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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: 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.