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Comment by ahelwer | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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!

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