Questions like these stem from the cancer that was the abandonment of “materialism” for “physicalism.” Physicalism has rotted people’s brains to believe that every law of nature needs an underlying “explanation” whereby the explanation is always some invisible entity that is impossible to observe under any possible circumstances but, like the hand of God, pilots the objects we can perceive in order to “explain” why they behave in that way, according to that law.

No, we do not need such an “explanation.” It is perfectly logically consistent to just treat is as nomological. It is a law of nature that tells you how the particles behave. The law is itself the “explanation.” There need not be any underlying invisible entities piloting the objects we perceive to “explain” why their behavior operates according to those natural laws. It is simply in their nature to do so.

The natural laws simply are a function of the historical state of the system. The explanation is the law. There is no deeper, invisible mechanism.

The Harvard physicist Jacob Barandes proved that quantum mechanics is mathematically equivalent to a statistical theory with history dependence in his paper here. There is thus always a rather simple and intuitive explanation for most quantum mechanical phenomena without resorting to things like multiverses or collapsing wavefunctions, but that it is just a statistical theory + history dependence.

I will use this simulator to illustrate: https://ophysics.com/l3.html

Rotating only the first 90 degrees blocks the light.

Rotating only the second 90 degrees blocks the light.

Rotating both 90 individually blocks the light.

Rotating the first at 45 degrees and the second at 90 degrees allows light to pass through.

Rotating the first at 90 degrees and the second at 45 degrees does NOT allow light to pass through.

To say that there is history dependence means the behavior of the particles is a function over its history, and so the behavior of the particle during an interaction can change if its history is different. If not all the light is blocked by the time it reaches the second one, then the behavior of the photon at the second one can be different if, in its history, it had interacted with the first one rotated at 45 degrees, and thus the second one may not block all the light as we would normally expect it to because you have changed the history of the particle.

In classical statistics, you can represent the statistical outcome of an interaction according to p(t)=f(U(t),p(t-1)) whereby U is the definition of the operator describing the interaction and p is the probability distribution. Mathematically, you can decompose the quantum state into two real-valued vectors according to its two degrees of freedom where one is a probability vector, common in classical statistics, and the other is the phase, and the way the probability vector evolves with an interaction can be defined by p(t)=f(U(t),p(t-1),h(t-1)) where h is the phase.

The phase can be interpreted as a sufficient statistic over the system’s historical trajectory, because you can get rid of the phase entirely by expanding out h(t-1) over its whole history such that you get:

p(t)=f(U(t),p(t-1),g(U(t-1),p(t-2),g(U(t-2),p(t-3),…)))

This extension would stop at a base case. It is quite trivial to prove that a degenerate distribution would be a base case, and so if there is a point in the system’s history where you know its value with certainty, then you can stop the expansion there, and thus the phase disappears from the evolution rule. Of course, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t use the phase mathematically, you just don’t interpret it as a physical entity, but as a sufficient statistic over the system’s statistical history.

You can think of each physical interaction like a black box the particle enters, the box alters its state, and then it leaves the black box. The black box is described by a function, which takes the particle’s pre-interaction state as an input, and then outputs its post-interaction state. You can conceive of quantum mechanics as just a form of statistical mechanics whereby the statistical behavior of the particle is a function not just of the particle’s statistical state right now and the current operator, but of all its previous statistical states and previous operators.

Each black box is, in a sense, “aware” of the whole history of the particle which enters it. The second polarizer “knows” that the particle had just interacted with the previous one at a 45 degree angle, so it changes its behavior accordingly. If we express it like this:

p(t)=f(U(t),p(t-1),g(U(t-1),p(t-2)))

Then the behavior of the second polarizer given by this function can change if U(t-1), the previous polarizer’s orientation, is changed.

Nah. They try to defend “value indefiniteness,” a position which is largely indefensible but has become very popular in academia despite having been all but ruled out, and should go the way of the aether. A physical theory needs observables with well-defined conditions under which they obtain well-defined properties or else it is not possible to make a single empirical prediction with the theory.

If you claim particles do not obtain definite values for their observables at all, this is the Everettian interpretation, the “Many Worlds” interpretation. But this trivially doesn’t work because, again, if particles never obtain definite values at all, then you cannot make a single empirical predictions with it. The theory has no connection to empirical reality. See Tim Maudlin’s paper “Can the World be Only Wavefunction?”

Indeed, whenever we have a statistical distribution, we presuppose that there exists an underlying real state of the system, but we are just ignorant of it. In order to derive the Born rule distribution, then Everettian mechanics must, at some point, admit to there being definite values to the observables. But to do that would be equivalent to a “collapse” approach, which they want to avoid, so they try to use arguments involving decision theory and such, but, as Adrian Kent showed in his paper “One world versus many: the inadequacy of Everettian accounts of evolution, probability, and scientific confirmation,” these explanations are always circular, as well as the paper “Epistemic Separability and Everettian Branches: A Critique of Sebens and Carroll” by R. Dawid and S. Friederich.

Indeed, Everettians also love to claim that their view is “local,” but if their viewpoint really is mathematically consistent with quantum mechanics, then, at some point, it must reproduce Born rule probabilities, meaning it must reproduce violations of Bell inequalities, and so it cannot be local, as shown in Aurélien Drezet’s paper "An Elementary Proof That Everett’s Quantum Multiverse Is Nonlocal: Bell-Locality and Branch-Symmetry in the Many-Worlds Interpretation". They often get around this by just redefining locality to be in terms of linearity or no-signaling, but any interpretation can be local if we just change the meaning of locality.

Of course, there are also “collapse” interpretations. The collapse, obviously, cannot just occur “when you look at it,” or else you end up devolving into crackpot solipsism, as per the “Wigner’s friend” thought experiment in Wigner’s “Remarks on the Mind Body Problem.” The “collapse” must occur before then, and it also must be an invariant collapse, or else the minds of other observers would depend upon how you personally look at them, and their own minds would not have independent existence. “Collapse” thus can only be a consistent view of physical reality if the collapse both occurs under well-defined conditions and is invariant.

But these are pretty much ruled out by John Bell’s paper “Against ‘Measurement’” which points out that the “collapse” approach cannot constitute a physical interpretation of quantum mechanics because orthodox quantum mechanics does not tell you when this “collapse” should occur, under what well-defined conditions, and so it does not give you an unambiguous ontology.

If this “collapse” really occurs, it is a non-reversible process, yet all unitary evolution operators are reversible. That means if I build a measuring device, and you give a complete physical description of the measuring device in terms of quantum mechanics, then an interaction with that measuring device would be described via unitary operators, and thus would be reversible, and so orthodox quantum mechanics would predict that an interaction with the measuring device is reversible, whereas a “collapse” approach would not.

This would in principle lead to different empirical predictions, as we would have something interact with a measuring device and then attempt to reverse the interaction, and the predictions between a “collapse” theory and orthodox quantum mechanics would deviate from one another. Theories like GRW and the Diosi-Penrose model are thus separate theories, not interpretations of the same theory. A physical collapse model can only be consistent if you believe orthodox quantum mechanics is simply wrong.

The “measurement problem” within orthodox quantum mechanics stems from the assumption of value indefiniteness. Nobody has proved it is possible to make quantum mechanics consistent with value indefiniteness without running into the measurement problem, and it is my position that it is not logically possible to do so. The measurement problem is a proof-by-contradiction that value indefiniteness is just an untenable position, an outdated position that has largely been ruled out but people still cling to their outdated ways due to preconceptions.

In MinutePhysics’ video, he does not defend any of the absurdities of the worldview he is proposing. He just attacks the alternative because it would have to not be spatiotemporal and calls that “crazy.” That’s not an argument, that’s an appeal to incredulity. There is no law of logic that says nature must necessarily be interpreted as spatiotemporal. If my two options are (1) believe the empirical evidence that demonstrates reality is spatiotemporal, or (2) adopt an entirely incoherent position that descends into irreconcilable contradictions in order to delude myself into believing it is spatiotemporal, then I am going to pick #1 every time, and saying it is “crazy” is a bit of an absurdity.

Indeed what is even more ridiculous about MinutePhysics’ and 3blue1brown’s dismissal of such a view as “crazy” is that it was also the view of John Bell, the guy who developed the theorem. Apparently, John Bell was “crazy,” yet, it was Bell who had the deep insight into the theory in order to develop this theorem in the first place, and so clearly he understood it better than a couple of YouTubers.

I’ll respond to your argument when you make manage to articulate single point Marx made and rebut it. Otherwise, there is nothing to say.

Lying about having read books is just pathetic dude. If you read a word he wrote you could respond to a word he wrote rather than invent complete delusions out of your behind. You’re now trying to psychoanalyze me and attack my character. You have zero ability to actually respond to ideas because you are too intellectually incurious to actually engage with them at all.

I’m pretty sure this goes against the properties proven of entanglement (Bell test) and how far entanglement can propagate, but I don’t know enough about quantum mechanics to explain why this explanation is incompatible with entanglement.

If you don’t know anything about the topic then maybe you shouldn’t speak on it. Especially when claiming you have debunked peer reviewed papers from Harvard physicists like Jacob Barandes.

However, I don’t currently see how this at all explains computing with superpositions; if it’s just statistics a superposition can never exist

Superposition is a property of statistics. Even classical statics commonly represent the system’s statistical state as a linear combination of basis states. That’s just what a probability distribution is. If you take any courses in statistics, you will superimpose things all the time. This is a mathematical property.

so entanglement doesn’t exist; so quantum algorithms wouldn’t be possible, but we know they are.

Quantum advantage obviously comes from the phase of the quantum state. If you remove the phase from the quantum state then all you are left with is a probability distribution, and so there would be nothing to distinguish it from a classical statistical theory. But the phase is, again, a sufficient statistic over the system’s history. The quantum advantage comes from the fact that you are ultimately operating with a much larger information space, since each instruction in the computer is a function over the whole algorithm’s history back to the start of the quantum circuit, rather than just the current state of the computer’s memory at that present moment.

What if two packets interact with each other? If you claim a collapse occurs then entanglement could never happen, and so such a viewpoint is logically ruled out. If you say a collapse does not occur but only occurs if you introduce a measurement device, then this is vague without rigorously defining what a measurement device is, but providing any additional physical definition with then introduce something into the dynamics which is not there in orthodox quantum mechanics, so you’ve not moved into a new theory and are no longer talking about textbook QM.

Big O brother

In any statistical theory, the statistical distribution, which is typically represented by a vector that is a superposition of basis states, evolves deterministcally. That is just a feature of statistics generally. But no one in the right mind would interpret the deterministic evolution of the statistical state as a physical object deterministically evolving in the real world. Yet, when it comes to QM, people insist we must change how we interpret statistics, yet nobody can give a good argument as to why.

We only “don’t fully understand where the probabilistic measurement happens” if you deny it is probabilistic to begin with. If you just start with the assumption that it is a statistical theory then there is no issue. You just interpret it like you interpret any old statistical theory. There is no invisible “probability waves.” The quantum state is an epistemic state, based on the observer’s knowledge, their “best guess,” of a system that is in a definite state in the real world, but they cannot know it because it evolves randomly. Their measurement of that state just reveals what was already there. No “collapse” happens.

The paradox where we “don’t know” what happens at measurement only arises if you deny this. If you insist that the probability distribution is somehow a physical object. If you do so, then, yes, we “don’t know” how this infinite-dimensional physical object which doesn’t even exist anywhere in physical space can possibly translate itself to the definite values that we observe when we look. Neither Copenhagen nor Many Worlds have a coherent and logically consistent answer to the question.

But there is no good reason to believe the claim to begin with that the statistical distribution is a physical feature of the world. The fact that the statistical distribution evolves deterministically is, again, a feature of statistics generally. This is also true of classical statistical models. The probability vector for a classical probabilistic computer is mathematically described as evolving deterministically throughout an algorithm, but no sane person takes that to mean that the bits in the computer’s memory don’t exist when you aren’t looking at them an infinite-dimensional object that doesn’t exist anywhere in physical space is somehow evolving through the computer.

Indeed, the quantum state is entirely decomposable into a probability distribution. Complex numbers aren’t magic, they always just represent something with two degrees of freedom, so we can always decompose it into two real-valued terms and ask what those two degrees of freedom represent. If you decompose the quantum state into polar form, you find that one of the degrees of freedom is just a probability vector, the same you’d see in classical statistics. The other is a phase vector.

The phase vector seems mysterious until you write down time evolution rules for the probability vector in quantum systems as well as the phase vector. The rules, of course, take into account the previous values and the definition of the operator that is being applied to them. You then just have to recursively substitute in the phase vector’s evolution rule into the probability vector’s. You then find that the phase vector disappears, because it decomposes into a function over the system’s history, i.e. a function over all operators and probability vectors at all previous time intervals going back to a division event. The phase therefore is just a sufficient statistic over the system’s history and is not a physical object, as it can be defined in terms of the system’s statistical history.

That is to say, without modifying it in any way, quantum mechanics is mathematically equivalent to a statistical theory with history dependence. The Harvard physicist Jacob Barandes also wrote a proof of this fact that you can read here. The history dependence does make it behave in ways that are bit counterintuitive, as it inherently implies a non-spatiotemporal aspect to how the statistics evolve, as well as interference effects due to interference in its history, but they are still just statistics all the same. You don’t need anything but the definition of the operators and the probability distributions to compute the evolution of a quantum circuit. A quantum state is not even necessary, it is just convenient.

If you just accept that it is statistics and move on, there is no “measurement problem.” There would be no claim that the particles do not have definite states in the real world, only that we cannot know them because our model is not a deterministic model but a statistical model. If we go measure a particle’s position and find it to be at a particular location, the explanation for why we find it at that location is just because that’s where it was before we went to measure it. There is only a “measurement problem” if you claim the particle was not there before you looked, then you have difficulty explaining how it got there when you looked.

But no one has presented a compelling argument in the scientific literature that we should deny that it is there before we look. We cannot know what its value is before we look as its dynamics are (as far as we know) random, but that is a very different claim than saying it really isn’t there until we look. This idea that the particles aren’t there until we look has, in my view, been largely ruled out in the academic literature, and should be treated as an outdated view like believing in the Rutherford model of the atom. Yet, people still insist on clinging to it.

They pretend like Copenhagen and Many Worlds are logically consistent by writing enormous sea of papers upon papers upon papers, where it only seems “consistent” because it becomes so complicated that hardly anyone even bothers to follow along with it anymore, but if you actually go through the arguments with a fine-tooth comb, you can always show them to be inconsistent and circular. There is only a vague aura of logical and mathematical consistency on the surface. The more you actually engage with both the mathematics and read the academic literature on quantum foundations, the more clear it becomes how incoherent and contrived attempts to make Copenhagen and Many Worlds consistent actually are, and how no one in the literature has actually achieved it, even though many falsely pretend they have done so.

You are just ranting about something you clearly have no idea what it is. Nothing you have said is even close to relevant to anything Marx wrote. Someone told you to hate it so you hate it, but you cannot even articulate anything Marx actually said or wrote.

I doubt you can even define it.

That’s propaganda of the deed. Not all leftists are anarchists.

Technically aether theory was never ruled out. People love to claim that the Michelson-Morley experiment ruled it out, but this is historical revisionism. The MM experiment was conducted in 1887. Hendrik Lorentz proposed his aether model in 1904. Obviously Lorentz was not such a moron he would not take into account the findings of MM, but that is what people are unironically suggesting when they say MM somehow retrocausally ruled out his model. Indeed, both Michelson and Morley did not believe their own experiments ruled it out either but continued to promote such models.

Lorentz’s aether model and Einstein’s relativity are actually mathematically equivalent so they make all the same predictions, so no possible experiment could rule out Lorentz’s aether theory that would not also rule out Einstein’s relativity. Indeed, if you read his 1905 paper where Einstein introduces special relativity, his criticism of Lorentz’s model is only a philosophical objection. He never posited that an experiment can rule it out. MM only rules out some very early aether models, not Lorentz’s model.

I would recommend also checking out John Bell’s paper “How to Teach Special Relativity,” where he also discusses this fact, and how the mathematics of special relativity are perfectly consistent with a reality with an absolute space and time. Taking space and time to be relative only comes at the level of metaphysical interpretation.

Everyone who advocates for a “third way” always just ends up advocating for capitalism.

It’s amazing how nonsensical the actual foundational axioms of modern day economics are.

Classical economics tried to tie economics to functions of physical things we can measure. Adam Smith for example proposed that because you can recursively decompose every product into the amount of physical units of time it takes to produce it all the way down the supply chain, then any stable economy should, on the average (not the individual case), roughly buy and sell in a way that reflects that time, or else there would necessarily have to be physical time shortages or waste which would lead to economic problems. We thus may be able to use this time parameter to make quantifiable predictions about the economy.

Many people had philosophical objections to this because it violates free will. If you can predict roughly what society will do based on physicals factors, then you are implying that people’s decisions are determined by physical parameters. Humans have the “free will” to just choose to buy and sell at whatever price they want, and so the economy cannot be reduced beyond the decisions of the human spirit. There was thus a second school of economics which tried to argue that maybe you could derive prices from measuring how much people subjectively desire things, measured in “utils.”

“Utils” are of course such ambiguous nonsense that eventually these economists realized that this cannot work, so they proposed a different idea instead, which is to focus on marginal rates of substitution. Rather than saying there is some quantifiable parameter of “utils,” you say that every person would be willing to trade some quantity of object X for some quantity of object Y, and then you try to define the whole economy in terms of these substitutions.

However, there are two obvious problems with this.

The first problem is that to know how people would be willing to substitute things rigorously, you would need an incredibly deep and complex understanding of human psychology, which the founders of neoclassical economics did not have. Without a rigorous definition, you could not fit it to mathematical equations. It would just be vague philosophy.

How did they solve this? They… made it up. I am not kidding you. Look up the axioms for consumer preference theory whenever you have the chance. It is a bunch of made up axioms about human psychology, many of which are quite obviously not even correct (such as, you have to assume that the person has evaluated and rated every product in the entire economy, you have to assume that every person would be more satisfied with having more of any given object, etc), but you have to adopt those axioms in order to derive any of the mathematics at all.

The second problem is one first pointed out, to my knowledge, by the economist Nikolai Bukharin, which is that an economic model based around human psychology cannot possibly even be predictive because there is no logical reason to believe that the behavior of everything in the economy, including all social structures, is purely derivative of human psychology, i.e. that you cannot have a back-reaction whereby preexisting social structures and environmental factors people are born into shape their psychology, and he gives a good proof-by-contradiction that the back-reaction must exist.

The idea that you can derive everything based upon some arbitrary set of immutable mathematical laws made up in someone’s armchair one day that supposedly rigorously details human behavior that is irreducible beyond anything else is just nonsense. No one has ever even tested any of these laws that supposedly govern human psychology.

Surprisingly that is a controversial view. Most physicists insist QM has nothing to do with probability! But then why does it only give you probabilistic predictions? Ye old measurement problem, an entirely fabricated problem because physicists cannot accept that a theory that gives you probabilities is obviously a probabilistic theory.

deleted by creator

The people who deny reality exists (“Schrodinger’s cat”) do so specifically because they want to preserve locality (no “Spooky action at a distance”), because Bell proved in 1964 that physical reality is not compatible with locality. If you accept that reality is not local (“Spooky action at a distance”) then there is no reason to deny realism (“Schrodinger’s cat”).

QM is a lot easier to understand when we stop pretending a theory that only gives you statistical results somehow has no relevance to statistics. Every “paradox” can always be understood and resolved by applying a statistical analysis. If you apply such a statistical analysis to entangled systems, let’s say you have two qubits with their own bit values b1 and b2, you find that if you apply a unitary operator to just b1, there are cases where the way in which this stochastically perturbs b1 has a dependence upon the value of b2.

You could not send a signal to b2 by perturbing b1 because perturbing b1 has no effect on b2, rather, the way in which b1 stochastically changes merely depends upon the current state of b2. You might think maybe you could send a signal the other way. If b1 depends upon b2, then you could perturb b2 to alter b1. But the dependence is always symmetrical, such that if you apply a stochastic perturbation to b2 the way in which it will change will depend upon the value of b1, and so it becomes a vicious circle.

It is non-local in the sense that the way in which one changes depends upon the value of the other far away, but not in the sense that perturbing one locally alters the value of the one far away, and the dependence is always symmetrically mutual, so there is no way to signal between them.

As it is normally explained, it’s definitely fake. There is no reason to believe particles turn into waves when you’re not looking and turn back into particles when you look, and believing this demonstrably leads to irreconcilable paradoxes. Dmitry Blokhintsev was correct that the particles are just particles, and the “wave” is a property of its stochastic dynamics over an ensemble of systems. The wave is part of the nomology: it tells you how the particles stochastically behave in the aggregate, but the particles are still particles at all times. Ontologically, they are particles. Nomologically, their stochastic dynamics in an ensemble of systems converges to wave-like behavior.