Comment by meroes | Hacker News Reader

Comment by meroes | Hacker News Reader

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What I still am left with is, yes we can write down a classical description of superposition, but SOMETHING RANDOM still happens.

When you imagine a fair coin being flipped and describing that with a probabilistic mathematical model, you can always imagine a classical story of what actually occurred. How you went from a spread out of possibilities to witnessing a single definite outcome. So I can understand the ontology because there is a classical ontology.

What QM is forcing us to do is write down as much classical story as possible, THEN SOMETHING TRULY RANDOM OCCURS. I can't imagine in my head any possible classical story. Both the coin and quantum "measurement" use probability theory in a similar way, but this is an important distinction.

When you say develop a new ontology, I really think you mean develop a recipe. I see no way to even comprehend anything but classical ontologies. I'm not sure if it's a limit of our, biology, imagination, or intuition. There is no classical ontology, nor settled ontology for that matter to describe the "measurement" of superpositions process.

This problem is solved by learning the language of mathematics. The limits of our language are the limits of our world. When we learn the language of vectors obeying the 2-norm manipulated by unitary matrices and collapsing probabilistically according to the Born rule, we have learned how a single qbit works.

But the Born rule required empirical content to come up with. Empirical content which is (possibly) fundamentally random.

You can't simulate that (fundamental randomness) purely classically. The classical world can be simulated with Turing machines, however. And we know infinite pen-and-paper maths can simulate any Turing machine.

How do I get from pen-and-paper maths (doing simple turing-machine-like operations/computations) to a truly random event, a necessary component for a quantum measurement? So when I'm doing my pen-and-paper maths, I have to go grab a radioactive atom and use the time it decays to somehow seed a random event into my simulation.

I do not know of a way to think beyond classically, or beyond the above notion of pen-and-paper maths.

Or are you saying some abstract high-dimensional vector really does ontologically exist in some even higher dimensional space? What space? Not spacetime, that is 4D. And even then how do we reduce that spread out WF to definite values in your ontology.

Math is not an ontology, unless you want to go the Mathematical Universe route.

The Many-worlds Interpretation explains the subjective randomness. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Many-worlds_interpretation

This.

The refusal of the majority of QM theoreticians to accept MWI is the root cause of the "mystery".

I'm sure decades after Copernicus, there were still astronomers going on and on about the complex interplay of the wanderers, and how the retrograde motion could only be explained with circles up circles, and spheres upon spheres.

This is no different.

And Copernicus was still wrong about the ontology and there are many critiques of MWI not just by people scared to accept its metaphysical weight.

I think it's unfair to criticize too harshly those who aren't ready to dive in with MWI. It's not that incomprehensible or too crazy, but it is far beyond what current physics says exists. We'd go from spacetime to some infinite or extremely high-dimensional space. Why should we need to go that far when other interpretations maybe ask less of us.

https://cloudflare-ipfs.com/ipfs/bafykbzacebhd6s3rewniz2q6b3...

pp. 21-35 307-355 355-368 (and more) if you or anyone wants some critiques of MWI

Why bother with a 3D model of the planets when a 2D model of circles upon circles asks less of us?

It's so much simpler to model the wanderers as moving along the surface of a celestial sphere! Adding depth adds nothing to our understanding when the current mathematical models can already predict their motion to high accuracy. It's all isomorphic anyway.

Look, just go away with your heretical notions, I have calculations to perform!

The way I think of it, which makes sense to me and maybe nobody else:

Quantum mechanics is completely deterministic. But the point from which we are observing it is random. (Not our origin in space, but our origin in possibilities.) The spread of a waveform is deterministic, but it seems random because we can't predict from which outcome our perspective will originate.

That's why the multiverse interpretation is (imo) the simplest way to reason about QM.

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