The Relationship Between Math and Physics

It seems to me that it is basic to all cognition, including that of very primitive organisms.

Look earlier. Maybe Genesis 1:4.

So there you already have two categories – light and darkness. Before there were categories, we have only “the earth was without form and void”.

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Here you are attributing to “very primitive organisms” a capability of accountable humans.
Quantum physics has made this point clear: The human observer is the basis to define and explain the world.

True enough!

Genesis 1 (Priestly source) and Genesis 2 (Jahwist source) illuminate each other:

Actually “our categories” describe the world as it is at the moment accountable humans are created.

At this moment the animal species are distinct, and accountable humans can sharply distinguish between human and non-human. This distinction disappears when you go back in time, as we are taught by Evolution.

Same thing for the distinction between fish and birds: They are clearly distinct at the moment when accountable humans are created, but the distinction disappears when you go back in time, however, as we are taught by Evolution, you have to go more back in time than for the disappearance of the category pair “human vs. non-human”.

Same thing for the category pair light vs. darkness: distinct at the moment when accountable humans appear, the distinction disappears when you go back in time and reach an original undifferentiated state (“the earth was without form and void”), as we are in fact taught by the “Big-Bang” theory.

Thus, Evolution helps us to a better understanding of what Genesis is telling us.

But the paramount teaching of Evolution is this:

Nothing in biology can help us to establish when humanity begins.

And here Genesis can:

Humanity begins at the moment when Got declares that:

  • Some creatures sharing a certain type of body are in God’s Image and thereby defines humanity.

  • Each human is accountable for killing another human, but humans are allowed to kill non-human animals for getting food.

But what does it mean to be in God’s Image?
Scripture answers: to have a body like the body God will take to incarnate (Colossians 1:15, Hebrews 1:3).

So thanks Evolution we can finally understand what the Genesis’ Word about the “Image of God” really means.

This meaning was hidden before because of the belief that “the species we meet today were constant forms since the dawn of animal life” (see Charles Darwin On the Origin of Species, 1859, chapter VI and IX).

Thanks Evolution we understand today that:
The aim of Creation is God’s Incarnation.
In my view the very basis of Christianity!

Only that it seems he is committed to the idea that there were an actual, literal Adam and Eve who were infused with the secret sauce that creates a soul, underwent the Fall and the serpent thing, and infected the rest of us with Original Sin. The site host appears to believe this as well.

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But they disagree, I think, on the nature of the secret sauce. And is it clear how much either of them believes of the literal story?

I’m not sure of the point.

An accountable human is capable of sitting still and doing nothing. So is a rock. Is it somehow a mistake to say that a rock has some capability that is found in accountable humans?

I don’t agree with that.

By themselves, categories don’t describe anything. Description depends on how we use categories.

But there was always light – at least by the time that the earth existed.

The Genesis account actually works better as an account of cognitive development than as an account of physical creation. “Let there be light” could be a description of organisms gaining the ability to distinguish between light and dark.

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If by “actual, literal Adam and Eve” you mean a single pair from whom all human persons are genealogically descended, then I am NOT committed to this idea.

The idea I endorse is the following:

At about 3,200 BC there were widespread all over the planet 5-10 million creatures with a body like our body (anatomic modern human body).

At this time God declared all these creatures to be in His Image. Furthermore, God endowed a little population in Sumer with sense of law and accountability: He gave them a commandment stating they would be punished if they transgress it.

For me “Adam and Eve” is a corporate name for these first accountable Image Bearers.

Your idea of the soul as a “secret sauce” corresponds to an mechanistic view of past centuries that meanwhile has been superseded by quantum science: The soul is not contained in the body, but rather the other way around, the soul contains the body .

The soul is what makes that @tim.anderson is someone with personal identity that remains conserved in all the material changes you undergo.

Consider a computer game in your laptop and the different characters appearing in the screen. Suppose you identify yourself with one of this characters: You outside the scree would be the soul of this character, and all the algorithms you trigger for guiding this character in the screen would be the main part of the character’s body; the character’s figure on the screen makes simply visible the soul and the body. Similarly, what we see of you is your very soul and the body contained in it, both together and inseparably appearing in the space-time.

God creates “Adam and Eve” as the first accountable Image Bearers at about 3,200 BC by infusing the sense of law into creatures with anatomic modern human body. It is this awareness of moral and legal responsibility what catalyzed the transformation of proto-writing into writing in Sumer.

Thereafter God transformed gradually all the other anatomic modern humans into accountable Image Bearers. This transformation was achieved after the Flood at the moment referred to in Genesis 9:5-6.

Some of the primeval accountable Image Bearers underwent the fall by transgressing God’s commandment.

In my view it is fitting to think that among this primeval population there were also such who acknowledged God’s love and remained faithful to Him. Nothing speaks against speculating that Melchizedek was one of these.

It looks like you have a completely wrong idea of what “Original Sin” means in Christianity.

It is NOT a sin each of us is personally guilty for:

So for instance, if I kill someone and die afterwards without repenting, I go to hell.

By contrast if an infant dies without Baptism he/she does NOT go to hell.

The badly-named “Original Sin” is a state which results from God’s will to redeem the sinners according to Romans 11:32:

For God has bound everyone over to disobedience so that he may have mercy on them all.

So we sinners can really call this state even a “happy one”: If there had been not such a state, we would now be all already in hell!

Further to my positive remarks on your use of punctuation: Is that colon after quantum science meant to indicate that the relationship between the soul and the body is a consequence of the science of QM?

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It is meant to indicate that quantum physics rules out the mechanistic explanation of the body and thereby leads us to a better understanding of the terms ‘soul’ and ‘body’.

The main insight in quantum physics can be formulated as follows:

Not all what matter for the physical phenomena is contained in the space-time.

This principle is particularly useful to explain “the relationship between the soul and the body”.

So for instance, the movements of my fingers while I am typing this post require energy coming from the food I eat, but the message I am conveying to you is given by the order of the characters I am putting on the screen of my laptop: This order (the “information”) comes from the spiritual powers of my soul (intellect, free will, memory) and cannot be reduced to material causes.

So my body is more than my “flesh and bones”: It consist also in all the skills (“algorithms”) I have learned to working conveniently with my laptop and interacting with the software of the site hosting this debate, skills that are now contained in my soul. What is more, “flesh and bones” themselves are integrated into an organism whose unity is ensured by the soul. So, at the end of the day, what we call “body” is the soul appearing in the space-time.

Needless to say that I will be thankful for any suggestion to improve my formulations and use of punctuation.

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QM as a science is formulated in spacetime. The Schrodinger equation is a relation based on time.

QM as a science says nothing about the nature of the world: that is an issue for philosophical interpretation.

Of the three important realist interpretations – GRW, many worlds, Bohmian – all accept the need to be consistent with SR, as is QM (GR still eludes us). So they try to be consistent with the constraints on timelike events imposed by SR, eg on causal interaction and on signaling classical (Shannon) information (Bohmians have some challenges in doing sos, but they try).

QM does recognize and account for quantum information and correlations.

Perhaps your concerns with spacetime come from non-locality. I agree QM is inconsistent with pre-QM intuitions about correlations in spacetime. This is one area where Einstein’s intuitions failed him.

I don’t see any justification for your apparent views on the need for a scientific or philosophical perspective which lies outside space time. Theological use of this perspective is a different matter, of course.

QM science has no problem including QM information and QM entropy in its theories. How or whether such information is real and has causal effects is an interesting philosophical issue. Scott Aaronson writes about it here. See Sean Carroll’s responses in the comments as well.

Your punctuation is uniformly excellent as far as I have seen. Your use of the colon that I questioned was spot-on according to my lights. Few know how to use the colon these days; for many, one or more periods is the limit of their punctuation skills.

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Thanks for this Bruce! I see you are acquainted with the ongoing discussion about QM interpretations, so it is a pleasure discussing with you on “non-locality” and “quantum information”.

Undoubtedly, “non-locality” experiments are paramount to demonstrating effects (correlations) coming from outside scape-time.

However, I would like to stress that this feature is not limited to “entanglement” experiments with two or more particles but is the very characteristic of the Quantum.

Non-locality appears already in single particle interference like the double-slit experiment. Indeed, such experiments led the founding fathers to the idea that the decision of the outcome happens at detection (“wavefunction collapse”), which became known as the Copenhagen or “orthodox” interpretation.

As you well know, Einstein as early as 1927 (at the 5th Solvay Conference in Bruxelles) smelled that the idea of the “collapse” implies a non-local coordination between detectors. He illustrated this implication on the basis of a famous thought experiment concluding (erroneously) to a conflict with relativity. Einstein understood that Quantum Mechanics means nonlocality and was not ready to swallow this. Ironically, the proposers of the “collapse”, although telling basically the right story, did not know the meaning of what they were telling. Astonishingly Einstein’s gedanken-experiment in 1927 has been first realized using today’s techniques in 2012, and I am proud for having proposed it and worked on its realization [see publication here].

Another important player at the 5th Solvay Conference was Louis de Broglie. He presented a different interpretation, the so called “pilot-wave” or “empty-wave” picture: The particle always follows a well determined path from the source to a detector, but there is an undetectable “empty wave” that travels by the alternative paths, joins the particle at the arrival, and, taking account of the path-length difference, guides the particle to one or other of the detectors to producing the characteristic interference fringes predicted by QM. Unfortunately, in the context of the single-particle gedanken-experiment Einstein discussed at the Conference, de Broglie’s “empty wave” can easily be misunderstood as sort of immaterial (energyless) “ghost-wave” carrying only information but travelling at the same speed of the material particle, so that you can explain interference avoiding nonlocal coordination. Indeed, Einstein misinterpreted this way de Broglie’s idea and praised it as promising.

The debate resumed in 1935 with the famous EPR paper, where Einstein proposed a new thought experiment with two particles, that is, an entanglement experiment. Some years later (1952) David Bohm published an article applying de Broglie’s picture to explain the EPR experiment. In this context it became clear that the “empty-wave” has nothing to do with a locally travelling “ghost-wave” but is a mathematical entity propagating in the so called phase-space which guides the material particle nonlocally to produce space-like separated correlated detections at the two sides of the setup. This is the origin of the Bohmian picture you refer to among the “realist interpretations”. This Bohmian picture inspired John Bell to find a criterion allowing to decide between quantum non-locality and Einstein’s locality by means of entanglement experiments: The meanwhile famous Bell inequalities. As you well know, a number of experiments since 1982 (to whose I have also collaborated) have ruled out Einstein’s locality upholding the quantum mechanical predictions.

The important lesson of the story so far is that the de Broglie-Bohm interpretation is itself nonlocal, although it can be misunderstood as local in single-particle experiments. In any case the “pilot-wave” is a mathematical “mental” entity that guides the material particle traveling in the physical space-time from outside this. The only difference with relation to Copenhagen is, that in this picture the “wave-function” influences macroscopic objects like detectors, and in the Bohm picture it influences microscopic particles.

Nonetheless, the debate on quantum non-locality is not yet definitely settled: The reason is the so called Many-Worlds interpretation, you also refer to. According to this picture any time an outcome happens in a quantum experiment, the world splits in two worlds, and the alternative outcome also happens in the other parallel world. What is more, the experimenter itself splits as well in two clones, so that each clone observes one of the two possible outcomes. The crucial point for the model to work is that each world is inaccessible to all the other parallel worlds . So at the end of the day for me all the parallel worlds are outside my space-time and inaccessible to my senses. This amounts to say that they are mental entities outside my observable reality. Many-Worlds has the enormous merit of having brought to light an important idea hidden in the Quantum:

The physical reality consist in all possible experiments (choices) humans of all times can perform. These choices and the corresponding outcomes are all present in God’s mind but I am free to choose the world I want to live in.

You may discover this idea hidden in what Scott Aaronson writes in the link you provide, if you read it attentively.

The GRW interpretation you also refer to fully assumes non-locality as well. It is rather concerned with a different issue: “Which are the conditions determining the occurrence of the collapse”, that is (with John Wheeler’s wording), the precise moment when a result “is a registered (‘observed’, ‘indelibly recorded’) phenomenon, ‘brought to a close’ by ‘an irreversible act of amplification’." This is the so called “measurement problem”, which has also interesting implications we could discuss in future posts.

In conclusion regarding non-locality all the different interpretations of the Quantum state the same after all:

Not all what matters for the physical phenomena is contained in the space-time accessible to our observations.

What I have explained before seems to support rather that the perspective is not merely a philosophical or theological one, but it is the natural conclusion from the quantum experiments. And you see that “different” interpretations of QM, if they lead to the same predictions as QM, are in fact not so different.

I would like to stress that Scott Aaronson and Sean Carroll are using a concept of “information” (Shannon information) different from that I use i.e.: information as we intend it in everyday life.

Shannon information is about the quantity of bits you can store in a physical volume or surface. For me “information” refers to the order of the bits allowing me to encoding a meaningful message. In this sense a huge amount of “Shannon information” can have zero “Suarez information”.

When I speak of the soul as ruling brain processes from outside space-time while I am typewriting this comment, I am comparing the brain to a quantum interferometer: Depending of the physiological parameters of my brain Quantum mechanics may be capable of predicting how many percent of each character of the alphabet (‘a’, ‘b’, ‘c’, …) there will be in the final text. By contrast there is no science (and there never will be one) capable of predicting the order of the characters in the final text and therefore the message I want convey.

This has the following consequence: Quantum physics may predict the distribution of the outcomes of my brain while I am sleeping, but the distribution of my actual brain outcomes may deviate in the short term from the quantum mechanical ones at times when I am acting purposefully.

Thanks in advance for further comments: I will enjoy continuing this discussion.

I don’t see anything in your thoughts that justifies the claim that the science of QM requires something outside of spacetime. Non-locality is a phenomenon that science says is in space time.

Nothing in my response was denying non-locality, only that it does not entail something outside of spacetime according to QM and any realistic interpretation of it.

Entanglement enters the two-slit experiment since the measurement event entangles the (eg) photon with the measuring device. But that is not important to my core point as explained in the previous paragraphs.

On wave-function collapse: De-coherence partially addresses the confused idea of wave-function collapse, at least FAPP, but it is incomplete (eg why do we see only one result in the decoherence-selected basis). However, it is the best we have so far as I know, without going beyond science to interpretations of QM…

I know MW violates the assumptions underlying Bell’s proof and so globally escapes non-locality, but one can still define a world-specific non-locality. in that interpretation.

Thanks for the explanation of how you use ‘information’. That is all well and good, but it is not then something that can be argued about using the science of QM.

I’m pretty Scott A is at least agnostic, if not an atheist, about the existence of God, so you are reading more into his blog entry on information that he intended. Although that is consistent with your arguments at the top of the thread, I suppose.

Concluding a viewpoint outside of spacetime may be a natural conclusion you make, but I guess you know my thoughts on whether your conclusions align with any science, philosophy, or even logic as I understand them. Which thoughts God has in mind is a hypothesis I have no need of.

Off till tomorrow, same bat-time, same bat-channel

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Do you have evidence for this or shall I assume you can read Scott’s mind at a distance?

See

The rest of his blog post and comments expand on the subtle distinction in the last sentence. But that qualification does not affect my conclusion that his physics is uninfluenced by the issue of the existence of God.

As best I can tell, your reasoning in previous post runs roughly as follows:

  1. Everyday intuitions tell us that spacetime is localized.
  2. The QM correlations are not spacetime localized (modulo interpretations).
  3. We should trust our everyday intuitions about spacetime.
  4. Therefore quantum correlations must operate outside of spacetime.

I reject 3 from this reasoning. (if you do not, you have to deal with what SR says about absolute simultaneity).

Thanks Bruce for your analysis. Actually I reject point 3 too.

My reasoning runs as follows:

  1. Michelson-Morley experiments (and related ones) establish that “signals propagating in space-time cannot travel faster than light”.

  2. Quantum mechanical experiments (interference, entanglement) demonstrate space-like separated correlated events.

  3. Therefore “quantum correlations” cannot be explained by signals propagating in space-time (i.e.: by relativistic local causality).

  4. And thus: Not all what matters for the observed physical phenomena is contained in space-time.

Regarding “what SR says about absolute simultaneity” the following story may be interesting:

Taking profit of the relativity of time (“no absolute simultaneity”) I have proposed and collaborated to perform the so-called “before-before experiment”, which aimed to test the hypothesis that the quantum correlations can be explained by “causality in time”, if one assumes precisely relativistic “multi-simultaneity”! [for details see here].

In the “before-before experiment” pairs of entangled particles are measured with devices (beam-splitters) moving in such a way that on each side of the set-up the measurement happens before the measurement on the other side. In this configuration with “before-before chronology” the correlations should disappear, if they arise from causality in time, as I was firmly convinced. Had this been the case, we would have proved quantum mechanics wrong!

On Friday June 22nd, 2001 the results were presented in the Colloquium of the GAP-Quantum group at the University of Geneva: “Unfortunately” for me, the correlations did not disappear, and the experiment confirmed the quantum mechanical predictions. I had the feeling I was attending my burial! After lunch we checked once again all the parameters of the set-up and, lo and behold! there was a fault in the arrangement, and the measurements had to be repeated. The hope to defeat quantum mechanics and win the Nobel Prize ignited again! But on Tuesday June 26th, at 7.15pm I suddenly realized that I was victim of a prejudice by thinking that all effects have to be explained by causal chains in time (in fact the same prejudice that led Einstein to reject quantum mechanics), and I foresaw that the results would confirm quantum mechanics, as it happened some days later.

So the story behind my claim is that I was committed to explain the quantum correlations without invoking anything outside time. But I was taught otherwise by the verdict of the experiment:

Not all what matters for the physical phenomena is contained in space-time.

The fascinating and complex relationship of Scott to YAHWEH deserves a comment on its own.

Huh? I thought MM was about the aether.

ETA: updated to remove initial misunderstanding of your use of ‘signals’.

I find your logic perplexing. QM is telling us our metaphysics must account for non-locality. There is no need to conclude that metaphysics has to involve something outside of spacetime. Since QM is a theory formulated within SR spacetime, logic dictates that any metaphysics that uses QM to conclude something exists outside of spacetime is not aligned with science.

As usual, you logic escapes me.

I’ll bow out of this exchange with a couple of links.

Here is relevant paper on QM and Humeanism from Tim Maudlin with logic that I find coherent:.

dhttp://www.oxfordscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199218219.001.0001/acprof-9780199218219-chapter-3

I also recommend his book

By ruling out the hypothesis of “aether” Michelson-Morley experiment demonstrates the very structure of space-time: Lorentz Invariance, no-absolute simultaneity, and impossibility of signaling faster than light. The later, I stress once again, is primarily a consequence of Michelson-Morley and related experiments.

Thanks for acknowledging that you misunderstood my explanation about ‘signals’.

Here you are misunderstanding what QM is all about: The wave function is not a “material wave” propagating in space-time but a nonlocal mathematical entity defined in a “Hilbert space”. The amazing thing is that such a mental entity produces observable, space-like correlated events: Each single event is well localized in space-time, however the correlation cannot be explained by any connection within space-time, and in this sense it comes from outside space-time.

With your misunderstanding of QM in your reasoning, you are begging the question after all.

The reason for this is that you misunderstand the “quantum logic”.

Nonetheless thanks for your valuable contributions.

I know Tim Maudlin. I myself support Humeanism (see for instance here). Hume’s criticism of causality amounts to state that even the usual causal chains we intuitively think to happen by means of continuous connections in space-time, actually cannot explain the phenomena because there is no such a continuity. In other words, Hume rightly guessed that space-time is quantized or pixelated. So “Humeanism” means that not only quantum correlations but also relativistic ones cannot be explained by continuous connections within space-time.

Nonetheless, as John Bell tirelessly stated: “Correlations cry out for explanation”.

If you keep to this (if you keep to science!) then you have to acknowledge that the explanation lies outside space-time.

And in fact you are acknowledging this when you write:

In the context of my explanation your statement means the following:

When you type your comments on this thread, QM may predict the statistic distribution for each of them (e.g.: 10% for ‘a’, 4% for ‘b’,… 7% for ‘e’,…etc.) however, it cannot predict the order in which the characters (‘a’, ‘b’, ‘c’, etc…) appear on the screen of your laptop.

This means that the meaning of what you write cannot be explained by using the science of QM. In this sense the most important things happening in our lives are beyond the grasp of the science of QM. However, they are not against this science. The science of QM opens the door to realms that are beyond QM. By assuming that we humans cannot predict and control all, we predict and control the world much better (we make better science) than by deluding ourselves we can control all. This is the weirdness of the Quantum Science, and also its greatness!