[FRIAM] Free will—ghost in the machine or just clever wiring?

[Santafe]

To join you in procrastination:

Not about free will, but the other part

> On Jun 10, 2025, at 1:17, Marcus Daniels <marcus at snoutfarm.com> wrote:
> 
> Here’s an idea that’s been helping me to procrastinate.  
> 
> 1. Suppose that spacetime is an embedding of entanglement.   An evolved quantum error correcting code (QEC) that enables a network to form geometries like the reality we see.

I very much like that this aspiration to an idea is being pushed, though I am not smart enough to understand it.  The gestures all seem to be in appealing directions.  But I got kicked out of physics several floors below this, for already not being able to keep up.  

I had a brief-ish conversation with the astrophysicist Katie Mack a few years ago on this topic.  I guess she can reach high enough to engage in a collaboration with the IAS geniuses who can follow and try to do serious work on these questions.  In Katie’s case, I think it was Nima Arkady-Hamed.  I have listened to a few of his lectures, and he speaks in sensible ways where many don’t, so I am inclined to trust the reputation that he really is smart enough to create.

> 2.  Suppose the Big Bang the result of a unifying supermassive black hole. 

I don’t think this goes through.  I know “the result of” gives wiggle room, but I don’t think there will be an unpack that draws any association between these two phenomena.  Reason is that the time-reverse of a black hole is not a big bang, but rather a white hole.  Converse to the way the BH consumes space and brings time to an end for the space that has “fallen in” through a horizon, the WH constantly produces space, which then emerges continually out of a horizon into the outer connected spacetime, from which it just goes on however space goes on (if those solutions are stable etc., which I am not sophisticated enough to check or experienced enough to cite).  

Big bangs seem like a different category of solutions involving singularities: the everything-everywhere-all-at-once solutions (how unfortunate that a tiresome and even sort of annoying movie has to make that expression the salient one for me to use).  

Come to think of it, I am not sure how many different kinds of solutions-involving-singularities there are in general relativity, or if anybody has ever produced a known-exhaustive list or typology.  Again, lost the grip on that balloon at a much lower altitude.

>  3.  Like other black holes, it had high entropy.
>  
> 4. That final black hole, lacking an exterior, launches a new universe. 
>  
> 5. The new universe might appear to be smooth in its geometric expansion, but that would only because of the embedded QEC.   It would be rich with unseen entanglement that was not subject to the QEC.
>  
> 6.  In this view, universes could evolve or even be nested.   Universes with no or crude QECs would be unstable and prone to collapse.  Universes with strong QECs could have orderly environments where life could emerge, as Eric describes in his book.

One of the lucky and enjoyable rescues that I experienced was a late-in-life conversation with Jim Hartle, who could respond to my specific ignorance in plain English (which a journal article can’t do), to explain that to the extent that there was a “derivation” that stipulated his and Hawking’s “wave function of the universe”, it was that that wave function produce what he termed “stable hydrodynamic variables” for its observables.  Most wave functions wouldn’t do that, so all the classical uniform arrows of time, stability of the vacuum, etc., would not be properties in those states.  Unbeknownst to me, that came to be a primary and publicly available emphasis in his writing many years later, but still well before I asked him my ignorant questions, as in this piece:

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10701-010-9460-0
The Quasiclassical Realms of This Quantum Universe - Foundations of Physics
link.springer.com


> 7.  A Big Crunch would be like checkpointing a virtual machine.   The evolved QECs could still be in the checkpoint and cause the next version of the universe to inherit its desirable properties.  Maybe it would be like a junkyard with some interesting parts that would find novel uses in the next go.
> 
> 8.  Speculating further, very sophisticated civilizations (after billions of years) might discover how to stack the deck to invent new metaphysics at the next Big Bang.   Simple beings, like humans – not being billions of years old -- might invent words for that like God.
>  
> 9. The whole thing could be deterministic and not facilitate any free will!
> 
> Now I should get back to work.

Yeah….

Eric


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