Fight what exactly? Determinism either is or isnt how the universe works, it isnt like some sort of external force of finite capacity that can be resisted by some application of effort. If it is true, then you have no choice but to act the way something like you would act, and the way humans are wired to think is in terms of choices and the possible outcomes of those choices, even if the choice you make and the thinking that leads you to it is inevitable. If it is not true, then the possibility of making different choices exists, but it doesnt look any different to you because you only get to perceive the result of following one set of them.
The thing about determinism is that while it may be an interesting philosophical exercise, beyond being difficult to maybe impossible to prove or disprove, it isnt really relevant to much. A deterministic universe looks, feels, and acts to us exactly like a nondeterministic one would.
I took it to mean fighting against a descent into nihilism.
I never understood the fight against nihilism, as if it’s inherently bleak. I came to the conclusion that nothing truly matters a long time ago, but that doesn’t keep me from feeling like stuff matters, and doing what matters to me. Subjective meaning can still drive you to pursue and live a good life even while you’re aware that objective meaning doesn’t exit. Happiness feels good, which is enough for me.
If nothing matters, then it doesnt matter that nothing matters, so while I technically am a nihilist, since I dont see a plausible mechanism for how some kind of objective purpose/meaning could exist, I dont really think much of it. If nothing matters there is no reason for me not to care about whatever I arbitrarily happen to value anyway. Expecting the universe to find those things important too just feels kind of self-centered somehow.
Also: everything matters ☹️ everything matters 🙂
I love nihilism because accepting that nothing inherently matters allows me to focus on the things that I decide matter to me. It also makes it easier for me to accept those things I dislike but am truly powerless to change.
I think I’d be so much unhappier if I was in some constant pursuit of a universal meaning of life, or felt like I had to fulfill some inherent purpose.
Either existence is a empty nothingness devoid of meaning, or existence is a empty blank canvas upon which we can imbue our own meaning.
That would make it existentialism
The truth of determinism is relevant to the most popular conception of free will. That’s why this comes up repeatedly. People seem to want themselves to be free from causality itself, because being bound by it makes you not “free”, and just going through the motions.
The problem here is the definition of free will itself . Rather than demanding from the universe that your mind be inexplicably free form causality, why not just accept a more useful definition of free will? Such as the ability to make decisions without undue coercion. Vague as that is, it’s at least a workable definition.
What if some parts of the universe are deterministic, and some others aren’t? Or that is is deterministic sometimes, but sometimes it is not?
Then, would it mean that initiating a chain of deterministic events that eventually causes suffering makes me responsible for this suffering?
What if i choose to cut taxes because i think I’ll have more money, but it causes a series of events that end up increasing organised crimes? What if it was always the deterministic result of that choice, but the choice itself was not deterministic and I could have chosen not to do it?
Oh it’s even worse.
The universe is indeterministic. It’s probabilistic and uncertain, but that doesn’t mean you actually have a choice. Your “choices” are just determined by quantum dice rolls.
Anything can happen, nothing is certain, but you still don’t actually exercise will over reality.
Tbh I dont think that this is actually incompatible with determinism, since the mechanism by which the future is predetermined doesnt necessarily have to be that all causes only have one possible effect associated with them. I mostly suspect the universe is deterministic because I suspect (though this is only a suspicion that I cannot prove) that the universe has block time and therefore that, even if random events with no clear “this must lead to that” chain exist, the future is predetermined merely by “already” existing along some time axis. Sort of like how if you had a character in a flipbook roll a die, and nothing earlier in the flipbook forces the die to have to land on one particular number to keep the plot self-consistent, the outcome of the die will still always be the same, because the pages where its result is shown already have been drawn.
Sure, but now you have to make a bunch of assumptions about things we can’t test or observe to keep the universe consistent with determinism. It’s not impossible that the universe is predetermined, but there’s just no reason to believe it is. You’re making more of an aesthetic argument than a scientific one.
It wasnt really an argument at all, except for the part that randomness isnt incompatible with determinism. I dont have a proper scientific reason for suspecting the future already exists, it just feels somehow “simpler” since it doesnt require assuming that the time dimension is somehow particularly different from space dimensions.
That’s assuming that our current understanding of quantum mechanics is even close to accurate, just because we haven’t figured out how to predict the outcomes yet doesn’t mean it can’t be done
That’s called Hidden Variable Theory, but there’s also no indication that this is how the universe works and everything we find just reinforces indeterminism and uncertainty.
The most notable development is the math working out to make hidden variables irrelevant i.e. they do not actually help us better describe reality or predict outcomes of measurement.
The math doesn’t seem to care whether God is rolling dice or not.
Speaking of predicting outcomes implies a forwards arrow of time. As far as we know, the arrow of time is a macroscopic feature of the universe and just doesn’t exist at a fundamental level. You cannot explain it with entropy without appealing to the past hypothesis, which then requires appealing to the Big Bang, which is in and of itself an appeal to general relativity, something which is not part of quantum mechanics.
Let’s say we happen to live in a universe where causality is genuinely indifferent to the arrow of time. This doesn’t mean such a universe would have retrocausality, because retrocausality is just causality with an arrow facing backwards. If its causal structure was genuinely independent of the arrow of time, then its causal structure would follow what the physicist Emily Adlam refers to as global determinism and an "all-at-once* structure of causality.
Such a causal model would require the universe’s future and past to follow certain global consistency rules, but each taken separately would not allow you to derive the outcomes of systems deterministically. You would only ever be able to describe the deterministic evolution of a system retrospecitvely, when you know its initial and final state, and then subject it to those consistency rules. Given science is usually driven by predictive theories, it would thus be useless in terms of making predictions, as in practice we’re usually only interested in making future predictions and not giving retrospective explanations.
If the initial conditions aren’t sufficient to predict the future, then any future prediction based on an initial state, not being sufficient to constrain the future state to a specific value, would lead to ambiguities, causing us to have to predict it probabilistically. And since physicists are very practically-minded, everyone would focus on the probabilistic forwards-evolution in time, and very few people would be that interested in reconstructing the state of the system retrospectively as it would have no practical predictive benefit.
I bring this all up because, as the physicists Ken Wharton, Roderick Sutherland, Titus Amza, Raylor Liu, and James Saslow have pointed out, you can quite easily reconstruct values for all the observables in the evolution of system retrospectively by analyzing its weak values, and those values appear to evolve entirely locally, deterministically, and continuously, but doing so requires conditioning on both the initial and final state of the system simultaneously and evolving both ends towards that intermediate point to arrive at the value of the observable at that intermediate point in time. You can therefore only do this retrospectively.
This is already built into the mathematics. You don’t have to add any additional assumptions. It is basically already a feature of quantum mechanics that if you evolve a known eigenstate at t=-1 and a known eigenstate at t=1 and evolve them towards each other simultaneously until they intersect at t=0, at the interaction you can seemingly compute the values of the observables at t=0. Even though the laws of quantum mechanics do not apply sufficient constraints to recover the observables when evolving them in a single direction in time, either forwards or backwards, if you do both simultaneously it gives you those sufficient constraints to determine a concrete value.
Of course, there is no practical utility to this, but we should not necessarily confuse practicality with reality. Yes, being able to retrospectively reconstruct the system’s local and deterministic evolution is not practically useful as science is more about future prediction, but we shouldn’t declare from this practical choice that therefore the system has no deterministic dynamics, that it has no intermediate values and when it’s in a superposition of states it has no physical state at all or is literally equivalent to its probability distribution (a spread out wave in phase space). You are right that reconstructing the history of the system doesn’t help us predict outcomes better, but I don’t agree it doesn’t help us understand reality better.
Take all the “paradoxes” for example, like the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen paradox or, my favorite, the Frauchiger–Renner paradox. These are more conceptual problems dealing with an understanding of reality and ultimately your answer to them doesn’t change what predictions you make with quantum mechanics in any way. Yet, I still think there is some benefit, maybe on a more philosophical level, of giving an answer to those paradoxes. If you reconstruct the history of the systems with weak values for example, then out falls very simple solutions to these conceptual problems because you can actually just look directly at how the observables change throughout the system as it evolves.
Not taking retrospection seriously as a tool of analysis leads to people believing in all sort of bizarre things like multiverses or physically collapsing wave functions, that all disappear if you just allow for retrospection to be a legitimate tool of analysis. It might not be as important as understanding the probabilistic structure of the theory that is needed for predictions, but it can still resolve confusions around the theory and what it implies about physical reality.
That’s one theory about how it might work, our inability to come up with another way to explain the possibility of quantum determinism is not evidence against it
It’s not that there aren’t other ways to explain the universe, but rather, none of those alternatives are more predictive or descriptive. Not only can’t we find hidden variables, we don’t need them.
You can believe there are angels dancing on the heads of pins (or whatever) and that’s the hidden variable causing uncertainty, but there’s literally no reason to. You’re introducing addition unnecessary complexity when we can explain everything without it.
Our inability to predict an outcome does not prove anything about the certainty of the outcome, our understanding of physics is incomplete and any conclusions you draw from incomplete information are necessarily assumptions, you felt compelled to describe that with reference to angels as a means of delegitimizing this fact because you’re emotionally invested in your preferred theory
This meme template usually ends with the like a dog bit, I wouldn’t look into it
There’s a lot of assumptions in saying it’s just meaningless chemicals
- That chemicals are meaningless and lacking intriniic value. Seen from the outside they may appear that way, but evidently from the inside it seems quite different.
- “We” are not some other unseen brain behavior (not a crazy idea since we’ve never seen consciousness working in the brain)
- We are within the brain
- The brain exists at all
- Any knowledge exists at all (dubious as Mickey points out)
Holy shit Mickey, what did you do to Pluto!?
The decision that your brain’s decisions are due to chemical reactions, which itself would be due to chemicals reactions, is self-referential but not circular reasoning.
Brains are electro-chemical btw, not just chemical
And what organ told you that, hmm?
I still think Death said it better in Hogfather.
Determinism is an irrelevant theory because of Gödel’s incompleteness and the Halting problem.
Predictions are always made from inside the universe, thus affect their own results. Therefore, perfect predictions are irredeemably impossible.
Now, can the universe be fully predicted from the outside ? Who cares ! What is outside the universe, by definition, cannot affect it, so the question is irrelevant, again by definition.
The only case where that could hypothetically matter is if there is a one-way gate to exit the universe (if you can come back, then it’s just a weird part of the universe, not truly outside, so the first arguments still stand).
And even then, proving the universe deterministic would at best be just one hint that maybe the “outside universe” is itself deterministic, not even a full proof.
Also, observing the universe without affecting it is a pretty weird concept, with what we know about quantum measurements affecting their own results. Not impossible by definition, but it would look quite different from what we do right now.
According to our current model, we would probably observe un-collapsed quantum field waves, which is a concept inaccessible from within the universe, and could very well just be an artifact of the model instead of ground truth.
But again, this is all irrelevant until someone builds the universe an exit door. That door being one-way only by definition also means there would be no way to know what’s on the other side and if it’s worth crossing (or if it instantly kills you) before you do.
So, if we do build such a door, there would be no way to experimentally confirm it is indeed an exit from the universe, and not just a wormhole with a very far exit, or a long lived pocket dimension, or an absolute annihilator that doesn’t lead anywhere.
According to our current model, we would probably observe un-collapsed quantum field waves, which is a concept inaccessible from within the universe, and could very well just be an artifact of the model instead of ground truth.
It so strange to me that this is the popular way people think about quantum mechanics. Without reformulating quantum mechanics in any way or changing any of its postulates, the theory already allows you to recover the intermediate values of all the observables in any system through retrospection, and it evolves locally and deterministically.
The “spreading out as a wave” isn’t a physical thing, but an epistemic one. The uncertainty principle makes it such that you can’t accurately predict the outcome of certain interactions, and the probability distribution depends upon the phase, which is the relative orientation between your measurement basis and the property you’re trying to measure. The wave-like statistical behavior arises from the phase, and the wave function is just a statistical tool to keep track of the phase.
The “collapse” is not a physical process but a measurement update. Measurements aren’t fundamental to quantum mechanics. It is just that when you interact with something, you couple it to the environment, and this coupling leads to the effects of the phase spreading out to many particles in the environment. The spreading out of the influence of the phase dilutes its effects and renders it negligible to the statistics, and so the particle then briefly behaves more classically. That is why measurement causes the interference pattern to disappear in the double-slit experiment, not because of some physical “collapsing waves.”
People just ignore the fact that you can use weak values to reconstruct the values of the observables through any quantum experiment retrospectively, which is already a feature baked into the theory and not something you need to add, and then instead choose to believe that things are somehow spreading out as waves when you’re not looking at them, which leads to a whole host of paradoxes: the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen paradox, the Wigner’s friend paradox, the Frauchiger-Renner paradox, etc.
Literally every paradox disappears if we stop pretending that systems are literally waves and that the wave-like behavior is just the result of the relationship between the phase and the statistical distribution of the system, and that the waves are ultimately a weakly emergent phenomena. We only see particle waves made up of particles. No one has ever seen a wave made up of nothing. Waves of light are made up of photons of light, and the wave-like behavior of the light is a weakly emergent property of the wave-like statistical distributions you get due to the relationship between the statistical uncertainty and the phase. It in no way implies everything is literally made up waves that are themselves made of nothing.
Now, can the universe be fully predicted from the outside ? Who cares ! What is outside the universe, by definition, cannot affect it, so the question is irrelevant, again by definition.
What if our universe is a simulation?
No, Mickey–I will perish like a duck.
This reminds me of that stupid thing in fallout 4 about possibly being a robot essentially and how it was supposed to be some big deal but I never understood what difference it made
I guess the only part that’s actually important is whether your memories are “real”, in the sense that they relate to real events. Remembering things that didn’t actually happen could cause a few problems.
Also, if I was functionally immortal and ageless, I’d probably like to know ! But I guess you eventually notice regardless.
And of course, the main problem is how synths get there, which is by murdering the person they were modeled after. That part is definitely a problem 😅
not much you can do if your memories are wrong, they are just as real as they where when you started so why change? this is something that hit me real hard as a kid but i just brushed it off eventually
I don’t mean emotionally wrong, I mean like remembering factually incorrect facts. But I suppose that shouldn’t be a huge problem unless the institute scientist who made your memories in particular was a moron/prankster and made you believe some wild shit 😅
In the case of Fallout 4, the big deal is that if you were a synth, that means all your memories and experiences prior to a certain point of your existence are almost assuredly made up. They are a fabrication. Maybe you never actually lived in the pre-war era. You never had a wife. You never had a child.
It would have been better from a story-telling point if that wasn’t added in a DLC long after most people played the main game through. It fits better if you do Far Harbour before ever finding Shaun so that you are forced to wonder if Shaun is even real.
Ya but why does it matter if your memory is all fake? not much you can do about it without a true answer one way or the other so just move on and don’t worry about it
Perish like a dog it is then. There is no tearing down reality without you inside of it.
Have fun
Occam’s razor defeats Plato’s cave. There’s no reason to think that the world we experience would be just metaphysical shadows on the wall. The burden of proof is on Mickey’s shoulders.
Oh yeah and Cogito Ergo Sum. So there is one bit of definitely provable knowledge.
Occam’s razor is a rule of thumb not an absolute rule of the universe.
If you go with Cogito Ergo Sum, I think that’s the stance Mickey is taking. You only know for sure of your own consciousness, everything else could be a delusion of the senses. You know, like shadows on a cave wall or whatever.
Yes, and my response to what Mickey said was that why would we think that we’re in the cave looking at shadows? Why should I complicate my view of the world with the added baggage of metaphysical idealism when materialism works just fine to explain everything I see? Sure our perception of the world is limited to our senses and measurement techniques, but the scientific framework we’ve built onto that base appears very consistent and functional with its predictive power. It’s definitely not omniscience, but it works.
I only brought up the Cogito argument to point out that Mickey is incorrect in saying that no certain knowledge exists.
I think one of the points Mickey would make is you can’t entirely trust the scientific framework because it’s still coming from our flawed senses. Even if everything adds up, it could still be a lie. Solipsism and all that.
I don’t think anyone is talking about metaphysical idealism, but conceptual things shouldn’t be written off because they are inconvenient. Numbers aren’t physical, but I doubt you’d say they don’t exist and therefore should be ignored, unless you’re the most extreme materialist.
Eliminative materialism isn’t my thing no. Emergent materialism is what I roll with. So the human mind and culture and numbers are things that exist as emergent properties of other things.
Sure it could all be a lie with us living in the matrix or so on, and it’s fun to entertain such thoughts every now and then. But I won’t accept it as truth without a better reason than “but technically it’s possible”.
Now I’m not sure you get what the allegory of the cave is about. It’s literally trying to explain that our perception can’t be 100% trusted.
I know. The matrix (or any other metaphysical idealism for that matter) is an example of a situation where we cannot trust our perception for knowledge about the true nature of the universe (much like the allegory of the cave), although taken to the extreme. The epistemological and metaphysical aspects of Plato’s cave are very much intertwined.
But you’re assuming, from what I’m reading through your comments, that these shadows are cast by metaphysical forces, and I’m interpreting the allegory as how our senses are ultimately something we can’t trust completely.
As accurate as science may seem, it is ultimately based on these senses. It’s the best way we can understand the physical world, but science, wisely, always has a caveat at the end of every law and discovery: “… As far as we know.”
This is a good thing, it means that nothing is held sacred and everything can be tested and questioned again.
“Cogito ergo sum” reaches too far. Discarding Occam’s razor, all we can truly state 100% is that thinking exists. Does it need a thinker ? No, the “thinker” may be an emergent property of the thoughts instead of their basis, thus an illusion too.
That’s not what I believe personally, but I think it’s a valid argument.
An interesting take, but surely there would still have to be some substrate to facilitate the thinking (a thinker)? A brain in a jar might not be what you think of yourself, but whatever is thinking the thoughts which you consider your own, definitely has to exist.
But then what perceives the illusion? How can the whole concept of an illusion have any meaning without a thinker to perceive what isn’t true?
There is no burden of proof. There is only the experience of the here and the now. Everything else is stories.
Those old cartoons really didn’t hold back, huh?
Or, as I love to say: you feel what you feel, it’s what you do with it that matters
The universe could just as well be made of only one type of matter. The fact that certain particles attract each other is miraculous in and of itself. It’s what facilitates complex matter and ultimately life. It’s also a funamental law upon which brains have evolved. It’s everything but absurd.
I think the usage of the word absurd in this context entails the third definition of the word here:
