First of all, I know the Uncertainty Principle makes clear that we can't KNOW what the universe will look like in the future
But let's say we had two universes exactly identical. And then we let them "run". Would both of them follow the exact same path, or would "random" differences make them different over time?
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I TAMED MY OWN FATE
Yes, Eternal Return is a real thing.
en.wikipedia.org
> Laplace's demon met its end with early 19th century developments of the concepts of irreversibility, entropy, and the second law of thermodynamics.
>In other words, Laplace's demon was based on the premise of reversibility and classical mechanics; however, Ulanowicz points out that
>many thermodynamic processes are irreversible, so that if thermodynamic quantities are taken to be purely physical then no such demon is possible
>as one could not reconstruct past positions and momenta from the current state.
Nigger, the past isn't really "locked in" based on the universe's current state, let alone the future.
Expectations of determinism are based on classical mechanics, which can't explain entropy and the "arrow of time".
Might as well take that shit to /x/ with the UFO's, Bigfoot and scary ghosts.
I mean if you know every single variable then you could predict almost anything. So kind of.
>muh free will parrot
yeah ok gramps go home
You cannot predict when a singe atom of Carbon 14 will decay. You can say that there is a 50% chance that it will decay before 5730 years pass. Perhaps in a single point in time the emitted beta particle could lead to a specific person getting cancer. It is, however, impossible to tell if it will decay at that point, and so you cannot say with 100% accuracy that the atom will lead to the person getting cancer. This is just one example of how the probabilities of quantum physics could lead to macroscopic butterfly effects.
The future, and the past, both have to exist in a set fashion due to special relativity. Different observers in different frames can observe events in different orders in yet another frame, as time relative to movement can be slower or faster. (And before the flat Earthers get in here, yes this has all been tested and observed, and yes, your phone depends on it every day - some shit just works in ways the common sense riles against, get over it.)
PBS put it in their usual pleb fashion:
youtube.com
>First of all, I know the Uncertainty Principle makes clear that we can't KNOW what the universe will look like in the future
That is correct.
>But let's say we had two universes exactly identical. And then we let them "run". Would both of them follow the exact same path,
Yes.
Physics as we know it is both fundamentally unpredictable, and deterministic.
>Physics as we know it is both fundamentally unpredictable, and deterministic.
How does special relativity affect the future? An event will happen before every observer can actually witness it. The information that the first observer collects will be unable to be transferred to the others before they can observe it themselves, and so there is no reason for determinism to be derived from this effect.
The concept is the past and future already exist, it's only a matter of traveling through them to see the result. It's not that special relativity affects the future, it simply demonstrates that the future is already established. Thus different observers can take in that future, or past, in different successions, even to the point of creating apparent causal violations from one another's perspectives.
Still doesn't mean you can predict jack, though it opens some possibilities, even if most are closed by the speed of light and cosmic censorship.
Don't get your pantees in a bunch thinking that determinism eliminates free will. You've a limited perspective, you make decisions with limited information, thus you are always under the burden of free will.
Among sapient beings, only the truly omniscient would lack free will.
...and maybe those damned laplace demons, but fuck those guys.
If you believe that special relativity can cause causal violations of any kind, then you clealy do not know enough about the subject to be talking about it. All it causes is the definition of simultaneous to be observer specific; nothing more, nothing less. In order for an observer to witness the effect before the cause, information would need to travel faster than the speed of light, which is not possible. As such, the cause must precede the effect for all inertial observers.
Well, for one, if you think it doesn't, you know nothing on the subject... But in this particular case, it's not the sort of causal violation you're thinking of. Its simply that two observers in different frames can watch events unfold in different orders, in a third frame. Thus, when they meet up and discuss what they saw, each will consider the others observation a causal violation. This phenomena just furthers demonstrates that the events exist independent of the of time in which they are witnessed, be they past or future.
As for the sort of causal violation you are thinking about, SR predicts tons, and it's largely up to QM to mitigate them, but it has its own:
arxiv.org
Granted, even Einstein had problems with a lot of what he predicted - thinking that some mechanism must exist in the universe, for instance, to prevent singularities forming, as those are actually quite a bit more frustrating, mathematically speaking. But, it seems, the universe doesn't always operate the way we want it to.
If you realized how pointless your question is you wouldn't have asked it.
Do you actually believe this or joking? Cause I actually kinda do
Everything, and I mean EVERYTHING, is 100% predetermined and there is nothing we can do to change it.
I'm getting into /x/ here but hear me out. Occasionally I have precognitive dreams but I dismiss their importance until they turn into deja vus. Only one time I had a precognitive dream the events of which happened on the next day, and that experience changed my perception of time forever. I did not gain any information that was of great importance in that specific dream; it was me and my friends having a conversation while walking in a park. What shocked me was that the next day the conversation happened word for word; the order in which we walked was the same; we all wore the same clothes I saw in my dream - everything was a carbon copy of my precognitive dream.
I know this is a personal experience and most of you will dismiss it for its irrelevancy unless you have experienced something similar, but how do you explain this Veeky Forums?
maybe false memories
Quantum no-deterministic effects would cause the universes to diverge
If it's a universe that is EXACTLY like ours then yeah, there is no reason to believe it would deviate at all. WE can't know what the future entails. That doesn't mean it's indeterministic.
Is it 100% proven that quantum effects are non deterministic? Or could there be something we are missing that would make them deterministic?
Why do people assume both determinism and randomness are incompatible?
The future of our Universe has already happened, but in many different ways. Think of time as a dimension of space, in such a way our Universe is a tesseract. Every single instant in time of this Universe is like a cube, and lining up these cubes you have one version of the Universe as a tesseract. This way makes it possible to travel back and forth in time (thus including retro-causality). The thing is, within just one Universe's timeline, there are many of the random events, and every time something random is about to occur, the Universe splits into as many other Universes as there are possible outcomes for this random event. So yes, they would run similarly, they would be equally complex tesseracts constantly branching out at every moment.
stuff like jesus toast and tide patterns would be different. there might be a hurricane somewhere else. quantum mechanics experiments would have a slightly different distribution of points
you might randomly jump to a period where you quit Veeky Forums and focus on something important.
en.wikipedia.org
Nothing theorized yet could.
>the Universe splits into as many other Universes as there are possible outcomes for this random event
That would imply there can be more than one outcome to these "random" events. There is none. Your conscious might say "Well, I have the choice between eating pancakes or waffles" but what you do eat is entirely up to your brain and it does what it does independent of your conscious and after it chooses something your conscious goes "yeah I meant that all along"
I don't doubt the possibility of other universes but they're all the same.
That's not what was being asked, and it's a valid question given the tone of these discussions. Is it actually the case the non determinism is proven outright, or is it just that our current models are based on it? And if the latter, is there really no good reason to consider these models incomplete?
The whole idea that QM makes the universe non-deterministic is predicated on the premise that it isn't determinable at the quantum level from the human perspective. It does not, however, eliminate the fact that SR dictates that all events that ever will, and ever have, happened, are fixed. It's only that it's mathematically impossible to predict from any single frame. As no other point of view is available, it's effectively non-deterministic, but in the grand scheme of things, the unfolding of all events are fixed, as demonstrated by the fact that the order of events may differ between observers.
Though, like says, it isn't something to sweat about. Determinism doesn't eliminate free will.
Dude entropy isnt some big mystery, it is completely explainable
hmm. Would that mean that if you had 2 identical universes they would follow the exact same path?
>muh quantum magic
The future can't materialize from nothing. Events can't just occur without a prior cause. Believing otherwise is to believe in magic.
It's one of those "insufficient data for a meaningful answer" questions.
We don't know what sorta of interference issues may or may not have been involved in the formation of this universe and its theoretical emergence from a quantum vacuum. There's a lot of debate about it, and the cosmic microwave background can be interpreted in more than one way. But, assuming two universe are formed under absolutely identical conditions, yes, the two universes should be identical - and it may even be that variances aren't possible at all.
But universes can theoretically be spawned from within this universe - you wouldn't notice, as the new universe would be moving away from this one at, effectively, faster than the speed of light, but that theory suggests that universes can have different sources and thus might have subtle variances that could cascade into radical differences.
At the moment, however, whenever you bring up the idea of multiple universes, you're well into /x/'land, as it's difficult to even speculate about.
Thanks for the great answer. I was not sugesting multiple universes are real. I am fascinated by the idea that variances may not be possible at all.
So if you had perfect information about the universe (If you looked at ALL frames of reference. Only hypothetically) Could you determine the exact moment a certain carbon atom is going to decay?
>Dude entropy isnt some big mystery, it is completely explainable
Sure, but it's incompatible with classical mechanics and determinism.
>So if you had perfect information about the universe (If you looked at ALL frames of reference. Only hypothetically) Could you determine the exact moment a certain carbon atom is going to decay?
Only if you were a god who could see the past and future at the same time and observe without interaction, as causal events get wonky, particularly at the quantum level. Particles, effectively, interfere with themselves, even temporally, and one cannot measure accurately without interaction, which is among what makes them impossible to accurately predict. There are simply some limitations to what you can do with a universe that you're part of.
Closet "trick" we have in that department is kind of a cheat involving observing a particle indirectly:
phys.org
Well, if you could simulate a universe, you could. Granted, that's cheating too, as you're effectively going back or forward to the moment it happened and observing a universe you aren't in. Without the ability to cheat like that, however, you can't do it.
But if you had perfect information you wouldnt need to measure without interaction because you would know the outcome of this interaction before it even happened. You wouldnt even have to measure anything, because you could just calculate everything parting from the initial state, your laws and constants.
This is going to sound like /x/ talk but maybe its not. Im not talking about some entity that is part of the universe doing this. I know there would be limitations. Im talking about "the universe itself" (and by that I mean the set of laws and constants+ initial state) being able to predict its own future (no, i dont believe the universe is sentient nor inteligent, so its not going to happen) and also be able to trace back all the interactions that have ever happened. Im probably just retarded but this seems to me like the ultimate question when it comes to deterministic vs non deterministic
Well, yeah, it's cheating though, cuz we can't do that, and it isn't physically possible to do that.
As a hypothetical, of course if you had all the data of a complete universe, past and present, you could just simply look up when any particular thing happened without altering the data in the process.
Such a universe would be deterministic - like ours, everything that will happened has happened from another perspective. But from the limited perspective of those living inside the universe, the future would be just as unpredictable as it is for us. They would, similarly, make their decisions based on limited information, as the space they take up within the simulation and the systems by which they acquire and store information only allows them so much knowledge. So, from their own perspective, they would have free will, even if some intern outside of the simulation can look up anything and everything that will ever happen to them.
How so?
No its not....
If you believe in cause and effect, then determinism is pretty much inevitable.
"Randomness" can be interpreted to mean effects where causes are not known and cannot be known. The outcome of a coin flip can be deterministic due to things like force applied, spin, temperature, etc. but this information is unavailable, and therefore the outcome is "random."
Even in the case of quantum mechanics, if you believe in cause and effect, there must have been some cause to the effect you measure, because causality means you cannot get something from nothing. Things like Bell's Theorem only mean that actually finding out the cause is physically impossible, so that the results are always random.
Cause and effect is overrated.
arxiv.org
Or, at least misunderstood. Things may have causes and effects, but effect, in some instances, may precede cause, cuz the universe likes to fux with your mind like that.
how would they have free will if every choice they make is determined? Your ability to predict it is irrelevant. If you took a guy and presented him with the exact same choice 1 million times. Lets say he opens his fridge and has to choose if he drinks a pepsi or a beer. would he not make the same decision 1 million times if all conditions were the same? What does it even mean to decide if your decision is determined? you didnt have a choice at all.
If you didn't have a choice you wouldn't have taken the action.
We operate with limited information from a limited perspective with a single frame of time, thus, from our own perspectives, we are forever burdened with free will, and cannot escape it.
The only perspective that would lack this free will, is that of hypothetical omniscient being living within that same universe. As it is physically impossible for such a being to exist, and we certainly aren't omniscient, we aren't liberated from free will in this manner. We make decisions that determine our futures without knowing with exactitude as to what those futures are or even how those decisions are made, and no perspective exists in the universe to inform us otherwise with absolute certainty. At the moment, as far as we can tell, it's just us here, so we're stuck with that.
>Is it 100% proven that quantum effects are non deterministic?
It is impossible for some physical phenomena to be non deterministic. Read Einstein's criticisms of quantum mechanics.
I have a very similar experience
One morning I remember thinking about a dream I'd had where I was having lunch at the cafeteria and the news was on about the death of a public figure from my country
I nearly stopped breathing when I recalled that exact moment when I saw the newscaster saying it word for word when I was having lunch in that cafeteria
everything was the same, the lightning, the clothes the anchor was wearing, even the food I was eating
the only difference is I was seeing myself in the dream, but that's usually how I dream
It's certainly very weird and I will never be able to explain it
>effect, in some instances, may precede cause, cuz the universe likes to fux with your mind like that.
Philosophically, this may actually be perfect for explaining how we can have determinism and free will simultaneously, and why stuff like Bell's Theorem says we cannot know causes: since the cause is in the future, it is impossible to know.
All free will requires is that we do not have perfect knowledge of the past and future, so we're kinda eternally set, even without the temporal weirdness, given that we don't even have perfect knowledge of our decision making progress.
Only gods lack free will.
process*
See, I had no idea I was going to make that typo, so I decided to click post anyways. Damnitall.