Making Better Sense of Quantum Mechanics

Making Better Sense of Quantum Mechanics

N. David Mermin

Abstract. We still lack any consensus about what one is actually talking about as one uses quantum mechanics. There is a gap between the abstract terms in which the theory is couched and the phenomena the theory enables each of us to account for so well. Because it has no practical consequences for how we each use quantum mechanics to deal with physical problems, this cognitive dissonance has managed to coexist with the quantum theory from the very beginning. The absence of conceptual clarity for almost a century suggests that the problem might lie in some implicit misconceptions about the nature of scientific explanation that are deeply held by virtually all physicists, but are rarely explicitly acknowledged. I describe here such unvoiced but widely shared assumptions. Rejecting them clarifies and unifies a range of obscure remarks about quantum mechanics made almost from the beginning by some of the giants of physics, many of whom are held to be in deep disagreement. This new view of physics requires physicists to think about science in an unfamiliar way. My primary purpose is to explain the new perspective and urge that it be taken seriously. My secondary aims are to explain why this perspective differs significantly from what Bohr, Heisenberg, and Pauli had been saying from the very beginning, and why it is not solipsism, as some have maintained. To emphasize that this is a general view of science, and not just of quantum mechanics, I apply it to a long-standing puzzle in classical physics: the apparent inability of physics to give any meaning to “Now” — the present moment.

Making Better Sense of Quantum Mechanics

N. David Mermin

Yet despite this unprecedented success there is notorious disagreement about. . . . The
sentence fades away because it is not so easy to say what the disagreement actually is
about. Everybody who has learned quantum mechanics agrees how to use it. “Shut up
and calculate!” There is no ambiguity, no confusion, and spectacular success. What we lack
is any consensus about what one is actually talking about as one uses quantum mechanics.
There is an unprecedented gap between the abstract terms in which the theory is couched
and the phenomena the theory enables us so well to account for. We do not understand
the meaning of this strange conceptual apparatus that each of us uses so effectively to deal
with our world.

This is, I suspect, because the Materialist / Physicalist has no understanding of how to integrate it into the classical physics they so worship, so they implicitly forbid any attempts by scientists at trying to understand the nature of it, because said scientists have all seemed to end up drawing non-Materialist / non-Physicalist conclusions, one way or another.

Every experience, as I use the
term here, is private to the person having that experience. So is the picture of the world
that each of us constructs from our own experience.
There is indeed a common external world in addition to the many distinct individual
personal external worlds. But that common world must be understood at the foundational
level to be a mutual construction that all of us have put together from our distinct private
experiences, using our most powerful human invention: language.
2.2. Language
Personal experience is private: I cannot enter your mind and share your own experience
exactly as you perceive it. It is uniquely and impenetrably yours and only yours. But
language enables each of us to communicate to others crude or even quite so

It's a very wrong, and a poorly thought about idea... the physicists who just shut up and calculate, without trying to put some stupid (not observed) narrative onto what QM is, are doing the right thing, and not getting dragged down the rabbit hole.

It's not private, otherwise we wouldn't have a shared experience, we share some structure... from which the rest of the structure of experience is built. The latter may be private, but it's incorrect to say it MUST be private. The former is NEVER private.

We have boatloads of anomalous human experiences that tell us that people really do recall other peoples experiences. For example, just look at the typical medical Near Death Experience with Out of Body experience during cardiac arrest whilst under anesthesia, or, Apparitions - like the famous Treasurers House, York sighting, which is not from our 'time', they are experiences from many hundreds of years ago, or Ancestor syndrome (inexplicable phobias), or Past life experiences (experiences that are not ours), or shared end of life experiences, or Quija board experiences, or Prayer...

Experience IS absolutely a shared construction, and Mermin's terrible ideas cannot reconcile his statement that Experience is private, and then Experience is a "mutual construction".

Experience IS absolutely a shared construction, and Mermin's terrible ideas cannot reconcile his statement that Experience is private, and then Experience is a "mutual construction".

Mermin didn't invent this idea. These two seem to have done do:

https://ar5iv.labs.arxiv.org/html/1612.07308

Most of the papers on this subject are dense with waffle, and nothing else. The above paper also includes some maths, which might make it more tractable, or utterly intractable - I have yet to explore.

David

It's a very wrong, and a poorly thought about idea... the physicists who just shut up and calculate, without trying to put some stupid (not observed) narrative onto what QM is, are doing the right thing, and not getting dragged down the rabbit hole.

It's not private, otherwise we wouldn't have a shared experience, we share some structure... from which the rest of the structure of experience is built. The latter may be private, but it's incorrect to say it MUST be private. The former is NEVER private.

We have boatloads of anomalous human experiences that tell us that people really do recall other peoples experiences. For example, just look at the typical medical Near Death Experience with Out of Body experience during cardiac arrest whilst under anesthesia, or, Apparitions - like the famous Treasurers House, York sighting, which is not from our 'time', they are experiences from many hundreds of years ago, or Ancestor syndrome (inexplicable phobias), or Past life experiences (experiences that are not ours), or shared end of life experiences, or Quija board experiences, or Prayer...

Experience IS absolutely a shared construction, and Mermin's terrible ideas cannot reconcile his statement that Experience is private, and then Experience is a "mutual construction".

I have been following QBism for several years and find it well considered.  Max, I cannot parse your first take - about private.  I see my physical being as having private thoughts.  Surely, the term "secret" has clear use.  However, people can "show" their tells, revealing mental states and secrets as non-verbal communication.  The idea is - without a physical signal - mind is private, but, in fact, leaking info to observers.

Your second point is interesting, since it's why I'm here wanting to learn about anomalous information transfer.  I believe there is "stuff" (structure and action) that we detect in the past and the future.  That is why a visionary can see past events or images of the future.

I am fully committed to the reality of Psi and have a simple model of how the process works.  I think that there is value in QBism, even if it doesn't address Psi.  Here is a quote from the paper where QBism speaks my language. 

 Science starts with mind, the private library of experience for each of us. From the contents of our own experience each of us strives to assemble what that experience means about the world that gives rise to it. An all too common misreading of QBism in the popular scientific press is “It’s all mind”. This is as wrong as the opinion most physicists have about physics, that it’s all world. There is mind and there is a world.

My take is that we have Materials Science and Physics to address the physical world and we have Information Science and the Humanities to address the informational world.  In the informational world (environment) there is a whole lot that is not understood.  That the past and future are "in there", as to both structure and meanings, has been obscured by Physicalism.  Meaning is active as a fundamental.

Many here have expressed negative opinions about how science doesn't include experience.  Here it is trying.