[FRIAM] Free Will in the Atlantic

[Marcus Daniels]

't Hooft mentions the possible implications for quantum computing.   This model brings to mind the old lattice gas architecture designs as a possible simulation approach.[1]
Also being interested in artificial atoms in a highly isolated environment instead of "real" ones, some of the objections like impossible to understand or control initial conditions as in pilot wave interpretations might not apply.   I guess I got distracted from the free will topic.   Regarding that, I can't help myself!

[1] And it makes me wonder if my old boss Chris was inadvertently writing quantum programs, back in the day!   Later, there was a community around quantum cellular automata for a while, but I think the field decohered.  

-----Original Message-----
From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> On Behalf Of David Eric Smith
Sent: Friday, April 9, 2021 3:41 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam at redfish.com>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Free Will in the Atlantic

Hi Marcus,

Yes, this gets to the nut of it for me:

> On Apr 10, 2021, at 6:48 AM, Marcus Daniels <marcus at snoutfarm.com> wrote:
> 
> 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.

I don’t understand what status “interpretations” of QM have in science.  To the extent that an interpretation is another activity one performs that must align with all the data-correspondences one has already checked, it doesn’t affect them.  If, sometime later, the interpretations one chose in the past affect the course of proposals for what to build next, then they do have a role, with respect to inference.  But the way they are discussed now is all for the period when they haven’t yet affected anything more.

After browsing Wikipedia on these questions to try to get a feel for what the society considers a stable condition for this discussion, I went to the Stanford Encyclopedia to see what the philosophers are comfortable with, and that made things even worse.  In particular, the people who believe there is a role for measurement as a primitive which is not simply a reference to decoherence phenomena completely lose me.  I don’t understand what is left for “measurement” to do if one is trying to provide a quantitative account of phenomena in terms of decoherence of correlation functions.

Similarly, the formulation of spooky action at a distance is one that feels to me like an artifact from an antique language, but not one we would be forced to create today if we had not inherited it from smart and uneasy people of the past.  I know how they arrive at this language, but since within QM the same phmena do not appear as action at a distance, but simply as the existence of some correlations and the absence of others, within the structure of the state vector, it doesn’t seem like there was anything within the science that ever required arriving at that language.  

As for what probabilities “are”?  I don’t know.  If one took that they are a property of correlation functions of observables that satisfy a certain set of axioms for composition and conditioning (kind of like Jaynes constructs them in his book The Logic of Science, but due to somebody else whom he cites but whose name I don’t recall), then again we aren’t taking our notion of probability as a primitive we have always “known” and are now trying to formalize, but rather as a phenomenal pattern, the properties of which we want to account for from some structure in a formalism as a way of assessing the formalism's validity.  Then again, to me, it sounds as if we are saying that our objection to probabilities is that they aren’t things that aren’t probabilities.  It is consistent, but doesn’t feel obligatory to me.  

I think I am very stupid in not being able to “get” this.  That doesn’t surprise me.  I don’t understand string theory.  I never even tried to understand twistors, or loop quantum gravity.  When a paper by a philosopher lands on my desk asking for a review, about the foundations of “reality” that fall prior to empirical observations, with applications to the nature of life, but drawn from twistor theory and loop quantum gravity, I don’t even know how to distinguish between something by a profound person and a hoax by a Sokal-bot.  So it isn’t strange that I wouldn’t understand this either. 

I guess the Clint Eastwood line is the best off-route to get on with the day: a man’s gotta know his limitations.  Gets easier year by year, and failure by failure.

Eric




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