[whatshisface]

"The Facts" basically say that among the statements, "Your experiment design isn't predestined by the universe to make it accidentally seem like quantum mechanics is true," "the state of the universe today is all you need to know to predict the state of the universe tomorrow," and "an experiment only has one outcome," there is at least one lie. If the first one is a lie that's superdeterminism, the second one the Copenhagen interpretation and the last one Many Worlds. What bothers me about getting philosophical is, philosophers will attempt to choose one or more based on intellectual aesthetic criteria that we developed from the womb onwards in the macroscopic world, while in reality the only legitimate answer is "we don't know." I think that is broadly speaking a problem that hampers the effectiveness of philosophy, there is not enough willingness to say "the present information does not permit a conclusion."

[MiroF]

This comment started out good but then stumbled in to some odd critique of philosophy as being incapable of dealing with unknowable things when indeed that seems to be perfectly within the purview of philosophy.

Humes Problem of Induction, for instance, is exactly an example of philosophical practice grappling with these unanswerables.

[whatshisface]

So, Hume didn't stop ethical philosophers from trying to derive morals, he only stopped some of them. Wittgenstein and Borges didn't stop philosophers from trying to "beat" language games using only language: they only stopped some philosophers. I'm not saying that there aren't visionary heroes who realize that some discussions aren't going to go anywhere for fundamental reasons; instead, I'm highlighting the fact that even when they do, "all of philosophy" almost never reaches a consensus about quitting the debate. In math, when they deduced that the Axiom of Choice was always going to be an axiom, everybody quit looking for ways to confirm or refute it. I think it's a weakness of philosophy that similar things can't happen.

[MiroF]

Hume's problem of induction is not about deriving moral principles (I believe you got it confused with the "is-ought" dichotomy.) Most philosophers have largely given up on giving a rational deductive basis for why we should believe in induction, so if anything that seems to be a perfect example of what you're describing.

I don't think the nature of quantum reality is anywhere near as settled. For decades, we thought that it was impossible to test local hidden-variable theories. Thank god some people were still working on the problem!

[paganel]

I might have read Hume the wrong way, but for me he was one of the few philosophers who basically said “there’s no way for us to know for sure” which can be approximated to “we don’t know”.

My favorite philosopher however remains Heraclitus, had we chosen to go his way we might have had less stupid questions, like “is the cat in the box dead or alive?” and instead we might have straight up came up with the answer “the cat is dead, alive and all the states between dead and alive, and we’re fine with that”. Unfortunately Aristotle was not fine with accepting the many “states” of the world “happening” all at the same time and went for the binary True-False way, bad-mouthing Heraclitus in the process. We certainly did manage to build a more efficient society by following Aristotle’s way but I think we have reached a local maximum, or it certainly looks that way. Maybe reverting to the pre-Socratics will help us go over this local maximum.

[MiroF]

It's terms like "local maxima" that make me realize how useful math knowledge is in conveying easily understandable concepts quickly. I perfectly understood what you meant, but don't think I could convey the concept in less than 10 words without a reference to "local maxima" or being "over-optimized"

[SomeOldThrow]

> Humes Problem of Induction, for instance, is exactly an example of philosophical practice grappling with these unanswerables.

Hume's problem of induction is arguably the last substantial thought on the subject, right up through Popper's bridge problem.

[kerkeslager]

> This comment started out good but then stumbled in to some odd critique of philosophy as being incapable of dealing with unknowable things when indeed that seems to be perfectly within the purview of philosophy.

What does it mean to "deal with" unknowable things in this case? If philosophy is claiming this as their purview, what are they going to do with it? I'd posit philosophers have two options:

1. Say, "I don't know." This is the better option, in my opinion, because it's honest, but scientists already said that, so why do we need philosophers to say the same thing? You can speculate beyond this and posit it from the beginning as "if this thing we don't know is true is true, then it would have this effect". But in other fields this would generally be a very low-value sort of discussion--respectable institutions would not, for example, give a lot of funding to scientific experiments which presuppose unstudied phenomena. You'd study the unstudied phenomenon first and come to conclusions there before moving on to further experiments which presuppose it. Philosophy isn't hurting anything by taking this approach, but it's not adding anything to what science has already done.

2. The second option is, you do what philosophers do all-too-often: simply present your speculation as fact, perhaps hiding a "I don't actually know" in a footnote somewhere so you can point to it when criticized. A common variant of this is teaching ridiculous ideas as equally valid, and then saying you're just teaching history of philosophy when criticized. This is how, for example, you get the categorical imperative taught in schools: it's trivial to come up with counterexamples where everyone behaving a certain way would be horrible, but if you point this out, philosophers will often simply say that they're just teaching Kant because he's historically important. Yet Kantian ethics are taught right next to much more realistic ethical ideas, and students often can't differentiate which ones make any sense and which ones don't. This would be like teaching flat earth-ism in science class, and then saying "it's history of science" when criticized. It's a motte and bailey argument[1] and it's dishonest and harmful to rational thought.

It seems to me that science has taken us as far as it's useful to go with regard to determinism, and philosophy has nothing of value to add on the subject.

Hume's Problem of Induction isn't comparable here. In that case, Hume is asking a question which science hasn't/can't ask, which is somewhat useful. I don't think, however, that Hume really answers the question, and I don't think it would be useful to pretend that we know the answer. In the case of Hume's Problem of Induction, philosophy adds the question but not the answer: with superdeterminism, science has already asked the question, and philosophy can't answer it any better, so philosophy has nothing to contribute.

[1] https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Motte_and_bailey

[chr1]

There is also the fourth possibility that the physical space is not similar to euclidean space at short distances, and locality in euclidean space is not physical. In this case the entangled particles are actually linked with one another, and can transmit the information about the filter they are interacting with, but because particles prefer to be linked to closeby particles, the long range links easily break not allowing to pass much information.

[mjevans]

My issue with the second statement, about knowing the exact state of the universe at any given reference time is that by definition the information within that state would require the entire space of the universe to store with sufficient detail to make an accurate prediction of future states. (One might also assume it would require a real universe's worth of processing power to compute a new state as well.)

I believe it's impossible to completely isolate any segment of that universe (E.G. to make it smaller and thus predictable within the capability bounds of a larger universe) without literally removing it from that universe. That no matter what every part of an existing universe interacts with every other part, even if very, very, indirectly.

As for the question of free will: I believe the biology is largely deterministic. For me, that leaves the main set of questions in the direction of all of the elements that might happen between, outside, or otherwise beyond our current understanding of how the universe works. I feel that if there is any actual freedom in free will that is where it comes from; otherwise it's just the RNG being too complex to understand completely masking the lack of actual choice.

[chr1]

The fact that nothing can propagate faster than light speed, allows to isolate segments of universe from one another. Of course you can not simulate the whole universe exactly, but simulating a part of it, like completely closed room, or a different smaller universe, is still interesting and useful.

Wolfram proposes an interesting solution to the question of free will, that does not require any randomness: computational irreducibility. It is the hypothesis that for some computations there is only one way to perform. That is if you try to predict what an AI will chose, your only option is to create an exact copy and let that copy to make the choice.

[cbkeller]

I think you forgot one: "The principle of locality always applies" / "no spooky action at a distance" -- while local hidden variable interpretations have been ruled out, nonlocal ones are still very much on the table.

[samirillian]

Where does Pilot Wave theory fall?

[klodolph]

My understanding is that it is possible to conduct an experiment which would invalidate pilot wave theory or confirm it, to the extent that theories are invalidated or confirmed--we just haven't figured out how to conduct the experiment.

The article mentions that Bell's inequality was in a similar position in the past.

[IX-103]

Why does pilot wave theory violate locality -- does it assume that the pilot waves travel faster than light? And if so, is it necessary for the pilot waves to travel faster than light or can they be limited to the speed of light and preserve locality?

[marcosdumay]

Pilot wave theory is based on the assumption that every particle is interacting with the entire Universe all the time.

[IX-103]

Does it have to be the simultaneous version of the current universe or can it be the universe as it was distance/c ago?

Actually with relativity and all I'm not exactly sure there is a just a single correct definition of the instantaneous state of the universe.

[aeternus]

Experiments have shown that pilot waves would have to travel faster than the speed of light.

My understanding of the experiment is as follows:

Take two entangled photons, beam them up to satellites far away from each other. The satellites have detectors that measure the polarization angle from 0 to 360 degrees. Since entangled photons have opposite polarization you'd expect an inverted V (red line): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell%27s_theorem#/media/File:B...

Instead, you get the blue line. Which is weird, because it is basically a cosine curve, and implies that the photons are able to determine the relative angle of the detectors. The crazy part is that this curve still holds even if those detectors are very far apart and you complete the experiment before any information about the relative angles of the detectors would have time to pass from one detector to the other at the speed of light. This is what implies that a pilot wave would have to move faster than the speed of light.

[pdonis]

> Why does pilot wave theory violate locality -- does it assume that the pilot waves travel faster than light?

Yes. The pilot wave at any given point can be affected instantaneously by changes anywhere else in the universe.

[kgwgk]

But in this regard the pilot wave is not different from the standard Schroedinger’s wavefunction, is it?

[pdonis]

No, it isn't. Both are interpretations of non-relativistic quantum mechanics, and in non-relativistic QM there is no speed of light limit.

[MiroF]

Schroedinger’s wavefunction isn't sufficient in a relativistic context