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Quantum Monism Could Save the Soul of Physics

blogs.scientificamerican.com

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Re: Quantum Monism Could Save the Soul of Physics

#21

Post by zwkrt »

ThomPete wrote: post #20
77pt77 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I wonder if we're starting to hit up against some sort of limitation or local maxima that is blocking our search to the global maxima. That and maybe also human cognitive ability limits.

Wisdom lies in paradox as the Taoist say. Language is a gross reduction of reality and has a hard time expresssing non-local concepts. Our inability to philosophically explain QM and classical physics in a consistant way is a good example of that. My guess is that there are concepts which require the ability to express perspectives of reality we arent able to grok because they requira a non-local (no now, no me, no i…

Wittgenstein teaches us that we invented language to solve a particular set of problems. Depending on which book of his you read, language is designed to either:

- talk about the configuration of objects in relation to each other in space and time.

- perform social functions and to describe the actions humans take in the social world.

In either case, I think it is totally clear that you are right and there are just certain sets of concepts that human language is fundamentally unsuited for. I think this is why some mathematical concepts are so abstruse; for example, I know that I can interpret a matrix as a twisty-rotatey-stretchy operation, but it is almost impossible for me to look at a matrix and understand what it is going to do except in the simplest cases. If foundations of QM are non-local (which they appear to be), we might have to take a long time to understand how best to communicate what is going on.

Re: Quantum Monism Could Save the Soul of Physics

#22

Post by zwkrt »

vokep wrote: post #7
rosser wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A monism, in this context, is a metaphysics with one fundamental substance. In "physicalism" or "materialism", that stuff is "matter". In "panpsychism" or "idealism", it's "consciousness".

Is it not all information regardless? What makes matter different from consciousness? sounds like different terms for the same fundamental thing: stuff that exists. The matter term comes from the fact the stuff is just stuff that exists The consciousness term comes from the fact that we can see stuff that exists But these are both just observational terms of 'stuff that exists', and it seems that anything existing at…

The tricky part of philosophy is that sometimes it attempts to overstep the bounds from 'what we can know based on data we can collect' (i.e., 'information') and 'what the fundamental concept/ontology/etc actually is'. The distinction is subtle, but one way to think about it is that you can never know somethings true nature only by investigating it scientifically--this will give you all the 'hows' but none of the 'whys'. Whether or not it is always appropriate to ask 'why' is another matter. I have a shaky and unfounded belief that asking 'why' questions about fundamental physics will not yield interesting results.

In programming we make monisms all the time. Think of Unix's "everything is a file" or Java's "Everything is an object". A monism is nice because it asserts that fundamentally there is some single common denominator underlying all emergent behavior. That being said, physicists are usually happy to do the calulations and get the expected results without needing a fundamental philosophy regarding the workings of the entire universe.

Re: Quantum Monism Could Save the Soul of Physics

#23

Post by turdnagel »

ThomPete wrote: post #20
77pt77 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I wonder if we're starting to hit up against some sort of limitation or local maxima that is blocking our search to the global maxima. That and maybe also human cognitive ability limits.

Wisdom lies in paradox as the Taoist say. Language is a gross reduction of reality and has a hard time expresssing non-local concepts. Our inability to philosophically explain QM and classical physics in a consistant way is a good example of that. My guess is that there are concepts which require the ability to express perspectives of reality we arent able to grok because they requira a non-local (no now, no me, no i…

Can you explain in further detail (or share a link to) what you mean by "non-local" here?

Re: Quantum Monism Could Save the Soul of Physics

#24

Post by phayes »

"Both monism and many worlds can be avoided, but only when one either changes the formalism of quantum mechanics—typically in ways that are in conflict with Einstein’s theory of special relativity—or if one understands quantum mechanics not as a theory about nature but as a theory about knowledge: a humanities concept rather than science."

Tut-tut. There's nothing "humanities rather than science" about the understanding that QM is 'just' probability theory

https://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0601158 https://terrytao.wordpress.com/tag/noncommutative-probabilit... https://arxiv.org/abs/math-ph/0002049 https://ncatlab.org/nlab/show/quantum+probability

applied to mechanics (and interpreted sensibly, as it is in any 'neo-Copenhagen' or 'pragmatist' interpretation). Grandiose and/or bizarre 'psiontology' is easily avoided.

Re: Quantum Monism Could Save the Soul of Physics

#25

Post by natalyarostova »

phayes wrote: post #24

"Both monism and many worlds can be avoided, but only when one either changes the formalism of quantum mechanics—typically in ways that are in conflict with Einstein’s theory of special relativity—or if one understands quantum mechanics not as a theory about nature but as a theory about knowledge: a humanities concept rather than science." Tut-tut. There's nothing "humanities rather than science" about the understand…

Saying a physical phenomena is 'humanities rather than science' is such a stupid statement. Reality is just a complex computer.

Re: Quantum Monism Could Save the Soul of Physics

#27

Post by jMyles »

nategri wrote: post #8
lkrubner wrote: post #4

Also, I'm annoyed that a science magazine would be careless in its wording: "it is infamous for its weirdness such as Schrödinger’s cat existing in a limbo of being half dead and half alive." The cat is 100% alive and also 100% dead. However, it has 100% chance of resolving to just one state once you look at it.

Darn near 100% of attempts to describe quantum mechanics with English sentences end up far from their target. To paraphrase the protagonist of A Serious Man : "No one understands the cat. The math... the math is what's important."

Actions have consequences. In this office, actions have consequences. Not just physics. Morally.

Very possibly my favorite Coen bros film.

Re: Quantum Monism Could Save the Soul of Physics

#28

Post by scottlocklin »

gotocake wrote: post #18
Koshkin wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> far better alternatives Are you referring to New Scientist ?

I was thinking of American Scientist and Physics World. I’m not really familiar with New Scientist, sorry!

New Scientist is pretty bad; sort of the weekly world news of science.

I completely agree with you about SciAm. I like quantamagazine myself. Though most science journalism is very, very bad these days. I'm guessing because not much is going on in the sciences; most of the research is pretty bad as well.

Re: Quantum Monism Could Save the Soul of Physics

#29

Post by gotocake »

scottlocklin wrote: post #28
gotocake wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was thinking of American Scientist and Physics World. I’m not really familiar with New Scientist, sorry!

New Scientist is pretty bad; sort of the weekly world news of science. I completely agree with you about SciAm. I like quantamagazine myself. Though most science journalism is very, very bad these days. I'm guessing because not much is going on in the sciences; most of the research is pretty bad as well.

Man I wish that I could disagree with you, but... yeah. At least the long overdue “come to Jesus” moment is slowly arriving for theoreticians. Maybe we’ll see another golden age of experimentalism, that would be nice! Slow and solid is after all, better than quick and inconsequential.

Re: Quantum Monism Could Save the Soul of Physics

#30

Post by neltnerb »

gus_massa wrote: post #17
will_brown wrote: post #10

>As it stands, quantum monism should be considered as a key concept in modern physics: It explains why “beauty,” understood as structure, correlation and symmetry among apparently independent realms of nature, isn’t an "ill-conceived aesthetic ideal” but a consequence of nature descending from a single quantum state. They can call it monism...but it sounds like they are just describing the spatial dimensions. 0D Poin…

No, spatial dimensions have a very specific meaning. The universe has 3 big special dimensions and 1 temporal dimension (and perhaps 8 or additional "small" dimensions.) Here monism means another thing, I'm not sure what, I'm not sure that it even mean anything at all. The important thing is if it is possible or not to find any experiment that can refute the existence of monism. (It's easier to be a little less techn…

I believe roughly he's saying that we are a universe experiencing itself that is intrinsically a single quantum state.

It has never made sense to me to separate the observer and the experiment, it's weird to suggest the observer is somehow more classical than the experiment, both are just evolving together in time as a quantum system. The idea of "collapse" makes no sense, there is no observer separate from the experiment, and instead the question of why we experience what we call "collapse" the way we do comes up. Practically, it makes more sense to me.

How can our experience of consciousness be real? What does it mean to be conscious? Can we numerically measure free will? Are those answerable questions under this framework?

Just let's not talk too much like that to the pop-gurus...

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