A quantum experiment is said to "call into question whether or not there is objective reality."
It doesn't really do that. What it does do is suggest that objective reality may somehow contain two sets of apparently contradictory facts. If so, that is itself an objective fact about reality. It's a confusing one, to be sure; it may well reframe some of our thinking and discussions. However, it still would happen to be an objective description of reality.
10 comments:
If two people compute the same thing and one gets zero and the other gets one as a result, that to me means there is NO objective reality. You can claim there is still "reality", but it does not meet the standard of being "objective" in any sense that has meaning.
The aggregate still collapses to objective reality, at our everyday scale, but this would seem to me pretty clear evidence that at the quantum level objective truth is simply not real...or that the source code for the simulation is just buggy at that granular a level. :)
There is an objective truth, though, if that's right: it is that both 1 and 0 can obtain, at least at the quantum level.
Aristotle gave us the Law of Noncontradiction. Maybe it only holds at certain levels of organization. That's OK; it's interesting, in fact. If it's true.
It fits in a way with what happens at the relativistic scale, where there is 'no fact of the matter' about whether events are or are not simultaneous. It all depends on one's frame of reference. That turns out to be so mathematically explicable that one can graph it, even though it seems shocking the first time you hear it.
Then let me find the limit - at what point would you concede objective reality is disproven? Or are the terms "objective" & "reality", when used together, redundant? Is everything we sense and measure both objective and real, regardless of perceived fallacies?
It'd be the point at which we can't describe it in a way you could understand. That could be because it was so non-objective that I couldn't put it into words; or it could be because no kind of objective reporting from me to you would survive well enough for you to understand it.
Here, at least, we can understand what they are saying. It's weird, it's not what we expect. But it's not weirder than relativity, and it's no weirder than the idea that relativity and this and our ordinary scale should somehow all fit together.
Your first paragraph describes a breakdown of reality into chaos, rather than just a violation of objective reality, in my mind. Here we have an agreed upon reality, not chaos, but there is no underlying truth to be determined, not even a c to orient everything else around.
That's it. Somehow the chaos -- quantum or relative -- resolves itself into order at our level of reality. That's interesting in itself. If it's all the right way to talk about reality, Good God. Well, literally. And that's no bad thing.
Well, rather than a breakdown of reality, maybe it simply suggests the limits of human understanding. Just because we cannot comprehend something doesn't necessarily mean there is no objective reality there to be understood.
From a historical perspective, this could very well be just an anomaly in our paradigm that will be resolved in a future revolution in physics, much like Newton resolved the contradictions between Copernicus & Galileo's heliocentric solar system and the Aristotelian-Ptolemaic cosmology that dominated the universities of their day.
We're all just math. It's hard to find anything else that holds still and can be called real.
Or, maybe objectivity isn't 100%. Maybe it holds for some phenomena and not others. Just because one thing fails to be objectively real doesn't necessarily mean that everything fails to be objectively real.
Ya ll want to know what objective reality is? Watch this and prepare for your world view to reach collapse threshold.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iigUBjf4-pc
This reality is only objective from an observer outside of linear time.
Earth is closer to an rpg simulation. People co create it the same way the graphics engine renders what you see on screen but not behind you.
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