EHeller comments on Welcome to Less Wrong! (5th thread, March 2013) - Less Wrong

27 Post author: orthonormal 01 April 2013 04:19PM

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Comment author: CarlShulman 04 April 2013 10:43:11PM 4 points [-]

which omits every single point that goes in favour of e.g. non-realism, because they are too irrational or too stupid.

No, that set of posts goes on at some length about how MWI has not yet provided a good derivation of the Born probabilities.

Comment author: EHeller 05 April 2013 12:21:56AM *  3 points [-]

No, that set of posts goes on at some length about how MWI has not yet provided a good derivation of the Born probabilities.

But I think it does not do justice to what a huge deal the Born probabilities are. The Born probabilities are the way we use quantum mechanics to make predictions, so saying "MWI has not yet provided a good derivation of the Born probabilities" is equivalent to "MWI does not yet make accurate predictions," I'm not sure thats clear to people who read the sequences but don't use quantum mechanics regularly.

Also, by omitting the wide variety of non-Copenhagen interpretations (consistent histories, transactional, Bohm, stochastic-modifications to Schroedinger,etc) the reader is lead to believe that the alternative to Copenhagen-collapse is many worlds, so they won't use the absence of Born probabilities in many worlds to update towards one of the many non-Copenhagen alternatives.

Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 05 April 2013 12:44:43AM 7 points [-]

Note that the Born probabilities really obviously have something to do with the unitarity of QM, while no single-world interpretation is going to have this be anything but a random contingent fact. The unitarity of QM means that integral-squared-modulus quantifies the "amount of causal potency" or "amount of causal fluid" or "amount of conserved real stuff" in a blob of the wavefunction. It would be like discovering that your probability of ending up in a computer corresponded to how large the computer was. You could imagine that God arbitrarily looked over the universe and destroyed all but one computer with probability proportional to its size, but this would be unlikely. It would be much more likely (under circumstances analogous to ours) to guess that the size of the computer had something to do with the amount of person in it.

The problems with Copenhagen are fundamentally one-world problems and they go along with any one-world theory. If I honestly believed that the only reason the QM sequence wasn't convincing was that I didn't go through every single one-world theory to refute them separately, I could try to write separate posts for RQM, Bohm, and so on, but I'm not convinced that this is the case. Any single-world theory needs either spooky action at a distance, or really awful amateur epistemology plus spooky action at a distance, and there's just no reason to even hypothesize single-world theories in the first place.

(I'm not sure I have time to write the post about Relational Special Relativity in which length and time just aren't the same for all observers and so we don't have to suppose that Minkowskian spacetime is objectively real, and anyway the purpose of a theory is to tell us how long things are so there's no point in a theory which doesn't say that, and those silly Minkowskians can't explain how much subjective time things seem to take except by waving their hands about how the brain contains some sort of hypothetical computer in which computing elements complete cycles in Minkowskian intervals, in contrast to the proper ether theory in which the amount of conscious time that passes clearly corresponds to the Lorentzian rule for how much time is real relative to a given vantage point...)

Comment author: wedrifid 05 April 2013 03:25:33AM *  8 points [-]

The problems with Copenhagen are fundamentally one-world problems and they go along with any one-world theory. If I honestly believed that the only reason the QM sequence wasn't convincing was that I didn't go through every single one-world theory to refute them separately, I could try to write separate posts for RQM, Bohm, and so on, but I'm not convinced that this is the case. Any single-world theory needs either spooky action at a distance, or really awful amateur epistemology plus spooky action at a distance, and there's just no reason to even hypothesize single-world theories in the first place.

It is not worth writing separate posts for each interpretation. However it is becoming increasingly apparent that to the extent that the QM sequence matters at all it may be worth writing a single post which outlines how your arguments apply to the other interpretations. ie.:

  • A brief summary of and a link to your arguments in favor of locality then an explicit mention of how this leads to rejecting "Ensemble, Copenhagen, de Broglie–Bohm theory, von Neumann, Stochastic, Objective collapse and Transactional" interpretations and theories.
  • A brief summary of and a link to your arguments about realism in general and quantum realism in particular and why the wavefunction not being considered 'real' counts against "Ensemble, Copenhagen, Stochastic and Relational" interpretations.
  • Some outright mockery of the notion that observation and observers have some kind of intrinsic or causal role (Coppenhagen, von Neumann and Relational).
  • Mention hidden variables and the complexity burden thereof (de Broglie–Bohm, Popper).

Having such a post as part of the sequence would make it trivial to dismiss claims like:

You lead the reader toward a false dichotomy (Copenhagen or many worlds) in order to suggest that the low probability of copenhagen implies many worlds. This ignores a vast array of other interpretations.

... as straw men. As it stands however this kind of claim (evidently, by reception) persuades many readers, despite this being significantly different to the reasoning that you intended to convey.

If it worth you maintaining active endorsement of your QM posts it may be worth ensuring both that it is somewhat difficult to actively misrepresent them and also that the meaning of your claims are as clear as they can conveniently be made. If there are Mihaly Barasz's out there who you can recruit via the sanity of your physics epistemology there are also quite possibly IMO gold medalists out there who could be turned off by seeing negative caricatures of your QM work so readily accepted and then not bother looking further.

Comment author: EHeller 05 April 2013 01:11:33AM *  4 points [-]

Note that the Born probabilities really obviously have something to do with the unitarity of QM, while no single-world interpretation is going to have this be anything but a random contingent fact.

Not so. If we insist that our predictions need to be probabilities (take the Born probabilities as fundamental/necessary), then unitarity becomes equivalent to the statement that probabilities have to sum to 1, and we can then try to piece together what our update equation should look like. This is the approach taken by the 'minimalist'/'ensemble' interpretation that Ballentine's textbook champions, he uses probabilities sum to 1 and some group theory (related to the Galilean symmetry group) to motivate the form of the Schroedinger equation. Edit to clarify: In some sense, its the reverse of many worlds- instead of taking the Schroedinger axioms as fundamental and attempting to derive Born, take the operator/probability axioms seriously and try to derive Schroedinger.

I believe the same consideration could be said of the consistent histories approach, but I'd have to think about it before I'd fully commit.

Edit to add: Also, what about "non-spooky" action at a distance? Something like the transactional interpretation, where we take relativity seriously and use both the forward and backward Green's function of the Dirac/Klein-Gordon equation? This integrates very nicely with Barbour's timeless physics, properly derives the Born rule, has a single world, BUT requires some stochastic modifications to the Schroedinger equation.

Comment author: shminux 05 April 2013 01:25:15AM *  2 points [-]

What surprises me in the QM interpretational world is that the interaction process itself is clearly more than just a unitary evolution of some wave function, given how the number of particles is not conserved, requiring the full QFT approach, and probably more, yet (nearly?) all interpretations stop at the QM level, without any attempt at some sort of second quantization. Am I missing something here?

Comment author: EHeller 05 April 2013 01:52:43AM 4 points [-]

Mostly just that QFT is very difficult and not rigorously formulated. Haag's theorem (and Wightman's extension) tell us that an interacting quantum field theory can't live in a nice Hilbert space, so there is a very real sense that realistic QFTs only exist peturbatively. This makes interpretation something of a nightmare.

Basically, we ignore a bunch of messy complications (and potential inconsistency) just to shut-up-and-calculate, no one wants to dig up all that 'just' to get to the messy business of interpretation.

Comment author: shminux 05 April 2013 06:21:56AM 2 points [-]

Are you saying that people knowingly look where it's light, instead of where they lost the keys?

Comment author: EHeller 05 April 2013 06:27:21AM *  3 points [-]

More or less. If the axiomatic field theory guys ever make serious progress, expect a flurry of me-too type interpretation papers to immediately follow. Until then, good luck interpreting a theory that isn't even fully formulated yet.

If you ever are in a bar after a particle phenomenology conference lets out, ask the general room what, exactly, a particle is, and what it means that the definition is NOT observer independent.

Comment author: shminux 05 April 2013 06:45:19AM *  2 points [-]

Oh, I know what a particle is. It's a flat-space interaction-free limit of a field. But I see your point about observer dependence.

Comment author: EHeller 05 April 2013 06:55:40AM 5 points [-]

Then what is it, exactly, that particle detectors detect? Because it surely can't be interaction free limits of fields. Also, when we go to the Schreodinger equation with a potential, what are we modeling? It can't be a particle, there is non-perturbative potential! Also, for any charged particle, the IR divergence prevents the limit, so you have to be careful- 'real' electrons are linear combination of 'bare' electrons and photons.

Comment author: [deleted] 06 April 2013 10:33:23AM 0 points [-]

and what it means that the definition is NOT observer independent.

[puts logical positivism hat on]

Why, it means this, of course.

[while taking the hat off:] Oh, that wasn't what you meant, was it?

Comment author: EHeller 07 April 2013 01:53:30AM *  0 points [-]

Why, it means this, of course.

The Unruh effect is a specific instance of my general-point (particle definition is observer dependent). All you've done is give a name to the sub-class of my point (not all observers see the same particles).

So should we expect ontology to be observer independent? If we should, what happens to particles?