Bernardo Kastrup on Coast to Coast

[Bernardo]

Well, he did have a brain involved. Are we going to make that an ideal too or the experiencer only?

How to reconcile the brain, and the obvious correlations between brain activity and subjective experience, is one of the most interesting challenges under idealism. After all, under idealism, the brain is in mind, not the other way around. I'm writing about it now, but here is a metaphor: http://www.bernardokastrup.com/2011/12/brain-as-knot-of-consciousness.html. Before you say that this is just a superficial metaphor: yes, I agree. That's why I am working on it now and will publish as soon as done.

 

[Bernardo]

How am I to determine which of the words used in the presentation refer to real things and which hallucinatory. Even a word like "inertia" is grounded in what might be a figment of my imagination -- how are we to talk about this stuff, given it may be so?

Every noun, every relationship, every adjective is based on my supposition that the listener (and even the listener themselves) is connected in a meaningful way to reality. I wonder how the solipsist is able to say anything and why?

Oh, I understand. Well, Idealism does NOT entail solipsism. An Idealist will state that all reality is in mind, but not necessarily in his personal, egoic mind. Under idealism, things only exist insofar as they are experienced, but not necessarily experienced by you under an egoic state (I'm using 'egoic' in its depth-psychological sense, i.e. the parts of the mind that we are aware of). For instance, I acknowledge the reality of your experiences, even though I am not aware of them. I do not consider you a mere figment of my imagination.

This may help: http://www.bernardokastrup.com/2012/01/our-future-sanity.html

My formulation of idealism does not deny the regularities and patterns of reality either. I acknowledge the regularities we call objects or the laws of physics. It's only my ontological interpretation that differs: I think these regularities are the regularities of the flow of mind, not hallucinated echos of an unprovable world outside of mind. In that sense, I think it is perfectly alright to use standard words to refer to objects and phenomena, since language itself has been built under this notion of object/subject duality, which I acknowledge as a useful metaphor.

 

[Dancing David]

David, this is a childish and substance-less reply. The implications of this paper are well-known and debated openly. Your suggestion that I am making things up is patently ludicrous.

Not really, which is why you left before, you are good at rhetoric and not substance. Leggett's inequality is false from the start, the first postulate of the inequality is violated by QM from the start, so I take it either you don't really know what Leggett's inequality means or don't really understand the start of QM. An object will never meet the first condition, as it is an aggregate of the Psi Schroedinger equations.

Debated by whom and where?
So what is the first principle of Leggett's inequality?

ETA:
You did read the link you made that I responded to, a violation Legget's inequality is different than a violation of bell's inequality.

Your conclusions in your post from the paper is false.

 

[Bernardo]

Bernardo, could you point out how the conclusions of the paper you linked to support (unlike "not dispute") your above hilited statement?

I didn't say that the Nature paper concludes that the aspects of physical reality we unveil through the study of entanglement are part of physical reality; I thought such conclusion was common-sense. If you don't think so, you are then assuming a mechanism for reality to transform itself fundamentally from something that is likely not objective (but mental instead) at a microscopic level, to something that is strongly objective at a macroscopic level. Even collapse of the wave function, whether psi is ontic or epistemic, wouldn't suffice to justify such a fundamental ontological break in the nature of reality.

 

[Dancing David]

I thought such conclusion was common-sense. If you don't think so, you are then assuming a mechanism for reality to transform itself fundamentally from something that is likely not objective (but mental instead) at a microscopic level, to something that is strongly objective at a macroscopic level. Even collapse of the wave function, whether psi is ontic or epistemic, wouldn't suffice to justify such a fundamental ontological break in the nature of reality.

Common sense, you mean "argumentum ad populum"?

The rest of your concepts are silly at best, wave forms exist.

they do do disappear and reappear at every interaction that is considered an observation.

There is no 'collapse of the wave function', there are interactions of wave functions, some of which result in constraint on the further propagation of the wave form. The more accurate statement would be 'interaction of the waveforms' as the superposition of wave forms in the CI is sort of dated in expression.

There is no reason to even pretend that something is likely not objective at the quantum level. The waveforms are objective, they are causal, they are just not deterministic in the classical sense.

So perhaps philosophical interpretation of QM terminology should be explored to a greater extent. And the boundaries of the QM interpretation elucidated prior to attaching philosophical meaning.

 

[Bernardo]

Not really, which is why you left before, you are good at rhetoric and not substance.

A comment I find very appropriate to you. I come here to be disagreed with by people who argue their case with substance, so I learn something. But I never really got anything out of you, with your authoritative but hollow rhetoric and bluffs.

Leggett's inequality is false from the start, the first postulate of the inequality is violated by QM from the start, so I take it either you don't really know what Leggett's inequality means or don't really understand the start of QM. An object will never meet the first condition, as it is an aggregate of the Psi Schroedinger equations.

You are trying to invert the onus of substantiation here, a well-known dialectic fallacy; and you're naive to think I will fall for that. The onus is on you to explain how the authors of the paper and the reviewers of Nature magazine could be so obviously wrong. How is it that the specific inequalities discussed in the paper, and verified experimentally, can be reconciled with realist theories? Please explain it to me and the world, because right now that doesn't seem very clear. The Nature paper argues they cannot be reconciled unless non-contextuality is given up. From the paper:

"In the experiment, we measure previously untested correlations between two entangled photons, and show that these correlations violate an inequality proposed by Leggett for non-local realistic theories. Our result suggests that giving up the concept of locality is not sufficient to be consistent with quantum experiments, unless certain intuitive features of realism are abandoned."

(The 'intuitive features' he is talking about is non-contextuality, which I am sure you know.)

You argue there isn't even an issue to begin with. Care to explain how such paper could be so terribly wrong? Even Alan Aspect takes this seriously. You are saying that not only I am full of crap, but the authors of the paper and many other physicists. Please enlighten us, then. No, wait... better yet: Write a letter to the editor of Nature magazine and explain to him how a 14-page paper he published is blatantly wrong even in its premises, let alone its conclusions.

The lightness with which you bluff your way around here is astonishing.

PS: Here is the entire abstract, for whoever finds it interesting:

"Most working scientists hold fast to the concept of 'realism' - a viewpoint according to which an external reality exists independent of observation. But quantum physics has shattered some of our cornerstone beliefs. According to Bell's theorem, any theory that is based on the joint assumption of realism and locality (meaning that local events cannot be affected by actions in space-like separated regions) is at variance with certain quantum predictions. Experiments with entangled pairs of particles have amply conrmed these quantum predictions, thus rendering local realistic theories untenable. Maintaining realism as a fundamental concept would therefore necessitate the introduction of 'spooky' actions that defy locality. Here we show by both theory and experiment that a broad and rather reasonable class of such non-local realistic theories is incompatible with experimentally observable quantum correlations. In the experiment, we measure previously untested correlations between two entangled photons, and show that these correlations violate an inequality proposed by Leggett for non-local realistic theories. Our result suggests that giving up the concept of locality is not sufficient to be consistent with quantum experiments, unless certain intuitive features of realism are abandoned."

 

[Bernardo]

Common sense, you mean "argumentum ad populum"?

The rest of your concepts are silly at best, wave forms exist.

they do do disappear and reappear at every interaction that is considered an observation.

There is no 'collapse of the wave function', there are interactions of wave functions, some of which result in constraint on the further propagation of the wave form. The more accurate statement would be 'interaction of the waveforms' as the superposition of wave forms in the CI is sort of dated in expression.

There is no reason to even pretend that something is likely not objective at the quantum level. The waveforms are objective, they are causal, they are just not deterministic in the classical sense.

So perhaps philosophical interpretation of QM terminology should be explored to a greater extent. And the boundaries of the QM interpretation elucidated prior to attaching philosophical meaning.

What an amazing series of unsubstantiated pronouncements; bluffs. You are saying ever so lightly that psi is obviously ontic, when large segments of the physics community consider psi merely epistemic. You are saying that collapse is an illusion (so I assume you adopt MWI) while large segments of the physics community believe collapse to be real. You make all these statements as if they were undisputed, or at least consensus, which is false. You don't seem to understand the status quo in physics today, and to have such a narrow view of science that you pass your opinions for established fact. It would be sad if it weren't kinda cute in a self-defeating sort-of-way.

Forgive me if I don't waste my time replying to you anymore; I just can't muster enough respect for that, despite goodwill.

 

[marplots]

(some snipped)
My formulation of idealism does not deny the regularities and patterns of reality either. I acknowledge the regularities we call objects or the laws of physics. It's only my ontological interpretation that differs: I think these regularities are the regularities of the flow of mind, not hallucinated echos of an unprovable world outside of mind. In that sense, I think it is perfectly alright to use standard words to refer to objects and phenomena, since language itself has been built under this notion of object/subject duality, which I acknowledge as a useful metaphor.

I think you are going to need a Michelson–Morley type experiment to find out if the aether you describe is real or a convenient fiction. The default for the materialist is always going to be the pragmatic, "Well, it seems to work out pretty well."

But isn't that the rub? Any result has to agree with my description of the world, even when that description is what's under attack. We need the unicorns in our proof that unicorns are a fiction. There's an odd recursive element here.

I am reminded of the search for neutrinos.

 

[Bernardo]

I think you are going to need a Michelson–Morley type experiment to find out if the aether you describe is real or a convenient fiction.

What 'aether'? I am describing no aether whatsoever. The only ontological primitive of my formulation is mind itself, the one thing nobody can ever deny, however one purports to explain it. After all, mind is the 'medium' of all knowledge. When I say the 'medium' I'm using the word in a metaphorical way, not as a literal material in the world outside. Mind is the subject, the knower, not the object of knowledge.

Idealism is the more skeptical metaphysics, as I tried to illustrate here: http://www.bernardokastrup.com/2012/01/our-future-sanity.html

The default for the materialist is always going to be the pragmatic, "Well, it seems to work out pretty well."

The discussion of operational effectiveness, as far as the ability to make predictions, is quite decoupled from metaphysics. Idealism does not deny the patterns and regularities of nature we came to call the laws of physics. It simply interprets them differently as far as ontology. As such, Idealism is at least as effective as materialism in predictive power, and I would say more effective in certain senses, as I explained here: http://www.bernardokastrup.com/2012/07/rational-evidence-based-non-materialist.html

We know from philosophy of science that models are ontologically-neutral. So the link you are trying to establish is not valid.

But isn't that the rub? Any result has to agree with my description of the world, even when that description is what's under attack. We need the unicorns in our proof that unicorns are a fiction. There's an odd recursive element here.

I am reminded of the search for neutrinos.

It seems to be a staple of this board for people to try and make this kind of silly, vacuous, smart-ass statement as if they were some sign of intellectual prowess. Curious... very curious...

 

[Bernardo]

Guys, once again, I am getting nothing out of this. Frankly, there has been absolutely nothing of substance in the criticism I got so far. The reason for my investing time in here is to get proper criticism. It's my second attempt and second disappointment.

This whole discussion seems to be a kind of theater where people compete to try to 'look smart' or something, with little regard to true curiosity and intellectual honesty. Time is too precious for me; I'm interested in authenticity.

And I am OK if you tell yourself that I am bailing out.

So long!

 

[marplots]

What 'aether'? I am describing no aether whatsoever. The only ontological primitive of my formulation is mind itself, the one thing nobody can ever deny, however one purports to explain it.

It isn't a denial of mind, but a disagreement about the properties which ends up being the same thing. So, for example, I experience it, but the meaning may be different -- it's darn tough to pin down just exactly what needs describing, even before you start to talk ontology.

After all, mind is the 'medium' of all knowledge. When I say the 'medium' I'm using the word in a metaphorical way, not as a literal material in the world outside. Mind is the subject, the knower, not the object of knowledge.

But isn't that precisely what we are up to? Knowing the knower?

The discussion of operational effectiveness, as far as the ability to make predictions, is quite decoupled from metaphysics.

I disagree. The operational effectiveness is one place to stand, a type of unbiased judge of matters (although this too can be disputed). It also gives an "aboutness" to the discussion of metaphysics. Do we actually care about the subject if it's all just logic and symbolism with no application? We might as well play chess.

Idealism does not deny the patterns and regularities of nature we came to call the laws of physics. It simply interprets them differently as far as ontology. As such, Idealism is at least as effective as materialism in predictive power, and I would say more effective in certain senses, as I explained here: http://www.bernardokastrup.com/2012/07/rational-evidence-based-non-materialist.html

I'll have to read it to comment, but are we going down the "hidden variable" path?

It seems to be a staple of this board for people to try and make this kind of silly, vacuous, smart-ass statement as if they were some sign of intellectual prowess. Curious... very curious...

I'll try harder. My guess is we are participating in a "Curse of Knowledge" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curse_of_knowledge) type discussion where you've traveled this road many times and I'm still exploring the topic. This might explain why some comments seem so shallow to you.

 

[marplots]

There's a problem in materialism that springs from using the material (in this framing, it includes energy) to measure the material. Eventually, we get at the roots -- any attempt to measure something at a fine enough level disturbs the thing you want to measure and the enterprise can go no further.

I wonder if there's a parallel with mind and thinking about thinking? Perhaps we should expect the layering to be impenetrable at some point, simply because we are using mind to examine mind.

 

[Dancing David]

A comment I find very appropriate to you. I come here to be disagreed with by people who argue their case with substance, so I learn something. But I never really got anything out of you, with your authoritative but hollow rhetoric and bluffs.



You are trying to invert the onus of substantiation here, a well-known dialectic fallacy; and you're naive to think I will fall for that. The onus is on you to explain how the authors of the paper and the reviewers of Nature magazine could be so obviously wrong.

because leggetts in equality, is wrong, so it doesn't amtter. It is not Bell's inequality.

I will ask you again, what is the first condiftion of Leggett's inequality?

Do you know, or have you confused it with Bell's inequality?

How is it that the specific inequalities discussed in the paper, and verified experimentally, can be reconciled with realist theories? Please explain it to me and the world, because right now that doesn't seem very clear.

Which realism are you discussing here, there are different kinds, the paper in teh post I responded to is about Leggett's inequality, I think you are confused.

The Nature paper argues they cannot be reconciled unless non-contextuality is given up.

You have confused two papers. or posted the wrong link in teh post I responded to?

From the paper:

(The 'intuitive features' he is talking about is non-contextuality, which I am sure you know.)

You argue there isn't even an issue to begin with. Care to explain how such paper could be so terribly wrong? Even Alan Aspect takes this seriously. You are saying that not only I am full of crap, but the authors of the paper and many other physicists. Please enlighten us, then. No, wait... better yet: Write a letter to the editor of Nature magazine and explain to him how a 14-page paper he published is blatantly wrong even in its premises, let alone its conclusions.

The lightness with which you bluff your way around here is astonishing.

PS: Here is the entire abstract, for whoever finds it interesting:

"Most working scientists hold fast to the concept of 'realism' - a viewpoint according to which an external reality exists independent of observation. But quantum physics has shattered some of our cornerstone beliefs. According to Bell's theorem, any theory that is based on the joint assumption of realism and locality (meaning that local events cannot be affected by actions in space-like separated regions) is at variance with certain quantum predictions. Experiments with entangled pairs of particles have amply conrmed these quantum predictions, thus rendering local realistic theories untenable. Maintaining realism as a fundamental concept would therefore necessitate the introduction of 'spooky' actions that defy locality. Here we show by both theory and experiment that a broad and rather reasonable class of such non-local realistic theories is incompatible with experimentally observable quantum correlations. In the experiment, we measure previously untested correlations between two entangled photons, and show that these correlations violate an inequality proposed by Leggett for non-local realistic theories. Our result suggests that giving up the concept of locality is not sufficient to be consistent with quantum experiments, unless certain intuitive features of realism are abandoned."

 

[Dancing David]

Berabrado,

This is the link you posted and in the post I responded to :
http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/2007/apr/20/quantum-physics-says-goodbye-to-reality


this is the reasearch discussed in teha rticle:
"Markus Aspelmeyer, Anton Zeilinger and colleagues from the University of Vienna, however, have now shown that realism is more of a problem than locality in the quantum world. They devised an experiment that violates a different inequality proposed by physicist Anthony Leggett in 2003 that relies only on realism, and relaxes the reliance on locality. To do this, rather than taking measurements along just one plane of polarization, the Austrian team took measurements in additional, perpendicular planes to check for elliptical polarization."

Now this is the research mentioned in the paper, it is about Leggett's inequality not Bell's.

Now not suprisingly, there are different kinds of realism and models that sue that term in the physics around QM,

so i ask you again because it is important:

What is the first postulate of Leggett's inequality? Leggett's reference to a non-QM interpetation or one that is incorrect.

here I will be dumb and show you exactly what this is about:

"The Leggett–Garg inequality[1], named for Anthony James Leggett and Anupam Garg, is a mathematical inequality fulfilled by all macrorealistic physical theories. Here, macrorealism (macroscopic realism) is a classical worldview defined by the conjunction of two postulates:[1]

Macrorealism per se: "A macroscopic object, which has available to it two or more macroscopically distinct states, is at any given time in a definite one of those states."

Noninvasive measurability: "It is possible in principle to determine which of these states the system is in without any effect on the state itself, or on the subsequent system dynamics.""

Did you even read what it was before you started talking about it?

Do you know enough about QM to understand that QM qill always violate Leggett's inequalities, neither postulate is true.

http://www.nature.com/srep/2011/110926/srep00101/full/srep00101.html

Introduced as the Bell inequalities in time, the violation of LG inequalities excludes the hidden-variable description based on the above two assumptions. We experimentally investigated the single photon LG inequalities under decoherence simulated by birefringent media. These generalized LG inequalities test the evolution trajectory of the photon and are shown to be maximally violated in a coherent evolution process. The violation of LG inequalities becomes weaker with the increase of interaction time in the environment. The ability to violate the LG inequalities can be used to set a boundary of the classical realistic description.

So this is not about QM and its use of realism, and this is not about classical mechanics and realism, this is about an incorrect attempt to create a definition between the two, and Leggetts postulates are violated by QM right off the bat.

And here is teh final paragraph of teh discussion:

In summary, we experimentally violated two generalized LG inequalities in an all-optical system using a CNOT gate. The violation of generalized LG inequalities disproves the definite classical evolution trajectory of the single qubit20 and implies that at least one of the two assumptions in the classical realistic description is untenable. The ability to violate LG inequalities can be used to set the boundary of the classical realistic description.

Well duh, you can not use macroscopic scale interactions to model QM systems, that si a given in QM, the behavior of teh quantum realm is what it is.

So the violation of Leggett's inequality means that you can not define QM events by classical models.

Duh.

So in Leggett's definition of realism, yes, QM violates Leggetts inequality, which is established by the two postulates from the get go.

A macroscopic object is not going to be in a range of definable eigenstates, it will be decoherent and a mishmash of all the sub states of teh whole system.

There for it will never meet the first of Leggetts postulates.

Leggett's second postulate makes no sense either, there is no observational interaction taht does not change a QM system, even if it is part of a macroscopic object.

So a paper saying that QM violates Leggett's inequality is no surprise, duh. You can not model macroscopic objects as QM, not can you model QM objects as macroscopic.

DUH. So Leggett's definition of realism is false, there are many other used in physics and QM.

 

[Daylightstar]

Bernardo, could you point out how the conclusions of the paper you linked to support (unlike "not dispute") your above hilited statement?

I didn't say that the Nature paper concludes that the aspects of physical reality we unveil through the study of entanglement are part of physical reality; I thought such conclusion was common-sense. If you don't think so, you are then assuming a mechanism for reality to transform itself fundamentally from something that is likely not objective (but mental instead) at a microscopic level, to something that is strongly objective at a macroscopic level. Even collapse of the wave function, whether psi is ontic or epistemic, wouldn't suffice to justify such a fundamental ontological break in the nature of reality.

^{Hilite by Daylightstar}
I did not claim that you said that the Nature paper concluded that.
You said:

... the conclusions extracted from entanglement experiments do apply to reality at large. ...

Then you said:

... This is not what is disputed as far as the conclusion of the paper, ...

Then I wondered whether/how you thought the paper supported your statement*:

... the conclusions extracted from entanglement experiments do apply to reality at large. ...

Since you said about it:

... This is not what is disputed as far as the conclusion of the paper, ...

So I prepared the following post asking you to clarify how the conclusions of the paper you linked to support (unlike "not dispute") your statement concerning the applicability of results from entanglement experiments to reality at large scale:

... the conclusions extracted from entanglement experiments do apply to reality at large. This is not what is disputed as far as the conclusion of the paper, ...

Bernardo, could you point out how the conclusions of the paper you linked to support (unlike "not dispute") your above hilited statement?

In stead of you telling me what you think about the support for your (hilited by me) statement, you are telling me what I am possibly assuming about reality transforming itself in a context which is entirely assumed by you.

Would you please be so kind as to explain how the conclusions of the paper you linked to support (unlike "not dispute") your above hilited statement?

Please, no bombastic (sorry, but that's how your post came across) rhetoric, just a plain and simple answer to my question:

Bernardo, could you point out how the conclusions of the paper you linked to support (unlike "not dispute") your above hilited statement?

Thank you