Trying to make sense of superdeterminism

Sabine Hossenfelder writes:

It does not help that most physicists today have been falsely taught the measurement problem has been solved, or erroneously think that hidden variables have been ruled out. If anything is mind-boggling about quantum mechanics, it’s that physicists have almost entirely ignored the most obvious way to solve its problems.

Her "obvious way" is to replace quantum mechanics with a superdeterministic theory of hidden variables. It says that all mysteries are resolved by saying that they were pre-ordained at the beginning of the big bang.

Peter Shor asks in reply:

I don't see how superdeterminism is compatible with quantum computation.

Suppose we eventually build ion trap quantum computers big enough to factor a large number. Now, suppose I choose a random large number by taking a telescope in Australia and finding random bits by looking at the light from 2000 different stars. I feed these bits into a quantum computer, and factor the number. There's a reasonable likelihood that this number has some very large factors.

Just where and how was the number factored?

I agree with him that it is impossible to believe in both superdeterminism and quantum computation.

Quantum computation cleverly uses the uncertainties about quantum states to do a computation, such as factoring a large integer. If superdeterminism is true, then there aren't really any uncertainties in nature. What seems random is just our lack of knowledge.

If I could make a machine with 1000 qubits, and each can be in 2 states at once, then it seems plausible that a qubit calculation could be doing multiple computations at once, and exceeding what a Turing machine can do. (Yes, I know that this is an over-simplification of which Scott Aaronson, aka Dr. Quantum Supremacy, disapproves.)

But is the uncertainty is all an illusion, then I don't see how it could be used to do better than a Turing machine.

I don't personally believe in either superdeterminism or quantum computation. I could be proved wrong, if someone makes a quantum computer to factor large integers. I don't see how I could be proved wrong about superdeterminism. It is a fringe idea with only a handful of followers, and it doesn't solve any problems.

Update: Hossenfelder and Shor argue in the comments above, but the discussion gets nowhere. In my opinion, the problem is that superdeterminism is incoherent, and so contrary to the scientific enterprise that it is hard to see why anyone would see any value in it. Shor raises some objections, but discussing the issue is difficult because superdeterminists can explain away anything.

Trying to prove many-worlds from first principles

Mordecai Waegelly and Kelvin J. McQueenz write Reformulating Bell’s Theorem: The Search for a Truly Local Quantum Theory:

The apparent nonlocality of quantum theory has been a persistent concern. Einstein et. al. (1935) and Bell (1964) emphasized the apparent nonlocality arising from entanglement correlations. While some interpretations embrace this nonlocality, modern variations of the Everett-inspired many worlds interpretation try to circumvent it. In this paper, we review Bell's "no-go" theorem and explain how it rests on three axioms, local causality, no superdeterminism, and one world. Although Bell is often taken to have shown that local causality is ruled out by the experimentally confirmed entanglement correlations, we make clear that it is the conjunction of the three axioms that is ruled out by these correlations.

We then show that by assuming local causality and no superdeterminism, we can give a direct proof of many worlds. The remainder of the paper searches for a consistent, local, formulation of many worlds.

I accept those assumption. Local causality is axiomatic for all of science. Only Gerard 't Hooft and Dr. Bee believe in superdeterinism.

From this he claims to prove many worlds!! No, this is crazy. No set of assumptions can prove the existence of unobservable parallel worlds.

The root of his error is that he has a hidden assumption in favor of hidden variable theories. Such theories have been discarded for a century.

Gizmodo reports:

Scientists studying kea, New Zealand’s alpine parrot, revealed that the famously mischievous birds could understand probabilities, an impressive mental feat.

The pair of researchers put six birds through a series of trials to see how they made decisions when faced with uncertainty. When prompted to choose, the kea generally opted for scenarios where they were more likely to earn a reward. This work is further evidence of some birds’ general intelligence, according to the paper published in Nature Communications.

These parrots must be smarter than the many-worlds advocates.

The above paper admits:

On a branching model, it is difficult to make sense of the probabilistic predictions of quantum mechanics. Pre-measurement, Alice might assert "there is a 0.7 probability that I will see spin-up (rather than spin-down)". But given branching, it seems that Alice should assign probability 1 to there being an Alice descendant that sees spin-up. Pre-measurement Alice is not uncertain of anything; she knows she will branch into descendants that see contrary results in different worlds, and she knows that neither of her descendants is the "real" Alice -- they both have equal claim to being pre-measurement Alice. It is therefore unclear what the "probability 0.7" is a probability of. This aspect of the problem is often referred to as the incoherence problem.

This problem has no solution. If you believe in many-worlds, you have to abandon probabilities.

You might think that the probabilities could be interpreted as the possibility of a particular branching. That is, one possible parallel world has probability 0.7, and the another has 0.3. However the many-worlds advocates have never been able to make such a theory work.

Dr. Bee attacks panpsychism

Sabine Hossenfelder writes in Nautilus:

I recently discovered panpsychism. ...

Can elementary particles be conscious? No, they can’t. It’s in conflict with evidence. Here’s why.

We know 25 elementary particles. These are collected in the standard model of particle physics. The predictions of the standard model agree with experiment to best precision.

The particles in the standard model are classified by their properties, which are collectively called “quantum numbers.” The electron, for example, has an electric charge of -1 and it can have a spin of +1/2 or -1/2. There are a few other quantum numbers with complicated names, such as the weak hypercharge, but really it’s not so important. Point is, there are handful of those quantum numbers and they uniquely identify an elementary particle.

She is responding to some pro-panpsychism articles in the same online magazine, such as here.

No, she is not correct. An electron is not determined by its quantum numbers. It also has position and momentum. More importantly, it also has whatever info its wave function attempts to capture.

There is some debate about whether the wave function fully characterizes everything about the electron. Dr. Bee believes in superdeterminism, and under that theory, the answer is certainly not. Superdeterminism requires that electron behavior is predicted by long-ago events that are not captured by the wave function.

Entanglement imposes another problem for saying the electron wave function is everything. The combination of these views lead to several paradoxes.

With the third option it is indeed possible to add internal states to elementary particles. But if your goal is to give consciousness to those particles so that we can inherit it from them, strongly bound composites do not help you. They do not help you exactly because you have hidden this consciousness so that it needs a lot of energy to access. This then means, of course, that you cannot use it at lower energies, like the ones typical for soft and wet thinking apparatuses like human brains.

Summary: If a philosopher starts speaking about elementary particles, run.

She lost me here. It seems to me that an electron could have an internal state with a tiny bit of consciousness. I know this sounds goofy, but I don't think she disproved it. She believes in superdeterminism, and that is much goofier.

Argyle Sweater on Einstein

From Feb. 20, 2020.

Randomness cannot be empirically shown

A new paper argues:

We consider the nature of quantum randomness and how one might have empirical evidence for it. We will see why, depending on one's computational resources, it may be impossible to determine whether a particular notion of randomness properly characterizes one's empirical data. Indeed, we will see why even an ideal observer under ideal epistemic conditions may never have any empirical evidence whatsoever for believing that the results of one's quantum-mechanical experiments are randomly determined. This illustrates a radical sort of empirical underdetermination faced by fundamentally stochastic theories like quantum mechanics.

Isn't this obvious?

A lot of people say that quantum mechanics shows that the world is intrinsically random, or objectively random, or some such nonsense. There is no empirical support for such statements. For one thing, there could be a superdeterminism that makes nothing random.

We say that coin tosses are random, because nobody goes to the trouble of tracking all the variables needed to predict the outcome.

We say radioactive decay is random, because there is no known way of predicting the precise decay time. But it seems possible that we could, if we knew more about about the state of nucleus in question.

The paper discusses tests for coin toss sequences to appear random, but we have no way of recognizing intrinsic randomness even if we saw it.

More millions for quantum BS

The NY Times reports:

SAN FRANCISCO — White House officials on Monday unveiled plans to increase federal funding for the development of artificial intelligence and quantum computing, two cutting-edge technologies that defense officials say will play a key role in national security.

The funding, part of the Trump administration’s $4.8 trillion budget proposal, would direct more money for A.I. research to the Defense Department and the National Science Foundation. The administration also wants to spend $25 million on what it calls a national “quantum internet,” a network of machines designed to make it much harder to intercept digital communication.

For several years, technologists have urged the Trump administration to back research on artificial intelligence — which could affect things as diverse as weapons and transportation — and quantum computing, a new way to build super-powerful computers. China’s government, in particular, has made building these machines a priority, and some national security experts worry that the United States is at risk of falling behind.

The proposed spending follows earlier administration moves. In 2018, President Trump signed a law that earmarked $1.2 billion for quantum research. The Energy Department recently began distributing its portion of that money — about $625 million — to research labs in industry, academia and government.

“The dollars we have put into quantum information science have increased by about fivefold over the last three years,” said Paul Dabbar, under secretary for science at the Energy Department, in an interview.

I actually wish that this were legitimate. It would be an exciting area of cryptologic research, and open up a whole new arena for security analysis.

But it is all bogus. There is no practical value to a quantum internet.

Rovelli rejects Eternalism

Physicist Carlo Rovelli just wrote an essay on the philosophy of time, favoring Neither Presentism nor Eternalism. He relies heavily on "Einstein’s conventional definition of simultaneity", without mentioning that the notion is entirely due to Poincare, years before Einstein.

Also:

Shortly after the formulation of special relativity, Einstein's former math professor Minkowski found an elegant reformulation of special relativity in terms of the four dimensional geometry that we call today Minkowski space. Einstein at first rejected the idea. (`A pointless mathematical complication'.) But he soon changed his mind and embraced it full heart, making it the starting point of general relativity, where Minkowski space is understood as the local approximation to a four-dimensional, pseudo-Riemannian manifold, representing physical spacetime.

The mathematics of Minkowski and general relativity suggested an alternative to Presentism: the entire four-dimensional spacetime is `equally real now', and becoming is illusory. This I call here Eternalism.

This is cleverly written to convince you that Minkowski derived a 4D geometry version of relativity from Einstein's work. This is not true.

Poincare was the first to formulate a 4D geometry version of relativity, and that paper was written before Einstein published anything on the subject. Minkowski's 4D space was developed directly from Poincare's work, not Einstein. Minkowski does cite Einstein's paper, but does not use anything from it, and it is not clear that Einstein had any influence on Minkowski at all. From Poincare's paper, Minkowski gets the 4D formalism, the pseudo-Riemannian metric, the 4D Lorentz transformations, and the 4D covariance of Maxwell's equations.

This subtle mistake of McTaggart is the same mistake as that which lies at the root of Eternalism. The ensemble of the events of the world is four-dimensional, and we can embrace it within a single image. But this is not a denial of becoming, no more than a single chart of the British royal dynasties is a denial of the fact that events happened in England along the centuries.

Rovelli is right that believing in relativity and using Minkowski does not a belief that all times exist at once. Some people seem to believe that relativity requires determination and a denial of the present. One can still have different philosophical views of time.