Our understanding of the universe has issues.

We still debate how to interpret quantum mechanics. It works, it’s one of the best tested theories out there, we just have no idea how to interpret the math.

Check measurement problem if you’re interested in going down the rabbit hole.

Just the thought they are "made of" some other thing is really the issue, in a very ultimate sort of way. Some people truly believe they are 'made of' thought, perception, even consciousness itself. Most people want a more rigorous, scientific kind of approach, but are stymied by the fact they seem to be 'made of' nothing more than probability (or perhaps "strings vibrating in 11 dimensions"). Is energy 'made of' wave functions or are wave functions 'made of 'energy? I propose they (energy and wave functions) are 'made of' and 'make up' the ineffability of being, and it's "turtles all the way down", as if that makes any sense. 😉

By the way, I started a subreddit for discussing things like this outside of r/philosophy and r/consciousness, feel free to visit or post there if you are interested.

Thanks for your time. Hope it helps.

What would make them unreal? Is there a distinction between realness and existence?

> You're building a strawman here. The nature of the issue is broader than just that one word.

No, I’m not. You keep saying that the misconception that observation requires a conscious observer is a common misconception among physicists. It is not. I don’t know where you’re getting this idea but it’s entirely false.

> The ones I used, which is why I said that. I'll leave it for you to obsess over which ones exactly.

So you’re blaming Bohr for your choice of words? Good on ya, that makes so much sense! /s

> Nah. The prize related to the "shut up and calculate" parts of the science, not their interpretations and conversations.

Then you frankly don’t understand it. I was beginning to gather as much by your other comments, but this is the nail in the coffin. The argument Einstein and Bohr were having was about whether the universe can be locally real (another example of scientific/philosophical terminology being easy to confuse). The argument they participated in led to the creation of different possible interpretations of quantum mechanics and culminated in John Bell realizing that any locally real interpretation must predict different correlations than an interpretation that isn’t locally real. He was hoping and expecting that this would allow physicists to show that the universe is in fact locally real, making quantum mechanics a bit easier for many to swallow. This Nobel Prize was awarded to the primary experimenters who tested those correlations, and who found the opposite of what Bell hoped. Bell’s theorem and tests of it are absolutely central to any discussion about interpretations of quantum mechanics, and they’ve ruled out all interpretations consistent with Einstein’s argument. The notion that Bell tests are unrelated to interpretations of quantum mechanics is laughably wrong.

> LOL. Yes, you misunderstand the problem. You are what I refer to as a neopostmodernist. If only something as simple as Bell's Theorem could be used to sort out language, consciousness, and existential truth.

You are what I would refer to as obtuse. You’re just changing what we’re arguing about halfway through to make yourself sound smarter. I am not arguing about the details of language, consciousness, and existential truth. I am merely pointing out that the language used to describe quantum mechanics is easily misunderstood, and that the specific misconception that quantum mechanics places conscious observation on a pedestal is easily dispelled by clarifying what the words used to talk about quantum mechanics means. But go ahead and call me a “neopostmodernist” if using big made up words makes you feel better, and accusing me of misunderstanding grandiose problems that were never under discussion in the first place.

This is a common misunderstanding. Quantum physics isn't strictly about small things. It's about systems with a low number of degrees of freedom. Experiments have been done with "macroscopic" (thousands of particles) systems; in controlled conditions the system can be made to exhibit quantum behaviour despite not being what one would traditionally call quantum.

RIP. We've lost an incredible mind and social scientist. Latour's 'Reassembling the Social' had a profound impact on me as a student of anthropology/sociology. Such sad news.

If it's me whom you're asking:

Yesterday, while trying to find her article about panpsychism, I stumbled upon this podcast. It explains the problems I had with her article a lot more concisely than I ever could (after all, the guy's a philosopher and I'm a physicist), so check it out if you're curious (fully recommend, it's an amazing video). https://youtu.be/BUIWW_2afBU

wow ok thanks. And what is energy made of? if such questions can be answered on a reddit post ahaha

You're acting like labor is the only thing of value to a company or to the production of something. It isn't. If one buy spends $10 million on factory equipment then hires people to run it, then he has contributed just as much (if not significantly more) than the people working the machines...

And acting like we don't work more than serfs because we have more stuff is just silly. Money basically just allows you to take the product of work in one area and exchange it for the product of work in another area. Serfs had to have food and a shack with no power, water, etc. If that was all we had to pay for today it wouldn't take nearly as much work. If you're working and buying it with money instead of building and farming it yourself, you're basically having to do enough work to exchange with the builders and the farmers for the product of their work... Today you're having to do enough to exchange with the builders, and the farmers, and the power company, and the water company, and the people making your phones, and the people running the cell towers, and the people building cars, and on and on and on... More things consumed or used by definitely requires more work to create.

Proving and explaining are only the same thing in a paper or a laboratory; the real world we live in and philosophize about is much more complicated than the scientific field of physics. In this way, the discussion here is very much a microcosm of the issue being discussed, and it is worth noting that your comment is, in a very real way you might not have been aware of when you wrote it, "overly dismissive". 😉

Thanks for your time. Hope it helps.

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I'm uncertain if I am more delighted or bemused by the need to try to reign in both sides of this debate that has followed from my comment. The existence of quantum computers would be a lot more coherent (pun intended) of an argument for the idea that extracting the deterministic world of physical objects conforming to classic physics from the principles of quantum mechanics is a 'done deal' if quantum computers were mundane appliances. But the truth is that real-world quantum computers are effectively gigantic super-expensive science experiments, not consumer goods, so the difficulty of wrestling practical power from superpositions, even in the abstract case of computational calculations, seems to support the "QM doesn't describe reality" side of the discussion more than the "QM does describe reality" side, if I can be forgiven for trying to simplify the conflict in that way.

I think the misunderstanding on DBeumont's part here is that he's taking the idea of decoherence in macroscopic objects to mean that they aren't governed fundamentally by QM when it just means we don't tend to see that kind of behaviour on our scale.

There have been experiments done with high numbers of coherent particles showing that it is a matter of maintaining the conditions to allow for coherence rather then some inherent exclusivity in macroscopic objects or that they are somehow exempt from the predictions of the theory, as you say, you can derive classical physics from QM.

Rip. May his memory continue to act in many networks for the long foreseeable future.

>That's one thing capitalism has going for it, you're free to form co-op, you're free to work in public sector, etc., it's not overly restrictive on following other paradigms.

How familiar are you with the history of unions in this country?

oh it wasn't meant as something which would challenge something else you said or anything like that I just asked because how crazy and interesting all this is thanks for having answered

so quatnum particles are made of energy no wait they 're made of wave functions?

>You can recover all of Newtonian mechanics from quantum mechanics.

I think it is fair to say this is true in principle, but in real terms you are overstating the case, and expressing a profession of faith rather than fact. In general I definitely support your side of the argument, but at this point you seem to be missing the nature of the counter-argument in order to "be right". We know that classic physics relates to, for instance, the collapse of superpositions and entanglement through decoherence into classically deterministic states, yes, but not really how or why. That's just putting words to mathematically described aspects of quantum systems. It doesn't really mean we actually can derive classic physics from QM, explicitly, just that we assume it must be possible theoretically. Your profession of faith in physical realism is scientifically appropriate, but philosophically it is akin to a declaration of omniscience.

Particle-like behaviour is one aspect of the manifestation of energy in quantum fields.

>That's just arguing about % of share, which is admittedly a real problem in capitalism in general, business/enterprise/etc fields are over compensated, but that doesn't change the fundamentals

The fundamentals that these people are parasites. All the labor they use to accumulate that wealth is delegated. It's not just about percentage, it's the literally 90% of the pie for none of the labor. That's absurd.

>The difference between a serf and this is that this is voluntarily.

That's not true. Coerced consent exists. We do not have an option to NOT participate in capitalism. And btw, the argument that you can just return to anarcho-primitivism instead is asinine.

>And that all happened while capitalism was a thing. No one says only private sector is allowed to invent

That's not the result of capitalism though. That's literal socialism.

>No one says only private sector is allowed to invent.

No. What was said was it's the only reason we've made most of our progress which is patently untrue. Go find /u/valyrianjedi's original comment.

>That's one thing capitalism has going for it, you're free to form co-op, you're free to work in public sector, etc., it's not overly restrictive on following other paradigms.

Have you ever played monopoly? Can you imagine starting the game of Monopoly halfway through? Does that game become more equitable as time passes?

>We do more work as serfs because we want to have and do have more.

No. We work more because things cost more. Obligation to pay and therefore labor has never stopped and has always been backed with the threat of violence. Buying property is buying the rights to a 1/3rd of a family/individual's income. There's a finite amount of land and with a growing population creates a landed elite.

> that this system produces certain solid results and isn't stifling.

Do you understand that capitalism isn't a static concept? It's something that's evolved and changed first through mercantilism and then industrialization and eventually globalization? It's still changing. We are in late stage capitalism and we are now dealing with the inevitability of inflation outpacing wages and concentrations of wealth never seen before in history. None of this is even mentioning what it's done to our planet in just the last few hundred years.

The idea thebeatifulseason identified generalizes to solipsism, but not all metaphysical uncertainty goes that far. Ultimately, solipsism itself is merely an instance of a broader category of unfalsifiable theories concerning consciousness. Other examples include simulation theory/brain in a jar, theism, panpsychism, and Last Thursdayism. They are not presumed implicitly false epistemically, although they are typically not worth discussing ontologically. However, this leaves the area of theology, which is to say morality or ethics, not merely theism, the existence and characteristics of God.

In science, an unfalsifiable theory is one that is logically incoherent or unnecessary, to the point it cannot be falsified empirically; it is "not even wrong". (A phrase which means "not even true enough to be incorrect", supposedly a remark made by Richard Feynman when presented with a naive and unfalsifiable hypothesis.) But philosophy is not science, and must confront rather than dismiss theories that cannot be disproven even in principle. In a very important respect science is a part of philosophy: science is all the easy parts of philosophy, the questions that can, in principle, be answered empirically, physics, while philosophy is everything left over, metaphysics.

>The people that are profiting the most aren't the ones actually doing the work, the science, in fact, their whole strategy is to extract more than what they put into science.

That's just arguing about % of share, which is admittedly a real problem in capitalism in general, business/enterprise/etc fields are over compensated, but that doesn't change the fundamentals, that's just playing with division of % of compensation.

The difference between a serf and this is that this is voluntarily. Ofc everything to do with labor could be argued to be somewhere on the spectrum of soft and hard "coercion", but I think inventing is way on the soft side, moreso than even current average in general.

We do more work as serfs because we want to have and do have more. Even then, if you look at the numbers they gave, it's often very close, or sometimes even more than back then.

>This is not the only way to do things. Public institutions exist and they've produced Nuclear Power, Computers, GPS, Radar, Lasers, Microwaves. Can you provide me with private sector equivalent?

And that all happened while capitalism was a thing. No one says only private sector is allowed to invent. That's one thing capitalism has going for it, you're free to form co-op, you're free to work in public sector, etc., it's not overly restrictive on following other paradigms.

>Without them, we would have no public education and if you believe that competition breeds more innovation, it's seems like you would want the barrier for entry to getting an education to be as freely available as possible? That's what you need for science. Investors are just the patron class of a long standing war against the lower classes that actually have to work for a living. That relationship has not changed and it has done more to oppress humanity than liberate us.

>The belief that we owe all innovation to this system is indoctrination and borderline Stockholm's syndrome.

I didn't say we owe all of this to this system (private sector within capitalism), just that this system produces certain solid results and isn't stifling.

Thank you, and happy cake day. I think that if you want to hold that chicken and egg can constitute propositions, then that is a good response. It seems plausible that chicken would be defined in terms of genetics, and since that is unchanged from egg to chicken, the egg came first.

But I of course take the semantic nihilist approach regardless.

I understand how it works it doesn't change a fact that this is a fundamentally parasitic relationship. The people that are profiting the most aren't the ones actually doing the work, the science, in fact, their whole strategy is to extract more than what they put into science.

I could take your argument and pose the relationship between Lord and Serf to seem mutually beneficial, but it isn't, one is exploiting the other. The relationship between capital and labor is the same except we actually work more than serfs do. This is not the only way to do things. Public institutions exist and they've produced Nuclear Power, Computers, GPS, Radar, Lasers, Microwaves. Can you provide me with private sector equivalent?

Without them, we would have no public education and if you believe that competition breeds more innovation, it's seems like you would want the barrier for entry to getting an education to be as low and freely available as possible, right? The more people that have an education, the more people that can enter particular job market thus generating more competition. That's what you need for science-- scientists.

Investors are just the patron class of a long standing war against the lower classes that actually have to work for a living. That relationship has not changed and it has done more to oppress humanity than liberate us and the belief that we owe all innovation to them is indoctrination and borderline Stockholm's syndrome.

So, a bunch of quantum particles get together, build a machine, and decide if quantum particles are there or not. Sounds to me like the universe has issues.

It doesn't really, but only because I don't know why you are asking it, and the answer doesn't make any difference to what I said. Quantum particles aren't really "composed" of anything, because that term suggests component parts, which is the opposite of what "quanta" means. Quantum particles are just energy, aka the localized affect of decoherent wave functions.