On a scale from pseudoscience to Hard Science how seriously is Quantum Immortality taken by people who Quantum for a living?
Was mainly wondering because I see it being promoted by things like Kurzesgtat (I know I butchered that) and other popular Science promoters.
Yet anytime I see anyone, even Roger Penrose himself, supposit that mind is any way connected to Quantum phenomenon it is attacked mercilessly and rushed out of the room like a crazed bloodied up goat that somehow snuck into a nursery.
So I am a little confused. By what mechanism would Quantum Immortality even work if science is so sure there is nothing like a soul jumping timelines?
Well I am of the same opinion of the philosopher Alexandr Bogdanov and the philosopher Jocelyn Benoist which is that indirect realism is based on very bad arguments in the first place, and this is the first premise of Chalmers’ argument for the “hard problem,” and so to drop it as a premise drops the “problem.” I would recommend Bogdanov’s book The Philosophy of Living Experience and Benoist’s book Toward a Contextual Realism. The uniting theme is that they both reject the existence of a veil that blocks us from seeing reality, and thus Chalmers’ notion of “consciousness” is rejected, and so there is no “hard problem” in the first place.
The “hard problem” is really just a reformulation of the mind-body problem, and Feuerbach had originally pointed out in his essay “On Spiritualism and Materialism” that the mind-body problem is not solvable because to derive it, one has to start from an assumption that there is a gulf between the mind and the body (the phenomena and the noumena, “consciousness” and physical reality), and so to then solve it would be to bridge that gulf, which contradicts oneself, as that would mean a gulf didn’t exist in the first place. He thus interprets the mind-body problem (later reformulated as the hard problem) as a proof by contradiction that indirect realism is not tenable, and so materialists should abandon this gulf at the very axiomatic basis of their philosophy.
There will never be a “solution” because it’s better understood as a logical proof that indirect realism is wrong. That means, no matter how intuitive indirect realism may seem and no matter how many arguments you think you can come up with off the top of your head to defend it, you should step back and actually rigorously evaluate those arguments as they cannot actually be correct and you must be making a mistake somewhere.
Wait, so conciousness isn’t real? What’s indirect realism?
I personally don’t believe it’s real in the way Chalmers defines it. You can define it in another way where it can be considered real, but his definition I don’t find convincing. Indirect realism is the belief that what we perceive is not real but kind of a veil that blocks us from seeing true reality. True reality then by definition is fundamentally impossible to observe, not by tools and not under any counterfactual circumstances.
What IS true reality?
I don’t find it useful to prepend adjectives to reality. Reality just is what it is.
I heard some quantum experiment proved objective reality was fake but I didn’t understand the article and assumed it was nonsense
There is a problem, not just among laymen, but also among academics, to continually conflate contextuality with subjectivity.
If I ask you the best music genre, and you ask me the best music genre, we will likely give different answers, because the question is subjective. It depends upon the subject and there is no “objectively” best music genre in the world. If I ask you the velocity of an object, and you ask me the velocity, it is conceivable we might give different answers if we are both perceiving it in two different reference frames. Is that because velocity is subjective? That it is all in our heads and just a personal opinion?
I find this hard to believe, because you can conduct an experiment where two observers use radar guns to measure the velocity of the object they are perceiving, and you can later compare them and see that the radar gun does indeed agree that the velocity was different. If it was purely subjective, why would a purely mechanical device like a radar gun also record the difference, which is not a conscious observer or a subject at all?
I believe that velocity can ontologically differ between observers. Meaning, it is part of objective reality that it differs. But this difference is not because they are observers. If the observers observed the same object in the same frame of reference they would perceive it at the same velocity. The difference is not reducible to them being observers, so calling it “observer-dependent” is misleading. The difference goes beyond them being observers and into objective reality: that they perceive the object in different measurement contexts.
This is what I mean by the distinction between contextuality and subjectivity. Some properties of then natural world really do ontologically realize themselves differently in objective reality depending upon the context of their realization.
Basically, what these academics do who claim quantum mechanics disproves objective reality is that they conflate subjectivity to contextuality and then demonstrate that two observers can give a different description of the same system in principle in quantum theory, and then conclude that this means there is no objective reality because the description of the quantum system must be subjective as it differs between the two observers. But, again, that does not follow. One can just interpret the difference as context-dependent rather than observer-dependent and then there is no trouble interpreting it as a physical theory of the natural world independent of the observer. It is just not independent of context.
There is in fact a whole philosophical school called contextual realism based on Wittgensteinian philosophy and originated by the French philosopher Jocelyn Benoist that argues that much of the confusion in philosophy (such as the “hard problem”) ultimately has its origins is continually confusing the contextual for the subjective and if the distinction is adhered to clearly from the get-go then the issue goes away. The physicist Francois-Igor Pris has written extensively on the relationship between this philosophical school and interpretative problems in quantum mechanics.
The logic of quantum theory does allow for two different observers to give different descriptions of the same system, but (1) the differences are never empirically relevant as the theory also predicts that if they were to become empirically relevant they would both agree on what they would both perceive, and (2) the theory predicts those deviations in the description, kind of like how Galilean relativity predicts that two observers will record different velocities in different frames of reference by using a Galilean transformation.
The fact that theory predicts these differences (in point #2) makes it hardly subjective, as the deviations are predicted by the objective theory, and they are always consistent with one another (in point #1).