[FRIAM] Free Will in the Atlantic

Fri Apr 9 17:48:52 EDT 2021

Yes, for me, it is that entanglement in a CA is consistent with my world.   No spooky action at a distance and without invoking much of any machinery to get there.    
When I was a child I loved taking things apart and in my teenage years spent a lot of time disassembling codes.   I liked the feeling of "Ok, that was as low as one could possibly go here.  I now know what really happens."   But ending with a _probability_?  That doesn't feel right.  Sure, for the purposes of analysis or synthesis, it is ok if the rules of the game involve probabilities.  I put down my debugger watchpoints and start tabulating samples.   But I do all kinds of things to get to the next day, not like I'm proud of it.

An example is radioactive decay.   What do you mean we're just going to throw up our hands and accept aggregate statistics?   Before you know it we'll be giving up on predicting the location of the next earthquake!   What kind of reductionists are we?   😊

Anyway, 't Hooft doesn't say QM is flawed, just that QM isn't an explanation.   He makes the distinction between the value of his idea as an interpretation vs. the possibility it (CAT) is how the universe works.   He's got nothing to prove, so I guess he has the luxury of expecting people to be reasonable about him daring to offer a suggestion.

Hossenfelder proposes an experiment.[1]    I think that is close to possible now (maybe the evidence is already available in some form).   The timescale she mentions of 1e-6 doesn't seem particularly challenging for modern electronics.  I know people that talk about the possibility of calculations on a quantum computer that can outrun the impinging environment rather than trying to correct for it.  This seems along the same lines.

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/1401.0286
-----Original Message-----
From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> On Behalf Of David Eric Smith
Sent: Friday, April 9, 2021 1:16 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam at redfish.com>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Free Will in the Atlantic

I also found this post fascinating, Marcus, thank you.

T’Hooft has been on this program for a long time, and the whole thing mystifies me.  He’s a just-enormous mind, and very fastidious in what he considers acceptable argument, so someone very much worth listening to.

But why does he think a classical description is somehow to be preferred to a quantum description?  Why does anyone?  If I propose a formalism of state vectors, evolving under unitary operators, with observables formalized as various projection operators, and multi-point, multi-time correlation functions of observables subject to splitting into fingers that are coherent within and non-interfering between (and no residual primitive concept of “measurement”, just decoherence of the collections of correlation functions that correspond to the experiential concept of “histories”), then I have a formalism with a fairly small number of primitives that gives a vast and apparently reliable empirical compression of everything we can see.  The state vector is not an observable.  A whale is not a fish  We learn these things about nature as we go along.

Supposing some very clever people could complete T’Hooft’s project and push a bunch of unobservable properties of some classical description up to high enough frequencies that they don’t impact the empirical tests we do — thus delivering the same answers we have checked with QM — then by what standard is the classical description to be preferred over the other one in terms of states and unitary evolution and decoherent histories?  I don’t understand where these priors come from, which seem to be so strong in people.  It seems to me like a bias to retain the familiar, and we have been familiar with classical abstractions for longer, and in more processing channels for sensory experience, than we are for quantum abstractions.  But to think that is informative about the world and not merely about one’s own situation as an observer seems to have been hoping the Copernican lesson didn’t really have to be learned.  Or is there a better reason that I am not seeing because I am obstinate?

Yes, the QM description doesn’t seem to include gravitation, which by every standard of evaluation that has worked for everything else looks like a low-energy theory with an inaccessible high energy foundation.  That looks hard, yes.  But I don’t see it as looking hard in a way that makes classical descriptions any more preferable than they would have been if we didn’t take the problem of gravitation into consideration.

On the muon experiment, if I understood the NYT article correctly, there are two claimed calculations, one in accord with the Brookhaven measurements (which I guess are further reinforced in the new experiment?) and one claiming a difference.  We’ll have to sort out whether either of those calculations of g-2 is correct, and if so which one.  Sabine Hossenfelder doesn’t believe it.  But then she didn’t like Life cereal either.  So I smile that that was the comment they wanted from her, which she was happy to provide, and move on.  She gave a public lecture in Santa Fe a few years ago, and didn’t want to go out to dinner with the host-gang afterward.  On one hand I felt bad/sad about her being put in a spot of having to turn them away (which probably didn’t bother her at all), on another hand I felt something was being missed, because off-line comments from here would probably have been interesting, and on a third hand I think it’s all good that people answer to themselves and not to social expectations.

Eric

> On Apr 10, 2021, at 3:16 AM, Marcus Daniels <marcus at snoutfarm.com> wrote:
> 
> 't Hooft has been has a book on these topics.[1]  He has papers periodically like this one where he socializes the idea in different ways.  The argument in this paper is if there were fast background variables, in quantum experiments like the double slit experiment, it could explain how these probabilistic measurements occur, with only deterministic drivers.     He goes on to speculate that it may have implications for modifications to the Standard Model at the highest energy domains, such as the muon experiment Frank mentioned might be hinting at.   It is much easier for me to believe than 11 and 24 dimensional spaces, branes, and all that.    Perhaps that's what Jon is suggesting:  Sure,  I do have some sort of agency (personality) that makes me favor some hypothesis over others, and thus some kinds of evidence over others -- it is a preference for premises and conclusions that aren't buried in layer after layer of math that could very well be wrong.    The deterministic story of entanglement -- the giant CA of the universe -- seems to work.   I can't help wonder if some people hate it JUST because it does take away their understanding of what science is?
> 
> [1] https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007%2F978-3-319-41285-6
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> On Behalf Of u?l? ???
> Sent: Friday, April 9, 2021 8:36 AM
> To: friam at redfish.com
> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Free Will in the Atlantic
> 
> Ha! OK. I'll try to read that. I read the abstract 4 times and still don't know what I'm about to read. I read the introduction once and still don't know what to expect. My next step is the Discussion, then the meat. If you care to toss a bone, I'd appreciate it. But then again, you might be rewarding me for being lazy.
> 
> On 4/8/21 9:58 PM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
>> 
>> https://arxiv.org/pdf/2010.02019.pdf
>> <https://arxiv.org/pdf/2010.02019.pdf>
> 
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