The Transactional Interpretation does not make any claims about if the universe is deterministic, since the wave functions travelling backwards in time can be travelling from possible futures, rather than a future that is predetermined.
If the the Many Worlds interpretation is true, there's a universe in which the Many Worlds interpretation isn't true. Therefore, the Many Worlds interpretation isn't true.
The question remains: If the unentanglement of collaps of wave function happens at the moment of measurement... what is that moment of measurement? Only realistic theories can describe measurement processes without further introduction of collapse. That is a problem that was sadly not adressed in the vid :/
@@Bolpat Many world interpretation doesn't necessary mean completely contradictory universes. Just a little tweak and you get an almost similar universe but *all the universes must obey the basic law of physics* Beside a lot of theories thought of being impossible have been proven correct
Heisenberg was speeding down the highway. A cop pulls him over and says “Do you have any idea how fast you were going back there?” Heisenberg says, “No, but I knew where I was.”
I love how your wife admits that doing science with specific goal in mind isn’t real science and than dismisses interpretations because she don’t like time travel :D But seriously, this format is great as well as your other videos. ❤️
But actually science develops by having specific goals in mind, for example lots of scientific discoveries were driven by the desire of the scientists to explain phenomena in a more simple and unified manner, having goals does not diminish the scientific pursuit at all, because at the end of the day once you develop a model motivated by some goals, then it can be pursued, tested, evaluated and so on, and then science continues, dismissing interpretations is actually not a good thing a lot of physicists would say because, all an interpretation means is to have something real to point to behind all the mathematical models created, if we just stick to the mathematical models and their predictions, then all we arrive at are models that drive predictive success without ever striving to find out how the world actually is, because mathematically there is literally an infinite number of models that could say very different things about the universe, and yet they could all give us the same exact predictions..... Its also important to note that if we don't have an interpretation can also drive future discoveries and give us new predictions to test, that could lead to new scientific discoveries, so it's very naive to dismiss them.
@@lolroflmaoization Thanks for saying so well what I was thinking. She was conflating science idioms incorrectly, especially around confirmation bias in testing vs goals. Also I almost choked when she said "if you don't get the results you want, just move on, abandon your theory" or something like that. We always loved when we got different results! It was this huge opportunity to find your experimental or data mistake or to look at the problem from different angles previously unseen. All theories are tools, not objectives, and one can hold more than one at once or not even consider them until or unless they become relevant. Old lab books/journals are precious for the data that you can go back over and look at with any theory or new understanding or just to see what you didn't see at the time. And my first lab was in an old building that stored projects from Apollo re-entry research. The damage to the concrete walls showed where many failures had occurred. I'm glad they didn't just say "well, that doesn't work, let's not go to the Moon."
@@seasidescott I think there is a big misinterpretation here though. There is a difference in not getting the results you expected, and not getting the results you want. Getting unexpected results is amazing, not getting the results you wanted is bias. Just as an example for other people who will inevitably read this in the future: Unexpected results is what leads to people trying to recreate those unexpected results to see where it leads them, this is often compared to the discovery of penicilline. Not getting the results you expected is what leads to people trying again and again untill they get the results they wanted, or at least close enough. These are often the kind of scientific papers that tell you that vaccines cause autism. Hence the "if you dont get the results you want, move on, abandon your theory" fits. If you got unexpected results, you dont really want the results you got, you have to move on from those expectation, abandon that theory and follow the trail where the unexpected results lead you.
you guys are a) adorable, and b) super smart! having Em asking her pleasantly straight-to-the-point cutting-through-the-bullshit questions really adds a lot to these videos; she should visit the asylum more often!
@@ScienceAsylum You did a really good job of it! Your wife also did a great job asking the right questions. You should have her own again if she's willing.
@@ScienceAsylum another interesting theme might be explaining the difference between forces that obey inverse square law and forces that don't (like strong and weak, afair). and how it is connected to a three-dimension world we live in
If we're in a deterministic world, that means that we have no free will according to the Asylum But if we're in a non-deterministic world, doesn't that mean that you're a slave to whatever the quantum particles randomize to?
Yeah I'm fine with the strong Copenhagen interpretation. Not cause of free will, I never even thought about that, and I still don't think it gives free will. I like it because it gives the simplest explanation that makes the most sense. According to de Broglie, everything is a particle and a wave. So by definition everything is inherently random. No matter which interpretation you use, you have to agree you will never be able to completely know the position and momentum of every particle in the universe. So the universe can never truly be deterministic. God does play dice, and he plays hard..
To me, Occam's razor would lead me to either pilot wave theory, or loss of causality. And in fact, retrocausality, as wild as it sounds, only sounds wild because we're used to thinking that the future can't cause the past. But all that might mean is that we don't perceive the universe as it is, but are forced to experience it in a sequence, due to some limitation of our perception.
This is a great format. I learned a lot. I am a physics hobbyist whose knowledge falls on the spectrum between the two of you. I’d like to commend your wife (sorry missed her name) but she is clearly very bright and asks really good questions. Also, my initial impression, based on this video, I think you guys make a great couple and are well suited for one another. Congrats on finding each other.
Excellent format Nick. I love the idea of having you lovely wife involved. She's smart, adds valuable POVs and ....keeps you solemn and direct. Her questions are smart and her comments and/or clarifications are cogent. Excellent program and you both have created a great program. Really well done!
Great video! Thanks so much for making it! Personally, I tend to shy away from introducing the concept of free will into discussions about QM interpretations. The way I see it, the smallest physical trace of thought or consciousness that we can verify experimentally is the size of a neuron. Since each neuron exists on a highly deterministic scale, the idea that there's any deeper sense in which our consciousness would be indeterministic seems like an effort to shoehorn an abstraction of our internal experience in where it doesn't belong. Even if we accept that QM is ultimately indeterministic, those tiny fluctuations would generally have little to no impact on the behavior of neurons, the apparent quanta of thought/consciousness/experience. Even if quantum fluctuations do influence the behavior of neurons, it still seems that those effects would be random in nature and uninfluenced by us and so the term "free will" seems inappropriate to me. It's really only about unpredictability rather than the human mind being somehow independent of physical law or being able to influence the probabilities of specific outcomes from quantum interactions in a way that contradicts the underlying indeterminism that we assumed. Suffice it to say that I don't see QM having the ability to save the comforting notion of free will in any interpretation, deterministic or not. Free will is dead, and man has killed it. That's just my two cents.
I also agree that free will is dead. My criticism was that there's obvious bias as the discussion goes on and there isn't an opportunity for the viewer to have their own reaction. We're talking about interpretations, so we're talking about philosophy. Just come out at the beginning and disclaim you are both free will proponents. That's fine. To talk about the other interpretations with sarcasm and disregard seems somewhat underhanded. I thought it was supposed to be OK to be a little bit crazy.
Copenhagen's: Universe is random and every event is the way it is just because that's how 'god rolled the dice' Many worlds: The universe is not random, it's just a superposition of states that evolves over time. Events seem random only because the individual eigenstates get more and more correlated with each interaction. Both interpretations make exactly the same outrageous level of assumptions. They just make it in different places. Occam's razor can't distinguish between them, unless you approach it with a bias for which assumption you subjectively "dislike less".
I'm sorry, but no. The Copenhagen Interpretation only assumes that the randomness seen in experiments is an actual property of the particle in question, and posits the existence of no additional entities to explain the wave-function collapse. The Many Worlds interpretation, on the other hand, assumes the randomness is merely apparent and posits the existence of a near infinite number of entangled universe to explain the apparent randomness. In no way is taking the randomness demonstrated by experiment at face value and using nearly infinite entities to explain how it's not _actually_ random at all equivalent under Occam's Razor. Positing 0 new entities is preferable to positing near infinite new entities. Taking experimental facts at face value is preferable to explaining them through other means.
@@APaleDot Existence is a physics lab; you don't get to turn off how the science is interpreted because some of it happens while someone is wearing a lab coat in an academic setting. Nobody is positing any "new entities" in MWI; it's simply the most simple explanation for the formalism that already works. It just takes the equation that enables it literally. "Positing near infinite entities" is an intuition you have for the model that makes it seem as if it is more complex than it is. Occam's Razor applies easily to MWI if it happens to be the most eloquent scientific explanation for the data, its formalism, and the outcomes we can experience/apply. There's no reason the universe/multiverse and its physics has to conform to human eyes or human intuition. MWI can be refuted, ignored, etc., but I think doing so at this point is akin to trying to find holes in the fossil record. Sometimes it's helpful to let go of the intuition and see what kind of models you can make/think about when you take human preference out of it (to the extent you can), regardless of what you have historically found most intuitive.
Many Worlds is theistic in a Calvinist sense of the term, it's just obsolete ideas from the past trying to survive quantum (and chaos science) devastation of certainty. I say: get over it, God does play dice and probably even gamble.
@@APaleDot Assuming that waveform collapse is a random choice means assuming that, as a brute force fact, one collapse happened, despite all the alternatives. That is metaphysically on the same level as positing an entity. Assuming that all waveform collapses are random choices is not one assumption. It's a near infinite list of assumptions. Random choice is a distinct concept from "randomness" as mere "unpredictability". Random choice is a metaphysical claim. Both Copenhagen and MWI predict that wavefunction collapse should be random in a sense of unpredictable. But only Copenhagen assumes it is due to random choice.
I like the Many Worlds interpretation because it makes sense: you have an observer O and a particle in a superposition P1+P2. They interact. Now you have a superposition of O1+P1/O2+P2; in each part of the superposition, the observer "sees" a non-superpositioned particle P. So there aren't really "many worlds", just one giant superposition with bits that are constantly re-superpositioning.
It’s interesting to me that you bring up Occam’s Razor as reasoning ‘against’ the Many World’s interpretation, as many of the proponents of that interpretation seem to feel like Occam’s Razor is in *their* favor! I’m not sure if they’ve referenced Occam’s Razor specifically but I do know that the main reason why Sean Carroll is such a strong supporter of the Many Worlds interpretation is because it doesn’t introduce weasel-wordy verbiage like “observer”/“observation” in regards to the “collapse” of the wave function, and instead takes the “least assumptions” approach by following the Schrödinger equation to its logical conclusion. I’m just a nobody layperson , so I don’t really have a meaningful leaning in either direction, but still thought that was interesting.
*"Many of the proponents of that interpretation seem to feel like Occam’s Razor is in their favor! "* Yes, I know. I had a conversation with Looking Glass Universe about this once and she's _adamantly_ disagrees with me.
Your description of "the general" Everettian point of view seems correct here in relation to Occam's Razor. MWI proponents advocate (correctly, I think) that the multiverse is exactly what is most obeying the principle of Occam here. It comes out of the math in a pretty literal way. The many worlds aren't "added," they're just *there*. Human intuitions, etc. are what's being added in other interps.
@@dannywest8843 - i guess it depend son how "real" you take the mathematical objects to be; are you adding an actual universe to your model to account for a few numbers, or are you just accepting that the numbers are actual universes?
I think Occam's razor is in favor of the strong Copenhagen interpretation. At face value, the science is telling that electrons are inherently random. So why not just take it that electrons are particles and waves, and forget about determinism. You can never find both the position and momentum of each particle anyway, so the universe can never truly be deterministic anyway. The MWI seems to be just a weird work-around for people who want to be pedantic about determinism. Like "the universe is deterministic! We're just not in the universe where it happens".
@@adarshmohapatra5058 But at the same time, the strong Copenhagen "artificially" creates the idea that a state randomly jumps to another without any explanation for the mechanism. MWI is just that but without such a jump. I think MWI gets misinterpreted by people who are only given a non-mathematical, verbal explanation. Mathematically, it makes the least assumptions. Forget about the "other worlds" or whatever, all you assume is that the state of the entire universe always follows the Schrodinger equation, and MWI is what you get.
I'd say causality is the most important tenant. If causality wasn't a thing, that would impair the ability of reasonable people to give a damn about anything. Screw realism, though, that's definitely just human pattern seeking biases. Causality>localism>determinism>realism.
@@MarkWadsworthYPP lmfao imagine the high level abstract physics concepts all living in an apartment complex, locality and realism were living together until they were shown to be mutually exclusive
@@KAMiKAZOW Yes, but I didn't have the time to edit it, so we quit. I don't think I'd start a new podcast until I have a team of people to help with things.
@@ScienceAsylum Absolutely! You two have such interesting discussion and banter. I would honestly edit for free if it meant more of you two talking. I hope one day it will see the light of day once more.
I have to admit I'm kind drawn to the Pilot Waves Interpretation. From a super-layman's perspective (I literally have learned everything about QM from RUclips) it makes a sort of sense. I've always felt that there was something fundamental that we were missing. And if you think about it, that's been true for all of history. At one point we had no clue about sub-atomic particles, we had no clue about atoms, or molecules, or cells, ... and every time we discovered them we exclaimed "oh! Now X makes sense." I don't see why this would be any different. It's turtles, all the way down! But again, I'm not a scientist, just a random schmuck. Thanks for the great video!!
The problem with pilot waves unlike the other interpretations is that it adds additional math that is incredibly hard to marry with Special Relativity and no one has done it so far, which is really problematic for something that promises to violate speed of light communication. It's basically how Quantum Mechanics gave rise to Quantum Field Theory, which is what the standard model of particle physics stands on top of, when you apply the Lorentz transformation to Quantum Mechanics and the math becomes invariant to it (what gives Special Relativity its 'there is no preferential frame of reference') and no one has found a way to apply it to pilot waves yet to produce this result. It's what gives scientists poor confidence in it despite its promise of making QM entirely 'classical', though it doesn't mean it's wrong, we don't know that yet, but the odds are not in its favor at the moment. At least it gives room for some actual theoretical work to be done.
@@ThatCrazyKid0007 Yeah, see, this is where II point out the "super-layman" comment above :) I am absolutely sure there are issues with the interpretation but, honestly, the math, and issues of it, are WAY beyond me.
@@dannywest8843 If I have learned anything it's that nothing involving QM should be interpreted as "firm truth". In fact, doesn't that fly in the face of some of its basic tenets? :)
@@mrnix1001 Yeah I know, just wanted to point out as another enthusiastic layman (studying in a STEM field helps understand the material a bit easier, but only up to a certain point) so you aren't confused why such an intuitive thing is not the most favored one, or barely favored at all. Cheers.
The many worlds interpretation works with the Occam's razor because the many worlds aren't an assumption, or even an ih=nherent part of the interpretation, but a way for us to understand what happens if you treat the measurement as any other process. What you end up with is that if the measured object was in a superposition, then after the measurement the entire system (the object being measured and the object measuring) are in a superposition. Then both components of the superposition evolve separately and don't affect each other, and thus can be interpreted as separate universes. The only assumption in this interpretation is that "the act of measurement does not require special treatment and functions as any other interaction". Occam's razor isn't in conflict with this interpretation then, and actually supports it over other interpretations which add new mechanisms and rules on top of the formalism that already works.
Yeah I feel like there's a lot of confusion about Occam's razor. It states that you should choose the explanation with the fewest assumptions going in, which is not necessarily the explanation that produces the "simplest" result.
Right, (unfortunately, in my opinion), Occam's razor leads to the many worlds interpretation. In the other interpretations, you have to add an assumption to the theory: what happens to the superpositions? You have to add a pilot wave, or a wavefunction collapse, or something to the theory. But in many worlds, you don't add anything.
"locality" always seemed to me to be based on a deeper assumption that the only suitable mathematical frameworks upon which to model quantum fields are ones that involves smooth topologies, which sort of means that you build a type of locality into the model from the start, doesn't it?
also with locality, for all interactions we create a particle to mediate them. it becomes a cleverly disguised tautology that could hide parasitic self reinforcing circular reasoning.
At least in some formulations, it looks like locality could be emergent, rather than axiomatic. This is one of the side branches coming out of the holographic principle. Nima Arkani-Hamed, Larry Susskind, and Sean Carroll have all touched on it in their lectures. Sean, in particular, is doing some interesting work in this area
@@Lantalia whatever interpretation you take, nature seems to be telling us that *something* we previously thought was axiomatic is actually emergent. Personally, my intuition tells me that it's time's arrow; if we take seriously the time-symmetric nature of our equations (and Feynman diagrams), I don't see why retrocausality shouldn't be a regular occurrence on quantum scales, particularly in isolated systems. Something like the transactional model, with information from every interaction being carried forward and backward in time, would certainly explain the "conspiratorial" nature of entanglement. I think the emergence of time's arrow can be explained simply by the idea that the overwhelming majority of particles simply have "momentum", as it were, in one particular temporal direction (away from the big bang), and in becoming entangled with each other they acquire this same property. As much as I adore the holographic principle, myself, I think it opens up a huge can of worms if we interpret it to mean we can sacrifice locality, namely, what exactly is this metaphysical substrate upon which the code of the universe runs, and what exactly creates this illusion of additional spatial dimension(s)?
There was an article in Scientific American a few years ago that discussed the idea that entangled particles were connected via space-time wormholes. What appears as a non-local interaction to us could actually be local through the wormhole. I'm not advocating that idea (I'm more of a Pilot Wave fan) and throwing wormholes into the QM interpretation game opens a whole new can of worms.
"It's all science fiction until it's experimentally validated." Ok, she's awesome. Great to see my tribe well represented (biologists). Though... Free will and determinism isn't what y'all think it is. Free will at a practical level and determinism go together perfectly fine.
Perhaps we somehow have the ability to choose which universe to “observe” every time the wave function of the multiverse that contains our brain becomes unentangled from the one you were observing. Basically the ultimate choose-your-own-adventure book.
I really appreciate how your wife is able to jump to concepts outside of her field of expertise because she is able to keep her scientific mind together - a bit like trying to stabilise a plasma field. 😂 It might be difficult, but not impossible with a lot of quick calculations.
@@TeodorAngelov Really? It's not the kind where if you knew everything about every particle in the present you could predict every future outcome? 'Cause in sure that's what I just heard him say and that's what I'm talking about. I don't expect you to agree with those religious people, but they agree with the physicists who believe in a deterministic universe.
Not necessarily, God either enables non-determinism with free will and simply (re)acts simultaneously or God enables determinism by knowing and/or setting things up. Calvinism, Islam, etc. are deterministic religions. Normal Christianity is usually non-deterministic, at least in the way that violates free will.
0:29 "We like to view physics as though we're finding some deeper understanding about the universe, but that's not really what physics is about. It's about making predictions." That right there hit me right into my deepest concerns about physics, because I know he's right, although I still want to believe it isn't true. I began studying physics as a way of grasping the hidden nature of the Cosmos, but I learned that's something you, personally and subjectively, make along the way, as you gain knowledge and understanding. Thanks for your videos, though! 😙
I don't think they're mutually exclusive. Yes, physics is about _modeling_ the physical world to make predictions and those models always end up being approximations of reality. But that doesn't mean we aren't learning about about the physical world. It's just that we're never getting the _full_ story. And besides, making accurate predictions in itself tells us something about the physical world -- how it behaves. In math, we sometimes say that "numbers _are_ what they _do._ " That is, mathematical objects are defined by their properties. The same is often true in physics and even with language in general. e.g. I'm Newtonian mechanics, we define a "force" as being anything that satifies Newton's second law. So we use that term to generalize a lot of different phenomena.
@@Lucky10279 It's both until you hit that wall, there is only so much we can figure out through experiment (and any theoretical work without experiments to back it up eventually is worthless and as good as any science fiction screenplay) until you concede to the universe, which is why it is mutually exclusive ultimately. We are and will be too limited to figure out everything, but the fun is finding all that we realistically can and seeing where that wall truly lies, what can we ultimately predict and what we concede to the unknown.
@@ThatCrazyKid0007 Well yeah, like I said, we never get the _full_ story, but that doesn't mean we aren't getting part of it. And just because we haven't yet come up with a way to verify any of the interpretations doesn't mean we won't do so in the future. QM is still a relatively branch of physics. I wish I could jump ahead a few hundred years and see what progress has been made on solving the measurement problem (since that's the problem that each interpretation is trying to solve). Alas, I cannot.
@@Lucky10279 We are talking about probing reality to the fundamental level, finding out all the why's, all the causes, but in reality physics is a study of effects and can we predict them. Finding out why is only sufficient up to the point we explain the effect, we need not dig further in physics, that's why Nick is ultimately right. You can of course try to explain the why's as the effects of some deeper why, but when do you say well that's as deep as it goes? At some point, it just turns into speculation based on arbitrary assumptions, which can't hold ground in physics if we can't verify it with experiments. I'd bet that even in a few hundred years, assuming we are still there and only keep increasing our ability to probe nature deeper, we'd either be stuck on the same problem or be stuck on a deeper problem without solving the fundamental why. At some point, it just crosses into metaphysics and without experimental data, you go from learning about reality to just guessing, hoping future generations will come up with the answer, but they never will. That's why it ultimately isn't about probing down to the fundamental level, it's just predicting effects.
I'm one who's taken by the implications of chaos theory for ostensibly deterministic, classical systems - namely that their behaviour cannot in practice be predicted, no matter how refined our measurements can realistically be expected to become over time. What I have never heard in these kinds of discussions is a generalization of chaos theory to the quantum world in which some interpretations are based on attributing classical properties to quantum objects in the hopes of achieving some sort of certainty. (I can only assume that lots of physics geeks have had such discussions amongst themselves, so perhaps I have just never come across any...) What I get from discussions like those in this video is that questions of determinism vs randomness and predestination vs free will (which I take as being closely related dyads) are essentially ideological/"faith"- based beliefs that may never in practice (and perhaps not even in principle) be resolvable through empirical testing of hypotheses. So... is taking a seemingly firm stance on such things (as both parties to the conversation do here) even consistent with "science"?
I'd say no. The problem is that although science is a tool people are using the idea or image of science (instead of real science) as a replacement for God. Therefore they have to make in fit into every corner of existence even if it's outside of the area of functional use. I think it really comes down to a desire for power. If the tool of science has no limit and the they (specific people in the establishment and not individual scientist) are the ones who wield it then they become godlike figures. If that's not the case then what would be the purpose of stepping out into the realm of philosophy while making such a concerted effort to deny that it's philosophy and calling it science instead?
Thank you both fulfilling our wish and making another video together. This is great stuff and should become a constant thing on the channel in the future.
Honestly people need to shut up about free will. If anything, a truly random universe has almost no free will since your actions and behavior are at the mercy of random quantum events that you have no control over
Loved the video, I like how you can have a complicated conversation with your wife and she gets it! I have a feeling you guys have hashed out a lot of science.
You two together are adorable to watch. Don’t know what the chemistry exactly is between the two of you. Love it! And am learning something at the same time!
2 года назад+1
Well when you have physics and biology, the only thing left is chemistry! 😜
Imho, this video is,1+1=3, and it's great! The two of them plus what they create or the extra dimension they add really helps get across what they're trying to convey. Thank you so much.
Nick, I commend you on your new format. Your wife, very pretty BTW and I love her hair, adds a great flair and compliments what you’re trying to achieve: teach and elucidate complex and engaging topics. You take on a more commanding and sober appearance in her presence and your wife adds value to the conversation by acting as a sounding board, clarifying and challenging. I love your new format - you made a great decision. I think your wife’s participation will broaden your sphere of audience. Well done!!!! 👍👍👍👍👍
Just wanna point out that wifu's hair looks very fashionable, and her responses to what he says are so encouraging and positively rebouncing the topic back to him. It's a perfect example of how couples should communicate. And the material is great!
I'm a programmer and the more I learn about Quantum Mechanics the more it sounds like we're in a simulation, because this whole uncertainity mess sounds like just effects of the IT concept of lazy evaluation. Don't calculate a precise value (position, charge, speed, whatever) until you actually really need it for other calculations.
As a programmer, seems that the speed of light is just the maximum speed that different "computers" can calculate what is going on. So, the sun explodes, the information has a delay (like a lag) to tell the others computers that this happened, and while the information doesn't reach "earth", everybody continues to calculate as the information hasn't changed.
I enjoy your channel a lot: very down to earth approach, I would say very intellectually honest, not trying to wow people with science fictiony sounding physics (though I am a fan of science fiction, from an artistic point of view). I like how you make the distinction in this video about quantum physics as a mathematical model, and trying to give more of a meaning to these models in wanting to have a fuller understanding of reality. I'm not much of a fan of the multiverse myself, and going with experience I do believe in free will. That said, there's still some explaining to do to know what the heck is going on in the universe 😂
Many Worlds is particularly vulnerable to that kind of fantastical descriptions that don't help understanding. It's also horribly named since it's practically _begging_ to described fantastically when what it's really about is treating the mathematics 100% literally and that's it. I considered that I might be better named something like "Universal Wavefunction," and someone else in the comments suggested "one-wavefunction interpretation," to make it more clear that the interpretation is really about the wavefunction itself than any science fiction portrayal of a multiverse.
For my part, I had to redefine "free will" so that even in a deterministic universe I still have it. I had to do this because even in a non-deterministic interpretation of quantum mechanics, it won't save free will, like at all. So what if random quantum wiggles mean you might choose different things if you rerun a moment over and over again? You're just entirely at the mercy of dice rolls instead of the course of a river. Dice being in control of your actions isn't really any more "freeing". How do we escape it? Well for me, I just had to distance myself from the notion that free will means that at any point I can make a choice entirely contradictory to my past experiences. That's not really satisfying either really. That's just... randomness no matter what physics you are into. Rather, I simply interpret it to mean that the group of interactions, the "process" that is my mind, is how the universe figures out how to proceed from moment to moment, at least local to my head area. As a result, it may be deterministic or random, but I am a PART of that process. My decision making apparatus, however predetermined or dice rolled it may be, is important in that it determines the flow of future events. Inputs go into my brain, the brain does things with those inputs, and it spits out decisions. That, to me, is "free will" enough and I am satisfied by that.
Many philosophers have done the same, the compatibalists. On the other hand, I don't think free will in a meaningful sense is possible weather the world is deterministic or not.
Yes, randomness is not "willing something" at all. Have you ever read 'dice man'? I reached for the cup of tea but my captor has flipped a coin saying i must have coffee. It probably resolves less free will to be random.. I call it being at the mercy of some cosmic roulette wheel, not autonomy. There is a more complex question. Unless consciousness is understood we have no hope. We can assume its emergent, we can assume nothing is greater than the sum of its parts.....although things may be greater than sum of parts, we see that an elementary particle is random but a collection of molecules is deterministic, so is it beyond the question to speculate how such properties like "will" can emerge.
@@jskratnyarlathotep8411 things is, we probably are even if its true. Quantum coherence is an unstable, isolated state. Its unlikely to exist in our big wet brains. Penrose i think theorise it might, but in form of qubits, quantum computing via microtubules, however this is entirely a speculation. It does pose that our "algorhythms" are more complex, more analogue than a mathematical algorhythm, so if our decisions are just determined information processing at least its a higher, complex, incomprehensible form that doesnt exist elsewhere in the universe.
What's Complicated is Cracking the Codes doing the Math, building the machine! Making the Symmetric Resonator by Frequency Quantum Computer, SRF-QC. Nickel or gold circuitry thats only the basics Now there are Super Computers, Run On Light ! More information ! I can feel the power Already, can you .
I like the many worlds interpretation. If the universe is already infinite by its size, why would it be crazy to think it can be just an infinitely big wave function where we only experience one of them (I mean, an infinite amount of them until we pass the point where they branch out)? I like determinism and have no issue with abandoning the idea of real free will... The illusion of free will is enough for me. Even if we can still argue that in the many worlds interpretation, as I understand it here, you actually have free will, it's just that you also made your other choices in other universes, but don't experience it.
I really liked the explanation of the many worlds. So it would be a multiverse of superpositions, not entirely separate universes? Which I thought was the idea.
You forgot to say that there is a chance that our universe is embedded within a fourth dimension, and that the particles are 4D particles interfering with a 3D space that is subspace of a 4D space which makes them probabilistic inside the 3D space but deterministic inside the 4D space, like a 2D sphere crossing a 2D plane, will appear to flat land creatures (on the 2D plane) as a circle increasing then decreasing which will make no deterministic sense to them, and all sort of 3D shapes of arbitrary complexity, then they will need to come up with 2D quantum physics to explain it .
there is 11-dimension theory, i believe it is a string theory but all the extra dimensions there are "compacted", because a full-sized fourth dimension would affect the 1/r^2 law of force propagation (both electromagnetic and gravitational)
Hello from North England. The future may not be deterministic, but one conclusion that is always positively true and determined evidenced with countless circumstances witnessed first hand, is the logic: The wife is always right. So, in conclusion: Happy wife, happy life. Could you now link to her channel where the mystery of biology is explained back to you/ us physics/ engineers? Keep up the great work on the channel.
Many Worlds is about as useful as the Simulation Hypothesis (another rather easy way to explain all of the weirdness of quantum mechanics). And, currently, just as provable. Not, as the lady said, "good science". Nothing more than a philosophical exercise.
I’m sure many people have already mentioned this. But this is such a great format for an educational video. Your wife represents all of us who are not experts in QM. And she represents us well!!
Don't be so judgemental about retro-causality. There are some points that you should consider - 1) In all classical mechanics, unidirectionality of time comes out of second law which is statistical. 2) In EM, it comes out of convection. 3) In QFT, again convention as anti-particles can be treated as particles traveling back in time. (Feynman-Stueckelberg interpretation) 4) In QM, retrocausal interpretation is an interpretation, that is it produces the same physics predictions. 5) Given all above do we really need to put in unidirectionality of time? because - 6) Unidirectionality is an extra assumption not retrocausality. As in any retrocausal framework if you can prove that proper or effective unidirectionality then lo and behold you have it but in any theory with unidirectionality of time, you can't afterwards prove retrocausality. For example, classical mechanics is retrocausal but it statistically gives rise to second law, so at macro-scale we effectively see unidirectionality.
This may be showing my ignorance. My understanding of quantum mechanics is that it doesn't say that these particles don't follow deterministic rules. It says that we lack the tools to measure these particles, but we can make predictions of where they are going to be at any given time. Am I off base? I think I'm in the camp of locality can be sacrificed -- but not really. The thing is that there is something affecting these particles across long distances in 3 dimensional space, but there is something happening some "where" else. We just don't understand what happens in this "4th dimension of space" (for lack of a better term) that appears like it's happening across long distances but not really.
I'll confess that I'm a proponent of the Transactional Interpretation, mostly because I think it's cool. It does provide an interpretation to Dirac's bracket notation, as consists of |i>, the forward-moving initial state, and . As far as time travel goes, the Transactional Interpretation can't be used to communicate backwards in time any more than collapsing an entangled state enables faster-than-light communication. On a somewhat-related note, are you going to do a video on the Arrow of Time?
I think the transactional interpretation has a nice symmetry in how it utilizes both components of the state, and interfering waves (even if one is coming from the future) is definitely more appealing to me than an arbitrary and spontaneous collapse. Personally I think I prefer many worlds because it maintains causality, but I can see merits to the transactional interpretation as well.
Determinism only says that something can't happen for no reason. Therefor anything other than determinism is, by definition, unreasonable. Also, correct me if I'm wrong, but you don't need "time travel" for the strong Copenhagen interpretation, you only need non-locality, which is already guaranteed for quantum interactions by the delayed-choice quantum eraser experiments.
Superdeterministic interpretations can satisfy realism, locality, determinism, and causality. Such interpretations might seem desirable, but they give up on something arguably deeper and more fundamental, the freedom of choice. Bell's inequality would be satisfied if you could play out ALL scenarios, but you do not have the freedom to select all scenarios. Your choices are entangled with the system your investigating such that Bell's inequality appears to be violated in any measurement you perform. A good analogy for this: it's as if you asked a class of 100 students one question each and they all answered correctly. A reasonable person would conclude that each student in the class is well-versed in the subject since you had the freedom to choose the order of the questions and an arbitrary ordering is unlikely to yield your 100/100 observation unless each student in the class knows the answer to the vast majority of the 100 questions. A superdeterministic interpretation would interject and maintain that you did not freely choose the order of the questions and that the only order you could have chosen is the one you did. Therefore, you've only demonstrated that each student knows the answer to just one question, since its possible that your questions entangled with the students knowledge. In fact, you have not even ruled out the appalling scenario in which all your students only know the answer to 1/100 questions. This is spooky enough, but it gets worse. The examiner can use a random number generator to decide the order of questions (such as tv static), but superdrterminism will maintain that you did not freely choose your random number generator and that the random number generator you chose was not free to choose the questions either. The entire universe is choreographed ahead of time to produce an observed reality in which Bell's inequality appears to be violated. The problem with superdeterminism, apart from the chill it sends down the spine, is in finding a reasonable mechanism which can entangle seemingly arbitrary processes. Although, this may just be due to the failure in our imagination. T 'hooft has already constructed a toy universe which is superdeterministic in his book "the cellular automata interpretation of quantum mechanics"
This was one of the shortest half hours I've ever experienced. Wow I have to admit I jumped right in because the short 1st part guaranteed this episode would be great to watch So kudos for the content and for the execution! Will Mrs Lucid co-host classic Asylum videos from time to time? It's nice to watch you 2 working together! Merry Christmas!
I'm sure she'll be open to doing this again. It won't be a consistent thing though. I need to focus on my normal videos most of the time. P.S. Merry Christmas!
I really, really hate that description of Many Worlds. That's a pop science analogy, not the actual theory. The theory is actually that you as an observer are also a quantum system. You become entangled with the results you observe, and so your wavefunction evolves in a superposition along with the system you observed. Each consistent state "exists" in that superposition, and wavefunction collapse isn't necessary because there's no omniscient observer that has to decide which part of the superposition propagates. It's superposition all the way down. You can DESCRIBE that as the universe splitting, if you want to handwave it. But that suggests that the entire universe is duplicated in a way that you can extract a snapshot of one particular state and compare it to another one. But you can't. It's just a superposition of the wavefunction evolving continuously. There aren't distinct global states.
I was under the impression that the pilot wave theory didn't require FTL because the waves exist over a range instead of being localized to a point. That is, it achieves nonlocality not by having FTL signaling but by having a lightspeed signal propagating from the time the particles originally interacted, in the form of a wave spreading out from that point. And even if that wasn't the case, we already know that some parts of physics don't obey the light speed limit because they aren't propagating through spacetime -- the expansion of space itself. I don't think the idea that an entity like a pilot wave exists below the level of spacetime is so absurd.
I think retrocausality has the same "untestability" issue as many worlds. We can't experience multiple universes. We can't observe time outside of time. I just can't imagine there's any way to "detect" if the past has been altered. For all I know, a meteor might have destroyed Earth this morning, and I experienced the destruction, and then something in the future reversed that action, so it didn't happen. All I know is that last part. From where I'm sitting now, a meteor did not distroy Earth this morning. I'm almost tempted to think that there could be an experimental "Faraday cage" that would protect things from having their past altered. Like, you could write some notes about the starting conditions of an experiment, put them in the cage, alter the past outside of the cage, and then compare the protected notes. But that seems impossible. Changing the past _has_ to change the notes that were written about the past. Best case: it _is_ possible to build the cage, but anything protected by it will inherently limit the parts of the past you can change. If I write, "the house is red", then I go back and paint it green, but I protect my "red" note, then it should be impossible for the greenness to find its way back to the point in time when I wrote the note. Otherwise it almost feels like we're trying to have our superposition and eat our measurement too.
Particle physicists are the Devil they dont believe in fields and therefore either Infinite universa or Time travel as an fundamental mechanic have to exist in Order to keep their billiard balls rolling. All this has to be spiced with some nonexisting dark Matter and some nonexisting Energy Drink to not Completely lose the concepts we have Made so far regarding Matter. You couldnt even explain how a particle accelerator creates new Matter without the Basis of a damn field. All Most sciencists and teachers do today is to Point at some hundred year old formula and yell eureka.
@@NeonGreenT I tend to think of the relationship between fields and particles sort of like Conway's Game of Life. The game's grid is the field. The color of a single space in the grid is not a physical thing, but just a value at that particular point in the field. Experimentally, we can't see the values of these individual cells. Based on the rules of propagation in Conway's Game of Life, there are certain patterns that have cohesion across time. For example, the space ship thing that sort of moves in one direction across the playing area. Since this space ship is made of a combination of values on the grid, and we've already decided that the "dots" on the grid are just values and not "stuff", that means even the space ship isn't a physical thing. The fundamental rules of the game don't mention spaceships. It's just a pattern that we can observe that is interesting to our human brains. In a way, the space ship is like a photon. While the cells are always propagating their information outward at every moment of the game, the space ship does not dissolve outward and break into pieces. Instead, it moves in a straight line at a constant speed, but like a photon. There are other combinations of dots that are large enough to be observed from the outside, but they don't have the right configuration to persist across time. The game's propagation rules cause them to bend, break, and disappear very quickly. I think this is a similar behavior to what are called "virtual particles". Of course, "Life" consists of just a single field, a simple two-dimensional orthogonal axis system, and the possible values of a cell are just zero and one. It's a very, very simple model. While it seems likely that the very fundamental rules to our universe should be few and simple, I don't think they'll be quite as few and simple as the rules of "Life".
My understanding of Many Worlds is that there is only one entity - the "multiverse" (universal wave function) - and the "worlds" just come from the ways different observers are able to interact with different parts of it. Sort of like how a distant galaxy could recede beyond our cosmological horizon and effectively become a separate universe since our futures can never interact, but we still consider it to really exist and Occam's Razor doesn't fault us for this.
The intuition that I have always had towards behavior of quantums is inclined towards the pilot wave theory. There may be a field that we cannot or haven't detected that all particles might be “dragging through”. I believe, due to reasons, that the universe has been “programmed” to solve a problem under certain rules, which is in fact quite elegant. Imagine you write a computer program, how would you program it? Write a script for every single possible input, or pass every input through a set of “if - then” statements that apply only the relevant solution to the problem?
These are fantastic videos. I’d love to see you on Star Talk or another podcast with a bunch more physics nerds just talkin science. Then again you guys have great chemistry and are very entertaining and interesting to listen to. 👍👍
How can a universe not be deterministic? If our mathematical description of quantum mechanics can only provide us with a rough estimate/probabilistic prediction of a particle, that doesn’t mean the particle actually behaves in completely random/unknowable ways without any cause. If a wave function collapses to reveal an electron at point a, something caused the electron to be at point a. Our current mathematical models may not be able to explain it, but that doesn’t mean that’s what actually happened. Things cannot randomly happen without any cause, and just accepting that they do closes the door to further questions.
Great video! I'd be curious to hear you expand on your aversion to determinism. Lots of people think it means free will doesn't exist, but I disagree. You're still making the choice based on logic of your choosing, it's just a question of when the choice gets made. In a deterministic universe, it's made before you're even born, but still using the logic you dictate when you make the choice in the present. You still have the same control over your destiny in a deterministic universe, and the choices you make carry no less weight.
I absolutely love this channel! Great discussion (both halves). I wish he could reconsider free will as not a given as I don’t believe it is, which would greatly influence his decision on the models.
Yeah, a lot of people (unfortunately some of them scientists) cling to the assumption of free will just because it makes them uncomfortable, even though it's a totally unscientific and illogical assumption.
@@SamChaneyProductions I think you're making the mistake of thinking that the universe is science instead of science being a human tool we use to understand the universe better. Did you miss that this whole video was about interpretations? Your whole comment is unscientific.
@@Gunshinzero No, I do not make that mistake. I know that science is just a set of models we create to approximately model the universe. I still fail to see why that would imply that free will is real. There is no evidence for it so doesn't make sense to incorporate belief in it into a scientific model
@@SamChaneyProductions That's the point. Making the model itself is not scientific so arguing that they shouldn't have free will in the model is pointless from a scientific perspective. Arguing that there is no free will is also not scientific so if you choose to engage in the conversation you should just come to grips with the fact that you have entered philosophy. People feel science is a safe zone of comfort so they try to squeeze everything they hold dear into it. No human lives scientifically or depend on it for life. People have been eating food before they knew what it did in the body. Yet people keep trying to hide their beliefs behind science. You believe improvable or unproven things just like everyone else. Those things may be correct but that isn't the point. The OP in this thread worded it properly by saying he doesn't believe it is instead of talking about it being illogical because it doesn't fit his philosophy.
I don't believe any interpretation, but Many Worlds is one of the more elegant ways to think about it imo. Idk why but determinism has always been a higher priority in my understanding of the universe. Also the most mathematically elegant, you just assume all states follow the Schrodinger equation.
From my limited knowledge I feel that locality and determinism are likely to be important to be preserved as I think locality is required for special and general relativity and they predict determinism as according to relativity different reference frames have different 'presents' and so from your own reference frame you are connected to other 'observers' whose reference frames will collectively include all of time so as Einsteins theories of relativity are largely correct such fundamental axioms and predictions are (I think) likely to be correct although we know General creativity breaks down at the Big Bang and black holes so maybe I am total wrong, but I am just trying to use evidence rather than my emotional preferences to judge what is important to be preserved by a quantum mechanics interpretation. This PBS video is what I am referencing to about the determinism thing so go watch that at ruclips.net/video/EagNUvNfsUI/видео.html as I am just repeating what I have heard less accurately and I don't have any significant qualifications to say anything with certainty so don't take my word for what I say.
In "Many Worlds" there aren't a bajillion "universes", there is just the one wavefunction, and the only assumption is that it keeps being the wavefunction doing its wave thing. It just happens to turn out that if you let the wavefunction do its thing without anything else getting in the way, it ends up looking like different branches of the universe happening all at once.
@@ScienceAsylum I'd argue that because the "many worlds" are in a superposition, it's like arguing that a particle in a superposition is in "two states at once", a phrasing you have said you don't like before.
Am I crazy if I understand free will differently than everyone else? If you say that deterministic system eliminates possibility for free will, what you imply is that free will requires some sort of randomness of the system that it exists in. For me random actions are exactly oppose to actions that are outcome of free will. In my understanding if agent X placed in stage Y (specific space time configuration) in which X need to chose A or B, X might have free will only if X chooses the same option no matter how many times we will retry this experiment. Imagine this, you are in a candy shop, you choose m&m, that's your decision, then someone rewinds time few minutes, everything is the same as before, you need to choose a candy, you need to choose the same, otherwise it's not your decision, if you choose different candy on each iteration what decision is that? Such acting would be driven by pure chaos not by free will. Of course deterministic system doesn't prove free will, it only makes it possible, but non deterministic system does not allow for free will to exists in my understanding.
I'd say non-determinism is necessary but not sufficient for free will. But I don't really believe in true free will anyways, just the impression of free will.
Not true things can move instantaneously between two universes . Zero gravity Remember. That's Faster than Light ! light is snail mail. Hahaha tomorrow New Nanowalls.
The Transactional Interpretation does not make any claims about if the universe is deterministic, since the wave functions travelling backwards in time can be travelling from possible futures, rather than a future that is predetermined.
Hi, so cool to see you comment on other physics videos
Ahh, another one of my favourite Physics channels!!
🤯
Nice
Interesting 🤔 Thanks for the correction!
There's a different universe where Nick is really into the many worlds interpretation. We just didn't end up in that universe.
If the the Many Worlds interpretation is true, there's a universe in which the Many Worlds interpretation isn't true. Therefore, the Many Worlds interpretation isn't true.
The question remains: If the unentanglement of collaps of wave function happens at the moment of measurement... what is that moment of measurement? Only realistic theories can describe measurement processes without further introduction of collapse. That is a problem that was sadly not adressed in the vid :/
@@Bolpat that is fundamentally unreal.
@@Bolpat Many world interpretation doesn't necessary mean completely contradictory universes. Just a little tweak and you get an almost similar universe but *all the universes must obey the basic law of physics*
Beside a lot of theories thought of being impossible have been proven correct
It's our fault, we observed his video :-D
Heisenberg was speeding down the highway. A cop pulls him over and says “Do you have any idea how fast you were going back there?” Heisenberg says, “No, but I knew where I was.”
this is so funny
Then the cop says "you were going over 70 miles per hour" and Heisenberg replies "Well great! Now we are lost!"
Or "yes I know exactly how fast but you can't prove I did it here".
@@dakrontu Oh, that's clever. I like it.
I love that
I love how your wife admits that doing science with specific goal in mind isn’t real science and than dismisses interpretations because she don’t like time travel :D
But seriously, this format is great as well as your other videos. ❤️
But actually science develops by having specific goals in mind, for example lots of scientific discoveries were driven by the desire of the scientists to explain phenomena in a more simple and unified manner, having goals does not diminish the scientific pursuit at all, because at the end of the day once you develop a model motivated by some goals, then it can be pursued, tested, evaluated and so on, and then science continues, dismissing interpretations is actually not a good thing a lot of physicists would say because, all an interpretation means is to have something real to point to behind all the mathematical models created, if we just stick to the mathematical models and their predictions, then all we arrive at are models that drive predictive success without ever striving to find out how the world actually is, because mathematically there is literally an infinite number of models that could say very different things about the universe, and yet they could all give us the same exact predictions.....
Its also important to note that if we don't have an interpretation can also drive future discoveries and give us new predictions to test, that could lead to new scientific discoveries, so it's very naive to dismiss them.
@@lolroflmaoization Thanks for saying so well what I was thinking. She was conflating science idioms incorrectly, especially around confirmation bias in testing vs goals. Also I almost choked when she said "if you don't get the results you want, just move on, abandon your theory" or something like that. We always loved when we got different results! It was this huge opportunity to find your experimental or data mistake or to look at the problem from different angles previously unseen. All theories are tools, not objectives, and one can hold more than one at once or not even consider them until or unless they become relevant. Old lab books/journals are precious for the data that you can go back over and look at with any theory or new understanding or just to see what you didn't see at the time. And my first lab was in an old building that stored projects from Apollo re-entry research. The damage to the concrete walls showed where many failures had occurred. I'm glad they didn't just say "well, that doesn't work, let's not go to the Moon."
Same for free will, which makes no sense in any type of universe regardless of in/determinism. Kind of silly, really.
@@seasidescott I think there is a big misinterpretation here though. There is a difference in not getting the results you expected, and not getting the results you want. Getting unexpected results is amazing, not getting the results you wanted is bias.
Just as an example for other people who will inevitably read this in the future:
Unexpected results is what leads to people trying to recreate those unexpected results to see where it leads them, this is often compared to the discovery of penicilline.
Not getting the results you expected is what leads to people trying again and again untill they get the results they wanted, or at least close enough. These are often the kind of scientific papers that tell you that vaccines cause autism.
Hence the "if you dont get the results you want, move on, abandon your theory" fits. If you got unexpected results, you dont really want the results you got, you have to move on from those expectation, abandon that theory and follow the trail where the unexpected results lead you.
Now I want to see a series where she explains biology to you.
Oh hell yeah! 😃
Maybe she already did... Did she contributed to the photosynthesis vid?
This would be fun. My favorites Asimov books were biology combined with chemistry and physics.
Me too
I don't. She hates time travel.
you guys are a) adorable, and b) super smart! having Em asking her pleasantly straight-to-the-point cutting-through-the-bullshit questions really adds a lot to these videos; she should visit the asylum more often!
remember: is ok to be a little crazy, but not when your wife is next to you.
Just wait until one of his clones shows up.
😂😂
Lol
Now Nick is serious.
@Emmet Ray lol
PLEASE HAVE MORE VIDEOS WITH HER! she asks great questions, acts as a great foil that the audience can relate with more
I can feel this deep effort to explain or clear things, Thank you both of you for this energy consuming exercise.
Explaining quantum ideas is _so_ hard!
@@ScienceAsylum You did a really good job of it! Your wife also did a great job asking the right questions. You should have her own again if she's willing.
@@ScienceAsylum another interesting theme might be explaining the difference between forces that obey inverse square law and forces that don't (like strong and weak, afair). and how it is connected to a three-dimension world we live in
All exercise is energy consuming..................................
The first step in science is to formulate a hypothesis, "Shut up & calculate, don't try to understand" limits Scientific exploration.
If we're in a deterministic world, that means that we have no free will according to the Asylum
But if we're in a non-deterministic world, doesn't that mean that you're a slave to whatever the quantum particles randomize to?
Yes I don't understand why some people think that basically a dice roll counts as free will..
Yeah I'm fine with the strong Copenhagen interpretation. Not cause of free will, I never even thought about that, and I still don't think it gives free will. I like it because it gives the simplest explanation that makes the most sense. According to de Broglie, everything is a particle and a wave. So by definition everything is inherently random. No matter which interpretation you use, you have to agree you will never be able to completely know the position and momentum of every particle in the universe. So the universe can never truly be deterministic. God does play dice, and he plays hard..
Exactly! Neither of the interpretations allows for any free will.
Totally love this format. You two are greater than the sum of your parts. Many thanks for clear and concise explanations.
To me, Occam's razor would lead me to either pilot wave theory, or loss of causality. And in fact, retrocausality, as wild as it sounds, only sounds wild because we're used to thinking that the future can't cause the past. But all that might mean is that we don't perceive the universe as it is, but are forced to experience it in a sequence, due to some limitation of our perception.
As if time were just a big ball of wibbly wobbly timey wimey… stuff?
The Science Asylum is the only channel for which I'll pause a PBS Spacetime video to watch a new upload immediately.
That's love right there.
Ahmen!
Good taste! Two of the best channels and I'd agree with your ordering
I can accept that.
Is it even possible to understand any of the PBS Spacetime videos?
This is a great format. I learned a lot. I am a physics hobbyist whose knowledge falls on the spectrum between the two of you. I’d like to commend your wife (sorry missed her name) but she is clearly very bright and asks really good questions. Also, my initial impression, based on this video, I think you guys make a great couple and are well suited for one another. Congrats on finding each other.
Excellent! Merry Christmas both!
Merry Christmas to you too!
Excellent format Nick. I love the idea of having you lovely wife involved. She's smart, adds valuable POVs and ....keeps you solemn and direct. Her questions are smart and her comments and/or clarifications are cogent. Excellent program and you both have created a great program. Really well done!
Great video! Thanks so much for making it!
Personally, I tend to shy away from introducing the concept of free will into discussions about QM interpretations. The way I see it, the smallest physical trace of thought or consciousness that we can verify experimentally is the size of a neuron. Since each neuron exists on a highly deterministic scale, the idea that there's any deeper sense in which our consciousness would be indeterministic seems like an effort to shoehorn an abstraction of our internal experience in where it doesn't belong. Even if we accept that QM is ultimately indeterministic, those tiny fluctuations would generally have little to no impact on the behavior of neurons, the apparent quanta of thought/consciousness/experience. Even if quantum fluctuations do influence the behavior of neurons, it still seems that those effects would be random in nature and uninfluenced by us and so the term "free will" seems inappropriate to me. It's really only about unpredictability rather than the human mind being somehow independent of physical law or being able to influence the probabilities of specific outcomes from quantum interactions in a way that contradicts the underlying indeterminism that we assumed. Suffice it to say that I don't see QM having the ability to save the comforting notion of free will in any interpretation, deterministic or not. Free will is dead, and man has killed it. That's just my two cents.
As someone who is also fascinated by quantum mechanics, this is exactly how I feel about it and i agree completely.
I also agree that free will is dead. My criticism was that there's obvious bias as the discussion goes on and there isn't an opportunity for the viewer to have their own reaction. We're talking about interpretations, so we're talking about philosophy. Just come out at the beginning and disclaim you are both free will proponents. That's fine. To talk about the other interpretations with sarcasm and disregard seems somewhat underhanded. I thought it was supposed to be OK to be a little bit crazy.
that is an amazingly concise way to put it
“Update yourselves!” Is going to be my cyberpunk saying. 💁🏻
Wake up, Samurai. We have a theory to learn.
This is one of the most important videos you've made to help expand my understanding of physics as a body of science. Thanks!
Happy to help 🤓
It sure has
A science asylum video is literally the best Christmas present ever. Yes, I’m that guy.
Copenhagen's: Universe is random and every event is the way it is just because that's how 'god rolled the dice'
Many worlds: The universe is not random, it's just a superposition of states that evolves over time. Events seem random only because the individual eigenstates get more and more correlated with each interaction.
Both interpretations make exactly the same outrageous level of assumptions. They just make it in different places. Occam's razor can't distinguish between them, unless you approach it with a bias for which assumption you subjectively "dislike less".
True.
I'm sorry, but no. The Copenhagen Interpretation only assumes that the randomness seen in experiments is an actual property of the particle in question, and posits the existence of no additional entities to explain the wave-function collapse. The Many Worlds interpretation, on the other hand, assumes the randomness is merely apparent and posits the existence of a near infinite number of entangled universe to explain the apparent randomness.
In no way is taking the randomness demonstrated by experiment at face value and using nearly infinite entities to explain how it's not _actually_ random at all equivalent under Occam's Razor. Positing 0 new entities is preferable to positing near infinite new entities. Taking experimental facts at face value is preferable to explaining them through other means.
@@APaleDot Existence is a physics lab; you don't get to turn off how the science is interpreted because some of it happens while someone is wearing a lab coat in an academic setting. Nobody is positing any "new entities" in MWI; it's simply the most simple explanation for the formalism that already works. It just takes the equation that enables it literally. "Positing near infinite entities" is an intuition you have for the model that makes it seem as if it is more complex than it is. Occam's Razor applies easily to MWI if it happens to be the most eloquent scientific explanation for the data, its formalism, and the outcomes we can experience/apply. There's no reason the universe/multiverse and its physics has to conform to human eyes or human intuition. MWI can be refuted, ignored, etc., but I think doing so at this point is akin to trying to find holes in the fossil record. Sometimes it's helpful to let go of the intuition and see what kind of models you can make/think about when you take human preference out of it (to the extent you can), regardless of what you have historically found most intuitive.
Many Worlds is theistic in a Calvinist sense of the term, it's just obsolete ideas from the past trying to survive quantum (and chaos science) devastation of certainty. I say: get over it, God does play dice and probably even gamble.
@@APaleDot Assuming that waveform collapse is a random choice means assuming that, as a brute force fact, one collapse happened, despite all the alternatives. That is metaphysically on the same level as positing an entity.
Assuming that all waveform collapses are random choices is not one assumption. It's a near infinite list of assumptions.
Random choice is a distinct concept from "randomness" as mere "unpredictability". Random choice is a metaphysical claim. Both Copenhagen and MWI predict that wavefunction collapse should be random in a sense of unpredictable. But only Copenhagen assumes it is due to random choice.
I like the Many Worlds interpretation because it makes sense: you have an observer O and a particle in a superposition P1+P2. They interact. Now you have a superposition of O1+P1/O2+P2; in each part of the superposition, the observer "sees" a non-superpositioned particle P. So there aren't really "many worlds", just one giant superposition with bits that are constantly re-superpositioning.
It’s interesting to me that you bring up Occam’s Razor as reasoning ‘against’ the Many World’s interpretation, as many of the proponents of that interpretation seem to feel like Occam’s Razor is in *their* favor!
I’m not sure if they’ve referenced Occam’s Razor specifically but I do know that the main reason why Sean Carroll is such a strong supporter of the Many Worlds interpretation is because it doesn’t introduce weasel-wordy verbiage like “observer”/“observation” in regards to the “collapse” of the wave function, and instead takes the “least assumptions” approach by following the Schrödinger equation to its logical conclusion.
I’m just a nobody layperson , so I don’t really have a meaningful leaning in either direction, but still thought that was interesting.
*"Many of the proponents of that interpretation seem to feel like Occam’s Razor is in their favor! "*
Yes, I know. I had a conversation with Looking Glass Universe about this once and she's _adamantly_ disagrees with me.
Your description of "the general" Everettian point of view seems correct here in relation to Occam's Razor. MWI proponents advocate (correctly, I think) that the multiverse is exactly what is most obeying the principle of Occam here. It comes out of the math in a pretty literal way. The many worlds aren't "added," they're just *there*. Human intuitions, etc. are what's being added in other interps.
@@dannywest8843 - i guess it depend son how "real" you take the mathematical objects to be; are you adding an actual universe to your model to account for a few numbers, or are you just accepting that the numbers are actual universes?
I think Occam's razor is in favor of the strong Copenhagen interpretation. At face value, the science is telling that electrons are inherently random. So why not just take it that electrons are particles and waves, and forget about determinism. You can never find both the position and momentum of each particle anyway, so the universe can never truly be deterministic anyway. The MWI seems to be just a weird work-around for people who want to be pedantic about determinism. Like "the universe is deterministic! We're just not in the universe where it happens".
@@adarshmohapatra5058 But at the same time, the strong Copenhagen "artificially" creates the idea that a state randomly jumps to another without any explanation for the mechanism. MWI is just that but without such a jump. I think MWI gets misinterpreted by people who are only given a non-mathematical, verbal explanation. Mathematically, it makes the least assumptions. Forget about the "other worlds" or whatever, all you assume is that the state of the entire universe always follows the Schrodinger equation, and MWI is what you get.
I'd say causality is the most important tenant. If causality wasn't a thing, that would impair the ability of reasonable people to give a damn about anything. Screw realism, though, that's definitely just human pattern seeking biases.
Causality>localism>determinism>realism.
"tenet" not "tenant"
@@MarkWadsworthYPP lmfao imagine the high level abstract physics concepts all living in an apartment complex, locality and realism were living together until they were shown to be mutually exclusive
You guys should do a podcast. No lie. I could listen to you guys talk about this kinda stuff for hours.
Existed already: scienceasylum.com/projects.php#podcast
@@KAMiKAZOW Yes, but I didn't have the time to edit it, so we quit. I don't think I'd start a new podcast until I have a team of people to help with things.
@@KAMiKAZOW was unaware- thanks for the link.
@@ScienceAsylum Absolutely! You two have such interesting discussion and banter. I would honestly edit for free if it meant more of you two talking. I hope one day it will see the light of day once more.
1st!
Thumbs up
Now watch
All 3 in superposition
I love time travel. Especially when they travel back to the 60's and have to dress like hippies.
That was a good Stargate SG-1 episode! (I'm sure it happens in other shows, but that's the one that pops into my head.)
I have to admit I'm kind drawn to the Pilot Waves Interpretation. From a super-layman's perspective (I literally have learned everything about QM from RUclips) it makes a sort of sense. I've always felt that there was something fundamental that we were missing. And if you think about it, that's been true for all of history. At one point we had no clue about sub-atomic particles, we had no clue about atoms, or molecules, or cells, ... and every time we discovered them we exclaimed "oh! Now X makes sense." I don't see why this would be any different.
It's turtles, all the way down!
But again, I'm not a scientist, just a random schmuck.
Thanks for the great video!!
The problem with pilot waves unlike the other interpretations is that it adds additional math that is incredibly hard to marry with Special Relativity and no one has done it so far, which is really problematic for something that promises to violate speed of light communication. It's basically how Quantum Mechanics gave rise to Quantum Field Theory, which is what the standard model of particle physics stands on top of, when you apply the Lorentz transformation to Quantum Mechanics and the math becomes invariant to it (what gives Special Relativity its 'there is no preferential frame of reference') and no one has found a way to apply it to pilot waves yet to produce this result. It's what gives scientists poor confidence in it despite its promise of making QM entirely 'classical', though it doesn't mean it's wrong, we don't know that yet, but the odds are not in its favor at the moment. At least it gives room for some actual theoretical work to be done.
I'd be wary of accepting as firm truth any model you find overly intuitive, especially when it comes to QM.
@@ThatCrazyKid0007 Yeah, see, this is where II point out the "super-layman" comment above :) I am absolutely sure there are issues with the interpretation but, honestly, the math, and issues of it, are WAY beyond me.
@@dannywest8843 If I have learned anything it's that nothing involving QM should be interpreted as "firm truth". In fact, doesn't that fly in the face of some of its basic tenets? :)
@@mrnix1001 Yeah I know, just wanted to point out as another enthusiastic layman (studying in a STEM field helps understand the material a bit easier, but only up to a certain point) so you aren't confused why such an intuitive thing is not the most favored one, or barely favored at all. Cheers.
You're such a good teacher. You discuss very difficult topics with ease.
This was one of my favorite videos.
The many worlds interpretation works with the Occam's razor because the many worlds aren't an assumption, or even an ih=nherent part of the interpretation, but a way for us to understand what happens if you treat the measurement as any other process. What you end up with is that if the measured object was in a superposition, then after the measurement the entire system (the object being measured and the object measuring) are in a superposition. Then both components of the superposition evolve separately and don't affect each other, and thus can be interpreted as separate universes. The only assumption in this interpretation is that "the act of measurement does not require special treatment and functions as any other interaction". Occam's razor isn't in conflict with this interpretation then, and actually supports it over other interpretations which add new mechanisms and rules on top of the formalism that already works.
Yeah I feel like there's a lot of confusion about Occam's razor. It states that you should choose the explanation with the fewest assumptions going in, which is not necessarily the explanation that produces the "simplest" result.
Right, (unfortunately, in my opinion), Occam's razor leads to the many worlds interpretation. In the other interpretations, you have to add an assumption to the theory: what happens to the superpositions? You have to add a pilot wave, or a wavefunction collapse, or something to the theory. But in many worlds, you don't add anything.
"locality" always seemed to me to be based on a deeper assumption that the only suitable mathematical frameworks upon which to model quantum fields are ones that involves smooth topologies, which sort of means that you build a type of locality into the model from the start, doesn't it?
also with locality, for all interactions we create a particle to mediate them. it becomes a cleverly disguised tautology that could hide parasitic self reinforcing circular reasoning.
Well, whatever the formulation/interpretation of QM you choose, it will always have to be compatible with General Relativity
At least in some formulations, it looks like locality could be emergent, rather than axiomatic. This is one of the side branches coming out of the holographic principle. Nima Arkani-Hamed, Larry Susskind, and Sean Carroll have all touched on it in their lectures. Sean, in particular, is doing some interesting work in this area
@@Lantalia whatever interpretation you take, nature seems to be telling us that *something* we previously thought was axiomatic is actually emergent. Personally, my intuition tells me that it's time's arrow; if we take seriously the time-symmetric nature of our equations (and Feynman diagrams), I don't see why retrocausality shouldn't be a regular occurrence on quantum scales, particularly in isolated systems. Something like the transactional model, with information from every interaction being carried forward and backward in time, would certainly explain the "conspiratorial" nature of entanglement. I think the emergence of time's arrow can be explained simply by the idea that the overwhelming majority of particles simply have "momentum", as it were, in one particular temporal direction (away from the big bang), and in becoming entangled with each other they acquire this same property. As much as I adore the holographic principle, myself, I think it opens up a huge can of worms if we interpret it to mean we can sacrifice locality, namely, what exactly is this metaphysical substrate upon which the code of the universe runs, and what exactly creates this illusion of additional spatial dimension(s)?
There was an article in Scientific American a few years ago that discussed the idea that entangled particles were connected via space-time wormholes. What appears as a non-local interaction to us could actually be local through the wormhole. I'm not advocating that idea (I'm more of a Pilot Wave fan) and throwing wormholes into the QM interpretation game opens a whole new can of worms.
"It's all science fiction until it's experimentally validated."
Ok, she's awesome. Great to see my tribe well represented (biologists).
Though... Free will and determinism isn't what y'all think it is. Free will at a practical level and determinism go together perfectly fine.
Perhaps they do, but I don't think most people have a problem with "practical" free will. They are concerned with the philosophical free will.
@@Reepecheep I’m fairly sure that’s what he meant
@@theflamethrower867 What do you mean by "that?" Are you saying that despite saying "practical free will" they really mean something else?
Perhaps we somehow have the ability to choose which universe to “observe” every time the wave function of the multiverse that contains our brain becomes unentangled from the one you were observing.
Basically the ultimate choose-your-own-adventure book.
I really appreciate how your wife is able to jump to concepts outside of her field of expertise because she is able to keep her scientific mind together - a bit like trying to stabilise a plasma field. 😂 It might be difficult, but not impossible with a lot of quick calculations.
Merry Christmas 🎅 🎄 ❤ ♥ 💕
Merry Christmas!
Merry Christmas 🤗🤗
6:14 Its like having water. We can drink it even if we don't understand what its made of.
"Non-determinism" sounds like a religion.
Determinism sounds like religion. It rather, I've heard religious people use the Bible to make assertions about determinism.
@@MatthewStinar The determinism we talk about has nothing to do with the bible
@@TeodorAngelov Really? It's not the kind where if you knew everything about every particle in the present you could predict every future outcome? 'Cause in sure that's what I just heard him say and that's what I'm talking about. I don't expect you to agree with those religious people, but they agree with the physicists who believe in a deterministic universe.
Not necessarily, God either enables non-determinism with free will and simply (re)acts simultaneously or God enables determinism by knowing and/or setting things up. Calvinism, Islam, etc. are deterministic religions. Normal Christianity is usually non-deterministic, at least in the way that violates free will.
@@SamGarcia Valid points. Ok only said that determinism as described by physicists sounds like religion as described by some Christians.
0:29
"We like to view physics as though we're finding some deeper understanding about the universe, but that's not really what physics is about.
It's about making predictions."
That right there hit me right into my deepest concerns about physics, because I know he's right, although I still want to believe it isn't true. I began studying physics as a way of grasping the hidden nature of the Cosmos, but I learned that's something you, personally and subjectively, make along the way, as you gain knowledge and understanding.
Thanks for your videos, though! 😙
Exactly! QM crushes the entire reason we're interested in physics in the first place. That's what makes us the most uncomfortable with it, I think.
I don't think they're mutually exclusive. Yes, physics is about _modeling_ the physical world to make predictions and those models always end up being approximations of reality. But that doesn't mean we aren't learning about about the physical world. It's just that we're never getting the _full_ story.
And besides, making accurate predictions in itself tells us something about the physical world -- how it behaves. In math, we sometimes say that "numbers _are_ what they _do._ " That is, mathematical objects are defined by their properties. The same is often true in physics and even with language in general. e.g. I'm Newtonian mechanics, we define a "force" as being anything that satifies Newton's second law. So we use that term to generalize a lot of different phenomena.
@@Lucky10279 It's both until you hit that wall, there is only so much we can figure out through experiment (and any theoretical work without experiments to back it up eventually is worthless and as good as any science fiction screenplay) until you concede to the universe, which is why it is mutually exclusive ultimately. We are and will be too limited to figure out everything, but the fun is finding all that we realistically can and seeing where that wall truly lies, what can we ultimately predict and what we concede to the unknown.
@@ThatCrazyKid0007 Well yeah, like I said, we never get the _full_ story, but that doesn't mean we aren't getting part of it. And just because we haven't yet come up with a way to verify any of the interpretations doesn't mean we won't do so in the future. QM is still a relatively branch of physics. I wish I could jump ahead a few hundred years and see what progress has been made on solving the measurement problem (since that's the problem that each interpretation is trying to solve). Alas, I cannot.
@@Lucky10279 We are talking about probing reality to the fundamental level, finding out all the why's, all the causes, but in reality physics is a study of effects and can we predict them. Finding out why is only sufficient up to the point we explain the effect, we need not dig further in physics, that's why Nick is ultimately right. You can of course try to explain the why's as the effects of some deeper why, but when do you say well that's as deep as it goes? At some point, it just turns into speculation based on arbitrary assumptions, which can't hold ground in physics if we can't verify it with experiments. I'd bet that even in a few hundred years, assuming we are still there and only keep increasing our ability to probe nature deeper, we'd either be stuck on the same problem or be stuck on a deeper problem without solving the fundamental why. At some point, it just crosses into metaphysics and without experimental data, you go from learning about reality to just guessing, hoping future generations will come up with the answer, but they never will. That's why it ultimately isn't about probing down to the fundamental level, it's just predicting effects.
I'm one who's taken by the implications of chaos theory for ostensibly deterministic, classical systems - namely that their behaviour cannot in practice be predicted, no matter how refined our measurements can realistically be expected to become over time.
What I have never heard in these kinds of discussions is a generalization of chaos theory to the quantum world in which some interpretations are based on attributing classical properties to quantum objects in the hopes of achieving some sort of certainty. (I can only assume that lots of physics geeks have had such discussions amongst themselves, so perhaps I have just never come across any...)
What I get from discussions like those in this video is that questions of determinism vs randomness and predestination vs free will (which I take as being closely related dyads) are essentially ideological/"faith"- based beliefs that may never in practice (and perhaps not even in principle) be resolvable through empirical testing of hypotheses.
So... is taking a seemingly firm stance on such things (as both parties to the conversation do here) even consistent with "science"?
I'd say no. The problem is that although science is a tool people are using the idea or image of science (instead of real science) as a replacement for God. Therefore they have to make in fit into every corner of existence even if it's outside of the area of functional use. I think it really comes down to a desire for power. If the tool of science has no limit and the they (specific people in the establishment and not individual scientist) are the ones who wield it then they become godlike figures.
If that's not the case then what would be the purpose of stepping out into the realm of philosophy while making such a concerted effort to deny that it's philosophy and calling it science instead?
Thank you both fulfilling our wish and making another video together. This is great stuff and should become a constant thing on the channel in the future.
Honestly people need to shut up about free will. If anything, a truly random universe has almost no free will since your actions and behavior are at the mercy of random quantum events that you have no control over
I go with Heisenberg. It's all comes from the math that makes excellent prediction, but we don't have any bloody clue.
He believes in absolute free will, therefore he must reject science. OK!
Exactly! I think he needs to watch this:ruclips.net/video/zpU_e3jh_FY/видео.html
"Whatever interpretation I get behind, it better be non-deterministic !"
- Nick Lucid
... yeah but you didn't have a choice but to believe that...
Thanks for the hard work. Love from Denmark.
Hope you enjoyed it!
'TECHNICALLY ITS ALL SCIENCE FICTION UNTIL ITS EXPERIMENTALLY VALDIATED.' - BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOMMMMMMMMMMM!!!!!!!!!!!!
Wife looks like she doesn't like to be "wrong", risky video.
She's a biologist. Biologists usually arent wrong. Biologists are superior.
@@mihael2800 You wouldn't happen to a whale biologist, would you?
@@WDCallahan what? I did not understand your sentence, sorry.
@@mihael2800 oh that's definitely impressive, that glance still perirces my soul, tho. Reminds me of my grandma when im having too much fun.
Loved the video, I like how you can have a complicated conversation with your wife and she gets it! I have a feeling you guys have hashed out a lot of science.
You two together are adorable to watch. Don’t know what the chemistry exactly is between the two of you. Love it! And am learning something at the same time!
Well when you have physics and biology, the only thing left is chemistry! 😜
Imho, this video is,1+1=3, and it's great! The two of them plus what they create or the extra dimension they add really helps get across what they're trying to convey. Thank you so much.
Glad you liked the style!
Nick, I commend you on your new format. Your wife, very pretty BTW and I love her hair, adds a great flair and compliments what you’re trying to achieve: teach and elucidate complex and engaging topics.
You take on a more commanding and sober appearance in her presence and your wife adds value to the conversation by acting as a sounding board, clarifying and challenging.
I love your new format - you made a great decision. I think your wife’s participation will broaden your sphere of audience.
Well done!!!! 👍👍👍👍👍
Just wanna point out that wifu's hair looks very fashionable, and her responses to what he says are so encouraging and positively rebouncing the topic back to him.
It's a perfect example of how couples should communicate.
And the material is great!
I'm a programmer and the more I learn about Quantum Mechanics the more it sounds like we're in a simulation, because this whole uncertainity mess sounds like just effects of the IT concept of lazy evaluation.
Don't calculate a precise value (position, charge, speed, whatever) until you actually really need it for other calculations.
As a programmer, seems that the speed of light is just the maximum speed that different "computers" can calculate what is going on. So, the sun explodes, the information has a delay (like a lag) to tell the others computers that this happened, and while the information doesn't reach "earth", everybody continues to calculate as the information hasn't changed.
I enjoy your channel a lot: very down to earth approach, I would say very intellectually honest, not trying to wow people with science fictiony sounding physics (though I am a fan of science fiction, from an artistic point of view). I like how you make the distinction in this video about quantum physics as a mathematical model, and trying to give more of a meaning to these models in wanting to have a fuller understanding of reality. I'm not much of a fan of the multiverse myself, and going with experience I do believe in free will. That said, there's still some explaining to do to know what the heck is going on in the universe 😂
Many Worlds is particularly vulnerable to that kind of fantastical descriptions that don't help understanding. It's also horribly named since it's practically _begging_ to described fantastically when what it's really about is treating the mathematics 100% literally and that's it. I considered that I might be better named something like "Universal Wavefunction," and someone else in the comments suggested "one-wavefunction interpretation," to make it more clear that the interpretation is really about the wavefunction itself than any science fiction portrayal of a multiverse.
"Isolated systems don't exist, unless you are talking about The Universe!" So great! 🤣🤣
The "under substance" is probably subspace in star trek
For my part, I had to redefine "free will" so that even in a deterministic universe I still have it. I had to do this because even in a non-deterministic interpretation of quantum mechanics, it won't save free will, like at all. So what if random quantum wiggles mean you might choose different things if you rerun a moment over and over again? You're just entirely at the mercy of dice rolls instead of the course of a river. Dice being in control of your actions isn't really any more "freeing".
How do we escape it? Well for me, I just had to distance myself from the notion that free will means that at any point I can make a choice entirely contradictory to my past experiences. That's not really satisfying either really. That's just... randomness no matter what physics you are into. Rather, I simply interpret it to mean that the group of interactions, the "process" that is my mind, is how the universe figures out how to proceed from moment to moment, at least local to my head area. As a result, it may be deterministic or random, but I am a PART of that process. My decision making apparatus, however predetermined or dice rolled it may be, is important in that it determines the flow of future events. Inputs go into my brain, the brain does things with those inputs, and it spits out decisions. That, to me, is "free will" enough and I am satisfied by that.
Many philosophers have done the same, the compatibalists. On the other hand, I don't think free will in a meaningful sense is possible weather the world is deterministic or not.
but really, why do we need to be free from inputs and dice rolls exactly?
Yes, randomness is not "willing something" at all. Have you ever read 'dice man'? I reached for the cup of tea but my captor has flipped a coin saying i must have coffee. It probably resolves less free will to be random..
I call it being at the mercy of some cosmic roulette wheel, not autonomy.
There is a more complex question. Unless consciousness is understood we have no hope. We can assume its emergent, we can assume nothing is greater than the sum of its parts.....although things may be greater than sum of parts, we see that an elementary particle is random but a collection of molecules is deterministic, so is it beyond the question to speculate how such properties like "will" can emerge.
@@jskratnyarlathotep8411 things is, we probably are even if its true. Quantum coherence is an unstable, isolated state. Its unlikely to exist in our big wet brains. Penrose i think theorise it might, but in form of qubits, quantum computing via microtubules, however this is entirely a speculation. It does pose that our "algorhythms" are more complex, more analogue than a mathematical algorhythm, so if our decisions are just determined information processing at least its a higher, complex, incomprehensible form that doesnt exist elsewhere in the universe.
Free will doesn't exist. What exists though is intelligence. Intelligence is the opposing force to entropy.
hey, I like it!Greetings from Zürich
This whole discussion was amazing, thank you!
What's Complicated is Cracking the Codes doing the Math, building the machine! Making the Symmetric Resonator by Frequency Quantum Computer, SRF-QC. Nickel or gold circuitry thats only the basics
Now there are Super Computers, Run On Light ! More information ! I can feel the power Already, can you .
I like the many worlds interpretation. If the universe is already infinite by its size, why would it be crazy to think it can be just an infinitely big wave function where we only experience one of them (I mean, an infinite amount of them until we pass the point where they branch out)? I like determinism and have no issue with abandoning the idea of real free will... The illusion of free will is enough for me. Even if we can still argue that in the many worlds interpretation, as I understand it here, you actually have free will, it's just that you also made your other choices in other universes, but don't experience it.
Loved it.
Enjoyed it.
Learned from it.
Liked it.
And Shared it as well.
Now this year can end.
Wonderful, love this conversation. A lot.
I really liked the explanation of the many worlds. So it would be a multiverse of superpositions, not entirely separate universes? Which I thought was the idea.
You forgot to say that there is a chance that our universe is embedded within a fourth dimension, and that the particles are 4D particles interfering with a 3D space that is subspace of a 4D space which makes them probabilistic inside the 3D space but deterministic inside the 4D space, like a 2D sphere crossing a 2D plane, will appear to flat land creatures (on the 2D plane) as a circle increasing then decreasing which will make no deterministic sense to them, and all sort of 3D shapes of arbitrary complexity, then they will need to come up with 2D quantum physics to explain it .
there is 11-dimension theory, i believe it is a string theory
but all the extra dimensions there are "compacted", because a full-sized fourth dimension would affect the 1/r^2 law of force propagation (both electromagnetic and gravitational)
Hello from North England. The future may not be deterministic, but one conclusion that is always positively true and determined evidenced with countless circumstances witnessed first hand, is the logic:
The wife is always right.
So, in conclusion:
Happy wife, happy life.
Could you now link to her channel where the mystery of biology is explained back to you/ us physics/ engineers?
Keep up the great work on the channel.
This video was one of the best experiences that I ever had on RUclips. Congratulations, I loved it
Thanks! This video under-performed (probably because it was twice as long as my normal videos).
Many Worlds is about as useful as the Simulation Hypothesis (another rather easy way to explain all of the weirdness of quantum mechanics). And, currently, just as provable. Not, as the lady said, "good science". Nothing more than a philosophical exercise.
I’m sure many people have already mentioned this. But this is such a great format for an educational video. Your wife represents all of us who are not experts in QM. And she represents us well!!
Don't be so judgemental about retro-causality. There are some points that you should consider -
1) In all classical mechanics, unidirectionality of time comes out of second law which is statistical.
2) In EM, it comes out of convection.
3) In QFT, again convention as anti-particles can be treated as particles traveling back in time. (Feynman-Stueckelberg interpretation)
4) In QM, retrocausal interpretation is an interpretation, that is it produces the same physics predictions.
5) Given all above do we really need to put in unidirectionality of time? because -
6) Unidirectionality is an extra assumption not retrocausality. As in any retrocausal framework if you can prove that proper or effective unidirectionality then lo and behold you have it but in any theory with unidirectionality of time, you can't afterwards prove retrocausality. For example, classical mechanics is retrocausal but it statistically gives rise to second law, so at macro-scale we effectively see unidirectionality.
Thank you for such wonderful content. A Christmas treat. Now I’m going to watch again!
please make another version of conversation with your clone and the squirrel 🐿️ 😆
We need more women in the maths and sciences.
Why?
@@omp199 More brain power.
@@henrytjernlund Do women have more brain power than men?
This may be showing my ignorance. My understanding of quantum mechanics is that it doesn't say that these particles don't follow deterministic rules. It says that we lack the tools to measure these particles, but we can make predictions of where they are going to be at any given time. Am I off base?
I think I'm in the camp of locality can be sacrificed -- but not really. The thing is that there is something affecting these particles across long distances in 3 dimensional space, but there is something happening some "where" else. We just don't understand what happens in this "4th dimension of space" (for lack of a better term) that appears like it's happening across long distances but not really.
I'll confess that I'm a proponent of the Transactional Interpretation, mostly because I think it's cool. It does provide an interpretation to Dirac's bracket notation, as consists of |i>, the forward-moving initial state, and . As far as time travel goes, the Transactional Interpretation can't be used to communicate backwards in time any more than collapsing an entangled state enables faster-than-light communication.
On a somewhat-related note, are you going to do a video on the Arrow of Time?
I think the transactional interpretation has a nice symmetry in how it utilizes both components of the state, and interfering waves (even if one is coming from the future) is definitely more appealing to me than an arbitrary and spontaneous collapse. Personally I think I prefer many worlds because it maintains causality, but I can see merits to the transactional interpretation as well.
Determinism only says that something can't happen for no reason. Therefor anything other than determinism is, by definition, unreasonable.
Also, correct me if I'm wrong, but you don't need "time travel" for the strong Copenhagen interpretation, you only need non-locality, which is already guaranteed for quantum interactions by the delayed-choice quantum eraser experiments.
Any conversation with my wife about my work never goes this smooth.
You can see some cuts in the editing, so it definitely it wasn't as smooth as presented.
@@SamGarcia 😂😂
Superdeterministic interpretations can satisfy realism, locality, determinism, and causality. Such interpretations might seem desirable, but they give up on something arguably deeper and more fundamental, the freedom of choice.
Bell's inequality would be satisfied if you could play out ALL scenarios, but you do not have the freedom to select all scenarios. Your choices are entangled with the system your investigating such that Bell's inequality appears to be violated in any measurement you perform.
A good analogy for this: it's as if you asked a class of 100 students one question each and they all answered correctly. A reasonable person would conclude that each student in the class is well-versed in the subject since you had the freedom to choose the order of the questions and an arbitrary ordering is unlikely to yield your 100/100 observation unless each student in the class knows the answer to the vast majority of the 100 questions. A superdeterministic interpretation would interject and maintain that you did not freely choose the order of the questions and that the only order you could have chosen is the one you did. Therefore, you've only demonstrated that each student knows the answer to just one question, since its possible that your questions entangled with the students knowledge. In fact, you have not even ruled out the appalling scenario in which all your students only know the answer to 1/100 questions.
This is spooky enough, but it gets worse. The examiner can use a random number generator to decide the order of questions (such as tv static), but superdrterminism will maintain that you did not freely choose your random number generator and that the random number generator you chose was not free to choose the questions either. The entire universe is choreographed ahead of time to produce an observed reality in which Bell's inequality appears to be violated. The problem with superdeterminism, apart from the chill it sends down the spine, is in finding a reasonable mechanism which can entangle seemingly arbitrary processes. Although, this may just be due to the failure in our imagination. T 'hooft has already constructed a toy universe which is superdeterministic in his book "the cellular automata interpretation of quantum mechanics"
This was one of the shortest half hours I've ever experienced. Wow
I have to admit I jumped right in because the short 1st part guaranteed this episode would be great to watch
So kudos for the content and for the execution!
Will Mrs Lucid co-host classic Asylum videos from time to time? It's nice to watch you 2 working together!
Merry Christmas!
I'm sure she'll be open to doing this again. It won't be a consistent thing though. I need to focus on my normal videos most of the time.
P.S. Merry Christmas!
I really, really hate that description of Many Worlds. That's a pop science analogy, not the actual theory. The theory is actually that you as an observer are also a quantum system. You become entangled with the results you observe, and so your wavefunction evolves in a superposition along with the system you observed. Each consistent state "exists" in that superposition, and wavefunction collapse isn't necessary because there's no omniscient observer that has to decide which part of the superposition propagates. It's superposition all the way down.
You can DESCRIBE that as the universe splitting, if you want to handwave it. But that suggests that the entire universe is duplicated in a way that you can extract a snapshot of one particular state and compare it to another one. But you can't. It's just a superposition of the wavefunction evolving continuously. There aren't distinct global states.
These conversations are excellent. A great way to describe complex ideas. More please!!
I was under the impression that the pilot wave theory didn't require FTL because the waves exist over a range instead of being localized to a point. That is, it achieves nonlocality not by having FTL signaling but by having a lightspeed signal propagating from the time the particles originally interacted, in the form of a wave spreading out from that point.
And even if that wasn't the case, we already know that some parts of physics don't obey the light speed limit because they aren't propagating through spacetime -- the expansion of space itself. I don't think the idea that an entity like a pilot wave exists below the level of spacetime is so absurd.
I think retrocausality has the same "untestability" issue as many worlds. We can't experience multiple universes. We can't observe time outside of time. I just can't imagine there's any way to "detect" if the past has been altered. For all I know, a meteor might have destroyed Earth this morning, and I experienced the destruction, and then something in the future reversed that action, so it didn't happen. All I know is that last part. From where I'm sitting now, a meteor did not distroy Earth this morning.
I'm almost tempted to think that there could be an experimental "Faraday cage" that would protect things from having their past altered. Like, you could write some notes about the starting conditions of an experiment, put them in the cage, alter the past outside of the cage, and then compare the protected notes. But that seems impossible. Changing the past _has_ to change the notes that were written about the past. Best case: it _is_ possible to build the cage, but anything protected by it will inherently limit the parts of the past you can change. If I write, "the house is red", then I go back and paint it green, but I protect my "red" note, then it should be impossible for the greenness to find its way back to the point in time when I wrote the note. Otherwise it almost feels like we're trying to have our superposition and eat our measurement too.
I wanted to observe time outside of time but I couldn't make any time for it.
Particle physicists are the Devil they dont believe in fields and therefore either Infinite universa or Time travel as an fundamental mechanic have to exist in Order to keep their billiard balls rolling. All this has to be spiced with some nonexisting dark Matter and some nonexisting Energy Drink to not Completely lose the concepts we have Made so far regarding Matter.
You couldnt even explain how a particle accelerator creates new Matter without the Basis of a damn field. All Most sciencists and teachers do today is to Point at some hundred year old formula and yell eureka.
@@NeonGreenT I tend to think of the relationship between fields and particles sort of like Conway's Game of Life.
The game's grid is the field. The color of a single space in the grid is not a physical thing, but just a value at that particular point in the field. Experimentally, we can't see the values of these individual cells.
Based on the rules of propagation in Conway's Game of Life, there are certain patterns that have cohesion across time. For example, the space ship thing that sort of moves in one direction across the playing area. Since this space ship is made of a combination of values on the grid, and we've already decided that the "dots" on the grid are just values and not "stuff", that means even the space ship isn't a physical thing. The fundamental rules of the game don't mention spaceships. It's just a pattern that we can observe that is interesting to our human brains. In a way, the space ship is like a photon. While the cells are always propagating their information outward at every moment of the game, the space ship does not dissolve outward and break into pieces. Instead, it moves in a straight line at a constant speed, but like a photon.
There are other combinations of dots that are large enough to be observed from the outside, but they don't have the right configuration to persist across time. The game's propagation rules cause them to bend, break, and disappear very quickly. I think this is a similar behavior to what are called "virtual particles".
Of course, "Life" consists of just a single field, a simple two-dimensional orthogonal axis system, and the possible values of a cell are just zero and one. It's a very, very simple model. While it seems likely that the very fundamental rules to our universe should be few and simple, I don't think they'll be quite as few and simple as the rules of "Life".
Doesn't the quantum eraser experiment open itself to a retro causal interpretation?
@@dutubsucks it could, but it's my understanding that it doesn't rule out other interpretations.
My understanding of Many Worlds is that there is only one entity - the "multiverse" (universal wave function) - and the "worlds" just come from the ways different observers are able to interact with different parts of it. Sort of like how a distant galaxy could recede beyond our cosmological horizon and effectively become a separate universe since our futures can never interact, but we still consider it to really exist and Occam's Razor doesn't fault us for this.
Early on, she totally had the look that said, "what kind of box of crazy have I gotten myself into?!?" Lol Thanks for the fun and the explanations!
The intuition that I have always had towards behavior of quantums is inclined towards the pilot wave theory. There may be a field that we cannot or haven't detected that all particles might be “dragging through”.
I believe, due to reasons, that the universe has been “programmed” to solve a problem under certain rules, which is in fact quite elegant.
Imagine you write a computer program, how would you program it? Write a script for every single possible input, or pass every input through a set of “if - then” statements that apply only the relevant solution to the problem?
These are fantastic videos. I’d love to see you on Star Talk or another podcast with a bunch more physics nerds just talkin science. Then again you guys have great chemistry and are very entertaining and interesting to listen to. 👍👍
what a great video loved the socratic conversation style!
How can a universe not be deterministic? If our mathematical description of quantum mechanics can only provide us with a rough estimate/probabilistic prediction of a particle, that doesn’t mean the particle actually behaves in completely random/unknowable ways without any cause. If a wave function collapses to reveal an electron at point a, something caused the electron to be at point a. Our current mathematical models may not be able to explain it, but that doesn’t mean that’s what actually happened. Things cannot randomly happen without any cause, and just accepting that they do closes the door to further questions.
You two have such a good relationship. It's like you're best friends!
Because we _are_ best friends! 😊
Great video! I'd be curious to hear you expand on your aversion to determinism. Lots of people think it means free will doesn't exist, but I disagree. You're still making the choice based on logic of your choosing, it's just a question of when the choice gets made. In a deterministic universe, it's made before you're even born, but still using the logic you dictate when you make the choice in the present. You still have the same control over your destiny in a deterministic universe, and the choices you make carry no less weight.
I absolutely love this channel! Great discussion (both halves). I wish he could reconsider free will as not a given as I don’t believe it is, which would greatly influence his decision on the models.
Yeah, a lot of people (unfortunately some of them scientists) cling to the assumption of free will just because it makes them uncomfortable, even though it's a totally unscientific and illogical assumption.
@@SamChaneyProductions I think you're making the mistake of thinking that the universe is science instead of science being a human tool we use to understand the universe better. Did you miss that this whole video was about interpretations? Your whole comment is unscientific.
@@Gunshinzero No, I do not make that mistake. I know that science is just a set of models we create to approximately model the universe. I still fail to see why that would imply that free will is real. There is no evidence for it so doesn't make sense to incorporate belief in it into a scientific model
@@SamChaneyProductions That's the point. Making the model itself is not scientific so arguing that they shouldn't have free will in the model is pointless from a scientific perspective. Arguing that there is no free will is also not scientific so if you choose to engage in the conversation you should just come to grips with the fact that you have entered philosophy.
People feel science is a safe zone of comfort so they try to squeeze everything they hold dear into it. No human lives scientifically or depend on it for life. People have been eating food before they knew what it did in the body. Yet people keep trying to hide their beliefs behind science. You believe improvable or unproven things just like everyone else. Those things may be correct but that isn't the point.
The OP in this thread worded it properly by saying he doesn't believe it is instead of talking about it being illogical because it doesn't fit his philosophy.
I don't believe any interpretation, but Many Worlds is one of the more elegant ways to think about it imo. Idk why but determinism has always been a higher priority in my understanding of the universe. Also the most mathematically elegant, you just assume all states follow the Schrodinger equation.
Excellent synergy between her accurate questions and his explanations
From my limited knowledge I feel that locality and determinism are likely to be important to be preserved as I think locality is required for special and general relativity and they predict determinism as according to relativity different reference frames have different 'presents' and so from your own reference frame you are connected to other 'observers' whose reference frames will collectively include all of time so as Einsteins theories of relativity are largely correct such fundamental axioms and predictions are (I think) likely to be correct although we know General creativity breaks down at the Big Bang and black holes so maybe I am total wrong, but I am just trying to use evidence rather than my emotional preferences to judge what is important to be preserved by a quantum mechanics interpretation. This PBS video is what I am referencing to about the determinism thing so go watch that at ruclips.net/video/EagNUvNfsUI/видео.html as I am just repeating what I have heard less accurately and I don't have any significant qualifications to say anything with certainty so don't take my word for what I say.
In "Many Worlds" there aren't a bajillion "universes", there is just the one wavefunction, and the only assumption is that it keeps being the wavefunction doing its wave thing. It just happens to turn out that if you let the wavefunction do its thing without anything else getting in the way, it ends up looking like different branches of the universe happening all at once.
That's just semantics.
@@ScienceAsylum The whole interpretation debate is "just semantics"!
@@ScienceAsylum I'd argue that because the "many worlds" are in a superposition, it's like arguing that a particle in a superposition is in "two states at once", a phrasing you have said you don't like before.
Am I crazy if I understand free will differently than everyone else? If you say that deterministic system eliminates possibility for free will, what you imply is that free will requires some sort of randomness of the system that it exists in. For me random actions are exactly oppose to actions that are outcome of free will. In my understanding if agent X placed in stage Y (specific space time configuration) in which X need to chose A or B, X might have free will only if X chooses the same option no matter how many times we will retry this experiment.
Imagine this, you are in a candy shop, you choose m&m, that's your decision, then someone rewinds time few minutes, everything is the same as before, you need to choose a candy, you need to choose the same, otherwise it's not your decision, if you choose different candy on each iteration what decision is that? Such acting would be driven by pure chaos not by free will.
Of course deterministic system doesn't prove free will, it only makes it possible, but non deterministic system does not allow for free will to exists in my understanding.
"Determinism doesn't allow for free will." How does non-determinism allow for free will, though? It's just random. Where is the will in that?
I'd say non-determinism is necessary but not sufficient for free will. But I don't really believe in true free will anyways, just the impression of free will.
Not true things can move instantaneously between two universes . Zero gravity Remember. That's Faster than Light ! light is snail mail. Hahaha tomorrow New Nanowalls.
11:16 can we just have a nice video without mind-blowing reality-altering anxiety-triggering data? just kidding, what an enjoyable conversation