Take ‘natural’ to mean ‘being fully explicable by states in the observable world’.
‘Supernatural’ means everything not natural by that definition.
You have results (like Aspect’s experiment) that prove that the world is not naturalist: the world is not fully explainable by observable states causing other states.
That is not the definition that natural sciences use for natural. Going down that rabbit hole is completely meaningless, since we are no longer talking about science at that point.
In addition, if using your definition, nothing is natural according to our current understanding.
Natural means pretty much “element of the physical universe, identified by observation”.
You’re claiming in another comment to this thread that you have M.Sc., you should be aware of this, please stop wasting everyone’s time.
Slapping “quantum” in front of something generally makes it involve indeterminism (excepting the many-worlds interpretation)
Indeterminism is by no means non-natural, and it does not make things any less observable. We can observe quantum states just fine.
And as for
Yeah all the Bell stuff
“All the Bell stuff” doesn’t have anything to do with “Didn’t some quantum nondeterminism prove the existence of effects without a natural cause?”
And no, it didn’t. AFAIK there are exactly zero physicists who argue that.
You made a ludicrous claim, and are unable or unwilling to back it up even a bit, yet somehow you feel continuing this without anything to show is a good use of anyone’s time. If you are not going to make an actual argument, I do not see value in continuing this conversation, as all it does is make this thread more difficult to read for others who most likely are not very interested watching yet another internet argument sidethread.
Natural means pretty much “element of the physical universe, identified by observation”.
Right. We are in agreement. And indeterminism says that those natural things are not sufficient explanations of experimental results. There is something going on in Aspect’s experiment
Determinism: things are fully explained by natural phenomena, i.e. by observable elements of the physical universe
Indeterminism: observable elements of the physical universe are insufficient to explain experimental results; there is something else, like randomness
AFAIK there are exactly zero physicists who argue that.
We must be misunderstanding each other somewhere. Surely you’re not saying that zero physicists argue indeterminism? Obviously many/most physicists believe in indeterminism.
A Snapshot of Foundational Attitudes Toward Quantum Mechanics (2013) by Schlosshauer, Kofler, and Zeilinger found that 64% of physicists believe that “Randomness is a fundamental concept in nature” and 48% believe “The randomness is irreducible”. For the question “What is your favorite interpretation of quantum mechanics?”, the most popular answer by some way was the Copenhagn interpretation (which as you know is anti-deterministic)
Lev Vaidman: “Historically, appearance of the quantum theory led to a prevailing view that Nature is indeterministic… Quantum theory and determinism usually do not go together.” (Vaidman, L. (2014). Quantum theory and determinism. Quantum Studies: Mathematics and Foundations, 1(1-2), 5–38. doi:10.1007/s40509-014-0008-4)
You made a ludicrous claim
Yes. And these ludicrous claims are standard in physics for decades now. Specifically, the ludicrous claim that most physicists believe is that there are things going on without natural causes (Natural means pretty much “element of the physical universe, identified by observation”). That’s an extremely standard ludicrous claim about our ludicrous universe.
and are unable or unwilling to back it up even a bit
That’s false.
yet somehow you feel continuing this without anything to show is a good use of anyone’s time. If you are not going to make an actual argument, I do not see value in continuing this conversation, as all it does is make this thread more difficult to read for others who most likely are not very interested watching yet another internet argument sidethread.
And indeterminism says that those natural things are not sufficient explanations of experimental results.
According to who, exactly? This is just not even remotely true.
If you want to continue this, link me the papers that have any support to what you are proposing, I’m tired of fighting unsubstantiated claims and you dodging every point I make.
My simple uncontroversial claims: A) indeterminism means natural/observable causes are not sufficient to explain all experimental results, B) plenty of physicists (most) believe in indeterminism. Then my funny claim for the craic was C) you can use the word ‘supernatural’ to describe those effects because they are not natural (“Natural means pretty much “element of the physical universe, identified by observation”.”)
When you say my claims are “not even remotely true”, and you want me to “support what you are proposing”, which of these claims is it?
It appears from context to be the first: the claim that indeterminism means events are not explained by their causes. But that’s just the definition of indeterminism like. What is your counter-claim? If you deny that indeterminism means things aren’t determined by observable causes, then what does it mean?
An example in a textbook: “If the world is genuinely indeterministic in this way, then it isn’t possible to provide a dynamical explanation of how a system produces a particular outcome in a quantum measurement — the outcome is intrinsically random.” – that’s from Ch.7 of Quantum [Un]speakables II, edited by Bertlmann and Zeilinger. You can also read section 3 of Ch.1 of Dirac’s 1930 textbook.
link me the papers that have any support to what you are proposing
I have linked two papers and an encylopædia entry already; you have not substantiated your claims with anything.
Here is an example of indeterminacy being “certified” in experiment that you might find interesting: Pironio, S., Acin, A., Massar, S., Boyer de la Giroday, A., Matsukevich, D.N., Maunz, P., Olmschenk, S., Hayes, D., Luo, L., Manning, T.A., Monroe, C.: Random numbers certified by Bell’s theorem. Nature 464, 1021 (2010)
I’m tired of fighting unsubstantiated claims and you dodging every point I make.
I have not dodged anything. I’m not sure what “point” you’re making. You seem to be saying that indeterminism doesn’t mean “things aren’t determined by observable causes” but yep that’s what indeterminism means.
If they were, it has nothing to do with nature being supernatural. It just means that nature’s state is not locally real. That does not tie into religion in any objective way.
In addition, both of those articles are (slightly) wrong. There was a lenghty discussion about how in r/physics when they came out. The tl;dr is that it boils down to:
locality
realism
independence of measurement
Pick two.
But that has no relevance to religion other than you can make either philosophical or religious argument out of anything.
Quantum mechanics show a break between the classical understanding of physics and the equations and laws derived from plain observation and the probabilistic and unstable nature of matter and energy at the smallest observable level.
Physics isn’t a done deal, we don’t know how a lot of stuff works. Our simplified classical models clearly don’t work on every level, but that doesn’t mean gravity suddenly doesn’t pull the earth and the moon towards each other.
Large scale physics (somewhere between molecules and stars) is full of simplified models. From spherical cows to “assume you’re walking along a perfectly straight, frictionless surface in a vacuum”, very few of the formulae taught in school actually model what really happens. They’re approximations that work at every relevant scale of physics, as we lack the ability to accurately simulate the chaotic nature of individual particles and energy fields.
Scientists were initially hoping that we could use Newton’s laws to describe how atoms interact (and then quarks and such, when they were discovered) and quantum theory has proven that this is not possible. That does not prove or disprove the existence of a higher being, it just proves that earlier extrapolations were wrong.
There’s no common definition of “natural cause” within physics as a science, so there’s no way to prove or disprove anything regarding natural causes. You can define the term within a specific paper, but that just proves or disproves something within the confines of that specific paper, experiment, and definition. I can call a puddle of water “Jesus”, evaporate the puddle, and claim to have killed God, but outside of my own wacky experiment nothing religious has happened.
Science will never be able to prove a negative, so no matter what happens, belief in the mere existence of the supernatural is always a possibility. Religion brings forth very few scientifically provable facts. We know lightning is caused by electrical discharge now, but we’ll never be able to prove that it’s not caused by an invisible Donar riding around in the heavens, swinging his hammer.
Oh dear. There are already two lemmings in this thread spreading this one.
Would you and @muntedcrocodile@lemm.ee and @Didros@beehaw.org please just look up “can you prove a negative or not” using your research method of choice. Make this the day you learn.
You can prove a negative in the mathematical sense, sure. You can’t prove a negative when the supernatural gets involved. Physics, chemistry, and biology aren’t Maths, and the supernatural isn’t formally defined mathematics.
I don’t think the second coming of Christ will have a tough job proving himself. Apocalyptic monsters and the dead rising would be a pretty clear way to prove the supernatural. So yes, it sure is possible.
People have certainly tried to prove weaker supernatural events. That includes government researchers looking into telepathy. Double blind tests have so far failed to prove every scientific claim about supernatural powers and experiences brought forward so far.
I haven’t seen any convincing evidence of the supernatural and the onus of proof is on the one that comes with the claim. Often, these claims are vague, imprecise, and noncommittal, so the proof is often weak and impossible to verify. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, as they say, and so far all the evidence I’ve been presented with had come down to “someone wrote this in a book millenia ago” and “I just feel it”.
The traditional notion of cause and effect is not something all philosophers even agree upon, I mean many materialist philosophers largely rejected the notion of simple cause-and-effect chains that go back to the “first cause” since the 1800s, and that idea is still pretty popular in some eastern countries.
For example, in China they teach “dialectical materialist” philosophy part of required “common core” in universities for any degree, and that philosophical school sees cause and effect as in a sense dependent upon point of view, that an effect being described as a particular cause is just a way of looking at things, and the same relationship under a different point of view may in fact reverse what is considered the cause and the effect, viewing the effect as the cause and vice-versa. Other points of view may even ascribe entirely different things as the cause.
It has a very holistic view of the material world so there really is no single cause to any effect, so what you choose to identify as the cause is more of a label placed by an individual based on causes that are relevant to them and not necessarily because those are truly the only causes. In a more holistic view of nature, Laplacian-style determinism doesn’t even make sense because it implies nature is reducible down to separable causes which can all be isolated from the rest and their properties can then be fully accounted for, allowing one to predict the future with certainty.
However, in a more holistic view of nature, it makes no sense to speak of the universe being reducible to separable causes as, again, what we label as causes are human constructs and the universe is not actually separable. In fact, the physicists Dmitry Blokhintsev had written a paper in response to a paper Albert Einstein wrote criticizing Einstein’s distaste for quantum mechanics as based on his adherence to the notion of separability which stems from Newtonian and Kantian philosophy, something which dialectical materialists, which Blokhintsev self-identified as, had rejected on philosophical grounds.
He wrote this paper many many years prior to the publication of Bell’s theorem which showed that giving up on separability (and by extension absolute determinism) really is a necessity in quantum mechanics. Blokhintsev would then go on to write a whole book called The Philosophy of Quantum Mechanics where in it he argues that separability in nature is an illusion and under a more holistic picture absolute determinism makes no sense, again, purely from materialistic grounds.
The point I’m making is ultimately just that a lot of the properties people try to ascribe to “materialists” or “naturalists” which then later try to show quantum mechanics is in contradiction with, they seem to forget that these are large umbrella philosophies with many different sects and there have been materialist philosophers criticizing absolute determinism as even being a meaningful concept since at least the 1800s.
Didn’t some quantum nondeterminism prove the existence of effects without a natural cause? (being divil’s advocate a bit here for the craic)
No
Slapping “quantum” in front of something does not make it magic.
Take ‘natural’ to mean ‘being fully explicable by states in the observable world’.
‘Supernatural’ means everything not natural by that definition.
You have results (like Aspect’s experiment) that prove that the world is not naturalist: the world is not fully explainable by observable states causing other states.
That is not the definition that natural sciences use for natural. Going down that rabbit hole is completely meaningless, since we are no longer talking about science at that point.
In addition, if using your definition, nothing is natural according to our current understanding.
If I say something this person burst into flames for supernatural reasons, I mean without a measurable cause in the observable universe.
That has very little to do with anything related to the arguments you’ve made before, and I am not interested in participating in a Gish Gallop.
reddit.com
Go on then: what definition do they use?
Slapping “quantum” in front of something generally makes it involve indeterminism (excepting the many-worlds interpretation)
Natural means pretty much “element of the physical universe, identified by observation”.
You’re claiming in another comment to this thread that you have M.Sc., you should be aware of this, please stop wasting everyone’s time.
Indeterminism is by no means non-natural, and it does not make things any less observable. We can observe quantum states just fine.
And as for
“All the Bell stuff” doesn’t have anything to do with “Didn’t some quantum nondeterminism prove the existence of effects without a natural cause?”
And no, it didn’t. AFAIK there are exactly zero physicists who argue that.
You made a ludicrous claim, and are unable or unwilling to back it up even a bit, yet somehow you feel continuing this without anything to show is a good use of anyone’s time. If you are not going to make an actual argument, I do not see value in continuing this conversation, as all it does is make this thread more difficult to read for others who most likely are not very interested watching yet another internet argument sidethread.
Right. We are in agreement. And indeterminism says that those natural things are not sufficient explanations of experimental results. There is something going on in Aspect’s experiment
Determinism: things are fully explained by natural phenomena, i.e. by observable elements of the physical universe
Indeterminism: observable elements of the physical universe are insufficient to explain experimental results; there is something else, like randomness
We must be misunderstanding each other somewhere. Surely you’re not saying that zero physicists argue indeterminism? Obviously many/most physicists believe in indeterminism.
Lev Vaidman: “Historically, appearance of the quantum theory led to a prevailing view that Nature is indeterministic… Quantum theory and determinism usually do not go together.” (Vaidman, L. (2014). Quantum theory and determinism. Quantum Studies: Mathematics and Foundations, 1(1-2), 5–38. doi:10.1007/s40509-014-0008-4)
Yes. And these ludicrous claims are standard in physics for decades now. Specifically, the ludicrous claim that most physicists believe is that there are things going on without natural causes (Natural means pretty much “element of the physical universe, identified by observation”). That’s an extremely standard ludicrous claim about our ludicrous universe.
That’s false.
Please calm down.
According to who, exactly? This is just not even remotely true.
If you want to continue this, link me the papers that have any support to what you are proposing, I’m tired of fighting unsubstantiated claims and you dodging every point I make.
???
I think I am misunderstanding you.
My simple uncontroversial claims: A) indeterminism means natural/observable causes are not sufficient to explain all experimental results, B) plenty of physicists (most) believe in indeterminism. Then my funny claim for the craic was C) you can use the word ‘supernatural’ to describe those effects because they are not natural (“Natural means pretty much “element of the physical universe, identified by observation”.”)
When you say my claims are “not even remotely true”, and you want me to “support what you are proposing”, which of these claims is it?
It appears from context to be the first: the claim that indeterminism means events are not explained by their causes. But that’s just the definition of indeterminism like. What is your counter-claim? If you deny that indeterminism means things aren’t determined by observable causes, then what does it mean?
An example in a textbook: “If the world is genuinely indeterministic in this way, then it isn’t possible to provide a dynamical explanation of how a system produces a particular outcome in a quantum measurement — the outcome is intrinsically random.” – that’s from Ch.7 of Quantum [Un]speakables II, edited by Bertlmann and Zeilinger. You can also read section 3 of Ch.1 of Dirac’s 1930 textbook.
I have linked two papers and an encylopædia entry already; you have not substantiated your claims with anything.
Here is an example of indeterminacy being “certified” in experiment that you might find interesting: Pironio, S., Acin, A., Massar, S., Boyer de la Giroday, A., Matsukevich, D.N., Maunz, P., Olmschenk, S., Hayes, D., Luo, L., Manning, T.A., Monroe, C.: Random numbers certified by Bell’s theorem. Nature 464, 1021 (2010)
Heisenberg proved in Uber den anschaulichen Inhalt der quantentheoretischen Kinematik und Mechanik in 1927 that there is an uncertainty associated with measurement. There are deterministic interpretations (e.g. many-worlds: “The existence of the other worlds makes it possible to remove randomness” or Bohm’s interpretation of nonlocal hidden variables) and indeterministic interpretations (e.g. Copenhagn: “Today the Copenhagen interpretation is mostly regarded as synonymous with indeterminism”)
I have not dodged anything. I’m not sure what “point” you’re making. You seem to be saying that indeterminism doesn’t mean “things aren’t determined by observable causes” but yep that’s what indeterminism means.
Are you talking about this?
Yeah all the Bell stuff
If they were, it has nothing to do with nature being supernatural. It just means that nature’s state is not locally real. That does not tie into religion in any objective way.
In addition, both of those articles are (slightly) wrong. There was a lenghty discussion about how in r/physics when they came out. The tl;dr is that it boils down to:
Pick two.
But that has no relevance to religion other than you can make either philosophical or religious argument out of anything.
Quantum mechanics show a break between the classical understanding of physics and the equations and laws derived from plain observation and the probabilistic and unstable nature of matter and energy at the smallest observable level.
Physics isn’t a done deal, we don’t know how a lot of stuff works. Our simplified classical models clearly don’t work on every level, but that doesn’t mean gravity suddenly doesn’t pull the earth and the moon towards each other.
Large scale physics (somewhere between molecules and stars) is full of simplified models. From spherical cows to “assume you’re walking along a perfectly straight, frictionless surface in a vacuum”, very few of the formulae taught in school actually model what really happens. They’re approximations that work at every relevant scale of physics, as we lack the ability to accurately simulate the chaotic nature of individual particles and energy fields.
Scientists were initially hoping that we could use Newton’s laws to describe how atoms interact (and then quarks and such, when they were discovered) and quantum theory has proven that this is not possible. That does not prove or disprove the existence of a higher being, it just proves that earlier extrapolations were wrong.
There’s no common definition of “natural cause” within physics as a science, so there’s no way to prove or disprove anything regarding natural causes. You can define the term within a specific paper, but that just proves or disproves something within the confines of that specific paper, experiment, and definition. I can call a puddle of water “Jesus”, evaporate the puddle, and claim to have killed God, but outside of my own wacky experiment nothing religious has happened.
Science will never be able to prove a negative, so no matter what happens, belief in the mere existence of the supernatural is always a possibility. Religion brings forth very few scientifically provable facts. We know lightning is caused by electrical discharge now, but we’ll never be able to prove that it’s not caused by an invisible Donar riding around in the heavens, swinging his hammer.
Oh dear. There are already two lemmings in this thread spreading this one.
Would you and @muntedcrocodile@lemm.ee and @Didros@beehaw.org please just look up “can you prove a negative or not” using your research method of choice. Make this the day you learn.
You can prove a negative in the mathematical sense, sure. You can’t prove a negative when the supernatural gets involved. Physics, chemistry, and biology aren’t Maths, and the supernatural isn’t formally defined mathematics.
Can you prove a positive where the supernatural is involved?
I don’t think the second coming of Christ will have a tough job proving himself. Apocalyptic monsters and the dead rising would be a pretty clear way to prove the supernatural. So yes, it sure is possible.
People have certainly tried to prove weaker supernatural events. That includes government researchers looking into telepathy. Double blind tests have so far failed to prove every scientific claim about supernatural powers and experiences brought forward so far.
I haven’t seen any convincing evidence of the supernatural and the onus of proof is on the one that comes with the claim. Often, these claims are vague, imprecise, and noncommittal, so the proof is often weak and impossible to verify. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, as they say, and so far all the evidence I’ve been presented with had come down to “someone wrote this in a book millenia ago” and “I just feel it”.
You should read the meta-analyses of the ganzfeld experiments.
The traditional notion of cause and effect is not something all philosophers even agree upon, I mean many materialist philosophers largely rejected the notion of simple cause-and-effect chains that go back to the “first cause” since the 1800s, and that idea is still pretty popular in some eastern countries.
For example, in China they teach “dialectical materialist” philosophy part of required “common core” in universities for any degree, and that philosophical school sees cause and effect as in a sense dependent upon point of view, that an effect being described as a particular cause is just a way of looking at things, and the same relationship under a different point of view may in fact reverse what is considered the cause and the effect, viewing the effect as the cause and vice-versa. Other points of view may even ascribe entirely different things as the cause.
It has a very holistic view of the material world so there really is no single cause to any effect, so what you choose to identify as the cause is more of a label placed by an individual based on causes that are relevant to them and not necessarily because those are truly the only causes. In a more holistic view of nature, Laplacian-style determinism doesn’t even make sense because it implies nature is reducible down to separable causes which can all be isolated from the rest and their properties can then be fully accounted for, allowing one to predict the future with certainty.
However, in a more holistic view of nature, it makes no sense to speak of the universe being reducible to separable causes as, again, what we label as causes are human constructs and the universe is not actually separable. In fact, the physicists Dmitry Blokhintsev had written a paper in response to a paper Albert Einstein wrote criticizing Einstein’s distaste for quantum mechanics as based on his adherence to the notion of separability which stems from Newtonian and Kantian philosophy, something which dialectical materialists, which Blokhintsev self-identified as, had rejected on philosophical grounds.
He wrote this paper many many years prior to the publication of Bell’s theorem which showed that giving up on separability (and by extension absolute determinism) really is a necessity in quantum mechanics. Blokhintsev would then go on to write a whole book called The Philosophy of Quantum Mechanics where in it he argues that separability in nature is an illusion and under a more holistic picture absolute determinism makes no sense, again, purely from materialistic grounds.
The point I’m making is ultimately just that a lot of the properties people try to ascribe to “materialists” or “naturalists” which then later try to show quantum mechanics is in contradiction with, they seem to forget that these are large umbrella philosophies with many different sects and there have been materialist philosophers criticizing absolute determinism as even being a meaningful concept since at least the 1800s.
1700s but yeah
Whatever we observe empirically is “natural” by definition. Causality is an assumption, not a law of nature.
Good comment