"According to quantum mechanics, material reality is neither composed of any kind of context-independent building blocks nor are there objects in the sense of an absolute ontology. In quantum field theory, “particles” are small amplitude excitations of a quantum field. Therefore it is...
I wasn't talking about brain imaging as a method of ghost detection. I was taking issue with your claim that detectability is a fundamental, or reliable, or even coherent account or criterion for the "thing-detected" to be physical.
I was saying that by your logic here:
Which you repeated here...
We need subjects/participants to TELL us about what they are doing (or at least assume they are following the tasks) in order to get even basic interpretations of neural correlate data off of the ground. What we can't do is make the leap from the assumption that brain imaging data is correlated...
No idea. It seems an odd stance to take by the author of a scientific monograph on the emerging understanding of the "mind" in
Wrong question. We know that we can "detect" brain function using (at least previously) standard methods in the dead:
"In 2009, a highly remarkable scientific...
This is patent nonsense and a really good example of junk science masquerading as popular science. Mapping sentences on a similarity space via crowd-sourcing methods (Mturk) to build a space in which a statistical machine learning approach using distance metrics/similarity can be constructed so...
No, you wouldn't be. But that is because "the scientific method" is a myth that is unfortunately still taught in basic science classes up to and including undergraduate courses (particularly those that are for an introduction to some particular science with titles like University Physics with...
One can certainly ask whether a theory is well-supported by evidence (which takes different forms depending upon the field). But the question you asked should be reversed in two ways. First, one is better served asking what ways pseudoscience uses (what appear to be) elements and methods of the...
This is a bit like asking “I know that lots of people cheat at poker and at cards more generally. What other games do you think contain cheating elements or methods?” It’s almost precisely the wrong question. Lots of people play games and lots of games are designed to be fair. But this doesn’t...
It might be useful at this point to briefly cover what issues or problems QM is often thought to have or to present us with in order to clarify how RQM does or does not resolve these issues. After all, popular/sensationalist presentations ascribe all manner of “sins” to QM in all manner of ways...
Well, the first and main problem I have with the idea as you have outlined it here is that this description makes little contact with RQM and perhaps none at all with “standard” quantum mechanics. Of course, this is not a criticism of what you wrote but rather a constraint imposed upon you by...
It doesn't. Firstly, it isn't even the only relational approach to quantum theory (and it isn't much of a relational interpretation at all, but that's less Rovelli's fault than it is the fact that "relative state" was taken and "relativistic quantum mechanics" is not an interpretation but (more...
It doesn't really work that way, but essentially yes. In fact, there are experimental realizations in which the experimenters are able to continually switch from observing "which path/slit" to restoring interference with the same system, or determining whether or not to measure "which path/slit"...
I have a number of problems with relational quantum mechanics (RQM), perhaps foremost being how promising RQM seems at first to be compared to how I think it ends up fairing! In trying to retain too many desiderata one generally wants out of physical theories whilst “answering” or “resolving”...
The "no objective reality" part (and what bother me most about these popular articles that keep coming) comes from the popular/sensationalist science reporting. Depending on which paper one reads and/or which author one talks to, these and similar results tend to be reported in the literature as...
You can't, really. This loophole remains because closing free choice in order to "solve" this problems results in the negation of the entirety of empirical science, including all quantum theory:
"The condition that the choice of the experiments is taken to be a free one means that the...
There is some important context that is almost entirely missing from both the popular summary in the OP’s link and the corresponding published paper. This is actually a rather perfect example of the numerous ways that popular science presentations distort actual scientific inquiry in diverse...
This is essentially saying that it applies to all dynamics and physical systems we know of- for now. There is no independent classical realm in which quantum theory somehow fails to apply. Rather, classical physics are approximations to an underlying quantum reality.
The best that can ever be said of any test of reality that claims to have demonstrated the subjective nature of reality empirically is that we cannot trust the claim.
Experiments that are designed and implemented outside of the mind (as opposed to thought experiments) assume a priori that there...
Thank you! And of course I remember our conversations, not only about graduate school but many other topics that were intrinsically interesting and made particularly so because of e.g., your knowledge, intellect, and sense of humor (both in discussion threads and chatting here). Just to pick one...
Actually, concerning the nature of gravitational force Newton (in his rightfully famous Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica) we find the well-known phrase "hypotheses non fingo." However, it is so well known that the nuances and extent to which Newton elsewhere seems indeed to suggest...