Noisy Machines by Michael James Kewming

Dear Michael,

It's very kind of you to read my essay and comment on it, thanks so much, as it has led me to your well crafted and most enjoyable essay, which I will give a very good rating.

As a practicing physicist measuring magnetic fields I deal with noise on a daily basis. As a hobbyist radio-astronomer noise is our bread and butter. As a retired EMC practitioner noise was mostly the enemy. And finally as an armchair philosopher noise is a most important facet of arguments against quantum misinterpretation.

I believe QM is an unreasonably effective mathematical tool of the physicist but I do not agree with the quote of Feynman "nature isn't classical, dammit, and if you want to make a simulation of nature, you'd better make it quantum mechanical" that you gave in your essay, for I truly believe that nature is classical, provided you are using the right physical ontology. I am not a nay-sayer of QM, just a free thinker who thinks it has been wrongly placed on a pedestal as the 'crown jewels'.

I have several areas where I feel QM needs revision:

1. I understand that there are Maxwellian explanations for the photoelectric effect, that gave birth to the notion of the photon as a particle.

2. HUP has been extended way too far past what Heisenberg originally developed. (I have made a few comments on this in posts to other essayists)

3. Wave/particle duality is a nonsense as presented by QM, as particles and their fields (and attendant waves) must always exist together, not seen as separate entities dependent on mode of observation.

4. The photon is not a particle, just purely a wave in the classical aether, and as such doesn't partake in the duality mentioned above. Young's slit experiments with particles need to be interpreted carefully as their fields and their Maxwellian radiation pass through both slits even if the particle does not.

5. The various interpretations of the collapse of the wave function truly require one to believe in magic, and put the 'observer' on a pedestal that is very misleading.

6. I believe in a certain type of entanglement that occurs during pair production and 'photon' splitting. I believe that from the moment of birth, noise in the environment cause degradation of the entanglement known as decoherence.

7. I do not think there is sound evidence for quantum superposition, and hence I do not think quantum computers will ever achieve their lofty claims. (See Alan Kadin's excellent essay notes regarding this).

8. I think that Bell's tests re EPR have been following an incorrect path of interpretation (see Barry Gilbert's challenging essay on EPR).

I realise that you work in the area of quantum optics and that I have made some big challenges. I say what I have said because I have developed a working preon theory (gimli theory) that reduces matter to a single particle, and thus gives structural insight to particle physics that is sadly lacking in the Standard Model of particle physics (a tapestry of quantum field theories, and a testament to the great mathematical ingenuity of particle physicists). The gimli model of the electron allows it to produce two distinct magnetic fields, one of which is interpreted to be the vector potential, thus explaining many electromagnetic phenomena.

For the record, I am not a believer in the Platonic realm, as you will have picked up from my essay. Another aside, in the realm of human endeavour bitcoin mining must be one of the most dissipative activities outside of exploding nuclear weapons!

All that aside, I agree with your overall conclusion and I certainly enjoyed reading and commenting on your fine essay.

Good luck with your ratings, as yours is an important essay,

Lockie Cresswell

(btw my brother is a Prof. at your Uni)

Dear Michal James.

"MEMORY" is just a time-effect in our emergent reality. (so it originates from a Point in a Point of TS).

I will read your essay, I promise, but today I am hospitalized for an operation on my colon where they will take away a tumour. I will have to stay ca 12 days before coming home.

best regards

Wilhelmus

Dear Michael,

you've provided a well-argued essay that takes the abstract notions of 'austere' mathematical Platonic domains and confronts them with the hands-on reality of the actual world. Do the issues noted by Gödel, Turing, and others survive the confrontation with a messy, noisy world of increasing entropy and finite resources?

You answer in the negative---and in the way you frame the debate, I can only agree: there is no device that could be built that actually realizes the necessary preconditions for undecidability to apply. Even the simplest possible systems that could hope to achieve computational universality eventually fall prey to the loss of energy to the environment, and to the degradation of their signal-bearing vehicles.

Sure, one could quibble at certain points. For instance, the famous result by Cubitt et al., demonstrating that whether a certain system has a gapped ground state is an undecidable question, essentially only applies to systems with an infinite number of degrees of freedom---and while such systems do exist in quantum field theory, arguments from e. g. the Bekenstein bound may be taken to suggest that an ultimate theory of nature ought to be finitary in this sense.

Likewise, one can show that the question of whether a certain output port in a chain of iterated quantum measurement (Stern-Gerlach type) experiments stays dark, is undecidable. But neither of these really demonstrates an exploitable source of undecidability.

But I don't think that the failure of concrete systems capable of universal computation in a realistic context to exist entails the inapplicability of Gödelian reasoning in a physical setting.

Consider randomness. Famously, no computational process can produce genuine randomness---not indefinitely, at least. Any given formal system can only approximate a random number to a finite degree; the digits of the number beyond that threshold correspond to undecidable propositions. Hence, as Feynman put it, "it is impossible to represent the results of

quantum mechanics with a classical universal device". To the extent that there is randomness, undecidability is relevant to physical reality.

Fine, one might say. We only ever make finite observations; it's good enough to use some pseudorandomness for our purposes. But then, it turns out, one can use entangled systems to send faster-than-light signals, in conflict with special relativity; hence, all such models must be noncomputable.

More generally, I think that even though undecidability may not apply on the level of concrete devices, this doesn't entail that it can't have no role to play in the formulation of laws themselves.

One typical argument one encounters is that we only ever make a finite set of observations, hence, collect finite data, which can be produced by a finitary system, such as a finite state automaton. That's of course true. But such a model would, effectively, be equivalent to a computer program that just outputs that data, without significantly compressing it; hence, if would yield poor predictive power.

But then, how could one have predictive power if, for instance, the data is due to a non-computable process? Well, any such process can be decomposed into a finite algorithm and a source of randomness---say, a string of random digits. An observer faced with (finite) observations of noncomputable data could then figure out the algorithmic part, and thus, explain their observations in terms of some algorithmic process interspersed with random events---which is, of course, exactly what we see.

So, in the end, I think that there's a window for the applicability of undecidability to natural law that your arguments leave open---and, as is probably no surprise given my own essay, I believe that this is what actually is realized in nature.

Still, I wish you the best of luck in the contest!

Cheers

Jochen

Dear Michael,

Thank you for steering me to your great essay. Kudos to you for asserting the fundamental inevitability of noise from the environment. You brilliantly capture the impossibility of isolating it by your statements: "The afterglow of the big bang buzzes in the background and virtual particles pop in and out of existence. No matter where you are in the universe, you cannot escape noise."

I believe that your premise, despite contradicting the conventional interpretation of physical reality, is solidly founded. The analysis in my essay concludes that the empirical facts of classical and quantum mechanics are completely and best explained by a physical reality that is contextually defined with respect to a positive ambient temperature. This leads to a physical reality in which the 2nd Law, entropy, and irreversibility are truly fundamental. The prevailing conception of a fundamentally deterministic physical reality, in which irreversibility and entropy are emergent, is an idealization based on an ambient temperature equal to absolute zero. Absolute zero can be approached, but it is physically unrealizable, and the prevailing conception is a fiction.

A positive ambient temperature effectively and objectively coarse-grains physical reality. Given a contextual reality and positive ambient temperature, you correctly assert that "asymptotic predictions of closed axiomatic systems can never exist in the physical world." You go on to provide an insightful well-written analysis of the implications on the operations of an actual Turing machine.

I have to disagree with you, however, regarding quantum computations. You state "their processing logic is entirely reversible as its evolution is governed by the Schrodinger equation." The Schrodinger equation describes a unitary and deterministic transition from a definite eigenfunction to a superposed wavefunction. However, I do not believe that a superposed wavefunction describes a physically superposed state. Superposed cats and superposed states in general do not exist. A superposed wavefunction describes the spontaneous and statistical process of transition from an initial eigenstate to one of the system's physically allowable eigenstates of higher entropy and stability. So, while a quantum computer's processing logic may be reversible, its physical calculations are not.

Best,

Harrison

Dear Michael,

This is very nice and well argued essay you have proposed here. I learnt many things, I did not know about conservative logic for example, and will for sure come back to it multiple times in the coming months.

You are perfectly correct that noise should not, and maybe cannot, be discarded. And the reference to the 3 Kelvin CMB is pot on about this.

A small issue I have with one of the theses you develop however, is that you say that because a computer ultimately relies on external resources (whatever they are for: memory, energy etc...), once this storage somehow runs out the programme will halt. This is perfectly true but I would not consider this as being the same as saying that the halting problem does not apply. If the programme is terminated before it terminates on its own then it is still a major problem and this is not, I believe, what the original Halting problem was about.

So, to me, if anything, you actually put forward, like Paul Davies does in his essay, an additional limitation to computation.

So, instead of dispelling these undecidability and incompatibility problems, I think you actually add to them by considering more realistic scenarios.

Another interesting point you mention is that mathematics can only go as far as the tools of mathematics, themselves governed by the laws of physics, enable them to go.

I would venture to object that the very laws of physics we have developed are equally prone to the same critic. So I am not sure how one can be used to undermine the other.

This reminds me of Penrose's claim that the proof of Godel's first incompleteness theorem could not be checked by a Turing machine and out of which he would conclude that our brains go beyond such idealised machines. Do you have any thoughts about this?

Many thanks again for this inspiring essay.

Best of luck for the contest.

Fabien

Hi Michael,

I really lied this paper. Well argued. I might note also that, in the event that someone tries a Lucasesque move (à la Minds, Machines and Gödel) of claiming that the mind can see things that computers cannot, your results apply their as well. So there is no escape into the "peace and quiet" of Plato's forms: doing this would require the same kinds of dissipative processes in the brain.

Good luck - you should do well!

Best

Dean

Dear Michael James,

I greatly appreciated your work and discussion. I am very glad that you are not thinking in abstract patterns.

While the discussion lasted, I wrote an article: "Practical guidance on calculating resonant frequencies at four levels of diagnosis and inactivation of COVID-19 coronavirus", due to the high relevance of this topic. The work is based on the practical solution of problems in quantum mechanics, presented in the essay FQXi 2019-2020 "Universal quantum laws of the universe to solve the problems of unsolvability, computability and unpredictability".

I hope that my modest results of work will provide you with information for thought.

Warm Regards, `

Vladimir