Quantum mechanics is a useful model in some contexts. It is not reality.
Other models are useful in other contexts.
Reality is unknownable. But we can always use better models.
Experiments spell doom for physical-collapse explanation of quantum weirdness
71–80 of 306 posts
Re: Experiments spell doom for physical-collapse explanation of quantum weirdness
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I can't think off-hand of any time travel novels with unchangeable history. Harry Potter has this as a plot point in one of the books. He essentially teaches/inspires himself to a spell to save the day.
Ah, yeah, good one. (Although more of a "novel that happens to have time travel in it" than "novel about time travel".)
Netflix's Dark is a good 3 seasons of a single nearly stable time loop.
Re: Experiments spell doom for physical-collapse explanation of quantum weirdness
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’d say a good heuristic would be to include all mammals in any theory about consciousness, wave function collapse, quantum consciousness, etc. and then see if the theory still holds up. If it does, you are probably on to something. I think scientifically we will look back on “humans are uniquely conscious” as a categorical differentiation instead of a gradient with other mammals to be as absurd as believing the eart…
No interpretation of quantum physics proposed by scientists ever required a conscious observer, that's more of a misinterpretation of what an observer is. It's an interaction, not a person or animal. As for the theory of consciousness, of course we are not special, it's information-processing, and it looks like thermodynamics is responsible for the emergence of information-processing structures. https://arxiv.org/abs…
> As for the theory of consciousness, of course we are not special, it's information-processing, and it looks like thermodynamics is responsible for the emergence of information-processing structures.
That's a really interesting paper, thanks for that. It's also a bit depressing to consider that there's a good chance that everything we think that makes us special is really just an emergent property of a thermodynamics memory and prediction system.
Re: Experiments spell doom for physical-collapse explanation of quantum weirdness
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
To be fair, the Copenhagen interpretation doesn't really fit today's world view. We have largely moved away from viewing humans or "consciousness" as something special, so the notion that an observer collapses the wave function just seems weird now. "Many worlds" or "the wave function never collapses, you are in a superposition" both make much more sense with how we currently view the world
I also prefer the Many Worlds interpretation and I do think that it is gaining popularity in relation to Copenhagen, but I'm not sure what you mean by "today's world view". And who is this "we" that you write about? I prefer Many Worlds because it is a simpler explanation, so I follow Occam's razor. That's it. Consciousness and the existence of qualia remains a fundamental mystery. There is something definitely speci…
What surprises me is not that many people think consciousness is a settled matter; but rather, people who, when faced with the claim that "consciousness" isn't settled, are so often tempted to assert that it is that they rapidly provide another example of how it isn't.
Re: Experiments spell doom for physical-collapse explanation of quantum weirdness
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
Having been passionate about this for awhile, I have a layman’s surface overview of the state of physics, or I like to believe so. It amused me to no end when my elderly aunt came to ask me for a tl;dr; on Quantum Physics. She stopped me shortly asking how she can control the universe with her mind. I tried to explain a bit about the famous interpretation (Copenhagen, not Von Neumann–Wigner) but she would have none o…
To be fair, the Copenhagen interpretation doesn't really fit today's world view. We have largely moved away from viewing humans or "consciousness" as something special, so the notion that an observer collapses the wave function just seems weird now. "Many worlds" or "the wave function never collapses, you are in a superposition" both make much more sense with how we currently view the world
> We have largely moved away from viewing humans or “consciousness” as something special.
Who is “we” in this comment? Christianity and Islam emphasize consciousness and the uniqueness of human experience, and their adherents still account more than 50% of the population.
As much popularity as the many worlds theory is gaining, the generic “we” almost certainly still doesn’t believe it, and many (most?) probably don’t even know about it.
Re: Experiments spell doom for physical-collapse explanation of quantum weirdness
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
Many worlds is just some peoples favorite because they get too weirded out but indeterminism. They prefer a billiard ball universe and so invented the hairbrained many worlds theory.
Or- and hear me out with this one- they prefer an explanation which follows naturally from existing experiments and doesn't require a hacked together non-linear irreversible operation which occurs only under bizarre conditions exactly when needed to patch over experimental results. No one in the whole world cares if the universe is deterministic or not, but collapse is embedded in an entirely deterministic system. MW…
> MWI may not be right, but collapse is wrong.
Such confidence ... I envy that.
Re: Experiments spell doom for physical-collapse explanation of quantum weirdness
#77There is an often-repeated statement that different quantum mechanical theories are equivalent. This is an over-simplification. Is wave function collapse is a real thing or just an approximation of what happens when a large system is entangled? Some smart people have tried to make theories where wave function collapse is a real thing. These new experiments are working to rule out those ideas. My feeling is that Evere…
Check out "superdeterminism," first proposed by Bell (of Bell's inequality fame) himself and currently being vigorously pursued by Sabina Hossenfelder. There is no "collapse" per se according to this model and everything is really classical with hidden variables, and the entanglement comes because everything shared the same origin (the big bang). A very fascinating and in my opinion the best explanation, though it's…
Even without superdeterminism free will is a concept that only makes any sense in specific contexts. To say otherwise is to introduce God of the Gaps style woo.
Re: Experiments spell doom for physical-collapse explanation of quantum weirdness
#78Quantum mechanics is a useful model in some contexts. It is not reality. Other models are useful in other contexts. Reality is unknownable. But we can always use better models.
"The map is not the territory" - Korzybski
Re: Experiments spell doom for physical-collapse explanation of quantum weirdness
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
Many worlds is just some peoples favorite because they get too weirded out but indeterminism. They prefer a billiard ball universe and so invented the hairbrained many worlds theory.
Or- and hear me out with this one- they prefer an explanation which follows naturally from existing experiments and doesn't require a hacked together non-linear irreversible operation which occurs only under bizarre conditions exactly when needed to patch over experimental results. No one in the whole world cares if the universe is deterministic or not, but collapse is embedded in an entirely deterministic system. MW…
It’s quite nice to have something irreversible though. It gives you time. Also nobody really thinks QM is the end of it, assuming semi classical physics under the hood is just odd to me. There is something below QM that we don’t understand yet (AdS/CFT looks like a good start to me) and personally I think the whole interpretation of QM debate will look stupid in retrospect. Yeah collapse is odd, but it just shows us this isn’t it. Reality is much weirder than we thought and giving up on realism is just the beginning.
Re: Experiments spell doom for physical-collapse explanation of quantum weirdness
#80Perhaps the collapse happens when all the quantum fields are activated at a particular point in their coordinate system.
I.e. if we have 3 fields, with respective coordinates [0, 1, 2], [1, 2, 3] and [2, 3, 4], a particle emerges only when the 3rd point of field A, the 2nd point of field B and the 1st point of field C, all with value = 2, are activated.
If the quantum field activations happen periodically, but their periods do not match, or the fields have different granularity when they are activated, then we may get a wave-like outcome for particles, since the interactions of all the fields happen only when the fields are synchronized at specific points in their history.
EDIT:
Writing the above made me realize that the underlying fabrique of the universe may work like a neural net, where each possible point in the universe is actually a node in a neural net, and each node has multiple fields connected to each node, and values flowing into the fields excite the nodes based on a function, for example accumulation. When a limit is exceeded in a node, a particle is created, or a particle disappears (for black holes).
A neural net of such proportions could be called ...God (yeah, I said it, sorry...I don't believe in a God but the parallelism is interesting, at least to me, from a philosophical perspective).