Reply To: Counterfactual communication protocol

#2793

Thanks Lev, it is so refreshing to get clear and simple answers to these kinds of questions! I continue to have concerns about the view you’re advocating, and would love to continue probing you about them if you’re game, but I just wanted to say that it’s nice to get straightforward answers!

So, can you tell me about how you think of the wave function (quantum state) ontologically? There’s no way I know of to mathematically formulate the wf/qs such that it can be understood as just directly representing some physical things/stuff in the 3D space we take ourselves to inhabit (and if this were possible we wouldn’t be having this discussion about “m”, etc.!). For example, to the extent one thinks about the wave function as something like a physical field, it’s evidently a field in a very high dimensional (so-called) configuration space. Is that how you think of it? If so, the idea that the m-field (in 3D space) is just an emergent property of the wf, really concerns me. How can an emergent property of a thing that lives in one space, live in a different space? Where does the new (3D) space come from?? Or maybe instead I shouldn’t think of the emergence of the m-field in this way (as if it really comes into existence) but should instead understand emergence in a more psychological sense, as in: the m-field is “what the wave function looks like, to us, who are also built of it, from the inside” if that makes sense. That avenue also really worries me, as it seems to basically imply that the whole 3D world we ordinarily take ourselves to live in, isn’t actually real, but is instead a kind of delusion… It has a “brain in a vat” flavor to me. I wrote about some of these worries here

https://ijqf.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/Norsen-Bell-paper.pdf

if anybody is really interested. But probably the short version above is enough to give the essence of the concerns. Can you shed any light on how you think about these things, Lev?

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