On Tue, May 7, 2024 at 11:14 AM Quan Tesla <quantes...@gmail.com> wrote: > > Don't you believe that true randomness persists in asymmetry, or even that > randomness would be found in supersymmetry? I'm referring here to the > uncertainty principle. > > Is your view that the universe is always certain about the position and > momentum of every-single particle in all possible worlds?
If I flip a coin and peek at the result, then your probability of heads is different than my probability of heads. Likewise, in quantum mechanics, a system observing a particle is described by Schrodinger's wave equation just like any other system. The solution to the equation is the observer sees a particle in some state that is unknown in advance to the observer but predictable to someone who knows the quantum state of the system and has sufficient computing power to solve it, neither of which is available to the observer. We know this because of Schrodinger's cat. The square of the wave function gives you the probability of observing a particle in the absence of more information, such as entanglement with another particle that you already observed. It is the same thing as peeking at my flipped coin, except that the computation is intractable without a quantum computer as large as the system it is modeling, which we don't have. Or maybe you mean algorithmic randomness, which is independent of an observer. But again you have the same problem. An iterated cryptographic hash function with a 1000 bit key is random because you lack the computing power to guess the seed. Likewise, if you knew the exact quantum state of an observer, the computation required to solve it grows exponentially with its size. That's why we can't compute the freezing point of water by modeling atoms. A theory of everything is probably a few hundred bits. But knowing what it is would be useless because it would make no predictions without the computing power of the whole universe. That is the major criticism of string theory. -- -- Matt Mahoney, mattmahone...@gmail.com ------------------------------------------ Artificial General Intelligence List: AGI Permalink: https://agi.topicbox.com/groups/agi/Teaac2c1a9c4f4ce3-M348cbbd93444a977d8ad5885 Delivery options: https://agi.topicbox.com/groups/agi/subscription
