• 84 Posts
  • 1.32K Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 29th, 2023

help-circle



  • Miss, your shirt has a slur on it. Which one is it? Um, it’s all of them.

    “Oh I know, I’m satirizing the propensity of westerners wearing clothes with words on them they don’t understand”

    “But, but, they are all terrible slurs, doesn’t that make you a bad person? You could have picked any random shit!”

    “Yes, but then you wouldn’t have said anything, I get much more of a reaction this way” (thinking smugly, I am so smart)








  • Well done; that is exactly correct. As we want to model the systems more accurately the computational resources get insane.

    If time is not continuous, then it would be possible to use a discrete model to predict these chaotic systems arbitrarily far into the future in our universe.

    Not necessarily; in fact (in my opinion) all that would do would set a lower bound on the time step required in your numerical simulation to achieve a “perfect” model. You would still have to solve the equations over and over again to know the future state.

    Quantum computers may be able to help us solve certain classes of problems much more efficiently. But even these don’t change the fundamental nature of reality; there are still unknowable future states.

    It also doesn’t matter if time is discrete or continuous; since we live inside time, we cannot experience the difference. The universe could run for a second, then stop for a year and then run again for a second, we would experience it as two continuous seconds.

    Maybe in the future we will work out some way to step outside the normal flow of time and answer that question.




  • There is a big difference between solving numerically, and being able to use current information to predict into the future for arbitrary time.

    Take for example the two body gravitational problem, given the appropriate current information, you can predict the state of the system at any point in the future.

    In the three body problem, you have to calculate small steps in time over and over to get the future state. This has limitations, as the error grows over time, this is why NASA etc refine the predictions as more measurements are taken.

    Chaos doesn’t mean we know nothing, it means we can’t predict arbitrarily far into the future. We can’t “solve” chaotic systems.

    Another example is weather prediction; if we could “solve” chaotic systems, we could predict the weather far in advance, think months or even years. We have 10 day predictions now, but this is mainly driven by throwing more compute at it and solving the system over and over and over again for small time jumps…yes the models have gotten more sophisticated; but brute force is the bulk of it.




  • Sorry, I kinda hate typing on my phone. And I made the assumption that this audience would have an appreciation of the nature of reality.

    Chaotic systems; are systems that future states cannot be determined by information about the current state or past states.

    examples:

    There are so many examples in reality where the interactions have unknowable future states. Not just because of lack of information; but because the outcomes exist in a probability space, there is no determined outcome.

    The universe is non-deterministic in reality; we KNOW this. It hasn’t been up for debate for a long time. So arguing from a deterministic universe point of view, is a thought experiment; it doesn’t reflect reality.

    I’m more interested in reality; thus the non-deterministic universe situations are the only ones worth serious consideration.

    I am not saying that having free will means that you have any choice open to you. Are your choices in any given situation constrained, yes! Are there situations where it feels like you have to choose a preset option, sure, and it doesn’t feel like there was much point in having the “choice”.

    But in every situation, you will always have a choice. Sometimes the choices will be shit, the worst of the worst; do I kill my baby to save a room full of people, or do I let it cry out and have the soldiers hear us and kill us all…


  • For there to be no free will, the universe has to be deterministic.

    Run a simple thought experiment…assume a nondeterministic universe with no free will: If there is no free will, then ALL your actions have to be predetermined. Now if some random event occurred, you would be unable to react to it. As it wouldn’t be in your preset actions.

    This makes no sense. You can react to any event that comes along.

    Second argument against no free will. Where is the information stored for all your future actions? Is this information stored in your great grandmother’s egg?

    A note to someone trying to make the argument’s that the universe is deterministic. While true randomness is still up for debate, chaotic interactions are not.