nanosiborg said:
I think of standard qm as the minimal set of maths necessary to calculate accurate predictions. The minimalist statistical interpretation (MSI) of qm is simply standard qm without any accompanying assumptions about deep reality. There's no measurement problem (in the foundational sense that I think you mean it) re MSI. Whatever you want to call it, it's just qm without reification of any of the maths used in calculating predictions.
I can appreciate that foundationalists have a problem with standard qm having reversible and irreversible dynamical processes, and that this seems illogical to you. It doesn't seem illogical to me because I don't think of standard qm as saying anything about deep reality, and qm works quite well in its present form. Why do what seem to some like disparate, even contradictory, elements of the theory produce such accurate results?
Dear nanosiborg,
I conclude from the above that you admit that standard qm has both reversible and irreversible processes. That probably means that it includes both unitary evolution (UE) and the projection postulate (PP). They give different predictions for the same quantum state. (If you believe, following von Neumann, that UE and PP "take turns", you add some extra problems (please see my post 824)). So it seems that "the maths used in calculating predictions" gives ambiguous predictions. This is a contradiction, or inconsistency, in my book. It isn't, in yours? You know, I like very much this one about a don't-give-a-damners' contest:
- How do you feel about work?
- Don't give a damn about work.
- How about money?
- Don't give a damn about money.
- How about women?
- Well, broads are always on my mind.
- Well, there seems to be some inconsistency with the goals of our contest.
- Don't give a damn about your inconsistency...
Well, I might be a don't-give-a-damner myself, but it looks like standard quantum theory might give ambiguous predictions for Bell tests.
As for "why accurate results?" Because PP can be a very good approximation to the results of UE in some cases (please see the arxiv / Physics Report article quoted in my post 824). Let me remind you that thermodynamics gives very accurate results, but its irreversibility still contradicts the reversibility of the underlying microscopic theory. You may say: if it's so accurate, why should we care? Because Nature cannot be "approximately nonlocal" - that does not make any sense. It's either local or not. The Coulomb law or Newton's gravity are very accurate, but they fail exactly where they predict nonlocality.
nanosiborg said:
I think one can accept the assumption of determinism without adopting superdeterminism
I agree
nanosiborg said:
, which I consider as a conspiratorial extension of it.
, however, 't Hooft's argument (please see my post 821) is not completely lost on me.
nanosiborg said:
I'm ready to accept the results of a loophole-free Bell test. I just hope that when this is done and qm is confirmed and lhv is contradicted, then the lhv people won't grasp at increasingly absurdly fashioned straws (such as superdeterminism).
I guess, some of them won't, some of them will... What would I do in such case? I honestly don't know, and I hope I won't need to choose:-)