Point is, these probability distributions are “ontological” for QM. It’s not that there “really is an electron somewhere” we just don’t know where, the electron “is really everywhere” in the probability distribution. Otherwise you wouldn’t get interference patterns. — khaled

This is literally what I explain, as the electron somehow "co-existing" in detached regions.

What is at issue is what to make of this.

That’s what I mean by not JUST updating the model with new information. Observations in QM change what is happening, not just what we think is happening. — khaled

That's not a problem. The model includes these interactive effects, so when we measure position precisely of a particle we update the model with this increase in constraint on position but also decrease the constraint on momentum.

We can do all this without making any ontological claims as to what exists apart from our calculating and measuring. This is where the "shutup and calculate" expression comes from; it works and it doesn't "have to" make any intuitive sense nor does one "have to" take a position on the ontological status of the electron apart from variables being more or less constrained in mathematical models that take real world inputs.

We take information from the real world, we put it in a model, we get information out that corresponds to future information we can take from the real world. This is all that "we know" is happening. What happens between information gatherings we don't know.

In the case of the classical "probability waves" of large objects, even if the above is true "in principle", we are free to imagine the drowning person somehow co-exists is in all possible locations and the possibilities "collapse" to one possibility when we find them (how do we check if the person is "really somewhere", we need to go and find them and check), nevertheless, the assumption that the person is "really somewhere" doesn't run into intuitive problems (the statistical model is completely compatible with this assumption).

In the case of quantum mechanics, not only is it a problem "in principle", but it's also a problem that our intuitions about how "real objects" should behave simply don't work.

If there was an obvious conclusion to be drawn, the best physicists of the last hundred years would have drawn it and all agreed.

I think Feinman says it best when he describes "doing quantum mechanics" as the same state of knowledge as Mayan priests (I think it was Mayan) calculating the next eclipses. They've discovered a pattern, and they can do the calculations and make predictions and those predictions come true, but they have no knowledge of orbital mechanics and what is "really happening". So, any explanation the high priest gives is complete speculation and doesn't seem much better than plenty other explanations available. In such a state of knowledge where the "true causes" are simply lacking, we just have a mathematical pattern of what we observe, "these are lucky numbers for the Sun God" is going be just as reasonable to believe as "things are floating up there and they can block each other ... coincidentally following the pattern we've discovered for some reason".

And speculation is fine; I'm simply arguing that unless there's an experiment that proves one equally reasonable speculation is more credible than another ... one equally reasonable explanation is not more credible than another.

And mostly, interpretations boil down to ontological positions that predate quantum mechanics. "Everything that can happen does happen," is a very old concept. Likewise, we simply can't know what reality is "really like", goes thousands of years before Kantian skepticism. Similarly, there is a specific state of the universe and the future is fully determined is also an old idea.

All we are doing in this conversation is throwing in some quantum jargon, which is useful because it can help readers here understand quantum mechanics a tiny bit better, but doesn't really setup anything really different in the speculations available. We know quantum mechanics "is wrong" and maybe a better theory lends itself to one over another speculation, just as Newtonian physics lends itself to a deterministic interpretation and Quantum Mechanics, at least on the surface viewing, lends itself to Kantian style skepticism of "not knowing anything about things in themselves"; but QM isn't "proven" as some sort of end all and be all of physics, so maybe some future theory gives us other indications about "the true ontology" (and perhaps equally misleading as the indications of Newtonian, General Relativity, and Quantum Mechanics).

It’s not like when the probability distribution of the location of the drowning person “collapses” when we see them, but really, there was always a person there even without us observing them. — khaled

Yes, we are "JUST" updating the model with the new information, but in quantum mechanics updating the model with new information can impact on the model in ways that aren't intuitive. If we measure a particles location precisely (constrain that variable) it also changes constraints on momentum, and we may now know less about the particles momentum than we did before. We do not need to make ontological assumptions about what "really exists" between measurements to make use of quantum mechanics.

But it’s not just “updating the model with new information” is it? — khaled

In science, yes, that is what is happening.

If we don't have new information, we cannot say what is happening other than the probability distributions that we already have based on old information.

If you make a claim about what is happening, how can that claim be verified?

By getting new information through new observations.

Talking about what is happening without any actual information about what is happening, is pseudoscience. It maybe true, it maybe false, but it's not a scientific claim that can be verified by experiment.

I appreciate the long explanation but there is nothing there I didn’t already know. — khaled

I very much doubt this is true.

“Really exist in some physical definite state” = collapse. — khaled

But how do we know this? We observe the world and see a definite state?

How do we know we've observed the world to see a definite state? We become conscious of the observation.

If we just had the wave function we can have as many particles as we like, and nothing in the math of the wave function "forces" us to collapse our possible states to more definite states.

The reason viewing the reality as "just the wave function" is that it conflicts with our being conscious of definite states.

Correct. And MWI is the idea that this is what happens, for each possible universe. Again, you have each possible single path block, not a single multi path block (though that’s what you get if you were to superimpose all the blocks on each other) — khaled

You do not understand my point.

There is nothing in quantum mechanics that prevents setting up a wave function state of however many things you want, and simply propagating it forward in time to the end of the universe.

There's nothing preventing a "spacial" view of time in such a mathematical structure so everything is "one block" and all the particles represented by all their possible world lines and spacially representing the probability density of each world line, and having one block.

What's "wrong" with such a view of the universe? (And whether the block-universe we're considering we define as Newtonian, General Relativity or Quantum terms )

The problem is the supposition that there are conscious beings that experience the flow of time. The idea the universe, however it is mathematically described, is one "single block" with past, present and future coexisting (just as up and down direction co-exist) is that it conflicts with the idea of conscious beings inhabiting the universe and experiencing time, and we get that idea from being conscious ourselves.

The point is that it is an analogous problem of a perfectly "fine" interpretation of a mathematical structure of which the only problem is the supposition of conscious beings experiencing time and change (rather than experiencing no time and no change as something existing as a solid changeless block would suggest).

Likewise, that wave functions just propagate indefinitely and never collapse is a perfectly "fine" interpretation of the mathematics of the wave function, of which the only problem is the supposition of conscious beings experiencing definite states represented by real numbers and not these probability distributions represented by complex numbers.

In both cases, since consciousness is "the problem" that prevents, it is entirely reasonable to consider some special relationship between consciousness and these things.

So a single path, for every possible path a world. — khaled

Again, you do not understand my point nor the mathematics of quantum mechanics.

It is not the case that when the wave functions "collapses" that a particle is then considered to have taken a definite path, only the properties observed become more definite for the time of observation, but it is still the case that the particle in some way (we really don't understand) when through all possible paths to get to that observation point: which is why interference patterns emerge (the particle went through, in some sense, both slits and then interfered with itself).

No the point is this isn’t the “result” of the experiment. The variable we want to examine is whether or not the wave function can collapse without our conscious interference. If we get a cookie, where was the conscious interference? We definitely didn’t measure which slit the electron went through. And we didn’t interpret the results on the screen. All that was done by things that aren’t conscious. Yet in the end, when we look at the cookie dispenser, it won’t be “in a superposition of dispensing and not dispensing a cookie” it will either dispense or not dispense a cookie. Based on that we can know whether or not collapse happened without measuring which slit the electrons are going through. That’s the point. Same with the cat. All you’d need is a cookie dispenser there too to know specifically whether or not the cat is alive without observing the cat, just the dispenser.

And, again, address the historical argument: — khaled

Wave function collapse is not a variable.

Variables are states of particles or fields that we can observe. "Wave function collapse" is simply what the "other possibilities" going away is referred to.

For instance, you can have a "probability wave" of a particle in classical mechanics, such as a random walk of a particle Brownian motion or someone who fell of a boat and is adrift at sea. Take the person at sea, based on known constraints, relevant laws of physics etc, a probability distribution of where we are likely to find the person after some time t can be calculated. "Our probability wave" representing where the person might be is the exact same sense of probability as where we might find a particle in a quantum mechanics experiment.

We then go and find the person, and the "wave function" or where they could have been "collapses" in our model because we have new information. This the exact same process as quantum physicists doing measurements and "collapsing" other possibilities that didn't happen when they find one possibility that did happen, they update the model with new information and continue. For instance, finding the persons boot (or what is evaluated as 50% likely to be the persons boot) would update the "lost at sea" model based on this new constraint of observing a boot at location x,y.z at time t.

The difference between classical and quantum probability "wave collapse", is that classical probabilities of the above scenario act only as a one sort of "blobbty diffusion" wave and don't have tell-tale characteristics we'd associate with classic waves such as waves in water.

Critically, as the classical "probability wave / blob" diffuses in space, it always remains cohesive. The probability wave representing where a person maybe based on some initial condition, has no disconnected regions. A person might fall down an elevator shaft, and so is very "unlikely" we'd observe the person in the state of falling down the elevator shaft, but it's not zero probability; we could open one of the other elevator doors on the way down and see the person falling. It's more likely we'd observe the person either just sitting somewhere at the top or then just lying t the bottom of the shaft, than it is to go and observe happen to open an elevator door in the middle and see the falling state, but obviously not impossible.

The classical probability blobs diffuse through space, but never disconnect entirely.

Likewise, someone in a house maybe more probable to be observed in one room or another and less likely we'd observe them right at the moment of going through a door, but obviously we might and people do need to walk through doors to be in different rooms.

We do not believe someone lost at sea somehow "really exists" in all the places we might find them, it is just a mathematical description of probabilities to help us find them. Likewise, we do not believe someone is in "all the rooms" they could be at once, it's just a mathematical description of where we might find them.

Critical to this view that someone lost at sea is a definite state or someone in a house is in a definite state, before we go and check where they actually are, is the probability regions never disconnect (there is a continuous connection of everywhere "they might be", just different probabilities for each place, and we might really find them anywhere in this region; we can run experiments to find that 1/10000 chance of randomly opening the elevator shaft over some time span at the moment someone, let's hope a dummy, is falling).

In quantum mechanics, regions of probability states can be entirely disconnected, and this completely breaks our normal intuition of probability diffusion of "little ball particle" at definite positions through space at each moment in time. How does the electron exist in a definite state but "move" between disconnected regions A and B without any possibility of us finding the electron in some connected bridge state between A and B (i.e. in the doorway)? Likewise, how does an electron interfere with itself so that it's probability of hitting certain regions of a detector is zero, and that even one at a time, electrons produce interference patterns?

The only way to make sense of this is to say the electron does not "move" in a classical sense between A and B and when we look we find where it "really is" but rather the electron somehow co-exists in some sense in both regions, but when we look to find the electron in region A, then somehow it's "existence" in region B disappears. This is what happens mathematically, and "collapsing the wave of probabilities" to the new reality, is a sensical way to describe the mathematical process of updating a model with new information (just as with updating a model of someone lost at sea with information about their probable shoe or then finding the person themselves).

What we cannot easily make sense of is what sort of "substance" the electron (or quantum fields if you prefer) really is to have these characteristics, nor can we easily make sense of how our observations affect the situation (to resolve such questions, we need to make observations, but obviously that is no longer the same question).

Again, address this: Consciousness evolved yes? In order for that to happen we needed to have collapsed, well defined molecules at least yes? And eventually after enough time a conscious thing evolved from these molecules yes?

Then how can consciousness be a requirement for wave function collapse? If it was, it would’ve never evolved. — khaled

The consciousness relation to wave collapse can solve this in different ways; such as simply stating first wave collapsing at some threshold of consciousness or something along those lines (evolution happens in every possibility, and then collapses to the first possibility of consciousness; explaining why there's more matter than antimatter, as only in these probability edge cases does matter outnumber anti-matter, and stars and evolution can happen etc.); but we have no experiment that even shows what is and isn't conscious so this is pseudoscience speculation; not anyway to go back and "observe" the universe before it collapsed to a definite state due to the first observation.

What we do know (or what I know) is that I'm conscious and observe a definite state of the universe around me (certainly more definite than observing "all possibilities" simultaneously). I can know what I observe; I cannot "know" what existence is "really like" prior to my observations. I can note that quantum mechanics basically prevents any intuitive visualizations of what "things are really like at all", but, as a Kantian, it's not really surprising that whatever we can say of the "noumena" always remains fundamentally speculative anyways (maybe new physical theories will lend themselves back to a more "Newtonian" view just to be overturned once again by something even more bizarre than quantum mechanics).

There is no experimental evidence that something just needs to be "big enough" to cause probability wave collapse.

"Big things" we assume are in definite states even if we don't look, only because we are big and perceive definite states. There is nothing in quantum mechanics that forces one to start "wave collapsing" once a certain amount of terms and time have been added to describe a system. There is nothing in the mathematics of quantum mechanics (as understood apart from the behaviour of apparatusses and having some independent existence from such apparent behaviour) that prevents adding as many states of things as one wants (as long as the it coheres with the previous states) and then simply propagating the resulting total state forward as far as one wants. The only reason we need to assume probability distributions collapse to "one world" is because we are conscious of only a single world; without this foundational assumption going into things, the mathematical structure of quantum mechanics would not lead us to invent it (i.e. conscious beings perceiving a single possibility) and without this constraint a mathematician that doesn't know "what it's about" I would expect would be perfectly happy with a bunch of parameters and variables, equations, ways to solve for one variable (or then the constraints on that variable) given other constraints on other variables etc.

In other words, if you took the math and removed all the meaningful labels like "time" and so forth, you could ask the mathematician to solve for something, for instance what to us is question about, given some initial state, the probability distribution of a particles position after some time t, but is just a "math problem" to the mathematician. The mathematician would provide whatever solutions exist for the question, which would be the constraints on variables in question (x,y,z coordinates and some additional value representing probability for each coordinate), likely in some equation form. What I contend the mathematician is unlikely to do is add the postulate that the probabilities "collapsed" in some sense on the way to the final answer, but rather would just plug in the provided parameters and constraints (i.e. the fundamental constants and whatever values for initial conditions we provide) into the equations and solve for the question. This would be the process no matter how much information we provide in terms of initial conditions or then constraints at, what is to us, future times which to us represents "measurements", but to the mathematician is just additional constraints to take into account to solve things without the need to imagine the solutions represent anything real at all.

Adding a lot of information about states would make the work the mathematician needs to do exceedingly long and difficult, but I contend at no point would the mathematician postulate wave collapse happening nor even postulate that when answers are given (constraints on variables provided constraints on other variables) that somehow a single range of one or more variables, what we would call possibility (i.e. the photon hitting a particular region of a sensor apparatus), is "special" in a sense of actually happening.

If this process (that for the mathematician is just math and doesn't represent reality in anyway) results (what is for us who understand how the variables are usually labeled) in the solution to a question about interference patterns in a double slit experiment, the mathematician will solve for the pattern and is happy to provide it, but there's nothing in the math that implies "one spot" in the pattern must logically "happen". The math doesn't logically lead to special spots where something actually happens, that is the core of the quantum mystery (why rejecting hidden variables, which is not the same as rejecting merely local hidden variables, is as problematic as accepting them; for if they do exist, where are they, and if they don't exist, then how do particles / quantum states "choose" where they end up, it seems then "pure uncaused spontaneity" ), there's no logic to where things actually happen, only the probability of happening, and so provided only the logic without context of an experienced reality we are talking about, a single reality does not jump out from the math as a logical necessity. It's mostly just a lot of integrals in abstract spaces which mathematicians solve for fun all the time without suddenly deciding certain values represent probabilities of something actually happening in some sense in the real world, and much less be led to add the postulate that "constraining events" (what we'd call wave collapse) randomly happen along the way to the final answer to a given question (these additional "constraining events" don't change the answer as it's unknown what will be constrained in such a hypothetical constraining event, and so adds no additional information to the initial conditions).

The reason quantum physics doesn't work like this mathematical exercise is because physicists add additional constraints by measuring things in the real world: the real world, not logic, provides this additional information that makes it reasonable to constrain a quantum model at some real time t to reflect what was actually measured. Logic does not even provide some necessary extrapolation from the equations of quantum mechanics that there must be "measurements"; hence, why all sorts of speculation is compatible with it. However, I'm sure you would agree that it is the equations of quantum mechanics that are extrapolated from the single world we see, not the other way around.

But, entropy makes everything quite a bit more deterministic. Whilst QM remains elusive for high variance in temperature gradients for atomic elements locally, and even non-locally, yea? — Shawn

Obviously, this whole conversation is in the context that there is no theory of quantum gravity, no real understanding of what dark matter or dark energy really "is", incompatible measurements of the Hubble constant that should be compatible, etc.

So, definitely some future new physics could re-frame all these questions totally differently. No reason in principle, if there are hidden variables in some other dimension, that we couldn't access them somehow.

The only point I'm trying to defend is my view on the idea we can "know" what reality is like before we look to see what it's like. Any such theory is speculative in my view. I don't have a problem with speculation though. Can be mind expanding and lot's of falsefiable scientific predictions originated in what may appear as speculation; so, I'm not here to judge for sure what's "really speculation" or "really totally not", but I will of course make the challenge to anyone claiming to know these things we have been discussing.

But in short, I haven't looked in detail about quantum entropy concepts other than combination of micro-states in an essentially classical sense.

However, splitting into different possibilities again involves the definition of measurement, which is precisely what is to be avoided in the MWI. If I have defined what exactly a measurement is, then I can simply choose the Copenhagen Interpretation. The MWI would then be superfluous. — SolarWind

I'm not sure I agree. MWI seems to me to still have the problem of when these worlds actually "split"; it's easy to say "when something is measured as is understood in the standard model", but if nothing is measuring anymore it doesn't seem to me clearly defined when universe splits are supposed to happen; whenever something "could have" been measured. I believe there's also the "continuous" split, at least in some sense, idea and interference patterns then need to be interpreted as these continuously splitting universes interfering with each other. Of course, you can (as with all these interpretations) just say "in a consistent with the standard model".

But to be clear, science does not have a measurement problem. I can take this clock and measure something taking 45 seconds to happen. I can take this ruler and I can measure this thing to be 18cm. I can take something and weigh it to read 40 grams. Likewise, I can make an apparatus in a precise way and read out measurements of the apparatus. I can predict how this precise apparatus will behave (what I will see in it's measurement output) using sophisticated mathematics and knowledge of how I built my apparatus and what state it will be in when I turn it on.

The "measurement problem" is not a problem scientists who measure things face, but rather a problem of people trying to take the person measuring out of the measuring and substituting some collection of particles or what-have-you, which of course can always be hypothesized to be in a superposition of all their possible outputs until someone bothers to check and report back that's not the case.

Only within a certain stochastic process governed by entropy, surely? — Shawn

Yes, this is the main problem with "entropy collapse" as I understand it. Entropy is (in it's classical sense) a macro statistical property resulting from fundamentally quantum process (as is temperature, a related macro property to entropy), so it doesn't really make sense in the usual way entropy is understood to say it can collapse wave functions.

So, some quantum version of entropy needs to be made for it to relate to quantum wave collapse. The one's I've seen are basically just some statistical probability of wave collapse based on number of particles or amount of information. Which can of course be postulated without any conflict with the standard model as it is, but the hope of such theorists is generally that there is some experimental difference that can be detected.

What exactly is a "quantum fork"? — SolarWind

Usually in these discussions what I am calling "a fork in the road" is called a branch in a graph of possible state changes.

What it means is simply that when a "wave collapses" and a value previously represented by a range of possibilities becomes one possibility (which is not really one possibility, it becomes just a more constrained range than it was before, as we don't observe particles at "points" but in a region, such as photons hitting a camera sensor we just know which region the photon hit, but not the exact location).

In multiple worlds interpretation there is no wave collapse of the possibilities into more constrained possibilities, but simply everything that can happen does happen in multiplying real and equally physical universes. Every time the universe splits to follow different possibilities new branches appear in the tree of real possibilities that constantly proliferate at a considerable rate, actualizing every possible state of the universe.

We've been recently debating the idea of wave collapse relating to consciousness, as opposed to multiple worlds where no "probability waves" ever collapse.

There are other possibilities, however. Earlier we were discussing hidden variables. Bell inequalities is about local hidden variables, but doesn't exclude non-local hidden variables. Everything could still be fully determined by non-local hidden variables, which, if we knew we could use to fully predict any quantum process. Based on quantum physics as it seems to be now, it's difficult to imagine, even in principle, being able to actually know these hidden variables. However, we can still nevertheless conceive of these hidden variables existing in some other hidden variable dimension that we could probe with the right apparatus to arbitrary precision. Such "hidden variable dimensions" being discovered and accessible to arbitrary precision to predict the exact results of quantum processes (not just the probability distribution of where each particle is likely to land, but exactly where each particle will land to arbitrary precision, constrained just by size of apparatus, for instance) would return physics to a Newtonian world view that everything seems to be in a definite state and larger asparagus gets us more precise results without limitation (in quantum physics as it is, there are fundamental limits to probing values: measure position precisely and you can't measure momentum precisely at the same time; measure too precisely and you create black holes and can no longer see what happens inside those black holes).

So, "likely" hidden variable dimensions, if they exist, we can't access them. However, there's nothing the matter in principle to suppose quantum processes follow some fully determined path without any randomness, due to smaller states we are unable to access.

Next to "consciousness based wave collapse", multiple worlds, full determinism, there are other ideas such as "entropy based wave collapse" as well as "wave collapse just happening spontaneously".

Sort of. But we weren’t talking about MWI. We were talking about collapse and what causes it. There is an inconsistency between “multiple world lines” and “collapse”. — khaled

There's no wave collapse in MWI, as the idea there is all possibilities really exist in some physical definite state and new universes pop into existence every time there is a quantum fork in the road.

"Wave collapse" is the idea there's only one universe that doesn't split at every quantum fork in the road, but the possibilities collapse into one path going forward.

In both MWI and "wave collapse" theories, if we "setup", or just imagine, a cosmic wave function at the beginning of the universe will have the same mathematical structure. It's just in one interpretation if we go "forward in time" with our equations we see a range of possibilities and "predict" one of those possibilities will "actually happen" for observers at that moment in time. Whereas in MWI we go forward in time with our equations and we see the same possibilities but assert every possibility corresponds to a real "universe" (which should really be called "subverse" to the real universe of all these possibilities actually existing).

No we don’t. We need to become conscious of the consequences of the result. Such as cookie or no cookie. Would you call that “becoming conscious of the result”? — khaled

Science works through consciousness. We formulate questions, we formulate answers to those questions, we try to "prove" an answer is right or wrong through experiments. If we imagine unconscious rocks sitting in a pond, they cannot "do science".

It simply makes no sense to say we will setup an experiment but neither of us will ever become conscious of the result, and that will settle, in a scientifically meaningful way, the issue at hand.

This is just what "science" means. If you setup your cookie experiment but never look at the results, but assure me the cookie is definitely either there or it isn't even if you don't look, I'll ask "how do you know". The only way for you to "know" is to go and check, but you're claiming to know even if you don't check.

We can definitely tell the state of the cat. Without observing the cat. — khaled

We cannot know the state of the cat without observing the cat. We can know it's possible states based on initial conditions when the lid of the box is closed, to know it's state afterwards we need to look in the box. We can do that by physically opening the box, we can do it by running an MRI of the box, we can do it by setting up a detector for cosmic rays debris that travel through the box, we can take the temperature of the box and conclude the cat is dead if the box is too cold or on fire if the box is too hot, but each way we might get information on the state of the box requires observations. If we want to have a sort of "pure" cat killing experiment, we would make our box a light year on each side and place the cat in a suitable smaller livable box in the middle with our experiment; this way we can be certain that no information is "leaking" out about the state of our cat.

Sigh. Read the whole comment please. I show why one of the interpretations (the one we happen to be discussing) is inconsistent with that. — khaled

There is no inconsistency with MWI. You just have the block universe of all the possible universes. You have mathematically exactly what I described as the "cosmic wave function" that contains all the possibilities. MWI and cosmic wave function are mathematically the same, only in cosmic wave function I am removing the postulate that there are any conscious beings in this mathematical structure that experience anything, so "all the quantum states" can just happily remain in one quantum block universe where time has no special meaning.

It's not really useful to try to visualize the quantum block universe since there's many more dimensions for field strengths and directions as well as more dimensions representing the probabilities (either mapped onto new dimensions or just left in complex value form; a mathematician investigating this structure won't care that values are complex).

As I say, it's off topic as my point is simply to bring in the analogy that the only "problem" for block universe interpretation of physics equations when we remove "time" as something special that is experienced ... is the fact that we do believe the universe has conscious observers that do in fact experience time.

Great. Now the question becomes, do we need a conscious observer for this to happen, or can it happen on its own. — khaled

This is what I am explaining; the only way for us to resolve this question scientifically, is to setup an experiment and then for us to both become conscious or the result. If we setup the experiment and then never look at the results (i.e. just keep the lid of Schrödinger's box closed) then we don't know if the wave has collapsed or not because we haven't looked.

That's just how science works, if we don't observe we cannot say what the "real state" of Schrödinger's box is; it is as consistent to say it is in some definite state as to say it remains in the quantum superposition of all it's possible states we might observe when we open the box. One is free to believe the quantum state had already collapsed multiple times since we closed the box ... one is free to believe the quantum state has not at all collapsed since we closed the box; both views will result in the same predictions (we both have the same information of the state of the box when it's closed, we both have the same equations, we will both arrive at the same possible states and probabilities for what we'll see when we open the box; what is "really in the box" when we aren't looking is a unfalsefiable claim, as to falsefy a claim about what's "really in the box" when it's closed, we need to open the box and look and so it's no longer closed).

Within the math of classical mechanics.

In Quantum mechanics it is very much inconsistent. Because there are 2 alternatives in quantum mechanics: — khaled

Having multiple interpretations of things does not create inconsistencies.

If you show a parabola equation to a mathematician, there's lot's of interpretations available such as an arch of a particle through space (approximately so), or a string suspended between two fixed points (approximately so), or a shape you have or intend to draw, quadratic growth of some value, or maybe we don't care about the parabolic shape but want to solve for it's roots which will tell us the information we want to know.

Multiple interpretations does not create mathematical inconsistencies.

If I tell you "6", it's not a mathematical inconsistency that I could be talking about 6 electrons or 6 bananas or just the number 6.

Likewise, even if we assumed quantum mechanics does not lend itself to a "block universe" interpretation (which it does), the block universe is not the only interpretation of classical mechanics. We can interpret classical mechanics as representing particles that really do move through time.

All this is getting off topic however, as the analogy that a block universe interpretation of physics is only problematic because we are conscious of the present and time clearly flows in one direction to us.

However, for those curious, the block universe interpretation is as easy in quantum mechanics as classical mechanics. There are just many more paths through the block associated with any particle. If we want to add "wave function collapse" (which the point of contemplating the "cosmic wave function" is that we don't need to ever add a wave function collapse, if we remove the hypothesis of conscious observers that see definite things) then the many potential world lines associated with a particle collapse in the block to the, if not one location, then "smaller region" anytime the wave function collapses in this block universe.

Again, the only reason to postulate "time" as some sort of changing singular experience in our quantum block universe is if we want to contemplate the idea that some of the "particle world lines" represent a conscious being that experiences "time" as some changing singular experience. However, if we had no observers in our quantum block universe there is nothing in the math that would tell us time is some special thing as we understand time to be in our experience.

To those following this discussion and still uncertain of what "the problem" is.

An analogous problem is the idea of a "block universe", which is a hypothesis that arises as soon as we assign a dimension to time that is mathematically the same as our dimensions of space; which you can do in any physics system be it Newton, General Relativity or Quantum mechanics.

When time is treated as a space dimension, one becomes (based on the math) free to imagine that time really is a physical dimension and particles travelling "through time" are "physically" long strands traversing this "space-time" physical substance (in one way or another).

If one describes the whole universe this way, there is nothing logically inconsistent within the math of saying the whole 4 dimensions (or however many dimensions you have in your system) physically exist (in some substance intuition sense) as one 4 dimensional block.

The logical inconsistency arises when we try to reconcile the block-universe view with our experience of time, and that only arises due to being conscious of "one moment to the next".

If a mathematical system describing "the" or just "a" universe was given to a mathematician, and the label "universe" was removed and the dimension of time wasn't labeled "time" then there would nothing in that mathematical structure that would lead our mathematician to hypothesize time. You ask the value (or range of values) of a position labeled as "a,b,c,d" in the mathematical structure, and our friendly mathematician crunches the numbers and gives you the result.

False. That's precisely the point. There are CONSEQUENCES to the wave not being resolved while we're not looking at it. Attach a measuring apparatus to a double slit experiment. Then have an AI recognize whether or not an interference or striped pattern is produced, and connect the AI to a cookie dispenser. If a striped pattern is produced, no cookie, if an interference pattern is produced, dispense a cookie. Start the experiment and go to the cookie dispenser. You will find no cookie. — khaled

This is just not how it works.

Interference patterns disappear, not because of wave collapse, but because of running a different experiment, where phase is not preserved through both slits; and without the same phase going through both slits, the interference pattern does not emerge; this is why there is no interference pattern even if you do not "look" at your experiment until the end.

However, if you put your experiment in the box with Schrödinger's cat, how is it described quantum mechanically? The particles, the detectors, the AI are all in superpositions of the different possibilities of when you open the box.

If we look at the math of quantum physics, there is no logical inconsistency in just letting the wave function propagate indefinitely without any "collapses". The logical inconsistency arises when we look at the world and do not see this wave function, but see definite things with definite values. Now, what we can make of this I think @Wayfarer has been describing very well, so I suggest reading his posts carefully.

Not true. Not even for MWI. MWI is the theory that ALL the possibilities happen. As in a universe where the wave function collapsed to A is created and another universe where the wave function was collapsed to B is created, and so on.... — khaled

You seem to be in a contradiction.

You're saying the MWI solves the problem we're talking about, but somehow the problem doesn't even exist for the proposed solution you are arguing against that "consciousness collapses wave functions".

You say:

False. If you set up a measuring machine and no one looks at the results, the wave function will still collapse. — khaled

If the wave function collapses anyway due to a measuring machine, why the need to postulate multiple worlds?

I think @Wayfarer describes the basic problem well, so I'll just repeat it:

I think that the 'observer problem' or 'measurement problem' in physics is precisely due to the fact that 'the act of observation' has a material effect on the outcome of experiments in quantum physics. This is the origin of the controversy, and the reason there is a problem of interpretation. They don't necessarily refer to consciousness but to the act of observation or registration or measurement. It can be argued that this act of observation can be made by an apparatus, not a person, but that begs the question of why the apparatus existed in the first place, and also whether anything it measures or registers constitutes information until it is interpreted by those who made the apparatus. If you say it does, it simply kicks the can down that road, so to speak; ultimately the information is interpreted by a human being, and whether it exists uninterpreted can only ever be an assumption. — Wayfarer

As I mention in my previous comment, there's nothing "special" about measuring apparatus, other than that we become conscious of their definite states, and, once we do, it is incoherent to continue in the belief that the measuring apparatus is in a superposition of different possible results (which, before we look, is entirely coherent to believe the measuring apparatus is in the superposition of the different measurement outcomes; to "know it's not" we have to look, and only after looking and seeing it definitely says "5" does it become incoherent to persist in the belief that it could be other values other than 5, as it definitely says 5).

Adding a "measuring apparatus" in the box with Schrödinger's cat, doesn't change the thought experiment. There's already the measuring apparatus of the Geiger counter that when activated releases the poison, we ca simply argue it is in a superposition along with the particle it's measuring. We can add into the box as many measuring devices as we like. The particle, the "measuring apparatus" of the Geiger counter, the cat, the air, everything in the box is just particles described by some wave function and there is nothing "logical" that forces us to believe the wave function collapses at any given moment before we check.

The question is what state these measuring devices are in before we look at them? How can we prove any hypothesis? If we're doing science, we have to look to prove our hypothesis, but this defeats the question we are trying to resolve.

When we check, we see one of the potential outcomes; there is no difference between saying we "could have seen one of the potential outcomes since the box was closed" and saying "we could have seen one of the potential outcomes since a series of wave function collapse that have happened since the box has closed", there is no mathematical difference in this second way to imagine things where the "possibility tree" is pruned regularly, just in our minds with imagined wave collapses, as that does not give us any new information in which to predict the state of the box. All we have is the information about the box before we close the lid, so if I just calculate the wave function based on that and let it evolve until the time we open the box to know the probabilities of different box states I may observe, this will be the same as hypothesizing the wave function collapses regularly for some reason.

Yes. Which means it's not the consciousness doing it. If the wave was already collapsed by the time it made it through your eyes, before it got processed in any way by the brain then it's your eyes doing it. Not your mind. — khaled

I'm not sure you're getting it.

We cannot, by definition "observe" when wave collapse happens before an observation.

If you say your eyes cause wave collapse (which already isn't necessarily a coherent use of the word cause), then we'd need an apparatus that makes observations on your eyes to see this eye-wave-collapse phenomenon happening.

If wave collapse happens before observation, we cannot, in principle, observe it. It can always be argued that the cat with the poison is in a super position of different states, and when we open and look, our eyes are in a super position too.

There is nothing in quantum mechanics itself that prevents, in principle, "pan super position" of just setting up the wave function of the whole universe and letting it evolve. If we do this for the big bang or any moment after the big bang, there is nothing in quantum mechanics that forces "observations" to collapse the universal wave function.

It's totally coherent, in principle, to just have a cosmic wave function that then evolves with time and is never "observed" to resolve uncertainties (i.e. collapse the wave function).

What is incoherent in this approach is that we do not (by we I mean my individual consciousness and any like consciousness) observe the wave function of the superposition of all possibilities since the big bang, but we observe one clear possibility.

It's only consciousness that for sure forces us to even come up with wave function collapse in the first place. If you presented the wave function to a mathematician that doesn't know what it's about, they wouldn't be able to find why and when it needs to "collapse" for the math to be coherent. It can evolve in time in it's wavy form indefinitely.

If one sets up a wave function with an "apparatus", the above mathematician would just view it as more particles in the wave function, nothing intrinsically special about the apparatus than the experiment it's connected too.

What makes "apparatus" special is psychics is that we consciously observe the apparatus and so see definite states of the apparatus and not superimposition of states.

This doesn't mean consciousness "causes wave collapse", but "we" cannot "know" about definite states of the universe until we become conscious of those states. What happens before, in principle, we cannot know about unless we look and become conscious of what's happening before (which is now no longer "before" we're conscious of it).

Given all this, it is as reasonable to believe consciousness collapses wave functions as some entropy threshold or the like.

Basically: If we can prove that the eyes cause wave function collapse fully, then it's not consciousness doing it is it? Unless you want to then propose that eyes are conscious. — khaled

This does not seem any different than just experimental apparatus causing wave function collapse, just eyes being apparatus.

The whole point of the question is that "whatever is there" before observation we don't know about until we observe it. Schrodinger's cat in the box.

The paper you cite just goes over the "apparatus" or "external entropy" causes wave collapse arguments. It does not propose an experiment that I can build, turn it on, and be convinced wave collapse has nothing to do with consciousness. An "argument" even in the reputable https://arxiv.org/ does not an experiment make.

Why must we be able to count worlds for it to be science? It's not a real infinity anyways. — khaled

Yes, I thought you would reply this and I had already edited my comment above, but unfortunately not before you already saw it, so here it is again:

(And before you say it's not infinite, just near infinite there's so many: any finite number is totally miniscule compared to infinity; the largest number that can possibly be represented in the entire accessible universe using all available energy and material and building up the most compact way to represent the largest numbers in the axiomatic system of your choice; is a minuscule number incredibly close to zero when compared to infinity). — boethius

If we did an experiment that showed that even without any conscious observers the wave would collapse anyways, — khaled

There is no such experiment proposed, even in principle.

But yes, if there was, it would no longer be pseudoscience but science.

The pseudoscientific beliefs that are unreasonable are the one's contradicted by actual experiments that you can repeat.

By-the-by, no apparatus can count to infinity and so infinite worlds is pseudoscience, not real science. The "popular" physicists that talk about infinite worlds are complete morons. (And before you say it's not infinite, just near infinite there's so many: any finite number is totally miniscule compared to infinity; the largest number that can possibly be represented in the entire accessible universe using all available energy and material and building up the most compact way to represent the largest numbers in the axiomatic system of your choice; is a minuscule number incredibly close to zero when compared to infinity).

Sure. But if one of them is unreasonable it makes the other unreasonable. — khaled

Yeah, I say both are reasonable.

Is reasonable? — khaled

Yes.

What I don't believe is that it is resolvable by experiment, just as whether anyone else is conscious to begin with is not resolvable by experiment (which solves the relativity problems of wave collapse if I'm the only conscious observer, by the by). Again, my belief other people are conscious is pseudoscience.

As a belief you clearly find unreasonable since you call having it being "In denial" — khaled

I said you're in denial it is a pseudoscientific belief, whereas I am not. Two beliefs being "as reasonable to believe" do not make them true. I trust people, even some experts; I think it's reasonable, but I do not think it is therefore true. Some people turn out to be untrustworthy, even if I thought it reasonable to trust them before.

I said as reasonable. Both are claims about consciousness we are unable to verify by experiment. They seem equally reasonable to me in this regard.

I'm not really following you anymore.

I'm pretty sure you don't understand what we've agreed to, but maybe you're feeling lucky.

As reasonable as believing there's some people that have a consciousness made of "expertise" in some way.

Not an experiment. But you manage to do it. I manage to do it in the same way. So does everyone I think. — khaled

It's not an experiment, it's not science. It's pseudoscience with all the same trappings of other pseudosiences: plausible sounding reasoning, anecdotes, unfalsefiable claims.

I'm just not in denial about it. Maybe other pseudoscientific things are reasonable to believe as well.

Right. And all I was saying is that it’s implausible that most experts (from trustworthy institutions that have no motivation to lie about this) saying that consciousness is not required for quantum wave collapse, are gaslighting us. This isn’t even a political issue. There is no reason to lie here. Do you agree with that much? — khaled

Yes, do even know this? Where's the data? And if so, what experiment allows us to distinguish between a "real expert" and not.

As for the subject matter, if someone talking about "science" doesn't have an experiment to backup their claim, it doesn't matter anyway. What you should say (even if you had the above data) is "most experts speculate consciousness is not needed for wave collapse".

But if it's just speculation, who cares?

History (which produces experts), if you bother to look at it, show us "experts" mostly agreeing on a lot of speculations at any given time. Most experts, until recently, nearly all "speculated" the expansion of the universe was slowing down, the question was just how much. Then someone (and it doesn't matter if they're an expert or not) provided evidence that the expansion is actually speeding up. Other groups then independently confirmed this ... maybe; more actual experiments, actually independent maybe needed to increase our confidence to certainty (there could be something seriously wrong with distance measurements, considering the conflict in measuring the Hubble constant may mean we're missing something profound). For now however, "experts" mostly speculate the universe is indeed accelerating in it's expansion.

Point is, what the experts mostly speculated before and what they mostly speculate now doesn't matter, what matters is experiment, independent verification, and the trust (based on feeling) that we place in such verifying experiments (that also extends to ourselves as part of this vaguely trustworthy humanity, as we can also do an experiment ourselves, but do it wrong).

Until recently a lot of "experts" speculated the LHC would give evidence of super-symmetry particles, like they did for previous accelerators; and with good reason, after a good run of discovering new particles with every bigger accelerator there wasn't good reason to assume it would stop. Point is, someone working on theories where the LHC doesn't discover anything more than the Higgs before the LHC results, was not "wrong" because many experts speculated otherwise. Speculation of experts doesn't resolve issues, otherwise no scientific breakthrough would ever happen (as they are almost always fringe ideas when they are first thought of, and would be discarded the moment they are thought of due to "contrary expert speculation").

But you have some confidence in them. Where does that come from? — khaled

I just told you: independent groups I have (for not experimental reasons) reason to believe are really independent and have run the same experiments and confirmed the same results; 2. interacting with technology that must be doing "something" and proposed explanations coherent with that and implausible that (again not due to experimental evidence by my feelings of humanity's trustworthiness) has been made up to gaslight me.

What the hell was that novella then? — khaled

One can always imagine some more complicated scheme fooling oneself in every way. It's an old philosophical exercise. Have you not heard of Descartes? I'm not suprised if you haven't; obviously he has nothing to do with your version of science.

Right, and what do you look at when you make your guesses? Does someone having a PhD or Doctorate improve your chances of trusting them in any way? That would be crazy! — khaled

You haven't bothered to reflect on anything I have said. I've made it clear that expert (to me) is the result of historical process and convention, and not a result of experiment. People get PhD as part of a historical process, not by getting in some box that verifies they are indeed made of "PhD substance" that is distinguishable from "layperson substance". Because I have this view, the credibility of PhD's is related to the political institutions that produce them, and I can doubt more an "expert" in China saying the CCP is like, the bestest or then an "expert" in Nazi Germany saying their race is superior to others. If, however, there's a political system I trust more that also produces experts, I trust those experts more.

Can you put two electrons next to each other yourself? I doubt it. — khaled

I'm not sure when science became just "trust us", but that just so happens to be the exact same epistemological framework of the Catholic church, which science fans are so proud of over throwing with "experiments you can do yourself to convince yourself of what the answer really is rather than just believe what the churchmen tell you".

Yes, things I haven't actually done, like put two electrons together, I have less confidence in than things I have done.

Now, for technology, it's only an argument that supports a "science" used to create it because you can run experiments on the technology yourself. I can run calculations on a computer that satisfy me of it's information processing power and information density.

There's a lot you can do yourself.

You're also forgetting the important step of independent groups confirming results, increasing our confidence we aren't being fooled (experiments "anyone can do" if they want and report to us confirmation or refutation; we can then evaluate their credibility as we wish, but there's no second experiment that actually tells us their credibility ... other than more groups we trust more doing the same experiment, or then ourselves if it means that much to us), rather than just believing experts.

What you can't do is propose an experiment that distinguishes between expert and non-expert.

Of course, maybe independent groups are secretly colluding to fool us. Ultimately, my trust in the reports of others is indistinguishable from my trust in humanity as a whole. Some level of scheming I find implausible, but not due to some experiment I've run but because I don't get "the feeling" the people around me are that duplicitous and I have "the feeling" humanity as a whole is similar. Of course, there's definitely schemes, based on the same feelings about people around me, I find completely plausible, like pretending "experts" backup the idea of selling people a lot of opioids. Essentially by definition I cannot actually verify by experiment exactly how trustworthy people are, I'm forced to make due with guessing and keeping an eye on things. Unless you have such an experiment, then the situation is that the purpose of an expert is that we trust them; it cannot be some experiment that tells us to or not and even less some expert of experts.

Sorry I didn't add the obvious implication of experimental evidence.

Experiments you can do yourself.

When someone tells you electrons are attracted to other electrons, how do you know they're wrong? — khaled

I'm pretty sure they're wrong.

Based on experiments I've actually seen.

Seeing the resume is experimental evidence.

And how do you think they got said features? If not by actually knowing what they're talking about (with maybe a few rare exceptions)? — khaled

Experimental evidence of what?

If I send you my resume with all known PhD diplomas that have ever existed, would you just accept the result of this experiment?

And how do we even know what PhD's diplomas exist you may wonder? Luckily I have a PhD in the history of PhD's on my resume, so you trust my expertise, question settled.

But then, being clever and insightful, you begin to wonder how I was able to accumulate over a million PhD diplomas. You scroll down and see "time travelling arts" and immediately jump to the only available conclusion based on the "experimental evidence" so far, which is I'm an immortal time travelling scholastic.

Still, you want to be sure and case may yet be closed. You see some of my PhD's have been issued recently, rather than centuries in the past or future as with most of them. So, being astute and careful, you call the institutions in question and ask around. What do you get? Pathetically useless anecdotes that don't prove anything at all. You demand experimental evidence to resolve your question! The dean of deans at the end of the line tells you to stop wasting their time and hangs up. You scream into phone that you're just trying to get at the experimental evidence that correctly distinguishes experts from non-experts in the same way we would expect to be satisfied in distinguishing electrons from protons, upon which the entire modern world is built, you mad person! But you hear only silence. You are forced to conclude that these institutions labeled "university" don't take knowledge seriously and can't be trusted.

You start pacing in your room. If there is no experimental evidence that can actually be carried out to distinguish between expert and layperson on a given subject, the whole epistemological foundation of global society may collapse. Bridges may collapse due to improper stressed concrete supervision, planes would fall out of the sky due to mad idiots making critical systems dependent on a single sensor, trump would be president! pandemics unleashed and place us all in lock downs and see the harrying day Westerners wear surgical masks in public like dirty Asians! The damages of an apocalypse of a world run by non-experts would have no realistic bounds; the icecaps could melt, species could go extinct at a rate not seen for tens of millions of years, we could even irrationally start killing the bees with chemicals they really don't like for all we could predict.

You pick up the phone, "give me the president of the United States of America". "President, smart and stable genius at that, speaking". You slam the phone down in horror: It's already begun. You turn on the TV to see the date; it's 2016, you've gone back in time, which doesn't surprise you as you have experimental evidence time travel exists, and you don't doubt the results of your experiments. Suddenly you see a shadowy figure in the corner holding some sort of exotic novelty cane. "It's you," you say. "Yes, it's me Khaled, Boethius from the forum -- which I'm sure you now realize is also the actual historical Boethius who discovered the secrets of time travel by taking a lot of drugs and talking with inter-dimensional muses -- and while you've been confident that experts have some real empirical experimental evidence establishing their expertise, rather than a historical social convention resulting in expertise labels without experiments available to confirm those labels really signify what we want them to signify, and have slept peacefully in your bed confident experts have organized everything in a reasonable way and you have no need to worry or even look our your window -- you need but focus on the extremely narrow area of expertise other experts have shoved your face into -- the world has actually not gone that way, and I've brought you back to 2016, to show you how it all began; the start of the destruction of your civilization because mad fools believed critical thinking could be delegated to experts and is not a collective social responsibility that succeeds or fails together, without any experiments available to convince us at any given time which is actually happening. "Now," I say seriously, "you have two choices: take the red pill, a massive complimentary dose of LSD, and I bring you back to ancient Greece and we do a bunch of orgies together, or take the blue pill, and I bring you back 2021, bring you up to speed on recent history, and you can try to work things out. Blue pill is also a complimentary dose of LSD; you want to do some LSD Khaled, cause that's why I'm here; most of my million PhD involve the psychedelic arts actually". You slam both pills into your mouth. After a long pause of appreciation, "so you're beginning to learn," I tell you.

You mean looking at their resumes? — khaled

You don't seem to be able to extricate yourself from your pseudoscientific beliefs about the world.

We can look at their resumes, I agree. Whether there is some difference between expert and layperson about our empirical world, relating to our state of knowledge as such and not features of society we are told about without experimental evidence, is what I disagree with.

No, it’s a definition. An expert is someone with a PhD or doctorate. We can confirm whether or not someone has this by looking at their resume. What’s so difficult here? — khaled

So much difficulty. See above.

You can't just define experts into existence in any meaningful sense.

Someone with a Phd or doctorate at least. — khaled

We can devise an experiment to resolve who likely has these socially constructed tittles, but to propose an "experiment" that bestows the claims to knowledge we desire, in our version our science today, means we need an experiment and it needs to be done multiple times and be peer-reviewed by existing experts ... but we don't know who's an expert yet, so the experiments cannot be done and pass into our version of science.

And it’s not the domain of science to define what “expert” means. So there is no scientific or pseudoscientific definition. But that’s what I have in mind when I say “expert”. — khaled

If it's a claimed fact about the world, then it's clearly psuedoscience. That proposed empirical facts about the world (we can observe this PhD degree on the wall of this university and agree this person is an expert) can be a state of knowledge neither scientific nor psuedoscientific is itself pseudoscience gobblediegook.

Put another way: There is probably a reason most quantum mechanics interpretations that bring in consciousness are dismissed as pseudoscience nowadays by most experts. — khaled

Ah, but do you have a non-pseudoscientific definition of expert.

Aie, there's the rub. But don't worry! I nominate myself to fill this power vacuum.

I think it's worth explaining the "stakes" in bell's inequality.

A fundamental rule of physics is locality, which just means information doesn't travel faster than the speed of light, which is another way of saying causes don't makes effects at faster than the speed of light. So "information travelling" is the same thing as "causes propagating" in these conversations.

Quantum correlations between distant events, such as a material, say a crystal, that produces pairs of particles going in different directions but when both are measured the pairs always have something correlated, such as opposite spin or polarization or what have you: measuring one particle allows a scientist at detector A predict with 100% certainty a measurement by another scientist at detector B, and A and B can be as far apart as the scientists can do.

So, we "know" something instantaneously about B from observations at A, which on first viewing seems to say information has traveled faster than light. Of course, if we inspect closer we don't "really know" anything about B because we're making the assumption that scientist at B makes a measurement, the device still works, a whole bunch of other assumptions. Rather, we're just predicting something at B based on our knowledge of A; but this isn't unusual. We predict things about other places and times regularly; that we predict the sun rises tomorrow does not mean information has traveled from tomorrow to today to allow us to make that predictions. So, already, with this more careful viewing, we're just predicting and not "exchanging information"; and these sorts of experiments can never be setup in such a way to allow the scientists to communicate faster than light. So locality isn't in trouble.

However, we are still left to wonder if the thing about particles at A and B is determined when the first scientists measures or whether it was "really set" at the crystal or whatever creating the particle pair. It's much simpler to imagine the incoming particle responsible for the key event, hits the crystal and two particles emerged with the correlated features and travel to scientists at A and B already with these values of interest. This intuitive way of looking at it is thus called "hidden variables", as the values we're interested in are there, just hidden from us until we measure them and so know about them.

Quantum mechanics is highly wound up in measurement uncertainty and the logical implications of this; however, for a while one could still wonder if the things being measured really become "definite" when they are measured or are already definite and we then just measure them to know something about this pre-existing definiteness. Just as on our normal human scale we measure a door to find out what it already is, not somehow to make nature take on some value at the same instant we measure it.

If the door is "already a meter" wide before we measure it, then there's some variable of definite value that is hidden from us but revealed to us when we measure it. For doors, this makes sense. However, for particles, quantum mechanics strongly suggests things really are uncertain until measured, that nature only takes on the definite value we are trying uncover in our act of uncovering it, but, if so, then correlated events must somehow "talk" to each other instantaneously; since particle at B cannot know ahead of time what scientist at A will measure and so prepare itself to be measured in the expected way; it is equally uncertain as perhaps scientist B will measure it first and so making B a clear value then forces A to take on the corresponding value when it's measured. Quantum mechanics (for a while) only "suggested" this instantaneous resolution of values at faster than light travel, because the "hidden variables" weren't needed to do quantum mechanics, so if they can be thrown out anyway and quantum mechanics is already quite bizarre, then, once you're "in it", it becomes intuitive to just not care about locality in this case (as it can't be used to communicate anyways, so who cares).

But people did care!

However, for a while, how to resolve the debate of whether there are hidden variables -- which seems question setup to be something in principle that can't be resolved by experiment, similar to resolving if there are ghosts we can't see or ever detect ever around or not by experiment -- had no experimental resolution.

Bells inequality is a proposed way to resolve the debate with experiment and prove the quantum entanglement realm is non-local and correlations are "made to exist" instantaneously without the cause needed for the correlation to happen travelling at slower than the speed of light (as opposed to if the values of the particle are set when the particles are created in an entangled state, then the information travels with them, since they already have the values to be discovered later, slower than light, to the detectors and so our usual visualization of cause remains local). Of course, we can change our intuition of cause to basically exclude these correlations, because scientist A is not able to use this effect to cause anything different to happen at B faster than the speed of light; so if cause is effecting events, then cause remains local and we just don't think about it more than this (the "shutup and calculate" view of physics).

I say "proposed way" because the experiments can involve crazy loopholes if not setup super carefully, and it get crazy complicated, and I'm not sure if there's consensus about what all the loopholes even are and if experiments have closed them all. Generally, new bell inequality experiments aim to close one loophole. If there's a proof about whether all the loopholes are for sure known about, I'm not aware of it. It's not like we're doing something like math and proofs in physics, obviously not: that would be crazy talk.

? — ssu

I say process. We could imagine the Swiss / Nordic experiment as some point in a process towards "withering away of the state".

Living in one Nordic country and knowing all my life the local Social Democracy, I'd say this is not true. — ssu

I too live in a Nordic country, and if I compare to life in the 19th century, there is simply no way to get around the fact a large part of the demands of "socialist agitation" of the 19th century is realized in these countries.

Worker protections, minimum wage, wellfare, healthcare, free day-care, primary, secondary and advance education, subsidized public infrastructure etc.

If you went back to the 19th century and said to people working in mines 80 hours a week, that they could have all these things but it wouldn't be "socialism", that you were advocating these things but not "socialism", they would say you had lost your mind. Capitalist or even just state agents sent to stop your "socialism but not" agitation would not at all care about whatever distinctions you are trying to make.

Living in one Nordic country and knowing all my life the local Social Democracy, I'd say this is not true.

The central government might transfer authority to local communities, but that hardly takes away the role of public authorities, likely it simply increases it on another level. Great, you don't have to ask permission from a central ministry, but your local communal authorities. — ssu

There is nominal power and there is real and effective power. Power is not simply administrative process, power is the ability to effectuate desired change in the real world. In real effective democracies, people effectuate power not only through administrative process and votes, but also through public opinion, strikes, and agitation of all sorts.

If the prime-minister of Finland started using state power in the way Louis 16 understood and used it, two things would happen: first, the immediate realization that there's no way to actually do that, and second, the removal from office nearly immediately. Xi wields effective state power today; the prime minister of Finland is an effective representative of the people on such a scale.

The effective power and who has it in Finland is simply in no way similar to the absolute monarchies of the 18th and 19th century, which is the centralization of authority Marx was critiquing (and then taken over and wielded by the bourgeoisie in much the same way kings did; to protect their property and keep the "little people" in line).

Well, you have no choice but to agree given that the statements are there, black on white. I would recommend you read the articles I suggested because the authors make some very interesting and very strong, in fact irrefutable arguments, in support of their findings. — Apollodorus

Yes, I'll look into them.

To be clear, I would not call myself "a Marxist", and I wouldn't say Marx develops what we would here call "a philosophy" at all, as he never really addresses the question of "why get involved in politics" in the first place.

However, what happens when the thinker doesn't address the issue anywhere else or when the major published works do not support any alternative conclusion? — Apollodorus

I don't think this criticism is fair. Marx has zero clue about the Soviet Union and Pol Pot and co. and is focused on what he thinks is relevant, which is almost entirely critiquing the bourgeoisie. They have the power and he's trying to reveal how that power really works.

As for it "not mattering much", I beg to differ. These are concepts that are central to Marxist theory. — Apollodorus

Depends which Marxist theory. If we're talking about Marx's theory according to Marx, then if he doesn't talk about an issue it's clearly not important to him. Perhaps he should have talked about it, but it clearly doesn't play an important role in his actual theory and writings.

How can you advocate revolution and write thousands of pages justifying it and "forget" to clarify what the actual goal of the revolution consists of, apart from vague statements about "freedom", "equality" and the like? And even these are controversial because on closer scrutiny there are some glaring inconsistencies. — Apollodorus

Though I understand it doesn't "look good" and perhaps the criticism is fair. However, in defense of Marx, if one is advocating "people power", then one doesn't really know what the people are going to do once they have the power. Marx believes people can take a much larger role in determining how their lives are governed, and once that happens he trusts people will make society better (as they live in society); it can be argued as both the apex of foolishness or the summation of wisdom to stay silent about what will actually happen once people "administer their own affairs".

One could say Marx is only showing the door, but that people will need to walk through it.

However, I will need to look into things more carefully. You are asking, to your merit, a more scholarly rebuttal, and so may require not only reading the material you reference but also reading and citing Marx in context, which may take some time.

However, according to some analysts like Andrzej Walicki (Marxism and the Leap to the Kingdom of Freedom) both Marx and his successors like Lenin often use concepts inconsistently and the authors I quoted above, Adamiack and Bender, are of the same opinion. Have you read any of them? — Apollodorus

I don't have time to look into it now, but I will do so.

However, on this topic, I completely agree concepts are used inconsistently. If we want to critique from a modern perspective, Marx's concept of science is fairly rudimentary, but that's common to the intellectual period. And to be fair to Marx, he has a far better conception of science than other important "scientific discipline founders" such as Freud, who has basically no conception remotely in common with modern science and is just basically riffing it.

If we're critiquing a sense of "what mistakes could Marx have avoided", then this is a more historical question.

For example, it is said that “the government of persons is replaced by the administration of things and the state dies (or withers) away" (Anti-Dühring).

But the state can't wither away if is assumes an administrative role, can it? — Apollodorus

For this, I think it's easy to defend Marx. The concept of the state they are working with is the apparatus of the absolute monarchy, the bourgeois start overthrowing the monarch but they keep the state (as, just like the kings they depose, they too are terrified of the "little people" taking their property, and they need the state to protect them).

The state is by definition repressive, because those are the only states that exist.

Our modern definition of the state is inclusive of more-or-less socialist paradises by the standards of the 19th century, but it is anachronistic to put in Marx's conception of the state something like Norway or Switzerland. Norway and Switzerland are far advanced on this road of the state becoming an administrative body genuinely working on behalf of working people.

Another related key concept is the "dictatorship of the proletariat". — Apollodorus

This question I have looked into. For me it's clear "dictatorship of the proletariat" simply means "majority rule" to Marx.

However, when a thinker writes thousands of pages and a phrase only appears once, I think it's also safe to say it doesn't matter much and shouldn't be used to come to any conclusions that are not obviously supported by the major published works. If Marx had Leninist "vanguard" ideas and desire to capture the state and mold people into socialists using state power, I think it's fair to assume he would have wrote about that idea.

Now, both the soviets and their foe the US wanted to attach Marx to statism, so it's an easy phrase to use as pretext and neither side is going to argue with it, but, for me anyways, that Marx provides clear analysis and approval of the Paris commune, the first direct democracy experiment and first "proletariat administrating their own affairs", is pretty clear indication Marx is not a statist.

The problem with Marx for people who don't like Marx, is that he's just extremely tame. He spends most of his time deconstructing (from his point of view) the delusions of the bourgeoisie, in extremely poignant and cutting prose, and very little time planning revolutionary forest squatting.

However, for non-statist Marxists, anarchists and socialists writ large, the state is simply not the main focus of political analysis. Rather, the real arena of politics is the ideas people have: change those ideas and society changes and the state changes. Get the idea into people's heads enough that they are not in anyway "subjects" of the kings of old or the states of new, and the power of the state fades away (just not in the delusional libertarian sense, which is just bourgeois hallucination; any society requires rules and organization etc. and the "bottom up" administrative control called "direct democracy" today is more-or-less "administration" as used by Marx; the people have the power, but they nevertheless need to administer things with administrative councils of some sort nominally similar to state apparatus, but without the oppression which is the essential nature of the state as understood by Marx).

In other words, the sate is centralized power, somehow made possible by "the people" but without any effective influence on this centralized power and in every way their lived dictated from this center. This is in stark contrast to real "people power" who then might nevertheless elect some central authority over certain appropriate tasks. We would call both "a state" in modern political theory, but the second kind simply didn't exist in the remotest sense of the words and to explain that government was possible without oppression nor chaos without rules, the term "administration" as apposed to the state gives a glimpse of this meaning. Otherwise, if what you are talking about has never been seen to exist, it is easy to make the criticism that "we can't function without a state" and everyone having a clear idea of what a state "is", as there's only one kind of example. A similar example is that we might want to stop calling the country the "kingdom" if we aim to not have any kings.

Though I touch on it in the above post, I think it's worth expanding what is meant by "revolutionary" in Marx's writing.

Marx writes well before the Soviet Union and a proliferation of communist insurgencies that bring to mind the idea of the "communist revolutionary" who lives in the forest, wears a beret, and dabbles in post-modernist critique on the side.

The meaning of revolution by Marx is more similar to how we use it today in that pretty much anything can be "revolutionary" in the sense of profound change.

This is made clear in Marx calling capitalism revolutionary and continuously revolutionizing itself with new technology and social changes; what we would call "innovation".

For Marx, real large scale revolutions start well before any political conception of them, in the material changes to the economy. The only reason our capitalist economists don't draw our attention to the material nature of our real economies, but rather stay focused on abstract representation of potential economies that may or may not exists is because A. they are profoundly and willfully stupid as it's their job to be that utterly, relentlessly and irredeemably stupid and B. it would be a segue into discussing whether Marx meant the same thing by materialism (aka. our modern understanding of science as dealing with objective phenomena in the material world).

Once these material changes get underway, it disrupts the old political structures (which could be more-or-less stable for a thousand years and all conception of an alternative basically doesn't exist) because the material interests of people to keep doing what their doing changes and this is impossible to go unnoticed indefinitely. Changes in material processes lead to changes in effective access to power. With new technology, comes new trade, large scale and stable trade that makes the need for "tight nit" and autonomous local political units (aka. fiefs) less needed for survival, and an ascendance of a trading merchant class that, with new found wealth and power and a profound (aka. revolutionary) changes to the real economy, find themselves at odds with aristocratic privilege which is now (for them) standing in the way of further revolutionary changes they are the leaders and masters of. For Marx, humanism and secularism is caused by these material changes in the economy and real wealth and power structures that call for a justifying philosophical framework once this ascending class of merchants and bourgeois factory owners and the like become conscious of their common interest to overthrow the old political order (what Marx calls the superstructure).

There is not really any reason to assume Marx believes there is any shortcuts to this process of the material changes of the economy under bourgeois capitalism in turn creating an ascending class of proletariat that, in a similar way to the bourgeois ascension to power, become conscious of their power and overthrow the superstructure with it. Signs of this ascension to power would be things like literacy.

The analysis always seems quaint because we don't say "bourgeois" or "proletariat", but there's not really any reason to not use Marx's words when discussing his though. However, you can basically read "bourgeois" to mean "investor" and "proletariat" to mean "working class". There are nuances that these substitutions don't pickup (the "bourgeois" have their own distinct culture that, according to Marx, they export everywhere and when the whole world wears blue jeans and suits and watches Hollywood films of damsels in distress in their cute little mansions ... it's a pretty accurate prediction).

So, if we read Marx as meaning processes that could play out over centuries -- just as it took centuries for bourgeois ascendance and consolidation of power in the first-past-the-post representational secular state (free from church and aristocratic interference, in which the working class is easily cajoled into following, if not the right, at least not the wrong, popular politician, be it Obama or Hitler) -- then the "withering away of the state" is perhaps a good way to describe Marx's idea (but of course that would give credit to Proudhon, which Marx would never do, so we may never know).

It seems that the state acquires a prominent position in the socialist phase, but it isn't clear what function it has or what happens to it in the communist phase. — Apollodorus

This is more of a Leninist idea and of course critical to Soviet understanding of Marxism (obviously, Soviet Union believed in an important role of the state).

However, Marx had good things to say about the Paris commune, which was what we'd call direct democracy and what Marx called the proletariat managing their own affairs.

Marx had a fierce dispute with Bakunin, who was essentially the Castro of his time advocating daring revolutionary acts to overthrow states. Marx satirizes Bakunin's idea he needs only 100 revolutionaries to bring about socialism, which, to be clear Bakunin actually says

There need not be a great number of these men. One hundred revolutionaries, strongly and earnestly allied, would suffice for the international organization of all of Europe. Two or three hundred revolutionaries will be enough for the organization of the largest country. — Bakunin, The Program of the International Brotherhood, 1869

So, Marx's view is much more nuanced than just daring acts of what we'd call "communist revolutionaries" in the 20th century, which of course brings up the matter of your OP.

Can anyone explain what is meant by concepts like the “withering away of the state” in Marxist theory? — Apollodorus

This is concept more associated with Proudhon, which Marx doesn't like to credit with anything, so (possibly due to intellectual arrogance) he never makes it abundantly clear he believes the same thing.

But the basic idea as expressed by Proudhon, is that what matters is the beliefs of the people and awareness of the working class of their ability to organize.

The communist manifesto repeats this theme in the idea that the communist is always a friend of the working class and always helping the working class in their struggles of the moment; so, this is very clear incrementalism. At the same time, the communist manifesto makes very bold assertions and talks about revolution a lot, and makes clear that's the goal, so we could interpret this as a call to violent revolution right now or a more mundane "social revolution" as we'd understand our social activists of today (Bernie Sanders sense of "revolution"; profound change but not necessarily immediate or super violent).

Of course, our mundane social activists of today following Bernie Sanders, for example, are only mundane because democracy does actually exist (even in US democratic change is easier than violent revolutionary change, as the Bolshevik style storming of Capital Hill shows us). If we contextualize to Marx's time, politics was of Europe was simply more violent as a matter of fact. So, though we expect from our intellectuals today to condemn violence, it was more just a mundane fact of political life, which Marx, as a political realist, accepts as an unfortunate part of political life and doesn't really advocate against but doesn't really advocate for more of either, as his opposition to Bakunin makes clear.

We can easily interpret the "withering away of the state" as the social democratic process of Europe. Individual citizens in Switzerland and Nordic countries for instance, can genuinely be argued to be free from state oppression and managing their own affairs through fair, or then fair enough, political process. As local awareness increases and local political entities take more active rolls of government management, the "state" becomes less and less relevant to political life; Switzerland's complicated power sharing and power nesting of cities and cantons with direct democratic initiatives possible at every level, that really are effective democratic power, make the Swiss "State" extremely limited in its power and (if you go to Switzerland) no Swiss citizen talks about being repressed by state power.

Of course, Switzerland is wealthy and does have a market, and therefore advanced as a "de facto capitalist success", but this is assuming state capitalist policies maintaining capital's dominance (in opposition to real democratic participation) is the source of Switzerland's wealth in the first place. The counter argument is that real effective democracy brings political stability, little interest in costly wars, good management decisions by the people of "their own affairs" which creates conditions for the accumulation of wealth and an easy time for working class people to, through democracy, ensure decent access to wealth in the form of free education, free health care, good public infrastructure everyone can enjoy, and excellent worker rights to protect against oppression on the job.

If we carry this social experiment of Switzerland, the Nordic's, New Zealand, forward, it is possible to imagine "the State" becoming less and less important, until it is, maybe nominally there as an administrative body of regional issues, but does not and essentially cannot exercise any real oppressive political power. Contrast this, of even the state of affairs of these countries today if you prefer not to speculate about the future, with the French Monarchy, the Tzars, "Communist" China, Nazi Germany, or the Roman Empire for that matter, and it gives a pretty good idea of what "the State" can be in terms of both centralization of power and capacity to oppress. Compared to these states: Nordic countries, Switzerland, and the like essentially don't have states with power over the working class noticeable on any non-logarithmic scale.

Just hmm. Taking these words as expressing what of your thoughts you thought worth presenting, a practice at once necessary, obligatory, correct, and no doubt unjust, it seems to me that if you do not have a whole raft of qualifying thoughts that you might have added, your whole enterprise goes into question. I am going to assume you actually have those qualifying thoughts and just didn't at that moment think them worth including. — tim wood

I think this is very well said and summarizes my own basic question of what the foundational ethical theory is used or implied to justify the transhumanism project.

If there's a framework taken for granted -- such as one of the "big tents" like utilitarianism or kantianism or even Nietzscheism or a variation on post-modernism (none of which, insofar as the label is concerned, might give a clear idea, but it would point in a general direction and terminology) -- it would give some context to the underlying moral or ethical purpose transhumanism is addressing.

Of course, I'd also have no issue with the idea of researching the subject as a technological tool without any moral judgements about its proper use, if any (i.e. just doing the objective scientific investigation), just as a nuclear physicist may say their research does not imply they are making the judgement nuclear bombs or even nuclear reactors should be built, and if so in what context (that the moral and political questions are complex and "science" doesn't take a position on them), but in reading parts of the conversation it definitely seems there is an underlying moral and political project and in clear opposition to specific philosophies (such as the evangelical Christians) "standing in the way of progress". In other words, it's clear what the "others" are that this project is against , but it does not seem clear what this project is really "for".

Not that I am defending the evangelical or otherwise conservative Christians (I criticize them harshly all the time), but if one takes specific and clear issue with one world view, it is my disposition, that one has oneself a clear and specific position from which one makes clear and specific criticisms (if one's criticism are used to justify one's own project, and not just critical thinking for the sake of it without pointing to an alternative "better" position).

As with other posters, the answers to "why is it good?" seem vague.