Relativity Is Not About Spacetime by Edward J. Gillis

Hi, E.E.K.,

I should have noted that the Venn circles don't need to be the same size. More on the order of a Euler diagram. That brings the exercise more in line with physical reality.

You are not -- how can I put this? -- dealing with the real issues of BT. You've admitted you don't really know all that much about BT. JC (not the Second Person of the Trinity in this case) has accused you of not understanding the material he advances in relation to BT, maybe not even BT itself. But still you reject Bell's Theorem.

Also waiting for Ed.

Wait ... a truly excellent post yesterday.

I hate the layout of this site. The honchos apparently believe it's more logical than straight chronological order. That's because nobody ever told them you can number posts for reference.

Not just one excellent post.

Ed,

Thanks for the response. In at least one interview AZ has noted that something sounding suspiciously like Superdeterminism cannot be ruled out, although he personally finds such a world unimaginable (because, among other things, you wouldn't truly be doing science if you couldn't freely choose your experiments). (In the same interview he makes clear his views concerning realism. The two freedoms. Yes, there is something we call "the moon" and this something probably exists independent of observation yet all we know is our construct "the moon" which doesn't clarify much but what's our choice?) And once again this quote from the Z group's Leggett paper. The first time I read it I thought, hey, these folks need someone to edit their English for erroneous negation. But I was wrong. It says exactly what the authors meant it to say.

"We believe that the experimental exclusion of this particular class indicates that any non-local extension of quantum theory has to be highly counterintuitive. For example, the concept of ensembles of particles carrying definite polarization could fail. Furthermore, one could consider the breakdown of other assumptions that are implicit in our reasoning leading to the inequality. These include Aristotelian logic, counterfactual definiteness, absence of actions into the past or a world that is not completely deterministic[.]"

I'm ignorant as to whether any experiments have been proposed by 't Hooft or others that might provide Superdeterminism something more than metaphysical status. My sense is you'd somehow need to muck around down at the Planck limit amid the quantum foam and that this is not do-able for HUP reasons. A default might be to go total Tractatus and say that "Free Will" and "Determinism" have never been conclusively formulated as genuine logical propositions (Conway to the contrary?) and so deserve to be consigned to silence -- or at least, more kindly, classified as "outside the world". As for jettisoning classical logic ... you'd be discarding the human mind's warrant to explore the microworld if (as I do) you believe our modes of cognition are embodied and selected for throughout the course of life's macroscopic existence on this planet.

nmann quoting Zeilinger et al, ""We believe that the experimental exclusion of this particular class indicates that any non-local extension of quantum theory has to be highly counterintuitive."

Not just counterintuitive, I think. Is there really any way that standard quantum mechanics can be coherent without nonlocality? Despite attempts by some notables (Tobias Fritz, e.g.) to do away with it, any probabilistic measure scheme *must* assign value to nonlocality in order to render a closed judgment on "the experiment not done."

Tom

Tom,

There is no point in arguing with the quantum mystics. They *want* to remain mystified. Any clear-cut, deterministic, local, and complete description of reality (like this one) is "noisily unreconstructed." How else can they continue to amuse themselves? How else can they continue to demand more public funding?

Joy

A Quantum Mystic is someone who believes in a Universal Quantum Consciousness communicating internally within itself and between you and me by means of "mind-pixels" (read: particle spin) per one Huping Hu, Ph.D, J.D. (who, IIRC, dropped a couple of congrats in Edwin Eugene Klingman's box a contest or two ago and was warmly and personally thanked in return) and his lady wife ... you want more data, google it.

FYI.

nmann,

Unlike several who frequent these threads, I see no point in being nasty to others. I tend more to subscribe to the old saw about the reason academic squabbles are so nasty is because the stakes are so small.

I'm not sure what you're referring to, but I don't apologize for personally thanking anyone who says something nice to me, whether or not they meet your approval.

And finally, I have never written or even thought in terms of 'mind-pixels', nor have I written of "Universal Quantum Consciousness". I do consider those who believe that conscious awareness and free will 'emerge' from the arrangement of Lego blocks in some specific order to be either fairly unaware of awareness per se, or as simply never having thought through the matter, but as this 'Darwinian' mystical idea of the emergence of awareness is the consensus required of true modernist believers, I tend to avoid the topic unless it's in an appropriate forum. And then I never say anything even remotely related to your characterizations. For those who are interested in what I have to say on this topic, see here. You chastized me yesterday for not being aware that your favorite sources had also admitted that it's possible that logic is at fault rather than local realism, and now you seem quite ready to pontificate on something you clearly have little understanding of.

What's the matter with you, wake up on the wrong side of bed or is it something you had for breakfast?

Edwin Eugene Klingman

E.E.K.,

Sorry. Sincerely. I know I've behaved in a beastly manner with no provocation. I've always liked you. You're extremely smart and have a sense of humor and seem like an excellent gentleman and someone fun to have a beer with. I'll try never to abuse you again although my wife tells me I'm a sociopath so there's no guarantee.

(((((((((( Edwin Eugene Klingman )))))))))) as we used to say on Guardian Unlimited Talk (where David Tong posted as m******* and regularly ragged the hell out of another poster who fancied himself some kind of brilliant scientific revolutionary. But Tong's a serious genius and understands as few do the fundamental importance of the fermion sign problem and appears on the FQXi masthead along with Joy so shut me up). Each pair of parentheses is a hug if you don't know the code. Endeavour not to become ill, as we might also have said.

Okay ... and maybe you never exchanged cheers with Huping Hu, even though you haven't denied it. If you did I don't care. I know you'd never believe in crazy stuff like mind pixels. But I know for sure Philip Gibbs did say "Thanks Huping" and moreover I suspect him to be the Philip E. Gibbs, Ph.D. who's part of Hu's inner cabal. But that's irrelevant to Science as done herein.

Cheers and best wishes

Dear nmann,

We all have our moments. There are one or two comments I've posted that I'd like to erase. Thanks for your response. I very much appreciate it. I always find your comments well worth reading, and look forward to more of them.

Edwin Eugene Klingman

Guys, I think you're missing Joy's point about quantum mysticism.

It isn't simply a matter of navel-gazing. We already know that there is no correlation between thought creation in one brain-mind and transference of that identical thought to another brain-mind. The wave function has to decohere from creation to transference as a consequence of distance. That's why it's so ridiculous for Sascha Vongehr and others to claim that if quantum theory is not non-deterministic, one ought to be able to beat the "Amazing Randi million dollar challenge." A determinist in the EPR sense does not dispute decoherence of the wave function over distance -- that's irrelevant -- the correlation of quantum particle properties has nothing to do with distance, no matter whether in quantum mechanics or classical physics.

The true question is whether the distance separation of correlated particles defines nonlocality. Quantum mechanics says, yes -- the observed property (spin up, say) of a local particle renders 1/2 of the pair correlation (spin down) nonlocal. Classical physics, which deals with coherent systems of particles rather than their bits, could not until recently come to grips with the issue of nonlocal correlations -- because decoherence of the wave function in three dimension space forces disappearance of the wave function at the boundary of infinity, and that's what we call nonlocality. Problem is, there is no such boundary to the 3-sphere of the 4 dimensional spacetime in which we actually live. That's why Joy's topological solution works; all quantum correlations are real and local because what we observe of a particle bit is simply connected to its partner bit in universally correlated wave functions (Bell's "Bertlmann's socks" parable). This doesn't show up classically, because the wave functions are described as statistical ensembles of particles, not as quantum correlated bits.

The topological description derives quantum predictions from classical parameters, which is not forbidden by Bell's theorem -- (which only forbids the derivation of classical predictions from quantum phenomena) -- and which is therefore manifestly real and local.

The mystical quantum interpretation -- of an observer-created reality, a probabilistic world assigning the value of nonlocality to "the experiment not done" -- has been obviated.

Tom

It's not mysticism to believe that nonlocality is factual, or that classically-indecipherable information could be communicated outside of space and time, or that events can occur without observable cause (or, as Hume pointed out a while back, that sequential occurrences are no necessary proof of causality). Mysticism is an amplified sense that you can relate all this stuff to your life -- that you and whatever it represents can communicate, that you can gain otherwise unobtainable knowledge, expand your consciousness, achieve Enlightenment, grab the hem of something larger than, something beyond existence as you presently know it.

QM has been feeding into this need ever since Eddington first began popularizing "the new science" back in the 1920s. He was actually pretty shameless, certainly by the standards of that time, but still he was only an enabler. Nothing he said to the public was untrue, just not complete and people were free to attach their own interpretations to it. They did. Nothing has changed except that these days most scientists try to be more careful and responsible and of course now there's entanglement. Can't be helped.

"...now there's entanglement."

Where?

Show me where this thing called "entanglement" is, or find me someone who has seen it, and I will withdraw all my papers and book against Bell at once.

"Where?"

It's not unaccepted practice in to treat a concept like any other noun. What's highly unusual is not to recognize when it's being treated in that manner. But I'll rephrase. "Now there exists the concept of entanglement."

The "in to treat" is explained by the fact that I started to say "in informal discourse to treat" but then remembered it's true in formal discourse too.

"It's not mysticism to believe that nonlocality is factual, or that classically-indecipherable information could be communicated outside of space and time ..."

Sure it is, nmann. Believing in nonlocality (or the quantum entanglement that entails it) doesn't make it factual. "Communicating outside space and time" is not mystical? -- really? Then it's quantum mechanical believers who should have the means to beat the misguided "Quantum Randi Challenge."

As I said in my essay, believers in Bell's theorem are the true determinists -- assigning deterministic value to their beliefs.

Tom

"Now there exists the concept of entanglement."

Now there also exists the concept of unicorn (not to mention the concept of UFO).

Tom,

I'll re-read your essay, keeping in mind that "believers in Bell's theorem are the true determinists -- assigning deterministic value to their beliefs" and see if I can get my head around it this time.

One question, though, first. Assume Joy's experiment were conducted and resulted in his hypothesis being validated ... would that have no deterministic value in your mind? Answering that would make my job easier.