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Mathematics is just a language to describe patterns we observe in the world. It really is not fundamentally more different from English or Chinese, it is just more precise so there is less ambiguity as to what is actually being claimed, so if someone makes a logical argument with the mathematics, they cannot use vague buzzwords with unclear meaning disallowing it from it actually being tested.
Mathematics just is a language that forces you to have extreme clarity, but it is still ultimately just a language all the same. Its perfect consistency hardly matters. What matters is that you can describe patterns in the world with it and use it to identify those patterns in a particular context. If the language has some sort of inconsistency that disallows it from being useful in a particular context, then you can just construct a different language that is more useful in that context.
It's of course, preferable that it is more consistent than not so it is applicable to as many contexts as possible without having to change up the language, but absolute perfect pure consistency is not necessarily either.
ChatGPT just gives the correct answer that the limit doesn't exist.
Speed of light limitation. Andromeda is 2.5 million light years away. Even if someone debunks special relativity and finds you could go faster than light, you would be moving so fast relative to cosmic dust particles that it would destroy the ship. So, either way, you cannot practically go faster than the speed of light.
The only way we could have intergalactic travel is a one-way trip that humanity here on earth would be long gone by the time it reached its destination so we could never know if it succeeded or not.
Dogmatism goes all ways. The Soviets temporarily threw out evolutionary biology for Lysenkoism because they believed there was an ideological connection between Darwinism and social Darwinism and thus thought it was an ideology used to justify capitalism, and the adoption of Lysenkoism was devastating to their agriculture and wasn't abandoned until 1948.
The main lesson that China learned from the Cold War is that countries should be less dogmatic and more pragmatic. That does not mean an abandonment of ideology because you still need ideology to even tell you what constitutes a pragmatic decision or not and what guides the overall direction, but you should not adopt policies that will unambiguously harm your society and work against your own goals just out of a pure ideological/moralistic justification.
Americans seemed to have gone this pragmatic direction under FDR, who responded to the Great Depression by recognizing that one should not take a dogmatic approach to liberalism either, and expanded public programs, state-owned enterprises, and economic planning in the economy. But when the USSR started to fall apart, if you read Chinese vs US texts on the subject, the Americans took literally the opposite lesson from it that China did.
The Americans used the USSR's collapse as "proof" that we have reached the "end of history" and that their liberal ideology is absolutely perfect and, in fact, we are not dogmatic enough. It is not a coincidence that the decline of the USSR throughout the 1980s directly corresponded with the rise of the neoliberal Reagan era. The USSR's collapse was used by Americans to justify becoming hyperdogmatioids.
You can just read any text from any western economists on China's "opening up" to private markets, and you will see that every single western economist universally will refuse to acknowledge that any of the state-owned enterprises, public ownership of land, or economic planning plays any positive role in the economy. They all credit the economic growth solely to them introducing private enterprise and nothing else alone, and thus they always criticize China from the angle of "they have not privatized enough" and insist their economy would be even better off if they abolished the rest of the public sector.
I wrote an article before defending the public sector in China as being important to its rapid development, and never in the article do I attack the role the private sector played, I simply defended the notion that the public sector also played a crucial role by giving economic papers from China as well as quotes from books from top Chinese economists.
My article was reposted in /r/badeconomics and the person who reposted it went through every single one of my claims regarding the public sector playing an important role and tried to "debunk" every single one of them. They could not acknowledge that the public sector played ANY beneficial role at all. This is what I mean by the west has become hyperdogmatoids. They went from FDR era to believing that it's literally impossible for the public sector to play any positive role at all, and this has led to Reaganite era in the USA as well as waves of austerity throughout western Europe as they have been cutting back on public programs and public policy.
In my opinion, the decline of the western world we have been seeing as of late is very much a result of westerners taking the exact opposite lessons from the Cold War and becoming hyperdogmatoids, adopting the same mistakes the USSR made but in the opposite direction. In most of the western world these days, expanding public control in the economy is not even a tenable economic position. Just about every western country the "left" political parties want to just maintain the current level of public control, and the "right" want austerity to shrink it, but parties which want to increase it are viewed as unelectable.
Any economics or sociology which suggests maybe it is a good thing in certain caes to expand public control in certain areas is denounced as "flat-earth economics" and not taken seriously, and this refusal to grapple with an objective science of human socioeconomic development is harming the west as their public programs crumble, wealth inequality skyrockets, their infrastructure is falling apart, and they cannot self-criticize their own dogmatism.
Historically they often actually have the reverse effect.
Sanctions aren't subtle, they aren't some sneaky way of hurting a country and so the people blame the government and try to overthrow it. They are about as subtle as bombing a country then blaming the government. Everyone who lives there sees directly the impacts of the sanctions and knows the cause is the foreign power. When a foreign power is laying siege on a country, then it often has the effect of strengthening people's support for the government. Even the government's flaws can be overlooked because they can point to the foreign country's actions to blame.
Indeed, North Korea is probably the most sanctioned country in history yet is also one of the most stable countries on the planet.
I thought it was a bit amusing when Russia seized Crimea and the western world's brilliant response was to sanction Crimea as well as to shut down the water supply going to Crimea, which Russia responded by building one of the largest bridges in Europe to facilitate trade between Russia and Crimea as well as investing heavily into building out new water infrastructure.
If a foreign country is trying to starve you, and the other country is clearly investing a lot of money into trying to help you... who do you think you are winning the favor of with such a policy?
For some reason the western mind cannot comprehend this. They constantly insist that the western world needs to lay economic siege on all the countries not aligned with it and when someone points out that this is just making people of those countries hate the western world and want nothing to do with them and strengthening the resolve of their own governments, they just deflect by calling you some sort of "apologist" or whatever.
Indeed, during the Cuban Thaw when Obama lifted some sanctions, Obama became rather popular in Cuba, to the point that his approval ratings at times even surpassed that of Fidel, and Cuba started to implement reforms to allow for further economic cooperation with US government and US businesses. They were very happy to become an ally of the US, but then suddenly Democrats and Republicans decided to collectively do a 180 u-turn and abandon all of that and destroy all the good will that have built up.
But the people of Cuba are not going to capitulate because the government is actually popular, as US internal documents constantly admits to, and that popularity will only be furthered by the increased blockade. US is just going to create a North Korean style scenario off the coast of the US.
Indeed it is, as Cuba is one of the few democracies in the Americas with a government driven by humanist principles and not by billionaire oligarchs, with one of its major exports being doctors and not bombs, which has continually refused to engage in austerity even during its worst economic crises caused by US siege on the country. Anyone who has a soul believes Cuba deserves to be defended as a beacon of what humanity could be if we set aside our love for money and replaced it with a love for humanity.
Basically no one believes in open borders, only some weird fringe anarchists who posts memes like the one above that are largely irrelevant in the real world. It's always just been a straw man from the right or just weird online fringe anarchists who hold the position.
The reason communists are critical of the US/European hostility towards immigrants is not because we want open borders but because western countries bomb, sanction, coup these countries and cause a refugee crisis then turn around and cry about those immigrants coming to their country.
At least llama.cpp doesn't seem to do that by default. If it overruns the context window it just blorps.
This happened to me a lot when I tried to run big models with low context windows. It would effectively run out of memory so each new token wouldn't actually be added to the context so it would just get stuck in an infinite loop repeating the previous token. It is possible that there was a memory issue on Google's end.
Depends upon what you mean by realism. If you just mean belief in a physical reality independent of a conscious observer, I am not really of the opinion you need MWI to have a philosophically realist perspective.
For some reason, everyone intuitively accepts the relativity of time and space in special relativity as an ontological feature of the world, but when it comes to the relativity of the quantum state, people's brains explode and they start treating it like it has to do with "consciousness" or "subjectivity" or something and that if you accept it then you're somehow denying the existence of objective reality. I have seen this kind of mentality throughout the literature and it has never made sense to me.
Even Eugene Wigner did this, when he proposed the "Wigner's friend" thought experiment, he points out how two different observers can come to describe the same system differently, and then concludes that proves quantum mechanics is deeply connected to "consciousness." But we have known that two observers can describe the same system differently since Galileo first introduced the concept of relativity back in 1632. There is no reason to take it as having anything to do with consciousness or subjectivity or anything like that.
(You can also treat the wavefunction nomologically as well, and then the nomological behavior you'd expect from particles would be relative, but the ontological-nomological distinction is maybe getting too much into the weeds of philosophy here.)
I am partial to the way the physicist Francois-Igor Pris puts it. Reality exists as independently of the conscious observer, but not independently from context. You have to specify the context in which you are making an ontological claim for it to have physical meaning. This context can be that of the perspective of a conscious observer, but nothing about the observer is intrinsic here, what is intrinsic is the context, and that is just one of many possible contexts an ontological claim can be made. Two observers can describe the same train to be traveling at different velocities, not because they are conscious observers, but because they are describing the same train from different contexts.
The philosopher Jocelyn Benoist and the physicist Francois-Igor Pris have argued that the natural world does have a kind of an inherent observer-observed divide but that these terms are misleading being "subject" tends to imply a human subject and "observer" tends to imply a conscious observer, and that a lot of the confusion is cleared up once you figure out how to describe this divide in a more neutral, non-anthropomorphic way, which they settle on talking about the "reality" and the "context." The reality of the velocity of the train will be different in different contexts. You don't have to invoke "observer-dependence" to describe relativity. Hence, you can indeed describe quantum theory as a theory of physical reality independent of the observer.
MWI very specifically commits to the existence of a universal wavefunction. Everett’s original paper is literally titled “The Theory of the Universal Wavefunction.” If you instead only take relative states seriously, that position is much closer to relational quantum mechanics. In fact, Carlo Rovelli explicitly describes RQM as adopting Everett’s relative-state idea while rejecting the notion of a universal quantum state.
MWI claims there exists a universal quantum state, but quantum theory works perfectly well without this assumption if quantum states are taken to be fundamentally relative. Every quantum state is defined in relation to something else, which is made clear by the Wigner’s friend scenario where different observers legitimately assign different states to the same system. If states are fundamentally relative, then a “universal” quantum state makes about as much sense as a “universal velocity” in Galilean relativity.
You could arbitrarily choose a reference frame in Galilean relativity and declare it universal, but this requires an extra postulate, is unnecessary for the theory, and is completely arbitrary. Likewise, you could pick some observer’s perspective and call that the universal wavefunction, but there is no non-arbitrary reason to privilege it. That wavefunction would still be relative to that observer, just with special status assigned by fiat.
Worse, such a perspective could never truly be universal because it could not include itself. To do that you would need another external perspective, leading to infinite regress. You never obtain a quantum state that includes the entire universe. Any state you define is always relative to something within the universe, unless you define it relative to something outside of the universe, but at that point you are talking about God and not science.
The analogy to Galilean relativity actually is too kind. Galilean relativity relies on Euclidean space as a background, allowing an external viewpoint fixed to empty coordinates. Hilbert space is not a background space at all; it is always defined in terms of physical systems, what is known as a constructed space. You can transform perspectives in spacetime, but there is no transformation to a background perspective in Hilbert space because no such background exists. The closest that exists is a statistical transformation to different perspectives within Liouville space, but this only works for objects within the space; you cannot transform to the perspective of the background itself as it is not a background space.
One of the papers I linked also provides a no-go theorem as to why a universal quantum state cannot possibly exist in a way that would be consistent with relative perspectives. There are just so many conceptual and mathematical problems with a universal wavefunction. Even if you somehow resolve them all, your solution will be far more convoluted than just taking the relative states of quantum mechanics at face value. There is no need to "explain measurement" or introduce a many worlds or a universal wavefunction if you just accept the relative nature of the theory at face value and move on, rather than trying to escape it (for some reason).
But this is just one issue. The other elephant in the room is the fifth point that even if you construct a theory that is at least mathematically consistent, it still would contain no observables. MWI is a "theory" which lacks observables entirely.
- Entanglement is just a mathematical property of the theory. If it is sufficient to explain measurement then there is not anything particularly unique about MWI since you can employ this explanation within anything. You also say I missed your point by repeating exactly what I said.
- You're the one giving this bullet point list as if you are debunking all of my points one-by-one. If you agree there is nothing especially "more local" about MWI than any other interpretation then why not just ignore that point and move on?
- A relative state is not an entangled state. Again you need to read the papers I linked. We are talking about observer-dependence in the sense of how the velocity of a train in Galilean relativity can be said to have a different value simultaneously for two different observers. I drew the direct comparison here in order to explain that in my first comment. This isn't about special relativity or general relativity, but about "relativity" in a more abstract sense of things which are only meaningfully defined as a relational property between systems. The quantum state observer A assigns to a system can be different from the quantum state observer B assigns to the system (see the Wigner's friend thought experiment). The quantum state in quantum mechanics is clearly relative in this sense, and to claim there is a universal quantum state requires an additional leap which is never mathematically justified.
- Please for the love of god just scroll up and read what I actually wrote in that first post and respond to it. Or don't. You clearly seem to be entirely uninterested in a serious conversation. I assume you have an emotional attachment to MWI without even having read Everett's papers and getting too defensive that you refuse to engage seriously in anything I say, so I am ending this conversation here. You don't even know what a universal wavefunction is despite that being the title of Everett's paper and are trying to lecture me about this subject without even reading a word I have written, claiming that the opinions of the cited academics here are "not even worth taken seriously." This is just an enormous level of arrogance that isn't worth engaging with.
- Not sure what this first point means. To describe decoherence you need something like density matrix notation or Liouville notation which is mathematically much more complicated. For example, a qubit's state vector grows by 2N, but if you represent it in Liouville notation then the vector grows by 4N. It is far more mathematically complicated as a description, but I don't really see why that matters anyways as it's not like I reject such notation. Your second point also agrees with me. We know the Born rule is real because we can observe real outcomes on measurement devices, something which MWI denies exists and something you will go on to deny in your point #4
- This is also true in Copenhagen. Again, if that's your criterion for locality then Copenhagen is also local.
- I think you should read Everett's papers "'Relative State' Formulation of Quantum Mechanics" and "The Theory of the Universal Wave Function" to see the difference between wavefunctions defined in a relative sense vs a universal sense. You will encounter this with any paper on the topic. I'm a bit surprised you genuinely have never heard of the concept of the universal wavefunction yet are defending MWI?
- That quotation does not come one iota close to even having the air of giving the impression of loosely responding to what I wrote. You are not seriously engaging with what I wrote at all. You denying the physical existence of real-world discrete outcomes is exactly what I am criticizing, so just quoting yourself denying it is only confirming my point.
The Many Worlds interpretation is rather unconvincing to me for many reasons.
|1| It claims it is "simpler" just by dropping the Born rule, but it is mathematically impossible to derive the Born rule from the Schrodinger equation alone. You must include some additional assumption to derive it, and so it ends up necessarily having to introduce an additional postulate at some point to derive the Born rule from. Its number of assumptions thus always equal that of any other interpretation but with additional mathematical complexity caused by the derivation.
|2| It claims to be "local" because there is no nonlocal wavefunction collapse. But the EPR paper already proves it's mathematically impossible for something to match the predictions of quantum theory and be causally local if there are no hidden variables. This is obscured by the fact that MWI proponents like to claim the Born rule probabilities are a subjective illusion and not physically real, but illusions still have a physical cause that need to be physically explained, and any explanation you give must reproduce Born rule probabilities, and thus must violate causal locality. Some MWI proponents try to get around this by redefining locality in terms of relativistic locality, but even Copenhagen is local in that sense, so you end up with no benefits over Copenhagen if you accept that redefinition.
|3| It relies on belief that there exists an additional mathematical entity Ψ as opposed to just ψ, but there exists no mathematical definition or derivation of this entity. Even Everett agreed that all the little ψ we work with in quantum theory are relative states, but then he proposes that there exists an absolute universal Ψ, but to me this makes about as much sense as claiming there exists a universal velocity in Galilean relativity. There is no way to combine relative velocities to give you a universal velocity, they are just fundamentally relative. Similarly, wavefunctions in quantum mechanics are fundamentally relative. A universal wavefunction does not meaningfully exist.
|4| You describe MWI as kind of a copying of the world into different branches where different observers see different outcomes of the experiment, but that is not what MWI actually claims. MWI claims the Born rule is a subjective illusion and all that exists is the Schrodinger equation, but the Schrodinger equation never branches. If, for example, a photon hits a beam splitter with a 50% chance of passing through and a 50% chance of being reflected and you have a detector on either side, the Schrodinger equation will never evolve into a state that looks anything like it having past through or it having been reflected, nor will it ever evolve into a state that looks anything like it having past through and it having been reflected. The state it evolves into is entirely disconnected from the discrete states we actually observe except through the Born rule. Indeed, even those probabilities I gave you come from the Born rule.
This was something Einstein pointed out in relation to atomic decay, that no matter how long you evolve the Schrodinger equation, it never evolves into a state that looks anything like decay vs non-decay. You never get to a state that looks like either or, both, or neither. You end up with something entirely unrecognizable from what we would actually observe in an experiment, only connected back to the probabilities of decay vs non-decay by the Born rule. If the universe really is just the Schrodinger equation, you simply cannot say that it branches into two "worlds" where in one you see one outcome and in another you see a different outcome, because the Schrodinger equation never gives you that. You would have to claim that the entire world consists of a single evolving infinite-dimensional universal wavefunction that is nothing akin to anything we have ever observed before.
There is a good lecture below by Maudlin on this problem, that MWI presents a theory which has no connection to observable reality because nothing within the theory contains any observables.
Rovelli also comments on it:
The gigantic, universal ψ wave that contains all the possible worlds is like Hegel’s dark night in which all cows are black: it does not account, per se, for the phenomenological reality that we actually observe. In order to describe the phenomena that we observe, other mathematical elements are needed besides ψ: the individual variables, like X and P, that we use to describe the world. The Many Worlds interpretation does not explain them clearly. It is not enough to know the ψ wave and Schrödinger’s equation in order to define and use quantum theory: we need to specify an algebra of observables, otherwise we cannot calculate anything and there is no relation with the phenomena of our experience. The role of this algebra of observables, which is extremely clear in other interpretations, is not at all clear in the Many Worlds interpretation.
— Carlo Rovelli, “Helgoland: Making Sense of the Quantum Revolution”
There is a lot of confusion because physicists changed the meaning of "locality" since the EPR paper to refer to relativistic locality (sending information faster than light) which was not what Einstein was on about. Einstein's locality is probably most succently summarized as such:
- ∀x(Var(Pr(S'|S))=Var(Pr(S'|S∪x))) where x∉S
In this case, assume a bunch of particles are interacting, and S is the state of a system of interacting particles prior to the interaction, and S' is the state of the system of interacting particles after the interaction. We then want to look at the variance (statistical spread) of the probability distribution of S' preconditioned on S, that is to say, a prediction of the state of the system after the interaction given complete knowledge of the state of the system prior to interaction, and then compare that to the variance of another prediction where we precondition both on S and x, where x is the state of something outside of the system of interacting particles.
If a theory is local, then the two should always be equal for any possible value of x. This is because the outcome of a local interaction should only be determined by everything participating in the local interaction, that is to say, S, so preconditioning on complete knowledge of the initial states of everything participating in the interaction should give you sufficient knowledge to predict the outcome of the interaction, that is to say, S', to best that is physically possible.
If you can include something outside of the interaction, that is to say, x, and it can improve your prediction further, then it must be nonlocal because it contains irreducible dependence upon something not involved in the interaction.
The point about the EPR paper is that if you don't assume hidden variables, then this definition of locality is broken. Two entangled particles are said to be ontologically in a superposition of states, meaning, having complete knowledge on their states prior to the measurement interaction can only predict them both with a distribution of 50%/50%, but if you precondition on knowledge of an observer's measurement far away, then you can improve your prediction as to your measurement of your local particle to 100% certainty, which violates this locality condition.
This is still local in the classical case where the only reason you could improve your prediction is because you were ignorant of the initial state of the particle to begin with, so you never preconditioned on the complete initial state of the system to begin with. Hence, adding hidden variables would, supposedly, restore this notion of locality, which we can call causal locality as opposed to relativistic locality.
What Bell's theorem proves is that adding hidden variables does not restore causal locality. This is because, as he proves, in quantum mechanics, the state of an individual particle in a collection of entangled particles can have dependence upon the configuration of a collection of measurement devices, even though it only ever interacts with an individual measurement device. That means this violation of causal locality is intrinsic to the mathematics of the theory and is not something that just arises due to a lack of hidden variables.
Even worse, as Bell says, adding hidden variables appears to make it "grossly nonlocal," which by that he meant it violates relativistic locality as well. At least without introducing something like superdeterminism or retrocausality.
Microtubules are structural and exist throughout the whole body, not just in the brain. They are part of the scaffolding of cells. If you broke them up, you'd die, because your cells would fall apart. They also have not much to do with the actual information processing in the brain, as again their role is strictly structural.
The state vector grows by 2N so 5 qubits is 25 = 32 continuous variables. I am not sure where you are getting a factorial from.
The mathematical description of a quantum computer is pretty much identical to that of a probabilistic computer (a kind of classical computer) with the only real difference being that real probabilities, which range from 0 to 1, are replaced with probability amplitudes, which are complex-valued, so they can be negative or even imaginary and only their square-magnitudes need to range from 0 to 1.
In a probabilistic computer, you describe the system with a vector that contains the real probabilities for every possible outcome, so if you have 3 bits, then the vector needs to be of size 2^3=8 since it needs to hold the probabilities for 000, 001, 010, 011, 100, 101, 110, and 111. You then evolve the vector by multiplying Markov matrices by the vector, which represents how a logic gate affects the probabilities. A Markov matrix is nothing more than a probabilistic truth table.
Again, quantum information evolves exactly the same way except that the vector contains complex-valued probability amplitudes as opposed to real probabilities and that the Markov matrices are replaced by unitary matrices, which the only difference is that unitary matrices, again, contain probability amplitudes rather than real probabilities.
People don't believe him because there is no reason to take his view on this issue seriously. Just because a person is smart in one area doesn't mean they are a genius in all areas. There is an old essay from the 1800s called "Natural Science and the Spirit World" where the author takes note of a strange phenomena of otherwise brilliant scientists being very nutty in other areas, one example being Alfred Russel Wallace who codiscovered evolution by natural selection but also believed he could communicate with and photograph ghosts from dead people.
People don't take Penrose's theory on consciousness seriously because it is not based on any reasonable arguments at all. Penrose's argument is so bizarre that it is amazing even Penrose takes it seriously. His argument is basically just:
(P1) There are certain problems that the answer cannot be computed. (P2) Humans can believe in an answer anyways. (C1) Therefore, humans can believe things that cannot be computed. (P3) The outcome of quantum experiments is fundamentally random. (C2) Therefore, the outcome of quantum experiments cannot be computed. (C3) Therefore, the human consciousness must be related to quantum mechanics.
He then goes out with this preconception to desperately search for any evidence that the brain is a quantum mechanical system, even though most physicists don't take this seriously because quantum effects don't scale up easily for massive objects, warm objects, and for objects not isolated from their environment, which all three of those things apply to the human brain.
In his desperate search to grasp onto anything, he has found very loose evidence that quantum effects might be scaled up a little bit inside of microtubules, and the one paper showing this maybe as a possibility which hasn't even been repeated has been plastered everywhere by his team as proof they were right, but it ignores the obvious elephant in the room that microtubules are just structural and are found throughout the body and have little to do with information processing the in brain and thus little to do with consciousness.
The argument he presents that motivates the whole thing also just makes no sense. The fact humans can choose to believe in things that cannot be computed doesn't prove human decisions cannot be computed. It just means humans are capable of believing things that they have no good reason to believe... I mean, that is literally a problem with LLMs, sometimes called "hallucinations," that they seem to just make things up and say it with confidence sometimes.
The idea that it is impossible to have a computer reach conclusions that cannot be proven is silly, because the algorithm for it to settle on an answer to a question is not one that rigorously validates the truth of the answer but just activates a black box network of neurons and it settles on whatever answer the neural network outputs with the highest confidence level. If you ask an AI if the earth orbits the sun, and it says yes, it is not because it ran some complex proof at that moment and proved with certainty that the earth orbits the sun before it says it. That's not how artificial intelligence works, so there is no reason to think that is how human intelligence would work either, and so there is no reason to expect that humans couldn't believe things without absolute proof in the first place.
There is no limit to entanglement as everything is constantly interacting with each other and spreading the entanglement around. That is in fact what decoherence is about, because spreading the entanglement throughout trillions of particles in the environment dilutes it such that quantum interference effects are to subtle to notice, but they are all technically entangled. So if you think entanglement means things are one entity, then you pretty much have to treat the whole universe as one entity. That was the position of Bohm and Blokhintsiev.