[HN Gopher] The Black Hole information loss problem is unsolvable
___________________________________________________________________
The Black Hole information loss problem is unsolvable
Author : chmaynard
Score : 116 points
Date : 2020-11-18 18:41 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (backreaction.blogspot.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (backreaction.blogspot.com)
| sterlind wrote:
| Not a physicist, but Hossenfelder didn't clarify well that,
| unlike previous proposed solutions, this one only relies on
| standard quantum mechanics and general relativity, not strings or
| LQG. Similar in spirit to Hawking's original approach, which she
| did mention.
|
| She seems to have a beef with extrapolating (even well-accepted)
| math, rather than doing experiments. But this kind of work
| clarifies where the theories clash and break down, how they can
| work together, maybe even testable predictions.
|
| I wonder if she would have been critical of the Casimir effect,
| back when it was thought to be untestable.
| effie wrote:
| Casimir effect prediction had a good theoretical grounding and
| testable prediction (force between parallel conducting planes).
| It was clear the effect (not the theory behind it) was is in
| principle testable in a lab.
| pontus wrote:
| I think this approach is a bit disingenuous. Her claim is that
| since we can't directly observe black hole evaporation, we can't
| know which mathematical model is "correct" in describing the
| phenomenon and that we're therefore just left with picking the
| explanation that we personally like the best.
|
| This same argument can be made about a ton of things. For
| example, we have yet to observe free quarks directly (due to
| confinement in QCD), but I don't think people are saying that the
| quarks model is just the one that we happen to find most
| pleasing. The reason we are confident in the quarks model is
| because it makes all sort of other predictions that we can
| confirm.
|
| Who is to say that the various ways of resolving the BH
| information paradox are indistinguishable simply because we can't
| observe the evaporation directly? Maybe they make other
| predictions as well.
|
| Generally, I think that we need to be skeptical of various
| speculative ideas and in many ways we have strayed off course for
| a while in theoretical physics, but I don't think the answer is
| to just explore topics and theories that are completely grounded
| in observations and experiments.
| xevrem wrote:
| I still don't understand what they mean by "loss". Why is this
| even a problem? The information isn't gone, its right -there- in
| the black hole, which until proven otherwise, is part of the
| universe.
|
| Until someone can prove the universe cares whether the info is in
| a black hole or not, its not really a problem is it? If anything
| the universe usually shows it doesn't care what we humans think,
| its going to do its own thing, regardless: i.e., weak nuclear
| force and "symmetries"
| whimsicalism wrote:
| But then the black hole evaporates...
| gizmo686 wrote:
| The black hole is not eternal. Once it is fully evaporated, you
| still need to account for the information that was contained
| within (or accept information loss).
| seppel wrote:
| > Once it is fully evaporated, you still need to account for
| the information that was contained within (or accept
| information loss).
|
| One way to escape this is:
|
| * You accept that the Hawkin radiation contains the original
| information.
|
| * But it is scrambled in a reversible way, but so hard that
| you cannot reverse it with the energie available in the
| universe.
|
| There are nice talk by Scott Aaronson about this, e.g.:
| https://simons.berkeley.edu/events/theoretically-speaking-
| se...
| cli wrote:
| I believe this was addressed in the first few paragraphs of the
| article: this problem is not about 'information', which is a
| vague phrase. Rather, it is about how black hole evaporation is
| fundamentally time irreversible.
| xevrem wrote:
| but wasn't the evaporation of black holes a suggested
| solution by hawking for information being "lost forever" in a
| black hole?
|
| i.e., hawking radiation is itself unconfirmed, so its a
| "solution" for something that remains unproven :|
| ssivark wrote:
| Right, but that is using a semi-classical calculation,
| whereas we know that ultimately any process (evolution of a
| closed system like the universe) compatible with quantum
| mechanics needs to be unitary/reversible.
|
| That mismatch is what sets up the BH information "paradox".
| pdonis wrote:
| _> The information isn 't gone, its right -there- in the black
| hole_
|
| No, it isn't; it hits the singularity inside of the hole and
| gets destroyed. At least, that's what Hawking's original model,
| the one he used to predict that black holes evaporate, says.
|
| One way of seeing why Hawking's model had to say this is to
| combine the following facts about the evaporating black hole
| and the Hawking radiation in Hawking's model:
|
| (1) The hole itself cannot contain any information other than
| its mass, charge, and spin (because of the "black holes have no
| hair" theorem), which is far too little information to describe
| everything that fell into the hole.
|
| (2) The Hawking radiation cannot contain any information about
| what fell into the hole because it is thermal, black-body
| radiation, i.e., the only information it contains is its
| temperature, which is related to the mass of the hole.
|
| So the information can't be stored either inside the hole or
| outside the hole, which means it must be destroyed, and the
| only place it can be destroyed is by hitting the singularity
| inside the hole.
|
| The black hole information loss problem is that the above is
| inconsistent with quantum unitarity. So Hawking's original
| model can't be right; but nobody knows what model should
| replace it.
| effie wrote:
| > The hole itself cannot contain any information other than
| its mass, charge, and spin... which is far too little
| information
|
| Maybe the information gets encoded in digits of value of mass
| expressed in some unit. There is enough digits to store any
| finite number of bits.
| SmooL wrote:
| Sure, and the point of this video is that while that may be
| _mathematically and theoretically_ sound, there's no way
| you can realistically make any measurements or any
| observations to confirm or deny your particular idea. What
| we have a lot of these ideas, with no way to discern
| between theories which accurately represent nature and
| theories which are merely mathematically correct.
| pdonis wrote:
| _> while that may be _mathematically and theoretically_
| sound_
|
| The particular idea suggested in the GP actually isn't.
| See my post upthread.
| yyyk wrote:
| Imagine a 2t object falls into the hole and then a 3t
| object. Can that be differentiated than what would have
| happened had there been only one 5t object using mass
| alone?
|
| Only if mass conservation is broken, and current theory
| does not predict this (where does the extra mass go to?).
| Same applies for the other 'no-hair' theorem properties -
| spin and charge.
| pdonis wrote:
| _> Maybe the information gets encoded in digits of value of
| mass expressed in some unit._
|
| No, it can't, not all the information. Two objects of the
| same mass but different internal composition would add the
| same mass to the hole, but would be described by different
| information. So the hole can't store in the value of its
| mass which of the two objects fell in.
|
| More generally, a hole of, say, ten Solar masses could have
| gotten that mass by an infinite number of possible
| combinations of things falling in. The mass itself can't
| distinguish between any of those possibilities; all it can
| tell you is that ten Solar masses total of stuff fell in.
| pa7x1 wrote:
| All of Quantum Mechanics respect unitary evolution, unitary
| evolution can be rewinded back. Black hole evaporation breaks
| unitary evolution, at least in the semi-classical approximation
| of Hawking. If you prepare a pure quantum state it will come
| out as mangled thermal radiation. You cannot return to the pure
| quantum state from the thermal radiation (i.e. we have lost
| information about it).
|
| This transition is impossible in Quantum Mechanics and it would
| suppose a killing blow to Quantum Mechanics if true. So a
| better way to rephrase our worries is that if Black Holes do
| not respect unitary evolution then our most precise physical
| theory is fundamentally wrong.
| Causality1 wrote:
| I don't fully understand the claim that all quantum processes are
| time-reversible. Aren't there a lot of spontaneous quantum
| phenomena that aren't?
| abdullahkhalids wrote:
| Quantum processes are described by Schrodinger's equation, that
| is a linear differential equation in time. Consequently, it's
| solutions for every possible boundary conditions are always
| reversible.
| effie wrote:
| There are "pure quantum evolution" processes (those described
| by unitary evolution of ket vector), such as atom sitting
| forever in its ground state or being in a superposition of
| different Hamiltonian eigenstates. Those are time-reversible.
|
| There are other processes which are not of such kind. Some
| people don't want to call those quantum processes, but they
| sure do have a prominent place in QM textbooks. For example
| spontaneous emission of light from an excited atom or
| radioactive decay of uranium atomic nucleus. Description of
| these processes isn't reducible to unitary evolution, instead
| irreversibility is assumed by employing the golden rule.
| shagie wrote:
| The most recent podcast for Star Talk Radio (
| https://www.startalkradio.net ) which, admittingly is much more
| of a layman's level than deep science, was about black holes.
|
| One of the topics covered in
| https://www.startalkradio.net/show/cosmic-queries-black-hole...
| was about the debate on the black hole information loss problem.
| keyle wrote:
| Can someone tl;dr this mad man's around a bottle of red wine
| ramble?
| tus88 wrote:
| The whole "information obeys the laws of physics" crap is just a
| fiction invented by modern physics to look cool in absence of any
| real progress for over a century, and to compete with software
| engineering.
| justincredible wrote:
| "vacuum cleaners don't clean the vacuum" great example /s.
| Reminds of NdGT being smug about summer daytime getting shorter.
| jesuscyborg wrote:
| Not true. All you have to do is launch Matthew McConaughey into a
| black hole and he'll solve it.
| saagarjha wrote:
| Unfortunately "love" is difficult to experimentally test.
| [deleted]
| beervirus wrote:
| I fully expected this to be crankery like some of this author's
| other stuff. But this one makes a lot of sense.
| aaron695 wrote:
| > crankery like some of this author's other stuff.
|
| Link?
| pjungwir wrote:
| As a non-physicist, I've always been hung up on a much simpler
| paradox: how does radiation escape from a black hole? I thought
| even light could not escape? Is there an explanation to that?
| acqq wrote:
| I suggest reading
|
| https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2018/11/03/ask-...
|
| Most importantly, he argues that Hawking's own popular
| explanation (often repeated across the media, about the
| particle-antiparticle pair) is too simple to be correct:
|
| "It's not right, though, in a number of ways. First off, this
| visualization is not for real particles, but virtual ones. We
| are trying to describe the quantum vacuum, but these are not
| actual particles that you can scoop up or collide with. _The
| particle-antiparticle pairs from quantum field theory are
| calculational tools only, not physically observable entities._
| Second, _the Hawking radiation that leaves a black hole is
| almost exclusively photons_ , not matter or antimatter
| particles. And third, _most of the Hawking radiation_ doesn 't
| come from the edge of the event horizon, but _from a very large
| region surrounding the black hole_. "
|
| Additionally, the article also writes enough to explain the
| whole context and gives enough details for those who are
| interested to learn more.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| Basically.. and this is somewhat lay: in quantum mechanics,
| there is fundamental randomness. Part of that randomness means
| that in space, virtual pairs of particles can be formed right
| at the barrier between being able to escape and not escape.
|
| Normally, these particles annihilate each other - however if
| one crosses the threshold and is not able to escape, it can't
| annihilate the other particle and that escapes as radiation.
| colejohnson66 wrote:
| So similar to "anti particles"?
| db48x wrote:
| No, even anti-matter particles have positive mass. Thus
| they make a black hole larger when they are absorbed.
| saagarjha wrote:
| Well, the pair created can be thought of as as a particle
| and an antiparticle, one of which falls in.
| [deleted]
| adzm wrote:
| This is Hawking radiation, which I'm sure wikipedia can explain
| better than me: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawking_radiation
|
| > A pair of virtual waves/particles arises just beyond the
| event horizon due to ordinary quantum effects. Very close to
| the event horizon, these always manifest as a pair of photons.
| It may happen that one of these photons passes beyond the event
| horizon, while the other escapes into the wider universe ("to
| infinity"). A close analysis shows that the exponential
| redshifting effect of extreme gravity very close to the event
| horizon almost tears the escaping photon apart, and in addition
| very slightly amplifies it. The amplification gives rise to a
| "partner wave", which carries negative energy and passes
| through the event horizon, where it remains trapped, reducing
| the total energy of the black hole. The escaping photon adds an
| equal amount of positive energy to the wider universe outside
| the black hole. In this way, no matter or energy ever actually
| leaves the black hole itself. A conservation law exists for the
| partner wave, which in theory shows that the emissions comprise
| an exact black body spectrum, bearing no information about the
| interior conditions.
| saiya-jin wrote:
| Yes its about matter-antimatter (or different spin?) particles
| forming spontaneously from energy on the edge of event horizon,
| one falling in and another escaping.
|
| At least that's my super-layman recollection, a lot of space to
| be wrong in that 1 sentence.
| BobbyJo wrote:
| It kind of doesn't. Stuff doesn't actually 'escape' a black
| hole to form Hawking radiation, rather, negative stuff goes in.
|
| Photon pairs form in the vacuum all the time. When a pair forms
| at the event horizon of a black hole, it rips the pair apart.
| Half falls in, and half shoots out into space. The half the
| falls in, through the effect that rips the pair apart, winds up
| with negative energy, lowering the energy level of the black
| hole.
| andrewflnr wrote:
| Hawking radiation itself is not observed, but she seems willing
| to take that for granted on the basis of pure math. I don't see a
| notable difference between that and the theoretical work she's
| dismissing here.
| DangitBobby wrote:
| I don't think so. She states clearly that the paradox simply
| means some of the underlying assumptions must be wrong. She
| does not claim to know which ones it must be.
| abdullahkhalids wrote:
| Yes, one resolution of the paradox is that there is no Hawking
| radiation, which is what the author almost said
|
| > Another option is that the black holes do not entirely
| evaporate and the information is kept in what's left, usually
| called a black hole remnant.
| zygotic wrote:
| Crap. Keep working the problem and... maybe you get a solution.
| Giving up is for wimps (What are WIMPs? - Universe Today+_)
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| For me, this was the money quote:
|
| > The black hole information loss problem is not a math problem.
| It's not like trying to prove the Riemann hypothesis. You cannot
| solve the black hole information loss problem with math alone.
| You need data, there is no data, and there won't be any data.
| Which is why the black hole information loss problem is for all
| practical purposes unsolvable.
|
| We lack experimental data. We lack a way to get experimental
| data. All we have is some beautiful mathematics. That's nice, but
| we don't know if it corresponds to reality. That's true of the
| paper under discussion, and it's true of all the other papers
| proposing solutions as well.
| rightbyte wrote:
| > We lack experimental data. We lack a way to get experimental
| data
|
| Sounds like pseudoscience to me.
|
| I wonder what happens if a particle is in early orbit in a
| black hole and another black hole gets close by and changes the
| net force. Is that impossible somehow? Can't you grab that
| particle with a spoon and bail if you are quick?
| coliveira wrote:
| This is not a convincing argument. We may not have data, but as
| in other problems in physics we may have indirect ways to get
| evidence. These indirect ways may not be apparent nowadays, but
| may become in the future.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| Sure, but until such a time, the problem will remain
| unsolvable.
| eternalban wrote:
| Intuitionism has been knocking on theoretical physics' door
| for a while now.
| sampo wrote:
| As far as I understand, Nordstrom's second theory of
| gravitation is a mathematically self-consistent theory for
| gravitation, and the only way to decide between it and
| Einstein's theory was by comparing to observations.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nordstr%C3%B6m%27s_theory_of_g.
| ..
| Kranar wrote:
| Indirect data is still data. What she's saying is that math
| equations aren't data and hence math equations alone can't
| solve this problem.
| ramshorns wrote:
| It leaves me wondering, is that data fundamentally impossible
| to collect, or do we just not know how yet? Sure, maybe the
| problem is unsolvable by math alone but that doesn't make it
| mathematically unsolvable. Maybe we could build or capture a
| black hole in the lab, put detectors all around it, and watch
| it evaporate, or something.
| jchook wrote:
| They did this in Earth by David Brin.
|
| Some theorize that evaporating micro black holes could/should
| be an observable effect of the Large Hadron Collider.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micro_black_hole
| tsimionescu wrote:
| It might not really be fundamentally impossible, but it could
| be completely unachievable practically - harder than
| unscrambling an omelette back into an intact, uncooked egg.
| wwarner wrote:
| Her frustration with the priorities of theoretical physics
| probably is justified, but in this case I disagree with @skdh.
| Her claim is that any solution for the BHIP cannot be falsified,
| and that strikes me as too pessimistic for two reasons. First,
| look at the results of pushing the theory harder with respect to
| _spinning_ black holes. Many predictions of Kerr 's theory have
| been observed, even if the ring singularity at the center hasn't.
| Second, we're observing new black hole phenomena every day, and
| if black holes really do explode at the end of evaporation, then
| maybe that is also observable. Sure, Hawking radiation is
| normally too small to be directly observed, but the theory can be
| driven into a place where it can make a testable prediction.
| platz wrote:
| Original result discussed on Sean Carroll's podcast, Mindscape:
| https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2020/09/21/115-...
|
| He seems a little non-committal if not skeptical.
|
| One telling exchange near the end regarding the gravitational
| path integral they used:
|
| * * *
|
| "1:18:41 SC: And there is this trick that you can introduce,
| 'cause what you're supposed to do is say, well, integrate up all
| of the spacetimes that match on to this particular wave function
| you're looking at. But the trick is, instead of integrating all
| the four-dimensional spacetimes that match on to this condition
| you're looking at, you can just say, well, I'm going to integrate
| over all four dimensional spaces, so I'm going to forget about
| spacetime. I'm just going to do what we call the Euclidean path
| integral because Euclid just talked about space, not time. And...
|
| 1:19:13 NE: Oh, you went there. [laughter]
|
| 1:19:15 SC: I did, I did. This is where I'm going. And so it was
| sort of like you could justify... It's a trick. It's a
| mathematical trick. And it's very rigorously justifiable in
| certain simple cases in quantum mechanics, and it certainly has
| the smell of being correct in certain more subtle cases in
| quantum field theory. In quantum gravity, what they were doing
| with it, it just seemed to be a trick so they could get a finite
| answer at the end of the day, and it was very unclear why it had
| anything to do with the real world, but they suggested it did.
| Maybe they were right. And since then, I think we've become a
| little more comfortable with the idea that we can use this trick
| of calculating quantum gravity wave functions by integrating over
| the Euclidean path integral, the set of all the spaces that end
| up looking like what we want, instead of all the spacetimes that
| look like what we want.
|
| 1:20:05 NE: Yes.
|
| 1:20:05 SC: And that's what you're doing, isn't it? That's the
| kind of wormholes that you're invoking.
|
| 1:20:09 NE: Yes, right. That's what I was trying to sweep under
| the rug.
|
| 1:20:11 SC: I know. [laughter] And you were right to do so, but I
| just like to live dangerously here.
|
| [chuckle]
|
| 1:20:18 SC: So Lenny and Juan have wormholes that are literally
| good old in spacetime wormholes, and you have wormholes that are
| in these fake Euclidean spaces that you used to calculate the
| entropy.
|
| 1:20:29 NE: That's exactly right. Yeah, that's exactly right. And
| these fake Euclidean spacetimes have more boundaries. There are
| more edges than our original spacetime, which means that these
| wormholes are connecting these... More edges than we have in our
| original spacetime, and therefore, it's difficult to make sense
| of them in terms of the original spacetime that we've started
| with."
|
| * _
| mellosouls wrote:
| The recent discussions here on the article Dr Hossenfelder is
| sceptical about:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24940086
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25092231
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| Note, however, her comment:
|
| > This is why the headline that the black hole information loss
| problem is "coming to an end" is ridiculous. Though, let me
| mention that I know the author of the piece, George Musser, and
| he's a decent guy and, the way this often goes, he didn't
| choose the title.
|
| She's against where the popular media wants to go with the
| article, and against the headline, but not so much against the
| article itself.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| I think she also believes that, since the problem is not even
| close to being testable at this time at least, it is not
| really worth studying to the current extent - any theories
| about it would only remain mathematical constructs, not
| physical theories.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| She said that
|
| > In my opinion, the black hole information loss problem is
| the most overhyped problem in all of science, and I say
| that as someone who has published several papers about it.
|
| So I'm not sure that she thinks it isn't worth studying. I
| think she thinks it isn't valid to declare that something
| "solves" it, though.
| c1ccccc1 wrote:
| So this new result is derived semiclassically, right? Which means
| it was derived using more or less the same assumptions Hawking
| used to derive Hawking radiation. So couldn't the same objection
| be made about the claim that black holes evaporate at all? After
| all, we also have no empirical data about that, and likely won't
| have such data for a long long time.
| Kranar wrote:
| Of course the criticism can also apply to Hawking radiation but
| it wouldn't be a particularly strong or even novel critique.
| Scientists already understand that an experimentally unverified
| prediction in theoretical physics could end up being wrong. If
| Hawking radiation does end up being wrong, however, it would
| most definitely result in some groundbreaking insights because
| Hawking radiation is itself built upon a set of assumptions
| that have a lot of experimental evidence.
|
| The multiple solutions to the black hole information loss
| problem all depend on a set of assumptions that do not have
| that same degree of experimental evidence and so the concern is
| that physicists will converge on the solution that they find
| most comforting, likely based on ideology or whatever is
| fashionable, rather than converge on the solution that has the
| most evidence. The article says that getting actual empirical
| data to determine which competing solution is correct is
| virtually impossible.
|
| So sure, Hawking radiation can be wrong and we have very little
| empirical data to support it, but it's not a theory that's
| competing with any other theories strictly on the basis of math
| equations derived from a set of assumptions. It's a theory that
| is almost uniquely derived from a pre-existing set of
| assumptions that do have a large body of empirical support
| whereas the solutions to the black hole information loss
| problem are not.
| c1ccccc1 wrote:
| > It's a theory that is almost uniquely derived from a pre-
| existing set of assumptions that do have a large body of
| empirical support.
|
| What additional assumptions (on top of the ones Hawking made)
| does the new calculation use that don't have a large body of
| empirical support?
| Kranar wrote:
| The most plausible solutions can be read on Wikipedia along
| with the assumptions they either make, or violate:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_hole_information_parado
| x...
| [deleted]
| xwdv wrote:
| If it's unsolvable then now what? What does it mean for humanity?
| qw3rty01 wrote:
| > These solutions are all mathematically consistent. We just
| don't know which one of them is correct. And why is that? It's
| because we cannot observe black hole evaporation.
|
| > You need data, there is no data, and there won't be any data.
| Which is why the black hole information loss problem is for all
| practical purposes unsolvable.
|
| She didn't say it was inherently unsolvable, only that it was
| practically unsolvable. There's still the possibility that it
| could be solved with some other data that doesn't require
| observing black hole evaporation.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| > And without data, the question is not which solution to the
| problem is correct, but which one you like best.
|
| I think this is correct to some extent, ultimately unavoidable,
| and some assumptions can be "inferred" as more reasonable than
| others, even in the absence of falsification.
|
| By Sabine's stance, the problem of induction [0] hasn't been
| "solved" because we actually have no reason to assume that past
| events are at all related to future events. So when we say that
| induction is possible, we say so because we "like best" that
| theory of causality, rather than my alternate theory that when
| you finish reading this sentence, all physics will cease to
| function and the universe will end.
|
| It didn't happen, but we had no reason to know so ahead of time
| deductively. However, it is still reasonable (in my view) to
| believe in induction.
|
| So sure, it's perhaps 'unsolvable', but if a plausible
| explanation comes around that is consistent with modern physics
| that seems good to me.
|
| [0]: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/induction-problem/
| pdonis wrote:
| _> By Sabine 's stance, the problem of induction [0] hasn't
| been "solved"_
|
| The "problem" of induction is a different kind of problem from
| the black hole information loss problem.
|
| Induction can't be tested against experimental data. Induction
| isn't a testable hypothesis; it's a strategy we have no choice
| but to adopt if we want to plan for the future at all. So there
| is no "problem" of induction at all: it's just something we're
| stuck with.
|
| Proposed solutions to the black hole information loss problem
| _can_ be tested against experimental data; we just don 't have
| the technical capability to acquire such data yet. That doesn't
| change the fact that until proposed solutions are tested
| against experimental data, and some proposed solution passes
| the test, the black hole information loss problem is not
| solved.
| enkid wrote:
| The problem if induction attacks the idea of experiments
| leading to anything meaningful.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| My point is that there are always going to be equally
| possible alternative theories which make any problem
| "unsolvable".
|
| I could make a theory that says that gravity works exactly as
| we think it does, except in about 1000 years will cease to
| function entirely - and that theory would be equally
| consistent with observation.
|
| We have to rely on some sort of proxy for the simplicity or
| elegance of the theory in order to preclude hypotheses like
| the above. If we find an elegant solution to the BHIP that
| uses existing QM + GR, then that seems like a pretty good
| resolution even if it can't be observationally verified yet.
| pessimizer wrote:
| This is a problem with "philosophical" induction, not logical
| induction. I don't even know what it means "to believe in
| [philosophical] induction." Does it mean to believe that future
| things will behave like things similar to them in the past,
| except when they don't, in which case we made a mistake in
| thinking they were similar?
| tsimionescu wrote:
| As far as I understand, there are plenty of plausible
| explanations that are consistent with modern physics. The
| problem is finding out which one of them (if any) is right,
| since they are not all mutually compatible.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| Sure, but I think there's a difference between "if we
| conjecture this additional effect that has never been
| observed but is not inconsistent with observation, then we
| see this thing" vs. "actually this is sort of resolved by a
| straightforward application of solutions to models we already
| had of effects we have already observed"
| shaded-enmity wrote:
| I'm confused, isn't the whole schtick around past events being
| related to future events the basis of causality?
| ethanbond wrote:
| Right, and GP point is that we actually only have data about
| how past events are related to other past events (and even
| then, the data is not very good). We have no information at
| all about how past or current events are related to future
| events.
| burrows wrote:
| What evidence do we have that causality will continue to
| "exist"?
| waterhouse wrote:
| People who believe that past experience is a good predictor
| of the future will make decent predictions as a result;
| people who believe that past experience has nothing to do
| with the future ("anti-inductivists") will make wrong
| predictions again and again. The inductivists will
| therefore outcompete the anti-inductivists.
|
| On the other hand, as a friend of mine pointed out, for the
| anti-inductivists that manage to exist, although they keep
| suffering from making wrong predictions, they will not see
| this as a reason to change their philosophy, so they are
| stuck in an epistemic trap. Since evidence has no meaning
| for them, no evidence can change their minds.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| > The inductivists will therefore outcompete the anti-
| inductivists.
|
| You have no deductive or a priori reason to know this,
| rhetoric about "epistemically traps" aside.
| shaded-enmity wrote:
| So is this survivorship bias or something else? I don't
| understand your point. I have a white wall in front of
| me. If I take a brush and red paint and paint a big red
| circle on the wall, are you saying that the big red
| circle "just happens to be there" with no relationship to
| the brush, red paint and my actions?
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