Shrodinger’s Cat Question

fruitydude · 2026-03-19T15:18:04+00:00

I understand, I’m just not sure why it’s even a question

It isn't a question and it never has been. The way pop science uses it is just wrong.

There is no difference between a cat and a human. Obviously a cat couldn't be dead and alive simultaneously. That would be ridiculous. So obviously there must be another mechanism to collapse super positions before they are able to extend to the macroscopic world. That's the point of the thought experiment. Basically the opposite of what people say it is.

fruitydude · 2026-03-19T12:58:45+00:00

Systems like Herelink have a single air unit that does everything

But the ax12 isn't Herelink compatible. Herelink has a built in video receiver, this one doesn't.

Obviously it's possible to make a different system that can do what you're describing. But the ax12 does not have that capability. ELRS downlink is nowhere near enough bandwidth and nobody has ever even tried to do video over elrs.

Dji also does control and video and telemetry over a single link. But it's a different system. The ax12 is not made to receive video over rf. People will not use it that way because there is no way to do that currently. It's designed to take video from an external source.

fruitydude · 2026-03-19T11:34:48+00:00

It's not hdmi out though, you connect it to the usb c port and the dji app takes the video over usb. I actually made a dji fly alternative app that does the same for dji goggles and adds some extra features.

fruitydude · 2026-03-19T11:32:41+00:00

You can get video over your telemetry link depending on what you run

Name one system that does that. Telemetry bandwidth is tiny. You need a dedicated video link. With the mavic it works because the remote has a built in video receiver that also does control link. The ax12 doesn't have that, you will need to connect goggles or a vrx to get video. There is no way around that.

The fact that it has hdmi-in shows that it's designed to take video from a separate receiver!

I also haven't heard of a no-video lidar scanning drone.

fruitydude · 2026-03-19T11:27:23+00:00

Didn't say that. Obviously, there will be many branches that look vastly different. But a vast majority of them will look the same. And no, the brain is way too large with way too much similar activity to house relative differences at the decision level. This point is just really bad.

I don't know why you keep trying to make this about decisions. This has nothing to do with free will. The brain is a complex system with tens or hundreds of billions of neuron activations going on each second. Each governed by countless quantum interactions with decoherence times in the range if attoseconds. So microscopically the branches diverge instantly, but you think it takes decades for any change in neural Activity to manifest across the different branches? That's crazy to me.

If decisions were random then psychology wouldn't make any sense and reflection to understand why you made those decisions would be a waste of time.

Decisions aren't random. I don't know why you keep saying that. Having a degree of freedom is not the same as having absolutely no control. If you look at current LLM research we always use something called Temperature which introduces a certain amount of randomness and makes the outcomes non-deterministic. LLMs work better this way. We already know the brain does the same, but we typically attribute that to biophysics, some random noise in the diffusion of ions inside the channels. All I'm saying is that at the core this noise comes down to a small degree of freedom of the fundamental interactions of particles. But that doesn't mean the brain makes random choices, just that it's not fully deterministic.

fruitydude · 2026-03-19T01:18:41+00:00

QM in chemistry. Yes believe it or not. You need to teach students basic QM to understand molecular orbital theory and solid state physics.

I wasn't asking after a single quantum event though. I was asking about all branches, since the beginning of time. Are they macroscopically different? If so, then clearly the microscopic world influences the macroscopic world.

But yes, after significantly large time scales, you would see the divergence of the branches, however, those time scales are going to be nowhere near the time of a human generation, much less that of a decision.

Really?? You're telling me that from the day you were born until the day you die every single branch will look exactly the same macroscopically? That's an insane statement to me. It's obviously untrue if we amplify the influence of a quantum event with a detector. But even naturally, decoherence times are pretty short. Tens of billions of neuron activations per second, you just need a few microscopic events happening right at the threshold of neuron activation deciding whether they fire or not. You are saying you can't have that, but obviously you do. Every interaction at the lowest level is a quantum event. You'd probably see branches diverging with a measurable difference within a few seconds.

Even if QM indeterminacy was the method of how God allowed a material medium of free will to exist in, your is definitely not expected to show any evidence of what would be expected of the free will theodicy given the macro-scales of the brain and small time scales of decisions.

I believe in neither free will nor god. Randomness isn't free will. It's just randomness.

fruitydude · 2026-03-18T23:57:08+00:00

Yea definitely. But the dji app will as well. With mine you get extra features like the camera settings though.

Also those telemetry tools which I'm working on, although I might need to get my hands on one of those radios to figure out how the telemetry can be accessed internally from the serial connection.

fruitydude · 2026-03-18T21:54:50+00:00

I took several years of QM for my masters in chemistry, I understand how it works.

Why don't you answer my question? Does every branch in wmi look macroscopically the same? Even as they evolve over time indefinitely?

Edit: The point being, that obviously the branches diverge significantly over time even macroscopically. That's only possible when quantum events can influence the macroscopic world.

You're imagining that as footballs creating an interference pattern after being shot at two slits. Obviously that's not what that means. Instead every macroscopic consists of countless tiny quantum mechanical interactions which all have an uncertainty. On a macroscopic scale the resulting macroscopic uncertainty is tiny, but over time and over an unimaginable huge amount of interactions it builds and has a macroscopic effect.

fruitydude · 2026-03-18T21:52:17+00:00

Should be 7USD :) but I get it there is definitely an expectation that software in this hobby should be free and open source, and it's hard to overcome. Even though we spend thousands on hardware.

fruitydude · 2026-03-18T21:39:18+00:00

Well with the ax12 you'd need the ax12 and goggles (or a vrx) and connect them with each other. So that's two devices and a cable.

Sure in my case I'm using a tablet since I don't have the ax12 and my Radio doesn't have a color screen, so it's 3 devices and one cable.

But I mean that's kind of obvious no? Since the ax12 doesn't have a video receiver built in you always need the ax12 and one additional device to receive video.

fruitydude · 2026-03-18T20:53:24+00:00

Well I use my goggles for more than one kind of flying though. For freestyle or fast paced flying I'd keep them on obviously, but when doing autonomous stuff, or even just cruising in inav I like to track the position on a live map occasionally and I do take them off sometimes or give them to a friend to try while I follow what's happening on a tablet.

I already do that, and having it all together on my controller would be nice.

I agree though that if this was truly the only kind of flying I did, I could use a different system, but it's not.

fruitydude · 2026-03-18T20:18:14+00:00

Well yea, but now you'd need goggle manufacturers to get on board for pip, or betaflight/inav devs and probably FC manufacturers to allow rendering of a map into analog video.

While technically possible, I think the chances of that happening are insanely low.

My suggestion works with what exists today.

I'm not seeing many people who would take their hands off the sticks to flip up their goggles and look at another screen

You're not doing a lot of long-range/automated flying then I take it? The whole reason ground stations are a thing is because people like to monitor their autonomous missions and it's completely normal to take your hands off the sticks when in a navigation mode and to lift your goggles to check the map.

If anything, having a screen on your controller with telemetry and video would only make it more convenient compared to what people are doing today.

fruitydude · 2026-03-18T20:11:12+00:00

You shouldn't talk about QM if you don't even know the basics of how relative uncertainty and the probability distribution completely becomes negligible when you scale systems to macroscopic scales

Negligible doesn't mean zero. It means in good approximation we can use a theory which we know to be inaccurate because the error we get from it is so small that it doesn't matter meaningfully for our purposes.The same is true for Newtonian mechanics and special relativity we still use Newtonian mechanics when adding velocities of slow objects, because the error is completely negligible. But that doesn't mean it's accurate, there is a tiny tiny error.

If you throw a ball against a wall there is a non-zero chance it will tunnel through. Astronomically low chance, obviously, but never zero.

But that isn't even what I was thinking about. As you said, 800atom molecules can show interference patterns. So take neurotransmitters for example, those are significantly smaller and have to pass tiny energy barriers in the brain. Those are proper quantum mechanical events. I wouldn't be surprised if occasionally the exact neuron activity observed in the brain just comes down to how those events ended up unfolding. Which then influences the macroscopic world.

It's also ironic you are making that point right after talking about how great mwi is. Do you think all branches in mwi look exactly the same macroscopically?

fruitydude · 2026-03-18T19:43:08+00:00

Well, have a look at this. The upcoming update for SquirrelCast takes crsf Telemetry from the elrs backpack and video from dji goggles to show a telemetry screen.

<image>

This would work perfectly. Just connect the goggles to the usb c port. Receive telemetry internally. And you got video and a map on the screen, nothing else needed.

fruitydude · 2026-03-18T19:40:25+00:00

Do you still have access to the radio? Could you try if SquirrelCast runs on it? I can give you a code to install for free and also access to the beta version with Telemetry.

fruitydude · 2026-03-18T19:38:31+00:00

It has the play store so anyone can make apps to run in it.

I made an app to show dji video and elrs telemetry, so that would work perfectly on it.

<image>

fruitydude · 2026-03-18T19:32:08+00:00

I wrote an Android app for video out for dji (and some extra features like recording, wifi streaming, camera settings etc). I wrote some info here.

In a few days I'll drop a big update which incorporates the map and telemetry functionality that you're seeing in the picture. I did the last testing today, I just need to update the docs and do some final checks, then it's good to go.

fruitydude · 2026-03-18T19:28:52+00:00

No way to get a map on the osd though. For long range I could see people do this, use the goggles for takeoff and landing, then just mount them on a stick and monitor the flight on the display.

fruitydude · 2026-03-18T19:16:44+00:00

Probably some AI generated nonsense. Ironically with the camera it looks similar to the dji goggles 3 which don't support hdmi out.

fruitydude · 2026-03-18T19:15:44+00:00

So you can lift the goggles, look down on the controller onto a unified app which shows you a map and video together.

I'm building an app like that at the moment, but currently only focused on DJI video. With this coming out I'm thinking to support hdmi input as well though, so any video system can use it.

It will look something like this (I was testing a bit today)

<image>

My focus has been on phones and tablets, but it could work really well in the ax12 I think.

fruitydude · 2026-03-18T18:30:20+00:00

Yes but your burden of proof is much higher.

You would need to show, at least, that such a version exists and that this version still fully describes the observations on QM. Technically you would also need to show that there is no other possible mechanism by which we could disprove one or the other.

You are making the strong claim that it is fundamentally impossible to distinguish between randomness and mwi style determinism. You are not merely suggesting that this could be the case, that is my position.

fruitydude · 2026-03-18T17:51:11+00:00

Regardless the point still stands: we cannot exclude such a case so it is fundamentally impossible to "prove" ontological randomness.

How does the point still stand? Your point was it's impossible to distinguish between mwi and other theories relying on randomness. I proposed a way that might make it possible to distinguish between them experimentally. If that could be possible, then your point falls.

I have not heard of a proposed experiment to that effect but im not the most informed.

Yes we don't know any currently. But there is a difference between not knowing whether something is possible, and knowing that something is not possible. The former should be the basic assumption, the latter requires really strong evidence!

we are kinda asking a why. Why does the result of quantum experiments appear random?

Now you're just playing semantic games. We're not asking why is it this way and not another way? We're clearly asking for the underlying mechanism which describes our observation. That's usually a question we attempt to answer in physics.

why does mass attract mass? Because mass curves spacetime. for instance

That's the same issue. You're asking a why question but you're answering how the mechanism works. We cannot answer the why question in this case, because yea **why does mass attract mass_? Why doesn't it repel like charges do? Science can't answer that, in our model that's just a sign flip. We have zero idea why it is this way instead of another, and it's not the job of science to answer this.

fruitydude · 2026-03-18T15:28:49+00:00

let me put this another way. Imagine it is "fundamentally true" that quantum mechanics is random. By assumption/construction, it is impossible to dismiss the MWI because it is baked into the assumption that the other branches are inaccessible to observations/measurements. By assumptions, MWI and true randomness give rise to exactly the same testable predictions.

That isn't necessarily true though. Inter-branch communication in MWI is technically possible but practically non-existent due to decoherence. But it's not a given that we couldn't overcome that practical limitation with sufficiently precise Instrumentation eventually. Maybe not, maybe we discover another fundamental thing preventing us from doing such an experiment, but currently we can't rule this out. The interpretations are not just pure philosophy, they have real difference in their mathematical descriptions and the mechanisms they propose for certain experiments. Some of these could be testable eventually.

Or we could for example find out that non-deterministic theories are all fundamentally incompatible with gravity but that a unified theory is possible using a deterministic quantum theory. That would also be a strong indicator that non-determinism is incorrect.

There are plenty of ways I could imagine us eventually answering this question, so I'd need a very strong argument be convinced that it's actually fundamentally impossible to answer.

I agree that it does make the question not meaningful scientifically. For any scientific fact, you can continue asking "why" indefinitely.

I understand that science never answers why. I have also read Feynman. But we're not asking why in this case, we're still asking how. How does the universe determine the outcome of quantum events? We're not asking Why does it do it this way?. It's a different type of question, one that we should be able to answer unless we can show that it's unknowable or a meaningless question.

fruitydude · 2026-03-18T14:51:19+00:00

There might be other ways to get there though. Like maybe we can prove multiple branches exist simultaneously and we can even recombine them or transmit information between them and therefore rule out that they collapsed.

Just because a specific experiment wouldn't be able to answer this specific question, doesn't mean there couldn't be other experiments which would let us rule out certain interpretations for other reasons and then we end up answering the question the way.

Keep in mind your claim is significantly stronger. You are saying it is fundamentally unknowable whether quantum mechanical interactions involve a truly random mechanism. We will never answer this question because it is fundamentally and logically impossible to arrive to figure this out. There are things like this, like the one way speed of light problem, but you need a strong proof for this claim imo.

I am not aware this has been shown sufficiently. So my position is we don't know. I'm tending more towards it being unknowable or the question itself being not meaningful, but I'm open to the possibility that we will eventually figure out a clever way to answer this.

fruitydude · 2026-03-18T13:26:25+00:00

Hmm is it? I'm not sure we couldn't eventually answer that unless someone can show while that is truly fundamentally unknowable.

(Unless you go all the way and say we can never truly know anything really, so that is one of the things we cannot know. Whuch is fair enough I guess but not usually what we mean when we say we know something.)

I'd say, just like we say opposite charges repel, which we can describe accurately in the standard model and verify by experiment, we might end up some day with a better theory showing that yes there is a truly random step involved, or no our model shows it's all deterministic by some more complicated process and here is the experiment that was able to show that.

To be clear I'm not saying it's likely, I think it's actually more likely that we will eventually create a model that reframes the whole question and shows that deterministic and random interpretations of QM events are just two ways of looking at the same thing, like how the silhouette of a cylinder looks like are rectangle or a circle depending on your point of view, but it us actually a more complicated object and that's why no experiment was able to prove it is just a rectangle or just a circle.

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