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Are the Mysteries of Quantum Mechanics Beginning to Dissolve?

quantamagazine.org

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Re: Are the Mysteries of Quantum Mechanics Beginning to Dissolve?

#21

Post by flockonus »

goatlover wrote: post #5
jadbox wrote: post #2

How does "quantum darwinism" effectively select a state? Like how does that work in principle- what is the selection criteria.

The article asks the same question in the last part, wondering whether it's just randomly selected. MWI proponents have always argued decoherence leads to the entire world being put into superposition as decoherence just spreads entanglement to the environment. The math never says entanglement destroys superposition beyond a certain point of complexity (many different entangled systems forming the environment). The a…

Random is a very interesting concept. In relation to nature we seem to use "random" as anything we can't or are currently unable to model.

To call something random doesn't mean it's impossible to model, in fact all sorts of natural facts seemed random one day before being covered by a model. One very relatable example example is the motion of stars in the the night sky, which seemed random for ages, until the Copernican revolution.

The fact we have access to random() function in programming seems to trip many people. random() is a particular model implementation of random, but stuff in nature isn't random().

My point is, using "just random" to do work in any scientific explanation is a clutch.

Re: Are the Mysteries of Quantum Mechanics Beginning to Dissolve?

#22

Post by vladms »

borissk wrote: post #8

Are the Mysteries of Quantum Mechanics Beginning to Dissolve? I don’t think so. Zurek’s Decoherence and Quantum Darwinism is thought-provoking, but it’s still speculation without broad buy-in from researchers. We might need ASI to crack these mysteries — our brains weren’t built for this kind of problem.

I think the brains of our stone age ancestors were not built for relativity either. In the end the normal sequence of generations (having children and then die at some point) offers "re-trainings" of the brains. So, besides waiting/hoping for artificial intelligence, we should continue to make (and train) children. Worked great so far.

Re: Are the Mysteries of Quantum Mechanics Beginning to Dissolve?

#23

Post by Sharlin »

A_D_E_P_T wrote: post #20
uh_uh wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's what having such senses feels like from the inside; the first-person view. The hard problem is that there is such a feeling at all.

It's not hard at all when you acknowledge that such senses exist in the world, and that you (like others) possess them. As an aside it tends to foster a certain tendency towards empathy. In essence, you're asking why there's an inside to being a self-modeling system. But "inside" isn't something extraneous, something additional -- rather, it's what "self-modeling" means. Really the "hard problem" has a very easy answ…

So you say that the hard problem of consciousness is explained by the fact that we appear to be conscious?

Re: Are the Mysteries of Quantum Mechanics Beginning to Dissolve?

#24

Post by A_D_E_P_T »

Sharlin wrote: post #23
A_D_E_P_T wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not hard at all when you acknowledge that such senses exist in the world, and that you (like others) possess them. As an aside it tends to foster a certain tendency towards empathy. In essence, you're asking why there's an inside to being a self-modeling system. But "inside" isn't something extraneous, something additional -- rather, it's what "self-modeling" means. Really the "hard problem" has a very easy answ…

So you say that the hard problem of consciousness is explained by the fact that we appear to be conscious?

The kneejerk response would be: Are you not conscious at this present moment? If we were to modulate your spatiotemporal senses with drugs or a lobotomy, do you doubt that you would be very differently conscious, or perhaps entirely unconscious?

I mean, there is a credible first-person answer to that question of yours, which each man can answer for himself.

But considered more seriously, the "hard problem" is an artifact of treating experience as a separate thing that needs to be generated. If you accept that self-modeling systems bounded in space and time exist, you've already accepted that experience exists -- because experience is what such a system is, from the inside. There's no second step where experience gets added. The question "why is there experience?" is exactly akin to "Why is there an interior to four walls and a roof?" The interior isn't a separate thing; it's necessarily constitutive.

Re: Are the Mysteries of Quantum Mechanics Beginning to Dissolve?

#25

Post by staticassertion »

flockonus wrote: post #21
goatlover wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article asks the same question in the last part, wondering whether it's just randomly selected. MWI proponents have always argued decoherence leads to the entire world being put into superposition as decoherence just spreads entanglement to the environment. The math never says entanglement destroys superposition beyond a certain point of complexity (many different entangled systems forming the environment). The a…

Random is a very interesting concept. In relation to nature we seem to use "random" as anything we can't or are currently unable to model. To call something random doesn't mean it's impossible to model, in fact all sorts of natural facts seemed random one day before being covered by a model. One very relatable example example is the motion of stars in the the night sky, which seemed random for ages, until the Coperni…

There's disagreement on this. You seem to just be saying that brute facts or brute contingencies don't exist, but I suspect most scientists would disagree with that.

Re: Are the Mysteries of Quantum Mechanics Beginning to Dissolve?

#26

Post by prmph »

Nevermark wrote: post #3

> None of the leading interpretations of quantum theory are very convincing. They ask us to believe, for example, that the world we experience is fundamentally divided from the subatomic realm it’s built from. Or that there is a wild proliferation of parallel universes, or that a mysterious process causes quantumness to spontaneously collapse. Actually, the "many worlds" "interpretation", simply treats the highly suc…

I think the MWI is actually the just-so explanation you claim to avoid.

Is it falsifiable?

If you have a theory that seems unassailable by any logic, that's a good signal it is tautological and not very useful.

Re: Are the Mysteries of Quantum Mechanics Beginning to Dissolve?

#27

Post by Maxatar »

flockonus wrote: post #21
goatlover wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article asks the same question in the last part, wondering whether it's just randomly selected. MWI proponents have always argued decoherence leads to the entire world being put into superposition as decoherence just spreads entanglement to the environment. The math never says entanglement destroys superposition beyond a certain point of complexity (many different entangled systems forming the environment). The a…

Random is a very interesting concept. In relation to nature we seem to use "random" as anything we can't or are currently unable to model. To call something random doesn't mean it's impossible to model, in fact all sorts of natural facts seemed random one day before being covered by a model. One very relatable example example is the motion of stars in the the night sky, which seemed random for ages, until the Coperni…

In science randomness is usually used to abstract over a large number of possible paths that result in some outcome without having to reason individually about any specific path or all such paths.

It does not have to mean something inherently non-deterministic or something that can't be modelled, although it certainly is the case that if something is inherently non-deterministic then it would necessarily have to be modelled randomly. Modelling things as a random process is very useful even in cases where the underlying phenomenon has a fully understood and deterministic model; a simple example of this would be chess. It's an entirely deterministic game with perfect information that is fully understood, but nevertheless all the best chess engines model positions probabilistically and use randomness as part of their search.

Re: Are the Mysteries of Quantum Mechanics Beginning to Dissolve?

#28

Post by artrockalter »

It would be interesting if most of our confusion with quantum mechanics came from treating probabilities as independent when they are actually highly correlated. I don’t really know any physics, but I’m familiar with probability and this type of problem seems to be the most common error in interpreting probabilities.

Re: Are the Mysteries of Quantum Mechanics Beginning to Dissolve?

#29

Post by prmph »

A_D_E_P_T wrote: post #20
uh_uh wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's what having such senses feels like from the inside; the first-person view. The hard problem is that there is such a feeling at all.

It's not hard at all when you acknowledge that such senses exist in the world, and that you (like others) possess them. As an aside it tends to foster a certain tendency towards empathy. In essence, you're asking why there's an inside to being a self-modeling system. But "inside" isn't something extraneous, something additional -- rather, it's what "self-modeling" means. Really the "hard problem" has a very easy answ…

How do you know they (and others) possess them?
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