3 ms·

Those 'testable consequences' have only been verified to within experimental accuracy. However small the deviation: when scaling up, consequences of small devia

Those 'testable consequences' have only been verified to within experimental accuracy. However small the deviation: when scaling up, consequences of small deviations soon start overshadowing the original guiding principles. The unsolvable three body problem, the flow of sandpiles, turbulence in water. Chaos has been far from solved. Your argument will hold when you provide an actual, experimentally verifiable reduction of macroscopic laws to microscopic principles. Until then, it is all handwaving and make-belief. In short, your argument hinges on reductionist assertions that are easily debatable. They may even turn out to be impossible to prove correct. The hard problem of consciousness has not been solved and you should not pretend that it does not exist.

loup-vaillant 16y ago
> Those 'testable consequences' have only been verified to within experimental accuracy. No, they have been verified up to perfect accuracy. That's because when 2 configurations are actually the same, the experimental measures are the squared modulus of complex numbers. If they are a tiny bit different (not the same), then the measures are the sum of the squared modulus of complex numbers. The two cases lead to very different results. > In short, your argument hinges on reductionist assertions that are easily debatable. It does hinges on reductionistic assumptions (there's only one territory out there, only maps are multi-level, and ontologically basic mental things don't exist). I doubt those are easily debatable, however. Up until now those assumptions worked, and I see no reason why they should break down some day. I am fully aware that the problem of conciousness has not been solved, but since we discovered that the mind is made of neurons, I think it is reasonable to believe it is solvable (though intractable at the moment).
- Confusion 16y ago
  No, they have been verified up to perfect accuracy. There is no such thing in experimental physics. You are glossing over a number of experimental details surrounding these 'experimental measures'. This experiment does not succeed all the time. The measures are taken a million times and the results averaged. You don't know the results of the switch of two individual particles. Hell, you can't even know for sure you actually switched them. That's a nice conundrum. And your claim that this notion can 'of course' be extended to larger things is begging the question.
  - Eliezer 16y ago
    I'm afraid you just don't understand the QM experiments in question. For there to be a secret difference between the two particles requires observed reality to be a lie.
    - Confusion 16y ago
      I think I understand these experiments pretty well, having executed experiments of their kind myself. The mathematics tells us the particles are indistinguishable. The physics tells us that the mathematics describes the observations pretty accurately. But they remain observations with an experimental error and they leave room for the especially interesting options of 1) small deviations that are amplified when you increase the scale of the problem and 2) small deviations that simply occur only 1 in a billion times, for whatever reason (the assumptions of homogeneity, isotropy, time-invariance, and so forth are dangerous assumptions). No observation allows you to conclude anything about what gives rise to those observations. You certainly cannot conclude it obeys the same mathematical relations used to predict the observations. We can't solve a trivial 3-body problem and the deviations in numerical approximations are problematic for some purposes. As we get more ambitious, those deviations will become smaller, but may remain too large for the goal. We don't know whether the law of gravity contains an exact exponent of 2. The Voyager spacecraft seem to suggest there may be more involved and nobody has offered a decent suggestion in the past decades. We can't predict the flow of sand rolling of a dune and we may never be able to do that, because the complexity of the problem may turn out to exceed the theoretically possible computational power of the universe. As for the second sentence: it's not observed reality that lies: it is our overinterpretation of the observations that are lies. We extrapolate beyond what is reasonable. There are too many trivial puzzles unsolved or even proven unsolvable. How can you possibly trust or accept a description with those defects to be the say-all, end-all description of our universe? I have every reason to believe that my universe defies complete description, modelling, simulation. How about yours?
      - loup-vaillant 16y ago
        > No observation allows you to conclude anything about what gives rise to those observations. No, but they sure should have a damn powerful influence over your estimated probabilities for your previous hypothesises. Many of those observations are tests, after all. Now, though I don't yield QM with my own strength, I can tell that the basics have little to do with chaotic systems, and that most of our intuitions are better thrown out the widow. Really, go read that sequence, at least until you can parse "complex amplitude distribution over a configuration space". It's accessible, it's established science, and I trust Eliezer reported it accurately. http://lesswrong.com/lw/r5/the_quantum_physics_sequence/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/r5/the_quantum_physics_sequence/

loup-vaillant 16y ago

> Those 'testable consequences' have only been verified to within experimental accuracy. No, they have been verified up to perfect accuracy. That's because when 2 configurations are actually the same, the experimental measures are the squared modulus of complex numbers. If they are a tiny bit different (not the same), then the measures are the sum of the squared modulus of complex numbers. The two cases lead to very different results. > In short, your argument hinges on reductionist assertions that are easily debatable. It does hinges on reductionistic assumptions (there's only one territory out there, only maps are multi-level, and ontologically basic mental things don't exist). I doubt those are easily debatable, however. Up until now those assumptions worked, and I see no reason why they should break down some day. I am fully aware that the problem of conciousness has not been solved, but since we discovered that the mind is made of neurons, I think it is reasonable to believe it is solvable (though intractable at the moment).

Confusion 16y ago
No, they have been verified up to perfect accuracy. There is no such thing in experimental physics. You are glossing over a number of experimental details surrounding these 'experimental measures'. This experiment does not succeed all the time. The measures are taken a million times and the results averaged. You don't know the results of the switch of two individual particles. Hell, you can't even know for sure you actually switched them. That's a nice conundrum. And your claim that this notion can 'of course' be extended to larger things is begging the question.
- Eliezer 16y ago
  I'm afraid you just don't understand the QM experiments in question. For there to be a secret difference between the two particles requires observed reality to be a lie.
  - Confusion 16y ago
    I think I understand these experiments pretty well, having executed experiments of their kind myself. The mathematics tells us the particles are indistinguishable. The physics tells us that the mathematics describes the observations pretty accurately. But they remain observations with an experimental error and they leave room for the especially interesting options of 1) small deviations that are amplified when you increase the scale of the problem and 2) small deviations that simply occur only 1 in a billion times, for whatever reason (the assumptions of homogeneity, isotropy, time-invariance, and so forth are dangerous assumptions). No observation allows you to conclude anything about what gives rise to those observations. You certainly cannot conclude it obeys the same mathematical relations used to predict the observations. We can't solve a trivial 3-body problem and the deviations in numerical approximations are problematic for some purposes. As we get more ambitious, those deviations will become smaller, but may remain too large for the goal. We don't know whether the law of gravity contains an exact exponent of 2. The Voyager spacecraft seem to suggest there may be more involved and nobody has offered a decent suggestion in the past decades. We can't predict the flow of sand rolling of a dune and we may never be able to do that, because the complexity of the problem may turn out to exceed the theoretically possible computational power of the universe. As for the second sentence: it's not observed reality that lies: it is our overinterpretation of the observations that are lies. We extrapolate beyond what is reasonable. There are too many trivial puzzles unsolved or even proven unsolvable. How can you possibly trust or accept a description with those defects to be the say-all, end-all description of our universe? I have every reason to believe that my universe defies complete description, modelling, simulation. How about yours?
    - loup-vaillant 16y ago
      > No observation allows you to conclude anything about what gives rise to those observations. No, but they sure should have a damn powerful influence over your estimated probabilities for your previous hypothesises. Many of those observations are tests, after all. Now, though I don't yield QM with my own strength, I can tell that the basics have little to do with chaotic systems, and that most of our intuitions are better thrown out the widow. Really, go read that sequence, at least until you can parse "complex amplitude distribution over a configuration space". It's accessible, it's established science, and I trust Eliezer reported it accurately. http://lesswrong.com/lw/r5/the_quantum_physics_sequence/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/r5/the_quantum_physics_sequence/