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> I feel like when people say ‘realist’ in this context, they mean someone who believes that ordinary intuitions about the way the world works are how the world

> I feel like when people say ‘realist’ in this context, they mean someone who believes that ordinary intuitions about the way the world works are how the world must work at all levels. From the article: > Like Einstein, Smolin is a philosophical ‘realist’ — someone who thinks that the real world exists independently of our minds and can be described by deterministic laws. So no, they don’t. Also, realism is consistent with quantum experiment — non-realism is merely an interpretation that’s had more developers work on it, not somehow a proven component of reality. (Commonly called Copenhagen interpretation; MWI and Bohmian are other interpretations; arguably loop quantum gravity too.) I agree with Smolin: non-realism is an extraneous assumption meant to preserve locality, but reality is empirically non-local. Ironically, it’s actually the non-realists who are guilty of what you say — they can’t let go of their Euclidean intuitions, and so come up with nonsense like denying realism. Their entire model is fundamentally predicated on things looking like a smooth Euclidean space at all scales below some threshold — that is, that reality all the way down looks like what we see when we look around. Non-realists insist on a Euclidean world despite contrary experimental evidence. If you view energy as distributed across the topology of your space, which often is radically non-Euclidean, you immediately have realism back — the world just is nothing like what’s in front of your eyes. (Enter loop quantum gravity.)

msla 7y ago
Alternatively, the non-realists prefer to view the Uncertainty Principle as deeply true instead of seeing Special Relativity as deeply false.
- FakeComments 7y ago
  Yes — so much so, they added it as an extra assumption to their model. The original justification is that we have things like Bell’s experiment that say reality is non-local or non-deterministic, because they exclude local determinism. But since then, we’ve found increasing evidence that it’s non-local, and so the choice made for the Copenhagen interpretation, to preserve locality at the cost of determinism, becomes unjustified. It’s now included as an extra assumption out of tradition, and because no one wants to seriously rewrite things. However, as Smolin contends, that may be a dead-end intellectually and an impediment to unifying QM with relativity. A non-local, but real QM interpretation has a more straightforward paradigm to merge with relativistic gravity: it aligns their models philosophically.
TelmoMenezes 7y ago
> non-realism is an extraneous assumption Realism is as much an assumption as non-realism. It doesn't feel that way, because realism fits the common sense of some evolved monkeys. Common sense sometimes is correct, sometimes is not. It doesn't really mean anything when we deal with these matters. In fact, I would argue that Occam's Razor advises us to prefer non-realism. With non-realism, we are restricted to something we know to exist, by virtue of our human experience: our first-person perception of things. The independent reality, or third-person perspective, is undoubtedly a useful model, but we have no empirical data to suggest it is real. In fact, I would argue that quantum mechanic does raise some serious issues w.r.t. the this model. Btw, this debate is almost as old as human culture. It was already present in Aristotle (materalism) vs. Plato (idealism). You can also find many traces of it in Eastern thought, e.g. the idea of Maya, or the question of: how can you really know if you are dreaming right now? > not somehow a proven component of reality There are no proven components of reality. Proof is something possible in the domain of mathematics, if one accepts certain axioms. Science is not in the business of proving things, it is an empirical endeavor. It gives us theories that resist falsification (until seen) + eternal doubt. Once you abandon doubt, you abandon science.
- v_lisivka 7y ago
  > In fact, I would argue that Occam's Razor advises us to prefer non-realism. Can you list these arguments, please? IMHO, Occam's Razor is at side of realism: our Universe has no bounds in space, in time, and in scale. So, we can predict future of any particle if we will have enough information about it, but we cannot do that with 100% confidence, because Universe is endlessly deep. We can only collect information about particles at our "layer" of Universe only (or "dimension" in terms of String theory). The deeper we will go, the more uncertainty we will have, because particles will be influenced by "layer(s)" ("dimensions") below our.
  - FakeComments 7y ago
    There’s also an “outside the box” problem: in a non-local universe, it may be impossible for you to compute the trajectory of something without perturbing it, eg, because you slightly jiggle all of the electrons everywhere. So the co-trajectory of your computation and the particle only ever agree by so much: attempts to increase the accuracy of the calculation kick the particle around, rendering it inaccurate. There’s deep senses in which uncertainty emerges from being part of the system you’re measuring, in any paradigm.

msla 7y ago

Alternatively, the non-realists prefer to view the Uncertainty Principle as deeply true instead of seeing Special Relativity as deeply false.

FakeComments 7y ago
Yes — so much so, they added it as an extra assumption to their model. The original justification is that we have things like Bell’s experiment that say reality is non-local or non-deterministic, because they exclude local determinism. But since then, we’ve found increasing evidence that it’s non-local, and so the choice made for the Copenhagen interpretation, to preserve locality at the cost of determinism, becomes unjustified. It’s now included as an extra assumption out of tradition, and because no one wants to seriously rewrite things. However, as Smolin contends, that may be a dead-end intellectually and an impediment to unifying QM with relativity. A non-local, but real QM interpretation has a more straightforward paradigm to merge with relativistic gravity: it aligns their models philosophically.

TelmoMenezes 7y ago

> non-realism is an extraneous assumption Realism is as much an assumption as non-realism. It doesn't feel that way, because realism fits the common sense of some evolved monkeys. Common sense sometimes is correct, sometimes is not. It doesn't really mean anything when we deal with these matters. In fact, I would argue that Occam's Razor advises us to prefer non-realism. With non-realism, we are restricted to something we know to exist, by virtue of our human experience: our first-person perception of things. The independent reality, or third-person perspective, is undoubtedly a useful model, but we have no empirical data to suggest it is real. In fact, I would argue that quantum mechanic does raise some serious issues w.r.t. the this model. Btw, this debate is almost as old as human culture. It was already present in Aristotle (materalism) vs. Plato (idealism). You can also find many traces of it in Eastern thought, e.g. the idea of Maya, or the question of: how can you really know if you are dreaming right now? > not somehow a proven component of reality There are no proven components of reality. Proof is something possible in the domain of mathematics, if one accepts certain axioms. Science is not in the business of proving things, it is an empirical endeavor. It gives us theories that resist falsification (until seen) + eternal doubt. Once you abandon doubt, you abandon science.

v_lisivka 7y ago
> In fact, I would argue that Occam's Razor advises us to prefer non-realism. Can you list these arguments, please? IMHO, Occam's Razor is at side of realism: our Universe has no bounds in space, in time, and in scale. So, we can predict future of any particle if we will have enough information about it, but we cannot do that with 100% confidence, because Universe is endlessly deep. We can only collect information about particles at our "layer" of Universe only (or "dimension" in terms of String theory). The deeper we will go, the more uncertainty we will have, because particles will be influenced by "layer(s)" ("dimensions") below our.
- FakeComments 7y ago
  There’s also an “outside the box” problem: in a non-local universe, it may be impossible for you to compute the trajectory of something without perturbing it, eg, because you slightly jiggle all of the electrons everywhere. So the co-trajectory of your computation and the particle only ever agree by so much: attempts to increase the accuracy of the calculation kick the particle around, rendering it inaccurate. There’s deep senses in which uncertainty emerges from being part of the system you’re measuring, in any paradigm.