Quantum experiments do not prove reality does not exist
They prove we don’t have the language to describe quantum reality
They prove we don’t have the language to describe quantum reality
Recently I saw a headline about how new experiments in quantum theory prove that reality doesn’t exist.
Statements like this, even if they are just to tease, are preposterous and silly.
People seem to love to try to show that the world doesn’t exist. Maybe it helps to justify trying to escape from it or why a world filled with evil is even allowed to exist. If reality doesn’t exist, then existential crisis is pointless. Why have a crisis over something that isn’t true?
The argument against realism is much older than quantum mechanics. It goes back to Plato. Plato did believe in a real world; he just thought we didn’t live in it. We lived in a faint reflection of reality. We could only access the true reality with our minds, through philosophy. There God lived, a kind of Sun radiating the pure light of philosophical truth.
This philosophy ultimately became a religion with the writings of the 1st century philosopher Plutarch, who posited that we had pure immortal souls which, rather than belonging here on Earth, actually belonged in a non-corporeal plane.
Gnostics of the 2nd century took this idea and incorporated Christian themes. They proposed that the physical world we live in was created by an evil being called Yahweh, the god of the Old Testament, and that the true, divine, Invisible God, was a much higher being. They believed that It sent Jesus in order to impart (or recognize those who had) knowledge (gnosis) that would help us regain our lost, non-corporeal state.
Many spiritual people these days, including many Christians, unfortunately, believe similar things.
Philosophy tends to respond to the problems of its times. Plato and Plutarch were responding to the brutal, capricious, fatalistic paganism of their day.
Quantum anti-realists, on the other hand, are responding, perhaps to the realism of classical physics, which quantum mechanics had pulled the rug out from under and the futile attempts realists had made to try to make sense of it.
The type of anti-realism that quantum theorists embrace goes back to Kant and the school of thought he founded which became German Idealism.
Kant was responding to the rationalism of the Enlightenment which attempted to reduce the world to one understood by pure reason. Hegel applied these ideas to human knowledge while Neitzsche applied them to morality.
Anti-realism’s slippery solipsistic slope ends with Descartes:
Cogito; ergo sum.
I think; therefore, I am.
It means that the world we perceive and the concepts we use to articulate reality are purely subjective (except the fact of our own existence).
Anti-realism, in its more modern conception, however, is that reality is simply open to interpretation. That is, you cannot cut reality “at the joints” and dissect it in a way that is independent of point of view.
Reality is just one big block of cheese.
-Anonymous.
Realists chuckle at this interpretation, suggesting that anti-realists just want to escape from the reality that their philosophy is stupid.
Austrian-British 20th century philosopher, Ludwig Wittgenstein made it his life’s work to articulate this problem and show that the realist versus anti-realist debate was itself futile. His argument was that the question they were debating, called the problem of representation, was meaningless.
Wittgenstein suggested these debates are not only futile but an intellectual disease. You can ask a realist or an idealist what color is the sky and both will say “blue”. Yet one will suggest that it is “really” blue while the other says that it is just “blue to them”.
What are we actually debating?
Wittgenstein suggested that realism vs. anti-realism debates are a confusion between reality and grammar, a fact Buddhists discovered over 2000 years earlier.
Consider the Zen koan (which the linked article starts out with), “if a tree falls in the forest, and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?” The realist says “yes” and the anti-realist says “no”, for anything unobserved does not exist. The truth is, however, that the better answer is: not applicable.
This gets at the heart of the realist vs. anti-realist debate about quantum theory.
The argument has to do with whether objects have a definite measurable state that is independent of our interacting with them. I.e., does the reality we perceive exist whether we are looking or not?
Quantum physicist John Wheeler referred to quantum particles passing through an apparatus as the “great smoky dragon” and was a strong believer that observation was critical to reality becoming “real”. This is the essence of the quantum anti-realist stance.
Wheeler stopped short of saying observers had to be conscious beings or what constituted observation but some of his students and contemporaries were quite certain that consciousness was an integral component of quantum measurement.
When people, respected scientists even, start arguing that you need conscious beings in order for reality to exist, I immediately see echoes of the anti-realist philosophers, who, unfortunately, are confusing our ability to represent reality linguistically with reality itself.
Realists, meanwhile, grasp for interpretations like Many Worlds and superdeterminism that return everything to a clear, objective state (but sweep certain problems under the rug in the process).
Anti-realist ideas are not coherently articulated in the press so people get the impression that human beings somehow “conjure” reality like godlike magicians when we look at it. Yet, in the early days of quantum theory, that is exactly how it appeared.
The problem was that particles like photons, electrons, and atoms could be put into states where they were clearly, measurably in two places at once, called a superposition of states. Yet they were only ever observed in one.
In order to articulate the problem, one of the fathers of quantum theory, Erwin Schrödinger invented a thought experiment to show how absurd it is: Schrödinger’s cat.
The basic premise of Schrödinger’s cat is that a cat is placed in a box and a particle is put into a superposition of two states. One state causes a vial of poison to be released into the box, killing the cat instantly. The other does not. Theoretically, the interaction between the particle and the poison and poison and cat puts the cat into a superposition of two states as well.
Recent experiments on ultracold macroscopic objects like mirrors used in gravitational wave detectors show that these states can apply to every day size objects. These objects are said to be in a delocalized state but become localized when observed.
Those who haven’t read Wittgenstein will say either that the cat is dead and alive at the same time until we look (anti-realist) or that the cat is somehow definitely dead or alive before we look (realist).
Those who have read the philosopher will say that it is meaningless to say what the cat’s state is and Schrödinger’s paradox might as well be a Zen koan.
In other words, Not Applicable!
The reason is because, when any thing in the universe is in a delocalized state, it cannot be said to be in any localized state at all, that includes dead and alive. Thus, when we try to explain whether reality is really real based on making statements about localized states and trying to apply them to delocalized ones, we are spewing meaningless streams of words.
Localization, meanwhile, is actually a physical process that occurs through something called decoherence. It happens when a delocalized object interacts with a large external localized state — like a detector in a particle accelerator made up of trillions of localized atoms. The interaction between a huge number of localized particles and the delocalized object causes a near instantaneous transfer of localization. This causes the object to fall into a single localized state. (This is why delocalization of macroscopic objects only works at ultracold temperatures where the atoms aren’t interacting much.)
This is similar to the process of reaching thermal equilibrium. When you bring some small amount of liquid in contact with a large amount, the small amount will very quickly disperse and reach equilibrium.
Of course, in the experiment with the cat, the process is reversed, which is less likely to occur but certainly can. The cat starts out localized and then becomes delocalized by interacting with the delocalized poison. Opening the box causes it to become localized again.
Anything could be delocalized. That doesn’t mean that its reality doesn’t exist. It means that your statements about localized reality don’t apply to it.
Delocalization is just as much a feature of our universe as localization. If we want to talk about it, we have to develop a new language.
So far, mathematics has given us a precise way of talking about delocalization. Meanwhile, when we use natural language like English to talk about it, we have to come up with clumsy constructions like “the cat is in a delocalized state across life and death”. Thus, it is our language that, perhaps, is at fault here and not reality.
Wittgenstein addressed this problem with his own cat, a lion, when he said that “if a lion could speak, we could not understand him.” In other words, the lion’s view of the world was so different from ours that we could not have a common frame of reference.
Wittgenstein's Lion
In Philosophical Investigations Wittgenstein famously said that "if a lion could speak, we could not understand him"…existentialcomics.com
I often think of this when it comes to aliens. Even if we could some how translate into one another’s languages, could we really communicate? What if we were to encounter aliens who have developed a completely quantum way of seeing the universe?
In any case, the problem here is that our language was created for a universe that consists of only localized states. If we want to talk about delocalized states, rather than making the attention grabbing cop out “reality doesn’t exist!” we have to come up with new words and grammars that can describe a quantum universe.
Perhaps we need a new conjunction that indicates delocalization like quand short for for “quantum and”. The cat is dead quand alive, not both, not one or the other.
Still, that doesn’t answer my burning question: what does it feel like to be delocalized?