this post was submitted on 09 Jul 2024
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Science deals with the natural, gods are by definition supernatural.
Science can not either prove or disprove existence of supernatural. It may only erode the reasoning why supernatural should exist.
That reasoning is subjective, and as such, there are no definite answers to your question unless we add additional constraints.
Didn't some quantum nondeterminism prove the existence of effects without a natural cause? (being divil's advocate a bit here for the craic)
No
Slapping "quantum" in front of something does not make it magic.
Take 'natural' to mean 'being fully explicable by states in the observable world'.
'Supernatural' means everything not natural by that definition.
You have results (like Aspect's experiment) that prove that the world is not naturalist: the world is not fully explainable by observable states causing other states.
That is not the definition that natural sciences use for natural. Going down that rabbit hole is completely meaningless, since we are no longer talking about science at that point.
In addition, if using your definition, nothing is natural according to our current understanding.
If I say something this person burst into flames for supernatural reasons, I mean without a measurable cause in the observable universe.
That has very little to do with anything related to the arguments you've made before, and I am not interested in participating in a Gish Gallop.
reddit.com
Go on then: what definition do they use?
Slapping “quantum” in front of something generally makes it involve indeterminism (excepting the many-worlds interpretation)
Natural means pretty much "element of the physical universe, identified by observation".
You're claiming in another comment to this thread that you have M.Sc., you should be aware of this, please stop wasting everyone's time.
Indeterminism is by no means non-natural, and it does not make things any less observable. We can observe quantum states just fine.
And as for
"All the Bell stuff" doesn't have anything to do with "Didn’t some quantum nondeterminism prove the existence of effects without a natural cause?"
And no, it didn't. AFAIK there are exactly zero physicists who argue that.
You made a ludicrous claim, and are unable or unwilling to back it up even a bit, yet somehow you feel continuing this without anything to show is a good use of anyone's time. If you are not going to make an actual argument, I do not see value in continuing this conversation, as all it does is make this thread more difficult to read for others who most likely are not very interested watching yet another internet argument sidethread.
Right. We are in agreement. And indeterminism says that those natural things are not sufficient explanations of experimental results. There is something going on in Aspect's experiment
Determinism: things are fully explained by natural phenomena, i.e. by observable elements of the physical universe
Indeterminism: observable elements of the physical universe are insufficient to explain experimental results; there is something else, like randomness
We must be misunderstanding each other somewhere. Surely you're not saying that zero physicists argue indeterminism? Obviously many/most physicists believe in indeterminism.
Lev Vaidman: "Historically, appearance of the quantum theory led to a prevailing view that Nature is indeterministic.... Quantum theory and determinism usually do not go together." (Vaidman, L. (2014). Quantum theory and determinism. Quantum Studies: Mathematics and Foundations, 1(1-2), 5–38. doi:10.1007/s40509-014-0008-4)
Yes. And these ludicrous claims are standard in physics for decades now. Specifically, the ludicrous claim that most physicists believe is that there are things going on without natural causes (Natural means pretty much “element of the physical universe, identified by observation”). That's an extremely standard ludicrous claim about our ludicrous universe.
That's false.
Please calm down.
According to who, exactly? This is just not even remotely true.
If you want to continue this, link me the papers that have any support to what you are proposing, I'm tired of fighting vague, unsubstantiated claims and you dodging every point I try to make.
???
I think I am misunderstanding you.
My simple uncontroversial claims: A) indeterminism means natural/observable causes are not sufficient to explain all experimental results, B) plenty of physicists (most) believe in indeterminism. Then my funny claim for the craic was C) you can use the word 'supernatural' to describe those effects because they are not natural ("Natural means pretty much “element of the physical universe, identified by observation”.")
When you say my claims are "not even remotely true", and you want me to "support what you are proposing", which of these claims is it?
It appears from context to be the first: the claim that indeterminism means events are not explained by their causes. But that's just the definition of indeterminism like. What is your counter-claim? If you deny that indeterminism means things aren't determined by observable causes, then what does it mean?
An example in a textbook: "If the world is genuinely indeterministic in this way, then it isn’t possible to provide a dynamical explanation of how a system produces a particular outcome in a quantum measurement — the outcome is intrinsically random." – that's from Ch.7 of Quantum [Un]speakables II, edited by Bertlmann and Zeilinger. You can also read section 3 of Ch.1 of Dirac's 1930 textbook.
I have linked two papers and an encylopædia entry already; you have not substantiated your claims with anything.
Here is an example of indeterminacy being "certified" in experiment that you might find interesting: Pironio, S., Acin, A., Massar, S., Boyer de la Giroday, A., Matsukevich, D.N., Maunz, P., Olmschenk, S., Hayes, D., Luo, L., Manning, T.A., Monroe, C.: Random numbers certified by Bell’s theorem. Nature 464, 1021 (2010)
Heisenberg proved in Uber den anschaulichen Inhalt der quantentheoretischen Kinematik und Mechanik in 1927 that there is an uncertainty associated with measurement. There are deterministic interpretations (e.g. many-worlds: "The existence of the other worlds makes it possible to remove randomness" or Bohm's interpretation of nonlocal hidden variables) and indeterministic interpretations (e.g. Copenhagn: "Today the Copenhagen interpretation is mostly regarded as synonymous with indeterminism")
I have not dodged anything. I'm not sure what "point" you're making. You seem to be saying that indeterminism doesn't mean "things aren't determined by observable causes" but yep that's what indeterminism means.
None of these is uncontroversial, C isn't even well-defined. I'd argue that B is correct only if A is correct. And A cannot be correct, since it leads to multitude of cotnradictions, one of which I'm going to demonstrate.
No, it most definitely is not. If you used this as a definition, I'm fairly certain that most physicists would absolutely not agree with your B.
Indeterminism means that if an experiment is repeated with the same parameters, there are no guarantees to get the same result. Nothing more than that.
Your definition implies that there needs to be a cause in the first place. And that is bordering on begging the question, because with that definition you are guaranteed to reach a point where there is something "unexplainable" (since there are infinite amount of layers), which can always be attributed to whatever supernatural thing you choose. There is absolutely no need for this to be the case.
In fact, you yourself quoted the textbook
Emphasis mine. That means, there is no cause, it's an intrinsic property of the theory, especially in Copenhagen interpretation, which is the status quo. As your definition implies a cause, it cannot apply here. There are other contradictions, but this one is simple and I only need one to show that the premise is flawed, and your other points rely on that.
My only claim is that you are incorrect. There aren't really too many papers written about that. (I hope) I've shown your premise to be false because of faulty definitions, what more would you need? None of the stuff you quoted is supporting you, and in fact contradicts you, unless we specifically assume that other people use the definition you've given, which, again, is already shown to be erroneous.
Ok, we are in agreement on everything.
Haven't you identified this casino as an element of the universe, and observed how it works? I can't predict exactly where the ball will fall, but i don't think roulette is supernatural. I can understand the non-deterministic process and chacterise the probability density. And test and observe over many trials to confirm the stochastic model is right.
Uncertainty, randomness, even entaglement and action at a distance can be observed right? with some degree of preision? When you start to pin them down with experiments and describe the probability distribution experimentally, repeatedly, testably then hey presto; I'd call that a "natural" obsrervable random or non-deterministic process.
Maybe it's natural with some more uncertainty than usual , but as you said about Heisenberg everything is at least a bit uncertain, so it's really just a matter of how big is the variance of the probability distribution of your explanation or prediction.
I know you're just trolling by trying to use "supernatural" as a term for, unknown / uncertain / not fully explained / non deterministic. For me supernatural might be be predicting that the roulete wheel will come up 6 black next time. A way to determine the exact oucome of a process we believe to be non-deterministic.
Of course that supernatural thing (like magnetism was back in the day) will become mundane if and when science can pin it down experimentally. Develop a model with a lower variance estimator.
I'd argue entanglement has beein going through a process from supernatural and spooky when it was only theoretical. To natural now that it's been proven, but theres still a lot of uncertainty. so you might call it peri-natural?
I see the whole process of scientific explanation being moving our understanding of phenomena out of the mystical magical and supernatural realm, into the mundane natural world once we understand more about them and have some well understood (even if weak and incomplete) predictive power.
Oh dear. There are already two lemmings in this thread spreading this one.
Would you and @muntedcrocodile@lemm.ee and @Didros@beehaw.org please just look up "can you prove a negative or not" using your research method of choice. Make this the day you learn.
Can you prove a positive where the supernatural is involved?
You should read the meta-analyses of the ganzfeld experiments.
Whatever we observe empirically is "natural" by definition. Causality is an assumption, not a law of nature.
Good comment
The traditional notion of cause and effect is not something all philosophers even agree upon, I mean many materialist philosophers largely rejected the notion of simple cause-and-effect chains that go back to the "first cause" since the 1800s, and that idea is still pretty popular in some eastern countries.
For example, in China they teach "dialectical materialist" philosophy part of required "common core" in universities for any degree, and that philosophical school sees cause and effect as in a sense dependent upon point of view, that an effect being described as a particular cause is just a way of looking at things, and the same relationship under a different point of view may in fact reverse what is considered the cause and the effect, viewing the effect as the cause and vice-versa. Other points of view may even ascribe entirely different things as the cause.
It has a very holistic view of the material world so there really is no single cause to any effect, so what you choose to identify as the cause is more of a label placed by an individual based on causes that are relevant to them and not necessarily because those are truly the only causes. In a more holistic view of nature, Laplacian-style determinism doesn't even make sense because it implies nature is reducible down to separable causes which can all be isolated from the rest and their properties can then be fully accounted for, allowing one to predict the future with certainty.
However, in a more holistic view of nature, it makes no sense to speak of the universe being reducible to separable causes as, again, what we label as causes are human constructs and the universe is not actually separable. In fact, the physicists Dmitry Blokhintsev had written a paper in response to a paper Albert Einstein wrote criticizing Einstein's distaste for quantum mechanics as based on his adherence to the notion of separability which stems from Newtonian and Kantian philosophy, something which dialectical materialists, which Blokhintsev self-identified as, had rejected on philosophical grounds.
He wrote this paper many many years prior to the publication of Bell's theorem which showed that giving up on separability (and by extension absolute determinism) really is a necessity in quantum mechanics. Blokhintsev would then go on to write a whole book called The Philosophy of Quantum Mechanics where in it he argues that separability in nature is an illusion and under a more holistic picture absolute determinism makes no sense, again, purely from materialistic grounds.
The point I'm making is ultimately just that a lot of the properties people try to ascribe to "materialists" or "naturalists" which then later try to show quantum mechanics is in contradiction with, they seem to forget that these are large umbrella philosophies with many different sects and there have been materialist philosophers criticizing absolute determinism as even being a meaningful concept since at least the 1800s.
1700s but yeah
Are you talking about this?
If they were, it has nothing to do with nature being supernatural. It just means that nature's state is not locally real. That does not tie into religion in any objective way.
In addition, both of those articles are (slightly) wrong. There was a lenghty discussion about how in r/physics when they came out. The tl;dr is that it boils down to:
Pick two.
But that has no relevance to religion other than you can make either philosophical or religious argument out of anything.
Yeah all the Bell stuff