Does Quantum Mechanics Reveal That Life Is But a Dream?

[RestlessSoul]

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?

A century ago, in reference to his work on wave/particle duality, Albert Einstein said to Louis de Broglie, “You have lifted a corner of the veil”. I suspect the allusion to Buddhist thought was conscious, even if metaphorical.

That Einstein’s identification of the “fabric” of spacetime may appear incompatible with the (apparently) substanceless nature of elementary particles, is a paradox which negates neither QM nor General Relativity. The two theories are yet to be reconciled - string theory and loop quantum gravity are ongoing attempts to do so - but each has been repeatedly confirmed over the last 100 years.

Regarding Quantum Field Theory, does the interpretation of sub atomic particles as excitations of a field, make the fundamental quanta of matter appear more tangible, more substantive - or more elusive, if not illusive?

 

[viole]

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...

Usually, serious scientist do not indulge in things like what reality is, since it is too fuzzy to them. Or completely ill defined. At least when they act as scientists.

So, probably it is not the case that reality does not exist (how can it not exist, by the way?). Maybe it is the case that reality is different from what we thought it was. Which is not a big deal, since our brains evolved for mere survival, and it is not surprising that they can only grasp concrete things (which they arbitrarily called reality) that are not in superposition of states.

Ciao

- viole

 

[LegionOnomaMoi]

Just because QM is not fully understood does not make it quantum woo.

Agreed. However, much of the sensationalist bunk is due to the author of a magazine article, not the physicists you dismiss with descriptions such as this:

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.

Flowery language and typical sensationalist mischaracterizations combined with the typical oversimplifications and obfuscations found in popular science writing all too frequently.
But terminology here fundamentally important, as evidenced by e.g., this statement:

I am a realist.

When it comes to quantum theory, realism doesn't mean what you may believe. For example, the orthodox interpretation of QM presented in many if not most textbooks is not "realist". Realism among both those in quantum foundations and related areas as well as physicists more generally often understand Bell's theorem in terms of a choice between realism and locality. That this is incorrect is immaterial for our purposes, as the more interesting part is that the majority seem to prefer locality to realism. Whatever else this indicates, it clearly suggests that rejecting "realism" is not understood at all as rejecting reality (otherwise, what would we even mean by prefering locality?) even by those who are not up-to-date on the terminology in quantum information, quantum foundations, etc., when it comes to interpretations and e.g., ψ-ontic vs. ψ-epistemic interpretations.
On the other hand, quite bizarre interpretations of quantum theory are technically realist even if they imply that the universe splits into branches when you get split ends (the other popular and far less radical realist interpretation is the Bohmian approach).
Fuchs in particular among QBists identifies his approach as realist, but in terms of a kind of enlarged reality where possibilities are "real" in some sense (I'm oversimplifying horribly here). Most have characterized QBism as anti-realist, as it is quite similar in many ways to the orthodox interpretation which is anti-realist.
Also anti-realist are approaches that identify the quantum formalism as nothing other than e.g., a preparation prescription or (similarly) in terms of statistical ensembles.
But neither realist nor anti-realist approaches involve denying an external reality. Rovelli believes that his approach (RQM) is realist and "objective" in the sense that, even though somehow all facts are relative to observers there is somehow supposed to emerge from the quantum formalism the possibility to define relations among all possible observers in a manner that allows for an inaccessible observer-independent reality among the vast networks of observer-dependent state assignments, observations, etc.
Many of the information-theoretic approaches (including QBism) are explicitly or implicitly agnostic as to any ontological model quantum theory describes. For QBists, quantum theory provides a subjective probability calculus that maximizes an agents "odds" of being correct about predictions. The pragmatic interpretation has a similar bent, as does the Neo-copenhagen interpretation.
In order to be a realist one has to accept some truly bizarre consequences and ascribe to external reality some properties most people are unwilling to attribute it. There are a plethora of no-go theorems that aim at narrowing down exactly this conundrum: accepting which assumptions will force us to reject which options and leave what others behind?

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'

So you would be an anti-realist. If you are not of the opinion that we can say what the state vector or wavefunction or similar formalism representing systems in quantum theory corresponds to in the physical world (and not just that there must be a correspondence), then you are an anti-realist.
Realism in this case commits one to a radical approach to quantum theory compared to agnosticism or many others. Multiverse proponents, radically non-local Bohmians who posit ghostly wave-guides for a dual ontology, perhaps certain modal interpretations, etc., are committed realists who would deny many of the kinds of properties we typically think of as "real" as actually being so, and/or add others that we would likely reject as absurd.

 

[LegionOnomaMoi]

Regarding Quantum Field Theory, does the interpretation of sub atomic particles as excitations of a field, make the fundamental quanta of matter appear more tangible, more substantive - or more elusive, if not illusive?

Quantum Field Theory grew out of a reinterpretation of the way that the quantum formalism describes systems when it is forced to obey the correct relativistic symmetries. In particular, the Klein-Gordon and Dirac equations were ostensibly relativistic quantum mechanical descriptions, but such descriptions (in which the states represent particles as in non-relativistic QM) turned out to be untenable. So, to make sense out of negative probabilities, the non-conservation of probability currents, negative energies, etc., as well as to continue (in the same vein as the KG and Dirac equations attempted) to place time and space on similar footing, theorists reinterpreted the operators of non-relativistic QM.
In QM, the operators act on physical states. In QFT, the operators act on the vacuum state associated with a point-like region in spacetime. So theorists called these operators "particles" and set about classifying them according the the symmetries they obeyed and other properties.
The "excitation" description found in popular sources as well as textbooks and elsewhere is the typical physics code one finds in a lot of the relevant literature for various reasons (some historical, some heuristic, some because they sound better, etc.). It refers to the particle detector, essentially. The particle detector can be described in a reference frame in some sophisticated ways in order to allow it to be identified with a particular point in spacetime during the "detection" of the kind of action on spacetime regions that "particles" (i.e., former operators that were promoted to make sense out of relativistic quantum theory in terms of fields) make.

 

[LegionOnomaMoi]

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

Nothing in quantum mechanics shows this. It is via the reinterpretation of the operators from QM and the demotion of the position operator to a status that is on par with "time" in spacetime that, along with conservation laws and symmetries (and the uncertainty principle, of course) makes it possible to suppose that the vacuum state is somehow interacting with quantum fields that create and annihilate "particles". In QM, these same operators are usually referred to as "raising" and "lowering" operators or "ladder" operators as they raise and lower energy levels. In QFT, they are reinterpreted in terms of particle numbers created or annihlated in some spacetime "vacuum state" they act on.

 

[LegionOnomaMoi]

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.

Actually, I said that such popular science pieces are almost always sensationalist garbage. And indeed they are, regardless of whether they are an online science news outlet or a more traditional magazine. The magazines are typically better in that they leave most of the sensationalist garbage to the title and opening (and maybe some of the conclusion) and actually leave some decent popular science writing in the main text. This is not one of those better pieces.
And, to your implied question, I would say just the same if it was any other popular science outlet. Scientific American isn't Science or Nature and even in those cases there are pieces that are deliberately sensationalist, albeit with far less garbage than the article in the OP.

 

[ChristineM]

not the physicists you dismiss with descriptions such as this:

Emmm i have not dismissed any physicist, i have dismissed philosophers making up woo because they thought about it.

Flowery language and typical sensationalist mischaracterizations combined with the typical oversimplifications and obfuscations found in popular science writing all too frequently.

Very flowery indeed.

When it comes to quantum theory, realism doesn't mean what you may believe

And then again, it may. You have no idea what i believe.

So you would be an anti-realist.

I am sure you didn't read or understand my post so I'll leave it here.

 

[setarcos]

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

What do we mean by real?

 

[setarcos]

Does Quantum Mechanics Reveal That Life Is But a Dream?

What is meant by dream?

 

[The Hammer]

What do we mean by real?

What is meant by dream?

Good questions.

How would you define these things?

 

[sun rise]

What is meant by dream?

The point about a dream is an analogy to dreaming. When we dream we take what is going on to be real and react accordingly. When we wake up, we realize that what we thought was real was only an illusion without objective truth.

We can look at what we perceive when awake as illusion also. Or perhaps just one way of perception. The reality is that what we perceive as solid can be equally looked at as a bundle of energy.

So if I rap my hand against a table, I could also say that a bundle of energy my senses perceive as a solid interacted with a bundle of energy my senses perceived as a table. If we perceived at the subatomic level, we'd see that as the reality.

 

[Twilight Hue]

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.

Yep. I think life has an illusory quality but it's undoubtedly not a dream.

 

[JIMMY12345]

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...

To deep for me. I am impressed but could not understand it. Please post more but simply for poor folk like me.

 

[RestlessSoul]

To deep for me. I am impressed but could not understand it. Please post more but simply for poor folk like me.

This is a good starting point for a layperson interested in the philosophy of science

 

[JIMMY12345]

This is a good starting point for a layperson interested in the philosophy of science

View attachment 59748

Dear Restless soul thank you so much. I am on my way to the bookshop.

 

[gnostic]

Emmm i have not dismissed any physicist, i have dismissed philosophers making up woo because they thought about it.

I have the same problems with many modern philosophers.

Especially when they make things up.

 

[Martin]

The point about a dream is an analogy to dreaming. When we dream we take what is going on to be real and react accordingly. When we wake up, we realize that what we thought was real was only an illusion without objective truth.

We can look at what we perceive when awake as illusion also. Or perhaps just one way of perception. The reality is that what we perceive as solid can be equally looked at as a bundle of energy.

So if I rap my hand against a table, I could also say that a bundle of energy my senses perceive as a solid interacted with a bundle of energy my senses perceived as a table. If we perceived at the subatomic level, we'd see that as the reality.

But we don't perceive elements of the sub-atomic world, we perceive things like colour, sounds and hardness.
It can be argued that what we perceive is illusory, since the brain constructs a mental model from sensory inputs. But those inputs are not directly related to the sub-atomic world.

 

[ChristineM]

But we don't perceive elements of the sub-atomic world, we perceive things like colour, sounds and hardness.
It can be argued that what we perceive is illusory, since the brain constructs a mental model from sensory inputs. But those inputs are not directly related to the sub-atomic world.

Colour, the detection of photons on the retina is a quantum effect.

The perception, interpretation of what the eye has detected isn't

 

[sun rise]

Colour, the detection of photons on the retina is a quantum effect.

The perception, interpretation of what the eye has detected isn't

"Life is but a dream" is poetry not science. Science is saying that we don't perceive the subatomic reality. Instead our senses construct an apparent solidity which does not in fact exist when looked at closely (through electron microscopes etc).

 

[ChristineM]

"Life is but a dream" is poetry not science. Science is saying that we don't perceive the subatomic reality. Instead our senses construct an apparent solidity which does not in fact exist when looked at closely (through electron microscopes etc).

Hmmm, have they invented colour election microscopes yet?

Photons are a quantum particle. Though we cannot actually see light we can see its effects, detect them with our rods and cones. The wavelength of those quantum particles enables us to determine the colour of that light that we can't see... Ok, im lost