Comment on Gottem

• bunchberry@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  Ah, so I see you are going to double-down on trying to defend the indefensible.

  They do have values. Their position is just a superposition, rather than one descrete one, which can be described as a wave. Their value is effectively a wave until it’s needed to be discrete.

  To quote Dmitry Blokhintsev: “This is essentially a trivial feature known to any experimentalist, and it needs to be mentioned only because it is stated in many textbooks on quantum mechanics that the wave function is a characteristic of the state of a single particle. If this were so, it would be of interest to perform such a measurement on a single particle (say an electron) which would allow us to determine its own individual wave function. No such measurement is possible.”

  When I say “real values” I do not mean pure abstract mathematics. We do not live in a Platonic realm. The mathematics are just a tool for predicting what we observe in the real world. Don’t confuse the map for the territory. The abstract wave has no observable properties, it is pure mathematics. If the whole world was just one giant wave in Hilbert space, then this would be equivalent to claiming that the entire world is just one big mathematical function without any observable properties at all, which obviously makes no sense as we can clearly observe the world.

  To quote Rovelli: “The gigantic, universal ψ wave that contains all the possible worlds is like Hegel’s dark night in which all cows are black: it does not account, per se, for the phenomenological reality that we actually observe. In order to describe the phenomena that we observe, other mathematical elements are needed besides ψ: the individual variables, like X and P, that we use to describe the world. The Many Worlds interpretation does not explain them clearly. It is not enough to know the ψ wave and Schrödinger’s equation in order to define and use quantum theory: we need to specify an algebra of observables, otherwise we cannot calculate anything and there is no relation with the phenomena of our experience. The role of this algebra of observables, which is extremely clear in other interpretations, is not at all clear in the Many Worlds interpretation.”

  Again, as I said in my first comment, any mathematical theory that describes the world needs to, at some point, include symbols which directly refer to something we can observe. An abstract mathematical function contains no such symbols.

  This is why you run into contradictions like the “Wigner’s friend” paradox where Wigner would describe his friend in a superposition of states, and if you believe that this literally means that all that exists inside the room is an abstract function, then you cannot explain how the observer in the room can perceive anything that they later claim they do, because there would be no observables inside of the room.

  You cannot get around criticisms of solipsism by just promoting purely abstract mathematical entities to being “objective reality” as if objects transform into purely Platonic mathematical functions. At least, if you are going to claim this, then you need some rigorous process to transform them back into something that is described with mathematical language where some of the symbols refer to something we can actually observe such that we can then explain how it is that we can observe it to have the properties that it does when we look at it.

  Sure. That doesn’t make the general understanding of the thought experiment accurate. Once the decay of the atom that triggers the poison is detected, it’s no longer in a superposition. It has to not be in order for the detection to occur.

  Please scroll up and read my actual comment. You seem to have skipped all the important technical bits, because you are claiming something which is mathematically incompatible with the predictions of quantum mechanics. Your personal self-theory you are inventing here literally would render entanglement impossible.

  The double slit experiment shows that an interaction can change the result from wave-like to particle-like behavior.

  Decoherence is not relevant here. Decoherence theory works like this:

  1. Assume that the system+environment become entangled.
  2. Assume that the observer loses track of the environment.
  3. Trace out the the environment.
  4. This leaves you with a reduced density matrix for the system where the coherence terms have dropped to 0.

  Notice that step #2 is entirely subjective. We are just assuming that the observer has lost track of the environment in terms of their subjective epistemic access, and step #3 is then akin to statistically marginalizing over the environment in order to then remove it from consideration.

  This isn’t an actual physical transition but an epistemic one. The system+environment are still in a coherent superposition of states, and decoherence theory merely shows that it looks like it has decohered if you only have subjective knowledge on a small portion of the much larger coherent superposition of states.

  If you believe that a superposition of states means it has no observable properties and is just purely a mathematical function, then decoherence does not solve your problem at all, because it is ultimately a subjective process and not a physical process. If you spent time studying the environment enough before running the experiment such that you could include the environment in your model then decoherence would not occur.

  I’m literally not. My entire point is that it isn’t a solipsism. Any interaction causes the waveform to collapse.

  Which, again, renders entanglement impossible, since objects must interact to become entangled.

  If we accepted your personal self-theory, then quantum computers should be impossible, because the qubits all need to interact many many times over as the algorithm progresses for them to all become entangled and to create a superposition of states of the whole computer’s memory.

  You are not listening and advocating things that are trivially wrong.

  yet you give no explanation of an alternative. Something is happening. How do you explain it?

  I just don’t deny value definiteness. That’s it. There is nothing beyond this.

  Consider a perfectly classical world but this world is still fundamentally random. The randomness of interactions would disallow us from tracking the definite values of particles at a given moment in time, so we could only track them with an evolving probability distribution. We can represent this probability distribution with a vector and represent interactions with stochastic matrices. Given that the model does not include observable definite values, would it then be rational to claim that particles suddenly transform into an infinite-dimensional vector in configuration space when you’re not looking at them and lose all their observable properties? No, of course not. The particles still have real observable properties in the real world, but you just lose track of them in the model due to their random evolution.

  You could create a simulation where you assign definite values and permute them stochastically at each interaction, and this would produce the same statistical results if you make a measurement at any given step. It is the same with quantum mechanics. It is just a form of non-classical statistical mechanics. There is no empirical, mathematical, or philosophical reason to deny that particles stop possessing real values when you are not looking at them. It is not hard to put together a simulation where the qubits are assigned definite bit values at all times and each logic gate just stochastically permutes those bit values. I even created one myself here. John Bell also showed you can do this with quantum field theory in his paper “Beables for Quantum Field Theory.”

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• vivalapivo@lemmy.today ⁨19⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  Any interaction causes the waveform to collapse

  Cult mindset

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