The Perfect First Question. by T H Ray

Hi Tom

Having started to get to grips with Joy Christian's work, I can appreciate what a superb job you have done in producing such a well-written and easy to read essay that discusses the meaning of such complex issues.

All the best in the competition,

Michael

Dear Tom,

First, thank you very much for this well-written and thought-provoking essay.

I've been feeling a heavy guilt trip for not commenting on your essay before now, especially in light of the very kind and thoughtful comments you left on the blog for my essay. Not to make too big a production of it, but the reasons for my failure to comment here are a bit complex. I've now read your essay four times, and it makes me feel incredibly stupid/obtuse to say that I still cannot claim to fully understand it. Your thought processes obviously are very subtle and refined. My thought processes, by contrast, tend to be what I think of as being at the more naive and primitive end of the spectrum. I'm convinced that both modes of thinking are important and useful, and certainly not necessarily mutually exclusive. That said, the subtlety of the argument in your essay has left me perplexed.

To offer just one example of my obtuseness, could you please give a few specific, concrete examples of the sorts of questions which might be asked in Wheeler's version of "20 Questions"? Even that basic point has left me unsure that I comprehend the underlying concept. Any help greatly appreciated.

Btw, I've been following with great interest the discussions you've been involved in over on George Ellis's blog on top-down vs. bottom-up causation. Fascinating stuff! Don't know whether you might have noticed a couple of posts I left there on the nature of sentience as it may relate to that topic. How could anyone not be deeply intrigued by all this?

Good luck in the competition!

Regards,

jcns

"It turns out to be Bell loyalists who are the actual determinists, believing that reality is determined by probabilistic measure schemata, by which they assign equally likely outcomes to [']... the experiment not done...[']..., and thereby limit the questions that can be asked, to an assumed domain of perfect knowledge."

Not necessarily. Now here's a Bell loyalist who REALLY thinks outside the box:

"... In a truly non-causal world, Bell's Theorem cannot be formulated because in such a world elemental events are not stable enough for Bell-type non-locality to even be defined. ....

"Bell showed in 1964 that this cosine-squared dependence of polarization correlations is incompatible with a local reality. Therefore any reality (quantum reality) that lies behind these facts must be non-local. It is important to realize that Bell's Theorem is based solely on the facts not on the details of quantum theory so that if someday quantum theory is falsified or replaced by a better theory, Bell's Theorem will still be valid. Even if quantum theory is wrong, reality must be non-local.

"Although Bell's Theorem is based on facts, it goes beyond facts to make confident assertions about the reality behind those facts. Because it deals with reality, not facts or theory, Bell's Theorem is metaphysical, not physical, and hence is vulnerable to certain metaphysical assumptions about the nature of the world that are essential to Bell's proof. If we live in a world where these metaphysical assumptions are not justified, then Bell's theorem cannot even be formulated. Here I examine a class of worlds in which Bell's Theorem does not apply, and in which non-locality, in the way it's defined by Bell, does not even make sense."

NOTE: Nick Herbert's use of the word "reality" might need clarification. He employs it in the Kantian sense of "noumenal reality" -- i.e., the Whatever beyond or behind the phenomenal ("factual") world of our perception.

A SIMPLE REFUTATION OF BELL'S NON-LOCALITY THEOREM (CAUTION: VALID ONLY IN SOME WORLDS)

Interestingly, the guy also believes that in a singular manner Bell managed to stick a finger through the veil:

SEE SPOT RUN: A SIMPLE PROOF OF BELL'S THEOREM

THR: Where, exactly, did Bell define "nonlocality?"

nmann: I should ask what's your point? (one senses a game is being played here) but anyway he definitely defined "locality" --

"The direct causes (and effects) of events are near by, and even the indirect causes (and effects) are no further away than permitted by the velocity of light." (from "La nouvelle cuisine", 1990, in "Speakable and unspeakable in quantum mechanics", Cambridge, 2004, p. 239).

One of the assumptions, of course, built into BT. I'm not confident he "defined" nonlocality except inferentially or by referring to Einstein's "Spooky Action" or to Bohmian pilot waves. I'd need to look back over a lot of material. But he was, as we know, a Bohmian of a sort, and Bohm (plus Hiley) offer a definition in the Abstract of "On the Intuitive Understanding of Nonlocality as Implied by Quantum Theory" (1975, well before Bell's death):

"We bring out the fact that the essential new quality implied by the quantum theory is nonlocality; i.e., that a system cannot be analyzed into parts whose basic properties do not depend on the state of the whole system."

Think JSB went there?

John Bell defined non-locality as a negation of his factorizability condition for the joint observation AB(a, b, L) = +1 or -1 made by Alice and Bob,

AB(a, b, L) = A(a, L) x B(b, L),

where Alice's measurement result A(a, L) = +1 or -1 remains independent of Bob's measurement context b as well as his measurement result B, and likewise Bob's measurement result B(b, L) = +1 or -1 remains independent of Alice's measurement context a as well as her measurement result A.

John Bell then concluded that no realistic theory satisfying his factorizability condition can reproduce all of the statistical predictions of quantum theory, or even the strong EPR correlation -a.b observed by Alice and Bob.

In this conclusion John Bell was simply wrong.

Attached is an explicit model satisfying the above factorizabilty condition and yet reproducing the strong EPR correlation exactly. The second paper attached contains a completely general theorem that proves that, not only the EPR correlation, but ALL stronger-than-classical quantum correlations can be reproduced purely local-realistically, maintaining both the reality and completeness conditions of EPR as well as the locality or factorizability condition of Bell.

Yet, the myth of Bell's theorem is likely to remain with us, because we love worthless waffles in physics much more than concrete facts and explicit demonstrations.

Joy ChristianAttachment #1: 16_disproof.pdfAttachment #2: 10_Origins.pdf

In the Intro to the iconic 1964 paper we see this, which is what I had in mind when I said "inferentially":

"Moreover, a hidden variable interpretation [who else could this be but Bohm?] of quantum theory ... has been explicitly constructed. That particular interpretation has indeed a grossly non-local structure. This is characteristic, according to the result to be proved here, of any such theory which reproduces exactly the quantum mechanical predictions."

THR: So what IS your point? Bell used the term. His meaning is pretty obvious. The word was never put into his mouth by others.

Joy: You're starting the resemble "Outraged in Tunbridge Wells" in the letters columns of the old Daily Telegraph or summat. You're a extraordinarily bright guy. Ease up!

You are right about both of your points:

(1) Yes, Bell's motivation and inspiration for his theorem came from the non-locality in Bohm's theory, of which he remained a big fan throughout his life.

(2) You are correct to recognize that I am outraged. This is because of the kind of treatment I have received from some parts of the physics community during the past five years, and especially during the past few months. I don't know about you, but Tom has witnessed some of this mistreatment. Needless to say, what you see on the Internet is only a fraction of what goes on in the real world. But nevertheless I will try to "ease up" if I can.

nmann,

Happy to know that it exists rationalists !

Regards

Tom,

Bell's program was "classical" because his primary intellectual weapon was classical logic. That is the logic of our world, the embodied logic of our brains. It's the logic of macroscopic physicality (something JSB proved: the classically logical is also the classically physical). All formulations of QM are classical ... Heisenberg's matrices are classical even if noncommutative etc.

We have two choices: Classical and Classical-NOT. We use the first to identify the second. The second has no meaning except as a contradiction of the first. Smart people ... Putnam, Finkelstein ... have tried to craft a quantum logic but without success. There's a reason. We can recognize and describe (in our own language) superposition but we can't do superposition. Nor can we replicate quantum randomness (cf. John von Neumann on being in a state of sin when you try to do that deterministically ... you need to tap an actual quantum source).

Nick Herbert's right: we don't know whether underlying "reality" is classically deterministic or in some manner non-causal. If Bell's classical logic is a correct tool then reality's at least nonlocal. (Leggett tests suggest it's also counterfactually indefinite.) If Bell's logic is wrong then it means classical logic itself is inapplicable beyond the macroscopic world although in ways we may never recognize, much less understand.

Hi nmann,

Bell's logic is wrong but it doesn't mean that classical logic can't apply microscopically. Have a look at De Raedt et al's work. Bell just simply didn't consider all the elements of reality in his logic. That is real easy to see in Joy Christian's work.

Fred

Hi Tom,

In the spirit of questioning hidden assumptions, there is an assumption in these considerations that the background metric doesn't change on you. As I commented to Edwin, a change in the signature of the background metric can turn local into apparently non-local in classical physics (see attachment for a toy model that demonstrates this). This effect has the potential to explain the odd Quantum Theory feature of non-local identity without non-local causation, which incidently probably won't conflict with Joy Christian's work [currently waiting for his book to arrive].

This feature explicitly arises in my demonstration that quantum field theory can be derived *from* classical physics, on the condition that QT is due to a representational change to continuous variables. This chagne is necessary because the classical physics theory over discrete physically-real variables is proven to be subject to Godel's incompleteness. Thus QT is the result of a *necessary* change in functional description of the dynamics which leads to local causation of observables.

MichaelAttachment #1: Local_to_nonlocal.pdf

Hi again Tom,

"I don't really mean to be that subtle. I hope to do better."

For the sake of clarity, my earlier comments were not intended as a criticism of your essay or your subtlety, but rather as an admission of my own obtuseness. Subtlety in this case may well be synonymous with brilliance. Having noted that the overwhelming majority of comments others have posted on your blog reveal no hint of befuddlement, I've concluded that my lack of fuller comprehension is probably due in large part to the inadequacy of background knowledge I bring to the topic.

If you're willing to help me along a bit, I'd welcome a relatively concise statement of the "bottom line" message you want readers of your essay to come away with. Call it "T. H. Ray's Essay for Dummies" if you like. I know we're constrained by length limits as to what we're able to cram into our essays, but these blogs can offer a welcome opportunity to expand on the essays. If you're so inclined, I'd welcome a bit of schooling. Recognizing how busy everybody tends to be these days, however, I also won't be offended if you're not so inclined. We've got to pick and choose how to spend our all-too-limited time. Thanks.

jcns

Hi Michael,

Nice illustration!

Let me make a minor clarification, however. You do mention this distinction above, but for other readers let me point out that what you demonstrate in your illustration is a *signalling* non-locality due to a possible signature change in the space-time metric. In Bell's language this type of non-locality has to do with a linkage between the experimental parameters a and b of Alice and Bob. Quantum theory, on the other hand, harbours a peculiar *no-signalling* non-locality, which in Bell's language has to do with a linkage between the measurement results A and B observed by Alice and Bob.

In my view the latter non-locality is only an apparent non-locality, because not only the quantum mechanical description of Reality is incomplete, but Bell's supposedly compete analysis of it is also quite incomplete, with the incompleteness in it creeping in from the very first equation of his famous paper. Thus the kind of possible explanation for the no-signalling non-locality you are suggesting is a bit heavy handed from my perspective. Within my framework such a non-locality is no more mysterious than the non-locality observed in Dr. Bertlmann's socks.

Best,

Joy

On second thought, there is something interesting about your illustration.

The signature change you induce from g = (-,,,) to g = (,,,) in the space-time metric is quite similar to the change in the orientation of the 3-sphere from (,,) to (-,-,-) I take as a choice between two initial conditions in my model. So there seems to be a closer link between what you are saying and the fundamental hypothesis of my model.

--Joy