Bernardo Kastrup: Sabine Hossenfelder is WRONG About Superdeterminism!

In 2022, Bernardo Kastrup wrote an article titled "The fantasy behind Sabine Hossenfelder's superdeterminism." Since Sabine is a great friend of the show, I naturally had to ask him about his criticisms of her in our interview. Enjoy!

Kastrup is the executive director of Essentia Foundation. His work has been leading the modern renaissance of metaphysical idealism, the notion that reality is essentially mental.

He has a Ph.D. in philosophy (ontology, philosophy of mind) and another Ph.D. in computer engineering (reconfigurable computing, artificial intelligence). As a scientist, Bernardo has worked for the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) and the Philips Research Laboratories (where the ‘Casimir Effect’ of Quantum Field Theory was discovered).

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[bencausey]

Dr. Brian - debates aren’t for the people debating, but for the people listening; for clarity. They are good and necessary in addition to informal discussion.

[chlojolo]

I find the moon analogy a little misleading because while it is the case in some sense that, in the superdeterministic view, if you had set up your camera differently you would have photographed a different moon, you are just as free to set up your camera differently as the moon is to be a different moon.

Assuming the two events are superdeterministically correlated, which is not a given. Changing the moon is an astronomically large effect, requiring cosmic correlations or even a cosmic conspiracy. But Hossenfelder makes clear that we only require enough of a sprinkling of superdeterminism to explain quantum spookiness. What’s insufficient at moon scale may suffice at muon scale.

To me all this interpretation competition is a sign that QM is bumping up on an epistemic limit that is essential and ineluctable. What’s happening behind the curtain may be deterministic or random or maybe even not a thing that “happens” in the strict sense. And any description of it may be impossible to falsify and thus to know.

But I can understand and appreciate why Hossenfelder is looking for a theory that can at least quantify and predict the upper bound of the effect. It would be more satisfying and (hopefully) more powerful than “…then a measurement occurs.”

[RWin-fpjn]

Bernardo is a great guest to have on. He is very clear in analyzing concepts and logic errors.about the measurement problem and hidden variables has been raging for 100 years now, with no end in sight. Why is that? How come we can calculate the consequences of GR and QP, yet appear to have a profound lack of understanding of the fundamentals underlying them. Answer; There are two options here; either there is an extremely complex add-on insight we yet have to crack, or, option number two; there is something extremely wrong in what we collectively take for granted. Which is it? Well, since no fundamental theory can be more complex than the theories derived from it (most of which we master), the second option must be correct. Ergo, we must be missing something extremely simple ever since we discovered QP. Let us simple laymen, help the community and start with the basics; QP processes are physical processes, i.e. they take place within a grid and are governed by a clock. Agree? OK, so far so good. Now what we have done for 100 years is to try to fit QP processes in the only grid we knew up to the 1900’s; space as the grid and time as the clock. Is that working? Have we ever been able to observe an atom bound electron in terms of spatial position? Well no, we need probability calculus for that. Ok and what about the clock? Well, we see entanglement processes taking place over infinite distance with no time delay. So the time clock doesn’t tick. So then, we obviously have a QP grid that is ORHTOGONALLY positioned to our spacetime grid. And let’s be honest; we know how to define this grid, don’t we? We know inside atoms, electrons have quantum leaps moving in terms of eV orbits which do not cost time but cost mass. Ergo? Ergo; energy is the grid in the QP world and mass is its clock. Sir Roger Penrose stresses this time and again substituting E=hf into E=MC2. Conclusion; we live in a DUAL continuum setting where Grid, Clock, Potential, Inertia fundamentally have a dual, orthogonal and intertwined relation with the measures of Space, Time, Energy, Mass. So if we measure an electron’s energy at the double slit experiment, we are actually dragging to the foreground its point-like ‘energy as potential’ function and thus collapse it’s ‘Energy as the grid’ to its inverse to keep the balance. This is why the interference pattern in the double slit experiment disappears. The moment we accept that physics has this dual setting, all discussions about hidden variables and measurement problems are solved…it is not hard. We just made it hard.

[ConnoisseurOfExistence]

He says it isn't intuitive that the properties of the moon will adjust to match our setup of observation. However, what he says is that the moon doesn't have any properties, until measured. Now that is much less intuitive, in my opinion...

[Max-ysnd]

The whole point of the superdeterministic argument is to escape from the non locality requirement suggested by Bell's inequality. It is a loophole to escape the conclusion that the wavefunction collapse suggested by the standard Copenhagen interpretation must be nonlocal. In return for regaining locality, we would have to accept that the outcome of the experiment was predetermined. Regardless of the correct interpretation, that Bernardo says that superdeterminsm relies upon non locality implies to me that he hasn't quite digested the arguments here.

[cryptocrush-]

Debates aren’t so much for those debating as they are for those that are watching; I usually learn something from one side I didn’t know previously.

[iainmackenzieUK]

I believe there is an important distinction to be made between "variables coming into existence" and, "variables taking on a specific VALUE" when an observation/ measurement is made. It is the value/ orientation etc of the variable that is uncertain, not the existence of the variable.

[ldlework]

The moon is a poor analogy, only applicable if the moon was otherwise shielded from any other sources of decoherence than your camera. I doubt this guy is confused about that, so not sure why using arguments he knows to be weak.

[gteichrow]

I’ll admit to being a fan of Sabine’s. But that doesn’t extend to her conjecture. That I find intriguing. This rebuttal I find weak and a not very convincing.

[itsjavaman]

What this gentlemen seems to be saying is that particles don't have properties until they are measured, or they have all properties until measured. (Would this be an infinity?) The problem that I see and need to get around is that if particle properties don't exist until you measure them. How can you explain increasing entropy? Or to ask differently, how can you have entropy at all in a universe without a collapsed wave function?

I thought what Sabine was saying is that measurement does not determine the properties of what you measure. The physical result you get comes from what you measured at a point in time. It is not the complete picture. There are other variables. What are those variables? They are what ever lead up to the state of the particle at the point in time you take your measurement. They are finite to the nature and properties of the particle at a point of the measurement, but they existed before the particle was measured. That's my understanding anyway. If you measure the moon at one point in time, then you measure it again, it will be different and the smaller you get, the more difference you will detect.

[dzikdziki]

Did this man use his moon analogy on his own beliefs? That would go something like this " The moon has no physical properties until we photograph it. " XD

[michaelyork]

The moon analogy is not at all correlative, whereas measurement on the nano scale could impart quantum energetic variations which would "physically" manifest upon the measured
phenomenon, while the energetic constituency could still be non physical. So super determinism means that observing is an energetic perturbation of the medium which functionally
responds to any form of energy alteration systematically, even if we must conclude a quasi reality of physicality. Everything is energy, it just appears to possess physicality.

[sxsmith]

I keep reading this stuff that BK is not a physicist and he doesn’t know what he’s talking about blah blah blah but Dr. Brian K. Is a physicist and if he thought Bernardo was wrong he would’ve said something. Right?

[NikoAmeristar]

I want to know how we can fix potholes in the country.

[RichardMarsh]

Please ask him to explain how it is that his non deterministic view works. Hopefully he realises that he can never give a satisfactory enough explanation, as doing so would imply removing probabilistic views from the explanation, an hence make them deterministic.
Claiming that things just are a certain way deterministically is not worse, than claiming that they just are in some other way non-deterministically. The latter is far less scientific, in his words, a belief.

[vaccaphd]

Random systems follow deterministic equations. For instance, the heat conduction equation. Hence, the randomness of particles does not violate the deterministic behavior of a system that comprises a large number of particles.

[SubtleReed]

This guy is basically reiterating how the measure is taken. Well, it is apparent that there are hidden things. He said so himself. So I would say that whatever he has to say at this point is non-sequitur. .

[StephenLawrence-reub]

Assuming determinism, if the camera setting were different then the past would be different to cause the different setting and those differences would stretch back billions of years. Some of those differences would influence the moon.
So, yes, the moon would be different. What Bernado is doing is assuming the past would have been the same regardless of what the camera setting was.

That is quite likely to just be a mistake with counterfactual reasoning. And it certainly shouldn't be assumed because it's question begging, assuming indeterminism in the first place.

[bozo]

Not the moon, just a photon reflected off the moon.

[ragnaarminnesota]

The hidden variable depend on what you measure. The interfermeter experiment. If you measure which path, it goes random. If you don't measure which path it always hit the same detector. Without hidden variables, you have FTL. There is no FTL. I think Sabine has made the the stronger arguments.