The brain is a physical object. Saying the brain playing a role in what we perceive somehow proves we don’t directly perceive reality as it really it from our point of view makes about as much sense as saying a painter can paint a painting of a fire so accurately that the painting it will suddenly burst into flames… no arrangement of a medium can transcend the medium.

What I mean by subjective experience is what you might refer to as what reality looks like from a specific viewpoint or what it appears like when observed.

So… reality? Why are you calling reality subjective? Yes, you have a viewpoint within reality, but that’s because reality is relative. It’s nothing inherent to conscious subjects. There is no such thing as a viewpoint-less reality. Go make a game in Unity and try to populate the game with objects without ever assigning coordinates to any of the objects or speeds to any of the object’s motion, and see how far you can go… you can’t, you won’t be able to populate the game with objects at all. You have to choose a coordinate system in order to populate the world with anything at all, and those coordinates are arbitrary based on an arbitrarily chosen viewpoint. Without picking a viewpoint, it is impossible to assign objects the majority of their properties.

If you claim that the physical world doesn’t exist independently of observation, and is thus nothing beyond the totality of observed appearances

No such thing as “appearances.” As Kant himself said: “though we cannot know these objects as things in themselves, we must yet be in a position at least to think them as things in themselves; otherwise we should be landed in the absurd conclusion that there can be appearance without anything that appears,” i.e. speaking of “appearances” makes no sense unless you believe there also exists an unobserved thing that is the cause of the appearances.

But there is neither an unobserved thing causing the appearances, nor is what we observe an appearance. What we observe just is reality. We don’t observe the “appearance” of objects. We observe objects.

If there is no object being observed

Opposite of what I said.

and the fact it it apparent from multiple perspectives is simply a consequence of the coherence of observation

What we call the object is certain symmetries that are maintained over different perspectives, but there is no object independently of the perspectives.

where do the qualities of those appearances originate from? How come things don’t cease to exist when they’re not being observed?

They cease to exist in one viewpoint but they continue to exist in others, and symmetries allow you to predict when/how those objects may return to your own viewpoint.

If you claim that the appearances don’t exist independently of the physical world being observed

I am claiming appearances don’t exist at all.

why does the world appear different from different perspectives?

Reality is just perspectival. It just is what it is.

How do you explain things like hallucinations (there is no physical object being observed, but still some appearance is present)?

If they perceive a hallucinated tree and believe it is the same as a non-hallucinated tree, this is a failure of interpretation, not of “appearance.” They still indeed perceived something and that something is real, it reflects something real in the physical world. If they correctly interpret it as a different category of objects than a non-hallucinated tree then there is no issue.

There’s no such thing as “subjective experience,” again the argument for this is derived from a claim that reality is entirely independent of one’s point of view within it, which is just a wild claim and absolutely wrong. Our experience doesn’t “contain” the physical world, experience is just a synonym for observation, and the physical sciences are driven entirely by observation, i.e. what we observe is the physical world. I also never claimed “the experience of redness is the same thing as some pattern of neurons firing in the brain,” no idea where you are getting that from. Don’t know why you are singling out “redness” either. What about the experience of a cat vs an actual cat?

There is no “hard problem.” It’s made up. Nagel’s paper that Chalmers bases all his premises on is just awful and assumes for no reason at all that physical reality is something that exists entirely independently of one’s point of view within it, never justifies this bizarre claim and builds all of his arguments on top of it which then Chalmers cites as if they’re proven. “Consciousness” as Chalmers defines it doesn’t even exist and is just a fiction.

I feel like this is no different practically speaking than just saying its behavior is random, but anthropomorphizing it for some reason.

If there is an agent who is deciding it then that would show up in the statistics. Unless you’re saying there exists an agent who decides the outcomes but always just so happens to very conveniently decide they should be entirely random. lol

Many-worlds is nonsensical mumbo jumbo. It doesn’t even make sense without adding an additional unprovable postulate called the universal wave function. Every paper just has to assume it without deriving it from anywhere. If you take MWI and subtract away this arbitrary postulate then you get RQM. MWI - big psi = RQM. So RQM is inherently simpler.

Although the simplest explanation isn’t even RQM, but to drop the postulate that the world is time-asymmetric. If A causes B and B causes C, one of the assumptions of Bell’s theorem is that it would be invalid to say C causes B which then causes A, even though we can compute the time-reverse in quantum mechanics and there is nothing in the theory that tells us the time-reverse is not equally valid.

Indeed, that’s what unitary evolution means. Unitarity just means time-reversibility. You test if an operator is unitary by multiplying it by its own time-reverse, and if it gives you the identity matrix, meaning it completely cancels itself out, then it’s unitary.

If you just accept time-symmetry then it is just as valid to say A causes B as it is to say C causes B, as B is connected to both through a local causal chain of events. You can then imagine that if you compute A’s impact on B it has ambiguities, and if you compute C’s impact on B it also has ambiguities, but if you combine both together the ambiguities disappear and you get an absolutely deterministic value for B.

Indeed, it turns out quantum mechanics works precisely like this. If you compute the unitary evolution of a system from a known initial condition to an intermediate point, and the time-reverse of a known final condition to that intermediate point, you can then compute the values of all the observables at that intermediate point. If you repeat this process for all observables in the experiment, you will find that they evolve entirely locally and continuously. Entangled particles form their correlations when they locally interact, not when you later measure them.

But for some reason people would rather believe in an infinite multiverse than just accept that quantum mechanics is not a time-asymmetric theory.

cuz I would immediately die?

That’s a classical ambiguity, not a quantum ambiguity. It would be like if I placed a camera that recorded when cars arrived but I only gave you information on when it detected a car and at what time and no other information, not even providing you with the footage, and asked you to derive which car came first. You can’t because that’s not enough information.

The issue here isn’t a quantum mechanical one but due to the resolution of your detector. In principle if it was precise enough, because the radiation emanates from different points, you could figure out which one is first because there would be non-overlapping differences. This is just a practical issue due to the low resolution of the measuring device, and not a quantum mechanical ambiguity that couldn’t be resolved with a more precise measuring apparatus.

A more quantum mechanical example is something like if you apply the H operator twice in a row and then measure it, and then ask the value of the qubit after the first application. It would be in a superposition of states which describes both possibilities symmetrically so the wavefunction you derive from its forwards-in-time evolution is not enough to tell you anything about its observables at all, and if you try to measure it at the midpoint then you also alter the outcome at the final point, no matter how precise the measuring device is.

Let’s say the initial state is at time t=x, the final state is at time t=z, and the state we’re interested in is at time t=y where x < y < z.

In classical mechanics you condition on the initial known state at t=x and evolve it up to the state you’re interested in at t=y. This works because the initial state is a sufficient constraint in order to guarantee only one possible outcome in classical mechanics, and so you don’t need to know the final state ahead of time at t=z.

This does not work in quantum mechanics because evolving time in a single direction gives you ambiguities due to the uncertainty principle. In quantum mechanics you have to condition on the known initial state at t=x and the known final state at t=z, and then evolve the initial state forwards in time from t=x to t=y and the final state backwards in time from t=z to t=y where they meet.

Both directions together provide sufficient constraints to give you a value for the observable.

I can’t explain it in more detail than that without giving you the mathematics. What you are asking is ultimately a mathematical question and so it demands a mathematical answer.

I am not that good with abstract language. It helps to put it into more logical terms.

It sounds like what you are saying is that you begin with something a superposition of states like (1/√2)(|0⟩ + |1⟩) which we could achieve with the H operator applied to |0⟩ and then you make that be the cause of something else which we would achieve with the CX operator and would give us (1/√2)(|00⟩ + |11⟩) and then measure it. We can call these t=0 starting in the |00⟩ state, then t=1 we apply H operator to the least significant, and then t=2 is the CX operator with the control on the least significant.

I can’t answer it for the two cats literally because they are made up it a gorillion particles and computing it for all of them would be computationally impossible. But in this simple case you would just compute the weak values which requires you to also condition on the final state which in this case the final states could be |00⟩ or |11⟩. For each observable, let’s say we’re interested in the one at t=x, you construct your final state vector by starting on this final state, specifically its Hermitian transpose, and multiplying it by the reversed unitary evolution from t=2 to t=x and multiply that by the observable then multiply that by the forwards-in-time evolution from t=0 to t=x multiplied by the initial state, and then normalize the whole thing by dividing it by the Hermitian transpose of the final state times the whole reverse time evolution from t=2 to t=0 and then by the final state.

In the case where the measured state at t=3 is |00⟩ we get for the observables (most significant followed by least significant)…

• t=0: (0,0,+1);(+1,+i,+1)
• t=1: (0,0,+1);(+1,-i,+1)
• t=2: (0,0,+1);(0,0,+1)

In the case where the measured state at t=3 is |11⟩ we get for the observables…

• t=0: (0,0,+1);(-1,-i,+1)
• t=1: (0,0,+1);(+1,+i,-1)
• t=2: (0,0,-1);(0,0,-1)

The values |0⟩ and |1⟩ just mean that the Z observable has a value of +1 or -1, so if we just look at the values of the Z observables we can rewrite this in something a bit more readable.

• |00⟩ → |00⟩ → |00⟩
• |00⟩ → |01⟩ → |11⟩

Even though the initial conditions both began at |00⟩ they have different values on their other observables which then plays a role in subsequent interactions. The least significant qubit in the case where the final state is |00⟩ begins with a different signage on its Y observable than in the case when the outcome is |11⟩. That causes the H opreator to have a different impact, in one case it flips the least significant qubit and in another case it does not. If it gets flipped then, since it is the control for the CX operator, it will flip the most significant qubit as well, but if it’s not then it won’t flip it.

Notice how there is also no t=3, because t=3 is when we measure, and the algorithm guarantees that the values are always in the state you will measure before you measure them. So your measurement does reveal what is really there.

If we say |0⟩ = no sleepy gas is released and the cat is awake, and |1⟩ = sleepy gas is released and the cat go sleepy time, then in the case where both cats are observed to be awake when you opened the box, at t=1: |00⟩ meaning the first one’s sleepy gas didn’t get released, and so at t=2: |00⟩ it doesn’t cause the other one’s to get released. In the case where both cats are observed to be asleep when you open the box, then t=1: |01⟩ meaning the first one’s did get released, and at t=2: |11⟩ that causes the second’s to be released.

When you compute this algorithm you find that the values of the observables are always set locally. Whenever two particles interact such that they become entangled, then they will form correlations for their observables in that moment and not later when you measure them, and you can even figure out what those values specifically are.

To borrow an analogy I heard from the physicist Emily Adlam, causality in quantum mechanics is akin to filling out a Sudoku puzzle. The global rules and some “known” values constrains the puzzle so that you are only capable of filling in very specific values, and so the “known” values plus the rules determine the rest of the values. If you are given the initial and final conditions as your “known” values plus the laws of quantum mechanics as the global rules constraining the system, then there is only one way you can fill in these numbers, those being the values for the observables.

“Free will” usually refers to the belief that your decisions cannot be reduced to the laws of physics (e.g. people who say “do you really think your thoughts are just a bunch of chemical reactions in the brain???”), either because they can’t be reduced at all or that they operate according to their own independent logic. I see no reason to believe that and no evidence for it.

Some people try to bring up randomness but even if the universe is random that doesn’t get you to free will. Imagine if the state forced you to accept a job for life they choose when you turn 18, and they pick it with a random number generator. Is that free will? Of course not. Randomness is not relevant to free will. I think the confusion comes from the fact that we have two parallel debates of “free will vs determinism” and “randomness vs determinism” and people think they’re related, but in reality the term “determinism” means something different in both contexts.

In the “free will vs determinism” debate we are talking about nomological determinism, which is the idea that reality is reducible to the laws of physics and nothing more. Even if those laws may be random, it would still be incompatible with the philosophical notion of “free will” because it would still be ultimately the probabilistic mathematical laws that govern the chemical reactions in your brain that cause you to make decisions.

In the “randomness vs determinism” debate we are instead talking about absolute determinism, sometimes also called Laplacian determinism, which is the idea that if you fully know the initial state of the universe you could predict the future with absolute certainty.

These are two separate discussions and shouldn’t be confused with one another.

In a sense it is deterministic. It’s just when most people think of determinism, they think of conditioning on the initial state, and that this provides sufficient constraints to predict all future states. In quantum mechanics, conditioning on the initial state does not provide sufficient constraints to predict all future states and leads to ambiguities. However, if you condition on both the initial state and the final state, you appear to get determinstic values for all of the observables. It seems to be deterministic, just not forwards-in-time deterministic, but “all-at-once” deterministic. Laplace’s demon would just need to know the very initial conditions of the universe and the very final conditions.

When Democrats win next election they will spend the whole election carrying on Trump’s policies and therefore normalizing them. Republicans go farther right, people like you say that’s proof they’re worse and we should back the Democrats, Democrats win and do all the same policies and therefore normalize it, which then allows Republicans to go farther right.

holocaust deniers should not bother replying because they will just get the instant block

Using the term “tankie” while defending a party carrying out a modern day holocaust is quite something.

Many Worlds is an incredibly bizarre point of view.

Quantum mechanics has two fundamental postulates, that being the Schrodinger equation and the Born rule. It’s impossible to get rid of the Born rule in quantum mechanics as shown by Gleason’s Theorem, it’s an inevitable consequence of the structure of the theory. But Schrodinger’s equation implies that systems can undergo unitary evolution in certain contexts, whereas the Born rule implies systems can undergo non-unitary evolution in other contexts.

If we just take this as true at face value, then it means the wave function is not fundamental because it can only model unitary evolution, hence why you need the measurement update hack to skip over non-unitary transformations. It is only a convenient shorthand for when you are solely dealing with unitary evolution. The density matrix is then more fundamental because it is a complete description which can model both unitary and non-unitary transformations without the need for measurement update, “collapse,” and does so continuously and linearly.

However, MWI proponents have a weird unexplained bias against the Born rule and love for unitary evolution, so they insist the Born rule must actually just be due to some error in measurement, and that everything actually evolves unitarily. This is trivially false if you just take quantum mechanics at face value. The mathematics at face value unequivocally tells you that both kinds of evolution can occur under different contexts.

MWI tries to escape this by pointing out that because it’s contextual, i.e. “perspectival,” you can imagine a kind of universal perspective where everything is unitary. For example, in the Wigner’s friend scenario, for his friend, he would describe the particle undergoing non-unitary evolution, but for Wigner, he would describe the system as still unitary from his “outside” perspective. Hence, you can imagine a cosmic, godlike perspective outside of everything, and from it, everything would always remain unitary.

The problem with this is Hilbert space isn’t a background space like Minkowski space where you can apply a perspective transformation to something independent of any physical object, which is possible with background spaces because they are defined independently of the relevant objects. Hilbert space is a constructed space which is defined dependently upon the relevant objects. Two different objects described with two different wave functions would be elements of different Hilbert spaces.

That means perspective transformations are only possible to the perspective of other objects within your defined Hilbert space, you cannot adopt a “view from nowhere” like you can with a background space, so there is just nothing in the mathematics of quantum mechanics that could ever allow you to mathematically derive this cosmic perspective of the universal wave function. You could not even define it, because, again, a Hilbert space is defined in terms of the objects it contains, and so a Hilbert space containing the whole universe would require knowing the whole universe to even define it.

The issue is that this “universal wave function” is neither mathematically definable nor derivable, so it only has to be postulated, as well as its mathematical properties postulates, as a matter of fiat. Every single paper on MWI ever just postulates it entirely by fiat and defines by fiat what its mathematical properties are. Because the Born rule is inevitable form the logical structure of quantum theory, these mathematical properties always include something basically just the same as the Born rule but in a more roundabout fashion.

None of this plays any empirical role in the real world. The only point of the universal wave function is so that whenever you perceive non-unitary evolution, you can clasp your hands together and pray, “I know from the viewpoint of the great universal wave function above that is watching over us all, it is still unitary!” If you believe this, it still doesn’t play any role in how you would carry out quantum mechanics, because you don’t have access to it, so you still have to treat it as if from your perspective it’s non-unitary.

If there is no hard evidence yet I have no reason to believe. Go find the evidence, then I will believe it.

On the contrary, this breaks semi-classical gravity’s usage of quantum mechanics. The predictions the approximation makes are not compatible with our observations of how quantum mechanics works, and scientists are working on an experiment that can disprove the hypothesis. ( https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.133.180201 )

The paper is interesting and in the right direction but is just a proposal. It needs to actually be performed, because the results can finally point in the right direction rather than just guessing at what the right direction is.

I’m afraid you’ve got that precisely backwards. Falsifiability is the core of science

No, it’s a justification for pseudoscience by allowing anyone to invent anything out of whole cloth based on absolutely nothing at all and call it “science.”

as it is the method by which factually-deficient hypotheses are discarded

Except it’s precisely used to justify them.

If there is no contradiction between the theory and experimental practice then either all false theories have been discarded or we have overlooked an experiment that could prove otherwise.

Those two, or the third case that we just haven’t conducted the experiment yet that would contradict with current theories (still talking about GR/QFT here specifically).

That’s distinctly false. The Higgs Boson was only proposed in 1964 and wasn’t measured 'til just 13 years ago.

I am obviously not defending that position and you know for a fact that is a position that has gained a lot of steam recently, you’re just trying to annoyingly turn it around on me to make it seem like I am defending a position I am not by stating something rather obvious.

Because we still have falsifiable hypotheses to test.

And this is exactly why you’re a promoter of pseudoscience: if a theory is “falsifiable” it’s “science” and “needs to be tested,” even if it’s literally based on nothing and there is no good reason anyone should take it seriously. If I claim there is a magical teapot orbiting Saturn that is the cause of some of its currently not well-understood weather patterns and if you just built a specialized 20 billion dollar telescope with a special lens on it and pointed it at specific coordinates you’d discover the proof, technically you can falsify this claim so by your logic it’s “science” and therefore we should go out of our way to investigate it. I don’t get why it is so difficult to just accept that there is more to a reasonable scientific proposal than it just technically can be falsified. That is obviously not a sufficient criteria at all and treating it as just allows for a ton of factually-deficient hypotheses based on nothing to be taken seriously.

Whatever bullshit nonsense or mysticism someone makes up, as long as there is technically some way to conduct an experiment to falsify it, you will say that’s “science.” Popper has been complete poison to the academic discourse. In the past I would have to argue against laymen mystics, the equivalent of the modern day “quantum healing” types. But these days I don’t even care about those mystics because we have much more problematic mystics: those in academia who promote nonsense like “quantum immortality” and “quantum consciousness” or whatever new “multiverse” theory someone came up with based on pure sophistry, and they pass this off as genuine science, and we are expected to take it seriously by because “erm it technically can be falsified.”

Although, my magic teapot analogy isn’t even good because the analogy says the teapot is proposed to explain not well-understood weather patterns, so it is proposed to explain an actual problem we haven’t solved. A more accurate analogy would be for a person to claim that they believe the hexagon cloud on Saturn should actually be a triangle. Why? No reason, they just feel it should be a triangle, because triangles seem more natural to them. According to you, again, this is technically still science because technically their theory can indeed be falsified by building the special telescope and pointing it at those coordinates.

It’s impossible to combat pseudoscience mentality in the public and to combat things like quantum mysticism when some of the #1 promoters of quantum mysticism these days are academics themselves. Half the time when I see a completely absurd headline saying that quantum mechanics proves material reality doesn’t exist and “everything is consciousness,” or that quantum mechanics proves we’re immortal, or that quantum mechanics proves we live inside of a multiverse or a simulation, I click the article to see the source and no, it doesn’t go back to a Deepak Chopra sophist, it goes back to “legitimate” publications by an actual academic with credentials in the field who is taken seriously because “falsifiability.”

How am I supposed to then tell the laymen the article they’re reading is bologna? I can’t, because they don’t understand quantum physics, so they wouldn’t even have the tools to understand it if I explained to them why it’s wrong, so they just trust it because it’s written by someone with “credentials.” Mysticism in academia is way more serious than mysticism among laymen because even otherwise reasonable laymen who do view science positively will end up believing in mysticism if it is backed an academic.

We have, actually. The list of unsolved problems in physics on Wikipedia is like 15 pages long and we’re developing new experiments to address those questions constantly.

Why are you intentionally being intellectually dishonest? We have been talking about a very specific theory and a very specific field of research this whole time, and you are trying to deflect this to science generally. I am sorry I even engaged with you at all, you are not in any way intellectually honest in the slightest and intentionally trying to misrepresent everything I say to “own” me and constantly are trying to pretend my position is something that it is not.

By criticizing a small handful of pseudoproblems in science you are now trying to dishonestly pretend I am claiming there are no genuinely unsolved problems, because you don’t want to actually address my point and are just a hack and I am blocking you after this post for such a ridiculously dishonest way to try and smear me rather than just address my point.

Likewise, there’s no reason to assume that the universe is not acting the way we’d like it to except where contradicted by observable evidence.

We should just assume the universe is behaving exactly the way we observe it to behave based on the evidence.

What we “like” is irrelevant. We should just observe the evidence and accept that is how the universe works until additional evidence shows otherwise.

If the laws of physics can “break down” then they aren’t “laws”, merely approximations that are only accurate under a limited range of conditions.

Plenty of laws of physics are only applicable to certain conditions, like the ideal gas law. Although, that’s not the impression I got from this conversation on how you were using “break down” in the first place, as we were talking about semi-classical gravity where you have singularities at black holes, and you were using “break down” in that sense. There is no change in the law of physics at black holes in semi-classical gravity, the singularity arises from the very structure of the theory and is not in contradiction with it, i.e. its fundamental principles don’t suddenly change at a black hole. The singularity at the black hole is a result of its underlying principles.

The fact that the universe continues to exist despite the flaws in our theories proves that there must be a set of rules which are applicable in all cases.

You want them to apply to cases that currently have not been demonstrated by physically even possible to probe, so you have not even demonstrated it is an actual “case” at all. I am not denying it isn’t physically possible to probe either before you dishonestly try to turn my statement around to intentionally misrepresent me as you love to do. I am saying quite the opposite: that we should try to probe the areas that seem to not make much in our current theories. We should be trying to probe quantum effects and gravitational effects at the same time to see how they behave, because that’s how we could actually make progress if semi-classical gravity is indeed wrong.

We shouldn’t be constantly inventing fake “theories” based on literally nothing that are technically falsifiable then acting surprised when they are falsified, and then slightly tweaking them so they are not longer falsified with the previous experiment but still technically falsifiable with a future experiment. This would be like if you pointed the expensive telescope at Saturn and did not see the magical teapot, so I just changed my mind and said the teapot is actually orbiting Neptune so we need a bigger telescope and then the theory would be falsified!

I could play this game forever and keep tweaking my nonsensical claim every time it is falsified, and according to you this is science! What I am saying is this is not science because science is not just falsifiability. There are tons of genuinely unsolved problems in science, but there are also a small number of “problems” which are poorly motivated, like the “fine-tuning problem” which is also not a genuine scientific problem.

It’s really like 99.9% of the stuff in physics that’s perfectly fine. Most people in the real world are actually working on practical problems and not nonsense like “quantum consciousness” or whatever. The handful of people I am criticizing is largely a small minority, but they have a huge impact on public discourse and public understanding of science as they tend to be very vocal

And if the rules can change, then our theories will have to be updated to describe those changes and the conditions where they occur.

Obviously.

I understand that in semi-classical gravity the curvature of spacetime is based on the expectation value of the stress energy tensor, and so a massive object in a superposition of two possible location would curve spacetime as if the object was in the middle-point of the two locations, but when the state vector is reduced it would suddenly shift to one of those two points. While this does seem weird, no one has ever physically demonstrated that measuring this is actually possible, so until there is a demonstration that it is actually physically possible to measure this, there isn’t actually a contradiction between theory and experimental practice. All we can say is “that seems weird” but that’s not a scientific argument against it.

You say it diverges from reality but… how do you know that? No experiment has ever demonstrated this. It could be that this is just how reality works, or it could also be that it’s just not physically possible to probe this in the first place, and so it’s just a nonphysical quirk of the theory of computing something nonphysical in the first place. We can’t say for certain it is wrong until someone actually conducts an experiment to probe it, and if we find it is wrong, then not only would we rule out semi-classical gravity, but we would have the data needed to actually replace it with something.

This is my issue with “fundamental physics” these days in general: they do not actually demonstrate any contradiction between theory and experimental practice. The desire to unify quantum mechanics and general relativity is just based on some preconceptions that information shouldn’t be destroyed and gravity should be quantizable like every other force, but how do you know that with certainty? You did not derive this from experimental observation, because semi-classical gravity is currently compatible with all experimental observations. It is more that one begins with a preconception of how they think reality should work and says the theory is wrong because it does not fit those preconceptions. Yes, certain aspects of semi-classical gravity are “weird,” but that’s not a scientific argument against it.

Because of the influence of Karl Popper, people think science = falsifiability, so new theories are then constructed not based on experimental evidence but by trying to better fit into our preconceptions, but are also made to falsifiable because that is “science.” When they are falsified by an experiment that just reconfirms the predictions of semi-classical gravity, they just tweak it a bit so the theory is not falsified by that experiment any longer but still technically falsifiable, and they do this ad infinitum. You end up with decades doing this and what do you have, String Theory that is only applicable to an anti-de Sitter space, a universe we don’t actually live in? Or Loop Quantum Gravity which can’t even reproduce Einstein’s field equations?

Popper has been a detrimental influence onto the sciences. Science is not falsifiability. Science is about continually updating our models to resolve contradictions between the theory and experimental practice. If there is no contradiction between the theory and experimental practice then there is no justification to update the model. I have seen a mentality growing more popular these days which is that “fundamental physics hasn’t made progress in nearly a century.” But my response to this is why should it make progress? Why have not encountered a contradiction between experimental practice and theory, so all this “research” into things like String Theory is just guesswork, there is no reason to expect it to actually go anywhere.

The same is also true of the so-called “measurement problem” which as physicists like Carlo Rovelli and Francois-Igor Pris have pointed out only arise because we have certain metaphysical preconceptions about how reality should work which when applied to quantum theory lead to absurdities and so people often conclude the theory must be wrong somehow, that it’s “incomplete,” that it needs to be replaced by something like an objective collapse theory or a multiverse theory or something similar. Yet, this is not a scientific criticism, the theory is in no contradiction with the experimental evidence. We should just get rid of our preconceptions about how reality should work and accept how reality does. As Bohr said: stop telling God what to do.

There is no reason to assume the universe acts the way we’d like it to. Maybe the laws of physics really are just convoluted and break down at black holes. While yes, maybe one day we will discover a theory where it does not break down, it is anti-scientific to begin with an a priori assumption that this must necessarily be the case. It could be that the next breakthrough in fundamental physics even makes the mathematics more convoluted! You cannot just begin with a starting point prior to investigation that this is how nature works, you have to derive that a posteriori through investigation, and currently this is what our best theory derived from investigation states. It may be wrong, but there is no justification in claiming it is wrong without showing a contradiction between theory and experimental practice.

This is my issue here. The desire to replace semi-classical gravity with something else, the measurement problem, the desire to unify all forces of nature into a “theory of everything,” trying to solve the “fine-tuning problem,” these are all ultimately pseudoproblems because they do no derive from any contradiction between experimental practice and theory. They are not genuine scientific problems. I am not even against people looking into these, because who knows, maybe they will stumble across something interesting, but the issue with treating these all as genuine “problems” is that when they go “unsolved” for a century, it makes it look like there is a “crisis in fundamental physics.” There just isn’t. In fact, it’s quite the opposite: every experimental test reconfirms our current best theories, this is the exact opposite of a “crisis.” People pretend like we have a “crisis” because our current theories are too good!