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Well, for one, classical mechanics don't work at the particle level, and we're not entirely sure they work at grand macro levels. We've noticed that galaxies behave in a way that suggests they have way, way more mass than is visible, so we invented Dark Matter to fill the missing mass.
Anyways, in quantum mechanical terms: I'm not a math guy so I can't provide the equations, but the foundation of quantum mechanics came from some very smart people doing a lot of math, and realizing that the solutions for particle position/momentum don't make sense unless you view them as statistical probabilities, not real values. So any particle you care to choose is in fact not deterministic as far as we can tell, and instead behaves probabilistically.
This has real world applications beyond weird math shit. For instance, quantum tunneling. Sometimes a particle will spontaneously move through a physical barrier it wouldn't be able to cross in classical mechanics, without expending energy to do so. This is actually a problem for CPUs. As transistors get increasingly smaller, the probabilities that electrons will decide to teleport out of a transistor and into a different place go up. And a CPU that can't control electron flow stops being a useful object and starts being an impure silicon crystal desk toy.
Their behavior doesn't follow our model of gravity. If we add a bunch of extra mass it follows it perfectly, however.
When we look at the movement of the planets in our solar system, we see that they all match our equations of orbital mechanics. They all have a balance between gravity and centripetal acceleration, so they follow stable orbits. If we discovered an exact copy of our solar system, but with planets that moved twice as fast in the same orbits, that wouldn't make sense with our equations. They would predict that gravity could not be strong enough to balance the centripetal acceleration, and the planets should fly apart as we watch. If that doesn't happen, it means one of our assumptions is wrong. It could be that the sun is actually much more massive than our sun, or something stranger is going on.
When we look at a galaxy, plug in the positions and velocities of all the stars we see, and try to simulate how it will behave, the simulation typically predicts that the galaxy is going to fly apart immediately. Since that's not happening, we know something is wrong with our explanation. The simplest fix is if there's a lot of mass that we can't see, but if that's not true, then we're in the much more uncomfortable situation of our equations being wrong or incomplete.
The version of Laplace's Demon that you're worried about is a part of the universe itself, which means it has to simulate itself, which is as complex as simulating the universe itself, because that's what the demon is doing. It's imaginable that it compresses this (like a quine) but the demon you're worried about also makes decisions that affect the universe, so it has to be able to consider more than one potential future universe, so it can't just assume the copy of the universe inside itself is the same as the one it's simulating outside itself, so it needs to simulate itself simulating multiple universes in which it's simulating...
As far as we know, there is no way to simulate the entire universe that is less complex than the entire universe. Which means that a decision-making Laplace's Demon has to be more complex than the upper bounds on computational complexity.
If we instead assume that it is possible to simulate the universe in less complexity than just having the universe (I don't know how that'd be possible, but it's not formally ruled out by anything as far as I know), then it's possible to fit a more complex simulation inside a less complex one. This means there are infinitely deep hierarchies of simulations, so we must be in a simulation already (as the chances of being at the top are one in infinity). And you'd be instantiated in multiple simulations (infinity is very big), with the chances of you experiencing any of them being proportionate to however popular it is to run that particular simulation, and whichever version of Laplace's Demon you're worried about is probably not a particularly popular one to run.
So in conclusion: either it's physically impossible, or we all live in an infinite number of simulations and the chances you're in the one you're worried about are vanishingly unlikely.
No. Then the simulation would be inaccurate. Laplace's Demon only works in the first place because it has a complete copy of the universe.
The demon shouldn't bother you anymore, I told Roko's basilisk it had been talking shit and the basilisk said it was gonna kick the demon's ass
I mean such a being is physically impossible. If it truly knew everything it would also have to fully comprehend its own knowing in that same granular fashion and then comprehend that comprehension and so on and so on toward infinity. Any arrangement of matter or anything that is imaginable within any of our understanding of physics allows for such a being or mechanism or object to contain an infinite recursion that contains at every level a complete copy of the previous.
To put frame it in a slightly different example. The universe cannot contain all of the information within itself within a finite part of itself.
Now that gets rid of the specific example of the being, but it does nothing to refute hard determinism.
But hey! As it happens I'm in the middle of listening to this episode of revleft radio about free will and determinism today.
I guess I don't really understand what's concerning you.
I suppose it's theoretical possible for there to be a really smart and powerful thing that exists and wants to make us suffer or consume the sun or something. But it's also possible and probably much more likely for catastrophic things to happen from our perspective just by the nature of the unfolding, unaware, cosmos.
Unless you mean something capable of enacting its will in a way that's qualitatively different somehow?
Everything points to most things either being dead, shortly dead, or out of its reach.
Even if this monster can reach across the cosmos and we ascribe some Real significance to suffering . . . there's only so long it can go on.
I frankly don't buy the whole punishing everyone posthumously with clones or whatever thing. If that kind of incentive structure worked for complex life as we know it, belief in Hell would have been sufficient. In fact a lot of this line of thinking dovetails with problems of God, just in a way that reconstrains it within the theoretically possible.
There's also a peculiar note of hubris in the idea that generalized AI would necessarily or even probably simply continue to refine itself indefinitely and with sufficient foresight that it became an unstoppable force in the universe. The idea that if something were just a little smarter than us and with better longevity, it would conquer all, to the point of outsmarting any attempt at strangling it in its crib - or that there's a level of precognition possible where at any given point in its life it might see a coming, lethal astronomical event and also be able to avert it. There's a lot that has to go right for the Machine God to be born, most of which has nothing to do with anything but chance.
There's a long time of probably anything happening in the universe, but the vast, vast majority of it is really unconducive to the sort of rich, stuff-happeningness necessary for a complex structure like an interstellar AI to emerge. At a certain point you have to wonder whether by the time a suitable "seed" and the conditions for our monster to really get under way exist, there will even be sufficient available energy anywhere at every stage of its development and ability to acquire more for it to cross interstellar gaps with the information necessary to get going there too, or to influence in some other fashion across those gaps, other stars or systems to its ends?
So I wouldn't call it inevitable. I think there's a pretty small window where any of this is even remotely possible. It's kind of a bummer, but the universe is largely just getting further and further apart. We don't even really know how much is already lost from ever being detectable from here.
...their past and future values for any given time are entailed; they can be calculated from the laws of classical mechanics.
This fundamental presupposition is faulty. Classical mechanics got owned when humanity observed that the overwhelming scientific evidence suggests atomic/subatomic particles actually do not conform to Newtonian laws of motion (see Einstein's "Spooky action at a distance.") so afaik scientists are slamming their heads against the wall trying to find a grand unified "Theory of Everything" that models the universe to do many things such as resolving the contradiction between "large" multi-atomic structures behaving in a Newtonian fashion and "small" atomic/subatomic structures having quantum mechanics.
there will be no contiguity of conscious experience
This seems unfalsifiable
I looked up this rokos basilisk shit and is literally just tech nerds making up a technology god to scare themselves with? Because I cannot believe anyone actually believes and is afraid of this nonsense lol. I'm more worried about your wizard lmao
A perfect replica of something is the something, any perceived distinctions between one and the other are academic. Twins have different conciousnesses because they have different experiences and are thus not perfect replicas of each other.
If you were to somehow copy paste someone from the past into the future, at the moment the copy-paste takes place the person in the future is indistinguishable from their past self. You would have no way of proving that they weren't their past self at the moment of copying, except by creating an arbitrary distinction between "original" and "copy" that is itself unfalsifiable.
Also, since non-existent things can't experience their own non-existence, neither version would functionally experience the time passed in the eons between the past-version's copying and the future-version's pasting. Think of the last time you got black-out drunk or fainted or got put under anesthesia. Did you experience the time you were blacked out? Or were you just one place, and then suddenly you were somewhere else?
The future-version would go on and have different experiences and become a different person from the past-version, sure, but that's no different than you becoming a different person than you were as a child.
"my higher level reasoning and sensorimotor functions may have been disabled, but core processes remained intact and uninterrupted"
This seems arbitrary. There are people who have clinically died or have had clinical death induced for medical procedures that report their time "dead" as being not much different than any other blackout. If you don't experience something, you don't experience it.
As for the point of view argument, that again seems like an unfalsifiable argument. You cannot experience a gap in your experience. If you die and then 1000 years later a being wakes up with your identity and all your memories up to the point of death, there's no way an outside ibserver can prove that it doesn't have your point of view without creating an essentialized, non-quantifiable "self" that stands outside of time.
And if a perfect copy of you was created while you were still alive, it's not that "you" would experience both versions simultaneously, it's that both versions would think of themselves as "you" and be right to do so. The second these versions looked at each other and realized they weren't one and the same, their experiences would diverge and they'd become functionally different beings. But both would still be correct in calling themselves the "original" you.
(Sorry, can't get quotes to work on mobile)
How could you prove that the simulacrum is an identical copy if you've been dead for 200 years?
Well that's kind of the point, you really couldn't, outside the copy's insistence that they were the original. But that means that insisting externally that they're not "really" who they say they are is just as unprovable.
There's futurists who take the maximalist position that eventually we'll either have predictive technology capable of re-tracing the history of every extant particle in the observable universe and thus recreating the past in perfect detail, or that we'll make some breakthrough in physics and cosmology that makes direct observation of the past possible.
I don't really know if I buy either of those propositions, but either way telling a recreation of a past individual that they're not really that individual despite their insistence is trying to disprove a negative. I've heard people bring up the Chinese Room in regards to this sometimes, but that also applies to literally every living being capable of communicating with you.
No but I don't remember any time I wasn't alive either.
"There has recently been proposed a limit on the computational power of the universe, i.e. the ability of Laplace's demon to process an infinite amount of information. The limit is based on the maximum entropy of the universe, the speed of light, and the minimum amount of time taken to move information across the Planck length, and the figure was shown to be about 10^120 bits. Accordingly, anything that requires more than this amount of data cannot be computed in the amount of time that has elapsed so far in the universe."
How can something so large make me feel so constrained?
It seems kinda weird to assume that just the negative supernatural elements of Christianity are real.
not sure, but I personally am Maxwell's demon, so there's that.
i simply do not feel like it, so therefore I don't. :gigachad-hd:
Depending on your preferred interpretation of quantum mechanics, particles may not even have a location most of the time. Either way, they act in a probabilistic way or are otherwise fundamentally unpredictable.
There is also the fact that the universe is a very chaotic system, so even if you could perfectly predict how a system would evolve, even the tiniest error in any measurement would ruin your predictions in the long term.
if one cannot observe a system without changing it, then such an omniscient demon is impossible: since 1) it's part of the system/universe and by observing it it will be changing it or, if it's not, then 2) by definition it cannot know the location/momentum of every atom in the universe, just of one closed system
bc you have to observe it again after changing it to know about its new state, thereby never attaining total omniscience
yeah exactly. like the other commenter said, if you accept quantum physics the laplace demon is outdated because the thought experiment points out a problem/possibility in classical mechanics, but not in quantum, where it's not even about atoms anymore, and knowing things becomes very problematic. even the concept of time becomes different, non-linerar, where idk if you can even talk about past-present-future.
from a very pragmatic position: can a human brain know itself, even disregarding quantum states, just down to an atom? not even that. because to "know" anything a brain requires so many synapses, and those are made of i don't even know how many infinities of atoms
This is out of my depth. Is that what people in archaeology say these days, that they just need to do better mathematical models?
Well I can assure you that that's impossible. For example, there probably were entire cultures whose artifacts were primarily wood or clay-based. We'll never know enough about them because these materials have long decomposed, there's just nothing to compute or extrapolate, yet they existed and influenced future developments. We can know a lot and computers can help too, but it will never be a full picture.
this is Shannon territory, where in some way maximum information is just maximum chaos, insofar as the 2nd law is concerned
then Laplace’s demon can be both impossible and determinism can be real
again, this is out of my depth, what i know is philosophy, but this is the right take imo. the demon is impossible, but determinism can be real in some sense (that certain events produce further events in a systematizable manner), but even if the universe is deterministic it is too complex for us to reliably predict it, simply because the complexity of our brains or algorithms can never match the complexity of the universe
we'd all kill ourselves if the world was fully computable/predictable anyway
Uh I mean per quantum mech we can't know the location and momentum of a particle to an exact degree, especially not at once. Now if that actually means the universe is deterministic who knows. Right now we have no real evidence to solve weather or not we have free will/the universe is deterministic.
My point is that you cannot know (as we understand right now) the information necessary to be able to determine future and past states of everything in the universe. (or anything at all) The Heisenberg uncertainty principle, one of the fundamental relationships in qmech, states that as you increase your knowledge of the location of a particle, you will be less certain of the momentum of the particle. This doesn't really make all that much sense at first until you understand that particles are both waves and particles at the same time. That doesn't make sense either, but when you combine the two, you can view the "particle" form of a particle-wave as a high knowledge of the location of the particle, while the wave form is when there is greater knowledge regarding the momentum of a particle. The first part hopefully makes sense, but the second part may be a little confusing without some more information. A particle's wavelength is inversely proportional to its momentum. Therefore knowing the wavelength of a particle is equal to knowing its momentum. The summary of this is that the more you try to pinpoint a particle-wave's location, the more it acts like a particle. The more you try to find the momentum of a particle-wave, the more it acts like a wave.
Qmech is the best answer we have right now. Its really kind of an unanswerable question.
my own thing is that t is possible to break from within determinism and give yourself free will "“in a sense Neo and the Matrix universe afforded itself free will from its own internal rules through the mediation of the author and the external deterministic rules”"
ground yourself in something cooler than science then if you want to ground yourself in something
