Recent content by lodbrok

It's not my example, it's Barandes' and he is talking about his formalism. Certainly he draws parallels with the Hilbert space formalism but I'm struggling to see what iste's issue is. To just say "I don't know if this description has any interpretation in it" seems too hand-wavy to me, some...

Then I don't know what you mean by "interpretation".

He presents a simple dynamical system with 17 states with dynamics that is cyclical (ontology). The system can be represented with a 17-dimensional vector (formalism), the dynamical law for the system can be represented as a matrix (formalism), modelling the dynamical evolution of the system by...

If you go back to the video that was posted (the discussion with Tim Maudlin), starting at exactly 1:58:55 up to about 2:17, and pay close attention, this is the clearest explanation that Barandes has given of his approach, very clearly distinguishing interpretation from formalism.

Sure, anyone can come up with their number for how many demons can dance simultaneously on the tip of a pin. It's never a question about the upper bound of SMHs (speculative metaphysical hypotheses) but rather the lower bound required to make sense of the formalism. And there is a good reason...

On the contrary, I think Barandes adds very important things that relate to ontology even without explicitly providing an intuition about the ontology: It adds: - Particles exist when we aren't looking - Particles exist in a single configuration, not multiple configurations at once (The cat is...

I'm bemused by the highlighted statement. What do you mean by it? I wasn't aware that the Universe models anything.

Is this an emotional reaction, or is it based on something wrong with his definition? The definition is quite straightforward: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2402.16935 What is absurd about this?

I see. Sorry, I misread "guide" to mean '... causing it to behave a particular way' as opposed to your intended '... guide our decision making about its behaviour'. That's why I immediately thought of the pilot wave.

I don't think Barandes will agree with what you call "guide". This is not like Bohmian mechanics at all. As I see it, in Barandes' view, the theory deals only with the evolution of the description, not the evolution of the configuration. Surely you can make inferences back and forth, but the...

Counter examples: Alice's detector is Off. I predict with certainty that she will get zero clicks. What element of reality in the particle could possibly have caused that? Another, instead of tossing, Bob simply places the coin heads up every time. I can predict the outcome will be heads with...

Regarding the existence of local hidden variables, EPR did not address this in their paper. Note the following quote in their conclusion:

That is not an accurate reading of the EPR paper. The paper deals with whether the QM description is complete, not whether local hidden variables exist.

EPR provided an operational definition of "realism" that has been used ever since. I'm not aware that anyone has provided a different one. If you think that definition is misguided, please suggest a new one. But if you are going to claim that "realism" is present or absent somewhere, it better...

Absolutely, and this is true not just of QM but also of classical mechanics. Thus it's not a revolutionary statement to say in some cases there is realism in QM.