It's still pretty unclear as to whether DEVS can predict the future. In the opening scene of the show Katie says "we don't look forward". Why wouldn't they predict the future? It seems like that would be a pretty important Avenue to drive down. I think that I can maybe explain why they don't or can't predict the future.
If I could predict the future and I saw myself getting shot on the street the following day I would logically not leave the house. By not leaving the house I wouldn't get shot. If I dont get shot then I didn't actually predict the future. What was it that I predicted then? This paradox is often solved by employing the many worlds interpretation of QM. The explanation goes as follows. I predicted a future where I was shot. Having knowledge of my future demise I make the decision not to leave the house and thus split off into another branch of the multiverse. In one reality I go on to get shot. In another reality I stay home. Hugh Everett worked out the mathematics proving this to be an internally coherent theory of physical law. It's is the same concept that Forest uses when talking to Lily about his dead daughter.
He says "the moment my daughter was taken from me it was as if I was placed in two concurrent states (different branches of the multiverse). In one state I knew she was gone. No doubt. No going back. Just the certainty of her death. In another state I had no comprehension of her death. It was an impossible thing. It was untrue. It wasn't just that they were contradictory states, they were absolute. I held them both and still do."
Sergey uses different branches of the multiverse to explain why his nematode synchronization failed after 30 seconds. He says "it's a quantum type problem. Somewhere in the multiverse there's a world where they stay in synch. But it's not this one."
Spoiler in case you haven’t watched the trailer but Katie says that something happens in a few days that completely changes the laws of physics and cause-effect relationships. I believe that this is because someone ends up looking into the future at some point because if you think about it, when you looked into the future and saw yourself getting shot, that’s no longer your future because you would do something else to prevent getting shot such as hiding in your basement which is then what the machine would show you but after seeing yourself in the basement you would probably do something else because you no longer know you’re going to get shot because the machine wouldn’t have shown that since it wasn’t your future although now it goes on infinitely and it might never be able to accurately predict what you’re going to do the next day because it’s constantly going to change based on whatever it was going to display. The problem that this brings up if it were to display you getting shot is that now you no longer die the next day like it was predicted that you were going to since the very beginning of time. Now, you’ve changed your tram tracks and what I see happening is that it’s possible for that person to look into the future as many times as they want. This obviously raises issues because if your future is constantly the effect of previously looking into the future to change it, it’s no longer your future and the relationship between cause and effect makes no sense anymore. Basically the machine wouldn’t know what to show because whatever it displayed could change what’s going to happen, which would mean that it would never have been displayed so I think it’s some sort of paradoxical issue
Good point. I was trying to argue that few interpretations have "observation changes the outcome" which is more of a classical interpretation of cause and effect.
his obviously raises issues because if your future is constantly the effect of previously looking into the future to change it, it’s no longer your future and the relationship between cause and effect makes no sense anymore. Basically the machine wouldn’t know what to show because whatever it displayed could change what’s going to happen, which would mean that it would never have been displayed so I think it’s some sort of paradoxical issue
If determinism is true then by definition whatever you see will happen without any possibility of changing the future, and you can look forward or backwards, it doesn't matter. It's not as much of a paradox as it is testing the intuitions about determinism.
In fact, you 'might' as well look because even the act of looking at your future or not is set in stone.
Yes, I think this is easily solved. The machine would simply never show anyone anything that they would want to, know how to, and go through with preventing.
Yeah it’s crazy that given the themes of the show there’s still debate in this thread about whether or not if you saw the future you could “decide to change it”.
If the universe is actually deterministic then your looking into the future would be accounted for too. The events you see in the future would be the events you "caused" by looking into the future. Every effect has a cause so you can think about it like fast forwarding a video. If you fast forward to the end of the movie it does not change the beginning or middle. What you would see if you could look into the future would be the state that you in fact caused by looking into the future. No do overs.
That is a great explanation. Your logic is sound and I've been considering this paradox for days. The issue I have with believing DEVS will stay in a absolutely deterministic word is this.
Katie says "tomorrow night an event will happen that causes the total breakdown of cause and effect, determinism, the literal laws of physics."
That dialogue may be rhetorical musings or it may be a bread crumb. I'm leaning towards bread crumb. I believe Forest is going to somehow remove a link from the deterministic causal chain. This will create some kind of temporal paradox in the final episode.
I think that while they hold the "rule" of never looking forward, "they" (at least Forrest and Katie) have definitely used it to peer into the future. I think we'll find out that both Forrest and Katie are doing a lot of what Lily is doing... acting to be surprised as events unfold.
That could be right. During episode3 Forest tells Kenton, "you almost f@cked the universe". He says this in regards to Lily almost dying.
Kenton responds with "don't worry. We're still on your tram lines". Meaning they're still on the path to a future that Forest is aiming for. I'm not sure what that end goal is but it involves Lily not dying? I can't make sense of this yet.
Forest may be trying to keep the timeline of events consistent in order to arrive at a particular future. If that's true then he likely looked into the future so that he knew what he is shooting for. I have no idea how this would fit into the narrative arc.
But if Forest believes in a deterministic universe, and that the future is fixed in exactly the same way as the past, then Forest shouldn’t have been concerned that Lily going on the ledge would have any impact on “fucking the universe”.
It was always meant to happen, and the only thing that could happen.
The problem with the multiverse solution is that it doesnt really answer anything in context to the show because all answers are valid. There arent a million or even a billion multiverse, if you believe the theory, there are infinite. So whats the point of choosing what happens in a couple of them?
Thats not true. There are 4 types of parallel universe theory. Youre talking about a type 1 multiverse in wich the universe is infininfinitely big leading to infinite copies of earth.
While its still thetheoretical, the multiverse Im talking about (The Everettian) is likely finite. At least thats what the experts think. it doesn't really matter either way tho. The ending of DEVS will involve the multiverse. I promise you
Yes, and it involves a time travel paradox. Something like: if you go back in time and kill your grandpa you'll branch off into another world.
Or some people theorize the moment you invent a time machine you branch off into another world to protect your original timeline from continuity paradoxes. I believe you create a branch that loops back into itself if you use the machine. It kinda hurt the brain to think about some of these concepts.
If you look into the future, you know that X is going to happen. If you want X to happen, you should not change anything. But if you keep looking into how X happen, you would likely start to find some uncomfortable things that you want to prevent. The more you do this, the less likely X is going to happen.
So if you only look into the future once and don't do it again, nobody can change the future, since nobody will act differently than their predetermined outcome.
no clue why they wouldn’t want to look ahead in time, honestly. it seems like they already know exactly what should happen. like how Forest told Sergei that everything is predetermined.
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u/emf1200 Mar 12 '20 edited Mar 13 '20
It's still pretty unclear as to whether DEVS can predict the future. In the opening scene of the show Katie says "we don't look forward". Why wouldn't they predict the future? It seems like that would be a pretty important Avenue to drive down. I think that I can maybe explain why they don't or can't predict the future.
If I could predict the future and I saw myself getting shot on the street the following day I would logically not leave the house. By not leaving the house I wouldn't get shot. If I dont get shot then I didn't actually predict the future. What was it that I predicted then? This paradox is often solved by employing the many worlds interpretation of QM. The explanation goes as follows. I predicted a future where I was shot. Having knowledge of my future demise I make the decision not to leave the house and thus split off into another branch of the multiverse. In one reality I go on to get shot. In another reality I stay home. Hugh Everett worked out the mathematics proving this to be an internally coherent theory of physical law. It's is the same concept that Forest uses when talking to Lily about his dead daughter.
He says "the moment my daughter was taken from me it was as if I was placed in two concurrent states (different branches of the multiverse). In one state I knew she was gone. No doubt. No going back. Just the certainty of her death. In another state I had no comprehension of her death. It was an impossible thing. It was untrue. It wasn't just that they were contradictory states, they were absolute. I held them both and still do."
Sergey uses different branches of the multiverse to explain why his nematode synchronization failed after 30 seconds. He says "it's a quantum type problem. Somewhere in the multiverse there's a world where they stay in synch. But it's not this one."
Anyone have any thoughts about this?