The politics of quantum mechanics

Lubos Motl writes:

You know, for years, many people who were discussing this blog were asking: What do axioms of quantum mechanics have to do with Motl's being right-wing? And the answer was "virtually nothing", of course. Those things really were assumed to be uncorrelated and it was largely the case and it surely should be the case. But it is no longer the case. The whole political machinery of raw power – at least one side of it – is now being abused to push physics in a certain direction.You know, for years, many people who were discussing this blog were asking: What do axioms of quantum mechanics have to do with Motl's being right-wing? And the answer was "virtually nothing", of course. Those things really were assumed to be uncorrelated and it was largely the case and it surely should be the case. But it is no longer the case. The whole political machinery of raw power – at least one side of it – is now being abused to push physics in a certain direction.

Maybe Motl is on to something.

Sean M. Carroll has written a preposterous book advocating the many-worlds version of quantum mechanics. It is being widely promoted in the left-wing news media, while right-wing sources either ignore or trash it. Is that a coincidence?

There is something about the left-winger that wants to believe in parallel universes. Carroll also says:

If the universe is infinitely big, and it looks the same everywhere, that guarantees that infinite copies of something exactly like you exist out there. Does that bother me? No.

I think that this is a left-wing fantasy. Do right-wingers about such unobservable egalitarianism? I doubt it.

Carroll promotes his dopey new quantum book

Physicist Sean M. Carroll has a NY Times op-ed today promoting his stupid new book.

“I think I can safely say that nobody really understands quantum mechanics,” observed the physicist and Nobel laureate Richard Feynman. ...

What’s surprising is that physicists seem to be O.K. with not understanding the most important theory they have.

No, that is ridiculous.

I assume that Feynman meant that it is hard to relate quantum objects to classical objects with a more intuitive understanding. Physicists grappled with the theory in the 1920s, and by 1935 everyone had a good understanding of it.

The reality is exactly backward. Few modern physics departments have researchers working to understand the foundations of quantum theory.

That is because the foundations were well-understood 90 years ago.

In the 1950s the physicist David Bohm, egged on by Einstein, proposed an ingenious way of augmenting traditional quantum theory in order to solve the measurement problem. ... Around the same time, a graduate student named Hugh Everett invented the “many-worlds” theory, another attempt to solve the measurement problem, only to be ridiculed by Bohr’s defenders.

They deserved to be ridiculed, but their theories did nothing towards solving the measurement problem, are philosophically absurd, and have no empirical support.

The current generation of philosophers of physics takes quantum mechanics very seriously, and they have done crucially important work in bringing conceptual clarity to the field.

Who? I do not think that there is any living philosopher who has shed any light on the subject.

It’s hard to make progress when the data just keep confirming the theories we have, rather than pointing toward new ones.

The problem is that, despite the success of our current theories at fitting the data, they can’t be the final answer, because they are internally inconsistent.

This must sound crazy to an outsider. Physicists have perfectly good theories that explain all the data well, and yet Carroll writes books on why the theories are no good.

The theories are just fine. Carroll's philosophical prejudices are what is wrong.

Carroll does not say what would discredit himself -- he is a big believer in many-worlds theory. If he wrote an op-ed explaining exactly what he believes about quantum mechanics, everyone would deduce that he is a crackpot.

Philosopher Tim Maudlin also has a popular new essay on quantum mechanics. He is not so disturbed by the measurement problem, or indeterminism, or Schroedinger's cat, but he is tripped up by causality:

What Bell showed that if A and B are governed by local physics — no spooky-action-at-a-distance — then certain sorts of correlations between the behaviours of the systems cannot be predicted or explained by any local physics.

This is only true if "local physics" means a classical theory of local hidden variables. Bell did show that quantum mechanics can be distinguished from those classical theories, but there is still no action-at-a-distance.

Update: Lumo trashes Carroll's article. Woit traces an extremely misleading claim about a physics journal editorial policy. The journal just said that it is a physics journals, and articles have to have some physics in them. Philosophy articles could be published elsewhere.

Deriving free will from singularities

William Tomos Edwards writes in Quillette to defend free will:

[Biologist Jerry] Coyne dismisses the relevance of quantum phenomena here. While it’s true that there is no conclusive evidence for non-trivial quantum effects in the brain, it is an area of ongoing research with promising avenues, and the observer effect heavily implies a connection. Coyne correctly points out that the fundamental randomness at the quantum level does not grant libertarian free will. Libertarian free will implies that humans produce output from a process that is neither random nor deterministic. What process could fit the bill?

No, they are both wrong. Libertarian free will certainly does imply that human produce output that is not predictable by others, and hence random. That is the definition of randomness.

Quantum randomness is not some other kind of randomness. There is only one kind of randomness.

Then Edwards goes off the rails:

Well, if the human decision-making process recruits one or more irremovable singularities, and achieves fundamentally unpredictable output from those, I would consider that a sufficient approximation to libertarian free will. Furthermore, a singularity could be a good approximation to an “agent.” Singularities do occur in nature, at the center of every black hole, and quite possibly at the beginning of the universe, and quantum phenomena leave plenty of room open for them. ...

The concept of a singularity becomes important once again here because if you can access some kind of instantaneous infinity and your options are fundamentally, non-trivially infinite, then it would seem you have escaped compatibilism and achieved a more profound freedom.

Now he is just trolling us. There are no singularities or infinities in nature. You can think of the center of a black hole that way, but it is not observable, so no one will ever know. There certainly aren't any black holes in your brain.

Coyne replies here, but quantum mechanics is out of his expertise.

Universal grammar and other pseudosciences

Everyone agrees that astrology is pseudoscience, but this new paper takes on some respected academic subjects:

After considering a set of demarcation criteria, four pseudosciences are examined: psychoanalysis, speculative evolutionary psychology, universal grammar, and string theory. It is concluded that these theoretical frameworks do not meet the requirements to be considered genuinely scientific. ...

To discriminate between two different types of activities some kind of criteria or
standards are necessary. It is argued that the following four demarcation criteria are
suitable to distinguish science from pseudoscience:
1. Testability. ...
2. Evidence. ...
3. Reproducibility. ...
4. The 50-year criterion.

By these criteria, string theory fails to be science. It mentions that a couple of philosophers try to defend string theory, but only by inventing some new category. I guess they don't want to call it "pseudoscience" if respectable professors promote it.

Respectable professors also have a long history of supporting Freudian psychoanalysis.

This claim about universal grammar struck me:

Chomksy (1975, p. 4) argues that children learn language easily since they do it without formal instruction or conscious awareness.

Not only is Chomsky well-respected for these opinions, but Steve Pinker and many others have said similar things.

This puzzles me. I taught my kids to talk, and I would not describe it as easy. I had to give them formal instruction, and they seemed to be consciously aware of it.

The process takes about a year. It is a long series of incremental steps. Steps are: teaching the child to understand simple commands, such as "stop", articulating sounds like "hi", responding to sounds, like saying "hi" in response to "hi", learning simple nouns, like saying "ball" while pointing to a ball, developing a vocabulary of 20 nouns or so, learning simple verbs like "go", putting together subject-verb, putting together subject-verb-object, etc.

All of these steps are difficult for a two-year-old, and require a great deal of individual instruction and practice.

Sure, two-year-olds might learn a lot by observing, but you could say the same about other skills. Some are taught to dress themselves, while others learn by mimicking others. No one would say that children learn to dress themselves without instruction.

Steven Pinker was the first to popularize the hypothesis that language is an instinct. In his influential book The Language Instinct, Pinker asserts that “people know how to talk in more or less the sense that spiders know how to spin webs” (Pinker 1995, p. 18). Pinker’s analogy is striking, since it is obviously incorrect. A spider will spin webs even if it remains isolated since birth. On the other hand, a child who has been isolated since birth will not learn language. In other words, while web-spinning does not require previous experience and it is innate, language does require experience and it is learned.

Chomsky and Pinker are two of our most respected intellectuals today.

Googling indicates that Chomsky had one daughter and no grandkids. Pinker has no kids. I am not sure that is relevant, as many others have similarly claimed that children learn language naturally.

Psychology is in crisis

I often criticize the science of Physics here, some some other sciences are doing much worse. Such as:

Psychology is declared to be in crisis. The reliability of thousands of studies have been called into question by failures to replicate their results. ...

The replication crisis, if nothing else, has shown that productivity is not intrinsically valuable. Much of what psychology has produced has been shown, empirically, to be a waste of time, effort, and money. As Gibson put it: our gains are puny, our science ill-founded.

This is pretty harsh, but it doesn't even mention how many leaders in the field have turned out to be fraud, or how some sub-fields are extremely politicized, or how much damage they do to people in psychotherapies.

Einstein did not get relativity from Hume

An Aeon essay starts:

In 1915, Albert Einstein wrote a letter to the philosopher and physicist Moritz Schlick, who had recently composed an article on the theory of relativity. Einstein praised it: ‘From the philosophical perspective, nothing nearly as clear seems to have been written on the topic.’ Then he went on to express his intellectual debt to ‘Hume, whose Treatise of Human Nature I had studied avidly and with admiration shortly before discovering the theory of relativity. It is very possible that without these philosophical studies I would not have arrived at the solution.’

More than 30 years later, his opinion hadn’t changed, as he recounted in a letter to his friend, the engineer Michele Besso: ‘In so far as I can be aware, the immediate influence of D Hume on me was greater. I read him with Konrad Habicht and Solovine in Bern.’ We know that Einstein studied Hume’s Treatise (1738-40) in a reading circle with the mathematician Conrad Habicht and the philosophy student Maurice Solovine around 1902-03. This was in the process of devising the special theory of relativity, which Einstein eventually published in 1905. It is not clear, however, what it was in Hume’s philosophy that Einstein found useful to his physics.

It is amazing that anyone takes Einstein's egomania seriously.

Einstein got relativity from Lorentz and Poincare, and spent his whole life lying about it. Saying that he got his ideas from some philosopher is just a way of denying credit to Lorentz and Poincare.

Worrying about testing the simulation hypothesis

Philosophy professor Preston Greene argues in the NY Times:

ut what if computers one day were to become so powerful, and these simulations so sophisticated, that each simulated “person” in the computer code were as complicated an individual as you or me, to such a degree that these people believed they were actually alive? And what if this has already happened?

In 2003, the philosopher Nick Bostrom made an ingenious argument that we might be living in a computer simulation created by a more advanced civilization. He argued that if you believe that our civilization will one day run many sophisticated simulations concerning its ancestors, then you should believe that we’re probably in an ancestor simulation right now. ...

In recent years, scientists have become interested in testing the theory. ...

o far, none of these experiments has been conducted, and I hope they never will be. Indeed, I am writing to warn that conducting these experiments could be a catastrophically bad idea — one that could cause the annihilation of our universe. ...

if our universe has been created by an advanced civilization for research purposes, then it is reasonable to assume that it is crucial to the researchers that we don’t find out that we’re in a simulation. If we were to prove that we live inside a simulation, this could cause our creators to terminate the simulation — to destroy our world. ...

As far as I am aware, no physicist proposing simulation experiments has considered the potential hazards of this work.

Isn't it great that we have philosophers to worry about stuff like this?

Extending this reasoning further, we should shut down the LHC particle collider, and all the quantum computer research. These are exceptionally difficult (ie, computationally intensive) to simulate. If we overwhelm the demands on the simulator, then the system could crash or get shut down.

We probably should not look for extraterrestrials either.

A psychiatrist wonders about our simulator overlords reading NY Times stories worrying about simulation.

I think these guys are serious, but I can't be sure. It is not any wackier than Many-Worlds.

Another philosopher, Richard Dawid, has a new paper on the philosophy of string theory:

String theory is a very different kind of conceptual scheme than any earlier physical theory. It is the first serious contender for a universal final theory. It is a theory for which previous expectations regarding the time horizon for completion are entirely inapplicable. It is a theory that generates a high degree of trust among its exponents for reasons that remain, at the present stage, entirely decoupled from empirical confirmation. Conceptually, the theory provides substantially new perspectives ...

Wow, a "universal final theory" that is entirely "decoupled" from experiment, and with no hope of "completion" in the foreseeable future. But it is conceptually interesting!

I am sure Dawid thinks that he is doing string theorists a favor by justifying their work, but he has to admit that the theory has no merit in any sense that anyone has ever recognized before.