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  • Yes, Bohr, and most physicists, are very confused on this subject, and do not properly understand Einstein's point. Physics doesn't even really exist anymore, because the term "physics" comes from Greek referring to the study of nature, but modern day physics is better described as "empirical mathematics." It is solely concerned with nothing else other than mapping what is observed to mathematical equations, and if you ask a more philosophical question of "okay, what do those equations actually tell us about the natural world?" it is typically dismissed. You see this with physicists like Lawrence Krauss and Niel deGrasse Tyson who dismiss philosophical questions as useless.

    Einstein's concern was that he did not see them as useless but to want to talk about reality, and he understood quite well that special relativity is not "really" (in the sense of referring to reality) compatible with non-local influences since he had developed it. In fact, this was his motivation for developing general relativity to begin with. When Einstein introduced special relativity in 1905, it actually made no new empirical predictions, because it was mathematically equivalent to a theory Lorentz introduced in 1904.

    Einstein's criticism of Lorentz's theory in Einstein's paper was that Lorentz's theory required a preferred slicing in spacetime, which Lorentz put there to take into account non-local effects from Newton's theory of gravity. Einstein argued that he believed this preferred slicing would later be proved to be superfluous, and after he published his paper, he sought to remove the non-locality from Newton's theory, and then subsequently sought to remove the non-locality from quantum mechanics, by fitting them both to local field theories.

    It is quite trivial to see why non-locality is not "really" compatible with special relativity. Giving a definition of "realism" is quite difficult, but we can adopt a minimal, but not sufficient, criterion. This criterion is what I like to refer to as the "no solipsism" criterion. I experience in the world in a definite way, and so I assume you do as well, and how you perceive the world should not depend upon whether or not, or how, I look at you. Mathematically, this criterion is to say that relativity/variance should not bubble up to the scale of the mental states of human beings. The mental states of other humans should be invariant.

    If you believe particles do not have real values until you measure them, then you can imagine a "Wigner's friend" type scenario where a friend in a lab measures a particle in a superposition of states while you are outside of the lab. From your perspective on the outside, you would have to describe both the friend and the particle in an entangled superposition of states, and thus the friend's mental state would not have an invariant and definite value until you look yourself, which would contradict with the friend's own experience.

    You might try to "solve" this by arguing that when the friend first measures the particle, they "collapse" the state to a definite value for both observers, and so for the observer outside of the room, it's not in a superposition, but this is not quantum mechanics. Introducing such an invariant transition is called an objective collapse theory, and objective collapse theories fundamentally cannot be mathematically equivalent to quantum mechanics, because they break the linearity in the unitary evolution, and so in principle any objective collapse theory (like GRW theory of the Diosi-Penrose model) would made different empirical predictions to quantum mechanics.

    Indeed, Bell definitively proved in 1964 that the states of particles simply cannot be Lorentz invariant given stock quantum mechanics, and since particles make up the human brain, then it logically follows that the mental states of observers cannot be invariant, i.e. you run into solipsism. You thus must give up one of two assumptions. You must either give up quantum mechanics, or you must give up special relativity, if you want to preserve realism.

    Giving up special relativity, interestingly enough, does not actually require modifying the mathematics at all. It only requires introducing a philosophical asymmetry in how we interpret otherwise mathematically symmetric reference frames, by assigning one particular reference frame a privileged status of representing a "real" representation of the system, and all other frames as representing an "apparent" representation. This is known as a preferred slicing in spacetime, and John Bell discusses this in his paper "How to Teach Special Relativity."

    You thus can actually fit quantum mechanics to a quite trivial realist interpretation, one where particles have real values at all times and merely evolve statistically, without modifying the mathematics at all, just by introducing a preferred slicing. But this is precisely what Einstein hated and was trying to avoid, because, like I said, his 1905 paper made no new predictions. His 1905 paper was really a bet: it was a bet that Lorentz's preferred slicing would be proved to be superfluous because gravity and quantum effects could be fit to local field theories, a bet which turned out to be wrong.

    However, what Einstein did not anticipate is how little physicists actually care about reality and nature to begin with. Most physicists did not interpret Bell's theorem as proof nature is non-local and therefore a preferred slicing is logically necessary. Most physicists just argued that we should stop talking about "reality" at all and only talk about what is consciously observed by the experimenter, and predicting that is all that matters, and if that is all you are concerned with, then there really is no incompatibility between quantum theory and special relativity.

    Einstein was baffled by this and once even asked Abraham Pais, "do you really believe that the moon doesn't exist when you aren't looking at it?" This is what I mean by saying physics no longer exists. Physicists often lie to your face. When they talk to Laymen and try to explain things, they will often give realist explanations, like describing vision in terms of photons reflecting off of a surface and being absorbed into the retinas of our eyes, or describing virtual particles as a "bubbling brew of particles popping in and out of existence," etc.

    Pretty much any time a physicist gives a realist explanation of something to a Laymen, they are lying, because these things literally do not exist in the theory. Objectively, quantum field theory does not anything with any definite properties at all. If I walk to my living room to my kitchen, I will feel quite strongly that I traversed a definite trajectory from my living room to my kitchen, and thus the particles that make up my body should have also traversed such a definite trajectory.

    But such a definite trajectory for the particles literally does not exist in quantum field theory. This is why John Bell described modern physics as a kind of "radical solipsism," because everything you perceive and all your memories have to be taken to be a lie, because they don't actually exist in the physics. Only the most direct impression in your conscious experience does in the immediate moment of observation.

    A lot of students who first start learning physics don't understand this and thus remain in denial of it. They genuinely cannot fathom the absurdity that modern day "physics" merely describes predicts what is consciously observed in the moment and gives no underlying realist account of how what was observed came to be to begin with, and so they deny it by regurgitating certain statements they've heard through the grapevine, like that there is a "collapse" or something about "branching" that explains this, but when you actually learn more and read the academic literature, once go beyond the Dunning-Kruger effect, you will start to learn that these "explanations" don't actually give an underlying account of what we observe at all (John Bell debunks the "collapse" argument in his article "Against 'Measurement'" and the "branching" argument in his paper "Quantum Mechanics for Cosmologists") and that modern physics simply does not have one.

    This is what bothered Einstein so much. You must necessarily either give up quantum mechanics, or you must introduce a preferred slicing in spacetime, thereby giving up "real" relativity (whereby relativistic effects are then interpreted to be only apparent), if you actually want a realistic account. If you insist upon not modifying the mathematics of quantum mechanics at all, as well as not introducing a preferred slicing into special relativity, then when you combine the two, you inevitably run into solipsism, because you cannot have a logically consistent accounting of reality whereby each observer's mental state is invariant.

  • The easiest way to understand this is in terms of mutual information.

    If we both flip a coin independently of one another, then both coins have a 50%/50% chance of being heads/tails and the distributions are independent of one another and thus uncorrelated, but imagine the two coins are initially attached to one another, flipped, and then we separate them. Now they're both still 50%/50% for heads/tails but are perfectly correlated, so they are guaranteed to have the same value, and so if you know one, you know the other. In this case, the coins are said to have mutual information on one another.

    It turns out in the physical world that mutual information, or more specifically quantum mutual information (QMI), plays a very important role. The marginal statistics on the behavior of a system can depend upon whether or not it shares mutual information with something else. You see this in the double-slit experiment because if you record the which-way information of a particle, then necessarily it must have interacted with something to record its state, and thus whatever measured it must possess QMI between itself and the particle, and thus the particle's marginal statistical behavior will change.

    This is in no way unique to human observers or human measurement devices. You can introduce just a single other particle into the experiment that interacts with the particle such that they become statistically correlated and it will have the same effect.

    QMI is rather counterintuitive because you can establish QMI in ways that you would intuitively think would not impact the system being measured. For example, you can have an entirely passive interaction whereby only the measuring device's state is altered and not the particle in order to establish QMI between them.

    You can also establish QMI without an interaction at all, such as, imagine that the measuring device is only placed on 1 of the 2 slits and you only fire a single photon and that photon is not detected. If it's not detected, you still know where it is, because it must have traversed the slit the measuring device was not on. Hence, the non-detection of something can still be a detection and thus can still establish QMI.

    Intuitively, you would think a passive measurement, or a measurement that does not even involve an interaction at all, should not alter the system's behavior. But the mathematical structure of quantum mechanics is such that the system's marginal stochastic behavior is genuinely statistically dependent upon the quantity of QMI, and so things you would intuitively believe should not affect the system do, in fact, affect the system.

    You can even use this effect to detect the presence or absence of something without ever (locally) interacting with it.

    In the Mach-Zehnder interferometer, the photon can take two possible intermediate paths, we'll call them A1 and A2, but both end up at the same place. Then, at the end of the experiment, it can take two possible paths again, B1 and B2, with a detector placed on both paths. You find, in practice, that there is a 100% chance the photon will show up on B1 and 0% on B2, unless you block either A1 or A2 with your hand, then it will have a 25% chance of showing up on B1, 25% chance of showing up on B2, and 50% chance of not showing up at all (because it was blocked by your hand).

    The reason this is interesting is because, without your hand blocking an intermediate path, there is a 0% chance it will show up on B2, but with your hand blocking one, it changes to 25%. Thus, if you measure a photon on path B2, you know with certainty that someone's hand must be blocking A1 or A2, yet, clearly the photon did not traverse the path of the hand or else it would have been absorbed by the hand and you would have detected nothing. You thus can deduce the presence/absence of the hand from a particle's behavior that never (locally) interacted with it, and so logically speaking, the hand must be having a non-local influence on the statistical behavior of the particle.

    This influence is due to the fact that if the particle interacts with the hand, it will be absorbed into it and slightly will alter the states of the particles in the hand, and if it does not interact with the hand, it will not do this. Thus, you could in principle look very closely at the particles that make up the hand and deduce whether or not the particle took the path the hand is on based on whether or not this alteration occurs, and thus there is QMI between the hand and the particle's path, regardless of whether or not the particle actually interacts with the hand. The mere presence or absence of this QMI changes the particle's behavior.

  • There isn't a scientific definition for "observation." In the Copenhagen interpretation, it really is treated just as vaguely as the colloquial definition, something the physicist John Bell complained about in his article "Against 'Measurement'", that the textbook axioms of quantum mechanics are inherently vague because they refer to "observation" or "measurement" which is not itself defined in the axioms. Saying that observation is just "when the wavefunction collapses" is a circular definition and doesn't answer anything, because then we can just ask, "when does the wavefunction collapse?" and the only answer the textbook axioms give is "when you observe/measure it."

  • Talking about racism against white people is rather strange because "white" is a concept specifically invented to oppress people outside of that group, to justify subjugating the "non-whites" in slavery or colonization or imperialism.

    If we were to try and define "white culture," we could only define it in terms of racial subjugation. You might say, well, what about European culture and traditions? Yes, there exists European food, European cultural traditions, etc, but that is not the same as "white culture." A French person and a US American have different cultural traditions, different holidays, different language.

    To talk about "white culture" means to talk about what unifies them together such that they should be considered part of a common bloc, and the only defining characteristic of "whiteness" that unifies it together is racial subjugation.

    Indeed, the same is also true of "black culture." Black culture is almost entirely understood as culture devised as a response to racial subjugation. When people think of black culture, they often think of things like traditions and songs devised in opposition to slavery, or black churches which were their own community centers developed independently of white churches due to racial segregation.

    You can argue that bigotry against Europeans exist, but bigotry against "whiteness" makes very little sense, because "whiteness" only exists as a category to justify subjugation, and it is the only thing that ties together "white people."

    It is harmful to promote "whiteness" even as a "white person." If you are French and you love your culture, that means you love French culture. If you are from Spain and you love your culture, that means you like Spanish culture. Have you ever met a person who said they love "white culture" that wasn't just a racist PoS? Universally, everyone who promotes the idea that people should be "proud of being white" and talks about the greatness of "white culture" are always just extreme racists.

    In my opinion, even "white people" would do themselves better to stop promoting identifying with "white" as an identity group.

  • I always say and always get flack for it, the US president legit doesn't matter much. If you want to predict the course of the USA, you will be right far more often if you just ignore who is president and look at precedent. Every bad president people love to play around with counterfactuals that it would've been better under the other president but really it would've been the same because the US government is an utterly enormous institution with a lot of momentum in a particular direction which one person is not going to change much.

  • The "weirdness" of QM all stems from a belief in "value indefiniteness," which is the idea that particles have no real properties when you are not looking at them, but suddenly acquire real properties when you look. If you believe that, then the question naturally arises, at what point do they acquire real properties precisely? What does "look" even rigorously mean? This issue was first brought up by John Bell in his article "Against 'Measurement'". The "answers" to this always fall into one of three categories:

    1. "Look" just means you become aware of it. This devolves into solipsism, because other people are also made up of particles, so they would have no real properties either until you become aware of them.
    2. "Look" is more of a specific physical process that measuring devices do. But this is vague without rigorously and mathematically defining what this physical process is, and if you do define it, then it's provable that no definition can be consistent with the mathematics of quantum mechanics. If we agree with the premise that "quantum mechanics is correct," then such an approach is trivially ruled out.
    3. There is no "look," systems never acquire real, observable properties at all. But then you run into Wittgenstein's rule-following problem. If the mathematical model never predicts that a system acquires real properties, then you can never tie it back to any real-world observation.

    The "weirdness" stems from starting with an assumption that is not logically possible to make consistent in the first place and then developing dozens of "interpretations" trying to make it consistent, but none of the major interpretations are ultimately logically consistent if we agree that (1) objective reality exists and (2) quantum mechanics is correct (some may be argued to be consistent but only because they openly admit they're dropping off #1 or #2).

    Feynman's belief in "value indefiniteness" stems from an argument he made here regarding the double-slit experiment and how probabilities should add together. I made a video here explaining why his argument does not work, but you can also read John Bell's paper here because von Neumann made a similar flawed argument and Bell gave a similar rebuttal to it.

    If you just drop off "value indefiniteness" as an assumption, which has no justification for it in the academic literature, then all the quantum woo around quantum mechanics disappears, and the arguments over interpretations like Copenhagen or Many Worlds or QBism simply become superfluous.

  • No. There is an obsession many people have, from laymen to academics alike, with quantum woo and trying desperately to extrapolate bizarre metaphysics from the linear algebra, but nothing in the mathematics of the theory necessitates their crackpot ideas. Objective reality exists.

  • science also is telling us that reality is a strange miasma of superpositions and that we actively participate in the creation of reality by simply existing/observing.

    It doesn't tell us that at all. This is just bizarre metaphysics invented out of someone's ass one day and became popular among academics, despite it having no empirical basis for it and not even being logically consistent if you take it seriously for more than five seconds.

    Quantum mechanics is just a statistical theory. You literally superimpose states in classical statistical mechanics as well. The only difference is quantum mechanics has an extra degree of freedom in the state description of the system that includes phases, and those phases evolve deterministically and influence the stochastic dynamics of the system. This gives a kind of "memory" effect whereby the same operator can have different behavior if the history is different, such as, a photon having 50%/50% chance of being reflected/transmitted by a beam splitter, unless its immediate previous interaction was of a beam splitter as well, then it is 100%/0% because the state of the phases are different.

    No, Sean Carroll is just wrong and he presents nothing to justify his position. The cat doesn't stop existing when you're not looking, nor is there is a multiverse, nor do things spread out as infinite-dimensional vectors in configuration space when you aren't looking. You just do not know its state because it is statistical as quantum mechanics is a statistical theory. Multiverse believers love to put their idea side-by-side another idea which is even more absurd in order to make it look more viable, but they never bother to defend their ideas on their own merit, without a comparison. Any time you ever encounter a multiverse believer, they will constantly bring up Copenhagen even if you never mention it.

    Carroll responds to a variant of Copenhagen that believes in a "spreading out" axiom that things diverge into a multiverse of every possibility represented by a vector in configuration space when you aren't looking, but then suddenly "collapses" back down into a definite configuration in state space when you look. He then attacks the "collapse" as silly, and therefore we should believe things spread out as a multiverse forever. But nowhere does he ever give any convincing justification for the "spreading out" axiom to begin with. That axiom is not grounded in any empirical evidence or in the mathematics at all, and so multiverse believers can only make their position look coherent by putting it beside another silly belief which also presupposes that axiom, and thus they make it appear reasonable that they never justify it.

    Just look at the awful slide 24:35. Someone can make this same argument in a perfectly classical universe. If we could not track the definite states of particles because they behaved randomly, but in a classical sense which did not violate Bell inequalities, we would also only be able to track the states of systems as vectors evolved by matrices. Someone could also come along and claim that particles do not have real states when you are not looking at them because they are not there in the mathematics, and that they are being the "reasonable" one for believing that the universe just evolves as a big deterministic vector.

    We would all look at them as if they are silly. Yet, somehow, this is stated unironically among multiverse believers as if it is somehow made less silly by quantum mechanics, when absolutely nothing in the theory makes this a less silly position.

  • Can we please, for the love of god, stop pretending it is just "laypeople" who push quantum mysticism? "Consciousness causes collapse" literally originated from academia. I know you hold physicists up on a pedestal so they can do no wrong and it's only the dumb laypeople, but the majority of times their crackpot quantum mystical claims are traceable directly back to a physicist holding a PhD. Quantum mysticism is rampant in academia as well, and people need to stop denying this fact.

  • mini tanks that you can drive around and have a laser tag style tank battle in

  • Trotskyism isn't a real ideology. They have no actual beliefs. If you ask them what "socialism in one country" even means, either they will just straw man it and claim that Stalin believed you can have socialism in one country as a permanent and unchanging state of affairs, or they will just reduce it to pure pedantic arguments over definitions.

    In the first case, it's obviously false, as Stalin argues the direct opposite in Foundations of Leninism that capitalism is a global system and thus socialism in one country is going to be inevitably dragged into international politics, and that socialism needs global victory to guarantee against capitalist restoration in the long-term. Many Trots will say this almost verbatim and pretend they are disagreeing with Stalin even though you can just read FoL and see that is Stalin's position.

    Socialism in one country was not an argument that we should only build socialism in one country, but an argument that we can build socialism in one country. It was a response to the Marxists who argued that the Bolsheviks should abandon socialist construction after it was clear the international revolution had failed and they would be isolated for some time. Stalin argued that they can build socialism in one country as a temporary state of affairs to later help facilitate revolutions in other countries.

    Other Trots just transform it into a purely definitional disagreement with no material substance. They will say that, by definition, socialism is international, so socialism in one country is by definition impossible. If your country has overthrown the bourgeoisie, expropriated the means of production for the working class, and replaced production for exchange with production for use, it is still not socialism by definition because they say the definition should include "+ also it's international."

    This is just definition mongering and doesn't have any practical implications.

    Trots fit into two categories.

    Some really are just MLs in denial with Stalin Derangement Syndrome. Nothing in ML theory says you have to worship Stalin. You can, if you wish, be an ML who just is critical of Stalin. But these kinds of Trots just make it their whole personality obsessing over Stalin, constantly bringing him up in every discussion, and try to pretend there is some big ideological definition between Stalin and Leninism which doesn't exist.

    They can't just say "I don't like Stalin" and move on, they are obsessed with making it their whole personality and ideology, and making sure everyone knows who much they hate Stalin, calling everything they dislike "Stalinist" and trying to pin all problems on Stalin personally. Just search the word "Stalinist" in any Trot article and you will see it said multiple times. They are so petty that Trot parties will often refer to themselves as "Marxist+Leninist" rather than "Marxist-Leninist" because they argue that Stalin used "Marxist-Leninist" first and gave it cooties and so they cannot use the dash and so they replace it with a + or the word "and".

    Others are leftcoms in denial, although some don't even deny it. They will call themselves Trots but then copy/paste leftcom rhetoric which Trotsky himself argued against. I have seen so-called Trots for example claim that you shouldn't have a revolution at all in a poor country like Russia was, which is a leftcom take but something Trotsky strongly denounced as that was the Menshevik position.

    Again, Trotskyism has no real ideology, so a person telling you they are a Trotskyist doesn't tell you their beliefs. They always have some other underlying belief, which is either Leninism or left-communism, and what unites them is just Stalin Derangement Syndrome. They also are united in opposing all real-world attempts to build socialism, arguing they are all influenced by Stalin and therefore are all "Stalinist" and should be condemned.

    So-called Maoists, who don't even read Mao, are basically just utopian socialists. They don't believe in historical materialism, which argues that the economic base is derivative of the material conditions and is thus ultimately not something you can "decide" but forms itself unconsciously. Human societies do not have the "free will" to decide their economic base. It is determined by the historical conditions at that time.

    What you can "decide" is only the superstructure around it: the political system, property rights, etc. Utopian socialists instead believe that you can indeed "decide" the economic base and try to force the economic base to be a particular way according to their moral philosophy, but this leads to economic devastation, hence the Gang of Four saying "it is better to live under poverty" than to stop trying to enforce a particular morality onto the economic base which was destroying the economy.

    Their utopian socialist vision of the world is just not economically viable, and so every Maoist revolution inevitably will just evolve towards "dengist" reforms when they actually are faced with building a real economy in the real world that has to take into account their actual material conditions and not just morality, so Maoists will support a revolution until it actually succeeds, then they will condemn it. Maoists also end up opposing every actually-existing socialist project, viewing themselves as holier-than-thou because those projects have abandoned the Maoist morality and so the Maoists see themselves as morally superior to it.

  • I’m going to reiterate my original claim because much of your comment misses the point. In the comment above I argued that quantum theory has interesting philosophical implications.

    You didn't read my original comment, then, since the whole point in my reply was to demonstrate that QM does not change the situation at all when it comes to the metaphysics, i.e. it does not have philosophical implications which classical mechanics did not have.

    So when you assert materialism this is intellectual honesty, but when someone argues for an anti-materalist stance, based on observable evidence as strange as quantum entanglement (which you are quick to explain away) this is just personal metaphysics?

    I don't know if your reading comprehension really is that poor or you are just intentionally misinterpreting what I stated.

    No, I did not claim that materialism is being "intellectually honest" here, I claimed that the ones being intellectually honest are the ones who do not pretend like quantum mechanics supports their metaphysics, which includes materialists, at least not any more than classical physics did.

    Occam’s razor doesn’t allow us to flippantly dismiss positions we deem unintuitive.

    Sure, but Sagan's razor does, if you present your mystical claims without a shred of evidence.

    Again, you’re familiar with the physics side but are incapable of considering alternate philosophical points of view.

    You are incapable of being intellectually honest and want to desperately pretend that quantum physics proves idealism. I at least have the intellectual honesty to not pretend quantum mechanics is relevant to such questions of metaphysics.

  • Gatekeeping? If you want to believe in crackpot mysticism, be my guest. Just don't expect me to believe it or not to criticize you for it if you attempt to spread those crank views on a public forum.

  • Furthermore, Bell-type experiments, which are a part of the broader quantum theory, display quantum entanglement such that measuring one half of the experiment decides the outcome of the other.

    That is just non-locality. It also doesn't "decide the outcome" of the other. It is more complicated than that. Bell's theorem is about a locally stochastic theory having to obey Reichenbachian factorization, which is the idea that a joint probability distribution between two objects should be factorizable if you condition on a common cause in their backwards light cone where they locally interacted. If you assume this, it places certain statistical bounds on what results you can expect, which is broken in practice.

    If you interpret quantum mechanics as a stochastic theory without altering its mathematics, then the outcomes are just random so nothing determines them by definition, but what one observer does in their lab does affect the kind of statistical correlations they would expect to find with another person's lab if they later compare results. In a deterministic model that does add something, like Bohmian mechanics, this model is also contextual, so the deterministic trajectories depend upon the full experimental context. Ultimately, the particle's trajectory is still ultimately determined by its initial state, but the observer changing the configuration of the measurement devices while the particle is mid-flight does alter the physical context of the experiment and thus can alter those trajectories.

    To be clear, Bernard does not promote skepticism about reality or its objectivity. But he argues convincingly that the evidence is inconsistent with materialism.

    If you presented him accurately then he undeniably does. You cannot claim X then turn around saying you're not claiming X. If there are no facts about things until you look at them then there is no objectivity. That is literally solipsism.

    Whether you agree with Bernard is immaterial (pun intended). The larger point here is that reasonable people can disagree with materialism giving the probabilistic, relational, and epistemologically problematic nature of subatomic particles.

    I don't see what is non-materialistic about statistics. One of the most famous and influential materialists in history, Friedrich Engels, heavily criticized causality in his writings, viewing cause-and-effect as an abstraction such that the same system could be described in a different context where what is considered the cause and what is considered the effect swap places. The physicist Dmitry Blokhintsev, the man who invented the concept of the graviton, was personally inspired by Engels' writings and even cited this in a paper he wrote criticizing the Copenhagenists for thinking lack of "Laplacian determinism" as he called it implies a contradiction with materialism, saying that materialist of his school had already rejected Laplacian determinism since the 1800s.

    Again, the arguments you're making have nothing to do with quantum mechanics at all. If they have literally no relevance to quantum mechanics, then it makes no sense to try and use quantum mechanics as an argument in your favor. One can also imagine existing in a universe where the laws of physics are classical without quantum mechanics at all, but systems still undergo fundamentally random perturbations. These are classical perturbations which cannot violate Bell inequalities, but would still disallow you from tracking the definite states of particles and they could only be tracked with a vector in configuration space that is a linear combination of basis states.

    If one wants to argue that randomness somehow contradicts with materialism, then the same argument could be made in that universe, and so the argument must have nothing to do with quantum mechanics.

    These insights obviously conflict with our understanding of materialism! We cannot simply presume the truth of materialism because we find it more intuitive. At best, scientists can justify their assumption of materialism on practical grounds.

    Sagan's razor. "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence." "Intuitive" refers to things which are blatantly obvious and self-evident and are supported by all of our observations. To deny it thus requires a much greater burden of evidence. If you want to claim everything we perceive is a lie, that we all live inside of a grand illusion and reality actually works fundamentally differently than to what we perceive, then this is, indeed, quite an extraordinary claim, and I am simply going to dismiss it unless you can provide extraordinary evidence for it.

    Yet, no extraordinary evidence is ever presented. Only vague loose philosophical arguments. That is just not convincing to me. The reality is that we already know you can fit the predictions of special relativity and quantum mechanics to simple theories point particles moving deterministically in 3D space with well-defined values at all times evolving in an absolute space and time. The point is, again, not that we should necessarily believe such a model, but the fact we know such models can be constructed disproves any claim that we cannot interpret quantum mechanics as a realist theory. If you don't add anything to it, you have to interpret it as a stochastic theory, but I have no issue with statistics. My issue only arises when people claim a system described by a statistical distribution has "no fact" about it in the real world.

    That is just mysticism not backed by anything.

    I take a very "conservative" approach to philosophy. If you are going to introduce some brand new world-shattering "paradigm shift" metaphysics, then I am going to be your biggest skeptic. I will want you to demonstrate that this is a necessity, either a logical or empirical necessity, such that all more trivial ways to conceive of the world have been exhausted.

    Our belief in objective reality and object permanence isn't just something we farted out one day for fun because we have an "unreasonable bias." People believe these things because they fit our day-to-day self-evident empirical observations and do a great job to make sense of things. If you are going to throw them out, you therefore better have a damned good reason, rather than just complaining that we're being "biased" based on our "intuition."

    That's just a cop-out.

    2/2

  • You may have good arguments for one camp within this discussion (e.g., sophisticated materialism) but to dismiss the philosophical implications outright prima facie indicates either a lack of familiarity with the philosophy of physics or perhaps a dismissal of metaphysics as a fruitful enterprise.

    No, it reflects something called intellectual honesty. It is always possible for two different groups of people, given the same predictive body of mathematics, to draw different metaphysical conclusions from them. The idea that the mathematics necessitate someone's particular metaphysics is just intellectual dishonesty pushed by people with bizarre views who can't defend them on any other grounds other than to dishonestly pretend that the mathematics somehow proves them.

    Call this “strong objectivity”. In contrast, Bernard d’Espagnat, theoretical physicist and philosopher of science, argues against materialism on the grounds that standard quantum mechanics is only “weakly objective”. (See his book, “On Physics and Philosophy”.) Although our observations are intersubjectively valid, quantum mechanics is predictive rather than descriptive: it does not describe the world as consisting of mind-independent entities that have determinate properties before they are observed/measured.

    This is blatantly obviously his personal metaphysical interpretation which is in no way necessitated from the mathematics. I can just look at the exact same body of mathematics and interpret it as describing an objective but stochastic world. Even in a purely classical world, but one which evolves through random perturbations, we would find that we cannot track the definite states of objects at a given time. We could thus only track an evolving probability distribution. But it is understood, typically, that when it comes to probability, that there is an underlying configuration of the system in the real world, but we just do not know which one it is.

    To deny this is to deny object permanence. These properties are not invisible, they are directly observable. We just happen to not be observing them in the moment, but they still possess observable properties and thus are observable under a counterfactually conceived circumstance. This is the basis of object permanence, that we don't reject the existence of observable things just because we are not observing them in the precise moment, as long as they can be observed under a counterfactual.

    There is no fact of the matter concerning the state of the system before we measure it.

    This is to devolve into crackpot solipsism. Humans are made out of particles. If particles have no fact of the matter about them until you look, then other humans also have no fact about them either before you look. This was Schrodinger's point about his "cat" thought experiment. He was trying to point out that your beliefs about fundamental particles cannot be confined to fundamental particles, that they necessarily also imply things about macroscopic objects as well, like cats, or other people.

    There is, again, literally nothing in the theory that forces you to accept this premise. The delusion goes back to John von Neumann who was a brilliant mathematician but also a crackpot who originated the "consciousness causes collapse" interpretation of quantum mechanics and was a major advocate for starting a WW3 nuclear holocaust. In one of his books on the mathematics of quantum mechanics, he tries to offer a mathematical "proof" that objective reality doesn't exist, by showing that, if quantum mechanics is just a stochastic theory, then it should follow certain statistical laws, and shows that it violates those laws.

    However, John Bell would later debunk von Neumann's "proof" in his own response paper, published at the same time he published his famous theorem. Since von Neumann was a brilliant mathematician, there were no mathematical flaws in his "proof," and so it had a major impact and caused many physicists to start agreeing with von Neumann's mysticism. But Bell pointed out that the issue is not in the mathematics, but the premises. von Neumann's assumptions about statistics are not just rules underlying pure statistics, but also include physical assumptions as well, specifically he adopted an assumption of additivity which only makes sense if the underlying physics are classical. If the underlying physics are not classical, then there is no reason for such an assumption to hold.

    All von Neumann really proved was that the underlying statistical dynamics cannot be governed by classical physics. This is why Bell also published his other paper in the same year published his paper in response to the EPR paper as well, showing that Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen's beliefs that the underlying physics can be reduced to a classical stochastic theory are false. These physicists with crackpot beliefs love to present a false dichotomy where the only two possibilities are (1) quantum mechanics is a classically stochastic theory or (2) objective reality doesn't exist. What Bell was trying to argue was that quantum mechanics is a non-classically stochastic theory.

    What is "non-classical" about it is debatable, but the most trivial answer which was the one Bell identified is that it is simply not a local theory. In the modern day literature, this non-locality is sometimes more accurately referred to as contextuality. The stochastic dynamics simply depend upon the full experimental context. For example, consider the Elitzur-Vaidman experiment: https://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/9305002

    This experiment proves that the mere presence or absence of a barrier alters the statistical behavior of a photon which never interacts with the barrier, because the photon's stochastic evolution depends upon the entire experimental context, not just what it directly interacts with at the moment. This is why von Neumann's additivity assumption does not hold. It assumes that if we only consider the photon that passed through path A while B is blocked, and path B while A is blocked, then the statistics of the photons passing through A or B when neither is blocked should just be Pr(A)+Pr(B). But, as shown from the Elitzur-Vaidman setup, this is obviously not the case, because the photon, even in the individual case, is influenced by the presence or absence of a barrier it does not interact with, so even if a photon takes path A, if there is no barrier on path B, it can influence its statistical behavior differently than if a barrier were present. You therefore cannot meaningfully add together Pr(A_barrier)+Pr(B_barrier) and expect it to yield Pr(A_nobarrier)+Pr(B_nobarrier). They are not the same.

    But, despite von Neumann's proof being debunked by Bell, these same crackpots in physics academia took Bell's theorem and started to run around claiming Bell's new theorem is proof objective reality doesn't exist, even though Bell never claimed that. Bell was literally a major proponent of realist models, publishing a paper trying to develop Bohm's pilot wave theory, as well as published a stochastic model that could reproduce quantum field theory. Non-locality isn't the only option. It's just the simplest and most intuitive one where all the supposed "paradoxes" disappear in a puff of smoke when you accept that it's just a contextual stochastic theory. However, there have been arguments made to drop other assumptions, like temporality rather than locality, based on the Two-State Vector Formalism. I am not a fan of non-temporality but I still respect such a position way better than denying objective reality even exists.

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  • It really does not. Physics academia is just filled with crackpot mystics. I like to call them the metaphysical-physicists, the physicists who do not just immerse their mind in practical work but start talking metaphysics.

    In 1964, the physicist John Bell proved that if you assume (1) that objective reality exists, (2) quantum mechanics is correct, and (3) special relativity is correct, then you run into a contradiction, and so one of the assumptions must be wrong. Deranged physicists in academia concluded #1 one is wrong and started to promote the crackpot mystical views that objective reality doesn't actually exist. Like 90% of the quantum mysticism you see these does not originate from non-physicists like Deepak Chopra but from actual PhD physicists.

    This is, at least, the story the mystics like to tell, that Bell's theorem "proved" there is no objective reality. But this is a historical falsification, because if you actually check the historical record, you find that physicists in academia started to come to the "consensus" that objective reality isn't real back in the 1927 Solvay conference, decades before John Bell ever published his theorem, and many more decades before it was ever confirmed in experiment, with Albert Einstein pretty much the last major holdout criticizing this turn of events, once asking Abraham Pais, "do you really believe that the moon doesn't exist when you're not looking at it?"

    They already decided it doesn't exist before they had any theorem or any empirical evidence that the theorem was correct. Bell's theorem genuinely has nothing to do with this turn of events.

    What is even more absurd is that we have known since the day special relativity was introduced in 1905 that it is not even necessary to make the right predictions of special relativity. Lorentz had proposed a theory in 1904 which is mathematically equivalent to special relativity without special relativity, and hence we know you can drop #3 without actually dropping the empirical predictions of #3. There is zero empirical necessity for premise #3.

    Metaphysical-physicists love historical falsification. They make up this completely bologna narrative that we should accept the truth of special relativity because "it is the most tested theory in the history of physics," but the statement is nonsensical, because it is mathematically equivalent to Lorentz's theory. Hence, every "test" for special relativity is also a test of Lorentz's theory.

    You see this dishonest line of argumentation pushed a lot by the metaphysical-physicist crowd. They will push the most absurd metaphysics you can imagine that is entirely incoherent and when you say you don't agree with that, they accuse you of denying the science because it is "well-tested." But none of their crackpot metaphysics has been tested at all. There is no experiment you can conduct that proves a particle doesn't have a definite value when you are not looking at it. This is just a delusion.

  • I don't believe God exists, "there is just atoms and the void." I also don't think they can be reconciled because relativity is just wrong. Bell's theorem proved that relativity is incompatible with objective reality, but people have such a strong devotion to it that many physicists have descended into crackpot woo territory claiming that we should deny objective relativity even exists in order to preserve relativity. "Reality doesn't exist, but thank God it's local!" That is legitimately a popular mindset among academics in physics and it's entirely deranged. If you (1) accept objective independently of the observer reality exists, and (2) the predictions of quantum mechanics are correct, then it is trivial to write down a two-qubit experiment, one far simpler than Bell's original theorem which proves that the states of the qubits cannot be Lorentz invariant. This conclusion is "escaped" in the academic literature by denying reality, denying premise #1, which, in my opinion, is an absurdity.

  • In quantum mechanics, the time evolution of the state is clearly defined, but how that mathematical state connects to a single observed outcome does not seem to be explicitly defined within the theory itself.

    Again, you are just asking for Laplacian determinism. I don't have any issues with randomness. That's just your personal problem. And, again, if it bothers you that much, there are deterministic models out there, like de Broglie - Bohm theory, where particles have definite positions at all times that evolve deterministically according to the quantum Hamilton-Jacobi equation, and you measure the particle at the location you find it because it evolves there deterministically.

    This is not simply a question of determinism vs. indeterminism,

    It objectively is. You cannot complain about nondeterminism and turn around and say it has nothing to do with nondeterminism. Your problem is clearly the nondeterminism as you constantly repeat that you dislike that there lacks a reason for one value to be selected over another from the probability distribution. That is, by definition, a complaint about nondeterminism.

    but rather about how the mapping from state to outcome is defined within the theory.

    In standard quantum mechanics it is, again, just random.

    And it seems that even in Bohmian mechanics, this ultimately depends on initial conditions or distributions (such as those corresponding to the Born rule), whose origin is not fully derived within the theory itself.

    What on earth does that even mean? If I fire a cannonball from point X and it lands at point Y, and Newtonian mechanics predicts the full deterministic trajectory that would lead it to land at Y given it started at X, would you also respond saying that in Newtonian mechanics the origins of objects is "not fully derived"? What does that even mean?

    Bohmian mechanics is very Newtonian esque. The particles just follow well-defined trajectories that are completely determined by their initial conditions. If a photon leaves a photon emitter at location X and later shows up at location Y, it was absolutely determined to show up at Y given its location at X, and the trajectory between X and Y in 3D space is also well-defined.

    And just to clarify one point: I am not Satoru Watanabe.

    Sure.

  • ψ is not necessary in the formulation of Bohmian mechanics. You can formulate it without it since the quantum potential Q only has partial dependence upon ψ.

    But I don't even see how it's relevant even if ψ is assumed. I don't think you have any idea what the measurement problem is. The measurement problem is not that "we assume things." All mathematical models in the entirety of human history assume something. If you replace the current model with a more fundamental model, that more fundamental model will also assume things. Having assumptions is not the problem. The assumptions being coherent is the problem.

    I am beginning to suspect that "Laura" is not even real and that you are Satoru Watanabe.

  • Yes I agree with the last statement. If someone tells me they only care to be empathic to other living creatures because they read Chalmers I would be a bit concerned. One's ethics shouldn't depend upon such an esoteric philosophical argument.

  • GenZedong @lemmygrad.ml

    I have trouble seeing Trotskyism as a real ideology

  • philosophy @hexbear.net

    My Criticism of Physicalism from a Materialist Perspective

  • philosophy @hexbear.net

  • Physics @mander.xyz

    Has quantum physics become a religion?