A lot of the “left” is really just petty bourgeois who long for the days of early-stage capitalism. They center their politics around being anti-monopoly and anti-big-tech and pro-small-business and the self-employed. They really just want “capitalism that works” rather than wanting to move beyond capitalism. AI has done more than any other technology to bring the contradictions between the capitalist mode of production and the regular working person to the forefront, by exposing the enormous disconnect between what regular people actually want and what the bourgeois wants, with this enormous all-encompassing technology progressing and being utilized in a way that is entirely out of touch of the common person. But, rather than recognize this disconnect stems from the disconnect between the material interests of the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, people have instead begun to blame it on the technology itself. This is why Luddism is ultimately a form of liberalism, as their “goal” is to destroy the technology to return to an earlier stage of capitalism when the contradictions were not so apparent, and thus to prolong capitalism’s survival.

I believe ECC is also targetable by quantum computers in theory. Post-quantum cryptography is lattice-based ciphers like Kyber.

I’d disagree about the blockchain. It doesn’t actually provide anything useful and massively wastes resources, because it requires a ton of energy doing useless calculations for a fake token that you just gamble with on the internet. Countries that ban it are immediately placed in an economic advantage because they free up tons of resources to actually go into producing real physical things and not meme coins, which is a big reason why China has largely banned Bitcoin, viewing it as a major burden on their energy infrastructure while contributing nothing real to the economy.

There are a lot of libertarian weirdos in tech who try to push certain technologies solely for ideological reasons. They will tell you how ideological superior the blockchain is for decentralizing things and thus not making you dependent on Uncle Sam. But they don’t actually provide any utility to that other than ideology.

The only non-ideological explanation I have ever received is that the blockchain is good because it makes it easier to break the law if the law is unjust. If for example you want to pay someone for something that is wrongfully made illegal to begin with, you can pay them in Bitcoin and get away with it easier.

That to me, however, is a bit of a bizarre argument. Saying that X should be legal because X can be used to break the law makes little coherent sense. Obviously, the law at that point is the problem and is what should be changed. If you have the power to influence what is legal (and thus to actually act upon the question of whether or not something should be legal), then obviously we should choose to get rid of the unjust law, not to legalize Bitcoin. If we do not have the power to influence what is legal, then the conversation is moot anyways.

NFTs were even worse, because nobody has ever made a non-ideological argument for NFTs. They are always justified based on some weird ideological belief about the sanctity of some nebulous “private property” registered on the blockchain. Laughably, blockchain technologies do not have the storage capacity to practically hold entire images, so they just held links to the images, and so many now lead to nowhere because the original servers they were registered with are down.

People often hate me for the fact that I often defend the utility and potential utility of AI and quantum technologies (even if I do agree that companies hype it and push out slop, that does not prove the technologies themselves are entirely a scam). But I have always been a critic of blockchain and the “metaverse,” because those were hypecycles which nobody could actually give me a single coherent explanation of how these things might improve human society at all in any material way.

…which is something I actually consider. It does indeed actually bother me that very few companies have actually adopted post-quantum cryptography yet. What is even the point of my VPN, for example, if there is a potential that everything is cracked 40 years down the line? NIST has already basically approved the standards. It should be an option for sensitive things, like anything to do with banking, data storage, and VPN.

Object permanence is technically an axiom. The idea that things exist even when we aren’t observing them.

If things do not exist exist when you’re not looking at them, well, you are a thing, and so you do not exist when I am not looking at you. Denying object permanence inevitably collapses into solipsism.

There’s also a problem with terms, particularly related to quantum mechanics. It uses the term observer. To a layman, that’s a person watching. To a scientist its any collection of atoms/fundamental particles that can cause the quantum waveform to collapse.

This is patently false. Observer in quantum mechanics absolutely just refers to an experimenter watching. What you are repeating is a common myth and does not accurately reflect the dominant views among physicists in academia.

What you are talking about is a physical collapse theory. A physical collapse theory is impossible to be perfectly reconciled with the mathematics of quantum mechanics. You can reconcile it in a limiting case, and potentially all cases we can actually practical observe, but not in all possible conceivable cases, due to physical collapse breaking the linearity of the theory.

Physical collapse theories are thus not even quantum mechanics but brand new speculative physical models. Some physicists have proposed such models, like GRW theory or the Diosi-Penrose model, but these are alternative speculative models which lack broad support.

The dominant paradigm is the Copenhagen interpretation. The Copenhagen interpretation rejects that the collapse is a physical event that happens at all, but treats it as a subjective event. The collapse occurs in the mathematics, not in physical reality, as a means of the observer book-keeping the information they have on the system.

The Copenhagen interpretation absolutely does not posit that observation is “any collection of atoms/fundamental particles that can cause the quantum waveform to collapse,” as this necessarily leads to the following question, “What exactly qualifies some physical systems to play the role of ‘measurer’? Was the wavefunction of the world waiting to jump for thousands of millions of years until a single-celled living creature appeared? Or did it have to wait a little longer, for some better qualified system…with a PhD?”

The way you frame it naturally leads one to ask what rigorous mathematical definition actually qualifies a collection of atoms/fundamental particles to be able to cause the quantum waveform to (physically) collapse, but quantum theory alone does not tell you that, so you would have to go beyond it and introduce a new model. Copenhagen does not do that. It does not posit what you are claiming at all.

quantum mechanics being the oddball

Quantum mechanics is not an oddball at all. In any statistical theory, you track only the observer’s knowledge of the state of the system, and thus do not actually include its definite state in the mathematics. But nobody interprets that to mean its definite state does not still exist in the real world, except in the case for quantum mechanics, when people insist we should suddenly do a 180 u-turn and interpret the statistics entirely differently.

The physicist Dmitry Blokhintsev published a paper back in the 1950s which already pointed this out, that the confusion around quantum mechanics all stems from insisting upon treating it as a non-statistical theory. Statistics deal with the observer’s subjective knowledge, and so naturally statistical states vary based on an observer’s subjective knowledge. If you insist that the statistical state is a physical state (and thus not “statistical” at all), then you end up with a picture whereby objective reality can change depending upon an observer’s subjective knowledge, which leads entirely to a breakdown of any coherent notion of objective reality, as demonstrated in Eugene Wigner’s famous “friend” paradox.

The reality is that no physicist has ever published a paper in the peer-reviewed literature actually establishing that quantum mechanics demands you believe that the quantum state is a physical state. This is just a very very popular belief. We should not treat the “academic consensus” as just “what most physicists happen to believe.” If we are living in a country that is mostly Christian, one might find most physicists identify as Christian, but that would not make Christianity the “academic concensus.”

The “academic consensus” should be established through a meta-analysis of the preponderance of findings in actual peer-reviewed, academic journals. Not just what physicists personally believe, but what they have actually published. Yet, no physicist has ever published a paper establishing this belief, despite its popularity.

Only one major paper I’m aware of even attempted to do so, that being the famous “PBR theorem.” But if you read that paper, even the paper itself acknowledges it is not definitive, because their proof depends upon you believing that the way the particle responds to an interaction only depends upon its present state, a property called Markovianity. This assumption is necessary because their proof requires that the particles are prepared independently in the past then come together to interact in the present, with no information stored regarding their preparation existing in the present, and thus their behavior must be independent of their preparation. But if the outcome of the interaction has dependence upon the past, then you can trivially explain the same results, because the information would not need to exist in the present to influence the outcome of the present interaction.

Indeed, the physicist Jacob Barandes mathematically proved that quantum mechanics is mathematically equivalent to a statistical theory that is non-Markovian, Hence, the “non-classicality” of quantum mechanics can be interpreted as not arising from particles existing in “multiple places at once,” as if the quantum state is a physical state, but merely that when particles interact, the outcome of the interaction simply takes into account, on the level of the nomology, their statistical states into the past.

There is no definitive reason to take the quantum state as a physical state, and so there is no conflict or confusion between quantum theory and object permanence. It is just a very very popular belief among physicists. Physics is not entirely math and empirical evidence. It is also ideology.

This was something pointed out heavily by the physicist John Bell. In his paper “On the Impossible Pilot Wave,” he points out that the physicist David Bohm had already proposed a model mathematically equivalent to standard quantum mechanics and made all the same predictions, yet did not have these bizarre features, and so belief in those bizarre features is ultimately an ideological choice and not demanded by the empirical evidence or the mathematical model.

Indeed, Bell also published a paper “How to Teach Special Relativity” where he points out that the mathematics and empirical predictions of special relativity is actually perfectly compatible with a universe with absolute space and time, where the relativity of measurements of rods and clocks is an emergent and not fundamental feature, and so belief that space and time are really relative is ultimately an ideological position and not demanded by the mathematics or empirical evidence.

Too many physicists tend to struggle to separate the ideology from the mathematics and empirical evidence, and constantly conflate the first with the latter two, as if you must believe in their particular ideological viewpoint or else you’re a crazy person, a “crackpot,” who is denying the mathematics and empirical evidence. But it just does not logically follow. Nothing in the linear algebra of quantum mechanics demands you actually believe particles exist in multiple states at once. It is a perfectly consistent position to believe that particles always have a definite state, while also believing that the mathematical body of quantum mechanics is completely accurate, because nothing in the mathematics itself demands you take on a particular ideological position.

That is a choice you make outside of the mathematics. It is a particular ideological choice, imposed on top of the mathematics of quantum mechanics, which leads to a conflict with object permanence. It is not the mathematics of quantum mechanics itself which conflicts with it at all.

[I]n 1952 I saw the impossible done. It was in papers by David Bohm. Bohm showed explicitly how[…]the subjectivity of the orthodox version, the necessary reference to the “observer,” could be eliminated. Moreover, the essential idea was one that had been advanced already by de Broglie (in 1927, in his “pilot wave” picture. But why then had Born not told me of this “pilot wave?” If only to point out what was wrong with it? Why did von Neumann not consider it? More extraordinarily, why did people go on producing “impossibility”proofs, after 1952, and as recently as 1978? When even Pauli, Rosenfeld, and Heisenberg, could produce no more devastating criticism of Bohm’s version than to brand it as “metaphysical” and “ideological?” Why is the pilot wave picture ignored in text books? Should it not be taught, not as the only way, but as an antidote to the prevailing complacency? To show that vagueness, subjectivity, and indeterminism, are not forced on us by experimental facts, but by deliberate theoretical choice?

— John Bell

The KX-7000/8 was 1643.60 yuan (~$245), the XC KX700M D4 motherboard was 912.20 yuan (~$135), the MTT S80 I bought off of a US seller for $270, the YMTC NVMe SSD (part number YMSS1CB06B11MC) I also got from a US seller for $70. The rest of the parts are pretty standard.

Most software is made for Windows so Windows is still overwhelmingly popular for home desktops PCs in China like 75%.

Whether or not the NEP occurred has no relevance to what I am talking about. What I am talking about was already the well-established dominant position among Marxists prior to the Stalin model. It was the position advocated by Marx, Engels, Lenin, etc, if you read Hilferding’s “Finance Capital” he talks about how early stage socialism will look and basically describes modern China to a T.

Equating modern China to NEP is a bit misleading because it implies (1) the policy is a development by Lenin, which Lenin did add a lot to Marxism, but what I am talking about is just classical Marxism and would be true even if Lenin never exited and can be found throughout Marxist writings prior to Lenin, and (2) when Lenin implemented the NEP, at the time, the country was so obscenely underdeveloped that national enterprises were few and far between did not even have a dominant position in the economy, which is why Lenin described NEP Russia as “state capitalist” and not socialist. While the dictatorship of the proletariat nationalized the largest enterprises, the largest enterprises objectively were insufficient to actually control the economy. The economy was largely still autonomous, overwhelmingly ran by small private producers.

That is not the state of modern day China, nor what earlier Marxists like Marx and Engels themselves, or other early Marxists like Hilferding were advocating. Lenin saw the NEP as a temporary transition period to lay the foundations for the large-scale enterprises which would then serve as the basis of socialism, but, at least according to Lenin’s own analysis, at the time, those did not sufficiently exist, and so it was explicitly not a form of socialism at all, not even an early stage of socialism, but of capitalism, due to the extraordinary levels of underdevelopment, even control of the largest enterprises did not translate itself to a dominant position of the “heights” of the economy.

Lenin also described the NEP as a “temporary retreat” precisely because it was state capitalist and not socialist.

When people equate modern day countries like Vietnam, China, Cuba, etc, to just doing the NEP in the modern era, it is very misleading. It implies these countries are not socialist but state capitalist, that they are not following the by-the-books development model suggested by Marxian political economy but are in a “temporary retreat” implementing a form of capitalism for the meantime. It also implies that this is an explicitly Leninist position, when it is not.

China already had a state capitalist phase and that had ended. The mistake was not that the state capitalist phase needed to be extended forever to all eternity in an endless NEP. The mistake was that the NEP should have gradually transitioned into a lower stage of socialism, which would then proceed to gradually transition into the higher stage of socialism, but the Stalin Model tried to jump directly from the NEP to the higher stage in one stroke. It was correct to move beyond state capitalism, just not in that way.

I don’t watch “breadtube” so I wouldn’t know.

People excuse the private property and “restricted” capitalism as necessary evils

You are already off on the wrong foot. You take Marxism to be a moralist philosophy that states private property is morally wrong therefore should all be made illegal, and you find it problematic that China has not done that, and then see people explaining why as “excusing” it as a “necessary evil.”

Marxism is not a moralist philosophy. The treatment of private property is not that it is morally repugnant. Marxism is a branch of scientific research that attempts to analyze the development of human societies objectively, using evidence and material analysis, to form models of it, as well as to use those models to predict how it will develop in the future.

The treatment of private property originates from Marx’s analysis that the material basis of private property is in the decentralization of production, but that markets have a natural tendency to centralize production as the production process becomes more and more complicated. Marx referred to this centralization of production as “socialization.”

Centralized production is a different foundation than decentralized production, and it is less socially stable when paired with private ownership, because you end up with an extraordinarily tiny number of people meticulously controlling everything in society.

Competition becomes transformed into monopoly. The result is immense progress in the socialisation of production. In particular, the process of technical invention and improvement becomes socialised. This is something quite different from the old free competition between manufacturers, scattered and out of touch with one another, and producing for an unknown market…Capitalism in its imperialist stage leads directly to the most comprehensive socialisation of production; it, so to speak, drags the capitalists, against their will and consciousness, into some sort of a new social order, a transitional one from complete free competition to complete socialisation. Production becomes social, but appropriation remains private. The social means of production remain the private property of a few. The general framework of formally recognised free competition remains, and the yoke of a few monopolists on the rest of the population becomes a hundred times heavier, more burdensome and intolerable.

(Lenin, Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism)

Marx made a prediction, based on this analysis, that this social instability will grow and grow as enterprises grow larger in scale, and eventually will become so socially unstable that society will not be able to proceed any further unless the contradiction is resolved. Given that the socialization of production is a natural consequence of the immense scale of production due to its technological complexity, Marx did not believe you could always “bust up” large enterprises without destroying their technological foundations (at least the ones which became large through fair means of actually producing the best product). Thus, you instead have to change the ownership structure around it, i.e. to make it public and no longer private.

Why do I mention all of this?

Because the moralist analysis say: “private property is morally evil, therefore we should make it all illegal.” This mentality leads people to think socialism is just about passing a law that says “all private property is now illegal, and any country which doesn’t do this is evil betrayer of ‘true’ socialism.”

But in Marx’s analysis, there is no moral condemnation of private property, but instead the expropriation of industries exists for a very particular purpose, which is to resolve the contradiction between the socialization of production and the privatization of appropriation. There is thus a necessary condition that is a prerequisite to justify expropriating industries: that the industry is sufficiently socialized.

You see, if you nationalize a section of the economy which is dominated by small enterprise, where production is not socialized and it is not already operating on a national scale, then you are requiring the state to take over a section of the economy which the infrastructure and technology objectively, materially does not even exist yet to operate it at a national scale. You will introduce a contradiction between socialized appropriate and private production.

The moralist position ends up introducing policies which are antithetical to Marx’s own analysis and would be predicted to fail. Indeed, Lenin in “A Tax in Kind” said that nationalizing the small producers would be “economic suicide” to the party that attempted it, and that in “Left-wing Communism: an Infantile Disorder” said that you just have to “learn to live alongside them” (the small producers). In the Manifesto Marx is clear that you cannot nationalize all the small producers instantly, but can only nationalize the largest enterprises, and then promote rapid economic development, because this will encourage the development of more national giants and allow you to extend expropriations very gradually over a long period of time.

The Marxist vision of a classless society is not one where there is no private businesses because having a private business is illegal and you will be shot if you try to start one. No, it is a society where the publicly owned national enterprises are so technologically developed and efficient that if you tried to start a private business, you would have no chance of competing and would just go bankrupt. It would not be laws that prevent you from starting your own private business, but the material conditions in the real world.

People complain that “only” 40% of China’s GDP output comes from the public sector, but they forget that 60% of China’s GDP output is from small-to-medium sized enterprises. These kinds of things should not be nationalized to begin with. People often bring up the NEP but it’s not relevant. It is just basic Marxian analysis 101 that it makes zero sense to nationalize producers which are not already operating at a national scale.

What the USSR implemented was ultimately a wartime economy for the purpose of preparing for war against Germany. It is not how Marxist generally understood how the development of socialism would proceed, and is largely an invention of Stalin, which is why it is referred to in Chinese literature as the “Stalin Model” (斯大林模式‌). It is ultimately a revision of classical Marxism that many people copied because for a short time it seemed to work, but that was only when the economy was focused primarily on heavy industry.

When it came time to shift into light industry, they ran into exactly the kind of contradiction that classical Marxism would predict, which is that the state simply lacked the material infrastructure to satisfy all the light industry demand on a national scale, and naturally you had black markets of small producers arise which tried to fill in the gap themselves, but due to Soviet law, they had to constantly crush the small producers that only spontaneously arose to fill the gaps in their own system. This was, again, something Lenin warned about, that you should not waste time trying to crush the small producers that only arise due to your own economic inefficiency.

This, however, contributed to enormous corruption, because, on a material level, their economy was simply not compatible with production on a national scale for all products, and so the small producers were unavoidable and would continually spontaneously return. Since they remained illegal, they became part of the black markets, an unregulated secondary economy which, already in violation of the law, would use their influence to try and bring down the Soviet government.

This is something the PCC in Cuba commented on when they reformed their law as well, that the small producers always existed and the change in law was merely recognizing their existence, and that the purpose of doing so is to allow for them to be properly regulated and controlled, which is more difficult when you just declare them illegal and pretend they don’t exist. There was objectively, materially speaking, always private enterprise in the USSR, Cuba, and China, just written legislation that remained in denial of it.

Yes, Bohr, and most physicists, are very confused on this subject, and do not properly understand Einstein’s point. Physics doesn’t even really exist anymore, because the term “physics” comes from Greek referring to the study of nature, but modern day physics is better described as “empirical mathematics.” It is solely concerned with nothing else other than mapping what is observed to mathematical equations, and if you ask a more philosophical question of “okay, what do those equations actually tell us about the natural world?” it is typically dismissed. You see this with physicists like Lawrence Krauss and Niel deGrasse Tyson who dismiss philosophical questions as useless.

Einstein’s concern was that he did not see them as useless but to want to talk about reality, and he understood quite well that special relativity is not “really” (in the sense of referring to reality) compatible with non-local influences since he had developed it. In fact, this was his motivation for developing general relativity to begin with. When Einstein introduced special relativity in 1905, it actually made no new empirical predictions, because it was mathematically equivalent to a theory Lorentz introduced in 1904.

Einstein’s criticism of Lorentz’s theory in Einstein’s paper was that Lorentz’s theory required a preferred slicing in spacetime, which Lorentz put there to take into account non-local effects from Newton’s theory of gravity. Einstein argued that he believed this preferred slicing would later be proved to be superfluous, and after he published his paper, he sought to remove the non-locality from Newton’s theory, and then subsequently sought to remove the non-locality from quantum mechanics, by fitting them both to local field theories.

It is quite trivial to see why non-locality is not “really” compatible with special relativity. Giving a definition of “realism” is quite difficult, but we can adopt a minimal, but not sufficient, criterion. This criterion is what I like to refer to as the “no solipsism” criterion. I experience in the world in a definite way, and so I assume you do as well, and how you perceive the world should not depend upon whether or not, or how, I look at you. Mathematically, this criterion is to say that relativity/variance should not bubble up to the scale of the mental states of human beings. The mental states of other humans should be invariant.

If you believe particles do not have real values until you measure them, then you can imagine a “Wigner’s friend” type scenario where a friend in a lab measures a particle in a superposition of states while you are outside of the lab. From your perspective on the outside, you would have to describe both the friend and the particle in an entangled superposition of states, and thus the friend’s mental state would not have an invariant and definite value until you look yourself, which would contradict with the friend’s own experience.

You might try to “solve” this by arguing that when the friend first measures the particle, they “collapse” the state to a definite value for both observers, and so for the observer outside of the room, it’s not in a superposition, but this is not quantum mechanics. Introducing such an invariant transition is called an objective collapse theory, and objective collapse theories fundamentally cannot be mathematically equivalent to quantum mechanics, because they break the linearity in the unitary evolution, and so in principle any objective collapse theory (like GRW theory of the Diosi-Penrose model) would made different empirical predictions to quantum mechanics.

Indeed, Bell definitively proved in 1964 that the states of particles simply cannot be Lorentz invariant given stock quantum mechanics, and since particles make up the human brain, then it logically follows that the mental states of observers cannot be invariant, i.e. you run into solipsism. You thus must give up one of two assumptions. You must either give up quantum mechanics, or you must give up special relativity, if you want to preserve realism.

Giving up special relativity, interestingly enough, does not actually require modifying the mathematics at all. It only requires introducing a philosophical asymmetry in how we interpret otherwise mathematically symmetric reference frames, by assigning one particular reference frame a privileged status of representing a “real” representation of the system, and all other frames as representing an “apparent” representation. This is known as a preferred slicing in spacetime, and John Bell discusses this in his paper “How to Teach Special Relativity.”

You thus can actually fit quantum mechanics to a quite trivial realist interpretation, one where particles have real values at all times and merely evolve statistically, without modifying the mathematics at all, just by introducing a preferred slicing. But this is precisely what Einstein hated and was trying to avoid, because, like I said, his 1905 paper made no new predictions. His 1905 paper was really a bet: it was a bet that Lorentz’s preferred slicing would be proved to be superfluous because gravity and quantum effects could be fit to local field theories, a bet which turned out to be wrong.

However, what Einstein did not anticipate is how little physicists actually care about reality and nature to begin with. Most physicists did not interpret Bell’s theorem as proof nature is non-local and therefore a preferred slicing is logically necessary. Most physicists just argued that we should stop talking about “reality” at all and only talk about what is consciously observed by the experimenter, and predicting that is all that matters, and if that is all you are concerned with, then there really is no incompatibility between quantum theory and special relativity.

Einstein was baffled by this and once even asked Abraham Pais, “do you really believe that the moon doesn’t exist when you aren’t looking at it?” This is what I mean by saying physics no longer exists. Physicists often lie to your face. When they talk to Laymen and try to explain things, they will often give realist explanations, like describing vision in terms of photons reflecting off of a surface and being absorbed into the retinas of our eyes, or describing virtual particles as a “bubbling brew of particles popping in and out of existence,” etc.

Pretty much any time a physicist gives a realist explanation of something to a Laymen, they are lying, because these things literally do not exist in the theory. Objectively, quantum field theory does not anything with any definite properties at all. If I walk to my living room to my kitchen, I will feel quite strongly that I traversed a definite trajectory from my living room to my kitchen, and thus the particles that make up my body should have also traversed such a definite trajectory.

But such a definite trajectory for the particles literally does not exist in quantum field theory. This is why John Bell described modern physics as a kind of “radical solipsism,” because everything you perceive and all your memories have to be taken to be a lie, because they don’t actually exist in the physics. Only the most direct impression in your conscious experience does in the immediate moment of observation.

A lot of students who first start learning physics don’t understand this and thus remain in denial of it. They genuinely cannot fathom the absurdity that modern day “physics” merely describes predicts what is consciously observed in the moment and gives no underlying realist account of how what was observed came to be to begin with, and so they deny it by regurgitating certain statements they’ve heard through the grapevine, like that there is a “collapse” or something about “branching” that explains this, but when you actually learn more and read the academic literature, once go beyond the Dunning-Kruger effect, you will start to learn that these “explanations” don’t actually give an underlying account of what we observe at all (John Bell debunks the “collapse” argument in his article “Against ‘Measurement’” and the “branching” argument in his paper “Quantum Mechanics for Cosmologists”) and that modern physics simply does not have one.

This is what bothered Einstein so much. You must necessarily either give up quantum mechanics, or you must introduce a preferred slicing in spacetime, thereby giving up “real” relativity (whereby relativistic effects are then interpreted to be only apparent), if you actually want a realistic account. If you insist upon not modifying the mathematics of quantum mechanics at all, as well as not introducing a preferred slicing into special relativity, then when you combine the two, you inevitably run into solipsism, because you cannot have a logically consistent accounting of reality whereby each observer’s mental state is invariant.

The easiest way to understand this is in terms of mutual information.

If we both flip a coin independently of one another, then both coins have a 50%/50% chance of being heads/tails and the distributions are independent of one another and thus uncorrelated, but imagine the two coins are initially attached to one another, flipped, and then we separate them. Now they’re both still 50%/50% for heads/tails but are perfectly correlated, so they are guaranteed to have the same value, and so if you know one, you know the other. In this case, the coins are said to have mutual information on one another.

It turns out in the physical world that mutual information, or more specifically quantum mutual information (QMI), plays a very important role. The marginal statistics on the behavior of a system can depend upon whether or not it shares mutual information with something else. You see this in the double-slit experiment because if you record the which-way information of a particle, then necessarily it must have interacted with something to record its state, and thus whatever measured it must possess QMI between itself and the particle, and thus the particle’s marginal statistical behavior will change.

This is in no way unique to human observers or human measurement devices. You can introduce just a single other particle into the experiment that interacts with the particle such that they become statistically correlated and it will have the same effect.

QMI is rather counterintuitive because you can establish QMI in ways that you would intuitively think would not impact the system being measured. For example, you can have an entirely passive interaction whereby only the measuring device’s state is altered and not the particle in order to establish QMI between them.

You can also establish QMI without an interaction at all, such as, imagine that the measuring device is only placed on 1 of the 2 slits and you only fire a single photon and that photon is not detected. If it’s not detected, you still know where it is, because it must have traversed the slit the measuring device was not on. Hence, the non-detection of something can still be a detection and thus can still establish QMI.

Intuitively, you would think a passive measurement, or a measurement that does not even involve an interaction at all, should not alter the system’s behavior. But the mathematical structure of quantum mechanics is such that the system’s marginal stochastic behavior is genuinely statistically dependent upon the quantity of QMI, and so things you would intuitively believe should not affect the system do, in fact, affect the system.

You can even use this effect to detect the presence or absence of something without ever (locally) interacting with it.

In the Mach-Zehnder interferometer, the photon can take two possible intermediate paths, we’ll call them A1 and A2, but both end up at the same place. Then, at the end of the experiment, it can take two possible paths again, B1 and B2, with a detector placed on both paths. You find, in practice, that there is a 100% chance the photon will show up on B1 and 0% on B2, unless you block either A1 or A2 with your hand, then it will have a 25% chance of showing up on B1, 25% chance of showing up on B2, and 50% chance of not showing up at all (because it was blocked by your hand).

The reason this is interesting is because, without your hand blocking an intermediate path, there is a 0% chance it will show up on B2, but with your hand blocking one, it changes to 25%. Thus, if you measure a photon on path B2, you know with certainty that someone’s hand must be blocking A1 or A2, yet, clearly the photon did not traverse the path of the hand or else it would have been absorbed by the hand and you would have detected nothing. You thus can deduce the presence/absence of the hand from a particle’s behavior that never (locally) interacted with it, and so logically speaking, the hand must be having a non-local influence on the statistical behavior of the particle.

This influence is due to the fact that if the particle interacts with the hand, it will be absorbed into it and slightly will alter the states of the particles in the hand, and if it does not interact with the hand, it will not do this. Thus, you could in principle look very closely at the particles that make up the hand and deduce whether or not the particle took the path the hand is on based on whether or not this alteration occurs, and thus there is QMI between the hand and the particle’s path, regardless of whether or not the particle actually interacts with the hand. The mere presence or absence of this QMI changes the particle’s behavior.

There isn’t a scientific definition for “observation.” In the Copenhagen interpretation, it really is treated just as vaguely as the colloquial definition, something the physicist John Bell complained about in his article “Against ‘Measurement’”, that the textbook axioms of quantum mechanics are inherently vague because they refer to “observation” or “measurement” which is not itself defined in the axioms. Saying that observation is just “when the wavefunction collapses” is a circular definition and doesn’t answer anything, because then we can just ask, “when does the wavefunction collapse?” and the only answer the textbook axioms give is “when you observe/measure it.”

Talking about racism against white people is rather strange because “white” is a concept specifically invented to oppress people outside of that group, to justify subjugating the “non-whites” in slavery or colonization or imperialism.

If we were to try and define “white culture,” we could only define it in terms of racial subjugation. You might say, well, what about European culture and traditions? Yes, there exists European food, European cultural traditions, etc, but that is not the same as “white culture.” A French person and a US American have different cultural traditions, different holidays, different language.

To talk about “white culture” means to talk about what unifies them together such that they should be considered part of a common bloc, and the only defining characteristic of “whiteness” that unifies it together is racial subjugation.

Indeed, the same is also true of “black culture.” Black culture is almost entirely understood as culture devised as a response to racial subjugation. When people think of black culture, they often think of things like traditions and songs devised in opposition to slavery, or black churches which were their own community centers developed independently of white churches due to racial segregation.

You can argue that bigotry against Europeans exist, but bigotry against “whiteness” makes very little sense, because “whiteness” only exists as a category to justify subjugation, and it is the only thing that ties together “white people.”

It is harmful to promote “whiteness” even as a “white person.” If you are French and you love your culture, that means you love French culture. If you are from Spain and you love your culture, that means you like Spanish culture. Have you ever met a person who said they love “white culture” that wasn’t just a racist PoS? Universally, everyone who promotes the idea that people should be “proud of being white” and talks about the greatness of “white culture” are always just extreme racists.

In my opinion, even “white people” would do themselves better to stop promoting identifying with “white” as an identity group.

I always say and always get flack for it, the US president legit doesn’t matter much. If you want to predict the course of the USA, you will be right far more often if you just ignore who is president and look at precedent. Every bad president people love to play around with counterfactuals that it would’ve been better under the other president but really it would’ve been the same because the US government is an utterly enormous institution with a lot of momentum in a particular direction which one person is not going to change much.

The “weirdness” of QM all stems from a belief in “value indefiniteness,” which is the idea that particles have no real properties when you are not looking at them, but suddenly acquire real properties when you look. If you believe that, then the question naturally arises, at what point do they acquire real properties precisely? What does “look” even rigorously mean? This issue was first brought up by John Bell in his article “Against ‘Measurement’”. The “answers” to this always fall into one of three categories:

1. “Look” just means you become aware of it. This devolves into solipsism, because other people are also made up of particles, so they would have no real properties either until you become aware of them.
2. “Look” is more of a specific physical process that measuring devices do. But this is vague without rigorously and mathematically defining what this physical process is, and if you do define it, then it’s provable that no definition can be consistent with the mathematics of quantum mechanics. If we agree with the premise that “quantum mechanics is correct,” then such an approach is trivially ruled out.
3. There is no “look,” systems never acquire real, observable properties at all. But then you run into Wittgenstein’s rule-following problem. If the mathematical model never predicts that a system acquires real properties, then you can never tie it back to any real-world observation.

The “weirdness” stems from starting with an assumption that is not logically possible to make consistent in the first place and then developing dozens of “interpretations” trying to make it consistent, but none of the major interpretations are ultimately logically consistent if we agree that (1) objective reality exists and (2) quantum mechanics is correct (some may be argued to be consistent but only because they openly admit they’re dropping off #1 or #2).

Feynman’s belief in “value indefiniteness” stems from an argument he made here regarding the double-slit experiment and how probabilities should add together. I made a video here explaining why his argument does not work, but you can also read John Bell’s paper here because von Neumann made a similar flawed argument and Bell gave a similar rebuttal to it.

If you just drop off “value indefiniteness” as an assumption, which has no justification for it in the academic literature, then all the quantum woo around quantum mechanics disappears, and the arguments over interpretations like Copenhagen or Many Worlds or QBism simply become superfluous.

No. There is an obsession many people have, from laymen to academics alike, with quantum woo and trying desperately to extrapolate bizarre metaphysics from the linear algebra, but nothing in the mathematics of the theory necessitates their crackpot ideas. Objective reality exists.

science also is telling us that reality is a strange miasma of superpositions and that we actively participate in the creation of reality by simply existing/observing.

It doesn’t tell us that at all. This is just bizarre metaphysics invented out of someone’s ass one day and became popular among academics, despite it having no empirical basis for it and not even being logically consistent if you take it seriously for more than five seconds.

Quantum mechanics is just a statistical theory. You literally superimpose states in classical statistical mechanics as well. The only difference is quantum mechanics has an extra degree of freedom in the state description of the system that includes phases, and those phases evolve deterministically and influence the stochastic dynamics of the system. This gives a kind of “memory” effect whereby the same operator can have different behavior if the history is different, such as, a photon having 50%/50% chance of being reflected/transmitted by a beam splitter, unless its immediate previous interaction was of a beam splitter as well, then it is 100%/0% because the state of the phases are different.

No, Sean Carroll is just wrong and he presents nothing to justify his position. The cat doesn’t stop existing when you’re not looking, nor is there is a multiverse, nor do things spread out as infinite-dimensional vectors in configuration space when you aren’t looking. You just do not know its state because it is statistical as quantum mechanics is a statistical theory. Multiverse believers love to put their idea side-by-side another idea which is even more absurd in order to make it look more viable, but they never bother to defend their ideas on their own merit, without a comparison. Any time you ever encounter a multiverse believer, they will constantly bring up Copenhagen even if you never mention it.

Carroll responds to a variant of Copenhagen that believes in a “spreading out” axiom that things diverge into a multiverse of every possibility represented by a vector in configuration space when you aren’t looking, but then suddenly “collapses” back down into a definite configuration in state space when you look. He then attacks the “collapse” as silly, and therefore we should believe things spread out as a multiverse forever. But nowhere does he ever give any convincing justification for the “spreading out” axiom to begin with. That axiom is not grounded in any empirical evidence or in the mathematics at all, and so multiverse believers can only make their position look coherent by putting it beside another silly belief which also presupposes that axiom, and thus they make it appear reasonable that they never justify it.

Just look at the awful slide 24:35. Someone can make this same argument in a perfectly classical universe. If we could not track the definite states of particles because they behaved randomly, but in a classical sense which did not violate Bell inequalities, we would also only be able to track the states of systems as vectors evolved by matrices. Someone could also come along and claim that particles do not have real states when you are not looking at them because they are not there in the mathematics, and that they are being the “reasonable” one for believing that the universe just evolves as a big deterministic vector.

We would all look at them as if they are silly. Yet, somehow, this is stated unironically among multiverse believers as if it is somehow made less silly by quantum mechanics, when absolutely nothing in the theory makes this a less silly position.

Can we please, for the love of god, stop pretending it is just “laypeople” who push quantum mysticism? “Consciousness causes collapse” literally originated from academia. I know you hold physicists up on a pedestal so they can do no wrong and it’s only the dumb laypeople, but the majority of times their crackpot quantum mystical claims are traceable directly back to a physicist holding a PhD. Quantum mysticism is rampant in academia as well, and people need to stop denying this fact.

mini tanks that you can drive around and have a laser tag style tank battle in