my_wan said:
Yes, I seek as few adjuncts to classical physics as possible. What I hope to have made clear, unless someone can provide a good counterargument, is that, at least in principle, it's possible to maintain both locality and realism. If someone can posit a rational FTL mechanism, that's empirically useful, I'll accept that as a local mechanism. The speed C is the limit of locality as we know because that's what it defines given our present understanding, not because it is, if faster effects exist. However, simply as a method of sweeping EPR under a rug is not a valid justification in my view.
Ok, perhaps so, but before that can be stated without equivocation, the objections I have articulated must be addressed. Merely stating it is so does not make it so. As for my reasons for avoiding non-local effects: Because the conceptual and mathematical nightmare it creates in trying to get it to coexist with what we know is beyond belief. Even QM presently is a tame beast in comparison. If it remains "consistent with other classical observations" then it must lack empirical meaning, outside of sweeping conceptual issues under the rug. The constraints of RoS are quiet severe.
Some of my own modeling attempts explicitly allow certain variables of sorts to randomly exceed C. Yet it's unworkable as an EPR mechanism, or any FTL summation. So I'm not adverse to FTL mechanisms as such, but merely to poke it in like some surgical instrument accidentally sewed into your body by a surgical doctor doesn't cut the mustard for me.
FTL is not a requirement for real wavefunctions. It does seem require a separation, at least in principle, between the waveform (itself an ensemble), and the ensemble imposed by on it solely by limitations of specific knowledge of that ensemble.
Ouch, I don't have a problem with the mind/body connection. I can even provide an empirically realistic self organizing 'toy' mind model, including memory, qualia, and evolutionary stages, with nothing more than metronomes and springs. Mathematically it's not really fundamentally new, but makes it easy to visualize how it leads to the empirical data. I generally find this kind of question involves the composition fallacy, and a failure to appreciate the nature and ubiquity of emergent properties. For this reason I find it interesting, but outside the scope here.
Perhaps even something that''ll fill the holes left by Bell's theorem.
I suspect that in labeling it "malarky" it's being interpreted within a singular myopic ontology. It was intentionally restricted in terms of an "information theory" for empirical and model independent consistency. Read my last response to DrC and I included at least one ontological model extension. If I took it as a final answer to the issues posed by QM, which I don't accept without GR, it would in fact be at the very least pointless. Understand what actually makes it work, and it gives you tools to think about real models, rather than just boring interpretations.
The most fundamental point I'm trying to make here is that, contrary to common opinion, EPR correlations don't entirely rules out all locally realistic theories. I've also provide the caveats that such models would require. I still have some interesting points to articulate for DevilsAvocado's last post. I look forward to defeat, if that is the truth, but the points actually need addressed for that to happen.
The problem you have is that not many people working in modern physics really care that EPR violations can be explained away by philosophical arguments about the nature of reality. You've mentioned the relational interpretation and an interpretation based on "probabilistic realism" (which I did reply to btw, I think you missed that since you claim your post was ignored) which are fun for those of a philosophical bent to ponder but for pragmatic scientists they are not very useful.
The relational interpretation is particularly unappealing, it just comes across as a clumsy way of extending einstein's spacetime relativity.
You (too) easily claim that consciousness may be explained by emergent properties in complex systems, as if that was a simple issue in comparison to explaining nonlocality!
The physical world is stuff A, consciousness is stuff B. Science will have to accept sooner or later that we haven't included stuff B in our models of reality.
Once we accept that stuff B has to be included we begin the next stage of our scientific development.
I don't think we need to throw deep philosophical arguments in just yet, science is about making theoretical models of how things work so as to make predictions or explain "why" something happens or is the way it is. Science starts with observations, and what I observe is that there is a physical world and there is my conscious awareness of this physical world. My conscious awareness is clearly not part of the physical world, so to model it scientifically I suggest it exists in is own separate "space", which mathematically we can model with extra dimensions appended to physical space or other topological constructs.
Our conscious thoughts seem to be able to have effects in the physical world and the physical world certainly affects our consciousness so we assume the two spaces are joined and can influence each other.
We can also assume consciousness is mundane and not something mystical, since it emerged from a mundane process, evolution.
Given that the only phenomena in science we know to be in conflict with classical local realism are quantum effects, it seems natural to assume consciousness and quantum effects are related, in particular it seems that entanglement and quantum computation gives a natural setting for our consciousness.
It also allows a natural solution to the problem of free-will: without conscious beings the universe is essentially the result of statistical physics. However, if we actually "are" a quantum system it seems reasonable to assume we can influence or "choose" quantum states in our own quantum system, so free-will is a conscious being selecting quantum states in his consciousness (which propagate to effects in the physical world). We do have to allow that an individual particle also has free-will, but if it's not related to any "desires" in a complex consciousness the "choices" made by individual particles are indistinguishable from random.
(Why we have desires to influence quantum states one way or another is complex, and
the problem of the human condition)
Rather than argue subtle and complex philosophical issues this raises I like to imagine a simple "thought experiment":
Imagine a sophisticated computer based on Mars, which knows all current physics, observing the Earth's exterior for the last few billion years. The computer would record all physical events, eruptions, meteor impacts, climate change etc and fit them to its physics model without much trouble. But then in 1957 it sees a metal object shoot up from the surface and
deliberately orbit the earth, in the years following it sees another metal object travel to the moon. How does it explain that with physics? Have conservation laws been broken? How can those events fit a physical model of the Earth which started as a relatively simple physical object, a big ball of molten rock.
Heck, we could even blow the Earth to pieces, maybe even the universe.
Without including consciousness (stuff B) as an additional component to reality in your scientific models you get nonsense.
So putting it all together, and returning to the OP's question, I suggest entanglement is due to signalling in the space of stuff B. It doesn't conflict with classical causality because the entire causal chain is restricted to the space of stuff B, although it may give rise to curious observations of backward events in the space of stuff A (classical space), it doesn't allow FTL signalling in the space of stuff A.
I don't even think this is a controversial model, it's bleedin' obvious.