[ExI] Bell's Inequality

Jason Resch jasonresch at gmail.com
Sat Dec 31 22:57:50 UTC 2016


On Sat, Dec 31, 2016 at 4:07 PM, Adrian Tymes <atymes at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Sat, Dec 31, 2016 at 1:30 AM, Jason Resch <jasonresch at gmail.com> wrote:
> > On Fri, Dec 30, 2016 at 11:10 PM, Adrian Tymes <atymes at gmail.com> wrote:
> >> Here is the core of our disagreement.  Superdeterminism - in ways that
> >> do not violate free will - seems more likely than MWI, to me.
> >
> > Interesting, I would like to know what about MWI you find so unlikely.
>
> The MW portion.  It posits all these other worlds/realities/whatever
> that just so happen to be perfectly locked away from any actual
> measurement - suggestive of a theory that was specifically made to be
> unfalsifiable.
>

MW is just barebones QM. As Everett said, MW is falsifiable because QM is
falsifiable.

Some quotes to this effect:

Everett’s theory is more than an interpretation of the quantum mechanical
effects we see (such as collapse). On the contrary, it is the very (and so
far only) explanation for them. On this matter, Deutsch said that talking
about Everett’s theory as an interpretation “*would be like talking of
dinosaurs as the ‘interpretation’ of fossil records, rather than the things
in the theory that explain them.*"

The cosmologist Max Tegmark concurs, saying, “*I disagree that the
distinction between Everett and Copenhagen is ‘just interpretation’. The
former is a mathematical theory, the latter is not. The former says simply
that the Schrödinger equation always applies. The latter says that it only
applies sometimes, but doesn't given an equation specifying when it doesn't
apply (when the so-called collapse is supposed to happen). If someone were
to come up with such an equation, then the two theories would be
mathematically different and you might hope to make an experiment to test
which one is right.*”

So it is not that MW is formulated to be unfalsifiable, it's that the
alternatives are not mathematical theories offering any explanation or
specification of how they work. CI doesn't explain how collapse or
observation are related or happen, and Superdeterminism doesn't specify how
photon pairs can know to offer the correct statistics according to how you
will choose to measure them at the time they are created.


>
> Granted,
>
> >> > It also seems like it would require math itself to be superdetermined,
> >> > what
> >> > if I chose what measurements to make based on the digits of Pi? Would
> Pi
> >> > then be superdetermined? Or only my decision to use Pi to guide my
> >> > measurements?
> >>
> >> The latter, just like our distant ancestors' eventual collective
> >> choice to use a base-10 numbering system in which values such as pi
> >> would be expressed.  Pi itself is not affected by your choice.
> >
> > But once Pi is chosen, it offers infinite digits beyond my or any
> physical
> > thing's control. Are physical outcomes now superdetermined for all
> eternity
> > to follow Pi now, based on a choice someone made thousands of years ago?
>
> Yes and no.
>
> Yes in that physical outcomes in the future are in part a result of
> past choices in general.  This has nothing to do with pi.  For
> example, this email could only have happened because you chose to
> respond to my previous email; had you not, I would have had nothing to
> respond to.  And once I send this email, it will always have been true
> from that point on that I sent this email; all outcomes from then on
> will be in a world where that happened.  Even millions or billions of
> years ago, all choices will be made in a universe with that event in
> its history.
>
> (I hesitate to say "based on" because this is a trivial thing that is
> highly unlikely to substantially influence any of those future
> decisions - but any that do care whether I sent this email, will be
> based on it.  You could even say they will be superdetermined to have
> been based on it, if you wish; it's redundant, but still true.)
>
> No in that what the value of pi is, was determined long before the
> Earth was formed, let alone before any human was around to make
> choices.  Anything about the exact value of pi is not "based on a
> choice someone made thousands of years ago", but is instead based on
> something older than our universe.  So far as we know, nothing caused
> the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter (which we call
> "pi") to have the value that it has.
>
> This is true of math in general: the relations and equations were
> always there, even if we were not around to discover them until the
> past several thousand years.  In that sense, math can be considered to
> be superdetermined even if MWI is true: going all the way back to the
> Big Bang, where MWI collapses to a single world, math was already
> there, and remains unchanged (even if observers' expressions of it
> differ) throughout all the multiple worlds.
>
> > Please explain. MWI is the simplest theory of QM we know of that is
> > compatible with all observations.
>
> Superdeterminism is simpler than MWI, and is compatible with all
> observations.
>

You need to posit almost a God-like magic to allow my selection of Pi in
the use of setting polarization angles in an iterated EPR experiment, to
cause the photon pairs to be generated with just the right patterns of
polarizations to yield the observed probabilities. No theory exists to
explain such a magic link, and to bolt it on to QM would serve to vastly
complicate the theory.


>
> > What this means: the infinite minds and observations are already out
> there,
>
> That it leads to assuming this sort of thing, is why MWI is more complex.


Occam's razor is not about reducing multiplicities of things predicted by a
theory, it is about reducing assumptions of the theory.

For example, the theory that stars were distant suns was a simpler theory
than that they were two distinct things. Yet that simpler theory implied
countless billions of other suns. An idea surely as mind blowing to people
who were not used to the idea as the idea of MW seems to many
contemporaries.

In general, the simpler the theory gets, the larger the ontology it yields.
It would take 10^120 bits to specify the history of this universe assuming
there is only one such history, but it would take only a few pages of
equations to specify the laws of physics and leave the particular arrange a
free parameter. But in this theory where a particular arrangement of
particles if a free parameter, that theory includes a vastly larger
ontology, of all possible physical universes sharing our physical laws.
Going a step further, and leaving the equations themselves as a free
parameter, requires no information to specify, and this leads to an
ensemble of all logically possible structures: every universe's history of
every possible set of laws.

It's a progression that began hundreds of years ago:

   - One planet -> Many planets (Heliocentrism)
   - One solar system -> Many star systems (Discovery of parallax)
   - One galaxy -> Many galaxies (Hubble's observations of red shift)
   - One history -> Many histories (Everett's many worlds)
   - One big bang -> Many big bangs (Eternal Inflation, bubble universes)
   - One physical law -> Many physical laws (String theory, anthropic
   reasoning)
   - One mathematical structure -> Many (all?) mathematical structures
   (Tegmark's, Marchal's, Standish's ultimate ensemble theories)

The trend is clear. It took 100 years for people to accept heliocentrism
after its discovery. Hopefully it doesn't take so long for people to adopt
the more recent theories. If there is any lesson from past theories, now
widely accepted, it is that nature is not parsimonious with creation, she
wastes a whole lot of existence on things unrelated to us and which we
wouldn't think are necessary.

Jason
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