Free Will: What others have thought about it in the past...

The evolution of thought around free will:

God: You think therefore you have sinned.

Plato: I think I can imagine what is.

Renes Descartes: I think therefore I am.

Hobbes: I think we're better off together.

Adam Smith: We are better off together.

Charles Darwin: I think I selected you because you think.

Elvis: I think I love you.

Mick Jagger: I think I can't get no satisfaction.

Pink Floyd: I think it's just one more brick in the wall.

Richard Nixon: I think I am not a crook.

Daniel Dennett: I think I think therefore I think.

Sam Harris: I think therefore I am not really thinking.

Christopher Hitchens: I think therefore I need no god.

Richard Dawkins: I think because it gives me more descendants.

Donald Trump: I think I'm a very smart person

Scott Adams: I don't think, I just do. I have no free will... so I can be an a$$hole. It's not my fault! I can't help myself.

Free Will: Do You Have It?

Does it even make sense to ask the question?  What if Free Will didn't exist? What difference would it make? What would be different in the real world?  Would we change punishments as people aren't responsible for their actions? Would more people 'give up' changing themselves? If there's really no free will, it doesn't matter. Nothing matters. But since I am going to make my life have meaning and matter, I think that means there is Free Will.

The people who don't believe in Free Will have nothing, nothing to support them.  They look for support for their ideas in the most amazing places and purposely work to refute anything that mismatches what was once written in a book. Some try to have current interpretations of  'religious' thought.  Religions assume Free Will. That's one thing we agree on. The Newtonians don't. They think that because we have equations that explain what happens next depending on what is happening now, that everything is predictable. Ha! That's laughable enough to cause a conniption fit!

Let alone their misunderstanding of Quantum Mechanics (where everything is probabilistic and depends upon the observer...) and their lack of knowledge of emergent properties - how an underlying set of rules in one domain can have an effect at another level. (Examples are different phases of water: ice, steam, liquid, etc.) Systems act differently than single instances. And they can't be predicted. At least they can't be predicted than anything less than a full simulation. This means that they are unpredictable.

What can we do with Free Will and the progress of Science?

We have Free Will. We also have an opportunity to make a true religion that is consistent with the facts and what we know and can grow and thrive in the presence of new information.

We have a unique opportunity when the Nerd Rapture happens.  We can actually choose what religion we want to make happen.  We can actually make any and all religions true in the minds of their followers. This is a fantastic opportunity for the Nerds. It's time to design what religion we want to make true.

Since we have Free Will, we can create whatever religion we want...

So what religion should we make into a reality? Any of them? All of them.  But we should also design our own religion that meets the secular moral code, believes in reality, allows anyone to join, and insists that all people are created equal? You betcha! What would that look like?

But wait, do we have Free Will, or is it just all an illusion?

First why do we think we have Free Will?

Is it just a matter of complexity?  We're so complicated that it appears that we have Free Will.

Or is it in the interaction of our consciousness with ourselves - does that mean we have Free Will?

What does that even mean. When I walk into a room and tell myself I see something, who am I talking to? Is there someone there who doesn't see the same thing as me? I don't think so. I actually think there is a separate consciousness that can't speak (see the famous corpus callosum slicing experiments...)

Is it just a matter of information? Is it just an illusion? How can knowing something be an illusion?

Like the famous physicist Claude Shannon said: information is the content in a message that cannot be predicted. [1]

Doesn't that definition assume that Free Will exists?  How can you do something unpredictable unless you have Free Will? It's not just that you are so complicated that it's not feasible to predict what you will do, we have to show it's fundamentally impossible.

And it sure feels like I make choices and isn't making choices the foundation of Free Will?

It certainly feels like I have Free Will. How could it be an illusion? What does an illusion or hallucination of an internal mind state even mean? It has something to do with reality, but I'm, not sure exactly what, yet.

If we settle the decision of whether or not I have Free Will, does it make any possible predictions change? Can it be scientifically measured? Does it have a consequence? If not, then it's not really a well framed question, is it?

So our first job is to define Free Will. And define it in a way that those who have Free Will will act differently than those who don't. Without that possibility you can't verify your reasoning.  If Free Will makes no difference then it doesn't matter if we have it or not. [Less is More blog]

Reality is what stays around even after you have no faith. You don't need faith in reality, it just is. Anything you must have faith for could be or could not be. And that's a tough thing to base your life on. You might have enough evidence to believe it, but beyond that, you are risking your eternal soul. If you have one. I'd argue you probably don't have an immortal soul...at least not yet. Science is hard at work in giving you one, but we aren't there yet.

Let's assume you don't have Free Will. Then your every action should be able to be predicted. That sounds hard. Harder than the weather. Things change all the time. To have to measure them accurately enough to predict what will happen in the future takes a lot of energy. If you don't know exactly where everything is to start, you can't say where it will be later. In a typical pool shot (absolutely following Newtonian equations) any error in the angle of the ball, the speed of the ball or the spin of the ball quickly grows astronomical in size after a few bounces and collisions. Yes, astronomical! How do we know this? Just look at how hard it is to predict the weather... we can't know the position, velocity and state of every atom. Not only is it impossible in Newtonian physics, it's inherently impossible in Quantum Mechanics (QM only gives you the probability of a particle being somewhere, so the errors get astronomically larger than in Newtonian physics.) So it can't be done.

What's the second way in which Free Will is obvious? The only way to say Free Will doesn't exist is to have a way to predict someone's future decisions. You can get pretty good at this by gathering lots of data and using it to build a model that makes predictions. But you're not going to get better answers by measuring less than every single atom's state. You're going to make mistakes in your prediction. The difference between the predictions and the truth are what show that Free Will exists.

So we can measure that Free Will exists given any model to do predictions. It's an easy thing to measure. You have Free Will. It's not an illusion. It can be measured. Free Will exists. Eventually the prediction model gets pretty good, but it will never be perfect. QM forbids it. You must have Free Will if you think you do.

Now, what religion do we create when the Nerd Rapture comes along? (Note to self: Nerd Rapture is that ability to put your mind elsewhere and back into your body.)  The religion we create for people to experience when their mind is elsewhere should be up to them. They can stay there if they want to. For the religion with No Name, we'll want to be in the real world. We'll understand that the world we experience when we are elsewhere is just made up.  The Religion with No Name is just living in Reality and deciding for yourself what's important. It's the only Religion Without Lies.

Long live Free Will.

Thanks for reading!
  - Dr. Mike Ritter





[1] The interesting thing here is that this means the information in the message depends upon the knowledge of the receiver. Which is obvious at the most basic level, you have to be able to decode the signal to receive the information. But then there are more levels of information possible if you have more context. The information in a message depends upon the receiver. 

Proclamations of the Final Great Awakening of the Human Race: The Religion with No Name

0. The Supernatural does not exist. Nature exists. Everything has a cause. Humans have souls.
1. Why would the human race base their lives upon a set of scratchings of paleolithic ancestors that barely knew how to reason and write?
2. Facts can be written down, but facts change, capabilities change, progress happens. Why would one assume that facts don't change unless it is to propagate their control and to selfishly increase it?
3. Science is the basis for determining new knowledge of the rules of the game. History still occurs and may be unknowable, but how to react to history is up to you.
4. Reason is the method to determine your actions and your goals.
5. Faith must be examined in the presence of every new fact.
6. Why would you let something as important as your life go unexamined?
7. Why would you let someone guide your life without examination of thier motives?
8. The Great Works include, but are not limited to: the death of Evolution by Natural Selection, the Gilgamesh project (ever-lasting life), the Nerd Rapture (creation of heaven), Universal Expansion of life and Rationalism: the Final Great Awakening of the Human Race. All depend upon the continual progress provided to us by Science. But Science is not enough.
9. Stop deluding yourself and examine claims that are presented to you: What? Why? Who benifits? What is your benifit? What will happen if everyone believes and acts upon this?
10. The morals and ethics given to us by Evolution are selfish and evil. The only thing they respond to is survival.
11. Science can lead us to the most advantageous moral and ethical code for the individual and for the human race.
12. Technology is the creation of a new set of capabilities that can be derived from Scientific knowledge.
13. Engineering is the increase in productivity of existing Technologies and the reduction to practice of newly invented Technologies.
14. Capitalism is a method to deploy the productivity and new capability gains from Engineering to the human race.
15. Government is the method that groups of humans use to maximize and ensure the fair distribution of the gains from Capitalism as well as to contain the use of force and increase safety of each other.
16. Freedom of religion demands the elimination of heresy. Claiming otherwise is a logical fallacy and our reason makes this unacceptable.
17. Fairness can be defined by assuming the tenet that 'everyone is created equal' in the eyes of the law (and of the people: the people agree to follow the law or pay the consequences as agreed to with the government) and following this tenet to set a requirement on every law passed that it treat people equally no matter who they are.
18. Capitalism definitely treats people differently based on what they own, but should never treat people differently depending on who their ancestors were.
19. You have no choice on who your ancestors were.
20. You can help choose your descendants.
21. The people must agree on their own form of government.
22. The elimination of heresy makes for a potentially peacefully society.
23. The right to disseminate information (free speech) must not be abridged.
24. Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness are sacrosanct rights that all humankind possess.
25. Groups of people must consent to be governed.
26. Religions are the way evolution has extended itself to use and control the meme-space to manipulate some genes chance of survival.
27. Culture is a common set of assumptions and accepted methods to act in any situation.
28. The first singularity was the Big Bang. This made it possbile to create information. Something was somewhere at some time and had some properties. All things that can be described with numbers and equations. This is what Newtonian Physics describes.
29. Quantum Physics describes reality one additional layer away. However, still using time it describes what happens between measurements and it only predicts a probability of some information (some property that can be represented by a number) existing at a certain time and place.
30. The second singularity was the invention of life: single celled life. This is what allows evolution to begin. Information is now replicated, nature begins to have a data bank that describes how it works. (For instance, your DNA contains about 1 GB of information)
31. The third singularity was language. Humans could talk to each other and send information from here to there and towards any time. The amount of information that could be transmitted by language is about 100 KB/day * 365 days/year * 30 years per generation = 1 GB, the same amount of information we carry in our DNA.
32. The fourth singularity is ongoing: reading and writing. Now any information can be anywhere at any time. A 400 page book contains about 1 MB of information. A thousand books, a very small library contain more information than an entire lifetime of talk or our entire genome. Now we have 6 TB disks that can hold 6000 copies of your DNA. A GB of data storage is now essentially free.
33. The fifth singularity will be when we can create conscious artificial intelligence. Evolution can do it, so can we.
34. The Gilgamesh project, increasing the useful human lifespan, will never end.
35. The sixth singularity will be the Nerd Rapture: it will allow you to recreate the soul, your consciousness with your memories, into whatever environment it wishes, even Heaven.
36. The human race must become multi-planetary or it will not survive.
37. The human race will continue to expand until other life forces us to stop.
38. We require renewable energy as fossil fuels will not be enough to power our progress in the near future.
39. God reveals himself all the time, yet he has never revealed himself to us.
40. Another of the Great Works is to recognize reality for what it is: Science.
41. Secular Humanism is a philosophy not a religion because it does not assume anything supernatural about God. This religion with No Name which is concerned with the Final Great Awakening of the Human Race is related to but is not Secular Humanism.
42. Reasoning by logic is different from reasoning by analogy, the latter is typically wrong.
43. Faith is the abiliity to belive in things that you cannot prove.
44. Persuasion instead of violence is the most progressive, efficient and likely manner to solve problems.
45. If nature were a person we would consider them evil.
46. If Evolution by Natural Selection were a person we would consider them evil.
47. Reasoning and Science can determine the rules of reality.
48. The rules of reality have always come out to be the same no matter where we look at them.
49. Mathematics is the language of the Universe.
50. Quantum Mechanics and reality have never been shown to disagree.
51. The Correspondence Principle describes the realtionship between Quantum and Classical Mechanics.
52. Emergent properties are derived from but not prescribed by the underlying systems. Different organizations of the underlying systems can produce different emergent properties. Different systems can produce the same emergent property.
53. There is Free Will.
54. If evolution can produce consciousness, so can we. Consciousness is an emergent property.
55. The human mind consists of two systems: they can be labeled fast and slow. Fast are typical neural nets that give an output dependent on the input and have feedback systems to change their configuration. Copies of these types of systems now run our world in the large. The second system is consciousness. This system can model arbitrary systems.
56. Consciousness must be taught how to percieve reality and model reality accurately. It is much harder than you think.
57. Since persuasion is the only ethical form of power, everyone must be taught its use, its effects and its consequences.
58. Humans have taken more rights to be unalienable, including but not limited to Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness. See the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights.
59. Freedom of religion, banishment of heresy and free speech without fear of reprisal by governments and the right to defend these rights with force are inalienable rights.
60. Feudalism, Communism and Cults of Personality (among others) are philosophies that have failed the human race.
61,. A lawful democracy with freedom of religion and speech is the most moral goverment in existence at the present time.
62. The people must be ever vigilant to ensure that tyrants do not encroach upon their rights.
63. It is time for the Final Great Awakening of humankind.
64. Is it time to throw off the evil yoke of Nature and Evolution by Natural Descent.
65. It is time to create a moral and ethical system based upon reality.
66. It is time to take the principles outlined here and build a religion based upon reality to benefit all of humankind.
67. This religion requires faith in what has been revealed to us about reality by Science.
68. This religion requires faith that together humankind can find God.
69. This religion requires faith that transforming the universe via the Great Works is the destiny of humankind.
70. This religion requires faith in progress.
71. This religion will require great sacrifices, perseverance and toil.
72. This religion is not for the faint-hearted, the weak or the hesitant.
73. This religion gives the human race its rightful place in the universe.
74. Without this religion the human race wanders under the evils of Evolution by Natural Selection towards its eventual death and destruction.
75. Without this religion the human race allows the false gods and their priests to manipulate them into slavery and subservience.
76. Without this religion the human race will perish.
77. The revelations that found this religion will be apparent to all who look, they are self-evident, independent of history and easily reproducable by anyone who can reason.
78. This religion does not banish the mystical, it embraces, engulfs and tames the unknown.
79. This religion does not banish the spiritual, it embraces, engulfs and tames the unknown.
80. While all pervious religions claim to be perfect and true, this religion only claims to be true and to strive for perfection.
81. This religion will have No Name, but all who follow it will be evident to their neighbors and will be fulfilled by the glory of the Great Works.
82. This religion will prove other religions have tenants that are false, immoral and naive and should be shunned, thus it will be attacked from fear as it will cause the collapse of the false religions and those who depend upon them.
83. Despite the adversity, this religion is the last, best hope for the human race.
84. The struggle will have many setbacks but we must be ever faithful that the destination is correct, the universe can be tamed and God will be found.
85. Amen to the religion with No Name.

Hilbert space has no physical extent or extent in time. Quantum wave functions live in Hilbert space.

Hilbert space has no physical extent or extent in time. Quantum wave functions live in Hilbert space. This means that when you change a parameter in Hilbert space it changes everywhere at the same time. Every single entangled wave function now sees the same modified Hilbert space at the same time. The changes in Hilbert space are transmitted at infinite speed, apparently (It's actually worse than that: if you set up the experiment correctly you can get the Hilbert space to affect particles in the past. Yes, you can change the distribution of measurements on an entangled particle by making another measurement in the future, after the first particle is gone, absorbed in a detector. [1])

It really is like Einstein said: if you think you understand quantum mechanics then you just haven't been paying attention enough!

Quantum mechanical wave functions are weirder than anyone thought they were and they were plenty weird before. Einstein, et al. defined how physical theories work, they consider locality critical: Two particles interact by being in the same place at the same time. There is no 'action at a distance' in modern physics. Things happen by exchanging particles. The fastest these particles can travel is at the speed of light. That's why special and general relativity produce such weird effects, nothing can go faster than the speed of light.

That assumption just doesn't hold in quantum mechanics or quantum field theories. Well, not quite. In addition to wave functions that represent particles that effectively can't go faster than the speed of light, there's some wiggle room on that. Wave functions only predict the probability distribution of making a particular measurement. You can measure a particle going faster than the speed of light, you just won't know where the particle is. This is Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. So particles sometimes go faster than the speed of light, but for a short time (a very short time) and it has consequences.  This is a rare event and no information is transmitted faster than the speed of light, the knowledge of the speed is traded for lack of knowledge of the particles whereabouts. It all balances out.  So every equation that physicists believe to be true depend upon locality: except for quantum mechanics. The standard model for quantum mechanics says that you can change Hilbert space, one parameter in Hilbert space, and every single wave function in the universe will recognize that change instantaneously, and if you configure it correctly the change can actually cause an effect on a wave function at an earlier time! The measurement can change the distribution of measurements that you have already recorded but not looked at. That's right. I said it. It says information can travel backwards in time.

You can make a measurement that will affect a separate measurement made in the past. Think about that. If that's not time travel, then what is? Of course this can't be used to send information into the past faster than the speed of light... (DAMN!)  It only changes the distribution of measurements, you have to know the results of the future measurements to verify the current measurements were altered, it's only the correlations of the two measurements that changes.

Like Einstein said about the neutrino: "Who ordered that?"

Einstein went on with Bell and Rosen and Podolsky to propose the measurements above in the hopes that they would show that quantum mechanics was actually a 'hidden variable' theory and nothing in the theory changed faster than the speed of light, but to their chagrin, the experiments proved the exact opposite. They showed that modifications to Hilbert space, unlike those to the space we can see that are limited to propagating at the speed of light, happen instantaneously across the entire universe. Hilbert space, where quantum mechanical wave functions live, is different than our observed space and time. Changes made in Hilbert Space can have  effects on the past, can travel faster than light and do not happen in the real world, but they do affect it.

How has science proven this? It seems just phantasmagorical! It's all about the fundamental tenets of quantum mechanics...

Quantum mechanics has this interesting feature called entanglement: what does this actually mean? It means that when you make measurements in the real world you change the state of the wave function every where in Hilbert Space instantaneously and hence the measurement you make in the real world is also altered. It basically says that quantum mechanics is a theory of a linear superposition of quantum states in Hilbert space. The way to affect the coefficients of the superposition (how much of this and how much of that) is to make a measurement.  And these effects are manifested across the universe instantaneously, even having effects back in time if they have to.

When you make a measurement you get one bit out of the measurement. The most illustrative example is measuring the spin of an electron. Spin can be thought of as the rotation of the election (not really, since the electron is a point particle as far as we can tell, so there's nothing there to actually spin... except the wave function can spread the electron around in space and that allows for the effects of spin to show up. An electron can only be in a single state after it is measured. That is what information is. It tells you if the wave functions (q-bits) are in a given state or not (can you measure the state?))

One of the most interesting things about quantum mechanics is the 'no-cloning' proposition. In order to preserve information (which we assume is a conserved quantity: is neither created nor destroyed) you cannot clone a quantum state without destroying it. In other words, you can copy a particular quantum state, but then you don't know what state the original system is in now. Without this proposition, you can send information faster than the speed of light. Einstein had prophesied in special relativity that no information could be transported faster than the speed of light. So far, he's been shown to be right. If information is conserved then the no-cloning theory of quantum mechanics is a consequence of this conservation law.

When something is preserved it points to a symmetry. Symmetries are very important to physics. Symmetry under rotation leads to conservation of angular momentum. Symmetry under translation leads to conservation of energy. Symmetry under time and charge leads to conservation of parity. Although all three symmetries interact to cause one symmetry to be preserved. So preservation of information, a grand symmetry if there ever was one, must be able to be shown to hold for quantum mechanical equations. And Lo and Behold: it does! What symmetry leads to conservation of information? The current claim is that they symmetry of equations in time combined with the purity of quantum states leads to the conservations of information The universe is all about information. [2] What does the purity of a quantum state mean? It means it's an eigenstate in Hilbert space. That's like being identified with an axis on a graph. Any state in Hilbert space has only one representation from a given set of quantum eigenstates. In other words, Hilbert space is linear and states are made up of linear superpositions of eigenstates. Think of it as one eigenstate cannot be made up of a superposition of any of the other eigenstates, they are all perpendicular to each other.

So somehow the universe changes the Hilbert space the wave function lives in instantaneously across the entire universe. Observable or not. It only requires that the two q-bits be entangled sometime in the past (and everything has been entangled since the big bang.) This preserves the transmission of information to the speed of light still. Even though you have changed the probability of the measurement on the receiving side instantaneously you can only tell that is true if you get the information about the measurement from the transmission side which can only be sent at the speed of light (Oops, no information can be transmitted faster than the speed of light, as far as we know) and information needs to be recorded on a physical thing (outside of Hilbert space) and physical objects are limited to traveling at the speed of light. So no contradictions from quantum mechanics are predicted when integrating with general relativity.

Okay, that's weird enough. Wave functions are not in the real world, the physical world, they live in Hilbert space. You are a quantum mechanical wave function, so you really live in Hilbert space. All quantum mechanical wave functions live in Hilbert space. What does this mean?

[Side bar: Hilbert was the mathematician that posed the ten most interesting mathematical problems to solve to finish the entire description of mathematics. [3] All of them have not been solved yet, although the solutions have broken the idea that the answers to these problem would solve mathematics forever. Only three of his proposed problems remains unsolved (some of them were not formulated carefully enough but have been solved for the different formulations), but the most famous (and most useful) problem to remain unsolved is Reiman's conjecture about the zeros of the Riemann equation and the distributions of primes (Reiman's theorem is amazing!  He proposed an equation that had a solution of zero for every prime number. This is super awesome, as now there is an analytical method to describe the distribution of primes. Assuming the proposition is true, of course...) End of Sidebar]

[Sidebar: Hilbert didn't like some of the answers he got to his top 24 problems. Actually he probably did like them, but they totally eradicated his original proposal that mathematics could be solved. Gödel, Turing and Church killed that idea with a vengeance! They showed that any system as complicated as the integers was too complicated to prove every truthful statement that could be written or even more germane: if you could prove every truthful statement then the theory was inconsistent (you can prove false things.) Which answer do you pick? Wholly shit! Of course in any sane universe you pick the former: it's consistent. But there are things that are true that you can never prove to be true and there are things that are false that you can never prove are false. But every statement you can prove is either true or false, it can't be both. This is a much better choice than inconsistency. If a system is inconsistent then it is useless. It can't be used to predict anything. this is the one thing I have faith in. Otherwise the entire world is less complicated than the integers. Hardly seems likely! End of sidebar]

So let's summarize the current state of Einstein's universe: Physical objects can't travel faster than the speed of light. Physical objects have mass and energy. These two things are equivalent and can change into each other. The interactions of masses are governed by Einstein's laws: No matter how fast you are travelling relative to another frame of reference, when you measure the speed of light it's always the same.  How did Einstein figure out that mass and energy are the same thing? It's a consequence of his equations: If something has a mass and energy in one frame these quantities are added together to predict it's motion. They transform together to a new frame. The equation treats them as the same thing. He figured out the conversion constant from his transformation equations:

E = mc^2.

This is weird, if light (and the other forces) were disturbances in space you would expect that if you travelled faster towards or away from a beam of light it would move faster or slower, but it doesn't. This means that as you speed up you bend space around you. It's like it can't keep up to the change in information at the speed of light. And it can't, you can only effect space that is close enough to you in time and space (this is the assumption of locality plus the universality of the speed of light.) This is the same as saying that a piece of mass or a q-bit after it's measured is a physical thing. The measurement tells you if it is in a particular state or not, that's one bit of information. Before the measurement the q-bits are entangled and in a particular superposition of states. The coefficients change as a function of time. Simultaneously (correlated) in the entire universe.

As discussed previously, this does not allow you to send information faster than the speed of light. The particle has to get there, and it is subject to Einstein's laws of general relativity. In fact, we made sure quantum mechanics was consistent with relativity and changed its formulation to make it so.

There are two possibilities: either the wave function changes instantaneously across the entire universe or the q-bits didn't really go into a superposition of states they just went into one particular state and evolved over time from there. No surprise. In fact, Einstein was a big fan of the second theory, it's called the theory of hidden variables. He and Rosen and Bell [5] devised an experiment to tell the difference between the two hypothesis. Einstein was very disappointed to learn that the first theory was correct.

But it's about to get weirder than that.

Our new understanding of quantum mechanics says that the change in the wave function does not change simultaneously all across the universe. It says that the effects of the change of the wave function can propagate back in time in the real world. Yes, that's right. I make a measurement now. You made a measurement in the past. I didn't change the measurement you made but I changed the distribution you measured it out of. So if you make this measurement many many times, it will be different if I make a measurement afterwards than if I do not make the measurement. I can change the past. Quantum mechanical theory insists that this is true.  Does Hilbert space have time? It has a Newtonian notion of time, it has to or it won't work. Unlike real space, time and the eigenstates don't mix. In the real world Einstein showed that they do mix. They can't mix in Hilbert space as this would ruin the purity of the eigenstates. [4]

You can affect the past. By making a measurement. By making certain measurements now, I can change what you will measure back then. My head hurts.

WTF? How does this make any sense?

[Sidebar: The other explanation proposed is that the q-bits were not in a superposition of states but in a particular state. This is the hidden variable theory. Why? Because there is some distribution of values that told the qubits to pick a particular state back in the last time you tried to entangle them. It turns out that the Bell theorem based on the Einstein-Rosen-Podolsky conjecture [5] tells you how to distinguish these two options. Lo and behold: quantum mechanics is correct, hidden variable theories are not correct. Hilbert spaced changes instantaneously across the entire universe. End sidebar]

Putting the q-bit in a particular state (not a superposition of states) doesn't work. If this were true you would measure a certain distribution at the receiver. If the wave function changes everywhere at the same time in the universe you measure a different distribution. We've done the experiment (proposed by Bell following Einstein, Rosen and Podolsky) thousands of times. The answer is always the wave function in Hilbert space changes instantaneously. The answer is never that it chooses a particular state at the time of entanglement.

What does this say? It says the wave function is not in physical space but in Hilbert space. What does that mean? It just means the quantum wave function really is a linear superposition of Hilbert eigenstates. There are other ways to test this: they all give the same answer. Wave functions come in linear superpositions of states and you can make measurements that tell you what state the q-bit is in. The state of all entangled q-bits (q-bits that are superimposed with each other) also change state at the same time across the universe, if one q-bit in the entanglement is measured..

This measurement gives you one bit of information. This is why the state has to change simultaneously across the inverse. To preserve information you must know what the measurement distribution will be in the second measurement as you measured a q-bit in a correlated state with the original q-bit. Of course they are correlated, they are directly related, there's only one bit of information measured here . If the wave function did not change instantaneously across the universe information would not be preserved.

There must be some equations (symmetries) that the conservation of information predicts. What are they?  Are they quantum mechanics? Is it the purity of the linear superposition of quantum states? Time translation symmetry predicts energy conservation.  The conservation of informations is the result of cause and effect always being related by locality.  This is the basics of classical physics, but for quantum mechanics this does not hold; so making predictions from quantum mechanical theory is really hard because it is like nothing that we know of in the real world, even though it's the firmament of the real world.

 thanks for reading.
  -Dr. Mike

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[1] https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg23030710-500-thats-odd-quantum-entanglement-mangles-space-and-time/?utm_campaign=Echobox&utm_medium=SOC&utm_source=Twitter#link_time=1518797663

[2] https://arxiv.org/pdf/1010.5300.pdf where quantum mechanics is derived from information theoretical considerations, for instance. While they do not discuss the conservation of information directly https://medium.com/the-physics-arxiv-blog/how-quantum-mechanics-derives-from-a-revolutionary-new-theory-of-information-4487489dbb34 I believe that this assumption can lead to their postulates. Also discussed in: https://arxiv.org/abs/1208.0493.  But the real claim is shown from https://philarchive.org/archive/CHICOI, however, in this paper they insist on the "no time travel in real space" which seems contradictory to the main discussion here. This is only apparent. We are talking about changing distributions in the past, not measurements.

[3] Actually turned into 23 or 27 problems: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilbert%27s_problems

[4] An interesting question: what would be the consequences to quantum theory if time in Hilbert space was like Einsteins time in real space?  Are the effects just to small to be noticed?

[5] Einstein-Rosen-Padolsky conjecture: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPR_paradox and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell%27s_theorem