From a brief stint in Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superdeterminism), Superdeterminism looks like it better satisfies Ockhams' Razor than the standard QM interpretation. All we have to give up is free will, and why should science try to defend that?
The problem isn't so much the lack of free will (that's accomplished by plain old determinism), but by the extraordinary lengths that the universe has to go through in order to make the super part happen.
In a Bell test experiment, it's not just that the outcomes were predetermined, but that the brains of two experimenters, and their experimental setups, were configured in a very precise way to make them choose measurements that would yield compatible results. That is, it's not so much that you didn't really get to make a choice, but that it took such a complicated configuration in order to bring about a fairly simple result.
And since you can't know the entire configuration of a brain, you've really just replaced the randomness with a mystery box. Instead of "John chose freely to set the experiment to up/down", all you get is "John was fated from the beginning of time to set the experiment to up/down -- a thing I learned by watching John set the experiment to up/down". Instead of randomness or free will, all you get is a sage nod after the fact, "Yes, so was it foreordained in the before-times."
It's not impossible. I'm not even really sure it's implausible. It's just that it doesn't seem to inform anything.
Layman here, but one thing I never understood: if we are to believe everything occurred started in a Big Bang, then why shouldn't we expect everything in the universe to be entangled quantum-mechanically? I feel like I'd be surprised if that weren't the case.
Entanglement is not a stable mode for particles afaik, it takes effort not to break apart. Note that it's not limited to two particles, so you have a point, but the effects would be vastly more limited in time, at least in the first degree of causality.
If you however mean that any entire observable universe¹, if cosmic super-inflation is true, must be causally related and thus "pre"-determined, which may be qualified as "super"-determined in a way, then I agree (layman too).
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[1]: Should we keep -c² as the metric of spacetime, i.e. no causality beyond the light boundary (function of time, in space).
Isn't it more accurate to say that isolated entanglement is not stable?
Basically any interaction with some other particle causes that particle to become entangled as well, and so you very easily get "avalanches" of entanglement that spread at the speed of light.
As soon as the avalanches reaches "the observer", the observer themselves become entangled with the originally entangled particle, which means that from their perspective it looks as though they no longer are. This is similar to conditional probabilities.
The math says so (and the math is right¹), but how we interpret it is another story entirely.
To get back on the example of dices: we might be building a whole storytelling around "probabilistic dices" because we haven't formalized the concept of the hand behind, yet.
I've always pictured entanglement as totally acceptable if you postulate an extra dimension. Then you simply have to picture a link in that extra dimension between the particles, like a 'U' crossing flatland in two 'dots' (particles) would manifest as 'entanglement' for the flatlanders.
But I've really grown skeptical of all such interpretations now (mine very much included), I'd tell you honestly that I probably favor the one that seems most beautiful to me within the space of possibilities (which is what I care about and investigate, the pure science). Interpretation is belief, basically, even if your name is Schrödinger.
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[1]: Even if eventually found to be partial as the article suggests, I think it's fair to assume any "new" quantum theory would be to QED/QCD what General Relativity was to Newton's equations of motion: precisely a generalization from which to derive Newton for small-ish quantities. Ergo, we can assume QM is 'True'.
That kind of entanglement doesn't really explain the Bell test results.
Entanglement is unstable, and easily swamped. It doesn't go away, but it becomes a very small factor in things. If I had two entangled electrons, and added them to two coins, the two coins are now entangled. But if I flip them, I don't expect the results to be significantly correlated. The classical behavior of the coins massively swamps the entanglement.
So even if you and I were performing a Bell test experiment, and know that the atoms of your brain are somehow entangled to the atoms of mine dating back to the origin of the universe, it's still unreasonable to expect that to lead us to set up the equipment in such a way as to preserve the correlations between two entangled particles in our experiment. There's just too much brain matter, and too much has happened to it from the beginning of the universe until now, for that entanglement to make a difference.
Thanks for the reply! So what I don't understand is, in your explanation, you appear to tacitly assume the rest of the brain matter is (in some sense, maybe statistically) "[mostly] independent" from the electrons we're measuring. As if, maybe they were behaving independently before, and only now have become a teeny tiny epsilon bit entangled due to the entangled electrons they're interacting with. But I don't understand what this assumption is based on; it seems to directly contradict the Big Bang idea. Presumably we all came from the same Big Bang, and were all completely entangled with each other at that point, with everything tied directly to everything else. Why should it be that after the particles got away from each other, this would stop being the case? I just don't understand. To me, if literally everything in the universe was entangled at some point, it will be forever—to my understanding, there's no way to "reduce" entanglement unless you have a source of particles with "less" entanglement to interact with, right? Which I understand would not be the case in this universe, because everything would be fully entangled with everything else.
That seems to follow from determinism... if the universe is deterministic then everything must align exactly in such a way that if you simulated the universe it would be identical every time.
It's not just that you get repeated results, but that the repeated results will be correlated to non-local results. In ordinary determinism every interaction can be explained purely by local stuff; the further something is, the less it matters. In this case a very far object has an unlikely effect, which can be achieved only by constructing a Rube Goldberg path for it to get to a particular state.
In many ways, superdeterminism is a sort of intuition that most ‘physicalistic’ minds would come up with, as a thought experiment. This sort of ultimate inter-connectedness is but generalization of reductionism after all.
But speaking of this today, knowing what we know (more like what we don't), and the formidable extent of our reach into and grasp of the cosmos (none, in the big picture)... I don't know. It's like the Ancients talking of "atoms". Sure, they had the right idea... but from there it would take another 2,000 years to actually hone in on the concept — and consider that thousands of years of civilization and history already preceded these people. It's neither preposterous to think we're millennias away from some discoveries, nor yet to firmly believe we'll get there, eventually.
Science problems aren't solved quickly by a biological species... I don't know that we can speak of "failure" when it's just been one century of milder fundamental discoveries but a slew of practical applications (still unfolding) of the current paradigm.
It doesn't just take a problem to crack the next paradigm in science, it also requires the incentive, at a civilizational / societal level, to push through to it. It rarely if ever took less than a century, because it takes the biological maturing of adult human beings to actually crack it, and typically 2-3-4 generations more so than 1/2 in-between Twitter and HN. (I'm being funny, not sarcastic here — we're all human, so chill the doom-and-gloom talk, that's my point).
In a very real sense, I feel like superdeterminism is pure metaphysics as we speak; could maybe become science by the year 4,000, give or take 1,900... Oh History, you chaotic brat...
I love the idea though.
(-skip!- Comment over. Below is me rambling about personal ideas with little to no sci value, most likely; have fun at your own risk).
It's actually somehow embedded in how I explain dark matter halos and galaxy rotations, as all being but 1 heterogenous object whose 'kernel', a supermassive blackhole, has more than enough oomph to justify just about any phenomenon —literally breaks spacetime-gravity! I mean, isn't it obvious that "a weird¹ gravitational halo" and "just about the biggest gravitational object known to the cosmos" happen to come in perfect pairs cutely called "galaxies" (like we'd call boats mere "sails" or even "triangles" on the ocean because we can't see better, or is it figure of speech). For a cool image, a galaxy is like an egg, with a disc-like yolk and a black hole in the middle. Egg shell = DM.
It's cool to think about such topics. It must be profoundly inspiring to actually work on such ideas. I just think it requires this humble reverence for time. I don't know how real it is, but it sure means we can't do now nor ever before its time any future event in the series, A or B regardless. New physics may have to wait...
Now meanwhile, we was promised flying cars 30 years ago. Can we talk about how superdeterminism solves our problem? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
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[1] think about it: both DM and BH "break" light as we know it with every other object (photons either pass through or can't escape); the insane gravitational effects (can't imagine DM doesn't "feel" the black hole and reciprocally, these are not limited in distance...); the singularity of having such pairs of DM + BH in pretty much every galaxy, or should we say that every galaxy is "inside" such a combo; and yeah it helps that both are unsolved problems thus perhaps requiring "new physics" to solve. I feel like both problems are but one and the same and solved by an extension of GR/QM to some degree (not necessarily unification, GUT or ToE, that might come much later or never). Anyhow just random thoughts gathered along the years. Now I wish this were my actual line of work... :)
Free will is a terrible name for it, and arguably inherently contradictory, like "involuntary fasting": it's a synonym for an uncaused cause.
What's lost in the process of burning that strawman, is that we can't ever have perfect knowledge of our environment or our nervous systems; and in a seeming paradox of determinism, a being who believes they have agency will behave differently than one who does not. Even if one accepts the model that we merely rationalize our subconscious choices (an imperfect model with some non-zero truth), the data from the outcome of that choice still feed into one's neural network and influence future choices, making the "free will software stack" a potentially valuable psycho-technology.
As a practical matter, I'm intrigued by the model that what we experience as consciousness, and the feeling of agency, really only has one knob to turn: what tiny fraction of our massive neural information network we orient the spotlight of our attention towards. That singular "decision" point, navigating what Buddhist cognitive scientist John Vervaeke calls the "salience landscape", has incredible potency on its own, iterated moment after moment for the entirety of a human lifespan.
"the data from the outcome of that choice still feed into one's neural network and influence future choices"
It seems to me that any time you have a process that feeds the output into the input, then you can easily have a divergence of trajectory whose precision exceeds anything that could be explicitly stored in a finite universe.
So it seems to me that free will must exist in the sense that a simple system, let alone a brain, can produce information from somewhere that can't come from the limited universe we seem to inhabit. Like, take the Mandelbrot set as a simple proof of concept. It may not have all the things in it that are in the universe, but it seems to have more resolution, more components, than can exist in reality. So if you used it to feed a process, it can add something to the universe as it affects reality.
Superdeterminism requires a ludicrous amount of complexity. It's not a simpler theory, it's a vastly, vastly more complex one.
It implies that the universe is fine tuned to such a degree that everyone who's ever done an experiment which might disprove QM ever arrived at their n-sigma result did so by random chance.
The only way it could make even a lick of sense is if we're living in a simulation, and there's a little green man who's job it is to ensure we never disprove quantum mechanics.
The thing that makes superdeterminism hard to believe is the same thing makes time travel plots where destiny is fixed hard to believe. The level of coincidence and orchestration required to make things play out in just the right way, despite determined humans trying to make them come out another way, becomes ridiculous.
The angle settings in a Bell test can come from basically anywhere. For example, you can point telescopes at opposite sides of the universe, feed the frames into a cryptographic pseudo random number generator, and use the output to decide the angles. For superdeterminism to be true, that would mean the initial state of the universe had to be such that millions of years later billions of stars on opposite sides of the universe would be in just the right configuration to make the SHA1 hash of a picture of them come out in a way that correlated in a simple way with the polarization angle of the photons you were generating locally. And then they'd also correlate for the next one. And the next one. And the next trillion after that. And also it has to be just right for all the other ways you can set up the angle selection.
I won't say it's literally impossible to satisfy that many constraints. There's a lot of degrees of freedom to work with, and only finitely many constraints before heat death. But it seems really really contrived to me. Like explaining why someone has rolled five hundred natural 20s with "Oh that's just how things were always going to play out" instead of "that seems suspicious. Let me see that die."
Superdeterminism means that a hugely macro level decision like which measurement to take is tightly coupled with teeny tiny micro level outcomes. It would mean that the physical predictions are really really complicated. I'd say Occam's Razor points the opposite direction.
Satisfying Occam's Razor is not a necessity, it's more a rule of thumb.
Based on Occam's Razor alone, modern DNN based models are complete garbage because of the amount of complexity involved in their models, yet they still hold useful predictive power.
Sometimes we have to throw out these general rules of thumbs and test the waters outside when we hit walls we can't seem to get around.
Interest and pursuit in the philosophy of science is something too largely brushed aside that, IMHO, needs an adrenaline shot these days. Unfortunately, few want to pursue that work because it doesn't pay the bills.
Totally agree. I was just countering the parent comment that said "occam's razor points this way" with "nah it points the other way." I don't intend to say we necessarily should follow it in either direction.
Because free will is supported by some pretty overwhelming evidence. Every human who has ever lived has had the experience of making a free choice. That experience is every bit as real as the experience of, say, seeing the moon. If you're going to seriously entertain the possibility that there is no free will then you need to be ready to entertain with equal seriousness that the moon does not exist because both are supported by similar bodies of evidence.
What really seems a mirage to me is mistaking free will for unpredictability. That's like saying that your mind needs to be outside the physical world ("a soul") to make "real decisions", which is absurd.
Yes, it is outrageous to claim free will is an illusion. As you point out, it contradicts a huge volume of evidence (our perception). However, a significant proportion of physicists believe free will is an illusion. What possibly could have persuaded such a large number of Earth's greatest skeptics?
The mind consists of different parts. Imagine the act of choosing to eat a strawberry ice cream or a chocolate ice cream. You happen to like chocolate and dislike strawberries. If you could analyze the path electrons follow inside your brain, you could trace, even predict that you will choose chocolate ice cream.
Does it mean that you aren't free? I don't think so.
You might say that you aren't free to like chocolate and dislike strawberries. I'm not convinced either. There were foods I disliked (actually most of them) that I chose to get used to, and finally came to appreciate. So I can make myself freer.
For minor dayly things I may indulge in neurotic behaviours. But I can make most decisions rationally and usually do that when they're important enough for my life. As I grow older I have more control so I'm actually more predictable. Does it means that I'm less free now?
Sure, you are free, but that you is precisely those electrons in "your" brain, nothing more and nothing less. So all there really is is electrons flowing in predictable ways, predictably choosing chocolate or strawberry.
Have you ever written any papers or blog posts regarding your thoughts on free will? I'd love to dig deeper into your perspective. I had assumed you would consider free will to be an illusion.
I do consider free will to be an illusion! But making that argument is far from the slam-dunk that the OP implied, even in the face of quantum mechanics. I don't believe in superdeterminism either. The problem with SD is that it requires all of the information about all future events to reside somewhere now, and there is no known place in the universe where it could be hiding.
There's a lot more where that came from if you're interested.
P.S. I love your handle! I see you created this account for the sole purpose of responding this comment. How did you even find this thread? It has been downvoted into oblivion.
The moon does not exist in the exact same sense that free will does not exist. The moon is a concept that only exists in living minds. From an ultimate perspective there is no moon and there is no free will. This is a straightforward consequence of physicalism.
I think free will is fundamentally a bad term/model, independent of the truth value of what everyone means by that label. That said, I think you might be somewhat conflating free will and consciousness; it's perfectly cogent, for instance, that a provably deterministic robot might have subjective experience; and that after executing each pre-determined binary instruction, would be programmed to have a feeling of "I chose that instruction".
I do think those who have a bias for materialism are overly eager to discard fuzzier subjectivities like free will, consciousness, even religious experiences and mystical states. There is obviously a sense in which Harry Potter is not real; but there is also a sense in which Harry Potter is more real than an arbitrary rock or tree, because as an ephemeral memeplex, that being altered planetary culture and created billions of dollars of economic activity. Just because a phenomenon lacks affordances for empirical measurement does mean it is necessarily absent from reality altogether.
