• bunchberry@lemmy.world
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    3 days ago

    Also Bell experiments have proven the indeterminacy which you say is absurd. No theory of local hidden variables can describe quantum mechanics.

    You say Bell’s theorem disproves realism, but then you immediately follow it up with saying it disproved local realism. Do you see how those two are not the same statements? It never even crossed Bell’s mind to deny reality. He believed that the conclusion to his own theorem is just that it is not local.

    (Technically, anything explained non-locally can also be explained non-temporally instead, so it is more accurate methinks to say spatiotemporal realism is ruled out. I am not as big of a fan of thinking about it non-temporally but there are some respectable people like Avshalom Elitzur who do. Thinking about it non-locally is far more intuitive.)

    Also, again, this is not about indeterminacy and determinacy, but about indefiniteness and definiteness, i.e. anti-realism vs realism. These are not the same things. To say something is indeterminate is merely to imply it is random. To say something is indefinite is to say it doesn’t even have a value at all. It is also sometimes called realism because it’s about object permanence. Definiteness is just object permanence, it is the idea that systems still possess observable properties even when they are not being directly observed in the moment.

    He’s asking where the line is between this indeterminacy and determinacy. At what scale to things move from quantum to “real” and why?

    You could in principle make this non-realism make sense if you imposed some sort of well-defined physical conditions as to when particles take on real values. Bell described this as a kind of “flash” ontology because you would not have continuous definite values but “flashes” of definite values under certain conditions. But it turns out that you cannot do this without contradicting the mathematics of quantum mechanics.

    These are called physical collapse models, like GRW theory, but these transitions are non-reversible even though all evolution operators in quantum mechanics are reversible, and so in principle if you rigorously define what conditions would cause this transition, you could conduct an experiment where you set up those conditions, and then try to reverse it. Orthodox quantum theory and the physical collapse model would make different predictions at that point.

    These models never end up being local, anyways.

    The reason I say value indefiniteness is absurd as a way to interpret quantum mechanics is because it is not necessitated by the mathematics at all, and if you believe it:

    1. It devolves into solipsism if you do not rigorously define a mathematical criterion as to when definite values arise, because then nothing has real values outside of you directly looking at it.
    2. If you do rigorously define a criterion, then it is no longer quantum mechanics but an alternative theoretical model.

    So, either it devolves into solipsism, or it is a different theory to begin with.

    Bell was fine with #2 as long as people were honest about that being what they were doing. He wrote an article “Against ‘Measurement’” where he criticized the vagueness of people who claim there is a transition “at measurement” but then do not even rigorously define what qualifies as a “measurement.” He wrote positively of GRW theory in his paper “Are there Quantum Jumps?” precisely because they do give a rigorous mathematical definition of how this process takes place.

    But Bell also didn’t particularly believe there was any reason to believe in value indefiniteness to begin with. You can just interpret quantum mechanics as a kind of stochastic mechanics, just one with non-local features, where it is random but particles still have definite values at all times. The same year he published his famous theorem in 1964 in the paper “On the Einstein Podolsky Rosen Paradox” he also published the paper “On the Problem of Hidden Variables” debunking von Neumann’s proof that supposedly you cannot interpret quantum mechanics in value definite terms. He also wrote a paper “Beables in Quantum Field Theory” where he shows QFT can be represented as a stochastic theory. He also wrote a paper “On the Impossible Pilot Wave” where he promoted pilot wave theory, not necessarily because he believed it, but because he saw it as a counterexample to all the supposed “proofs” that quantum mechanics cannot be interpreted as a value definite theory.

    My point isn’t about randomness/indeterminacy. It is about “indefiniteness,” the claim that things have no values until you look. This either devolves into solipsism, or into a theory which is not quantum mechanics. It is far simpler to just say the systems have values when you’re not looking, you just don’t know what they are, because the random evolution of the system prevents you from tracking them. It is sort of like, if I hit a fork in the road and take either the left or right path, and you don’t know which, you wouldn’t then conclude I didn’t take a path at all until you look. You would conclude that you just don’t know what it is, and maybe assign probabilities to them. The fact that the probability distribution doesn’t contain a definite value does not demonstrate that the real world doesn’t contain a definite value, and believing it doesn’t unnecessarily over-complicates things. And definite ≠ deterministic. Maybe the path taken is truly random, but there is a path taken.

    • AnarchoEngineer@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      3 days ago

      First, I would like to note that I’m not here to assert any “quantum woo” about measurement and the soul or anything. I don’t think conscious observation has anything to do with the collapse; more likely it’s our method of measurement that affects the outcome. In fact I’d assume these phenomena would exist even in a universe without sentient beings. I’m not advocating for solipsism.

      My intuition would be that certain kinds of common interactions (which we also end up using to take our measurements) “cause the collapse” and then: more particles -> more interaction -> more collapse, which would explain the fact we don’t see macro scale indeterminacy but do notice it at a quantum level.

      Second, I’ll admit this really isn’t my field. You sound like you know what you’re talking about and have pointed me towards interesting theories and people to look into, so thanks for that, and I’ll defer to your judgement until I have a better grasp on this topic