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Spacetime events and objects aren't all that exists, a new quantum interpretation suggests.
[...] In the new paper, three scientists argue that including "potential things on the list of "real" things can avoid the counterintuitive conundrums that quantum physics poses. It is perhaps less of a full-blown interpretation than a new philosophical framework for contemplating those quantum mysteries. At its root, the new idea holds that the common conception of "reality" is too limited. By expanding the definition of reality, the quantum's mysteries disappear. In particular, "real" should not be restricted to "actual" objects or events in spacetime. Reality ought also be assigned to certain possibilities, or "potential" realities, that have not yet become "actual." These potential realities do not exist in spacetime, but nevertheless are "ontological" — that is, real components of existence.
"This new ontological picture requires that we expand our concept of 'what is real' to include an extraspatiotemporal domain of quantum possibility," write Ruth Kastner, Stuart Kauffman and Michael Epperson.
[...] In their paper, titled "Taking Heisenberg's Potentia Seriously," Kastner and colleagues elaborate on this idea, drawing a parallel to the philosophy of René Descartes. Descartes, in the 17th century, proposed a strict division between material and mental "substance." Material stuff (res extensa, or extended things) existed entirely independently of mental reality (res cogitans, things that think) except in the brain's pineal gland. There res cogitans could influence the body. Modern science has, of course, rejected res cogitans: The material world is all that reality requires. Mental activity is the outcome of material processes, such as electrical impulses and biochemical interactions.
Kastner and colleagues also reject Descartes' res cogitans. But they think reality should not be restricted to res extensa; rather it should be complemented by "res potentia" — in particular, quantum res potentia, not just any old list of possibilities. Quantum potentia can be quantitatively defined; a quantum measurement will, with certainty, always produce one of the possibilities it describes. In the large-scale world, all sorts of possibilities can be imagined (Browns win Super Bowl, Indians win 22 straight games) which may or may not ever come to pass.
This could be an amazing breakthrough - and it would also reconcile Einstein's 'Left Shoe' construction.
Somehow, reading this paper also made me think of software design!
Read the article at sciencenews.org
Read the paper at arxiv.org
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday October 05 2017, @05:04PM (2 children)
What makes one fit better than another? For example, suppose using the duplication technology mentioned elsewhere, I just duplicate the first person and fit to the duplication, ignoring the second person altogether (or perhaps slide the second person into the piranha tank while claiming the duplicate was the second person all along)? That's best fit.
Obviously, you're not speaking of those sorts of shenanigans, so there are constraints on that fitting. But what are those constraints? "Oh, this red looks green to you now? Let's adjust the mind link so it looks the right shade of red." Some choices of fittings would hide the very details that supposedly go into the first person differences.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Thursday October 05 2017, @06:12PM (1 child)
More agreement. For example, a fit where both have some "activation" in the "communism area" is better than one where one has that activation and the other hasn't. Think of it like a map where borders are drawn (and don't take that analogy too literal). If one contains the borders of Germany of 1937 and one contains the border of Germany of 2017, then the enclosed regions agree better than if one contains the borders of Germany of 1937 and the other contains the borders of France of 2017. Therefore Germany 2017 is a better fit to Germany 1937 than France 2017, even though the regions differ considerably.
So someone suddenly seeing "green" when being showed "red" would, for example, associate the colour he sees with gooseberries rather than strawberries, with Islamic countries rather than communist countries, with a forest rather than with a sunset, with "go" rather than "stop", etc.
Reading your comment again, I now suspect you are thinking I talked about a fit to an "ideal red". I didn't; such an "ideal red" doesn't exist. I mean a fit between two person's view of the colour red (the better the fit, the more do their concepts of "red" agree"), or in the case of someone suddenly seeing red as green, the fit of his new perception of red to his old perceptions of red and of green. If that person's new perception of red more closely fits that person's old perception of green than it does its old perception of red, then that person now percepts red as green.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday October 05 2017, @08:16PM
No, it's more viewing a shade of red, switch gets flipped so now the same shade is viewed through the perception of a second person, and then adjusting till it gets close to the initial perception.