Understanding Barandes' microscopic theory of causality

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Discussion Overview

This thread explores Barandes' microscopic theory of causality as presented in his pre-print "New Prospects for a Causally Local Formulation of Quantum Theory." The discussion focuses on the implications of Barandes' claims regarding causal locality in quantum mechanics, particularly in relation to Bell's theorem, and seeks to understand the interpretation of entanglement within this framework.

Discussion Character

  • Debate/contested
  • Exploratory
  • Technical explanation
  • Conceptual clarification

Main Points Raised

  • Some participants express skepticism about Barandes' assertion that his theory deflates Bell's theorem, questioning how he can claim a causally local hidden-variables formulation of quantum theory.
  • Barandes distinguishes between causal locality and Bell's local causality, which raises concerns about whether he is merely restating the no-signaling theorem.
  • There is a suggestion that Barandes' interpretation could lead to a fundamentally different understanding of the universe compared to general relativity.
  • One participant notes that Barandes does not translate "entanglement" into his new framework, implying that it remains an unresolved aspect of his theory.
  • Another participant proposes that Barandes' hidden variables differ from those in Bell's theorem, suggesting a violation of the assumption of "divisibility" into an objective beable.
  • Concerns are raised about the difficulty of explaining causal locality through a Bayesian network analogy as attempted by Barandes.
  • Some participants emphasize the need for an open-minded approach to understanding Barandes' principles rather than dismissing them outright.

Areas of Agreement / Disagreement

Participants generally do not reach consensus, with multiple competing views regarding the implications of Barandes' theory and its relationship to established concepts in quantum mechanics and relativity. The discussion remains unresolved on several key points, particularly concerning the interpretation of entanglement and the validity of Barandes' claims about causal locality.

Contextual Notes

Participants note limitations in understanding Barandes' framework, particularly regarding the translation of established quantum concepts into his proposed language. There are unresolved questions about the implications of his theory for existing interpretations of quantum mechanics and the foundational assumptions underlying Bell's theorem.

  • #391
Fra said:
For me the only conceptual resolution to this is the insight that the laws of nature is emergent. I see it like this: Its exactly because nature does not "know" that the natural resolution is stochastic progression, but one that is constrained by interaction history. Each subsystems "random walk" as it interact with other subsystems has a definite history, but this does not map onto an single objective beable state, like in system dynamics; this is where I see paradigm breakdown. Instead what reaplces the state space is more like an evolving "network" or contexts. A "trajectory" in this is a different animal than a "path" in a state space. This makes sense to me. But the problem is that I see "law" (ie differential equations) beening replaced by a kind of stochastic process/algorithm. So the arrow of time as defined by dynamical law, is conceptually replaced by a "learning" network. And they can be consistent if and only if the learning network reaches some steady state, where "effective" dynamical laws can be seem at moderate time scales.

This is conceptually fine for me, but the missing part is the algoritmic implementation, and proof that steady states that map onto the standard models "effective theories" - ie differential equations in effective state spaces - exists. This is more complicated, but conceptually more satisfactory than having a dynamical law that "just is" for no particular reasons. This is easier to accept if one realizes that even classical physics has mysteries. We are just "used to" those mysteries and accept them.
You might find this Curt Jaimungal episode interesting:



Fra said:
But this view is a plain descrpitive probability of all time history, which in itself has zero predictive value in the situation where you want to guess the near future from a limited sample. Descriptive statistics give no insight into causal mechanisms at all.

Well I think all probabilities bottom-out this way. Probabilities just won't be veridical or even meaningful, at least for physical systems, if they don't match approximately what would happen if you repeated scenarios infinitely many times. The Omniscient observer has just made a direct calculation of these probabilities in an objectivist / frequentist manner. From the perspective of another kind of observer standing at some point in time of the history of the specific scenario being codified, and subjectively not knowing what will happen next, these probabilities will still have predictive value.

At the same time, this descriptive kind of laws is the same kind of perspective Morbert was pointing at when he said Laws codify what we can say about it - Humean regularities in the behavior of the universe. Albeit, to some extent this codification kind of depends on what an observer happens to be able to see or cognitively process, and the omniscient observer can count stuff that ordinary people are unable to see. But the point is that from this perspective; if definite trajectories exist and they can be counted, then you can codify probabilistic laws about them in principle from which the indivisible probabilities emerge as a special case.
 

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