We can talk quantum philosophy here too, right? Why is there so much focus on the determinism/indeterminism question as it pertains to quantum mechanics but not on what is clearly the far more consequential locality/nonlocality debate? The empirical failure of local realism is the most profound discovery we have ever made and yet few people discuss it.
Undermining the principle of local causality undermines the physics's Standard Model. The alternatives are fatalism or many worlds. What is the palatable answer here?
Shit son, talking about semantics don't change shit.
Levi Perry
This. Also this really isn't the right board for the philosophy of physics and metaphysics in an advanced sense.
Colton Williams
What's so philosophical about atoms moving at speeds so fast that they appear to be teleporting and matter being created out of nothing, only to be destroyed because anti-matter appears out of nothing to cancel it out?
Luke Taylor
Any resource on that shit OP?
William Torres
It's not semantics. The things being discussed here are substantive issues.
Action at a distance has always been a problematic concept in physics and philosophy and our classical worldview was (and still is for many, even after the quantum revolution) predicated on the idea that contact-action is the only kind that can exist. Any discovery to the contrary is enormously important. It would be like saying the weather in Norway affects a dice roll you make in Vegas instantaneously. How do you explain something like that?
Don't know, maybe cuz that shit make up the reality that we living in?
Asher Gutierrez
>It would be like saying the weather in Norway affects a dice roll you make in Vegas instantaneously. >How do you explain something like that? Chaos Theory
Matthew Young
Shit, OP, I don't have a IQ above 130, can you give a quick rundown on that stuff in an simple brainlet language?
Liam Moore
The thing to keep in mind here is that there is an instantaneous causal influence that occurs. Instead of an A - B - C relationship where, to invert the example I gave, the roll of a dice might plausibly be connected to Norway before the roll so that it has an effect on the weather in some way, what occurs at C occurs because of what happened at A without any intervening contact. It is a nonlocal effect and it does not rely on any common cause that Chaos Theory might use to account for this behavior. There is a clear causal relationship, but the catch is that it undermines locality.
Bell's Theorem shows that no local hidden variable theory of quantum mechanics is possible. This means we need to give up a set of metaphysical assumptions that undergirded our understanding of the classical world: locality, a weak formulation of realism called counterfactual definiteness that refers to an objective reality that science can account for, or freedom (free will). It is unclear which of these must go, but it is a fact that we do not live in a world in which all three are true.
Connor Martin
Superluminality implies instantenous action as well, right?
Camden Rodriguez
Yes
Nathaniel King
If it has real-life applications it's definitely not philosophy
Julian Taylor
...
Caleb Anderson
If you put it that way then yes, conventional physics go out the window. Still don't see the link btw quantum mechanics and philosophy
Juan Barnes
it's philosophy of physics dummies. This is the humanities board, not the continental philosophy board.
It's philosophy because it strikes at the heart of the conceptual and interpretational issues of quantum mechanics. What the actual implications of this discovery are, in terms of ontology and the metaphysical worldview that underlies our best physics, is a matter that science and the formalism of quantum mechanics is silent on.
Nicholas Diaz
Fuck off, just because the purvuy of physics is encroaching upon traditional philosophical questions doesn't mean you get to appropiate the fruits of our labors. Waste away with your meaningless word games like you always have and leave to productive work to us physicists.
Luke Price
Quantum philosohy seems like a field of study still in it's infancy. Maybe scientists should put their efforts into making a little bit more progress in quantum mechanics before starting to philosophize on their findings
Brayden Williams
Why do you think the existance of free will has anything to do with Bell's Theorem. The dichotomy is randomness or locality isn't it
Andrew Thomas
>T. undergrad
Jackson Fisher
t. tenured philosophy professor
Christopher Baker
that's a funny attitude because it was the anti-philosophical "pragmatist" attitude among physicists following World War 2 that precluded John Bell from publishing his theorem in respected journals. The issue was seen as too "philosophical". He had to publish it first in an underground paper called Epistemological Letters. For those who now recognize what he did it's regarded as the most discovery of science and a rare example of experimental metaphysics.
Bell explained that superdeterminism was one way of escaping the conclusion of action-at-a-distance. If the experimenters are not free variables and there are "conspiratorial" local realistic influences propagating back from our cosmogony, then we might find that the universe has conspired just right to make it appear as though there are non-local effects in nature. This is not a widely held interpretation, but it is recognized as a valid, if not likely one.
Joseph Kelly
I see. But still, like the name implies, determinism can be true even if superdeterminism isn't. I'd say the only thing that in the OP image that doesn't refute free will is the inability to model the universe altogether.
Ayden Allen
Quantum mechanics is complete. Bell settled that. Now it's the philosophers job to interpret what the world must be like for it to be true.
Jacob Mitchell
Sure. Superdeterminism being false (and it probably is) doesn't prevent any other kind of determinism from being true.
John Scott
Haven't been keeping up with the scientific community. Those this mean that matter can travel FTL now?
Aaron Gray
No. This is a common misconception that gets everyone. What is being transferred is neither matter nor energy, nor does it necessarily mean that we can send signal FTL (although Bell had some interesting comments regarding the anthropocentric nature of this kind of claim). The importance of this discovery lies in its metaphysical consequences and its surprising repudiation of an idea long-held since Plato: that all action must be local. It raises philosophical questions about the nature of matter and how reality truly operates. It creates a problem for the Standard Model of physics (and perhaps even the practice of science as an intellectual enterprise), which rests on the assumption of local causality, and it creates enormous tension between the two pillars of physics, relativity and quantum.
Hunter Evans
If neither matter nor energy is being transferred, then what is? Information? In that case as you say, this makes us question if we are actually living within a simulation. This would easily explain how atoms can "teleport" and/or appear out of nothing: someone(God, 4th dimensional aliens, an eldritch abomination) is coding data into the system
Julian Butler
>If neither matter nor energy is being transferred, then what is?
This is where philosophical analysis might come in handy. Bell provided a rather famous example that illustrates that challenge of reconciling classical intuitions with the failure of local realism called Bertlmann's socks.
Imagine you know someone who wears a pair of mismatched colored socks everyday and you know with certainty that those socks will always be mismatched. What colors he wears on a given day are unpredictable. When you come to find that he is wearing a sock that is pink, you acquire instantaneous knowledge that the other sock is not-pink. Now in a classical world this isn't very mysterious. He put the socks on before you came to know about them, and you discovering that one sock was pink has no effect on what the other color is.
But in a world as described by Bell's Theorem, the colors are ontologically indeterminate prior to the "measurement process". Meaning that the color of the socks are not actually decided until a measurement is performed (note that this has nothing to do with consciousness or conscious observation. Measurement in this sense simply means the quantum system coming into contact with the measurement apparatus). Measuring one sock to be pink, then, has an instantaneous effect on the other, which becomes not-pink. It is not clear, from this analysis, what is actually being transferred. What is clear is that a causal influence occurs and that it is some kind of action at a distance. There is no plausible mechanism to explain it.
Julian Howard
so you're telling me this might as well be magic for all we know?
Christopher Gonzalez
that is unironically the word that some absolutely baffled physicists and philosophers have used to describe this, when they're not choosing to ignore it. Einstein is usually taken to have had philosophical objects to quantum mechanics because of its indeterminism, but this was not his concern. It was the nonlocality implied by an ontic interpretation of the quantum state that perturbed him and it does appear to be the case that nature performs this. The alternatives are those you've probably heard of before. Many Worlds eliminates distant action at the cost of many worlds, Cramer's transactional interpretation replaces it with retro-causality (which isn't much better in my opinion). A commonsense view of the world is irrecoverable.
Eli Morales
how would one go about harnessing this "magic"?
Samuel Hall
you don't. it's uncontrollable
Brandon Brooks
Absolutely fascinating. This truly represents a paradigm shift on our traditional understanding of the universe. This got me thinking that this might be a case of sufficiently-advanced technology/phenomena. This seems like it was pulled straight out of science-fiction.
William Torres
chaos magic huh? i understand
Juan Perez
Shit, so many buzzword that I can't truly grasp what shit is been say here.
Landon Robinson
>determinism/indeterminism question as it pertains to quantum mechanics but not on what is clearly the far more consequential locality/nonlocality debate? false the interesting question is on contextuality and noncontextuality, ie does it make sense to measure any observable after any other observable. Nobody cares about locality today.
