Reality (General)

by dhw, Friday, November 15, 2019, 10:59 (1618 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: Our reality is created by quantum reality, which is not ours. That is why we do not understand it. That is why the cat is both alive and dead. Your bus is not the cat.

dhw: And the cat is not my bus. How does that prove that the theoretical dead-or-alive cat (which I believe would also be made of particles if it existed) is more real than the bus?

DAVID: My view of quantum reality is not your view. When we study basic real particles that make up, and underlie our reality (the bus), we find they do strange things we do not understand. We both agree on this. What Kastner and I am trying to tell you is simply that the physics of the quantum particles is a different form of reality than we appreciate in our 'Big" world.

That is obvious since, unlike the bus, individual particles behave in a manner we do not understand. You wrote: “When we get down to the basis of reality we bump into the unreality of quantum actions by the weirdness of what the particles do.” I replied: "Why are you now calling quantum actions unreal? They are part of the material world, and I accept the scientists’ discoveries, but since science cannot explain these actions, I refuse to accept that they are more real than the explicable behaviour of the combined particles of the bus! [...] And quantum reality is not a separate reality because it is an incomprehensible part of the material world. It is you who have introduced and believe in a separate reality in the immaterial form of “pure energy”, i.e. God, although we “don’t know what is on the other side of quantum uncertainty”.
You have ignored the latter hypothesis, and continue to focus on what I have already accepted, but you brush aside the whole basis of my disagreement with Kastner over the claim that quantum reality, which we do not understand, is more real than the bus reality we know.

DAVID: And that different form of reality creates our reality. An example: tickling a particle in Madrid makes a particle in the Azores change in the same way. Another example: late choice experiments change the result of an experiment after the event, meaning consciousness is part of the process!!! The same particles make up your bus. There are obviously two realities, one the basis of the other. Both real with one responding to consciousness.

I have not disputed any of this, except that I jib at the argument that quantum mechanics is the basis of or creates our reality, since the combined particles that make up the bus behave in a totally predictable manner. I have even expanded your last remark by pointing out that all forms of our reality are dependent on the subjectivity of our conscious perception. The nearest any of us can come to objective reality is by consensus, and consensus has it that the behaviour of the combined particles of the bus and of the quantum theorist who steps in front of it denotes an explicable and predictable reality. That is why I dispute the claim that the inexplicable, unpredictable reality of quanta is more real than that of the bus. You have encapsulated the whole dispute with your very last comment:

DAVID: The bus is fooling you.

More fool you if you think so. And, dear friend, I beg you not to step in front of it.