
Quantum Physics and the Abuse of Reason - dsego
http://steve-patterson.com/quantum-physics-abuse-reason/
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chrischen
Seems like the author is falling into his own trap by having a bias for
determinacy. For the same reason he states that observing a blurry photograph
does not make the thing blurry, observing classical mechanics as deterministic
does not make the world deterministic. Yet he has a bias for determinism
simply because it is what he sees, comprehends, and is familiar with.

First, he brushes away the many world's interpretation, which I believe has
superceeded the CI in popularity now. It addresses pretty much all of the
issues he has with CI including collapse, obersvation mysticism. It even
addresses Einstein's issues with CI in that God no longer plays dice.

Second, they've experimentally disproven local hidden variable theory in a
quantum interaction like entanglement via disproving bells inequality. In
other words scientists have already considered there might be hidden particles
and properties at play affecting quantum interactions and they have disproven
their existence.

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jmatthews
Any links to a source to this claim? I was unaware it had became possible to
disprove a negative.

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gbelote
If quantum-entangled particles exist (they do) you can use them to coordinate
in a way that's impossible within a "hidden variable" model of the universe.
You can dig into this by searching for "bell's inequality" or "bell test
experiments", there are a few different experiments that have been done many,
many times. There's a pretty good Veritasium video that explains one such
experiment in non-physicist terms: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZuvK-
od647c](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZuvK-od647c)

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foldr
Many of the people arguing that quantum physics undermines logic are
_physicists_ who understand QM as well as anyone. For example, Lawrence Krauss
often suggests that theistic arguments based on classical logic are undermined
by QM (which shows that reality isn't "logical").

The idea that QM is deeply weird, counterintuitive, challenging, profound,
etc., is one that's relentlessly pumped out by the physics PR machine. In
other words, physicists are fine with _physicists_ making wild philosophical
speculations about QM; they just don't want anyone else to join the party.
Well, it doesn't work like that. Either this stuff has philosophical
implications or it doesn't. And if it does, those are fair game for
philosophers to comment on. (And sure, some of these philosophers don't always
know as much about the physics as they should, but their ignorance in this
respect is usually nothing in comparison to modern physicists' ignorance of
philosophy.)

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nevinera
Of _course_ it has philosophical implications. The problem is that
philosophers largely don't understand QM well enough to talk about them. To be
fair, many physicists don't either.

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foldr
Could you give a specific example of such a philosopher? Or some kind of
justification of the "largely"? How carefully have you examined that body of
work?

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nevinera
>How carefully have you examined that body of work?

Don't be ridiculous. Very few professors of philosophy would have even had
enough math to read the basic expressions necessary for such understanding. I
don't need to survey the literature to be confident that the significant
majority of philosophers don't understand quantum mechanics, cannot explain
the chemical or electrical mechanisms by which brains work, and don't
understand statistics well enough to interpret experimental data.

Those things require a deal of training and experience that a philosophy
education is not likely to provide. There are plenty of philosophers out there
that do understand any or all of those things, obviously. Did you think I was
trying to claim that there are none?

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foldr
Have you read any bad papers about quantum mechanics by philosophers? You're
playing the hard-headed empiricist here, so don't just speculate -- show us
the data.

The philosophers who write about physics usually have some training in it
besides their philosophy education.

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placebo
I think most attempts to support mysticism using quantum mechanics are made by
people who know very little about either, but know quite a bit about what
people want and how to make money from it.

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jwklemm
The author initially sets up this piece to be a criticism of quantum
mysticism. However, as the post goes on, it seems to become a dismissal of
quantum mechanics all together -- based on an obvious bias for determinacy.

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api
You don't need QM for paradoxes... they come up in all kinds of classical
systems with feedback loops. You also don't need QM to do a number on
determinism. Look up the work of Ilya Prigogine.

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skybrian
You can skip most of this but the bit about the Afshar experiment looks
important. According to Wikipedia it's still controversial. Does anyone know
more about it?

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lisper
Yes, but it's hard to explain succinctly. TL;DR: the Afshar experiment does
not actually show what it purports to show. It's a bit of rhetorical sleight-
of-hand. The reason is the presence of the lens, which supposedly creates an
image of the two slits, but in fact does not. What it really does (which can
be demonstrated mathematically) is create an interference pattern that looks
like an image of the two slits but really isn't. So it is not the case that
because it looks like a photon went through one slit or the other at the end
of the experiment that it did in fact go through one slit or the other.

If you're interested in the details, Feynman has a good explanation in "QED:
The strange theory of light and matter" using a mirror rather than a lens but
amounting to the same thing.

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analog31
For me, a simple litmus test for a quantum phenomenon is: Can it be turned
into a proposal for an experimental determination of Planck's constant? It
doesn't have to be a great experiment -- determining h to within an order of
magnitude would satisfy.

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kordless
> Category: philosophy

Undoubtedly.

