Feynman’s Question

“We’ve lost the idea of causality”
–Richard Feynman

In say 5,000–10,000 years, our descendants (likely some form of AI), may marvel at our simple ignorances & illusions. It probably sounds crazy, but the idea of the “individual” is as meaningless as the non-holographic flat-Earth theory. If you’re not willing to take a serious look at what is and isn’t an “individual,” then you’re not doing science.

Statements of attribution (who did what when) as a form of intellectual ownership, are fairly meaningless. And in a way, such conclusions are utterly contrary to the scientific method. The idea we attribute such things to individuals is faulty. We have little knowledge of their true intellectual genesis. Am I of course referring to determinacy and the butterfly-effect.

The problem with statements of attribution is best revealed as a lack of observer-independent “free” will w/super-deterministic EPR. In a 1985 interview with Paul Davies, John Bell had this to say:

“There is a way to escape the inference of superluminal speeds and spooky action at a distance. But it involves absolute determinism in the universe, the complete absence of free will. Suppose the world is super-deterministic, with not just inanimate nature running on behind-the-scenes clockwork, but with our behavior, including our belief that we are free to choose to do one experiment rather than another, absolutely predetermined, including the ‘decision’ by the experimenter to carry out one set of measurements rather than another, the difficulty disappears. There is no need for a faster-than-light signal to tell particle A what measurement has been carried out on particle B, because the universe, including particle A, already ‘knows’ what that measurement, and its outcome, will be.

Bell’s 1985 realization is a snowflake waiting for an avalanche. A clue to Feynman’s question. Yet, neither Bell nor Feynman own these insights anymore than any other speaker own his or her questions & conclusions.

What lies locked away, waiting for an environment able to access such realizations about nature, is a profoundly different way of looking at reality. This new world is not unlike realizing a non-holographic Earth is not flat, that it’s round and curves back on itself on a closed surface. For what lies off the edge of a flat Earth? Nothing more than a myth. Free will is our version of this non-existent flat Earth cliff.

If a lack of free-will limits “the observer,” then super-determanism necessarily eliminates the realness of all identity.

This leads us to “Feynman’s question:”

In order to understand the physics, one must always have a neat balance, and contain in his/her head, all the the various propositions and their interrelationships because the Laws often extend beyond the range of their deductions. This will only have no importance when all the laws are known.

Another thing that’s interesting in the relation of mathematics to physics, is this: a very strange thing, that by mathematical arguments, you can show that you can start from very many different apparent starting points and come to the same thing. That’s pretty clear if you have axioms and you can use some of the theorems. But actually, the physical laws are so delicately constructed that the statements of them have such qualitatively different character that it is very interesting. So if you permit me, I’m going to state the Law of Gravitation in three different ways, all of which are exactly equivalent (it turns out). But they sound completely different.

One — there’s the forces between the objects as described before. And each object, when “it sees the force” on it, accelerates or changes it’s motion rather at a certain amount per second, as I’ve described before. The regular way, I call it Newton’s Law.

Now there’s a completely different way. That law says that the force depends on “something” at finite distance away. See, it has what we call a non-local quality. The force on this depends on where that one is over there. Now, you may not like the idea of action at a distance, that “it can know” what’s going on over there.

Well then, there’s another way of stating the laws which is very strange and it’s called the field way of representing the laws. And they’re so very hard to explain, but I just want to give you some rough idea of what it’s like. And it says a completely different thing, that there’s a number at every point in space. I know, it’s a number and it’s not a mechanism. It’s the trouble with this whole physics, that it must be mathematical. There’s a number at every point in space. Here’s a number, and here’s a number, and so on. And the numbers are changing rather when you go from place to place. If an object is placed at one of these points somewhere in space, the force on it is in the direction in which that number (I call it the name it’s given called a potential), is in the direction in which that potential changes as quick as it can. And the force is proportional to how fast it changes as you move. That’s one statement.

But it’s not enough yet because I have to tell you how to determine how the potential varies. I could say that the potential varies as 1/(the distance from each object). But, that’s back to the action at a distance idea. However, the force is at a distance.

But you can state the law in another way, and it says the following: You don’t have to know what’s going on anywhere outside of a little ball.

If you want to know what the potential is here [in the middle of the ball], you tell me what it is on the surface, of any ball no matter how small (you don’t have to look outside you just tell me what is in the neighborhood), and how much mass there is in the ball. So the rule is this:

The potential at the center = the average of the potential on the surface of the little ball —minus(a constant E/twice the radius of the ball)(multiplied by the mass that’s inside the ball).

Now you see this law is different than the other one because it only tells what happens at one point in terms of what very close by [still at some distance however]. Newton’s Laws tell what happens at one time, in terms of what happens at another instant. It gives from instant to instant how to work it out. But in space, it leaps from place to place. But this thing is both local in time and also local in space [given that there is still some radius, a non-local distance, between the center and the surface], because it only depends on what’s in the neighborhood.

And now there there’s a completely different way. You see there’s a difference in the philosophy, in the qualitative ideas involved. You don’t like action at a distance, then you can get away without it [while excepting that the small ball surface is still non-local action at some distance, even though it’s small]. Now I’ll show you one that is philosophically the exact opposite, in which there’s no discussion at all about how the thing works it’s way from place to place, in which the whole thing is an overall statement.

As goes as follows, when you have other particles around and you wanna know how this one moves from one place to another, you do it as follows… you invent a possible motion that gets from one given place to some other place that you’re interested in, in a given amount of time. Say it wants to go from here to here in an hour. And you wanna know by what route it can get from there to there in an hour, by what curve. So what you do is you calculate a quantity guessing the curve. If you try this curve, you calculate a certain number for this quantity. I don’t want to tell you what this quantity is, but for those that heard of these terms, this quantity on this route is the average of the difference between the kinetic and potential energy. Now if you calculate this for this route, then for another route, you’ll get of course different numbers for the answer. But there’s one route which gives the least possible number, and that’s the route that the particle takes. Now we’re describing the actual motion, the ellipse by saying something about the whole curve.

We’ve lost the idea of causality, that the particles here sees the pull, moves to here, and so on. Instead of that, in some grand fashion, it “smells” all the [imaginary?] curves “around,” all the “possibilities,” and “decides” which one to take [even though it’s always apparently required to take the path of least resistance].

This is an example of the wide range of beautiful ways of describing nature. And that when people talk, that nature must have causality–well, you could talk about it this way: “Nature must be stated in terms of a minimum principle.” Well, you could about it this way: “Nature must have a local field.” And so on. And the question is: which one is right?

Now, if all these various alternatives are mathematically not exactly equivalent, and if for certain ones there will be different consequences for one than for others, then that’s perfectly alright. Then we only need to do the experiments to find out which way nature actually “chooses” to do it [assuming it could do it either way with different results, or that there was a choice mechanism].

Mostly, people come along and they argue philosophically they like this one better than that one. But we have learned from much experience that all intuitions about what nature’s going to do philosophically fail. It never works. One just has to work out all the possibilities and just try all the alternatives [experimentation that assumes the selection of various alternatives and the resultant observations are neither illusions nor absent free will].

Now in this particular case I’m talking about here, these theories are exactly equivalent. The mathematical consequences in every one of the different formulations (Newton’s Laws, the local field method, and this least/minimum principle), give exactly the same consequences [not really true for Newton, GR, & QM depending on space-time scale]. What do we do then? You will read in all the books that we therefore cannot decide scientifically on one or the other. That’s true.

If they are equivalent, it is scientifically “impossible to make a decision,” because there’s no experimental way to distinguish if all the consequences are the same. Psychologically [given human error and intuitive limits], they’re very different [due to human illusion/constructs only] in two ways. First, philosophically you like them or don’t like them [intuitive aggregate mental state only which is likely super-determinant]. Training is the only thing you can do to beat that disease [assuming you have the choice how or if you perform such training]. Second, psychologically they’re different because they’re unequivocal when you go to guess at a new law.

As long as a physics is incomplete and we’re to understand the other [unknown] laws, then the different possible formulations gives clues [paradoxes] as to what might happen in another circumstance. And they become [potentially] not equivalent in psychologically suggesting to us to guess as to what the laws might look like in a wider situation.

For instance, Einstein realized that signals could not propagate faster than the speed of light, for electricity. He guessed that it was a general principle. He guessed that it would be true of everything, of gravitation. If “the signals” can’t go any faster than the speed of light [necessarily implying black holes trap both gravity & light propagators], it turns out, that the method of describing the forces instantaneously [Newtons universal time] is very poor. And in the Einstein’s generalization of gravitation, this [Newton] method of describing physics is hopeless inadequate and enormously complicated. Whereas this one [the small ball averaged potential] is neat and simple, and so is this one [field least/minimum principle]. And so we haven’t decided between those two yet.

In fact it turns out that the quantum mechanics says that, as I’ve stated them, that neither is right. But that a minimum principle exists turns out to be a consequence of the fact that, on a small scale, particles obey quantum mechanics. And the best laws at presently understood are a combination of the two in which minimum principles use local laws. And present day believes that the laws of physics have to have both the local character and also the minimum principle.

But we don’t really know.

So, it’s this way that if you have a structure only partly accurate, then something is going to fail. If you write it with just the right axioms, then maybe only one axiom fails and the rest remain. But if you write it with another set of axioms, they all collapse. But we can’t tell ahead of time, without some intuition and guesswork, as to the best way write it until we find out the new situation. And so we must therefore always keep all the alternative ways of looking at the thing in our heads so that physicists do Babylonian mathematics and pay little attention to the precise reasoning from fixed axioms.

One of the amazing characteristics of nature is this variety of interpretation schemes which is possible. It turns out that this is only possible because the laws are just so special and delicate. For instance, that the law [of gravitation] is the 1/inverse square is what permits it to become local. With the 1/inverse cubed, it couldn’t be done this way. And at the other end of the equation, that the forces related to the rate of change of the velocity, that permits this kind of a way of writing the laws, the minimum principle. Because if, for instance, if the force where proportional to the rate of change of position instead of velocity, you couldn’t write it this way. And if you try to modify the laws much, you find that you can only write them in fewer ways. I always find that mysterious and I don’t understand the reason,why it is that the laws of physics always seem to be possible to be expression in such a tremendous variety of ways. They seem to be be able to get through several wickets at the same time

Now I would like to make a number of remarks on the relation of mathematics and physics which are a little more general. The first is that the mathematicians are only dealing with the structure of the reasoning. And they do not really care about what they’re talking. They don’t even need to know what they’re talking about, or as they themselves say, or whether what they say is true. That is, if the axioms are carefully formulated and complete enough, it is not necessary for the person doing the reasoning to have any knowledge of the meaning of these words. And they would be able to deduce, in the same language, new conclusions. If I use the term for a triangle in one of the axioms and they’ll be some statement about triangles and a conclusion. Whereas, the person that is doing the reasoning might not know what a triangle is. But then I can read his thing back and say oh that’s just a triangle. And so I know this new fact. In other words, mathematicians prepare abstract reasoning that is ready to be used if you will only have a set of axioms about the real word.

But the physicist has meaning to all the phrases. And there is a very important thing that a lot of people who study physics who come from mathematics don’t appreciate:

“The physics is not mathematics and mathematics is not physics.”

One helps the other. But you have to have some understanding of the connection of the words with “the real world.” It is necessary at the end to translate what you figured out into English, into the world, into the blocks of copper and glass that you’re going to do the experiments with to find out whether the consequences are true. And this is a problem that is not a problem of mathematics at all.

…

I must say that it is possible, and I’ve often made the hypothesis that physics ultimately will not require a mathematical statement, that the machinery ultimately will be revealed. It’s just a prejudice like one of these other prejudices [like super-determinism].

It always bothers me that in spite of all this local business, what goes on in a no matter how tiny a region of space, and no matter how tiny a region of time, according the laws as we understand them today, takes a computing machine an infinite number of logical operations to figure out.

Now how could all that be going on in that tiny space? Why should it take an infinite amount of logic to figure out what a stinky tiny bit of space-time is going to do? And so I’ve made the hypothesis often that the laws are gong to turn out to be, in the end, simple. Like the checkerboard.

There can only be one answer to this interesting question: super-determinism.

Not unlike having previously admitted that a non-holographic Earth is rounded, or that the Earth travels around the Sun, will a realization of a true super-determinant physical reality lead to a collective, which is not individually self-aware but rather collectively-aware, capable of unlocking the remaining and perhaps ultimate discoveries revealing the realness of nature. This “theory of everything” undoubtedly requires acceptance of super-determinism.

A new world of super-determinacy that inevitably awaits our descendants (assuming a war with AI doesn’t result in mutual extinction) is perhaps the single most profound and significant state of awareness that can ever be imagined or attained. The current question we seem to face, not as individuals but rather as a total interdependent form of complex life systems (including all plants & animals past & present), is whether we average out to a determinacy that ultimately has an awareness-cone open to knowing these types of truths, subconsciously or not. Or, whether we’re on a path to endless happy delusion, content within virtual fantasies of imaged non-physical games.

Do you really want to know how nature works?

Or, have you no choice to even make this “decision” due to selfishness & futile predispositions to hinder & reject the potentially fatal & self-destructive* delusions about individuality & choice which prevent you accepting the notion of fate?

Hypothetically assume there was an experiment with rock-solid proof of fate, that free will was an illusion (there is an actual experiment involving the measurement early cosmological events which are now vastly separated that might prove observer’s lack choice). Would it really change your life in the near term? I seriously doubt much would change initially. Most people would either go on happily on using invalid mental constructions out of habit & laziness, or simply ignore it until successive generations progressively evolved into a new normal where causality & the notion of choice is easily lost to history.

Here’s Davies’ fascinating interview in Ghost in the Atom with John Bell:

*: I should correct myself, the fatality of being collectively predisposed to know or reject the reality of free will technically remains unknown and could go either way in terms of “self-destructive” extinction when you also include the extinction of all descendants that cause ancestors or sibling/cousins to go extinct.