Additional food for thought:

https://www.technologyreview.com/2019/03/12/136684/a-quantum-experiment-suggests-theres-no-such-thing-as-objective-reality/

https://qr.ae/pvepzt

https://qr.ae/pvepjo

The way I look at it our perception of reality is solid objects and liquid and gaseous; and then there are black hoes and sub-atomic particles and quirks and quarks.

But to a mechanic of quantum, the reality is wave forms, or not even that. I don't know what reality looks like on a quantum level. And I surmise that a mechanic would be hard-pressed to describe it to me in a way that would make sense to me. (Through nobody's fault: mine, the mechanic's, or the quantum's.)

The upshot is, that in our perception reality is solid-like, and it's nothing to sneeze at. It is a substantial way of looking at things, solids as reality, because to most of mankind that is the only available way.

That mechanics look at it as a dense wave form, is okay, but it's neither here nor there, for me as a real person.

Does quantum physics say nothing is real? — Darkneos

Start with the easy part - you know that things, at least some things, are real. You wake up in the morning. Get dressed, brush your teeth. Have some coffee, maybe eat breakfast. Go to work. You know that your clothes, your toothbrush, coffee, pop tarts, your car are real. You know that because those are the kinds of things we created the concept of "reality" to apply to. Quantum mechanics doesn't change that.

The danger with QM is that people get the physics and metaphysics all wrapped around each other. Drastically different physical principles apply to sandwiches and surfboards than apply to subatomic particles. The world works differently at different scales. Why would we think that wouldn't be true. Different metaphysical regimes apply at different scales. That's the thing about metaphysics - there's not just one appropriate view of reality. The philosophical lesson of QM is that what works at human scale doesn't work at all at nano-scale.

See. Easy.

:100: :clap: :up:

One of the problems with quantum reality in human minds is that quantum reality does not LOOK like anything. Humans like to see things that they can see... like god. He is an old man with a flowing beard and very powerful. Or a river, or a cloud.

Heck, photons and light waves are not visible on the quantum level. You think you see one, and poof, it's not even there. And without photons and light waves you can see nothing.

Does quantum physics say nothing is real?

No.

Drastically different physical principles apply to sandwiches and surfboards than apply to subatomic particles. The world works differently at different scales. Why would we think that wouldn't be true. Different metaphysical regimes apply at different scales. That's the thing about metaphysics - there's not just one appropriate view of reality. The philosophical lesson of QM is that what works at human scale doesn't work at all at nano-scale. — T Clark

:clap: :party:

:fire: :up: — 180 Proof

Sorry, I already did that. Beat you to it!! :smile:

Whoops. :smirk:

Though on the off side...does it really say that? From what I've been told there are so many interpretations of QM that you can pretty much just have it say whatever you want. — Darkneos

Quantum mechanics is very robust mathematically. But once you get into interpretations of what it actually "means," then it is as much about how good your imagination is, as anything else.

But the general answer I get from those who know this stuff is NO. It doesn't say anything like that. When I get into the philosophy about it I get stuff like "well that depends what you mean by reality", after that I pretty much tune it out. — Darkneos

If you search for "real" in your Schaum's Outline of Quantum Mechanics you will find nothing, save mentions of the real number system. "reality" is in the domain of speculation by both experts and quantum mysticists.

If you search for "real" in your Schaum's Outline of Quantum Mechanics you will find nothing, save mentions of the real number system. "reality" is in the domain of speculation by both experts and quantum mysticists. — jgill

On the other hand, among those physicists who are aquatinted with philosophical accounts of realism and anti-realism, most consider themselves philosophical realists.

A good way to wrap heads around the concept of quantum physics is that things at the smallest Planck measurement to the largest objects in the universe tend to be a scale of probability. Going from total randomness at the smallest scale and sequentially becoming less and less random. At the scale we exist, the probabilities that go against deterministic cause and effect, are so infinitely small that they basically never happen.

So... our scale in the universe cannot be randomized in physical processes, even if we can witness randomness and strange probabilities at quantum scales.

Your last paragraph…which scale are you referring to by “our scale” and which physical processes?

Randomness produced at the quantum level = randomness and classically defined phenomena on the macro level. And vice versa

The way I see it and this is my mere conjecture at this point for our instruments do not allow us to peer at the every infetesimal scales thus randomness is attributed to unknown events is that such phenomena are found at the observable scale too and as our instruments still face the same problem at this scale then we can not truly attribute cause and effect thus the end result appears random also.

How do you know? I from all the links I've gathered there seems to be something to there being no objective reality based on what that guy on Quora is saying.

But then again I know next to nothing about QM so.....

“our scale” and which physical processes? — Deus

Our scale = us, human-sized things observing our surroundings.
Physical processes = physics at our human scale, i.e Einsteins theories etc.

Randomness produced at the quantum level = randomness and classically defined phenomena on the macro level. And vice versa — Deus

Not sure what you meant by this? It's an increasing probability certainty of cause and effect the larger in scale you go from the smallest to the largest.

On the other hand, among those physicists who are aquatinted with philosophical accounts of realism and anti-realism, most consider themselves philosophical realists. — Joshs

That would be my guess. Were I a physicist I would be in that camp. Actually, I probably wouldn't care one way or the other.

How do you know? I from all the links I've gathered there seems to be something to there being no objective reality based on what that guy on Quora is saying. — Darkneos

There is something to it. I started a whole discussion about it. I think the concept of objective reality can be very misleading. On the other hand, in some situations, it is very useful, e.g. the scientific method. Another example - our everyday life. Trees don't cease to exist when we're not looking. Somebody said something about how reality is what's left when nobody's there.

Whether or not there is or isn't objective reality is a metaphysical question. As R.G. Collingwood wrote in his "Essay on Metaphysics," metaphysical questions don't have yes or no answers. Metaphysical claims are not true or false. They are more or less useful in specific situations. As I noted previously, the idea of objective reality is probably not very useful at quantum scale.

The links seem to say different. Even the first one I posted about useful fictions.

Though TBH referring to other people as a useful fiction scares me. It sounds...lonely.

The links seem to say different. — Darkneos

What makes your sources any more authoritative than all the other thousands of voices out there, including mine. As I said, it's not a physics question, it's a metaphysics one. The failure to recognize the difference between everyday or scientific reality and metaphysics is the biggest failure of most posters on the forum.

I've had my say. If you're not convinced, or even interested, I can't think of anything else that might make you think twice.

The danger with QM is that people get the physics and metaphysics all wrapped around each other. Drastically different physical principles apply to sandwiches and surfboards than apply to subatomic particles. The world works differently at different scales. Why would we think that wouldn't be true. Different metaphysical regimes apply at different scales. That's the thing about metaphysics - there's not just one appropriate view of reality. The philosophical lesson of QM is that what works at human scale doesn't work at all at nano-scale. — T Clark

That's a very well put and useful paragraph TC.

That's a very well put and useful paragraph TC — Tom Storm

Thank you.

The world works differently at different scales. Why would we think that wouldn't be true. — T Clark

Because we believe in the uniformity of nature and the unity of science.

Are there really different "laws of nature" at different scales? Really? That sounds crazy to me. What doesn't sound crazy is that different methods of approximation work at different scales, and it's not even hard to think of examples of that, just based on selecting granularity. But that's a change in how we approximate what's happening, not a change in what's happening. We all know that regular Newtonian mechanics works pretty darn well for a lot of purposes, and is in some sense always false.

And yes of course there are differences between how a crowd of 50,000 behaves and how a group of 5 behaves. Yes, scale matters. But it should be explicable how you crossover from one scale to the next — even if there is no simple, non-fuzzy boundary. We should still have a single theory of group behavior and changes in behavior should track changes in the size of the group for good reason. The crowd of 50,000 is made of the same bits as the group of 5. As the quantity of people increases, new properties of the group become salient, in a predictable way, I should think. And so it is with our world of medium-sized dry goods and the critters of the subatomic zoo they're made of.

We observe a lot of stability; we know there's nothing like that in what our stable stuff is made of, so I assume those instabilities somehow combine to produce larger scale stabilities. (I assume it's vaguely similar to how fundamentally stochastic processes predictably result in Gaussian distributions and power-law distributions, and so on, all the randomness yielding order.) That's not a change in the rules, but a predictable result of the rules, and the rules that apply only to stable stuff (if there are any of those, even as approximations) are also a predictable result of the rules down below.

Anyhow, that's why at least one person (me) would think that wouldn't be true, based entirely on my assumptions and with hardly any knowledge of quantum theory at all. I've just never understood the "it's just a matter of scale" view — as if Mother Nature checks the size of what she's dealing with and then picks the appropriate rule-book to follow for that size object. That leaves the events at different scales isolated from each other in a way I find incomprehensible.

The failure to recognize the difference between everyday or scientific reality and metaphysics is the biggest failure of most posters on the forum. — T Clark

:100: :up:

It would depend on what one means by nothing and real. It's quite fascinating although not unexpected that at those scales of reality, there's confusion as to what's real and what's not.

The world works differently at different scales. Why would we think that wouldn't be true. Different metaphysical regimes apply at different scales. That's the thing about metaphysics - there's not just one appropriate view of reality. The philosophical lesson of QM is that what works at human scale doesn't work at all at nano-scale — T Clark

There are ways of accommodating within a a single metaphysics the situation in physics that the world appears to work differently at different scales. For instance, one can argue, as the followers of Quine do , that facts and value systems ( accounts of the world) are inextricably bound together. Thus, it is not just the human and nano scales of physical description that can’t be fully integrated. It is also the myriad descriptions of reality within the various subsegments of the biological and social sciences. Whatever we study within one approach responds also to other theories and procedures, but with
different new precision. Since it responds to various systems, it cannot be how one system renders it.

“ Alternative approaches develop separate webs of precise findings. Precision develops within each
web, but they are not consistent with each other
Quine rightly saw that the order of nature cannot be just one of these "webs." Although they can be internally consistent, they cannot be reconciled. Even if they could be, we know in advance that more of them will soon form. Since we know it in advance, we can assert it in advance:
Nature ..... can respond with surprising and precise detail, but differently to different approaches.
The responsive order provides a "reality" to check against. We can check each approach (procedure, performance, set of experiments, measurements) against the feedback of an equally precise "reality." But there is no way in which we could "check" so as to decide between these "realities.” Eugene Gendlin, The Responsive Order )

Notice that the concept of fact-value inseparability is a unitary metaphysical conception describing a situation of multiple accounts. You will find that almost all philosophers treat metaphysics as a way to synthetically unify disparate accounts at the most general level of thought.

There are ways of accommodating within a a single metaphysics the situation in physics that the world appears to work differently at different scales. — Joshs

Just to clarify, in terms of our folk notions of reality, QM goes far beyond saying that things work differently on a small scale. QM suggests that there is no distinct reality outside measurement events (which don't require consciousness, but human activity is a kind of measurement.)

So when you say physicists are realists, that doesn't necessarily answer the OP. If the OP had some sort of Newtonian picture of the world, then the answer is yes, QM says that a fair portion of that absolute realm is not real.

As I said, it's not a physics question, it's a metaphysics one. The failure to recognize the difference between everyday or scientific reality and metaphysics is the biggest failure of most posters on the forum. — T Clark

This is squarely false. It is a physics question. There are a number of quantum theories which vary considerably in how they explain quantum experiments, and none of them confirm your folk notions of reality.

You have misrepresented the scientific field in this thread and should by no means be talking down to anyone else.

There are ways of accommodating within a a single metaphysics the situation in physics that the world appears to work differently at different scales. For instance, one can argue, as the followers of Quine do , that facts and value systems ( accounts of the world) are inextricably bound together. Thus, it is not just the human and nano scales of physical description that can’t be fully integrated. It is also the myriad descriptions of reality within the various subsegments of the biological and social sciences. Whatever we study within one approach responds also to other theories and procedures, but with different new precision. Since it responds to various systems, it cannot be how one system renders it. — Joshs

I don't see how this substantively differs from what I wrote. It seems like there's just a language tweak that allows you and Quine to bundle a bunch of different metaphysical approaches into a single mega-metaphysics.

I have no problem with that I guess, I just find it less clear than the way I describe it.

This is squarely false. It is a physics question. There are a number of quantum theories which vary considerably in how they explain quantum experiments, and none of them confirm your folk notions of reality.

You have misrepresented the scientific field in this thread and should by no means be talking down to anyone else. — frank

I disagree. Please explain how I am "talking down."