Understanding Barandes' microscopic theory of causality

  • #451
If the issue is that Barandes seem to wants the metaphysical benefit of "real trajectories" without supplying the formal machinery that would make those trajectories like objective beables rather than underdetermined stuff?

Then, my opinion is that it is a key feature here is that a subsystem’s real trajectory is fundamentally non-inferrable from an external perspective. It is therefore not an objective beable in the Bohmian or Bell-style sense. I see this as a feature, not a problem.

The difficulty is to accept that there can indeed be a hidden reality of a subsystem that is fully real, while the single realized trajectory of that subsystem is not itself the level at which the nomological structure lives. So it is not treated as an objective state-variable whose value directly influence via dynamical law another subsystem, as in Bohmian mechanics.

In Barandes’s picture, law is not a deterministic law for the actual microstate, as in an ordinary system dynamics. Rather, the nomological structure resides at the level of indivisible stochastic transition probabilities, which in turn is associated to each decomposed "subsystem". Causal structure is encoded in the relations among these probabilities, as defined by the global constrained Gamma, not in a trajectory-to-trajectory mechanism at the level of single realized events. The single-event level is irreducibly (Barandes chose the word indivisible to avoid confuison with other use of the term) stochastic.

For me this can be conceptaully plausible if you imagine interacting information processing systems. But not human observer, rather any physical subsystem; as it interacts with fellow subsystems. This is totally "classical" at each subsystem level, the magic lies in the insight "interaction rules" are defined at the level of inteacting information processing subsystems, ie at nomological descision level. This guarantees that we have no FTL pathologies. non-local correlations OTOH can be understood as an artifact from insisting on describing this from external view as system dynamics and "effective laws", that really does not reflect the true "causal relation".

Now, the problem i see is: this pushes all the "problems" into one point. What is the origin and explanation of the global constraint Gamma? Clearly Gamma encode non-trivial information/constrains, that begs a first principle answer; that encodes te same thing that is normally encoded in hilbert space structure and hamiltonians.

Barandes does not explain Gamma beyond the correspondence via alternative constructions, it follows from the hilbert picture, and it is not the task of the quantum-stochastic-correspondence alone to supply one. As I mentioned before, I see this as an alternative handle. Question is, what can we do with this new handle? If this new handle is more weird than the other handle of hilbert formalism, then of course it is hard to see the point.

This is why for me, the value of Barandes picture pivots on wether we can find a way to explain Gamma - without referring to the other side of the correspondence; ie regular hilber/hamiltonian stuff.

My "interpretation/understanding" here however is that Gamma probably need to be understood as emergent (in some way that isnt clear), from a process that is more general (=more crazy, less constrained) that the unistochastic picture. Personally, its the only viable direction I distinguish.

/Fredrik
 
on Phys.org
  • #452
javisot said:
The feeling I get is as if we took Copenhagen and changed everything written in English to Spanish, and then said that the result is a new interpretation....

What do you mean by interpretation? (Many Worlds and Copenhagen, while describing the same thing, are based on remarkably different physical realities)
He shows we can interpret quantum systems as systems with a definite, classical configuration, evolving unistochastically in time. The ontology is similar to Bohmian mechanics, but without the guiding nomology.
 
  • #453
Morbert said:
He shows we can interpret quantum systems as systems with a definite, classical configuration, evolving unistochastically in time. The ontology is similar to Bohmian mechanics, but without the guiding nomology.
I reconstruct the sentence then: "the feeling I get is as if we took BM and changed everything written in English to Spanish, and then said that the result is a new interpretation..."
 
  • #454
javisot said:
I reconstruct the sentence then: "the feeling I get is as if we took BM and changed everything written in English to Spanish, and then said that the result is a new interpretation..."
But the absolute KEY difference is what you omitted "but without the guiding nomology".

I'd say the key difference is not in "hidden variables" themselves. Ie i think the difference lies at the level where law-constraint applies. This is a major difference in the take on causal mechanisms.

In BM, the trajectory follows system dynamical law. In Barandes stochastic, no law rule individual trajectories, law only constrains the stochastic structure in which actual trajetories are realized.

This is why i think Barandes reformulation of microphysical causation is central to all this. The nature of causation is just as muchm, if not the bigger mystery as microphysical ontology itself.

/Fredrik
 
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  • #455
Morbert said:
They are Barandes's words. They are in the correspondence paper abstract. He explicitly says "can be".
Imo, this is just over-reading incidental phrases. If Barandes was seriously about promoting some kind of distinction then he would explicitly assert statements about the difference.

Morbert said:
The problem with these joint probabilities, denoting observed relative frequencies the omniscient observer happened to observe, is they are not reproducible. The observer could collect a new sample of trajectories, and the observed relative frequencies don't have to be the same. They don't have to be regular.

Possibly, but if frequentist probabilities sufficiently characterized in terms of something like law-of-large numbers may be context-dependent, even in such a way that is not useful or interesting, it doesn't mean they don't exist. It just means they change with some kind of context.
 
  • #456
iste said:
Imo, this is just over-reading incidental phrases. If Barandes was seriously about promoting some kind of distinction then he would explicitly assert statements about the difference.
Now you're charging him with not "promoting" a distinction, and you're contriving a misreading. I don't know if there is much substance here for me to respond to.
Possibly, but if frequentist probabilities sufficiently characterized in terms of something like law-of-large numbers may be context-dependent, even in such a way that is not useful or interesting, it doesn't mean they don't exist. It just means they change with some kind of context.
And even if they exist in this narrow metaphysical sense, they are not law-like, and hence we should not expect a theory to reproduce them.

The conversation is starting to loop.
 

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