Closet Cases – Republicans secretly love what they publicly hate So far in 2022, more than 300 anti-LGBT bills have been proposed across 36 states – at least one third of which are directed at trans youth. This surge, especially in anti-trans legislation from Republicans, stands in stark contrast to a startling fact. Republicans love […]
Choice and “predestination” are unintuitive even in secular philosophy. The interpretation of quantum mechanics most popular among quantum physicists - the Many Worlds Interpretation - is a fully predestinatory model. Everything flows completely from the initial boundary conditions of the universe. Your choices are fully calculated in. Even if you experience quantum randomness in your perception, that’s just because you can only remember your own path on the quantum world tree - neighboring universes where the quantum randomness flipped the other way are outside of your perception.
This interpretation is 100% consistent with all observations we can make. And yet we observe ourselves making choices. This is because we do not understand the full complexity of our own neurology. We simplify the fully quantum-deterministic biological computer that is our body as a person with thoughts, feelings, and motivations. In this simplification, choice seems malleable, when in truth choosing the other option would either be physically impossible or down to a quantum coin flip with no intelligent reasoning behind it.
When we imagine someone “could have made” a different choice, we are implicitly imagining a slightly different universe (branch) from the one we live in, in which some different historical quantum perturbation or some difference in the material reality resulted in them making the other choice.
Which means that while a MWI supporter believes in predestination of sorts, they can still choose freely whether to have strawberry or pistachio ice cream. It’s just that the boundary conditions of the universe and the particular quantum perturbations of their particular quantum history result in them choosing one or the other.
While John Calvin was not a quantum physicist, he did preach a similar philosophy. Though this is definitely a point where the dozens of different branches of Calvinism differ on the theological details.
But roughly speaking, this means that while Calvinists do believe in predestination, they also believe/notice they can choose whether to live in sin or to obey god. It’s just that this choice is determined by God, as it is determined by God whether or not they go to hell. And according to the Bible, people who make “good” choices go to heaven and people who make “bad” choices go to hell. Therefore they choose “good”, or try to. Not because it earns them a place in heaven but so that if God chose to send them to hell anyway that would be kind of bullshit.
(This last sentence is heavily editorialized; it’s the sort of thing they’ve had regular schisms about)
So a Calvinist hearing your attitude would respond something like “Of course you would go wild if you knew the truth of predestination, you’re probably the sort of person that goes to hell”. When someone is ostracized from the community, the community comes to the collective conclusion that they’re probably the sort of person that goes to hell. They can’t know God’s will for certain, but the Bible tells them as much as anything can and it looks like the Bible says they’re doomed.
Meanwhile they, the good Calvinists, are probably predestined to Heaven, so all their bad actions are probably just bumps on the road to God’s mercy, right? … Right?
You should generally dismiss what physicists in academia say about metaphysics, because crackpot quantum mysticism is rampantly popular and so you rarely get anything coherent from them.
I would recommend you check out my article here. Most academics in the physics departments believe in a property called “value indefiniteness” which amounts to crackpot solipsism based on poorly reasoned arguments that obviously cannot possibly be correct because Louis de Broglie presented a counterexample decades before these crackpot arguments were even made.
This is a strange phenomenon that the physicist John Bell points out in his paper “On the Impossible Pilot Wave.” The “pilot wave” theory is a model which is mathematically equivalent to standard quantum mechanics yet is value definite, and was first presented by de Broglie in the Solvay conference in 1927. Yet, despite this, academics from John von Neumann to Richard Feynman would go on to publish “impossibility theorems” trying to prove value definiteness is impossible, even though they all had a counterexample sitting in their lap.
Bell would then go on to publish several papers showing where the flaws in all their arguments are, but it had no impact on academia, and solipsism remains the overwhelmingly dominant position. Indeed “value indefiniteness” really is just a renaming of solipsism to make it sound less ridiculous. It literally means that particles have no values when you’re not looking at them, and since macroscopic objects, even other human beings, are made up of particles, it naturally applies to them as well: value indefiniteness = other people don’t exist if you’re not looking at them.
Many Worlds arose from this same crackpot delusion of physicists who recognize that solipsism is kinda silly but don’t want to give up value indefiniteness… which is literally solipsism. So they try to find a middle ground between solipsism and solipsism and their views just end up becoming coherent.
Bell points out in his paper “Quantum Mechanics for Cosmologists” that Many Worlds is still basically just solipsism but with a lot of extra baggage to confuse people to what they are even arguing so it is not so obvious that it is. A lot of Laymen falsely think Many Worlds is just the claim that there are many classical worlds. If I go to measure a photon in a superposition of both possible paths, then they think it means there will be a classical world where I perceive it on one path and another classical world where I perceive it on another path.
No, Many Worlds is even more incoherent, because no one perceives anything on any path at all. There are simply no objects which travel through 3D space within the interpretation. Consider that you walk from your living room to your bedroom, and you remember clearly that you did that. Since Many Worlds is still value indefinite, there does not exist any definite trajectories in 3D space, and so your memory has to be a complete lie. That didn’t happen. Indeed, no matter how strongly you feel that there is a computer/phone screen in front of you right now, in Many Worlds, that also must be a lie, because no objects exist in 3D space so there cannot be an object with a definite value in front of you right now.
This is what Bell saw as so absurd about it. Everything we perceive and believe we have perceived has to be largely disconnected from the real world, almost as if we’re living in a fake simulation, a brain in a vat, that is entirely disconnected from what is “actually going on.” Many Worlds is more batshit idiotic than you are led to believe from YouTube videos. It does not follow from the science at all, but follows from the crackpot quantum mysticism of “value indefiniteness,” which has no basis in the mathematics at all. Even many of the believers in academia admit that no one knows how to actually derive what we actually perceive from the interpretation.
Choice and “predestination” are unintuitive even in secular philosophy. The interpretation of quantum mechanics most popular among quantum physicists - the Many Worlds Interpretation - is a fully predestinatory model. Everything flows completely from the initial boundary conditions of the universe. Your choices are fully calculated in. Even if you experience quantum randomness in your perception, that’s just because you can only remember your own path on the quantum world tree - neighboring universes where the quantum randomness flipped the other way are outside of your perception.
This interpretation is 100% consistent with all observations we can make. And yet we observe ourselves making choices. This is because we do not understand the full complexity of our own neurology. We simplify the fully quantum-deterministic biological computer that is our body as a person with thoughts, feelings, and motivations. In this simplification, choice seems malleable, when in truth choosing the other option would either be physically impossible or down to a quantum coin flip with no intelligent reasoning behind it.
When we imagine someone “could have made” a different choice, we are implicitly imagining a slightly different universe (branch) from the one we live in, in which some different historical quantum perturbation or some difference in the material reality resulted in them making the other choice.
Which means that while a MWI supporter believes in predestination of sorts, they can still choose freely whether to have strawberry or pistachio ice cream. It’s just that the boundary conditions of the universe and the particular quantum perturbations of their particular quantum history result in them choosing one or the other.
While John Calvin was not a quantum physicist, he did preach a similar philosophy. Though this is definitely a point where the dozens of different branches of Calvinism differ on the theological details.
But roughly speaking, this means that while Calvinists do believe in predestination, they also believe/notice they can choose whether to live in sin or to obey god. It’s just that this choice is determined by God, as it is determined by God whether or not they go to hell. And according to the Bible, people who make “good” choices go to heaven and people who make “bad” choices go to hell. Therefore they choose “good”, or try to. Not because it earns them a place in heaven but so that if God chose to send them to hell anyway that would be kind of bullshit.
(This last sentence is heavily editorialized; it’s the sort of thing they’ve had regular schisms about)
So a Calvinist hearing your attitude would respond something like “Of course you would go wild if you knew the truth of predestination, you’re probably the sort of person that goes to hell”. When someone is ostracized from the community, the community comes to the collective conclusion that they’re probably the sort of person that goes to hell. They can’t know God’s will for certain, but the Bible tells them as much as anything can and it looks like the Bible says they’re doomed.
Meanwhile they, the good Calvinists, are probably predestined to Heaven, so all their bad actions are probably just bumps on the road to God’s mercy, right? … Right?
You should generally dismiss what physicists in academia say about metaphysics, because crackpot quantum mysticism is rampantly popular and so you rarely get anything coherent from them.
I would recommend you check out my article here. Most academics in the physics departments believe in a property called “value indefiniteness” which amounts to crackpot solipsism based on poorly reasoned arguments that obviously cannot possibly be correct because Louis de Broglie presented a counterexample decades before these crackpot arguments were even made.
This is a strange phenomenon that the physicist John Bell points out in his paper “On the Impossible Pilot Wave.” The “pilot wave” theory is a model which is mathematically equivalent to standard quantum mechanics yet is value definite, and was first presented by de Broglie in the Solvay conference in 1927. Yet, despite this, academics from John von Neumann to Richard Feynman would go on to publish “impossibility theorems” trying to prove value definiteness is impossible, even though they all had a counterexample sitting in their lap.
Bell would then go on to publish several papers showing where the flaws in all their arguments are, but it had no impact on academia, and solipsism remains the overwhelmingly dominant position. Indeed “value indefiniteness” really is just a renaming of solipsism to make it sound less ridiculous. It literally means that particles have no values when you’re not looking at them, and since macroscopic objects, even other human beings, are made up of particles, it naturally applies to them as well: value indefiniteness = other people don’t exist if you’re not looking at them.
Many Worlds arose from this same crackpot delusion of physicists who recognize that solipsism is kinda silly but don’t want to give up value indefiniteness… which is literally solipsism. So they try to find a middle ground between solipsism and solipsism and their views just end up becoming coherent.
Bell points out in his paper “Quantum Mechanics for Cosmologists” that Many Worlds is still basically just solipsism but with a lot of extra baggage to confuse people to what they are even arguing so it is not so obvious that it is. A lot of Laymen falsely think Many Worlds is just the claim that there are many classical worlds. If I go to measure a photon in a superposition of both possible paths, then they think it means there will be a classical world where I perceive it on one path and another classical world where I perceive it on another path.
No, Many Worlds is even more incoherent, because no one perceives anything on any path at all. There are simply no objects which travel through 3D space within the interpretation. Consider that you walk from your living room to your bedroom, and you remember clearly that you did that. Since Many Worlds is still value indefinite, there does not exist any definite trajectories in 3D space, and so your memory has to be a complete lie. That didn’t happen. Indeed, no matter how strongly you feel that there is a computer/phone screen in front of you right now, in Many Worlds, that also must be a lie, because no objects exist in 3D space so there cannot be an object with a definite value in front of you right now.
This is what Bell saw as so absurd about it. Everything we perceive and believe we have perceived has to be largely disconnected from the real world, almost as if we’re living in a fake simulation, a brain in a vat, that is entirely disconnected from what is “actually going on.” Many Worlds is more batshit idiotic than you are led to believe from YouTube videos. It does not follow from the science at all, but follows from the crackpot quantum mysticism of “value indefiniteness,” which has no basis in the mathematics at all. Even many of the believers in academia admit that no one knows how to actually derive what we actually perceive from the interpretation.