New proof dramatically compresses space needed for computation

Sabine Hossenfelder also has very 'interesting' ideas about determinism.

Which I share. It’s haunted me for a long time, but I’ve accepted it. Much like Sabine.

We can’t predict the future but we do not have free will as most people think we have, imho. Many of those separated brain cases seem to confirm this stance.

Sure, but if someone finds themselves feeling incredibly defeated by the thought, then how can we call it productive philosophy? I went too far down this rabbit hole about 8 years ago, and built up a strong mindset of all the things I wanted to be that I couldn't because I wasn't born in the right circumstances. Much better to feel like I can absolutely be those things at least in spirit, and maybe talk to other people about it and find people who are willing to see the unexpected parts of me.

Yes, we have enough accurate theories now that we can predict parts of the future with incredible accuracy in ways that weren't possible 100+ years ago, but we don't have a bulletproof theory of everything, much less a bulletproof theory of everything about humans.

Championing superdeterminism is like being the smart alec who says they can predict anything if you give them enough initial context. Sure, now go make risky investments that will only go up.

The Heisenberg uncertainty principle itself shows that it is not worth fretting too much about superdeterminism.

We will never be able to replace every theory that uses probabilities with ones that don't.

We can evaluate various courses of action, and pick one based on that evaluation. I think something like that is what most people think of as having free will. If we discover that evaluation function is deterministic, it shouldn't change our attitudes to it imo. This is how we normally think of the past: what we did in the past is now determined, and yet we were just as free then as we are in the present. And we presently either suffer or enjoy the consequences of those past decisions, so we better take our present decisions reasonably seriously.

In general I'm quite sceptical of taking physical theories as guidance for life, even more so speculative interpretations of physical theories. Physics can tell us, probabilistically, how relatively simple systems will evolve in time, but most events in our life are way beyond what it can predict, so that should caution us against extrapolating its concepts to these more complicated phenomena. We don't know what conceptual innovations might be required to have a fully coherent and precise account of them, or if that is even possible. The best insight we can get on our life is to acutally live it and reflect on those experiences.

Other considerations are that we don't currently have a fundamental physical theory, since general relativity and the standard model don't work together. Even when they do apply, the equations can't be solved exactly for systems of more than two particles. Everything else involves approximations and simplifications, and in fact even the concept of particle is only valid in a non-relativistic approximation. That suggests to me that physical theories are best thought of at the moment as tools that have a limited domain of effectiveness, though of course within that domain they're extremely effective.

Oh, I wasn't talking about free will. I was talking about 'superdeterminism'. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superdeterminism

Superdeterminism requires crazy 'conspiracy theories' to work.

Btw, I think determinism and free will are compatible. At least for some definitions of free will.

Quantum mechanics itself is actually completely deterministic. It's just certain interpretations, like Copenhagen, that unnecessarily introduce nondeterminism. The Many Worlds interpretation is one that doesn't have that property.

In any case, I don't think determinism and free will have much to do with each other. Eg a classically random fair coin is non-deterministic, but can hardly be said to have free will.

In the other direction, a Turing machine is completely deterministic, but in general you can't predict what it does (without running it.)

If you want to bring up quantum mechanics, I think the no-cloning theorem is more important: no one can learn everything about you in order to 100% simulate and predict you. (Which is what you'd need for the Turing machine. And humans are at least as complicated as Turing machines.)