If that bothers you, you can just think of a time crystal which perpetually oscillates between two states chucked into a rotating black hole, such that you jump in after it and meet it at the Malament-Hogarth event—where an infinite amount of time has elapsed on the worldline of the time crystal. The same issues apply there.
But really, the point of the thought experiment isn’t to say that such states of affairs are possible, it’s to point out that if they were, there are systems that must be in some definite state, where what state that is must be independent of the system’s history. That’s how this sort of thing connects to randomness: a way to generate (true, as opposed to pseudo-) randomness is by finding a way to decide the question of whether a given Turing machine halts, which you can do with the sort of setup Thomson’s lamp represents. So in this sense, everybody who posits that the universe contains randomness, posits that it contains processes equivalent to this.
Both linked concepts are beyond my comprehension. I don’t see how time crystals (a system in perpetual motion, thus performing no work; but also with constant internal energy; thus in equilibrium with it’s surroundings) could survive being looked at, much less being chucked into a black hole. From what I’m reading you have to actively drive a time crystal, with lasers or microwaves and thus non-equilibrium, so it radiates energy and can’t exist in perpetuity.
Second, I don’t understand how I can ever meet up with something by jumping into a black hole after it.
This is effectively asking whether infinity is odd or even, which frankly doesn’t make sense mathematically. In order to make it appear solvable you’ve transformed the time axis to map an infinite number of switches into a finite time but that is doesn’t actually change the problem in any meaningful way.
You might as well just say you have a light switch that turns off an on once a second, and then ask what is the final state of the switch, after an infinite time.
Ah, okay. I was about to say that I would suspect that, if there is an answer, I’d expect that the lamp would be in a superposition of both on and off. It would be alternating infinitely fast, and that means both states exist at once. As such, you have a random result. It’s cool that was the point of the thought experiment.
But the term I used there would seem to mean the thought experiment was unnecessary, at least with what we know today. All you’d need to observe is that randomness exists in the quantum world, which becomes probabilistic rather than deterministic. The mind runs on electricity, which means it uses electrons, and electrons have probabilistic properties. So that would seem to be your source of randomness.
That has, in fact, been what I’ve proposed before as a means by which consciousness might not be entirely deterministic.
The whole quantum physics and real world infinities aren’t my area of expertise. The mind, however, I do know a little more about. And it doesn’t run on electrons. It runs on two gradients, of sodium and potassium ions across the cell membrane. There are also various proteins that maintain that gradient and allow for diffusion of those ions across the cell membrane when certain voltages occur. For communication across synapses it runs on various larger molecules such as acetylcholine and serotonin and their receptors, which are again large protein molecules. AFAIK even the smallest of those, the sodium ions, are way too large to be a source of randomness via quantum level effects.
But perfectly amenable to other randomness e.g. pedesis. Well, more the larger molecules, I mean. There is a certain amount of randomness inherent in whether the protein is going to hit this receptor or that one.
Brownian Motion isn’t truly random, though. It appears random to us because it’s a chaotic system and we can never truly know the exact location and velocity of every single particle in the initial condition, but if you somehow DID have all of that information you could predict the outcome at any time in the future. Compare that to quantum processes which are not just unknown, they are unknowable.
You can not have all that information. You can never have it all.
Partly because some of those particle-particle interactions are quantum processes. Molecules aren’t clusters of elastic billiard balls, they’re interacting probability clouds that can only be modeled statistically, not directly observed in terms of position and velocity of all their components, the way you’re stating. And at that scale, whether an electron is here or therematters for an individual atom-to-atom interaction.
And partly because that “somehow” is unobtainable in the real universe because of other introduced uncertainties (e.g. observer effect). They are just as unknowable in real terms as the quantum processes.
Yes there is no clear cut line between quantum and non-quantum, its all a continuum. The the smaller that particle the larger the relative quantum effect, and in truly chaotic systems the small quantum effects can mean the difference between ending up in one state or the other. But in terms. statistically modeling Brownian motion to account for overall levels of uncertainty regarding the state and progression of the system, unknown variability of the system classical effects of not knowing within plus or minus a hundred percent what the position and velocity of each individual particle on a practical level massively outweighs any slight unknowable difference in the elasticity of the collisions.
So long story short even if there is quantum effects going on, the model of the system is purely classical.
I’ve never been convinced by any of the attempts to use QM to explain consciousness or free will. I think it relies on a combination of a misunderstanding of what it means to be an observer in the double slit experiment, bolstered a faulty logic that since we can’t fully explain either consciousness or QM, they could be related.
Every source I know of calls it either a random or stochastic process. Let’s start with the most easily available, and now you can cite one that says it isn’t.
NO-ONE can know it. Because there is true randomness involved.
…is where you admit true determinism doesn’t actually exist. Brownian motion can only be modeled statistically, it is literally impossible to know the position and velocity of every component involved, even if you were uniquely privileged observer - some randomness is inherent at that level. Not just a chaotic system, which doesn’t break determinism, but true randomness. Hence unknowable.
I’m not using QM to explain free will. I’m only using it to explain why determinism is bunk. And I was only using the observer effect to refer to the real-world impossibility of resolving larger-scale uncertainties, not QM ones.
Even if it wasn’t bunk, the free will I subscribe to (free will as free agency) would still be there.
Everything is affected by QM, there’s no “faulty logic” in examining the possible effects in any physical science field. We weren’t really discussing consciousness, but brain neurochemistry, a physical science. Someone else brought up chemical gradients as though they were absolutely just Classic Mechanics. But they’re not. They’re stochastic processes, and we model them best that way. The literature on modeling gradients and neural networks is replete with “Markov Chain” and “Monte Carlo”…God doesn’t play dice, he plays roulette, apparently.
This isn’t a “we” problem. Uncertainty of position/momentum is a “universe” problem, it’s not a problem of our inability to precisely observe, but a problem of the preciseness itself not existing.
It isn’t so much that we don’t know the exact location and velocity of every particle, it’s that the exact location and velocity of every particle does not exist.
Right, but doesn’t that effect disappear for all practical purposes at larger scales? And aren’t things the size of sodium and potassium ions large enough that they are large scale for QM purposes, much less a huge protein like a sodium-potassium ATPase pump with thousands of carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and hydrogen atoms?
But again there are different sources of stochasticness that work on different scales and have different levels of effect. Say I have a cup of water and asked if I grabbed a water molecule out of that cup what would its velocity be. Well we don’t know, there is too much randomness in the system to come up with an answer. but a physicist could measure the temperature of the coffee, do some calculations and say that its velocity is generally centered around 600 m/sec with a standard deviation of say generally centered around 600 m/sec with a standard deviation of say 100m/sec. I can also ask that same physicist what is the variability in position and velocity due to QM effects and he will probably come back with a value distribution with a standard deviation somewhere south of 10^-10 m/sec. So almost all of the unknown variability in the particles motion comes from garden variety, “we just happen not to know” rather than the QM unknowable.
Right, they would be giving you the statistical properties of the group of molecules, not the specific information about the individual molecules.
This seems to completely ignore chaos theory. The particles may be “knowable” to an certain accuracy at a given moment. But, if you then want to see how the system evolves in the future, your prediction will get further and further from observation, as those tiny inaccuracies build up.
Just because the unknowable parts of their velocity are small doesn’t mean that they can be simply ignored.
Even randomness is not a mechanism for choice. Furthermore, in a block universe there is no passage of time either the future, present, and past all coexist. To have real choice seems to require something supernatural.
That doesn’t follow from QM, though. Bohmian mechanics is completely equivalent in terms of observations, yet deterministic—hence, everything in QM is compatible with determinism.