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Objective Reality Doesn't Exist, Quantum Experiment Shows
By Alessandro Fedrizzi, Massimiliano Proietti November 20 2019
Alternative facts are spreading like a virus across society. Now, it seems they have even infected science — at least the quantum realm. This may seem counter intuitive. The scientific method is after all founded on the reliable notions of observation, measurement and repeatability. A fact, as established by a measurement, should be objective, such that all observers can agree with it.
But in a paper recently published in Science Advances, we show that, in the micro-world of atoms and particles that is governed by the strange rules of quantum mechanics, two different observers are entitled to their own facts. In other words, according to our best theory of the building blocks of nature itself, facts can actually be subjective.
Observers are powerful players in the quantum world. According to the theory, particles can be in several places or states at once — this is called a superposition. But oddly, this is only the case when they aren't observed. The second you observe a quantum system, it picks a specific location or state — breaking the superposition. The fact that nature behaves this way has been proven multiple times in the lab — for example, in the famous double slit experiment.
In 1961, physicist Eugene Wigner proposed a provocative thought experiment. He questioned what would happen when applying quantum mechanics to an observer that is themselves being observed. Imagine that a friend of Wigner tosses a quantum coin — which is in a superposition of both heads and tails — inside a closed laboratory. Every time the friend tosses the coin, they observe a definite outcome. We can say that Wigner's friend establishes a fact: the result of the coin toss is definitely head or tail.
Wigner doesn't have access to this fact from the outside, and according to quantum mechanics, must describe the friend and the coin to be in a superposition of all possible outcomes of the experiment. That's because they are "entangled" — spookily connected so that if you manipulate one you also manipulate the other. Wigner can now in principle verify this superposition using a so-called "interference experiment" — a type of quantum measurement that allows you to unravel the superposition of an entire system, confirming that two objects are entangled.
When Wigner and the friend compare notes later on, the friend will insist they saw definite outcomes for each coin toss. Wigner, however, will disagree whenever he observed friend and coin in a superposition.
This presents a conundrum. The reality perceived by the friend cannot be reconciled with the reality on the outside. Wigner originally didn't consider this much of a paradox, he argued it would be absurd to describe a conscious observer as a quantum object. However, he later departed from this view, and according to formal textbooks on quantum mechanics, the description is perfectly valid.
The experiment
The scenario has long remained an interesting thought experiment. But does it reflect reality? Scientifically, there has been little progress on this until very recently, when Časlav Brukner at the University of Vienna showed that, under certain assumptions, Wigner's idea can be used to formally prove that measurements in quantum mechanics are subjective to observers.
Brukner proposed a way of testing this notion by translating the Wigner's friend scenario into a framework first established by the physicist John Bell in 1964. Brukner considered two pairs of Wigners and friends, in two separate boxes, conducting measurements on a shared state — inside and outside their respective box. The results can be summed up to ultimately be used to evaluate a so called "Bell inequality". If this inequality is violated, observers could have alternative facts.
We have now for the first time performed this test experimentally at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh on a small-scale quantum computer made up of three pairs of entangled photons. The first photon pair represents the coins, and the other two are used to perform the coin toss — measuring the polarization of the photons — inside their respective box. Outside the two boxes, two photons remain on each side that can also be measured.
Despite using state-of-the-art quantum technology, it took weeks to collect sufficient data from just six photons to generate enough statistics. But eventually, we succeeded in showing that quantum mechanics might indeed be incompatible with the assumption of objective facts — we violated the inequality.
The theory, however, is based on a few assumptions. These include that the measurement outcomes are not influenced by signals traveling above light speed and that observers are free to choose what measurements to make. That may or may not be the case.
Another important question is whether single photons can be considered to be observers. In Brukner's theory proposal, observers do not need to be conscious, they must merely be able to establish facts in the form of a measurement outcome. An inanimate detector would therefore be a valid observer. And textbook quantum mechanics gives us no reason to believe that a detector, which can be made as small as a few atoms, should not be described as a quantum object just like a photon. It may also be possible that standard quantum mechanics does not apply at large length scales, but testing that is a separate problem.
This experiment therefore shows that, at least for local models of quantum mechanics, we need to rethink our notion of objectivity. The facts we experience in our macroscopic world appear to remain safe, but a major question arises over how existing interpretations of quantum mechanics can accommodate subjective facts.
Some physicists see these new developments as bolstering interpretations that allow more than one outcome to occur for an observation, for example the existence of parallel universes in which each outcome happens. Others see it as compelling evidence for intrinsically observer-dependent theories such as Quantum Bayesianism, in which an agent's actions and experiences are central concerns of the theory. But yet others take this as a strong pointer that perhaps quantum mechanics will break down above certain complexity scales.
Clearly these are all deeply philosophical questions about the fundamental nature of reality. Whatever the answer, an interesting future awaits.
This article was originally published at The Conversation. The publication contributed the article to Live Science's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights.
https://blog.nomorefakenews.com/2019/11 ... o-be-fake/A whole branch of science turns out to be fake
by Jon Rappoport
November 20, 2019
Devotees of science often assume that what is called science is real and true. It must be. Otherwise, their faith is broken. Their superficial understanding is shattered. Their “superior view” of the world is torpedoed.
Such people choose unofficial “anti-science” targets to attack. They never think of inspecting their own house for enormous fraud.
For example: psychiatry.
An open secret has been slowly bleeding out into public consciousness for the past ten years.
THERE ARE NO DEFINITIVE LABORATORY TESTS FOR ANY SO-CALLED MENTAL DISORDER.
And along with that:
ALL SO-CALLED MENTAL DISORDERS ARE CONCOCTED, NAMED, LABELED, DESCRIBED, AND CATEGORIZED by a committee of psychiatrists, from menus of human behaviors.
Their findings are published in periodically updated editions of The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), printed by the American Psychiatric Association.
For years, even psychiatrists have been blowing the whistle on this hazy crazy process of “research.”
Of course, pharmaceutical companies, who manufacture highly toxic drugs to treat every one of these “disorders,” are leading the charge to invent more and more mental-health categories, so they can sell more drugs and make more money.
But we have a mind-boggling twist. Under the radar, one of the great psychiatric stars, who has been out in front in inventing mental disorders, went public. He blew the whistle on himself and his colleagues. And for several years, almost no one noticed.
His name is Dr. Allen Frances, and he made VERY interesting statements to Gary Greenberg, author of a Wired article: “Inside the Battle to Define Mental Illness.” (Dec.27, 2010).
Major media never picked up on the interview in any serious way. It never became a scandal.
Dr. Allen Frances is the man who, in 1994, headed up the project to write the latest edition of the psychiatric bible, the DSM-IV. This tome defines and labels and describes every official mental disorder. The DSM-IV eventually listed 297 of them.
In an April 19, 1994, New York Times piece, “Scientist At Work,” Daniel Goleman called Frances “Perhaps the most powerful psychiatrist in America at the moment…”
Well, sure. If you’re sculpting the entire canon of diagnosable mental disorders for your colleagues, for insurers, for the government, for Pharma (who will sell the drugs matched up to the 297 DSM-IV diagnoses), you’re right up there in the pantheon.
Long after the DSM-IV had been put into print, Dr. Frances talked to Wired’s Greenberg and said the following:
“There is no definition of a mental disorder. It’s bullshit. I mean, you just can’t define it.”
BANG.
That’s on the order of the designer of the Hindenburg, looking at the burned rubble on the ground, remarking, “Well, I knew there would be a problem.”
After a suitable pause, Dr. Frances remarked to Greenberg, “These concepts [of distinct mental disorders] are virtually impossible to define precisely with bright lines at the borders.”
Frances should have mentioned the fact that his baby, the DSM-IV, had unscientifically rearranged earlier definitions of ADHD and Bipolar to permit many MORE diagnoses, leading to a vast acceleration of drug-dosing with highly powerful and toxic compounds.
Here is a smoking-gun statement made by another prominent mental-health expert, on an episode of PBS’ Frontline series. The episode was: “Does ADHD Exist?”
PBS FRONTLINE INTERVIEWER: Skeptics say that there’s no biological marker—that it [ADHD] is the one condition out there where there is no blood test, and that no one knows what causes it.
BARKLEY (Dr. Russell Barkley, professor of psychiatry and neurology at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center): That’s tremendously naïve, and it shows a great deal of illiteracy about science and about the mental health professions. A disorder doesn’t have to have a blood test to be valid. If that were the case, all mental disorders would be invalid…There is no lab test for any mental disorder right now in our science. That doesn’t make them invalid.
Without intending to, Dr. Barkley blows an ear-shattering whistle on his own profession.
So let’s take Dr. Barkley to school. Medical science, and disease-research in particular, rests on the notion that you can make a diagnosis backed up by lab tests. If you can’t produce lab tests, you’re spinning fantasies.
These fantasies might be hopeful, they might be “educated guesses,” they might be launched from traditional centers of learning, they might be backed up by billions of dollars of grant money…but they’re still fantasies.
Dr. Barkley is essentially saying, “There is no lab test for any mental disorder. If a test were the standard of proof, we wouldn’t have science at all, and that would mean our whole profession rests on nothing—and that is unthinkable, so therefore a test doesn’t matter.”
That logic is no logic at all. That science is no science at all. Barkley is proving the case against himself. He just doesn’t want to admit it.
Psychiatry is all fraud all the time. Without much of a stretch, you could say psychiatry has been the most widespread profiling operation in the history of the human race. Its goal has been to bring humans everywhere into its system. It hardly matters which label a person is painted with, as long as it adds up to a diagnosis and a prescription of drugs.
300 so-called mental disorders caused by…what? No lab evidence. No defining diagnostic tests. No blood tests, saliva tests, brain scans, genetic assays. No nothing.
But psychiatrists continue to assert they are the masters of causation. They know what’s behind “mental disorders.” They’re in charge.
What about the generalized “chemical imbalance” hypothesis stating that all mental disorders stem from such imbalances in the brain?
Dr. Ronald Pies, the editor-in-chief emeritus of the Psychiatric Times, laid that hypothesis to rest in the July 11, 2011, issue of the Times with this staggering admission:
“In truth, the ‘chemical imbalance’ notion was always a kind of urban legend—never a theory seriously propounded by well-informed psychiatrists.”
Boom.
Dead.
The point is, for decades the whole basis of psychiatric drug research, drug prescription, and drug sales has been: “we’re correcting a chemical imbalance in the brain.”
The problem was, researchers had never established a normal baseline for chemical balance. So they were shooting in the dark. Worse, they were faking a theory. Pretending they knew something when they didn’t.
In his 2011 piece in Psychiatric Times, Dr. Pies tries to protect his colleagues in the psychiatric profession with this fatuous remark:
“In the past 30 years, I don’t believe I have ever heard a knowledgeable, well-trained psychiatrist make such a preposterous claim [about chemical imbalance in the brain], except perhaps to mock it…the ‘chemical imbalance’ image has been vigorously promoted by some pharmaceutical companies, often to the detriment of our patients’ understanding.”
Absurd. First of all, many psychiatrists have explained and do explain to their patients that the drugs are there to correct a chemical imbalance.
And second, if all well-trained psychiatrists have known, all along, that the chemical-imbalance theory is a fraud…
…then why on earth have they been prescribing tons of drugs to their patients……since those drugs are developed on the false premise that they correct an imbalance?
The honchos of psychiatry are seeing the handwriting on the wall. Their game has been exposed.
The chemical imbalance theory is a fake. There are no defining physical tests for any of the 300 so-called mental disorders. All diagnoses are based on arbitrary clusters or menus of human behavior. The drugs are harmful, dangerous, toxic. Some of them induce violence. Suicide, homicide. Some of the drugs cause brain damage.
So the shrinks have to move into another model of “mental illness,” another con, another fraud. And they’re looking for one.
For example, genes plus “psycho-social factors” cause mental disorders. A mish-mash of more unproven science.
“New breakthrough research on the functioning of the brain is paying dividends and holds great promise…” Professional PR and gibberish.
Meanwhile, the business model demands drugs for sale.
So even though the chemical-imbalance nonsense has been discredited, it will continue on as a dead man walking, a zombie.
Two questions always pop up when I write a critique of psychiatry. The first one is: psychiatric researchers are doing a massive amount of work studying brain function. They do have tests.
Yes, experimental tests. But NONE of those tests are contained in the DSM, the psychiatric bible, as the basis of the definition of ANY mental disorder. If the tests were conclusive, they would be heralded in the DSM. They aren’t.
The second question is: if all these mental disorders are fiction, why are so many people saddled with problems? Why are some people off the rails? Why are they crazy?
The list of potential answers is very long. A real practitioner would focus on one patient at a time and try to discover what has affected him to such a marked degree. For example:
Severe nutritional deficiency. Toxic dyes and colors in processed food. Ingestion of pesticides and herbicides. Profound sensitivities to certain foods. The ingestion of toxic pharmaceuticals. Life-altering damage as a result of vaccines. Exposure to environmental chemicals. Heavy physical and emotional abuse in the home or at school. Battlefield stress and trauma (also present in certain neighborhoods). Prior head injury. Chronic infection. Alcohol and street drugs. Debilitating poverty.
Other items could be added.
Psychiatry is: fake, fraud, pseudoscience from top to bottom. It’s complete fiction dressed up as fact.
But the obsessed devotees of science tend to back away from this. They close their eyes. If a “branch of knowledge” as extensive as psychiatry is nothing more than an organized delusion, what other aspect of science might likewise be parading as truth, when it is actually mere paper blowing in the wind?
...irrational human behavior (which is pretty much all human behavior)...
It hasn't always been like this.
. We're selfish, tribal animals, not paragons of virtue.
The Selective Laziness of Reasoning
Emmanuel Trouche,a Petter Johansson,b,c Lars Hall,bHugo Mercierda CNRS, Laboratory for Language, Brain and Cognitionb Cognitive Science, Lund Universityc Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study, Uppsala Universityd Center for Cognitive Sciences, University of Neuchâtel
Received 7 October 2014; received in revised form 14 July 2015; accepted 16 July 2015
Abstract
Reasoning research suggests that people use more stringent criteria when they evaluate others’arguments than when they produce arguments themselves.
BenDhyan » Sun Nov 24, 2019 1:36 am wrote:DrEvil » Sun Nov 24, 2019 7:40 am. We're selfish, tribal animals, not paragons of virtue.
Sort of true, but there is a way of transcending this lower nature, it is a choice all human souls have the opportunity to make in this life. However, such a soul that chooses transcendence must leave this word of maya behind, which means they must transcend the personal "I". No I, no thought, no thought, no separation from the underlying unity of existence. Bye bye cruel world of pretentious beliefs. It is not a way that can yield results overnight, but is a lifelong struggle for true understanding of what and who one really is in the cosmic context.
The default position of the vast majority of human beings is of a peaceful, loving and inquisitive nature. These three things are ghastly, sickening and repulsive to the control system, that should be erased from consciousness if possible, to be replaced with self-doubt and the type of irrational behaviour that the system itself promotes. Look around - at friends, family and community - then ask yourself, what drives good people to do despicable things? Is it human nature - or is it the system in which we are forced to exist?
It hasn't always been like this. If there is such a thing as good and evil, the pendulum has slowly swung towards evil, with a helping hand. It can swing back, with a concerted effort, but that effort will have to be Herculean, because evil weighs a lot more than good and it takes the concerted effort of a vast number of good-natured people to balance, then eventually outweigh the relatively small amount of concentrated evil.
You, as a human being, are not, by default, irrational, stupid or insane. You are a sentient being who knows, intrinsically, right from wrong. Defining billions of sentient beings other than yourself as 'irrational' is the pinnacle of supremacist doctrine, parroted by those that are confused, co-opted or complicit in a system based on heirarchy.
Trust your intuition. - coffin_dodger
Elvis » Sun Nov 24, 2019 4:20 am wrote:Humans may be peaceful, loving and inquisitive by nature—and I believe they are—but that doesn't mean they don't behave irrationally.
Humans' irrationality is demonstrated empirically again and again. It's not just cultural, either. It's human.
The biggest mistake of the Enlightenment—and coffin_dodger, you might agree here—might be its belief in objectivity. In a purely objective view, humans are nothing more than collections of atoms, their responses are nothing more than electro-chemical reactions, and thus what happens to any human is of no consequence.
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/6130 ... e-reality/
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