Regarding Quantum Mechanics and Materialism

Footage from said video is used for purposes of commentary and criticism, which is permitted according to article 107 of the US Copyright Act ("Fair Use") and §22 of the Swedish Copyright Law.

[ShunTachibana]

"Never go full Deepak." Okay, I need to start using that expression. 

[CaptIronfoundersson]

To be perfectly honest, my brain turns to suet pudding at the first mention of the term quantum. I don't understand the math especially. I don't understand the mechanics or the physics. I find the ideas fascinating, but I'm so out of my depth I can't even see the surface. The idea that someone can take these ridiculously difficult concepts and without even a basic understanding of them, try to debunk science while proving the impossible, is monumentally insulting. Excellent video.

[TheShadowOfMars]

This is now my favourite Martymer video.

I study applied quantum field theory, and whenever these issues come up I prefer to use the Copenhagen interpretation. But I don't hold to it as my "worldview" - the correct philosophical stance to counter-intuitive scientific discoveries is that "models are to be used, not believed". The Copenhagen description is "good enough" for most purposes, and I personally find it intuitive, but I'm perfectly aware that I cannot justifiably declare it to be the "correct picture of reality".

IMHO, Copenhagen and Many-Worlds have approximately equal merit when judged by Occam's Razor - assume a "Heisenberg cut" or assume "parallel universes" depending on what your personal intuition deems to be more reasonable. Looks like Martymer and I vote different ways on this.

[virtualatheist]

These people using Quantum Mechanics in their arguments is like me correcting a Frenchman on grammar*


*I don't speak French.

[Shooter__Andy]

Thanks, Martymer. QP is one of the things I completely don't understand and you make it simple enough for me (and others like me) to grasp.

[DjVortex-w]

One extremely strange form of argumentation, which seems in essence what this guy is also doing, is trying to prove that something supernatural exists, and once that has been proven, it somehow automatically implies the existence of a god. It's hard to grasp the logic behind this, but it seems to be a classical fallacious argument of the form:

1) God is supernatural.
2) Supernatural things exist.
3) Therefore God exists.

There are, of course, at least three things horribly wrong in this. (I think the proper name for the major fallacy here is "fallacy of the undistributed middle", but that's of course not the only problem in it.) And you could use the same logic to prove anything you want. A completely equivalent deduction would be:

1) Unicorns are horned animals.
2) Horned animals demonstrably exist.
3) Therefore unicorns exist.

This deduction is actually even better because the second premise is actually true (unlike in the deduction about god above.)

[sambutler]

Oh boy, have I been waiting for this =)

[holz_name]

That's a common misconception I frequently observe from "spiritual" or apologetics that try to use science. Only because we use a wave function to describe something, it does not mean this something is a wave. What we call naturals laws (which are described by math) are *descriptive* laws. Those are laws that describe nature, and we call them laws only because the behavior of nature appear to not change, i.e. Newton's law was valid yesterday and will be valid tomorrow.

That is why many questions philosophers and apologetics rise are just not valid questions. For example, the questions "who gave the laws of nature?" or "who created the laws of nature?" are not valid questions. Also the question "why does nature follow math?" is not valid. We use math to describe nature. We could use anything else, like pictures or a poem, to describe nature. We use math because it is more practical, not because nature have some kind of intrinsic concept of math.

[InspiringPhilosophy]

Thanks for the response. I'll be posting a rebuttal on my blog in two or three weeks.

[richo]

Excellent explanations of the basic principles...
and the common misunderstandings of QM.

[KingCrocoduck]

My approach to science is pretty instrumentalist so I don't really weigh in much on which interpretation of quantum is the best. I'm more of a "just do the math and get the right answers" guy, so Copenhagen is where I currently stand. Who knows, though... once I get to grad school, that might change.

[theapistevist]

What's interesting about the word "observation" is that you can't even observe things like photons or electrons without some device meant to make these observations. So the observation isn't conscious. Not only that, if there is a god, it must be capable of observing, nullifying the double slit experment.

[nanoduckling]

The core problem here is still definition of terms and a good example crops up in this video. There is a sense that in everett many worlds (which is probably the only consistent interpretation I've heard which I didn't find extremely philosophically objectionable) there is a sense in which the wavefunction is the only thing which is real, it is the only thing which exists. That's why MWI doesn't make excessive assumptions, it only contains one entity. Of course that does mean that all of the things we traditionally think of as real or material aren't any longer, but are rather emergent properties of the portion of the wavefunction we happen to inhabit.

[TMMx]

This is great. I regret that I never picked up on the fact that Raatz conflates the idea that observation causes wave-function collapse with the idea that observation creates reality itself. So obviously silly.

[QuantumOverlord]

The Copenhagen interpretation is the one currently taught, but not one that scientists take much notice of. This is justified though, as it is intuitive mathematically, and there are also historical reasons behind it. Anyway, as far as I am aware the MWI is accepted by the majority of scientists as the least contrived interpretation. 

[rationalworld]

This video actually cleared up so much for me! I am a high-school freshman, and while you say that anyone who does not understand the math of the Schrodinger equation should not go near quantum mechanics, I have done so in the past with varying degrees of mind-blowing catastrophe. 

I have had an ongoing discussion with my father regarding this, and he is a physicist, so he has some experience in the area, although quantum mechanics is not his specialty. We were both laboring under the misconception that "observation" meant that something was observed by some sort of apparatus, whether it be an eye or a camera. Also that a photon would have to strike the particle for it to be observed. 

Anyway, some of the concepts makes a lot more sense with this new definition of "observation" so thank you for that!

[jiberish]

IP is intellectually dishonest.
He has been corrected many times on his misuse of "observed/observation", in that he does not use the proper meaning used in the field in which he's talking about.
But he refuses to be corrected because his arguments would fall apart without that misuse.
I've been noticing this form of dishonesty becoming very common recently.

[AhsimNreiziev]

It's nice to have someone debunk the "Conscious Observer" arguments, that I will say.
Not to mention the "Conscious Creator"



However, there *is* just one thing I must note:

7:02 till 7:09:
_If you only have locality, not realism, local realism is violated_,
plus
_If you have only realism but not locality, local realism is violated_
followed by the question:
_How did we rule out these two options?!_

The note: the first option was ruled out by the EPR thought experiment, as noted earlier in your video. So I'm afraid the only two options left are the non-local ones. I personally prefer the realistic one, but I'm afraid anyone that wants to preserve locality will need to adjust to the fact that this can't be done.

[mariaer]

It's so nice to see someone clarifying the ideas of quantum mechanics, even if very simplified. There is just so much confusion about the terms the scientists use that gets distorted through the medium we non- QM physicists learn about this, that it all seems kind of stupid to us. 
Like this observer thing. It's great to hear you explain it like this, as I've always imagined it must (in some sense) work like, after hearing endless sht from news, documentaries and other sources that use waaay too many analogies for anything to make sense.

[ozzy]

Can you do another one of these? He's got a ton of other claims in that video that I was hoping you'd address. Specifically where he showed Dr. Michio Kaku claiming there must be a cosmic consiousness. It was part of that same video you were using.