funnily enough, that’s exactly the argument that you seem to be making. “reality” is perceived by us precisely because it is a social construct that is useful to us, and therefore it has to be simple.

I’m only saying the language we use to describe reality is socially constructed and “fuzzy.”

I am a direct realist, I believe you can perceive reality directly for what it really is. You just cannot capture what it really is in words. My words describing my dog will always be “fuzzy.” But if I just go look at my dog and hug my dog and don’t think words at all, nothing about that is fuzzy.

The raw perceptions are real, and each perception really is equivalent to the totality of all that there is. That may seem weird to say, because if I cannot see you right now, then does that mean you don’t exist? No, I can see you right now, just not in fine detail. Your body has mass, and that mass has a gravitational pull, and as you move, as your heart beats, it sends out gravitational waves. These are too subtle for me to notice but technically they do make an impression on me as well as slightly move everything around me, and if somehow I could notice, collect, and process all of that information, I could derive where you are purely from what is right in front of me right now.

But, in practice, I can’t do that. When we change vantage points, we don’t go from black-and-white experiencing things to not experiencing things. It’s an infinite gradation, where we go from seeing things with high fidelity to low fidelity. Things we see with high fidelity are easy to notice, process, contemplate, etc. But things we see with low fidelity are much more difficult to notice. But noticing something is not the same as not seeing it. If I watch a film and don’t pay attention at all to the background characters, so if you later ask me what was the color of the shirt of one of the background characters, and I report I did not know, that doesn’t prove I did not see it, I just didn’t pay attention to it. Even the stuff in front of me that is too subtle to pick out and notice, I am still seeing it, in the sense that, mathematically, it really does make a slight different on the impression on my virtual cortex.

In everything experience, we really do see all of reality at once. We just don’t see it all in equal levels of fidelity, and changing vantage points changes only the fidelity of what we are perceiving, to make certain things easier to notice. But every perception implicates the whole.

That is a point of view that is basically impossible for most modern philosophers to understand because they are obsessed with representionalism which falsely conflates experience (reality) with consciousness (awareness), which are entirely different things. They treat everything we experience as part of consciousness, but since reality is obviously independent of consciousness, then that makes reality itself independent of experience, and if you can’t experience it, then how can you even know it exists? This then devolves into idealism, solipsism, the hard problem, the mind-body problem, etc.

But I reject the whole framework because experience and consciousness are not the same thing. Experience is just direct reality for what it really is, in its full totality. It does not enter consciousness unless I become aware of it and start thinking about it.

What I am disagreeing with is that the “physical worldview” even comes entirely from the empirical evidence to begin with. The empirical evidence gives you a body of mathematics, but you have to apply another layer of philosophical interpretation on top of the mathematics to get to a “physical worldview.”

I thus am arguing that the same body of mathematics, and thus empirical evidence, without any modification at all, is compatible with multiple “physical worldviews,” i.e. different “ways of thinking about it,” and I am arguing that my way of thinking about SR is actually more logically consistent than the standard way.

Energy being conserved is not just practically wrong but empirically wrong, as you said yourself, on large scales you can observe it being wrong and energy conservation failing. I am explicitly talking about different ways of viewing the same body of mathematics where there is no empirical method to distinguish between the two interpretations.

A simple example is fields. Most physicists believe the mathematics of fields, involving the assignment of a set of numbers to every point in space, corresponds to an ontological field, whereby they imagine an invisible object piloting particles around. They always speak of the fields as objects in the world that “cause” things to do something.

But we could equally argue that the mathematics of fields is just a way of describing the dispositions of particles. That is to say, the particles just move on their own. There is no invisible entity piloting them around, but this is not to deny the mathematics of fields, but rather, to interpret the mathematics of fields as a way of describing the dispositions of particles.

The mathematics of fields and the ontology of fields are not the same thing and the former doesn’t necessarily imply the latter. And so we can interpret the same body of mathematics, and thus empirical evidence, without denying the mathematics of fields at all, but only denying the ontology of fields. This would not lead to any new predictions, but it would give you a different way of “thinking about” the same body mathematics.

(I didn’t downvote you FYI. The other person did.)

This is just an identity paradox, which the literature is full of them, and I find Plato’s solution way less convincing than the holistic solutions presented by people like Engels and Bohm.

The holistic solution is to argue that “identity” really doesn’t exist. There was never a “river” to begin with. Reality is just not actually divided up into autonomous objects. As Bohm argued, autonomous objects are human inventions. We create them because talking about reality as a whole, all at once, is not physically possible with our finite brains. We have to break it up into chunks to talk about it, and it is a mistake to confuse those chunks for reality, as if reality really contains autonomous objects moving around within it.

This was something Engels also cautioned against, outright rejecting identity for a simple reason. Imagine you say that this particular tree is represented by the variable A. Well, the moment you have said the tree is A, the tree has already changed a bit, it’s not what it was before, so it is now ¬A. If you say both A and ¬A are the same, that’s logically inconsistent. If you say the tree at the instantaneously later time should be considered a different variable B, then you no longer have a single “tree” but an infinite number of distinct objects, which contradicts with the notion of there being a single tree.

Indeed, he points to many other problems, such as the fact that you cannot meaningfully draw a concrete border for where the tree begins in space and where it ends, and where it begins in time (when it was “born”) and when it ends (when it dies). If you zoom in closely enough, the border between the “tree” and everything else becomes fuzzy and ill-defined, and its transition from a seed to a tree, and from a tree back to the earth, also is a gradual process without a well-defined boundary. Engels thus concludes that for formal logic to make sense at all, we intentionally have to ignore the real complexity of the world. If we say the tree is A, for example, we have to first ignore the flow of time and treat it completely static, and we have to not zoom in too closely so that we don’t notice the issue with ill-defined borders, so on and so forth.

The conclusion is, again, that objects don’t really exist. There is no “tree” or “river” that is a well-defined, static and unchanging object like the variables in formal logic, A or B or X or Z. This is where your Plato point breaks down. You replace the ill-defined river with another definition including an ill-defined “shape of the landscape,” which is also changing all the time just as much as the river does, with no singular and consistent “shape of the landscape,” and its very precise shape is impossible to rigorously define even at a single time instant.

Although, the philosopher Jocelyn Benoist, who does take a similar approach, disagrees with the framing of saying that “objects don’t exist,” because a philosophy that just says no thing exists can be linguistically confusing, so there should be some meaningful way to refer to the existence of real objects.

He makes a distinction between abstract objects, which do not exist in reality and are only a human construct part of our language, and real objects, which is when the linguistic symbol is employed in a Wittgensteinian language game, and thus is imbued with a context.

For example, Benoist would say that, if you are talking about a river in the abstract, it does not refer to anything real. But the word “river” serves as a socially constructed norm that can be used to judge reality to be something, and thus can be employed in a social setting. If I see a river and point to it, and say, “look at that river over there,” the river is now not just an abstract symbol, but it is a symbol pointing to something in a real world context, where people can really observe its glistening surface, dip their toes in it and feel its cold water, etc.

It’s meaningful to talk about real objects only if we are implicitly or explicitly imbuing that object (as a symbol) with a real-world context (where the symbol is employed to identify something in real-world experience) through the social practice of identification, which is the purpose of objects, to serve as a norm by which to judge reality by. The real object is thus the object + the context in which it is employed.

For 99% of people, that is what they can observe in their daily lives, and it’s the simplest model that “gets the job done”

Well, for me, 99% is not good enough. I want 100% compatibility, not just with what I observe in my day-to-day life, but with all empirical evidence ever gathered and recorded by humanity.

The thing is that Occam’s razor is not just a philosophical argument. It comes from practical thinking. The thing is, our brains are a computer too. So they need software…

You’re explaining the process you believe leads to people employing Occam’s razor. That doesn’t justify the usage of the razor. This is basically an is/ought thing. You describing an “is” (the process that causes it) doesn’t get you to an “ought” (that the razor should be logically employed in all cases).

Also, as I said, one can mount a strong argument against Occam’s razor in this case.

Particularly, special relativity without assuming an absolute rest frame is not logically compatible with non-local effects, yet quantum mechanics is non-local. The physicists Frauchiger and Renner directly proved in a paper published in Nature Communications that this leads to a time-paradox without specifying an absolute time-ordering of events.

Well, they argued there are two other ways to avoid the time-paradox as well. One is to just claim quantum mechanics is wrong, which I don’t think it’s wrong. The other is to posit that there is a multiverse, because maybe two observers describe the same system in contradictory and logically incompatible ways because they are actually describing two different branches of the multiverse.

However, Jeffrey Bub in his paper “Two Dogmas’ Redux” shows mathematically that this doesn’t work, because the paradox can be proved to be completely confined to a single branch of the wavefunction, so it cannot be resolved by considering higher branches. While Frauchiger and Renner posit that the multiverse may solve the problem in their paper (and indeed say this in many interviews), Bub proved they are wrong, and it is still inconsistent.

The only logically consistent conclusion, then, is that there is an absolute time-ordering.

When I said I could mount a strong argument against it, my point was not merely that I’d throw out Occam’s razor in this case. If I offer no meaningful alternative, then it doesn’t really strengthen my case that one can mount a reasonable defense.

But my point is stronger than that. I am pitting two different assumptions against one another: (1) Occam’s razor, and (2) the view that your worldview should be logically consistent. I am pointing out that applying #1 in this case violates #2, and that I believe #2 is more important here.

Can I prove it’s more important? No, but I think I could convince a lot of people who were willing to listen.

You missed the part where metaphysicians claim that what they are doing isn’t metaphysics at all, but science and logic, or something along those lines.

No, I didn’t. I agree with that. I have literally written an entire book criticizing how people conflate the mathematical models of modern physics with philosophical interpretations of those models, and then pretend their metaphysics is not philosophy but something “proved by the empirical evidence.”

The book was motivated precisely by the question I raised in my previous comment: does the common man’s position really have to be abandoned?

Philosophers, including physicists who write philosophy, very commonly point to modern physics as establishing the need to abandon certain common worldviews and adopt a new metaphysics. But they often present this not as metaphysics, but as something directly established by empirical reality, such that questioning it is treated as equivalent to denying science.

One example is the dominant interpretation of special relativity, which claims that space and time are ontologically relative. We can experimentally verify that clocks drift from one another exactly as the mathematics predicts, such as when two airplanes fly in opposite directions and meet again. The conclusion is then presented as empirically proven: space and time themselves must be relative.

But John Bell pointed out in “How to Teach Special Relativity” that the same mathematics can be given a different philosophical interpretation while preserving the same empirical predictions.

You can instead assume that spacetime is absolute, while objects in motion undergo physical effects that cause moving clocks to slow and rulers in the direction of motion to contract. The measurements of rods and clocks would then be emergent properties produced by absolute space and time plus these physical effects. The mathematics remains the same, but its ontological interpretation changes.

If physicists object that such an absolute rest frame could never be experimentally identified, that does not prove it does not exist. It means only that its existence is empirically undetermined. At that point, the usual response is Occam’s razor: if we cannot directly detect such a frame, we should eliminate it from our ontology.

My point is not that this is wrong. It may be a perfectly reasonable philosophical choice. My point is that Occam’s razor is a philosophical argument.

You have not empirically proven that space and time are relative. You have shown that relativity follows from the mathematics given a particular interpretation of what the mathematics represents. Choosing that interpretation over another requires an additional philosophical argument. If there were motivation to make an argument in response (which is a whole other topic, but I argue one can mount a strong counterargument), then it would lead to a philosophical debate, and that debate could not be settled empirically.

This is the broader point I am making: the same mathematics can be compatible with multiple ontological interpretations. Empirical evidence can constrain those interpretations, but it does not necessarily determine them uniquely.

So, if you are an extremely conservative skeptic who refuses to abandon the common man’s worldview unless doing so is strictly necessary, you can always ask whether the new worldview actually follows necessarily from the mathematics and empirical evidence.

Often, it doesn’t. The physical evidence motivates the metaphysical debate, but it does not wholly determine its outcome.

For me the bias is not just in making idealist views look “higher IQ” but that they depict a person who just has the most basic self-evident views that are the most widespread and commonplace among people who don’t do philosophy at all (that there exists a material objective reality) as only possessing those views because they just got them from the television.

I think this is very common in philosophy, where people want to sound more interesting by positing very bizarre towers of metaphysics, which they claim are justified by some incredibly intellectual line of reasoning. They then paint normies as stupid for not believing that for not following their lengthy complex line of reasoning.

But quite often these lengthy complex lines of reasoning are just the author tricking themselves out of an obvious conclusion, by writing so much they obfuscate what is being talked about, so then it makes it look like their bizarre conclusions logically follow, when anyone who actually takes the time to parse that metaphysical tower will find it does not.

But they rely precisely on the fact that nobody will bother to parse it because it is too complicated, and then use the complexity as a sign of the “intellectualism” of the position.

I’ve always been a fan of defending the common man’s views by analyzing arguments against it, going over the tower of metaphysics and seeing if their conclusions really do follow and prove the common man wrong. I’ve never found any argument that necessitates they are wrong. Sometimes the arguments are strong enough such that you have to make some additional clarifications, but that only serves to better flesh out the position rather than to dismantle it, so there is nothing inherently “stupid” about the common position.

The author’s bias in this is rather… apparent lol

Broke: “Somethings are illusions, some aren’t.”

Woke: “Everything is an illusion.”

Bespoke: “There is no such thing as an illusion.”

Now, the apparent impossibility of basing ‘the correct knowledge’ … on our perception says less about our perception and more about the conceptual framework we attempt to apply to it. Our perception is really just perception of what there is. … In itself there is no ‘illusion’ here, only full contact with reality … However, there seems to be a gap between the perceptual presence of these things and the concepts we try to apply to them … The answer does not lie in the nature of this particular kind of perception, but rather in the nature of the conceptual apparatus through which we view it. For the very concepts we use in such cases … are rooted in perception … these concepts, that is, concepts that have made perception itself a norm, do play a central role. Thus, the notion of ‘perceptual illusion,’ … in fact registers a gap between the specific way in which we are presented with things in a given perception and the general perceptual determination that imbues some of our concepts. … We call those features of perception that are left outside the system of our perceptual concepts … ‘perceptual illusions.’ … The question is not whether in itself our perception conforms to a norm … but rather how much of the perceived we have incorporated into our definition of that norm. … illusions, just are perceptions on my account. … we simply have a perception in every case where we may be inclined to say that we do.

— Jocelyn Benoist, “Toward a Contextual Realism”

People use QM to “justify” a whole bunch of woo. I have seen even people with PhDs do it.

Reality is probabilistic and none knows why, almost like someone programmed a video game.

Some video games have probability, especially RPGs, but that is definitely not an inherent feature of video games.

No one knows why quantum outcome changes based on mere observation.

A measurement is an interaction, and an interaction inherently disturbs what it is interacting with. In the macroscopic world, we can avoid this through very subtle measurements that don’t disturb the system enough to matter. But Planck’s constant places an absolute limit on how subtle a disturbance can be. When we measure properties on a small enough scale, you just cannot physically interact with it in a way that is subtle enough to not noticeably disturb it.

I don’t know why people always act like this is beyond human comprehension. It’s not complicated or counterintuitive. It’s just what the physicist Dmitry Blokhintsev referred to as the “finiteness of interaction.” In classical mechanics, we tend to believe that it is always possible to have better precision in your measurement devices, and so infinite precision is conceivably possible, even if practically impossible. However, in quantum mechanics, precision is finite due to h. Infinite precision just is not possible.

You get what I’m saying - just by me looking at the experiment result changes.

You say “just by me looking” as if it’s insignificant.

Yes, on the macroscopic scale, bouncing photons off of things (looking) at something does not (typically) significantly alter its macroscopic properties. But it does alter its microscopic properties, and so on a microscopic scale, it is changing.

Hence, if you are looking at it at a microscopic scale, then bombarding it with photons is going to significantly alter what you see.

I have to observe the reality in order to force it’s hand and render the outcome. Not sure what that means or where that even came from, in regards to what you have said previously. If I were to design a video game I would surely not render the entire world unless someone interacts with it - to conserve resources.

I am not sure how you jumped from “if we try to measure something we change it” to “things aren’t rendered until you look.” That’s a big leap. I don’t know where it came from.

Also, if it were to conserve resources, then no one would bother trying to develop quantum computers, because they would compute less than classical computers. But the fact is they compute more. The mathematical structure of quantum physics is exponentially more complicated than classical physics. If I was designing an efficient video came engine, I would definitely not use quantum physics!

It just does not conserve resources but uses exponentially more resources. That’s just a mathematical fact.

And now there is this: modern work suggests that the extra spatial dimension itself may emerge from quantum entanglement. Roughly: 2D quantum information → entanglement structure → emergent 3D geometry/spacetime.

You say “modern work” but you’re really just talking about speculative papers by String Theorists building on other speculative theories. It’s really just a mathematical curiosity with no way to test it and is certainly not accepted by the broad scientific community.

I don’t know about you, but this sure as hell seems like a graphics engine.

I have never seen a graphics engine that uses 2D quantum information and entanglement to produce 3D effects. What on earth? This is another leap which I am genuinely baffled at where it even came from.

And another thing : At the deepest level, the universe may consist of quantum information and relationships. Space and time emerge from how that information is organized and changes. So… Do I understand it right? “It from bit” as they call it - is this basically like a video game source code? We are “information” floating in space?

You are trying to draw analogies between computers and reality, that reality contains information, and so does computer code, therefore reality is computer code. But the comparison can equally go the opposite direction: computers contain information because reality contains information, and therefore that only proves computers are physical, not that reality is a computer.

I see this fallacious line of reasoning all the time from proponents of the simulation hypothesis, whereby they draw comparisons between computers and physics and then want to declare that this means physical reality is a computer. But computers are parts of physical reality, constructed within it, and have to follow its own laws. And so it is only natural there would be similarities.

Again, similarities between computers and physics only proves that computers are physical. It does not prove reality is a computer.

And why is spacetime quantized? - This is pretty crazy imo.

It’s literally not. In both general relativity and quantum mechanics, it is continuous.

Quantum mechanics does not mean “everything is quantized.” Plenty of things still are continuous, including spacetime.

It is only quantized in some fringe speculative theories which are not even complete and only worked on by a tiny handful of physicists, like Loop Quantum Gravity. I don’t know where you got the idea from that spacetime is quantized. That is definitely not part of contemporary, established physics.

No reason to believe we are in a simulation and nothing about quantum suggests we are.

I do know what happens after death. Rigor mortis.

Well there is no reason to think it is real.

You are fallaciously conflating a mathematical model with your own personal metaphysical interpretation of what the model represents. You are presupposing that a purely mathematical description in terms of a superposition of basis states literally represents, in ontological reality, particles being in multiple states at once, and then when I say I disagree with that metaphysical accounting, you accuse me of denying the physics.

But I am not. I am denying your philosophical accounting of the physics. Nothing about a superposition of basis states implies that particles are in multiple states at once. Do not conflate a mathematical description (superposition) with a specific metaphysical ontology, and don’t accuse others of being science deniers because they disagree with your metaphysics. I do not appreciate that at all.

We also use superposition of basis states in classical statistics as well, and no one in their right mind interprets that as the particle being in multiple states at once. The only thing that makes quantum theory different is that we also have to keep track of a phase, but the phase is mathematically decomposable into a function over its statistical history, and is thus merely a sufficient statistic over the particle’s historical statistical trajectory. The whole theory is mathematically equivalent to a statistical theory with history dependence.

Questions like these stem from the cancer that was the abandonment of “materialism” for “physicalism.” Physicalism has rotted people’s brains to believe that every law of nature needs an underlying “explanation” whereby the explanation is always some invisible entity that is impossible to observe under any possible circumstances but, like the hand of God, pilots the objects we can perceive in order to “explain” why they behave in that way, according to that law.

No, we do not need such an “explanation.” It is perfectly logically consistent to just treat is as nomological. It is a law of nature that tells you how the particles behave. The law is itself the “explanation.” There need not be any underlying invisible entities piloting the objects we perceive to “explain” why their behavior operates according to those natural laws. It is simply in their nature to do so.

The natural laws simply are a function of the historical state of the system. The explanation is the law. There is no deeper, invisible mechanism.

I’ll respond to your argument when you make manage to articulate single point Marx made and rebut it. Otherwise, there is nothing to say.

Lying about having read books is just pathetic dude. If you read a word he wrote you could respond to a word he wrote rather than invent complete delusions out of your behind. You’re now trying to psychoanalyze me and attack my character. You have zero ability to actually respond to ideas because you are too intellectually incurious to actually engage with them at all.

I’m pretty sure this goes against the properties proven of entanglement (Bell test) and how far entanglement can propagate, but I don’t know enough about quantum mechanics to explain why this explanation is incompatible with entanglement.

If you don’t know anything about the topic then maybe you shouldn’t speak on it. Especially when claiming you have debunked peer reviewed papers from Harvard physicists like Jacob Barandes.

However, I don’t currently see how this at all explains computing with superpositions; if it’s just statistics a superposition can never exist

Superposition is a property of statistics. Even classical statics commonly represent the system’s statistical state as a linear combination of basis states. That’s just what a probability distribution is. If you take any courses in statistics, you will superimpose things all the time. This is a mathematical property.

so entanglement doesn’t exist; so quantum algorithms wouldn’t be possible, but we know they are.

Quantum advantage obviously comes from the phase of the quantum state. If you remove the phase from the quantum state then all you are left with is a probability distribution, and so there would be nothing to distinguish it from a classical statistical theory. But the phase is, again, a sufficient statistic over the system’s history. The quantum advantage comes from the fact that you are ultimately operating with a much larger information space, since each instruction in the computer is a function over the whole algorithm’s history back to the start of the quantum circuit, rather than just the current state of the computer’s memory at that present moment.

What if two packets interact with each other? If you claim a collapse occurs then entanglement could never happen, and so such a viewpoint is logically ruled out. If you say a collapse does not occur but only occurs if you introduce a measurement device, then this is vague without rigorously defining what a measurement device is, but providing any additional physical definition with then introduce something into the dynamics which is not there in orthodox quantum mechanics, so you’ve not moved into a new theory and are no longer talking about textbook QM.

In any statistical theory, the statistical distribution, which is typically represented by a vector that is a superposition of basis states, evolves deterministcally. That is just a feature of statistics generally. But no one in the right mind would interpret the deterministic evolution of the statistical state as a physical object deterministically evolving in the real world. Yet, when it comes to QM, people insist we must change how we interpret statistics, yet nobody can give a good argument as to why.

We only “don’t fully understand where the probabilistic measurement happens” if you deny it is probabilistic to begin with. If you just start with the assumption that it is a statistical theory then there is no issue. You just interpret it like you interpret any old statistical theory. There is no invisible “probability waves.” The quantum state is an epistemic state, based on the observer’s knowledge, their “best guess,” of a system that is in a definite state in the real world, but they cannot know it because it evolves randomly. Their measurement of that state just reveals what was already there. No “collapse” happens.

The paradox where we “don’t know” what happens at measurement only arises if you deny this. If you insist that the probability distribution is somehow a physical object. If you do so, then, yes, we “don’t know” how this infinite-dimensional physical object which doesn’t even exist anywhere in physical space can possibly translate itself to the definite values that we observe when we look. Neither Copenhagen nor Many Worlds have a coherent and logically consistent answer to the question.

But there is no good reason to believe the claim to begin with that the statistical distribution is a physical feature of the world. The fact that the statistical distribution evolves deterministically is, again, a feature of statistics generally. This is also true of classical statistical models. The probability vector for a classical probabilistic computer is mathematically described as evolving deterministically throughout an algorithm, but no sane person takes that to mean that the bits in the computer’s memory don’t exist when you aren’t looking at them an infinite-dimensional object that doesn’t exist anywhere in physical space is somehow evolving through the computer.

Indeed, the quantum state is entirely decomposable into a probability distribution. Complex numbers aren’t magic, they always just represent something with two degrees of freedom, so we can always decompose it into two real-valued terms and ask what those two degrees of freedom represent. If you decompose the quantum state into polar form, you find that one of the degrees of freedom is just a probability vector, the same you’d see in classical statistics. The other is a phase vector.

The phase vector seems mysterious until you write down time evolution rules for the probability vector in quantum systems as well as the phase vector. The rules, of course, take into account the previous values and the definition of the operator that is being applied to them. You then just have to recursively substitute in the phase vector’s evolution rule into the probability vector’s. You then find that the phase vector disappears, because it decomposes into a function over the system’s history, i.e. a function over all operators and probability vectors at all previous time intervals going back to a division event. The phase therefore is just a sufficient statistic over the system’s history and is not a physical object, as it can be defined in terms of the system’s statistical history.

That is to say, without modifying it in any way, quantum mechanics is mathematically equivalent to a statistical theory with history dependence. The Harvard physicist Jacob Barandes also wrote a proof of this fact that you can read here. The history dependence does make it behave in ways that are bit counterintuitive, as it inherently implies a non-spatiotemporal aspect to how the statistics evolve, as well as interference effects due to interference in its history, but they are still just statistics all the same. You don’t need anything but the definition of the operators and the probability distributions to compute the evolution of a quantum circuit. A quantum state is not even necessary, it is just convenient.

If you just accept that it is statistics and move on, there is no “measurement problem.” There would be no claim that the particles do not have definite states in the real world, only that we cannot know them because our model is not a deterministic model but a statistical model. If we go measure a particle’s position and find it to be at a particular location, the explanation for why we find it at that location is just because that’s where it was before we went to measure it. There is only a “measurement problem” if you claim the particle was not there before you looked, then you have difficulty explaining how it got there when you looked.

But no one has presented a compelling argument in the scientific literature that we should deny that it is there before we look. We cannot know what its value is before we look as its dynamics are (as far as we know) random, but that is a very different claim than saying it really isn’t there until we look. This idea that the particles aren’t there until we look has, in my view, been largely ruled out in the academic literature, and should be treated as an outdated view like believing in the Rutherford model of the atom. Yet, people still insist on clinging to it.

They pretend like Copenhagen and Many Worlds are logically consistent by writing enormous sea of papers upon papers upon papers, where it only seems “consistent” because it becomes so complicated that hardly anyone even bothers to follow along with it anymore, but if you actually go through the arguments with a fine-tooth comb, you can always show them to be inconsistent and circular. There is only a vague aura of logical and mathematical consistency on the surface. The more you actually engage with both the mathematics and read the academic literature on quantum foundations, the more clear it becomes how incoherent and contrived attempts to make Copenhagen and Many Worlds consistent actually are, and how no one in the literature has actually achieved it, even though many falsely pretend they have done so.