Lemmy has a problem where sometimes if you delete posts it sometimes still shows up in certain instances. Deleted a post one and later resposted it only to then realize people could now see both of them.

They got the shortest end of the stick of imperialism. US carried out a genocide against Vietnam, Korea, and Laos. The Japanese also carried out a genocide against the Chinese. The Chinese people started to lose faith in the KMT when it was taken over by Chiang Kai-shek, who started to get close with Nazi Germany who was allied with the Japanese and started to implement fascist policies in China. There is a much greater understanding of the evils of imperialism.

Christianity, which is one of the main material institutions used to propagate reactionary dogma, is also a pretty insignificant material force in Asian countries. The Confucian cultural institutions are much more prevalent. This matters because liberalism just believes the government should protect “individual rights” then remain entirely hands-off. It is therefore not outcome-oriented. If this leads to a horrible society, well, so be it.

Confucianism is very outcome-oriented. It directly argues the purpose of the state should be public interests, to solve problems in society, to serve the public, etc. This is why the KMT fell out of favor. Chinese people thought it was silly that Chiang Kai-shek started to ban certain hairstyles and beat people who didn’t have their hair cut to very specific lengths, when this did nothing to solve real problems in the country like mass hunger and poverty.

There is just, generally speaking, a much greater popularity in Asian countries for outcome-oriented politics. Western politics tends to be more moral-oriented. Take for example COVID-19. The USA did not have serious lockdowns because it would violate the moral principle of individual freedom, so sacrificing over a million people was deemed a worthy price to pay. The Chinese had serious lockdowns and saved the lives of millions, but they were condemned by westerners for doing so, many describing it as Orwellian 1984. Even though the outcome was better, western society is generally not outcome-oriented. The influence of Christianity promotes a good-vs-evil mentality, and so most people think in moralist terms.

The Asian communists also seem to have actually read Marx. A lot of “Marxists” seem to have never read Marx… and this sometimes even applies to those in socialist countries. Many self-proclaimed Marxists simply do not understand historical materialism and that the basis of political power ultimately rests in industry and the production process. Asian communists understood this and internalized it and thus realized if they want real independence as a country they need to develop their own industrial base, and if they want to really improve people’s lives they need to focus on developing productivity.

Marxists outside of Asia have had more of a tendency to think in moralist terms. Socialism for them is more about moral principles, like liberalism’s individual rights, but replaced by “collective rights.” There was a movement like this in China temporarily, the Gang of Four, who implemented policies based on an abstract concept of socialist morality, and this led to economic chaos. When challenged on it, they claimed it was better to be poor than to sacrifice these moralist principles. This caused them to become viewed unfavorably and later ousted from power.

But that mentality was much more persistent outside of Asia, even in other socialist countries.

Lenin was just wrong and it is his poor philosophy that either must devolve into idealism or into complete nonsense.

Modern day “physicalism” (I do not consider to this be materialism) is a complete disaster because these “physicalists” refuse to let go of dualism. They still desperately want to cling on to the belief that there is a gulf between what we perceive and reality, but as Feuerbach correctly pointed out, if you belief such a gulf exists, you cannot bridge it later without contradicting yourself.

This leads to the rise in the mind-body problem and the so-called “hard problem of consciousness,” which “physicalists” these days don’t even bother to try and rebut it anymore, saying things like, “I agree with you Mr Idealist, you are completely right there is a hard problem of consciousness. I have no idea what the solution is, though. :)” Do you think that convinces anyone over? No, it just drives them into the camp of idealism.

Many things we observe we observe indirectly. Some things we observe indirectly with the use of tools. Some things we observe indirectly through a logical chain of reasoning, such as, piecing together evidence at a crime scene and then conclude that, under a counterfactual scenario, if you were in the room, you would have perceived a particular person commit the crime, even though you did not directly perceive it.

However, these tool-indirect and counterfactual-indirect statements are uniquely distinct from transcendental-indirect statements, where one tries to posit the existence of an ontology that is fundamentally unobservable under any counterfactual and even with the use of tools, but, like the hand of God, acts upon the world from outside of it to manipulate the things we can empirically observe.

If everything we perceive is part of some “veil” that blocks us from seeing true reality, then by definition true reality is fundamentally unobservable even in principle. It cannot be perceived indirectly with the use of tools. It cannot be perceived under any counterfactual scenario. It can only be derived through “pure reason,” and thus through transcendentalism.

Transcendentalism is incredibly abstract as it usually involves reifying certain logical or mathematical forms, yet these logical and mathematical forms are part of the language we use to describe the natural world, and to reify the language is to reify something socially constructed, and thus the ontology becomes ambiguous based on one’s social setting.

We see this throughout the disaster that is the current state of physics academia, for example, where physicists constantly reformulate the same mathematics of the same theory so it makes all the same empirical predictions, yet believing they are inventing new ontology, despite the fact there is nothing empirically distinguishable between their formulation and many previous ones. This has led to a situation where nobody can agree what objective reality even is, and so academics have adopted a stance that it’s just a personal opinion and anyone’s opinion is just as a good as anyone else.

Transcendentalism will always devolve into postmodernism.

Bogdanov was trying to caution against this by rebutting the very basis of dualism, the very claim that we do not perceive reality for what it is. However, Lenin, completely incapable of letting go of Kantian metaphysics, misinterpreted Bogdanov as claiming that we should believing in the veil but reject the reality beyond the veil, i.e. to devolve into idealism, when Bogdanov’s actual position was to reject that such a veil even exists to begin with, as the starting point of materialist philosophy.

Indeed, the path towards idealism is always the same. “Physicalists” insist upon Kantian metaphysics, which inevitably devolves into transcendentalism, which is inevitably arbitrary. People then realize it is arbitrary, and so they begin to reject all transcendental-indirect claims entirely, but do not drop the Kantian framework. They still hang on to the belief that what they perceive is the veil and “true” reality is beyond it. They call the veil “phenomenal” or “subjective” or “conscious,” or as Lenin did, “reflective.” Thus they come to reject “true” reality, only believing in the veil, and devolve into idealism, as an attempt to escape the arbitrariness of transcendentalism.

Yet, “physicalists” have no weapons against idealism because their philosophy genuinely is arbitrary, and so they drive people to idealism in droves. They genuinely cannot grasp that Kantian metaphysics might just be wrong, and so they straw man anyone who rejects their dualist foundations as an “idealist” themselves because, in their mind, the idea that what we perceive is not reality but a veil that blocks us from seeing reality is an entirely unquestionable gospel truth. If you say that you do not believe in a transcendental reality, they therefore come to believe you are claiming that you reject the existence of material reality, and that you only believe in the “veil” of “the Idea,” and therefore must be an idealist. Their straw man comes not from dishonesty, but a genuine lack of mental ability to grasp the very idea that someone may reject transcendental reality and the veil at the same time, and thus believe in reality, which is not “beyond” our ability to perceive but is the direct object of study of the material sciences, which is driven by empirical observation.

Nowhere in Marx/Engels works do they talk about this dualist split, and it baffles me that anyone can read Dialectics of Nature and not come out with a takeaway that it is cautioning against transcendentalism and taking a direct realist stance. Lenin’s poor philosophical writings have been a disaster upon materialist philosophy, causing it to merge into incoherent “physicalism” of bourgeois academia, and the philosophy has entirely stopped developing and is stuck in the 20th century. Physicalism is the introduction of transcendentalism into materialist philosophy justified through dualism, which is not only the route bourgeois academia has taken but is the route even many Marxists have taken influenced by Lenin’s poor philosophical writings.

Indeed, I have found stronger criticisms of idealism these days not in modern Marxist writings but in those of the Wittgenstein school, such as the contextual realist works of Jocelyn Benoist, as Marxist materialists these days have merged with the physicalists and have deviated so far off course of reasonable philosophy.

“Physicalism” is incredibly weak as you believe in the phenomena and the noumena, yet admit the noumena is something you take on faith, and so naturally, if someone questions taking something blindly on faith, then all you are left with is the phenomena, and hence it quickly devolves into idealism upon scrutiny, or just believing in random bull crap based on personal feelings, and thus into postmodernism.

Philosophers like Bogdanov and Benoist actually attack the very notion of the phenomena. Something which physicalists like Lenin could not grasp letting go of. Bogdanov’s attack was not on the noumena to leave the phenomena intact, but to dismantle the entire dualist split of Kantian metaphysics. The abandonment of materialism for physicalism has been a complete disaster.

here’s even evidence for “warm” quantum processing happening within each neuron in the microtubules

No.

Petty bourgeoisie ≠ bourgeoisie. They are best not understood as just the bourgeoisie but slightly smaller, but better understood as essentially a distinct class. The petty bourgeoisie do not necessarily always have class interests aligned with the bourgeoisie. The Manifesto talks about how the petty bourgeoisie may even side with the proletariat at times. It depends upon whether or not they see their future prospects under the capitalist society favorable such that they may grow to become a member of the bourgeoisie, or whether or not they see it as more likely the bourgeoisie will ruin them and they will be hurled into the proletariat. In the latter case, they may find themselves more sympathetic to the proletariat, wanting a social safety net for the workers in anticipation that they may join them soon.

The property relations are also not the same between petty bourgeoisie and bourgeoisie. The petty bourgeoisie are either self-employed, meaning their own their own means of production directly, or they run a fairly small business, so there may technically be antagonisms between the socialization of labor and private appropriation, but the antagonisms are very small. There is a reason you sometimes you hear common people talk positively about “mom and pop shops,” because typically with smaller enterprises there is a less of a disconnect between the ownership and the workers so conditions tend to be a bit better than working for a giant faceless megacorporation owned by shareholders who never even stepped foot in the corporation in their lives.

The small scale of petty bourgeoisie property also makes it incapable of being a basis for a socialist society, since a socialist society introduces socialized appropriation on a national scale, so the enterprise must be on a national scale or else the socialist government would be introducing a contradiction between socialized appropriation and private production rather than resolving one. Economic systems aren’t moral ideas written on paper, but real physical machines in the real world, that require real infrastructure and computational technologies to run it, and this will limit the scale in which you can meaningfully operate an enterprise.

If a sector of the economy is dominated by the petty bourgeoisie, it means the technology and infrastructure simply has not advanced enough in that sector to nationalize it. If you nationalize it, you will not physically be capable of operating it on a national scale, which will lead to huge bureaucratic problems if you try to do so anyways. The failure of the government to then plan that sector will cause the spontaneous rise in a black market to resolve the government’s failures, and if you try to then crush that black market by force, you will just be destroying something that came into existence due to your own government’s failures, and thus destroying your own economy.

Small-scale production is simply not the basis for socialist society, and outlawing small-scale production makes zero sense from a Marxian socioeconomic analysis. The proletariat thus can only meaningfully expropriate the property of the bourgeoisie, and then has to focus on encouraging the development of the forces of production, because in the long-run, that will cause much of the petty bourgeoisie to destroy themselves, and the rest to become into the bourgeoisie, which then allows for the gradual extension of that expropriation.

Yes, free lancers and struggling artists are also members of the petty bourgeoisie. That is not an insult because these labels aren’t moral judgements, and it’s not even a declaration that these people are the “enemy,” as, again, the Manifesto points out that the petty bourgeoisie can side with the working class. A self-employed struggling artist might still support working class movements precisely because they are struggling, believing they will likely end up having to get a job in the long-run so they might as well support the proletariat class, and many do. But they also might not, as some might see themselves as just a misunderstood great artist who will one day catch a break and their art will take off, and they will become rich and famous, and because of that belief they could also see their interests as aligned with the bourgeoisie.

The point is just that petty bourgeoisie (1) have their own class interests which are not necessarily aligned with bourgeoisie or proletariat and can side with both depending upon the historical conditions, (2) has a different property form of private production which is too underdeveloped to be the material basis of socialist society as it is distinct from the socialized production of the bourgeoisie, and (3) therefore do not have the same relations to production as either the bourgeoisie or the proletariat.

It is quite common in capitalist societies for the interests of the petty bourgeoisie and bourgeoisie to clash. There are not literally the same class as the bourgeoisie that just happens to be smaller. They are more of a distinct social class. This social class also has a different trajectory to it. The proportion of petty bourgeoisie and bourgeoisie in capitalist society is always shrinking in proportion to proletariat with the development of the forces of production. But when the petty bourgeoisie’s numbers shrink, it is because they are destroyed by the bourgeoisie, and so in the long-run, all the petty bourgeoisie are doomed to destruction by the bourgeoisie, but the bourgeoisie cannot destroy themselves, at least not entirely. Only the proletariat can end the bourgeoisie as a class. The trajectories of the two classes are thus also different.

Superdeterminism is a bit odd in that it rejects even effective free will, at least in very specific circumstances. Let’s say you set up an experiment where the observer is given the free choice to measure a particle in a particular way. If you were Laplace’s demon and could see the precise state of the initial particle, that information alone would be sufficient to predict the choice the observer will make because they would be guaranteed to be pre-correlated with that value.

It would be like Final Destination where, just by looking at a single variable in a single particle, you would know with absolute certainty what conscious decision the observer would make ahead of time, and all their complex brain chemistry and stuff becomes unnecessary to predict what decision they will make, because you will know with certainty what the orientation of the measurement must be. You could try everything to stop them and change their mind and even fight them, but you’d find yourself entirely unable to change it, because the laws of physics would guarantee the particle would be measured on that particular choice of orientation.

You might be able to get around this by arguing that the these variables are fundamentally unobservable and hidden from us so that you still have effective free will, but then the model becomes pointless. Hossenfelder has suggested she thinks a hidden variable model should be testable and she thinks it may be possible to find patterns in the quantum noise and violations of the Born rule under specific circumstances. If these variables become even partially knowable then even effective free will, at least in certain very contrived circumstances, becomes doomed.

That is kind of the weirdest thing about it.

I hope you guys donate to the flotilla. https://nuestraamericaflotilla.org/

I think there may be a misunderstanding here. The hard problem of consciousness asks why experience exists at all.

You are the one with the misunderstanding here. Sadly, most people who read Chalmers, in my experience talking to hundreds of Chalmerites, do so in such a way that they do not stop to question his premises and become immediately convinced his arguments are equivalent to unquestionable fact without actually stopping to think about the assumptions going into his arguments and having the intellectual curiosity to investigate those assumptions.

To call “experience” something that is about “consciousness” is already a huge leap, it is to adopt an indirect realist stance, one that needs to be philosophically justified. To not adopt that stance renders the question meaningless, as, in a direct reality stance, “why does experience exist” is equivalent to asking “why does reality exist,” but existence and reality are synonyms, so the question is tautological.

You have to first establish that there is genuinely a good reason to believe that what we perceive is not reality and is instead “consciousness” or “subjective” or “phenomenal” in order for the question to even make sense. The question itself is ultimately just a reformulation/rediscovery of the mind-body problem. Ludwig Feuerbach realized, in his 1866 essay “On Spiritualism and Materialism,” that the mind-body problem is ultimately not solvable because to solve it is to contradict oneself. If you start from the premise that there is a gulf between what we perceive and the material world, then you will never be able to fill that gulf later as that contradicts your own premises. You thus have to abandon the idea that there is a gulf to begin with as the starting point of your philosophy.

That is to say, the mind-body problem / hard problem of consciousness is a proof by contradiction that indirect realism is not tenable, and so something must be wrong with indirect realist premises. (If you choose to believe in indirect realism, then you must solve the hard problem, not me!) They may seem “intuitive” but they must necessarily be wrong. The materialist philosopher Friedrich Engels would then write a book in 1883 called Dialectics of Nature where he insists on abandoning metaphysical abstractions and tying reality directly to real-world observation, showing that the origin of the mind-body problem stems from abandoning the connection. Alexandr Bogdanov in his 1913 book The Philosophy of Living Experience steps through many of the arguments in favor of indirect realism, such as those from dreams and illusions, and demonstrates them to all be horribly flawed as they always conflate experience with the interpretation of experience (which requires thought) which are not the same thing.

This same kind of thinking was later rediscovered through the writings of the late Wittgenstein. In 2021, the philosopher Jocelyn Benoist published a book Toward a Contextual Realism where he also analyzes these sames kinds of arguments, such as those from illusions, and shows them to all be faulty from a Wittgensteinian perspective, and that there is a constant conflation among philosophers between subjectivity and contextuality: things that differ between observers because they are observers (subjectivity), and things that differ between observers because they are really ontologically different in reality independent of the observer as they have dependence upon the context of their realization (contextuality).

Inspired by the materialist school of philosophy that goes through Feuerbach to Engels to Bogdanov, the physicist Carlo Rovelli published a book called Helgoland in 2021 where he discusses interpretations of quantum mechanics and criticizes the confusion as stemming from the presumption that there is a disconnect between physical reality and what we observe, and all we observe are things in discrete observation and the relations between those observations. If we understand reality to thus merely consist of relational objects which cannot be meaningfully conceived of as autonomous entities in complete isolation but can only be conceived of in their relations with everything else, then it logically follows that the kind of “god’s eye view” of the world “from the outside” that Chalmers proposes doesn’t even exist:

If the world consists of relations, then no description is from outside it. The descriptions of the world are, in the ultimate analysis, all from inside. They are all in the first person. Our perspective on the world, our point of view, being situated inside the world (our “situated self,” as Jenann Ismael beautifully puts it), is not special: it rests on the same logic on which quantum physics, hence all of physics, is based. If we imagine the totality of things, we are imagining being outside the universe, looking at it from out there. But there is no “outside” to the totality of things. The external point of view is a point of view that does not exist. Every description of the world is from inside it. The externally observed world does not exist; what exists are only internal perspectives on the world which are partial and reflect one another. The world is this reciprocal reflection of perspectives.

Inspired by the realist and anti-idealist school of philosophy that goes through Wittgenstein to Benoist, the physicist Francois-Igor Pris published a book in 2020 called “Contextual Realism and Quantum Mechanics,” where in it he argues a very similar thing but from a Wittgensteinian perspective, that we should abandon the notion of autonomously existing things that can be considered in complete isolation. To consider something in itself (non-contextuallty) is to consider it metaphysically. One must instead only assign real ontology to things which are realized in a particular context (“Independently from the means of their identification, there are no events”).

Without specifying the context of its realization then it is metaphysical and not physical, it is akin to talking about a tree in the abstract and not an actual tree in a real-world context. The mathematics on their own are merely a language used to describe reality and thus is normative and socially constructed. You will not find “reality” within the mathematics. Reality is what the mathematics are used to predict and describe, which is the real world, which is what is actually perceived in experimental observation, and is not the mathematics themselves. To actually perceive something in experimental observation means that what the mathematics describes must be realized in a real-world context. There is a distinction between the pure mathematics of the parabola used in trajectories in Newtonian mechanics, and an actual real-world observable object in a real-world context that is taking on a trajectory that can be identified as a parabola.

It is a bit intellectually dishonest to say that, “the appearance of terms like ‘subjectivity’ and ‘quantum’ does not automatically imply quantum mysticism. If those terms trigger that association, the actual argument may not be getting evaluated on its own terms,” as you are dishonestly portraying it as if I am merely claiming the existence of the word “subjective” means it is metaphysics. You are not evaluating the argument on its own terms, as that is obviously not the argument.

Eugene Wigner put forward his famous thought experiment whereby two different observers can assign different quantum states to the same system. Since he believed anything that differs between observers is “subjective” and therefore deals with “consciousness,” he concludes that quantum mechanics must fundamentally be about “consciousness” and takes an explicitly idealist stance. The argument is clearly not that Wigner is wrong because he used the word “consciousness.” That is intellectually dishonest. The argument is that Wigner is wrong because two observers describing a system differently does not imply their descriptions are subjective in nature, as the physical properties they are describing are relational (Rovelli) or contextual (Pris) in nature. The former implies their descriptions are not of objective reality but of the subjective mind, and thus quantum theory is not a theory of the physical world independent of the observer, whereas the latter does not imply this.

This conflation between subjectivity and contextuality, or between subjectivity and relationality, are prevalent throughout the academic literature, even among physicists, and much of the confusion goes away if one is clear with this distinction. But making the distinction is rather counter-intuitive from an indirect realist standpoint, which is very popular in academia these days despite its glaring flaws, and thus there is a constant tendency to conflate subjectivity and contextuality together, to treat “objective reality” as dealing with things that are non-contextual and thus cannot be realized differently in different measurement contexts, and “subjective experience” to be things which can differ between measurement contexts. But this whole narrative is the source of so much confusion.

As Pris argues, it is a philosophical error that is both the source of the measurement problem and the hard problem, as both deal with a supposed gulf between what we observe (measure, experience) and a supposed “true” reality that is beyond it and unreachable by any observation, in any context, with any tools. To drop the assumption thus dissolves both problems, as they cannot arise in the first place in direct realist philosophy.

I’ve been using YouTube since back when they had a 5 star rating system. I’m not sure I’d describe it as “wild” it was just more dominated by smaller creators. The smaller creators still exist there’s just a lot of other content as well so they can be harder to find. I do like plenty of big creators as well. The only thing that particularly annoys me these days if that sometimes if you try to search for things the results are biased in favor of corporate news.

I prefer some basic level of stability and moderation or else things turn into 4chan.

Am the only one who doesn’t want the internet to be a “wild” place?

Nah. Everyone openly talked about their love of piracy even on big platforms up until recently. The dying off of speak of piracy arose with the rise of AI, because now big corporations are pirating, so piracy has switched to be seen as not something against the man but in favor of it, and the online western left has switched to becoming the world’s biggest defenders of intellectual property right law.

There is no strong evidence that quantum mechanics plays a direct role in general intelligence, and there are multiple reasons to think it is unnecessary for modeling cognitive processes. In my opinion, the challenge is not classical computation itself but the limitations of the von Neumann architecture. Traditional CPUs operate largely sequentially: instructions are fetched, processed, and stored in a linear fashion. Parallelism can be added through multiple cores or specialized instructions, but scaling this to the level of biological neural networks is extremely difficult.

For example, the AMD EPYC 9654 has 192 logical cores, yet this is tiny compared to the parallelism of the human brain, which has roughly 86 billion neurons, each capable of processing information simultaneously in a massively distributed network. Standard CPU designs simply cannot match this kind of concurrency efficiently.

GPUs can help because they are designed for highly parallel tasks, originally for graphics rendering, which is naturally parallel. Neural network computations map well onto GPU architectures, which is why GPUs accelerate both training and inference. However, this works best when tasks can be fully offloaded to the GPU. It breaks down when you consider real-time, interactive AI. Input from sensors must be collected, preprocessed, and routed by the CPU, and outputs must be translated into actions, using the CPU as a middle-man.

Training and inference on the same model simultaneously is also not practical with this kind of architecture. Current architectures generally require either separate hardware for training and inference or carefully scheduled workflows that switch the GPU between modes, with the CPU orchestrating data movement.

We need a fundamentally different computing paradigm. This would involve processor architectures that integrate massive parallelism directly into the hardware and thus eliminate the CPU-GPU distinction. They would connect inputs and outputs directly to the computational substrate and would be able to carry out in-chip training.

Quantum mechanics is more weird than that. It’s not accurate to say things can be in two states at once, like a cat that is both dead and alive at the same time, or a qubit that is both 0 and 1 at the same time. If that were true, then the qubit’s mathematical description when in a superposition of states would be |0>+|1>, but it is not, it is a|0>+b|1> where the coefficients (a and b) are neither 0 or 1, and the coefficients cannot just be ignored if one were to give a physical interpretation as they are necessary for the system’s dynamics.

You talk about it being “half” a cat, so you might think the coefficients should be interpreted as proportions, but proportions are such that 0≤x≤1 and ∑x=1. But in quantum mechanics, the coefficients can be negative and even imaginary, and do not have to sum to 1. You can have 1/√2|0>-i/√2|1> as a valid superposition of states for a qubit. It does not make sense to interpret -i/√2 as a “half,” so you cannot meaningfully interpret the coefficients as a proportion.

Trying to actually interpret these quantum states ontologically is a nightmare and personally I recommend against even trying, as you will just confuse yourself, and any time you think you come up with something that makes sense, you will later find that it is wrong.

The point that Bell tried to point out in his “Against ‘Measurement’” article is that when you say “we start including atomic scale things we might as well just include everything up to and including the cat,” you have to place the line somewhere, sometimes called the “Heisenberg cut,” and where you place the line has empirically different implications, so wherever you choose to draw the line must necessarily constitute a different theory.

Deutsch also published a paper “Quantum theory as a universal physical theory” where he proves that drawing a line at all must constitute a different theory from quantum mechanics because it will necessarily make different empirical predictions than orthodox quantum theory.

A simple analogy is, let’s say, I claim the vial counts as an observer. The file is simple enough that I might be able to fully model it in quantum mechanics. A complete quantum mechanical model would consist of a quantum state in Hilbert space that can only evolve through physical interactions that are all described by unitary operators, and all unitary operators are reversible. So there is no possible interaction between the atom and the vial that could possibly lead to a non-reversible “collapse.”

Hence, if I genuinely had a complete model of the vial and could isolate it, I could subject it to an interaction with the cesium atom, and orthodox quantum mechanics would describe this using reversible unitary operators. If you claim it is an observer that causes a collapse, then the interaction would not be reversible. So I could then follow it up with an interaction corresponding to the Hermitian transpose of the operator describing the first interaction, which is should reverse it.

Orthodox quantum theory would predict that the reversal should succeed while your theory with observer-vials would not, and so it would ultimately predict a different statistical distribution if I tried to measure it after that interaction. Where you choose to draw the Heisenberg must necessarily make different predictions around that cut.

This is why there is so much debate over interpretation of quantum mechanics, because drawing a line feels necessary, but drawing one at all breaks the symmetry of the theory. So, either the theory is wrong, or how we think about nature is wrong.

but twitter anarchist told me ai = hitler

You keep sending me quantum woo mysticism that I don’t care to respond to. I am a materialist. I do not believe in mysticism, and I see quantum mechanics as entirely a physical theory that describes the physical world as it exists independently of the observer. It is not mystical at all but is quite boring and mechanical.

The papers you keep sending me are from the “Subjectivity Intersection Emergence Lab,” a random unaccredited institution created by Satoru Watanabe, whose only credentials is a bachelor’s in business administration. He then publishes paper under his “lab” that are not peer reviewed and list him as the only author. One of the papers you sent me, he claimed that he found evidence that humans can consciously influence the outcomes that are fundamentally random in quantum mechanics, which if were true would directly violate the statistical rules of quantum mechanics and would surely win him a Nobel Prize! So where is his Nobel Prize? Oh yeah, it doesn’t exist, because his “research” is not peer reviewed.

These are papers from a crackpot and I don’t care to take them seriously. Another paper you linked he tries to “solve” the “hard problem of consciousness” by linking it to quantum mechanics, which the paper is so esoteric and filled with buzzwords it was probably written by ChatGPT. I do not even believe the “hard problem of consciousness” exists as it is solely a feature of indirect realist philosophy and I am a direct realist, so anyone claiming to be trying to “solve” it by combining “consciousness” with quantum phenomena is engaging in abstract metaphysical woo. There is no such thing as the “hard problem of consciousness,” and it is just bad indirect realist philosophy that deludes people into thinking it exists, and that is why every attempt to “solve” it is never taken seriously by the actual academic community because it never yields anything useful or coherent at all, because it is trying to “solve” a “problem” that is invented out of whole cloth by pure sophistry.

These are just nonsense. You have found some crackpot on the internet and are expecting me to review all their papers and they are garbage. I despise quantum woo and I was trying to be kind by ignoring it, and trying to re-articulate what I am trying to say so that you think in realist and materialist terms and stop trying to think of quantum theory in woo woo magical “consciousness” terms. I do not care to entertain that kind of stuff and don’t want to argue about it. I have replied to multiples of your own threads because you keep making new threads, and I am merely putting my point of view out there, and don’t really care to argue over bizarre idealist mumbo jumbo.

The solution lies in stopping talking about “observers” to begin with. The velocity of a moving train differs between observers as it is at rest relative to an observer riding it but in motion relative to an observer sitting next to the tracks, but there is clearly nothing special here about conscious observers nor is anything about velocity subjective in nature. If you pointed a radar gun at the train, the gun would also record different values for the velocity of the train from both perspectives, and the radar gun is clearly not a conscious observer nor is it a subject. It is a purely mechanical physical object.

We thus have to interpret velocity as not subjective or observer-dependence but as contextual in nature. The distinction here is that velocity should be interpreted as literally being physically realized to have different values in different measurement contexts. It does not differ between the two observers because they are conscious observers. There is nothing subjective about it. It is just that some physical properties of the natural reality do ontologically differ in different contexts, i.e. the difference in velocity as perceived between the two observers is a real difference.

There is no universal “true” velocity of which the relative velocities are just a subjective description of. There is only the relative velocities, and the relative velocities are ontological. They are not perceiving some illusion or veil disallowing them from seeing “true” reality. True reality really is the velocity they perceive, which really does ontologically differ between observers, not because they are observers, but because the two observers occupy different measurement contexts, and the property is context-dependent. If the two observers occupied the same context (i.e. both are aboard the train) then they would measure the same velocity.

It is thus not about observer-dependence but context-dependence. The former implies subjectivity and some special role for conscious observers, whereas the latter is more clear that properties of physical systems merely are realized differently in different contexts, that they really do ontologically differ as their values are contingent upon the context in which they are realized in relation to everything else.

Speaking of “observers” itself does lead you into an infinite regress of observers, so we should drop the language of “observers” and “observer-dependence,” but instead talk about the context under which the properties of physical systems are realized. There is no “chain” required because the introduction of “observers” in the first place is unwarranted and arises from confusing contextuality with subjectivity. We need not make any mention of the observer at all. We can simply speak about the realized properties of particles, and the context under which this realization takes place.

We should stop treating it as if the only ontological properties are non-contextual ones. There is an obsession among people to believe that if we cannot assign non-contextual values to all properties of particles, then they cannot be said to exist ontologically, i.e. there is no “objective reality.” But this is nonsense. We have known physical systems have irreducibly contextual properties since Galileo, as even long prior to quantum mechanics or general relativity, we have known things like velocity and space and time coordinates are context dependent and there is no universal coordinate system.

We thus should stop pretending like there is meaningfully a universal coordinate system, a sort of “godlike” point of view on the world. It just doesn’t exist. As Carlo Rovelli put it, we should stop pretending like there meaningfully exist a physical world “as viewed from the outside.” Such a thing is not philosophically or logically coherent, and it cannot even be made consistent with the laws of physics. Physical, ontological reality, as it really exists independent of the observer, is irreducibly dependent upon the context in which it is realized.

Even speaking of “relations” is somewhat confused because a relation between things always implies two different things, and thus we are forced to introduce the relation between the observer and what is observed, and such an interaction, as Rovelli himself admits, only makes sense if conceived of from a third-person perspective, i.e. the perspective “from the outside.” It leads into the same kind of observer-dependence and thus infinite regress if taken to be a foundational starting point.

This is my one criticism of relational quantum mechanics. To be logically consistent, it must drop talk about interactions and relations, and merely talk of context and realizations. I wrote an article on this below in The Quantastic Journal.

• https://medium.com/the-quantastic-journal/the-fundamental-unit-of-the-world-is-not-interactions-270c03785b58

I would, again, implore you to read the writings of the physicist and philosopher Francois-Igor Pris (he has a dual PhD in these). He has repeatedly tried to point out that if we just stick to speaking about context and realization, then there is no issue interpreting quantum theory as a theory of the physical world independent of the observer. The conflation between subjectivism and contexutalism (observer-dependence and context-dependence) leads one into falsely thinking quantum theory is a subjectivist theory, and thus their “way out” is either to devolve into idealism, or to claim the theory is wrong because of its contextual nature.

If you drop this conflation, then quantum theory is a physical theory of reality independent of the observer like any other theory. The observer is not important. What one needs to specify is the context under which one expects the physical property of a system to be realized, such as, specifying the preparation of the experiment and the orientation of the measurement device, and then this places constraints on its realized values. The only fundamental difference between quantum theory and theories beforehand is that classical theories place complete constraints and so the value is uniquely determined by the full experimental context, whereas the full experimental context in quantum mechanics only constraints it to a probability distribution of possible realized values.

This fact has some conterinuitive implications, because whatever value is realized, this is also part of the preparation and thus context for a later measurement, and so, before the first measurement takes place, you don’t actually even fully know the context of the second measurement. You instead have to just wait until the first one is carried out to then re-orient yourself by updating your accounting of the context, i.e. by reducing the state vector based on the property of the system realized in that context, to then make a prediction as to the second measurement.

This is somewhat counterinuitive because usually the context of the first measurement should fully determine what value will be realized for the second as well, but the fundamentally random nature of quantum theory makes this not the case, and so it defies some of our basic intuition, but you can just get used to this very quickly, because nothing is logically inconsistent about it.

I’d keep it but replace the torch and tablet with a sickle and hammer.

i think i now better understand your point, but you are getting confused a bit.

Great, immediately to insults.

engels is not a direct realist he is a diamatist.

The two are not mutually exclusive categories.

yes, engels declares matter and motion as ideas, but your confusion comes from an idealist understanding of ideas themselves

Again, more insults.

for marxists the human observes the world directly and then creates ideas, but this ideas are not nuomenal, they are just another representation of matter in the form of thougth.

Where the hell did I ever imply ideas are noumenal???

it would be something like this. we perceive motion, we create the idea of motion, then we take into practice (with the material world) this idea of motion to deepen our understanding of it.

poo poo pee pee 1 + 1 = 2 the sky is blue

You are saying the most trivial stuff possible and pretending like you’re somehow proving I’m some sort of confused moron. This entire post is dripping with vitriol and complete lack of respect for my intelligence. You are not engaging in any of my large collection of lengthy articles and just hurling insults while repeating obvious things off of the top of your head to “own” me.

That was as far as I could be bothered to read. Just blocking and moving on. I am sorry I ever bothered to try and talk to you.