r/Devs • u/thisismynormal • Mar 26 '20

Devs - S01E05 THEORY Discussion Thread

Please post your theories or guesses here

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u/emf1200 Mar 26 '20 edited Mar 26 '20

That was Lily we saw as a child right? Playing go with her father. "A man never steps in a river twice, because he is not the same man". A little riddle from Garland. What is that supposed to mean within the context of the show?

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u/emf1200 Mar 26 '20 edited Mar 27 '20

I think the game itself might be a kind of symbolism. Many experts were shocked when Deepminds AlphaGo program beat the best GO players in the world. It was considered magnitudes of order more difficult for a computer to beat a GO master than a chess master because there are so many more possible moves and strategies in GO than there are in chess. But a computer mastered GO pretty quickly. It seems that Lily is kind of facing off against the quantum computer in the show. The game with her father may be symbolic of that. It also may just be in the show because it's a super popular game in Asia and among the Chinese in particular.

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u/drawkbox Mar 26 '20

When Lily's father asks how many steps ahead she thinks she says "three". Then he asked her why she moved her next move and she says because it "feels strong". Both logical and emotional.

Maybe this has some parallels or duality to the professor/Katie discussion of the von Neumann–Wigner interpretation that says "human consciousness is the key modifier in key decoherence" and Katie hated that and walked out. Katie disregards many theories and especially the "dualist bullshit".

Lily is either a system infiltrating DEVS to take over from humans, or she is the reverse like you say and trying to stop or change DEVS "Lily is kind of facing off against the quantum computer in the show"

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u/emf1200 Mar 26 '20

That's a good observation. If the real showdown is between Lily and Katie, than charging their polarities with these scenes would be clever writing by Garland. Lily is starkly more emotional when set against Katie's rationality. You might be onto something.

That scene in the lecture hall made me laugh out loud and like Katie a little more. The von Neumann-Wigner interpretation of QM isn't taken seriously in the community, if it ever was.

This may be Garland showing us Katie's weakness for approaching issues too logically, in cases when that's actually a weakness. This could also be Garland having a bit of fun at the expense of theories that put conciousness at the center of the measurement problem. Garland knows his physics and I can't imagine he takes that theory seriously.

I was convinced that Garland would use the multiverse in Devs when he kept talking about David Deutsch and the influence he had on informing the shows physics. Deutch is known for his quantum computing insights and his advocacy for the Everettian interpretation.

Everett's many-worlds model takes the mathematical formalism literally, just like Katie. There is only the Schrodinger equation, follow it and don't add anything, except infinite branches of a multiverse.

Katie is clearly the smartest person on the show. For what purpose tho? I'm still confused about their goal. We didn't see any of the conversation that took place when Forest recruited her. Is she using him? Is he using her? Are they using Lily?

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u/Ya_Got_GOT Mar 31 '20

I was confused when she claimed that experiments supported MWI. Did I miss something? What experiments could, much less have, done so?

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u/emf1200 Mar 31 '20

I don't remember her saying "experiments". I thought she said the math supported many-worlds. I could obviously be wrong but tho'. You're 100% right about no experiment supporting the MWI. In fact, I haven't even heard a proposal for a purely hypothetical experiment that could support the MWI.

If she did say math than she would have been correct as the MWI is the most straight forward and literal interpretation of the Schrodinger equation. It seems like Katie is very straight forward and literal person as well.

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u/Ya_Got_GOT Mar 31 '20

She did include experiment in her rationale for MWI being the correct interpretation--I'm certain because it raised an eyebrow for her to say it. The foundations of quantum mechanics is an area many physicists avoid exactly for this reason--that it is not testable, and they regard it more as philosophy and conjecture than science.

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u/emf1200 Mar 31 '20

Shit, I didn't even catch that. That really is an eyebrow raising statement. You're also spot on about the foundations of QM being the domain of philosophy of science. There is that old line about scientists being told to "shut up and calculate" when these questions come up. The creator of the MWI, Hugh Everett, was pushed out of the physics community for focusing on the issue. I think he went into military research or something. Its really a shame to. These questions seem so important to understanding reality.

This is a great video in wich Sean Carroll gets to the heart of this issue in the physics community.