Hi again,

I’m sorry for not paying attention for so long, but looking back now I think I still need to respond to some of Travis’ comments of a week ago. There are two things I would like to clarify. One is the issue of “locality.” I said I would like to see retrocausation used in a way which restores some kind of locality to QM, and as I also…[Read more]

Hi Ken,

I’ve finally read not only your “information” article but also your 1307 arXiv preprint, which indeed required some “wading.” I must say I think you’re on the right path, with the most appropriate motivations I’ve seen yet (that is, of course, to the best of my judgement). And there’s a lot to do. I wonder why there aren’t more people…[Read more]

Hello Aurelian and Rod,

Thanks very much for your replies.

I will need to take a look at the papers of Miller and of Aharonov and Gruss.

The way I see it, it is completely OK for the Born rule to be stipulated, rather than derived. Newton also stipulated the universal law of gravitation, even though he disliked the idea of action at a distance.…[Read more]

Hello again Rod,

I’m sorry I didn’t respond to your reply at the time, but better late than never. First I want to thank you for it, but then I want to clarify what I meant.

I wanted to find out in what sense you claim that your model explains the phenomena Bell’s theorem identifies as perplexing. In my mind, the first thing a model must do to…[Read more]

OK, friends,

Now I’ve read the rest of the discussion again, and I see that Ken has already given good answers to your questions, Travis. I’d like to add just a few more words:

(a) First, it seems that we will all remain unhappy unless we have a quantum theory without observers. That was the main point in my discussion back when I wrote my…[Read more]

Hi Travis and Justin,

I’ve been meaning to get aroud to responding to you for quite a few days now, and I feel that perhaps I should apologize for taking so long. But then one of the first items in my response is to say that I liked your description, Travis, with “falling off the back burner.” So perhaps I’ll leave it at that.

I agree…[Read more]

Hi Ken,

There’s one point which has been nagging at the back of my mind these last few days: When I said “good” retrocausal models, what I meant is that they should be clear about what the ontic variables and the epistemic variables are, and that there would be a natural way to take the log of the number of possible ontic states and associate it…[Read more]

Hi Daniel,

I agree that retrocausation is a good axiom to use. At least it’s negation – the assumption that the causal arrow of time applies to microscopic degrees of freedom – should not be used.

But I think you’ve overstated your point. From your description, it sounds like there’s a potential causal loop – couldn’t Jim ask Alice and Bob…[Read more]

Hello Dustin,

I read your contribution with much interest. Your motivations seem to overlap with mine to a very large extent (see my own contribution in this conference, also available at http://arxiv.org/abs/0807.2041). Nevertheless, the technical details are quite different. I like your use of the Wheeler-Feynman interaction along…[Read more]

Hi again, Ken,

Regarding the “extra” time, it was there in the original Stochastic Quantization paper and subsequent works, but it is also possible (as they occasionally note) to simply stipulate an “equilirium distribution” to begin with, and then there’s no need for the “equilibration” to “occur” as this “extra” time tends to infinity (of…[Read more]

Thanks, Ken. I now read your work with Price, and indeed my point above largely overlaps with your discussion there.

Regarding consciousness, please don’t bring that into the discussion – I’m sure it won’t help, just like the introduction of the concept of “free will” led to much discussion, with only a fraction pertaining to the relevant q…[Read more]

However, your planned attempt to generalize this to partially entangled states leads me to think that the symmetry principle may not always work: it appears that introducing asymmetric states will be easy.

More likely, the relevant physical principle is the increase of entropy, or the fact that the entropy was low in the past (I say this partly…[Read more]

No. In high-energy physics it is typically the mass of a particle which is protected. Because of renormalization, the parameters of the Lagrangian change their values (“running coupling constants”), so the observed mass of a particle should “naturally” be on the order of the energy scale of the theory. Some masses are much smaller. The prime…[Read more]

Great work! In my mind, this is just the right sort of reply to Wood and Spekkens.
It is worth mentioning that our colleagues seeking foundational theories of nature in the field of high-energy physics, generally consider “protection by symmetry” to be a legitimate, and in fact standard, form of fine tuning.