“It’s not AI because we can explain how it works” slop.

The behavior of quantum systems are just holistic and respond to a de-localized property called quantum mutual information, which is a quantifiable property from the whole structure of the experiment.

If the particle passes through the slits, if there is QMI established between its position value and something, its dynamics change than if there was no QMI.

You can replace the measuring device with a single additional particle that interacts with the one going through the slits such that the QMI between them becomes maximal and it has the same effect as measuring.

That’s because the whole point of a measuring decide is to establish a correlation between itself and what it is testing to measure, so as a consequence any strong measurement establishes maximal QMI between the measuring device and what is being measured.

And since the dynamics of the system depend upon that quantity… it has the effect of altering its dynamics.

The position/momentum thing isn’t just about a difficulty in knowing the position and momentum at the same time. The Kochen-Specker theorem rules that out. The difficulty is that it cannot actually have both properties at the same time. Either one is emergent from the other, or they’re both emergent from a third property, like the configuration of the field.

funnily enough, that’s exactly the argument that you seem to be making. “reality” is perceived by us precisely because it is a social construct that is useful to us, and therefore it has to be simple.

I’m only saying the language we use to describe reality is socially constructed and “fuzzy.”

I am a direct realist, I believe you can perceive reality directly for what it really is. You just cannot capture what it really is in words. My words describing my dog will always be “fuzzy.” But if I just go look at my dog and hug my dog and don’t think words at all, nothing about that is fuzzy.

The raw perceptions are real, and each perception really is equivalent to the totality of all that there is. That may seem weird to say, because if I cannot see you right now, then does that mean you don’t exist? No, I can see you right now, just not in fine detail. Your body has mass, and that mass has a gravitational pull, and as you move, as your heart beats, it sends out gravitational waves. These are too subtle for me to notice but technically they do make an impression on me as well as slightly move everything around me, and if somehow I could notice, collect, and process all of that information, I could derive where you are purely from what is right in front of me right now.

But, in practice, I can’t do that. When we change vantage points, we don’t go from black-and-white experiencing things to not experiencing things. It’s an infinite gradation, where we go from seeing things with high fidelity to low fidelity. Things we see with high fidelity are easy to notice, process, contemplate, etc. But things we see with low fidelity are much more difficult to notice. But noticing something is not the same as not seeing it. If I watch a film and don’t pay attention at all to the background characters, so if you later ask me what was the color of the shirt of one of the background characters, and I report I did not know, that doesn’t prove I did not see it, I just didn’t pay attention to it. Even the stuff in front of me that is too subtle to pick out and notice, I am still seeing it, in the sense that, mathematically, it really does make a slight different on the impression on my virtual cortex.

In everything experience, we really do see all of reality at once. We just don’t see it all in equal levels of fidelity, and changing vantage points changes only the fidelity of what we are perceiving, to make certain things easier to notice. But every perception implicates the whole.

That is a point of view that is basically impossible for most modern philosophers to understand because they are obsessed with representionalism which falsely conflates experience (reality) with consciousness (awareness), which are entirely different things. They treat everything we experience as part of consciousness, but since reality is obviously independent of consciousness, then that makes reality itself independent of experience, and if you can’t experience it, then how can you even know it exists? This then devolves into idealism, solipsism, the hard problem, the mind-body problem, etc.

But I reject the whole framework because experience and consciousness are not the same thing. Experience is just direct reality for what it really is, in its full totality. It does not enter consciousness unless I become aware of it and start thinking about it.

What I am disagreeing with is that the “physical worldview” even comes entirely from the empirical evidence to begin with. The empirical evidence gives you a body of mathematics, but you have to apply another layer of philosophical interpretation on top of the mathematics to get to a “physical worldview.”

I thus am arguing that the same body of mathematics, and thus empirical evidence, without any modification at all, is compatible with multiple “physical worldviews,” i.e. different “ways of thinking about it,” and I am arguing that my way of thinking about SR is actually more logically consistent than the standard way.

Energy being conserved is not just practically wrong but empirically wrong, as you said yourself, on large scales you can observe it being wrong and energy conservation failing. I am explicitly talking about different ways of viewing the same body of mathematics where there is no empirical method to distinguish between the two interpretations.

A simple example is fields. Most physicists believe the mathematics of fields, involving the assignment of a set of numbers to every point in space, corresponds to an ontological field, whereby they imagine an invisible object piloting particles around. They always speak of the fields as objects in the world that “cause” things to do something.

But we could equally argue that the mathematics of fields is just a way of describing the dispositions of particles. That is to say, the particles just move on their own. There is no invisible entity piloting them around, but this is not to deny the mathematics of fields, but rather, to interpret the mathematics of fields as a way of describing the dispositions of particles.

The mathematics of fields and the ontology of fields are not the same thing and the former doesn’t necessarily imply the latter. And so we can interpret the same body of mathematics, and thus empirical evidence, without denying the mathematics of fields at all, but only denying the ontology of fields. This would not lead to any new predictions, but it would give you a different way of “thinking about” the same body mathematics.

(I didn’t downvote you FYI. The other person did.)

This is just an identity paradox, which the literature is full of them, and I find Plato’s solution way less convincing than the holistic solutions presented by people like Engels and Bohm.

The holistic solution is to argue that “identity” really doesn’t exist. There was never a “river” to begin with. Reality is just not actually divided up into autonomous objects. As Bohm argued, autonomous objects are human inventions. We create them because talking about reality as a whole, all at once, is not physically possible with our finite brains. We have to break it up into chunks to talk about it, and it is a mistake to confuse those chunks for reality, as if reality really contains autonomous objects moving around within it.

This was something Engels also cautioned against, outright rejecting identity for a simple reason. Imagine you say that this particular tree is represented by the variable A. Well, the moment you have said the tree is A, the tree has already changed a bit, it’s not what it was before, so it is now ¬A. If you say both A and ¬A are the same, that’s logically inconsistent. If you say the tree at the instantaneously later time should be considered a different variable B, then you no longer have a single “tree” but an infinite number of distinct objects, which contradicts with the notion of there being a single tree.

Indeed, he points to many other problems, such as the fact that you cannot meaningfully draw a concrete border for where the tree begins in space and where it ends, and where it begins in time (when it was “born”) and when it ends (when it dies). If you zoom in closely enough, the border between the “tree” and everything else becomes fuzzy and ill-defined, and its transition from a seed to a tree, and from a tree back to the earth, also is a gradual process without a well-defined boundary. Engels thus concludes that for formal logic to make sense at all, we intentionally have to ignore the real complexity of the world. If we say the tree is A, for example, we have to first ignore the flow of time and treat it completely static, and we have to not zoom in too closely so that we don’t notice the issue with ill-defined borders, so on and so forth.

The conclusion is, again, that objects don’t really exist. There is no “tree” or “river” that is a well-defined, static and unchanging object like the variables in formal logic, A or B or X or Z. This is where your Plato point breaks down. You replace the ill-defined river with another definition including an ill-defined “shape of the landscape,” which is also changing all the time just as much as the river does, with no singular and consistent “shape of the landscape,” and its very precise shape is impossible to rigorously define even at a single time instant.

Although, the philosopher Jocelyn Benoist, who does take a similar approach, disagrees with the framing of saying that “objects don’t exist,” because a philosophy that just says no thing exists can be linguistically confusing, so there should be some meaningful way to refer to the existence of real objects.

He makes a distinction between abstract objects, which do not exist in reality and are only a human construct part of our language, and real objects, which is when the linguistic symbol is employed in a Wittgensteinian language game, and thus is imbued with a context.

For example, Benoist would say that, if you are talking about a river in the abstract, it does not refer to anything real. But the word “river” serves as a socially constructed norm that can be used to judge reality to be something, and thus can be employed in a social setting. If I see a river and point to it, and say, “look at that river over there,” the river is now not just an abstract symbol, but it is a symbol pointing to something in a real world context, where people can really observe its glistening surface, dip their toes in it and feel its cold water, etc.

It’s meaningful to talk about real objects only if we are implicitly or explicitly imbuing that object (as a symbol) with a real-world context (where the symbol is employed to identify something in real-world experience) through the social practice of identification, which is the purpose of objects, to serve as a norm by which to judge reality by. The real object is thus the object + the context in which it is employed.

For 99% of people, that is what they can observe in their daily lives, and it’s the simplest model that “gets the job done”

Well, for me, 99% is not good enough. I want 100% compatibility, not just with what I observe in my day-to-day life, but with all empirical evidence ever gathered and recorded by humanity.

The thing is that Occam’s razor is not just a philosophical argument. It comes from practical thinking. The thing is, our brains are a computer too. So they need software…

You’re explaining the process you believe leads to people employing Occam’s razor. That doesn’t justify the usage of the razor. This is basically an is/ought thing. You describing an “is” (the process that causes it) doesn’t get you to an “ought” (that the razor should be logically employed in all cases).

Also, as I said, one can mount a strong argument against Occam’s razor in this case.

Particularly, special relativity without assuming an absolute rest frame is not logically compatible with non-local effects, yet quantum mechanics is non-local. The physicists Frauchiger and Renner directly proved in a paper published in Nature Communications that this leads to a time-paradox without specifying an absolute time-ordering of events.

Well, they argued there are two other ways to avoid the time-paradox as well. One is to just claim quantum mechanics is wrong, which I don’t think it’s wrong. The other is to posit that there is a multiverse, because maybe two observers describe the same system in contradictory and logically incompatible ways because they are actually describing two different branches of the multiverse.

However, Jeffrey Bub in his paper “Two Dogmas’ Redux” shows mathematically that this doesn’t work, because the paradox can be proved to be completely confined to a single branch of the wavefunction, so it cannot be resolved by considering higher branches. While Frauchiger and Renner posit that the multiverse may solve the problem in their paper (and indeed say this in many interviews), Bub proved they are wrong, and it is still inconsistent.

The only logically consistent conclusion, then, is that there is an absolute time-ordering.

When I said I could mount a strong argument against it, my point was not merely that I’d throw out Occam’s razor in this case. If I offer no meaningful alternative, then it doesn’t really strengthen my case that one can mount a reasonable defense.

But my point is stronger than that. I am pitting two different assumptions against one another: (1) Occam’s razor, and (2) the view that your worldview should be logically consistent. I am pointing out that applying #1 in this case violates #2, and that I believe #2 is more important here.

Can I prove it’s more important? No, but I think I could convince a lot of people who were willing to listen.

You missed the part where metaphysicians claim that what they are doing isn’t metaphysics at all, but science and logic, or something along those lines.

No, I didn’t. I agree with that. I have literally written an entire book criticizing how people conflate the mathematical models of modern physics with philosophical interpretations of those models, and then pretend their metaphysics is not philosophy but something “proved by the empirical evidence.”

The book was motivated precisely by the question I raised in my previous comment: does the common man’s position really have to be abandoned?

Philosophers, including physicists who write philosophy, very commonly point to modern physics as establishing the need to abandon certain common worldviews and adopt a new metaphysics. But they often present this not as metaphysics, but as something directly established by empirical reality, such that questioning it is treated as equivalent to denying science.

One example is the dominant interpretation of special relativity, which claims that space and time are ontologically relative. We can experimentally verify that clocks drift from one another exactly as the mathematics predicts, such as when two airplanes fly in opposite directions and meet again. The conclusion is then presented as empirically proven: space and time themselves must be relative.

But John Bell pointed out in “How to Teach Special Relativity” that the same mathematics can be given a different philosophical interpretation while preserving the same empirical predictions.

You can instead assume that spacetime is absolute, while objects in motion undergo physical effects that cause moving clocks to slow and rulers in the direction of motion to contract. The measurements of rods and clocks would then be emergent properties produced by absolute space and time plus these physical effects. The mathematics remains the same, but its ontological interpretation changes.

If physicists object that such an absolute rest frame could never be experimentally identified, that does not prove it does not exist. It means only that its existence is empirically undetermined. At that point, the usual response is Occam’s razor: if we cannot directly detect such a frame, we should eliminate it from our ontology.

My point is not that this is wrong. It may be a perfectly reasonable philosophical choice. My point is that Occam’s razor is a philosophical argument.

You have not empirically proven that space and time are relative. You have shown that relativity follows from the mathematics given a particular interpretation of what the mathematics represents. Choosing that interpretation over another requires an additional philosophical argument. If there were motivation to make an argument in response (which is a whole other topic, but I argue one can mount a strong counterargument), then it would lead to a philosophical debate, and that debate could not be settled empirically.

This is the broader point I am making: the same mathematics can be compatible with multiple ontological interpretations. Empirical evidence can constrain those interpretations, but it does not necessarily determine them uniquely.

So, if you are an extremely conservative skeptic who refuses to abandon the common man’s worldview unless doing so is strictly necessary, you can always ask whether the new worldview actually follows necessarily from the mathematics and empirical evidence.

Often, it doesn’t. The physical evidence motivates the metaphysical debate, but it does not wholly determine its outcome.

For me the bias is not just in making idealist views look “higher IQ” but that they depict a person who just has the most basic self-evident views that are the most widespread and commonplace among people who don’t do philosophy at all (that there exists a material objective reality) as only possessing those views because they just got them from the television.

I think this is very common in philosophy, where people want to sound more interesting by positing very bizarre towers of metaphysics, which they claim are justified by some incredibly intellectual line of reasoning. They then paint normies as stupid for not believing that for not following their lengthy complex line of reasoning.

But quite often these lengthy complex lines of reasoning are just the author tricking themselves out of an obvious conclusion, by writing so much they obfuscate what is being talked about, so then it makes it look like their bizarre conclusions logically follow, when anyone who actually takes the time to parse that metaphysical tower will find it does not.

But they rely precisely on the fact that nobody will bother to parse it because it is too complicated, and then use the complexity as a sign of the “intellectualism” of the position.

I’ve always been a fan of defending the common man’s views by analyzing arguments against it, going over the tower of metaphysics and seeing if their conclusions really do follow and prove the common man wrong. I’ve never found any argument that necessitates they are wrong. Sometimes the arguments are strong enough such that you have to make some additional clarifications, but that only serves to better flesh out the position rather than to dismantle it, so there is nothing inherently “stupid” about the common position.

The author’s bias in this is rather… apparent lol

Broke: “Somethings are illusions, some aren’t.”

Woke: “Everything is an illusion.”

Bespoke: “There is no such thing as an illusion.”

Now, the apparent impossibility of basing ‘the correct knowledge’ … on our perception says less about our perception and more about the conceptual framework we attempt to apply to it. Our perception is really just perception of what there is. … In itself there is no ‘illusion’ here, only full contact with reality … However, there seems to be a gap between the perceptual presence of these things and the concepts we try to apply to them … The answer does not lie in the nature of this particular kind of perception, but rather in the nature of the conceptual apparatus through which we view it. For the very concepts we use in such cases … are rooted in perception … these concepts, that is, concepts that have made perception itself a norm, do play a central role. Thus, the notion of ‘perceptual illusion,’ … in fact registers a gap between the specific way in which we are presented with things in a given perception and the general perceptual determination that imbues some of our concepts. … We call those features of perception that are left outside the system of our perceptual concepts … ‘perceptual illusions.’ … The question is not whether in itself our perception conforms to a norm … but rather how much of the perceived we have incorporated into our definition of that norm. … illusions, just are perceptions on my account. … we simply have a perception in every case where we may be inclined to say that we do.

— Jocelyn Benoist, “Toward a Contextual Realism”