-
Travis Norsen replied to the topic in the forum Travis Norsen 8 years, 9 months ago
Hi Max, Thanks for your submission, which I think is an excellent one for stimulating some discussion about what people who like Bohmian mechanics find valuable about it. I have actually found Bohmian mechanics very illuminating in thinking about several of the things you mentioned, and when I first read your submission I thought “It would be…[Read more]
-
Travis Norsen joined the group 2015 International Workshop on Quantum Foundations 9 years ago
-
Travis Norsen commented on the post, Lessons of Bell's Theorem: Nonlocality, yes; Action at a distance, not necessarily. 9 years, 2 months ago
Yes, that does just kind of repeat the stuff I don’t understand/buy, so I guess this is a good place to stop. It’s become clearer, though, that for you the ability of a variable “to be the target of an intervention” is crucial/central, and clear that you mean something by this *other* than just that the variable in question is agent-controllable.…[Read more]
-
Travis Norsen commented on the post, Lessons of Bell's Theorem: Nonlocality, yes; Action at a distance, not necessarily. 9 years, 2 months ago
Hi Wayne, I don’t understand your position here at all. Of course I understand the “free will” or “no conspiracies” assumption in Bell’s theorem (I biasedly think the very best discussion of this anywhere is in the scholarpedia article I wrote with Daniel, Nino, and Shelly) but I don’t see that as being relevant at all to what’s at issue here.…[Read more]
-
Travis Norsen commented on the post, Lessons of Bell's Theorem: Nonlocality, yes; Action at a distance, not necessarily. 9 years, 2 months ago
“Consider the toy example of the two boxes, with irreducibly chancy underlying physics, making no assumption about whether it’s in a relativistic spacetime. The outcome variables are not the sorts of things that can be a target of an intervention—there’s no process that can set them to particular values—and so they don’t fall within the…[Read more]
-
Travis Norsen commented on the post, Lessons of Bell's Theorem: Nonlocality, yes; Action at a distance, not necessarily. 9 years, 2 months ago
Hi again Wayne. I thought about this a little more and re-read some of your paper, and now I feel like I understand the situation better. I think I was groping in the right direction before. So it indeed seems to me like your general description of causation in section 2 leads naturally to Bell’s “local causality”, rather than just one or the…[Read more]
-
Travis Norsen commented on the post, Lessons of Bell's Theorem: Nonlocality, yes; Action at a distance, not necessarily. 9 years, 2 months ago
“The setting variables can be the target of an intervention, the outcome variables can’t. This isn’t about what we, as agents, can do; it’s about what sorts of processes are possible.”
I haven’t read Woodward yet, but I don’t see why we can’t talk about the causal effect on Y (one of the outcomes) due to X (the other outcome). According to…[Read more]
-
Travis Norsen replied to the topic Are there really two different Bell’s theorems? in the forum John Bell Workshop 2014 9 years, 2 months ago
Hey, I agree with Howard about something! Namely: the actual EPR paper is quite convoluted. Re: Matt’s #s 4 and 5, I actually think somebody would have a much easier time reconstructing a rigorous version of EPR+Bell by reading Bell alone (and perhaps the cited Einstein!) than by reading Bell plus EPR. Bell’s recapitulation of the EPR-ish…[Read more]
-
Travis Norsen commented on the post, Lessons of Bell's Theorem: Nonlocality, yes; Action at a distance, not necessarily. 9 years, 2 months ago
I just have a minute before running to a meeting, so I’ll come back later to your two questions and just respond to your responses to my comments:
Second point: Yes, I get, from your page 2, that you don’t *want* things to rest on this distinction. But don’t they end up that way? Some violations of Bell’s “local causality” (which is…[Read more]
-
Travis Norsen commented on the post, Reply to Norsen's paper "Are there really two different Bell's theorems?'' 9 years, 2 months ago
3. Fair enough.
6. Thanks. I suppose my feeling is that you are not managing to “keep it as background”, but are instead setting it completely aside as irrelevant. (Which makes sense, insofar as you define your mission as examining exclusively the thing you segregate off as “his theorem/result/proof”.) But then you are simply repeating and…[Read more]
-
Travis Norsen commented on the post, Lessons of Bell's Theorem: Nonlocality, yes; Action at a distance, not necessarily. 9 years, 2 months ago
Hi Wayne. I just read through your paper and found it very clear and thought-provoking and nice. I should probably read it again before commenting here, but I’m not sure when I’ll have time, so I’ll just register a couple of half-baked reactions/questions.
So, first, just to double-check that I’m understanding your terminology the way you…[Read more]
-
Travis Norsen replied to the topic Are there really two different Bell’s theorems? in the forum John Bell Workshop 2014 9 years, 2 months ago
Matt, re: #1866, good, it seems like we’re basically on the same page. I suspect there remains some lingering disagreement having to do with whether Bell (in ’64) meant to define locality with his Einstein quotations and/or how similar the Einstein quotation (what Howard calls “no telepathy”) is to (Bell’s later formalized) “local causality”.…[Read more]
-
Travis Norsen replied to the topic Are there really two different Bell’s theorems? in the forum John Bell Workshop 2014 9 years, 2 months ago
Hi Matt. Yes, I agree with you. Refuting B’ (i.e., refuting Bohr’s “completeness doctrine”) and refuting B (i.e., establishing deterministic hidden variables) are distinct, though of course closely-related. (In case it’s not obvious, here by “refuting” I mean “subject to the assumption of locality”. Post-Bell — i.e., once it is established…[Read more]
-
Travis Norsen commented on the post, Reply to Norsen's paper "Are there really two different Bell's theorems?'' 9 years, 2 months ago
Howard, some further comments in response to your comments. (I follow your numbering scheme.)
1. My view, as you must know by now, is that Bell’s *definition* of “locality” is provided by the passage he quotes from Einstein, and that some of his later words must be understood not as attempts to provide a general definition, but instead as…[Read more]
-
Travis Norsen replied to the topic Are there really two different Bell’s theorems? in the forum John Bell Workshop 2014 9 years, 2 months ago
Thanks for the comments, Matt. I’m of course happy to hear that you found the paper thought-provoking, and in particular happy to hear that it helped you realize that there is no basis for thinking Bell meant Parameter Independence by “locality”. As should be clear, I completely agree with what you say about the “mathematically rigorous part of…[Read more]
-
Travis Norsen commented on the post, Reply to Norsen's paper "Are there really two different Bell's theorems?'' 9 years, 3 months ago
Dear Howard,
Rather than write another detailed rebuttal to the many points you raise here, I would like to simply re-frame the big picture and encourage interested people to make up their own minds on the basis of what has already been written.
I will cut right to the chase. You wrote, in your original paper, that “there is only one…[Read more]
-
Travis Norsen replied to the topic Bell on Bell’s theorem: The changing face of nonlocality in the forum John Bell Workshop 2014 9 years, 3 months ago
Hi Chris, Yes, I agree, we’re not making any progress, and it seems a good time to wrap this up and agree to continue over beers someday. I feel I should wrap up some loose ends, but this will be my last post so you can take the author’s prerogative of having the last word.
First, just to clarify, I understand perfectly well that you’re not…[Read more]
-
Travis Norsen replied to the topic Bell on Bell’s theorem: The changing face of nonlocality in the forum John Bell Workshop 2014 9 years, 3 months ago
Hi Chris, Sorry, it’s not the distinction as such that I find “weird and metaphysical”, but rather your use of it in this context. Let me try to step back and explain what’s bothering me. On the one hand, I thought I understood you Everettian types to be ontologically monist about the quantum state. But then, in the discussion that arose…[Read more]
-
Travis Norsen replied to the topic Bell on Bell’s theorem: The changing face of nonlocality in the forum John Bell Workshop 2014 9 years, 3 months ago
Hi Chris. First, I hope you know I was just being playful with “confusion or forgetfulness about the ontology”. At any rate, *I* remain quite confused about the ontology of this Everettian theory, and your latest comments only add to that (with this new — and to me weird and metaphysical — distinction between occurrent and merely…[Read more]
-
Travis Norsen replied to the topic Bell on Bell’s theorem: The changing face of nonlocality in the forum John Bell Workshop 2014 9 years, 3 months ago
Hi Chris, Thanks for your comments in response to my queries. I’ve already said a lot about all of these issues in my own contribution to the Bell volume, so for the most part I’ll just invite you (and whoever else is interested) to check that out if you want to see what I think about several of the points you raised. I’m not convinced, for…[Read more]
- Load More