Hacker News Reader

Comment by zwkrt | Hacker News Reader

Wittgenstein teaches us that we invented language to solve a particular set of problems. Depending on which book of his you read, language is designed to either:

- talk about the configuration of objects in relation to each other in space and time.

- perform social functions and to describe the actions humans take in the social world.

In either case, I think it is totally clear that you are right and there are just certain sets of concepts that human language is fundamentally unsuited for. I think this is why some mathematical concepts are so abstruse; for example, I know that I can interpret a matrix as a twisty-rotatey-stretchy operation, but it is almost impossible for me to look at a matrix and understand what it is going to do except in the simplest cases. If foundations of QM are non-local (which they appear to be), we might have to take a long time to understand how best to communicate what is going on.

View on HN

> If foundations of QM are non-local

They're not. Non-locality is an artifact of certain interpretations / modifications of QM (where it isn't simply a misconception). See e.g. https://sci-hub.tw/10.1088/1751-8113/47/42/424011 and https://arxiv.org/abs/1411.2120 or the QBism intro https://arxiv.org/abs/1311.5253 or Ray Streater's old EPR webpage https://web.archive.org/web/20151117174141/http://www.mth.kc... or Gell-Mann's video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gNAw-xXCcM8 or...

Maybe I am misunderstanding you but non-locality is not just an artifact. It's proven both experimentally and mathematically through Bells Theorem. It's as solid as Einstein's theory of relativity and gravity.

What is interpreted is mostly the consequence of that philosophically (i.e. what does that mean).

Well, that is what I said: non-locality is just an artifact "of certain interpretations / modifications of QM". Bell's theorem doesn't prove non-locality; what it proves is that no (alternative) theory (of mechanics) that's both classical, aka naively realist, and local could reproduce QM's successful predictions (of those experimental results).

Which must lead us to conclude non-locality unless we can come up with a better explanation.

I've seen a few alternatives like electrical universe theory which tries to take the spookiness out of QM but so far no other theory reconsile both clasically and QM and the two are proven to the extent that anything can be proven. Classical physics is not proven more than QM. You could easily reverse your argument starting with QM and saying classical physics doesn't prove locality.

No, it mustn't! The logical negation of the conjunction "classical* and local" is "non-classical or non-local". Electrical universe theory"?! Please stick to standard and generally accepted quantum foundations / interpretation. There's no (non-local) spookiness to be taken out of QM in the first place - except for those who choose to reject the non-classical option. %

* Your last remarks suggest you haven't read those Werner refs and don't know what is meant by the term "classical" as I've used it here - it's a reference to the structure of (general) probability state spaces, not to classical physics per se - and you should substitute "(naively) realist" for "classical" in the above.

% And those familiar with the probability theoretic aspects (see my links in a comment in a different thread here, or Tom Banks's teaser: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/files/2011/... ), probably won't want to do that. For example, the reason violations of Bell-type inequalities occur in QM is mundane from this perspective: "What on earth did you expect?! You have observables that don't commute! Use the appropriate inequality." https://sci-hub.tw/10.1016/0375-9601(87)90075-2

You are the one who seems to be using esoteric interpretations of language to come to a conclusion that you have yet to provide any argument or evidence for.

The problem of interpretation is at the reconciliation phase that's what I care about.

Thanks for the links, they helped clarify my thoughts.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com