Quantum weirdness isn’t weird – if we accept objects don’t exist
newscientist.com
newscientist.com
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
Whether something exists, and whether you call it X only because there are humans who call it X, those are two different things. On a planet without humans, stones exists, but no one is there to call them "stones". So they don't really exist, is that what the article is trying to tell me?
Also, the stones do not exist, because only atoms exist, mwa-ha-ha-ha! Or maybe just someone equivocates "exists" and "is not made of smaller components".
The example with red color, again confuses "this object reflects red light" with "there is an eye that perceives the reflected red light". Also, good point that things can't reflect red light if they are in complete darkness.
Does anything of the above have anything in common with quantum physics?
Would adding quantum physics to this confused thinking make it any more meaningful?
but don't only exist because humans call them atoms?
This has little to do with humans. The photon is irreducible yet is our (anyone's) smallest investigative tool.
Would you ever modify the meaning of exits in this context? The planet with rocks could be traveled to by something physical. In QM, the causal relation is broken due to measurement by any physical object we know of, down to fundamental particles.
If there is no physical setup -> it does not exist. Right?
Or maybe Popper is 100% wrong?
Maybe just not 100% right. That happens to many people.
If we can't observe something directly, because a photon disturbs it, there may be other ways. Like, create the same situation thousand times, always throw one photon at it, make a statistics of how the photon deflects, and try to explain it. Or just find the simplest model that fits the known data, and assume that the parts you cannot observe directly still follow the model... simply because there is no good reason to assume they don't.
If we take the logic of "if I can't verify it by experiment, it does not exist" too far, then Big Bang is also not real, because we can't replicate it in the lab. Actually, we should take quite seriously the idea that the universe was created at this very moment, because we can't create the yesterday in the lab either.
We have access to memories of the past which are physical. Records in the rock strata of Earth's formation, neuronal connections in our brain of Grandma's barbecue and who was in attendance, red-shifted EM signals traveling since a few seconds after the big bang.
The information of these processes and events is never lost. "The present is the key to the past" and such. Even every causal relation since t=0 could be worked back to arbitrary accuracy from t=n for a near-omnipotent civilization. One still following all laws of physics, just very advanced and capable.
QM creates a novel situation imo where nothing, not even near-omnipotence, allows one to probe "pre-measurement". The very act of measuring causes something to occur. Scattering a photon or electron or proton with something is the smallest tool in quantum field theory, probably the most well studied near-fundamental theory in physics. There is no way in principle to ever probe pre-measurement because there is no disturbance-free way to observe. There is no sub-photon. There's nothing besides particles and fields to investigate with. There's no tool to build to improve things. The type of knowing in knowing the superposition of states pre-measumrent is not the same as knowing the past. We can arbitrarily improve tech to investigate the past to arbitrary degrees. The information of the past is out there, physically accessible to some kind of observer. In QM, there is no way to improve that lack of knowledge. It is forever inaccessible to any type of observer.
If this still all exists for you, then what about the past? Why doesn't that exist? What notion of "exists" could you thread that denies the past's existence yet asserts the existence other inaccessibles?
Surely there are kinds of existence in each of these ideas.
(To be clear absolute size isn't the only motivator for QM, just one aspect of it).
The photons we send to the atoms encoding the information about the past also cause disturbances, don't they?
This is not run-of-the-mill ontological reductionism; this is a rejection of ontological realism, which nearly everyone takes for granted (including you, from the sound of it), but many philosophers do not.
The connection between ontological anti-realism and relational quantum mechanics (Rovelli's brainchild) is pretty straightforward. I think Rovelli is arguing that the quantum measurement problem is only a problem if we assert things ontologically, in terms of what's exactly here and there, rather than an expression of a relation between the measuring device and the system.
The point being that base reality is not accessible to us, only our perceptions and interpretations of reality. We have no way of knowing what the reality is beyond our perceptions.
For a while now, I’ve been intrigued by the possibility of literally unthinkable thoughts; something that is outside the capacity of human neural architecture in the way that HTML is outside [0] the capacity of RegEx?
1. It could be uncomputable, since it seems likely to me that we can't think uncomputable thoughts. (Not a rigorous scientific hypothesis, but it seems more likely than not to me.)
2. It could be uncomputable in a human lifetime. I think these already exist today: can anyone really be said to thoroughly understand a proof generated by an exhaustive computational search?
One can play around with the semantics of what we mean by "unthinkable" and "thought," but I think "computable" at least provides one interesting start to an exploration of this concept.
Can an octopus mind, for a body with eight limbs but no bones, ever be accurately emulated by a human mind?
Are there truths we can only reach with an exocortex (pen and paper included)?
Are there thoughts whose time or space requirements grow exponentially with respect to some measure in a human brain anatomy, but which could be linear in some other anatomy (existing or hypothetical)?
A simple example: in his boo The Crystal and the Way of Light, Namkhai Norbu describes one of his meditational experiences where he sees 5 spheres of light in one bigger sphere. In this experience, there is no space between the spheres but this seemed perfectly natural. After he finished the practice session, he sat and tried to draw it and after several attempts realized it's impossible. There are many similar accounts.
(Kantian noumena) of human perception and are not ontologically exhausted by their relations with humans or other objects. The article, as it appears, all relations, including those between nonhumans, distort their related objects in the same basic manner as human consciousness and exist on an equal footing with one another.
Consciousness can't come from material if it doesn't really exist. So is material "created" by Consciousness?
For usage in popular fiction & fun reading, take a deep dive into the lore of The Elder Scrolls, especially Morrowind-era content. In short, the universe is dreamed up by The Dreamer, and thus by definition is made of consciousness. Interesting consequences ensue as a result, especially for the few bits of consciousness (people) that become "lucid" within the dream.
This was all inspired of course by some parts of Hinduism if I remember correctly.
Since this is paywalled we can't estimate how off the article is though.
Checkout "hawking radiation" for a real concrete example
(joke stolen from SMBC comics)
I’ve not been particularly impressed with New Scientist ever since they put the EM Drive on the front cover.
Materialism was, and continues to be, a mistake.
Or are you suggesting that quantum mechanics is a bad model?
1. Quantum Mechanics is a fairly accurate representation of the world, or at least about as good as we can come up with given our current state of technology.
2. Quantum Mechanics is a fairly inaccurate representation of the world.
2a. Incorrect theories dominating for centuries is a natural consequence of the scientific method and trying to determine the nature of the universe.
2b. Incorrect theories dominating for centuries is a result of an imperfect implementation of the scientific method in our modern society.
2c. The scientific method is incapable of providing humans with a true and accurate understanding of the world.Quantum weirdness, remember, is defined by physics. It's tested by physics. And it's perfectly compatible with materialism. The problem is in people's understanding.
Full disclosure - I'm no subscribing to finish reading the article. But what it sounds like is "if we change our philosophy to match physics, physics is easy". Quantum physics has always made sense. The only issue was that it wasn't intuitive.
There isn't really any reason to expect physics to match our intuition, when our intuition isn't built for dealing with the sorts of things modern physics deals with.
This is metaphysics, not physics. Physics is a set of models about what should happen in response to specific events (modelling cause and effect); metaphysics is about trying to understand the nature of reality.
It alters how we think about the fundamental makeup of matter, but it's still a way of describing a material universe that obeys some laws of physics, with no implication of things sometimes associated with non-materialism (dualism, panpsychism, afterlife).
Quantum mechanics already significantly shook up how we thought about matter. Our conception of matter fundamentally being some kind of relation coefficient of information is weird, but still wouldn't be as surprising and paradigm-breaking as, say, some sort of reality where everything is consciousness, a la Donald Hoffman.
It could still be a natural world full of emergent phenomena such as consciousness. Maybe "naturalism" is a term I'd be more philosophically comfortable with for these sorts of discussions.
Materialism in this case just means that we have access to objective reality. Idealism is not necessarily supernatural, but it does claim that we do not have access to objective reality beyond our perception and interpretation.
The definition of "matter" keeps shrinking the closer we look. It seems that we can never truly know what reality is made of at its lowest levels, and all we have is essentially our own subjective interpretations of what we perceive.
> It could still be a natural world full of emergent phenomena such as consciousness. Maybe "naturalism" is a term I'd be more philosophically comfortable with for these sorts of discussions.
Naturalism is just the idea that there is no supernatural process at work. I'm not talking about naturalism.
True.
>It seems that we can never truly know what reality is made of at its lowest levels, and all we have is essentially our own subjective interpretations of what we perceive.
How can we say that with confidence, though? What if we're just still scratching at the surface of fundamental physics? What if in 3,000 years we have much more than our subjective interpretations and do pretty much understand what's going on?
This feels like a little bit like a "God of the gaps" type argument. It's fair to say we likely don't truly understand the fabric of reality, the universe, and matter, but it doesn't necessarily mean we can't or never will.
>Naturalism is just the idea that there is no supernatural process at work. I'm not talking about naturalism.
I think many people interchange "materialism" and "naturalism", even if it may not be correct.
> This feels like a little bit like a "God of the gaps" type argument. It's fair to say we likely don't truly understand the fabric of reality, the universe, and matter, but it doesn't necessarily mean we can't or never will.
I'm just extrapolating the trend - of course I don't know what end-game physics looks like, but I'm basing my understanding over what's happened so far.
All we have to build our interpretations on are what we know now. That's the reason we no longer believe in supernatural causes - we've figured out better explanations for enough phenomena that we can reasonably assume the rest are explained naturally too. From the models we have so far, we know that the universe is organised bottom-up and our understanding of what we consider "complete objects" like a cat or a solar system are just the emergent phenomena of collections of rules (or are engineered based on those rules in the case of manmade objects). So if objects don't actually exist in the way we perceive them, I'm not sure what credibility is left for materialism if the whole concept of 'object' only exists in my interpretation.
> I think many people interchange "materialism" and "naturalism", even if it may not be correct.
That may well be true, but I had to look 'naturalism' up because I hadn't heard the term before. It's probably the angle from which I've approached metaphysics that's to blame for that though.