# The Central Paradox of Statistical Mechanics: The Problem of The Past

This is the third part in a three-part series on the foundations of statistical mechanics.

1. The Necessity of Statistical Mechanics for Getting Macro From Micro
2. Is The Fundamental Postulate of Statistical Mechanics A Priori?
3. The Central Paradox of Statistical Mechanics: The Problem of The Past

— — —

What I’ve argued for so far is the following set of claims:

1. To successfully predict the behavior of macroscopic systems, we need something above and beyond the microphysical laws.
2. This extra thing we need is the fundamental postulate of statistical mechanics, which assigns a uniform distribution over the region of phase space consistent with what you know about the system. This postulate allows us to prove all the things we want to say about the future, such as “gases expand”, “ice cubes melt”, “people age” and so on.
3. This fundamental postulate is not justifiable on a priori grounds, as it is fundamentally an empirical claim about how frequently different micro states pop up in our universe. Different initial conditions give rise to different such frequencies, so that a claim to a priori access to the fundamental postulate is a claim to a priori access to the precise details of the initial condition of the universe.

There’s just one problem with all this… apply our postulate to the past, and everything breaks.

Notice that I said that the fundamental postulate allows us to prove all the things we want to say about the future. That wording was chosen carefully. What happens if you try to apply the microphysical laws + the fundamental postulate to predict the past of some macroscopic system? It turns out that all hell breaks loose. Gases spontaneously contract, ice cubes form from puddles of water, and brains pop out of thermal equilibrium.

Why does this happen? Very simply, we start with two fully time reversible premises (the microphysical laws and the fundamental postulate). We apply it to present knowledge of some state, the description of which does not specify a special time direction. So any conclusion we get must as a matter of logic be time reversible as well! You can’t start with premises that treat the past as the mirror image of the future, and using just the rules of logical equivalence derive a conclusion that treats the past as fundamentally different from the future. And what this means is that if you conclude that entropy increases towards the future, then you must also conclude that entropy increases towards the past. Which is to say that we came from a higher entropy state, and ultimately (over a long enough time scale and insofar as you think that our universe is headed to thermal equilibrium) from thermal equilibrium.

Let’s flesh this argument out a little more. Consider a half-melted ice cube sitting in the sun. The microphysical laws + the fundamental postulate tell us that the region of phase space consisting of states in which the ice cube is entirely melted is much much much larger than the region of phase space in which it is fully unmelted. So much larger, in fact, that it’s hard to express using ordinary English words. This is why we conclude that any trajectory through phase space that passes through the present state of the system (the half-melted cube) is almost certainly going to quickly move towards the regions of phase space in which the cube is fully melted. But for the exact same reason, if we look at the set of trajectories that pass through the present state of the system, the vast vast vast majority of them will have come from the fully-melted regions of phase space. And what this means is that the inevitable result of our calculation of the ice cube’s history will be that a few moments ago it was a puddle of water, and then it spontaneously solidified and formed into a half-melted ice cube.

This argument generalizes! What’s the most likely past history of you, according to statistical mechanics? It’s not that the solar system coalesced from a haze of gases strewn through space by a past supernova, such that a planet would form in the Goldilocks zone and develop life, which would then gradually evolve through natural selection to the point where you are sitting in whatever room you’re sitting in reading this post. This trajectory through phase space is enormously unlikely. The much much much more likely past trajectory of you through phase space is that a little while ago you were a bunch of particles dispersed through a universe at thermal equilibrium, which happened to spontaneously coalesce into a brain that has time to register a few moments of experience before dissipating back into chaos. “What about all of my memories of the past?” you say. As it happens the most likely explanation of these memories is not that they are veridical copies of real happenings in the universe but illusions, manufactured from randomness.

Basically, if you buy everything I’ve argued in the first two parts, then you are forced to conclude that the universe is most likely near thermal equilibrium, with your current experience of it arising as a spontaneous dip in entropy, just enough to produce a conscious brain but no more. There are at least two big problems with this view.

Problem 1: This conclusion is, we think, extremely empirically wrong! The ice cube in front of you didn’t spontaneously form from a puddle of water, uncracked eggs weren’t a moment ago scrambled, and your memories are to some degree veridical. If you really believe that you are merely a spontaneous dip in entropy, then your prediction for the next minute will be the gradual dissolution of your brain and loss of consciousness. Now, wait a minute and see if this happens. Still here? Good!

Problem 2: The conclusion cannot be simultaneously believed and justified. If you think that you’re a thermal fluctuation, then you shouldn’t credit any of your memories as telling you anything about the world. But then your whole justification to coming to the conclusion in the first place (the experiments that led us to conclude that physics is time-reversible and that the fundamental postulate is true) is undermined! Either you believe it without justification, or you don’t believe despite justification. Said another way, no reflective equilibrium exists at an entropy minimum. David Albert calls this peculiar epistemic state cognitively unstable, as it’s not clear where exactly it should leave you.

Reflect for a moment on how strange of a situation we are in here. Starting from very basic observations of the world, involving its time-reversibility on the micro scale and the increase in entropy of systems, we see that we are inevitably led to the conclusion that we are almost certainly thermal fluctuations, brains popping out of the void. I promise you that no trick has been pulled here, this really is the state of the philosophy of statistical mechanics! The big issue is how to deal with this strange situation.

One approach is to say the following: Our problem is that our predictions work towards the future but not the past. So suppose that we simply add as a new fundamental postulate the proposition that long long ago the universe had an incredibly low entropy. That is, suppose that instead of just starting with the microphysical laws and the fundamental postulate of statistical mechanics, we added a third claims: the Past Hypothesis.

The Past Hypothesis should be understood as an augmentation of our Fundamental Postulate. Taken together, the two postulates say that our probability distribution over possible microstates should not be uniform over phase space. Instead, it should be what you get when you take the uniform distribution, and then condition on the distant past being extremely low entropy. This process of conditioning clearly preferences one direction of time over the other, and so the symmetry is broken.

It’s worth reflecting for a moment on the strangeness of the epistemic status of the Past Hypothesis. It happens that we have over time accumulated a ton of observational evidence for the occurrence of the Big Bang. But none of this evidence has anything to do with our reasons for accepting the Past Hypothesis. If we buy the whole line of argument so far, our conclusion that something like a Big Bang occurred becomes something that we are forced to believe for deep logical reasons, on pain of cognitive instability and self-undermining belief. Anybody that denies that the Big Bang (or some similar enormously low-entropy past state) occurred has to contend with their view collapsing in self-contradiction upon observing the physical laws!

# Is The Fundamental Postulate of Statistical Mechanics A Priori?

This is the second part in a three-part series on the foundations of statistical mechanics.

1. The Necessity of Statistical Mechanics for Getting Macro From Micro
2. Is The Fundamental Postulate of Statistical Mechanics A Priori?
3. The Central Paradox of Statistical Mechanics: The Problem of The Past

— — —

The fantastic empirical success of the fundamental postulate gives us a great amount of assurance that the postulate is good one. But it’s worth asking whether that’s the only reason that we should like this postulate, or if it has some solid a priori justification. The basic principle of “when you’re unsure, just distribute credences evenly over phase space” certainly strikes many people as highly intuitive and justifiable on a priori grounds. But there are some huge problems with this way of thinking, one of which I’ve already hinted at. Here’s a thought experiment that illustrates the problem.

There is a factory in your town that produces cubic boxes. All you know about this factory is that the boxes that they produce all have a volume between 0 m3 and 1 m3. You are going to be delivered a box produced by this factory, and are asked to represent your state of knowledge about the box with a probability distribution. What distribution should you use?

Suppose you say “I should be indifferent over all the possible boxes. So I should have a uniform distribution over the volumes from 0 m3 to 1 m3.” This might seem reasonable at first blush. But what if somebody else said “Yes, you should be indifferent over all the possible boxes, but actually the uniform distribution should be over the side lengths from 0 m to 1 m, not volumes.” This would be a very different probability distribution! For example, if the probability that the side length is greater than .5 m is 50%, then the probability that the volume is greater than (.5)3 = 1/8 is also 50%! Uniform over side length is not the same as uniform over volume (or surface area, for that matter). Now, how do you choose between a uniform distribution over volumes and a uniform distribution over side lengths? After all, you know nothing about the process that the factory is using to produce the boxes, and whether it is based off of volume or side length (or something else); all you know is that all boxes are between 0 m3 and 1 m3.

The lesson of this thought experiment is that the statement we started with (“I should be indifferent over all possible boxes”) was actually not even well-defined. There’s not just one unique measure over a continuous space, and in general the notion that “all possibilities are equally likely” is highly language-dependent.

The exact same applies to phase space, as position and momentum are continuous quantities. Imagine that somebody instead of talking about phase space, only talked about “craze space”, in which all positions become positions cubed, and all momentum values become natural logs of momentum. This space would still contain all possible microstates of your system. What’s more, the fundamental laws of nature could be rewritten in a way that uses only craze space quantities, not phase space quantities. And needless to say, being indifferent over phase space would not be the same as being indifferent over craze space.

Spend enough time looking at attempts to justify a unique interpretation of the statement “All states are equally likely”, when your space of states is a continuous infinity, and you’ll realize that all such attempts are deeply dependent upon arbitrary choices of language. The maximum information entropy probability distribution is afflicted with the exact same problem, because the entropy of your distribution is going to depend on the language you’re using to describe it! The entropy of a distribution in phase space is NOT the same as the entropy of the equivalent distribution transformed to craze space.

Let’s summarize this section. If somebody tells you that the fundamental postulate says that all microstates compatible with what you know about the macroscopic features of your system are equally likely, the proper response is something like “Equally likely? That sounds like you’re talking about a uniform distribution. But uniform over what? Oh, position and momentum? Well, why’d you make that choice?” And if they point out that the laws of physics are expressed in terms of position and momentum, you just disagree and say “No, actually I prefer writing the laws of physics in terms of position cubed and log momentum!” (Substitute in any choice of monotonic functions).

If they object on the grounds of simplicity, point out that position and momentum are only simple as measured from a standpoint that takes them to be the fundamental concepts, and that from your perspective, getting position and momentum requires applying complicated inverse transformations to your monotonic transformation of the chosen coordinates.

And if they object on the grounds of naturalness, the right response is probably something like “Tell me more about this ’naturalness’. How do you know what’s natural or unnatural? It seems to me that your choice of what physical concepts count as natural is a manifestation of deep selection pressures that push any beings whose survival depends on modeling and manipulating their surroundings towards forming an empirically accurate model of the macroscopic world. So that when you say that position is more natural than log(position), what I hear is that the fundamental postulate is a very useful tool. And you can’t use the naturalness of the choice of position to justify the fundamental postulate, when your perception of the naturalness of position is the result of the empirical success of the fundamental postulate!”

In my judgement, none of the a priori arguments work, and fundamentally the reason is that the fundamental postulate is an empirical claim. There’s no a priori principle of rationality that tells us that boxes of gases tend to equilibrate, because you can construct a universe whose initial microstate is such that its entire history is one of entropy radically decreasing, gases concentrating, eggs unscrambling, ice cubes unmelting, and so on. Why is this possible? Because it’s consistent with the microphysical laws that the universe started in an enormously low entropy configuration, so it’s gotta also be consistent with the microphysical laws for the entire universe to spend its entire lifetime decreasing in entropy. The general principle is: If you believe that something is physically possible, then you should believe its time-inverse is possible as well.

Let’s pause and take stock. What I’ve argued for so far is the following set of claims:

1. To successfully predict the behavior of macroscopic systems, we need something above and beyond the microphysical laws.
2. This extra thing we need is the fundamental postulate of statistical mechanics, which assigns a uniform distribution over the region of phase space consistent with what you know about the system. This postulate allows us to prove all the things we want to say about the future, such as “gases expand”, “ice cubes melt”, “people age” and so on.
3. This fundamental postulate is not justifiable on a priori grounds, as it is fundamentally an empirical claim about how frequently different microstates pop up in our universe. Different initial conditions give rise to different such frequencies, so that a claim to a priori access to the fundamental postulate is a claim to a priori access to the precise details of the initial condition of the universe.

There’s just one problem with all this… apply our postulate to the past, and everything breaks.

Up next: Why does statistical mechanics give crazy answers about the past? Where did we go wrong?

# The Necessity of Statistical Mechanics for Getting Macro From Micro

This is the first part in a three-part series on the foundations of statistical mechanics.

1. The Necessity of Statistical Mechanics for Getting Macro From Micro
2. Is The Fundamental Postulate of Statistical Mechanics A Priori?
3. The Central Paradox of Statistical Mechanics: The Problem of The Past

— — —

Let’s start this out with a thought experiment. Imagine that you have access to the exact fundamental laws of physics. Suppose further that you have unlimited computing power, for instance, you have an oracle that can instantly complete any computable task. What then do you know about the world?

The tempting answer: Everything! But of course, upon further consideration, you are missing a crucial ingredient: the initial conditions of the universe. The laws themselves aren’t enough to tell you about your universe, as many different universes are compatible with the laws. By specifying the state of the universe at any one time (which incidentally does not have to be an “initial” time), though, you should be able to narrow down this set of compatible universes. So let’s amend our question:

Suppose that you have unlimited computing power, that you know the exact microphysical laws, and that you know the state of the universe at some moment. Then what do you know about the world?

The answer is: It depends! What exactly do you know about the state of the universe? Do you know it’s exact microstate? As in, do you know the position and momentum of every single particle in the universe? If so, then yes, the entire past and future of the universe are accessible to you. But suppose that instead of knowing the exact microstate, you only have access to a macroscopic description of the universe. For example, maybe you have a temperature map as well as a particle density function over the universe. Or perhaps you know the exact states of some particles, just not all of them.

Well, if you only have access to the macrostate of the system (which, notice, is the epistemic situation that we find ourselves in, being that full access to the exact microstate of the universe is as technologically remote as can be), then it should be clear that you can’t specify the exact microstate at all other times. This is nothing too surprising or interesting… starting with imperfect knowledge you will not arrive at perfect knowledge. But we might hope that in the absence of a full description of the microstate of the universe at all other times, you could at least give a detailed macroscopic description of the universe at other times.

That is, here’s what seems like a reasonable expectation: If I had infinite computational power, knew the exact microphysical laws, and knew, say, that a closed box was occupied by a cloud of noninteracting gas in its corner, then I should be able to draw the conclusion that “The gas will disperse.” Or, if I knew that an ice cube was sitting outdoors on a table in the sun, then I should be able to apply my knowledge of microphysics to conclude that “The ice cube will melt”. And we’d hope that in addition to being able to make statements like these, we’d also be able to produce precise predictions for how long it would take for the gas to become uniformly distributed over the box, or for how long it would take for the ice cube to melt.

Here is the interesting and surprising bit. It turns out that this is in principle impossible to do. Just the exact microphysical laws and an infinity of computing power is not enough to do the job! In fact, the microphysical laws will in general tell us almost nothing about the future evolution or past history of macroscopic systems!

Take this in for a moment. You might not believe me (especially if you’re a physicist). For one thing, we don’t know the exact form of the microphysical laws. It would seem that such a bold statement about their insufficiencies would require us to at least first know what they are, right? No, it turns out that the statement that microphysics is is far too weak to tell us about the behavior of macroscopic systems holds for an enormously large class of possible laws of physics, a class that we are very sure that our universe belongs to.

Let’s prove this. We start out with the following observation that will be familiar to physicists: the microphysical laws appear to be time-reversible. That is, it appears to be the case that for every possible evolution of a system compatible with the laws of physics, the time-reverse of that evolution (obtained by simply reversing the trajectories of all particles) is also perfectly compatible with the laws of physics.*

This is surprising! Doesn’t it seem like there are trajectories that are physically possible for particles to take, such that their time reverse is physically impossible? Doesn’t it seem like classical mechanics would say that a ball sitting on the ground couldn’t suddenly bounce up to your hand? An egg unscramble? A gas collect in the corner of a room? The answer to all of the above is no. Classical mechanics, and fundamental physics in general, admits the possibilities of all these things. A fun puzzle for you is to think about why the first example (the ball initially at rest on the ground bouncing up higher and higher until it comes to rest in your hand) is not a violation of the conservation of energy.

Now here’s the argument: Suppose that you have a box that you know is filled with an ideal gas at equilibrium (uniformly spread through the volume). There are many many (infinitely many) microstates that are compatible with this description. We can conclusively say that in 15 minutes the gas will still be dispersed only if all of these microstates, when evolved forward 15 minutes, end up dispersed.

But, and here’s the crucial step, we also know that there exist very peculiar states (such as the macrostate in which all the gas particles have come together to form a perfect statuette of Michael Jackson) such that these states will in 15 minutes evolve to the dispersed state. And by time reversibility, this tells us that there is another perfectly valid history of the gas that starts uniformly dispersed and evolves over 15 minutes into a perfect statuette of Michael Jackson. That is, if we believe that complicated configurations of gases disperse, and believe that physics is time-reversible, then you must also believe that there are microstates compatible with dispersed states of gas that will in the next moment coalesce into some complicated configuration.

1. A collection of gas shaped exactly like Michael Jackson will disperse uniformly across its container.
2. Physics is time reversible.
3. So uniformly dispersed gases can coalesce into a collection of gases shaped exactly like Michael Jackson.

At this point you might be thinking “yeah, sure, microphysics doesn’t in principle rule out the possibility that a uniformly dispersed gas will coalesce into Michael Jackson, or any other crazy configuration. But who cares? It’s so incredibly unlikely!” To which the response is: Yes, exactly, it’s extremely unlikely. But nothing in the microphysical laws says this! Look as hard as you can at the laws of motion, you will not find a probability distribution over the likelihood of the different microstates compatible with a given macrostate. And indeed, different initial conditions of the universe will give different such frequencies distributions! To make any statements about the relative likelihood of some microstates over others, you need some principle above and beyond the microphysical laws.

To summarize. All that microphysics + infinite computing power allows you to say about a macrostate is the following: Here are all the microstates that are compatible with that macrostate, and here are all the past and future histories of each of these microstates. And given time reversibility, these future histories cover an enormously diverse set of predictions about the future, from “the gas will disperse” to “the gas will form into a statuette of Michael Jackson”. To get reasonable predictions about how the world will actually behave, we need some other principle, a principle that allows us to disregard these “perverse” microstates. And microphysics contains no such principle.

Statistical mechanics is thus the study of the necessary augmentation to a fundamental theory of physics that allows us to make predictions about the world, given that we are not in the position to know its exact microstate. This necessary augmentation is known as the fundamental postulate of statistical mechanics, and it takes the form of a probability distribution over microstates. Some people describe the postulate as saying “all microstates being equally likely”, but that phrasing is a big mistake, as the sentence “all states are equally likely” is not well defined over a continuous set of states. (More on that in a bit.) To really understand the fundamental postulate, we have to introduce the notion of phase space.

The phase space for a system is a mathematical space in which every point represents a full specification of the positions and momenta of all particles in the system. So, for example, a system consisting of 1000 classical particles swimming around in an infinite universe would have 6000 degrees of freedom (three position coordinates and three momentum coordinates per particle). Each of these degrees of freedom is isomorphic to the real numbers. So phase space for this system must be 6000, and a point in phase space is a specification of the values of all 6000 degrees of freedom. In general, for N classical particles, phase space is 6N.

With the concept of phase space in hand, we can define the fundamental postulate of statistical mechanics. This is: the probability distribution over microstates compatible with a given macrostate is uniform over the corresponding volume of phase space.

It turns out that if you just measure the volume of the “perverse states” in phase space, you end up finding that it composes approximately 0% of the volume of compatible microstates in phase space. This of course allows us to say of perverse states, “Sure they’re there, and technically it’s possible that my system is in such a state, but it’s so incredibly unlikely that it makes virtually no impact on my prediction of the future behavior of my system.” And indeed, when you start going through the math and seeing the way that systems most likely evolve given the fundamental postulate, you see that the predictions you get match beautifully with our observations of nature.

Next time: What is the epistemic status of the fundamental postulate? Do we have good a priori reasons to believe it?

— — —

* There are some subtleties here. For one, we think that there actually is a very small time asymmetry in the weak nuclear force. And some collapse interpretations of quantum mechanics have the collapse of the wave function as an irreversible process, although Everettian quantum mechanics denies this. For the moment, let’s disregard all of that. The time asymmetry in the weak nuclear force is not going to have any relevant effect on the proof made here, besides making it uglier and more complicated. What we need is technically not exact time-reversibility, but very-approximate time-reversibility. And that we have. Collapsing wave functions are a more troubling business, and are a genuine way out of the argument made in this post.

# A Cognitive Instability Puzzle, Part 2

This is a follow of this previous post, in which I present three unusual cases of belief updating. Read it before you read this.

I find these cases very puzzling, and I don’t have a definite conclusion for any of them. They share some deep similarities. Let’s break all of them down into their basic logical structure:

Joe
Joe initially believes in classical logic and is certain of some other stuff, call it X.
An argument A exists that concludes that X can’t be true if classical logic is true.
If Joe believes classical logic, then he believes A.
If Joe believes intuitionist logic, then he doesn’t believe A.

Karl
Karl initially believes in God and is certain of some other stuff about evil, call it E.
An argument A exists that concludes that God can’t exist if E is true.
If Karl believes in God, then he believes A.
If Karl doesn’t believe in God, then he doesn’t believe A.

Tommy
Tommy initially believes in her brain’s reliability and is certain of some other stuff about her experiences, call it Q.
An argument A exists that concludes that hat her brain can’t be reliable if Q is true.
If Tommy believes in her brain’s reliability, then she believes A.
If Tommy doesn’t believe in her brain’s reliability, then she doesn’t believe A.

First of all, note that all three of these cases are ones in which Bayesian reasoning won’t work. Joe is uncertain about the law of the excluded middle, without which you don’t have probability theory. Karl is uncertain about the meaning of the term ‘evil’, such that the same proposition switches from being truth-apt to being meaningless when he updates his beliefs. Probability theory doesn’t accommodate such variability in its language. And Tommy is entertaining a hypothesis according to which she no longer accepts any deductive or inductive logic, which is inconsistent with Bayesianism in an even more extreme way than Joe.

The more important general theme is that in all three cases, the following two things are true: 1) If an agent believes A, then they also believe an argument that concludes -A. 2) If that agent believes -A, then they don’t believe the argument that concludes -A.

Notice that if an agent initially doesn’t believe A, then they have no problem. They believe -A, and also happen to not believe that specific argument concluding -A, and that’s fine! There’s no instability or self-contradiction there whatsoever. So that’s really not where the issue lies.

The mystery is the following: If the only reason that an agent changed their mind from A to -A is the argument that they no longer buy, then what should they do? Once they’ve adopted the stance that A is false, should they stay there, reasoning that if they accept A they will be led to a contradiction? Or should they jump back to A, reasoning that the initial argument that led them there was flawed?

Said another way, should they evaluate the argument against A from their own standards, or from A’s standards? If they use their own standards, then they are in an unstable position, where they jump back and forth between A and -A. And if they always use A’s standards… well, then we get the conclusion that Tommy should believe herself to be a Boltzmann brain. In addition, if they are asked why they don’t believe A, then they find themselves in the weird position of giving an explanation in terms of an argument that they believe to be false!

I find myself believing that either Joe should be an intuitionist, Karl an atheist, and Tommy a radical skeptic, OR Joe a classical-logician, Karl a theist, and Tommy a reliability-of-brain-believer-in. That is, it seems like there aren’t any significant enough disanalogies between these three cases to warrant concluding one thing in one case and then going the other direction in another.

# Hopping Midpoints

Put down three points on a piece of paper. Choose one of them as your “starting point”. Now, randomly choose one of the three points and hop from your starting point, halfway over to the chosen point. Mark down where you’ve landed. Then repeat: randomly choose one of the three starting points, and move halfway from your newly marked point to this new chosen point. Mark where you land. And on, and on, to infinity.

What pattern will arise? Watch and see!

Controls:
E to increase points/second.
Q to decrease points/second.
Click and drag the red points to move them around.
Pressing a number key will make a polygon with that number of sides.

# The problem with the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics

The Schrodinger equation is the formula that describes the dynamics of quantum systems – how small stuff behaves.

One fundamental feature of quantum mechanics that differentiates it from classical mechanics is the existence of something called superposition. In the same way that a particle can be in the state of “being at position A” and could also be in the state of “being at position B”, there’s a weird additional possibility that the particle is in the state of “being in a superposition of being at position A and being at position B”. It’s necessary to introduce a new word for this type of state, since it’s not quite like anything we are used to thinking about.

Now, people often talk about a particle in a superposition of states as being in both states at once, but this is not technically correct. The behavior of a particle in a superposition of positions is not the behavior you’d expect from a particle that was at both positions at once. Suppose you sent a stream of small particles towards each position and looked to see if either one was deflected by the presence of a particle at that location. You would always find that exactly one of the streams was deflected. Never would you observe the particle having been in both positions, deflecting both streams.

But it’s also just as wrong to say that the particle is in either one state or the other. Again, particles simply do not behave this way. Throw a bunch of electrons, one at a time, through a pair of thin slits in a wall and see how they spread out when they hit a screen on the other side. What you’ll get is a pattern that is totally inconsistent with the image of the electrons always being either at one location or the other. Instead, the pattern you’d get only makes sense under the assumption that the particle traveled through both slits and then interfered with itself.

If a superposition of A and B is not the same as “A and B’ and it’s not the same as ‘A or B’, then what is it? Well, it’s just that: a superposition! A superposition is something fundamentally new, with some of the features of “and” and some of the features of “or”. We can do no better than to describe the empirically observed features and then give that cluster of features a name.

Now, quantum mechanics tells us that for any two possible states that a system can be in, there is another state that corresponds to the system being in a superposition of the two. In fact, there’s an infinity of such superpositions, each corresponding to a different weighting of the two states.

The Schrödinger equation is what tells how quantum mechanical systems evolve over time. And since all of nature is just one really big quantum mechanical system, the Schrödinger equation should also tell us how we evolve over time. So what does the Schrödinger equation tell us happens when we take a particle in a superposition of A and B and make a measurement of it?

The answer is clear and unambiguous: The Schrödinger equation tells us that we ourselves enter into a superposition of states, one in which we observe the particle in state A, the other in which we observe it in B. This is a pretty bizarre and radical answer! The first response you might have may be something like “When I observe things, it certainly doesn’t seem like I’m entering into a superposition… I just look at the particle and see it in one state or the other. I never see it in this weird in-between state!”

But this is not a good argument against the conclusion, as it’s exactly what you’d expect by just applying the Schrödinger equation! When you enter into a superposition of “observing A” and “observing B”, neither branch of the superposition observes both A and B. And naturally, since neither branch of the superposition “feels” the other branch, nobody freaks out about being superposed.

But there is a problem here, and it’s a serious one. The problem is the following: Sure, it’s compatible with our experience to say that we enter into superpositions when we make observations. But what predictions does it make? How do we take what the Schrödinger equation says happens to the state of the world and turn it into a falsifiable experimental setup? The answer appears to be that we can’t. At least, not using just the Schrödinger equation on its own. To get out predictions, we need an additional postulate, known as the Born rule.

This postulate says the following: For a system in a superposition, each branch of the superposition has an associated complex number called the amplitude. The probability of observing any particular branch of the superposition upon measurement is simply the square of that branch’s amplitude.

For example: A particle is in a superposition of positions A and B. The amplitude attached to A is 0.8. The amplitude attached to B is 0.4. If we now observe the position of the particle, we will find it to be at either A with probability (.6)2 (i.e. 36%), or B with probability (.8)2 (i.e. 64%).

Simple enough, right? The problem is to figure out where the Born rule comes from and what it even means. The rule appears to be completely necessary to make quantum mechanics a testable theory at all, but it can’t be derived from the Schrödinger equation. And it’s not at all inevitable; it could easily have been that probabilities associated with the amplitude were gotten by taking absolute values rather than squares. Or why not the fourth power of the amplitude? There’s a substantive claim here, that probabilities associate with the square of the amplitudes that go into the Schrödinger equation, that needs to be made sense of. There are a lot of different ways that people have tried to do this, and I’ll list a few of the more prominent ones here.

## The Copenhagen Interpretation

(Prepare to be disappointed.) The Copenhagen interpretation, which has historically been the dominant position among working physicists, is that the Born rule is just an additional rule governing the dynamics of quantum mechanical systems. Sometimes systems evolve according to the Schrödinger equation, and sometimes according to the Born rule. When they evolve according to the Schrödinger equation, they split into superpositions endlessly. When they evolve according to the Born rule, they collapse into a single determinate state. What determines when the systems evolve one way or the other? Something measurement something something observation something. There’s no real consensus here, nor even a clear set of well-defined candidate theories.

If you’re familiar with the way that physics works, this idea should send your head spinning. The claim here is that the universe operates according to two fundamentally different laws, and that the dividing line between the two hinges crucially on what we mean by the words “measurement and “observation. Suffice it to say, if this was the right way to understand quantum mechanics, it would go entirely against the spirit of the goal of finding a fundamental theory of physics. In a fundamental theory of physics, macroscopic phenomena like measurements and observations need to be built out of the behavior of lots of tiny things like electrons and quarks, not the other way around. We shouldn’t find ourselves in the position of trying to give a precise definition to these words, debating whether frogs have the capacity to collapse superpositions or if that requires a higher “measuring capacity”, in order to make predictions about the world (as proponents of the Copenhagen interpretation have in fact done!).

The Copenhagen interpretation is not an elegant theory, it’s not a clearly defined theory, and it’s fundamentally at tension with the project of theoretical physics. So why has it been, as I said, the dominant approach over the last century to understanding quantum mechanics? This really comes down to physicists not caring enough about the philosophy behind the physics to notice that the approach they are using is fundamentally flawed. In practice, the Copenhagen interpretation works. It allows somebody working in the lab to quickly assess the results of their experiments and to make predictions about how future experiments will turn out. It gives the right empirical probabilities and is easy to implement, even if the fuzziness in the details can start to make your head hurt if you start to think about it too much. As Jean Bricmont said, “You can’t blame most physicists for following this ‘shut up and calculate’ ethos because it has led to tremendous develop­ments in nuclear physics, atomic physics, solid­ state physics and particle physics.” But the Copenhagen interpretation is not good enough for us. A serious attempt to make sense of quantum mechanics requires something more substantive. So let’s move on.

## Objective Collapse Theories

These approaches hinge on the notion that the Schrödinger equation really is the only law at work in the universe, it’s just that we have that equation slightly wrong. Objective collapse theories add slight nonlinearities to the Schrödinger equation so that systems sometimes spread out in superpositions and other times collapse into definite states, all according to one single equation. The most famous of these is the spontaneous collapse theory, according to which quantum systems collapse with a probability that grows with the number of particles in the system.

This approach is nice for several reasons. For one, it gives us the Born rule without requiring a new equation. It makes sense of the Born rule as a fundamental feature of physical reality, and makes precise and empirically testable predictions that can distinguish it from from other interpretations. The drawback? It makes the Schrödinger equation ugly and complicated, and it adds extra parameters that determine how often collapse happens. And as we know, whenever you start adding parameters you run the risk of overfitting your data.

## Hidden Variable Theories

These approaches claim that superpositions don’t really exist, they’re just a high-level consequence of the unusual behavior of the stuff at the smallest level of reality.  They deny that the Schrödinger equation is truly fundamental, and say instead that it is a higher-level approximation of an underlying deterministic reality. “Deterministic?! But hasn’t quantum mechanics been shown conclusively to be indeterministic??” Well, not entirely. For a while there was a common sentiment amongst physicists that John Von Neumann and others had proved beyond a doubt that no deterministic theory could make the predictions that quantum mechanics makes. Later subtle mistakes were found in these purported proofs that left a door open for determinism. Today there are well-known fleshed-out hidden variable theories that successfully reproduce the predictions of quantum mechanics, and do so fully deterministically.

The most famous of these is certainly Bohmian mechanics, also called pilot wave theory. Here’s a nice video on it if you’d like to know more, complete with pretty animations. Bohmian mechanics is interesting, appear to work, give us the Born rule, and is probably empirically distinguishable from other theories (at least in principle). A serious issue with it is that it requires nonlocality, which is a challenge to any attempt to make it consistent with special relativity. Locality is such an important and well-understood feature of our reality that this constitutes a major challenge to the approach.

## Many-Worlds / Everettian Interpretations

Ok, finally we talk about the approach that is most interesting in my opinion, and get to the title of this post. The Many-Worlds interpretation says, in essence, that we were wrong to ever want more than the Schrödinger equation. This is the only law that governs reality, and it gives us everything we need. Many-Worlders deny that superpositions ever collapse. The result of us performing a measurement on a system in superposition is simply that we end up in superposition, and that’s the whole story!

So superpositions never collapse, they just go deeper into superposition. There’s not just one you, there’s every you, spread across the different branches of the wave function of the universe. All these yous exist beside each other, living out all your possible life histories.

But then where does Many-Worlds get the Born rule from? Well, uh, it’s kind of a mystery. The Born rule isn’t an additional law of physics, because the Schrödinger equation is supposed to be the whole story. It’s not an a priori rule of rationality, because as we said before probabilities could have easily gone as the fourth power of amplitudes, or something else entirely. But if it’s not an a posteriori fact about physics, and also not an a priori knowable principle of rationality, then what is it?

This issue has seemed to me to be more and more important and challenging for Many-Worlds the more I have thought about it. It’s hard to see what exactly the rule is even saying in this interpretation. Say I’m about to make a measurement of a system in a superposition of states A and B. Suppose that I know the amplitude of A is much smaller than the amplitude of B. I need some way to say “I have a strong expectation that I will observe B, but there’s a small chance that I’ll see A.” But according to Many-Worlds, a moment from now both observations will be made. There will be a branch of the superposition in which I observe A, and another branch in which I observe B. So what I appear to need to say is something like “I am much more likely to be the me in the branch that observes B than the me that observes A.” But this is a really strange claim that leads us straight into the thorny philosophical issue of personal identity.

In what sense are we allowed to say that one and only one of the two resulting humans is really going to be you? Don’t both of them have equal claim to being you? They each have your exact memories and life history so far, the only difference is that one observed A and the other B. Maybe we can use anthropic reasoning here? If I enter into a superposition of observing-A and observing-B, then there are now two “me”s, in some sense. But that gives the wrong prediction! Using the self-sampling assumption, we’d just say “Okay, two yous, so there’s a 50% chance of being each one” and be done with it. But obviously not all binary quantum measurements we make have a 50% chance of turning out either way!

Maybe we can say that the world actually splits into some huge number of branches, maybe even infinite, and the fraction of the total branches in which we observe A is exactly the square of the amplitude of A? But this is not what the Schrödinger equation says! The Schrödinger equation tells exactly what happens after we make the observation: we enter a superposition of two states, no more, no less. We’re importing a whole lot into our interpretive apparatus by interpreting this result as claiming the literal existence of an infinity of separate worlds, most of which are identical, and the distribution of which is governed by the amplitudes.

What we’re seeing here is that Many-Worlds, by being too insistent on the reality of the superposition, the sole sovereignty of the Schrödinger equation, and the unreality of collapse, ends up running into a lot of problems in actually doing what a good theory of physics is supposed to do: making empirical predictions. The Many-Worlders can of course use the Born Rule freely to make predictions about the outcomes of experiments, but they have little to say in answer to what, in their eyes, this rule really amounts to. I don’t know of any good way out of this mess.

Basically where this leaves me is where I find myself with all of my favorite philosophical topics; totally puzzled and unsatisfied with all of the options that I can see.

# A probability puzzle

To be totally clear: the question is not assuming that there is ONLY one student whose neighbors both flipped heads, just that there is AT LEAST one such student. You can imagine that the teacher first asks for all students whose neighbors both flipped heads to step forward, then randomly selected one of the students that had stepped forward.

It seemed initially obvious to me that the teacher was correct. There are exactly as many possible worlds in which the three students are HTH as there worlds in which they are HHH, right? Knowing how your neighbors’ coins landed shouldn’t give you any information about how your own coin landed, and to think otherwise seems akin to the Gambler’s fallacy.

But in fact, the teacher is wrong! It is in fact more likely that the student flipped tails than heads! Why? Let’s simplify the problem.

Suppose there are just three students standing in a circle (/triangle). There are eight possible ways that their coins might have landed, namely:

HHH
HHT
HTH
HTT
THH
THT
TTH
TTT

Now, the teacher asks all those students whose neighbors both have “H” to step forward, and AT LEAST ONE steps forward. What does this tell us about the possible world we’re in? Well, it rules out all of the worlds in which no student could be surrounded by both ‘H’, namely… TTT, TTH, THT, and HTT. We’re left with the following…

HHH
HHT
HTH
THH

One thing to notice is that we’re left with mostly worlds with lots of heads. The expected total of heads is 2.25, while the expected total of tails is just 0.75. So maybe we should expect that the student is actually more likely to have heads than tails!

But this is wrong. What we want to see is what proportion of those surrounded by heads are heads in each possible world.

HHH: 3/3 have H (100%)
HHT: 0/1 have H (0%)
HTH: 0/1 have H (0%)
THH: 0/1 have H (0%)

Since each of these worlds is equally likely, what we end up with is a 25% chance of 100% heads, and a 75% chance of 0% heads. In other words, our credence in the student having heads should be just 25%!

Now, what about for N students? I wrote a program that does a brute-force calculation of the final answer for any N, and here’s what you get:

 N cr(heads) ~ 3 1/4 0.25 4 3/7 0.4286 5 4/9 0.4444 6 13/32 0.4063 7 1213/2970 0.4084 8 6479/15260 0.4209 9 10763/25284 0.4246 10 998993/2329740 0.4257 11 24461/56580 0.4323 12 11567641/26580015 0.4352 13 1122812/2564595 0.4378 14 20767139/47153106 0.4404 15 114861079/259324065 0.4430 16 2557308958/5743282545 0.4453 17 70667521/157922688 0.4475

These numbers are not very pretty, though they appear to be gradually converging (I’d guess to 50%).

Can anybody see any patterns here? Or some simple intuitive way to arrive at these numbers?

# Anti-inductive priors

I used to think of Bayesianism as composed of two distinct parts: (1) setting priors and (2) updating by conditionalizing. In my mind, this second part was the crown jewel of Bayesian epistemology, while the first part was a little more philosophically problematic. Conditionalization tells you that for any prior distribution you might have, there is a unique rational set of new credences that you should adopt upon receiving evidence, and tells you how to get it. As to what the right priors are, well, that’s a different story. But we can at least set aside worries about priors with assurances about how even a bad prior will eventually be made up for in the long run after receiving enough evidence.

But now I’m realizing that this framing is pretty far off. It turns out that there aren’t really two independent processes going on, just one (and the philosophically problematic one at that): prior-setting. Your prior fully determines what happens when you update by conditionalization on any future evidence you receive. And the set of priors consistent with the probability axioms is large enough that it allows for this updating process to be extremely irrational.

I’ll illustrate what I’m talking about with an example.

Let’s imagine a really simple universe of discourse, consisting of just two objects and one predicate. We’ll make our predicate “is green” and denote objects $a_1$ and $a_2$. Now, if we are being good Bayesians, then we should treat our credences as a probability distribution over the set of all state descriptions of the universe. These probabilities should all be derivable from some hypothetical prior probability distribution over the state descriptions, such that our credences at any later time are just the result of conditioning that prior on the total evidence we have by that time.

Let’s imagine that we start out knowing nothing (i.e. our starting credences are identical to the hypothetical prior) and then learn that one of the objects ($a_1$) is green. In the absence of any other information, then by induction, we should become more confident that the other object is green as well. Is this guaranteed by just updating?

No! Some priors will allow induction to happen, but others will make you unresponsive to evidence. Still others will make you anti-inductive, becoming more and more confident that the next object is not green the more green things you observe. And all of this is perfectly consistent with the laws of probability theory!

Take a look at the following three possible prior distributions over our simple language:

According to $P_1$, your new credence in $Ga_2$ after observing $Ga_1$ is $P_1(Ga_2 | Ga_1) = 0.80$, while your prior credence in $Ga_2$ was 0.50. Thus $P_1$ is an inductive prior; you get more confident in future objects being green when you observe past objects being green.

For $P_2$, we have that $P_2(Ga_2 | Ga_1) = 0.50$, and $P_2(Ga_2) = 0.50$ as well. Thus $P_2$ is a non-inductive prior: observing instances of green things doesn’t make future instances of green things more likely.

And finally, $P_3(Ga_2 | Ga_1) = 0.20$, while $P_3(Ga_2) = 0.5$. Thus $P_3$ is an anti-inductive prior. Observing that one object is green makes you more than two times less confident that the next object will be green.

The anti-inductive prior can be made even more stark by just increasing the gap between the prior probability of $Ga_1 \wedge Ga_2$ and $Ga_1 \wedge -Ga_2$. It is perfectly consistent with the axioms of probability theory for observing a green object to make you almost entirely certain that the next object you observe will not be green.

Our universe of discourse here was very simple (one predicate and two objects). But the point generalizes. Regardless of how many objects and predicates there are in your language, you can have non-inductive or anti-inductive priors. And it isn’t even the case that there are fewer anti-inductive priors than inductive priors!

The deeper point here is that the prior is doing all the epistemic work. Your prior isn’t just an initial credence distribution over possible hypotheses, it also dictates how you will respond to any possible evidence you might receive. That’s why it’s a mistake to think of prior-setting and updating-by-conditionalization as two distinct processes. The results of updating by conditionalization are determined entirely by the form of your prior!

This really emphasizes the importance of having good criterion for setting priors. If we’re trying to formalize scientific inquiry, it’s really important to make sure our formalism rules out the possibility of anti-induction. But this just amounts to requiring rational agents to have constraints on their priors that go above and beyond the probability axioms!

What are these constraints? Do they select one unique best prior? The challenge is that actually finding a uniquely rationally justifiable prior is really hard. Carnap tried a bunch of different techniques for generating such a prior and was unsatisfied with all of them, and there isn’t any real consensus on what exactly this unique prior would be. Even worse, all such suggestions seem to end up being hostage to problems of language dependence – that is, that the “uniquely best prior” changes when you make an arbitrary translation from your language into a different language.

It looks to me like our best option is to abandon the idea of a single best prior (and with it, the notion that rational agents with the same total evidence can’t disagree). This doesn’t have to lead to total epistemic anarchy, where all beliefs are just as rational as all others. Instead, we can place constraints on the set of rationally permissible priors that prohibit things like anti-induction. While identifying a set of constraints seems like a tough task, it seems much more feasible than the task of justifying objective Bayesianism.

# Making sense of improbability

Imagine that you take a coin that you believe to be fair and flip it 20 times. Each time it lands heads. You say to your friend: “Wow, what a crazy coincidence! There was a 1 in 220 chance of this outcome. That’s less than one in a million! Super surprising.”

Your friend replies: “I don’t understand. What’s so crazy about the result you got? Any other possible outcome (say, HHTHTTTHTHHHTHTTHHHH) had an equal probability as getting all heads. So what’s so surprising?”

Responding to this is a little tricky. After all, it is the case that for a fair coin, the probability of 20 heads = the probability of HHTHTTTHTHHHTHTTHHHH = roughly one in a million.

So in some sense your friend is right that there’s something unusual about saying that one of these outcomes is more surprising than another.

You might answer by saying “Well, let’s parse up the possible outcomes by the number of heads and tails. The outcome I got had 20 heads and 0 tails. Your example outcome had 12 heads and 8 tails. There are many many ways of getting 12 heads and 8 tails than of getting 20 heads and 0 tails, right? And there’s only one way of getting all 20 heads. So that’s why it’s so surprising.”

Your friend replies: “But hold on, now you’re just throwing out information. Sure my example outcome had 12 heads and 8 tails. But while there’s many ways of getting that number of heads and tails, there’s only exactly one way of getting the result I named! You’re only saying that your outcome is less likely because you’ve glossed over the details of my outcome that make it equally unlikely: the order of heads and tails!”

I think this is a pretty powerful response. What we want is a way to say that HHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH is surprising while HHTHTTTHTHHHTHTTHHHH is not, not that 20 heads is surprising while 12 heads and 8 tails is unsurprising. But it’s not immediately clear how we can say this.

Consider the information theoretic formalization of surprise, in which the surprisingness of an event E is proportional to the negative log of the probability of that event: Sur(E) = -log(P(E)). There are some nice reasons for this being a good definition of surprise, and it tells us that two equiprobable events should be equally surprising. If E is the event of observing all heads and E’ is the event of observing the sequence HHTHTTTHTHHHTHTTHHHH, then P(E) = P(E’) = 1/220. Correspondingly, Sur(E) = Sur(E’). So according to one reasonable formalization of what we mean by surprisingness, the two sequences of coin tosses are equally surprising. And yet, we want to say that there is something more epistemically significant about the first than the second.

(By the way, observing 20 heads is roughly 6.7 times more surprising than observing 12 heads and 8 tails, according to the above definition. We can plot the surprise curve to see how maximum surprise occurs at the two ends of the distribution, at which point it is 20 bits.)

So there is our puzzle: in what sense does it make sense to say that observing 20 heads in a row is more surprising than observing the sequence HHTHTTTHTHHHTHTTHHHH? We certainly have strong intuitions that this is true, but do these intuitions make sense? How can we ground the intuitive implausibility of getting 20 heads? In this post I’ll try to point towards a solution to this puzzle.

Okay, so I want to start out by categorizing three different perspectives on the observed sequence of coin tosses. These correspond to (1) looking at just the outcome, (2) looking at the way in which the observation affects the rest of your beliefs, and (3) looking at how the observation affects your expectation of future observations. In probability terms, these correspond to the P(E), P(T| T) and P(E’ | E).

Looking at things through the first perspective, all outcomes are equiprobable, so there is nothing more epistemically significant about one than the other.

But considering the second way of thinking about things, there can be big differences in the significance of two equally probable observations. For instance, suppose that our set of theories under consideration are just the set of all possible biases of the coin, and our credences are initially peaked at .5 (an unbiased coin). Observing HHTHTTTHTHHHTHTTHHHH does little to change our prior. It shifts a little bit in the direction of a bias towards heads, but not significantly. On the other hand, observing all heads should have a massive effect on your beliefs, skewing them exponentially in the direction of extreme heads biases.

Importantly, since we’re looking at beliefs about coin bias, our distributions are now insensitive to any details about the coin flip beyond the number of heads and tails! As far as our beliefs about the coin bias go, finding only the first 8 to be tails looks identical to finding the last 8 to be tails. We’re not throwing out the information about the particular pattern of heads and tails, it’s just become irrelevant for the purposes of consideration of the possible biases of the coin.

If we want to give a single value to quantify the difference in epistemic states resulting from the two observations, we can try looking at features of these distributions. For instance, we could look at the change in entropy of our distribution if we see E and compare it to the change in entropy upon seeing E’. This gives us a measure of how different observations might affect our uncertainty levels. (In our example, observing HHTHTTTHTHHHTHTTHHHH decreases uncertainty by about 0.8 bits, while observing all heads decreases uncertainty by 1.4 bits.) We could also compare the means of the posterior distributions after each observation, and see which is shifted most from the mean of the prior distribution. (In this case, our two means are 0.57 and 0.91).

Now, this was all looking at things through what I called perspective #2 above: how observations affect beliefs. Sometimes a more concrete way to understand the effect of intuitively implausible events is to look at how they affect specific predictions about future events. This is the approach of perspective #3. Sticking with our coin, we ask not about the bias of the coin, but about how we expect it to land on the next flip. To assess this, we look at the posterior predictive distributions for each posterior:

It shouldn’t be too surprising that observing all heads makes you more confident that the next coin will land heads than observing HHTHTTTHTHHHTHTTHHHH. But looking at this graph gives a precise answer to how much more confident you should be. And it’s somewhat easier to think about than the entire distribution over coin biases.

I’ll leave you with an example puzzle that relates to anthropic reasoning.

Say that one day you win the lottery. Yay! Super surprising! What an improbable event! But now compare this to the event that some stranger Bob Smith wins the lottery. This doesn’t seem so surprising. But supposing that Bob Smith buys lottery tickets at the same rate as you, the probability that you win is identical to the probability that Bob Smith wins. So… why is it any more surprising when you win?

This seems like a weird question. Then again, so did the coin-flipping question we started with. We want to respond with something like “I’m not saying that it’s improbable that some random person wins the lottery. I’m interested in the probability of me winning the lottery. And if we parse up the outcomes as that either I win the lottery or that somebody else wins the lottery, then clearly it’s much more improbable that I win than that somebody else wins.”

But this is exactly parallel to the earlier “I’m not interested in the precise sequence of coin flips, I’m just interested in the number of heads versus tails.” And the response to it is identical in form: If Bob Smith, a particular individual whose existence you are aware of, wins the lottery and you know it, then it’s cheating to throw away those details and just say “Somebody other than me won the lottery.” When you update your beliefs, you should take into account all of your evidence.

Does the framework I presented here help at all with this case?

# A simple probability puzzle

In front of you is an urn containing some unknown quantity of balls. These balls are labeled 1, 2, 3, etc. They’ve been jumbled about so as to be in no particular order within the urn. You initially consider it equally likely that the urn contains 1 ball as that it contains 2 balls, 3 balls, and so on, up to 100 balls, which is the maximum capacity of the urn.

Now you reach in to draw out a ball and read the number on it: 34. What is the most likely theory for how many balls the urn contains?

(…)

(…)

The answer turns out to be 34!

Hopefully this is a little unintuitive. Specifically, what seems wrong is that you draw out a ball and then conclude that this is the ball with the largest value on it. Shouldn’t extreme results be unlikely? But remember, the balls were randomly jumbled about inside the urn. So whether or not the number on the ball you drew is at the beginning, middle, or end of the set of numbers is pretty much irrelevant.

What is relevant is the likelihood: Pr(There are N balls | I drew a ball numbered 34). And the value of this is simply 1/N.

In general, comparing the theory that there are N balls to the theory that there are M balls, we look at the likelihood ratio: Pr(There are N balls | I drew a ball numbered 34) / Pr(There are M balls | I drew a ball numbered 34). This is simply M/N.

Thus we see that our prior odds get updated by a factor that favors smaller values of N, as long as N ≥ 34. The likelihood is zero up to N = 33, maxes at 34, and then decreases steadily after it as N goes to infinity. Since our prior was evenly spread out between N = 1 and 100 and zero everywhere else, our posterior will be peaked at 34 and decline until 100, after which it will drop to zero.

One way to make this result seem more intuitive is to realize that while strictly speaking the most probable number of balls in the urn is 34, it’s not that much more probable than 35 or 36. The actual probability of 34 is still quite small, it just happens to be a little bit more probable than its larger neighbors. And indeed, for larger values of the maximum capacity of the urn, the relative difference between the posterior probability of 34 and that of 35 decreases.