Quantum weirdness isn’t weird – if we accept objects don’t exist

https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg24933250-500-quantum-weirdness-isnt-weird-if-we-accept-objects-dont-exist/

by jonbaer • 5 years ago

26 60 5 years ago

34679• 5 years ago

Way back in 1781 Immanuel Kant discussed this (without considering quantum implications, obviously) in "Critique of Pure Reason". He coined the term "noumenon" to describe a thing as it is, not as it is perceived.

ben_w3• 5 years ago

And Plato before him had his cave.

For a while now, I’ve been intrigued by the possibility of literally unthinkable thoughts; something that is outside the capacity of human neural architecture in the way that HTML is outside [0] the capacity of RegEx?

[0] https://stackoverflow.com/a/1732454

drunkpotato• 5 years ago

I can think of two ways a thought could be unthinkable:

1. It could be uncomputable, since it seems likely to me that we can't think uncomputable thoughts. (Not a rigorous scientific hypothesis, but it seems more likely than not to me.)

2. It could be uncomputable in a human lifetime. I think these already exist today: can anyone really be said to thoroughly understand a proof generated by an exhaustive computational search?

One can play around with the semantics of what we mean by "unthinkable" and "thought," but I think "computable" at least provides one interesting start to an exploration of this concept.

qiqing• 5 years ago

There are also "impossible" colors. There was an article on HN frontpage several weeks ago about it, I think.

motohagiography• 5 years ago

There are, and they begin with a brainfu*k esolang dialect called Hofstadter that represents instructions as different camelCase capitalizations of the name Hofstadter. If neither of these are familiar to you, sorry about your afternoon!

dvfjsdhgfv• 5 years ago

This is actually quite a common theme in Buddhist literature. Apart from the central concept of the nature of mind that is by definition unthinkable (in the same way that the eye can't see itself), there are also specific experiences related to the nature of mind that evade ordinary mind.

A simple example: in his boo The Crystal and the Way of Light, Namkhai Norbu describes one of his meditational experiences where he sees 5 spheres of light in one bigger sphere. In this experience, there is no space between the spheres but this seemed perfectly natural. After he finished the practice session, he sat and tried to draw it and after several attempts realized it's impossible. There are many similar accounts.

weatherlight2• 5 years ago

Doesn't Kant then go on to explain, in which phenomenal objects are said to conform to the mind of the subject and, in turn, become products of human cognition.

(Kantian noumena) of human perception and are not ontologically exhausted by their relations with humans or other objects. The article, as it appears, all relations, including those between nonhumans, distort their related objects in the same basic manner as human consciousness and exist on an equal footing with one another.

diarrhea• 5 years ago

The title makes it sound like it's going to be on functional programming.

jjoonathan• 5 years ago

Maybe we're living in a simulation and that really is the root cause.

wlesieutre• 5 years ago

We should look for signs that we're optimized for efficient computation. Like maybe a minimum temperature or a maximum speed or a rule that position and momentum are only knowable to certain tolerances.

(joke stolen from SMBC comics)

est• 5 years ago

paywalled.

beaconstudios8• 5 years ago

... and science starts to come round to a metaphysics that was at the root of taoism and hinduism thousands of years ago.

Materialism was, and continues to be, a mistake.

zackees• 5 years ago

or physics is broken.

beaconstudios8• 5 years ago

so we should be more willing to hold onto materialism than science?

Or are you suggesting that quantum mechanics is a bad model?

andagainagain• 5 years ago

Or physics is perfectly fine, and so is materialism.

Quantum weirdness, remember, is defined by physics. It's tested by physics. And it's perfectly compatible with materialism. The problem is in people's understanding.

Full disclosure - I'm no subscribing to finish reading the article. But what it sounds like is "if we change our philosophy to match physics, physics is easy". Quantum physics has always made sense. The only issue was that it wasn't intuitive.

rafaelvasco4• 5 years ago

It will always be. Science is by definition always incomplete. Once you know how Everything in the Universe works, you already transcended Science and became a God.

mortehu• 5 years ago

Are you saying taoism's longevity comes from the application of superior models of physics?

beaconstudios8• 5 years ago

I'm saying that it's funny how we're coming back round to something that used to be accepted. That makes materialism the abberation, not idealism.

This is metaphysics, not physics. Physics is a set of models about what should happen in response to specific events (modelling cause and effect); metaphysics is about trying to understand the nature of reality.

meowface2• 5 years ago

Is the "everything is quantum entanglement" theory proposed here really incompatible with materialism? Additionally, is "materialism" perhaps just an overloaded term with no strict definition?

It alters how we think about the fundamental makeup of matter, but it's still a way of describing a material universe that obeys some laws of physics, with no implication of things sometimes associated with non-materialism (dualism, panpsychism, afterlife).

Quantum mechanics already significantly shook up how we thought about matter. Our conception of matter fundamentally being some kind of relation coefficient of information is weird, but still wouldn't be as surprising and paradigm-breaking as, say, some sort of reality where everything is consciousness, a la Donald Hoffman.

It could still be a natural world full of emergent phenomena such as consciousness. Maybe "naturalism" is a term I'd be more philosophically comfortable with for these sorts of discussions.

beaconstudios8• 5 years ago

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

Materialism in this case just means that we have access to objective reality. Idealism is not necessarily supernatural, but it does claim that we do not have access to objective reality beyond our perception and interpretation.

The definition of "matter" keeps shrinking the closer we look. It seems that we can never truly know what reality is made of at its lowest levels, and all we have is essentially our own subjective interpretations of what we perceive.

It could still be a natural world full of emergent phenomena such as consciousness. Maybe "naturalism" is a term I'd be more philosophically comfortable with for these sorts of discussions.

Naturalism is just the idea that there is no supernatural process at work. I'm not talking about naturalism.

rafaelvasco4• 5 years ago

Not a mistake. But merely something incomplete. Consciousness is the Way.

arbitrage• 5 years ago

this is like paywalled blogspam.

ben_w3• 5 years ago

Also my impression just as I reached the end of the free bit.

I’ve not been particularly impressed with New Scientist ever since they put the EM Drive on the front cover.

staticman2• 5 years ago

I'm pretty sure the pop culture depiction of quantum physics doesn't accurately depict the real science.

Since this is paywalled we can't estimate how off the article is though.

gloryless• 5 years ago

That's 100% true, exhibit "ant man". But felt like he was leading to the actual math before paywall. Comes down to a probabilistic existence, and exhibiting characteristics based on other particles being present or not present. All of which makes no sense to human life.

Checkout "hawking radiation" for a real concrete example

rambojohnson• 5 years ago

p a y w a l l

ca98am79• 5 years ago

The most interesting thing, to me, is that if you abandon materialism, what does it say about Consciousness?

Consciousness can't come from material if it doesn't really exist. So is material "created" by Consciousness?

luplex• 5 years ago

Consciousness is not a material phenomenon anyways. To me it seems plausible that consciousness and matter are produced by the same code.

jonbon2• 5 years ago

People have proposed the idea that consciousness is the building block of the universe and not matter. See Itzhak Bentovs book Stalking The Wild Pendulum.

TheCapeGreek• 5 years ago

Panpsychism is the term.

For usage in popular fiction & fun reading, take a deep dive into the lore of The Elder Scrolls, especially Morrowind-era content. In short, the universe is dreamed up by The Dreamer, and thus by definition is made of consciousness. Interesting consequences ensue as a result, especially for the few bits of consciousness (people) that become "lucid" within the dream.

This was all inspired of course by some parts of Hinduism if I remember correctly.

minblaster• 5 years ago

Check out nonduality. It’s amusing that we insist that consciousness, which we experience firsthand, must be created by matter, which we experience indirectly. The image creating the screen.

rafaelvasco4• 5 years ago

Yes. The only way to solve the riddle is to accept that everything comes from Consciousness.

Viliam12343• 5 years ago

I can only see the introduction, but it already shows some confused thinking.

Whether something exists, and whether you call it X only because there are humans who call it X, those are two different things. On a planet without humans, stones exists, but no one is there to call them "stones". So they don't really exist, is that what the article is trying to tell me?

Also, the stones do not exist, because only atoms exist, mwa-ha-ha-ha! Or maybe just someone equivocates "exists" and "is not made of smaller components".

The example with red color, again confuses "this object reflects red light" with "there is an eye that perceives the reflected red light". Also, good point that things can't reflect red light if they are in complete darkness.

Does anything of the above have anything in common with quantum physics?

Would adding quantum physics to this confused thinking make it any more meaningful?

naringas• 5 years ago

So they don't really exist because only atoms exist

but don't only exist because humans call them atoms?

meroes2• 5 years ago

What about Dirac's words ~ there being a fundamental size where any experiment will disturb the subject non negligibly, thus science can never speak causally prior to quantum measurements.

This has little to do with humans. The photon is irreducible yet is our (anyone's) smallest investigative tool.

Would you ever modify the meaning of exits in this context? The planet with rocks could be traveled to by something physical. In QM, the causal relation is broken due to measurement by any physical object we know of, down to fundamental particles.

If there is no physical setup -> it does not exist. Right?

Or maybe Popper is 100% wrong?

Viliam12343• 5 years ago

Or maybe Popper is 100% wrong?

Maybe just not 100% right. That happens to many people.

If we can't observe something directly, because a photon disturbs it, there may be other ways. Like, create the same situation thousand times, always throw one photon at it, make a statistics of how the photon deflects, and try to explain it. Or just find the simplest model that fits the known data, and assume that the parts you cannot observe directly still follow the model... simply because there is no good reason to assume they don't.

If we take the logic of "if I can't verify it by experiment, it does not exist" too far, then Big Bang is also not real, because we can't replicate it in the lab. Actually, we should take quite seriously the idea that the universe was created at this very moment, because we can't create the yesterday in the lab either.

weatherlight2• 5 years ago

What I'm gathering from the introduction of the article is all properties are emergent behaviors that are particular to the observer. In the case of the stone, the atoms in the stone, observe and interact with each other, the atoms themselves come it being because of on the interaction of their subatomic particles.

vehemenz2• 5 years ago

I don't see any confused thinking here.

This is not run-of-the-mill ontological reductionism; this is a rejection of ontological realism, which nearly everyone takes for granted (including you, from the sound of it), but many philosophers do not.

The connection between ontological anti-realism and relational quantum mechanics (Rovelli's brainchild) is pretty straightforward. I think Rovelli is arguing that the quantum measurement problem is only a problem if we assert things ontologically, in terms of what's exactly here and there, rather than an expression of a relation between the measuring device and the system.

beaconstudios8• 5 years ago

This is interesting, does Rovelli lay these ideas out in a book? The idea that quantum mechanics are based in causality but not realism aligns closely with my own metaphysical beliefs based in an interpretation of idealism from a cybernetic (study of nonlinear causality) perspective. It would be interesting to hear his case.

beaconstudios8• 5 years ago

the point is that what we call distinct objects are not inherently distinct - it is us that draw the distinctions. Also, that our labels for things are not labels of identity, but labels of function/purpose - if I point at an object and call it a "chair", what I am saying is that it can be sat on, not that "chair" summarises its inherent characteristics.

The point being that base reality is not accessible to us, only our perceptions and interpretations of reality. We have no way of knowing what the reality is beyond our perceptions.

sanatgersappa• 5 years ago

Sounds a lot like Nagarjuna's theory of dependent origination.

datavirtue• 5 years ago

I have been wondering lately if it is possible that humans may have a quantum signature that they leave behind on everything they touch and that it may be possible to detect that signature. I was imagining a technology that could isolate the signatures and identify the person who hand sewed my shoes, for example.

rafaelvasco4• 5 years ago

What we think is real is just how we perceive it. So what was Real and what is Perception ?

sandworm101• 5 years ago

I see a big red flag whenever a scientific unknown results in scientists questioning the nature of reality. Once upon a time we didn't know how the sun could stay to bright for so long. Some people resorted to the supernatural for explanations. They were wrong (nuclear fusion). Today we cannot understand the movement of particles. Some now question the nature of reality while other debate whether reality even exists without a conscious mind to see it. I take a step back when the scientists resort to the language of philosophers and theologians. Reality is almost certainly more mundane. In decades/centuries to come, when we figure out what is actually happening, those who compared quarks to trees falling in unseen woods might look like the people who saw the hot sun as proof of the supernatural.

marcusKral• 5 years ago

When we think that something is weird, it's just us that are looking at it incorrectly. Quantum phenomenon make perfect sense once you accept that everything is just information, including space and time. So objects do exist, but only as collections of information which we then experience internally as "reality"... a little like simulation theory. We are essentially part of a cognitive field.

RikNieu• 5 years ago

I read an excellent book called The Idea Of The World, by Bernando Kastrup that reminds me of this. It made me consider idealism waay more seriously.

dang• 5 years ago

Looks like it's hardwalled, which means it's off topic for HN.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10178989

Quantum weirdness isn’t weird – if we accept objects don’t exist

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