New Scientist: “Underneath the uncertainty of quantum mechanics could lie a deeper reality in which, shockingly, all our actions are predetermined.”
Early last month, a Nobel laureate physicist finished polishing up his theory that a deeper, deterministic reality underlies the apparent uncertainty of quantum mechanics.
So all of those mind-blowing paradoxes only look like paradoxes because our minds are too puny to find the order beneath the chaos, and the free will debate is up for grabs again. But remember, not all deterministic systems are predictable (weather, anyone?), and if we can’t predict, then we may as well be free. And even if we aren’t, I’m with Isaac Bashevis Singer: “We must believe in free will — we have no choice.”
How far down the rabbit hole do you want to go?
You don’t have to go very far down that rabbit hole.
There’s what we know we know, and what we know we don’t know, and what we know we can’t know.
We know we don’t know about determinism. We don’t know we can’t know about it (though we have strong evidence we can’t).
Someone coming up with a model that implies determinism is only really interesting if the model leads to superior predictive capability.
It’s pretty hard to prove determinism.
-t
I knew you were going to say that.