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Quantum weirdness isn’t weird – if we accept objects don’t exist
- diarrhea 6y agoThe title makes it sound like it's going to be on functional programming.
- jjoonathan 6y agoMaybe we're living in a simulation and that really is the root cause.
- wlesieutre 6y agoWe should look for signs that we're optimized for efficient computation. Like maybe a minimum temperature or a maximum speed or a rule that position and momentum are only knowable to certain tolerances. (joke stolen from SMBC comics)
- 34679 6y agoWay back in 1781 Immanuel Kant discussed this (without considering quantum implications, obviously) in "Critique of Pure Reason". He coined the term "noumenon" to describe a thing as it is, not as it is perceived.
- ben_w 6y agoAnd Plato before him had his cave. 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? [0] https://stackoverflow.com/a/1732454 https://stackoverflow.com/a/1732454
- drunkpotato 6y agoI can think of two ways a thought could be unthinkable: 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.
- ben_w 6y agoAnother possibility is thoughts which just don’t fit into the shape of structure within a human mind. 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)?
- qiqing 6y agoThere are also "impossible" colors. There was an article on HN frontpage several weeks ago about it, I think.
- motohagiography 6y agoThere are, and they begin with a brainfu*k esolang dialect called Hofstadter that represents instructions as different camelCase capitalizations of the name Hofstadter. If neither of these are familiar to you, sorry about your afternoon!
- dvfjsdhgfv 6y agoThis is actually quite a common theme in Buddhist literature. Apart from the central concept of the nature of mind that is by definition unthinkable (in the same way that the eye can't see itself), there are also specific experiences related to the nature of mind that evade ordinary mind. 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.
- weatherlight 6y agoDoesn't Kant then go on to explain, in which phenomenal objects are said to conform to the mind of the subject and, in turn, become products of human cognition. (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.
- est 6y agopaywalled.
- beaconstudios 6y ago... and science starts to come round to a metaphysics that was at the root of taoism and hinduism thousands of years ago. Materialism was, and continues to be, a mistake.
- zackees 6y agoor physics is broken.
- beaconstudios 6y agoso we should be more willing to hold onto materialism than science? Or are you suggesting that quantum mechanics is a bad model?
- Nbox9 6y agoQuantum mechanics might be a bad model, but over the last century it’s become less controversial and more accepted in the scientific community. The last century has produced more scientists and mathematicians than any other century. I can see a few possible situations. 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.
- andagainagain 6y agoOr physics is perfectly fine, and so is materialism. 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.
- arbitrage 6y agothis is like paywalled blogspam.
- ben_w 6y agoAlso my impression just as I reached the end of the free bit. I’ve not been particularly impressed with New Scientist ever since they put the EM Drive on the front cover.
- staticman2 6y agoI'm pretty sure the pop culture depiction of quantum physics doesn't accurately depict the real science. Since this is paywalled we can't estimate how off the article is though.
- gloryless 6y agoThat's 100% true, exhibit "ant man". But felt like he was leading to the actual math before paywall. Comes down to a probabilistic existence, and exhibiting characteristics based on other particles being present or not present. All of which makes no sense to human life. Checkout "hawking radiation" for a real concrete example
- rambojohnson 6y agop a y w a l l
- ca98am79 6y agoThe most interesting thing, to me, is that if you abandon materialism, what does it say about Consciousness? Consciousness can't come from material if it doesn't really exist. So is material "created" by Consciousness?
- luplex 6y agoConsciousness is not a material phenomenon anyways. To me it seems plausible that consciousness and matter are produced by the same code.
- jonbon2 6y agoPeople have proposed the idea that consciousness is the building block of the universe and not matter. See Itzhak Bentovs book Stalking The Wild Pendulum.
- TheCapeGreek 6y agoPanpsychism is the term. 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.
- minblaster 6y agoCheck out nonduality. It’s amusing that we insist that consciousness, which we experience firsthand, must be created by matter, which we experience indirectly. The image creating the screen.
- rafaelvasco 6y agoYes. The only way to solve the riddle is to accept that everything comes from Consciousness.
- Viliam1234 6y agoI can only see the introduction, but it already shows some confused thinking. 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?
- naringas 6y ago> So they don't really exist > because only atoms exist but don't only exist because humans call them atoms?
- meroes 6y agoWhat about Dirac's words ~ there being a fundamental size where any experiment will disturb the subject non negligibly, thus science can never speak causally prior to quantum measurements. 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?
- Viliam1234 6y ago> 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.
- sanatgersappa 6y agoSounds a lot like Nagarjuna's theory of dependent origination.
- datavirtue 6y agoI have been wondering lately if it is possible that humans may have a quantum signature that they leave behind on everything they touch and that it may be possible to detect that signature. I was imagining a technology that could isolate the signatures and identify the person who hand sewed my shoes, for example.
- marcusKral 6y agoWhen we think that something is weird, it's just us that are looking at it incorrectly. Quantum phenomenon make perfect sense once you accept that everything is just information, including space and time. So objects do exist, but only as collections of information which we then experience internally as "reality"... a little like simulation theory. We are essentially part of a cognitive field.
- rafaelvasco 6y agoWhat we think is real is just how we perceive it. So what was Real and what is Perception ?
- sandworm101 6y agoI see a big red flag whenever a scientific unknown results in scientists questioning the nature of reality. Once upon a time we didn't know how the sun could stay to bright for so long. Some people resorted to the supernatural for explanations. They were wrong (nuclear fusion). Today we cannot understand the movement of particles. Some now question the nature of reality while other debate whether reality even exists without a conscious mind to see it. I take a step back when the scientists resort to the language of philosophers and theologians. Reality is almost certainly more mundane. In decades/centuries to come, when we figure out what is actually happening, those who compared quarks to trees falling in unseen woods might look like the people who saw the hot sun as proof of the supernatural.
- RikNieu 6y agoI read an excellent book called The Idea Of The World, by Bernando Kastrup that reminds me of this. It made me consider idealism waay more seriously.
- dang 6y agoLooks like it's hardwalled, which means it's off topic for HN. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=paywalls%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10178989 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10178989