[lmm]

> The laws of physics were there before people started studying physics. Didn't make it less interesting for those who were interested.

But they're interesting because they are laws - because there's some structure there, because the same causes consistently have the same effects. Superdeterminism denies all that.

> If you don't have free will, then how can you change smth?

I'd say that if you're an inherent part of the causal chain that makes something happen then it's fair to say that you changed it. You don't have to assume free will to acknowledge that we affect our environment.

> What part of a computer "learns" during gradient descent?

I don't know or particularly care, but the learning happens - you can't understand the behaviour of the system otherwise.

[geertj]

> But they're interesting because they are laws - because there's some structure there, because the same causes consistently have the same effects. Superdeterminism denies all that.

There can be structure without cause and effect. Take any static physics problem, for example a flexible sheet that’s stretched over some frame. Since there is no time dimension there is no cause and effect but at every point in the sheet there is structure (Poisson’s law).

Both QFT and GR are the same order in time and space dimensions. Now, time is special among the dimensions because of the second law of thermodynamics, but I still have this feeling that it’s our being part of the universe and our brains having sufficient complexity for self reference that causes the illusion of a linear flow of time, while in fact all time happened in one ‘instant’ and one of the requirements for our universe to exist is that it is self consistent (causing these weird conspirational coincidences).

[lmm]

> There can be structure without cause and effect. Take any static physics problem, for example a flexible sheet that’s stretched over some frame. Since there is no time dimension there is no cause and effect but at every point in the sheet there is structure (Poisson’s law).

Up to a point - that kind of structure still depends on a notion of spatial distance and "influence" where you can reason locally about subsets. It's fairly fundamental that some parts of the sheet are more closely related to each other than other parts of it. If you had a model where every point of the sheet was equally closely related to every other point, you wouldn't be able to have any nontrivial structure, I think.

[temp438]

> But they're interesting because they are laws - because there's some structure there, because the same causes consistently have the same effects. Superdeterminism denies all that.

Wait, how does it deny it?

> i'd say that if you're an inherent part of the causal chain that makes something happen then it's fair to say that you changed it. You don't have to assume free will to acknowledge that we affect our environment.

it's separating us from the environment and saying that one part changed the other, but that's just a simplification as our heads can't contain the whole system with all it's events. A blurry reflection. So now we "look" at this reflection and say : this is wrong, it makes no sense

Without simplification, we had some "initial" state and it "goes" somewhere. Like sand in a clock. We all know where the sand goes and what will happen in an hour.

We have words like "interesting, learn, understand" which don't really mean anything when we think about determinism. Science requires an observer but who is looking?

[lmm]

> Wait, how does it deny it?

To be able to talk about cause and effect you have to have a concept of independence. Superdeterminism's basic premise is essentially that everything in the past can affect everything in the future - you chose which direction to measure because the particle was polarised a particular way (or because of some common underlying cause). So how can you possibly talk about what caused you to measure a particular direction when apparently it was magically due to this thing that has no visible connection to it?

> We have words like "interesting, learn, understand" which don't really mean anything when we think about determinism. Science requires an observer but who is looking?

And yet science does work. We're able to make predictions and see them borne out.

[temp438]

> So how can you possibly talk about what caused you to measure a particular direction when apparently it was magically due to this thing that has no visible connection to it?

You mean a connection we can measure.

as i understand, our measurements rely on what we know and what we know relies on previous events. Its like what and how we measure something is simultaneosly determined by that something. We can't measure the size of a cat's soul because we don't have instruments for it but if we invent the instruments there will be no other choice than measuring them in a particular way the soul allows us to measure it.

Don't know if it make sense at all, but i tried to make sense of it.

[lmm]

Not necessarily that we can measure, but that we can reason about. We can't directly measure energy for example, but we know/assume that it obeys certain laws regarding conservation and locality.

If the cat's soul changed the usual laws of physics around the cat, it would destroy our ability to do physics when cats were nearby. It's not about whether we can measure it but about whether we can isolate its effects. If you can't do an experiment that doesn't depend on the state of the entire universe, you can't do an experiment.