Ed O'Shaughnessy on Farcaster

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https://warpcast.com/~/channel/thomas

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@aviationdoctor.eth

My little non-physicist mind is being blown right now as I burrow deeper into the superdeterminism rabbit hole, guided by t' Hooft's writings, a bunch of YouTube videos, and ChatGPT 4o in the role of the ever-patient tutor. It feels to me like superdeterminism is to physics what solipsism is to metaphysics: arguably the most important question, because everything is downstream from it; and yet the most pointless, because it is untestable and (assuming it is true) does not really change anything (except perhaps drive us all to nihilism). https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/978-3-319-41285-6.pdf

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Ed O'Shaughnessy

Nihilism ain't all bad! "However, this view of nihilism gives an entirely new viewpoint. People who call themselves “nihilists” often consider themselves pessimistic. But that is not inherent to nihilism, the universe is indifferent and this is merely a reality. Trying to seek for a greater meaning in something superstitious or beyond us is a failure to understand the only and actual foundation of meaning as the mind itself. Thus, Nietzsche’s teachings are not to be used to fight against nihilism, but rather to embrace it as our reality, and then to strive for self-overcoming and acceptance through the concept of the Overman, the Will to Power, and the Eternal Recurrence. It is us, our minds, that create our meaning and value." https://eternalisedofficial.com/2020/12/15/misunderstanding-nihilism/

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@aviationdoctor.eth

Oh I agree. Nihilism (just like cynicism, by the way) gets a reflexive bad rap. In this specific context, I’m referring to what happens if we all agree that the world is superdeterministic. In physics, it means that experimenters are not free to perform whatever experiment they like; both those experiments and their outcomes are predetermined since the Big Bang, and physicists are more akin to readers of a book written by someone else. In everyday life, it means we’re all mesoscopic cellular automata going through preordained motions. I was just listening to a podcast with Roger Penrose and one of the guests was challenging superdeterminism on the basis that consciousness is pointless if we have no free will. That’s where my nihilism comment comes from — it’s hard for people to embrace the idea that they are just passive spectators of a the movie of their life being projected onto their mental screen. There’s cognitive resistance to accepting that their decisions are already made for them

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Ed O'Shaughnessy

Can this be reconciled with Stephen Wolfram's computational irreducibility? (And have we had this conversation in a previous run of the simulation?!)

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@aviationdoctor.eth

Yes! They actually go hand in hand. All wolfram is saying is that you can’t predict the behavior of more complex cellular automata (even though it’s 100% deterministic), because there’s an irreducible number of computational steps you have to go through. Superdeterminism and t’ Hooft’s CAI claim that the universe is one giant cellular automaton, where each cell is one Planck volume. So (as I understand) the passage of time is just the universe performing calculation on that lattice, one Planck time unit after another. We still can’t predict the future (we would need to perform the calculation for that) but it’s still entirely “baked in” (determined)

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@aviationdoctor.eth

(Keep in mind that all this is my lay understanding — I’m not a physicist so I may be getting the details wrong and I’m probably oversimplifying. I just want to get people excited and curious about this topic because I find it amazingly cool and fundamental to everything else)

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Ed O'Shaughnessy

I wonder what role randomness plays in this. If I think about randomness as "jitter" in the system I could envisage a rapid divergence into multiple possible paths. I guess that brings us back to quantum mechanics and one's preferred interpretation tho. (My brain is starting to hurt!)

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@aviationdoctor.eth

I agree that it’s the key unknown here. 1/ If you follow Copenhagen, then randomness exists until the measurement is made / the wavefunction collapses. 2/ If you follow Everett, no need for randomness because every possible outcome will exist in a separate branch of the universe. 3/ if you follow t’ Hooft / CAI, then there is rigorously zero randomness anywhere, ever. I find that appealing because it’s cleaner than 1/ (no dice-playing god, no dead and alive cat, no spooky action at a distance), and it’s a lot less wasteful than 2/ (no infinitely many universes).

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@aviationdoctor.eth

In fact the randomness that bothers you is also what bothered Einstein. It’s Bell who in the 60s tried to prove Einstein wrong, but his theorem requires statistical independence (≈ free will) to explain the quantum behavior. If you strip away that assumption, you land back at CAI / superdeterminism, which I find is more aligned with Occam’s razor

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Ed O'Shaughnessy

I guess it comes down to what I *choose* to believe (said with no irony!), I can choose to believe I have free will in a stochastic universe, or that I have no free will in a deterministic universe, and then act accordingly. The funny thing is that even choosing the latter still means I need to function as if I have free will.

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