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I have a degree in theoretical physics and a gold medal, which is to say I have endured the requisite intellectual beatings. Often the best interpretations of
by d4rkn0d3z 1y ago
I have a degree in theoretical physics and a gold medal, which is to say I have endured the requisite intellectual beatings. Often the best interpretations of physical theory are unpalatable to the average person. The idea that there is in fact no objective physical reality is the most egregious offender in this regard. However, it is nonetheless the best conclusion that one can draw given strict adherence to what the mathematical formalism of QM provides. There is simply no physical machinery to support an objective reality, period.
Now, that being said, the remarkable part is that the forgoing conclusion does us zero harm. We can still have the logical predictive fiction that an objective reality exists. What staggers the mind is the corollary that no human has ever erected a truth. Moreover, every intelligent species that ever endeavors to ask these questions will find the same non-answer.
- grebc 1y agoI am just a lay person so a lot of the maths is over my head for all of this, but I do try to follow the best I can. Do you ever ponder that the maths that you try to distill into the “laws of physics” is just too low of a fidelity for such a complicated system? For example when you capture a gorgeous sunrise/sunset in a photo, and despite you doing every trick under the sun to get a good angle/lighting etc, the photo is never as good as what you experienced in person. Or maybe you just never experienced the sunrise/sunset shrug.
- d4rkn0d3z 1y agoQM provides the most accurate and verifiable predictions in human history. The follow on from that is that my thoughts can be conveyed to you over a sea of quivering electrons. The one catch is that you must accept that when you are not looking the universe does its evolving in a way that is inimical to your conceptualizations.
- JimmyBuckets 1y agoYou have beautiful way of writing. Do you have a blog?
- grebc 1y agoThank you for trying.
- d4rkn0d3z 1y agoWhat were you hoping for?
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- grebc 1y agoI apologise as I replied in a shirty manner and deleted as I thought better of it. I don’t think we’ll be able to really discuss the matter so have a good night!
- d4rkn0d3z 1y agoThe idea is that there is no "complicated system", or at least that you are not permitted to concieve of one without describing it in physical detail.
- dekken_ 1y ago> is just too low of a fidelity for such a complicated system? I think you're asking questions that some are afraid to ask. It appears to me that some people have become accustomed to working with approximations, and have accepted the map for the terrain. Fundamentally, I don't see how you can use continuous math to explain a discrete system.
- d4rkn0d3z 1y ago"It appears to me that some people have become accustomed to working with approximations, and have accepted the map for the terrain." No, here we are discussing the formalism without approximations associated with an instance of its approximate application. And QM says "The map is the terrain".
- dekken_ 1y agoQM is many things You might want to be a little more specific, and rely less on approximations. I am aware of what the Copenhagen interpretation states, thanks
- d4rkn0d3z 1y agoTo what approximations do you refer? Here we discard Copenhagen and move forward.
- dekken_ 1y agoTake your pick Schrodinger/Dirac/Feynman. A wave is a product, trigonometric functions do not exist. Gerard hooft was on Curt Jaimungal's youtube channel a while back, I generally agree with him, discrete systems cannot be explained by real numbers, only integers
- d4rkn0d3z 1y agoNot following youtube, sorry.
- MangoToupe 1y ago> What staggers the mind is the corollary that no human has ever erected a truth. Hell, you don't need a physics degree for this, nor even QM, just a robust grasp of the limits of empiricism. Hume connected the dots centuries ago.
- d4rkn0d3z 1y agoI see this as decidedly non-Humean. Why be Humean anyway?
- squishington 1y agoI think language does us a disservice here. I'm reminded of Korzybski's work in Science and Sanity. The interpretation of "truth" depends on which level of abstraction you are operating on. "Every statement is true in some sense, false in some sense, and meaningless in some sense". The term "reality" implies a perceiver, and that perceiver is generating "reality" based on their neurological instrument, which has its own biases based on its prior experience and genetics.
- d4rkn0d3z 1y agoI agree that language other than math fails us here. Nevertheless, I humbly try to convey thoughts that occur in me with these tools.
- an0malous 1y agoBut the problems described by the parent comment also exist in mathematical language, that’s what Godel Incompleteness is. The problem is inherent to all conceptual frameworks
- d4rkn0d3z 1y agoI would disagree, completeness is not required consistency is all you need really. QM is consistent.
- yubblegum 1y ago> The term "reality" implies a perceiver No. Subjective reality is what we experience as sentients. There must be an object reality and imho that is the only statement of truth that can be uttered in language, with "language" to be understood in the sense that Werner Hisenberg uses that term. So I'm with Bohr, Hisenberg on this matter. We can not 'presume' to speak of the Real with capital R. It exists but it can not be 'encompassed'. No vision can encompass Him, but He encompasses all vision. Indeed, He Is the Most Subtle, the All-Aware! - Qur'an - 6.103
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- omnee 1y agoYour conclusion rests on the assumption that QM's description of reality represents the ontological truth. And such a 'truth' is not provable. However, as you already mentioned, it doesn't matter as QM provides the strongest epistemological claims, and this is what matters in the end.
- d4rkn0d3z 1y agoI think otherwise. I am precisely saying that QM as a formalism denies ontological truth in the first instance. You have to do something like the BM guy above is embarking on.
- jostylr 1y agoFor non-relativistic QM, the QM formalism is provable from Bohmian mechanics, an actual particle theory. BM starts from particles have locations the change continuously in time via a guidance equation using the wave function of the universe. One may choose other theories to explain quantum phenomena, but to say "There is simply no physical machinery to support an objective reality, period." is just false, at least in that realm. As for relativistic QFT, there are plausible pathways using Bohmian ideas as well though nothing as definitive as BM has been firmly established. I would also say that any theory that does not have room to say definitively that I exist is a theory that is obviously contradictory to my experience and is therefore falsified. There has to be room in the theory for at least me. Additionally, I would certainly value much more a theory that has room for the rest of humanity more than one which questions the existence of everyone but me. I am not even sure what the point of a theory would be if it could not account for collaborative science being done.
- d4rkn0d3z 1y agoQM does not deny you existence, it rather denies you a complete objective description of how you exist. Or perhaps it says that your existence is not an objective phenomena.
- n4r9 1y agoBM is objective, and indeed deterministic. I'm not exactly sure what you mean by "complete" but it has all the same predictions as other interpretations of QM. It has some odd quirks however, such as explicit non-locality.
- smokel 1y agoOnce the notion of objective truth is relinquished, what ontological or epistemic status remains for reasoning itself? Is it to be understood as a pragmatic construct, or as something with deeper necessity beyond empiricism?
- d4rkn0d3z 1y agoDeep necessity, we follow logic so we are not grunting beasts.
- smokel 1y agoBut where does logic exist in, then? Does it not need consistency to be useful? And what causes the consistency? It's turtles all the way down.
- d4rkn0d3z 1y agoLogic does not exist in a physical sense, but try to think without it. For example, try to think without the law of noncontradiction. Can you categorize?
- smokel 1y agoI tried quite a lot. I've come to the conclusion that thinking (and logic) is probably some pattern that only seems interesting to itself. (Yes, I am aware of the otherwise nonsensical concepts "pattern" and "interesting".)
- fellowniusmonk 1y agoMy instantiation of logic isn't physicalized? Is there unphysicallized logic?
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- nathan_compton 1y agoI've got a doctorate and I don't really see what you are saying, primarily because "no objective physical reality" is somewhat vague. QM, for example, is a totally adequate theory of objective reality! it just describes an objective reality with properties which differ to some degree from those intuitive to creatures at classical scales. It may be inadequate in other respects (not invariant, a little unsatisfying wrt the born rule, etc) but it isn't as if it implies NO OBJECTIVE REALITY.
- energy123 1y agoI second your comment. This is where a degree in philosophy would have been useful. The term "objective reality" is just a semantic indirection to a cluster of loosely defined concepts. Okay, what concepts? That whole discussion is philosophy, informed by physics.
- d4rkn0d3z 1y agoSee above.
- WhitneyLand 1y agoThis is what’s meant by no objective reality as alluded to in the article. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relational_quantum_mechanics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relational_quantum_mechanics The claim is not that objects don’t exist, just that they don’t have observer independent properties.
- d4rkn0d3z 1y agoThis is what I mean.
- fellowniusmonk 1y agoAnd to further clarify, observer independence is referring to the frame itself not that humans imagine the world into being in the solipsistic sense many believe. I say this because just a few days ago on this forum someone was asserting that without humans the earth would not exist, that human observation instantiates the earth and the earth did not exist before human consciousness.
- griffzhowl 1y agoCan you be more precise about what you mean by "objective reality"? I would say that QM shows the world is not classical, but it doesn't say there's no objective reality: the predictions it makes about what we observe (reality) are extremely reliable and accurate (i.e. objective). Yes, those predictions are just probabilistic for any single system, but when you have a lot of systems the probability that you will observe a specific outcome (to within observational error) can approach 1. A lot of our technology, such as lasers, transistors, etc., relies on this. I don't see how you make sense of that while denying there's objective reality.
- d4rkn0d3z 1y agoI mean there is no perspective from which one can obtain a view of all properties of all systems that will not be invalid to another observer.
- platz 1y agoif your definition requires universal observer agreement you already have that issue with special relativity / light cones / the spacetime metric. many worlds posits a single universal quantum state it's just only partially accessible to observers, which is different from saying that it simply doesn't objectively exist. maybe it depends on your definition of objective
- griffzhowl 1y agoIn my view there is such a perspective: quantum mechanics. So far as we know its predictions are valid for all observers. But what that means is that we have to readjust our classical conceptions about what a "property of a system" is. The word "property" in general is just a logical concept, and doesn't carry any intrinsic ontological implications. There can be mathematical properties, physical properties, properties of thoughts and dreams etc., and this way of talking about things doesn't by itself imply any specific ontological interpretation. It's just a feature of the structure of language. About physical properties specifically, if we derive our concept of physical property from quantum mechanics, instead of trying to retain the inadequate classical meaning, then physical properties are exactly those represented by the state vector: e.g. its projections on to each of the basis vectors corresponding to some observable. True, as is well-known from the Bell and Kochen-Specker theorems, we can't consistently say that a quantum state has some specific value of its observables independently of interactions with other systems, but this is just the classical conception of a physical property (formalized, e.g., by a real-valued function on phase space). But quantum mechanics doesn't thereby force us to say that a physical system has no definite properties. Instead, we can reconfigure our conception of physical property to make it compatible with quantum mechanics. Then in general the properties of quantum states are probabilistic (at least some of them - the dimension of its state space, for example, is not), but the theory unambiguously assigns to a state the probabilities that the various possible measurement outcomes will be observed. These probabilities are among that state's properties, and all indications are that these probabilities are objective features of the state, independently of our ways of representing the state. In fact the dependence goes in the other direction: this (objectively) probabilistic character of quantum states (among other things, like the quantization of energy exchanges) is what forced us to change the way we think of physical states.
- WhitneyLand 1y ago>>no objective physical reality is…the best conclusion that one can draw given strict adherence to what the mathematical formalism of QM provides… Can’t get on board with that. Relational QM/no objective reality is just one viewpoint, and it’s worth noting it’s not consensus. To clarify he’s not claiming objects don’t exist, just that they don’t have observer independent properties. It is fun to try and wrap your head around what no objective reality would mean. To grasp what we already have shown to be true about time being relative, the examples around simultaneity are a great wtf demonstration: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relativity_of_simultaneity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relativity_of_simultaneity
- d4rkn0d3z 1y agoTo clarify he’s not claiming objects don’t exist, just that they don’t have observer independent properties. -- that's right!
- kelseyfrog 1y agoIs existence an observer independent property?
- nh23423fefe 1y agono, unruh effect
- GoblinSlayer 1y agoYou could say the same about relative existence of the magnetic field in classical electrodynamics.
- Marshferm 1y agoIsn’t it as likely that we have formulaic illusions like time that suffuse our inability to reach objectivity? And in those paradoxes: change only at Planck speed, motion is illusory, quantum gravity obeys probability as in Darwin, the theoretical observer independent reality exists. The process of philosophy involves shedding illusions like words, statements, time, space to reach objectivity. A loop quantum gravity philosopher claiming there is no objective reality could just be an observer stuck at a bottleneck (notice he doesn’t call into question illusory attributes the piece relies on like biographical info). Barbour’s observation, that quantum appears to demand specialization and record keeping at very unique planes (records are geology, fossils, impressions, photographs) hints that observers are what physical reality is, is counterpoint to “there is no objective reality.” If reality is non trivially about record keeping, then of course there’s an objective reality, the Darwinian outcome is the objective sum of record keeping and the study of their differences.
- onli 1y agoNice example of physics tumbling into meaningless metaphysical nonsense.
- d4rkn0d3z 1y agoNice example of hurling meaningless invective.
- AIorNot 1y agoDonald Hoffman, Bernardo Kastrup and other idealists have been saying this for years https://youtu.be/yqOVu263OSk?si=M3fcLbJneZ0S5Jpq https://youtu.be/yqOVu263OSk?si=M3fcLbJneZ0S5Jpq Adivita Vedanta, Buddhism, mystics and perennial philosophers have been saying this for centuries https://youtu.be/cwcft4auszA?si=1vYsny6jZb--IE_0 https://youtu.be/cwcft4auszA?si=1vYsny6jZb--IE_0 Wolfram is also taking in the same vein but in a different approach https://youtu.be/8SD9WgPCZ28?si=t8XvVfJV8qi-K_0q https://youtu.be/8SD9WgPCZ28?si=t8XvVfJV8qi-K_0q Ie something is up and spacetime is NOT fundamental
- anon84873628 1y agoSome philosophers and mystics may be metaphorically correct, but that's not evidence of anything. Lots of people say really wrong things about reality too.
- skirmish 1y agoWhat do you think about this blog post: [1]? It seems to be promoting very similar ideas but I lack education to evaluate its claims. [1] https://andercot.substack.com/p/theres-no-single-objective-reality https://andercot.substack.com/p/theres-no-single-objective-r...
- skirmish 1y agoHm, I wrote this while reading the beginning, and then it rapidly went downhill with alien conspiracy theories.
- eboynyc32 1y agoSo is it all a dream?
- figassis 1y agoTo me, what makes sense is that there is one reality (or I guess, our reality is unity), and everything in it, including “living” beings and “intelligence” is inseparable from the singleton. So trying to observe an object or an event, is the same as reality observing itself. It wouldn’t surprise me that the feedback loop of this is what we perceive as observer dependent attributes. Whether this reality is an objective physical reality or something else entirely is irrelevant and does us no harm.