The problem with physics

[Alan Grayson]

The problem with physics is physicists ! Yeah, that's my conclusion after many years of studying, arguing and reading. Many, perhaps most, attribute ontological character to what is epistemological; namely the wf. This leads to all kinds of conceptual errors, and ridiculous models and conjectures -- such as MW, particles being in two positions at the same time, radiioactive sources that are simultanously decayed and undecayed, and so forth. The wf gives us information about the state of a system and nothing more. Sorry to disappoint. AG

[Philip Thrift]

On Thursday, November 14, 2019 at 4:25:16 PM UTC-6, Alan Grayson wrote:

The problem with physics is physicists ! Yeah, that's my conclusion after many years of studying, arguing and reading. Many, perhaps most, attribute ontological character to what is epistemological; namely the wf. This leads to all kinds of conceptual errors, and ridiculous models and conjectures -- such as MW, particles being in two positions at the same time, radiioactive sources that are simultanously decayed and undecayed, and so forth. The wf gives us information about the state of a system and nothing more. Sorry to disappoint. AG

Physics is only models that come and go. One model (an expression in a language) can be replaced by another if it's useful. Physicists who jump from a model to an absolute statement about reality are out over their skis.

How Models Are Used to Represent Reality

Ronald N. Giere

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/216300663_How_Models_Are_Used_to_Represent_Reality

Most recent philosophical thought about the scientific representation of the world has focused on dyadic relationships between language-like entities and the world, particularly the semantic relationships of reference and truth. Drawing inspiration from diverse sources, I argue that we should focus on the pragmatic activity of representing, so that the basic representational relationship has the form: Scientists use models to represent aspects of the world for specific purposes. Leaving aside the terms "law" and "theory," I distinguish principles, specific conditions, models, hypotheses, and generalizations. I argue that scientists use designated similarities between models and aspects of the world to form both hypotheses and generalizations.

@philipthrift. 

[Alan Grayson]

I fundamentally disagree. The premise underlying models is that they progressively approach a "true" discription of the external world. Do you really think the Earth-centered model of the solar system is equally true as our present understanding? AG 

[Philip Thrift]

One is much better than another truthiness-wise. 

But good luck in life finding the absolute truth! Let us know when you find it.

@philipthrift  

[Alan Grayson]

I notice you habitually avoid discussing the problem of ontological versus epistemological in the context of superposition and wf's. But this is where, IMO, the rubber hits the road for the fantasies which are so prevalent today. AG 

[Alan Grayson]

Don't put words in my mouth. All physical models are provisional, but I don't accept what I consider philosophical BS that you posted here previously. AG 

[Brent Meeker]

The Earth centric view of Ptolemy was not as true as Newton's heliocentric view...but that's because it was not as accurate.  Newton is considered superior, not just because his theory was more accurate, but because it had a universal application.  The greatest importance of Newton was that he broke the idea that the heavens went by different rules than the Earth.  So "truth" per se is not the distinction.  As Bill can tell you astronomers have no problem with regarding the Earth as stationary and the Sun going around it.  But they use Newton's equations to determine how it goes.  It's convenience...not truth.

The sciences do not try to explain, they hardly even try to  interpret, they mainly make models. By a model is meant a  mathematical construct which, with the addition of certain verbal  interpretations, describes observed phenomena. The justification of  such a mathematical construct is solely and precisely that it is  expected to work.
    --—John von Neumann

Brent

[Alan Grayson]

On Thursday, November 14, 2019 at 5:09:15 PM UTC-7, Brent wrote:

On 11/14/2019 3:56 PM, Alan Grayson wrote:

On Thursday, November 14, 2019 at 4:49:36 PM UTC-7, Philip Thrift wrote:

On Thursday, November 14, 2019 at 4:25:16 PM UTC-6, Alan Grayson wrote:

The problem with physics is physicists ! Yeah, that's my conclusion after many years of studying, arguing and reading. Many, perhaps most, attribute ontological character to what is epistemological; namely the wf. This leads to all kinds of conceptual errors, and ridiculous models and conjectures -- such as MW, particles being in two positions at the same time, radiioactive sources that are simultanously decayed and undecayed, and so forth. The wf gives us information about the state of a system and nothing more. Sorry to disappoint. AG

Physics is only models that come and go. One model (an expression in a language) can be replaced by another if it's useful. Physicists who jump from a model to an absolute statement about reality are out over their skis.

How Models Are Used to Represent Reality

Ronald N. Giere

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/216300663_How_Models_Are_Used_to_Represent_Reality

Most recent philosophical thought about the scientific representation of the world has focused on dyadic relationships between language-like entities and the world, particularly the semantic relationships of reference and truth. Drawing inspiration from diverse sources, I argue that we should focus on the pragmatic activity of representing, so that the basic representational relationship has the form: Scientists use models to represent aspects of the world for specific purposes. Leaving aside the terms "law" and "theory," I distinguish principles, specific conditions, models, hypotheses, and generalizations. I argue that scientists use designated similarities between models and aspects of the world to form both hypotheses and generalizations.

@philipthrift. 

I fundamentally disagree. The premise underlying models is that they progressively approach a "true" discription of the external world. Do you really think the Earth-centered model of the solar system is equally true as our present understanding? AG

The Earth centric view of Ptolemy was not as true as Newton's heliocentric view...but that's because it was not as accurate. 

It's not as accurate because it's not as "true". If the Earth had approximately the same mass as the Sun, the most accurate model would be different. But that's not the reality. It's because the Sun is so much more massive than the Earth, that we use the Sun centered model. All models are not equal; some are truer than others. That was my point. AG

 

Newton is considered superior, not just because his theory was more accurate, but because it had a universal application.  The greatest importance of Newton was that he broke the idea that the heavens went by different rules than the Earth.  So "truth" per se is not the distinction.  As Bill can tell you astronomers have no problem with regarding the Earth as stationary and the Sun going around it.  But they use Newton's equations to determine how it goes.  It's convenience...not truth.

Bill's failing, as I recall, was the belief and insistence that he's always right. No astronomer of sound mind would regard the Earth as stationary and the Sun going around it. AG 

[Lawrence Crowell]

On Thursday, November 14, 2019 at 4:25:16 PM UTC-6, Alan Grayson wrote:

The problem with physics is physicists ! Yeah, that's my conclusion after many years of studying, arguing and reading. Many, perhaps most, attribute ontological character to what is epistemological; namely the wf. This leads to all kinds of conceptual errors, and ridiculous models and conjectures -- such as MW, particles being in two positions at the same time, radiioactive sources that are simultanously decayed and undecayed, and so forth. The wf gives us information about the state of a system and nothing more. Sorry to disappoint. AG

As I see it the wave function is epistemological on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, but ontological on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Sundays. On Shabbat it is neither. 

LC 

[Alan Grayson]

On the days the wf is ontological, what does it look like? AG

[Brent Meeker]

On 11/14/2019 4:20 PM, Alan Grayson wrote:

Newton is considered superior, not just because his theory was more accurate, but because it had a universal application.  The greatest importance of Newton was that he broke the idea that the heavens went by different rules than the Earth.  So "truth" per se is not the distinction.  As Bill can tell you astronomers have no problem with regarding the Earth as stationary and the Sun going around it.  But they use Newton's equations to determine how it goes.  It's convenience...not truth.

Bill's failing, as I recall, was the belief and insistence that he's always right. No astronomer of sound mind would regard the Earth as stationary and the Sun going around it. AG 

Not at all.  They do it all the time, because when it comes to aiming your telescope you do it relative to the Earth, not the Sun.

Brent

[Alan Grayson]

On Thursday, November 14, 2019 at 5:20:59 PM UTC-7, Lawrence Crowell wrote:

[Alan Grayson]

I was thinking of calculating the orbit of a planet. For stars apparently fixed on the celestial sphere, Earth centered calculations are convenient. AG 

[Brent Meeker]

Which is the point.  There is no "true" center of the solar system, there are just more and less convenient coordinate systems in which to calculate things.  So you need to ask yourself what do you mean when you say it is more true that the Sun is the center of the solar system and the Earth orbits the Sun than the other way around?  If you're honest you will conclude that you mean it is easier to make good estimates of the future in that coordinate system.  Why is Einstein's gravity "truer" than Newton's.  Why is the quantum atom better than the Bohr atom?  Why is Darwinian theory better than Lamarckian.  The reason one scientific theory is better than another is three dimensional:

1. It gives more accurate predictions where the theories overlap and no emprically false ones.
2. It has a wider domain of application.  It applies in more places or over a bigger range of parameters.
3. It is consilient with our other best theories.  So it reduces the number of different things we must understand as independent.

A theory that is better on all three dimensions, we regard as truer.   Not the other way around: It is not the case that we judge it better because it's truer, because we don't, and can't, know where the truth is.

Brent

[Alan Grayson]

So when we see ~200 billion stars rotating around the galactic enter, it's equally true that each star can be regarded as the center, with everything rotating about itself. This is a form of relativity, let's call it the relativity of truth, that find obscures the value of evolving models in better describing the external world. AG  

[Brent Meeker]

Sure.  You know there's no 'center of the universe' in any current model.  For such a center to have any operational meaning would require that momentum not be conserved.

This is a form of relativity, let's call it the relativity of truth, that find obscures the value of evolving models in better describing the external world. AG

Except that still invites looking at it backwards; as though there is something called "the truth" but it's relative to what we know.  I'm saying that there is a concept of "truer" that has an operational meaning, but there is no operational meaning to "the truth" that we are approximating.  The only meaning I can give "the truth" is the collection of propositions expressing the known empirical facts; but even those are ambiguous because every observation depends on some theories.    

I've explicitly described how we define models as better ("truer") when we evolve them.  Do you have some other criterion?  Something involving what's true?

Brent

[Alan Grayson]

On Thursday, November 14, 2019 at 8:15:18 PM UTC-7, Brent wrote:

On 11/14/2019 6:30 PM, Alan Grayson wrote:

On Thursday, November 14, 2019 at 7:18:02 PM UTC-7, Brent wrote:

On 11/14/2019 5:48 PM, Alan Grayson wrote:

On Thursday, November 14, 2019 at 5:34:02 PM UTC-7, Brent wrote:

On 11/14/2019 4:20 PM, Alan Grayson wrote:

Newton is considered superior, not just because his theory was more accurate, but because it had a universal application.  The greatest importance of Newton was that he broke the idea that the heavens went by different rules than the Earth.  So "truth" per se is not the distinction.  As Bill can tell you astronomers have no problem with regarding the Earth as stationary and the Sun going around it.  But they use Newton's equations to determine how it goes.  It's convenience...not truth.

Bill's failing, as I recall, was the belief and insistence that he's always right. No astronomer of sound mind would regard the Earth as stationary and the Sun going around it. AG 

Not at all.  They do it all the time, because when it comes to aiming your telescope you do it relative to the Earth, not the Sun.

Brent

I was thinking of calculating the orbit of a planet. For stars apparently fixed on the celestial sphere, Earth centered calculations are convenient. AG

Which is the point.  There is no "true" center of the solar system, there are just more and less convenient coordinate systems in which to calculate things.  So you need to ask yourself what do you mean when you say it is more true that the Sun is the center of the solar system and the Earth orbits the Sun than the other way around?  If you're honest you will conclude that you mean it is easier to make good estimates of the future in that coordinate system.  Why is Einstein's gravity "truer" than Newton's.  Why is the quantum atom better than the Bohr atom?  Why is Darwinian theory better than Lamarckian.  The reason one scientific theory is better than another is three dimensional:

1. It gives more accurate predictions where the theories overlap and no emprically false ones.
2. It has a wider domain of application.  It applies in more places or over a bigger range of parameters.
3. It is consilient with our other best theories.  So it reduces the number of different things we must understand as independent.

A theory that is better on all three dimensions, we regard as truer.   Not the other way around: It is not the case that we judge it better because it's truer, because we don't, and can't, know where the truth is.

Brent

So when we see ~200 billion stars rotating around the galactic enter, it's equally true that each star can be regarded as the center, with everything rotating about itself.

Sure. 

I meant to put a question mark at the end of that sentence. AG

 

You know there's no 'center of the universe' in any current model. 

To the extent that galaxies rotate, they have a center. AG 

For such a center to have any operational meaning would require that momentum not be conserved.

This is a form of relativity, let's call it the relativity of truth, that find obscures the value of evolving models in better describing the external world. AG

Except that still invites looking at it backwards; as though there is something called "the truth" but it's relative to what we know.  I'm saying that there is a concept of "truer" that has an operational meaning, but there is no operational meaning to "the truth" that we are approximating.  The only meaning I can give "the truth" is the collection of propositions expressing the known empirical facts; but even those are ambiguous because every observation depends on some theories.    

I've explicitly described how we define models as better ("truer") when we evolve them.  Do you have some other criterion?  Something involving what's true?

Brent

There's a philosophical principle that I endorse; namely, that there exists an external world and hopefully our models are increasingly better descriptions of that world. At least that's our goal. Beneath your words seems to be a denial of that principle. We can call this "the truth", although I don't think I used that phrase. AG 

[Brent Meeker]

You make it just an unsupported article of faith.  In my epistemology we hypothesize that there is some reality as a meta-theory and that is supported by our experience of finding a sequence of truer theories, by which I mean more accurate, more comprehensive, and more consilient theories.

Brent

[Philip Thrift]

There is no "epistemology" without human-level consciousness, and quantum stuff happens without humans. Where the epistemology stuff got into QM you have to ask that weird cult of physicists who got into that.

@philipthrift

[Philip Thrift]

It's models up and down, as Vic would say.

@philipthrift 

 

[Philip Thrift]

On Thursday, November 14, 2019 at 6:20:07 PM UTC-6, Alan Grayson wrote:

On Thursday, November 14, 2019 at 5:09:15 PM UTC-7, Brent wrote:

On 11/14/2019 3:56 PM, Alan Grayson wrote:

It's not as accurate because it's not as "true". If the Earth had approximately the same mass as the Sun, the most accurate model would be different. But that's not the reality. It's because the Sun is so much more massive than the Earth, that we use the Sun centered model. All models are not equal; some are truer than others. That was my point. AG

Did you ever read philosophy, I mean technically, even like SEP articles on things like truth?

  https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/truth/ 

I don't mean having taking formal courses in philosophy, but read something of a technical nature [ e.g. https://plato.stanford.edu/index.html ] on the subject.

  

Are you formulating your own theory of truth?

Some might call that BS, just winging it on their own.

(I cite articles written by well-known philosophers. Who do you cite?)

@philipthrift 

 

[Alan Grayson]

So does everything else; what we call the Laws of Physics or the Laws of Nature. AG

 

Where the epistemology stuff got into QM you have to ask that weird cult of physicists who got into that.

If the wf were ontological, we could see one directly. What does one look like? AG 

@philipthrift

[Alan Grayson]

Vic was out of central casting -- for the "shut up and calculate" school. AG 

 

[scerir]

"Interpretations of quantum mechanics, unlike Gods, are not jealous, and thus it is safe to believe in more than one at the same time. So if the many-worlds interpretation makes it easier to think about the research you’re doing in April, and the Copenhagen interpretation makes it easier to think about the research you’re doing in June, the Copenhagen interpretation is not going to smite you for praying to the many-worlds interpretation. At least I hope it won’t, because otherwise I’m in big trouble." -Peter Shor

[Alan Grayson]

Those seeking a Theory of Everything implicitly believe in the possiblity that our models are progressing towards a description of the external world. That's all I am saying. But I see getting lost in technical jargon about "truth" obscures this basic pov of most seeking it. AG 

 

[Alan Grayson]

Friend; I sent you an email about a week ago.  As for the MWI, it fits what Nietzsche said about Plato; the great viaduct of corruption. AG

[Philip Thrift]

There are no "laws" (how did that word get into science?) and there is no wave function.

https://arxiv.org/abs/1201.2382

https://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0610204

http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/15819/1/Allori-Ex-nat-metaph-OUP-latest-draft.pdf

https://www.quantamagazine.org/quantum-theory-rebuilt-from-simple-physical-principles-20170830/

@philipthrift

[Philip Thrift]

His (Peter Shor @PeterShor1 Discovered Shor's algorithm for prime factorization on quantum computers) algorithm is very clever, but it's bizarre that a quantum "interpretation" is to some either Many Worlds or "Copenhagen".

@philipthrift

[Alan Grayson]

What's to be gained by splitting hairs? By "laws" we mean patterns which can be relied upon to make predictions, usually in the form of mathematical formulas. WF's are solutions of differential equations. Any further questions? ;-). AG 

[scerir]

Il 14 novembre 2019 alle 23.25 Alan Grayson <agrays...@gmail.com> ha scritto:

The problem with physics is physicists ! Yeah, that's my conclusion after many years of studying, arguing and reading. Many, perhaps most, attribute ontological character to what is epistemological; namely the wf. This leads to all kinds of conceptual errors, and ridiculous models and conjectures -- such as MW, particles being in two positions at the same time, radiioactive sources that are simultanously decayed and undecayed, and so forth. The wf gives us information about the state of a system and nothing more. Sorry to disappoint. AG

"The question of whether the waves are something 'real' or a fiction to describe and predict phenomena in a convenient way is a matter of taste. I personally like to regard a probability wave, even in 3N-dimensional space, as a real thing, certainly as more than a tool for mathematical calculations. For it has the character of an invariant of observation; that means it predicts the results of counting experiments, and we expect to find the same average numbers, the same mean deviations, etc., if we actually perform the experiment many times under the same experimental condition. Quite generally, how could we rely on probability predictions if by this notion we do not refer to something real and objective ?" -M. Born, 1949, p. 105-106

https://archive.org/stream/naturalphilosoph032159mbp/naturalphilosoph032159mbp_djvu.txt

[Alan Grayson]

It seems to me that Born is going down a slippery slope. I see the wf as "real" in an epistemological sense; it tells us what we know about a system. But if it's "real" in an ontological sense, I think it leads to nonsensical interpretations of superpositions, and reality, as I described above. AG 

[Philip Thrift]

If one wants to posit a "probability wave" as a "wave of propensities", why not?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Probability_interpretations#Propensity

Propensity theorists think of probability as a physical propensity, or disposition, or tendency of a given type of physical situation to yield an outcome of a certain kind or to yield a long run relative frequency of such an outcome.

Propensities, or chances, are not relative frequencies, but purported causes of the observed stable relative frequencies. Propensities are invoked to explain why repeating a certain kind of experiment will generate given outcome types at persistent rates, which are known as propensities or chances. Frequentists are unable to take this approach, since relative frequencies do not exist for single tosses of a coin, but only for large ensembles or collectives (see "single case possible" in the table above).[2] In contrast, a propensitist is able to use the law of large numbers to explain the behavior of long-run frequencies. This law, which is a consequence of the axioms of probability, says that if (for example) a coin is tossed repeatedly many times, in such a way that its probability of landing heads is the same on each toss, and the outcomes are probabilistically independent, then the relative frequency of heads will be close to the probability of heads on each single toss. This law allows that stable long-run frequencies are a manifestation of invariant single-case probabilities. In addition to explaining the emergence of stable relative frequencies, the idea of propensity is motivated by the desire to make sense of single-case probability attributions in quantum mechanics, such as the probability of decay of a particular atom at a particular time.

@philipthrift

[scerir]

"The underlying error may be the conviction that the system itself has to be represented in order to represent our actions upon it. In quantum theory we represent actual operations and the relations among them, not a hypothetical reality on which they act. Quantum theory is a theory of actuality, not reality. I have taken this term from Whitehead's writings." -David Finkelstein, in 'The State of Quantum Physics'.

"Unfortunately, quantum theory is incompatible with the proposition that "measurements" are processes by means of which we discover some unknown but preexisting reality." -Asher Peres, "What is a state vector?" , Am. J. Phys. 52 (7), July 1984

[John Clark]

On Thu, Nov 14, 2019 at 10:27 PM Alan Grayson <agrays...@gmail.com> wrote:

> I notice you habitually avoid discussing the problem of ontological versus epistemological 

It is a ontological fact that Bell's inequality is violated and there is no epistemological explanation for that fact. You keep wanting a mental picture of the quantum world that conforms with your common sense everyday expectations of how things should work, I'd like that too but our wish will never be granted. I like Many Worlds because although it's very bizarre it's the least bizarre quantum interpretation that fits the hyper bizarre facts; but the universe doesn't care what I think is strange so if it turns out Many Worlds is not true then we would know that something even stranger is.

 John K Clark

[Lawrence Crowell]

There is no decision procedure to determine if QM is ψ-epistemic or ψ-ontic. It is not provable either way.

LC

 

[Alan Grayson]

Occam's Razor. AG 

 

[Alan Grayson]

Applying an epistemological interpretation doesn't guarantee that everything in nature will be explained; rather, it avoids the worst interpretations that egregiously depart from common sense. It's not that I insist on ordinary experience being affirmed; rather, I prefer to avoid unnecessary assumptions and conclusions which, on their face, seem extremely bizaare and unwarranted. Apply Occam's Razor. AG

[Philip Thrift]

Allowing the ψ-epistemic  is equivalent to"scientifically" positing that all there is (all reality - whether one calls it the cosmos,  nature, the universe-in-toto, ...) is a product of "mind".

It's laughable that those - physicists I guess - who believe the ψ-epistemic are some of the ones decrying "postmodernism". This is basically the Deepak Chopra philosophy that he has seminars on.

@philipthrift

[John Clark]

On Fri, Nov 15, 2019 at 11:39 PM Alan Grayson <agrays...@gmail.com> wrote:

> Applying an epistemological interpretation doesn't guarantee that everything in nature will be explained; rather, it avoids the worst interpretations that egregiously depart from common sense. 

Common sense is screaming that Bell's Inequality could never be violated but the experiment has been performed many times and there is no longer any doubt, common sense is dead wrong; therefore any explanation of it is going to seem extremely bizarre to creatures that evolved to survive on the African Savanna not to have a intuitive understanding of the inner workings of the quantum world.

 

> Apply Occam's Razor. 

Apply Einstein's Razor too, "make things as simple as possible but not simpler."

John K Clark

[Brent Meeker]

On 11/15/2019 11:43 PM, Philip Thrift wrote:

On Friday, November 15, 2019 at 9:49:02 PM UTC-6, Alan Grayson wrote:

On Friday, November 15, 2019 at 6:51:45 PM UTC-7, Lawrence Crowell wrote:

On Friday, November 15, 2019 at 3:06:08 PM UTC-6, John Clark wrote:

On Thu, Nov 14, 2019 at 10:27 PM Alan Grayson <agrays...@gmail.com> wrote:

> I notice you habitually avoid discussing the problem of ontological versus epistemological 

It is a ontological fact that Bell's inequality is violated and there is no epistemological explanation for that fact. You keep wanting a mental picture of the quantum world that conforms with your common sense everyday expectations of how things should work, I'd like that too but our wish will never be granted. I like Many Worlds because although it's very bizarre it's the least bizarre quantum interpretation that fits the hyper bizarre facts; but the universe doesn't care what I think is strange so if it turns out Many Worlds is not true then we would know that something even stranger is.

 John K Clark

There is no decision procedure to determine if QM is ψ-epistemic or ψ-ontic. It is not provable either way.

LC

Occam's Razor. AG 

 

Allowing the ψ-epistemic  is equivalent to"scientifically" positing that all there is (all reality - whether one calls it the cosmos,  nature, the universe-in-toto, ...) is a product of "mind".

How do you conclude this??  The epistemic interpretation just says the wf is our mathematical representation of what we know about reality.

It's laughable that those - physicists I guess - who believe the ψ-epistemic are some of the ones decrying "postmodernism". This is basically the Deepak Chopra philosophy that he has seminars on.

It's laughable that you are so quick to mock, rather than understand.

Brent

[ronaldheld]

Really late, but for the center of the Solar System use Solar system barycentric coordinates.

[Alan Grayson]

But the MWI is the most UN-parsimonious interpretation possible! Can't you see that? Apparently not. When a horse race ends, those with your persuasion will continue to wonder which horse won. AG 

[Philip Thrift]

On Saturday, November 16, 2019 at 10:54:06 AM UTC-6, Brent wrote:

The epistemic interpretation just says the wf is our mathematical representation of what we know about reality.

If that is the definition of epistemic, then any mathematical physics is epistemic ("ur mathematical representation of what we know"):

Einstein Field Equations [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein_field_equations ] is epistemic

Maxwell's Equations [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxwell%27s_equations ] is epistemic,

...

Obvious we write down down some math to model some aspect of nature, because that's what we know to do.

@philipthrift

...

 

[Brent Meeker]

On 11/16/2019 2:38 PM, Philip Thrift wrote:

On Saturday, November 16, 2019 at 10:54:06 AM UTC-6, Brent wrote:

The epistemic interpretation just says the wf is our mathematical representation of what we know about reality.

If that is the definition of epistemic, then any mathematical physics is epistemic ("ur mathematical representation of what we know"):

It is the definition of epistemic.  And it is in contrast to the ontic interpretation of QM which says that the wave function is real and changing it due to a measurement must be described a some physical process, not just taking the measurement into account to update our knowledge.

Brent

Einstein Field Equations [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein_field_equations ] is epistemic

Maxwell's Equations [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxwell%27s_equations ] is epistemic,

..

Obvious we write down down some math to model some aspect of nature, because that's what we know to do.

@philipthrift

...

 

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[Philip Thrift]

On Saturday, November 16, 2019 at 4:45:56 PM UTC-6, Brent wrote:

On 11/16/2019 2:38 PM, Philip Thrift wrote:

On Saturday, November 16, 2019 at 10:54:06 AM UTC-6, Brent wrote:

The epistemic interpretation just says the wf is our mathematical representation of what we know about reality.

If that is the definition of epistemic, then any mathematical physics is epistemic ("ur mathematical representation of what we know"):

It is the definition of epistemic.  And it is in contrast to the ontic interpretation of QM which says that the wave function is real and changing it due to a measurement must be described a some physical process, not just taking the measurement into account to update our knowledge.

Brent

From an applied mathematics perspective, it seems that Schrödinger equation, Einstein equations, Maxwell's equations, ... are all tools for making predictions about measurements, whether those measurements are made by lab instruments or telescopes.

I don't see where a philosophically metaphysical and esoteric term like "knowledge" comes in in any of those equations.

@philipthrift

[John Clark]

On Sat, Nov 16, 2019 at 3:34 PM Alan Grayson <agrays...@gmail.com> wrote:

>> Apply Einstein's Razor too, "make things as simple as possible but not simpler."

But the MWI is the most UN-parsimonious interpretation possible!

I don't see why having 2 completely different sets of physical laws, one for when something is being observed and one for when something is not being observed, is more unparsimonious that having just one set of laws, particularly when it is not at all clear exactly what "observed" means.

 

> Can't you see that?

Nope.

John K Clark

[Philip Thrift]

We don't know what the physical constituents of quantum mechanics are.

(We don't know what the physical constituents of gravity are either.)

But in the case of QM, there are a number of hypothetical models, like with

    Adrian Kent's https://arxiv.org/abs/1305.6565 "real path quantum theory" RPQT

that only have one world, not many worlds.

In that sense MWI is unparsimonious. 

(Sean Carroll has never talked about RPQT that I am aware of.)

@philipthrift 

[Brent Meeker]

It comes into QM because it's probabilistic.  If you wrote Maxwell's equations for the field produced by charged particles whose position was only given by a probability density function you would get a probabilistic prediction and when you measured the field at a few points and got definite answers, you would change you prediction of the field so that it matched the measurements at those points.  Your knowledge of the field would still not be definite but it would have changed due to the measurement.  Schrodinger's equation only predicts probabilistic measurement results, so it's always like that.

Brent

[Philip Thrift]

Just because one formulates stochastic vs. deterministic models doesn't mean "knowledge" has any special place in one type vs. the other,

I took a course in stochastic differential equations 

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stochastic_differential_equation

and I don't think the philosophical subject of "knowledge" came up in any special way vs. the subject of (deterministic) differential equations.

@philipthrift

[Brent Meeker]

Then there was something that changed when you got a measurement, whatever you called it.  Maybe the Bayesian estimated density function.

Brent

@philipthrift

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[Alan Grayson]

Oh, I think I get it; I finall get it. Joe the Plumber goes into a lab and does a double slit experiment, just one trial; and viola, a multitude of ENTIRE universes are created, copies of Joe and everything else. Now THIS is certainly parsimonious, as any dummy can see. AG 

[Philip Thrift]

On Sunday, November 17, 2019 at 11:23:29 PM UTC-6, Brent wrote:

On 11/17/2019 2:47 PM, Philip Thrift wrote:

On Sunday, November 17, 2019 at 4:36:13 PM UTC-6, Brent wrote:

On 11/16/2019 11:39 PM, Philip Thrift wrote:

On Saturday, November 16, 2019 at 4:45:56 PM UTC-6, Brent wrote:

On 11/16/2019 2:38 PM, Philip Thrift wrote:

On Saturday, November 16, 2019 at 10:54:06 AM UTC-6, Brent wrote:

The epistemic interpretation just says the wf is our mathematical representation of what we know about reality.

If that is the definition of epistemic, then any mathematical physics is epistemic ("ur mathematical representation of what we know"):

It is the definition of epistemic.  And it is in contrast to the ontic interpretation of QM which says that the wave function is real and changing it due to a measurement must be described a some physical process, not just taking the measurement into account to update our knowledge.

Brent

From an applied mathematics perspective, it seems that Schrödinger equation, Einstein equations, Maxwell's equations, ... are all tools for making predictions about measurements, whether those measurements are made by lab instruments or telescopes.

I don't see where a philosophically metaphysical and esoteric term like "knowledge" comes in in any of those equations.

It comes into QM because it's probabilistic.  If you wrote Maxwell's equations for the field produced by charged particles whose position was only given by a probability density function you would get a probabilistic prediction and when you measured the field at a few points and got definite answers, you would change you prediction of the field so that it matched the measurements at those points.  Your knowledge of the field would still not be definite but it would have changed due to the measurement.  Schrodinger's equation only predicts probabilistic measurement results, so it's always like that.

Brent

Just because one formulates stochastic vs. deterministic models doesn't mean "knowledge" has any special place in one type vs. the other,

I took a course in stochastic differential equations 

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stochastic_differential_equation

and I don't think the philosophical subject of "knowledge" came up in any special way vs. the subject of (deterministic) differential equations.

Then there was something that changed when you got a measurement, whatever you called it.  Maybe the Bayesian estimated density function.

Brent

Stochastic modeling has nothing (in general) to do with Bayesian modeling. (Though the latter of course can be considered a special case of the former.) And quantum mechanics works fine as a stochastic model without ever introducing Bayesian probability densities.

@philipthrift

[Bruno Marchal]

On 15 Nov 2019, at 00:56, Alan Grayson <agrays...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Thursday, November 14, 2019 at 4:49:36 PM UTC-7, Philip Thrift wrote:

On Thursday, November 14, 2019 at 4:25:16 PM UTC-6, Alan Grayson wrote:

The problem with physics is physicists ! Yeah, that's my conclusion after many years of studying, arguing and reading. Many, perhaps most, attribute ontological character to what is epistemological; namely the wf. This leads to all kinds of conceptual errors, and ridiculous models and conjectures -- such as MW, particles being in two positions at the same time, radiioactive sources that are simultanously decayed and undecayed, and so forth. The wf gives us information about the state of a system and nothing more. Sorry to disappoint. AG

Physics is only models that come and go. One model (an expression in a language) can be replaced by another if it's useful. Physicists who jump from a model to an absolute statement about reality are out over their skis.

How Models Are Used to Represent Reality

Ronald N. Giere

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/216300663_How_Models_Are_Used_to_Represent_Reality

Most recent philosophical thought about the scientific representation of the world has focused on dyadic relationships between language-like entities and the world, particularly the semantic relationships of reference and truth. Drawing inspiration from diverse sources, I argue that we should focus on the pragmatic activity of representing, so that the basic representational relationship has the form: Scientists use models to represent aspects of the world for specific purposes. Leaving aside the terms "law" and "theory," I distinguish principles, specific conditions, models, hypotheses, and generalizations. I argue that scientists use designated similarities between models and aspects of the world to form both hypotheses and generalizations.

@philipthrift. 

I fundamentally disagree. The premise underlying models is that they progressively approach a "true" discription of the external world. Do you really think the Earth-centered model of the solar system is equally true as our present understanding? AG 

The problem is not with physicist, but with physicalism. Then a huge technical problem is that the term “model” is used in opposite sense by physicists and logicians, and the sense of “model” used by logicians is technical and required some good understanding of what is a theory as considered in logic (basically a finite machine, actually).

Physics works well, but when confused with metaphysics, it leads to difficulties which should not even exists if people were more aware of the epistemology/ontology problem. That problem, when taken into account, destroys the physicalist hypothesis for any “reasonable theory of what is a qualia, or what can be a conscious first person confirmation of an event.

And the many-world confirms what we know already about the existence of all computations, and that no machine can self-localize itself in any singular computations. Here, many physicalist use an ontological commitment to hide the metaphysical technical difficulties, which are made precise when we assume Mechanism or even quite weak versions of it.

With mechanism, there is no philosophical problem, but a real technical problem: comparing the physics in the head of the machine with the physics observed, and thanks to the MW formulation of QM, it fits remarkably until now. It fits also formally, until now.

The problem of physicalism (not of physics) is that it requires a non-computationalist theory of mind, and there is none, except for vague statement like “consciousness collapse the wave” (debunked by many, notably Abner Shimony).

Bruno

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[Bruno Marchal]

On 15 Nov 2019, at 01:06, Alan Grayson <agrays...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Thursday, November 14, 2019 at 4:56:33 PM UTC-7, Alan Grayson wrote:

On Thursday, November 14, 2019 at 4:49:36 PM UTC-7, Philip Thrift wrote:

On Thursday, November 14, 2019 at 4:25:16 PM UTC-6, Alan Grayson wrote:

The problem with physics is physicists ! Yeah, that's my conclusion after many years of studying, arguing and reading. Many, perhaps most, attribute ontological character to what is epistemological; namely the wf. This leads to all kinds of conceptual errors, and ridiculous models and conjectures -- such as MW, particles being in two positions at the same time, radiioactive sources that are simultanously decayed and undecayed, and so forth. The wf gives us information about the state of a system and nothing more. Sorry to disappoint. AG

Physics is only models that come and go. One model (an expression in a language) can be replaced by another if it's useful. Physicists who jump from a model to an absolute statement about reality are out over their skis.

How Models Are Used to Represent Reality

Ronald N. Giere

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/216300663_How_Models_Are_Used_to_Represent_Reality

Most recent philosophical thought about the scientific representation of the world has focused on dyadic relationships between language-like entities and the world, particularly the semantic relationships of reference and truth. Drawing inspiration from diverse sources, I argue that we should focus on the pragmatic activity of representing, so that the basic representational relationship has the form: Scientists use models to represent aspects of the world for specific purposes. Leaving aside the terms "law" and "theory," I distinguish principles, specific conditions, models, hypotheses, and generalizations. I argue that scientists use designated similarities between models and aspects of the world to form both hypotheses and generalizations.

@philipthrift. 

I fundamentally disagree. The premise underlying models is that they progressively approach a "true" discription of the external world. Do you really think the Earth-centered model of the solar system is equally true as our present understanding? AG 

I notice you habitually avoid discussing the problem of ontological versus epistemological

That is the antic mind-body problem. It is nice that QM forces us to revisit it, and you are right, the reflex here is put put it under the rug, as we do in theology since 1500 years.

in the context of superposition and wf's. But this is where, IMO, the rubber hits the road for the fantasies which are so prevalent today. AG 

The mind-body problem domain is a root for many fantaisies. I guess humans needs a “solution” to get some sense in their life. The difficulty for applying reason here is that when we do that, the first thing to acknowledge is that we don’t know, and our theory of mind (mainly computer science) is still very young. Even there, people hides the “problem of matter” for long. 

The problem is psychological, cultural, social. We are still in the era where people confuse God and spacial theories of God. We are in the era of liars, I’m afraid.

Bruno

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[Bruno Marchal]

On 15 Nov 2019, at 01:23, Alan Grayson <agrays...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Thursday, November 14, 2019 at 5:20:59 PM UTC-7, Lawrence Crowell wrote:

On Thursday, November 14, 2019 at 4:25:16 PM UTC-6, Alan Grayson wrote:

The problem with physics is physicists ! Yeah, that's my conclusion after many years of studying, arguing and reading. Many, perhaps most, attribute ontological character to what is epistemological; namely the wf. This leads to all kinds of conceptual errors, and ridiculous models and conjectures -- such as MW, particles being in two positions at the same time, radiioactive sources that are simultanously decayed and undecayed, and so forth. The wf gives us information about the state of a system and nothing more. Sorry to disappoint. AG

As I see it the wave function is epistemological on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, but ontological on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Sundays. On Shabbat it is neither. 

LC 

On the days the wf is ontological, what does it look like? AG

Seen by whom? God? Or a creature itself described by the wave? Even this is not clear without some theory of how the observer’s mind relate to 3p descriptible notions. In QM, and in arithmetic, a part of a system can be much more complex than the system itself.

Bruno

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[Bruno Marchal]

On 15 Nov 2019, at 03:17, 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List <everyth...@googlegroups.com> wrote:

On 11/14/2019 5:48 PM, Alan Grayson wrote:

On Thursday, November 14, 2019 at 5:34:02 PM UTC-7, Brent wrote:

On 11/14/2019 4:20 PM, Alan Grayson wrote:

Newton is considered superior, not just because his theory was more accurate, but because it had a universal application.  The greatest importance of Newton was that he broke the idea that the heavens went by different rules than the Earth.  So "truth" per se is not the distinction.  As Bill can tell you astronomers have no problem with regarding the Earth as stationary and the Sun going around it.  But they use Newton's equations to determine how it goes.  It's convenience...not truth.

Bill's failing, as I recall, was the belief and insistence that he's always right. No astronomer of sound mind would regard the Earth as stationary and the Sun going around it. AG 

Not at all.  They do it all the time, because when it comes to aiming your telescope you do it relative to the Earth, not the Sun.

Brent

I was thinking of calculating the orbit of a planet. For stars apparently fixed on the celestial sphere, Earth centered calculations are convenient. AG

Which is the point.  There is no "true" center of the solar system, there are just more and less convenient coordinate systems in which to calculate things.  So you need to ask yourself what do you mean when you say it is more true that the Sun is the center of the solar system and the Earth orbits the Sun than the other way around?  If you're honest you will conclude that you mean it is easier to make good estimates of the future in that coordinate system.  Why is Einstein's gravity "truer" than Newton's.  Why is the quantum atom better than the Bohr atom?  Why is Darwinian theory better than Lamarckian.  The reason one scientific theory is better than another is three dimensional:

1. It gives more accurate predictions where the theories overlap and no emprically false ones.
2. It has a wider domain of application.  It applies in more places or over a bigger range of parameters.
3. It is consilient with our other best theories.  So it reduces the number of different things we must understand as independent.

A theory that is better on all three dimensions, we regard as truer.   Not the other way around: It is not the case that we judge it better because it's truer, because we don't, and can't, know where the truth is.

Complete agreement here. Good post. I apply this to all domain, including theology where such view are judged heretical by people who have enforced their theory by brutal force (the worst argument per authority!).

Bruno

Brent

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[Bruno Marchal]

On 15 Nov 2019, at 04:15, 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List <everyth...@googlegroups.com> wrote:

On 11/14/2019 6:30 PM, Alan Grayson wrote:

On Thursday, November 14, 2019 at 7:18:02 PM UTC-7, Brent wrote:

On 11/14/2019 5:48 PM, Alan Grayson wrote:

On Thursday, November 14, 2019 at 5:34:02 PM UTC-7, Brent wrote:

On 11/14/2019 4:20 PM, Alan Grayson wrote:

Newton is considered superior, not just because his theory was more accurate, but because it had a universal application.  The greatest importance of Newton was that he broke the idea that the heavens went by different rules than the Earth.  So "truth" per se is not the distinction.  As Bill can tell you astronomers have no problem with regarding the Earth as stationary and the Sun going around it.  But they use Newton's equations to determine how it goes.  It's convenience...not truth.

Bill's failing, as I recall, was the belief and insistence that he's always right. No astronomer of sound mind would regard the Earth as stationary and the Sun going around it. AG 

Not at all.  They do it all the time, because when it comes to aiming your telescope you do it relative to the Earth, not the Sun.

Brent

I was thinking of calculating the orbit of a planet. For stars apparently fixed on the celestial sphere, Earth centered calculations are convenient. AG

Which is the point.  There is no "true" center of the solar system, there are just more and less convenient coordinate systems in which to calculate things.  So you need to ask yourself what do you mean when you say it is more true that the Sun is the center of the solar system and the Earth orbits the Sun than the other way around?  If you're honest you will conclude that you mean it is easier to make good estimates of the future in that coordinate system.  Why is Einstein's gravity "truer" than Newton's.  Why is the quantum atom better than the Bohr atom?  Why is Darwinian theory better than Lamarckian.  The reason one scientific theory is better than another is three dimensional:

1. It gives more accurate predictions where the theories overlap and no emprically false ones.
2. It has a wider domain of application.  It applies in more places or over a bigger range of parameters.
3. It is consilient with our other best theories.  So it reduces the number of different things we must understand as independent.

A theory that is better on all three dimensions, we regard as truer.   Not the other way around: It is not the case that we judge it better because it's truer, because we don't, and can't, know where the truth is.

Brent

So when we see ~200 billion stars rotating around the galactic enter, it's equally true that each star can be regarded as the center, with everything rotating about itself.

Sure.  You know there's no 'center of the universe' in any current model.  For such a center to have any operational meaning would require that momentum not be conserved.

This is a form of relativity, let's call it the relativity of truth, that find obscures the value of evolving models in better describing the external world. AG

Except that still invites looking at it backwards; as though there is something called "the truth" but it's relative to what we know.  I'm saying that there is a concept of "truer" that has an operational meaning, but there is no operational meaning to "the truth" that we are approximating. 

Well, it is by definition the truth that we search.

The only meaning I can give "the truth" is the collection of propositions expressing the known empirical facts; but even those are ambiguous because every observation depends on some theories.   

So let us find a theory which do not depend on the observation, but still predict them accurately (of course). Mathematical physics is a step in that direction (and plays already an important role in physics), but for the absolute truth, a theory of mind is simpler, and some determine entirely what the physical reality lust look like.

Bruno

 

I've explicitly described how we define models as better ("truer") when we evolve them.  Do you have some other criterion?  Something involving what's true?

Brent

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[Philip Thrift]

On Monday, November 18, 2019 at 8:01:12 AM UTC-6, Bruno Marchal wrote:

Then a huge technical problem is that the term “model” is used in opposite sense by physicists and logicians, and the sense of “model” used by logicians is technical and required some good understanding of what is a theory as considered in logic (basically a finite machine, actually).

Bruno

I have thought about this almost 50 years, and have come to the conclusion that 'model' as used in physics to mean a mathematical formulation of a theory is correct, and that mathematical logicians should have never used that word for what they are using it for. It should be 'interpretation', 'semantics', or domain' instead.

So Peano axioms is a model of arithmetic, and is ℕ a possible interpretation (or semantics, or domain).

Mathematical logicians just goofed up, that's all.

@philipthrift

[Bruno Marchal]

On 15 Nov 2019, at 09:21, Philip Thrift <cloud...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Thursday, November 14, 2019 at 6:06:22 PM UTC-6, Alan Grayson wrote:

On Thursday, November 14, 2019 at 4:56:33 PM UTC-7, Alan Grayson wrote:

On Thursday, November 14, 2019 at 4:49:36 PM UTC-7, Philip Thrift wrote:

On Thursday, November 14, 2019 at 4:25:16 PM UTC-6, Alan Grayson wrote:

The problem with physics is physicists ! Yeah, that's my conclusion after many years of studying, arguing and reading. Many, perhaps most, attribute ontological character to what is epistemological; namely the wf. This leads to all kinds of conceptual errors, and ridiculous models and conjectures -- such as MW, particles being in two positions at the same time, radiioactive sources that are simultanously decayed and undecayed, and so forth. The wf gives us information about the state of a system and nothing more. Sorry to disappoint. AG

Physics is only models that come and go. One model (an expression in a language) can be replaced by another if it's useful. Physicists who jump from a model to an absolute statement about reality are out over their skis.

How Models Are Used to Represent Reality

Ronald N. Giere

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/216300663_How_Models_Are_Used_to_Represent_Reality

Most recent philosophical thought about the scientific representation of the world has focused on dyadic relationships between language-like entities and the world, particularly the semantic relationships of reference and truth. Drawing inspiration from diverse sources, I argue that we should focus on the pragmatic activity of representing, so that the basic representational relationship has the form: Scientists use models to represent aspects of the world for specific purposes. Leaving aside the terms "law" and "theory," I distinguish principles, specific conditions, models, hypotheses, and generalizations. I argue that scientists use designated similarities between models and aspects of the world to form both hypotheses and generalizations.

@philipthrift. 

I fundamentally disagree. The premise underlying models is that they progressively approach a "true" discription of the external world. Do you really think the Earth-centered model of the solar system is equally true as our present understanding? AG 

I notice you habitually avoid discussing the problem of ontological versus epistemological in the context of superposition and wf's. But this is where, IMO, the rubber hits the road for the fantasies which are so prevalent today. AG 

 

There is no "epistemology" without human-level consciousness,

Or without (Löbian) machines’ consciousness.

and quantum stuff happens without humans.

That is right, but it does not happen without machine’s consciousness. The wave is how machines predicts its more probable continuation coming from its necessary ignorance of which computations support them.

Where the epistemology stuff got into QM you have to ask that weird cult of physicists who got into that.

The problem is that if we assume a unique well defined physical universe, the epistemology of the observer acts on matter, and that is weird indeed, especially that it acts in a way violating physical realism and/or special relativity. No problem with the MW, which in the contrary confirms the simplest theory of mind (brain is a computer).

Bruno

@philipthrift

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[Bruno Marchal]

On 15 Nov 2019, at 11:02, 'scerir' via Everything List <everyth...@googlegroups.com> wrote:

Il 15 novembre 2019 alle 1.20 Lawrence Crowell <goldenfield...@gmail.com> ha scritto:

On Thursday, November 14, 2019 at 4:25:16 PM UTC-6, Alan Grayson wrote:

The problem with physics is physicists ! Yeah, that's my conclusion after many years of studying, arguing and reading. Many, perhaps most, attribute ontological character to what is epistemological; namely the wf. This leads to all kinds of conceptual errors, and ridiculous models and conjectures -- such as MW, particles being in two positions at the same time, radiioactive sources that are simultanously decayed and undecayed, and so forth. The wf gives us information about the state of a system and nothing more. Sorry to disappoint. AG

As I see it the wave function is epistemological on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, but ontological on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Sundays. On Shabbat it is neither. 

LC 

"Interpretations of quantum mechanics, unlike Gods, are not jealous, and thus it is safe to believe in more than one at the same time. So if the many-worlds interpretation makes it easier to think about the research you’re doing in April, and the Copenhagen interpretation makes it easier to think about the research you’re doing in June, the Copenhagen interpretation is not going to smite you for praying to the many-worlds interpretation. At least I hope it won’t, because otherwise I’m in big trouble." -Peter Shor

But you can’t have both interpretation absolutely true together, so this is just the instrumentalist position, which is not available in fundamental science, even if useful in practice. An architect can believe that Earth is flat, and still believe that Earth is round when he take a plane for her holiday. She will still have some image making this consistent (like Earth is a big ball, locally flat), and similarly, the metaphysician search a big picture which makes coherent its change of theory during the week. He has too, as it is its job. Then with mechanism, we get the “absolute truth”, indeed, each Turing universal theory will do the job. And physics is explained by the “theology of the machine”, indeed, the neoplatonist one recanted through the Church-Turing thesis works very well … until now. Unfortunately, it raises the old Platonic doubt about a PHYSICAL reality out there. It is in the mind of the universal machine, yet, with a testable quantum-like (already) statistics. We lust just do the experiences asked by the universal machine, and listed by the theorem prover of the self-referential sensible and intelligible “matter”. It fits well up to now, and do solve the epistemological vs ontological question.

Bruno

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[Bruno Marchal]

On 15 Nov 2019, at 11:04, Alan Grayson <agrays...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Friday, November 15, 2019 at 1:34:40 AM UTC-7, Philip Thrift wrote:

On Thursday, November 14, 2019 at 6:20:07 PM UTC-6, Alan Grayson wrote:

On Thursday, November 14, 2019 at 5:09:15 PM UTC-7, Brent wrote:

On 11/14/2019 3:56 PM, Alan Grayson wrote:

It's not as accurate because it's not as "true". If the Earth had approximately the same mass as the Sun, the most accurate model would be different. But that's not the reality. It's because the Sun is so much more massive than the Earth, that we use the Sun centered model. All models are not equal; some are truer than others. That was my point. AG

Did you ever read philosophy, I mean technically, even like SEP articles on things like truth?

  https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/truth/ 

I don't mean having taking formal courses in philosophy, but read something of a technical nature [ e.g. https://plato.stanford.edu/index.html ] on the subject.

  

Are you formulating your own theory of truth?

Some might call that BS, just winging it on their own.

(I cite articles written by well-known philosophers. Who do you cite?)

@philipthrift 

Those seeking a Theory of Everything implicitly believe in the possiblity that our models are progressing towards a description of the external world.

“External world” is ambiguous. Is the arithmetical reality an external world? If yes, I am OK.

Bruno

That's all I am saying. But I see getting lost in technical jargon about "truth" obscures this basic pov of most seeking it. AG 

 

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[Bruno Marchal]

On 15 Nov 2019, at 11:07, Alan Grayson <agrays...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Friday, November 15, 2019 at 3:02:57 AM UTC-7, scerir wrote:

Il 15 novembre 2019 alle 1.20 Lawrence Crowell <goldenfield...@gmail.com> ha scritto:

On Thursday, November 14, 2019 at 4:25:16 PM UTC-6, Alan Grayson wrote:

The problem with physics is physicists ! Yeah, that's my conclusion after many years of studying, arguing and reading. Many, perhaps most, attribute ontological character to what is epistemological; namely the wf. This leads to all kinds of conceptual errors, and ridiculous models and conjectures -- such as MW, particles being in two positions at the same time, radiioactive sources that are simultanously decayed and undecayed, and so forth. The wf gives us information about the state of a system and nothing more. Sorry to disappoint. AG

As I see it the wave function is epistemological on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, but ontological on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Sundays. On Shabbat it is neither. 

LC 

"Interpretations of quantum mechanics, unlike Gods, are not jealous, and thus it is safe to believe in more than one at the same time. So if the many-worlds interpretation makes it easier to think about the research you’re doing in April, and the Copenhagen interpretation makes it easier to think about the research you’re doing in June, the Copenhagen interpretation is not going to smite you for praying to the many-worlds interpretation. At least I hope it won’t, because otherwise I’m in big trouble." -Peter Shor

Friend; I sent you an email about a week ago.  As for the MWI, it fits what Nietzsche said about Plato; the great viaduct of corruption. AG

If you have a reference where Nietzsche said that, I’m interested. 

Of course I disagree. The Unique World Idea looks more like he Christian Sin of Pride, to me, and Plato created science by allowing himself to doubt the animal’s criterion of reality (I can smell, see, touch … it). That’s how both mathematics, physics, and eventually mathematical logic are born.

Bruno

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[Bruno Marchal]

On 15 Nov 2019, at 11:23, Philip Thrift <cloud...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Friday, November 15, 2019 at 4:02:57 AM UTC-6, scerir wrote:

Il 15 novembre 2019 alle 1.20 Lawrence Crowell <goldenfield...@gmail.com> ha scritto:

On Thursday, November 14, 2019 at 4:25:16 PM UTC-6, Alan Grayson wrote:

The problem with physics is physicists ! Yeah, that's my conclusion after many years of studying, arguing and reading. Many, perhaps most, attribute ontological character to what is epistemological; namely the wf. This leads to all kinds of conceptual errors, and ridiculous models and conjectures -- such as MW, particles being in two positions at the same time, radiioactive sources that are simultanously decayed and undecayed, and so forth. The wf gives us information about the state of a system and nothing more. Sorry to disappoint. AG

As I see it the wave function is epistemological on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, but ontological on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Sundays. On Shabbat it is neither. 

LC 

"Interpretations of quantum mechanics, unlike Gods, are not jealous, and thus it is safe to believe in more than one at the same time. So if the many-worlds interpretation makes it easier to think about the research you’re doing in April, and the Copenhagen interpretation makes it easier to think about the research you’re doing in June, the Copenhagen interpretation is not going to smite you for praying to the many-worlds interpretation. At least I hope it won’t, because otherwise I’m in big trouble." -Peter Shor

His (Peter Shor @PeterShor1 Discovered Shor's algorithm for prime factorization on quantum computers) algorithm is very clever, but it's bizarre that a quantum "interpretation" is to some either Many Worlds or "Copenhagen”.

The wave/matrix formalism works quite well. Then either the wave collapse, or it does not.

Bruno

@philipthrift

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[Bruno Marchal]

On 15 Nov 2019, at 22:05, John Clark <johnk...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Thu, Nov 14, 2019 at 10:27 PM Alan Grayson <agrays...@gmail.com> wrote:

> I notice you habitually avoid discussing the problem of ontological versus epistemological 

It is a ontological fact that Bell's inequality is violated and there is no epistemological explanation for that fact.

It is (almost, not yet completely) explained by Mechanism, and its many arithmetical computations.

You keep wanting a mental picture of the quantum world that conforms with your common sense everyday expectations of how things should work, I'd like that too but our wish will never be granted. I like Many Worlds because although it's very bizarre it's the least bizarre quantum interpretation that fits the hyper bizarre facts; but the universe doesn't care what I think is strange so if it turns out Many Worlds is not true then we would know that something even stranger is.

Yes, indeed. We know that Mechanism has to be false, and that consciousness acts on matter, even FTL.

Bruno

 John K Clark

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[Bruno Marchal]

On 16 Nov 2019, at 02:51, Lawrence Crowell <goldenfield...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Friday, November 15, 2019 at 3:06:08 PM UTC-6, John Clark wrote:

On Thu, Nov 14, 2019 at 10:27 PM Alan Grayson <agrays...@gmail.com> wrote:

> I notice you habitually avoid discussing the problem of ontological versus epistemological 

It is a ontological fact that Bell's inequality is violated and there is no epistemological explanation for that fact. You keep wanting a mental picture of the quantum world that conforms with your common sense everyday expectations of how things should work, I'd like that too but our wish will never be granted. I like Many Worlds because although it's very bizarre it's the least bizarre quantum interpretation that fits the hyper bizarre facts; but the universe doesn't care what I think is strange so if it turns out Many Worlds is not true then we would know that something even stranger is.

 John K Clark

There is no decision procedure to determine if QM is ψ-epistemic or ψ-ontic. It is not provable either way.

Testing Z1* or X1*, or even just S4Grz1 would be enough to see if QM is Turing-epistemic or not. The test done so far confirms it Turing-epistemic character.

Bruno

LC

 

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[Bruno Marchal]

On 16 Nov 2019, at 04:49, Alan Grayson <agrays...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Friday, November 15, 2019 at 6:51:45 PM UTC-7, Lawrence Crowell wrote:

On Friday, November 15, 2019 at 3:06:08 PM UTC-6, John Clark wrote:

On Thu, Nov 14, 2019 at 10:27 PM Alan Grayson <agrays...@gmail.com> wrote:

> I notice you habitually avoid discussing the problem of ontological versus epistemological 

It is a ontological fact that Bell's inequality is violated and there is no epistemological explanation for that fact. You keep wanting a mental picture of the quantum world that conforms with your common sense everyday expectations of how things should work, I'd like that too but our wish will never be granted. I like Many Worlds because although it's very bizarre it's the least bizarre quantum interpretation that fits the hyper bizarre facts; but the universe doesn't care what I think is strange so if it turns out Many Worlds is not true then we would know that something even stranger is.

 John K Clark

There is no decision procedure to determine if QM is ψ-epistemic or ψ-ontic. It is not provable either way.

LC

Occam's Razor. AG 

Occam razor definitely sides with the MW, and even more with the many-epistemic worlds/histories implied by the mechanist hypothesis. Compare:

Copenhague: Unintelligible dualist theory of mind + the wave

Everett: Mechanist theory of mind + the wave

Mechanism (well-understood!): mechanist theory of mind.

Mechanism win, by Occam razor, as it uses a simple natural assumption, already used by Darwin, and just pushed it at its extreme logical consequence.

Bruno

 

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[Brent Meeker]

You avoided the point that when you get a measurement result to you change something.  You denied it was knowledge.  So what is it?

Brent

[Brent Meeker]

On 11/18/2019 7:03 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
> Testing Z1* or X1*, or even just S4Grz1 would be enough to see if QM
> is Turing-epistemic or not. The test done so far confirms it
> Turing-epistemic character.

What does "Turing-epistemic" mean?

Brent

[John Clark]

On Sun, Nov 17, 2019 at 7:43 AM Philip Thrift <cloud...@gmail.com> wrote:

> Adrian Kent's https://arxiv.org/abs/1305.6565 "real path quantum theory" RPQT

If you fire electrons at 2 slits and observe the slits then each electron takes a real path through one and only one slit and no interference pattern is produced.  If you fire electrons at 2 slits and do NOT observe the slits then a interference pattern is produced indicating that each electron went through both slits. Thus real path quantum theory needs 2 sets of physical laws, one for when things are observed and one when they are not. Many Worlds only needs one set of physical laws, and one set is more parsimonious than two. And if everything that can happen does happen then unlike its competition Many Worlds doesn't have to explain exactly what a "observation" is or worry about the true nature of consciousness because it has nothing to do with it.

John K Clark  

[Alan Grayson]

You're hopelessly deluded. AG 

[Brent Meeker]

On 11/18/2019 12:20 PM, Alan Grayson wrote:

On Monday, November 18, 2019 at 1:16:46 PM UTC-7, John Clark wrote:

On Sun, Nov 17, 2019 at 7:43 AM Philip Thrift <cloud...@gmail.com> wrote:

> Adrian Kent's https://arxiv.org/abs/1305.6565 "real path quantum theory" RPQT

If you fire electrons at 2 slits and observe the slits then each electron takes a real path through one and only one slit and no interference pattern is produced.  If you fire electrons at 2 slits and do NOT observe the slits then a interference pattern is produced indicating that each electron went through both slits. Thus real path quantum theory needs 2 sets of physical laws, one for when things are observed and one when they are not. Many Worlds only needs one set of physical laws, and one set is more parsimonious than two.

That's what the evangelists for MWI say.  But in fact some more stuff is needed to explain why we see the world as we do, i.e. how probability comes into it and why is there a preferred basis.  Maybe this more stuff can be derived from Schroedinger's equation, but even to do so seems to require additional assumptions.

Brent

And if everything that can happen does happen then unlike its competition Many Worlds doesn't have to explain exactly what a "observation" is or worry about the true nature of consciousness because it has nothing to do with it.

John K Clark  

You're hopelessly deluded. AG 

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[Philip Thrift]

There is no measurement.

How then does the path-integral [theory of quantal histories, without ever needing to call on state-vectors, measurements, or external agents as fundamental notions] offer an alternative to the textbook formalism of state-vectors, Hamiltonians, and external observers? A first answer is that from the path integral one can derive a functional μ_quantum -- the quantal measure -- which directly furnishes the probability of any desired "instrument-event" E. (This measure is closely related to the so called decoherence functional.) In saying this, I am presupposing that the Born rule (or rule of thumb!) is correct, and then just taking note of the fact that the Bornian probabilities for any specified set of "pointer readings" are furnished directly by μ_quantum, without any appeal to Schroedinger evolution of the wave-function or its "collapse" during the measurement. In this way μ_quantum is analogous to the classical measure μ_classical that furnishes the probability of a set of histories -- an "event" -- in the case of a purely classical stochastic process like diffusion or Brownian motion. If one construes the path-integral in this way, namely as a generalized measure on a space of "histories", then one sees not only how quantal processes differ from classical stochastic processes, but also how closely the two resemble each other, the primary difference being simply that μ_classical and μ_quantum satisfy different sum-rules.

https://www.perimeterinstitute.ca/people/rafael-sorkin

@philipthrift 

[Brent Meeker]

In using path integrals you arrive a probabilities for various possible outcomes.  But that's not the end of the science.  You also observe/measure/experience some particular outcome.  And then you compute future path integrals starting from the observed state...using the observed state implies you went from a state of uncertainty expressed by probabilities to a state of certainty regarding the new state....aka using knowledge.

Brent

[John Clark]

On Mon, Nov 18, 2019 at 4:14 PM 'Brent Meeker' via <everyth...@googlegroups.com> wrote:

>> If you fire electrons at 2 slits and observe the slits then each electron takes a real path through one and only one slit and no interference pattern is produced.  If you fire electrons at 2 slits and do NOT observe the slits then a interference pattern is produced indicating that each electron went through both slits. Thus real path quantum theory needs 2 sets of physical laws, one for when things are observed and one when they are not. Many Worlds only needs one set of physical laws, and one set is more parsimonious than two.

> That's what the evangelists for MWI say. 

I think "evangelists" is unfair. Even the most ardent fan doesn't say we know for certain the MWI is true, they just say it's the least crazy idea that anybody has so far thought of that explains the crazy experimental facts, and they readily admit it's possible the problem is just that nobody has thought hard enough yet. And they certainly don't say anybody who disagrees with the MWI will be eternally tortured as the loving Christian God constantly threatens to do to those who don't believe in Him.

 

> But in fact some more stuff is needed to explain why we see the world as we do, i.e. how probability comes into it

If the Schrödinger equation really means what it says and everything that can happen does happen then probability would have to come into it when answering the question "What will a being that remembers being Brent Meeke today see tomorrow?".

> Maybe this more stuff can be derived from Schroedinger's equation, but even to do so seems to require additional assumptions.

Additional assumptions are needed only if you insist on getting rid of those other worlds, just as you can get a theory that very accurately predicts how the planets move in the night sky even though the theory has the Earth at the center and the sun and all the planets moving around it, you just have to assume lots and lots of epicycles. But the Copernicus theory won because it was more parsimonious in its assumptions. Hugh Everett's genius wasn't that he added something new to Quantum Mechanics, his genius was in getting rid of useless junk.

John K Clark

 

[Bruce Kellett]

On Tue, Nov 19, 2019 at 10:24 AM John Clark <johnk...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Mon, Nov 18, 2019 at 4:14 PM 'Brent Meeker' via <everyth...@googlegroups.com> wrote:

>> If you fire electrons at 2 slits and observe the slits then each electron takes a real path through one and only one slit and no interference pattern is produced.  If you fire electrons at 2 slits and do NOT observe the slits then a interference pattern is produced indicating that each electron went through both slits. Thus real path quantum theory needs 2 sets of physical laws, one for when things are observed and one when they are not. Many Worlds only needs one set of physical laws, and one set is more parsimonious than two.

> That's what the evangelists for MWI say. 

I think "evangelists" is unfair. Even the most ardent fan doesn't say we know for certain the MWI is true, they just say it's the least crazy idea that anybody has so far thought of that explains the crazy experimental facts, and they readily admit it's possible the problem is just that nobody has thought hard enough yet. And they certainly don't say anybody who disagrees with the MWI will be eternally tortured as the loving Christian God constantly threatens to do to those who don't believe in Him.

 

> But in fact some more stuff is needed to explain why we see the world as we do, i.e. how probability comes into it

If the Schrödinger equation really means what it says and everything that can happen does happen

The Schroedinger equation says nothing of the sort.. Only things that are nomologically possible given your particular initial conditions can happen. And that rules out things like "there is a copy of me that turns left whenever I turn right....".

 

then probability would have to come into it when answering the question "What will a being that remembers being Brent Meeke today see tomorrow?".

> Maybe this more stuff can be derived from Schroedinger's equation, but even to do so seems to require additional assumptions.

Additional assumptions are needed only if you insist on getting rid of those other worlds,

Additional assumptions are needed if you want to make sense of questions like" "What will a being that remembers being John Clark today see tomorrow."

just as you can get a theory that very accurately predicts how the planets move in the night sky even though the theory has the Earth at the center and the sun and all the planets moving around it, you just have to assume lots and lots of epicycles. But the Copernicus theory won because it was more parsimonious in its assumptions. Hugh Everett's genius wasn't that he added something new to Quantum Mechanics, his genius was in getting rid of useless junk.

And he was something of an idiot because he did not see that you could not get probabilities out of a deterministic theory without adding something extra.

Bruce

[Philip Thrift]

On Monday, November 18, 2019 at 3:48:35 PM UTC-6, Brent wrote:

In using path integrals you arrive a probabilities for various possible outcomes.  But that's not the end of the science.  You also observe/measure/experience some particular outcome.  And then you compute future path integrals starting from the observed state...using the observed state implies you went from a state of uncertainty expressed by probabilities to a state of certainty regarding the new state....aka using knowledge.

Brent

Knowledge is something having to do with human brains ("knowing"), and when they became the "engines" of speaking and writing, then knowledge could be communicated between intelligent beings. (Perhaps other primates too are knowledge-able, but that's debatable.)

Now it seems to me that in the first few billion years at least of the universe (after the Big Bang) there were no knowledge-able beings, There hadn't been time for them to evolve anywhere.

But during that time quantum processes (and chemical, and at least somewhere at some point biological precesses) were going along fine without any knowledge-able beings exiting, and thus there was no knowledge changing" -- because there was no knowledge during that time.

So how is knowledge needed as a concept in any way in QM when QM processes were occurring in the universe fine before knowledge existed?

Whoever put "knowledge: in QM screwed up.

@philipthrift

[Brent Meeker]

On 11/18/2019 3:23 PM, John Clark wrote:

On Mon, Nov 18, 2019 at 4:14 PM 'Brent Meeker' via <everyth...@googlegroups.com> wrote:

>> If you fire electrons at 2 slits and observe the slits then each electron takes a real path through one and only one slit and no interference pattern is produced.  If you fire electrons at 2 slits and do NOT observe the slits then a interference pattern is produced indicating that each electron went through both slits. Thus real path quantum theory needs 2 sets of physical laws, one for when things are observed and one when they are not. Many Worlds only needs one set of physical laws, and one set is more parsimonious than two.

> That's what the evangelists for MWI say. 

I think "evangelists" is unfair. Even the most ardent fan doesn't say we know for certain the MWI is true, they just say it's the least crazy idea that anybody has so far thought of that explains the crazy experimental facts, and they readily admit it's possible the problem is just that nobody has thought hard enough yet. And they certainly don't say anybody who disagrees with the MWI will be eternally tortured as the loving Christian God constantly threatens to do to those who don't believe in Him.

 

> But in fact some more stuff is needed to explain why we see the world as we do, i.e. how probability comes into it

If the Schrödinger equation really means what it says and everything that can happen does happen then probability would have to come into it when answering the question "What will a being that remembers being Brent Meeke today see tomorrow?".

> Maybe this more stuff can be derived from Schroedinger's equation, but even to do so seems to require additional assumptions.

Additional assumptions are needed only if you insist on getting rid of those other worlds,

No. Not just get rid of additional worlds, even to explain how different possibilities, which all happen, come to have probabilities (in the operational frequentist) sense as specified by the Born rule.  And also to explain why we can only measure and see the variables we do, instead of vector sums of them in Hilbert space, i.e. "the preferred basis problem".

just as you can get a theory that very accurately predicts how the planets move in the night sky even though the theory has the Earth at the center and the sun and all the planets moving around it, you just have to assume lots and lots of epicycles.

Or you compute their motion relative to the mass center and then transform to Earth-centric (that's the popular method).

But the Copernicus theory won because it was more parsimonious in its assumptions. Hugh Everett's genius wasn't that he added something new to Quantum Mechanics, his genius was in getting rid of useless junk.

But did he get rid of it by postulating things just as questionable as Bohr's insistence that we had to assume a classical world in order to have objective records and do science.

Brent

John K Clark

 

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[Brent Meeker]

You're dodging the question like you're running for office on the know-nothing ticket.

I've already asked all the way I can think of what it is that causes you to change your estimate of the future evolution of a quantum system when you measure it.  I've concluded you have no knowledge of this process.

Brent

[Daniel Fischer]

The sophistication of how to use knowledge is arguable to no end. But for reasons of fascination you may thread two wires between knowledge and consciousness. The more conscious an entity is, the more it can observe and reflect upon its environment and use knowledge to pursue its fundamental goal (stay conscious). 

Given every bit of the universe from the Big Bang to where we are now, you can weave these two threads between various forms of self-organizing matter with varying levels of knowledge or sophistication building layers upon layers. All in order to ensure a state of continuity is achieved by ever lasting consciousness being pushed out into higher life forms reaching greater and greater knowledge, and consciousness, or you may call it novelty. 

It’s not so much life wants to exist, it’s that consciousness wants to exist and keeps evolving into higher forms of complexity and in order to exist must create various supporting systems that we understand as the observable universe. 

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[John Clark]

On Mon, Nov 18, 2019 at 6:48 PM Bruce Kellett <bhkel...@gmail.com> wrote:

>> If the Schrödinger equation really means what it says and everything that can happen does happen

> The Schroedinger equation says nothing of the sort.. Only things that are nomologically possible given your particular initial conditions can happen.

Or to say the exact same thing with different words, everything that can happen does happen.

> And that rules out things like "there is a copy of me that turns left whenever I turn right....".

That would be true only if you assume the wave function collapses, and Schrödinger says absolutely nothing about that, it was tacked on by people who wanted only one world.

 

>> Additional assumptions are needed only if you insist on getting rid of those other worlds,

> Additional assumptions are needed if you want to make sense of questions like" "What will a being that remembers being John Clark today see tomorrow."

Like what?

>> Hugh Everett's genius wasn't that he added something new to Quantum Mechanics, his genius was in getting rid of useless junk.

> And he was something of an idiot because he did not see that you could not get probabilities out of a deterministic theory 

You can if the theory is deterministic but not realistic as Many Worlds is, that is to say if a deterministic interaction between 2 particles always produces more than one outcome.

John K Clark

[Philip Thrift]

You are dodging the question:

Was there any knowledge to be changed (or updated) - or  my "knowledge of this process" - or "my estimate of the future evolution of a quantum process" - anywhere in he universe 10 billion years ago?

Knowledge (changing/updating knowledge) in any way whatsoever is completely irrelevant to anything in quantum mechanics.

That;s been stated at least 100 times, and that that was stated 20 years ago on Vic's Atoms and Void. You keep objecting. OK. We get it.

@philipthrift

[Philip Thrift]

On Tuesday, November 19, 2019 at 1:48:50 AM UTC-6, John Clark wrote:

Schrödinger says absolutely nothing about [wave function collapse, it was tacked on by people who wanted only one world.

 

John K Clark

True about Schrödinger, but there are one world formulations in which there is no wave function collapse, or no wave function at all to begin with.

@philipthrift

[scerir]

True about Schrödinger, but there are one world formulations in which there is no wave function collapse, or no wave function at all to begin with.

@philipthrift

“The idea that they [measurement outcomes] be not alternatives but all really happen simultaneously seems lunatic to him [the quantum theorist], just impossible. He thinks that if the laws of nature took this form for, let me say, a quarter of an hour, we should find our surroundings rapidly turning into a quagmire, or sort of a featureless jelly or plasma, all contours becoming blurred, we ourselves probably becoming jelly fish. It is strange that he should believe this. For I understand he grants that unobserved nature does behave this way – namely according to the wave equation. The aforesaid alternatives come into play only when we make an observation - which need, of course, not be a scientific observation. Still it would seem that, according to the quantum theorist, nature is prevented from rapid jellification only by our perceiving or observing it. [........] The compulsion to replace the simultaneous happenings, as indicated directly by the theory, by alternatives, of which the theory is supposed to indicate the respective probabilities, arises from the conviction that what we really observe are particles - that actual events always concern particles, not waves."
-Erwin Schroedinger, The Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics. Dublin Seminars (1949-1955) and Other Unpublished Essays (Ox Bow Press, Woodbridge, Connecticut, 1995), pages 19-20.

[Philip Thrift]

Yes, I should add:

True about Schrödinger, but there are one world formulations in which there is no wave function collapse, or no wave function -- and no observers -- at all to begin with.

@philipthrift 

[Bruce Kellett]

On Tue, Nov 19, 2019 at 6:48 PM John Clark <johnk...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Mon, Nov 18, 2019 at 6:48 PM Bruce Kellett <bhkel...@gmail.com> wrote:

>> If the Schrödinger equation really means what it says and everything that can happen does happen

> The Schroedinger equation says nothing of the sort.. Only things that are nomologically possible given your particular initial conditions can happen.

Or to say the exact same thing with different words, everything that can happen does happen.

Hmmm! You have to be careful that you are not just saying the hat happens, happens! If there is a world in which I turn left, there is no necessity for there to be a world in which a copy of me turns left at that moment.

> And that rules out things like "there is a copy of me that turns left whenever I turn right....".

That would be true only if you assume the wave function collapses, and Schrödinger says absolutely nothing about that, it was tacked on by people who wanted only one world.

Nothing to do with collapse. Why is it that you many-worlds advocates always accuse someone who opposes you of assuming some collapse? Rubbish, it assumes no such thing.

>> Additional assumptions are needed only if you insist on getting rid of those other worlds,

> Additional assumptions are needed if you want to make sense of questions like" "What will a being that remembers being John Clark today see tomorrow."

Like what?

That beings like John Clark, with identifiable characteristics, actually exist at all.

>> Hugh Everett's genius wasn't that he added something new to Quantum Mechanics, his genius was in getting rid of useless junk.

> And he was something of an idiot because he did not see that you could not get probabilities out of a deterministic theory 

You can if the theory is deterministic but not realistic as Many Worlds is, that is to say if a deterministic interaction between 2 particles always produces more than one outcome.

Actually, I thought one of the attractions of the many worlds theory was that it was realistic -- in the sense that the wave function really exists a a physical object, and that all possibilities contained in that equation are realized. How much more realistic do you want?

Nevertheless, the SWE does not give a probability without some further assumptions. Why do you think that MWI advocates spend so much time an effort trying to derive the Born rule? You cannot get probabilities from the Schroedinger equation without some additional assumptions.

Bruce

[Bruno Marchal]

On 18 Nov 2019, at 15:28, Philip Thrift <cloud...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Monday, November 18, 2019 at 8:01:12 AM UTC-6, Bruno Marchal wrote:

Then a huge technical problem is that the term “model” is used in opposite sense by physicists and logicians, and the sense of “model” used by logicians is technical and required some good understanding of what is a theory as considered in logic (basically a finite machine, actually).

Bruno

I have thought about this almost 50 years, and have come to the conclusion that 'model' as used in physics to mean a mathematical formulation of a theory is correct, and that mathematical logicians should have never used that word for what they are using it for. It should be 'interpretation', 'semantics', or domain' instead.

So Peano axioms is a model of arithmetic, and is ℕ a possible interpretation (or semantics, or domain).

Usually the domain is the set from which the model is built. N is the domain, But the Model is the whole structure set (N, 0, +, *). The interpretation is the function going from the syntactic symbol to diverse object or construction made on the domain.

In some more vague context, we can use “interpretation”, “semantic” and “model” as quasi synonym. The term “domain” has acquired a more technical sense in the theory of domain by Scott, but very often is used to described the set used in the model.

Logicians use “model" like painters. The naked model is the reality, and the painting is the syntax or theory pointing to that reality. Physicists use model, like in Toy model, a simplification, or a theory, and is used most of the time as both a theory or its interpretation (taken for granted most of the time, although this has evolved a little bit, notably through the difficulties to interpret QM).

Mathematical logicians just goofed up, that's all.

Logic is mainly the study of proof theory, model theory, and the relations between both. “Model” has acquired a technical meaning. I think the term has been introduced by Löwenheim, probably in his "cornerstone paper” on this subject “Über Möglichkeiten im Relativkalkül” (“On Possibility In the Relative Calculus” in German). 

A good interesting book on the birth of Model Theory is the book by Calixto Badesa: “The Birth of Model Theory”, 2004, Princeton University Press (translated from Spanish).

Bruno

@philipthrift

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[Bruno Marchal]

It means “epistemic” with an emphasis on the fact that the subject is any universal machine/number, not just the humans. It is epistemic in the sense of the Theaetetus, with “rational opinion” replaced by Gödel’s arithmetical predicate of provability.

Bruno


>
> Brent

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[Bruno Marchal]

On 18 Nov 2019, at 22:14, 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List <everyth...@googlegroups.com> wrote:

On 11/18/2019 12:20 PM, Alan Grayson wrote:

On Monday, November 18, 2019 at 1:16:46 PM UTC-7, John Clark wrote:

On Sun, Nov 17, 2019 at 7:43 AM Philip Thrift <cloud...@gmail.com> wrote:

> Adrian Kent's https://arxiv.org/abs/1305.6565 "real path quantum theory" RPQT

If you fire electrons at 2 slits and observe the slits then each electron takes a real path through one and only one slit and no interference pattern is produced.  If you fire electrons at 2 slits and do NOT observe the slits then a interference pattern is produced indicating that each electron went through both slits. Thus real path quantum theory needs 2 sets of physical laws, one for when things are observed and one when they are not. Many Worlds only needs one set of physical laws, and one set is more parsimonious than two.

That's what the evangelists for MWI say.  But in fact some more stuff is needed to explain why we see the world as we do, i.e. how probability comes into it and why is there a preferred basis.  Maybe this more stuff can be derived from Schroedinger's equation, but even to do so seems to require additional assumptions.

With mechanism: it requires *less* assumptions. Any physics accepting the mechanist theory of mind must explain the physical appearance from a measure on all (relative) computations. The math required for doing this requires more axioms (like the distribution of prime number studies seems to require analytical axioms). That is normal, given incompleteness.

Bruno

Brent

And if everything that can happen does happen then unlike its competition Many Worlds doesn't have to explain exactly what a "observation" is or worry about the true nature of consciousness because it has nothing to do with it.

John K Clark  

You're hopelessly deluded. AG 

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[John Clark]

On Tue, Nov 19, 2019 at 5:26 AM Bruce Kellett <bhkel...@gmail.com> wrote:

>>> Only things that are nomologically possible given your particular initial conditions can happen.

>> Or to say the exact same thing with different words, everything that can happen does happen.

> Hmmm! You have to be careful that you are not just saying the hat happens, happens!

Anything that does not violate the laws of physics, particularly quantum physics, can happen. If you fire a electron at 2 slits observing it going through the left slit would be OK with Schrodinger's equation, and so would observing it going through the right slit, and if you don't observe the slits at all it would be OK with Schrodinger's equation to deduce from the resulting interference pattern that the single electron went through both slits. Yes that is absolutely ridiculous but don't blame me, blame God.   

>>> And that rules out things like "there is a copy of me that turns left whenever I turn right....".

>> That would be true only if you assume the wave function collapses, and Schrödinger says absolutely nothing about that, it was tacked on by people who wanted only one world.

> Nothing to do with collapse.

It has everything to do with collapse. Copenhagen people say when the electron hits the photographic plate the wave function collapses and the electron makes up its mind where it is and assumes a discreet position, and that's why it makes a sharp spot and not a big smudge on the plate. Many Worlds people say otherwise, not because they enjoy being contrary but because they don't know how else to explain the bizarre results of the 2 slit exparament.  

> Why is it that you many-worlds advocates always accuse someone who opposes you of assuming some collapse? Rubbish, it assumes no such thing.

If the wave function collapses then an evolving quantum object, such as yourself, will be in one and only one state tomorrow.  If the wave function does NOT collapse then you won't be ( "you" being defined as anything that remembers being Bruce Kellett today).

>>> Additional assumptions are needed if you want to make sense of questions like" "What will a being that remembers being John Clark today see tomorrow."

>> Like what?

> That beings like John Clark, with identifiable characteristics, actually exist at all.

The only assumption is that the Schrodinger equation means what it says, and it says nothing about it collapsing. You can add extra terms to the equation and make it collapse but Occam would not approve, those additional mathematical complexities do not improve predictions one bit, they do nothing but get rid of those other worlds.

 

>>> he [Everett] was something of an idiot because he did not see that you could not get probabilities out of a deterministic theory 

>> You can if the theory is deterministic but not realistic as Many Worlds is, that is to say if a deterministic interaction between 2 particles always produces more than one outcome.

> Actually, I thought one of the attractions of the many worlds theory was that it was realistic -- in the sense that the wave function really exists a a physical object,

I don't know where in the world you got that idea. Even probability is pretty abstract but you don't even get that until you take the square of the absolute value of the wave function, which contains imaginary numbers by the way. How much more different from a physical object do you want?

 

> How much more realistic do you want?

It would need one hell of a lot more to be realistic! A theory is realistic if it says a particle is in one and only one definite state both before and after an interaction even if it has not been observed. Many Worlds is about as far from that as you can get.

> Nevertheless, the SWE does not give a probability without some further assumptions. Why do you think that MWI advocates spend so much time an effort trying to derive the Born rule? You cannot get probabilities from the Schroedinger equation without some additional assumptions.

Irrelevant for this discussion because EVERY quantum interpretation assumes the Born Rule. I don't claim the MWI can solve every quantum problem but it can solve one, the mystery of the observer, and it is at least the equal of the other interpretations in explaining the other mysteries. In other words the Many Worlds Interpretation is the least bad idea anybody has come up with over the last century to explain the weird nature of the quantum world.

John K Clark

[Bruno Marchal]

On 19 Nov 2019, at 01:33, Philip Thrift <cloud...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Monday, November 18, 2019 at 3:48:35 PM UTC-6, Brent wrote:

In using path integrals you arrive a probabilities for various possible outcomes.  But that's not the end of the science.  You also observe/measure/experience some particular outcome.  And then you compute future path integrals starting from the observed state...using the observed state implies you went from a state of uncertainty expressed by probabilities to a state of certainty regarding the new state....aka using knowledge.

Brent

Knowledge is something having to do with human brains ("knowing"), and when they became the "engines" of speaking and writing, then knowledge could be communicated between intelligent beings. (Perhaps other primates too are knowledge-able, but that's debatable.)

If it is communicated through words, what is communicated is only a belief, which might be true (and in that case it is a knowledge, but only a belief has been communicated. 

This is a small nuance which has a big importance for understanding how the laws of the observable have top emerge from a statistics on all relative computations. Knowledge is something private, and is not communicable *as such*.

Now it seems to me that in the first few billion years at least of the universe (after the Big Bang) there were no knowledge-able beings, There hadn't been time for them to evolve anywhere.

But during that time quantum processes (and chemical, and at least somewhere at some point biological precesses) were going along fine without any knowledge-able beings exiting, and thus there was no knowledge changing" -- because there was no knowledge during that time.

So how is knowledge needed as a concept in any way in QM when QM processes were occurring in the universe fine before knowledge existed?

Whoever put "knowledge: in QM screwed up.

You can blame the “unique-worlders” who added to QM the wave-collapse axiom, which makes sense in Nature only if it is done by consciousness. But then they need a non computational theory of mind (which will required some actual infinities in Nature, etc.).

Without wave-collapse axiom, the superposition are there for ever, and are contagious to anything interacting or not with them. QM (that is the SWE) explains why a machine with memory will memorise only one particular outcome when interacting with a superposition. This SWE explains entirely why the machine will at first believe in some collapse, and then understand that it does not need it, which simplify a lot the theory.

Bruno

@philipthrift

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[Bruno Marchal]

Right. And with Mechanism that “one world” is the arithmetical combinatory algebra, or anything Turing equivalent to it. The physical world is retrieved from the observable phenomenology of the universal machine. The Löbian machine (which already know that they are universal) already know this.

Bruno

@philipthrift

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[Philip Thrift]

On Tuesday, November 19, 2019 at 8:46:18 AM UTC-6, Bruno Marchal wrote:

On 18 Nov 2019, at 15:28, Philip Thrift <cloud...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Monday, November 18, 2019 at 8:01:12 AM UTC-6, Bruno Marchal wrote:

Then a huge technical problem is that the term “model” is used in opposite sense by physicists and logicians, and the sense of “model” used by logicians is technical and required some good understanding of what is a theory as considered in logic (basically a finite machine, actually).

Bruno

I have thought about this almost 50 years, and have come to the conclusion that 'model' as used in physics to mean a mathematical formulation of a theory is correct, and that mathematical logicians should have never used that word for what they are using it for. It should be 'interpretation', 'semantics', or domain' instead.

So Peano axioms is a model of arithmetic, and is ℕ a possible interpretation (or semantics, or domain).

Usually the domain is the set from which the model is built. N is the domain, But the Model is the whole structure set (N, 0, +, *). The interpretation is the function going from the syntactic symbol to diverse object or construction made on the domain.

In some more vague context, we can use “interpretation”, “semantic” and “model” as quasi synonym. The term “domain” has acquired a more technical sense in the theory of domain by Scott, but very often is used to described the set used in the model.

Logicians use “model" like painters. The naked model is the reality, and the painting is the syntax or theory pointing to that reality. Physicists use model, like in Toy model, a simplification, or a theory, and is used most of the time as both a theory or its interpretation (taken for granted most of the time, although this has evolved a little bit, notably through the difficulties to interpret QM).

Mathematical logicians just goofed up, that's all.

Logic is mainly the study of proof theory, model theory, and the relations between both. “Model” has acquired a technical meaning. I think the term has been introduced by Löwenheim, probably in his "cornerstone paper” on this subject “Über Möglichkeiten im Relativkalkül” (“On Possibility In the Relative Calculus” in German). 

A good interesting book on the birth of Model Theory is the book by Calixto Badesa: “The Birth of Model Theory”, 2004, Princeton University Press (translated from Spanish).

Bruno

The transition from syntax to semantics is not not as clean as may be thought, but there is mathematical logic and programming language theory and theorem proving systems, each with some different perspective and vocabularies. 

In my own formulation 

   Program

   Language

   Translation

   Object

   Substrate

I could identify Substrate with Model (in the mathematical logic sense).

@philipthrift

[John Clark]

On Tue, Nov 19, 2019 at 3:59 AM Philip Thrift <cloud...@gmail.com> wrote:

>> Schrödinger says absolutely nothing about [wave function collapse, it was tacked on by people who wanted only one world.

 

> True about Schrödinger, but there are one world formulations in which there is no wave function collapse, or no wave function at all to begin with.

It has been proven that Schrödinger's Wave Equation and Heisenberg's Matrix Mechanics are mathematically equivalent, what is true for one is true for the other and which you use is entirely a matter of taste. Most prefer Schrödinger  because most of the time it's easier to use.

John K Clark

[Brent Meeker]

On 11/19/2019 12:30 AM, Philip Thrift wrote:

On Monday, November 18, 2019 at 6:50:38 PM UTC-6, Brent wrote:

On 11/18/2019 4:33 PM, Philip Thrift wrote:

On Monday, November 18, 2019 at 3:48:35 PM UTC-6, Brent wrote:

In using path integrals you arrive a probabilities for various possible outcomes.  But that's not the end of the science.  You also observe/measure/experience some particular outcome.  And then you compute future path integrals starting from the observed state...using the observed state implies you went from a state of uncertainty expressed by probabilities to a state of certainty regarding the new state....aka using knowledge.

Brent

Knowledge is something having to do with human brains ("knowing"), and when they became the "engines" of speaking and writing, then knowledge could be communicated between intelligent beings. (Perhaps other primates too are knowledge-able, but that's debatable.)

Now it seems to me that in the first few billion years at least of the universe (after the Big Bang) there were no knowledge-able beings, There hadn't been time for them to evolve anywhere.

But during that time quantum processes (and chemical, and at least somewhere at some point biological precesses) were going along fine without any knowledge-able beings exiting, and thus there was no knowledge changing" -- because there was no knowledge during that time.

So how is knowledge needed as a concept in any way in QM when QM processes were occurring in the universe fine before knowledge existed?

Whoever put "knowledge: in QM screwed up.

You're dodging the question like you're running for office on the know-nothing ticket.

I've already asked all the way I can think of what it is that causes you to change your estimate of the future evolution of a quantum system when you measure it.  I've concluded you have no knowledge of this process.

Brent

You are dodging the question:

Was there any knowledge to be changed (or updated) - or  my "knowledge of this process" - or "my estimate of the future evolution of a quantum process" - anywhere in he universe 10 billion years ago?

Your knowledge of processes 10 billion years ago is based on measurements done in telescopes and laboratories today and inferences from them.

Knowledge (changing/updating knowledge) in any way whatsoever is completely irrelevant to anything in quantum mechanics.

Forget "knowledge".  I'm not arguing about semantics.  I'm asking what changes when there is a measurement of a quantum system?

Brent

That;s been stated at least 100 times, and that that was stated 20 years ago on Vic's Atoms and Void. You keep objecting. OK. We get it.

@philipthrift

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[Brent Meeker]

Are there possibilities which have probabilities and of which only one is realized?

Brent

[Brent Meeker]

On 11/19/2019 6:55 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:

On 18 Nov 2019, at 22:14, 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List <everyth...@googlegroups.com> wrote:

On 11/18/2019 12:20 PM, Alan Grayson wrote:

On Monday, November 18, 2019 at 1:16:46 PM UTC-7, John Clark wrote:

On Sun, Nov 17, 2019 at 7:43 AM Philip Thrift <cloud...@gmail.com> wrote:

> Adrian Kent's https://arxiv.org/abs/1305.6565 "real path quantum theory" RPQT

If you fire electrons at 2 slits and observe the slits then each electron takes a real path through one and only one slit and no interference pattern is produced.  If you fire electrons at 2 slits and do NOT observe the slits then a interference pattern is produced indicating that each electron went through both slits. Thus real path quantum theory needs 2 sets of physical laws, one for when things are observed and one when they are not. Many Worlds only needs one set of physical laws, and one set is more parsimonious than two.

That's what the evangelists for MWI say.  But in fact some more stuff is needed to explain why we see the world as we do, i.e. how probability comes into it and why is there a preferred basis.  Maybe this more stuff can be derived from Schroedinger's equation, but even to do so seems to require additional assumptions.

With mechanism: it requires *less* assumptions. Any physics accepting the mechanist theory of mind must explain the physical appearance from a measure on all (relative) computations.

You frequently use this unconditional form of "must" when you actually mean "must, if my theory is right"  which is trivial.

Brent

The math required for doing this requires more axioms (like the distribution of prime number studies seems to require analytical axioms). That is normal, given incompleteness.

Bruno

Brent

And if everything that can happen does happen then unlike its competition Many Worlds doesn't have to explain exactly what a "observation" is or worry about the true nature of consciousness because it has nothing to do with it.

John K Clark  

You're hopelessly deluded. AG 

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[Brent Meeker]

On 11/19/2019 6:57 AM, John Clark wrote:

On Tue, Nov 19, 2019 at 5:26 AM Bruce Kellett <bhkel...@gmail.com> wrote:

>>> Only things that are nomologically possible given your particular initial conditions can happen.

>> Or to say the exact same thing with different words, everything that can happen does happen.

> Hmmm! You have to be careful that you are not just saying the hat happens, happens!

Anything that does not violate the laws of physics, particularly quantum physics, can happen.

That's not quite right.  Events inconsistent with the laws of physics can't happen.  But also things inconsistent with initial or boundary conditions (which are typically classical) can't happen.  So it is not JUST the SWE.

If you fire a electron at 2 slits observing it going through the left slit would be OK with Schrodinger's equation, and so would observing it going through the right slit, and if you don't observe the slits at all it would be OK with Schrodinger's equation to deduce from the resulting interference pattern that the single electron went through both slits. Yes that is absolutely ridiculous but don't blame me, blame God.   

>>> And that rules out things like "there is a copy of me that turns left whenever I turn right....".

>> That would be true only if you assume the wave function collapses, and Schrödinger says absolutely nothing about that, it was tacked on by people who wanted only one world.

> Nothing to do with collapse.

It has everything to do with collapse. Copenhagen people say when the electron hits the photographic plate the wave function collapses and the electron makes up its mind where it is and assumes a discreet position, and that's why it makes a sharp spot and not a big smudge on the plate. Many Worlds people say otherwise, not because they enjoy being contrary but because they don't know how else to explain the bizarre results of the 2 slit exparament.  

> Why is it that you many-worlds advocates always accuse someone who opposes you of assuming some collapse? Rubbish, it assumes no such thing.

If the wave function collapses then an evolving quantum object, such as yourself, will be in one and only one state tomorrow.  If the wave function does NOT collapse then you won't be ( "you" being defined as anything that remembers being Bruce Kellett today).

>>> Additional assumptions are needed if you want to make sense of questions like" "What will a being that remembers being John Clark today see tomorrow."

>> Like what?

> That beings like John Clark, with identifiable characteristics, actually exist at all.

The only assumption is that the Schrodinger equation means what it says, and it says nothing about it collapsing. You can add extra terms to the equation and make it collapse but Occam would not approve, those additional mathematical complexities do not improve predictions one bit, they do nothing but get rid of those other worlds.

 

>>> he [Everett] was something of an idiot because he did not see that you could not get probabilities out of a deterministic theory 

>> You can if the theory is deterministic but not realistic as Many Worlds is, that is to say if a deterministic interaction between 2 particles always produces more than one outcome.

> Actually, I thought one of the attractions of the many worlds theory was that it was realistic -- in the sense that the wave function really exists a a physical object,

I don't know where in the world you got that idea. Even probability is pretty abstract but you don't even get that until you take the square of the absolute value of the wave function, which contains imaginary numbers by the way. How much more different from a physical object do you want?

 

> How much more realistic do you want?

It would need one hell of a lot more to be realistic! A theory is realistic if it says a particle is in one and only one definite state both before and after an interaction even if it has not been observed. Many Worlds is about as far from that as you can get.

> Nevertheless, the SWE does not give a probability without some further assumptions. Why do you think that MWI advocates spend so much time an effort trying to derive the Born rule? You cannot get probabilities from the Schroedinger equation without some additional assumptions.

Irrelevant for this discussion because EVERY quantum interpretation assumes the Born Rule. I don't claim the MWI can solve every quantum problem but it can solve one, the mystery of the observer, and it is at least the equal of the other interpretations in explaining the other mysteries. In other words the Many Worlds Interpretation is the least bad idea anybody has come up with over the last century to explain the weird nature of the quantum world.

The Born rule is a way of predicting probabilities.   But how do these probabilities apply in MWI.   Do they apply to "observations"...but there are no observations in MWI; observations are functionally equivalent to wave-function collapse.

Brent

John K Clark

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[Philip Thrift]

On Tuesday, November 19, 2019 at 12:27:21 PM UTC-6, Brent wrote:

On 11/19/2019 12:30 AM, Philip Thrift wrote:

On Monday, November 18, 2019 at 6:50:38 PM UTC-6, Brent wrote:

On 11/18/2019 4:33 PM, Philip Thrift wrote:

On Monday, November 18, 2019 at 3:48:35 PM UTC-6, Brent wrote:

In using path integrals you arrive a probabilities for various possible outcomes.  But that's not the end of the science.  You also observe/measure/experience some particular outcome.  And then you compute future path integrals starting from the observed state...using the observed state implies you went from a state of uncertainty expressed by probabilities to a state of certainty regarding the new state....aka using knowledge.

Brent

Knowledge is something having to do with human brains ("knowing"), and when they became the "engines" of speaking and writing, then knowledge could be communicated between intelligent beings. (Perhaps other primates too are knowledge-able, but that's debatable.)

Now it seems to me that in the first few billion years at least of the universe (after the Big Bang) there were no knowledge-able beings, There hadn't been time for them to evolve anywhere.

But during that time quantum processes (and chemical, and at least somewhere at some point biological precesses) were going along fine without any knowledge-able beings exiting, and thus there was no knowledge changing" -- because there was no knowledge during that time.

So how is knowledge needed as a concept in any way in QM when QM processes were occurring in the universe fine before knowledge existed?

Whoever put "knowledge: in QM screwed up.

You're dodging the question like you're running for office on the know-nothing ticket.

I've already asked all the way I can think of what it is that causes you to change your estimate of the future evolution of a quantum system when you measure it.  I've concluded you have no knowledge of this process.

Brent

You are dodging the question:

Was there any knowledge to be changed (or updated) - or  my "knowledge of this process" - or "my estimate of the future evolution of a quantum process" - anywhere in he universe 10 billion years ago?

Your knowledge of processes 10 billion years ago is based on measurements done in telescopes and laboratories today and inferences from them.

Knowledge (changing/updating knowledge) in any way whatsoever is completely irrelevant to anything in quantum mechanics.

Forget "knowledge".  I'm not arguing about semantics.  I'm asking what changes when there is a measurement of a quantum system?

Brent

The reality of processes 10 billion years ago are not dependent on any being ever measuring them and having their knowledge updated.  

 A diffraction pattern emerges in video recordings of single-photon double-slit experiments whether anyone sees the video or not. what changes is the image on the video frame-by-frame. If you take a video of a an arrow shot from a bow, it follows a parabolic curve, and what changes is its position frame-by-frame.

@philipthrift

[Philip Thrift]

If you roll a (6-sided) die you get any one of six possible outcomes (1 dot to 6 dots). You don't get say 2 dots and 5 dots as the single outcome. 

That's the way probability works.

@philipthrift

[John Clark]

On Tue, Nov 19, 2019 at 2:30 PM 'Brent Meeker'  <everyth...@googlegroups.com> wrote:

>>Anything that does not violate the laws of physics, particularly quantum physics, can happen.

> That's not quite right.  Events inconsistent with the laws of physics can't happen.  But also things inconsistent with initial or boundary conditions (which are typically classical) can't happen. So it is not JUST the SWE.

Initial conditions rigidly determine the evolution of a system according to the laws of classical physics, but the SWE is not classical and it's not the only thing that isn't. As Richard Feynman said:
"Nature isn't classical, dammit, and if you want to make a simulation of nature, you'd better make it quantum mechanical".

>> EVERY quantum interpretation assumes the Born Rule. I don't claim the MWI can solve every quantum problem but it can solve one, the mystery of the observer, and it is at least the equal of the other interpretations in explaining the other mysteries. In other words the Many Worlds Interpretation is the least bad idea anybody has come up with over the last century to explain the weird nature of the quantum world.

>The Born rule is a way of predicting probabilities.   But how do these probabilities apply in MWI.   Do they apply to "observations"...but there are no observations in MWI;

You can have observations in MWI if you want, it's just that observations don't change physical law so one set of laws is enough. Sean Carroll and others have shown that the square of the absolute value of the wave function is the only way for a rational being to assign unitary probability in a Many Worlds multiverse during the instant after a split has occurred, and if probability isn't unitary it's not of much use:

Many Worlds and the Born Rule

 John K Clark