That was is shall be is the definition of fatalism.
-
Welcome to Religious Forums, a friendly forum to discuss all religions in a friendly surrounding.
Your voice is missing! You will need to register to get access to the following site features:- Reply to discussions and create your own threads.
- Our modern chat room. No add-ons or extensions required, just login and start chatting!
- Access to private conversations with other members.
We hope to see you as a part of our community soon!
Physics and Free will
- Thread starter LegionOnomaMoi
- Start date
That was is shall be is the definition of fatalism.
It isn't inevitable with choice involved, the only way to have choice is to know the things that can happen in potential and the things don't necessarily have to manifest for it to have been an actual potential.
Hence the thread. However, in spacetime "choice" is simply an event which has already happened and already determined.
There are assumptions in both our interpretations. I assume, because we measure the contradictory aspects, like up and down spin, that something about it is real. With the copenhagen you would need to assume the superposition is some sort of illusion and was never there to begin with. You have admitted you ignore it for the sake of measurement but we are measureing something real. Here is a question though. When bob colappses the wave state and finds up spin, how do we know it couldn't be the other given different circumstances? So i am saying we don't know if alice carried the information or in addition the instaneous correlation happened due to entanglement.
Alex_G
Enlightner of the Senses
My initial reaction to the subject hijacks the phrase ‘frame of reference’ and extends it (for good or ill) away from its technical physical definition to a more social/philosophical one. That we are somewhat doomed in satisfactorily aligning adequate explanations of ‘free will’ with laws of physical reality because all the features and faculties we attribute to ourselves as conscious beings (and by loose extension what we’re talking about with free will) are within a choreographed “frame of reference”, within which various social and conscious experiences are inherently defined.
That is, when I talk of my awarenesses, my thoughts, my influences, my control, my decisions and actions, all of these feel so tangible and real, that references to overarching 4th dimensional mechanics that radically redefine my own physical reality at base, do little to really answer on an emotional level. (An admitted appeal to emotion that is at least pertinent and noteworthy rather than posing as rational).
That I think the whole construct of conscious life, and social existence is but a stage upon which actors walk. And within this stage of life, our everyday nomenclature and references are utterly dependant on the space of this ‘stage’ in which we operate. That when I live my life, all these aspects of a deliberated consciousness are still quite meaningful relative to the stage, however “false” it can be considered overall.
That ‘on stage’ whilst embedded in falsehood, true definitions can exist. (so to speak).
Essentially from an explanatory point of view, such ‘meaning’ is not well engaged or credited by bypassing the whole play, which is often (at least with subjects of this nature) a limitation of certain scientific habits in explanation.
Of course I’m just thinking out loud, and am far from rigidly positioned on this interesting subject. It’s just to add some dialogue and discussion
I haven't given my interpretation.
The orthodox/Copenhagen interpretation holds that we can't posit about the nature of things we never measure, interact with, and for which there we there exists no known or even assumed direct relation to any physical state or property. The "wavefunction" or state-vector which gives us the probability of yielding specific results given particular specifications and set-ups is a mathematical entity. It is very similar to the treatment of systems in statistical mechanics in that we model dynamical systems using probabilities. The difference is mainly that in statistical mechanics, we know (more or less) how we are simplifying a problem by describing statistically what we'd ideally model deterministically (i.e., we aren't simply limited by a lack of knowledge of a systems initial states where e.g., every molecule of a gas is accounted for and modelled with precision).
In QM, we don't have any idea what we are describing via probabilities other than a procedure whereby specified preparations yield particular, probabilistic results. There's no gas molecule which we can say exists but for which we lack sufficient information or sufficiently precise initial conditions among all the other gas molecules. In fact, rather than (as is true in statistical mechanics) a physical system with too many "particles" for us to know enough about, in QM the wave-function/state-vector contains all the information about the system. However, "all the information" is irreducibly probabilistic.
I ignored it before you raised the issue. I have not ignored it since. Every time I have described QM in this thread, I have deliberately not ignored measurement but spend post after post dealing with it.
It can be and will be. The "wave state" is information we can transcribe into a probability distribution function (or probability densities). The "collapse" is simply a word for describing how the irreducibly statistical/probabilistic "wave state" always and only yields a discrete value for an "observable" we never observe (because it is a mathematical operator).
What!?
You talk of measuring but ignore the fact that there is something to measure. That there is something to measure has us treat the particle as a wave function. So because of what you say of time, the same is true of a photon, it is everywhere in the measurable spread via trick of spacetime, and no longer is once not in a quantum state.
Ah. So that's the disconnect. No worries: quantum measurement is one of the most difficult parts of the whole theory to understand, and I’m not great at explaining outside of a classroom, tutoring session, or similar venue in which the back and forth is a lot more immediate and dynamic.
I’m going to try to tackle this issue in several ways and hope one sticks. The questions here is “what does it mean to measure” and “what do we measure when we do”?
Explanation Method 1: Steal
The above were scanned from the intro paper by Evans to Quantum Mechanics at the Crossroads.
Method 2: Classical vs.Quantum
One way to explain how I’m not ignoring measuring or that something is measured is to consider what was measured (and how) in classical and what the quantum analogues are (the closest things to the classical version that we have in QM).
One of the worst choices the founders of QM made was to retain the language of classical physics but to fundamentally change many of the most important terms. I sometimes say that there wasn’t any “classical theory of measurement’ the way that there is for quantum mechanics, and while there is a lot of truth to that, here I’m going to go another way.
Classical measurement theory in a nutshell, was statistics: how to take bad or inadequate measurement devices and either treat the system statistically, the measurements statistically (i.e., repeat the measurement over and over and then sort of “average” the results into a single “idealized” value), or both.
To see how this kind of “measurement theory” is so different, consider ballistic measurements as classical experiments. When Steyr developed the IWS 2000 ant-materiel rifle, they developed a 15.2mm armor piercing fin stabilized discarding sabot (APFSDS) cartridge weighing 308 grains with a muzzle velocity of 1,540 meters per second specific for that rifle. Each one of those descriptions is, in classical physics, “an observable”. Muzzle velocity is may be a mathematical abstraction, but we know exactly how it relates to the physical system: it is the speed and direction of the 15.2mm APFSDS round as it leaves the barrel of the gun. And, in classical physics, we can measure this as precisely as we want without disturbing the system. The same is true for the weight, the dimensions, and how many inches of rolled homogenous steel armor it can penetrate at a kilometer.
Of course, many observables are unique to a particular system. Cars don’t have a muzzle, but we do refer to things like miles per gallon. However, this is more engineering than physics. In physics, the main observables we’re interested in are things like position and velocity. We want to know where something is, how fast it is going, and in what direction. But the point is that we don’t actually need to think of these things as “observables”. It’s obvious what we mean when we refer to the velocity of a car, a baseball, or a bullet. Not only is it obvious what we mean, but the only thing that really changes when we use different instruments to obtain values from these systems is how accurate they are.
Enter quantum mechanics. There are countless popular science sources on QM, and yet so few actually convey the real “uncertainty” of QM. Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle is nothing compared to the radical way in which we deal with measurement itself. Quantum mechanics, including measurement, is based on a number of “postulates”. Here is the 2nd given in a fairly standard, introductory course in QM:
"The only possible result of a measurement on a single system of a physical observable associated with the operator Aˆ is an eigenvalue of the operator Aˆ.
(Levi’s Applied Quantum Mechanics, 2nd Ed.).
First, notice we are measuring an observable, which seems natural (like measuring “velocity”) until you ask “what does it mean to “associate” a “physical observable” with an “operator”? Say I want to know the velocity of a photon. The velocity is a value, right? Maybe I don’t know it exactly, but the widely-misunderstood “uncertainty principle” says I can know something about it’s value, no? No. Because the measurement process in QM works in reverse: “an observable is understood to have a definite value if the probability that a measurement indicates a particular value of the observable is equal to one. In quantum mechanics, this can only be satisfied if the system is in an eigenstate of the observable associated with the value in question.”
Sounds like nonsense, but the important thing is that it is much worse than it sounds. It says that when we measure, the “observable” we measure doesn’t have a value even after I have finished my experiment and obtained the results. Part of this is due to the fact that I have to set-up my system to begin with. How do I prepare a quantum system such that I can talk about its properties before my experiment and relate them to my results?
I don’t. Actually, I fundamentally disturb the system but then call this disturbance “preparation”. At this point, I now a mathematical representation of a system that corresponds to nothing in the physical world. Rather, it has a procedural basis. I’m transcribing how I set up my system in such a way as to be able to relate it to the measurement.
Then, after I’ve finished my experiment I want my measurements. So I take the actual “measurements” (the information from the experiment) but I don’t call these measurement. I use them to apply the mathematical operators that I call “observables” despite the fact that they aren’t observed. Once these operators are applied to my mathematical representation, I then have a certain probability of obtaining a value for a system that isn’t the one I represented based on an “observable” that isn’t a value but an operator and which isn’t measured but applied to a mathematical entity.
Method 3: Screw the Orthodox/Copenhagen Interpretation
A lot of the confusion stems not only from the fact that I’ve been using a common formulation of Orthodox/Copenhagen Interpretation. Here’s my view of how we should actually talk about what’s going on. First, QM tells us about the world via a procedure for generating results in accordance with the theoretical/mathematical framework that it is. However, as a theory of physics, the wave-functions/state-vectors, observables, and all the stuff that sounds like we’re talking about something “real” is actually completely divorced from the physical world in every known sense. That said, just because we don’t know what it is that we’re describing such that we can use QM (i.e., we don’t know what the correspondence is between the wave function/state vector or the observables and the actual properties of the physical system) doesn’t mean that we can simply say it is a probability function for generating measurement values. The values that we obtain aren’t statistical because we lack information, but because whatever a quantum system is it seems to behave (or be) fundamentally different from all classical reality.
There are no particles. There are only the approximations of particles that behave more and more like particles in classical physics as we go from subatomic scales to atomic scales to molecular scales and so on. What there “are” seems to be systems that we only observe as discrete because we make them that way when we observe them, but the fact that we can interact with them when we use the mathematics of waves, fields, and other “spread out” functions means that in some sense that is what they are. They are thing that do not have definite properties until we force them to. And they will only have definite properties because we force them to.
Method 4: Link to a hundred page document
Between Classical and Quantum
That's a bit like saying "we treat the dead cat like it's alive". There's no reason to think that we're treating a particle ever, because our measurements aren't actually of properties of particles but measurements of states we obtain mathematically. To repeat: a fundamental difference between classical and quantum physics is that in the latter we don't measure observables like momentum or position, we represent these as math functions that will act on our observations to give us values whereas in classical physics, the observables were the values.
What trick? Think of it this way: in classical physics, quantum mechanics doesn't work. Relativity takes classical physics and says that the laws of physics still hold everywhere and always, but to understand how they do we have to realize that the way we describe them dynamically (i.e., through time) is relative.
In other words, the "trick" of spacetime (whatever that means) shouldn't exist for quantum systems because there is nothing about spacetime that makes any system different from us (and I've yet to meet someone in a superposition state). Also, it says that the kind of interactions quantum systems are capable of (especially entanglement) are impossible. So on the one hand relativity offers nothing to help understand QM, and on the other it presents another fundamental difficulty as it seems to deny that quantum systems can exist.
I have been going with "screw the orthodox method".
I don't know if you have seen the movie "Next". Well I see it a lot like that, the character was clairvoyant and could see the future. However he could see what would happen next in different scenarios until he picked the one he liked. That's what we get with the time paradox your describing. In qm we don't just get choices as determined by classical physics because it is in-deterministic in a very real sense, in such a reap sense that it these non existent particles have to be accounted for as variables. From the beginning all choices would be seen even if one course is ultimately determined because that's what the time paradox allows.
I don't know if you have seen the movie "Next". Well I see it a lot like that, the character was clairvoyant and could see the future. However he could see what would happen next in different scenarios until he picked the one he liked. That's what we get with the time paradox your describing. In qm we don't just get choices as determined by classical physics because it is in-deterministic in a very real sense, in such a reap sense that it these non existent particles have to be accounted for as variables. From the beginning all choices would be seen even if one course is ultimately determined because that's what the time paradox allows.
Legion, Relativity does offer help to qm cause relativity proves, that the type of paradoxes that qm shows us, are real and you deny exists. We already know objects can be timeless and no where yet everywhere so what's the problem. Relativity could be the very thing causing the wave effect, cause photons are timeless and are in a state where they can leap space without crossing it.
In general relativity it is possible to be your own father (I'm not exaggerating; causal paradoxes abound). Moreover, in general relativity there is no gravity only curvature which determines the trajectories of matter, while gravity in QM remains a force (hence a major incompatibility between the two).
Rather, we know 'timeless" describes everything as space and time cannot be separated and all objects are defined by a time dimension (as well as "spatial" directions). Nothing can be timeless excepting that spacetime shows that everything is timeless and time has no meaning.
Were that true, then relativity would be compatible with quantum mechanics. However, as quantum mechanics violates fundamentals of both special and relativity, it can't be said that relativity does anything more than make more problematic both theories (relativity and quantum mechanics).
Photons are not timeless, and it is meaningless in relativity to speak of movement in space, let alone for anything to 'leap space".
It really is timeless because of time dilation but time zero is where the math breaks down but that is no issue for me I don't do math. Leaping space is what nasa talks about on their site on based on relativity by bending spacetime outside a spaceship, theoretically of course and warp the universe.
It's timeless because there is no time. Time dilation refers to differences among observers measuring changes in the t coordinate from their respective reference frames.
There is no time zero, nor does the math break down when the t coordinate is 0.
Perhaps thinking about spacetime from a more intuitive perspective may help. I'm currently sitting down typing at some location and you are (I hope) also at some location. Imagine we both had GPS enabled phones (that might not require imagining), only instead of GPS coordinates we could both see where we are located in 3D space by the coordinates x, y, & z. When you refer to changes in time, or positions in space, in the context of spacetime or relativity, you are asking questions/making comments that are equivalent to the following:
1) What is the length that I would have to travel in 2D space in order to reach you?
2) If neither of us moved, how long would it take for us to occupy the same space?
3) How far is it from your 3D space to a 1D space?
4) What is the volume of a 1D line?
5) Describe your 3D motion in 1D space.
and so on.
We are used to think of 3D space as "space". We don't generally think of it in terms of individual dimensions, because even the thinnest sheet of paper is actually a 3D object. It makes as much sense to talk about 2D objects in 3D space as it does to refer to 100D objects in 3D space.
Likewise, it makes no sense to talk about "space" (understood as our 3D space we experience) or "time" in 4D spacetime. This is akin to asking about 100-dimensional objects in the space we experience. No such object can exist in such a space.
That's because if they started talking about manifolds, tensors, differential geometry, and geodesics nobody would read their site. When they publish studies, they say very different things. For one thing, the kind of "bending" or "warping" of spacetime talked about in articles on their site or elsewhere is generally considered a problem with the theory general relativity as it allows causal paradoxes. For another, it is arguably impossible even in theory and if it is possible nobody understands how other than through highly theoretical models loaded with exotic assumptions:
On the impossibility of superluminal travel: the warp drive lesson
Exotic solutions in General Relativity: Traversable wormholes and “warp drive” spacetimes
Finally, most of these suggestions aren't just likely impossible and highly theoretical, but thought exercises. One theoretical warp drive discussed in a journal article always and only travels faster-than-light, making it rather useless even if it were possible. Also, even if some "warp drive" is actually possible, that doesn't mean we can ever build it.
A photon reference frame is the speed of light because it's light and in a quantum state to begin with. What I am saying is general relativity gives us a theory that multi world is possible. QM is more testable but spelling out the same possible multi world possibility. In a quantum state, or at the speed of light or enough mass allows us to choose a time and place in the universe, in a purely deterministic universe alternatives are not even potentially possible as relativity and qm allow.
Recall that a central reason modern physics requires spacetime, as well as a primary reason for relativistic physics in general is that the speed of light isn't "relative". While a simplistic, it is surprising how close we get to the much more complicated truth by saying that the reasons for differences between observations in different reference frames (like time dilation) is because the speed of light is not different. If I am riding on a motorcycle at 80 mph I can easily through a 90 mph fastball, because if I throw it at what seems to me to be 10 mph someone with a radar gun standing by the side of the road would clock its speed at 90 mph. My speed is added to the ball. This is true for almost everything, the big exception being light: no matter how fast I travel, the speed of light stays the same.
As a consequence, photons don't have reference frames (for all intents and purposes; it's easier than getting into null geodesics or the null intervals of events on the worldlines of massless particles). Part of what makes up a reference frame in terms of spacetime coordinates is relative velocity. Light has no relative velocity.
Worse still, in general relativity nothing (not even photons) have quantum states. Relativistic quantum physics is the incorporation of special relativity into quantum mechanics, but there is no such unification for general relativity and quantum mechanics.
Also, unless quantum physics is wrong, everything is always and everywhere in a quantum state. We're made up of electrons and protons and so forth, these are governed by quantum physics not classical mechanics, and thus we all are described by wavefunctions. It's just that while things start to seem classical (point-like or particle-like) very quickly once we move beyond the scale of the atom.
Certainly, general relativity is part of the reason for many a multiverse cosmology. But the earliest multiverse theory arose independently of general relativity, cosmology, and particle physics. The MWI (many-worlds interpretation) was proposed about 60 years ago and as Bousso, Susskind, and Tegmark (among others) have shown, it is a multiverse theory. In other words, not only does QM itself give us the kind of theory you refer to, but did so some 3 decades before the earliest multiverse theories motivated by the standard model/general relativity/cosmology.
I'm not sure I understand what you mean here or what you refer to.
Arguably relativity allows no alternatives, which was the point of this thread. Everything has already happened and nothing will ever happen, because spacetime is absolute (every location is defined in terms of space and time, and thus there is no point in spacetime where something hasn't "happened" because it happens in time which is just one coordinate of a spacetime point, and nothing ever happens because there is no time for it to happen in). This is much more contentious than the indeterminism of quantum mechanics, which is built into the theory and all extensions of it (QFT, QED, QCD, etc.).
My argument is the many world's idea and I do feel relativity allows it for the same reason qm allows it, in potential. I feel like quantum states, black holes and light speed are different ways of achieving the same spacetime warp, and that's why the strange behavior, it's possible as a matter of physics in many different ways we have seen classical physics seemingly violated.
Legion, doesn't the many world's interpretation reconcile determinism and free will or is that scenario unsatisfactory as far as free will is concerened? I think your saying that wouldn't count except when the maths pretends many world's is accurate, if only for the sake of our sanity.
That's hard to say, because the definition of "free will" is quite subtle and the MWI more than a little unclear (essentially, it asserts that all possible states of a quantum system are realized given any "measurement/observation", but neither explains how whatever state an observer in a particular universe observes (that is, how measurement/observation results in particular results for particular universes) nor what "measurement/observation" really is. Also, it's kind of difficult to relate such a theory with free will when the theory posits that there are infinitely many versions of me making every action and choice I could. It's a bit like replacing free will as the capacity to choose with the realization of all choices in various universes, but in each one the choice is determined (although how we don't know).
There's a reason the many-worlds interpretation contains the word "interpretation". It is one way of trying to make sense of the math. Personally, I find the idea that every time someone's hair has a split end a new universe is created or every time someone splits a bag of candy new universes are created rather insane. Also, the MWI says that certain observers will "split" universes such that we can explain why we only ever find a single state/result given a measurement/observation of a quantum system, but it provides to mechanism or even a reason as to why any observer measures the particular value s/he does (i.e., why out of the possibly infinite universes any particular one results from a measurement). So the MWI isn't just an interpretation of the math because the math doesn't explain how any measurements are observed such that we can explain how these measurements result in the universes they do.
Finally, if you are interested in maintaining sanity, physics should be avoided at all costs.
That's hard to say, because the definition of "free will" is quite subtle and the MWI more than a little unclear (essentially, it asserts that all possible states of a quantum system are realized given any "measurement/observation", but neither explains how whatever state an observer in a particular universe observes (that is, how measurement/observation results in particular results for particular universes) nor what "measurement/observation" really is. Also, it's kind of difficult to relate such a theory with free will when the theory posits that there are infinitely many versions of me making every action and choice I could. It's a bit like replacing free will as the capacity to choose with the realization of all choices in various universes, but in each one the choice is determined (although how we don't know).
There's a reason the many-worlds interpretation contains the word "interpretation". It is one way of trying to make sense of the math. Personally, I find the idea that every time someone's hair has a split end a new universe is created or every time someone splits a bag of candy new universes are created rather insane. Also, the MWI says that certain observers will "split" universes such that we can explain why we only ever find a single state/result given a measurement/observation of a quantum system, but it provides to mechanism or even a reason as to why any observer measures the particular value s/he does (i.e., why out of the possibly infinite universes any particular one results from a measurement). So the MWI isn't just an interpretation of the math because the math doesn't explain how any measurements are observed such that we can explain how these measurements result in the universes they do.
Finally, if you are interested in maintaining sanity, physics should be avoided at all costs.
Yes I know many worlds is an interpertation and really depends on how you see the superposition as real or not. Many world's says it is real while your saying it is just math. I think it is real but only in potential and only one scenario is actualized. So in that view every action has a vast amount of potential directions outside the common classical physics. In quantum it is too small a significance for us to notice most the time but yes everything is fundamentally quantum any how.
Not really. I've unfortunately confused things, I think, by presenting the orthodox interpretation and not making clear that I don't buy it. I believe that quantum systems are fundamentally indeterministic and their states/properties completely non-classical in that they lack definition (their states are not precisely defined the way systems are in classical physics). I don't believe that the math suggests that observations somehow spawn branching universes, particular as the math doesn't define observation, doesn't indicate how observations result in particular branches, or even what observations are. I consider the decoherence program far more likely.
That's pretty close to what I think, but its is vastly different from the many-worlds interpretation.