A Malleable Universe
The notion of a completely objective reality is the bedrock principle of science, which is the main reason Einstein was so uncomfortable with Bohr’s “nothing exists without observation” take on quantum theory. Yet Christopher Fuchs, a physicist now at the University of Massachusetts, and Ruediger Schack of Royal Holloway University of London disagree. They contend that Bohr was on to something: Our notion of an objective reality needs modification. The physical world cannot be separated from our own efforts to probe it. How could it be otherwise, since we ourselves are embedded in the very world we’re seeking to understand?*
They call their way of looking at quantum mechanics QBism, a modified version of a theory they developed with University of New Mexico physicist Carlton Caves called Quantum Bayesianism. QBism combines quantum mechanics with Bayesian probability, a variation on standard probability in which the odds of any given event are revised as one gains more knowledge of the many possible conditions tied to the event. For example, if a patient complains of headaches to a doctor, the initial odds of a diagnosis of brain cancer might be low. As the doctor examines the patient, the odds of a cancer diagnosis may go up or down.
... QBism applies similar reasoning to physics experiments: Whenever physicists perform an experiment, they are updating their own subjective knowledge. There is no fixed underlying reality that different observers can independently experience. Just as a doctor must assess each patient individually, so too must a physicist approach the fresh, ever-changing phenomena presented by the quantum world. In QBism, the experimentalist cannot be separated from the experiment — both are immersed in the same living, unpredictable moment.
“If QBism says one radical and important thing about the nature of reality, then observer participancy is it,” says Schack. “Subjects matter. And reality, if QBism is right, cannot be conceived without always including the subject. That’s certainly a bold statement about the real world, about reality. It’s just a feature of reality that is very fundamental.”
From The War Over Reality, Discover Magazine. See also Interview with Christopher Fuchs, Quanta Magazine.
*Max Planck: 'Science cannot solve the ultimate mystery of nature. And that is because, in the last analysis, we ourselves are part of nature and therefore part of the mystery that we are trying to solve.'
What I take this to mean, is that objectivity cannot be absolute. And I think the reason this is controversial is that it undermines realism, which is the (usually instinctive) idea that the Universe simply exists as it always does, and that we humans come into it and go out of it in an instant, relative to the vastness of space and time which science observes. But this undermines that view, because it illustrates the sense in which the observer is inextricably part of the picture. We don't, actually, stand outside of, or apart from, the Universe which we are analysing; so what we're analysing cannot be absolutely objective.
Andrei Linde makes this exact point at 3:16 in this Closer To Truth interview.
Comments (48)
For example, you can assert that "god" is the ultimate solipsist or the 'wavefunction' here; but, then that would be redundant if we too were in some sense solipsists also partaking in his wavefunctional dream...
Or put otherwise, it is simply trivially true that the experimenter cannot be separated from the experiment: and this speaks to the nature of experiments (as conducted by human/other experimenters) and not, as it were, the universe itself. So one needs to be very careful about how to treat these kinds of claims. It is undeniably true that the observer is always part of the picture - insofar as it is only ever a picture.
Or put yet otherwise, because this is a hard point to grasp: the relation between measurement and universe is absolutely asymmetrical. Of course any measurement of the universe will depend on the fact of it being so measured: that is what it means to be part of the universe. But it does not follow that the universe depends, 'existentially', on measurement. But this attempt to wring a substantive from a tautology is just the kind straightforward logical fallacy committed by quantum-woo charlatans day after day.
It is true that this does require a reevaluation of what 'objectivity' means: measurement isn't just about attaining a POV 'from nowhere'. It is always a kind of POV 'from somewhere'. But this speaks to the enterprise of measurement itself, and not anything else.
This is true so far as it goes, but there is a lurking problem: there are parts of the universe that are dependent ontologically on the act of measurement. But then, these are precisely the things that are likely to be involved in what's gleaned from the measurement itself.
In other words, if you take seriously the idea that measurements only reveal things qua measured, and there's no reason to think that it's possible to measure things qua things as they are independent of or prior to measurement, then you immediately end up in Kantianism.
How, then, do we know what effect the measurement has? Presumably, we measure this too...and so on ad infinitum.
The worry therefore is not as trivial as you make it out to be.
I think you misunderstand the significance of the ‘measurement problem’ and what has come out of it. The point is, it came to light precisely in the attempt to measure and understand the ostensible ‘fundamental building blocks of the Universe’. What it seems to do is undermine the presumption of the mind- independent nature of the objects of physics - the very ‘principle of objectivity’, as the article says. It’s a big deal. This implication is what made Albert Einstein so uncomfortable about it - it is why he famously asked the question ‘does the moon continue to exist when we’re not looking at it?’ Whereas Bohr and Heisenberg were not nearly so bound to a realist attitude - hence their so-called ‘Copenhagen interpretation’.
If it were only saying what think it is, then indeed it would be ‘trivially true’ - but it’s not.
But this would only be the case if you ignore the specificity of the experiments involved. The cool thing that QM teaches us is that measurement is just another kind of physical interaction. It places us on the same footing as everything else in the universe. That's just what it means to say that 'we are part of what we are trying to measure'. The whole import of QM is that it demolishes any pretence to human exclusivity - we don't stand apart from the world, we are already of it. There's no need to try and attempt to 'get outside' because one is 'already inside', if I may put it that way. This in turn bars any Kantian interpretation of QM, insofar as it denies any attempt to make of us exceptions to the rule.
Quoting Wayfarer
Thanks for not addressing my point, charlatan. Now is about the time you post a coat-of-arms picture I believe, or whatever other detritus you usually spew in lieu of argument.
I'm sorry, I don't see how this addresses my post. Can you explain?
We seem to be talking past each other. I don't understand what this has to do with my post.
?
The comic is a more intuitive explanation of what I was talking about. I didn't say anything about measurement not being physical, exclusive to humans, etc.
The point is just that many things in the world are unquestionably dependent on measurement, no matter what your view of it is. Those things include the very things we're interested in as data when conducting expriements – say, impressions produced on our sense organs and so on.
Thus, we only ever measure things as they are while being measured. To the extent that what is recorded is an artifact of the measurement, we are not recording what the thing is independent of that measurement. This is a problem because we have no way of 'subtracting' the effect of the measurement except via more measurement.
This becomes especially odd when we consider that, say, even in looking at things, the info we get is from visual stimulus, the entirety of which is dependent on the 'measurement' – no measurement, no visual stimulus. Thus, so the classical problem goes, when we see something we indeed see it (and perhaps not an illusion), but what we see about it is how it hits our eyes, and so learn nothing about what it is as apart from that interaction with our eyes.
What is this 'the thing' 'independent of that measurement'? It's like asking 'what does red look like in the absence of light?': it's not that it looks other than it does in light, it's that the question is wrong. It misunderstands what it means to be red, which is just to look like that in the presence of light. That doesn't make it an 'artefact': good measurements really do capture something of what is so measured: red 'really does' look like that. But: 'what does it look like in the absence of a look?' - this is just a badly formed question, leading to false puzzles.
Very well – but if you say all properties of the thing we're interested in are relative to the measurement in this way (what it is to have that property just is to look a certain way under certain conditions), then this collapses into Kantianism. We deal with phenomena, and we learn about things only that they look certain ways to us.
Quoting StreetlightX
This is not what I said, though.
But what is the status of 'us'? You're treating 'us' as an exception that is somehow different from 'everything else'; but this is just what is unwarranted.
"Us" would be whoever's measuring.
Quoting StreetlightX
How am I doing this?
By assuming this entails Kantianism.
Quoting Snakes Alive
And what is measuring? A: A physical interaction.
But science will not be co-opted.
The claim is belied by the rest of the post, in which four scientists: Planck, Bohr, Fuchs and Schack - two of them in the veritable pantheon of physicists - disagree with it. We could add Heisenberg and Bohm to that for a start.
In no sense at all is that notion of objectivity a bedrock of science. Science is silent on that topic. That people like Hawking claim it is a bedrock does not make it so. It may be a bedrock of scientism, but it is certainly not a bedrock of science.
I don't follow. Can you explain?
Quoting StreetlightX
I don't understand. I never denied this, and I don't see why it's relevant.
What about Einstein, though? He was rather the odd man out in this respect, don’t you think?
Consider modifying this bold bit to something like: 'what it is to have that property is just to be interacted with in a certain way under certain conditions". Is this a Kantianism? But there are no noumena here: the idea is that all properties are relational in this way: any interaction whatsoever will yield a 'result' appropriate to that interaction. There's only a Kantianism if one tries to substaintialize an 'object' apart from these interactions (like a 'red' without the conditions of 'red': a nonsense). There's nothing special about measurement. If there were no measurement, the universe would still be there, quite independent of it, insofar as measurement is just a subclass of physical interactions, which take place all the time, everywhere. The charge of Kantianism only holds if measurement is not understood to belong to the larger class of physical interactions - that is, if you exceptionalize measurement. But this is just what the QM shows to be false: we are no different to anything else in the universe.
Would it help if the label "Kantianism" were dropped?
We are still left, on your purported solution, with the inability to ascertain any properties except those that are in relation to the measurer.
That all properties are relational, if they are, doesn't seem to help. When we seek knowledge of things, we don't generally think of ourselves as just reporting how the measured thing affects the measurement apparatus (ultimately, us). But your out seems to be exactly what a hardcore correlationist or idealist would accept: that the only properties we can possibly measure, are those that are artifacts of the measurement.
Whether the universe "is" independent of this is also irrelevant, because those things that "are" independent of the measurement are precisely what the act of measurement locks us out of ascertaining.
Quoting StreetlightX
Or, put another way: what is this, but an admission of what you tried to deny? You warn: do not substantialize the object outside of the interaction of measurement! But that seems to be the point of the OP.
Also, note that you deny the noumenon while affirming it: the universe is, you say, outside of our measuring it, but all we ascertain in measurement are our interactions with it!
‘The measurement problem’ is called ‘a problem’ precisely because this is what it calls into question. It sounds preposterious; just the kind of thing a charlatan would say.
This 'just' here is doing a lot of work, and it hides over an equivocation: a measurement on its own doesn't really yield any knowledge whatsoever; a measurement is nothing other than a motivated physical interaction - and it's the motivation that matters. One observes particle decay in the ATLAS detector: what is its significance? Well, you need to place that observation within a theoretical framework in which it has a place (even if that place is, at it were, 'out of place' - perhaps this means you need a new theory, etc). But measurement qua measurement is just setting things up to bump into each other in a certain way. Ideally this bumping tells you something about the phenomena, if you know what you're looking for: if it bumps in this way and not that, it means...; otherwise, it means...; significance is never given in the mere observation itself.
Quoting Snakes Alive
But this is a false dichotomy through and through. All we ascertain in measurement are our interactions with it, yes, but who gives a fuck about us? Why are we the 'measure or measure', as it were? It's only by elevating measurement itself into a transcendental principle of 'universe-constitution' that you can get the kind of idealist peddling that Wayfrer would like. But that's unwarrented, unscientific hogwash.
But there's the rub: what it tells you is only that some bumping took place. In what way would this ever amount to bumping-transcendent facts? This I take it is the worry about being unable to 'exclude ourselves.' We "want" knowledge of things independent of measurement: but by design, that is never what measurement actually gives us.
Quoting StreetlightX
I agree that nothing follows from this about the universe being constituted by measurement; what does follow is that the only thing measurement ever allows us to partake in are those things that are ontologically dependent on it, and hence that the rest of the universe is, or might conceivably be, independent of it, doesn't seem to matter to the actual process of knowledge-seeking. It might be an interesting metaphysical hypothesis (a transcendent one that we could never in principle verify), but that's it.
I don't think I believe the Kantian conclusion here, but I just don't see how what you've said coherently escapes from it. There are two ways to read the OP: one as Deepak Chopra, one as Kant. I think Wayfarer's "real" intention is to be Deepak Chopra, which I agree is silly. But the video he posted with the time stamp seems much more like Kant, and I'm aware of no good argument against this general picture of things.
Quoting StreetlightX
We're the ones that have to try to figure it out; hence we 'give a fuck about us,' because we have our limitations to work with in trying to figure it out.
But how is this not just a fancy way of phrasing a tautology (and thus a triviality)? 'The only things we can measure are those things that we can measure.' Once you deny the 'constitution' route, that's all one is really left with.
That's not what I said.
What I said was, "the only thing measurement ever allows us to partake in are those things that are ontologically dependent on it."
That measurement changes the object, insofar as it's being measured, means that we can't ever see something except qua measured, and so can't know what it is independently of that measurement occurring. This is not tautological. Again, look at the jellyfish example.
I feel that Einstein eludes classification. He was undoubtedly deeply philosophical, and I think his ideas changed greatly during the course of his life, which I see as a sign of an open mind. His large collection of memorable sayings is so varied that people of all different conflicting philosophical positions like to claim him as one of their own, but I I doubt he belongs to any neatly labelled philosophical school, or maybe he belonged to many of them, one after another.
His 'God does not play dice' and 'the moon is still there when nobody is looking at it' are indications of a lifelong inclination towards an anti-idealist position, perhaps materialism. But I very much doubt he was a reductive materialist, and I suspect he would have recoiled in distaste at the sort of scientism that is popular in some circles these days. After all, he said it was God that doesn't play dice, not The Universe. He was such a chameleon that he probably meant different things by the word God from one day to another, but I feel convinced that he thought there were great, deep mysteries out there, that we could never approach just by empirical experiment.
What are your thoughts on Einstein?
But this seems to be an incoherency: what you want to ask is something like: how can we know something that, in principle, be known? But this is not a question that makes sense. The idea seems to be that there is some set of knowable-things that, in principle, could be known if only we could... know it otherwise than though how we come to know things; but that's not how knowledge - or really anything - works. It's a category error to expect knowledge to be 'operative' independently of the kinds of thing which make it knowledge. It's not 'you can't know'; it's 'you're using the word knowledge wrong'. It's the attempt to wring blood out of an (oxymoronic) stone.
Reworded: Measurement changes the object, insofar as it's being measured, means that we can't ever see something except qua measured, and so... it makes no sense to speak of knowledge otherwise than this.
Perhaps you mean to say that no observer, including instruments, is without causal force in the act of observing. We think the experiment is conducted without being influenced by the experimenter but that, some claim, is not the case. The very act of observing, by us or with instruments, has an effect on the thing being observed.
Does this harm our claim to scientific objectivity?
Yes, because if this claim is true then objectivity isn't achievable.
However, what do you make of repeatibility - the fact that experiments conducted at different places and at different times yield same or similar results?
To say the least it seems the subjective component in the act of observation is shared among ALL observers in exactly the same way. In short we can ignore it without consequence as it doesn't hamper the scientific enterprise.
It would be a real problem if the same experiment produced different results when done at different places and separate times. That would be chaotic.
Yes, that seems to be the point of the OP, and it is the Kantian conclusion.
I can let Wayfarer speak for himself, but this is what was bolded:
"The physical world cannot be separated from our own efforts to probe it. How could it be otherwise, since we ourselves are embedded in the very world we’re seeking to understand?"
And this was the 'take-home:'
"What I take this to mean, is that objectivity cannot be absolute. And I think the reason this is controversial is that it undermines realism, which is the (usually instinctive) idea that the Universe simply exists as it always does, and that we humans come into it and go out of it in an instant, relative to the vastness of space and time which science observes. But this undermines that view, because it illustrates the sense in which the observer is inextricably part of the picture. We don't, actually, stand outside of, or apart from, the Universe which we are analysing; so what we're analysing cannot be absolutely objective."
Yeah, this is rubbish. Or at least, it does not follow.
He wasn’t a materialist nor really reductionist. Despite the efforts of people like Dawkins to enlist him for militant atheism, he always denied being atheist, although he certainly disdained organised religion. He had quite an expansive philosophical attitude, sometimes bordering on the mystical, which comes across in many of his popular writings and aphorisms from later in life. But given all that, he was a very determined realist. One of the very good popular books on Einstein and Bohr’s relationship was Manjit Kumar’s ‘Quantum’. It goes into some depth about Bohr and Einsteins’ tussles over this matter which usually consisted of Einstein dreaming up some ‘gedanken’ [thought experiment] and then Bohr labouring to come up with a response. This happened over decades - but Bohr was never bested, according to the book.
The climax of all of that was the EPR paradox, which of course was never able to be made subject to experimental analysis in Einstein’s lifetime, but was to become the subject of the famous Alain Aspect experiments which proved once and for all ‘spooky action at a distance’.
John Stewart Bell, quoted in Quantum Profiles, by Jeremy Bernstein [Princeton University Press, 1991, p. 84]
The point that impresses me about Bohr and Heisenberg, was that their so-called ‘Copenhagen Interpretation’ was not at all a theory or hypothesis, but just musings on what could and couldn’t be said on the basis of what they had discovered. I suppose Einstein’s frequent complaint that quantum physics could not be considered ‘complete’ amount to him saying that it doesn’t provide a conceptually coherent causal chain - a foundational hypothesis. Science had wanted to provide a complete, realist account, and instead stumbled into a mystery which is remains unsolved; the ‘nature of reality’ still remains a Rorschach test.
It's rubbish because we are defined by our seperation from other things. The issue isn't that our experiences are somehow seperate from the world (and perceptions). Rather, it is no matter this connection of our experiences, things that I encounter are not me.
The mountain I see in the distinct is not me. Another's body I see across the room is not me. Any connection I have with the world around me doesn't undo or remove this seperation.
In any instance were we are investigating the world, this seperation is necessary defined. My experience of investigating the flight of birds is not the flying birds themselves. The birds are other beings who would fly just as well without my investigation.
What Linde is saying is that, taken as a whole, the universe is predicted to be static and unchanging (per the Wheeler-DeWitt equation). In order to predict a dynamic and changing universe, as we all observe, you have to split the universe into subsystems, i.e., you, the observer + the rest of the universe.
For some experimental results on this, see Quantum Experiment Shows How Time ‘Emerges’ from Entanglement
That doesn't challenge the idea of objective reality. It just means that what is measured depends on one's frame of reference.
I think the potential philosophical problem is actually at 6:04 in the video where Linde is asked how it is that the universe seems to have been around a lot longer than sentient creatures. He says, "This brings me to the interpretation of quantum mechanics ... Everything becomes real at the moment it is observed ... Before you make an observation there is no such thing as real existence of anything there. But once you make an observation everything looks as if it existed all the time before it happens."
It hasn't been proven - it's an interpretational issue. Per the quantum interpretations table on Wikipedia, roughly half are local interpretations, including QBism.
Again - the role of the observer is inextricable; you can't assume 'a view from nowhere'. What I think all of this is showing is the role of the observing mind in the establishment of duration. After all, time exists on a scale - if you were a being who lived for a billion years, your sense of duration would be completely different from that of the human. But which is the most accurate? Well, it's a meaningless question; 'accuracy' can only be judged, given a scale.
Quoting Andrew M
What I had said was:
Quoting Wayfarer
Agreed.
Quoting Wayfarer
Yes.
Quoting Wayfarer
Do you mean there can be different standards for measurement, depending on the context?
See The Debate between Plato and Democritus, Werner Heisenberg
Quantum mysticism: gone but not forgotten, Lisa Zyga.
But does QM undermine the very notion of their being anything ultimate or fundamental? I mean, why not 'field' or 'process'?
There is a Quantum Field Theory, isn't there? Are you saying that it is vague?
In any case, if you are drawing a distinction with objects here, what makes you think that objects in general are not vague? For example you see a tree and I see the same tree, it happens all the time: but what precisely is that entity which we both see?
Anyway you didn't answer the first question.
A similar kind of exasperation lay behind Schrodinger’s cat - he was pointing out how ridiculous the implications of his equation were with a real-life analogy. He wasn’t just being mischievous:
[quote=Erwin Schrodinger]God knows I am no friend of probability theory, I have hated it from the first moment when our dear friend Max Born gave it birth. For it could be seen how easy and simple it made everything, in principle, everything ironed and the true problems concealed. Everybody must jump on the bandwagon. And actually not a year passed before it became an official credo, and it still is.[/quote]
Letter to Einstein (13 June 1946), as quoted by Walter Moore in Schrödinger: Life and Thought (1989)
For everyone involved there was real angst; Heisenberg recalled being reduced to tears around Bohr’s kitchen table on some occasions, so bitter were the arguments (he was very much the junior partner.)
And I don’t think it’s ever really been resolved. I think basically the discoveries enabled such an bonanza that after the war questions of interpretation became passé. There was gold in them thar hills, even if nobody knew how it got there. Shut up and calculate. That’s why, when Everett came along, the field was ripe for the picking:
From a Scientific American profile (and worth a read; tragic character that he was.)
Everett's interpretation now has many followers. And this is still where it’s at, although a straw poll of physicists published on Sean Carroll's blog looked like this:
More recent philosophical discussion has moved on from the reality versus mysticism debates between the founders of quantum mechanics. "The war over reality" essay is about whether the quantum state describes the underlying world (intrinsic realism) or information about observers (participatory realism). Fuch's QBism and Rovelli's RQM are examples of the latter (characterized as Type-II in the paper linked below).
Quoting Interpretations of quantum theory: A map of madness
Quoting On Participatory Realism - Chris Fuchs
//ps// from the Fuchs article:
:up:
//ps//Because ‘participatory realism’ means, not that the conversation has ‘moved on’ from reality v mysticism, but that the mystics won.
So the argument is that is necessary to index the quantum state to a participant (broadly conceived). As an analogy, there is nothing mystical about ordinary statements like, "The apple is red" or "I am in pain". But they are statements that are only meaningful when indexed to individual sentient creatures with particular sensory capabilities. There is no intrinsic "redness" or "pain" in the world.
The way QBism conceives of indexing compared to RQM is different (Bayesian probabilities versus relative reference frames). But the general idea is that there needs to be a natural integration of first and third person perspectives - a view from somewhere - to make proper sense of quantum mechanics.
Which, as it happens, is something that the natural and holistic approaches of Aristotelian hylomorphism and Peircean pragmatism, to name but two, both do.