{"id":615,"date":"2020-09-27T13:46:02","date_gmt":"2020-09-27T13:46:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/crowhill.net\/blog\/?p=615"},"modified":"2020-09-27T16:07:23","modified_gmt":"2020-09-27T16:07:23","slug":"devs-and-the-folly-of-the-deterministic-universe","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/crowhill.net\/blog\/2020\/09\/27\/devs-and-the-folly-of-the-deterministic-universe\/","title":{"rendered":"Devs and the folly of the deterministic universe"},"content":{"rendered":"

There’s a TV show on Hulu called Devs<\/a>. It’s about a big tech company with a deep secret and an engineer who’s trying to find out why her boyfriend died. I’ve only seen the first four episodes, but I like it. <\/p>\n

This isn’t too much of a spoiler, because I think it’s revealed in the first episode, but the big secret is that they’ve discovered a way to calculate history. If everything is deterministic, as the tech giant in Devs insists, then with a big enough computer, and with programmers who have a comprehensive knowledge of physics, you can calculate the future and the past. <\/p>\n

I don’t know if I’ve told this story recently, but this is very much like the thought experiment I had in English class in 12th grade. It went like this. <\/p>\n

Imagine that the universe consists of only two 1 kg marbles, one meter apart. That’s it. There’s nothing else in the universe. <\/p>\n

With a little bit of math, you could calculate what’s going to happen to those marbles. Gravity would attract them. They’d collide and lose some energy, bounce away, until gravity pulled them back together again, etc. You could conceivably write a problem to explain exactly where those two marbles are for all of eternity. <\/p>\n

If you add a few marbles, it gets a little more complicated, but it’s still conceivable. It still works if you add billions of marbles, although you’d need a computer that might not have been available in 1981. (Realize that this thought experiment was based on my knowledge of physics at the time. It wouldn’t really work this way. I was imagining space as a given, for example. But those details don’t change the value of the thought experiment.) <\/p>\n

Continuing on …. What does it matter if we exchange these marbles for protons, neutrons, electrons, etc.? In my mind, it didn’t change anything. They still act according to fixed, deterministic rules. And it doesn’t matter if we collect these particles into ponds and streams and rocks and mountains. Everything is still clockwork, and completely deterministic. Each cause has a precise effect, according to the laws of physics. <\/p>\n

Why would that change if these particles assembled themselves into bacteria and protozoa and such? They’d be very complicated machines, but they’d still be deterministic. <\/p>\n

So there I was, in English class, thinking this through, with my clockwork universe in my head. I could advance the frame forward one millisecond and know exactly where everything should be. Or I could go back one millisecond and see where everything had been. From the moment of the Big Bang, everything would progress according to deterministic rules. Not that I knew what all those rules were, or that I could calculate it all, but that didn’t matter. Whatever those rules were, they were like the laws I already knew. They’d work by strict application of mathematically precise formulas. <\/p>\n

Or, in other words, gravity doesn’t ask if you want to fall, and it doesn’t care that the asteroid falling onto the planet is going to wipe out the dinosaurs. <\/p>\n

The introduction of animals seems like a problem, but it doesn’t change the reality. They’re just complicated meat machines. At their core, they’re just as deterministic as the marbles. <\/p>\n

I knew enough of the grand eras in the history of the universe to pretend that I could advance through my experiment until Earth was formed, and then I would think through the geologic ages and imagine that it was all the natural, necessary, determined result of the Big Bang. <\/p>\n

Including me sitting in English class thinking about this. <\/p>\n

At that point it all went “poof!” in a cloud of ridiculousness. <\/p>\n

The idea that a deterministic, unfeeling, impersonal, mechanical universe would generate a kid sitting in English class imagining all this stuff struck me as the single dumbest thing I had ever thought in my life. I didn’t know it yet, but that was the death blow to the worldview I’d tried to develop in my teen years. <\/p>\n

I realized later (and probably knew a little about it then) that some very competent, intelligent physicists would dispute the idea that the universe is deterministic in the way I have described. I accept that, although for the life of me I can’t understand what they mean. Does a proton get to choose which way to go? To my way of thinking (which is very possibly wrong), if it’s not moved, it’s not moving. (Take that metaphorically. I understand about momentum and such.) <\/p>\n

People who don’t believe in determinism apparently believe that a cause can have an indeterminate effect. That doesn’t mean “so complicated we can’t figure it out,” which would still work with my thought experiment, but “it’s impossible<\/i> to figure it out because cause doesn’t work that way.” (Don’t get distracted by thinking about humans. The issue is cause at a fundamental, physical level.) <\/p>\n

The bottom line is that I found then, and still find now, that materialistic determinism is about as dumb as anything can be, although none of the alternatives seem all that appealing either. <\/p>\n

Devs seems to be confronting this issue in a decently fun sci-fi TV setting. It’s a little slow, but I’m enjoying it. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There’s a TV show on Hulu called Devs. It’s about a big tech company with a deep secret and an engineer who’s trying to find out why her boyfriend died. I’ve only seen the first four episodes, but I like it. This isn’t too much of a spoiler, because I think it’s revealed in the … Continue reading “Devs and the folly of the deterministic universe”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-615","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/crowhill.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/615","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/crowhill.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/crowhill.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crowhill.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crowhill.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=615"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/crowhill.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/615\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":618,"href":"https:\/\/crowhill.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/615\/revisions\/618"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/crowhill.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=615"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crowhill.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=615"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crowhill.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=615"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}