Special relativity leads to time paradoxes if anything can influence anything else faster than light, because then observers can disagree about the temporal ordering of causally connected events. If the state of a particle depends on that time-ordering, then observers will disagree about the particle’s state. In other words, the state cannot be Lorentz invariant.
The No-Communication Theorem at first seems to put this worry to rest. But then you realize that communication does not imply locality. It only implies locality in what we can directly and empirically observe at the moment of observation. It does not rule out the possibility of nonlocality, and therefore time paradoxes, that emerge only through inferences made via a causal chain of reasoning.
In 1964, Bell showed precisely how such inferences can be constructed, leading to the conclusion that the real states of particles cannot be Lorentz invariant.
The ways people try to get around Bell’s theorem, I’ve simply lost faith in.
One approach is to deny that particles have real states when we are not looking at them, so that any indirect inference about their unobserved state is invalid. But human brains are also made of particles. So, much like in Wigner’s friend, this seems to force you toward solipsism, because you cannot admit that other observers have definite mental states until you look at them.
The response is then to add a caveat: when a quantum system interacts with a measuring device, it “collapses” into a definite state. The definite state therefore exists before you look at it, but somehow cannot propagate upward to the level of conscious observers, so the solipsism problem does not arise.
Sure, that works. But now you have contradicted the mathematics of quantum mechanics.
The density matrix of a system in a superposition of states is not the same as the density matrix of a system in a classical statistical mixture of eigenstates. Consequently, subsequent interactions can produce different statistical results. David Deutsch pointed this out in one of his papers on quantum mechanics as a universal theory: introducing collapse at measurement inherently produces a deviation from the standard quantum-mechanical evolution. Thus, it matters how you define a “measurement,” and each proposed definition effectively constitutes a different theory with different empirical predictions, as in GRW, Diosi-Penrose, and related approaches.
After the 2022 Nobel Prize experiments, I’ve lost faith in the idea that quantum mechanics will eventually be shown to be incorrect. So, by extension, I have to abandon the collapse approach.
Now things get worse when we bring in the paper by Frauchiger and Renner in Nature Communications. They construct a system of entangled particles in which the violation of Lorentz invariance becomes much more explicit, because it does not arise from some complicated statistical argument. Instead, it follows deterministically from an inference that two observers make about the immediate previous state of the particles.
They use qubits, and, in the relevant setup, one observer concludes that the state is 0000 while the other concludes that it is 1111. Again, a contradiction.
The conclusion, however, depends statistically on the time-ordering of the events, specifically on which observer measures first. So if there were an absolute time-ordering, there would be no contradiction at all. That would mean special relativity is wrong and that there must be an absolute spacetime.
Frauchiger and Renner point out another possible solution: Many Worlds. If there is a multiverse, perhaps the two observers’ conclusions, 0000 and 1111, are not contradictory because they refer to different branches of the wavefunction.
They have repeated this point in interviews, but Jeffrey Bub, in his paper “‘Two Dogmas’ Redux,” showed mathematically that this does not work. The inconsistency can be confined to a single branch of the wavefunction, so appealing to additional branches cannot resolve it.
Scott Aaronson has a blog post addressing this problem, but I find his solution unconvincing, which is probably why it remains a blog post rather than a journal article. Actually, I think his solution works. The problem is that he does not seem to take his own solution seriously enough to follow it through to its implications.
Looking at his premises, I noticed that his solution mirrors something I had independently developed and discussed briefly at the end of a chapter in a book I had written. But it was not a solution I endorsed, precisely because of its consequences. If you take it seriously, it is unambiguously retrocausal, and retrocausal in a way that can be demonstrated mathematically.
It is always meaningless and distracting when physicists respond to these problems by saying that you cannot “compare counterfactuals,” or that we should question “counterfactual definiteness.” If we cannot compare inferences across counterfactuals, then we need to specify which counterfactuals permit those inferences and which do not. But once you have specified that, you have already specified what is physically different between the two situations. At that point, we can drop the language of “counterfactuals” and simply describe the difference in ordinary causal terms.
Indeed, if we apply this to Aaronson’s answer, the relevant difference he identifies is that, in the contradictory scenario, two observers choose to perform Bell-basis measurements. Therefore, we cannot make the same inference about the system’s history in that scenario. In other words, the history must be different.
But this means that the history is different in the case where two observers perform Bell-basis measurements, even though their choice of measurement can be made arbitrarily far in the future.
That is where the proposal becomes unambiguously retrocausal. You can, in fact, show rigorously that Aaronson’s answer is correct using the Two-State Vector Formalism, as I’ve found a way to calculate. But replacing nonlocality with retrocausality amounts to trading nonlocality in space for nonlocality in time. The theory is still nonlocal in spacetime and therefore still appears to require a preferred frame to remain consistent.
That leaves what seems to me to be the only viable interpretation: there is an absolute time-ordering, and therefore there must be an absolute spacetime.
At first this seems absurd, because special relativity is extraordinarily well tested. But John Bell has an interesting paper, “How to Teach Special Relativity,” in which he shows that the theory is compatible with an absolute spacetime without changing either its mathematics or its empirical predictions.
You can retain the symmetry of all Lorentz frames in the mathematics. You do not have to change the equations at all. Instead, you introduce a philosophical asymmetry into the interpretation of the frames.
You interpret one frame as representing real spacetime, while every other frame represents emergent, or apparent, spacetime. This works because each Lorentz frame, considered in isolation, has the structure of Galilean spacetime. It is only when you begin transforming between frames that the full Lorentzian structure appears.
Since all the frames remain mathematically symmetrical, there is no experiment that can tell us which frame is the real one, even though we assert that there is an asymmetry in the underlying ontology.
This might initially seem like a problem, because we need the absolute time-ordering to resolve the contradiction in the Frauchiger-Renner scenario and determine definitively whether the state is 0000 or 1111.
But it turns out that this does not matter, precisely because of the No-Communication Theorem. The inconsistencies are restricted to things that cannot be observed directly, but only inferred. No observer directly observes the contradictory 0000 or 1111 in the Frauchiger-Renner setup.
By saying that an absolute rest frame exists but that we do not know which frame it is, all we are saying is that there exists an absolute answer, either 0000 or 1111, but we do not know which one it is. There is therefore no longer a logical contradiction. The apparent contradiction has simply been replaced by classical uncertainty.
Not only does this resolve the paradox, but it also seems to resolve most of the major paradoxes of quantum mechanics. The theory reduces to a kind of statistical mechanics, but with nonlocal evolution laws. More precisely, those nonlocal laws themselves emerge from the non-Markovian nature of the underlying dynamics, which is a clarification needed to explain how the theory avoids the PBR theorem.
There is no measurement problem, no need for multiverses, and no fundamental collapse. Ultimately, the theory is just statistics, governed by nonclassical laws describing how those statistics evolve in time.
The fact that this conclusion seems to be forced by the Frauchiger-Renner paradox, at least given that I have not found another way to escape the paradox that I find logically consistent, is already compelling. But what makes it even more convincing is that it dramatically simplifies quantum mechanics as a whole while simultaneously resolving many of its other conceptual problems, particularly the measurement problem.
For that reason, I have never been more convinced of anything in my life: space and time are absolute, and special relativity is an emergent description of an underlying absolute spacetime.
You must log in or # to comment.
My apologies, I haven’t read this entire post and just got hung at the first few lines. Observers can disagree on order of certain events but will not disagree on causal relationship of events: these cannot travel faster than light. Bells theorem excludes local hidden variables that would otherwise explain the behaviour seen in quantum entanglement experiments but does not allow for FTL exchange of information.
The No-communication theorem only deals with practically communicable information, i.e. what could be used to build a telephone, and thus only rules out exchange of information in the sense of non-local effects that you can directly and empirically observe in the instantaneous moment of observation.
It does not rule out that particles non-locally causally influence each other in general, and these non-local causal influences directly leads to the paradox shown by Frauchiger and Renner. No, it doesn’t allow you to superluminally communicate, because again, you cannot directly observe the non-local effects, but in this particular paradox, the contradiction is only a single inference backwards.
Meaning, you measure the system at time t+1 to infer its state at time t. The state at time t is not observed, so it’s not something that can be used to communicate, and the disagreement doesn’t lead to a conflict in empirical predictions. But, if you believe in the existence of objective reality, then you have to admit that the disagreement is here.
Mathematically, if a stochastic perturbation really is local, you could represent it in the form:
p’=(Γ⊗I)p
Where Γ would describe the stochastic perturbation on just one bit, I is the identity matrix, p is the probability distribution of the two bits before the perturbation, and p’ is after.
It is trivial to prove in the Frauchiger-Renner case that Γ does not exist, meaning, you have to describe the statistical evolution of the entangled system in the form:
p’=Γp
Meaning, a matrix that affects both bits, even though you only perturb one of them. That doesn’t mean Γ represents perturbing the other bit, but it does mean it takes the other bit’s value into consideration as an input.
Both observer A can draw an inference about the system at time t with a measurement at t+1, and observer B can draw an inference about the system at time t with a measurement at t+1. The paradox arises from the fact that the Γ that the measurement is perturbing, and the Γ that describes the measurement encompasses both systems, meaning that the measurement only leads to an outcome at time t+1 that is statistically correlated with the system at time t when the prepared system is left undisturbed.
If either of the observers measure it, they disturb it, and so a subsequent measurement would not be correlated to the system’s state at time t, breaking the ability to draw the inference at time t from the measurement at time t+1. This means if one observer measures the system at time t+1 to draw an inference about its state at time t, and they are the first to measure it, then they can correctly draw the inference, but the second observer who does so cannot, and thus who has the “correct” inference depends upon the time-ordering of the events.
But the system and the measurements can be spatially distributed, and so the events can be space-like separated. Thus, who would draw the “correct” inference, and thus the actual state of the system at time t, ceases to be Lorentz invariant. This, again, arises because the measurement outcome at t+1 mathematically and necessarily must be a Γ that encompasses the whole entangled system at once, so there is a direct causal influence on the first observer’s measurement and the second, as they are altering the entangled system.
It is important to stress that saying the state of the system is not Lorentz invariant is the same as saying that there is a time-paradox, because it arises from a disagreement about the ordering of two causally-connected events which the specific ordering determines the state of the particle, and so there is disagreement over the state of the particle.
The fact you cannot communicate with this does not get out of the predicate. It is still there.
The only thing no-communication buys you is that you can dismiss the problem by saying that you only care about empirical results and don’t care about reality to begin with, but if you are a pure pragmatist, “shut and up calculate,” then we should be consistent and apply that to special relativity as well, and so my viewpoint shouldn’t be so controversial to have a slightly different philosophical take on how to interpret the mathematics underlying SR, a take which ultimately has no empirical consequences.
Yet, you can look at the downvotes and see how controversial it is. Nobody really believes in “shut up and calculate.” They have a metaphysical story in their head about reality from the mathematics and want you to believe that story. They only seem to fall back to “shut up and calculate” when you show their story is inconsistent, then suddenly it doesn’t matter and all that matters are “empirical results.”
Right or wrong… Faith has no place in science.
So then why does everyone here universally agree that I need to have faith in “the field” and am arrogant if I don’t believe in a particular philosophy that has no empirical evidence to support it just because a lot of people in “the field” do? How is that not faith?
Mathematics gives you empirical predictions, and so you only change the empirical predictions if you change the mathematics. But the same body of mathematics can be interpreted in various different ways. If we want to think about what the mathematics implies about reality, we have to apply a layer of philosophical interpretation, in order to comment on how to think about the mathematics.
But the same body of mathematics can be thought about in multiple different ways, and since the body of mathematics itself is not changing, then the empirical predictions do not change, so you cannot resolve the disagreement empirically.
The facts of physics do not oblige us to accept one philosophy rather than the other.
— John Bell, “How to Teach Special Relativity”
It seems to me then that the only position is to resolve it logically. You need to make an argument about how to think about it. Even if you are a pure positivist who just says “shut up and calculate,” that’s still a philosophical stance on how to think about the mathematics and it still needs a justification. Sure, it’s not an empirical justification, but you should still be able to give reasons as to why you believe what you do, and show it is logically consistent.
When I say I’m not convinced that the dominant stance of SR (which philosophically interprets what is directly measured by rods and clocks is directly equivalent to ontological space and ontological time) is actually that logically consistent, so I make an argument as to why a different way of thinking about the same mathematics is more logically consistent, I am told by just about everyone here that I need to just shut up and have faith in “the field” and believe the dominant philosophy (which, again, interprets what is directly measured by rods and clocks is directly equivalent to ontological space and ontological time), or else I’m accused of being “arrogant” and a “know-it-all.”
That is the overwhelmingly dominant consensus of just about everyone who has replied and downvoted this post, that I must have faith in the dominant philosophical paradigm, even though no empirical evidence can establish it.
Even if you truly are a complete pragmatist, well, your opinion is arguably only popular in QM. There is a lot of “shut up and calculate” in QM, but not much for interpretations of SR. Most everyone agrees with a single interpretation, and so you would also be “disagreeing with the field,” and not just myself, so that attack on me popular in this thread seems to be rather bizarre.
Couldn’t get published so published to social media instead?
Personal attack. I was hoping this website would be better than reddit.
I mean you’re the one disagreeing with most of the field without actual proof on a tiny forum instead of publishing an opinion to Nat Comm or other actual journal. You give yourself no qualifications to be someone arguing against the field. You present to an audience containing a lot of non-physicisicts (who nonetheless can follow logic) but define pretty much none of the theories you reference while still dragging this out for 30+ paragraphs. There are multiple points where you outright dismiss contrary views without reason besides “I don’t like it therefore its stupid and wrong.”
I’m not sure what response you are hoping for here. Unless you have an alternative with the logic and math behind it your opinion isn’t really worth anything.
I mean you’re the one disagreeing with most of the field
Appeal to popularity.
without actual proof
I mean, it’s proved to the best it can be. You of course, have to agree to some unprovable assumptions: like, “objective reality exists,” and that “a physical theory should be logically consistent,” so on and so forth. I cannot prove those to you. I require them as a basis for any proof, and once you accept that, the mathematical proofs I have referenced directly and unambiguously follow, and I don’t think there are many people in the literature disputing the veracity of these mathematical proofs.
What they are disputing the veracity of is the proofs’ premises, whether or not they are philosophically justified, or maybe there are some hidden premises that Frauchiger and Renner missed in their proof. If you agree with my starting point, then the mathematical proof follows. Of course, you can dispute some of my philosophical premises.
There are multiple points where you outright dismiss contrary views without reason besides “I don’t like it therefore its stupid and wrong.”
Yet you don’t point to one of them where I said that. The quotation is literally a fabrication.
I am hoping for someone to either point out a mistake in my reasoning, or give a stronger argument for the opposing side.
But, of course, if you don’t even understand the mathematics enough to know what I am talking about, the best you can do is resort to personal attacks and appeals to popularity, or fabricate quotes to lie about what I said.
I am not interested in engaging with the reddit-brained people who don’t actually understand the topic I am talking about but what to farm upvotes by just constantly insisting I should “have faith in the popular opinion” yet have no technical ability to explain why the popular opinion even is what it is, and thus cannot even mount a defense as to why it is correct.
The problem with this mentality is that it forgets that belief isn’t a choice. I cannot just choose to believe something. I believe things because of the evidence. If I put forward to you a mathematical proof, which I know like the back of my hand, that has certain implications that have convinced me towards a particular belief, you cannot convince me out of it by just saying, “believe the authorities.” If I point out a philosophical paper that shows a logical inconsistency in a particular way to interpret the mathematics, and I know that paper like the back of my hand and it also convinced me of the same thing, then saying “believe the authorities” cannot possibly convince me out of it.
I would need to hear why “the field” is correct. But, of course, you cannot explain why, because you don’t know yourself. That is the same tactic redditors constantly use: they jump into topics they don’t understand, and to avoid having to actually engage with the argument, they just flaunt vague appeals to “the authorities” and “the field” to farm upvotes and paint the other person as a crank, without actually addressing any of their arguments, because they have no capability of actually addressing them, since, unlike you, I actually understand the mathematics, and so I do not need to appeal to anyone, since I can read the papers and just describe them in my own words on their own merit.
This isn’t debate class. Going against the consensus position requires greater proof. If you want to say pi has a determined end digit you need more than the fact that NASA only uses 15 decimals and calculating the circumference of a 46Billion light year spherical universe within the error of an atom requires 37. Pi and other irrational numbers still continue far beyond that. Regardless of additional digits being unnecessary/useless logically.
1+1=2 sure but you’re arguing the same stuff that quantum theories have been showing time and again. Schrodingers cat example was originally a point about the absurdity of the seeming logical flaw of a molecule being in a state before observation. The cat is dead because of the poison regardless of when you open the box. Molecularly the measurements we have however show these differing states. Perhaps that is a measurement error but multiple measures, multiple people, and unless you have math or measurement otherwise the data shows this is what happens.
You discount the counterfactuals and whoever Aaronson is. You discount the wavefunction theory collapse. You’re trying to argue from logic but without any real proofs of your assumptions.
I’m not asking for belief much less faith. The quantum theory side has their arguments well-known and well-hashed at this point if you can’t bother to go beyond the chatbot and learn “why” thats on you not me. You apparently don’t understand the math well enough to explain it or show it so…whatever, feel free to rejoice in your arrogance towards everyone else.
You random lemmy, you’ve figured out the universe and fixed quantum mechanics, the next Nobel Laureate, wow! we’ll all see your genius in 20y when the field catches up. /s
Going against the consensus position requires greater proof.
It doesn’t require much proof to have doubts or to start a discussion about it, and the only real merit an opening idea must have, is if it is an interesting one ! This IS interesting, and there clearly ARE an internal discrepancy - whether OP misunderstands or its real. OP is NOT alone in this doubt. Sagan’s “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence” is imho just scientific lazyness, and not good for Scientific discussions/exploration. We are not trying to decide on emergency ‘life or dead’ situations here, so ANY idea should be allowed, and discussed on its own merit.
But that are just my opinion oc…
Appeal to popularity.
LOL peer review is not a popularity contest. This know-it-all debate pervertry merely enhances the premise of the criticism you’ve received.
Stop dancing around it and tell us what possibly falsifiable evidence you have to back up your positions
This know-it-all debate pervertry merely enhances the premise of the criticism you’ve received.
Personal attack. You specifically kind of remind of the people on /r/consciousness who would put forward some incredibly bizarre wacko idea of “consciousness” and when I’d say, hmm, I don’t believe in that, they would not actually defend their position but would just accuse me of being “arrogant” and a “know-it-all.”
It’s a common tactic to get you to shut up because they can’t actually engage in the conversation in good faith.
If I’m wrong, why is it so hard to just show me where I’m wrong?
Stop dancing around it and tell us what possibly falsifiable evidence you have to back up your positions
Double-standard.
Your philosophical beliefs, which are not empirically verifiable, have to be believed without question. But if I’m not convinced, then suddenly I need to back it up empirically.
Yeah sure. I have to believe your metaphysical story which cannot be empirically verified that is intended to “explain” the meaning behind the mathematics, but when I point out that the same body of mathematics is compatible with a different story and I’m not convinced of yours, suddenly we flip-flop and demand empirical evidence.
Not a fan of the downvotes and juvenile snark either, but you’re in public for better or worse.
Not so much. This post makes repeated use of the words “believe” and “faith”. This is a science community. If you want to be taken seriously then maybe be more careful with your words and provide some evidence.
“believe” and “faith”
…absolutely also exist within the scientific space. For instance, I believe that 1+1=2, and I have faith that someone else have proved it - I believe those things as absolute facts, but I actually don’t know for sure - not even if all my senses tells me so. Also, all theories and ideas start out as nothing but a flimsy belief, an itch, a set of assumptions about stuff, a base of ‘personal truth’, so these words are absolutely part of this space, and one shouldn’t be called out if they have another interpretation of existing evidence/consensus. You have just been caught up in the public Merican ‘Science vs crazy God-fearer’ fight, gotten annoyed, and have lost the original querying nature of scientific exploration. All big discoveries have broken prior ‘facts’…
Don’t be the ‘Prof. Dave’ of a science forum… There is no God-w.shippers here right now, so relax man… smoke a huge joint and start doubting a little…
The 17 people who will see this will be impressed at least.
faith needs no proofs. believe or disbelieve at will because it doesn’t matter to anyone but you. when you used apples to argue against oranges and folks pointed it out you doubled down, like a religious true believer who needs belief to justify everything. live with uncertainty, my guy. no one will validate your cross-domain nonsense. its a typical ruse for sealioning and most will see this as trolling or a manic episode. the “thought this website would be better than reddit” is exactly why folks are on lemmy and not on reddit. to get more signal to counter your noisy nonsense. you thought folks on “this website” would eat your illusions and not push back. so sorry you don’t understand a whole lot about your world, my guy. maybe the faith you’re struggling with is in your fellow human beings and not in the truth or in facts. externalizing your feelings and blocking reflections of you is what a child does. grow up. i hope i earned your block like you promised to anyone not addressing the subject by addressing the elephant in the room which to most here is the subject because you don’t deserve the science eyeballs on your emotional struggle. keep looking for folks to validate your religious needs and you’ll find cranks and charlatans. you’re certainly not conducting science here.
Response#1
I’m sorry for the downvotes your getting
I don’t think you are correct. However, Philosophy of Science was a kind of sub-major to my main one, so I am always interested to hear other people’s takes on the nature of reality, especially SR and QM.
One interesting thing I’ve noticed in all the replies here is how quickly you people fall back to pure positivist utilitarianism.
You insist I should believe your personal, non-empirical metaphysical interpretation of the mathematics underlying the theory, i.e. your own way of how to “think about” the math, but when I point out that the unmodified math is compatible with different ways of thinking about it, you suddenly flip-flop to pure positivist utilitarians.
Suddenly, we shouldn’t be interpreting the math on a philosophical level at all, we should just be concerned with what is “empirical” and “falsifiable” and stop philosophizing over questions of “what if real.”
You all want to have your cake and eat it too: you want to insist that I am wrong for not agreeing with the dominant philosophical interpretation of SR, but also, whenever I point out there are alternative ways to think about the same math, you switch to a positivist pragmatist utilitarian so that you can dismiss it unless it makes different empirical predictions (and thus changes the math) from standard SR.
Of course, if you were true pragmatists, then you wouldn’t be upset about me not agreeing with the dominant philosophical interpretation of the mathematics underlying SR to begin with. If you truly believed in “shut up and calculate,” you’d shut up and calculate, rather than being so defensive over a person believing in a different way of thinking about the same body of mathematics without modification.
It’s just a very convenient way of pushing a particular philosophy but then swapping to a different standard when it is criticized so that you then don’t have to defend it.
So obviously once you publish this you’ll be famous. Hence I don’t think you are correct in your analysis
Personal attack.
Oh…
Ok…
Have fun.
You know what’s great about animals? They don’t know about special relativity.
They’re also tasty.
It sounds like the key theorist that convinced you of this is Jeffrey Bub.
Has Bub himself implied that his criticism of Frauchiger and Renner’s conclusion contradicts special relativity?
My opinion follows directly from the logical consequences of the mathematics (and my philosophical assumptions). It doesn’t matter who wrote it or whose opinion it is. I do not believe these things because I can cite someone saying something. I don’t need to cite anything at all. I can walk through the paradox from scratch and show the logical implications of it.
People who obsessively cite things are people who don’t know what they’re talking about, because they cannot put anything into their own words, so they have to reference people who they believe are justifying it for them. I need to do none of that because I understand the math, I’ve written extensively on it, including a whole book, and so my views do not need to rely on a single person, as I can derive it all from scratch in my own head.
I don’t know why, but I find this concept hard to explain to people. Everyone I talk to treats everything as a constant citing-game where nobody just talks about things in their own words, showing they comprehend the argument themselves, and deal with it on its own merit. They treat arguments as just a bunch of loose references with no overall cohesion.
The only thing interesting about Bub is the criticism that Many Worlds resolves the paradox and showing it has its own internal inconsistency, but I already thought Many Worlds is incoherent for a lot of other reasons, anyway, so no, it didn’t particularly change my views on this subject. I’d recommend you read Bell’s “Quantum Mechanics for Cosmologists” as well as Tim Maudlin’s “Can the World be Only Wavefunction?”
Both of those had already convinced me the interpretation made no sense. Even if no one has shown any problems with Many Worlds, I’d probably still hold this opinion, because if your only alternative to a preferred foliation is an entire multiverse… I’d just find a preferred foliation simpler.
But, yes, that is really the current state of the academic literature. You have to pick one of the four:
- Don’t care about inconsistencies
- Multiverse
- Quantum mechanics is wrong.
- Preferred foliation
It kind of misses the big picture to focus on Bub’s point specifically. We need to put it in the broader context and show that the current state of the academic literature, the published papers at the moment, really do restrict us down to those 4 choices. Since we are restricted down to these four choices, I’d need much more than one argument to be rebutted. Because even if you debunked Bub’s point specifically, that doesn’t necessarily mean I’d be convinced to move over to camp #1, #2, or #3.
As for Bub’s point specifically, no, he basically “solves” it through Copenhagen, although his take on Copenhagen is very similar to RQM. Both of which I categorize in #1, as well as “shut up and calculate,” because all of them allow for inconsistencies but don’t view it as a problem either because they don’t care or they don’t think it’s important. Frauchiger and Renner openly point out that Copenhagen is inconsistent, and he doesn’t ultimately deny it but just drops the requirements of consistency.
My problem with allowing inconsistencies is that it clearly reduces to a kind of solipsism. Bub himself admits that his viewpoint doesn’t allow you to “stitch together” different perspectives into a single unified objective reality, because they contradict with each other. But he denies that this kind of objective reality exists, but claims it is not “solipsism” because “perspectives” aren’t the same as “minds.” This is, again, basically an identical viewpoint expressed by RQM.
But this is also why I eventually abandoned RQM. I started to doubt it when I read Rovelli’s paper “Relational EPR”
Consider a simple Bell pair, Alice is given one half, Bob the other. Alice measures hers, and, think of it like the universe rolls a dice at that moment and that decides its outcome. But, since Rovelli says it is local, this means no dice roll occurred for Bob’s yet, since Alice’s measurement cannot influence Bob’s. The issue is, if Bob measures shortly after Alice, then the universe would do a dice roll for Bob’s outcome, but since Alice’s is already decided, unless Bob’s has a way to non-locally know Alice’s result, then Bob’s must be randomly chosen independent of Alice’s, yet we know in practice they are dependent.
Rovelli escapes this by saying that the issue is that we are trying to consider what happens in Alice and Bob’s perspective at the same time. We have to treat them as entirely separate realities that cannot be “juxtaposed.” Alice measures her particle, a dice roll happens, but nothing ever happens on Bob’s side until Alice travels to Bob and interacts with it herself, and then the dice roll occurs, meaning she is carrying the measurement outcome with her, so of course when it does occur, the information is locally available to make them agree.
But, do you not see what happened? You have to deny that, from Alice’s perspective, there really is anything going on for Bob until Alice arrives at Bob. From Alice’s perspective, it is as if Bob doesn’t even exist in her reality. If Bob later claims to Alice, he measured the particle and found it to have an upwards spin projection 1 hour before Alice arrived, Alice would have to disbelieve that. Bob did nothing before Alice arrived; rather, the whole history of Bob believing had measured it 1 hour ago and all the evidence that he did measure it 1 hour ago must have been created (akin to Last Tuesdayism) in Alice’s reality the moment Alice interacted with Bob.
(Indeed, Bell’s criticism of Many Worlds is similar, that it also is forced to resort to a kind of Last Thursdayism. While, unlike RQM, Many Worlds doesn’t deny a reality independent of Alice’s perspective, the reality it admits to simply contains none of the things humans have memories about, and so the memories must be interpreted all as false impressions, something Everett openly says and just embraces it.)
Personally, I believe in a kind of “no-solipsism” postulate, which says that the mental states for other observers must be definite regardless of my own observing of them. That is to say, I must be able to admit that your mind exists, and is really thinking of something right now, even when I am not looking at you. Abandoning that to me seems like solipsism, and that is ultimately what Rovelli and Bub do, indeed Rovelli has a paper “On the consistency of Relative Facts” which basically responds to a criticism that they are not inconsistent saying that you have to consider all observers in basically separate realities they do not have to be consistent with one another and cannot communicate or influence each other.
I feel like this is just a philosophical trick and I remain unconvinced of it. It to me feels like people are reaching for incredibly bizarre metaphysics and philosophical arguments to escape an obvious conclusion from the empirical data. None of this bizarre metaphysics is logically necessary. We don’t need multiverses or Last Thursdayism or these bizarre arguments about every observer existing in a separate reality that cannot be juxtaposed. If you just apply a slightly different philosophical interpretation to SR, one that actually makes it simpler to comprehend, then QM just reduces to a kind of statistical theory, and the mystery ends there.
I can’t cognitively follow your level of thinking on this, so I’ll refrain. But I see more and more thinkers getting frustrated by current inconsistencies in almost all fields of Science, and the ‘Scientism’ put out - as seen in the reactions here doesn’t help science at all. It’s like most science passionate people are still believing that they defend science against some religious cult, and therefore have double down on what is current weak consensus with a lot of inconsistencies. People are unwittingly slowing down scientific exploration to safeguard their own locked down beliefs.
I follow a few unconventional thinkers like Unzicker, M Levin and similar ‘rebel’ thinkers in many different fields, and while I can’t vouch for any particular direction of thought, write a critical paper or define what’s wrong with the current state of Science, I can see that current consensus and science/knowledge eco-systems are weak as fuck - all over the place, with weak assumptions, ignored inconsistencies, monetary interests, and a very rigid dogmatism in certain ‘fundamentals’ / consensus science. Fields are not really moving forward as they could’ve.
Sociology, psychology, economics and such fields are btw much much worse, and completely crammed with ideological thinking/consensus - just saying.
New and better science won’t come from those that follow mainstream consensus like religious dogmas, but from those that can see the weak spots and break out of that consensus-structure. Too bad you couldn’t find a descent level of intellectual exploration/discussions here :-(
Take your down-votes as a badge of honor !
In simple terms, what I am saying is that:
- Despite common misconception, the No-Communication Theorem doesn’t rule out non-locality, but only communicable non-local effects, meanings those you can directly observe and build a superluminal telephone. That’s impossible, but it doesn’t rule out inferred non-local effects which you can infer from the data which aren’t directly observed.
- The dominant philosophical interpretation of the mathematics underlying special relativity is fundamentally incompatible with anything non-local because it leads to time-paradoxes, and Bell’s theorem ultimately very indirectly through inference proves such time-paradox must exist.
- The paper by Frauchiger and Renner proves a specific case of this, where two observers make a measurement at time t+1 to make an inference about the unmeasured system at time t, and that two observers come to entirely contradictory and mutually incompatible conclusions.
- Since both observers cannot be logically correct at the same time, one must be right and one must be wrong, but saying who is right or wrong depends upon the time-ordering of two space-like separated events, so to assume one person is right and one person is wrong, you must assume that there exists an absolute time-ordering.
Since the state at time t is not observed to begin with, then knowing who was “correct” doesn’t really matter, so you don’t even need to know what the absolute time-ordering is, i.e. you don’t need to specify a specific absolute rest frame. You just have to assume one exists at all, which then licenses you to assume that a single answer to the question of the particle’s state at time t exists in nature, which resolves the paradox on its own.
And, I have went through the academic literature, there simply are no other solutions even provided other than these three: (1) quantum mechanics is wrong, (2) some complicated philosophical story about why we should not care if a physical theory of nature contains internal contradictions when trying to describe objective reality, or (3) there exists a multiverse.
People insult me for not “trusting the field,” the scientism as you call it, but those are literally the only three other options that “the field” has provided me, and no one in this thread can defend them because they know they are even worse answers to the paradox. Supposedly, they want me to mindlessly trust “the field,” but can’t tell me even which position of “the field” I’m supposed to be mindlessly trusting. There isn’t even a consensus in academia on how to resolve this paradox, so I don’t even know what they want me to be trusting, and nobody can tell me, because the people responding don’t even understand what I am talking about.
‘because the people responding don’t even understand what I am talking about.’
I had to re-read your comments and run it through AI to map it to how I personally understand the universe. I can see the dissonance of current SR interpretation claiming no global ‘now’, and the ‘instant’ outcome of the observer thought experiment requiring such a global now, as you describe them further up. I unfortunately can’t do Math at a sufficient level, and still have too many knowledge gaps - missing studies/results/theories etc - to form a coherent reply to your dissonance.
Tbh any of the 4 options - 1 + 3 alternatives - are all a bit wacky to me, but QM seems hard to escape from.
In my private (non-proved/non-consensus) model of the structure of the universe, I have invented a fluid-dynamics planck substrate that all fields are derived from, and that certainly have a global clock - a ‘now’, whereas all local systems (higher complexity/states) in that ‘bohmian-like lattice/soup’ have a derived slower speed - a local reality. However, the AI thinks my ideas fall somewhere in the slick/weaselly ‘philosophical’ group as I cant prove any of it, and thus just allow the apparent inconsistency to exist as is by assuming a global clock and just adding noise. Not good, but hey, it’s a work in progress… ;-)
Anyway, I suspect that you use AI to discuss ideas/theories, and the only issue it had with the selection of comments I gave it + my own thoughts, was that your Fraushiger/Renning interpretation might be too strong in the direction of a direct conflict with SR, but I suspect you have already discussed and re-thought that a few times, so just thought I’d mention it anyway.
Thanks for starting the discussion, forcing an exploration, and hence expanding my knowledge on the topic !
Okay. Show me a proof. Mathematical or experimental, your choice.
You did not read the post.
This is not a post about empirical results. If you bothered to read what I wrote at all, I have said many times that nothing I have written here has any relevance to anything experimental, because the interpretation of SR discussed by Bell is mathematically equivalent to SR, and is only a philosophical reinterpretation of the same body of mathematics.
The argument is, as shown by mathematical proofs I have referenced if you bothered to read the post, that QM is not logically consistent with SR (under the standard interpretation). The only four ways out presented in the academic literature are (as argued by Frauchiger and Renner):
- Inconsistency doesn’t matter
- There is a multiverse
- Quantum mechanics is wrong
- The reinterpretation of SR discussed by Bell is the right way to think about the mathematics of SR
I am merely saying that
(a.) Consistency should matter, or else you cannot even meaningfully have a theory of objective physical reality.
(b.) As pointed out by Bub’s mathematical proof, Frauchiger and Renner are not correct in saying that #2 resolves the inconsistency, and there are other problems with #2 as well (see Bell’s paper “Quanutm Mechanics for Cosmologists” and Maudlin’s paper "Can the World be Only Wavefunction?).
(c.) I don’t think quantum mechnaics is wrong.
Ergo, I am forced into #4.
If you want to convince me I’m wrong of #4, you need to give me an argument defending #1-#3.
It’s funny that one of the most upvoted personal attacks against me for “disagreeing with the field” even though if I accept #3 I’d have to believe QM is wrong, which to me seems like a much bigger disagreement with the field!
The mathematical proofs force you into either of those four. Based on your emphasis of “experimental,” I presume you fit into #1 yourself. A “shut up and calculate” approach, that these philosophical questions regarding consistency don’t matter, only raw empirical results matter. A pure pragmatist. Which is fine, I respect that. I am just saying that I do care about understanding reality, not just predicting measurement outcomes. It’s just a difference of values.
Science is not a search for truth. Science does not give one iota of care as to whether the movement of the stars in the sky is “really” due to phlogiston currents, unaligned permeable crystal spheres, gravitationally distorted spacetime, divine trolling, or faerie bureaucracy. Because science is the search for useful theories that let us predict future states.
This is a philosophical point that’s important to know but often forgotten, but any time someone gets their head turning about weirdness and “reality” it bears repeating.
Contemplating an objective point of view that is irrelevant to the individual observed is entirely consistent with general relativity. But since it’s not a measurable frame of reference, the concept is not scientifically useful and so is disregarded as irrelevant the same way aether and angels are.
(Because if there is an aether it’s a permiable ever present solid indistinguishable from “nothing”, and if angels are moving the planets they are doing so with superhuman profedsionalism that never makes errors.)
Sure, being a pure pragmatist, “shut up and calculate” kind of guy, who only cares about pure practicality and engineering at the end of the day and simply is not bothered by philosophical questions, such a person would find what I say a complete waste of time to discuss.
But then… why not apply that thinking to SR as well? Why not take a “shut up and calculate” approach to SR?
Why do I need to believe a particular philosophical story and a set of metaphysics in how to interpret the mathematics underlying SR?
People seem to do this with QM as well. They will put forward an interpretation that makes little sense, you point out it makes sense, then they fall back to “shut up and calculate.” But why did you put forward and insist upon that interpretation to begin with if you are anti-interpretation?
Just look at the downvotes and replies. People are very upset that I am not agreeing with the standard philosophical interpretation and the standard package of metaphysics that is placed on top of the mathematics, and am merely pointing out that the same mathematics are not only compatible with a different philosophical interpretation, but there is a lot of good reasons to take that other one more seriously as more logically consistent.
But the response I then get from many people actively upset that I dare question the dominant philosophical interpretation is to fall back on pure pragmatism and insist all that matters is what can be “empirically” shown, what is “falsifiable,” and that “science is not a search for truth.”
Sure, but then… why care at all if I interpret the same body of mathematics differently? If it’s not a topic you even care about it shouldn’t bother you.
