Editing Philosophical Research:MDem/5.2/1111 FreeWill (section)

=== quantum mechanics for tiny bird Pokémon ===

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<div>if we want to understand the relationship between randomness and the conscious experience of individuals, we need to start small. specifically, it would benefit us to see if we can find the smallest, simplest physical object or process known to exist in our universe that resembles a random number generator — something so small one would think it could not <em>possibly</em> have space for any kind of conscious brain. does such a thing exist? of course it does. near the smallest possible levels of physics, though according to some scientific hypotheses not quite at the smallest scale of spacetime possible, objects and processes operate according to a set of mathematical rules called <dfn>quantum mechanics</dfn>.

quantum mechanics is very commonly misunderstood by the general public, and on top of that misunderstood in a number of creative ways. within the world of the SCP Foundation, an "unfiction" collaborative writing project put together by thousands of different authors, a report on a phenomenon restructuring all organic life into new iron-based cellular structures (SCP-6217) features a researcher claiming that because quantum mechanics exists they will never lose their ability to make decisions and turn into a mindless machine. anyone who actually knows what quantum mechanics is would know this particular claim is an empty and ineffective statement. even if there are quantum processes going on in the body and brain of the researcher, there are also quantum processes going on in every single piece of inanimate matter which has never had a thought or made a decision at all; if a researcher were to try to use quantum mechanics to defend themself from The Broken God, they would more or less be walking right into its hands and into the same kinds of random mindless stochastic processes as the ones throughout nature it had already been claiming. quantum mechanics does not, in and of itself, provide any particular medium for consciousness. it is simply too unreliable, and too small. in any human brain, there are particular reliable structures such as neurons and glia. quantum mechanics is almost precisely defined as the uncertainty any of those particular brain cells or connections will be there. if a cell suddenly vanished from your brain and turned into a bunch of random liquid or proteins, do you think that would aid your ability to be aware of your surroundings? and yet, this is exactly the kind of thing quantum-mechanical processes do. at tiny scales far smaller than a brain cell, quantum interactions basically take one kind of fundamental particle and swap it out for another and hope the rest of the universe doesn't notice. the study of quantum mechanics, in general, deals with such things as how atoms manage to consistently stay atoms when the quarks inside them are constantly re-dividing themselves and swapping their material with the rest of the surrounding universe. one slightly concerning fact that physicists have learned is that atoms _don't always succeed_ at staying together, and in fact, one reason that neutrons decay is that atoms can rarely leak quark material through a process known as the <i>weak force</i>, or <dfn>weak interaction</dfn>. a down quark can leak part of its overall mass and energy into a W-minus boson, becoming an up quark, before the lost W boson then changes into an electron and an electron antineutrino. put in simple terms, quarks are never solid, and are really a kind of interacting, fluctuating process. any three quarks bound into a proton or neutron are constantly re-dividing into a new set of quarks and gluons, and connected with this overall instability, sometimes a particular group of quarks simply begins losing "quark stuff" entirely. it would thus certainly appear from the example of fundamental forces such as the weak interaction that randomness and the ability of individuals to exert an individual will are separate things, where randomness does not necessarily <em>entail</em> the ability to have control over one's body.

of course, if we look more closely at the differences between different scales of the universe, we will begin to realize that an airtight description of known quantum-mechanical processes at the small scale is by no means the full picture. at larger scales, other kinds of phenomena or effects begin to appear which although they are _bizarrely similar_ to quantum mechanics are also in some ways different. the Vegeta effect or Entei effect we have named earlier is one of these larger-scale quantum-like processes.

of course, all of this talk of quantum-mechanical mathematics or quantum-like logical models can begin to get rather esoteric if we get too far away from the scales of everyday experience people are generally familiar with. in order to better explore these concepts in a way that is easily understandable, it may be best if we return to the example of Shiny Pidgey.

how does a Pokémon professor prove that Shiny Pokémon are real? certainly, an empirical approach would get at least part of the way — if you can show someone a Shiny Pokémon, then you do have a solid piece of evidence that there have ever been Shiny Pokémon period. but what if you wanted to know _why_ Pokémon are Shiny? given nothing more than an outside description of a single Shiny Pokémon, a researcher would need to look awfully closely at how that Pokémon emerges from and interacts with the rest of the world.

say a Pokémon researcher collects over 5,000 Pidgeys, and eventually finds a Shiny. this experiment would illustrate not just the existence of that one Shiny Pokémon or a Shiny form of Pidgey, but the _entire process_ of Shiny Pokémon existing and coming into being only occasionally — the fact there is just one Shiny Pidgey next to all the other normal Pidgeys _indirectly gives us information about the Shiny Pidgey_ and the underlying processes which lead to the existence of Shiny Pidgey. this is more or less the same way real-world quantum physicists demonstrate how it is that quantum-scale interactions lead up to the more stable kinds of matter and physical behaviors we observe at larger scales — scientists observe physical phenomena that are visible from the outside, and essentially work from the outside in. first, some strange set of observations will be collected that happens not to match previous predictions. then, scientists will attempt to find a specific physical process they can study from the outside which they predict to have been produced through certain quantum interactions. then, they will build some kind of apparatus such as the Large Hadron Collider or the IceCube neutrino detector in order to collect what amounts to aggregated information about events that are usually too small and unlikely to observe individually. often, researchers arrive with their model of what quantum interactions "should" produce and gain information when the actual results for what is produced do not match the results side for the processes they predicted to be happening, but either way, physicists generally must build models of what they will observe in experiments based on the kinds of outwardly-observable arrangements or behaviors of things they actually observe in experiments. this process of aligning real-world phenomena to theoretical models of what is happening beneath them can be termed _scientific phenomenology_. _phenomenology_ itself has existed as a concept in any number of different philosophies, but it is important to make the distinction that different forms of phenomenology are designed to serve different purposes and contrasted with any of these /other/ phenomenological philosophies, any particular scientific method operates from a particular conception of phenomenology which has proved itself useful to science and the purpose of interpreting and designing experiments.

if one wishes to study and detail the workings of the universe, phenomenology is one of the easier parts of the task versus the actual process of finding out what kinds of interactions might be going on beneath the surface. anyone familiar with the actual findings of quantum mechanics would immediately understand this — looking at the sheer number of equations and kinds of interactions quantum physicists have described, it would seem as if the sheer amount of complexity that gets casually tossed into irrelevance when going from lower scales to higher scales is staggering. of course, what somebody considers "complex" is relative. if we were to look at all fundamental particles in particular locations as individuals, the universe would seem astoundingly complex, while if we were to look at fundamental particles and fundamental particle interactions as mere repetitions of the same basically-identical things, and quantum-mechanical equations as a _summary_ of the whole universe, the quantum scale might instead begin to seem simple. atoms are complicated. there are hundreds of different atoms, and when they combine into new compounds we cannot always predict how they will behave. the quantum scale, however, does not present anywhere near as many possibilities. once you know about all the quantum interactions whose effects can be detected in everyday life, the overall shape the quantum scale presents to the larger world becomes easily intelligible, like we effectively know everything that could possibly happen down inside that level and at the end of the day the whole existence of quantum mechanics has become more or less predictable and prosaic. if you specifically look at quantum mechanics from the angle of the macroscopic world governed by the patterns of classical physics, and ask, "if I'm classical, what does quantum mechanics mean for /me/?" it would begin to seem that despite any ongoing theoretical problems of fuzzy-looking particles and difficulties in measuring things without greatly changing them by physically bumping into them, quantum-mechanical interactions are really not that dissimilar from any other physical process such as rolling wheels or chemical reactions, and not truly much more strange or mysterious than anything larger.

if it happens to be the case that the one most illustrative example in our universe of what /should/ amount to a physical, generally-impenetrable random number generator is secretly simpler than we want to think and ultimately predictable, that should begin to raise some rather worrying existential questions.

let us return for a moment to the universe of Pokémon. in online communities formed around the _Pokémon_ console games, people generally discuss and share many different methods to change people's experience of the game or make use of novel strategies to achieve otherwise difficult or unimaginable goals. in a digital game, anybody could simply find ways of modifying the game processes or save memory in order to cheat. but what if sequence breaking through cheat codes is not the way you want to play the game, and you would rather create a unique challenge with its own kinds of difficulty, amounting more or less to inventing a new game? _Pokémon_ fans have created many of these kinds of challenges, from Nuzlocke challenges which allow players only a limited number of total Pokémon to various speedrun categories to finding ways to progress through _Pokémon_ games backwards. among these many alternate ways to play Pokémon is the challenge of _guessing the pseudorandom number generator seed_. players have created programs which can input various outward phenomenological events that happen within the game and the time displayed on the console clock along with a working model of how the pseudorandom number generator actually generates numbers in order to arrive at a state of things where the program is capable of predicting the outward shape of every subsequent event that will occur in the game. this process is not necessarily easy to pull off, as it requires players to time their actions very carefully to hit the correct system times and frames of the game in order to effectively align onto the exact cycle of the game's secret power series — in this sense, any useful outcomes of guessing the seed do require completing what amounts to their own lesser game challenge. nonetheless, should anyone be able to correctly complete this challenge, it is only a matter of time before they will be able to get almost any specific category of Pokémon they want. time the Pokémon trainer's actions versus the incidence of Pokémon encounters properly, and the player can decide which of several Pokémon will appear with the best statistics, or which of several Pokémon will appear as a Shiny Pokémon. if a pseudorandom number generator is basically just one big series of numbers coming into contact with a player or a clock, the Pokémon world only ever really had one free-floating object exerting the Entei effect, and should you manage to /leap over/ that single Entei effect, it won't be long before you can simply lock the path of your trainer onto the otherwise chaotic trails of the three wandering Legendary Beasts and get your hands on a Shiny Entei.

the fact that being able to predict an entire Pokémon game by merely knowing a number is a thing that exists is amusing and absurd. the _Pokémon_ series has been adapted into non-interactive stories any number of times, most famously including the _Pokémon_ TV show, but also including any number of manga adaptatons. in light of discovering the deeper workings of the games, how are we supposed to interpret the TV show? could there be some possibility that somebody existing in the universe of the _Pokémon_ TV show could also begin ending up with the rarest and strangest Pokémon just by guessing the universal random number generator seed? in general, few people would think of this as a possibility. to most people, it would appear that although the _Pokémon_ console games have a certain kind of artificiality in which they clearly present themselves through procedures and numbers, the universe of the Pokémon TV show possesses certain missing kinds of "reality" which further cause its inhabitants to behave like living beings and material objects such that this kind of trivial prediction of many things at once would not be possible. how does this happen? what are the characteristics of this more fully-simulated reality?
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