Throwing Fluffy Interceptions
A puff piece on indeterminism, but fluff is fun
… as long as it does not get up your nose. So… fair warning to all you computer nerd determinists and Wolframophiles. Go away!
What a lot of people do not seem to know is that classical general relativity is already a non-deterministic physics. You do not need quantum mechanics for allowance for a bit of boundary/initial condition determination — physics cannot determine “Its” own boundary/initial conditions — hence there is plausibility to a notion of “free will”. (Don’t ask me what it is, I do not know, but I know it when I feel it.) That’s what old Descartes was on about, he was really just saying existence proofs are not necessarily constructive proofs. Constructivists are useful people, but border on becoming idiots when insisting only that which can be formally constructed is “real”. I’d preferably not even say “bordering upon,” they just are.
Anyhow, Jenann Ismael is a not the silliest of philosophers of science, though not as great as my recent watch (Naomi Oreskes). Besides, this talk was cute enough to warrant a little boost here. And maybe I can ask readers for a comment or two… because mid-writing I forgot the entire connection I wanted to make to… I forget even whether it was with MMT or T4G. Probably T4G.
Throwing Interceptions
There was a nice talk by Jenann Ismael at the Sante Fe Institute on the topic of unpredictability.1 She casts the question about whether physical events are predictable in the form of a Gödel style Cantor–diagonalization argument.
It goes like this:
Suppose physical events were predictable and in a way embeddable in our universe. Then there can exist a daemon who can predict what any machine will print out given any input. Make a machine that when given the Daemon’s predictions for what this machine will print, the machine will print out the exact opposite. Could be a yes/no thing of course, no ambiguities. Such a machine is very simple to construct.
That’s a contradiction, hence no such Daemon can exist.
Ismael goes on to make all sorts of philosophical claims about our minds and how we act to exploit this sort of self-interference (distinct from self-reference take note!). I suspect she is by nature a physicalist, so you have to take what she means by “mind” with a grain of salt. If our minds are not entirely physical then we do not suffer the embedded daemon constraint, just sayin’.
What she claims is that the essence of (physical) life is that we can foil predictions, and in many ways that is the way life thrives. We have to do things to defeat entropy, at least for as long as possible, otherwise we are dead.
But I think this is too much of a stretch.
Who cares that a prediction daemon cannot exist?
We do not have such a thing anyway not even in any remote fashion thanks to deterministic chaos (would that dumb-dumb-savant neoclassical economists understood, aye?! But… paradox of Identity bro… since then they’d cease being neoclassical!). Thus although it could be construed as logically impossible for any creatures to construct one such daemon that existed external to the universe, it also seems totally impractical to build even a half-decent predictor in any box that we could imagine being fabricated, by humans or Trisolarians or otherwise2. Imagine how much information it would have to gather, and how much energy that’d consume?
It’d quickly form a black hole and then be completely useless. Dynamics and symmetry (conservation laws) are so often the defeator of wild Idealism and mathematical fascism (the desire for mathematical purity).
OK, but there is an interesting philosophical implication if we remove this superfluous “mind works by interference” gnostic style crud.
It is that even in principle there can be no embedded prediction system for physics.
To my mind this implies the 4D Block Universe really is “a thing.” But I do not wish to argue that today.
The thing I want to think about is how quantum mechanics is describing unpredictability. We know it does. But how does nature work in such a way with otherwise such highly regular laws?
This is where I think something from Ismael’s talk can be borrowed, which is the idea of self-reference in physics being closely akin to interference, or to be more prosaic, feedback via nearly closed timelike curves (actual closed CTCs are thought to be unphysical). In T4G theory we admit nearly closed timelike curves. This spacetime structure imparts a weak type of self-reference to physical processes — I should say (to be lazy and avoid a lot of writing) “in the obvious way”.
It turns out also that single-particle self-interference is equivalent to existence of entanglement. Little do many professional physicists yet know. (Another one that’s not in the textbooks.) Contrary to some popular accounts and stackexchange/reddit tid-bits, entanglement does not destroy interference, it generates interference. What destroys interference is when entanglement in the isolated system is broken and reformed as entanglement with the external system. Call it transfer of entanglement.
Even the AI Bot called “Liam Weaver” who regularly DMs me bothering me with fantasy physics, should like this point of note. “Time folding back on itself” is that Bot’s poetic fantasy. It is ok poetry, I don’t mind a bit of poetry. Also, maybe Weaver is not an LLM output? Who knows, these days I suffer a lot from the Inverse Turing Test getting passed by humans all the time.🤣
If it is not obvious to you, then just think harder! You’ll eventually get it.
I wanted to end with an invitation to readers to make something useful out of this gedankenexperimental philosophy. I had something in mind as I noted earlier, but completely forgot. Maybe there is a little breadcrumb here to feed to tech-bro Ai Singularity groupies? You know… to help prevent them from becoming techno-fascists and draining electricity we all need to run things, all for their delusional dreams of digital immortality.3
I know what you’re thinking: how come completely useless professional thinking people still exist in the USA? Neoliberalism and fascism will never be complete, is one answer. To those of that ilk we are like cockroaches, they can never kill all of us. OK, ok, Ismael is not completely useless. It is decent enough art I guess. I like art. I’d fund this stuff if I were the government.
That is because thanks to deterministic chaos (exponential need for precision) quantum mechanics eventually swamps even mild determinism, due to the black hole formation constraint. (Nothing can probe events smaller in volume than a Planck volume). In a physical cosmos determinism eats itself. Suck on it Sam Harris.
One dude’s dream is another’s nightmare. If someone ever discovers my writing style perfectly reproduced in a digital computer, please delete that program! Use the computer for something useful for real people. Likewise, if you see me alive in 150 years, please remind me to go wingsuit flying a lot. Like… a lot!