Comment by zyxzevn | Hacker News Reader

Comment by zyxzevn | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Since we are looking at an alternative interpretation:

Max Planck's Loader Model - the simplest interpretation that is never looked at.

In the Loader Model atoms have a hidden and random energy state, and a detectable state. The energy of light is spread evenly as waves. And when the energy reaches a threshold the detectable state changes. Photons do not exist. What we see are just detectable jumps of the energy states.

I never heard of it, until I found an experimenter that claimed to find evidence for it. With higher levels of energy than normal light, he found that (more often) two or more atoms can reach a next state, when one quantum of energy is emitted. Other experimenters classify these double-quanta as "noise".

Occham's razor?

Because it is the simplest interpretation, I would like to see more research into this. Maybe there is something to it, or maybe it can reveal some hidden variables in the detectors.

See: www.threshodmodel.com

Note: the experimenter is not a very good communicator and it took me some time to understand what he was explaining.

I haven't heard of the Loader model, but as an (ex-) Particle Physicist, I should point out that photons are just one example of the more general phenomenon of gauge bosons. In terms of the particle content associated with nature (and the predictions the _existence_ of those particles imply as emergent phenomena from "gauge theories" in quantum field theory), the photons of electrodynamics as well as their counterparts, the weak bosons of the weak force and the gluons of quantum chromodynamics, all make very specific predictions about how certain particles ought to behave and the strength with which they should do so.

In that light, photons (and to a lesser extent, the other gauge bosons) play a significant role in theoretically calculating the dipole moment of the electron (how strong the electron interacts electromagnetically) which has been calculated to about 12 decimal places theoretically and experimentally measured to roughly the same precision. And the prediction fits _beautifully_, I believe it is the most (numerically) accurate prediction in all of science. So at the very least, photons are meaningful descriptions of some kind of quantum field oscillation whose existence is, implicitly, extraordinarily well determined.

Typing this in a rush, but just to say, photons are a very specific kind of energy quanta, and I don't think the loader model really replaces them in that sense.

I think the Loader Model is a more direct path to what you are describing. In most cases it does not break with any observations that I saw.

The "accuracy" is probably the same, depending on how the experiment is setup. Even a standing clock can give the accurate time, once a day. ;-)

But, the experiment that are directed towards detecting this variant, show that the Loader model is valid... due to double detections of quanta, when there should only be one. According to the experimenter that I linked to, with easy-to-repeat experiments.

So Occham's razor tells me to look into it, before starting more complicated theories. It is not my favourite theory, but I am a scientist.

I had a small discussion setup here. Feel free to add a comment. https://saidit.net/s/Physics/comments/18rz/nullhypothesis_qu... (saidit is a friendly community for open discussions)

I think photon self-interaction might be thought of as a confirmation of photon's existence. Particle ontology is a tough question, but I don't think there is a reason to exclude photon from the list without excluding all other particles.

Not to mention that experiments suggest that atoms don't play any special role in the underlying physical structure of reality.

Photons can also be seen as waves. And waves can also influence each other, in non-linear situations.

Because the experiments and theory are so simple, I think it is the most scientific approach, to at least test this Loader model more thoroughly. Even if I don't agree with it. ;-)

The simplest interpretation is that there is no such thing as matter. Physicists are studying consciousness.

It is actually the only explanation that is consistent with experience, since there is no experience outside of consciousness.

Perhaps there is no experience outside of consciousness (depending on exactly what you mean by that). I take it to mean that consciousness is the only thing that we (directly) experience. Fine. But that doesn't mean that "studying consciousness" is the only explanation that is consistent with "no experience outside of consciousness". It's the only explanation that's limited to that.

A real external world is perfectly consistent with us not experiencing anything outside of consciousness, that is, that our consciousness is how we experience what we experience. There's still something out there - an external world - that we experience, though.

The alternative way of taking your words - that there is no external world at all, that all we are is consciousness, that we aren't actually experiencing a real world - is the total death of science, because there's nothing actually there to study.

"It's the only explanation that's limited to that." Indeed, and that's what makes it the simplest explanation. People posit matter, which nobody has ever had a direct experience of, then can't find a way to explain how consciousness comes out of it. Starting with consciousness is much in line with experience and solves the problem.

I think it's reasonable to assume that an "external" world exists, but it doesn't mean that it's not all consciousness : as Donald Hoffman posits, what we perceive is the combined output of other conscious agents. I don't see how that means the death of science. I suppose you meant physics, which could indeed be seen in this context as a rather convoluted way of studying consciousness, but I'm not so sure : it would become a study of the regularities of consciousness.

This is a new agey woo kind of idea that comes probably from a layman's interpretation of the effect of the observer on changing the quantum system being measured. However, it does not scale to macro systems. As Sam Harris put it when debating this idea with Deepak Chopra, the moon does not disappear when we're not looking at it. The universe was before consciousness and will continue to be afterwards.

But the moon does disappear. The moon as I understand it is a glowing disk with particular patterns on it. That disc and patterns only ever existed in my mind. When not looking at the moon, it goes back to being a very large number of particles near each other and nothing more.

To go even further, "particles" are also a construction of ours, a representation of an even more "diffuse" reality.

"Spacetime is doomed. There is no such thing as spacetime fundamentally in the actual underlying description of the laws of physics. That is very startling because what physics is supposed to be about is describing things as they happen in space and time. So if there's no spacetime, it's not clear what physics is about." - Nima Arkani-Hamed Cornell Messenger Lecture 2010.

> As Sam Harris put it when debating this idea with Deepak Chopra, the moon does not disappear when we're not looking at it.

That’s a silly statement. How do we know that, if we aren’t looking at it?

Because we have object permanence. People like Deepak Chopra select magical assumptions specifically because they can't produce any verifiable predictions, and waste everybody's time promoting meaningless nonsense.

I'm not sure Deepak Chopra is the best representative for such ideas. Donald Hoffman or Bernardo Kastrup make a much more serious case.

But still, the number one unverifiable prediction is that there is a thing called matter that exists outside consciousness and that somehow, consciousness emerges out of it. Nobody can prove matter exists, nobody has ever had a direct experience of it, and nobody has any idea how consciousness could come out of it, yet it's still the default hypothesis…

Object permanece is a silly statement? On the contrary it's the mainstream view. Anyone wanting to challenge it has the burden of proof on them to demonstrate otherwise.

I'm pretty sure the mainstream view is that the moon "as a glowing disc" is entirely created by your brain.

It does not mean that there is nothing when no one is looking, just that what we see is a representation by our brain of something objective that we can't directly assess. The representation stops to exist when we stop looking. What part is representation and what part is objective is debatable.

Assigning more to the representation and less to the objective solves some problems neatly, like that of quantum entanglement.

Take Donald Hoffman's example of a cube drawn in perspective as lines on a piece of paper. In your mind you see a cube, but nowhere is there actually a cube. The front and back faces of the cube are entangled : if your mind has decided on the projection in which one face is the "front", the other face has to be the "back", and vice-versa if your mind has decided on the other projection.

It's actually a very old idea in Eastern philosophy called "non duality" : everything it but one big consciousness. Sam Harris of all people should know.

Deepak Choprah is clearly not the right person with which to discuss such things, and debating him is just Sam Harris being full of himself or a publicity stunt, not an actual serious look at these ideas.

I wished people offered a rebuttal instead of just downvoting. I understand Einstein himself entertained the idea.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com