Does Quantum Mechanics Reveal That Life Is But a Dream?

[sun rise]

Putting this ScientificAmerican blog entry here because of the agreement between Eastern models where we are "dreaming" that we're individuals and the headline of this entry. This hypothesis is naturally not proven and even controversial but maybe it's true.

Does Quantum Mechanics Reveal That Life Is But a Dream?

A radical quantum hypothesis casts doubt on objective reality

As philosopher Michael Strevens points out in The Knowledge Machine, science resolves disputes by means of repeated observations and experiments. Strevens calls scientists’ commitment to empirical data the “iron rule of explanation.” Ideally, the iron rule produces durable, objectively true accounts of the world.

But subjectivity is hard to expunge even in physics, the foundation on which science rests. Quantum mechanics, a mathematical model of matter at very small scales, is science’s most rigorously tested theory. Countless experiments have confirmed it, as do computer chips, lasers and other technologies that exploit quantum effects.

Unfortunately, quantum mechanics defies common sense. For more than a century, physicists have tried to interpret the theory, to turn it into a coherent story, in vain. “Every competent physicist can ‘do’ quantum mechanics,” a leading textbook says, “but the stories we tell ourselves about what we are doing are as various as the tales of Scheherazade, and almost as implausible.”
...
Others keep probing the theory. In 1961 a prominent theorist, Eugene Wigner, proposed a thought experiment similar to the conundrum of Schrödinger’s cat. Instead of the fabled cat in a box, imagine that a friend of Wigner is inside a laboratory monitoring a radioactive specimen. When the specimen decays, a detector flashes.

Now imagine that Wigner is outside the lab. If Wigner’s friend sees the detector flash, he knows that the specimen has decayed. But to Wigner, standing outside the lab, the specimen, his friend and the entire lab hover in a blur of possible states. Wigner and his friend seem to occupy two distinct realities.

In 2020, physicists performed a version of Wigner’s thought experiment and concluded that his intuitions were correct. In a story for Science headlined “Quantum paradox points to shaky foundations of reality,” physics reporter George Musser says the experiment calls objectivity into question. “It could mean there is no such thing as an absolute fact,” Musser writes, “one that is as true for me as it is for you.”
...
QBists hedge their mind-centrism, if only so they don’t come across as loons or mystics. They accept that matter exists as well as mind, and they reject solipsism, which holds that no sentient being can really be sure that any other being is sentient. But QBism’s core message, science writer Amanda Gefter says, is that the idea of “a single objective reality is an illusion.” A dream, you might say.
...
Physicists have more in common than most would like to admit with artists, who try to turn the chaos of things into a meaningful narrative. Some artists thwart our desire for meaning. T. S. Eliot’s poem The Waste Land is an anti-narrative, a grab bag of images that pop in and out of the void. The poem resembles a dream, or nightmare. Its meaning is that there is no meaning, no master narrative. Life is a joke, and the joke is on you if you believe otherwise...

 

[ChristineM]

It seems to me that a philosopher has spent a few hours "thinking" about QM, cited a couple of ambiguities and declared reality is not real. Perhaps a simple dropping half a brick on his toe would change his mind, no thinking about it involved.

 

[The Hammer]

It seems to me that a philosopher has spent a few hours "thinking" about QM, cited a couple of ambiguities and declared reality is not real. Perhaps a simple dropping half a brick on his toe would change his mind, no thinking about it involved.

Just because you feel something, doesn't make it "real", pain included.

 

[Heyo]

Putting this ScientificAmerican blog entry here because of the agreement between Eastern models where we are "dreaming" that we're individuals and the headline of this entry. This hypothesis is naturally not proven and even controversial but maybe it's true.

Does Quantum Mechanics Reveal That Life Is But a Dream?

A radical quantum hypothesis casts doubt on objective reality

As philosopher Michael Strevens points out in The Knowledge Machine, science resolves disputes by means of repeated observations and experiments. Strevens calls scientists’ commitment to empirical data the “iron rule of explanation.” Ideally, the iron rule produces durable, objectively true accounts of the world.

But subjectivity is hard to expunge even in physics, the foundation on which science rests. Quantum mechanics, a mathematical model of matter at very small scales, is science’s most rigorously tested theory. Countless experiments have confirmed it, as do computer chips, lasers and other technologies that exploit quantum effects.

Unfortunately, quantum mechanics defies common sense. For more than a century, physicists have tried to interpret the theory, to turn it into a coherent story, in vain. “Every competent physicist can ‘do’ quantum mechanics,” a leading textbook says, “but the stories we tell ourselves about what we are doing are as various as the tales of Scheherazade, and almost as implausible.”
...
Others keep probing the theory. In 1961 a prominent theorist, Eugene Wigner, proposed a thought experiment similar to the conundrum of Schrödinger’s cat. Instead of the fabled cat in a box, imagine that a friend of Wigner is inside a laboratory monitoring a radioactive specimen. When the specimen decays, a detector flashes.

Now imagine that Wigner is outside the lab. If Wigner’s friend sees the detector flash, he knows that the specimen has decayed. But to Wigner, standing outside the lab, the specimen, his friend and the entire lab hover in a blur of possible states. Wigner and his friend seem to occupy two distinct realities.

In 2020, physicists performed a version of Wigner’s thought experiment and concluded that his intuitions were correct. In a story for Science headlined “Quantum paradox points to shaky foundations of reality,” physics reporter George Musser says the experiment calls objectivity into question. “It could mean there is no such thing as an absolute fact,” Musser writes, “one that is as true for me as it is for you.”
...
QBists hedge their mind-centrism, if only so they don’t come across as loons or mystics. They accept that matter exists as well as mind, and they reject solipsism, which holds that no sentient being can really be sure that any other being is sentient. But QBism’s core message, science writer Amanda Gefter says, is that the idea of “a single objective reality is an illusion.” A dream, you might say.
...
Physicists have more in common than most would like to admit with artists, who try to turn the chaos of things into a meaningful narrative. Some artists thwart our desire for meaning. T. S. Eliot’s poem The Waste Land is an anti-narrative, a grab bag of images that pop in and out of the void. The poem resembles a dream, or nightmare. Its meaning is that there is no meaning, no master narrative. Life is a joke, and the joke is on you if you believe otherwise...

QM really is a field that lends itself to mysticism or "quantum woo". It is notoriously hard to understand and people have tried to substitute magical thinking for real understanding since there are people. *cough* religion *cough*
With that said, QM, even with correct understanding, is shaking the fundamentals of science but so did Relativity. We have that sorted out pretty well and QM may come to the same conclusion: We live in an objective reality - just not at the same time.

 

[blü 2]

Just because you feel something, doesn't make it "real", pain included.

Pain is an evolved neural response to a particular physical situation (including physiological / biological situations) and it's there to stimulate a response from the brain-stem or brain appropriate to the pain signal, no?

What's not "real" about biological and bioelectrical responses?

 

[LegionOnomaMoi]

It seems to me that a philosopher has spent a few hours "thinking" about QM, cited a couple of ambiguities and declared reality is not real. Perhaps a simple dropping half a brick on his toe would change his mind, no thinking about it involved.

And your characterization is about as woefully, hopelessly incorrect and horribly wrong as could be. I once asked Chris Fuchs why he didn't publish a particular paper in a philosophy journal as it explained a lot of the QBist philosophy and he told me that he didn't feel comfortable enough with the philosophical literature (particularly the nuances of terms in philosophy of physics, the larger contexts of philosophical areas of debates even particular to QM, etc.) to submit a piece to a philosophy journal.
Fuchs and the other QBism founders have been among the central players in quantum foundations for about as long as it has been a well-established, recognized field in physics. Mermin, a convert, is the only one I know who wrote a piece in a philosophy journal, but that was to explain the Bell experimental scheme in a simplified manner and it predated his "conversion" to QBism as the correct interpretation of QM. Caves, Schack, the QBism group in Boston, their collaborators and colleagues and Perimeter, etc., are all leading physicists, not philosophers. The extended Wigners friend has been the subject of much theoretical and experimental breakthroughs since at the very least the Frauchiger and Renner paper and actually earlier with similar work by Časlav Brukner (and the origins of the extended Wigner's friend used in a very, very different light go back even earlier with work by Deutsch).
Among those whose views are similar to the QBists in terms of their interpretation of QM, only Healey is a philosopher, but he has spent much of his life on quantum theory and is cited in the physics literature. Nothing in your characterization is accurate.
That said, the link is to popular science piece. They are almost always sensationalist garbage.

 

[PureX]

There are still 'rules' governing the actions of physicality. We just don't understand them as well as we thought we did.

 

[Brian2]

If objective reality is not real, how will we ever know if that is true?

 

[RestlessSoul]

A dream seems real for as long as it lasts. Can we say more of life?

 

[exchemist]

Putting this ScientificAmerican blog entry here because of the agreement between Eastern models where we are "dreaming" that we're individuals and the headline of this entry. This hypothesis is naturally not proven and even controversial but maybe it's true.

Does Quantum Mechanics Reveal That Life Is But a Dream?

A radical quantum hypothesis casts doubt on objective reality

As philosopher Michael Strevens points out in The Knowledge Machine, science resolves disputes by means of repeated observations and experiments. Strevens calls scientists’ commitment to empirical data the “iron rule of explanation.” Ideally, the iron rule produces durable, objectively true accounts of the world.

But subjectivity is hard to expunge even in physics, the foundation on which science rests. Quantum mechanics, a mathematical model of matter at very small scales, is science’s most rigorously tested theory. Countless experiments have confirmed it, as do computer chips, lasers and other technologies that exploit quantum effects.

Unfortunately, quantum mechanics defies common sense. For more than a century, physicists have tried to interpret the theory, to turn it into a coherent story, in vain. “Every competent physicist can ‘do’ quantum mechanics,” a leading textbook says, “but the stories we tell ourselves about what we are doing are as various as the tales of Scheherazade, and almost as implausible.”
...
Others keep probing the theory. In 1961 a prominent theorist, Eugene Wigner, proposed a thought experiment similar to the conundrum of Schrödinger’s cat. Instead of the fabled cat in a box, imagine that a friend of Wigner is inside a laboratory monitoring a radioactive specimen. When the specimen decays, a detector flashes.

Now imagine that Wigner is outside the lab. If Wigner’s friend sees the detector flash, he knows that the specimen has decayed. But to Wigner, standing outside the lab, the specimen, his friend and the entire lab hover in a blur of possible states. Wigner and his friend seem to occupy two distinct realities.

In 2020, physicists performed a version of Wigner’s thought experiment and concluded that his intuitions were correct. In a story for Science headlined “Quantum paradox points to shaky foundations of reality,” physics reporter George Musser says the experiment calls objectivity into question. “It could mean there is no such thing as an absolute fact,” Musser writes, “one that is as true for me as it is for you.”
...
QBists hedge their mind-centrism, if only so they don’t come across as loons or mystics. They accept that matter exists as well as mind, and they reject solipsism, which holds that no sentient being can really be sure that any other being is sentient. But QBism’s core message, science writer Amanda Gefter says, is that the idea of “a single objective reality is an illusion.” A dream, you might say.
...
Physicists have more in common than most would like to admit with artists, who try to turn the chaos of things into a meaningful narrative. Some artists thwart our desire for meaning. T. S. Eliot’s poem The Waste Land is an anti-narrative, a grab bag of images that pop in and out of the void. The poem resembles a dream, or nightmare. Its meaning is that there is no meaning, no master narrative. Life is a joke, and the joke is on you if you believe otherwise...

I find this unhelpful and drifting too close to quantum woo for comfort. I dislike articles like this that try to make things mysterious, instead of doing what in my opinion is the job of science, which is to analyse natural phenomena and demystify them.

My understanding is that there are interpretations of QM that suggest what are "real" are the interactions between QM entities and that ascribing a continuous "reality" to them in between interactions is not strictly justified or meaningful. It also seems to be the case that how one describes a quantum system depends on the informational frame of reference of the observer, rather in the way that, in relativity, it depends on the spatial frame of reference of the observer. But neither of these concepts claims "everything is a dream". In any case, what would that mean? if everything were "a dream", a dream is all we would have and so that is what we would mean when we spoke of "reality".

Metaphysical speculations notwithstanding, QM experiments give independently verifiable results. So QM remains an objective theory of matter, whatever the constraints may be on what we can know about QM systems.

 

[ChristineM]

And your characterization is about as woefully, hopelessly incorrect and horribly wrong as could be. I once asked Chris Fuchs why he didn't publish a particular paper in a philosophy journal as it explained a lot of the QBist philosophy and he told me that he didn't feel comfortable enough with the philosophical literature (particularly the nuances of terms in philosophy of physics, the larger contexts of philosophical areas of debates even particular to QM, etc.) to submit a piece to a philosophy journal.
Fuchs and the other QBism founders have been among the central players in quantum foundations for about as long as it has been a well-established, recognized field in physics. Mermin, a convert, is the only one I know who wrote a piece in a philosophy journal, but that was to explain the Bell experimental scheme in a simplified manner and it predated his "conversion" to QBism as the correct interpretation of QM. Caves, Schack, the QBism group in Boston, their collaborators and colleagues and Perimeter, etc., are all leading physicists, not philosophers. The extended Wigners friend has been the subject of much theoretical and experimental breakthroughs since at the very least the Frauchiger and Renner paper and actually earlier with similar work by Časlav Brukner (and the origins of the extended Wigner's friend used in a very, very different light go back even earlier with work by Deutsch).
Among those whose views are similar to the QBists in terms of their interpretation of QM, only Healey is a philosopher, but he has spent much of his life on quantum theory and is cited in the physics literature. Nothing in your characterization is accurate.
That said, the link is to popular science piece. They are almost always sensationalist garbage.

Just because QM is not fully understood does not make it quantum woo. And thinking about the quantum process that allowed you to make your post shows that reality is real.

Unless of course we are, every one of us having the same quantum dream every one else is having.

I am a realist. If something is not known or not understood then I say 'i don't know'. Not 'that is not understood so i will proclaim my idea and every one must agree'

 

[Hermit Philosopher]

Putting this ScientificAmerican blog entry here because of the agreement between Eastern models where we are "dreaming" that we're individuals and the headline of this entry. This hypothesis is naturally not proven and even controversial but maybe it's true.

Does Quantum Mechanics Reveal That Life Is But a Dream?

A radical quantum hypothesis casts doubt on objective reality

As philosopher Michael Strevens points out in The Knowledge Machine, science resolves disputes by means of repeated observations and experiments. Strevens calls scientists’ commitment to empirical data the “iron rule of explanation.” Ideally, the iron rule produces durable, objectively true accounts of the world.

But subjectivity is hard to expunge even in physics, the foundation on which science rests. Quantum mechanics, a mathematical model of matter at very small scales, is science’s most rigorously tested theory. Countless experiments have confirmed it, as do computer chips, lasers and other technologies that exploit quantum effects.

Unfortunately, quantum mechanics defies common sense. For more than a century, physicists have tried to interpret the theory, to turn it into a coherent story, in vain. “Every competent physicist can ‘do’ quantum mechanics,” a leading textbook says, “but the stories we tell ourselves about what we are doing are as various as the tales of Scheherazade, and almost as implausible.”
...
Others keep probing the theory. In 1961 a prominent theorist, Eugene Wigner, proposed a thought experiment similar to the conundrum of Schrödinger’s cat. Instead of the fabled cat in a box, imagine that a friend of Wigner is inside a laboratory monitoring a radioactive specimen. When the specimen decays, a detector flashes.

Now imagine that Wigner is outside the lab. If Wigner’s friend sees the detector flash, he knows that the specimen has decayed. But to Wigner, standing outside the lab, the specimen, his friend and the entire lab hover in a blur of possible states. Wigner and his friend seem to occupy two distinct realities.

In 2020, physicists performed a version of Wigner’s thought experiment and concluded that his intuitions were correct. In a story for Science headlined “Quantum paradox points to shaky foundations of reality,” physics reporter George Musser says the experiment calls objectivity into question. “It could mean there is no such thing as an absolute fact,” Musser writes, “one that is as true for me as it is for you.”
...
QBists hedge their mind-centrism, if only so they don’t come across as loons or mystics. They accept that matter exists as well as mind, and they reject solipsism, which holds that no sentient being can really be sure that any other being is sentient. But QBism’s core message, science writer Amanda Gefter says, is that the idea of “a single objective reality is an illusion.” A dream, you might say.
...
Physicists have more in common than most would like to admit with artists, who try to turn the chaos of things into a meaningful narrative. Some artists thwart our desire for meaning. T. S. Eliot’s poem The Waste Land is an anti-narrative, a grab bag of images that pop in and out of the void. The poem resembles a dream, or nightmare. Its meaning is that there is no meaning, no master narrative. Life is a joke, and the joke is on you if you believe otherwise...

Dear @sun rise

The way I understand it is that the probability wave theory in quantum physics - seen through Schrödinger, not through Copenhagen view - challenges our understanding of “reality” because it suggests that every probability manifests itself (Multiverse idea).

However, I’d suggest the exact opposite: no probability manifests itself - they only appears to do so.

And, if the latter were to be closer to truth, then, in a way, yes; our perception of “reality” would be sort of like a dream.

Though not literally a “dream” cognitively speaking, obviously.


Humbly
Hermit

 

[metis]

It seems to me that a philosopher has spent a few hours "thinking" about QM, cited a couple of ambiguities and declared reality is not real. Perhaps a simple dropping half a brick on his toe would change his mind, no thinking about it involved.

I agree, and some have taken q.m. to sometimes "questionable" ends, although I'm not referring to anyone here at RF.

 

[exchemist]

I agree, and some have taken q.m. to sometimes "questionable" ends, although I'm not referring to anyone here at RF.

Oh I can think of one at least that does that. And another that did but doesn't post here any more.

 

[sun rise]

That said, the link is to popular science piece. They are almost always sensationalist garbage.

Wow. Scientific American almost always publishes "sensationalist garbage". I hate to think what you might say if this speculative piece was published in a mainstream outlet.

 

[sun rise]

The article outlining a hypothesis is part of a long tradition in modern physics which includes The Tao of Physics from a few decades ago.

The entire QM field including quantum entanglement is beyond my understanding but maybe there's one person on RF that really understands it. And some of the current understanding that chaos theory (butterfly effect) does not apply at the quantum level adds to my mental bogglement.

I do find being scientifically boggled to be enjoyable, hence this thread.

 

[RestlessSoul]

An awful lot has happened since Bohr, Heisenberg, Pauli and the other Copenhagenists declared QM a “closed theory”. The “Spooky stuff at a distance” as Einstein called it, or “woo” if you prefer, far from going away, has been repeatedly confirmed. Particle entanglement is established at the heart of the disparity between classical and quantum physics. The measurement problem, and the effect of the act of observation on the outcome of experiments, have led to the consensus among physicists, that it is not possible to define reality independently of the way we look at it.

What we call reality, from our perspective “equidistant from the atoms and the stars” (Carl Sagan), is a world of symbolism; the drama of our lives unfolds dependent on the interpretation which our minds extract from the information to which our senses have access. This is not “Woo”, this is not stuff you can read about only in the works of mystics and seers - though one may find such ideas in the writings of visionaries as diverse as Nagarjuna, Lao-tse and William Blake. What the article in the OP alludes to, is a way of looking at the universe elucidated by physicists, working at the frontiers of knowledge; a universe in which indeterminacy is endemic, nothing is solid, nothing is fixed. A universe in which the question “what is real”, opens a door not on one world, but on many.

Anyway, here’s theoretical physicist Anthony Aguirre;

“We break things down into smaller and smaller pieces, but the pieces, when examined, are not there. Just the arrangements of them are. What then, are things?… they exist, it would appear, only as created by, and in relation to, us and the universe. They are, the Buddha might say, emptiness.”

 

[gnostic]

Anyway, here’s theoretical physicist Anthony Aguirre;

“We break things down into smaller and smaller pieces, but the pieces, when examined, are not there. Just the arrangements of them are. What then, are things?… they exist, it would appear, only as created by, and in relation to, us and the universe. They are, the Buddha might say, emptiness.”

But as Quantum Mechanics and Quantum Field Theory have shown, there are no true emptiness...

Emptiness, as in “nothingness”, don’t exist at all...the concept of emptiness of the Buddha’s schools of thought, is but an “illusion”.

So what Buddhists have strived for all these centuries and millennia are essentially the “Maya”. Ain’t that ironic?

 

[exchemist]

Wow. Scientific American almost always publishes "sensationalist garbage". I hate to think what you might say if this speculative piece was published in a mainstream outlet.

Yeah but I don't think this kind of thing is Scientific American at its best. They really ought not to dabble in obscurantism. "Dreams" indeed. Pah!

 

[gnostic]

From what I understand of QM, which I am no expert, is that at quantum-level, what we considered to be “solid”, isn’t very solid at all, if we were able to view the individual particles.

But in day-to-day life, we don’t view the world as just particles, so from macro-level, objects, some matters can be solid.

Under normal circumstances, we don’t see that the air have various gases, eg oxygen, nitrogen, carbon dioxide, methane, etc, so all these gases are in gaseous state as oppose to solid or liquid state. But at high wind speed, there would be enough pressures from the air that air become solid enough to pick up cars, cows, humans, etc, throwing them metres away during tornadoes or hurricanes.