and nomological possibility.

Brent

I am not sure what is new here. Many-worlds interpretation of QM is obviously an example of Lewis' modal realism in the context of QM. As was discussed here some time ago, it may not even involve splitting of worlds. That is, all the quantum parallel worlds may be distinct worlds (objects) even before a measurement; they are just exactly the same before the measurement (exact copies of each other) and they start to differ at the measurement event. A regularity in the multiverse of these quantum worlds manifests in the fact that the worlds start differing in proportions given by the Born rule, based on the (same) state of the worlds at the moment of measurement.

More generally about possible worlds or objects, I still see no difference between a world that is logically possible (consistent) and a world that "exists".

Really?  It is logically possible that you don't exist.  So would the world without you have no difference from this world?

A world without me is possible (logically consistent). A world with me is possible too, obviously. And so both worlds exist, because they are both possible.

 

A logically possible world is a world that is identical to itself, that is, it has the properties it has and does not have the properties it does not have. If two worlds have all the same properties except the property of existence (one exists and the other doesn't) what does it even mean?

That only shows that a given world must either exist or not exist.  Maybe only worlds with Tomas Pales in them exist.  That's a different property.

It shows that if a given world is possible, it doesn't make sense to ask whether it exists. Because there is no difference between being possible and existing.

 

So I see no alternative to modal realism.

If we want to go into more details we may ask what properties a world or object may have and based on that we may differentiate between different kinds of worlds or objects, for example spatiotemporal worlds versus worlds that don't have a temporal or spatial structure. An important kind of property is relations between objects (relational properties), and the most general kind of relation is similarity, which holds between any two objects and thus is a necessary kind of relation. It just means that two objects have certain common properties and certain different properties. Mathematics as the most general study of relations explores the similarity relation as morphism in category theory and has reduced it to the set membership relation in set theory. Set theory is interesting to me in that it grounds mathematics in concrete worlds made of collections (sets), as opposed to abstract relations like numbers, functions, symmetries etc.

But if all mathematically (structurally) and consistently characterized worlds/objects exist, it seems surprising that we live in a world with quite stable laws of physics that persist in time (along the time dimension of spacetime). Since reality is a mess of everything possible

"Possible" is a rather ill defined concept and "everything possible" is even worse.  "Logically possible" doesn't fix the problem.  Logic is about language and propositions.  What is logically possible depends on what rules of logic one adopts.  Is it logically possible that Sherlock Holmes companion is both John Watson and James Watson?  Does a contradiction imply everything?

By "possible" I always mean logically possible (consistent) - an object is possible if it has the properties that it has and doesn't have the properties that it doesn't have. In other words, it is identical to itself. That's classical logic, and the only kind of logic that makes sense to me. An object that is not what it is doesn't make sense to me. What's the deal with James Watson? Is it an alternative name for John Watson?

 

we might expect that the regularities (laws) of our world may change or disappear any second, which apparently doesn't happen. Hume put it as "the constant conjunction between causes and effects." The fact that the laws of physics in our world have been stable for billions of years may be explained by the anthropic principle: we could have evolved only in a world with such a long term stability. But it may not be obvious why such a stability would continue into the future.  In fact, it may seem that such a stability in the future is very unlikely because there are many ways our world could be in the future but only one way in which it would be a deterministic extension of the world it has been until now.

This world is not deterministic.

Yeah but it is to a large extent deterministic, with stable laws of physics. And even when the determinism is disrupted by quantum indeterminacy, the disruption is not completely arbitrary but follows the Born rule.

 

Maybe the future stability can be explained by Solomonoff induction, which seems to imply the opposite: it is more likely that laws of physics will continue to hold. Why? Because given the way our world has been until now, this world is more simple if its regularities (such as laws of physics) continue than if they are discontinued, and more simple

 

Some of the laws of physics (maybe all of them) are simple because physicist insist on it.  If it's too complicated we hand it off to biology or geology and declare it mere historical accident.  :-)

I am not saying that the laws of physics of our world are simple, just that our world (spacetime) is more simple if they don't change.

[Brent Meeker]

On 2/27/2022 12:52 PM, John Clark wrote:

On Sun, Feb 27, 2022 at 2:50 PM Brent Meeker <meeke...@gmail.com> wrote:

<"Possible" is a rather ill defined concept and "everything possible" is even worse. 

I would say a useful definition of "possible" is the set of things or relationships that do not produce contradictions.

How could a set of things produce contradictions.  Contradiction is a relation of propositions, not things.  I'm surprised that you a strong advocate of examples over definitions would not have noticed that there are no examples of contradictory things.

Brent

I would also say it's easier to describe everything than to describe a particular smaller subset of the possible, for example less information is required to describe all the infinite digits of π than to describe only the first trillion digits of π and no more.  And nobody knows if the laws of physics that are different from those that we observe (such as by having different fundamental constants) produce contradictions or not, nobody knows if that's possible.

John K Clark    See what's on my new list at  Extropolis

gco

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[Brent Meeker]

On 2/27/2022 12:59 PM, Tomas Pales wrote:

On Sunday, February 27, 2022 at 8:50:02 PM UTC+1 meeke...@gmail.com wrote:

On 2/27/2022 8:43 AM, Tomas Pales wrote:

On Thursday, February 24, 2022 at 4:45:11 AM UTC+1 meeke...@gmail.com wrote:

This should be of interest to all the everythingists on this list.  I'd especially like to hear what Bruno thinks of it.  It's a bit expensive, so I may wait for more reviews before I take it up.

Birmingham-based philosopher Alastair Wilson has taken up the Herculean task of putting modal realism and many-worlds quantum theory together into a coherent, unitary view of reality. The results of this effort have been presented in several papers in recent years, and are now assembled in this thought-provoking book. While, as we will see, questions remain, Wilson has no doubt managed to come up with ingenious new hypotheses and has proposed solutions to existing problems and, more generally, with a powerful new modal realist view. The resulting perspective will certainly be of interest in the coming years, especially for naturalistically inclined philosophers, demanding that metaphysical hypotheses be made as continuous with our best science as possible.

https://ndpr.nd.edu/reviews/the-nature-of-contingency-quantum-physics-as-modal-realism/

From the review I take it that Wilson has missed the intermediate kind of possibility, namely computability which is between logical possibility and nomological possibility.

Brent

I am not sure what is new here. Many-worlds interpretation of QM is obviously an example of Lewis' modal realism in the context of QM. As was discussed here some time ago, it may not even involve splitting of worlds. That is, all the quantum parallel worlds may be distinct worlds (objects) even before a measurement; they are just exactly the same before the measurement (exact copies of each other) and they start to differ at the measurement event. A regularity in the multiverse of these quantum worlds manifests in the fact that the worlds start differing in proportions given by the Born rule, based on the (same) state of the worlds at the moment of measurement.

More generally about possible worlds or objects, I still see no difference between a world that is logically possible (consistent) and a world that "exists".

Really?  It is logically possible that you don't exist.  So would the world without you have no difference from this world?

A world without me is possible (logically consistent). A world with me is possible too, obviously. And so both worlds exist, because they are both possible.

But they are certainly different.  You tried to infer that they must both exist because there is no difference between the one with you, which exists by observation, and the one without you.

 

A logically possible world is a world that is identical to itself, that is, it has the properties it has and does not have the properties it does not have. If two worlds have all the same properties except the property of existence (one exists and the other doesn't) what does it even mean?

That only shows that a given world must either exist or not exist.  Maybe only worlds with Tomas Pales in them exist.  That's a different property.

It shows that if a given world is possible, it doesn't make sense to ask whether it exists. Because there is no difference between being possible and existing.

And you know this last how:?

 

So I see no alternative to modal realism.

If we want to go into more details we may ask what properties a world or object may have and based on that we may differentiate between different kinds of worlds or objects, for example spatiotemporal worlds versus worlds that don't have a temporal or spatial structure. An important kind of property is relations between objects (relational properties), and the most general kind of relation is similarity, which holds between any two objects and thus is a necessary kind of relation. It just means that two objects have certain common properties and certain different properties. Mathematics as the most general study of relations explores the similarity relation as morphism in category theory and has reduced it to the set membership relation in set theory. Set theory is interesting to me in that it grounds mathematics in concrete worlds made of collections (sets), as opposed to abstract relations like numbers, functions, symmetries etc.

But if all mathematically (structurally) and consistently characterized worlds/objects exist, it seems surprising that we live in a world with quite stable laws of physics that persist in time (along the time dimension of spacetime). Since reality is a mess of everything possible

"Possible" is a rather ill defined concept and "everything possible" is even worse.  "Logically possible" doesn't fix the problem.  Logic is about language and propositions.  What is logically possible depends on what rules of logic one adopts.  Is it logically possible that Sherlock Holmes companion is both John Watson and James Watson?  Does a contradiction imply everything?

By "possible" I always mean logically possible (consistent) - an object is possible if it has the properties

Properties are things we invent to describe objects.  It's a muddle to imagine you can define objects by properties.  Does my car have the property of being insurable?

that it has and doesn't have the properties that it doesn't have. In other words, it is identical to itself. That's classical logic, and the only kind of logic that makes sense to me.

Then I suggest you read some books by logicians.

An object that is not what it is doesn't make sense to me. What's the deal with James Watson? Is it an alternative name for John Watson?

Conan Doyle couldn't keep his imaginary world consistent and in some stories Holmes companion is James Watson and in some he's John Watson.  So I guess that world doesn't exist.

Brent

 

we might expect that the regularities (laws) of our world may change or disappear any second, which apparently doesn't happen. Hume put it as "the constant conjunction between causes and effects." The fact that the laws of physics in our world have been stable for billions of years may be explained by the anthropic principle: we could have evolved only in a world with such a long term stability. But it may not be obvious why such a stability would continue into the future.  In fact, it may seem that such a stability in the future is very unlikely because there are many ways our world could be in the future but only one way in which it would be a deterministic extension of the world it has been until now.

This world is not deterministic.

Yeah but it is to a large extent deterministic, with stable laws of physics. And even when the determinism is disrupted by quantum indeterminacy, the disruption is not completely arbitrary but follows the Born rule.

 

Maybe the future stability can be explained by Solomonoff induction, which seems to imply the opposite: it is more likely that laws of physics will continue to hold. Why? Because given the way our world has been until now, this world is more simple if its regularities (such as laws of physics) continue than if they are discontinued, and more simple

 

Some of the laws of physics (maybe all of them) are simple because physicist insist on it.  If it's too complicated we hand it off to biology or geology and declare it mere historical accident.  :-)

I am not saying that the laws of physics of our world are simple, just that our world (spacetime) is more simple if they don't change.

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[John Clark]

On Sun, Feb 27, 2022 at 5:38 PM Brent Meeker <meeke...@gmail.com> wrote:

>> I would say a useful definition of "possible" is the set of things or relationships that do not produce contradictions.

How could a set of things produce contradictions.  Contradiction is a relation of propositions, not things.  I'm surprised that you a strong advocate of examples over definitions would not have noticed that there are no examples of contradictory things.

You can't have relationships if there are no things, but you're right, I should've used the word "and", not "or".

  John K Clark    See what's on my new list at  Extropolis

an0

 

[Tomas Pales]

On Sunday, February 27, 2022 at 11:38:00 PM UTC+1 meeke...@gmail.com wrote:

How could a set of things produce contradictions.  Contradiction is a relation of propositions, not things.  I'm surprised that you a strong advocate of examples over definitions would not have noticed that there are no examples of contradictory things.

Example of a contradictory (and thus logically impossible) thing: a square circle. A circle that is not a circle. A contradictory thing is such that it has a property that it does not have.

 

[Tomas Pales]

On Sunday, February 27, 2022 at 11:45:32 PM UTC+1 meeke...@gmail.com wrote:

On 2/27/2022 12:59 PM, Tomas Pales wrote:

On Sunday, February 27, 2022 at 8:50:02 PM UTC+1 meeke...@gmail.com wrote:

On 2/27/2022 8:43 AM, Tomas Pales wrote:

On Thursday, February 24, 2022 at 4:45:11 AM UTC+1 meeke...@gmail.com wrote:

This should be of interest to all the everythingists on this list.  I'd especially like to hear what Bruno thinks of it.  It's a bit expensive, so I may wait for more reviews before I take it up.

Birmingham-based philosopher Alastair Wilson has taken up the Herculean task of putting modal realism and many-worlds quantum theory together into a coherent, unitary view of reality. The results of this effort have been presented in several papers in recent years, and are now assembled in this thought-provoking book. While, as we will see, questions remain, Wilson has no doubt managed to come up with ingenious new hypotheses and has proposed solutions to existing problems and, more generally, with a powerful new modal realist view. The resulting perspective will certainly be of interest in the coming years, especially for naturalistically inclined philosophers, demanding that metaphysical hypotheses be made as continuous with our best science as possible.

https://ndpr.nd.edu/reviews/the-nature-of-contingency-quantum-physics-as-modal-realism/

From the review I take it that Wilson has missed the intermediate kind of possibility, namely computability which is between logical possibility and nomological possibility.

Brent

I am not sure what is new here. Many-worlds interpretation of QM is obviously an example of Lewis' modal realism in the context of QM. As was discussed here some time ago, it may not even involve splitting of worlds. That is, all the quantum parallel worlds may be distinct worlds (objects) even before a measurement; they are just exactly the same before the measurement (exact copies of each other) and they start to differ at the measurement event. A regularity in the multiverse of these quantum worlds manifests in the fact that the worlds start differing in proportions given by the Born rule, based on the (same) state of the worlds at the moment of measurement.

More generally about possible worlds or objects, I still see no difference between a world that is logically possible (consistent) and a world that "exists".

Really?  It is logically possible that you don't exist.  So would the world without you have no difference from this world?

A world without me is possible (logically consistent). A world with me is possible too, obviously. And so both worlds exist, because they are both possible.

But they are certainly different.  You tried to infer that they must both exist because there is no difference between the one with you, which exists by observation, and the one without you.

No, I talked about two exactly same worlds (copies), with all the same properties, and I asked what it would even mean if one of them existed and the other didn't.

 

A logically possible world is a world that is identical to itself, that is, it has the properties it has and does not have the properties it does not have. If two worlds have all the same properties except the property of existence (one exists and the other doesn't) what does it even mean?

That only shows that a given world must either exist or not exist.  Maybe only worlds with Tomas Pales in them exist.  That's a different property.

It shows that if a given world is possible, it doesn't make sense to ask whether it exists. Because there is no difference between being possible and existing.

And you know this last how:?

Because I see no difference between being possible and existing.

 

So I see no alternative to modal realism.

If we want to go into more details we may ask what properties a world or object may have and based on that we may differentiate between different kinds of worlds or objects, for example spatiotemporal worlds versus worlds that don't have a temporal or spatial structure. An important kind of property is relations between objects (relational properties), and the most general kind of relation is similarity, which holds between any two objects and thus is a necessary kind of relation. It just means that two objects have certain common properties and certain different properties. Mathematics as the most general study of relations explores the similarity relation as morphism in category theory and has reduced it to the set membership relation in set theory. Set theory is interesting to me in that it grounds mathematics in concrete worlds made of collections (sets), as opposed to abstract relations like numbers, functions, symmetries etc.

But if all mathematically (structurally) and consistently characterized worlds/objects exist, it seems surprising that we live in a world with quite stable laws of physics that persist in time (along the time dimension of spacetime). Since reality is a mess of everything possible

"Possible" is a rather ill defined concept and "everything possible" is even worse.  "Logically possible" doesn't fix the problem.  Logic is about language and propositions.  What is logically possible depends on what rules of logic one adopts.  Is it logically possible that Sherlock Holmes companion is both John Watson and James Watson?  Does a contradiction imply everything?

By "possible" I always mean logically possible (consistent) - an object is possible if it has the properties

Properties are things we invent to describe objects.  It's a muddle to imagine you can define objects by properties.  Does my car have the property of being insurable?

We need to define properties with precision in order to see if there is any inconsistency between them. The ultimate level of precision is mathematical precision where all relational properties are reduced to set membership relations, thus reducing the structure of an object to a pure set - that is, a set whose all members are themselves sets, all members of its members are sets, and so on, down to empty sets or maybe even without bottom.

that it has and doesn't have the properties that it doesn't have. In other words, it is identical to itself. That's classical logic, and the only kind of logic that makes sense to me.

Then I suggest you read some books by logicians.

Will they explain what is a circle that is not a circle, and similar nonsense?

 

An object that is not what it is doesn't make sense to me. What's the deal with James Watson? Is it an alternative name for John Watson?

Conan Doyle couldn't keep his imaginary world consistent and in some stories Holmes companion is James Watson and in some he's John Watson.  So I guess that world doesn't exist.

Well, if according to his description two different persons are the same person then a world with such a person cannot exist.

[Brent Meeker]

But what is a contradiction.  How do you know there is not a square circle.  The best you can do define square and circle, so all you've done is prove that to descriptions are contradictory.  This the way the scholastic philosophers thought they could discover truth by armchair thinking.  For example they thought that no object can be two different places at the same.  It was a law logic, implicit in the definition of "a thing".  But along came quantum mechanics and turned out nature didn't care about their definition.

Brent

[Brent Meeker]

So to know whether a world exist we must first reduce it's description to mathematical relations between sets.  Sets of what?  What good is a criterion that can never be checked.

that it has and doesn't have the properties that it doesn't have. In other words, it is identical to itself. That's classical logic, and the only kind of logic that makes sense to me.

Then I suggest you read some books by logicians.

Will they explain what is a circle that is not a circle, and similar nonsense?

No, about whether a true proposition requires that its referents exist.  Whether all propositions follow from a contradiction.  The scope of quantifications...  Whether you can quantify over relations.  Try

https://www.amazon.com/Thinking-About-Logic-Introduction-Philosophy/dp/019289238X/ref=sr_1_1

I think you have an impoverished view of logic.



Brent

 

An object that is not what it is doesn't make sense to me. What's the deal with James Watson? Is it an alternative name for John Watson?

Conan Doyle couldn't keep his imaginary world consistent and in some stories Holmes companion is James Watson and in some he's John Watson.  So I guess that world doesn't exist.

Well, if according to his description two different persons are the same person then a world with such a person cannot exist.

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[Tomas Pales]

The structure of every object should be reducible to a pure set, which is a set of sets of sets etc., down to empty sets. So in principle we could check the consistency of the structure by defining it as a pure set. But due to Godel's second incompleteness theorem we can't do even that because it is impossible to prove that set theory is consistent. But our inability to prove the consistency of an object has no impact on whether the object is consistent and thus whether it exists. We just know that if an object is not consistent it cannot exist because it is nonsense.

that it has and doesn't have the properties that it doesn't have. In other words, it is identical to itself. That's classical logic, and the only kind of logic that makes sense to me.

Then I suggest you read some books by logicians.

Will they explain what is a circle that is not a circle, and similar nonsense?

No, about whether a true proposition requires that its referents exist.  Whether all propositions follow from a contradiction.  The scope of quantifications...  Whether you can quantify over relations.  Try

https://www.amazon.com/Thinking-About-Logic-Introduction-Philosophy/dp/019289238X/ref=sr_1_1

I think you have an impoverished view of logic.

But when I ask about what objects exist I am interested in objects that are defined consistently, objects that have the properties they have. An object that simultaneously has and doesn't have the property of circle is nonsense, so it can't exist. I don't care whether some paraconsistent logic blocks logical explosion from a contradiction or can be useful in analysis of contradictory data.

[Jason Resch]

On Sun, Feb 27, 2022, 11:43 AM Tomas Pales <litew...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Thursday, February 24, 2022 at 4:45:11 AM UTC+1 meeke...@gmail.com wrote:

This should be of interest to all the everythingists on this list.  I'd especially like to hear what Bruno thinks of it.  It's a bit expensive, so I may wait for more reviews before I take it up.

Birmingham-based philosopher Alastair Wilson has taken up the Herculean task of putting modal realism and many-worlds quantum theory together into a coherent, unitary view of reality. The results of this effort have been presented in several papers in recent years, and are now assembled in this thought-provoking book. While, as we will see, questions remain, Wilson has no doubt managed to come up with ingenious new hypotheses and has proposed solutions to existing problems and, more generally, with a powerful new modal realist view. The resulting perspective will certainly be of interest in the coming years, especially for naturalistically inclined philosophers, demanding that metaphysical hypotheses be made as continuous with our best science as possible.

https://ndpr.nd.edu/reviews/the-nature-of-contingency-quantum-physics-as-modal-realism/

From the review I take it that Wilson has missed the intermediate kind of possibility, namely computability which is between logical possibility and nomological possibility.

Brent

I am not sure what is new here. Many-worlds interpretation of QM is obviously an example of Lewis' modal realism in the context of QM. As was discussed here some time ago, it may not even involve splitting of worlds. That is, all the quantum parallel worlds may be distinct worlds (objects) even before a measurement; they are just exactly the same before the measurement (exact copies of each other) and they start to differ at the measurement event. A regularity in the multiverse of these quantum worlds manifests in the fact that the worlds start differing in proportions given by the Born rule, based on the (same) state of the worlds at the moment of measurement.

More generally about possible worlds or objects, I still see no difference between a world that is logically possible (consistent) and a world that "exists". A logically possible world is a world that is identical to itself, that is, it has the properties it has and does not have the properties it does not have. If two worlds have all the same properties except the property of existence (one exists and the other doesn't) what does it even mean? So I see no alternative to modal realism.

If we want to go into more details we may ask what properties a world or object may have and based on that we may differentiate between different kinds of worlds or objects, for example spatiotemporal worlds versus worlds that don't have a temporal or spatial structure.

There has been some work in this question which I cover some of here:

https://alwaysasking.com/why-does-anything-exist/#Why_Time

Also, there are also arguably anthropic reasons for our 3+1 spacetime:

https://alwaysasking.com/is-the-universe-fine-tuned/#Infinitely_Intelligent_Babies_and_Spacetime_Dimensionality

An important kind of property is relations between objects (relational properties), and the most general kind of relation is similarity, which holds between any two objects and thus is a necessary kind of relation. It just means that two objects have certain common properties and certain different properties. Mathematics as the most general study of relations explores the similarity relation as morphism in category theory and has reduced it to the set membership relation in set theory. Set theory is interesting to me in that it grounds mathematics in concrete worlds made of collections (sets), as opposed to abstract relations like numbers, functions, symmetries etc.

But if all mathematically (structurally) and consistently characterized worlds/objects exist, it seems surprising that we live in a world with quite stable laws of physics that persist in time (along the time dimension of spacetime).

Even in an everything ensemble, observers should expect to find stable, simple, probabilistic laws:

https://alwaysasking.com/why-does-anything-exist/#Why_Laws

Since reality is a mess of everything possible we might expect that the regularities (laws) of our world may change or disappear any second, which apparently doesn't happen.

Or you don't remember it happening:

"When we die, the rules surely change. As our brains and bodies cease to function in the normal way, it takes greater and greater contrivances and coincidences to explain continuing consciousness by their operation. We lose our ties to physical reality, but, in the space of all possible worlds, that cannot be the end. Our consciousness continues to exist in some of those, and we will always find ourselves in worlds where we exist and never in ones where we don’t. The nature of the next simplest world that can host us, after we abandon physical law, I cannot guess."

-- Hans Moravec in “Simulation, Consciousness, Existence” (1998)

https://frc.ri.cmu.edu/~hpm/project.archive/general.articles/1998/SimConEx.98.html

Hume put it as "the constant conjunction between causes and effects." The fact that the laws of physics in our world have been stable for billions of years may be explained by the anthropic principle: we could have evolved only in a world with such a long term stability. But it may not be obvious why such a stability would continue into the future.  In fact, it may seem that such a stability in the future is very unlikely because there are many ways our world could be in the future but only one way in which it would be a deterministic extension of the world it has been until now. Maybe the future stability can be explained by Solomonoff induction, which seems to imply the opposite: it is more likely that laws of physics will continue to hold. Why? Because given the way our world has been until now, this world is more simple if its regularities (such as laws of physics) continue than if they are discontinued, and more simple worlds are more likely (more frequent in the collection of all possible worlds) than more complex worlds. (A simpler set of properties is instantiated in more possible worlds than a more complex set of properties.) Such a deterministic world is fully defined by some initial conditions and laws of physics, while a world whose regularity is discontinued at some point would need an additional property that would define the discontinuation and thereby make the world more complex. Solomonoff induction deals only with computable sequences, I don't know if it can be generalized to uncomputable sequences. If it can't, it may indicate that conscious beings of our kind can only exist in a world with such a computable feature (or else we would likely see the stability of laws of physics disappear any second from now). I don't understand the mathematical details of Solomonoff induction and it seems to be a rather unfamiliar explanation for why we should expect the laws of physics to remain stable.

https://arbital.com/p/solomonoff_induction/

Yes this is the basis of Markus Mueller's work, deriving physical law from algorithmic information theory, which is based on Smolonoff induction.

As Saibal Mitra (on this list) said:

"To derive the effective laws of physics, one needs to do statistics over the ensemble of identical observers. This involves performing summations over the multiverse, but these summations are with a constraint that says that some given observer is present."

-- Saibal Mitra in discussion list (2018)

This of course means the laws are only approximately stable, and from the perspective of any observer may change, or be invented on the fly (e.g. when discovering ever less significant digits of some fundamental constant).

It also means any theory bridging ultimate reality and physics needs some theory of observation (consciousness). Physics after all, is the science of observation: predicting future observations given past ones.

Jason

[John Clark]

On Sun, Feb 27, 2022 at 3:59 PM Tomas Pales <litew...@gmail.com> wrote:

> A world without me is possible (logically consistent)

I would certainly agree with that, but the tiny minority of physicist who believe in Superdeterminism, such as Sabine Hossenfelder, would not; they think the universe could only have started out in one very very specific way, a way that required it to produce you 13.8 billion years later because if it did not a paradoxical logical inconsistency would have been produced.  Personally I think that idea is nuts because I simply can't imagine a more egregious violation of Occam's razor than Superdeterminism.

John K Clark    See what's on my new list at  Extropolis

dsq

[Brent Meeker]

Sabine seems to argue against free will as the source of statistical independence...which might be true.  But the most rigorous tests of Bell's theorem, as by Alain Aspect, used photons from opposite directions in the universe to set the polarizations.  To say those were not statistically independent is what I take to be the idea of superdeterminism.  I don't see that it has anything to do with Occam's razor.  It just says the universe is deterministic (as Laplace thought) and it started in some one definite state and nothing random ever happened.  I don't buy it...I'm not even sure it's operationally distinct from good old quantum randomness.  But then I don't buy MWI either.

Brent
I believe in every interpretation of quantum mechanics to the extent it points out the problem, and disbelieve in every interpretation to the extent it claims to have solved it.
   --- Peter Shor

[John Clark]

On Mon, Feb 28, 2022 at 2:22 PM Brent Meeker <meeke...@gmail.com> wrote:

> Sabine seems to argue against free will as the source of statistical independence...which might be true. 

It's neither true nor untrue because "free will" is just gibberish  

> I don't see that it has anything to do with Occam's razor.  It just says the universe is deterministic (as Laplace thought) and it started in some one definite state and nothing random ever happened. 

Determinism just means a future state of the universe can be calculated from the information in a previous date, but it says nothing about the initial condition of the universe. Superdeterminism says in addition that out of all the huge, and possibly infinite, number of states the universe could've started out in it started out in the one in only state that would not only produce humans after 13.8 billion years but humans who would always just happen to perform the wrong experiments so that they would always be fooled into thinking that the universe was random and non-local when in reality it was neither. And it's literally impossible for there to be a theory with a greater violation of Occam's razor than that.  

> I don't buy it...I'm not even sure it's operationally distinct from good old quantum randomness.  But then I don't buy MWI either.

I don't buy it either. Many Worlds is better than Superdeterminism, Copenhagen is better than Superdeterminism, "I don't know" is better than Superdeterminism, even Shut Up And Calculate is better than Superdeterminism.

John K Clark    See what's on my new list at  Extropolis

sua

[Tomas Pales]

On Monday, February 28, 2022 at 2:48:48 PM UTC+1 Jason wrote:

On Sun, Feb 27, 2022, 11:43 AM Tomas Pales <litew...@gmail.com> wrote:

Since reality is a mess of everything possible we might expect that the regularities (laws) of our world may change or disappear any second, which apparently doesn't happen.

Or you don't remember it happening:

"When we die, the rules surely change. As our brains and bodies cease to function in the normal way, it takes greater and greater contrivances and coincidences to explain continuing consciousness by their operation. We lose our ties to physical reality, but, in the space of all possible worlds, that cannot be the end. Our consciousness continues to exist in some of those, and we will always find ourselves in worlds where we exist and never in ones where we don’t. The nature of the next simplest world that can host us, after we abandon physical law, I cannot guess."

-- Hans Moravec in “Simulation, Consciousness, Existence” (1998)

https://frc.ri.cmu.edu/~hpm/project.archive/general.articles/1998/SimConEx.98.html

I am not sure that my consciousness would continue to exist in a different world after it ended in this one. A copy of me might continue in another world but it wouldn't be me, just someone who looks like me and has the same history as me until the point of my death.

[Tomas Pales]

Any empty set is a world without me.

 

[Brent Meeker]

On 2/28/2022 11:49 AM, John Clark wrote:

On Mon, Feb 28, 2022 at 2:22 PM Brent Meeker <meeke...@gmail.com> wrote:

> Sabine seems to argue against free will as the source of statistical independence...which might be true. 

It's neither true nor untrue because "free will" is just gibberish  

> I don't see that it has anything to do with Occam's razor.  It just says the universe is deterministic (as Laplace thought) and it started in some one definite state and nothing random ever happened. 

Determinism just means a future state of the universe can be calculated from the information in a previous date, but it says nothing about the initial condition of the universe. Superdeterminism says in addition that out of all the huge, and possibly infinite, number of states the universe could've started out in it started out in the one in only state that would not only produce humans after 13.8 billion years but humans who would always just happen to perform the wrong experiments so that they would always be fooled into thinking that the universe was random and non-local when in reality it was neither. And it's literally impossible for there to be a theory with a greater violation of Occam's razor than that.

That's like saying it's violation of Occam's razor that some buy won a million dollars in the lottery because it was so improbable that he won.  If the universe started out in some definite state and it evolved deterministically then that it produced humans who did certain things is no more remarkable than if had produced Martians who did something different.  Already the definite initial state and determinism imply all subsequent states.  That seems pretty simple.  And how is it different from MWI which is also deterministic?  Nobody seemed worried about superdeterminism when Lagrange wrote about it.  Was it just because he failed to extend it to human decisions?  Aren't you a compatibilist; you believe in will, but physically determined will?

Brent

 

> I don't buy it...I'm not even sure it's operationally distinct from good old quantum randomness.  But then I don't buy MWI either.

I don't buy it either. Many Worlds is better than Superdeterminism, Copenhagen is better than Superdeterminism, "I don't know" is better than Superdeterminism, even Shut Up And Calculate is better than Superdeterminism.

John K Clark    See what's on my new list at  Extropolis

sua

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[Brent Meeker]

If it had the same memories as you wouldn't it be you?  And would it be insane you if those memories were inconsistent with the history of the world you found yourself in?  And among all logically possible worlds (which you think exist) aren't worlds like that in which your memories and the recorded history in the world are inconsistent, infinitely more numerous than those in which they are consistent?

Have you read Robert Wilson's "Divided by Infinity".  It's a short story: https://www.tor.com/2010/08/05/divided-by-infinity/

Brent

[Brent Meeker]

On 2/28/2022 2:47 AM, Tomas Pales wrote:
> The structure of every object should be reducible to a pure set, which
> is a set of sets of sets etc., down to empty sets. So in principle we
> could check the consistency of the structure by defining it as a pure
> set. But due to Godel's second incompleteness theorem we can't do even
> that because it is impossible to prove that set theory is consistent.
> But our inability to prove the consistency of an object has no impact
> on whether the object is consistent and thus whether it exists. We
> just know that if an object is not consistent it cannot exist because
> it is nonsense.

To say an object is consistent is nonsense.  It just means the object is
not self-contradictory.  But objects aren't propositions. So already
there's a category error.  You refer to the properties of the object. 
But those are mostly relational and we invent them, like my car that is
insurable.  They are no "of the object" per se.

Brent

[John Clark]

On Mon, Feb 28, 2022 at 3:31 PM Brent Meeker <meeke...@gmail.com> wrote:

>> Determinism just means a future state of the universe can be calculated from the information in a previous date, but it says nothing about the initial condition of the universe. Superdeterminism says in addition that out of all the huge, and possibly infinite, number of states the universe could've started out in it started out in the one in only state that would not only produce humans after 13.8 billion years but humans who would always just happen to perform the wrong experiments so that they would always be fooled into thinking that the universe was random and non-local when in reality it was neither. And it's literally impossible for there to be a theory with a greater violation of Occam's razor than that.

 

> That's like saying it's violation of Occam's razor that some buy won a million dollars in the lottery because it was so improbable that he won.  If the universe started out in some definite state and it evolved deterministically then that it produced humans who did certain things is no more remarkable than if had produced Martians who did something different. 

No, it's saying that whenever humans did an experiment in physics and changed something in a way they thought was random and concluded from the experiment that the universe was random and non-local they were actually being fooled because what they thought was random was not random at all,  instead it was a part of a grand conspiracy that started 13.8 billion years ago from a very very specific initial state that resulted in humans always being fooled no matter how many times they repeated such experiments. The only reason somebody would concoct such a ridiculous theory is that for whatever reason they just didn't like the Many Worlds idea and were desperate to do something, anything, to avoid it. If they really believed in superdeterminism then there would be no point in conducting scientific experiments at all because the universe is perverse and will always lie to them so the entire scientific method is invalid.  You couldn't even trust your own memories or thoughts because the universe has been engineered from the start to make fools of us, so even thinking is a waste of time. I thought the holy rollers who say the universe is only 4000 years old and God buried dinosaur bones to fool humans and test their faith were bad, but this is worse, much much worse.  

John K Clark    See what's on my new list at  Extropolis

lqg

sua

[Jesse Mazer]

Superdeterminism goes well beyond Laplacean determinism. Determinism is just about the dynamical laws--if you know some "initial" state of the universe at time T1, it says you can perfectly predict the state at a later time T2 (or an earlier time, in a time-symmetric theory). Superdeterminism is a constraint on the initial conditions which is meant to rule out some broad class of possible worlds that are *not* ruled out by the dynamical laws. In quantum theory, superdeterminism is invoked to allow for the possibility that the dynamical laws are local realist ones (of a single-world kind), so that under "generic" initial conditions one would expect statistically to see Bell inequalities respected (in contradiction to quantum predictions), but superdeterminism constrains the initial conditions to a special set which predetermine that experimenters doing Bell tests will routinely see Bell inequalities violated. This is why, in stating the assumptions needed to prove Bell's theorem, physicists will specify that they are assuming superdeterminism is false by referring to the "no-conspiracy" assumption, so named because superdeterminism is understood conceptually as a kind of conspiracy in the initial conditions of the universe that makes us think the dynamical laws are very different from what they actually are.

Jesse

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/6b2f2563-9231-ad7b-f444-0226b4546256%40gmail.com.

[Tomas Pales]

On Monday, February 28, 2022 at 9:42:33 PM UTC+1 meeke...@gmail.com wrote:

On 2/28/2022 12:23 PM, Tomas Pales wrote:

On Monday, February 28, 2022 at 2:48:48 PM UTC+1 Jason wrote:

On Sun, Feb 27, 2022, 11:43 AM Tomas Pales <litew...@gmail.com> wrote:

Since reality is a mess of everything possible we might expect that the regularities (laws) of our world may change or disappear any second, which apparently doesn't happen.

Or you don't remember it happening:

"When we die, the rules surely change. As our brains and bodies cease to function in the normal way, it takes greater and greater contrivances and coincidences to explain continuing consciousness by their operation. We lose our ties to physical reality, but, in the space of all possible worlds, that cannot be the end. Our consciousness continues to exist in some of those, and we will always find ourselves in worlds where we exist and never in ones where we don’t. The nature of the next simplest world that can host us, after we abandon physical law, I cannot guess."

-- Hans Moravec in “Simulation, Consciousness, Existence” (1998)

https://frc.ri.cmu.edu/~hpm/project.archive/general.articles/1998/SimConEx.98.html

I am not sure that my consciousness would continue to exist in a different world after it ended in this one. A copy of me might continue in another world but it wouldn't be me, just someone who looks like me and has the same history as me until the point of my death.

If it had the same memories as you wouldn't it be you?

It seems like asking that if there are two same cars aren't they the same car?

 

  And would it be insane you if those memories were inconsistent with the history of the world you found yourself in?  And among all logically possible worlds (which you think exist) aren't worlds like that in which your memories and the recorded history in the world are inconsistent, infinitely more numerous than those in which they are consistent?

A severe disconnect between an organism's memories and the history of its world appears to be an evolutionary disadvantage, heading for extinction even before the organism evolves enough complexity to hold a significant level of consciousness. 

Have you read Robert Wilson's "Divided by Infinity".  It's a short story: https://www.tor.com/2010/08/05/divided-by-infinity/

Looks interesting.

 

[Tomas Pales]

On Monday, February 28, 2022 at 9:47:21 PM UTC+1 meeke...@gmail.com wrote:

On 2/28/2022 2:47 AM, Tomas Pales wrote:
> The structure of every object should be reducible to a pure set, which
> is a set of sets of sets etc., down to empty sets. So in principle we
> could check the consistency of the structure by defining it as a pure
> set. But due to Godel's second incompleteness theorem we can't do even
> that because it is impossible to prove that set theory is consistent.
> But our inability to prove the consistency of an object has no impact
> on whether the object is consistent and thus whether it exists. We
> just know that if an object is not consistent it cannot exist because
> it is nonsense.

To say an object is consistent is nonsense.  It just means the object is
not self-contradictory.  But objects aren't propositions. So already
there's a category error. 

I said what it means that an object is consistent. It means that it is identical to itself, or in other words, it has the properties it has. No square circle.

 

You refer to the properties of the object. 
But those are mostly relational and we invent them, like my car that is
insurable.  They are no "of the object" per se.

What else do we invent? The whole world around us?

 

[Jason Resch]

1. If you lose consciousness tonight and wake up in bed the next morning, despite being in a different time, place, and slightly different atomic make up via metabolism, have you survived and is it still you?  (why or why not?)

2. If you are resuscitated after falling into a frozen lake and drowning after 40 minutes have you survived death, would it still be you? (why or why not?)

3. If half of your head is blown up in a lab accident, and advanced medical technology restores you to your original self by healing your wounds and replacing missing tissues have you survived? (Does it matter to your survival whether your original body's atoms are used in the reconstruction?)  (why or why not?)

4. If you are transported in a destructive teleportation machine which breaks down and scans you at a molecular level and reassembles you on Mars, have you survived?  (why or why not?)

5. If your mind is uploaded into a computer, which lasts until near the heat death of the universe, and some compassionate aliens in another universe having vastly more computational resources than our own, which simulated our universe from the big bang until the heat death, chose to copy your uploaded mind state at the time of the heat death into their own universe so that it could continue, have you survived?  (why or why not?)

I am interested at which numbered stage you cease to believe in your survival.

Jason

[Brent Meeker]

On 2/28/2022 1:01 PM, John Clark wrote:

On Mon, Feb 28, 2022 at 3:31 PM Brent Meeker <meeke...@gmail.com> wrote:

>> Determinism just means a future state of the universe can be calculated from the information in a previous date, but it says nothing about the initial condition of the universe. Superdeterminism says in addition that out of all the huge, and possibly infinite, number of states the universe could've started out in it started out in the one in only state that would not only produce humans after 13.8 billion years but humans who would always just happen to perform the wrong experiments so that they would always be fooled into thinking that the universe was random and non-local when in reality it was neither. And it's literally impossible for there to be a theory with a greater violation of Occam's razor than that.

 

> That's like saying it's violation of Occam's razor that some buy won a million dollars in the lottery because it was so improbable that he won.  If the universe started out in some definite state and it evolved deterministically then that it produced humans who did certain things is no more remarkable than if had produced Martians who did something different. 

No, it's saying that whenever humans did an experiment in physics and changed something in a way they thought was random and concluded from the experiment that the universe was random and non-local they were actually being fooled because what they thought was random was not random at all,  instead it was a part of a grand conspiracy that started 13.8 billion years ago from a very very specific initial state that resulted in humans always being fooled no matter how many times they repeated such experiments.

So you think their decisions were not deterministic; then they were either random or libertarian "free will".  If they were deterministic they were determined by any Cauchy slice of their past light cone, including the one 13.8 billion years ago.  There's no "consipiracy to it; that implies some intelligence agent arranging it.  It's just what happened.  You don't believe in free will, but you believe in statistically independent will.

Brent

The only reason somebody would concoct such a ridiculous theory is that for whatever reason they just didn't like the Many Worlds idea and were desperate to do something, anything, to avoid it. If they really believed in superdeterminism then there would be no point in conducting scientific experiments at all because the universe is perverse and will always lie to them so the entire scientific method is invalid.  You couldn't even trust your own memories or thoughts because the universe has been engineered from the start to make fools of us, so even thinking is a waste of time. I thought the holy rollers who say the universe is only 4000 years old and God buried dinosaur bones to fool humans and test their faith were bad, but this is worse, much much worse.  

John K Clark    See what's on my new list at  Extropolis

lqg

sua

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[Bruce Kellett]

On Tue, Mar 1, 2022 at 8:02 AM John Clark <johnk...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Mon, Feb 28, 2022 at 3:31 PM Brent Meeker <meeke...@gmail.com> wrote:

  If the universe started out in some definite state and it evolved deterministically then that it produced humans who did certain things is no more remarkable than if had produced Martians who did something different. 

No, it's saying that whenever humans did an experiment in physics and changed something in a way they thought was random and concluded from the experiment that the universe was random and non-local they were actually being fooled because what they thought was random was not random at all,  instead it was a part of a grand conspiracy that started 13.8 billion years ago from a very very specific initial state that resulted in humans always being fooled no matter how many times they repeated such experiments. The only reason somebody would concoct such a ridiculous theory is that for whatever reason they just didn't like the Many Worlds idea and were desperate to do something, anything, to avoid it

It is not Many Worlds that Hossenfelder rejects. It is, rather, the idea of non-locality. Her rejection of the implications of Bell's theorem for the possibility of a local explanation of the Bell-type correlations is based on a rejection of the idea of 'statistical independence'. In other words, she wants to allow the distribution of hidden variables to depend on the settings of both remote detectors, whereas locality would rule this out. Since MWI does not violate 'statistical independence', either, MWI does not provide a solution that Hossenfelder would accept.

My main criticism of superdeterminism as Hossenfelder presents it, is that she does not give a mechanism whereby statistical independence is violated -- she does not explain how particular hidden variables that depend on both settings of the final measurement instruments could actually determine the outcome of the correlation experiments. The main point is that for non-aligned polarizers, the measurement outcomes are not deterministic but, rather, probabilistic. In order for these probabilities to determine the observed correlations, there must be correlations (or dependence) between repeats of the measurements. Hossenfelder does not give any account of the necessary non-locality over time.

In other words, her mathematical point, while valid, does not translate into a physical theory.

Bruce

 

If they really believed in superdeterminism then there would be no point in conducting scientific experiments at all because the universe is perverse and will always lie to them so the entire scientific method is invalid.  You couldn't even trust your own memories or thoughts because the universe has been engineered from the start to make fools of us, so even thinking is a waste of time. I thought the holy rollers who say the universe is only 4000 years old and God buried dinosaur bones to fool humans and test their faith were bad, but this is worse, much much worse.  

John K Clark    See what's on my new list at  Extropolis

lqg

sua

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[Brent Meeker]

On 2/28/2022 1:12 PM, Jesse Mazer wrote:

Superdeterminism goes well beyond Laplacean determinism. Determinism is just about the dynamical laws--if you know some "initial" state of the universe at time T1, it says you can perfectly predict the state at a later time T2 (or an earlier time, in a time-symmetric theory). Superdeterminism is a constraint on the initial conditions which is meant to rule out some broad class of possible worlds that are *not* ruled out by the dynamical laws.

In a deterministic system any given initial condition rules out infinitely many futures.

In quantum theory, superdeterminism is invoked to allow for the possibility that the dynamical laws are local realist ones (of a single-world kind), so that under "generic" initial conditions one would expect statistically to see Bell inequalities respected (in contradiction to quantum predictions), but superdeterminism constrains the initial conditions to a special set

Then postulating that the initial conditions were in this set seems like just another dynamical law; like Born's rule.

Brent

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/CAPCWU3%2BD3rR7vyErL_NfyK180Wz8oYW0id2zO72ZShkFdydbMw%40mail.gmail.com.

[Brent Meeker]

On 2/28/2022 1:29 PM, Tomas Pales wrote:

On Monday, February 28, 2022 at 9:47:21 PM UTC+1 meeke...@gmail.com wrote:

On 2/28/2022 2:47 AM, Tomas Pales wrote:
> The structure of every object should be reducible to a pure set, which
> is a set of sets of sets etc., down to empty sets. So in principle we
> could check the consistency of the structure by defining it as a pure
> set. But due to Godel's second incompleteness theorem we can't do even
> that because it is impossible to prove that set theory is consistent.
> But our inability to prove the consistency of an object has no impact
> on whether the object is consistent and thus whether it exists. We
> just know that if an object is not consistent it cannot exist because
> it is nonsense.

To say an object is consistent is nonsense.  It just means the object is
not self-contradictory.  But objects aren't propositions. So already
there's a category error. 

I said what it means that an object is consistent. It means that it is identical to itself, or in other words, it has the properties it has. No square circle.

Which, if I understand correctly, means every object is tautologically consistent.

 

You refer to the properties of the object. 
But those are mostly relational and we invent them, like my car that is
insurable.  They are no "of the object" per se.

What else do we invent? The whole world around us?

If you limit "the world" to it's description, yes.

Brent

[Jesse Mazer]

On Mon, Feb 28, 2022 at 6:12 PM Brent Meeker <meeke...@gmail.com> wrote:

On 2/28/2022 1:12 PM, Jesse Mazer wrote:

Superdeterminism goes well beyond Laplacean determinism. Determinism is just about the dynamical laws--if you know some "initial" state of the universe at time T1, it says you can perfectly predict the state at a later time T2 (or an earlier time, in a time-symmetric theory). Superdeterminism is a constraint on the initial conditions which is meant to rule out some broad class of possible worlds that are *not* ruled out by the dynamical laws.

In a deterministic system any given initial condition rules out infinitely many futures.

Yes, the conditional probability P(later conditions B | initial conditions A) is 1 for a unique value of B, 0 for every other possible value of B. But the dynamical laws themselves don't tell you anything about the non-conditional probability P(initial conditions A) for different possible choices of A. Superdeterminism adds an extra constraint which says P(initial conditions A) is 0 for the vast majority of possible initial conditions in the phase space, and only nonzero for a tiny fraction with some very special characteristics.

 

In quantum theory, superdeterminism is invoked to allow for the possibility that the dynamical laws are local realist ones (of a single-world kind), so that under "generic" initial conditions one would expect statistically to see Bell inequalities respected (in contradiction to quantum predictions), but superdeterminism constrains the initial conditions to a special set

Then postulating that the initial conditions were in this set seems like just another dynamical law; like Born's rule.

Can you elaborate on the analogy to Born's rule? Born's rule is not a constraint on initial states.

Even if we accept in principle the idea of laws that consist of constraints on allowable initial conditions, there is also the argument that the mathematical formulation of such a constraint would have to be incredibly complex in an algorithmic sense, that it would have to have some built-in "concept" of high-level observers and measuring instruments so that the hidden variables could be assigned to particle pairs in a way that anticipated the fact that the two particles would later be measured by instruments in a certain configuration (the orientation of stern-gerlach devices used to measure each particle's spins, for example).

Jesse

 

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/9200337c-b1da-5de0-4c89-0494296cfeb4%40gmail.com.

[Tomas Pales]

Ok, it depends on how we define "you". If we define "you" as on object that only exists at a certain moment of time, then the "you" at this moment is not the "you" at the next moment. You die instantly and never survive. But in a world of time we experience objects as persisting or extended in time and we care (a positive emotion) about a definition of "you" as an object persisting or extended in time, and we identify survival with the extension of this object in time. Would we also care about a definition of "you" as an object that is extended in time until some point, then is destroyed and restored to the previous state at a later time? (this object would be a collection of objects that are extended but not continuous in time) In some I cases, I think yes. We care about the object being continuously conscious but we are willing to let the conscious object be destroyed every night if we can expect with a high degree of certainty that it will be restored in the morning. But even then, we would not want the object to be destroyed or restored in a painful way or to be restored in an alien world to which it would have difficulty adjusting or have its social bonds from the previous day severed (the severing of social bonds would occur also if you were to die in this world and your consciousness would be "restored" in an exact copy of you in an exact copy of this world, because the bonds would be severed in the original world). So if a restoration happens (and we may not always be as certain of it as when we fall asleep at night) we can always define the restored "you" as a continuation of the destroyed "you" but we may not like being such a "you".

 

[Brent Meeker]

On 2/28/2022 3:11 PM, Bruce Kellett wrote:

On Tue, Mar 1, 2022 at 8:02 AM John Clark <johnk...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Mon, Feb 28, 2022 at 3:31 PM Brent Meeker <meeke...@gmail.com> wrote:

  If the universe started out in some definite state and it evolved deterministically then that it produced humans who did certain things is no more remarkable than if had produced Martians who did something different. 

No, it's saying that whenever humans did an experiment in physics and changed something in a way they thought was random and concluded from the experiment that the universe was random and non-local they were actually being fooled because what they thought was random was not random at all,  instead it was a part of a grand conspiracy that started 13.8 billion years ago from a very very specific initial state that resulted in humans always being fooled no matter how many times they repeated such experiments. The only reason somebody would concoct such a ridiculous theory is that for whatever reason they just didn't like the Many Worlds idea and were desperate to do something, anything, to avoid it

It is not Many Worlds that Hossenfelder rejects. It is, rather, the idea of non-locality. Her rejection of the implications of Bell's theorem for the possibility of a local explanation of the Bell-type correlations is based on a rejection of the idea of 'statistical independence'. In other words, she wants to allow the distribution of hidden variables to depend on the settings of both remote detectors, whereas locality would rule this out.

Presumably because they are both determined by some common cause in the overlap of their past light cones.  But that's a kind of science defeating conclusion: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1407.0363.pdf  because it is also the settings of the detectors depending on the hidden variable values.

Brent

Since MWI does not violate 'statistical independence', either, MWI does not provide a solution that Hossenfelder would accept.

My main criticism of superdeterminism as Hossenfelder presents it, is that she does not give a mechanism whereby statistical independence is violated -- she does not explain how particular hidden variables that depend on both settings of the final measurement instruments could actually determine the outcome of the correlation experiments. The main point is that for non-aligned polarizers, the measurement outcomes are not deterministic but, rather, probabilistic. In order for these probabilities to determine the observed correlations, there must be correlations (or dependence) between repeats of the measurements. Hossenfelder does not give any account of the necessary non-locality over time.

In other words, her mathematical point, while valid, does not translate into a physical theory.

Bruce

 

If they really believed in superdeterminism then there would be no point in conducting scientific experiments at all because the universe is perverse and will always lie to them so the entire scientific method is invalid.  You couldn't even trust your own memories or thoughts because the universe has been engineered from the start to make fools of us, so even thinking is a waste of time. I thought the holy rollers who say the universe is only 4000 years old and God buried dinosaur bones to fool humans and test their faith were bad, but this is worse, much much worse.  

John K Clark    See what's on my new list at  Extropolis

lqg

sua

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[Tomas Pales]

On Tuesday, March 1, 2022 at 12:15:39 AM UTC+1 meeke...@gmail.com wrote:

On 2/28/2022 1:29 PM, Tomas Pales wrote:

On Monday, February 28, 2022 at 9:47:21 PM UTC+1 meeke...@gmail.com wrote:

On 2/28/2022 2:47 AM, Tomas Pales wrote:
> The structure of every object should be reducible to a pure set, which
> is a set of sets of sets etc., down to empty sets. So in principle we
> could check the consistency of the structure by defining it as a pure
> set. But due to Godel's second incompleteness theorem we can't do even
> that because it is impossible to prove that set theory is consistent.
> But our inability to prove the consistency of an object has no impact
> on whether the object is consistent and thus whether it exists. We
> just know that if an object is not consistent it cannot exist because
> it is nonsense.

To say an object is consistent is nonsense.  It just means the object is
not self-contradictory.  But objects aren't propositions. So already
there's a category error. 

I said what it means that an object is consistent. It means that it is identical to itself, or in other words, it has the properties it has. No square circle.

Which, if I understand correctly, means every object is tautologically consistent.

Every existent object is what it is. A square circle is not what it is, so it can't exist.

 

You refer to the properties of the object. 
But those are mostly relational and we invent them, like my car that is
insurable.  They are no "of the object" per se.

What else do we invent? The whole world around us?

If you limit "the world" to it's description, yes.

But only consistent descriptions correspond to the world, so in this sense the world is consistent.

[Bruce Kellett]

On Tue, Mar 1, 2022 at 10:57 AM Brent Meeker <meeke...@gmail.com> wrote:

On 2/28/2022 3:11 PM, Bruce Kellett wrote:

On Tue, Mar 1, 2022 at 8:02 AM John Clark <johnk...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Mon, Feb 28, 2022 at 3:31 PM Brent Meeker <meeke...@gmail.com> wrote:

  If the universe started out in some definite state and it evolved deterministically then that it produced humans who did certain things is no more remarkable than if had produced Martians who did something different. 

No, it's saying that whenever humans did an experiment in physics and changed something in a way they thought was random and concluded from the experiment that the universe was random and non-local they were actually being fooled because what they thought was random was not random at all,  instead it was a part of a grand conspiracy that started 13.8 billion years ago from a very very specific initial state that resulted in humans always being fooled no matter how many times they repeated such experiments. The only reason somebody would concoct such a ridiculous theory is that for whatever reason they just didn't like the Many Worlds idea and were desperate to do something, anything, to avoid it

It is not Many Worlds that Hossenfelder rejects. It is, rather, the idea of non-locality. Her rejection of the implications of Bell's theorem for the possibility of a local explanation of the Bell-type correlations is based on a rejection of the idea of 'statistical independence'. In other words, she wants to allow the distribution of hidden variables to depend on the settings of both remote detectors, whereas locality would rule this out.

Presumably because they are both determined by some common cause in the overlap of their past light cones.  But that's a kind of science defeating conclusion: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1407.0363.pdf  because it is also the settings of the detectors depending on the hidden variable values.

The mathematics of superdeterminism, as specified by Sabine, requires the hidden variables to depend on the detector settings, but not the other way round.

Bruce

[Brent Meeker]

On 2/28/2022 3:39 PM, Jesse Mazer wrote:

On Mon, Feb 28, 2022 at 6:12 PM Brent Meeker <meeke...@gmail.com> wrote:

On 2/28/2022 1:12 PM, Jesse Mazer wrote:

Superdeterminism goes well beyond Laplacean determinism. Determinism is just about the dynamical laws--if you know some "initial" state of the universe at time T1, it says you can perfectly predict the state at a later time T2 (or an earlier time, in a time-symmetric theory). Superdeterminism is a constraint on the initial conditions which is meant to rule out some broad class of possible worlds that are *not* ruled out by the dynamical laws.

In a deterministic system any given initial condition rules out infinitely many futures.

Yes, the conditional probability P(later conditions B | initial conditions A) is 1 for a unique value of B, 0 for every other possible value of B. But the dynamical laws themselves don't tell you anything about the non-conditional probability P(initial conditions A) for different possible choices of A. Superdeterminism adds an extra constraint which says P(initial conditions A) is 0 for the vast majority of possible initial conditions in the phase space, and only nonzero for a tiny fraction with some very special characteristics.

But if the universe is deterministic it had only one initial condition...so of course it had special characteristics.  Just as the winning lottery ticket had a special number on it.

 

In quantum theory, superdeterminism is invoked to allow for the possibility that the dynamical laws are local realist ones (of a single-world kind), so that under "generic" initial conditions one would expect statistically to see Bell inequalities respected (in contradiction to quantum predictions), but superdeterminism constrains the initial conditions to a special set

Then postulating that the initial conditions were in this set seems like just another dynamical law; like Born's rule.

Can you elaborate on the analogy to Born's rule? Born's rule is not a constraint on initial states.

Born's rule for measurement results is not a dynamical law either.

Even if we accept in principle the idea of laws that consist of constraints on allowable initial conditions, there is also the argument that the mathematical formulation of such a constraint would have to be incredibly complex in an algorithmic sense,

Why?  "No hidden variable" isn't very complex.

that it would have to have some built-in "concept" of high-level observers and measuring instruments so that the hidden variables could be assigned to particle pairs in a way that anticipated the fact that the two particles would later be measured by instruments in a certain configuration (the orientation of stern-gerlach devices used to measure each particle's spins, for example).

But in a deterministic system all those things have a common cause; their past light cones overlap.

Brent

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/CAPCWU3%2BjPoBDd131NDsoM8MwDGTqg6oU%2BmeZELph%3D%3DHjJR1TvA%40mail.gmail.com.

[Brent Meeker]

I didn't say it wasn't.  I was just pointing out that this is based on the premise that the world exists.  So it is invalid to infer from "this world has a consistent description" that "all world's with consistent description exist".

And having a consistent description is not really that helpful.  Before quantum mechanics everyone was sure that it was true of the world that nothing could be in two different places at the same time.  It was just logic.

Brent

[Jesse Mazer]

On Mon, Feb 28, 2022 at 7:39 PM Brent Meeker <meeke...@gmail.com> wrote:

On 2/28/2022 3:39 PM, Jesse Mazer wrote:

On Mon, Feb 28, 2022 at 6:12 PM Brent Meeker <meeke...@gmail.com> wrote:

On 2/28/2022 1:12 PM, Jesse Mazer wrote:

Superdeterminism goes well beyond Laplacean determinism. Determinism is just about the dynamical laws--if you know some "initial" state of the universe at time T1, it says you can perfectly predict the state at a later time T2 (or an earlier time, in a time-symmetric theory). Superdeterminism is a constraint on the initial conditions which is meant to rule out some broad class of possible worlds that are *not* ruled out by the dynamical laws.

In a deterministic system any given initial condition rules out infinitely many futures.

Yes, the conditional probability P(later conditions B | initial conditions A) is 1 for a unique value of B, 0 for every other possible value of B. But the dynamical laws themselves don't tell you anything about the non-conditional probability P(initial conditions A) for different possible choices of A. Superdeterminism adds an extra constraint which says P(initial conditions A) is 0 for the vast majority of possible initial conditions in the phase space, and only nonzero for a tiny fraction with some very special characteristics.

But if the universe is deterministic it had only one initial condition...so of course it had special characteristics.  Just as the winning lottery ticket had a special number on it.

But if you don't know that initial condition, then absent knowledge of some lawlike constraint on initial conditions, I think it makes sense to treat all initial microstates consistent with the historical data you've seen so far as equally likely in terms of the subjective probability you assign to them (this sort of assumption is needed in classical statistical mechanics, where to make probabilistic predictions about an isolated system, you generally start with the assumption that all microstates consistent with your knowledge of the macrostate are equally likely). So even if Bell inequalities have been consistently violated in the past, if you believe that's just a consequence of a particular "lucky" set of initial conditions and not the dynamical laws or a lawlike constraint on initial conditions, then if you believe the dynamical laws are local ones you should expect the pattern to break down in the future, since there are many more possible initial microstates consistent with the experimental results you've seen so far in which the pattern of Bell inequality violations would break down and the inequalities would subsequently be respected.

 

 

In quantum theory, superdeterminism is invoked to allow for the possibility that the dynamical laws are local realist ones (of a single-world kind), so that under "generic" initial conditions one would expect statistically to see Bell inequalities respected (in contradiction to quantum predictions), but superdeterminism constrains the initial conditions to a special set

Then postulating that the initial conditions were in this set seems like just another dynamical law; like Born's rule.

Can you elaborate on the analogy to Born's rule? Born's rule is not a constraint on initial states.

Born's rule for measurement results is not a dynamical law either.

I would say that in the Copenhagen interpretation the experimenter's choice about what to measure is not determined by dynamical laws, but once the state of the detector is set, the interaction between the detector and the quantum system being measured does obey a dynamical law, one that says the system's wavefunction will collapse onto one of the eigenstates of whatever variable the detector is set to measure (the projection postulate) with probability determined by the square of the prior amplitude on that eigenstate (Born's rule).

In any case, if you don't consider Born's rule to be any sort of true dynamical law, were you saying it "seems like" a dynamical law in some sense, and that the constraint on initial conditions "seems like" a dynamical law in the same sense?

 

Even if we accept in principle the idea of laws that consist of constraints on allowable initial conditions, there is also the argument that the mathematical formulation of such a constraint would have to be incredibly complex in an algorithmic sense,

Why?  "No hidden variable" isn't very complex.

Are you interpreting superdeterminist theories as ones where there are no hidden variables? Unless superdeterminism is assumed to measurably depart from the predictions of QM, it does require hidden variables--the idea in a Bell test measurement involving spin measurements, for example, is that the particle pair have hidden variables which predetermine what spins they will have along the axes the experimenters will later choose to measure.

 

that it would have to have some built-in "concept" of high-level observers and measuring instruments so that the hidden variables could be assigned to particle pairs in a way that anticipated the fact that the two particles would later be measured by instruments in a certain configuration (the orientation of stern-gerlach devices used to measure each particle's spins, for example).

But in a deterministic system all those things have a common cause; their past light cones overlap.

The event of the particle pair being emitted from the source is in the past light cone of each of the measurements, but each experimenter could for example base their decision about what axis to measure on a pseudorandom algorithm that took as its seed some astronomical data from a region that's outside the past light cone of the pair emission, and also outside the past light cone of the other experimenter making their own decision. And the hidden variables assigned to the particles when they're emitted have to act as though they "anticipate" what measurements will be performed on them, even if the choice of measurements depended on information outside the past light cone of the emission event.

 

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/a40cc3e8-6f9a-8f25-aa51-cba2ef6b3e88%40gmail.com.

[Brent Meeker]

On 2/28/2022 7:14 PM, Jesse Mazer wrote:

On Mon, Feb 28, 2022 at 7:39 PM Brent Meeker <meeke...@gmail.com> wrote:

On 2/28/2022 3:39 PM, Jesse Mazer wrote:

On Mon, Feb 28, 2022 at 6:12 PM Brent Meeker <meeke...@gmail.com> wrote:

On 2/28/2022 1:12 PM, Jesse Mazer wrote:

Superdeterminism goes well beyond Laplacean determinism. Determinism is just about the dynamical laws--if you know some "initial" state of the universe at time T1, it says you can perfectly predict the state at a later time T2 (or an earlier time, in a time-symmetric theory). Superdeterminism is a constraint on the initial conditions which is meant to rule out some broad class of possible worlds that are *not* ruled out by the dynamical laws.

In a deterministic system any given initial condition rules out infinitely many futures.

Yes, the conditional probability P(later conditions B | initial conditions A) is 1 for a unique value of B, 0 for every other possible value of B. But the dynamical laws themselves don't tell you anything about the non-conditional probability P(initial conditions A) for different possible choices of A. Superdeterminism adds an extra constraint which says P(initial conditions A) is 0 for the vast majority of possible initial conditions in the phase space, and only nonzero for a tiny fraction with some very special characteristics.

But if the universe is deterministic it had only one initial condition...so of course it had special characteristics.  Just as the winning lottery ticket had a special number on it.

But if you don't know that initial condition, then absent knowledge of some lawlike constraint on initial conditions, I think it makes sense to treat all initial microstates consistent with the historical data you've seen so far as equally likely in terms of the subjective probability you assign to them (this sort of assumption is needed in classical statistical mechanics, where to make probabilistic predictions about an isolated system, you generally start with the assumption that all microstates consistent with your knowledge of the macrostate are equally likely). So even if Bell inequalities have been consistently violated in the past, if you believe that's just a consequence of a particular "lucky" set of initial conditions and not the dynamical laws or a lawlike constraint on initial conditions, then if you believe the dynamical laws are local ones you should expect the pattern to break down in the future, since there are many more possible initial microstates consistent with the experimental results you've seen so far in which the pattern of Bell inequality violations would break down and the inequalities would subsequently be respected.

I agree.  And if that happens I guess it will be (weak) support for superdeterminism.

 

 

In quantum theory, superdeterminism is invoked to allow for the possibility that the dynamical laws are local realist ones (of a single-world kind), so that under "generic" initial conditions one would expect statistically to see Bell inequalities respected (in contradiction to quantum predictions), but superdeterminism constrains the initial conditions to a special set

Then postulating that the initial conditions were in this set seems like just another dynamical law; like Born's rule.

Can you elaborate on the analogy to Born's rule? Born's rule is not a constraint on initial states.

Born's rule for measurement results is not a dynamical law either.

I would say that in the Copenhagen interpretation the experimenter's choice about what to measure is not determined by dynamical laws, but once the state of the detector is set, the interaction between the detector and the quantum system being measured does obey a dynamical law, one that says the system's wavefunction will collapse onto one of the eigenstates of whatever variable the detector is set to measure (the projection postulate) with probability determined by the square of the prior amplitude on that eigenstate (Born's rule).

In any case, if you don't consider Born's rule to be any sort of true dynamical law, were you saying it "seems like" a dynamical law in some sense, and that the constraint on initial conditions "seems like" a dynamical law in the same sense?

I'm pointing out it could be imitated by superdeterminism even though it's used as a law in QM.  It's analogous to computer programs; there's really no sharp distinction between program and data.

 

Even if we accept in principle the idea of laws that consist of constraints on allowable initial conditions, there is also the argument that the mathematical formulation of such a constraint would have to be incredibly complex in an algorithmic sense,

Why?  "No hidden variable" isn't very complex.

Are you interpreting superdeterminist theories as ones where there are no hidden variables?

No, I'm saying no hidden variables rules out superdeterminism.  Since either their are hidden variables that are sensitive to the polarization settings, or the polarization settings are influenced by the hidden variables.  But if there are no hidden variables...no superdeterminism.

Unless superdeterminism is assumed to measurably depart from the predictions of QM, it does require hidden variables--the idea in a Bell test measurement involving spin measurements, for example, is that the particle pair have hidden variables which predetermine what spins they will have along the axes the experimenters will later choose to measure.

 

that it would have to have some built-in "concept" of high-level observers and measuring instruments so that the hidden variables could be assigned to particle pairs in a way that anticipated the fact that the two particles would later be measured by instruments in a certain configuration (the orientation of stern-gerlach devices used to measure each particle's spins, for example).

But in a deterministic system all those things have a common cause; their past light cones overlap.

The event of the particle pair being emitted from the source is in the past light cone of each of the measurements, but each experimenter could for example base their decision about what axis to measure on a pseudorandom algorithm that took as its seed some astronomical data from a region that's outside the past light cone of the pair emission,

That's three past light cones that must not overlap to rule out a common cause violation of statistical independence.  That means they need to be more that 14 billion light years apart.

Brent

[Tomas Pales]

I was not making such an inference. I was just clarifying what it means for a world to be "consistent": it means that it has only a consistent description. As for "all worlds with consistent description exist", my reason for believing this is still the same: I see no difference between a world being consistent and existing.

 

And having a consistent description is not really that helpful.  Before quantum mechanics everyone was sure that it was true of the world that nothing could be in two different places at the same time.  It was just logic.

But before we can assess whether something has a consistent description we need to specify the description precisely. With a vague description we may be missing an inconsistency lurking somewhere in it or there may appear to be an inconsistency that is not really there. For example, if we try to describe a quantum object in terms of classical physics the description will not be precise enough and the assumptions inherent in those terms will be contradictory. The ideal description would reveal the complete structure of the object down to empty sets but we can't physically probe objects around us to that level.

[John Clark]

On Mon, Feb 28, 2022 at 6:07 PM Brent Meeker <meeke...@gmail.com> wrote:

>>>> Determinism just means a future state of the universe can be calculated from the information in a previous date, but it says nothing about the initial condition of the universe. Superdeterminism says in addition that out of all the huge, and possibly infinite, number of states the universe could've started out in it started out in the one in only state that would not only produce humans after 13.8 billion years but humans who would always just happen to perform the wrong experiments so that they would always be fooled into thinking that the universe was random and non-local when in reality it was neither. And it's literally impossible for there to be a theory with a greater violation of Occam's razor than that.

 

>>> That's like saying it's violation of Occam's razor that some buy won a million dollars in the lottery because it was so improbable that he won.  If the universe started out in some definite state and it evolved deterministically then that it produced humans who did certain things is no more remarkable than if had produced Martians who did something different. 

>> No, it's saying that whenever humans did an experiment in physics and changed something in a way they thought was random and concluded from the experiment that the universe was random and non-local they were actually being fooled because what they thought was random was not random at all,  instead it was a part of a grand conspiracy that started 13.8 billion years ago from a very very specific initial state that resulted in humans always being fooled no matter how many times they repeated such experiments.

> So you think their decisions were not deterministic;

I don't know if human actions are determined or not, but one thing I do know is that it's either deterministic or it's not deterministic, and if it's not deterministic, if it doesn't have a cause, then it must be random because that's what "random" means. Free Will on the other hand doesn't mean anything .

  > If they were deterministic they were determined by any Cauchy slice of their past light cone, including the one 13.8 billion years ago.

Correct. 

 

 > There's no "consipiracy to it; 

Incorrect. If superdeterminism is correct then out of the huge, and possibly infinite number of states the initial condition of the universe could've been in 13.8 billion years ago, it was in the one and only state that would fool human beings 13.8 billion years in the future into thinking that the many world's idea is correct when really it was not. I admit it's not technically impossible for such a thing to occur by random chance, but the likelihood of it occurring would, by comparison, make it almost a sure thing that by random chance in the next five seconds the second law of thermodynamics will be violated and all the air molecules in the room you're in right now will dramatically decrease in entropy and, because all air will be concentrated in one square inch in the lower southwest corner, you will suffocate to death.

> that implies some intelligence agent arranging it.  

Indeed it does because there is only one chance in an astronomical number to an astronomical power to an astronomical power of that happening randomly. And because it requires an intelligent designer to begin the universe, and an intelligent designer that is obsessed with making fools of human beings, that's just one of the many reasons why superdeterminism is idiotic. No other cosmological theory requires that the universe have one and only one very specific initial condition, and that's why superdeterminism is such a gross violator of Occam's razor. 

> You don't believe in free will,

I neither believe nor disbelieve in free will because the free will "idea" is so bad it's not even wrong, and that is a pretty good definition of gibberish.  

 > but you believe in statistically independent will.

If I knew what  "statistically independent will" meant I might be able to say if I believed in it or not.

John K Clark    See what's on my new list at  Extropolis

gib

[Brent Meeker]

I think that's a cheat.   It's not that classical physics was imprecise.  It was just wrong.  QM and Newtonian mechanics even have different ontologies.  If you're wrong about the subject matter no amount of logic will correct that.  Logic only explicates what is implicit in the premises.  It's a cheat to appeal to an ideal description when you have no way of producing such a description  or knowing if you have achieved it or even knowing whether one exists .

Brent

[Brent Meeker]

On 3/1/2022 2:42 AM, John Clark wrote:

On Mon, Feb 28, 2022 at 6:07 PM Brent Meeker <meeke...@gmail.com> wrote:

>>>> Determinism just means a future state of the universe can be calculated from the information in a previous date, but it says nothing about the initial condition of the universe. Superdeterminism says in addition that out of all the huge, and possibly infinite, number of states the universe could've started out in it started out in the one in only state that would not only produce humans after 13.8 billion years but humans who would always just happen to perform the wrong experiments so that they would always be fooled into thinking that the universe was random and non-local when in reality it was neither. And it's literally impossible for there to be a theory with a greater violation of Occam's razor than that.

 

>>> That's like saying it's violation of Occam's razor that some buy won a million dollars in the lottery because it was so improbable that he won.  If the universe started out in some definite state and it evolved deterministically then that it produced humans who did certain things is no more remarkable than if had produced Martians who did something different. 

>> No, it's saying that whenever humans did an experiment in physics and changed something in a way they thought was random and concluded from the experiment that the universe was random and non-local they were actually being fooled because what they thought was random was not random at all,  instead it was a part of a grand conspiracy that started 13.8 billion years ago from a very very specific initial state that resulted in humans always being fooled no matter how many times they repeated such experiments.

> So you think their decisions were not deterministic;

I don't know if human actions are determined or not, but one thing I do know is that it's either deterministic or it's not deterministic, and if it's not deterministic, if it doesn't have a cause, then it must be random because that's what "random" means. Free Will on the other hand doesn't mean anything .

  > If they were deterministic they were determined by any Cauchy slice of their past light cone, including the one 13.8 billion years ago.

Correct. 

 

 > There's no "consipiracy to it; 

Incorrect. If superdeterminism is correct then out of the huge, and possibly infinite number of states the initial condition of the universe could've been in 13.8 billion years ago, it was in the one and only state that would fool human beings 13.8 billion years in the future into thinking that the many world's idea is correct when really it was not. I admit it's not technically impossible for such a thing to occur by random chance,but the likelihood of it occurring would, by comparison, make it almost a sure thing that by random chance in the next five seconds the second law of thermodynamics will be violated and all the air molecules in the room you're in right now will dramatically decrease in entropy and, because all air will be concentrated in one square inch in the lower southwest corner, you will suffocate to death.

> that implies some intelligence agent arranging it.  

Indeed it does because there is only one chance in an astronomical number to an astronomical power to an astronomical power of that happening randomly. And because it requires an intelligent designer to begin the universe, and an intelligent designer that is obsessed with making fools of human beings, that's just one of the many reasons why superdeterminism is idiotic. No other cosmological theory requires that the universe have one and only one very specific initial condition,

Every deterministic theory requires that the universe began in one and only one very specific initial condition.

and that's why superdeterminism is such a gross violator of Occam's razor.

That implicitly assumes that humans being fooled is improbable because the choices they think they are making are at least algorithmically random and independent of hidden variables and instrument settings.  But all theory says is that their choices, or the hidden variables, are correlated by some past common cause...which could be in the dynamical evolution.

> You don't believe in free will,

I neither believe nor disbelieve in free will because the free will "idea" is so bad it's not even wrong, and that is a pretty good definition of gibberish.  

 > but you believe in statistically independent will.

If I knew what  "statistically independent will" meant I might be able to say if I believed in it or not.

It's what you have implicitly used in arguing that the initial conditions of the universe are improbable if they produce violations of Bell's inequality because of an initial condition.  That requires that human choices about instrument settings be statistically independent.

Brent

John K Clark    See what's on my new list at  Extropolis

gib

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[spudb...@aol.com]

Good to hear from you Jason, long time, no hear. I always enjoyed your articles and liked how you were able to apply physics to philosophy, in a helpful way. Please continuing article-making and rock-on! 

Spud

-----Original Message-----
From: Jason Resch <jason...@gmail.com>
To: Everything List <everyth...@googlegroups.com>
Sent: Mon, Feb 28, 2022 8:48 am
Subject: Re: The Nature of Contingency: Quantum Physics as Modal Realism

On Sun, Feb 27, 2022, 11:43 AM Tomas Pales <litew...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Thursday, February 24, 2022 at 4:45:11 AM UTC+1 meeke...@gmail.com wrote:

This should be of interest to all the everythingists on this list.  I'd especially like to hear what Bruno thinks of it.  It's a bit expensive, so I may wait for more reviews before I take it up.

Birmingham-based philosopher Alastair Wilson has taken up the Herculean task of putting modal realism and many-worlds quantum theory together into a coherent, unitary view of reality. The results of this effort have been presented in several papers in recent years, and are now assembled in this thought-provoking book. While, as we will see, questions remain, Wilson has no doubt managed to come up with ingenious new hypotheses and has proposed solutions to existing problems and, more generally, with a powerful new modal realist view. The resulting perspective will certainly be of interest in the coming years, especially for naturalistically inclined philosophers, demanding that metaphysical hypotheses be made as continuous with our best science as possible.

https://ndpr.nd.edu/reviews/the-nature-of-contingency-quantum-physics-as-modal-realism/

From the review I take it that Wilson has missed the intermediate kind of possibility, namely computability which is between logical possibility and nomological possibility.

Brent

I am not sure what is new here. Many-worlds interpretation of QM is obviously an example of Lewis' modal realism in the context of QM. As was discussed here some time ago, it may not even involve splitting of worlds. That is, all the quantum parallel worlds may be distinct worlds (objects) even before a measurement; they are just exactly the same before the measurement (exact copies of each other) and they start to differ at the measurement event. A regularity in the multiverse of these quantum worlds manifests in the fact that the worlds start differing in proportions given by the Born rule, based on the (same) state of the worlds at the moment of measurement.

More generally about possible worlds or objects, I still see no difference between a world that is logically possible (consistent) and a world that "exists". A logically possible world is a world that is identical to itself, that is, it has the properties it has and does not have the properties it does not have. If two worlds have all the same properties except the property of existence (one exists and the other doesn't) what does it even mean? So I see no alternative to modal realism.

If we want to go into more details we may ask what properties a world or object may have and based on that we may differentiate between different kinds of worlds or objects, for example spatiotemporal worlds versus worlds that don't have a temporal or spatial structure.

There has been some work in this question which I cover some of here:

https://alwaysasking.com/why-does-anything-exist/#Why_Time

Also, there are also arguably anthropic reasons for our 3+1 spacetime:

https://alwaysasking.com/is-the-universe-fine-tuned/#Infinitely_Intelligent_Babies_and_Spacetime_Dimensionality

An important kind of property is relations between objects (relational properties), and the most general kind of relation is similarity, which holds between any two objects and thus is a necessary kind of relation. It just means that two objects have certain common properties and certain different properties. Mathematics as the most general study of relations explores the similarity relation as morphism in category theory and has reduced it to the set membership relation in set theory. Set theory is interesting to me in that it grounds mathematics in concrete worlds made of collections (sets), as opposed to abstract relations like numbers, functions, symmetries etc.

But if all mathematically (structurally) and consistently characterized worlds/objects exist, it seems surprising that we live in a world with quite stable laws of physics that persist in time (along the time dimension of spacetime).

Even in an everything ensemble, observers should expect to find stable, simple, probabilistic laws:

https://alwaysasking.com/why-does-anything-exist/#Why_Laws

Since reality is a mess of everything possible we might expect that the regularities (laws) of our world may change or disappear any second, which apparently doesn't happen.

Or you don't remember it happening:

"When we die, the rules surely change. As our brains and bodies cease to function in the normal way, it takes greater and greater contrivances and coincidences to explain continuing consciousness by their operation. We lose our ties to physical reality, but, in the space of all possible worlds, that cannot be the end. Our consciousness continues to exist in some of those, and we will always find ourselves in worlds where we exist and never in ones where we don’t. The nature of the next simplest world that can host us, after we abandon physical law, I cannot guess."

-- Hans Moravec in “Simulation, Consciousness, Existence” (1998)

https://frc.ri.cmu.edu/~hpm/project.archive/general.articles/1998/SimConEx.98.html

Hume put it as "the constant conjunction between causes and effects." The fact that the laws of physics in our world have been stable for billions of years may be explained by the anthropic principle: we could have evolved only in a world with such a long term stability. But it may not be obvious why such a stability would continue into the future.  In fact, it may seem that such a stability in the future is very unlikely because there are many ways our world could be in the future but only one way in which it would be a deterministic extension of the world it has been until now. Maybe the future stability can be explained by Solomonoff induction, which seems to imply the opposite: it is more likely that laws of physics will continue to hold. Why? Because given the way our world has been until now, this world is more simple if its regularities (such as laws of physics) continue than if they are discontinued, and more simple worlds are more likely (more frequent in the collection of all possible worlds) than more complex worlds. (A simpler set of properties is instantiated in more possible worlds than a more complex set of properties.) Such a deterministic world is fully defined by some initial conditions and laws of physics, while a world whose regularity is discontinued at some point would need an additional property that would define the discontinuation and thereby make the world more complex. Solomonoff induction deals only with computable sequences, I don't know if it can be generalized to uncomputable sequences. If it can't, it may indicate that conscious beings of our kind can only exist in a world with such a computable feature (or else we would likely see the stability of laws of physics disappear any second from now). I don't understand the mathematical details of Solomonoff induction and it seems to be a rather unfamiliar explanation for why we should expect the laws of physics to remain stable.

https://arbital.com/p/solomonoff_induction/

Yes this is the basis of Markus Mueller's work, deriving physical law from algorithmic information theory, which is based on Smolonoff induction.

As Saibal Mitra (on this list) said:

"To derive the effective laws of physics, one needs to do statistics over the ensemble of identical observers. This involves performing summations over the multiverse, but these summations are with a constraint that says that some given observer is present."

-- Saibal Mitra in discussion list (2018)

This of course means the laws are only approximately stable, and from the perspective of any observer may change, or be invented on the fly (e.g. when discovering ever less significant digits of some fundamental constant).

It also means any theory bridging ultimate reality and physics needs some theory of observation (consciousness). Physics after all, is the science of observation: predicting future observations given past ones.

Jason

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[spudb...@aol.com]

I cannot help but think that because of of limited telescopes and neutrino detectors and the like, that we are still missing what is going on in the Universe. I am not trying to say, "here be dragons," but suspect that there will be, "Here be anomalies in specific and reliable laws that we measure over and over. Hossenfelder is still, despite superdeterminism, a very conservative voice in physics. I don't think she dabbles in anything that your fellow Texan Hugh Everett did, or Max Tegmark does. 

-----Original Message-----
From: John Clark <johnk...@gmail.com>
To: 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List <everyth...@googlegroups.com>
Sent: Mon, Feb 28, 2022 9:52 am
Subject: Re: The Nature of Contingency: Quantum Physics as Modal Realism

On Sun, Feb 27, 2022 at 3:59 PM Tomas Pales <litew...@gmail.com> wrote:

> A world without me is possible (logically consistent)

I would certainly agree with that, but the tiny minority of physicist who believe in Superdeterminism, such as Sabine Hossenfelder, would not; they think the universe could only have started out in one very very specific way, a way that required it to produce you 13.8 billion years later because if it did not a paradoxical logical inconsistency would have been produced.  Personally I think that idea is nuts because I simply can't imagine a more egregious violation of Occam's razor than Superdeterminism.

John K Clark    See what's on my new list at  Extropolis

dsq

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[John Clark]

Brent Meeker <meeke...@gmail.com> wrote:

> Every deterministic theory requires that the universe began in one and only one very specific initial condition.

Incorrect, none of the others demand specificity, none of the others are picky about initial conditions. No other cosmological theory needs the universe to start out in one and only one very specific state for the idea to work, nearly any state would do. Superdeterminism is unique, no other deterministic theory, or theory of any sort,  requires that the universe began in one and only one very very very specific initial condition, the only one that supports their pet theory. If the many world's idea could be ruled out in some other way nobody in their right mind would propose an idea as ridiculous as superdeterminism. Nobody!

Nearly all initial conditions would have resulted in a universe that looked pretty much like this one, but one hyper-rare one won't. There is one chance in an astronomical^2 number (or more) it did not, and superdeterministic fans insist that must be the very one it did start out in because they're desperate to avoid many worlds. Well OK two can play at that game, maybe despite all the evidence to the contrary, Fred Hoyle's steady state cosmological theory is correct after all but the universe started out in the one and only initial condition that would forever mislead us into thinking it is not. Or maybe the geocentric theory is correct and everything in the universe really does rotate around the earth. If the initial conditions were just right dinosaur bones could have been formed from non-biological geology less than 4000 years ago, so maybe dinosaurs were never flesh and blood and  never lived more than 66 million years ago. If you don't like a theory, any theory not just many worlds, all you have to do is just ignore all the evidence that it's true and claim that the initial conditions are causing us to be deceived. This way lies madness.  

John K Clark    See what's on my new list at  Extropolis

mda

[Brent Meeker]

On 3/1/2022 12:58 PM, John Clark wrote:

Brent Meeker <meeke...@gmail.com> wrote:

> Every deterministic theory requires that the universe began in one and only one very specific initial condition.

Incorrect, none of the others demand specificity, none of the others are picky about initial conditions.

So you're denying that deterministic mechanics are time reversible and so could be projected back to specific state?

No other cosmological theory needs the universe to start out in one and only one very specific state for the idea to work, nearly any state would do. Superdeterminism is unique, no other deterministic theory, or theory of any sort,  requires that the universe began in one and only one very very very specific initial condition, the only one that supports their pet theory. If the many world's idea could be ruled out in some other way nobody in their right mind would propose an idea as ridiculous as superdeterminism. Nobody!

Nearly all initial conditions would have resulted in a universe that looked pretty much like this one, but one hyper-rare one won't. There is one chance in an astronomical^2 number (or more) it did not, and superdeterministic fans insist that must be the very one it did start out in because they're desperate to avoid many worlds. Well OK two can play at that game, maybe despite all the evidence to the contrary, Fred Hoyle's steady state cosmological theory is correct after all but the universe started out in the one and only initial condition that would forever mislead us into thinking it is not. Or maybe the geocentric theory is correct and everything in the universe really does rotate around the earth. If the initial conditions were just right dinosaur bones could have been formed from non-biological geology less than 4000 years ago, so maybe dinosaurs were never flesh and blood and  never lived more than 66 million years ago. If you don't like a theory, any theory not just many worlds, all you have to do is just ignore all the evidence that it's true and claim that the initial conditions are causing us to be deceived. This way lies madness.  

Yes.  I said that it would ruin science to adopt it as a theory.

Brent
That which can explain anything, fails to explain at all.

John K Clark    See what's on my new list at  Extropolis

mda

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[John Clark]

On Tue, Mar 1, 2022 at 4:13 PM Brent Meeker <meeke...@gmail.com> wrote:

On 3/1/2022 12:58 PM, John Clark wrote:

Brent Meeker <meeke...@gmail.com> wrote:

>>> Every deterministic theory requires that the universe began in one and only one very specific initial condition.

>> Incorrect, none of the others demand specificity, none of the others are picky about initial conditions.

> So you're denying that deterministic mechanics are time reversible and so could be projected back to specific state?

 

 Brent you are being disingenuous, I don't believe any disinterested party could read what I wrote and make that conclusion.

John K Clark    See what's on my new list at  Extropolis

iki

 

No other cosmological theory needs the universe to start out in one and only one very specific state for the idea to work, nearly any state would do. Superdeterminism is unique, no other deterministic theory, or theory of any sort,  requires that the universe began in one and only one very very very specific initial condition, the only one that supports their pet theory. If the many world's idea could be ruled out in some other way nobody in their right mind would propose an idea as ridiculous as superdeterminism. Nobody!

Nearly all initial conditions would have resulted in a universe that looked pretty much like this one, but one hyper-rare one won't. There is one chance in an astronomical^2 number (or more) it did not, and superdeterministic fans insist that must be the very one it did start out in because they're desperate to avoid many worlds. Well OK two can play at that game, maybe despite all the evidence to the contrary, Fred Hoyle's steady state cosmological theory is correct after all but the universe started out in the one and only initial condition that would forever mislead us into thinking it is not. Or maybe the geocentric theory is correct and everything in the universe really does rotate around the earth. If the initial conditions were just right dinosaur bones could have been formed from non-biological geology less than 4000 years ago, so maybe dinosaurs were never flesh and blood and  never lived more than 66 million years ago. If you don't like a theory, any theory not just many worlds, all you have to do is just ignore all the evidence that it's true and claim that the initial conditions are causing us to be deceived. This way lies madness.  

Yes.  I said that it would ruin science to adopt it as a theory.

Brent
That which can explain anything, fails to explain at all.

John K Clark    See what's on my new list at  Extropolis

mda

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[Brent Meeker]

On 3/1/2022 1:18 PM, John Clark wrote:

On Tue, Mar 1, 2022 at 4:13 PM Brent Meeker <meeke...@gmail.com> wrote:

On 3/1/2022 12:58 PM, John Clark wrote:

Brent Meeker <meeke...@gmail.com> wrote:

>>> Every deterministic theory requires that the universe began in one and only one very specific initial condition.

>> Incorrect, none of the others demand specificity, none of the others are picky about initial conditions.

> So you're denying that deterministic mechanics are time reversible and so could be projected back to specific state?

 

 Brent you are being disingenuous, I don't believe any disinterested party could read what I wrote and make that conclusion.

Well then our current state does pick out a specific initial state AND so does every other deterministic theory given our state.  Right?  You seem to be trying to treat the universe as probabilistic and talk about ensembles of initial states, but there's only one universe.  If it's deterministic (which I very much doubt) it projects onto just one initial condition.  I'm just trying to be clear on what superdeterminism says, and it doesn't say that some demiurge looked at our current state and then contrived the initial state to produce it. 

I suppose it could be deterministic but not reversible.

Brent

John K Clark    See what's on my new list at  Extropolis

iki

 

No other cosmological theory needs the universe to start out in one and only one very specific state for the idea to work, nearly any state would do. Superdeterminism is unique, no other deterministic theory, or theory of any sort,  requires that the universe began in one and only one very very very specific initial condition, the only one that supports their pet theory. If the many world's idea could be ruled out in some other way nobody in their right mind would propose an idea as ridiculous as superdeterminism. Nobody!

Nearly all initial conditions would have resulted in a universe that looked pretty much like this one, but one hyper-rare one won't. There is one chance in an astronomical^2 number (or more) it did not, and superdeterministic fans insist that must be the very one it did start out in because they're desperate to avoid many worlds. Well OK two can play at that game, maybe despite all the evidence to the contrary, Fred Hoyle's steady state cosmological theory is correct after all but the universe started out in the one and only initial condition that would forever mislead us into thinking it is not. Or maybe the geocentric theory is correct and everything in the universe really does rotate around the earth. If the initial conditions were just right dinosaur bones could have been formed from non-biological geology less than 4000 years ago, so maybe dinosaurs were never flesh and blood and  never lived more than 66 million years ago. If you don't like a theory, any theory not just many worlds, all you have to do is just ignore all the evidence that it's true and claim that the initial conditions are causing us to be deceived. This way lies madness.  

Yes.  I said that it would ruin science to adopt it as a theory.

Brent
That which can explain anything, fails to explain at all.

John K Clark    See what's on my new list at  Extropolis

mda

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[Tomas Pales]

On Tuesday, March 1, 2022 at 8:14:31 PM UTC+1 meeke...@gmail.com wrote:

But before we can assess whether something has a consistent description we need to specify the description precisely. With a vague description we may be missing an inconsistency lurking somewhere in it or there may appear to be an inconsistency that is not really there. For example, if we try to describe a quantum object in terms of classical physics the description will not be precise enough and the assumptions inherent in those terms will be contradictory. The ideal description would reveal the complete structure of the object down to empty sets but we can't physically probe objects around us to that level.

I think that's a cheat.   It's not that classical physics was imprecise.  It was just wrong.  QM and Newtonian mechanics even have different ontologies.  If you're wrong about the subject matter no amount of logic will correct that.  Logic only explicates what is implicit in the premises.  It's a cheat to appeal to an ideal description when you have no way of producing such a description  or knowing if you have achieved it or even knowing whether one exists .

It's not a cheat, it's a complete mathematical description. Every mathematical structure can be ultimately described as a pure set. Classical physics and quantum physics have not been described as pure sets and so they are not complete mathematical descriptions. The fact that it is not feasible for us to achieve such a description of physical structures doesn't mean that it doesn't exist.

 

[Bruce Kellett]

On Wed, Mar 2, 2022 at 7:58 AM John Clark <johnk...@gmail.com> wrote:

Brent Meeker <meeke...@gmail.com> wrote:

> Every deterministic theory requires that the universe began in one and only one very specific initial condition.

Incorrect, none of the others demand specificity, none of the others are picky about initial conditions. No other cosmological theory needs the universe to start out in one and only one very specific state for the idea to work, nearly any state would do. Superdeterminism is unique, no other deterministic theory, or theory of any sort,  requires that the universe began in one and only one very very very specific initial condition, the only one that supports their pet theory. If the many world's idea could be ruled out in some other way

Many worlds is not the issue for Hossenfelder. She is concerned about the non-locality of conventional quantum mechanics. With Einstein, she wants to rule out "Spooky action at a distance." Since many worlds cannot give a local account of Bell-type correlations, either, that theory is of little interest to Sabine: she insists on a local theory, and MWI is not local.

It seems that her strategy has been to find a flaw in Bell's proof that no local hidden variable theory is possible. Since any theorem is only as good as its premises, she sees a loophole in Bell's assumption of statistical independence -- the hidden variables are required to be independent of the remote detector settings. However, simply finding a flaw in Bell's theorem does not prove that quantum physics is local. What is ultimately required is a local account of the correlations that violate Bell's inequality. No one has ever given such a local model.

Bruce

[Brent Meeker]

And the fact that you can form a sentence using the word doesn't mean it exists either.

Brent

[Tomas Pales]

Which word?

[Brent Meeker]

"Complete" mathematical description.

Brent

[Tomas Pales]

I said it because according to set theory every mathematical structure can be reduced to a pure set. So a pure set would be a complete mathematical description of any object. It basically means that an object is analyzed down to its smallest parts (empty sets). This internal structure of the object also establishes all the object's relations to all other objects, including for example the relation of "insurability" between a car and insurance providers.

[John Clark]

On Tue, Mar 1, 2022 at 4:29 PM Brent Meeker <meeke...@gmail.com> wrote:

>>> So you're denying that deterministic mechanics are time reversible and so could be projected back to specific state?

 

 >> Brent you are being disingenuous, I don't believe any disinterested party could read what I wrote and make that conclusion.

> Well then our current state does pick out a specific initial state AND so does every other deterministic theory given our state.  Right? 

Wrong. If the universe is deterministic then obviously the state it's in now came from a specific initial condition 13.8 billion years ago, HOWEVER no cosmological theory except for superdeterminism claims to be able to specify EXACTLY what that ancient specific initial condition was by examining present day conditions. And you may ask how EXACTLY does it do this? It does this by ASSUMING that the many world's idea must be wrong and then noting that out of the astronomical^2  number of states the universe could've started out in it must've started out in that ONE because that is the only ONE that is consistent with the assumption that many worlds is wrong. If that is not a violation of Occam's razor what the hell is? By contrast the only assumption that the many worlds idea makes is that Schrodinger's equation means what it says.

> I suppose it could be deterministic but not reversible.

Superdeterministic advocates not only claim the universe is deterministic AND reversible they claim to know EXACTLY what the initial state of the universe was 13.8 billion years ago, it was in the ONE and ONLY state in which their theory could work.  That is not science, that is madness. 

And Brent, I have made this same point using different words many times and you have never directly refuted any of it, and I simply don't believe you don't understand what I'm saying, that's why I stand by my remark that you are being disingenuous. I like to debate too but sometimes I have to admit the other guy made a good point.

John K Clark    See what's on my new list at  Extropolis

gqd

[Brent Meeker]

Which means you are assuming the world is a mathematical structure.  In other words begging the question.

Brent

[Brent Meeker]

On 3/2/2022 4:31 AM, John Clark wrote:

On Tue, Mar 1, 2022 at 4:29 PM Brent Meeker <meeke...@gmail.com> wrote:

>>> So you're denying that deterministic mechanics are time reversible and so could be projected back to specific state?

 

 >> Brent you are being disingenuous, I don't believe any disinterested party could read what I wrote and make that conclusion.

> Well then our current state does pick out a specific initial state AND so does every other deterministic theory given our state.  Right? 

Wrong. If the universe is deterministic then obviously the state it's in now came from a specific initial condition 13.8 billion years ago, HOWEVER no cosmological theory except for superdeterminism claims to be able to specify EXACTLY what that ancient specific initial condition was by examining present day conditions.

Yes.  I don't see any advocate of superdeterminism saying they know how to specify the initial state, except by saying it's the past projection of the one we observe.  Which is exact in a mathematical sense, but useless in a operational sense.

And you may ask how EXACTLY does it do this? It does this by ASSUMING that the many world's idea must be wrong and then noting that out of the astronomical^2  number of states the universe could've started out in it must've started out in that ONE because that is the only ONE that is consistent with the assumption that many worlds is wrong. If that is not a violation of Occam's razor what the hell is?

Occam's razor is just a suggestion.

By contrast the only assumption that the many worlds idea makes is that Schrodinger's equation means what it says.

That's the point that Sabine objects to.  That is NOT it's only assumption.  It assumes that the Born rule applies and wave-functions must be renormalized accordingly.  Sabine's not a fan of MWI.

> I suppose it could be deterministic but not reversible.

Superdeterministic advocates not only claim the universe is deterministic AND reversible they claim to know EXACTLY what the initial state of the universe was 13.8 billion years ago, it was in the ONE and ONLY state in which their theory could work. 

That's not claiming they know what it was.

That is not science, that is madness. 

And Brent, I have made this same point using different words many times and you have never directly refuted any of it, and I simply don't believe you don't understand what I'm saying, that's why I stand by my remark that you are being disingenuous. I like to debate too but sometimes I have to admit the other guy made a good point.

I think you are being obtuse.  Suppose when Laplace met with Napoleon and explained his theory of the clockwork universe, completely deterministic, Napoleon had said, "Very interesting.  Since your theory is deterministic and time reversible does that mean that when you have determined the position and momentum of very particle you could calculate the state of the universe at the beginning of time?"

Laplace:  That is correct.

Napoleon: "Then the universe must have started in that particular configuration.  This is madness.  Your theory says that the universe could only have started in that one particular state!  That means I can calculate that 223 years from now John K Clark will be incensed at such a theory!"

Brent

John K Clark    See what's on my new list at  Extropolis

gqd

iki

 

No other cosmological theory needs the universe to start out in one and only one very specific state for the idea to work, nearly any state would do. Superdeterminism is unique, no other deterministic theory, or theory of any sort,  requires that the universe began in one and only one very very very specific initial condition, the only one that supports their pet theory. If the many world's idea could be ruled out in some other way nobody in their right mind would propose an idea as ridiculous as superdeterminism. Nobody!

Nearly all initial conditions would have resulted in a universe that looked pretty much like this one, but one hyper-rare one won't. There is one chance in an astronomical^2 number (or more) it did not, and superdeterministic fans insist that must be the very one it did start out in because they're desperate to avoid many worlds. Well OK two can play at that game, maybe despite all the evidence to the contrary, Fred Hoyle's steady state cosmological theory is correct after all but the universe started out in the one and only initial condition that would forever mislead us into thinking it is not. Or maybe the geocentric theory is correct and everything in the universe really does rotate around the earth. If the initial conditions were just right dinosaur bones could have been formed from non-biological geology less than 4000 years ago, so maybe dinosaurs were never flesh and blood and  never lived more than 66 million years ago. If you don't like a theory, any theory not just many worlds, all you have to do is just ignore all the evidence that it's true and claim that the initial conditions are causing us to be deceived. This way lies madness.  

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[Tomas Pales]

Yeah, I am assuming that things constitute collections - that's what a mathematical structure is. What other kind of structure can there be?

 

[Brent Meeker]

Don't you see that "things" and "collections" are concepts we impose on the world.  Didn't you notice when the whole ontology of the world shifted from particles to fields?  No?  Did you see metphysicians rushing to revise their world views? 

The kind of structure there can be is what you stub your toe on in the dark.

Brent

[John Clark]

On Wed, Mar 2, 2022 at 3:56 PM Brent Meeker <meeke...@gmail.com> wrote:

 >> If the universe is deterministic then obviously the state it's in now came from a specific initial condition 13.8 billion years ago, HOWEVER no cosmological theory except for superdeterminism claims to be able to specify EXACTLY what that ancient specific initial condition was by examining present day conditions.

>Yes. I don't see any advocate of superdeterminism saying they know how to specify the initial state,

Well I sure as hell see it! There are at best a 2^(astronomical) number and at worst an infinite number of states that the universe could've started at, but superdeterministic fans insist it must've started in ONE and ONLY ONE specific state. And why are they so certain it started in that state? Because that is the ONE and ONLYstate in which their ridiculous theory works. A theory just can't get more specific than specifying one thing out of a 2 ^(gargantuan) number of things as superdeterminism claims to be able to do. A theory can't get much stupider either because there is at best only one chance in 2^(astronomical) and at worst one chance in infinity of it being correct.

And you may ask how EXACTLY does it do this? It does this by ASSUMING that the many world's idea must be wrong and then noting that out of the astronomical^2  number of states the universe could've started out in it must've started out in that ONE because that is the only ONE that is consistent with the assumption that many worlds is wrong. If that is not a violation of Occam's razor what the hell is?

> Occam's razor is just a suggestion.

Good God! Are you really so uninterested in finding the truth and so interested in winning a debate that you're willing to abandon Occam's razor?

>> By contrast the only assumption that the many worlds idea makes is that Schrodinger's equation means what it says.

> That's the point that Sabine objects to.  That is NOT it's only assumption.  It assumes that the Born rule applies

As I've said more than once, The Born Rule is NOT an assumption, it is a FACT that has been experimentally demonstrated far more extensively than anything else, not just in physics but in all of science.

 

 > Sabine's not a fan of MWI.

A keen grasp of the obvious.  

John K Clark    See what's on my new list at  Extropolis

okc

gho

[Tomas Pales]

And the concept of "collections" obviously corresponds to the world. After all, how could it be otherwise? If there are two somethings they automatically constitute a collection of two somethings. Particles or fields, whatever - they have mathematical descriptions and mathematical descriptions are in principle reducible to pure sets.

[Brent Meeker]

One of their mathematical descriptions used to be that two different something could not be in the same place at the same time.  That two identical things must be the same thing.  It's just logic. 

Yes, all mathematical descriptions can be reduced to sets and relations.  I'm told they can also be reduced to categories, but haven't studied category theory.  Russell and Whitehead thought they can be reduced to logic.  And things admit of mathematical description.  But you've leaped over all that to things are their mathematical description.

Brent

[Bruce Kellett]

On Thu, Mar 3, 2022 at 8:41 AM John Clark <johnk...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Wed, Mar 2, 2022 at 3:56 PM Brent Meeker <meeke...@gmail.com> wrote:

 >> If the universe is deterministic then obviously the state it's in now came from a specific initial condition 13.8 billion years ago, HOWEVER no cosmological theory except for superdeterminism claims to be able to specify EXACTLY what that ancient specific initial condition was by examining present day conditions.

>Yes. I don't see any advocate of superdeterminism saying they know how to specify the initial state,

Well I sure as hell see it! There are at best a 2^(astronomical) number and at worst an infinite number of states that the universe could've started at, but superdeterministic fans insist it must've started in ONE and ONLY ONE specific state. And why are they so certain it started in that state? Because that is the ONE and ONLYstate in which their ridiculous theory works. A theory just can't get more specific than specifying one thing out of a 2 ^(gargantuan) number of things as superdeterminism claims to be able to do. A theory can't get much stupider either because there is at best only one chance in 2^(astronomical) and at worst one chance in infinity of it being correct.

This whole discussion is rather beside the point since the universe is patently not deterministic.But, if it were, then it necessarily started out in the exact state that would be obtained if you took the present state and reversed it back to the beginning. The fact that there could have been an arbitrarily large number of initial states is totally irrelevant -- only one numbered ticket wins the lottery, no matter how many tickets are printed.

Bruce

[John Clark]

On Wed, Mar 2, 2022 at 4:56 PM Bruce Kellett <bhkel...@gmail.com> wrote:

This whole discussion is rather beside the point since the universe is patently not deterministic.

The determinism question is far from settled. If many worlds is correct then the multiverse is deterministic, and if superdeterminism is correct (but of course it isn't)  then the same would be true. And we know that Schrodinger's equation is completely deterministic.  All we can say for certain is that if the universe is deterministic and if superdeterminism is ignored, as it should be, then the universe must be non-local or non-realistic or both. Many Worlds is local but not realistic.

> But, if it were, then it necessarily started out in the exact state that would be obtained if you took the present state and reversed it back to the beginning. The fact that there could have been an arbitrarily large number of initial states is totally irrelevant

If you insist that the universe HAD to start in one hyper specific state and if the only reason you can give for insisting that it did start in that very very unusual state is because that's the only way you can get your theory to work, and if there is no other evidence your theory is correct, then in my humble opinion your theory has a bit of a problem.  

John K Clark    See what's on my new list at  Extropolis

xzq

gco

 

[Tomas Pales]

But mathematics doesn't demand that you can't associate different sets with the same location in a topological space. They chose to describe objects that cannot be associated with the same location in spacetime because it worked in classical physics... until more precise measurements showed that some objects in our world (bosons) are not like that. Two things with all the same properties are one thing. Two exact copies are not the same thing because they differ in one property - their position in reality (and thus in their relations to other things).

Yes, all mathematical descriptions can be reduced to sets and relations.  I'm told they can also be reduced to categories, but haven't studied category theory.  Russell and Whitehead thought they can be reduced to logic.  And things admit of mathematical description.  But you've leaped over all that to things are their mathematical description.

Things correspond to a mathematical description.

 

[Bruce Kellett]

On Thu, Mar 3, 2022 at 9:18 AM John Clark <johnk...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Wed, Mar 2, 2022 at 4:56 PM Bruce Kellett <bhkel...@gmail.com> wrote:

This whole discussion is rather beside the point since the universe is patently not deterministic.

The determinism question is far from settled. If many worlds is correct then the multiverse is deterministic, and if superdeterminism is correct (but of course it isn't)  then the same would be true. And we know that Schrodinger's equation is completely deterministic.  All we can say for certain is that if the universe is deterministic and if superdeterminism is ignored, as it should be, then the universe must be non-local or non-realistic or both. Many Worlds is local but not realistic.

Many worlds is not a local theory. And the determinism of the Schrodinger equation does not mean that the present state of the universe can be reversed in order to recover the exact initial state.

Bruce

[John Clark]

On Wed, Mar 2, 2022 at 5:50 PM Bruce Kellett <bhkel...@gmail.com> wrote:

> Many worlds is not a local theory.

Many worlds can explain all known experimental results without resorting to non-local influences because many worlds is not a realistic theory.  

> And the determinism of the Schrodinger equation does not mean that the present state of the universe can be reversed in order to recover the exact initial state.

True, and that's because although it's deterministic many worlds is not a realistic theory.  

John K Clark    See what's on my new list at  Extropolis

req

[Bruce Kellett]

On Thu, Mar 3, 2022 at 10:50 AM John Clark <johnk...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Wed, Mar 2, 2022 at 5:50 PM Bruce Kellett <bhkel...@gmail.com> wrote:

> Many worlds is not a local theory.

Many worlds can explain all known experimental results without resorting to non-local influences because many worlds is not a realistic theory. 

In that case, if you believe that MWI is local, give me the local account of Bell-type correlations of spin measurements at spacelike separations. I will salute you if you can do this, because no one else has ever managed in the past. Realism is completely beside the point.

Bruce

[Brent Meeker]

Then we agree that things and their mathematical descriptions are not identities.  I contend that the difference is that some mathematical descriptions have no referent.

Brent

[Tomas Pales]

Descriptions are just words, symbols, notations which refer to things. Why would some mathematical descriptions have a referent and others not?

 

[Brent Meeker]

Why are some books fiction and some not.

Brent

[Tomas Pales]

Because the fictional ones don't describe our world.

[John Clark]

On Wed, Mar 2, 2022 at 7:05 PM Bruce Kellett <bhkel...@gmail.com> wrote:

>> Many worlds can explain all known experimental results without resorting to non-local influences because many worlds is not a realistic theory. 

> In that case, if you believe that MWI is local, give me the local account of Bell-type correlations of spin measurements at spacelike separations.

OK, the key is understanding what "the collapse of the wave function" means physically. Many Worlds says everything that is not forbidden is mandatory so everything Schrodinger's wave equation does not rule out does physically happen, so "collapse" just means that different solutions to Schrodinger's equation are ... well... different. And the great virtue of tautologies is that they're always true. Richard Feynman said all the weirdness in quantum mechanics can be found in the  2 slit experiment, so I will use that to illustrate the point. This is how I think Many Worlds would describe the two-slit experiment and several variations of it.

Many Worlds says that in the usual experiment the universe splits after the photon passes the two slits because the 2 worlds are different, a photon in one world went through the right slit and a photon in another world went through the left slit. But when the photons hit the film they no longer exist in either world, so the 2 worlds are identical once more, so the universes fuse back together again. Looking back from that fused world we find evidence that the photon went through slit X only and evidence it went through slit Y only and this causes an interference pattern. There is nothing special about an observer in any of this, the same thing would happen if nobody looked at the film, or even if you used a brick wall instead of film, because the important thing is not that the photon makes a record (whatever that is) but simply that it is destroyed.  Mind has nothing to do with any of this so unlike the Copenhagen interpretation Many Worlds doesn't need to explain it, or explain what “measurement" means, or “record", or “observation", or “consciousness". That is a gargantuan advantage! The key point is that worlds split when they become different and merge when they become the same again.

Now do the two-slit experiment again but instead of using film to stop the photon after it passes the slits let the photon head out into infinite space. If Many Worlds is correct then the entire universe splits into 2 when the photon hit's the 2 slits and never recombines. There is nothing special about you the observer, you split just like everything else, you know that the photon went through one and only one slit, but you don't know which one. The 2 slit experiment can be set up in such a way that you can tell which slit the photon went through, but if you do that then the photons will not produce an interference pattern on the film. This is because even after the photon hits the film in both worlds and is destroyed the worlds remain different because in one the physical memory pattern in your brain encodes that the photon went through slot right and in the other slot left, so the different worlds don’t merge back together, and so no interference pattern is seen in either world.

Many Worlds predicts that even if you could devise an experiment that could detect which slit the photon went through without changing the photon in any way (it would pose enormous technical challenges but I think that might be possible, perhaps by using Stimulated Emission) there still would be no interference pattern because although the photons are identical the universes would still be different because your brain has different memory patterns which means the physical structure of your brain is still different in the two universes. Separate worlds only emerge if there is a difference between them, if the worlds evolve in such a way that the difference disappears then re-coherence occurs. For obvious reasons re-coherence can only occur if the 2 worlds are only very very slightly different and have only been separated for a short time, and that's why experiments of this sort are difficult and it explains why in our everyday world we don’t see macro objects becoming entangled, and even atoms aren’t usually entangled for long at room temperature.  

>  I will salute you if you can do this, because no one else has ever managed in the past

As much as I'd like to take the credit for it nothing I said is original with me, I just used my own words to describe what other people have done.  

> Realism is completely beside the point.

Nope. If Many Worlds was a realistic theory and thus a photon always remained in one and only one definite state both before and after passing a slit and before and after a measurement is made then none of the above could possibly work.

John K Clark    See what's on my new list at  Extropolis

s2e

[smitra]

On 03-03-2022 01:05, Bruce Kellett wrote:
> On Thu, Mar 3, 2022 at 10:50 AM John Clark <johnk...@gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>> On Wed, Mar 2, 2022 at 5:50 PM Bruce Kellett <bhkel...@gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>>

>>> _> Many worlds is not a local theory._

>>
>> Many worlds can explain all known experimental results without
>> resorting to non-local influences because many worlds is not a
>> realistic theory.
>
> In that case, if you believe that MWI is local, give me the local
> account of Bell-type correlations of spin measurements at spacelike
> separations. I will salute you if you can do this, because no one else
> has ever managed in the past. Realism is completely beside the point.
>
> Bruce

It's trivial, as the dynamics is described by a Hamiltonian that only
contains local interactions. This mans that all non-local effects arise
via common cause effects. The creation of the entangled pair of spins
happens at some space-time point, so it's the result of local
interactions. The later when Alice and Bob each receive one of the two
spins, they get correlated with the spins they measure, because they and
their measurement gear consist of particles that evolve according to the
Schrodinger equation too and that evolution also only involves local
interactions. This then causes Bob and Alice to evolve in superpositions
that are correlated as a result of the initial entanglement of the spin.

What goes wrong in arguments about this issue is when people switch to a
classical picture as soon as Bob and Alice arise who with their
macroscopic measurement devices measure the spin components in certain
directions. The picture in which a macroscopic effectively classical Bob
and Alice collapse wavefunctions is not the correct picture. It is only
a FAPP effective description of what really is going on, but it will
hide the local nature of QM due to replacing the exact description by an
effective description.

Another example of how apparent non-locality arises due to replacing an
exact QM description by treating effectively classical quantities as
classical instead of quantum mechanical, is the Aharanov-Bohm effect:


https://arxiv.org/abs/1906.03440

"In the Aharonov-Bohm (AB) effect, a superposed charge acquires a
detectable phase by enclosing an infinite solenoid, in a region where
the solenoid's electric and magnetic fields are zero. Its generation
seems therefore explainable only by the local action of gauge-dependent
potentials, not of gauge-independent fields. This was recently
challenged by Vaidman, who explained the phase by the solenoid's current
interacting with the electron's field (at the solenoid). Still, his
model has a residual non-locality: it does not explain how the phase,
generated at the solenoid, is detectable on the charge. In this paper we
solve this non-locality explicitly, by quantising the field. We show
that the AB phase is mediated locally by the entanglement between the
charge and the photons, like all electromagnetic phases. We also predict
a gauge-invariant value for the phase difference at each point along the
charge's path. We propose a realistic experiment to measure this phase
difference locally, by partial quantum state tomography on the charge,
without closing the interference loop."

Saibal

[Brent Meeker]

And insofar as astronomical improbabilities go it's not really any different than imagining that we got to here thru a sequence of quantum branching, each of which had probability less than 1.0 and whose product must be infinitesimally near zero by now. 

What Sabine argues is that in any experiment the preparation of the measurement instruments (or person) and the thing measured can be correlated by slower than light signals and so cannot be guaranteed to be statistically independent. Her idea seems to be that the Hilbert space could be fractal and this would induce statistical correlations.   https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fphy.2020.00139/full

Brent

[John Clark]

On Thu, Mar 3, 2022 at 1:17 PM Brent Meeker <meeke...@gmail.com> wrote:

> What Sabine argues is that in any experiment the preparation of the measurement instruments (or person) and the thing measured can be correlated by slower than light signals and so cannot be guaranteed to be statistically independent.

Well of course science can't guarantee it! Pure mathematics is in the guaranteeing business not science, but science can tell us what ideas are worth our time and what ideas are not. If only one state in 2^(astronomical)^(gargantuan)^(enormous) possible initial states for the universe will cause us now, after 13.8 billion years of deterministic evolution, to incorrectly conclude from our experiments that Bell's inequality is violated when in reality it has not been then I can't see why we shouldn't take geocentric cosmology just as seriously as superdeterminism, as another ONE of those 2^(astronomical)^(gargantuan)^(enormous) states must cause us to incorrectly conclude that the universe does not rotate around the Earth when in reality it does. So I treat both ideas equally and give both superdeterminism and geocentrism all the respect they deserve. Why don't you?  

John K Clark    See what's on my new list at  Extropolis

ntc

[Bruce Kellett]

On Fri, Mar 4, 2022 at 1:04 AM John Clark <johnk...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Wed, Mar 2, 2022 at 7:05 PM Bruce Kellett <bhkel...@gmail.com> wrote:

>> Many worlds can explain all known experimental results without resorting to non-local influences because many worlds is not a realistic theory. 

> In that case, if you believe that MWI is local, give me the local account of Bell-type correlations of spin measurements at spacelike separations.

OK, the key is understanding what "the collapse of the wave function" means physically. Many Worlds says everything that is not forbidden is mandatory so everything Schrodinger's wave equation does not rule out does physically happen, so "collapse" just means that different solutions to Schrodinger's equation are ... well... different. And the great virtue of tautologies is that they're always true. Richard Feynman said all the weirdness in quantum mechanics can be found in the  2 slit experiment, so I will use that to illustrate the point. This is how I think Many Worlds would describe the two-slit experiment and several variations of it.

I take the fact that you have changed the subject to a many worlds account of the two-slit experiment as clear evidence that you do not have a local many worlds account of the question at issue, namely, a local account of Bell-type correlations. Don't worry. No one else has such a local account either. Saibal's account below is every bit as non-local as the original quantum account.

Many Worlds says that in the usual experiment the universe splits after the photon passes the two slits because the 2 worlds are different, a photon in one world went through the right slit and a photon in another world went through the left slit. But when the photons hit the film they no longer exist in either world, so the 2 worlds are identical once more, so the universes fuse back together again. Looking back from that fused world we find evidence that the photon went through slit X only and evidence it went through slit Y only and this causes an interference pattern. There is nothing special about an observer in any of this, the same thing would happen if nobody looked at the film, or even if you used a brick wall instead of film, because the important thing is not that the photon makes a record (whatever that is) but simply that it is destroyed.  Mind has nothing to do with any of this so unlike the Copenhagen interpretation Many Worlds doesn't need to explain it, or explain what “measurement" means, or “record", or “observation", or “consciousness". That is a gargantuan advantage! The key point is that worlds split when they become different and merge when they become the same again.

You equivocate on the word "world". What you are really talking about here are just components of a superposed wave function. Such superposed components can interfere, whereas separate worlds (or branches) are disjoint and cannot interfere.

Now do the two-slit experiment again but instead of using film to stop the photon after it passes the slits let the photon head out into infinite space. If Many Worlds is correct then the entire universe splits into 2 when the photon hit's the 2 slits and never recombines. There is nothing special about you the observer, you split just like everything else, you know that the photon went through one and only one slit, but you don't know which one. The 2 slit experiment can be set up in such a way that you can tell which slit the photon went through, but if you do that then the photons will not produce an interference pattern on the film. This is because even after the photon hits the film in both worlds and is destroyed the worlds remain different because in one the physical memory pattern in your brain encodes that the photon went through slot right and in the other slot left, so the different worlds don’t merge back together, and so no interference pattern is seen in either world.

Many Worlds predicts that even if you could devise an experiment that could detect which slit the photon went through without changing the photon in any way (it would pose enormous technical challenges but I think that might be possible, perhaps by using Stimulated Emission) there still would be no interference pattern because although the photons are identical the universes would still be different because your brain has different memory patterns which means the physical structure of your brain is still different in the two universes. Separate worlds only emerge if there is a difference between them, if the worlds evolve in such a way that the difference disappears then re-coherence occurs. For obvious reasons re-coherence can only occur if the 2 worlds are only very very slightly different and have only been separated for a short time, and that's why experiments of this sort are difficult and it explains why in our everyday world we don’t see macro objects becoming entangled, and even atoms aren’t usually entangled for long at room temperature.  

>  I will salute you if you can do this, because no one else has ever managed in the past

As much as I'd like to take the credit for it nothing I said is original with me, I just used my own words to describe what other people have done. 

No, it is not original. And it is not a local account of the correlations under discussion either  -- so no lollipops from me!.

Bruce

[Bruce Kellett]

On Fri, Mar 4, 2022 at 4:05 AM smitra <smi...@zonnet.nl> wrote:

On 03-03-2022 01:05, Bruce Kellett wrote:
> On Thu, Mar 3, 2022 at 10:50 AM John Clark <johnk...@gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>> On Wed, Mar 2, 2022 at 5:50 PM Bruce Kellett <bhkel...@gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>>
>>> _> Many worlds is not a local theory._
>>
>> Many worlds can explain all known experimental results without
>> resorting to non-local influences because many worlds is not a
>> realistic theory.
>
> In that case, if you believe that MWI is local, give me the local
> account of Bell-type correlations of spin measurements at spacelike
> separations. I will salute you if you can do this, because no one else
> has ever managed in the past. Realism is completely beside the point.
>
> Bruce

It's trivial, as the dynamics is described by a Hamiltonian that only
contains local interactions

All local Hamiltoinans contain only local interactions. The point here is that the correlations are not determined by a local Hamiltonian. Consider this:

    All local interactions are separable (have separable states).

    The entangled triplet state is not separable.

    Therefore it is not local.

This mans that all non-local effects arise
via common cause effects. The creation of the entangled pair of spins
happens at some space-time point, so it's the result of local
interactions. The later when Alice and Bob each receive one of the two
spins, they get correlated with the spins they measure, because they and
their measurement gear consist of particles that evolve according to the
Schrodinger equation too and that evolution also only involves local
interactions. This then causes Bob and Alice to evolve in superpositions
that are correlated as a result of the initial entanglement of the spin.

But the effect of that initial entanglement is only non-locally available at the point of Alice's and Bob's separate measurements. So your account has not eliminated the non-locality -- you have just disguised it by calling it a "common cause" effect. That common cause is only non-locally available to Alice and Bob.

Bruce

[Brent Meeker]

On 3/3/2022 9:05 AM, smitra wrote:

On 03-03-2022 01:05, Bruce Kellett wrote:

On Thu, Mar 3, 2022 at 10:50 AM John Clark <johnk...@gmail.com>
wrote:

On Wed, Mar 2, 2022 at 5:50 PM Bruce Kellett <bhkel...@gmail.com>
wrote:

_> Many worlds is not a local theory._

Many worlds can explain all known experimental results without
resorting to non-local influences because many worlds is not a
realistic theory.

In that case, if you believe that MWI is local, give me the local
account of Bell-type correlations of spin measurements at spacelike
separations. I will salute you if you can do this, because no one else
has ever managed in the past. Realism is completely beside the point.

Bruce

It's trivial, as the dynamics is described by a Hamiltonian that only contains local interactions. This mans that all non-local effects arise via common cause effects. The creation of the entangled pair of spins happens at some space-time point, so it's the result of local interactions. The later when Alice and Bob each receive one of the two spins, they get correlated with the spins they measure, because they and their measurement gear consist of particles that evolve according to the Schrodinger equation too and that evolution also only involves local interactions.

You write "the get correlated", but breaking statistical independence requires that the instrument settings be already correlated with the spins before they interact with the instruments and Alice and Bob.  That could be thru some common cause, but it seems unlikely when the polarization settings are determined by photons from many light years away on opposite hemispheres of the cosmos.  That implies a very long chain of local interactions to the common cause.

Brent

[John Clark]

On Thu, Mar 3, 2022 at 6:06 PM Bruce Kellett <bhkel...@gmail.com> wrote:

>>  the key is understanding what "the collapse of the wave function" means physically. Many Worlds says everything that is not forbidden is mandatory so everything Schrodinger's wave equation does not rule out does physically happen, so "collapse" just means that different solutions to Schrodinger's equation are ... well... different. And the great virtue of tautologies is that they're always true. Richard Feynman said all the weirdness in quantum mechanics can be found in the  2 slit experiment, so I will use that to illustrate the point. This is how I think Many Worlds would describe the two-slit experiment and several variations of it.

> I take the fact that you have changed the subject to a many worlds account of the two-slit experiment as clear evidence that you do not have a local many worlds account of the question at issue, namely, a local account of Bell-type correlations.

Just exchange the 2 slits in the experiments that I described with a polarizer and then the world would split because of polarization differences not because of which slip the photon went through, or if you prefer exchange the photons with electrons and the 2 slits with a Stern-Gerlach magnet, and then the world will split because of differences in spin of the electron; after that everything I said was still hold true, and nowhere would there be a need to invoke non-local influences. And you can build any Bell-type experiment you like with polarization or with spin,

> Saibal's account below is every bit as non-local as the original quantum account.

I don't know what you mean by "the original quantum account" but Superdeterminism is the only way to have determinism, locality, and reality, nothing else can give you all three. Superdeterminism is also very very dumb, it's so dumb I find it astonishing that anybody takes it seriously when it has the same intellectual gravitas as  geocentrism, 

> You equivocate on the word "world".

I did? I thought I was being clear, for these purposes the words "world" and "universe" are interchangeable and have exactly the same meaning they have when used in any other context. I meant nothing new or exotic in the words.

> What you are really talking about here are just components of a superposed wave function.

The word "just" in the above is not powerful enough to destroy the Many World's idea, you're gonna have to do one hell of a lot better than that.  

John K Clark    See what's on my new list at  Extropolis

jib

[Bruce Kellett]

On Fri, Mar 4, 2022 at 10:45 AM John Clark <johnk...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Thu, Mar 3, 2022 at 6:06 PM Bruce Kellett <bhkel...@gmail.com> wrote:

>>  the key is understanding what "the collapse of the wave function" means physically. Many Worlds says everything that is not forbidden is mandatory so everything Schrodinger's wave equation does not rule out does physically happen, so "collapse" just means that different solutions to Schrodinger's equation are ... well... different. And the great virtue of tautologies is that they're always true. Richard Feynman said all the weirdness in quantum mechanics can be found in the  2 slit experiment, so I will use that to illustrate the point. This is how I think Many Worlds would describe the two-slit experiment and several variations of it.

> I take the fact that you have changed the subject to a many worlds account of the two-slit experiment as clear evidence that you do not have a local many worlds account of the question at issue, namely, a local account of Bell-type correlations.

Just exchange the 2 slits in the experiments that I described with a polarizer and then the world would split because of polarization differences not because of which slip the photon went through, or if you prefer exchange the photons with electrons and the 2 slits with a Stern-Gerlach magnet, and then the world will split because of differences in spin of the electron; after that everything I said was still hold true, and nowhere would there be a need to invoke non-local influences. And you can build any Bell-type experiment you like with polarization or with spin,

Yes. But you have to show how non-separable states can exhibit locality. Or, at least, you are required to show in detail how the correlation arise locally, in many worlds, or in any other theory.

> Saibal's account below is every bit as non-local as the original quantum account.

I don't know what you mean by "the original quantum account" but Superdeterminism is the only way to have determinism, locality, and reality, nothing else can give you all three. Superdeterminism is also very very dumb, it's so dumb I find it astonishing that anybody takes it seriously when it has the same intellectual gravitas as  geocentrism, 

> You equivocate on the word "world".

I did? I thought I was being clear, for these purposes the words "world" and "universe" are interchangeable and have exactly the same meaning they have when used in any other context. I meant nothing new or exotic in the words.

Worlds are disjoint and do not interact. Your wave function components are not disjoint until decoherence makes them non-interacting.

> What you are really talking about here are just components of a superposed wave function.

The word "just" in the above is not powerful enough to destroy the Many World's idea, you're gonna have to do one hell of a lot better than that.

I am not trying to demolish many worlds. I am just pointing out that it is no more a local theory than is any collapse theory.

Bruce

[Bruce Kellett]

On Fri, Mar 4, 2022 at 10:30 AM Brent Meeker <meeke...@gmail.com> wrote:

On 3/3/2022 9:05 AM, smitra wrote:

On 03-03-2022 01:05, Bruce Kellett wrote: 

In that case, if you believe that MWI is local, give me the local
account of Bell-type correlations of spin measurements at spacelike
separations. I will salute you if you can do this, because no one else
has ever managed in the past. Realism is completely beside the point.

Bruce

It's trivial, as the dynamics is described by a Hamiltonian that only contains local interactions. This mans that all non-local effects arise via common cause effects. The creation of the entangled pair of spins happens at some space-time point, so it's the result of local interactions. The later when Alice and Bob each receive one of the two spins, they get correlated with the spins they measure, because they and their measurement gear consist of particles that evolve according to the Schrodinger equation too and that evolution also only involves local interactions.

You write "the get correlated", but breaking statistical independence requires that the instrument settings be already correlated with the spins before they interact with the instruments and Alice and Bob.  That could be thru some common cause, but it seems unlikely when the polarization settings are determined by photons from many light years away on opposite hemispheres of the cosmos.  That implies a very long chain of local interactions to the common cause.

Yes, I asked for a local account in many worlds theory of the correlations. Saibal did not mention many worlds; he merely referred only to some "common cause." Now any common cause for Alice's and Bob's measurements must come from some event or events where their respective past light cones overlap, and this might be arbitrarily far in the past. You are, therefore, in the realm of a superdeterministic theory, and this path does not amount to a local account in MWI.

Bruce

[smitra]

Yes, but this non-locality is a trivial issue in the MWI, analogous to
common cause effects in classical physics, while in case of a real
collapse the nonlocal effect would be present in the dynamics of Nature,
die to collapse itself being a fundamental part of the dynamics.

For example, in the MWI picture from Bob's point of view, when he
measures his spin, he knows that the spin state of Alice in his sector
is the opposite. So, if he knows what Alice's polarizer setting is, he
knows the superposition in which Alice and her spin will end up in (of
course, not Alice's exact state, only as so far the outcome of the spin
measurement is concerned in the formal form of a |up, Alice finds up> +
b |down, Alice finds down>).

It's the fact that Bob knows that he has a copy who found the opposite
spin and in that sector the state of Alice is different that makes this
not a dynamical non-local effect. But if collapse is real and the other
Bob does not exist, then there is a real fundamental problem with this
non-locality. Note that we don't need to get into the Bell-type
correlations here, these are only relevant to prove that the random
results after a measurement cannot be due local hidden variables. Given
that this is an established experimental fact we can just assume this it
be true. So, Bob collapsing not just his own spin but also Alice's spin
is a problem if the collapse is real. But in the MWI there is no
collapse, all the other sectors objectively exist, it's just that his
and Alice's sector are correlated with all non-local effects having
arisen via local dynamics.

Saibal

[smitra]

On 04-03-2022 00:30, Brent Meeker wrote:
> On 3/3/2022 9:05 AM, smitra wrote:
>
>> On 03-03-2022 01:05, Bruce Kellett wrote:
>> On Thu, Mar 3, 2022 at 10:50 AM John Clark <johnk...@gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>>
>> On Wed, Mar 2, 2022 at 5:50 PM Bruce Kellett <bhkel...@gmail.com>
>>
>> wrote:
>>
>> _> Many worlds is not a local theory._
>>
>> Many worlds can explain all known experimental results without
>> resorting to non-local influences because many worlds is not a
>> realistic theory.
>
> In that case, if you believe that MWI is local, give me the local
> account of Bell-type correlations of spin measurements at spacelike
> separations. I will salute you if you can do this, because no one else
>
> has ever managed in the past. Realism is completely beside the point.
>
> Bruce
>
> It's trivial, as the dynamics is described by a Hamiltonian that only
> contains local interactions. This mans that all non-local effects
> arise via common cause effects. The creation of the entangled pair of
> spins happens at some space-time point, so it's the result of local
> interactions. The later when Alice and Bob each receive one of the two

> spins, THEY GET CORRELATED with the spins they measure, because they

> and their measurement gear consist of particles that evolve according
> to the Schrodinger equation too and that evolution also only involves
> local interactions.
> You write "the get correlated", but breaking statistical independence

> requires that the instrument settings be ALREADY CORRELATED with the

> spins before they interact with the instruments and Alice and Bob.
> That could be thru some common cause, but it seems unlikely when the
> polarization settings are determined by photons from many light years
> away on opposite hemispheres of the cosmos. That implies a very long
> chain of local interactions to the common cause.
>
> Brent

In the MWI there is no issue with statistical independence. This is
something Hossenfelder has invoked in her new theory about
superderminism. In the MWI when you measure the state of a system that's
not in an eigenstate of the observable, then you will end up in an
entangled superposition with the measured system. That's the correlation
I was talking about.

Saibal

[John Clark]

On Mon, Mar 7, 2022 at 3:41 AM smitra <smi...@zonnet.nl> wrote:

> It's the fact that Bob knows that he has a copy who found the opposite
spin and in that sector the state of Alice is different that makes this
not a dynamical non-local effect. But if collapse is real and the other
Bob does not exist, then there is a real fundamental problem with this
non-locality. Note that we don't need to get into the Bell-type
correlations here, these are only relevant to prove that the random
results after a measurement cannot be due local hidden variables. Given
that this is an established experimental fact we can just assume this it
be true. So, Bob collapsing not just his own spin but also Alice's spin
is a problem if the collapse is real. But in the MWI there is no
collapse, all the other sectors objectively exist, it's just that his
and Alice's sector are correlated with all non-local effects having
arisen via local dynamics.

Yes, and all that is possible because Many Worlds is local but not realistic, in comparison to something like Pilot Wave Theory which is realistic but not local, or Shut Up And Calculate which is, .... well..., adherence to that viewpoint insist I'm not allowed to say, or even think about, what it is.

  John K Clark    See what's on my new list at  Extropolis

i1

[Bruce Kellett]

On Mon, Mar 7, 2022 at 7:41 PM smitra <smi...@zonnet.nl> wrote:

On 04-03-2022 00:17, Bruce Kellett wrote:
>
> But the effect of that initial entanglement is only non-locally
> available at the point of Alice's and Bob's separate measurements. So
> your account has not eliminated the non-locality -- you have just
> disguised it by calling it a "common cause" effect. That common cause
> is only non-locally available to Alice and Bob.
>
> Bruce

Yes, but this non-locality is a trivial issue in the MWI, analogous to
common cause effects in classical physics,

If by "common cause" you mean what happens at the formation of the entangled pair, then your claim is manifestly false. Classical common cause correlations must always satisfy the Bell inequalities while we know experimentally that these inequalities are violated.

while in case of a real
collapse the nonlocal effect would be present in the dynamics of Nature,
die to collapse itself being a fundamental part of the dynamics.

I don't know why you are obsessed with collapse theories. My question does not concern such theories. I am asking for an account of the claimed locality of MWI -- completely independent of any collapse.

For example, in the MWI picture from Bob's point of view, when he
measures his spin, he knows that the spin state of Alice in his sector
is the opposite.

That is the question. How does he know this? He is at a spacelike separation and cannot, locally, know either Alice's polarizer setting, or her result.. He cannot know that his spin state is opposite, because he cannot know 'opposite to what?'

So, if he knows what Alice's polarizer setting is,

He cannot know this, so the rest of your statement is otiose.

he
knows the superposition in which Alice and her spin will end up in (of
course, not Alice's exact state, only as so far the outcome of the spin
measurement is concerned in the formal form of a |up, Alice finds up> +
b |down, Alice finds down>).

It's the fact that Bob knows that he has a copy who found the opposite
spin and in that sector the state of Alice is different that makes this
not a dynamical non-local effect.

That knowledge is surely relevant, since Bob does not know either Alice's setting, or her result. Such a logical possibility has no bearing on locality or non-locality.

But if collapse is real and the other
Bob does not exist, then there is a real fundamental problem with this
non-locality.

Again, your irrelevant obsession with collapse theories.

Note that we don't need to get into the Bell-type
correlations here, these are only relevant to prove that the random
results after a measurement cannot be due local hidden variables. Given
that this is an established experimental fact we can just assume this it
be true.

In other words, are you simply giving up on the possibility of an explanation of these correlations?

So, Bob collapsing not just his own spin but also Alice's spin
is a problem if the collapse is real. But in the MWI there is no
collapse, all the other sectors objectively exist, it's just that his
and Alice's sector are correlated with all non-local effects having
arisen via local dynamics.

You have not demonstrated this -- you have merely assumed it. Zero out of ten for your explanatory effort. I am still waiting for someone who actually understands the problem to explain how MWI can give a local account of these correlations. 

Bruce

[smitra]

The setting of the polarizers are also the result of only local
interactions. Processes in your brain determine how you will end up
choosing the setting of your polarizer. If the settings were not a
priori agreed (a set of different setting can be agreed a priori for a
Bell test), then that only makes the situation a bit more complex, you
end up in a superposition of different polarizer settings and in each
sector for a definite polarizer setting you are in a superposition of
the different spin outcomes. This extra layer of complexity does not
change anything.

As far as the explanation of the correlation is concerned, this follows
the derivation of the correlations using quantum mechanics. For example,
for two spins in the singlet state one can take Alice's results of up
and down spins, represented by plus and minus 1's respectively, and
Bob's up and down results are assigned the opposite signs. Measurements
are done for an angle theta between the polarizers, the fraction of
differences in the string of ones and minus ones is evaluated. This is
repeated for an angle of 2*theta. Then for certain values of theta the
fraction of differences become more than twice as large when the angle
is doubled, this is inconsistent with local hidden variable theories due
to the fact that the differences can be interpreted as mutations in one
string and doubling the angle would then amount to adding the same
fraction of mutations twice over. The maximum fraction of mutations
would then be doubled if there is zero overlap, in case of an overlap
would be less than double. It's impossible to increase the fraction of
mutations by more than a factor of 2.

While this then excludes a local hidden variable theory underlying
quantum mechanics, there is nothing nonlocal about quantum mechanics
itself. Every step is a local process here, from the choice to set the
polarizers, the creation of the entangled spin pairs, the measurement
process etc. etc. That the correlations one observes cannot be explained
by a local hidden variable theory, is a problem for such local hidden
variable theories. There isn't (for all we know now) a hidden variable
theory underlying quantum mechanics, nor is there anything in the
dynamics (except for objective collapse) that's inherently nonlocal.

So, I don't see where the problem is.

Saibal

[smitra]

> John K Clark See what's on my new list at Extropolis [1]

Indeed. Also what Sidney Coleman said here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EtyNMlXN-sw&t=2024s

Saibal

[Bruce Kellett]

The problem is that you have not given a local explanation of the correlations. I agree that all local interactions are local. But there is a non-local effect arising from the non-separability of the entangled singlet state. You have not explained how this can be accounted for locally -- certainly not in the context of a many worlds, non-collapse, theory. MWI does not remove the inherent non-locality of the non-separable quantum state.

Bruce

[John Clark]

On Tue, Mar 8, 2022 at 6:02 AM Bruce Kellett <bhkel...@gmail.com> wrote:

> I agree that all local interactions are local.

Well... that's mighty big of you.

John K Clark    See what's on my new list at  Extropolis

bbx

[John Clark]

On Mon, Mar 7, 2022 at 5:02 PM Bruce Kellett <bhkel...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Mon, Mar 7, 2022 at 7:41 PM smitra <smi...@zonnet.nl> wrote:

>> For example, in the MWI picture from Bob's point of view, when he
measures his spin, he knows that the spin state of Alice in his sector
is the opposite.

>That is the question. How does he know this?

In Many Worlds he knows this because when Bob makes a measurement the universe (which includes Alice) splits into 2, in one universe Bob's photon is polarized up and Alice's photon is polarized down, and in the other universe Bob's photon is polarized down and Alice's photon is polarized up. And that is entirely consistent with Alice's view of the situation.  When Alice makes a measurement the universe (which includes Bob) splits into 2, in one universe Alice's photon is polarized up and Bob's photon is polarized down, and in the other universe Alice's photon is polarized down and Bob's photon is polarized up. In Many Worlds there are no universes that have up-up or down-down photons because that would violate Schrodinger's Equation which demands that angular momentum be conserved, and the one and only assumption Many Worlds makes is that Schrodinger's equation means what it says.  

 

> He is at a spacelike separation and cannot, locally, know either Alice's polarizer setting, or her result..

That is nonsense, the experiment has been performed many many times and Bob ALWAYS makes the correct prediction about the polarization of Alice's photon. 

> He cannot know that his spin state is opposite, because he cannot know 'opposite to what?'

Huh? Opposite to the polarization measurement that Bob just made, obviously.

 John K Clark    See what's on my new list at  Extropolis

obx

 

[Bruce Kellett]

It's a shame that we have spent so much time arguing about this when it is clear that you do not have the remotest understanding of what the issues actually are. The opposite polarization states you mention above are a direct consequence of the non-locality of the non-separable entangled spin state. Until you can grasp this fact, then we are going nowhere.

Bruce

[John Clark]

Right, if Many Worlds and all other non-realistic theories turn out to be wrong then things really are non-local, unless they're superdetermined, but that's ridiculous.  

As I said in a private communication with you: 

"There is room in the multiverse for there to be a universe that contains an Alice who sets her polarizer to ANY angle you care to name, and every one of those universes also contains a Bob who has set his polarizer parallel to Alice's. And when one sees up polarization ("up" being defined as the arbitrary angle Alice decides to set her polarizer) the other is absolutely positively 100% certain to see "down" and vice versa. 

There are, of course, universes in which Alice and Bob set their polarizers (or Stern–Gerlach magnets) at angles that are neither parallel nor orthogonal, but in such universes quantum reality experiments of this sort cannot be performed because the entanglement between the photons (or electrons) would be destroyed, so they're irrelevant. Entanglement is absolutely necessary to perform these experiments that's why, although simple in principle, they're devilishly hard to perform in practice."

>  Until you can grasp this fact, then we are going nowhere.

Then I guess we're going nowhere because I don't know what the hell your problem is, the fact that you cannot specify your problem makes me suspect there is no problem, at least not in this universe. 

John K Clark    See what's on my new list at  Extropolis

nwm

[Bruce Kellett]

On Wed, Mar 9, 2022 at 9:14 AM John Clark <johnk...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Tue, Mar 8, 2022 at 4:53 PM Bruce Kellett <bhkel...@gmail.com> wrote:

> It's a shame that we have spent so much time arguing about this when it is clear that you do not have the remotest understanding of what the issues actually are. The opposite polarization states you mention above are a direct consequence of the non-locality of the non-separable entangled spin state.

 

Right, if Many Worlds and all other non-realistic theories turn out to be wrong then things really are non-local, unless they're superdetermined, but that's ridiculous.  

As I said in a private communication with you: 

"There is room in the multiverse for there to be a universe that contains an Alice who sets her polarizer to ANY angle you care to name, and every one of those universes also contains a Bob who has set his polarizer parallel to Alice's. And when one sees up polarization ("up" being defined as the arbitrary angle Alice decides to set her polarizer) the other is absolutely positively 100% certain to see "down" and vice versa. 

There are, of course, universes in which Alice and Bob set their polarizers (or Stern–Gerlach magnets) at angles that are neither parallel nor orthogonal, but in such universes quantum reality experiments of this sort cannot be performed because the entanglement between the photons (or electrons) would be destroyed, so they're irrelevant.

There, in that statement, is one of your many sources of confusion. The entanglement of the spins in the singlet state is a property of the state itself -- the plorizer settings by either or both of Alice and Bob are absolutely irrelevant for the existence of the initial entangled state.

Bruce

[John Clark]

On Tue, Mar 8, 2022 at 5:30 PM Bruce Kellett <bhkel...@gmail.com> wrote:

> The entanglement of the spins in the singlet state is a property of the state itself -- the plorizer settings by either or both of Alice and Bob are absolutely irrelevant for the existence of the initial entangled state.

That would be true only if things are realistic, that is to say if before it was measured the electron already existed in one and only one definite state, but as I've said over and over, Many Worlds is NOT a realistic theory.  

John K Clark    See what's on my new list at  Extropolis

nrt