SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Submitted via IRC for Runaway1956__
Study: There may be no such thing as objective reality
Everyone is entitled to their own facts. That's not an opinion. At least, according to a new quantum mechanics study.
What we view as objective reality – the idea that what we can observe, measure, and prove is real and those things we cannot are theoretical or imaginary – is actually a subjective reality that we either unravel, create, or dis-obfuscate by the simple act of observation.
A smarter way of putting it can be found in the aforementioned study, "Experimental test of nonlocal causality" conducted by lead author Martin Ringbauer and an international team of physicists and researchers:
Explaining observations in terms of causes and effects is central to empirical science. However, correlations between entangled quantum particles seem to defy such an explanation. This implies that some of the fundamental assumptions of causal explanations have to give way.
Also at The Conversation
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 18 2019, @02:41PM (12 children)
F = G*m1*m2/r^2
PV= nRT
J= sigma*T^4
c^2= a^2 + b^2
No cause and effect. Only lesser sciences like psychology care about cause and effect.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday November 18 2019, @03:53PM (11 children)
Incorrect. Zymurgists very much care about cause and effect and theirs is unarguably the highest scientific calling.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 18 2019, @04:08PM (10 children)
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Mysticism_and_Logic_and_Other_Essays/Chapter_09 [wikisource.org]
(Score: 3, Touché) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday November 18 2019, @04:24PM (3 children)
Don't take wiseass remarks seriously.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 18 2019, @04:36PM (2 children)
Don't take wiseass remarks seriously.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 18 2019, @05:06PM (1 child)
Take THAT, wiseass!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 18 2019, @05:13PM
Trump said either A or else B. Quid Quo Pro. Impeach!!
A = Putin could use the public bathroom
B = use his private one
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Monday November 18 2019, @05:15PM (3 children)
My take on the matter is that causation is too complex to deal with. It deals with a complex interaction of multiple inputs, and is statistical in nature. I recommend "Causality: Models, Reasoning, and Inference" by Judea Pearl, Cambridge University Press, 2000.
It's not surprising that the medieval notion of causation was a bit flaky. So was their idea of logic. But that doesn't mean that the underlying phenomenon is unlawful.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 18 2019, @05:19PM (1 child)
I have talked to Judea Pearl before, neither he nor his followers have been able to provide a single real life example where those DAGs are of any value.
Causality simply is not an important concept in science because every event is collectively caused by every single event in its past timecone. In science you want to distill the most important functional relationships down to a simple set of assumptions/postulates.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Wednesday November 20 2019, @02:07AM
Yes/no. You can argue a "sum over histories" approach, and that works, sort of. But the question is the degree of relevance. If you expect infinite precision, then, yes, you do need totally accurate evaluation of the entire time-cone. But a lot of the effects are so small that they have no measurable effect. (Which, of course, depends on your measuring instruments.)
That's why I said it was statistical in nature. You need to consider the several most important causal elements, and what that means depends on both the precision you expect in the result and the delicacy of the balance between alternatives. I'll agree that it's almost impossible to specify just how far one needs to go, but the further out you go, the smaller the incremental effect. So an iterative approach looks reasonable to me. This is closely (how closely?) analogous to the way neural nets decide whether or not to detect an edge. If it's closely enough analogous, then that provided the "real life example" you were asking for.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Tuesday November 19 2019, @04:55PM
My take is that we have big problems with language. The way things are being described, there's a lot of stuff that simply does not make sense. The fault is in the inadequate and plain wrong names and descriptions, not objective reality.
For example, a glass of water can be full, half full/half empty, totally empty, or anything in between. It can even be slightly overfull, temporarily. But it can't have a negative quantity of water.
Extrapolation is a technique that must be considered cautiously. It's so easy for a simple extrapolation to be garbage, routine for a naive application to produce values outside the possible, a color whiter than pure white, blacker than totally, completely black (fuligin?), emptier than empty, or colder than absolute zero. A famous example is Moore's Law about the doubling of computing power every 18 months. We all realize it can't really hold up, that it must break down at some point. Also in this category is the whole notion of traveling backward in time, by extrapolating Relativity to faster than light speeds. The passage of time slows to zero as an object approaches light speed. Therefore, if something were somehow to go faster than light, time would have to run backward for it, and viola! Time travel into the past! Another bad extrapolation is the notion that a black hole might be a point with infinite density and mass.
Adding to the problem is journalistic drama. To use a Betteridge Law style of headline, they might as well have said "Is Everything You Thought You Knew Wrong??" Count on them to mangle scientific findings out of all recognition. They love misusing extrapolation by not bothering to limit it, as that way it is so wont to produce dramatically impossible values.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 18 2019, @10:52PM (1 child)
I'll see your mystical "Notions of Cause" and raise you a Second Law of Thermodynamics [wikipedia.org]. Unscramble *that* egg, friend.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 19 2019, @12:00AM
I don't see any concept of cause in those equations, nor anything useful that has come from examining whether the second law of thermodynamics explains "cause and effect" or not.