[HN Gopher] The Zen anti-interpretation of quantum mechanics (2021)
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The Zen anti-interpretation of quantum mechanics (2021)
Author : Tomte
Score : 34 points
Date : 2022-12-27 18:33 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (scottaaronson.blog)
(TXT) w3m dump (scottaaronson.blog)
| akomtu wrote:
| What does it have to do with zen?
| fpoling wrote:
| One of Zen ideas is that thinking hides the true nature of the
| world since it is based on models and interpretations. So not
| doing interpretations is a step towards enlightenment.
| green_on_black wrote:
| "true nature" -- I'd say that this idea of a "true" nature
| (even existing) is quite arrogant.
| Finnucane wrote:
| First there is a mountain, then there is no mountain, then
| there is.
| pasquinelli wrote:
| go ask the pillar
| dilap wrote:
| This feels like a cop out.
|
| Like sure, you can just do the math and get results and not worry
| about it. But what's the motivation here?
|
| When you get down to it, he seems to believe many-worlds is true,
| BUT holds the philosophical position that you shouldn't, like,
| care. Because there's no practical benefit to caring; because it
| doesn't help you with the calculations.
|
| But, hey, I still care! _What_ the real nature of reality is is
| an interesting question! It 's fun & satisfying to think about,
| even if has no direct physical practical implications. Plus, it
| can certainly have psychological implications, dramatically
| impacting how we feel about the things that have happened to us
| and life in general.
| blamestross wrote:
| > Plus, it can certainly have psychological implications,
| dramatically impacting how we feel about the things that have
| happened to us and life in general.
|
| Other than offering amusement by recreationally asking how many
| parallel universes can dance on the head of a pin, how should
| it affect anything?
|
| It is no mercy to know there are kinder universes out there,
| for with them come those more cruel.
|
| You are already a mote in the sea of infinity, what hope is
| offered by adding more dimensions to that ocean's depth?
|
| Anyone wise enough to make it this far should know better than
| to presume that the best available theoretical model is
| actually the truth. We just use it out of pragmatic lack of a
| better one (which will likely someday come, but we are
| approaching the less fun side of the scientific knowledge
| sigmoid)
| dilap wrote:
| Well, do you think there _is_ a truth, understandable by
| humans, about the nature of the universe?
|
| If you think there is, what better guide than our best
| theories of physics so far?
|
| So of course _what_ the nature of the universe is doesn 't
| really affect anything, on a physical level, but our sense of
| what happens after we're gone does in fact change our
| behaviors. E.g. Most people contemplate with more horror the
| possibility of all humanity being wiped out than their own
| isolated death, even though from the individual perspective
| it is the same.
|
| Somehow things that cannot possibly matter to us physically
| still matter to us intellectually.
|
| > It is no mercy to know there are kinder universes out
| there, for with them come those more cruel.
|
| Well, that's debatable. For example, if you're finding _this_
| universe to be particularly cruel, perhaps it is a solace to
| think it 's just one of the universes you must endure, and in
| some other universe you're having a much easier time.
| LightMachine wrote:
| And it is absurd to say it has no direct practical
| implications. We still don't know all of physics, and part of
| the reason is precisely because we're stuck in the wrong
| mindset regarding how nature works. Only a better insight on
| the true nature of the universe can give us the correct
| mathematical models.
| thinkmcfly wrote:
| Can you explain what the direct and practical implications
| are? I don't know if I buy what the link says about this, but
| I do know that no one has ever found utility by being
| frustrated about many worlds
| [deleted]
| yarg wrote:
| I think it's beyond being a cop out; I suspect that some of the
| things that he's dismissing might be gravitationally relevant:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31630528
| dekhn wrote:
| It's so odd to read about QM by people who don't go into a lab
| and do QM experiments. Like, this whole article is about the
| _math_ _currently_ used to make predictions using QM. Not what
| actually goes on when you prepare entangled particles, not what
| happens (physically), etc. The "interpretation" of QM (IE, how
| do we square our mental intuition about how physical matter and
| energy behave) isn't super interesting, as long as you can
| retrain your intuition to help make predictions about interesting
| experiments. Unlearn you must.
| dekhn wrote:
| The right frame of mind is not "shut up and calculate", it's
| "shut up and make testable hypotheses and then invalidate them
| experimentally".
| layer8 wrote:
| Even if the different interpretations currently have no
| testable hypotheses, it is still significant which
| interpretation you subscribe to, because it guides how you
| think about the physics, and may prevent you from thinking in
| certain directions, or "out of the box".
|
| The blog post's Zen approach sounds like an agnostic stance,
| which probably isn't a bad thing in that regard.
| dang wrote:
| Discussed at the time:
|
| _The Zen Anti-Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26363004 - March 2021 (64
| comments)
| fpoling wrote:
| The article misses that we do not know how classical world that
| we perceive arises. Ultimately according to QM the whole universe
| is just single wave function with no probabilities. But this
| contradicts our experience of the classical world including that
| we measure probabilities.
|
| So we need to explain that to avoid various very ad-hock notions
| of classical measurement device and similar routes.
|
| There are attempts to explain the classical world using a notion
| of decoherence, but that have problems with little progress in
| the last, say, 20 years to address them.
|
| Then there are ideas based on Everett works that perhaps it is a
| conscious itself that perceives the classical world and the real
| world is the wave function. But then such ideas do not explain
| the exact numerical probabilities.
|
| The interesting resent suggestion was that the probabilities were
| not really physical but rather represent the lack of information
| in Bayesian sense.
|
| In past that was used to construct various hidden variable
| theories, but the new take is that the classical notion that the
| state of a system can be fully described by its properties at
| some moment in time is wrong. One also needs to know some
| information about future to fully describe evolution of the
| system. This is very speculative, but at least it is fully
| compatible with relativity and explains probabilities. They
| simply represent lack of knowledge of boundary conditions in the
| future.
| FeepingCreature wrote:
| In the single wavefunction, beings who perceive classical
| reality arise from mere wavefunction mathematics. How does this
| not answer the question?
|
| Once you can locate yourself in a system, the system is
| adequate as a physical theory of your phenomenological state.
| fpoling wrote:
| This does not explain how a classical observer gets
| probabilities that are precisely measured. In universe-as-a-
| wave-function there are no probabilities. So how exactly do
| they arise and what they mean?
| dools wrote:
| What I don't get is why people are more concerned with how
| Qauntum Mechanics works than they are with the way in which, for
| example, electro magenetic waves travel in a vacuum. Like we can
| "physically" understand how sound travels, and we can "visualise"
| that as a "mechanism" right? But we have no similar way of
| "physicalising" the way in which light travels, but no-one seems
| to have any trouble accepting that. Quantum states seem to be no
| different: they're just a way things work, that we don't have a
| good "macro physical" analogy for.
| sampo wrote:
| Quantum mechanics has wave function collapse, which is both
| essential in applying the theory to explain any physical
| situation, and at the same time not described by the theory.
| Other than "and then it collapses".
|
| Classical theories don't have this problem.
| krastanov wrote:
| For many people the statement "electromagnetic fields exist as
| a (fundamental) building block of Nature" is just as reasonable
| as "atoms exist as a (fundamental) building block of Nature".
| The word "fundamental" is not particularly important, I am
| keeping it for historical reasons. You are perfectly
| comfortable with the existence of atoms (given your comments
| about understanding sound waves), presumably because you know
| of experiments that have demonstrated their existence. We have
| experiments that have demonstrated the existence of EM waves.
| So the questions is, what in your personal aesthetic tastes is
| making atoms more palatable?
|
| The question of interpreting quantum mechanics is quite
| different. We do not have a popular mathematical framework that
| clearly explains why we perceive a classical world while being
| "inside" of a quantum wavefunction. There is plenty of
| vagueness and oversimplification in that last statement, but
| the difference is "we have an abstraction that explains mostly-
| perfectly EM waves and we do not care about whether people are
| comfortable with the abstraction" vs "we do not even have a
| mathematical abstraction explaining why we perceive a classical
| world inside of a quantum universe".
| cuteboy19 wrote:
| Aka "Shut up and calculate" interpretation of QM. But yes, an
| interpretation is only needed because we need to square the
| theory with our intuition. Once we say that our intuition is
| hopelessly wrong, interpretation is not needed
| jetrink wrote:
| The essay doesn't agree.
|
| > You shouldn't confuse the Zen Anti-Interpretation with "Shut
| Up And Calculate." The latter phrase, mistakenly attributed to
| Feynman but really due to David Mermin, is something one might
| say at the beginning of the path, when one is as a baby.
| gizmo686 wrote:
| Finish the paragraph:
|
| > but after years of study and effort you've returned to the
| situation of the baby, who just sees the thing for what it
| is.
| FeepingCreature wrote:
| I think his view is less "shut up and calculate" and more
| "to calculate is to know."
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