Submitted by aalluubbaa t3_121yeey in singularity
0002millertime t1_jdog9af wrote
Reply to comment by AnOnlineHandle in The whole reality is just so bizzare when you really think about it. by aalluubbaa
He is kind of right, in a sense. If two objects are perfectly entangled, then you can "force" the unobserved object into a certain state by observing (interacting with) only its entangled partner. Of course you aren't really forcing anything.
My favorite interpretation is the Many World Interpretation, and it's more about you yourself also becoming entangled with a certain part of the universal wave function, and that limits what you can observe, due to decoherence. The Copenhagen Interpretation gives the same results, but then you have to assume instantaneous wave function collapse affecting both entangled partners, rather than you just finding yourself in a subsection of the larger wave function, that never collapses.
AnOnlineHandle t1_jdorzcz wrote
This is beyond my level of understanding, but why do we presume it didn't have a state until measured, and the two particles didn't just spin off in opposite directions at the start?
plateauphase t1_jdotnsz wrote
my friend, last year's nobel in physics was awarded for experiments that ruled out local realism [1], [2], [3], [4]. current best scientific understanding indicates that physical properties don't exist before measurement, ie. physicality doesn't have standalone existence.
anton zeilinger: "there is no sense in assuming that what we do not measure about a system has reality."
Professional-Let9470 t1_jdp49t8 wrote
Hmmm, and why might physical properties not exist before measurement? Perhaps because someone out there is trying to save massive amounts of computing power by not rendering every detail of every subatomic particle.
Just saying, the more we learn the more plausible it seems to me that we’re in a simulation.
plateauphase t1_jdqmcky wrote
mm, sheer logical conceivability doesn't convince me. why is it not the flying spaghetti monster with its noodly appendages, and why not an infinite regression? why not thousands of other logically possible scenarios?
AnOnlineHandle t1_jdoxyeo wrote
Yeah I get that it's well respected, I'm trying to understand it.
plateauphase t1_jdqlimg wrote
yeah, it's kind of impossible if not absurdly difficult and jarringly unintuitive under physicalist assumptions. fortunately, the scientific theories are metaphysically neutral, so it's open for alternative interpretations, such as analytic idealism!
basically, physicality is the appearance of mental processes from across the private conscious pov. like the dashboard of dials on a plane, which definitely display measurements of an external world, physical properties represent the external world, which is not physical, but mental. mental just means of the same kind that consciousness is, which is all we ever directly know.
this doesn't explain mind in terms of an other existent, but takes mind as the reductive base, exactly like physicalism doesn't explain 'the physical', but takes that as the reductive base. however, while 'physicality' is a perfectly transcendental, non-mental existent, which cannot be experienced and is a metaphysical postulate, not an empirical observation, consciousness, mental processes, experientiality is the only given of nature which we directly and most intimately know.
AnOnlineHandle t1_jds3umz wrote
I think that makes sense, though I was more wondering why we think what we do about this specific situation.
0002millertime t1_jdotpcq wrote
That was one idea, called "Hidden Variables". However, there is a statistical test for this, now called "Bell's Inequalities". This test has been performed, and definitively showed that hidden variables do not exist. It's actually pretty fascinating stuff, and I'd encourage anyone to read more about it all.
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