Challenging local realism with human choices

I find the comment that - "if human will is free, there are physical events without cause".  Isn't that the definition of random?  

Chris - I am not sure I understand your comment about Jung's synchronicity.  Can you explain?  A governing dynamic sounds like a something that can be quantified to me.

I take the comment about "physical events without cause" to refer to the correlation between measurements made on two distant entangled particles. There can't be a causal relationship between the two measurements (on the assumption that a causal influence can't travel faster than light). And there can't be a hidden common cause because Bell's inequalities are violated, which means the correlation can't be explained by hidden variables.

I agree random events in general can be without cause, but I think the "event" the article is talking about is the correlation between the measurements in the Bell test.

The aspect of synchronicity that this seems to resemble is the "temporally coincident occurrences of acausal events" in the description you quote, because the observed correlation is "acausal" in the sense that it's neither the result of one measurement causing the other, nor the result of a cause that's common to the two measurements.

Well, it looks rather like causation, if you observe one particle and measure something, and if someone else measures the other particle and measures something which correlates with the first measurement, despite the fact that there wouldn't be time for light to travel between the two measurement sites. The question is, how does the second particle "know" about the result of the measurement made on the first particle? That's the spookiness.

I'm also curious about what's in Max's mind, to make him think there's nothing strange about the phenomenon. It does sound almost as though he is thinking in terms of hidden variables, but at the same time acknowledging that Einstein was wrong in suggesting that approach.

To "know" something is to have mutual information, which is typically achieved thru communication.  Entanglement is mutual information, contained in physical structure (usually spin) without communication.  In my terms, this is structural to the states of entangled particles, which can be many photons at once.  Not just 2.  In the future that number of 8 could grow substantially.

One way to create entangled photons is to use a special crystal that can split a high energy photon into two of lower energy. Like twins in a horror movie, the daughters possess a mystical connection between them.

The problem is only a fraction of incoming photons get entangled, and that makes entangling more than two fiendishly difficult. You can try to place a few crystals in a row, but the more photons you try to entangle, the less efficient the whole process becomes.

In 2012, Jian-Wei Pan and his team at the University of Science and Technology of China steamrolled the issue by developing a laser system that produced entangled photon pairs at a much higher rate. That’s how they set a record of the time of eight entangled photons.

https://cosmosmagazine.com/physics/two-q...iest-light

Avoiding a dose of gobbledygook - I won't analyze the inferences about multiple photons with the same informational structure.  I do offer the comments that local realism cannot be true for mind to be able to change the structural properties of probable states of affairs, including manifest physical things, events and processes.  So, the constant confirmation of entanglement is very strong support for informational structure.

Second, if hidden variables are true - it would cloud the issue for informational realism.  A clean cut between physics and information science, which I propose exists as multiple generative levels, would be obscured.

This whole subject of random input being generated purposefully was summed-up by John Von Neumann decades ago.

 Any one who considers arithmetical methods of producing random digits is, of course, in a state of sin. For, as has been pointed out several times, there is no such thing as a random number — there are only methods to produce random numbers, and a strict arithmetic procedure of course is not such a method.

To "know" something is to have mutual information, which is typically achieved thru communication.  Entanglement is mutual information, contained in physical structure (usually spin) without communication.

Well, I think everyone agrees the observers can't communicate with each other using entanglement. 

The snag is that it's the results of the measurements that are correlated. As I understand it, what Bell's Theorem is telling us, is that this correlation can't be explained on the basis of information that existed before the measurements were made. And there's no time for information from the first measurement to be communicated (at the speed of light or slower) to the site of the second measurement before it's made. I don't think it's easy to understand how that happens.

I think we have to be a bit careful in likening entanglement to psi. But I think the similarity is that there's something that looks like the communication of information, in circumstances in which physical principles appear to forbid the communication of information.

I'm guessing that may be the problem your having, you're trying to understand quantum entanglement from a classical position. But you will never make it fit, because your trying to use the less fundamental, and less accurate laws to understand entanglement. Where as entanglement is more fundamental and more accurate a part of the laws of Nature than are classical correlations.

Well, what's your understanding? Are you saying the information to account for the correlations is already there in the system before the measurements are made, or what?

Max

I'm still struggling to understand your point, to be honest. You seem to be implying I'm misunderstanding something, but you don't seem to want to be explicit. Or maybe you're just saying that I shouldn't find the effects of entanglement strange, because you don't. If so, I don't think it's very helpful unless you can communicate why it doesn't seem strange to you, beyond saying "That's just quantum mechanics."

I take the comment about "physical events without cause" to refer to the correlation between measurements made on two distant entangled particles. There can't be a causal relationship between the two measurements (on the assumption that a causal influence can't travel faster than light). And there can't be a hidden common cause because Bell's inequalities are violated, which means the correlation can't be explained by hidden variables.

I agree random events in general can be without cause, but I think the "event" the article is talking about is the correlation between the measurements in the Bell test.

Looking at the paper, I realise that my interpretation was wrong. It's not referring to the correlation between the measurements as being "without cause" in the sense that one measurement can't influence the other, but to something simpler. It's just saying that the outcome of the measurements is itself truly random, and not determined by a hidden variable or other properties of the system.