The Perfect First Question. by T H Ray

Because I expect Vongehr may delete it (he's already deleted Joy Christian's comments on his site), and because it is relevant to my essay, I want to reproduce here some comments by nmann and my reply:

nmann wrote:

To the best of my imperfect knowledge, this is the only recorded comment or commentary by (Ludwig Wittgenstein) directly in re: QM. It feels like it's saying much the same thing as Anton Zeilinger's "Photons are clicks in photon counters." --:

"The views of modern physicists (Eddington) tally with mine completely, when they say that the signs in their equations no longer have 'meanings', and that physics cannot attain to such meanings but must stay put at the signs. But they don't see that these signs have meaning in as much as -- and only in as much as -- immediately observable phenomena (such as points of light) do or do not correspond to them.

"A phenomenon isn't a symptom of something else: it is the reality. A phenomenon isn't a symptom of something else which alone makes the proposition true or false: it itself is what verifies the proposition." -- Philosophical Remarks, pp 282-3 (1929-30)

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I replied:

You're right, nmann. As an early influence in the Vienna school of logical positivism, Wittgenstein subscribed to the notion of language analysis as the limit of knowledge.

Though such belief logically leads to Vongehr's fatuous "quantum Randi challenge," it is completely divorced from rational empirical science. All meaning is invested in observation alone ("What you see is what you get") such that every observer's interpretation of the physical phenomenon is equally valid in the context of the language used to describe it -- while the language itself is held to be meaningless. This is the core belief of postmodern drivel, which thankfully has not so far infected science to any degree greater than isolated cases like Vongehr. The knee-jerk reaction of legitimate scientists -- whom I won't further embarrass by naming -- in the endorsement of Vongehr's view, betrays their innocence of the pseudo-science philosophy that actually supports the "challenge."

I don't know if Vongehr has actually corresponded with Amazing Randi -- though I doubt it. Randi's challenge is itself based on rational science -- the correspondence between mathematical theory and physical result. Randi's skepticism is grounded in the fact that there is no theory that supports coherent psychic communication (whose failure is explained quite adequately by decoherence); it has nothing to do with Vongehr's quantum mysticism and postmodern babble.

Tom

Robert,

How many pair correlations do you expect you will measure at a time?

Tom

Sorry, Robert. I find your explanation logically incoherent. For if there is no correlation of one point to another, there is no information.

Tom

Robert, a quantum or classical bit is a pair, a fundamental unit of information. If you think otherwise, you are against not only the logic, but the physical evidence.

Hi Robert,

I had to hop over to your essay site to make some sense of this dance. Even though I haven't read your essay (I will, promise) -- I find this comment you made to a discussant significant in understanding what you're getting at:

" ... the uncertainty principle represents a fundamental limit. The point is that the limit is true by definition of what is meant by a bit of information. It says nothing at all 'interesting' about the nature of reality. Heisenberg mistakenly thought he had discovered some deep, underlying mystery of nature. In fact, he merely discovered a very peculiar way of restating the definition of a bit of information."

Your first sentence contradicts your trivialization of Heisenberg's principle in your last sentence. Discovering a fundamental limit as a physical law is indeed a " ... deep, underlying ..." property of how Nature works. It isn't trivial.

One problem I have had in getting across my own view is that a cadre of true believers in Bell's theorem as physical law (a very large cadre as I have discovered) lump all who don't accept that quasi-law into a category of "Bell deniers" who don't know the theorem and must be crackpots. Joy Christian has the same problem (although I think he must accept some blame for framing his argument as a "disproof.")

Fact is, though, that neither Joy Christian nor I are "Bell deniers." To these true believers, I'll wager, if JSB were alive today HE would be a "Bell denier." No -- it is exactly because we do understand how strong quantum correlations are, that we see why Bell's theorem fails at a fundamental level. Or I should say, that Joy led me to that understanding by introducing the correct topological domain that incorporates those results in a local realistic manner.

We don't have to dismiss Heisenberg uncertainty or any experimental facts. We only need a classical explanation that obviates nonlocality and probabilism.

Best,

Tom

As predicted, the posts from Sascha Vongehr's site have disppeared. What has not disappeared, is the reason why one should care about whether Vongehr's idea of science is rational -- and whether it is important that the scientific enterprise should continue to be based on rationalism.

Vongehr advocates a postmodern social constructivist view. I would bet that most scientists are not even aware of what that is, for mainstream science has for 300 years followed the "fingo non hypotheses" philosophy of Newton -- that is, an objective model is not interpreted into existence by the language of the observer, nor is it dependent on such language for objective validity. As my collaborator Pat Frank and I wrote for an article in "Free Inquiry" in 2004, " ... the meaning of empirical data is found only within the context of a falsifiable theory. This is true, even if the meaning is that the data contradict the prediction and refute the theory. Only a falsifiable physical theory distinguishes the meaning of lightning away from the hand of god. Only the capacity of falsification produces a unique prediction and provides an unambiguous meaning to the data."

Vongehr's strawman argument -- in which he asserts with absolutely no support that most scientists are naive realists -- would have us believe that there is no unambiguous meaning. That the message is in the eye of the beholder and truth is constructed by consensus. In trying to fit his philosophy to the scientific enterprise, he has managed to profoundly misinterpret the same John Wheeler who said, "No phenomenon is a physical phenomenon until it is an observed phenomenon,"* into saying that Wheeler's utterly simple idea is to assume the quantum and accept nonlocality as physical law. Wrong -- Wheeler assumed nothing -- the comparison of Wheeler's idea to Einstein's elevator gedanken experiment requires an actual physical analogue. Vongehr's proposal does not only fail to meet that standard, it bypasses and subverts the rationalist enterprise entirely.

What would Randi do? Assuredly, not this.

Tom

*Quoted by Robert Scully in *The Demon and the Quantum* 2007

Not only is Vongehr's program philosophically bankrupt, it is mathematically and physically flawed. In rallying his "fanboys" -- an epithet that Sascha is fond of hanging on me -- to the cause of irrational science with his "quantum Randi challenge," he appeals to the digital magic of the computer:

"Some have suggested that (hidden variables) are 'topological' and related to hyper spheres. This is entirely irrelevant, because there is no difference for a computer whether it calculates relations applicable to our usual Euclidian three dimensional space or something else. Many strange geometries and topologies (e.g. black holes and worm holes and the SU(2) double covering that Fermions modeled. Computers have no idea about which of those worlds is the one they happen to actually compute in." (http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1207/1207.5294.pdf)

Here's a prime example of one who knows a lot about computers and next to nothing about computing. The series of logical operations that go into simulating a physical phenomenon only implement the expected result, not the physical experiment. Vongehr's claim is identical to a claim that a computer simulation of the Einstein light-bending experiment in 1919 proves special relativity.

That's the problem with those true believers who want Bell's theorem to be enshrined as a physical law -- their models prove what their models assume.

If science is a rationalist enterprise (which means that elements of the mathematical theory correspond 1 to 1 with elements of the physical result, where the mathematics is independent of the physics) -- this ain't science.

Tom

Sascha,

The worm turns, doesn't it? After many months of libeling Joy Christian in a public forum with falsehood and innuendo, and suborning others to do the same, you complain of unfairness.

You can certainly fool some of the people some of the time with your truncated quotes and the ugly strawmen you build from them; however, I can by fact and source support everything I have said:

1. Randi's rationalist challenge has nothing to do with your strange idea of Bell's theorem and what it implies.

2. Most scientists are not familiar with social constructivism, and those who are do not base their science on it. Poll them.

3. Yes, one should care whether science is a rationalist enterprise. Has nothing to do with you, just your misguided and irrational philosophy of science.

4. You have no physical analogue to Wheeler's simple idea, nor any possibility for such. (A computer simulation is not a physical analogue.) The source of Wheeler's proposal is the continuum, not the quantum, which you would know if you were at all familiar with the body of his work as a relativist, " ... in short, that all things physical are information-theoretic in origin and that this is a participatory universe." The correspondence between discrete information output to discrete elements of a continuous range of input variables is a continuous measurement function.

Tom

Joy, you're right, of course. It isn't my intention to elevate the position of Vongehr's frivolous ideas to the level of a serious scientific discussion.

What has always stuck in my craw is the moral implication of what he and Campbell are about. Disguising a gossip blog in the clothes of science is hardly the noble undertaking that it is advertised to be.

In a famous confrontation at the Cambridge Moral Science Club in 1946, Wittgenstein wielded a fireplace poker in the face of visiting lecturer Karl Popper. The details are unclear.* What is not unclear, is that Popper's withering criticism of Wittgenstein's philosophy led Wittgenstein to demand an example from Popper of a "moral principle." Popper's reply: "Not to threaten visiting lecturers with pokers."

Someone has to, as Bertrand Russell is said to have done -- at the moment Wittgenstein took the red hot poker from the fireplace and waved it at Popper -- say, "Wittgenstein, put down that poker at once!"

To not say so, is as serious a moral breach as the threat itself.

Tom

*_Wttgenstein's Poker_, David Edmonds & John Edinow, Haper Collins 2001

Sascha Vongehr complains on his blog: "Experts agree that solving the

Quantum Randi Challenge would deserve the Nobel Prize. However, experts also keep demanding to reformulate the challenge with a variation of the Bell inequality called 'CHSH'."

I should hope so. The experts are the ones who have studied EPR/Bell and its CHSH extension to a considerably higher standard than an unpublished arxiv paper that reads as if it were a sophomore term paper written the night of the big frat party beer bust.

Because I know Vongehr's proposal to be flawed in principle -- the idea of it bears hardly even a superficial resemblance to the real Randi challenge -- I hadn't read the paper before. Now that I have, I am even more incensed that such babble survives on the borrowed credibility and reputation of the scientific enterprise.

I went in expecting to dissect the paper and refute it point by point. It turned out to be a waste of time to even read, much less bother to refute -- Vongehr's principal notion is that "The described multi-player game computer setup constitutes a classical physical system; computers are physical! In short: if the computer setup could violate Bell's inequality, that very computer network would be a classical physical system that violates the Bell inequality and such would deserve a Nobel Prize."

This is not just laughable; it borders on the insane. Coming from one who regularly savages serious researchers as "crackpots," and recommends Prozac, it comes across to me as simply pitiful. At any rate, it is the easiest matter to refute the notion: if Vongehr understood even the first jot of Wheeler's information-theoretic program that he pretends to, he would know that it isn't computers that are physical; information is physical. Current research in complex systems -- such as that by Strogatz, et al in the small world effect, and Bar-Yam, et al in bounded rationality -- clearly show that interacting systems (even a multi-player game such as V proposes) show little change on the large scale over long time intervals. Undaunted by empirical facts and actual experimental results, though, V allows his players to win against large odds because they live in parallel worlds. Sorry, dude, we all live in the same world where even your own "peer reviewer" Richard Gill acknowledges that the law of large numbers applies equally to every case, and that experimental results must be independent of theoretical expectations.

As for this gem -- "About the equivalence of classical physics and classical computation: All experimental observations have finite resolution due to experimental errors/accuracy. The (today practically limitless) finite capacity of computer memory does therefore not present an obstacle to those who believe classical physics to involve true continuums." -- Good to know that Sascha has all the time in eternity at his disposal. Seems that he not only truncates critics to suit his whims, nature herself gets a close haircut.

There are no "true continuums." There are continua constrained by abitrary boundary conditions, and there is THE continuum. It was the continuum, singular, from which Wheeler derived quantum information, and which every mathematician distinguishes from discrete numbers.

Now if one can prove that the simulation of a continuous function is a continuous function ... no chance that Vongehr is up to it, though.

Tom

Thank you kindly, Gurchan. I will read your paper when I can -- yes, getting through all these fine compositions under deadline is a daunting task. Thanks for reading and commenting on mine, however ... much appreciated!

Tom