How can there still be ontological debate about time?

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FVBTVS
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Re: How can there still be ontological debate about time?

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FVBTVS wrote: Fri Nov 21, 2014 3:59 pm
The Real MPD wrote: Fri Nov 21, 2014 3:54 pm
deterministic
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Re: How can there still be ontological debate about time?

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No way am I getting Vern'd like that! (but yes also :lol: forever at that)
Necrometer wrote: Fri Dec 01, 2017 7:56 pm
Necrometer wrote: Fri Nov 21, 2014 3:03 pmThat's a fine write-up but it doesn't convince me that there are actually multiple possible outcomes vs. us just lacking precise predictive power. There could be a shadow dimension that makes everything make sense, but we can't access it.

I think we are in a totally deterministic universe...
OK physics dudes I've stumbled across the double slit experiment and finally revisited this whole issue. So Bell's Theorem forbids "hidden variables" like the ones I was advocating for to make sense of the weird outcome of the double slit and related experiments. But Bell goes on to define one case where his theorem need not apply:
There is a way to escape the inference of superluminal speeds and spooky action at a distance. But it involves absolute determinism in the universe, the complete absence of free will. Suppose the world is super-deterministic, with not just inanimate nature running on behind-the-scenes clockwork, but with our behavior, including our belief that we are free to choose to do one experiment rather than another, absolutely predetermined, including the 'decision' by the experimenter to carry out one set of measurements rather than another, the difficulty disappears. There is no need for a faster-than-light signal to tell particle A what measurement has been carried out on particle B, because the universe, including particle A, already 'knows' what that measurement, and its outcome, will be.
And I guess this is in line with what I have been intuitively feeling. Everything is woven together, time is something we perceive but doesn't have meaning (regarding causality) beyond being a coordinate along which stuff can happen. I take great comfort in reading this. People actually write it off because it would mean free will didn't exist. What an atrocious call to make when you're trying to puzzle out the nature of the universe...
one more thing:
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cr ... 99t-hooft/#
I'm in a giddy haze of fulfillment right now - I fucking hated the zany quantum fuzz
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Re: How can there still be ontological debate about time?

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Nice! Hm, I hadn't thought about the spooky action at a distance and how it might be explained by assuming a deterministic universe. Food for thought...

edit: "Not only is everything you do preordained, the universe reaches into your brain and stops you from doing an experiment that would reveal its true nature. The universe is not just set up in advance. It is set up in advance to fool you."
...admittedly sounds bleak as fuck, but if it's true, wouldn't this also mean that the assumption that everything is predetermined is also off limits? How far does this barrier reach - obviously, we aren't forbidden from assuming we're being fooled?
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Re: How can there still be ontological debate about time?

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the universe reaches into your brain
I think this is humanizing it too much - the idea is that the line between "brain" and "rest of universe" is absolutely artificial, and we know it has always been a human construct. since it looks like every waveparticle in the universe was (and perhaps will be) at the same placetime there's no reason to assume anything isn't entangled.

I want to believe there are some ways to test this idea (despite the fact that it nullifies the practice of science itself!) - I've never totally understood those TOTALLY insane slit experiments where results change if you do/don't open the file that recorded the particle-inducing/wave-collapsing observation. my hippie brain is now thinking that experiments predicting the future would be possible only in one of the two scenarios (superdeterministic or non-superdeterministic) but hell if I know which is which...
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Re: How can there still be ontological debate about time?

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https://physics.stackexchange.com/quest ... tum-models
this guy is up to his neck in this shit:
Using this freedom I end up with quite a few models that I happen to find interesting. Starting with deterministic systems I end up with quantum systems. I mean real quantum systems, not any of those ugly concoctions. On the other hand, they are still a long way off from the Standard Model, or even anything else that shows decent, interacting particles.

Except string theory. Is the model I constructed a counterexample, showing that what everyone tells me about fundamental QM being incompatible with determinism, is wrong? No, I don't believe that. The idea was that, somewhere, I will have to modify my assumptions, but maybe the usual assumptions made in the no-go theorems will have to be looked at as well.

I personally think people are too quick in rejecting "superdeterminism". I do reject "conspiracy", but that might not be the same thing. Superdeterminism simply states that you can't "change your mind" (about which component of a spin to measure), by "free will", without also having a modification of the deterministic modes of your world in the distant past. It's obviously true in a deterministic world, and maybe this is an essential fact that has to be taken into account. It does not imply "conspiracy".
also comforting that string theory is the winningest teammate of this outlook :tup:
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Re: How can there still be ontological debate about time?

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the guy I linked above, Gerard 't Hooft, is my new hero. He has a nobel prize for the sort of mind-melting shit you don't just stumble across or "luck" your way into (coughbiologycough) and still has to deal with anklebiting armchair-physicist trolls on message boards. he can barely contain his rage with these twerps sometimes :lol:

anyway, his person website RULES, it's peppered with classic animated GIFs, one is even a Far Side character?
http://www.staff.science.uu.nl/~hooft101/

best page by far is this one - the instructions are killing me:
http://www.staff.science.uu.nl/~hooft101/puzzel.html
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Re: How can there still be ontological debate about time?

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I can't fucking believe how much better my posts were back when I used a keyboard instead of a phone. That's seriously the only difference.

Also fuck determinists and compatibilists you're gay
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Re: How can there still be ontological debate about time?

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haha this Hooft guy:

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"Riding on wheels is difficult for animals. this is because paved roads normally do not exist in Nature. But now they do, and therefore it is natural to expect that genetic changes will occur that enable animals to drive, just as we do. See my picture of Rotipious vacuator. Wheels grow like bones or teeth, and are replaced every once in a while."

:lol: :lol:
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Re: How can there still be ontological debate about time?

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right? :lol:
Eight Bit Alien wrote: Thu Dec 07, 2017 11:51 pmcompatibilists
how dare you even insinuate such a thing

incompatibilism 4 lyfe
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Re: How can there still be ontological debate about time?

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Necrometer wrote: Tue Dec 05, 2017 9:43 pm the guy I linked above, Gerard 't Hooft, is my new hero. He has a nobel prize for the sort of mind-melting shit you don't just stumble across or "luck" your way into (coughbiologycough) and still has to deal with anklebiting armchair-physicist trolls on message boards. he can barely contain his rage with these twerps sometimes :lol:
't Hooft is up there as one of the most important physicists of the last few decades. I'm glad that you guys are finding yourselves appreciating him.

He has been on this beat for quite a while. He wrote this paper back in 2002. Pop sci folks are false and should not entry, but you actual eggheads might want to give it a shot. If you want to go further back, he also wrote this.

I have not read this paper but I'll try to square away some time in the next few days so I can try to contribute something more meaningful than just dusting off my account here. Ultimately, I'm going into this leaning more on the side of determinism and the feeling that the random nature of the quantum is bizarre but manageable. I'm not all too familiar with superdeterminism outside of definitions that heavily rely on poetic device.
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Re: How can there still be ontological debate about time?

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thanks for pointing out that 1988 paper, where he says "quantum mechanics is not a theory about reality; it is a prescription for making the best possible predictions about the future if we have certain information about the past" which is very much in line with the "all models are wrong; good models are useful" maxim that is extremely useful in maintaining sanity as a scientist. it might seem trite but I think this plot is useful here - my growth in trying to understand the world has exposed me to each of those phases and the high of the first phase (wow, I'm learning so much - soon all mysteries will be abolished!) makes it all too easy to settle into the second phase (I understand everything and it feels great) even if you're smart enough to know better. physicists/mathematicians are all the more susceptible to the trap since all of math can be subjected to proofs, and the vast majority of physics is subject to clockwork precision ...and I already wrote all this stuff in this thread back in 2014. ugh...

anyway I am really sad that fancy math has never clicked for me, and I'm a pretty hopeless self-teacher, so I have to live with trying to get the gist of all this stuff without knowing what's going on under the hood. everything 't Hooft says makes sense to me in a general sense, and I think I have a decent grasp of his cellular automaton model. but in trying to rule out alternative explanations for things, I confront pilot waves and remain confused. are pilot waves semi-local hidden variables? does it posit that quantum waveforms are random but not "fully" random - that each wave/particle comes in with its own specific flavor/history?

watching this now...

yeah, it seems overly clunky, and is sort of passing the buck. I feel like the entire universe could be a big shifting wave/particle ball pit (?) and pilot wave theory is just binning wave-like and particle-like behavior into two categories but not doing a great job of explaining things any better

so I'm sticking with "everything is entangled and thus deterministic and time has no inherent direction so causation is illusory" as the hypothesis to beat
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Re: How can there still be ontological debate about time?

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This was a good thread
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Re: How can there still be ontological debate about time?

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James, have you ever read anything about the connection between time and entropy? All systems heavily tend towards disorder, so energy spreads out (see your hot cup of coffee that grows cold, thereby heating up the environment by a tiny degree), and this process is not time-reversible due to probability.
Here's another thought: all of spacetime from the beginning of the universe to the endless (?) future could be described as a four-dimensional (three dimensions of space + time on the x-axis), eternal and unchangeable object. Obviously, this would imply a (super-)deterministic universe.
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