Which Quantum Mechanical Interpretation to you Like/Prefer?

[pocaracas]

Well, I had QM in college.... 3 semesters... Just shut up and calculate.
I'm not a philosopher... but it was always my impression that the unpredictability in QM was attached to our inability to measure anything individually.... it's always a statistical measurement.
Then again, you can tele-transport a photon, nowadays...

[Kayenneh]

Yeah.. I can barely grasp basic physics, QM is waaaay beyond me.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vY_Ry8J_jdw

Fascinating subject though!

[Chas]

The mathematics describe observation and predict behavior - it is a model, not reality.

There seem to be a dozen or two interpretations. I haven't studied more than a couple, but I will.
However, I reject any interpretation that implies the observer affects reality.


I think a team like Dennett and Hofstadter is what we need for explaining QM.

[Cato]

All quantum phenomenons that are ever observed happen at a distance greater than a Planck length.
The Planck length is actually much smaller than any of our current instrument can measure.
More than that, many physicists believe that we can never measure anything with size less than the Planck length regardless of technology advances.

I think your "pet peeve" is about quantum mysticism, not about quantum phenomenon at distances greater than a Planck length.

I understand this and gave examples of such. You are perhaps right regarding quantum mysticism, but at a certain point it all becomes a form of mysticism due to the measurement problem and applying quantum mechanics to systems and particles larger than electrons.

I'm all for creative ideas that may help guide future research, but we simply don't yet have enough understanding to take any of the proposals seriously. The mathematical formalism places boundaries on scientists that mystics like Chopra can ignore; however, some ideas strain credulity; the problems with the von Neumann interpretation that you pointed out is an excellent example.

There isn't a shred of evidence that quantum phenomenon can be responsible for consciousness. I posit that if it were, we would expect to have evidence of consciousness in non living entities. The fact that a vast majority of living things don't display characteristics approaching what we call consciousness should be revealing when pondering this. To me this indicates that conscioiusness should be bounded by carbon based organic chemistry, not quantum physics (getting to the quantum is too regressive at this point and we would lose sight of the forest for the trees).

The danger in not taking a skeptical position like this is succumbing to some anthropic tug. This in turn results in ideas that are simply a few equations removed from mysticism and pure conjecture.

[Anomalocaris]

For me, what your preference might be is meaningless, unless you have a plausible way to distinguish the likelihood of that which you prefer from those of every other alternative.

Otherwise "prefer" is the same as "Whaaaaah, I want!!!!!!"

[MindForgedManacle]

Why do you sympathize with Many-worlds interpretation?
Do you believe that there exist other worlds beside the one we live in?

I think it's a reasonable interpretation of quantum mechanics and does away with a lot of the apparent paradoxes and such, like the EPR paradox. As for whether I think there really are other worlds, I don't know. I sort of end up at the same position as with many other scientific theories, in that it's a way of making sense of the world, but whether or not the world is really like that isn't always an easy question.

[Theo Zacharias]

I understand this and gave examples of such. You are perhaps right regarding quantum mysticism, but at a certain point it all becomes a form of mysticism due to the measurement problem and applying quantum mechanics to systems and particles larger than electrons.

Why it all becomes a form of mysticism due to the measurement problem and applying quantum mechanics to systems and particles larger than electrons?
QM has been applied to particles larger than electrons, for example superconductivity, diamagnetism and spectroscopy which are all QM phenomenon happens on a scale much larger than electrons. Are you saying that these phenomenons are a form of mysticism?

I'm all for creative ideas that may help guide future research, but we simply don't yet have enough understanding to take any of the proposals seriously.

Actually taking some of the idea on the interpretation seriously can help developing the theory even further. One of the example of this is quantum decoherence. Quantum decoherence was originally an idea applied to Bohm interpretation and then used by Everett as a core of his many-world interpretation. It was then ignored for many years. Now, it's part of QM itself (not just part of its interpretations). Had the idea been taken seriously and not ignored for so many years back then by most physicists, we would have much more progress on the research related to it.

The mathematical formalism places boundaries on scientists that mystics like Chopra can ignore; however, some ideas strain credulity; the problems with the von Neumann interpretation that you pointed out is an excellent example.

Are you saying that there is a mathematical formulation in QM that places boundaries on von Neumann interpretation?
From my understanding, there is no such boundaries on Schrödinger equation, its relativistic version Dirac equation and any other mathematical formulations that I know. Other than that, as far as I know most of QM interpretations are conducted based on shared assumptions on the mathematical foundation. John von Neumann himself was actually a mathematician who help developing mathematical formulation of QM.

There isn't a shred of evidence that quantum phenomenon can be responsible for consciousness. I posit that if it were, we would expect to have evidence of consciousness in non living entities. The fact that a vast majority of living things don't display characteristics approaching what we call consciousness should be revealing when pondering this. To me this indicates that conscioiusness should be bounded by carbon based organic chemistry, not quantum physics (getting to the quantum is too regressive at this point and we would lose sight of the forest for the trees).

The problem is that consciousness is ill-defined. We don't even have an accepted theory to test the existence of consciousness. If there is an android as sophisticated as Data in Star Trek that behaves similar to human, how can we tell that it's consciousness or not? How can we tell that it really fells pain or just simulate the behavior of feeling pain?

You seems to conclude that consciousness should be bounded by carbon based organic chemistry because a vast majority of non-living things don't display characteristics approaching what we call consciousness. Well, my question is: what exactly are characteristics approaching what we call consciousness that you're talking about? Take Data as an example. Does Data fulfill your requirement as something that has consciousness? Are you a functionalist? Or maybe you don't believe that computer scientist working on artificial intelligence will ever be able to create an android as sophisticated as Data even in million of years?

The danger in not taking a skeptical position like this is succumbing to some anthropic tug. This in turn results in ideas that are simply a few equations removed from mysticism and pure conjecture.

Agree that we should be skeptical. But being skeptical does not necessarily mean that we should reject the idea. I myself will wait until we have enough knowledge in this area, i.e. until at least we have an accepted theory to test the existence of consciousness. Until then, if someone asks me whether quantum phenomena has anything to do with consciousness, I will say "I don't know". I won't accept the idea but I won't reject it either.

I think it's a reasonable interpretation of quantum mechanics and does away with a lot of the apparent paradoxes and such, like the EPR paradox. As for whether I think there really are other worlds, I don't know. I sort of end up at the same position as with many other scientific theories, in that it's a way of making sense of the world, but whether or not the world is really like that isn't always an easy question.

I don't think you need to adopt any QM interpretations to solve the EPR paradox. The EPR paradox as originally written on the EPR paper is the apparent contradiction between QM and the thought experiment designed on the paper. According to QM, we cannot know the exact value of a particle's position and momentum simultaneously. But according to the thought experiment designed on the paper, we can know that. This is the paradox. Bell's theorem combined with several experiments to test Bell's inequalities showed that the prediction of QM is true. Thus, the paradox was resolved without resorting to any QM interpretations.

The interpretations are needed if we want to speculate what really happen on the EPR experiment regarding to locality. QM interpretations such as Copenhagen, many-worlds, Bohm, etc. have a different way answering this question. But they are all agree that the conclusion on the original EPR paper is not correct, i.e. that we cannot know the exact value of a particle's position and momentum simultaneously.