The “All At Once” Universe Shatters Our View of Time (Emily Adlam)

Michael Hoffman, 6:45 am, Apr. 12, 2025

Contents:

Mytheme Decoded: {burning bush} = Non-Branching Eternalism

2:14 pm April 12, 2025: I have reached confidence in interpreting Moses’ burning bush.

Definite decoding of the {burning bush} mytheme; I’ve posted this hypothesis before.

This how now reached the status of a confirmed hypothesis.

The {burning bush} is not an entheogen; it is an experiential revelation resulting from entheogens. Equivalent to {cut right trunk}, {cut right branch}, {cut branch}.

To “cut branch” = to deny possibilism (possibility-branching) & affirm eternalism (a single, closed future), which includes:

  • Affirm 2-level, dependent control.
  • See God, as uncontrollable source of control-thoughts.

I gained threshold-crossing confidence about decoding “burning bush” while listening to Jacob Barandes talk about branches in the video interview:
Harvard Scientist: “There is No Quantum Multiverse” | Jacob Barandes [Part 3]
I moved that video partial transcription, re: “branch”, to below.

Burning Bush (Van der Borch) – Finger Shapes, Burning Away Branching Possibilities – Proves Bush = Tree

Crop by Michael Hoffman

image processing, and interpretation by Cybermonk [11:04 p.m. February 9, 2023]

Crop, image processing, and interpretation by Michael Hoffman, 11:04 p.m. February 9, 2023
Photo Credit: Julie M. Brown
Crop by Michael Hoffman
“Entry into Jerusalem John Rush diamond frond.jpg” 152 KB 10:28 pm Feb. 26, 2025
Photo Credit Julie M. Brown.
April 10, 2022 image processing & crop by Michael Hoffman.

Sacrifice of Isaac (Van der Borch) – branches burning; compare bush burning:

Burning Bush, and Tablets (Ingeborg Psalter)

Aspect ratio corrected by Michael Hoffman

The Mystic Y (Ingeborg Psalter); Burning Bush

Burning Bush

Crop by Michael Hoffman, Jan. 26, 2025

Features (some noted before):

  • Foolish youth stance: Weight on left foot.
  • Left elbow is touching {fire}.
  • Good though: right hand closer to ground than left hand, per f134 image rules.
  • Turning to look Left, not as good as Right.
Crop by Cybermonk, December 11, 2024

Intro, Relevance to Egodeath Theory

New video yesterday, Apr. 11, 2025. Lacks concept of psychedelic experiencing of eternalism, lacks concept of transcend eternalism.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6I2OhmVWLMs&t=3350s = 55:50

Posted at YouTube

This is my main copy though I could designate https://egodeaththeory.org/2025/04/11/psychedelic-4d-spacetime-block-universe-mysticism/ instead as the main location for such commentary.

My Comment 1 on a Curt & Emily Video

55:50 – Curt Jaimungal asks Emily Adlam the popularly worded, inferior question.  People should not debate “presentism” vs. eternalism, but rather, _possibilism_ vs. eternalism. 

Possibilism (branching, open future) vs. eternalism (non-branching, closed future) are the two relevant models for personal control, as contrasted in the medieval art genre of mushroom-trees.

That genre uses {cut right trunk} and {cut right branch} motifs, assigned to standing on _right_ foot rather than left foot. 

The diagrammatic art genre of mushroom-trees claims that the _branching_ model (possibilism) produces control instability, but relying on the non-branching model (eternalism) produces control stability.

Emily Adlam’s view, 4D spacetime block-universe eternalism, supports the Egodeath theory of psychedelic eternalism, in which block time with dependent control (“non-control” in a sense) is experienced, and the contrast between the branching vs. non-branching models is perceived. 

Posted to youtube April 15, 2025:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FoQhHmjyERA
The “All at Once” Theory: The Universe is a Single Timeless Block
April 14, 2024
This video is a short clip of the main interview.

My Comment 2 on a Curt & Emily Video

Everyone went running after (branching) Quantum Mysticism, but the “road not taken” (or less taken) can be called (non-branching) 4D Spacetime Mysticism, or Block-Universe Mysticism.

The competing, Minkowski-based model. Around 1880-1910 seems like a nascent version of this earlier type of Physics-oriented mysticism formed.

The full version of this interview held up to multiple listens, a favorite.

My Comment 3 on a Curt & Emily Video

Someone asked me “What is Quantum Mysticism?”

Wikipedia has a good article “Quantum mysticism”, saying it is bunk spiritual reinterpretation of Quantum Physics; I agree.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_mysticism

The Wikipedia article emphasizes eg.that the mind or “observer effect” creates many worlds at every moment: that’s the extreme of ego-power inflation.

I have defined the opposite use of Physics for an opposite version of mysticism that is offensive to ego power:

The future is single and already exists, not like domino-chain determinism causality, but quite different like Emily Adlam’s All-at-Once, eternalism; “4D spacetime block-universe mysticism”.

Popular Quantum Mysticism is not the Presentism view of time like the interview contrasts against Eternalism.

(Find “Presentism” in the present page transcript, asked by Curt.)

The popular view is actually Possibilism, which is depicted in medieval art as branching (contrasted against non-branching ie Eternalism perceived in the mystical state of consciousness, which I assert).

Motivation for this Page

I have read books about block time in Physics, but haven’t given them much attention, since they just reiterate my view from January 1988 in a university course in Modern Physics.

This interview provides an efficient equivalent of giving attention to this genre of Physics books.

My psychedelic church is dominated by virtual dogma of Quantum Mysticism. They mistakenly equate this version of mysticism with “the” “Science” view.

But around 1880 and with my breakthrough in Jan. 1988, Physics produced an earlier, better version of mysticism that doesn’t reify false ego and branching-power, but zaps it 100% to smithereens like Zeus revealing his power to Semele.

I am naming this earlier but ignored version of Physics mysticism as eg 4D Spacetime Mysticism, or with less emphasis on the combat within Physics, block-universe mysticism, understood as psychedelics-experienced/ revealed.

Info about Curt Jaimungal

https://www.google.com/search?q=%22Curt+Jaimungal%22

Info about Emily Adlam

https://www.google.com/search?q=%22Emily+Adlam%22

YouTube Videos:
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=emily+adlam

“Theories of Everything” Videos Playlist by Curt Jaimungal

Theories of Everything with Curt Jaimungal – playlist, including video interviews about:

  • “no quantum multiverse”/ Shattering Manyworlds Theory
  • retrocausality, superdeterminism
  • time doesn’t flow – it’s an emergent effect
  • Hofstadter’s strange loops
  • Time Doesn’t Exist [Never write this stupid binary construction – always say “the sense in which x”. Your intelligence doesn’t exist.]
  • Roger Penrose
  • No Scientific Innovation Since the 1920s
  • Physics community divided
  • Consciousness Theories

Video: The “All At Once” Universe Shatters Our View of Time (Emily Adlam)

Video title:
The “All At Once” Universe Shatters Our View of Time
Everything Happens at Once! (Emily Adlam)
YouTube channel: Curt Jaimungal
Apr 11, 2025
✪ Members first on April 10, 2025
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6I2OhmVWLMs —

Description Section of Video

Description (“More” link at video):

“Today we are joined by physicist and philosopher Emily Adlam for her first appearance on Theories of Everything to challenge one of the deepest assumptions in science: that time flows.

“In this thought-provoking conversation, Adlam presents her “all-at-once” view of physics, where the universe is more like a completed Sudoku puzzle than a film playing forward.

“We explore the measurement problem in quantum mechanics, the role of the observer, the illusion of causality, and why these foundational questions demand both philosophical clarity and scientific precision.”

New Substack: https://curtjaimungal.substack.com

Links might only work from Desc section in the video at YouTube.

•⁠ ⁠Emily’s profile: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/…

•⁠ ⁠Spooky Action at a Temporal Distance (paper): https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles…

•⁠ ⁠Quantum Field Theory and the Limits of Reductionism (paper): https://arxiv.org/pdf/2407.20457

•⁠ ⁠Two Roads of Retrocausality (paper): https://arxiv.org/pdf/2201.12934

•⁠ ⁠Taxonomy for Physics Beyond Quantum Mechanics (paper): https://arxiv.org/pdf/2309.12293

•⁠ ⁠Strong Determinism (paper): https://arxiv.org/pdf/2203.02886

•⁠ ⁠Carlo Rovelli on TOE:    • The Loop Quantum Gravity Debacle: Car…  

•⁠ ⁠Stephen Wolfram on TOE:    • Solving the Problem of Consciousness …  

•⁠ ⁠Emily interviewed about Nonlocality:    • Nonlocality Not in Space but in Time:…  

•⁠ ⁠Tim Palmer on TOE:    • Tim Palmer: Non-Locality, Universe on…  

•⁠ ⁠Tim Maudlin on TOE:    • Why Bell’s Theorem Changes Everything…  

•⁠ ⁠Algorithmic Randomness and Probabilistic Laws (paper): https://arxiv.org/pdf/2303.01411

•⁠ ⁠Governing Without a Fundamental Direction of Time (paper): https://arxiv.org/pdf/2109.09226

•⁠ ⁠Matt Segal on TOE:    • Is The Universe Conscious? | Matt Segall  

•⁠ ⁠Jacob Barandes on TOE:    • There’s No Wave Function? | Jacob Bar…  

•⁠ ⁠Sabine Hossenfelder on TOE:    • The Major Flaws in Fundamental Physics  

•⁠ ⁠Bernardo Kastrup and Sabine on TOE:    • Bernardo Kastrup Λ Sabine Hossenfelde…  

•⁠ ⁠Sean Carroll on TOE:   • The Crisis in (Fundamental) Physics i…  

Timestamps (Even Though “Time Is an Illusion”, Like the Intelligence of People Who Talk That Way)

Timestamps:

00:00 Introduction

00:56 Observers in Quantum Mechanics

02:15 The Measurement Problem

06:23 Dogmas in Quantum Foundations

08:24 Causation and Its Philosophical Implications

09:12 The Arrow of Time and Its Mysteries

10:28 Exploring Coarse Graining and Reductionism

13:21 Non-Locality: Temporal vs. Spatial

16:06 The Nature of Non-Locality

19:34 Temporal Non-Locality and Its Implications

21:51 Retrocausality: The All-at-Once Perspective

26:25 The Measurement Problem and All-at-Once Framework

28:24 Observer-Centric Interpretations of Quantum Mechanics

31:29 Probabilities in Physics

32:51 The Process Matrix and Causal Structures

38:33 Foundations of Physics and Philosophy

1:05:16 The Emergence of Space-Time

1:08:11 Exploring Correlations in Physical Parameters

1:10:44 Epistemology of the Measurement Problem

1:13:26 Lessons in Patience and Persistence

Key Words to Find in the Transcript

Find:

  • possible, possibilism
  • presentism
  • eternalism, eternalist
  • [find ‘eternalist’ in Kyle Bromhall’s article about James’ 1897 article DoD?
    No, just eternal: https://philarchive.org/archive/BROAIU-2]
  • branch
  • many worlds, manyworlds
  • multiverse

My Commentary Notation

[i will clean up the transcription later, remove extra space chars which will hint that I have studied the sentence. markup, bold, & my commentary does same.]

Transcript

Introduction

00:00 Introduction

Coming up soon…

Emily Adlam:

“The dogma I worry about is that we should think  about physics in terms of time evolution.

This picture where you start at the beginning  and evolve forwards in time,

[sounds like Tim Freke’s attempted revision of spirituality in terms of “emergent, evolutionary spirituality, which has a low view of previous expressions of spiritual enlightenment – as I have complained but repaired, since 1986.]

that’s a very intuitive [read: naive] way of thinking about physics, but it  is very clearly not a good fit for what we are seeing.

There’s really good evidence coming from lots of different parts of physics that we shouldn’t be thinking about time in those  terms.”

Curt Jaimungal (intro):

Imagine a completed Sudoku puzzle.

The  rules don’t dictate that you start in one corner  and then work systematically across the grid.

Instead, they just constrain what patterns  are valid for the entire puzzle. Professor  Emily Adlam of Chapman University suggests that  the fundamental laws of physics work similarly.  

You don’t evolve the universe step-by-step  from past to future. Instead, there are   these constraints. Something that selects valid  patterns across all of spacetime simultaneously.  

This quote-unquote all-at-once perspective helps  explain paradoxical quantum phenomena like delayed  choice experiments and Bell nonlocality.

It  also comports with Einstein’s relativity,   where the distinction between past and future  depends on the observer’s reference frame.

Observers in Quantum Mechanics

00:56 Observers in Quantum Mechanics

If  correct, this paradigm shift would transform  our understanding of causality, of observers, and of the nature of physical law itself.

CJ:

What’s  the largest unsolved problem in physics today that  you’re interested in?

EA:

Well, this is not a very  original answer, but I think the measurement  problem of quantum mechanics for me still really  stands out as an important unsolved problem.  

Not just because it’s intellectually interesting,  but because it seems to me that it’s closely   linked to a variety of concrete problems that  we’re working on in modern physics.

In particular,  I think in the context of work on quantum gravity,  a lot of the issues we’re really struggling   with are ultimately to do with the nature of  observers, the nature of observation.

For example, solving the problem of time is all about trying  to understand how to put the observers and their  theories in a way that reproduces the kinds of  observations we expect to see.

And so that makes me think that perhaps there’s an issue here where  we never really came to grips with how to think  about observers in the context of ordinary quantum  mechanics, and that’s really holding us back from making us progress on further physics.

So I think  that problem to me demands a solution not just for  intellectual curiosity, but also to be able to  make real progress.

The Measurement Problem

02:15 The Measurement Problem

And what’s the definition of ‘observer’?

Is it the same as a measuring device, or  what counts as a measurement?

Emily Adlam:

Well that’s exactly  the problem.

We don’t know clearly how to define  observers in concrete physical terms.

We have,  of course, an intuitive notion of what an observer  is, and we know what we expect observers to see,  but it’s still very unclear how to properly  model observers within quantum mechanics.

All the interpretations of quantum mechanics say  something different about how you should represent  observers, and that has important knock-on effects  for how you’re going to think about observers in  the context of further physics like quantum  gravity.

How does the problem of observers,  or defining what observers are, have  anything to do with quantum gravity?  

So, I mean, one of the big problems we encounter  in the formulation of quantum gravity is known as  the problem of time, which refers to the fact that  if you impose a sort of canonical quantization on  gravity, the result is that time evolution seems  to vanish.

You end up with this sort of strained,  timeless model.

And so then one obvious problem  you have is to try to understand how the kinds of  experiences that we have could possibly arise in this context.

Where does our sense of doing things  in time and obtaining outcomes come from?

And so  there are lots of interesting ideas around this,  but a lot of this is still very focused on this  question of how exactly should you represent   an observer, and how can you make sense of  sort of local observations in this setting.  

So why don’t you tell us how you make sense of  observers, then? Well, I mean, unfortunately,  I don’t have a complete answer to this question.

I  think one thing that we can see clearly from both  general relativity and quantum gravity is that  making sense of observers is probably going to  require understanding them in sort of relational  terms, understanding observations as things that  happen in some sense relative to our observers,  rather than being things that are out there in   the world by themselves.

So that seems like an  important insight, which I think is also relevant  for standard quantum mechanics. But certainly,  it’s an ongoing project to understand exactly how  to make that work in a coherent way. We’re going  to get to the relational interpretation of quantum  mechanics and your work with Carlo Rovelli.

Carlo Rovelli: Physics Without Time

https://www.google.com/search?q=%22carlo+rovelli%22
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carlo_Rovelli#Physics_without_time

But  prior to that, I want to know, what the heck is   a Sudoku universe?

The Sudoku universe  is a way of thinking about time and laws in the  context of modern physics.

So there’s this perhaps  quite traditional way of thinking about physics,   where we imagine it as something like a computer, as Ken Wharton puts it.

So we think of an initial  state being put in, and then the universe just  evolves the initial state forwards in time and   produces the course of history.

And that’s,  I think, the intuitively natural way to think about physics that many people still use.

But  there’s, I think, really good evidence coming   from lots of different parts of physics that we  shouldn’t be thinking about time in those terms.  

We should instead be thinking about the laws of nature as applying all at once to the whole of history.

So in that sense, they’re like the  rules of a game of Sudoku.

The rules of Sudoku  don’t tell you to start at the left and then move  towards the right.

What they do is constrain the  whole grid and tell you whether an entire solution  is valid or invalid.

So the thought is that the  laws of nature perhaps work like that and not  like time evolution.

Is that the same as saying  that there’s some imposition of consistency? 

So certainly consistency is one important kind  of constraint.

I think probably we need more  constraints than just consistency because I  don’t know how to derive the actual laws that we  observe from purely consistency conditions.

It  would be neat if that could be done. But it seems  like there might be some constraints going beyond  just consistency conditions to sort of impose  the specific types of laws that we actually see.  

You had a 2018 paper called Spooky Action at  a Temporal Distance, which is a great title  by the way.

A Dogma in Quantum Foundations: That We Should Think in Terms of Time Evolution

06:23 Dogmas in Quantum Foundations

You mentioned something becoming  a dogma in physics.

I’m quoting you, a dogma, and something like there’s an assumption which is  actively limiting progress in quantum foundation. 

So what is it? And those are strong words.

So I’d like you to justify your usage of that language.  

Emily Adlam:

The dogma I was worrying about there was  this idea that we should think about physics in terms of time evolution, this picture where you  start at the beginning and evolve forwards in   time.

As I say, that’s a very intuitive way  of thinking about physics, but it is I think  very clearly not a good fit for what we are  seeing in modern physics.

And yet nonetheless,  many people I think are still drawn to try to  think about things in those terms.

So for example, in quantum foundations, it’s very common to be  quite focused on trying to give causal accounts of things to understand either in classical  terms or to move to a sort of quantum notion of causation where you can tell the story about  one thing causing another thing causing another   thing.

And that I think is not a good use of our  efforts because there are clear indications that  that’s not really the structure that physics  actually has.

And so trying to force it into a causal structure is not likely to be a good way of  understanding it.

[‘causal’ implies branching possibilities & monolithic, autonomous control — vs non-branching possibilities with 2-level, dependent control -Michael Hoffman]

In the philosophical literature,  there’s disputes as to what is causation.

Do you  have a personal account of causation?

Yeah. When  I say personal, I mean one that you favor. 

Definitely the accounts of causation I favor.  

Other ones which suggest that causation needs  to be understood essentially as a macroscopic  phenomenon.

So causation I think clearly has  something to do with thermodynamics and the   thermodynamic arrow in terms of entropy.

It’s  also I think clearly related to perspective,  the perspective of macroscopic observers like us  and what we can and can’t achieve.

It’s related to  interventions and telling a story about what  observers like us can achieve by intervening  on certain types of variables.

So all of those  things make it seem very macroscopic in nature,  which means that for me it’s incorrect to think  of causation as being something that adheres in  the microscopic world.

Causation and Its Philosophical Implications

08:24 Causation and Its Philosophical Implications

Certainly there are I think  important kinds of structure in the microscopic world that we need to think about, but I don’t  think those structures are causal in the ordinary   sense.

And so it’s not going to be particularly  helpful to try to model them in causal terms.  

So I’d like to talk about non-locality as  well, specifically temporal non-locality.

And   in temporal is time. And earlier you mentioned the  problem of time.

And then here we’re talking about  the arrow of time or the thermodynamic arrow  of time. So it sounds to people who know some  physics that, oh, there’s a problem of time.  Is that the problem of the arrow of time?

Is the problem of time different than the arrow of  time problem? And does the second law solve it?  

All of these get entwined in their mind. So why  don’t you distinguish those?

What is the problem of time?

What is the arrow of time and what it  has to do with the second law?

The Arrow of Time and Its Mysteries

09:12 The Arrow of Time and Its Mysteries

The arrow of time usually refers to the fact that in the  world, as we experience it, there are all these  temporal asymmetries, you know, glasses break and  don’t usually recompose themselves.

All of these  kinds of obvious asymmetries that characterize  our lives.

The problem of the arrow of time  is that the underlying physics mostly seems to be time-symmetric.

So in that sense, it’s not obvious  where all of these asymmetries could come from. 

You seem to have to impose them by just deciding  by fiat that the initial state of the universe  is some special kind of state, which can explain   those asymmetries.

But for many people, that’s not  super satisfying.

The problem of time in quantum  gravity is a distinct issue.

It refers to the  fact that within a specific technical formalism  for quantizing gravity, when you perform that  quantization, you find that time evolution ends  up being what’s called a gauge transformation,  which means that it’s not physically real.

It’s   just kind of giving two different descriptions of  the same thing. So it looks like time evolution  in the ordinary sense is not present at all. So  that leads to a problem of trying to understand,  you know, where do our experiences come from? 

Why do we have these experiences that feel like  they are temporal in nature?

Exploring Coarse Graining and Reductionism

10:28 Exploring Coarse Graining and Reductionism

So they are separate  problems, but I think it’s very likely they are linked.

I think certainly the story about why we  have experiences which are temporal in nature must  have something to do with thermodynamics and the  fact that we live in this very asymmetric regime.

[our experiencing is always shaped in the form of causal agency steering among branching possibilities into an open future]  

So there’s still work to be done to flesh  out the connections between these things,   but certainly I think they’re not completely  independent.

So some people explain the arrow  of time with coarse graining. I think Stephen  Wolfram does this, and in coarse graining is the  notion of renormalization. You had a paper on why  reductionism is false, or at least not necessarily  true, and you tied it to renormalization.

Can you  please talk about that?

In that paper,  you know, this is sort of an exploratory paper. 

I’m not necessarily committed to the view that  reductionism is false, but I’m interested in  whether that is maybe one way to try to resolve  some of the problems that we encounter in quantum  field theory.

So one of the problems is a sort of  fine-tuning issue where we find that in certain  kinds of cases, it seems that the values of two  distinct fundamental constants must be very  carefully adjusted to fit each other in order  to produce the observed value of the constant  at a higher scale.

And sort of the observation  I was making here was that if you say things are  the other way around, if you say that the higher  level constant is fundamental and the smaller  scale constants are in fact derived from it,  that gives you a very natural explanation for why  they’re fine-tuned in this way, because they are   in fact fixed by the actual value of the higher  level constant.

So the thought there was just that  perhaps changing our way of thinking such  that in some cases smaller scale things  are explained by larger scale things rather than  vice versa might be a way of understanding some   of those phenomena.

Then it was important to  look at the renormalization transformations,  because renormalization is the transformation  we use in quantum field theory to move between  different scales.

And so the question I was  looking at there was trying to understand, given  the mathematical structure of the renormalization  translations, is it possible that things could be  reversed in direction and that the higher scale  things could define the lower scale things and   not vice versa?

We normally wouldn’t think that’s  possible in sort of more ordinary physics, because  we think there’s a sort of many-to-one mapping  where many microscopic possibilities get mapped   to one macroscopic possibility, so the macroscopic  possibility can’t determine what’s going on in the  microscopic scales.

But renormalization is in  fact a one-to-one transformation, so it does  seem more plausible in the kind of regime where  that’s relevant, that perhaps the higher scale   things could determine the lower scale things  because of the specific mathematical structure  of that transformation. Even at fixed points?  So fixed points are somewhat more complicated,  

Non-Locality: Temporal vs. Spatial

13:21 Non-Locality: Temporal vs. Spatial

because fixed points do involve scenarios where  many solutions get mapped to one solution. But the  thing about fixed points is that they can occur  both at very small scales and at larger scales.

So  it’s not obvious to me that invoking fixed points  particularly favors one direction of explanation, since they occur at both levels.

So let me  see if I can phrase this in the language for  mathematicians, and correct me if I’m incorrect. 

The renormalization group is a set of tools to  determine how parameters change with different  scales, whether it’s energy scales or length   scales or what have you. Now, it’s less of a group  in the algebraic sense and more a set of tools,  but if it was to be something like a group, it  would be a monoid, because not every element is  invertible.

However, most of the elements are  invertible, and this would mean that you don’t  privilege some scales being more fundamental, in  the same way that in an affine group you don’t   have a privileged origin? That’s right, yeah.  So we have various approximations we use to do  renormalization, and many of those are not  invertible.

But there are good reasons to think   that the real underlying transformations should be  invertible. And if that’s the case, then outside  of fixed points, you can go from small scales to  large scales, or you can go from large scales to   small scales. It’s kind of the same from the point  of view of the underlying math. And so there’s no  sort of obvious sense in which the physics is  telling you the small things must explain the   big things and not vice versa.

Let me see if I can  make another analogy. So let’s imagine there’s a  bird in the sky and you take a snapshot of that  bird. And then you say, okay, its position is   here and its velocity is here, or its momentum.  And then you could say, okay, where is it going  to be?

And then you can plan out or you can  predict its trajectory. And then you say, well,  look what we got here as an initial position and  velocity.

But why did you call this “initial”?

Like  you could actually, from another point, make the  trajectory go backward.

And so you have the whole  trajectory.

So what is the “initial” point?

Why is one point being privileged?

Yeah, I mean, I think  that’s a great analogy, because I would say much  the same about time evolution as well, that there  is no particular reason to privilege one point. 

Certainly the physics doesn’t tell you you have   to do that. And yeah, I think the same is true, at  least for many applications of the renormalization transformation.

The physics doesn’t seem to be  telling you that the smallest, most fundamental  scales must actually be privileged in that sense. 

The Nature of Non-Locality

16:06 The Nature of Non-Locality

So let’s get to nonlocality.

There’s a large  hubbub about nonlocality and Bell’s theorem and  also realism.

Well, what is nonlocality?

Yeah, so in the context of quantum mechanics, nonlocality  is the phenomenon that quantum mechanics exhibits  correlations which seem to be too strong to be  explained by any local model.

So normally when  we see correlations at a distance, we would expect  to explain them by some common cause in the past.  

They both came from the same source or something  like that. But Bell’s theorem demonstrates that  the types of correlations we see in quantum  mechanics can’t be explained that way.

It seems   as though there’s some kind of direct influence  between events happening at a distance that can’t  be explained in this sort of common cause way.  Now there’s two different types of nonlocality,  spatial and temporal.

And you have many papers,  many talks as well on temporal nonlocality. So  please distinguish the two.

Yeah. So perhaps the,  I guess the traditional way of thinking about  nonlocality in quantum mechanics is to imagine it  as a spatial form of nonlocality.

So that involves  a situation in which perhaps Alice performs a  measurement in one location. And as soon as she  does that, the wave function collapses everywhere  in the world.

And that sort of conveys information  across to Bob wherever he is. And that has  an impact on the results of his subsequent   measurement.

So that nonlocality is spatial  because the effect of what Alice does is just  transferred to the whole global state everywhere  at the same time.

Whereas temporal nonlocality  suggests that nonlocality doesn’t necessarily have  to be conveyed immediately in terms of the current  state of the world.

You can potentially think  of nonlocality as kind of hopping across time   as well. So Alice performs her measurement at  some time and at some other place.

And at some  later time, Bob performs a measurement and there’s  just a direct relationship.

There’s some kind of   constraint requiring that Bob’s outcome reflects  Alice’s choice in some way.

So there’s a kind of  direct nonlocal impact that is not mediated  by a global state evolving forward carrying  that information. Does spatial nonlocality  imply temporal or vice versa?

Combining spatial nonlocality with relativistic  constraints makes it very compelling to think  that there should be temporal nonlocality.

That’s  because if you take a frame of reference within a  relativistic setting where you have a spatially  nonlocal effect, something Alice does influences  something that happens over here, you’re allowed  within relativity to make a change of reference   frame to get another equally valid reference  frame.

And in that reference frame, those events  are not going to be at the same time anymore. 

Bob’s event over here is going to be either in  the future or the past of Alice’s observation. 

So it looks like by making that transformation,  you have turned your spatial nonlocality into  temporal nonlocality.

So that in that sense, if you believe what relativity tells us about  the close connections between space and time, it seems very hard to maintain that nonlocality  is always spatial and never temporal.

So then why is it that physicists, if I understood one of your  papers correctly, why is it that physicists focus on the spatial nonlocality when if you’re in the  relativistic setting and both are on quote-unquote “equal footing”?

(A term I don’t like for various  reasons. I’ll put a link to a video on why I don’t like “equal footing”.)

Particles don’t take “all possible paths simultaneously.” Here’s why.
Curt Jaimungal, April 3, 2025
https://curtjaimungal.substack.com/p/particles-dont-take-all-possible?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email&utm_content=share – “Firstly, what is this word “possible”? Possible isn’t a physics word.”

Temporal Non-Locality and Its Implications

19:34 Temporal Non-Locality and Its Implications

But regardless, why is  it that physicists tend to focus on the spatial nonlocality compared to the temporal one?

One main reason for this is because quantum mechanics historically and still usually today is formulated as a time-evolution theory.

So the natural way to think about quantum  mechanics in its standard formulation is to  formulate it in terms of global states which carry all the information forwards in time. 

So from that point of view, if you’re trying to  model locality in that picture, perhaps the sort of natural thing to do is have a global collapse of the wave function that takes place everywhere and so to have a spatial nonlocality.

If you are  formulating quantum mechanics in a different way,  as a non-time evolution theory, then temporal nonlocality becomes much more natural and  compelling.

But that’s not the traditional way in  which we have formulated quantum mechanics.

Is the  future influencing the past an example of temporal  nonlocality?

Yes, so it could be. It depends, I think, how you think about the way in which  the future influences the past.

If, for example, your model of the future influencing the past involves some kind of like backwards evolving state that goes back and carries the information  backwards in time, you might end up with a picture  where there is a backwards influence, but it is  sort of locally mediated by a backwards evolving  state.

On the other hand, if your model of the way  in which the future influences the past is some  kind of all-at-once style model where there’s just  a sort of global constraint relating these two things to each other, in that case it is going to  look much more like temporal nonlocality because  there doesn’t need to be a sort of literal state  that goes back and carries the information.

Right.  

In your work, as I was going through it, you  differentiate between dynamical retrocausality, so influences propagating backward in time  step-by-step, and then this all-at-once, and this term “all-at-once” will come up over and over again.

I believe it’s an all-at-once temporal retrocausality.

Retrocausality: The All-at-Once Perspective

21:51 Retrocausality: The All-at-Once Perspective

But would it be called  retrocausality at that time?

At that point,  if it’s all—I guess that’s a pun—would it be  called retrocausality if it’s happening all at once?

Why is it retrocausality?

Yeah, well, I use  retrocausality in this connection just to sort of,  in a loose way, to relate what’s going on here  to sort of more traditional discussions of   retrocausality.

I think, strictly speaking, what’s  going on there is not retrocausality because I  think there’s no causality in fundamental physics. 

So, neither the forwards nor the backwards direction is truly causal.

But certainly, if  you try to look at this from a more macroscopic  point of view and you sort of write down a causal  model in which a person intervenes on something, in that sense, you’re going to get effects that  look retrocausal from that macroscopic point of view, even though I do think that you should  acknowledge that at the fundamental level, none of this is causal.

So, when  you’re thinking about all-at-once, are you also thinking about boundary conditions?

So, the ordinary way that physics is thought  about is that you have your boundary conditions  plus the laws, and you then evolve forward.

Definition of ‘All-at-Once’

So,  please define what all-at-once is.

All-at-once refers to this sort of Sudoku  universe-style idea where the laws of nature  apply to the whole of history all at once.

The one possible type of all-at-once model is a  model in which you fix the initial and the final  conditions, and then you ask the laws to determine  what happens in between.

That’s quite a   common type of problem that we see even in fairly  standard physics.

But it’s also not the only kind  of possibility.

When I talk about all-at-once  or constraint-based laws, I usually talk about  the laws of nature determining the whole history  at once.

In that sense, often it will be the  case that you can fix any state anywhere on  the history, and that will be sufficient to   fix the rest.

It could be the initial state,  could be the final state, could be one or more  states in between.

In that sense, in that kind  of picture, no particular point of time has to  be specially privileged.

It’s just the history  as a whole which is selected by the laws.

When  speaking about these histories, it reminds me of  the transaction interpretation.

Have you done any   work on the transaction interpretation, or do you  have any thoughts on it?

The transactional  interpretation is certainly interesting.

I’m  interested in these kinds of retrocausal models.  

I guess I would like to see more emphasis from  the transactional interpretation on moving away  from specific experimental situations to a more  general picture where I can understand how the  experimental situations and the observers in  particular are supposed to arise from something  more fundamental than that.

In some cases, the  transactional interpretation seems to me overly   focused on a setup where the instruments and the  observers are already given.

Tim Maudlin had a  challenge to the transactional interpretation  about how there’s some contradiction in simple   backward causal stories.

So, firstly, what is Tim  Maudlin’s objection or challenge, and what does  the all-at-once model do to resolve it?

Maudlin’s  concern was that if you imagine an experiment in  which we take some sort of preliminary measurement  in the middle of the experiment and then we use  that to determine part of the final conditions,  the final measurement we’re going to make,  that looks inconsistent with the most naive  version of the transactional interpretation   because the transactional interpretation is  supposed to take the initial and final conditions.  

Determine what happens in between so you can  make that become contradictory.

There are more  sophisticated versions of the transactional  interpretation which avoid this issue,   but I think all of them ultimately avoid this  issue by moving away from the sort of naive  story where there’s a literal transaction taking  place in some sort of temporal process and more  towards an all-at-once style picture where the  whole thing is kind of atemporal and has to be  thought of as being determined in this atemporal  sense that fixes its consistency.

So I think  ultimately, resolving that kind of problem,  both in the transactional interpretation and   in retrocausal models more generally, does seem  like it’s going to push you towards an all-at-once  style picture.”

https://egodeaththeory.org/2021/01/22/quotes-from-the-great-mystics-of-egodeath/#Control-vortex —

Martin Ball’s going to inevitably run into the Egodeath theory. And in a way, he probably already has; Ball talks about ‘the shadow’, or something like that, this kind of New-Agey term: but, that is the problem; the threat of ego death looming, in the altered state.

We can help show – in addition to the critique of Pop Sike, make it constructive and show them how they can move closer to the Egodeath theory, why the Egodeath theory is a more attractive option than their current paradigms, intellectually speaking: just for coherence; and, for providing the fullest model of what goes on in the altered state.

Because that’s really what draws us, what has drawn us to it; there’s nothing that really compares to the depth of explanation; that actually, pushing through towards the ego death, and not trying to skate around the outside and use the sacrament for some other purpose.

Cyberdisciple, Transcendent Knowledge Podcast, episode 3 (19:00)
Crop by Michael Hoffman
Crop by Michael Hoffman

We started this conversation with  talking about the largest problem that irks you,  and it was the measurement problem, and now  we’re talking about the all-at-once model.  

The Measurement Problem and All-at-Once Framework

26:25 The Measurement Problem and All-at-Once Framework

Did the measurement problem lead you to this  all-at-once quantum framework, or did you starting this all-at-once quantum framework lead  you to realize the importance of the measurement   problem?

They are separate in that the indications that the all-at-once  model is correct come partly from quantum  mechanics but also from other parts of physics,  from relativity and quantum gravity and so on.

Just adopting an all-at-once style model  does not by itself solve the measurement problem  because the measurement problem is to a large   extent about how to model observers.

Just saying  we’re going to tell an all-at-once story doesn’t  answer the question of how to model observers. 

So I do think that it seems clear to me that the   right solution to the measurement problem is  going to be some all-at-once style solution,  but there are a number of different possibilities  within that, and so I think it’s still for me open  which is the right way to do that.

“Cubism” Is Mistranscription of: QBism (Quantum Bayesianism)

Do you find cubism? Or other observer-centric interpretations  to be unsatisfactory?

I find them incoherent.

My  worry about them is that if you’re really serious  about your observer-centricity, that is going to  lead you inevitably to a picture in which every   observer kind of has their own little reality and  they’re not able to communicate with each other.  

That I think is incompatible with the practice  of science.

Science is a very social activity.  

The sort of objectivity of science rests on the  fact that we have all these different scientists doing observations and then sharing them.

So I  don’t think it’s reasonable to interpret quantum  mechanics in any way which ultimately says  we can’t actually communicate with different   observers.

I am however interested in sort of  more moderate observer-centric views which allow  that observers play an important role or that  perspectives in general play an important role,  but which nonetheless make provision for sort of  connections between perspectives to happen.

Such as relational quantum?

Observer-Centric Interpretations of Quantum Mechanics

28:24 Observer-Centric Interpretations of Quantum Mechanics

Yeah, so I mean relational quantum mechanics in its standard formulation does have the problem that I’ve just described  because it does imply that it is impossible in  an absolute sense to ever know anything about  what’s going on in anyone else’s perspective.  

But the work that I did with Carlo Rovelli  recently was about thinking about how could  you alter relational quantum mechanics to overcome  this issue.

And so we did suggest a possible way   to address that by adding a postulate which  allows communication between observers.

The Economist [promotional]

https://economist.com/toe [theories of everything]

CJ:

“Just a  moment. Don’t go anywhere. Hey, I see you inching  away. Don’t be like the economy. Instead, read The  Economist.

I thought all The Economist was was  something that CEOs read to stay up to date on   world trends. And that’s true, but that’s not only  true.

What I’ve found more than useful for myself  personally is their coverage of math, physics,  philosophy, and AI, especially how something  is perceived by other countries and how it may  impact markets.

For instance, The Economist had an  interview with some of the people behind DeepSeek  the week DeepSeek was launched. No one else had  that.

Another example is The Economist has this  fantastic article on the recent dark energy data which surpasses even Scientific American’s  coverage, in my opinion.

They also have the chart  of everything. It’s like the chart version of  this channel.

It’s something which is a pleasure   to scroll through and learn from.

Links to all of  these will be in the description, of course.

The Word “Now, ” Is on the Egodeath Block List; the Instructor’s Equivalent of the “So, ” Virus (Verbal Tic)

Now, The Economist’s commitment to rigorous journalism  means that you get a clear picture of the world’s  most significant developments.

I am personally  interested in the more scientific ones,  like this one on extending life via mitochondrial  transplants, which creates actually a new field  of medicine, something that would make Michael  Levin proud.

The Economist also covers culture,  finance and economics, business, international  affairs, Britain, Europe, the Middle East, Africa,  China, Asia, the Americas, and of course, the USA. 

Whether it’s the latest in scientific innovation  or the shifting landscape of global politics,  The Economist provides comprehensive coverage,  and it goes far beyond just headlines.

“Look, ” Is a Junk Filler Word

Look, if  you’re passionate about expanding your knowledge   and gaining a new understanding, a deeper one,  of the forces that shape our world, then I  highly recommend subscribing to The Economist.

I  subscribe to them, and it’s an investment into my,  into your, intellectual growth. It’s one that  you won’t regret.

As a listener of this podcast,  you’ll get a special 20% off discount.

Now  you can enjoy The Economist and all it has to  offer for less.

Head over to their website,  http://www.economist.com slash TOE, T-O-E, to get  started.

Thanks for tuning in, and now let’s  get back to

the exploration of the mysteries  of our universe.

Again, that’s economist.com slash  TOE.

https://economist.com/toe [theories of everything]

How Do You Think about Probabilities?

How is it that you think about probabilities?  

Like there are different interpretations of  probabilities.

Forget about quantum mechanics.  

There are different interpretations of what a  probability is.

So in metaphysics and in science, how do you think about probability?

Probabilities in Physics

31:29 Probabilities in Physics

Yeah, I think  the interpretation of probability is a very hard  

problem. I think I’m not wholly satisfied with any  of the approaches that we have available to us.  

The sort of frequentist approaches are useful  in many cases, but have pretty significant  philosophical problems for accounting for certain  kinds of edge cases. Subjective Bayesianism,  I think, just doesn’t do justice to the fact  that certain probabilities do seem to be out   there in the world and not just in our minds. 

The sort of dispositionalist accounts are quite  mysterious and also very hard to reconcile with  all-at-once style physics.

There are a couple of  recent approaches that I’m very interested in. 

Frequentism: Anything “CAN” Cause Psilocybin Effects, but How Frequently DOES it? 0%, not 50% as Falsely Implied

There’s a view called gnomic frequentism due to   someone called John Roberts, which suggests that  probabilities should be understood in terms of  laws which require that frequencies should look a  certain way.

There’s some really nice work on this  recently by Eddie Chen and John Barrett looking  at the ways in which you could potentially expand  on that and think about probabilities as sort of  constraints on relative frequencies.

While that  work is still ongoing, I think that’s a really  interesting direction and probably the most  promising approach from my point of view. 

What do you mean?

What is Eddie Chen saying   that probabilities should look a certain way? 

What does that mean?

The Process Matrix and Causal Structures

32:51 The Process Matrix and Causal Structures

This is working within the sort of all-at-once style constraint-based view  of laws.

The observation is that if you allow  that laws are global constraints which apply to the whole of history, then you can formulate a   probabilistic law as saying something like, the  relative frequency of occurrences of some outcome  across all instances of this type of measurement  across all of history must have some value or must  fall in some range.

You can think of the laws  or probabilities as directly constraining the  relative frequencies that actually occur.

That’s  somewhat similar in spirit to the frequentist   approaches, but I think avoids some of the more  serious problems for frequentism because it’s  not just saying that probabilities are whatever  the frequencies should happen to be.

It really is   saying that the laws constrain the frequencies  and require them to have certain values.  

How does your approach compare with Shelley  Goldstein’s approach?

The approach that Eddie  Chen and Shelley Goldstein have worked on in terms  of laws is, I think, very similar in spirit to  mine.

Indeed, Eddie and I are working on a project  examining some of those similarities.

But perhaps  one difference is that they are inclined to think  of those all-at-once constraints as a fundamental  primitive, whereas I perhaps prefer to think  of them as being a form of modal structure in  accordance with a generally structurally realist approach to physics and to laws.

But I don’t think  those views are necessarily incompatible  with each other.

They’re more a difference   of emphasis.

[that sounds like how recently, I’ve been adjusting the relative emphasis of integrated possibilism/eternalism thinking; good news & bad news of enlightenment, etc. -Michael Hoffman ]

Modal: Facts about What Is Possible and Impossible

What’s a modal structure?

What does  that mean?

Modal is a word that philosophers  use to refer to facts about what is possible and  impossible.

Perhaps the most well-known example of  modal structure is causal structure.

So, that’s  one form that modal structure can take.

Because  I don’t think causation is fundamental, I don’t  think that can be the most general type of modal  structure.

But I do think the world has some other  kind of structure, which is in some way similar to  causal structure, but perhaps more general than  that.

And so, that’s where I would expect those  all-at-once constraints to live. Modal structure. 

So, modal comes from philosophy. It’s not a term  you hear in theoretical physics. Now, it is when  you start to study the foundations of physics  or the foundations of quantum mechanics.

But I’m  curious how philosophical tools, such as modalism  or analyzing determinism or realism, has guided  your research?

There’s a useful back and forth to be had here.

I think  that modern theoretical physics has important lessons for a variety of traditional philosophical  discussions.

This discussion about lawhood is a  great example.

Both me and Eddie and Shelley are  inspired by noting that traditional philosophical  accounts of lawhood don’t seem to do a very good  job of accommodating the kinds of laws we see in   modern physics.

Two-Way Inspiration between Physics & Philosophy

And I think there’s a useful  sort of flow of information backwards as well,  because using these philosophical tools and doing  the work to analyze, okay, so what are laws now?  

How can we understand the types of laws we’re  seeing in modern physics?

That’s a useful way   of clarifying our thoughts about what’s going  on in theoretical physics, understanding what  are useful directions for future research,  and understanding how we can connect those  developments back up to the kinds of things we’re  concerned with in philosophy and in everyday life.  

CJ:

Do you encounter the attitude from physicists  that, hey, physics, experimental physics,  theoretical physics, it doesn’t need anything  from philosophy?

Philosophy hasn’t contributed anything to science in the past 100 years other  than maybe Popper, and before that it was a while, and you can’t just count Aristotle, that was  thousands of years ago.

So do you encounter   that attitude?

Emily Adlam:

I think there’s a wide spectrum  of attitudes within physics. I mean, I certainly  have encountered people with that attitude, but  I’ve also encountered many physicists who love   philosophy and are very interested in it and are  very keen to talk to philosophers.

So while that  attitude does exist, I think there’s also plenty  of goodwill and interest in both communities to  talk to each other and make progress.

CJ:

What would  be the counterpoint to someone who’s saying that  philosophy hasn’t contributed directly to physics in the past few decades?

EA:

Definitely the most  obvious example I would say is Bell’s theorem and  the discussion around non-locality.

Bell’s theorem  was very much regarded as not mainstream physics  when it was formulated, and Bell was a physicist,  but other people involved in the discussion  of non-locality and pushing this forward,  like Shimoni, were not physicists, they were  primarily philosophers.

Certainly, I think   this topic probably got more of a foothold within  philosophy before it moved back into mainstream  physics, but now it’s certainly recognized as  mainstream physics.

The Nobel Prize was awarded  for it recently.

So I think that’s an example  of a case where topics that were considered   sort of foundational and conceptual were worked  on within philosophy for a while, but ultimately  became recognized as part of mainstream physics.  So what got you interested in philosophy?

Foundations of Physics and Philosophy

38:33 Foundations of Physics and Philosophy

Did you  start in physics or did you start in philosophy? 

My undergrad was in both physics and philosophy,  so I guess both.

I’ve always been very interested  in physics and in science, but my questions have  

always been more on the side of what is considered  to be foundational physics or philosophy of  physics.

I think it was a toss-up for a long time  whether I was going to be a physicist working on   the foundations of physics or a philosopher.  My PhD is actually in physics, not philosophy,  but in the end, I think perhaps the kind of work I  want to do feels like it lives more happily within   philosophy. So that’s why I ended up here.

And  what does foundations mean? So when someone says  they study the foundations of something.

That means something to do with  interested in the sort of more basic conceptual  questions and looking at the sort of underlying  structures and perhaps understanding why the  theory is the way it is or understanding basic  principles of the theory. It’s sort of a contrast  to more applied approaches.

If you study  the foundations of quantum mechanics, you’re not  going to be primarily working on how to build new  quantum technologies.

You’re going to be thinking  about the structure of the theory and what it all   means. And perhaps those results will eventually  go on to be useful in quantum technologies. They  often do.

But if you’re working in foundations,  that’s not your sort of primary focus.  

So what I enjoy about your work is that much  like Jacob Barandes is, you emphasize clarity of  concepts and principles as a guide to progress. 

Taxonomy for Physics Beyond Quantum Mechanics (Adlam, Hance, Hossenfelder, Palmer; June 2024)

You actually co-authored a paper last year,  if I’m not mistaken, with Sabine Hossenfelder and  Tim Palmer, both of whom have been on the podcast  before.

So I’ll put a link to that on screen  and in the description.

Taxonomy for Physics Beyond Quantum Mechanics
Emily Adlam, Jonte R. Hance, Sabine Hossenfelder, and Tim N. Palmer
June 2024
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2309.12293

The paper is called a  taxonomy of physics for quantum theory or beyond  quantum theory.

It’s something that everyone  should read if they’re interested in physics.

And  if you follow this podcast, you can follow that   paper.

So there are different concepts that are  explained there with precision.

I’ve heard local beables be described as ontological entities.

And  I believe you said it’s something like the input  value on a C model that’s assigned to a compact  region of space-time.

And you explained what   a C model is. I think it’s a calculation model,  if I’m not mistaken.

So anyhow, what led you to  write that paper?

This paper arose out of a  conference on retrocausality and superdeterminism.  

Retrocausality and superdeterminism are two  approaches that people have often tried to  use in order to avoid the conclusion that quantum  mechanics might be nonlocal.

So this conference  was kind of discussing those possibilities.

Can  you get rid of nonlocality using one of these   methods?

And I think what we discovered is that  there were a variety of different ways in which  people were using the words retrocausality  and superdeterminism.

And there was a sort  of problem where people were talking past each  other because they were just using these words  in different ways.

So the goal of this paper was  to sort of provide a clarifying story which would  help explain what’s going on with these terms  and perhaps can we have a sort of community-wide  consensus about how to use these words so we can  have discussions more clearly.

[like Kafei tripping on my 2007+ attempted redefinition of ‘determinism’ to mean eternalism]

When people hear  temporal nonlocality, how is that different  than time travel?

Time travel, much  like retrocausality, could be temporally local or  temporally nonlocal.

If your vision of time travel  involves people literally moving backwards in time  – sorry, the cat is eating it – and those people  literally traveling backwards in time, that’s  going to look like a temporally local form of   time travel if there’s a sort of literal path back  in time that they go around.

On the other hand, if  they just kind of disappear at one point and then  reappear at another point, that’s going to look   temporally nonlocal because it’s a sort of cause  that just jumped across time.

So I think either of  those is possible as a model of time travel. 

Free Will

Does any of this have to do with free will?

Certainly.

If you look at the all-at-once style of model, that does seem like it has some  implications for free will because some people  have thought that something that’s important to  free will is the idea that the future is genuinely  open, that in this moment as I am acting, there is no fact of the matter about what my action is  going to be.

[Diary of a Madman album, Ozzy Osbourne:
Believer, lyrics by Bob Daisley, 1981:

DESTINY PLANNED OUT
SPECULATION OF THE WISE

end of song Believer]

Photo: Michael Hoffman, April 12, 2025

And in an all-at-once style model, that way of thinking about free will is not  available to you.

The whole of the universe exists at once.

I’m acting now, but there is already some fact from the atemporal point of view about what my action is going to be.

[pre-existence of future control-thoughts]

So I don’t think that means we have to say “there is no such thing as free will“ in that context.

But certainly, we’re  going to have to be a bit more careful about how  we analyze free will and what that means.

So this  doesn’t depend on determinism.

[correct: eternalism is the case, regardless of whether causal-chain determinism / domino-chain causality is the case, as the mechanism by which the future is closed – find “random” in Self-control Cybernetics, Dissociative Cognition, & Mystic Ego Death (1997 core theory spec):
https://egodeaththeory.org/2020/11/30/self-control-cybernetics-dissociative-cognition-mystic-ego-death/#budaac — Michael Hoffman wrote in Feb. 1997:
“Conventional determinism overemphasizes predictability in principle and perfect seamlessness of the chain of cause and effect, and cannot tolerate the slightest bit of true randomness or disjoint in the chain of cause and effect. More relevant to discovering ego-transcendence is that each point on any timeline is predetermined, and the future permanently exists, elsewhere in the spacetime block. The hypothesis about the eternally unbroken causal chain, in which the past eventually controls the future, is excessive, delicate, and irrelevant to higher experience. Even if there is some true randomness in the world, the future remains predetermined, because of the illusory nature of the flow of time, and the inability to the ego-entity to be an ultimate origin of its own thoughts and choices.” etc, see entire section -Michael Hoffman]

[per Kafei misreading Egodeath.com / The Entheogen Theory of Religion and Ego Death (Hoffman, 2007 main article) http://egodeath.com/EntheogenTheoryOfReligion.htm & https://egodeaththeory.wordpress.com/the-entheogen-theory-of-religion-and-ego-death-2006-main-article/ ,
EVERYONE defines “determinism” as causal-chain determinism, never as eternalism.]

It’s just saying  that there’s something that’s globally fixed? 

Yeah.

So even if you have a probabilistic model  in the all-at-once context, what that’s going to  look like is either it’s going to be some kind of  frequency constraint, as Eddie Chen has suggested,  or perhaps it’s going to be the course of history  is selected in a probabilistic way from some  set of possibilities.

But either way, you end up saying the course of history is determined all at  once.

So there’s no sense in which I’m acting now,  and yet my future actions are still open, even if they’re probabilistic. They have, from this atemporal point of view, already been chosen.

Calvinism

CJ:

I remember, oh gosh, I forgot who it was.  Someone was saying, it could be the  Calvinists.

Maybe it was a religion, or maybe it was an actual philosopher, was saying  that if you have trajectories in space-time,  just because they exist and you can view it  from a God’s-eye point of view atemporally,  

it doesn’t mean that those trajectories cause the  movement. Those trajectories are the movement.  Sorry, are the trajectory.

So an agent can still  be causal.

There’s nothing about the trajectories  causing. The laws don’t cause.

So can you please  distinguish between

  • the determination of an agent  
    and
  • causal origination of an agent?

Yeah.

So  because I think that causation is not fundamental  in any case, I think that understanding how the  history comes about is not going to involve any  kind of causal story.

That’s going to be some  more general kind of modal constraint, perhaps,  that selects the history.

I mean,

Causation is something that appears at a much higher level of description and probably is only going to be  relevant in the kinds of regimes where you have agents taking actions.

So I think it’s perfectly  possible to say, in some sort of fundamental  sense, the history was already there and was  selected in an all-at-once way.

But nonetheless, the agent is the cause of their action because  causation is only suitable in that kind of regime of description anyway.

And so it is still true. 

Insofar as there is such a thing as causation, it’s still true that the agent is causing their actions.

[say “the sense in which”; avoid saying eg “the agent is illusion, causality is illusion, time is illusion, my intelligence is an illusion”]

CJ:

Right. What do you disagree most with, Carla Rovellion?

What I disagree  most with?

I think we still have  an ongoing debate about whether it’s necessary  to change relational quantum mechanics in the way   that we suggested.

So we proposed a postulate that  you can add to the theory which makes it possible  for observers to communicate with each other in  an absolute sense and for their perspectives to   become aligned in an absolute sense.

Carlo, I  think, is not convinced that’s necessary.

He  thinks perhaps it’s enough that there’s a sort of,  it’s relationally true that within my perspective,  it seems as though I have access to your  perspective and he thinks that might be adequate.  

For me, I think that doesn’t solve the kinds of  epistemic worries I have about the role of social  inquiry in science.

So I think the absolute story  is necessary, but this is an ongoing debate.

Now,  many derivations in physics rely on integration  by parts, and then they have this argument that, and the boundary terms are zero, and  because of that, we get so-and-so.  

Are there times when these surface terms are  ordinarily set to vanish, but because of your  work on all at once, you believe that to be  an unreasonable assumption?

Oh gosh, that’s an  interesting question.

I actually have not thought  about that.

Seems very possible, but I would have   to think more about the technical details  before I could say one way or another. Okay,  what is self-location?

So self-location refers  to scenarios in which you are uncertain about  your location within the universe.

So you might  be uncertain where you are or when you are, or if  you’re in a multiverse, you might be uncertain  about which universe within the multiverse you   are currently located in.

So it’s those kinds  of questions pertaining to a location within a  universe. And there’s something between pure and  superficial, if I’m not mistaken.

What are those?  

Yeah, so when we talk about self-locating  uncertainty in philosophy or in physics,  I think there are two important, broadly different  classes of self-locating uncertainty that we   should distinguish between.

So what I call pure  self-locating uncertainty refers to cases where  you are uncertain about what location you are  out of a possible class of locations which are  all located within the same world. So for  example, Adam Elga’s case falls into that  bracket.

Two Dr. Evils (Like the Good M. Hoffman vs. the Evil M. Hoffman in the Field of Entheogen Scholarship)

That’s a case in which Dr. Evil, or  a person who believes himself to be Dr. Evil,  receives a credible message telling him that  a subjectively identical duplicate has been   made of Dr. Evil and placed somewhere.

So in  that case, he’s now uncertain whether he is  in fact the real Dr. Evil or the duplicate, but  both of those people exist within one and the   same world.

So that is pure self-locating  uncertainty. By contrast, superficially  self-locating uncertainty refers to the case  where you’re uncertain about your location,   but the possible locations you could be in belong  to different possible worlds.

Possible Worlds

So for example,  suppose you wake up and you haven’t looked at  the clock yet, so you don’t know what time it is.  

You’re uncertain about your location in time, but  of course in every possible world there’s exactly  one time at which you actually wake up, and so the  different possible times you could be located in  belong to different possible worlds corresponding  to those different possible times you could wake   up.

So that’s, I think, an importantly different  type of self-location. Is this related to the  sleeping beauty paradox?

The sleeping  beauty paradox in fact involves a mixture of  pure and superficially self-locating uncertainty. 

So I think the correct way to analyze that is to  appeal to your scientific theory to determine the  superficially self-locating credences and then to  assign the pure credences any way you want.

So the  outcome is that the correct solution is the double  half a solution.

Okay, well it’d be useful for you  to outline what the paradox is at this point and  then why you think the solution is the double half  one.

Okay, yeah.

The sleeping beauty paradox  refers to a scenario in which an experiment is  being performed on you.

You’re going to be put  to sleep and then you’ll be woken up either once  or twice in the course of the experiment.

We will  decide which one it is based on the outcome of  a coin flip. So we flip the coin and if it lands  heads then you’ll be woken once on Monday and  if it lands on tails then you’ll be woken twice  on Monday and Tuesday.

So the question is about  what credences should you assign to the outcome  of the coin toss? Should you assign and do the  credences change if you’re woken up and then told  what day it is?

So various different approaches  have been taken to try to decide what the correct  assignation of probabilities is. Most philosophers  I think are of the view that when you learn  something about what day it is you ought to change  your credences.

My view is that because the coin  flip issue is a superficially self-locating issue  whereas the issues about when you are located are  pure, the outcome is that the further information  shouldn’t change any of your assignations  of credences because the right way to assign  credences in these situations is always to assign  the superficial self-location credences first and  then having done that arrange your pure credences  as you would like.

That means that the pure  information isn’t going to change the superficial   information and so the probability is always going  to be half regardless of waking up.

Now was there  something about when they say you get woken up  twice that after you get woken up once you take  something to forget that you woke up once? Yes,  you are not going to know that you’ve woken up   at once or twice. Now what does any of this have  to do with physical law?

Yeah, so self-location  is important to physical law particularly in  the context of physical theories that deal with  multiverses.

So in particular the cosmological  multiverse and the many worlds interpretation of  quantum mechanics has a multiverse and in both of  these multiverses in order to make certain kinds   of predictions it’s necessary that you assign some  credences over locations within the multiverse.  

You have to assign probabilities to which universe  you might be within this multiverse and so all of  those approaches to making predictions in  a multiverse are kind of predicated on the  assumption that there is in fact some objectively  right or uniquely correct way to assign your  self-locating credences over parts of the  multiverse.

And so therefore they are necessarily  predicated on the claim that there are unique  ways to assign pure self-locating credences.  

There’s a right way to do it and there’s a wrong  way to do it.

So I think that’s wrong.

I think  that for superficially self-locating credences  there are right ways to assign them because  those credences can just be inherited from a  scientific theory but in the pure case there   is nothing whatsoever which could compel you or  constrain you to assign your credences in any  particular way.

So any assignation of credences  is fine and therefore you’re not going to be able   to get meaningful predictions out of any theory  which involves this kind of multiverse reasoning.  

So if I’m right about that, that’s a serious  problem both for the cosmological multiverse and for the many worlds interpretation of quantum  mechanics because it seems to say that we can’t  make meaningful predictions in that context and  we therefore can’t obtain any sensible evidence   for scientific theories in that context because  there’s nothing to sort of predict and then see  if it comes true.

Sean Carroll

https://www.google.com/search?q=%22Sean+Carroll%22

I’m sure you’ve spoken to Sean Carroll about this. So have you and what has he  said or what do you think he would say?

Emily Adlam:

I have  not spoken to Sean Carroll about this. I know that  Carroll has a view of the multiverse which and  of the Everettian multiverse in particular which  is based on the idea that certain constraints on  self-locating credences can help tell you how to  assign probabilities in the Everettian case.

I do  think this view says that approach is wrong. There  are no rational constraints on self-locating  credences in the Everettian scenario and so   any model which sort of takes that as a starting  point I think cannot be right.

CJ:

I believe in 1907,  if I’m not mistaken, Einstein had his happiest  thought about free fall and weightlessness.

Have  you had a happiest thought? A happiest thought? I  think one moment I’d pick out is there’s a theorem  in quantum foundations called the PBR theorem.

The  PBR theorem is about the reality of the quantum  state.

It attempts to prove that if in order  to reproduce all of the predictions of quantum  mechanics it must be the case that the quantum  state is a real objective thing which travels   through time conveying information from one time  to another.

I think thinking about this theorem,  one thing that struck me was that the whole  theorem was predicated on the assumption of what I would call temporal locality.

“Temporal Locality” (vs. Usual, Spatial Locality)

It’s predicated  on the assumption that if a measurement result  depends on earlier preparation there must be  something which travels between them carrying  that information from one point to another.

That  I think was the origin of most of my work on  temporal non-locality was the observation  that there’s this significant assumption being made in this theorem that is perhaps not  being questioned in the way that it should be.  

Presentism vs. Eternalism

Do you have any thoughts about eternalism versus  presentism?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6I2OhmVWLMs&t=3350s = 55:50

Can you please briefly define those  terms?

Yeah, so presentism is a philosophical view  which says that in some sense only the present is  real. The past and the future are not currently  real.

Eternalism says that the whole of history  is real at once.

There’s no sort of privileged  present moment.

[more relevantly, eternalism says:

  • no branching possibilities as claimed by possibilism.
  • 2-level, dependent control, not monolithic, autonomous control.]

It’s all there.

As you might  expect given my views on all at once physics, I’m definitely more on the eternalist side.

I  think it’s very hard to make presentism [ought to discuss possibilism branching manyworlds instead] work in  a way that is compatible with relativity because  relativity denies that there exists a global  present.

So it’s kind of unclear what the present even is in that picture.

People have made attempts  to sort of reformulate presentism in relativistic  ways, but I think all of them feel a bit ad hoc  and not very compelling to me.

So certainly in the context of what we know about physics now, eternalism seems to me much more viable. [than stupid pointless presentism – BUT WHAT ABOUT POSSIBILISM?]

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QBism (“Cubism”) vs. Manyworlds

[“Cubism” Is Mistranscription of: QBism (Quantum Bayesianism)]

We talked about cubism, transactional,  many worlds.

What other interpretation of  quantum mechanics have we not talked about  that you feel fails significantly, and why does  it fail?

Well, the obvious ones are the sort of  primitive ontology approaches, so the Bohmian  approach and the spontaneous collapse approach.  

You know, I wouldn’t say these approaches  fail.

What I’d say is that, at present,   we don’t know how to reproduce the whole of  quantum field theory in these kinds of approaches,  and there are reasons to think we may never be  able to do that, or that it’s very difficult   to do that in the context of this particular  kind of view.

So, you know, never say never,  but right now I’m not sure the prospects for  expanding those to cover all of quantum theory  look very good, and, you know, until we can show  that that can be done, that’s a sort of compelling  reason to be worried about those approaches.

So  what’s on your mind these days, research-wise?  Research-wise, so I have been thinking about, one thing I’ve been thinking about is a problem  in relational quantum mechanics.

So there’s this  worry, relational quantum mechanics is committed  to the view that all physical systems can, in some  sense, count as observers. They can have quantum  states defined relative to them.

There’s a worry  brought up by Caslav Brukner that it doesn’t make  sense to say something like a qubit is an observer  because there’s no way to get a well-defined basis  in which a qubit could make an observation.

So  you just couldn’t get a well-defined observed  value out of an interaction involving a qubit. So  I think he’s right about that as an objection. I  think the way to resolve this is to appreciate  that the description of the world relative to  a qubit is not going to be a full quantum Hilbert  space.

It’s not going to be as complicated as that   because a qubit just doesn’t have the right enough  physical resources to define that kind of relative  description.

So I’ve been trying to think about  what would be a sensible way of formulating what  the world does look like relative to a qubit, and  thus of sort of understanding what the range of  observations that something like a qubit could  make might look like.

Do you then generalize  a quantum system to a process matrix?

Why don’t  you define what a process matrix is?

Great. Yeah,  so

Process matrices are a tool developed  within quantum foundations recently to study  causal processes more general than those we  would encounter in our ordinary space-time.  

So the idea here is that we’ll start with a set  of laboratories in which agents can do various  actions, and we’ll write down a description of  the way in which these laboratories are related  to each other.

But we will not require that  these laboratories have any sort of specific   space-time location, and so we won’t require  that their relationships are constrained by  the causal structure of ordinary space-time.

The  only constraint we’ll put on them is that it has   to be logically consistent, so they have to be  related to each other in ways that won’t produce  logical contradictions.

So what we can do then is  end up with a description of a class of possible  causal processes, which is much more general than  what we would normally encounter in the world, and  that is potentially going to give us an idea of  what kinds of processes might perhaps be possible,  for example, in certain regimes of quantum gravity  where space-time in the ordinary sense breaks down   or is perhaps not present.

The process matrix  is another way of formulating or thinking about  quantum mechanics, or what?

Or thinking about the  wave function or density matrices?

Process  matrices are quantum innate here, but they are  much more general than ordinary quantum mechanics,  because in ordinary quantum mechanics we  would tell a story in which you start with   a state and just evolve forwards and produce  everything in a well-defined temporal order.  

Process matrices retain aspects of the quantum  formalism, but get rid of that evolution story,  so we’re not requiring that you can sort of tell  a story about the temporal unfolding of how one  laboratory leads to the next laboratory and so  on.

You allow much more general possibilities  for how those laboratories could be related to  each other.

Do you derive the Born rule, or do  you have to assume it? Do you have to postulate  it somehow? In the process matrix formalism,  it’s not clear that the Born rule is even used. 

I think certainly understanding where the Born  rule fits into that picture is an ongoing  project that hasn’t yet been fully resolved.  But with that said, you can also formulate an  equivalent of the process matrix formalism in  purely classical physics.

It’s called the process  function formalism. So that’s perhaps conceptually   a bit clearer.

You don’t have to worry about  the Born rule and measurements, but you still  have this idea that you can think about general  causal processes without necessarily imposing a  pre-existing spacetime structure on them.

What’s  Humean supervenience, and what is its relation  to asymmetric dependence?

Humean supervenience is  the idea that the world is just a distribution of  categorical properties over spacetime. It’s just  one thing and another thing and another thing.  

There’s no deeper structural connections. And  so everything else, including things like the  laws of nature and the facts about causation, have  to, in some sense, depend on or supervene on this  distribution of of actual facts.

So, for example, the Humeans will say that the laws of nature don’t  make things be the way they are.

All the laws  are just sort of convenient descriptions of  the way things happen to be.

They’re just the best  systematization of whatever has actually happened.  

In your model, what’s at the ground?

What do you  take as your ontological commitments?

The way I formulate that in the past  is we start from some space of possible courses of history, which might be an ensemble of Humean  mosaics composed of distributions of facts across  spacetime.

Michael Hoffman, March 2014
Michael Hoffman, March 2014

And then we have constraints which  determine which elements of that set are allowed  by the laws of nature.

And then some element of  that set is going to be selected and made actual.  So we have a sort of space of possibilities,  the constraints narrow down the possibilities, and then one constraint is somehow selected. 

I think there’s more work to be done here on  understanding what the space of possibilities look  like and how the space of possibilities is related to the constraints and to the properties that we  see in our everyday lives.

Crop by Michael Hoffman

But that’s the general   picture, that you have possibilities narrowed down  and then one is going to be selected.

The Emergence of Space-Time

1:05:16 The Emergence of Space-Time

So spacetime  would emerge from possibilities plus constraints? 

Yeah, I think the story that we should tell about  spacetime here is certainly still a work in  progress.

In my previous work on the subject,  I’ve just kind of taken spacetime as given and  imagined, let’s select the constraints are just  going to tell you how things are distributed  across spacetime.

But certainly that I think   can’t be the right final answer, because modern  physics and particularly quantum gravity tells  us that spacetime probably emerges from something  more fundamental.

So I think ultimately that the right story is going to be more complex than that. 

But exactly how to formulate that is not clear,  partly because the quantum gravity itself is not  fully formulated and there’s still a lot of open questions to be resolved there.

What would it  be that selects the specific dimensionality and signature, like three plus one? [3 space dims, 1 time dim]

Yes, that’s  a great question.

Ultimately, I think at least  some aspects of the way spacetime is have got to  come from consistency constraints.

So for example,  using the process matrix formalism, for example,  you can see that there’s going to be a need.  

If you want to have consistency, there’s usually  going to be a need for things to occur in some  well-defined order.

And a well-defined order  stops processes from looping back on themselves  and producing contradictions.

So I think from  those kinds of consistency constraints, you  can get already the idea that there’s got to be  some kind of something like a temporal dimension,   which is different from the spatial dimensions. 

I also think you can get the idea that it needs  to have a sort of a relativistic spacetime  structure from the observation that if you   have superluminal signaling, for example, you can  use that to create a loop which goes around and  which could then also be used to create logical  contradictions.

So consistency is also going to  give you something like the light cone structure  of spacetime.

I don’t know yet how to get exactly  three dimensions out of that.

It would be great  if there were a way to get that as a consistency  condition as well. I’m not sure what that would  look like, but certainly I think many aspects of   spacetime structure can be understood in that  sort of basic way as consistency conditions.  

Do you imagine that you’ll be able to derive  any of the fundamental constants from global   laws?

Or is there still, let’s say alpha or  g, or is there still going to be some residual  contingency leaving room for why these structures? 

Yeah, that’s a great question.

Strong Determinism

So Eddie Chen has  written before about this idea called strong determinism, which is the idea that maybe the laws of nature are so strong that they actually  dictate the whole course of history uniquely and  there’s only one possibility.

Photo Credit Julie M. Brown.
April 10, 2022 image processing & crop by Cybermonk. full body.

That’s in some ways  an old idea. Leibniz hoped for something like that  as well.

It doesn’t seem obvious to me how to get  there from the laws that we currently know.

And  I’m skeptical that we could possibly know all of  the constraints, even if they do exist, a set of constraints that strong.

But in principle, I  think that it’s certainly possible that there  are constraint-based laws that we perhaps haven’t  arrived at yet and might be able to arrive at one  day, which would give an explanation of some of those things.

Exploring Correlations in Physical Parameters

1:08:11 Exploring Correlations in Physical Parameters

Do you imagine there would  be specific correlations between seemingly  unrelated physical parameters?

Certainly,  

it’s very, very possible. I mean, it’s a bit hard  to speculate because we don’t have much of a sense  of what that would look like.

But certainly, if we  could give explanations for relationships between  the values of things, that would be a very,  I think, compelling piece of evidence that   this way of thinking is right.

So it’s certainly  something to look for.

Are you more interested  in the philosophy of physics specifically or more  broadly into the philosophy of science?

What about  metaphysics?

What about ethics?

Yes, I do focus  largely on the philosophy of physics because my  training is in physics.

But I think many of the  questions we are talking about in the philosophy   of physics have really interesting implications  for more general questions in the philosophy of  science.

So these questions about the nature  of lawhood, for example, and I think once you  move to an all-at-once style account of laws,  that’s going to have implications for a lot of other traditional philosophical questions about  things like causation, explanation, determinism,  and so on, free will.

So although my focus comes  from physics, a lot of that expands more generally into philosophy of science and also metaphysics because these questions about lawhood, causation,  explanation do also link to metaphysics.

Ethics,  I’m very interested in ethics. I’ve never worked  on it professionally, though.

Cool.

Advice for Young Upcoming Researchers in the Field of Physics and Philosophy

Do you have  any advice for young upcoming researchers in  the field of physics and philosophy?

I think  my biggest piece of advice would be to work  on the things that you love and are interested  in. I think there can be a pressure to work on  something that is currently one of the hot topics  or that is getting lots of attention in the field  at the time.

But ultimately, I think what’s most  rewarding and what will be successful in the long   run is for you to pursue the things that you care  about and do the work that you’re interested in.  

It might take a little bit longer to get  attention, but I think it’s better to ultimately  establish that program of things that you really  care about rather than feeling you have to do   research on a certain topic because it’s popular. 

What’s some topic that’s underappreciated?

What’s some topic that’s underappreciated that you  think should be more appreciated?

So I’ll give you  an example of something that’s a hot topic right   now, black holes, supermassive black holes and  time travel or time dilation, etc.

And those are  said ad nauseum in these popular science circles.  So what’s something else that you think people   should be paying more attention to?

Epistemology of the Measurement Problem

1:10:44 Epistemology of the Measurement Problem

I’m on a bit  of a crusade to get people to pay more attention to the epistemology of the measurement problem.

I  think when we talk about the measurement problem,  it often gets framed in terms of ontology, in  terms of we need to know what is really there   and what is really happening.

Whereas for me, I  think the measurement problem is really important precisely because it ties to questions about  how could we possibly know the things we are  supposed to know?

How can we make sense of the  empirical confirmation associated with quantum  mechanics?

And I think that a number of very  popular interpretations of quantum mechanics   have really big problems answering those  kinds of questions.

So particularly the many worlds interpretation and the observer relative  interpretations have really bad epistemic problems and I think do not do a good job of answering  these epistemic issues.

So I really like to   see our discussions of the measurement problem  focus more on these questions of you’ve got to  make the epistemology coherent and consistent  within itself.

And I think that’s a good way  of kind of narrowing down the possibilities and  understanding what a viable solution looks like.  

Can you repeat these epistemological  questions that you think people or physicists or foundational physicists should be thinking  about?

Yeah, I mean the fundamental question is  that when we’re thinking about how to interpret  quantum mechanics, it is I think essential that  our interpretation tells a consistent story about how we could have come to know about the theory.

So for example, I think the many worlds interpretation has a real problem with this because the many worlds interpretation  has difficulty giving meaning to assignations  of probability to measurement outcomes.

And in  particular, it seems hard in the many worlds context to justify the claim that you should  expect to see high probability outcomes.

But if  you can’t expect to see high probability outcomes,  then you can’t use the outcomes you have observed to as evidence for the theory, because you have no  idea whether the outcome is one that’s assigned a  high or a low probability by the theory.

So you  can’t like connect it back up to the structure of the theory you’re trying to find out about.

So  I think that’s a very serious epistemic problem.  

CJ:

Lessons in Patience and Persistence

1:13:26 Lessons in Patience and Persistence

What’s a lesson, Emily, that you wish you had  learned earlier that if you could tell your younger self, it would be beneficial?

I think  probably as many people would tell their younger  selves, I would counsel patience that it takes this kind of thing.

Research definitely takes  time and work and you will fail many times and  many things will not go anywhere.

And I think  you have to be persistent and hang on and have  faith that in the long run, you’re going to come  to interesting results.

And people will eventually  come to be interested in what you’re doing. And   it does come eventually.

It just takes time.

It doesn’t happen immediately.

CJ:

So was there a time,  maybe a year, three years, four years where  people weren’t interested in your work and  that frustrated you or made you downcast?

Emily Adlam:

I think  for some time I was worried that the kind of work I was doing was not going to be mainstream enough for me to be able to make a career in the field.

I actually left academia for a few years and worked  outside of it because I was pessimistic about  whether I could do the kind of work I wanted to  do and be in the field.

But eventually some of the  things I was doing, I did get positive feedback  on and that I think was enough to encourage me  to come back and keep working on this stuff.

And I don’t regret that.

I think that was the right decision.

But yeah, looking back, perhaps if I’d  understood the need for patience, that could have  been avoided.

CJ:

Tell me about that. So you left  academia for a while and then were you still  publishing while you were outside?

EA:

Yeah, I did. In  my PhD, I mostly published on pure physics topics.  

After finishing, I left academia but continued to  think about particularly more philosophical topics  and to publish and to write on those things. 

And eventually I think I came to the realization  that clearly this is what I should be doing  professionally.

And so then sort of…

I wanted to switch from the more physics side into the more philosophy side.

How did you get back in?

Yeah,  it wasn’t straightforward, especially because I was looking for philosophy positions and had physics qualifications.

But the people at the  University of Western Ontario were very helpful  and encouraging and found a way to bring me there and allow me to do a postdoc there.

That was a  very, very productive time, really fantastic.

So  that was my route back into the field.

Thank You

CJ:

Well, it’s  fantastic speaking with you.

Thank you so much for  spending your time with me.

Yeah, it was really fun.

Thank you.

Cheers.

Curt Jaimungal Resources

“I’ve received several  messages, emails and comments from professors  saying that they recommend Theories of Everything [videos series] to their students, and that’s fantastic.

If you’re a professor or lecturer and there’s a particular  standout episode that your students can benefit  from, please do share.

And as always, feel free to contact me.

Transcripts at Substack

New update! Started a Substack.
https://curtjaimungal.substack.com

Writings on there are currently about language  and ill-defined concepts, as well as some other   mathematical details. Much more being written  there. This is content that isn’t anywhere else.  

It’s not on Theories of Everything, it’s not on Patreon.

Also, full transcripts will be placed there at some point in the future.

Several people  ask me,

Hey Curt, you’ve spoken to so many people in the fields of theoretical physics, philosophy  and consciousness.

What are your thoughts?

While  I remain impartial in interviews, this Substack  is a way to peer into my present deliberations on these topics.

Also, thank you to our partner,  The Economist.

I also found out last year that external links count plenty toward the [utoob] algorithm,  which means that whenever you share on Twitter, say on Facebook or even on Reddit, etc., it  shows YouTube, hey, people are talking about  this content outside of YouTube, which in turn  greatly aids the distribution on YouTube.”

TOE Podcast 🦶

Crop by Michael Hoffman – four(!) definite Cubensis mushrooms, Great Canterbury Psalter, f177 row 1. [quote Ruck: “This will silence art historians once & for all.”]
“f177-toes.jpg” 58 KB 2:51 pm Dec. 7, 2024

“Thirdly,  you should know this podcast is on iTunes, it’s  on Spotify, it’s on all of the audio platforms.  

All you have to do is type in Theories of  Everything and you’ll find it.

Personally, I gain   from re-watching lectures and podcasts. I also  read in the comments that, hey, total listeners  also gain from replaying. So how about instead you  re-listen on those platforms like iTunes, Spotify,  Google Podcasts, whichever podcast catcher  you use.

And finally, if you’d like to support  more conversations like this, more content like  this, then do consider visiting patreon.com slash  CURTJAIMUNGAL and donating with whatever you like. 

There’s also PayPal, there’s also crypto, there’s   also just joining on YouTube. Again, keep in mind,  it’s support from the sponsors and you that allow  me to work on TOE full-time. You also get early  access to ad-free episodes, whether it’s audio  or video.

It’s audio in the case of Patreon, video  in the case of YouTube.

For instance, this episode that you’re listening to right now was released  a few days earlier. [April 10, 2025 i think]

Every dollar helps far more  than you think. Either way, your viewership  is generosity enough. Thank you so much.”

/ end of transcript

God’s Playing of Dice Is Frozen into the 4D Spacetime Block Universe

The Wonders & Terrors of 4D-Spacetime Block-Universe Mysticism

angry at impossible requests, “we are too stupid to understand anything you write”. SOUNDS LIKE A *YOU* PROBLEM

Strong candidate for title for article for psychedelic church reader.

Supposedly no one knows what “block-universe” means; my solution is add the other term, 4D spacetime.

harrassed for providing something that pop ppl haven’t heard of:
the combination of not Quantum Mysticism , but
4D Spacetime Mysticism.

THESE ARE THE ACTUAL TERMS IN THE FIELD – deal with it!

  • James studies: block-universe mysticism
  • Minkowski studies: 4D Spacetime Mysticism
  • combined:
  • 4D spacetime block-universe mysticism
    fsbum

better than the correct term eternalism – THIS IS BULLSHT:

IF I SAY “QUANTUM DETERMINISM MYSTICISM” NO ONE BATS AN EYE.

BUT I AM “WRONG” FOR WRITING “INCOMPREHENSIBLE GIBBERISH” when I use the fair, comparable, competing terms:

  • eternalism
  • 4D spacetime
  • block-universe

else i’ll write:

The Wonders & Terrors of 4D-Spacetime Block-Universe Eternalism Mysticism

or going the other direction toward folk myth analogy wording:

The Wonders & Terrors of {snake frozen in rock} Mysticism

The Wonders & Terrors of Block-Universe Mysticism

The Wonders & Terrors of 4D Spacetime Mysticism

Maddening Frustrations and Insanely Unreasonable Demands for Titling a Theory Introduction Article

Would people say “keep it simple , dumb it down” had I written FAMILIAR junk jargon? eg:

The Wonders & Terrors of Quantum Mysticism & Experiencing Determinism

This is a bias against the new theory, in favor of the dominant old theory.

The old theory gets a pass, and the new theory is blocked: “I haven’t heard of it, therefore you are being too unclear.”

  • “neuroplasticity” – I have heard of that, so, it’s good term’y.
  • “fear of ego dissolution” – I have heard of that, so, it’s good term’y.
  • “block-universe mysticism – I haven’t heard of that, so, it’s bad term’y.

This is letting the ignorant dictate what the teacher teachers.

I hear: “People are too ignorant to be informed.”

The student is not EXPECTED to understand the meaning of the title. Duh!

“Theory of Relativity? I don’t know what that means, therefore, you failed to name the theory well.”

Insanity! Ridiculous demands! IMPOSSIBLE TO MEET!

F*CK THIS SH*T.

I’M GOING TO WRITE THE ARTICLE (& TITLE) THAT MAKES SENSE TO Egodeath community, AND TO HELL WITH EVERYONE ELSE.

IMPOSSIBLE DEMANDS! UNREASONABLE!

Harvard Scientist: “There is No Quantum Multiverse” | Jacob Barandes [Part 3]

I got confident about decoding the {burning bush} mytheme while listening to “branch” in this video, while listening to Jacob Barandes talk about branches in
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wrUvtqr4wOs – around 2:20:00.

Click More to expand Description, click the Show Transcript button, Find “branch”.

Probabilities in Statistical Mechanics

1:59:0 Probabilities in Statistical Mechanics

Problems with Many Worlds Interpretation

2:11:30 Problems with Many Worlds Interpretation

…

2:25:00 —

Jacob Barandes:

“And the branches are not fundamental. The world’s not fundamental. They’re not fundamentally there. They’re just useful, convenient ways to describe the wave function. But now we have a problem.
2:25:34
If the branches are not fundamental, if they’re emergent, we can’t have a probability axiom that assigns them probabilities.

You see, the axioms, the fundamental axioms of your theory are supposed to refer to fundamental things.

If the branches are emergent, approximate things, not fundamental things, the axioms cannot say, oh, if at some point in the future we develop these emergent approximate branches, then by axiom they’ll be assigned probabilities.

If the branches are now not fundamental, but merely emergent, merely just convenient ways to describe what’s going on, then it’s very difficult to think about how you would make an axiom that they should be assigned probabilities.

If we’re not going to get the probabilities from the axioms, we now
have a fundamental problem.

And this is where so much of the work in Everettian quantum theory has happened, this problem of probabilities.

If the branches are emergent things, not fundamental, and we can’t assign them probabilities by fiat through the axioms, how do probabilities happen?

Now, I think the argument I would make here is that they don’t.

If you were compelled to believe in an outlandish metaphysical picture like the many worlds interpretation because you had to, because it was empirically unavoidable, like we look out into outer space and we see galaxies
many, many, many billions of light years away.

We see countless galaxies billions of light years away. That leads us to believe that there is a big universe out there.

We see clocks on airplanes move at slightly different rates, atomic clocks move at slightly different rates.

That’s hard to believe, but we can do the experiments and we see this repeated rigorously many times.

It’s not that we should never believe outlandish things, but as Carl Sagan said, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

The many worlds interpretation says that there is an uncountable profusion of universes that are coming out of every single moment, not even just measurements, but all the time.

That’s an outlandish statement, and sure, we could believe it if we were compelled to by either rigorous logical reasoning or by just unavoidable empirical results.

[like mushroom imagery in Christian art is an outlandish proposition, why would mushrooms be in Christian art? [insert Panofsky args, end of letter 2]]

But we’re just not.

When you’re formulating many worlds interpretation, you run into this problem of,

Challenges of Probability in Many Worlds

2:27:42 Challenges of Probability in Many Worlds

2:27:46

Jacob Barandes:

“well, I have the per basis problem.

I guess I can deal with that by letting the branches be emerged into decoherence, but then I can’t axiomatically assign probabilities anymore.

At that point, you just give up, because you’re no longer compelled through rigorous logic or empirical data that you have to believe in many worlds. Why are you still trying to chase it down?

That is, this extravagant outlandish metaphysical picture is no longer forced upon us logically or by experiment.

Why are we chasing it down?

Why are we starting with the assumption that they [many worlds branches] should be there, and we need to somehow gerrymander our axioms and principles and assumptions to get the many worlds picture to come out?

That’s the impression that I get when I see some of the work going on right now.

We’re not compelled to take many worlds on as a serious idea.

We can only get it off the ground by adding lots more stuff.

Why are we doing this?

Let me just describe a couple of the routes people have taken, and then we can quit, because that’s basically the end of it.

Tim Freke’s Emergent Evolutionary Spirituality, Frozen in Rock

Jacob Barandes:

One route is the route that David Wallace takes in his book, The Emergent Multiverse.”

“It is an excellent book.

You should list it on the YouTube channel, and I recommend everybody interested should read it.

David Wallace is a fantastic, brilliant philosopher and also trained in physics.

The book is a beautiful book. I recommend it to everybody who’s interested in quantum foundations.

In that book, he tries to solve this problem of probability.

How do we get probabilities assigned to these things?

By introducing a large number of additional assumptions.

I tell them, read it, and then just make a list of every extra assumption he has to make.

He assumes that we should have the same metaphysical relationship to many copies of ourselves as we would if there were only a unique individual we were to become.

That means you have to take kind of a stand on old questions like the metaphysical teleporter problem in metaphysics.

The theorem he uses requires invoking a notion of free will that requires taking a compatibilist stance,

[The kind of “compatibilism” in Egodeath theory affirms eternalism, and the experience of possibilism. – Michael Hoffman]

because in many worlds interpretation, there’s just a deterministically evolving universal wave function.”

Who Are the Agents?

Jacob Barandes:

“Yet, he has in his proof of the Born rule agents, which is already a dangerous idea.

Agents, we’re bringing back agents, making choices about which unitary operations they’re going to perform.

This is a crucial part of the proof.

He has a little footnote where he admits, yes, this does entail certain assumptions about free will, but free will is a big problem.

No one solved it.

That doesn’t make the case.

If you’re resting on an unsolved problem, it doesn’t make the case that what you’re doing is going to work.

He introduces a number of what he calls richness axioms and rationality axioms.

The rationality axioms are supposed to be general good practices of what it means to be a rational observer.

[tell Houot, cloaked with mantle of “rational science explorer”]

These were developed in a one-world kind of picture, and the assumption is that they also work in a many-worlds picture.

Basically, the way that one tries to proceed here is one says, what does it mean to be rational?

[Houot: it means alien contact with alien advanced machine elves on psychedelics while sailing a ship in a literal physical external world]

It means that you want to use the tools of decision theory, the formal, precise, probabilistic tools for making good decisions called decision theory.

People who use the tools of decision theory, who are rational, will end up assigning probabilities to branches according to the Born rule.

That’s roughly and very gross outline how this argument
is supposed to work.

John Norton, again, philosopher at University of Pittsburgh, raised
an objection to really any such approach to try to get probability out.

In a deductive argument, the conclusion cannot be any stronger than the premises.

If you’re trying to get probability to emerge as a conclusion, there must have been probability already in your premises.

In this proof of the Born rule, one is trying to get probability out, so there must be probability somewhere in the premises.

If you don’t assume probability somewhere in the premises, somewhere you must be doing something that is not legitimate.

You can see how this unfolds for this decision theoretic argument, which goes back to David Deutsch also.

There’s an earlier version of it in a 1999 paper by David Deutsch, this old quantum theory in decisions.

You can also link to that.

The argument is that if you obey the rules of being a rational observer and use decision theory, you’re going to end up assigning probabilities according to the Born rule.

But you can ask, why is that the definition of rationality?

I mean, in a many-worlds type universe, there are going to be observers who behave rationally according to the dictates of decision theory.

Some of those observers are going to be very successful over 10 years, and others are going to be very unsuccessful because in the many-worlds interpretation, everything will happen on some branch.

But there are also observers who do not obey the rules of decision theory.

There’s some very irrational observers who just choose not to follow any of the rules of decision theory, and there are going to be branches in which they’re going to be unsuccessful over 10 years, and there are going to be branches in which they’re successful over 10 years.

All those observers are just there.

And to say that, well, you should just be rational and obey decision theory by axiom does not solve the probability problem.

In a one-world picture where only one future actually happens, it seems to be the case that people who are rational and think very carefully about their decisions and use something like a decision-theoretic approach, in the long run, over 10 years, tend to make more money or healthier or live better lives, whatever it is that you want.

And that gives us reason to think, oh, these are good rational principles.

If people who follow these principles tend to do better, I see people who exercise and people who make good financial decisions and hedge their investments, they do better, I go, oh, well, there are good reasons, therefore, to do what they do and take on their principles.

But you can’t turn it around and say that we’re going to start with axiomatically, this is the way to be rational, and then go backward and show that that then entails this is how probability should work.

And that’s kind of the sort of reverse argument that’s taking place.

I should say that not all Everetians take this decision-theoretic view.

Simon Saunders, for example, tries to do probability in a more Boltzmannian, statistical mechanical way, by coarse-graining and actually counting in some sense, but it’s still in its embryonic form.

Yeah.

So, there are a lot of approaches to the many-worlds interpretation, and at present, none of them seem to find a way to get probability off the ground, and I don’t think that you can.

And to the extent that you can by just taking on more and more assumptions, you’re doing the thing where you’re adding on extra-empirical assumptions that can’t be verified in an experiment.

I mean, I don’t know how experimentally to test that I should have the right relationship to many copies of myself.

I mean, that’s an extra-empirical statement.

If you have to take many of those on in order to get the picture off the ground, I don’t know how credible it is.

How much credence should I give to a theoretical picture that relies
on a tower of SMHs, of speculative metaphysical hypotheses?

I feel like if you have to do all that work to get the theory off the ground, then it lowers your credence that we should take on such an outlandish idea that there are all these many worlds.

So that’s basically where I end up with the many-worlds approach, and this is one of the reasons why I think there’s room for another interpretation that’s much more conservative, that says, well, we do experiments, we see one outcome, maybe that’s because there is just one outcome.”

The Case for a New Interpretation [Possibilism Randomness Freewill Agency Power? Random Distribution Frozen in Rock?]

2:35:14 The Case for a New Interpretation

Jacob Barandes:

“And the experiments look probabilistic, maybe that’s because they are in fact probabilistic.

Nature is telling us it’s probabilistic, we should listen to nature, rather than saying, nope, nope, nope, gotta be deterministic, there’s a universal wave function evolving deterministically, it’s gotta be Markovian, you know, maybe we should just listen to nature and build a theory around what nature’s telling us.

That’s I think the conservative, non-outlandish approach that one should take.

Smooth Speech

CJ:

I wanna know, how is it that you got so great at being articulate and smooth with your speech?

Jacob Barandes:

“That’s a very, very kind thing to say, I really appreciate that, that’s really nice of you to say. I think we all have different strengths.

I’m bad at many, many, many things. There are a few things I’ve gotten good at through practice, there’s some things we’re all born kind of a little bit good at, we’ve got like embryonic things that we’re sort of good at, and then we hone those things.

I’ve taught many classes over many years here, I’ve interacted with such amazing students, brilliant, idealistic, just wonderful students who ask all kinds of great questions.

I just think it’s practice, you just talk a lot with people about very intricate topics, and over time it gets easier.

That’s the best answer I think I can give.”

Stag with Branching Antlers Caught Helplessly in Vines

Jacob Barandes:

“There’s an Aesop fable I like to bring up with people, it’s about a stag and its antlers.

There’s the stag who’s drinking from a pool and admiring his beautiful antlers, he thinks his antlers are so magnificent, so glorious.”

[king of the forest you could say]

Lucas Cranach “Eve Tempted by the Serpent” Adam and Eve 1533 “Adam und Eva”

two color versions of the Power of Myth image from my thx 2013 breakthrough
https://egodeaththeory.org/2023/02/18/eve-tempted-by-the-serpent-lucas-cranach-1530-painting/

aside: https://egodeaththeory.org/2023/02/18/hatsis-cancelled-his-book-the-sacred-mushroom-conspiracy/

https://egodeaththeory.org/2025/02/25/idea-development-page-25/#color-Cranach-Eve-Tempted-by-Serpent

“Lucas Cranach” “Adam und Eva”

good version: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_und_Eva_%28Cranach%29#/media/Datei:Image-Cranach_-_Adam_and_Eve_1533.jpg

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_and_Eve_(Cranach)#/media/File:Lucas_Cranach_d.%C3%84._-_Adam_und_Eva_(Gem%C3%A4ldepaar),_Art_Institute_of_Chicago.jpg

found at page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_and_Eve_(Cranach)

showing “Eve Tempted by the Serpent” by Cranach, that shows: branching antlers, behind branching legs, behind holding a branch:

Jacob Barandes:

“He goes on and on, antlers are really the envy of the animal kingdom, then he looks at his legs and says, but my legs are bony and ugly, and if only my legs could be as remarkable as my antlers.

As the stag is pondering this, he suddenly becomes aware that a pack of wolves is chasing him, so he gets up and runs from the water, he’s trying to get away from the wolves, and he sees a forest, he’s gonna run into the forest to hide.

And as he runs into the forest, his [branching] antlers start getting tangled in all the [non-branching] vines, and before he knows it, he can’t run anymore, he’s stuck.”

Crop by Michael Hoffman

Sacrifice of Isaac (Golden Psalter)

Crop by Michael Hoffman

 Isaac (Canterbury Psalter)

Crop by Michael Hoffman

Sacrifice of Isaac (Van der Borch) – branches burning

instead of bush burning

Jacob Barandes:

“As the wolves approach him, he realizes that the thing that he was praising, his antlers, was his undoing, and the thing that he thought was his weakest feature, his legs, they were the things that would have saved him.

If it had just been his legs, his legs would have saved him.“

[especially Right foot, not Left]

So the reason I bring this up is, in addition to saying that I think we’re all good at a few things and maybe have difficulty with a lot of things, some of the things we think we’re bad at, seen in another way are the things we’re good at, and sometimes vice versa.

So I’m gonna say something that anyone who has known me growing up will laugh at, because it’s so obvious.

I came into this world profoundly lacking in common sense, okay?

Anyone who’s ever known me growing up would say that’s the most obvious statement I’ve ever made, okay?

Profoundly lacking in common sense.

And as I grew up, you know, you get made fun of, you make a lot of mistakes, you do a lot of silly things because you lack common sense, and you see it as kind of a weak feature, you see it as something you’re a little bit embarrassed about.

When you get into philosophy and foundations of science, philosophy of physics, what you see is a lot of people whose common sense takes them in directions they shouldn’t go.

You see a lot of people who make arguments or make speculations or make claims that just seem very commonsensical to them, and sometimes those are not really rigorously supported.

People can, their common sense can lead them into error.

Suddenly, lacking common sense becomes a huge advantage, because when I
read a philosophy paper or I listen to a seminar or I’m trying to formulate an argument, I don’t have the kind of common sense that makes the answers obvious to me.

So I see every argument, and I have to take it apart and really disassemble it and understand what all the pieces do, because I don’t have an intuition, a common sense for how things are supposed to work.

What this means is that to some extent, and obviously, I mean, we all make mistakes, I make errors too, but I feel like some of the errors I might have made if I had more common sense I’m less likely to make.

So a thing that I thought was my weakest feature, Stag’s legs, in a different context turned out to be really useful, like being on land and having only flippers for your arms and legs.

And then one day, you discover the ocean, and suddenly, what you thought was your weakest feature becomes now your greatest asset.

So that’s a general lesson I think that everyone needs to take to heart.

Many of the things we think are maybe our weak features can, in a different way, actually be a strength.

So if you’re the kind of person who has a lot of trouble paying attention to things but gets super hyper-focused on some things, and you think that’s a problem, well, it could be a problem in some contexts, but in other situations, it could be a superpower.

And we see this all the time with lots of things that people may feel embarrassed about. And now you’re speaking to researchers and potential researchers, people who are younger students, even people who are older students’ perspective, there are some people who are 70 and getting their PhD and watch this.

Yeah.

So what is a method that they can use to help figure out or distinguish between what is an actual good feature versus an actual bad feature that they thought was good?”

– Jacob Barandes / Curl Jaimungal

No One at the Bridge (Rush, 1975)

No One at the Bridge (Rush, 1975)
channel: Wraxtiorre’s Mess
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=70BgSKTBh9s —

https://www.rush.com/songs/the-fountain-of-lamneth/

Lyrics by Neil Peart:

III. No One At the Bridge 

Crying back to consciousness
The coldness grips my skin
The sky is pitching violently
Drawn by shrieking winds
Seaspray blurs my vision
Waves roll by so fast
Save my ship of freedom
I’m lashed helpless to the mast

Call out for direction
And there’s no one there to steer
Shout out for salvation
But there’s no one there to hear
Cry out supplication
For the maelstrom is near
Scream out desperation
But no one cares to hear

Remembering when first I held
The wheel in my own hands
I took the helm so eagerly
And sailed for distant lands

Crop by Michael Hoffman

But now the sea’s too heavy
And I just don’t understand
Why must my crew desert me
When I need a guiding hand

— Rush

S.A.T.O. (e.g. Sailing the Acid Trip Ocean) (Ozzy Osbourne, 1981)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qGoQ6AZYfMc —

https://www.google.com/search?q=s.a.t.o.+lyrics
http://egodeath.com/sablyrics.htm#xtocid229130 — Egodeath interpretation

Sailing the Acid-Trip Ocean
Lyrics by Bob Daisley —

Photo: Cybermonk
Photo: Michael Hoffman, April 2025

See Also

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Author: egodeaththeory

http://egodeath.com

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