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507. Like Razorblade Pie: The Man Who Rowed Christopher Columbus Ashore (Feat. Alebrelle)

🕑 Added 2022-07-18 13:01:07 +0000 UTC

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Cyclops giraffe

The story about the rat covered baby. I bet that was his baby from the affair.

Christopher Metzger

PBS has an amazing YouTube channel called Space Time and just this week they put out an episode about the implications of quantum mechanics on free will. TL;DW: It's still an open question, and likely will be indefinitely. But the idea of "superdeterminism" argues that a scientist’s “choices” on when / how they measure a quantum event could be correlated to the event that they’re measuring. The appearance of randomness in quantum mechanics comes from the assumption that the measurement and the event are independent events. If they are actually both effects of a single cause at some point in the past though, then we can resolve the apparent paradoxes of uncertainty and things like faster-than-light communication between entangled particles — by simply sacrificing free will. Unfortunately, as I understand it superdeterminism isn’t falsifiable with known science, because the entire observable universe was causally linked if you go far enough back in time.

Dave Ruff

Fantastic episode! Alebrelle's views on free will and the lack thereof matches my own except that as a wanna-be physics nerd, I do consider quantum probability (and the Many Worlds Interpretation) as making even the mostly irreducible complexity moot. But functionally, the "illusion" of free will, and for that matter, consciousness and continuity, is all we have to go by, so their importance in the "choices" and their consequences still matter, for all intents and purposes. And to Michael: it's outcome, man. When I was much younger, I was all about intent, but to the rest of the world, outcome is what "matters". Great, great conversation!