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Comment by beders | Hacker News Reader

What has the human brain to do with anything? This whole thing is philosophical at best. Physics is real whether we observe it or not. I think we settled on that one. Using subjective experience in trying to explain physical systems is bonkers.

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On the contrary, decades of experiments violating Bell's inequality have shown that the statement "Physics is real whether we observe it or not" can only be true if we abandon locality. Non-local interpretations of QM, such as Bohmian mechanics, are however incompatible with the Standard Model which is by far the most accurately tested theory in physics.

There is no incompatibility between orthodox quantum mechanics and Bohmian mechanics, the latter makes exactly the same predictions as the former. As does any other interpretation of quantum mechanics. That's why they're called interpretations, they're ways of ascribing an ontology to or making sense of the mathematical models that are known to work so well to make experimental predictions. They're not supposed to be competing theories.

There is nothing inconsistent or inherently problematic about abandoning locality, quantum mechanics has some intrinsically non-local components anyway. It speaks in favor of Bohmian mechanics that it explicitly describes this non-locality and isolates it.

The point is that non-relativistic quantum mechanics and therefore also Bohmian mechanics are wrong. They cannot even describe hydrogen atoms correctly! Solving this issue required developing relativistic quantum field theories. So far nobody managed to create a convincing relativistic version of Bohmian mechnics.

Realism can be salvaged in a fully deterministic theory.

Note however that empirical science in a deterministic world is a strange concept.

Edit: However in my opinion empirical science in a nonlocal or nondeterministic world is equally strange, if you really think about it.

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