As you may know (hopefully, since you’re the one who first touted the theory in this thread) the many-worlds interpretation renders QE fully local. Of course, I expect you to walk that back and jump to defending a different, incompatible, QM model, as that seems to be your pattern in the thread.
Your inconsistency. Which still stands.
I take it you’re a theoretical physicist, then, able to declare probabilities so easily…of course, being incompatible, it’s a certainty one of them is wrong at least. That’s some good sciencing, there!
In other words, because it was convenient for your argument…
To quote Wiki (as I’m sure you’ve already read):“The present status is that no conclusive, loophole-free Bell test has been performed”
Oh, and as a bonus:
“Bell himself considered absolute determinism an implausible solution.”
I have no idea why you keep bringing up things that undermine your own position.
No, they’re not. Fallacy of composition.
Yeah, that’s not an answer to the question
Neither is any statement that begins with as much weaseling as ‘Suppose, for instance, I were to define “God”’, in any way, your explicit definition for God. But OK, let’s suppose that counts as you explicitly giving us your definition of the God you’re agnostic about - is that really the definition you want to use for the rest of this thread? The frigging Prime Mover? You care to explain how that meets the “rational” criterion? Or the “scientifically compatible” one?
Or how you can create something without interacting with it, in a supposedly fully causal and deterministic Multiverse?
The theory that I brought up was De Broglie-Bohm, a theory notably distinguished by the fact that it explicitly requires non-locality. Everettian many-worlds is regarded as a local theory but what does that have to do with anything? QE only ever came up because you thought it would be a good way to attack De Broglie-Bohm, but unfortunately for your argument, it’s mainstream QM. Your comment is perplexing and seems quite incoherent, but if I’m not understanding you, please explain.
Yes, it’s a common reason for bringing things up in these sorts of discussions.
Hmmmm… both misleading and irrelevant at the same time, double points for that one! Misleading because, if you read a little further, the “loopholes” were different in different experiments, and for all of them to produce the same results would require a really unlikely conspiracy of nature. But more importantly, it has absolutely no bearing on anything I said. What I said was that the predictions of De Broglie-Bohm are consistent with experimental results (for instance, these results by Alain Aspect et al.). What I said was correct.
Bell was clearly talking about “absolute determinism”, an obvious reference to universal superdeterminism. Read the full quote and discussion at the link. Did you really not know that, or are you doing this deliberately?
You’re not getting my point. One of the most powerful concepts in all of science is unification – the recognition that apparently different phenomena are actually different manifestations of the same thing. It may or may not be true that some entirely different phenomenon – or, according to your claim, no causality at all – is responsible for triggering the decay of a single atom while its physical structure very precisely determines the statistical decay rate of a large number of them. Theories of quantum determinism suggest that it isn’t true. There’s no proof either way. Therefore your claim that radioactive decay is proof that “causality is a fiction” is stated without basis, and presenting such a claim as a proven fact is just plain wrong. Period.
Sure. It isn’t irrational, and it isn’t scientifically incompatible. Most gods of traditional religion fail this test.
First, there is no presumption of knowledge about the physical laws of the multiverse, if the concept of such laws can even be considered meaningful. Second, I see no contradiction between creating an entity and not meddling with its autonomous evolution. This is effectively what we do every time we write and then run a simulation.
Yes, I know this - you brought it up, I countered with it being silly because of its nonlocality, you reply that that means QE (which I do not dispute) and I counter with the fact that there are other explanations for QE that don’t require non-locality, the implication being that DB-B continues to be silly.
Ask the guy who first brought Many Worlds up in this thread…
Yes - only, usually people show some consistency in the explanations they advocate, they don’t just toss out whatever competing QM explanation fits the current topic, and then advance the contradicting model when that suits them.
If you think DB is an answer for anything, you have to disavow your earlier appeals to Copenhagen and Many Worlds. That’s what consistency means.
Who cares? You were the one who was advancing Bell experiments like they settled anything. Exactly the opposite, they leave as many questions as they answer anything.
Experimental results with loopholes - that’s meaningless for actually settling anything. So technically correct, but bullshit, all the same.
I know that’s what he’s talking about - and Superdeterminism is just Bell’s term for exactly the sort of causal determinism you’re advocating - the kind that supposedly lies behind radioactive decay and the like, the determiner “outside space and time”. The kind that noncausality renders superfluous to requirements.
The stochastic nature of radioactive decay is a fact. Unless you’re just throwing all of QM under the bus in one go now, rather than piece by piece?
:rolleyes: Truly, an awe-inspiring explanation, majestic in its breadth and depth…
So you’re fine for the Multiverse to be non-deterministic?
Never said there was. Doesn’t answer the question…
Groundless bullshit accusations. I mentioned Copenhagen and Everett in specific, appropriate contexts, none of which contexts had anything to do with whether I happened to endorse them or not. Copenhagen only came up because you imagined you had some sort of gotcha in pointing out that Schrodinger’s cat paradox was actually put forward as a criticism, so it was fair for me to say sure, it was a criticism of Copenhagen, but the Copenhagen interpretation came to be widely accepted. And I mentioned many-worlds to drive home the fact that if one accepts it, then not only does Schrodinger’s thought experiment fail to illustrate a paradox in mainstream QM, but the simultaneous dead and alive paradox can be considered to have a physical reality in the Everett multiverse, which is quite an interesting point. That was all I said about them and if I said anything that could be construed as “inconsistent” then please point it out.
Completely aside from that, you do also realize that it’s reasonable in a discussion about controversial phenomena with competing theories to actually mention some of them, right?
No, I don’t think you do know. He means something much more specific. Pay attention to this statement (from my earlier link on superdeterminism):
Although [Bell] acknowledged the loophole [of superdeterminism], he also argued that it was implausible. Even if the measurements performed are chosen by deterministic random number generators, the choices can be assumed to be “effectively free for the purpose at hand,” because the machine’s choice is altered by a large number of very small effects. It is unlikely for the hidden variable to be sensitive to all of the same small influences that the random number generator was.
This statement seemed to me to be so central that I wanted to be sure that Wikipedia got it right, and I checked his original paper, Free Variables and Local Causality, Epistemological Letters, Feb 1977. And that is indeed what he’s saying. I have the relevant excerpt but it’s a bit long to post here.
Superdeterminism is a term coined by Bell himself (AFAIK, for the first time in that BBC interview) as a sort of straw man that, if true, would explain the entanglement results of the EPR experiments, by asserting that the states of the particles and the measurement choices made by the experimenters were all predetermined in advance. That would eliminate the difficult problem of how one particle “communicates” instantaneously with the other. It’s synonymous with the philosophical position that everything in the universe is predetermined and there’s no free will. Bell was skeptical that the latter could be the case, and argues in the quote above that even in a deterministic universe the cumulative influence of “small effects” – the essential argument from chaos theory – would still allow us to make apparently free choices.
In short, the core of his argument in that paper is the even in a fully deterministic universe, chaotic effects would allow sufficient free variables in the settings of the measurement instruments at the two locations that the non-locality theorem of QM follows, just as in De Broglie-Bohm.
Which has no bearing at all on whether any particular process, including the one we’re discussing, is deterministic or not. Of course if there’s something I’m misunderstanding, I would welcome any clarification.
It’s also a completely irrelevant fact in this context. Saying it’s “stochastic” is a statistical observation about the output that says nothing about the underlying process. The nature of the underlying process is, at present, unknown. If and when it becomes known, it may identify a causality. Since you can’t rule that out, your claim that there is factually no causality is bunk.
Yes, thank you, it was elegantly short and sweet, giving the objection exactly the argument it deserves.
To be a Gnostic, if I parse the idea accurately, (and ignoring for the moment the notion that you have to somehow fit in with any of the ancient groups calling themselves “Gnostic”), you do not believe anything you do not “know” (gnosis) to be true. Knowlege in this sense is not defined as or constrained by our notions of scientific method, positivism, repeatability of experimentation, the necessity of measurable quantifiable elements, etc, but it definitely rules out believing a bunch of shit that you did not personally derive from your own experience in some fashion.
Therefore it also strips you of the imaginary authority that believers embrace as the excuse for feeling certain of what they believe. Nope, it’s all on you and your interpretation of your experience. At best God personally told you some stuff but on some level maybe that happened and maybe you only think that happened, you dig what I’m saying? No holy book no holy anointed truth-speaker nothing of that sort to hide behind.
Agnosticism (with the A) is a cop-out. You can’t effectively live your life going around shrugging and saying “I don’t know” about things that count in life. You have to make some choices about what you’re going to treat as ‘true’, even if just provisionally while you continue to contemplate the matter. And once you’ve done that, you’re a gnostic.
My point precisely - and thereby hangs the whole argument - I’m not asking you for a theoretical overview of possible frameworks, I’m asking you for your definition of God. So jumping from one contradictory model to another in your answers gets us nowhere.
In short, his argument is that he loved free will so much he was willing to embrace contradictions, I know. But the kind of Universe his strawman envisions (And it is implausible, I agree with Bell here) is the deterministic universe you propose, where even quantum effects are purely deterministic. Where nothing is truly random. I’m not saying Superdeterminism is defined as being what you propose, I’m saying what you propose is functionally identical to the Universe of Superdeterminism. And DB-B doesn’t claim to be able to predict the timing of radioactive decay…
Bell’s solution is to introduce the seeming randomness of chaotic effects - but chaos is not random, and isn’t an answer for why randomness exists.
It says everything about the underlying process - that it’s inherently unpredictable. That it’s not a failure of knowledge.
QM seems to have a pretty good handle on the underlying process, and it’s QM that says it’s unpredictable. So it’d only become unknown if QM is wholly overturned.
Only if QM is wholly overturned.
But I do, as I see no reason to toss out QM
So you are, in fact, willing to throw QM under the bus. And here you were arguing so passionately for Heisenberg earlier…
I wouldn’t say “elegantly” or “sweet”. No non-answer to a straightforward question is elegant. The thing that was awe-inspiring about its breadth and depth was the total lack thereof. It’s the level of discourse of a two-year old “Why?” “Because!”. I understand that the Prime Mover God is indefensible on any rational, scientific basis, but you didn’t even try.
It’s too bad that you’ve become so obsessed with this bogus tangent that you’ve now not only moved the goalposts, you have removed them from the field entirely and transported them to the planet Neptune. And it’s too bad because there are elements of this discussion that could be really interesting if approached without this kind of personal invective (my apologies, though, if I contributed to it). It seemed to escalate from your claim that I don’t understand the difference between determinism and causality and then to the claim that I’m throwing around contradictory QM theories in some kind of ill-informed confusion. Jesus H. Christ on a pogo-stick! Once again and for the third time, I mentioned several different QM theories in response to specific things you claimed, that’s all. And NONE of them were in relation to the God-definition question, which I dealt with separately. So cut it out, OK?
The linkage between QM and the God discussion was brought up by you and was all started by your bogus claim in #144 that “particle decay and quantum vacuum fluctuations give the lie to universal causality”. Which is a questionable, unproven claim, and it’s just simply bogus to claim it as being established fact.
John Bell wasn’t quite so simple-minded or self-contradictory as you claim, but that’s getting well beyond the scope of this discussion and I’d rather focus right now on the salient point that started all this, your original claim about causality being a “fiction”, in my response below.
Completely wrong and a completely a futile line of argument, for several different reasons. First, nothing in it disproves my hypothesis that the process that triggers decay is the same process – driven by natural laws and the dynamics of the atomic structure – that determines the well-defined statistical decay rate. If this turns out to be true, of course we still wouldn’t be able to predict the exact moment of decay of a particular atom because we won’t have the necessary information, but we could do the following: build a model of an individual atom according to this understanding, run the simulation millions of times, and thereby accurately infer the element’s half-life from fundamental causality. Such a model would be fundamentally causally deterministic. The conclusion here is: unknowability (about the detailed state of a particular system) doesn’t preclude causality.
Second, suppose that atomic decay is not due solely the isolated dynamics of the atom, but is influenced by complex external factors. In that case the decay process might be regarded as stochastic at the quantum level. So what? Does that preclude causality? You’d have a hard time convincing the editors and contributors of this book. The fact is that there are lots of things like that in the familiar classical world: financial markets and weather systems are often considered to be stochastic processes, but no one would claim that they lack causality. Global climate models represent regional climates below some threshold of spatial resolution stochastically (else we would have an infinite regression of computational detail requiring infinitely powerful computers), yet no one claims they are truly random and without causation, and maybe right across the hall another group might be working on regional models doing physics-based simulations of exactly the same processes.
The description of a process as probabilistic rather than deterministic is nothing more than a reflection of the amount of information we have about it. Which gets us to exactly the same conclusion as the first case, above. One might even acknowledge that the external factors affecting any given instance of radioactive decay may be complex indeed; the non-locality of De Broglie-Bohm posits interactions that may involve the entire universe. Yet DB-B is explicitly deterministic and is sometimes known as “the causal interpretation of QM”.
TL;DR version: your continued assertion that radioactive decay “proves” that “causality is a fiction” is nonsense.
I would never base a theological conclusion on it…but it was my understanding, too, that quantum uncertainty meant that the time at which an atom decays is absolutely random, and not measurable or predictable, even in abstract theory. The “information” – the “expiration date” so to speak – isn’t written down anywhere, or even to be found in the totality of the environment. The protons and neutrons have unpredictable positions, and every once in a while, enough of them will be far enough from the others to permit spontaneous fission to take place.
Again, what this could possibly have to do with theology, I can’t begin to imagine.
the connection with theology was the claim by MrDibble that “universal causality is a fiction”, which is an unsubstantiated claim
the supposed non-determinism of quantum states – and specifically the apparent randomness of so-called quantum collapse, if such a thing even has a physical reality – is extremely controversial and is in part a problem of interpretation that lies at the intersection of QM and philosophy. For any practical purpose, radioactive decay is most certainly “random” for any given element or particle, but that tells us nothing about the underlying fundamentals – or about potential future discoveries.
Wrong. It’s not a failure of information - we can never have sufficient information to predict the decay instant. That’s the whole point.
What is “fundamental causality”, please? And how does it explain violating the contiguity requirement?
No, it wouldn’t. If you are “fundamentally” unable to predict a specific event, even with all possible knowledge, it is “fundamentally” not.
Yes, it does. Once again - causality doesn’t just mean the system has a cause, it means every event has a proximate cause, and for the timing of radioactive decay, there’s no such thing you can pin down. Even more so for VFs.
You seem to be saying because we know why atoms decay, that gets us out of having to say when. But it doesn’t, not if we want to preserve causality. But it isn’t the probabalistic decay that’s an event for the purposes of causality, it’s the specific instant of decay. And that’s inherently random.
I haven’t asserted that’s the case, so this is all irrelevant.
All you’ve proved is that I was right, and you don’t understand what causality actually means.
But that still wouldn’t apply to the Big Bang, which had no proximate cause.
(Now, sure, some people have said that the Big Bang is “God,” but it’s totally impersonal and lacks most of the useful qualities of a god.)
Absolute determinism might undermine “free will” – but since it wouldn’t remove the illusion of free will, it wouldn’t change much, even if scientifically proven. We’d still have to act as if we were making decisions about our lives.
It just doesn’t seem much relevant; you can’t use either determinism or randomness to demonstrate a “personal” God, let alone a creator spirit who sent his son to die in Jerusalem. There doesn’t seem to be any meat on this bone!
No, true. You can only use randomness/lack of determinism to eliminate certain definitions of God. Personal Gods fail all sort of other tests, that one isn’t necessary.
well i do. he’s completely fictional; only exists in a book. never been seen outside it by sensible people. and nor could he. he’s not described well enough in that book so that any two or more un-indoctrinated people could agree with certainty that they had indeed seen/experienced that very character.
When you say the word ‘God’, or ‘god’, you’re not referring to an abstract idea of just any god, but rather the earthly definitions thereof; ie omnipresent, omnipotent, omni-anything, who created the universe or runs the universe or watches over us or anything like that; whatever version it is of that god, they don’t exist. There is no god who created anything because this is not how anything works. I have evidence: a can of tuna has gone through multiple processes and tasks until it reached me, and similarly every stone is a product of the accumulation of minerals and weather conditions over thousands of years, and so is every mountain, every star, every bird, and every human being. It didn’t happen once, nor has it been proved once, in the history of mankind that anything was created out of the blue, or suddenly materialized out of nowhere. Everything that exists or has ever existed or will ever exist is the result of time, effort and processes. Therefore, I know for sure that there is no god by our earthly definitions; I am definitely not an agnostic or skeptic when it comes to that.
You can’t say: since I haven’t seen a purple elephant with nineteen ears that lives in Japan, I can’t rule out the possibility that it exists. Well, you sure can, because there are no purple elephant with nineteen ears.
I don’t know if there’s any other queer version of a god out there, such as a non-sentient cluster of stars that somehow have physical authority over the universe, but in such case it wouldn’t be a god, because a god is concept inherent to planet Earth.
So yes. I’m not skeptical about this, and I have reserved no space in my brain for such belief under any conditions, because if I did, I’ll have to check my pocket every two minutes to make sure that my cellphone hasn’t desolidified into seafood soup.
Yes, you did. You said the exact opposite just a few posts previous! When I said in #176, in reference to why atoms decay vs. when they decay, that “They are the same question”, you responded “No, they’re not. Fallacy of composition.”
Make up your friggin mind. And you accuse me (without basis) of being inconsistent just because I mention several different QM theories!
For the sake of brevity, I’m going to frame my response in reference to this as I think this encapsulates your whole failed argument and the rest is just filler.
I have never argued that the unknowability of the quantum state isn’t fundamental. It is. You may well say that’s the point, but it doesn’t address my point at all. My argument is whether that answers and ends the discussion about the underlying nature of QM. It does not, and indeed it’s the formulation of the most basic question of all. The real question is whether the quantum behaviors that are accessible to our observations and described by our equations define an ultimate reality, as the traditional Copenhagen interpretation would have it, or whether there is a deeper underlying reality, the kind that Bohmian mechanics hints at, and secondarily whether that underlying reality is causally deterministic. More formally, the question is whether a description of QM is to be regarded as epistemological or ontological, and, by extension, whether reality is therefore to be defined by the limits of knowability or whether it has an independent existence.
This can’t be dismissed as a meaningless or entirely abstract philosophical argument. I submit that there may be dramatic evidence to the contrary, notably the example of quantum computers. If we can build practical versions of quantum computers with any kind of significant capacity, we’d be dealing with some truly counterintuitive manifestations – a single chip, for instance, that has hundreds or millions of times greater computing power than the resources that are seen to be physically present, or that has more storage states than there are particles in the entire universe. Shor’s algorithm describes a way that a quantum computer could find the prime factors of an enormously large number, such that the computing resources required could greatly exceed the capacity of the whole of physical reality. At this point I think epistemological interpretations of QM would become rather moot.
If you really know the fundamental nature of QM with such absolute certainty as you’ve just described, then you are a wiser man than I, or anyone who has ever lived. It’s not your basic facts that are wrong, it’s the conclusions you derive from them.
I’m willing to be agnostic about lesser gods, small-g entities, like Zeus or Odin, or maybe Q from Star Trek. Powerful enough to compel human worship – powerful enough to reprogram our brains to mandate our faith – but not “Creation Class” entities, since those simply cannot exist. The concept is self-contradictory.
There’s just barely room for an “embedded universe” or “Sim” concept, where the Creator lives in a higher-level cosmos, and our entire cosmos is a creation embedded in that cosmos. Just as we can play Sim City, so this massive meta-person is playing Sim-Cosmos.
But in that case, 1) this person is not a “God,” but just a programmer. He isn’t using “miracles” but only the natural laws of his own, higher-level cosmos.
And, 2) where did he come from? Is it “higher cosmoses all the way up?” At some point there has to be a topmost level, and there, the concept of creator has to fall flat. The topmost level guy has to have come about by non-intelligent, non-designed processes.
Seems clear to me that efforts to define “God” (or force someone else to) don’t ever go very far, in spite of yielding impressive page counts.
My Contribution To the Topic:
If it helps, I think the core idea is something to do with purpose or intent: Did the universe just happen, or is it happening because some force/being/consciousness/plate of spaghetti/unicorn intended for it to happen. At least, that’s how I tend to think about the question. Which doesn’t even scratch the surface of deeper questions, like “What does the spaghetti taste like?”
Optional Bonus Information:
Based on that logic, if someone asks, I would say I am agnostic, because I simply have no idea whether the universe exists “on purpose” or represents a mere random event. (If God exists and He has a plan, I’m not convinced that it is a good one.) Besides, the atheists act too much like angry religious people for me to want to be in their club. However, I acknowledge that listening to religious people can inspire a lot of frustration. I try to tell myself that they can’t help it that they suck at rational thought. Most of the time, my life is better if I ignore them, instead of arguing with them. And their lives are WAY more tranquil.
If there is a God, I have no doubts that said entity has nothing whatsoever to do with any of the world’s organized religions. Beyond that, I quit spending much time pondering the existence or non-existence of God some time ago. While I’m willing to posit the possibility that something/someone created the universe “on purpose”, I’m not willing to waste much time on the idea until someone suggests a believable motive.
So, strictly speaking “agnostic”, but not “God-curious”. I think we need a word for that.
And it’s too bad because there are elements of this discussion that could be really interesting if approached without this kind of personal invective (my apologies, though, if I contributed to it). It seemed to escalate from your claim that I don’t understand the difference between determinism and causality and then to the claim that I’m throwing around contradictory QM theories in some kind of ill-informed confusion. Jesus H. Christ on a pogo-stick! Once again and for the third time, I mentioned several different QM theories in response to specific things you claimed, that’s all. And NONE of them were in relation to the God-definition question, which I dealt with separately. So cut it out, OK?