• webghost0101@sopuli.xyz
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    1 month ago

    To elaborate i need to give you some context, which is that i originally studied game design and i have a autistic-philosophical interpretation of the world and logic as “(game) mechanics”

    If i lack sleep i get tired -> basic game mechanic of the real world.

    I can go very far with that and id love to give you all the details of conscious mechanics a comment wont do it justice and just because i can understand the world trough such lens does not mean others do.

    So with this background you might infer i like to play games, and immerse first persons puzzle games are a special favorite if mine.

    Que “Outer Wilds” back then just an experimental alpha I believe but its to date one of my most favorite games. Literally life changing in how it gave me an intuitive understanding of the basic rules of quantum mechanics, who as far as i understand is the scientific frontier. A person who would state they fully understand quantum mechanics is the last person i would trust to have any understanding of it.

    This game made me shift my gears, once i realized this was based on real science and not just a cool game play feature i had to gain quantum knowledge in real life and i watched some recordings of Mitt classes on superposition just to get a better understanding.

    Now quantum science isn’t exactly philosophy, ive always been interested in philosophy but its by studying quantum mechanics, inspired by that game that i learned about the mechanic of emerging properties. I think on a video about the dual slit experiment.

    I internally quickly put together that a song/music is an emerging properties of musical notes. Music can change our emotions in intentional ways so music is a form intelligence. So intelligent systems can emerge from parts that have no intelligence of their own.

    At that point i did not yet know that emergence was already a known topic in philosophy just quantum science, because i still tried to avoid external influences but it really was the breakthrough I needed and i have gained many new insights from this knowledge since.

    • bunchberry@lemmy.world
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      1 month ago

      A person who would state they fully understand quantum mechanics is the last person i would trust to have any understanding of it.

      I find this sentiment can lead to devolving into quantum woo and mysticism. If you think anyone trying to tell you quantum mechanics can be made sense of rationally must be wrong, then you implicitly are suggesting that quantum mechanics is something that cannot be made sense of, and thus it logically follows that people who are speaking in a way that does not make sense and have no expertise in the subject so they do not even claim to make sense are the more reliable sources.

      It’s really a sentiment I am not a fan of. When we encounter difficult problems that seem mysterious to us, we should treat the mystery as an opportunity to learn. It is very enjoyable, in my view, to read all the different views people put forward to try and make sense of quantum mechanics, to understand it, and then to contemplate on what they have to offer. To me, the joy of a mystery is not to revel in the mystery, but to search for solutions for it, and I will say the academic literature is filled with pretty good accounts of QM these days. It’s been around for a century, a lot of ideas are very developed.

      I also would not take the game Outer Wilds that seriously. It plays into the myth that quantum effects depend upon whether or not you are “looking,” which is simply not the case and largely a myth. You end up with very bizarre and misleading results from this, for example, in the part where you land on the quantum moon and have to look at the picture of it for it to not disappear because your vision is obscured by fog. This makes no sense in light of real physics because the fog is still part of the moon and your ship is still interacting with the fog, so there is no reason it should hop to somewhere else.

      Now quantum science isn’t exactly philosophy, ive always been interested in philosophy but its by studying quantum mechanics, inspired by that game that i learned about the mechanic of emerging properties. I think on a video about the dual slit experiment.

      The double-slit experiment is a great example of something often misunderstood as somehow evidence observation plays some fundamental role in quantum mechanics. Yes, if you observe the path the two particles take through the slits, the interference pattern disappears. Yet, you can also trivially prove in a few line of calculation that if the particle interacts with a single other particle when it passes through the two slits then it would also lead to a destruction of the interference effects.

      You model this by computing what is called a density matrix for both the particle going through the two slits and the particle it interacts with, and then you do what is called a partial trace whereby you “trace out” the particle it interacts with giving you a reduced density matrix of only the particle that passes through the two slits, and you find as a result of interacting with another particle its coherence terms would reduce to zero, i.e. it would decohere and thus lose the ability to interfere with itself.

      If a single particle interaction can do this, then it is not surprising it interacting with a whole measuring device can do this. It has nothing to do with humans looking at it.

      At that point i did not yet know that emergence was already a known topic in philosophy just quantum science, because i still tried to avoid external influences but it really was the breakthrough I needed and i have gained many new insights from this knowledge since.

      Eh, you should be reading books and papers in the literature if you are serious about this topic. I agree that a lot of philosophy out there is bad so sometimes external influences can be negative, but the solution to that shouldn’t be to entirely avoid reading anything at all, but to dig through the trash to find the hidden gems.

      My views when it comes to philosophy are pretty fringe as most academics believe the human brain can transcend reality and I reject this notion, and I find most philosophy falls right into place if you reject this notion. However, because my views are a bit fringe, I do find most philosophical literature out there unhelpful, but I don’t entirely not engage with it. I have found plenty of philosophers and physicists who have significantly helped develop my views, such as Jocelyn Benoist, Carlo Rovelli, Francois-Igor Pris, and Alexander Bogdanov.