Quantum Physics: There is no Independent Reality

[Astro Cat]

First I would like to preface this response with the fact that I am not a quantum physicist or specializing in a branch (like solid-state or such) that would make use of a lot of quantum training and I have not participated in specifically QM-based research. However, I am an astrophysics grad student and a decent chunk of my education has been quantum. I just finished grad QM2 this last winter (with QM1 before that, and undergrad QM before that). That being said, most coursework is just working problems out of JJ Sakurai's text and doesn't deal so much with metaphysics: as is often misattributed to Bohr (and I do not know the real origination of the famous line), we "shut up and calculate."

That being said, I have had an interest in quantum interpretations for a long time and have followed the likes of Roland Omnés, Bernard d'Espagnat, and to a lesser extent Lee Smolin (though he is less of a philosopher, he understands the importance of it) on these matters.

I'm obviously new here, and it seems as though I'm wading into the middle of some long-standing conversation. I wondered if you would like to share the basis of your argument on non-realism?

Is it that you think QM is non-realist currently (which would be true; though I'd describe many interpretations as instrumentalist) or that you think there can never be a realist interpretation for quantum phenomena?

[Phil8659]

Spinoza

Spinoza is mentioned in the opening. Now, I once did a digital edition of Spinoza, and although people take his work seriously, they apparently miss the joke. Now, Plato presented what many call the Theory of Forms, and are wholly ignorant, as Aristotle explained to people, that the Form meant definition, and again, when he said We know all things by its form, i.e. by its definition.
So, here was Spinoz's joke, He countered with a so-called theory of the material, i.e. a theory, called today, the Theory of Relativity, which, nobody sees that joke either as we can name either the relative or the correlative, and verb and a noun. In short, If a thing is perceptible, it cannot possibly be intelligible, and if it intelligible, it cannot possibly be perceptible.
Now, Spinoza makes what appears deliberate contradiction after contradiction, and it really is a very good Joke. I cannot possibly believe that any one as intelligent as he was, that he took that work serious, as it is really funny.

One can no more predicate existence as one can reality. There are more, the joke is on you, than people realize.

As soon as an author states "There exists, such and such." I laugh. One can even imagine a magician trying to pull a rabbit out of his hat.

It is wholly impossible to believe and is a fact, that every system of information processing is effected by binary recursion, creating definition upon definition, and then claim, that there is also such a thing as its exact converse, the negation of grammar itself. One can say, Spinoza started the joke called science as it is today.

But, believe all you want, it keeps good jokes being repeated.

Now, you can claim all you want that truth is relative, and I do not believe that Spinoza thought so either; but he did show, people are just happy parroting complete nonsense.

Einstein can be forgiven, after all he was born with a partial brain. But it just goes to show, being born without a brain is equal to being born with one that is just broke.

[FlashDangerpants]

I'm obviously new here, and it seems as though I'm wading into the middle of some long-standing conversation. I wondered if you would like to share the basis of your argument on non-realism?

Is it that you think QM is non-realist currently (which would be true; though I'd describe many interpretations as instrumentalist) or that you think there can never be a realist interpretation for quantum phenomena?

I can provide some background, but this is the PN forums, you should expect all the backstories to be weird... this one really sucks.

So you appear to be into, and a product of, the sciences, hard sciences no less! And you may have formed an opinion about those sciences, something to do with them being good or at least useful, because you can predict outcomes of some test with a level of precision, or something like that.... but... but what if there was no reality for you be testing all your predictions against? Spooky thoughts!

Well then the sciences would be just these Frameworks... Systems of Knowledge if you will. Just as other stuff like Law, and history are FSK things too. But everyone agrees the sciency FSKs (well physics really, not so much zoology) are totally the best FSK things of all. But if that doesn't rely on correspondence of worldly observation and sciency explanation on the subject of some sort of reality stuff/thing... then it must the agreement of all those people that makes science good, not the epxeriments and stuff....

... and that means that if you can make some new FSK thing that uses a bunch of science words like "QuantumNomNomNNoms", and "neural", then you get to announce that it is "near equivalent" to the "Science FSK". And you've pulled all that off by deciding that the onotolgical status of some "real world" thing is sufficiently in doubt that any old shit can be facts if you just believe hard enough. Like theTaliban.

That, in a nutshell, is why Vegetable Armpit has launched about 700 threads discussing generalised antirealism. As to what his own FSK thing is, and why he wants that, well that's two more dark tales. He's not one of the sane or competent people.

[Phil8659]

Now, because an adjective is used, then Reality must be a relative, where one member of the class is Independent, and the other, what is on well-fair? or maybe lives at home? Or with its aunt?

Does a Universal take a particular adjective?

Now, for all you genius's who did not understand and learn to understand Plato, if we have all these different kinds of reality, what is the name of the class of which they are all members?

[kovacs]

You are too hasty without understanding the whole contexts of my stance from all the posts I had posted but rather judge merely from this post, thus amateurish;

It's the OP in a philosophy forum. Of course I am going to respond to what is written there. If it was part of a larger thread, then this response might make some sense, but even then the statements in this OP are problematic and misleading at best.

I am not familiar with the author nor I am bothered in this case.

It's not positive that your not bothered by being caught out appealing to authority and you don't understand that authority and further that authority actually contradicts your position. You're misrepresenting the physicist you quoted, you don't understand or care to understand the article. You're throwing it at people as if you've read and understood the article and as part of a condescending post. That it doesn't bother you when this is pointed out is easy to pretend online or even worse, if true, says something almost pathological about your relationship with being honest.

I did not introduce the article and I admit I did not read the whole article.
It was not my intention to justify my view based totally on the article as authority but merely to point out the article present the issue of the OP, i.e.

That's great, but note your use of the adverb totally. The article contradicts your use of it and your position. Perhaps he is not right, but you got caught throwing out quotes, out of context, in an appeal to authority, where you have not done basic work - it's a short articicle - nor have you understood the article or even what the portion you quoted entaisl.

The Copenhagen interpretation has its limitations but its basic fundamentals are still applicable to Quantum Mechanics.

this sounds like political speech. Vague, not really asserting anything and further not a response to what I said or the status of the Copenhagen Interpretation. You condescended to people who disagreed with you and wrote AS IF the Copenhagen interpretation or really interpretations are the consensus opinion of current physics. This is not correct.
And your reasserting that is it in an even vaguer way in this post is not even close to an argument.

For authority I had always reference this;

• Model-dependent realism
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model-dependent_realism
  It claims that it is meaningless to talk about the "true reality" of a model as we can never be absolutely certain of anything. The only meaningful thing is the usefulness of the model.

Yes, that's an article in Wikipedia on one philosophical position. Wikipedia has other articles with differeing opinions. What you referenced was not an authority but a description of a philosophical position that you agree with, presumably. Though actually you seem NOT to understand model dependent realism, because 1) it is a realism and elswhere you condescend to realists and 2) it is an epistemological and pragmatist position NOT an ontological position. YOu have taken repeatedly here an ontological anti-realist position. Again and again. YOu can even see in the shallow Wikipedia article that it does not reject reality in itself, which you have. So, if that's your authority you either don't understand it or only appeal to authority as far as it says what you want, but ignore it when it disagrees. Which means you don't hold the authority as an authority.

Relational quantum mechanics

this is a better appeal to authority since this position is closer in one way to the one you have taken in other threads, one irony being that in the Wikipedia article and more clearly in the writings of the actually people who hold this position, one can see how poorly you understand the Copenhagen Interpretation. But it is also further away from your position because
Observers
don't
have
to
be
human

Any physical system can collapse the wave, for ex

It's also not really an anti-realism and is associated with a variety of realisms, even if these realisms are different from the most common ones.

And of course there is no consensus in the physics community regarding the truth of this position, so a lot of the posturing in relation to realists is absurd.

It still smacks of amateur hour. Links and quotes of things not read or understood to bolster what are mainly assertions not arguments.

Hey, I read some of this and it seems to support me, maybe, kinda and this, which contradicts the other authority I just threw at you also supports me, well, at least in the part I want to quote, etc. does not a demonstration or even an argument make.

You are right that my argument is related to ontology and where my focus is against ontological metaphysical realism.

Whilst model dependent realism [MDR] is not about ontological reality, it does not indicate that what is reality at some point is entangled with the human conditions and leaving what is ultimate reality hanging.
"It [MDR] claims that it is meaningless to talk about the "true reality" of a model as we can never be absolutely certain of anything."

The article [which I did not state I agreed with its conclusion] refer to the Copenhagen Interpretation, where the point I am interested for discussion is to refute the "ontological" basis of reality as claim by say Einstein who believed a thing-in-itself exists independent of the human conditions.

In metaphysical terms, the Copenhagen interpretation views quantum mechanics as providing knowledge of phenomena, but not as pointing to 'really existing objects', which it regards as residues of ordinary intuition. This makes it an epistemic theory.
This may be contrasted with Einstein's view, that physics should look for 'really existing objects', making itself an ontic theory.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copenhage ... _variables?

Btw, where is your 'professional' argument to support whatever is your stance?
Your arrogance may actually turn out what you think is real could be an illusion.

I mean, seriously. This is a joke. THE ARTICLE YOU PROVIDED IS BY A PROFESSIONAL PHYSICIST AND HE IS ARGUING AGAINST YOUR POSITION.
So, there is an argument provided by you against your own position. You used it in an appeal to authority and there it is presenting a professional argument against your position. I don't need to provide an arguement against your stance, there is a decent one in that article by a professional.

And that's fine. It's fine to disgree. There is not a consensus in physics. You can mount arguments against realism
But 1) you have condescended to people AS IF they are behind the times, going against the new physics. That is BS. Modern physics does not have a consensus on the Copenhagen interpretation or on realism. Your condescension was misplaced, but further, 2) from what I can see you cite things to support your position that do not sort your position. 3) you do not have an overview of physics but present yourself as if you do 4) you pick things off the internet that in some abrupt quick read (of part of the site or article) seem to support your position and when it is pointed out they don't, you don't care, despite using them as appeals to authority. This is amateur hour.

It's a philosophy forum, which means, generally, that most of us are amateurs when pulling out information from physicists, say. But if you are going to present your ideas with the type of certainty you do, one would expect that you would actually read the articles you quote and cite and throw at people.

You do the same thing with Ordinary Language Philosophy. You don't appear to understand the people who have moved beyond OLP, how much they still agree with OLP
and
that their positions do not support your differents with PH.

You decided he was basing his ideas on OLP. YOu then found that some people are against that and that there are new developments in language philosophy. But those development don't support your position on what facts are. They don't undermine it. If you'd actually done the work and said

Here's the current, more popular in philosophy of language position. And here's how it supports my use of fact or undermine's PH's position on the use of 'fact' or how one determines it. But you haven't done that, nor do I think you can.

All you did was find something that seemed to undermine what you think his philosophy of language position is. But it actually doesn't undermine his position. And if you tried you'd find that Grice, for example, still used OLP, and further his objections were as a naturalist, a believer in naturalism, which is not going to help your position at all.

Grice was, however, also a life-long practitioner of ordinary language philosophy. He begins the “Prolegomena” to Studies in the Way of Words by noting that “some may regard [ordinary language philosophy] as an outdated style of philosophy,” but he urges us “not to be too quick to write off such a style.” Instead, he urges us to build “a theory which will enable one to distinguish between the case in which an utterance is false or fails to be true, or more generally fails to correspond to the world in some favored way, and the case in which it is inappropriate for reasons of a different kind” (Grice 1989, 4). Much of Studies in the Way of Words addresses this task.

from the Stanford Encyclopedia of PHilosophy.

See, it's not amateur hour because of your positions. I am not a realist, and am closer to antirealism.

The problem is you're just flinging around citations and links without really understanding them. Alright, some of this stuff is really hard, we are all out of our depth sometimes, but you don't even read the positions your fling. And you don't care when this is pointed out. If all you wanted was a descriptions of the Copehagen interpretation there are much better places to go....

YOu obviously chose that link because it seemed like he agreed with you (when in fact he didn't). When it is pointed out that he didn't, you pretend that you weren't interested in his position. BS, you quoted a portion of his article that appears, out of context, to agree with you.

Grow up.

I know it's harsh in online forums. But hubris and being disingenous are not going to help you minimize that.

It would likely better to argue your own cases and stopping citing so many people and linking. It is not making your cases better and I think is helps you miss the holes in your own positions. Which doesn't mean your positions are wrong. I agree with a few of them I have seen.

Your arrogance may actually turn out what you think is real could be an illusion.

See, this ends up just being embarrassing. YOu are just assuming that if anyone has an issue with the way you post, they can't deal with what you are arguing is the case. I was clear that I was criticizing HOW you posted not your position.

If you really think you are going to write a book that will change the world, you need to become an adult around this.
You can pretend that I am wrong about why you quoted that physicist, but it's obvious. So, whatever posturing you do, you know yourself you quoted him because he seemed to be agreeing with you. You know that. Go ahead post some denials, but if you can't look at that yourself - you don't have to admit it to me - if you can't own up to that yourself, then you are cutting off learning and that hurts you and your work.

Your choice. Shit, you could just not respond to me and digest this. I promise not to conclude I won or you couldn't respond. I am sure you could have some sort of comeback. But who the fuck cares what I think and no one else will care if you come back with a great rejoinder.

What should matter to you is that your sloppy thinking got noticed. Your sloppy practices here got noticed. That doesn't mean you are wrong in your core ideas, it means your process and your professionalism need work. That's all.

Or you can ignore that, pretend, try to appear strong and certain and admit no pretending or errors or laziness and that will be your loss and not mine. It won't hurt me in the least. Or get me to deny the obvious.