Recent content by stevendaryl

A topic can have substance without it being a testable (or falsifiable) theory. For example: the claim that scientific theory must be falsifiable is not itself a falsifiable theory. The theory of differential equations is not falsifiable.

Just a note about “superdeterminism” versus ordinary “determinism”. It’s easy to think that there is no distinction, that superdeterminism is just determinism assumed to apply to human choices. This leads to people to think that superdeterminism is only objected to for philosophical reasons...

Yes, but that’s an important contribution. I’m just saying that there is no substance (yet) to superdeterminism.

I would also point out that superdeterminism is not a theory. It is a class of theories. I would say that there isn’t actually a superdeterministic theory on the table for consideration. Just the idea that maybe it’s worth exploring.

I don’t think it’s fair to say it’s just popularity. MWI has been around for a long time, and even though the arguments for it haven’t convinced everyone, the arguments pro and con have been offered and rebutted. I don’t think that superdeterminism is in that position. Of course, things can...

It seems to me that superdeterministic requires arbitrarily much fine-tuning. Basically, the superdeterminism loophole for EPR is that if you assume that the choices made by the experimenters (Alice and Bob) are correlated with the initial setting of the hidden variable in the twin pair, then...

I don’t understand how the ensemble interpretation of QM is an interpretation. In classical statistical mechanics, the meaning of an ensemble of systems is a collection of systems that are macroscopically identical but microscopically different. But in quantum mechanics, an electron that is in...

The original paper can be found here: http://jamesowenweatherall.com/SCPPRG/EverettHugh1957PhDThesis_BarrettComments.pdf

Everett’s original paper on what came to be known as the “Many-Worlds Interpretation” didn’t talk about branching. It talked about the state of the rest of the world relative to the state of the observer.

I don’t have an answer, but I would like to point out that there could be a “many worlds” interpretation of classical probability, as well. To simplify things, let’s assume a world that is deterministic except for one thing: There is a coin that can be flipped so tgst the outcome, heads or...

I don’t see what it has to do with particles. The question is: Does Alice’s measurement affect the “current state”, or not? If so, then her actions affect Bob’s results, contrary to the limitations of relativity.

So that’s the intuition behind Einstein’s argument. What Einstein seemed to believe is that what future results of a measurement are possible is determined by the state of the universe prior to the measurement. Furthermore, if all causal influences are limited by lightspeed, then the...

Yes, but I don’t understand what point you are making. Let me introduce a fictional situation and see what you think about it. Suppose that there are a pair of coins. Each coin can be flipped to give a result of “heads” or “tails”. Looking at either coin in isolation reveals no pattern to the...

Not the future, but the value. If you can predict with 100% certainty the location of a particle 10 years from now, then that means that “the location 10 years from now” is a function of the current state.

I don’t understand this objection. Alice and Bob will get together later and tell each other what results they got. She’s making a prediction about what Bob will say. I guess we can coin a new term, something like “teledict”, which would be defined as computing some fact about conditions that...