Schrodinger makes a good argument in the book “Nature and the Greek and Science and Humanism” that we should actually just abandon the idea that there even is a trajectory.

Our sciences are derived from inductive reasoning. You drop a ball, it falls to the ground, you repeat it, it falls again, and eventually, you come up with a mathematical law to describe this. You assume from that point if you drop it an infinite number of times, it will always fall to the ground, but this is just an assumption that cannot be proven.

When the members of the Frontiers of Science discussed physics, they often used the abbreviation “SF.” They didn’t mean “science fiction,” but the two words “shooter” and “farmer.” This was a reference to two hypotheses, both involving the fundamental nature of the laws of the universe. In the shooter hypothesis, a good marksman shoots at a target, creating a hole every ten centimeters. Now suppose the surface of the target is inhabited by intelligent, two-dimensional creatures. Their scientists, after observing the universe, discover a great law: “There exists a hole in the universe every ten centimeters.” They have mistaken the result of the marksman’s momentary whim for an unalterable law of the universe. The farmer hypothesis, on the other hand, has the flavor of a horror story: Every morning on a turkey farm, the farmer comes to feed the turkeys. A scientist turkey, having observed this pattern to hold without change for almost a year, makes the following discovery: “Every morning at eleven, food arrives.” On the morning of Thanksgiving, the scientist announces this law to the other turkeys. But that morning at eleven, food doesn’t arrive; instead, the farmer comes and kills the entire flock.

— Cixin Liu

We also do this to derive our concept of trajectories. We can measure something a x(0) and x(t), then repeat the experiment and measure it at x(0.5t), then repeat it again and measure it at x(0.25t) and x(0.75t), so on and so forth, measuring many many in-between points. From that, we assume that if we continue to cut the intervals in half and measuring in between, our predictions will continue to hold, making us conclude that there is a completely continuous transition between x(0) and x(t) exactly as described by our mathematics, which we can fit to unambiguous mathematical equations.

Yet, this is just an assumption. We cannot actually know that this continuous transition exists, and what Schrodinger argued is that there is in fact good reason to think it doesn’t. This is because, in various particle experiments, you cannot actually try to reconstruct this path in a way that is unambiguous and would be consistent with every experiment. It is much simpler just to treat it as if the particle was over there at x(0), and now it is over here at x(t), with a time delay of t. Rovelli describes it as nature evolving through succession of events, rather than nature being made up of “stones bouncing around,” nature flows according to these succession of events whereby things manifest their properties to one another during an interaction, but there is no trajectory the particle actually took in between interactions.

These trajectories are entirely metaphysical and could never actually be experimentally verified, since verification requires observation, and observation is an interaction, so to posit that there is any path in between interactions is to posit that there exists something in between observations, and by definition you could not observe that. It would always have to be something assumed a priori. This is what I meant when I said most people approach quantum mechanical interpretation seem to have a desire to assume quantum theory can tell us about things beyond what is even possible to observe, and much of the confusion around the theory is trying to philosophically understand this unobservable realm of what is going on in between observations.

I tend to agree with physicists like Schrodinger, Rovelli, and Francois Igor Pris that what makes the most sense is to just abandon this because it is entirely metaphysical and ultimately faith-based and cannot actually be experimentally verified. We should just stick to what we can actually confirm through observational evidence, and observations are discrete, so any continuity we assume about nature is ultimately metaphysical and could not be derived from observation. That is why it makes more sense to consider reality not as autonomous stones bouncing around, but as a succession of discrete events, and the physical sciences allows us to predict what properties of systems will be realized during those events.

No, this website doesn’t get that many posts so I often keyword search to find things to reply to, and I am assuming your posts just both commented on a topic I keyword searched.

I’ve adopted a few views that helped me cope with the practically non-existent explanation of what is really going on:

The thing is, I’ve been obsessed with this topic for so long that I do not really agree. The purpose of me being interested in the topic is to research and find reasonable explanations, and there is only so many years you can do that before you actually start coming to some conclusions.

These days I am a strong supporter of the contextual realist approach, which the philosopher-physicist Francois Igor Pris has some good books on the subject, but sadly he does not write in English if you only speak English, but mostly in Russian. It is based on the writings of the philosopher Jocelyn Benoist, which you can read his book Towards a Contextual Realism which has a good English translation, it is more philosophy than physics, although it does touch a little bit on quantum mechanics towards the end. Pris’s books are more specifically about the application of Benoist’s philosophical framework to quantum theory.

Our brains are meat computers. Theories talk about the following: What does a computer measure after they have performed an experiment? In other words, theory isn’t supposed to be emotionally fulfilling. It is merely making predictions for the computer.

I see the purpose of theories as ultimately to be able to predict how things change. If I drop a ball, it falls to the ground, if I drop it again, it falls again, and so I can assume through inductive reasoning that if I drop a third time, it will probably fall again. I could then create a mathematical model which describes this behavior, and so anyone can plug into the model the ball when lifted up, and then run a computation and see what it spits out is a prediction of the ball having fallen to the ground.

I am by no means a utilitarian when it comes to scientific theories, as if I think they are just “useful tools for making predictions and tell us nothing about reality.” Rather, my view is that these “useful tools for making predictions” are useful precisely because they tell us something about reality: they capture how reality changes over time. If they did not, they could not be used to make predictions about it.

I think a lot of the difficulty in interpreting quantum theory is that a lot of people see ontology somewhat differently. They think that the ontology is not merely how reality that we can experimentally observe changes over time, but that it must also tell us about some alternative realm beyond all possibilities to ever observe. People for some reason have a desire to introduce additional and unnecessary metaphysics to the ontology of the system, to add things to it we cannot actually ever verify is actually there, and it’s my view that if you abandon this temptation then you avoid much of the conceptual difficulties of the theory.

Truth is a lot like the stars. There’s one big one, and a lot of small ones. Maybe we just have to accept that quantum physics is all about the many small ones.

To be honest, I’m not sure what you mean by this.

I have a degree in computer science, and have always loved learning about computing. Whenever there is some new kind of computer on the market, I try to get ahold of it to learn to start programming for it entirely on my own free time as a hobby. When I got into quantum computing, I got rather frustrated at most explanations on the subject regarding how it worked. I mean, the mathematics isn’t even that bad, just a lot of linear algebra. It was the language around the mathematics that bothered me, nobody could give me a consistent description of what was really going on, that is to say, there was no consistent account of the relationship between the mathematics and the ontology of the theory. Really, the theory has no ontology, as the Copenhagen interpretation largely stresses that quantum mechanics represents the limits of human knowledge, so we cannot actually say anything about how nature really is. At that point, I kind of become obsessed over the topic of the relationship between the mathematics and ontology, reading tons and tons of books on the subject, going all the way back to Heisenberg, Einstein, Schrodinger, Bohr, to reading many contemporary authors. It’s really natural philosophy that interests me, I have never put much thought into things like moral philosophy or other kinds.

Sorry, but this video is just painful to listen to, as it is just a series of claims where none of them are explained in any detail what is actually meant.

• “We’ve moved now into fully materialist thinking where everything is dead there is no Divine Beyond, and so Consciousness is the problem that needs to be solved. But the problem with that is there’s nothing in well that is the problem is that there’s nothing in matter that would make you think that it could be conscious”
• “…at one point that, even though everything in an organism is completely dependent on seemingly not living or non-conscious physical processes, he says that it could be that all these physical processes physics itself is there for life so that’s almost theological or at least somewhat mystical and that still separates life from matter in a certain way.”
• " I wonder if conscious experience is actually to be found in the wave function or whatever the wave function represents for us because there’s no way for a thought to be just like a collection of electrons and and protons constructed together like Lego blocks."
• “I’m not convinced that any software can be conscious on the kind of computing hardware that we have, and I think if we want to make sentient robots we’re going to need a different kind of hardware, and it could be…smart materials”

All of these kinds of phrases are just presented without much elaboration. If you are going to do a whole video, you might as well actually elaborate on what you’re talking about. The whole video is largely just presenting a series of conclusions without putting much effort to explaining.

The closest thing the guy in the video gets to explaining anything is trying to justify it through “smart materials,” but his own explanation contradicts himself as he does not define these “smart materials” in terms of a new chemical structure or a new atomic number, but instead describes them in terms of their behavior, stating that they are “materials that participate in their own generation…to be able to construct themselves.”

However, if you’re defining “smart materials” purely in terms of their function, their ability to construct themselves, then there is no reason in principle that machines made of iron and silicon could not construct themselves, albeit engineering self-reproducing robots is hard, but no reason to think it would literally require a new substance to achieve.

He never even explains anything about what is meant by “consciousness” so I have no idea what he is getting at with any of those other phrases, but he suggests in one of those quotes that this “consciousness” could be achieved with “smart materials,” and thus he seems to define consciousness in terms of a behavior which I see no reason we could not replicate in principle, contradicting again the previous statements that this is somehow a big challenge for “materialists.”

Agreed, I second the point that discontinuous time is no way in contradiction to belief in the present. Whatever step you are in that discontinuity would be the present. To suggest that it moving in discrete steps implies the present is the past, I’m not sure what that even means, I am wondering if Jaumel is imagining a continuous time that is constantly moving and then comparing that to the discrete time. The continuous time would always be ahead of it. But, of course, that thought experiment implies there is a continuous time, which contradicts with the notion that time is discrete, and so such a thought experiment would not be valid. If time is discontinuous, it would only move in discrete steps, so whatever is the current step would be the present.

I am a direct realist so by necessity I am a presentist, as you can only observe the present. The past exists only in terms of presently-existing records, such as the fossil record. When we talk about the past existing, what we are really talking about is models we constructed in the present based on empirical data in the present. Saying Socrates is taller than Descartes is like saying the Giant Man is taller than Jack. The statement makes sense when we keep in mind the context in which the statement is being made. The context of the latter statement is being made in reference to the fictional texts of Jack and the Beanstalk. The context of the former statement is being made in reference to historical records of Socrates and Descartes. These texts/records exist in the present so it is sensible to make those kinds of statements about them when that context is kept in mind.