This is a response to this video: https://youtu.be/ThRAjEUQKFQ

So Chocolate hat has responded to my original blog and he once again has shown he simply does not understand any of my criticisms. I will try my best to respond to each criticism he makes and show why he has not saved materialism in any non-ad hoc way. I will explain what that means but to start off he made a previous response to the first part of my blog which I respond to on my Facebook page here. https://www.facebook.com/CivilianName295/posts/365639533857863

And so this blog post will be addressing part 2 of his response to my blog. Normally if a response is short I just use my Facebook page but in this instance there is a lot that needs to be addressed and so this deserves a blog. I will also be addressing his decoherence argument and responding to many of his objections. So his first objections don’t start until 5:30-5:40

“No evidence for consciousness playing a role in collapse” 

He mainly objects that the consciousness causes collapse (CCC for short) is only one interpretation and I would agree with him on this. In fact our version of CCC is not the same most people think about because in our version consciousness only creates the physical appearance of reality and not matter itself. This should be clear given that under theism God creates the reality and we don’t we are only the participants in reality and not the creators of it. So I wanted to make that point clear to both chocolate and my readers so there is no misunderstanding. What he doesn’t understand is the Heisenberg/Dirac choice which is how we choose between the different possibilities of the wave function. This is the basis of standard quantum theory (orthodox Copenhagen interpretation) but I will explain this later. 

6:00-6:05 

“All interpretations of QM are equally consistent with the theory”

Again I would agree however this doesn’t have to do with which one is the right one it has to do with parsimony and it being ad hoc or not. As I pointed out in my previous blog response Bohmian mechanics works but it’s also ad hoc which is my response to your claim that quantum mechanics doesn’t debunk materialism. The fact that its ad hoc gives us good reason to reject it however you still don’t seem to understand that point. Yes quantum mechanics doesn’t totally debunk materialism but in order to save materialism you have to make ad hoc interpretations to fit the data which is not rational and not going where the evidence leads. 

6:30-8:27

“Many world explains quantum mechanics mathematically and is the simplest formalization, Occam razor alone cannot debunk the MWI…as for IP video please feel free to watch it but we should learn to take IP with a punch of salt and to double-check everything he says” 

So Chocolate Hat had nothing to say about the real criticisms of the MWI and so he just dismisses it pretending they don’t exist. Well if he can’t defend his position regarding the MWI then I suspect that he shouldn’t use it as a defense of realism. So he doesn’t attempt to defend the MWI at all. The only thing he responds to is Occam’s razor however as I pointed out that includes the other criticism so on top of the other criticisms it’s a violation of Occam’s razor because in order to fix the problems it has to create ad hoc assumptions that’s what it means to violate Occam’s razor. 

Next he mocks my misspelling of the word “bohemian mechanics” with “bohmian mechanics”. Well I don’t know if this is to entertain his audience but yes I misspelled the term. So that does nothing to address my original criticism, moving on now

So ironically chocolate hat talks briefly about quantum entanglement and how two particles from opposite sides of the universe can interact and I agree its valid. What he doesn’t realize is that under quantum entanglement in order for relativity to work space would need to be an illusion to allow the entanglement to happen beneath space-time and so the space between all objects does not exist. Meaning that objects don’t actually exist but are emergent phenomena as emergent space time shows us. Materialism says that only physical objects exist and that the physical is all there is. So if physical objects only exist within space time and if space time is an illusion then materialism is automatically debunked since no objective physical object exist but instead is an emergent illusion and we all know our minds can’t be illusions since that claiming the mind is an illusion destroys all knowledge claims you can make. So nice job accidentally debunking materialism chocolate hat 😉 

11:30-15:20

Chocolate hat doesn’t address the objections raised by the papers that critique bohmian mechanics he just responds by saying that these issues are still debated and that physicist still hold to bohmian mechanics. 

The main problem with Chocolate responses is that I’m not proposing the interpretation to be wrong but rather that its ad hoc and thus should be rejected. The papers were cited not to disprove bohmian mechanics but rather show why it’s very ad hoc and should not be considered a good alternative to standard quantum theory. That is my main point and if he didn’t get that at my original blog then it was a misunderstanding of the point I was trying to make.

15:30-16:12

“Decoherence poses a problem for CCC since the quantum system becomes decohered so that no quantum effects take place and photo detectors can cause collapse” 

So this is essentially Chocolate hats decoherence argument that he made in his response to IP. That quantum systems decohere with each other making them collapse before anyone looks. Well there are many problems with this decoherence argument and I will point out why. First if we are talking from a pragmatic standpoint, then yes, the photo detector causes collapse and I have never denied that. However, it completely misses the real issue of what that would entail, namely a following von Neumann chain to initiate ultimate collapse. So despite chocolate hats claim, the von Neumann chain does take into effect the environmental decoherence effects on particles. But decoherence alone cannot fully explain collapse beyond a pragmatic understanding, and the debate is over the truth of reality. So this appears to be a bait and switch: announce interaction/decoherence can fully explain collapse, but fail to mention that it only applies in the pragmatic Copenhagen Interpretation, which doesn’t address the truth of what reality is. There are many physicist that admit that decoherence doesn’t solve the measurement problem. As E Joos said quoted,“Does decoherence solve the measurement problem? Clearly not. What decoherence tells us, is that certain objects appear classical when they are observed. But what is an observation? At some stage, we still have to apply the usual probability rules of quantum theory.¹“. There are far more I could have used, like this one from Maximilian Scholosshauer, “…decoherence arises from a direct application of the quantum mechanical formalism to a description of the interaction of a physical system with its environment. By itself, decoherence is therefore neither an interpretation nor a modification of quantum mechanics.²” In fact I could keep going on, but the point is physicists do not say the interaction/decoherence can fully explain collapse other than from a pragmatic standpoint. And there are many good papers that explain why decoherence cannot solve the measurement problem beyond a pragmatic understanding. (1)

The reason why they use decoherence is because it doesn’t take any metaphysical conclusions into account and also we are slowly starting to see quantum effects happen at the macro level, decoherence is what makes things look classical but they in reality are not so chocolate hats decoherence argument fails.

17:10-17:20

“If you can propose a mathematical calculation that is consistent with the data that is falsifiable then you can qualify your thesis”

Yes I have one in fact its a direct mathematical derivation of conscious agents. This model predicts quantum mechanics itself, general relativity and a solution to the hard problem. You may be making predictions from quantum mechanics as well as the interpretations however conscious agent dynamics predicts quantum mechanics, general relativity all while solving the hard problem that materialism has caused. You want mathematical derivations I have one in this paper (2)

So near the end of the video Chocolate hat seems to misunderstand that we are not saying OUR consciousness creates reality but that God is creating reality. The Heisenberg/Dirac choice is how we participate in nature not control it. This is me and IPs position regarding this issue. The observer has the ability to put the right questions into nature and yield a result. As Henry Stapp says “The observer in quantum theory does more than just read the recordings. He also chooses which question will be put into nature: which aspect of nature his inquiry will probe. I call this important function of the observer the “Heisenberg choice” to contrast it with the “Dirac choice” which is the random choice on the part of nature that Dirac emphasized.” (more about this can be read here) (3) 

So according to standard quantum theory the Dirac choice is a choice between alternatives that are specified by the Heisenberg choice. The observer must first specify which aspect of the system he will probe than nature returns with the Dirac choice. So it is the observer who asks the question and recognizes the answer. The interaction chain steams back from an ability to make a Heisenberg choice which gets a random Dirac choice from nature and this is how we get one actual outcome from the wave function. Only the observer has the ability to “choose” (Give Heisenberg choice) between possibilities, non-conscious measuring devices cannot.

 

And so this refutes Chocolate hats last objection regarding quantum mechanics. Now I understand that chocolate hat can respond to even these criticisms my main point is that the interpretations that try to save realism are ad hoc and should not be taken seriously. I know chocolate hat and many others won’t like this and they will stick to realist interpretations but its ad hoc. There are also very strong philosophical arguments as well as quantum gravity research that points us to a simulated universe and idealism but for now we can see why the responses from chocolate hat at best make the realist interpretations possible but not plausible. Yes realist interpretations are possible but possibility is not probability and so if we want to be less ad hoc we should reject materialism since it requires ad hoc assumptions for it to be compatible with quantum mechanics.

(1) https://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0112095

(2) https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4060643/

(3) https://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/9905054