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“DCP rough notes for his new book” wrote: Objectivity, then, is a myth. . . .

There is no avoiding this quantum corruption.

Here is a concrete example of what this means: Imagine a spinning electron locked inside an opaque box. According to classical physics, the electron is either spinning clockwise or counterclockwise; there is no third possibility. Moreover, if you leave the electron alone, the direction of its spin will not change.

Quantum physics sees things very differently. According to quantum physics, an electron behaves like a wave of probability. It is simultaneously spinning clockwise and counterclockwise.

However . . . the instant you open the box, the instant you interact with the electron, you cause one of the possibilities to be fully realized. The electron you observe will be spinning in only one direction — either clockwise or counterclockwise — and no longer both.

Thus, you are not an objective observer.

You are not merely observing some preordained reality.

You are unavoidably helping to determine the outcome.

You.

It’s an absolute truth, then, that no matter how carefully or honestly you do an experiment, its results will always be tainted by your involvement in it.

“Science no longer is in the position of observer of nature,” explained the German physicist Werner Heisenberg, “but rather recognizes itself as part of the interplay between man and nature.” (128-129, italics in the original)

Drawn from pages 121-129 of Guillen, Believing is Seeing

I’m pretty sure that there are multiple interpretations of the collapse of the wave function. Dan is presenting one which jives favorably with his Mormon worldview. But we do have a physics expert here on the board who I would love to be educated by if I have that wrong.

Dan likes to use apparent contradictions as you said to support the wide swath of contradictions in Mormon theology. I remember him using this example.

Summation after a famous Indian mathematician named Srinivasa Ramanujan, it states that if you add all the natural numbers, that is 1, 2, 3, 4, and so on, all the way to infinity, you will find that it is equal to -1/12.

Objectivity is hard, but not for any mysterious reasons that overrule common sense. Measuring tiny things would be tricky even without quantum mechanics, because measurement is never just somehow acquiring information about something without affecting it.

Measuring something means letting it act upon some kind of measuring device, whether that device is a balance scale with a swinging needle or a Geiger counter or a light-sensitive cell in a human retina. It was Newton, not Heisenberg, who told us that every action entails a reaction. Seeing a thing isn't seeing the thing: it's seeing light waves that bounced off the thing. Seeing light waves is absorbing the light waves; that's a pretty catastrophic reaction for the light waves. Bouncing light waves makes the bouncing thing bounce back in its turn, just a bit.

Observing something by absorbing the light waves that it reflects is like inferring the location of an aircraft carrier by tossing ping pong balls at its hull. It's a source of error that each ping ball shoves the USS Enterprise around a wee bit, so the ship isn't quite where it was before the ping ball hit. As a matter of purist principle, whoa: your observation (with ping pong balls) partly determines the position of the carrier. Objectivity is a myth, groovy dude.

Medieval philosophers may have been methodologically limited to qualitative true-or-false propositions, but science is quantitative. It may be true that ping pong balls affect the position of the Enterprise, and that reflected light waves impart recoil, but the size of the effect is minute. When we look at big things, using small things, we can safely ignore the whole issue of reaction, at least most of the time. If we're trying to measure a single electron, however, then we're not bouncing ping pong balls off of ships. We're using a cue ball to probe the location of the eight ball, at best; we might be using a bowling ball to detect the location of a marble. Reaction is obviously going to be a big issue in interpreting the data we get.

So measurement back-action is not a specifically quantum weirdness. It's a subtlety of observation that was always there, if we thought about observation carefully. Quantum mechanics really is strange, though. QM weirdness is stacked on top of such subtleties as measurement reaction, and QM weirdness is not weird in any convenient woo-y way that resonates with any human philosophy I've ever heard. QM is an alien children's game. The rules aren't hard to parse, but they're weird. Or at least, they're weird in a purist true-or-false way where you speak everything strictly. The quantitative amount of weirdness is limited, to the point where it only makes any practical difference on really small scales. Aircraft carriers and bowling balls are every bit as quantum mechanical as single electrons, but on their scales the quantum weirdness just doesn't matter and we can safely ignore it, along with Newtonian reaction in measurement.

That's two tricky things we can ignore due to scale. Quantum corrections and measurement reaction are separate logical issues. Without quantum mechanics, we'd still have measurement reaction, however small it might be. With quantum mechanics, measurement reaction can still be negligibly small, if the measurement is of something big.

So quantum mechanics is not a get-out-of-objectivity free card that anyone can just play whenever they want. Perfect objectivity is impossible, even without quantum mechanics, but objectivity to within an insignificant margin of error can be perfectly possible, even within quantum mechanics, if you're not trying to measure tiny or unstable things. If you want to uphold your view as more than just, like, your opinion, but you can't demonstrate it objectively, then you're going to have to explain exactly why objectivity is inherently super-hard in your case, by explaining why your case is like measuring marbles with bowling balls, or something. There is no blanket excuse that you can invoke by citing quantum mechanics.

If anyone really wants to frame their philosophical argument quantum mechanically, well, good luck with that. Quantum mechanics is anything but vague and fuzzy. It's expletive linear algebra. Do the math, or don't go there.

Nice explanation, PG. Somebody might actually pay to read stuff like that. Nobody is going to buy 7 volumes worth of the stuff Drumdude quoted from DCP. Not even his friends, likely, because it's all RT quality stuff. You can just log into SeN and get the next RT that you gloss over.

As for PG's post: I liked the explanation about using large things to measure small things.

also this part,

QM weirdness is stacked on top of such subtleties as measurement reaction, and QM weirdness is not weird in any convenient woo-y way that resonates with any human philosophy I've ever heard. QM is an alien children's game. The rules aren't hard to parse, but they're weird.

right, it doesn't help any agenda. For instance, the apologists bring in Kuhn to say "observation is theory laden" and theories are biased. The way that could help apologists in a straightforward way is like, okay, we have this data linking spaulding's writing to Book of Mormon authorship, but clearly the theory could be biased to make the data fit what we want to see. However, that's not true even with the Copenhagen Interpretation because no matter what you're thinking, your consciousness is not influencing the state of the electron being observed. You can think as biasedly and ignorantly as you want, and your electron observations will fall into the same predictable pattern as anyone else's.

What he's really doing is equivocating senses of the word "objectivity".

Gadianton wrote: ↑

Tue Dec 20, 2022 8:02 pm

You can think as biasedly and ignorantly as you want, and your electron observations will fall into the same predictable pattern as anyone else's.

Yes, and this is important. Perhaps someone can squint at quantum measurement in a way that makes them feel proud about having in some sense caused this drastic change in reality, but nobody can make wave functions collapse in the kind of causal way that matters, where you get to choose what outcome happens. Nobody's consciousness is doing anything more to impose its will on any photon than a mindless grain of photosensitive film does. Nobody can even budge the probabilities in the slightest, one way or the other, just by observing; the probabilities are fixed as objectively as anything has ever been thought to be objectively fixed.

If we're talking about such microscopic bits of reality as an electron spin or a photon polarisation, after all, the feat of changing them would hardly be one of strength. You can easily rotate an electron spin by waving a fridge magnet anywhere near it. The trouble is one of precision and knowledge, to know when to stop waving the magnet because the spin is now where you want it. Manipulating an electron spin by hand like that would be like trying to use a leaf blower to turn a grain of dust right-side up, when the grain of dust is too small to even see which way up would be right. There really are some strange things about quantum measurement, but getting random results is only what you'd expect, even without quantum mechanics, when big galoots like ourselves interact with such small things.

What he's really doing is equivocating senses of the word "objectivity".

I expect you're right. Which two senses is he swapping?

I'm going to retract that statement and stick with this sentence as nonsense:

DCP wrote:It’s an absolute truth, then, that no matter how carefully or honestly you do an experiment, its results will always be tainted by your involvement in it.

I went back and read what he wrote and may have skimmed too quickly, picking up his "Objective..." as not at the beginning of a sentence. The question of scientific objectivity isn't always a discussion of whether "Objective Reality" -- a world outside a perceiver exists.

A point about objectivity that may or may not be related to DCPism.

One sense of "objective" regards dividing the world up into subject and object. Since the TV series 1899 used Plato's cave for a point way out of period, we'll go with that. In Plato's cave, beings are illuminated and cast shadows on the wall. Let's say the shadows are what our tools can perceive, and the beings are the real objects. When a being drops a ball, the cave occupants watch the shadow fall on the wall. They come up with equations describing the falling shadow, and maybe the first set of such equations is wrong, but the cave theorists are very stubborn and so institutional bias keeps the right set of equations from gaining acceptance for a very long time. The other sense of "objective" is being fair minded, impartial, governed by facts rather than feelings, and so on. This kind of bias persists whether you're in the cave or outside the cave.

The beings have a six-sided die, but it's hollow, the numbers are routed out, and a face always lands orthogonal to the wall. In shadow world, these numbers appear randomly on the wall. The randomness doesn't make any additional philosophical points about cave subjectivity not already made. Even if the die is thrown only when eyes are closed so when they open it changes.

Gadianton wrote: ↑

Wed Dec 21, 2022 12:11 am

I'm going to retract that statement and stick with this sentence as nonsense:

DCP wrote:It’s an absolute truth, then, that no matter how carefully or honestly you do an experiment, its results will always be tainted by your involvement in it.

I went back and read what he wrote and may have skimmed too quickly, picking up his "Objective..." as not at the beginning of a sentence. The question of scientific objectivity isn't always a discussion of whether "Objective Reality" -- a world outside a perceiver exists.

Peterson is a fundamentalist, and like all fundamentalists, he is trying desperately to preserve religious doctrines which are regarded as weird nonsense by the vast majority of humanity.

Fundamentalists know that most people think their beliefs are absurd and false, and this angers them deeply because they've confused their fuzzy feelings with facts.

A traditional fundamentalist response to scientific or historical debunkings is to obsess about faceless "elites" and to cast themselves as avatars of "common sense" which, while completely unprovable, is nonetheless correct. And it will be vindicated someday in an act of divine apocalypse.

But for someone who has some exposure to rational inquiry, the traditional fundamentalist mien is unsatisfying. They have directly seen that rational inquiry is a true method and have used it for themselves. So instead of trying to discard reason, they instead try to reconcile it with belief. This neo-fundamentalist ideation inevitably fails, however, because religion is proto-science, humanity's attempt to explain phenomena via pure reason rather than observation. No matter how many times they dig around in Israel, Turkey,
Mexico, or anywhere, the evidence for the fabled stories is never to be found.

There are two alternatives once this point is reached: 1) Separating science and faith and concluding that the stories may not actually be entirely true. This is the path toward enlightenment, or at least true tolerance. 2) Believing that rational inquiry is the culprit. But instead of utterly discarding it as a tool of "librul elitists," the neo-fundamentalist will instead take Peterson's route, which is to take postmodernism's useful tools of social analysis and employ them in the service of denigrating reason itself.

In this case, Peterson has intertwined his regular faux-postmodernist method with classic "quantum woo." These arguments he considers to be so completely profound are routinely used to justify such obvious balderdash as astrology, crystal healing, and vaccine autism.

Quantum divining rods could come in handy when looking for a schrödinger water source. Anyway, it all proves that Joseph was a true prophet and that obeying an angel with a drawn quantum sword is essential.

I guess the two senses of “objective” are related enough to help with confusing them. If objective reality doesn’t even exist, then it’s easier to get away with seeing what you want to see, even if it’s not what other people want to see. And on the other hand, if you are biased enough, then you can end up behaving as though objective reality doesn’t exist, regardless of whether it actually does.

If anyone is interested in what weirdness quantum mechanics really does have, I’m afraid you have to go beyond the simplest scenario of measuring only one thing, and look at correlations among multiple properties.

Suppose for example that there are three conditions X, Y, and Z, each of which must be either true or else false. We don't actually know which is true or false, though. We have to accept a number of different scenarios as possible. We can still reach some logical conclusions about the probabilities of different kinds of scenario.

Consider the set of all possible scenarios in which X and Z are both true. Label the number of possible scenarios of this kind as N(XZ). Within this set of possible scenarios there is a subset in which Y is true as well; say its number is N(XYZ). N(XYZ) cannot possible be greater than N(XZ), because all the N(XYZ) cases are special cases among the N(XZ) cases.

Then there is another set of possible scenarios, in which Y is true while Z is false. This is a completely different set of scenarios from our first set, because Z is false in all these ones and it was true in all those ones. Call the number of this second kind of possible scenario N(YZ'). Within this second set there is another smaller subset, in which X is true as well as Y (and Z is still false); let the number of cases here be N(XYZ'), which cannot be greater than N(YZ').

So now let's count up all the scenarios in which X and Y are both true, regardless of Z. The number of these cases in which Z is true is N(XYZ), while the number of them in which Z is false is N(XYZ'). So the total number of cases in which X and Y are both true, regardless of Z, is N(XY) = N(XYZ) + N(XYZ'). Our count can't be missing any cases of X and Y both being true, and we can't be counting any case twice, because in every case of X and Y being true, either Z is also true and we count this case in N(XYZ), or else Z is false and we count this case in N(XYZ').

Since N(XYZ) can't be greater than N(XZ), and N(XYZ') can't be greater than N(YZ'), we have to conclude that N(XY) can't be greater than N(XZ) + N(YZ'). If we express this in terms of probabilities, we have to say that P(XY) ≤ P(XZ) + P(YZ'). This is a rigorous conclusion from pure logic, and it has to be true no matter how it was determined which scenarios counted as possible.

The conclusion P(XY) ≤ P(XZ) + P(YZ') is an example of a Bell inequality, named after the theoretical physicist John Stewart Bell. The weird thing is that quantum measurements can violate the logical inequality. As experiments, such measurements are not trivial. The quantum mechanical theory for these measurement outcomes is very simple, however—it just isn't a theory of logical inference. Instead it's a couple of lines of simple matrix algebra. The experiments conform to the quantum prediction, even when this provides P(XY) > P(XZ) + P(YZ'), in violation of logic.

This doesn't mean that logic is wrong. It just means that quantum measurement outcomes cannot consistently be associated with distinct logical cases of how things really are. The mapping between our measurement results and microscopic reality is somehow tricky.

It shouldn't be surprising that it's tricky, given all the complexity involved in magnifying tiny quantities up to our level. The surprising thing is that the rules for quantum measurement are brutally simple, though weird.

It's almost as though in the crunch time leading up to release of the universe, God got hit by some last-minute budget cuts and had to implement everything on radically compromised hardware. So God drank a whole case of Jolt and came up with a quick and dirty software solution that scraps the whole idea of maintaining a logically consistent microscopic infrastructure for reality, and does something else that is cheaper, instead. Like one of those procedurally generated role-playing games where you think it's simulating a whole world down to high resolution, but all it's really tracking is one array of 8-bit data. It all looks so real that you just can't believe it's being made up that simply, but if you happen to look really closely at the hallway corners, then you can see how it glitches.

I'm not saying that's what happened, but to me it gives the flavour of quantum mechanics, more accurately than all the stuff that sounds woo-ish. QM is anything but vague and permissive. It's specific and simple, and simply hard to believe.