Ruth and causality (General)

by David Turell , Monday, August 19, 2013, 15:46 (3902 days ago) @ dhw

dhw: I'm fine with "QM is not really in our world", but not with CAUSATION "is not really in the world". Ruth links her scepticism to expectation and prediction,-Re-read her blog with George Musser. it makes her theory clear to me:-http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/critical-opalescence/2013/06/21/can-we-resolve-quantum-paradoxes-by-stepping-out-of-space-and-time-guest-post/-"My development of the Transactional Interpretation makes use of an important idea of Werner Heisenberg: "Atoms and the elementary particles themselves ... form a world of potentialities or possibilities rather than things of the facts." This world of potentialities is not contained within space and time; it is a higher-dimensional world whose structure is described by the mathematics of quantum theory. The Transactional Interpretation is best understood by considering both the offer and confirmation as Heisenbergian possibilities—that is, they are only potential events. That removes the possibility of causal-loop inconsistencies, since neither the positive-energy offer wave nor the negative-energy confirmation wave carries real energy, and neither is contained in spacetime. It is only in the encounter between the two that real energy may be conveyed within spacetime from an emitter to an absorber—and when this occurs, all the energy is delivered in the normal future direction."- -> dhw:That's why I've questioned Ruth's support for Hume and Russell, who claim to have eliminated causality as an ontological feature of the world. ..... Ruth, won't you come riding to our rescue?:-"As is evident from von Baeyer's article, quantum theory truly challenges us to think outside the box—and, in this case, I submit that the box is spacetime itself. (my bold)If this seems farfetched, consider the eloquent point made by physicist and philosopher Ernan McMullin: "Imaginability must not be made the test for ontology. The realist claim is that the scientist is discovering the structures of the world; it is not required in addition that these structures be imaginable in the categories of the macroworld." Only if we face the strange non-classical features of the physical world head-on can we have a physical, non-observer-dependent account of our reality that solves longstanding puzzles such as the problem of Schrödinger's Cat."-And in comments:
"As is well-known, the collapsed calculation in quantum mechanics gives also 2/36. However, the uncollapsed result in QM can be anything from zero to 4/36, depending on the relative phases of the probability amplitudes. This sort of thing is not seen in Vegas, but it is seen with the double slit. Thus looking, or, if you like, the collapse, has an observable consequence, unlike in the classical situation. This result violates the 4th and 7th Laws of Probability of Laplace. But these 18th-century laws are based on nothing more than the assumption that intermediate events, whether observed or not, actually happen. In consequence, unobserved intermediate events do not happen, as Feynman pointed out. (my bold)-This is the headache in its full face. It's resolution is another matter, but mere subjectivity fails to resolve it.-James H. Cooke
Los Alamos, NM"-https://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=can-quantum-beyesnism-fix-paradoxes-quantum-mechanics-Conclusion: there are no immediate causes and effects in QM. It is all probability, results depending upon what you look for. I still defend Ruth. This blog is what originally caught my eye. If correct it makes perfect sense because it takes us away from classical cause and effect.