You Can't Smoke a Wavefunction

... or “Is F Real?” ... or ψ or any other function?

Jacob Barandes again with another one of his seminar variations. This time presented to the ESA. Why not? It’s good for astronauts to know physics is not just dances of mystical fields all in your mind. You cannot think your way out of a bad rocket re-entry problem dude, you have to at least push a few physical buttons. They’re real.

Red ink teacher pen on homework is too unspecific.

Are Wavefunctions Real?

The title is “Are Wavefunctions Real?” which I want to answer by,

No, wavefunctions are not real, and nor are any functions!

However that’s not too helpful.¹ All that amounts to is a definition. Functions are real in a platonic sense, if you happen to believe the platonic realm is something real. (I do, but I do not know what it is, and have no clue about the nature of things non-physical.)

That all goes under the sensible heading of, “You cannot say a thing does not exist just because you cannot imagine it.”

There are, of course, a lot of things we can prove do not exist. Like the proverbial ‘rock so massive even God cannot lift it up,’ and other more mundane things, like private donations to politicians being non-corrupting, and right triangles without a right angle.

It is still semi-useful as a statement of principle. If by “real” we restrict the meaning to “physical” then for sure, wavefunctions being mathematical (the phrase of geeks is “living in Hilbert space”) are by definition non-physical. It is the Stuff (largely unknown to the scientist except for some algebraic weights relating them by symmetries) that we are trying to model with said wavefunctions that are physically real, not the function itself, which is just an abstract concept in the model in our heads.

“But our head is physical,” I hear you say. Not so. Can you prove that? Of course I do not mean your brain grey matter or your literal physical ‘head’ since that is also by definition physical. I mean your mind, where your mental model is understood. Bunches of atoms and molecules cannot ever have such phenomenal qualia. There is no “emergence” because you just cannot get subjective states from objective states, and physics is all objective, despite what the quantum new-agers have been telling you (don’t believe them). Again, these are just from definitions.

If you define “Physics” differently to me, then ‘anything goes’ up to your redefinitions. But I find it thoroughly useless and stupifying if you admit subjective phenomenology into “Physics”. It ruins everything. All sorts of nonsense then becomes “physics”, and although I am one in favour of democracy, I also think it is just sensible and helpful to have clear definitional boundaries when possible. That is, when it is possible! That’s called mathematics — a pretty useful thinking toolkit!

Besides, by restricting Physics to what is objectively discernible, we gain a lot, not only making Physics a sharper subject — if you redefine physics to include the mental realm, then I’ll just define something else that excludes mental phenomena, say Objectics, or Applied Mathematics. Then you can have your Mind as part of your physics, and good luck to you, since you’ll get nothing but slop from that diseased conception.

None of this means I think the objective phenomena are separate or divided from the subjective. Obviously there is interaction. Otherwise our consciousness is a cruel joke. And if there is anything deep that Rene Descartes ever said, it was that ‘God is not malicious.’ Which means, if you find the world cruel and malicious, you’d better find the reason for it, and maybe eliminate it² if it was due to some decrepit thinking person. I hate to agree with the Charlie Kirk crowd, no… I really do hate to…, but some of them are correct that having the capacity of free will comes with having the capacity to be nasty and cruel. Obviously. It is part of the whole point! You cannot grow spiritually unless you have a capacity for cruelty, and the whole Meaning of Lif is to try to grow spiritually, and help others as well, so that we are not cruel.

It is the potential for cruelty that is vital, not being cruel. Do not exercise your full range of potential! How about that for something to tell school kids at the next assembly!

If you define “your head” differently to me then again anything goes, up to your redefinition logic. Just respect my definitions for now, ok? Otherwise ꘝꕯꕷꕷ off and go read Wolfram’s junk or Dennett’s slop for your daily fix of Materialism, or Hoffman and Kastrup for your daily fix of equally encrudified Idealism. (I reject all such totalitarian ideologies…. even though there’s slim chance one of them may be in some sense “true”).

An Indivisible Conjecture

A strange thing Jacob says is that when you understand the concept of an indivisible stochastic process, “It turns up in lots of places.”

I think yes, provided you are talking about lost information — which artificially forces your description (not the system itself) to become memory-dependent. But otherwise, hell no! It does not turn up anywhere except in quantum processes.

I want to propose an offshoot conjecture,

Any theorist doing physics using irreducibly non-Markov processes is doing quantum mechanics.

Why “doing physics”? Because you can cook up any old abstract system that is non-Markov. The key is to have no knowledge of higher order conditional probabilities .

But in classical physics we could know them (the higher order probabilities) — because there is no limit upon measurement precision. Hence for non-classical mechanics we need that knowledge to be irreducibly unattainable, as in metaphysically unattainable.

Why are they “doing QM”? Because in our known universe the only processes that violate classical mechanics are those in quantum mechanics. So all the soft sciences are dealing with missing information, thus may or may not need to use non-Markov transition map models. But that is only because they lack the measurement precision.

They cannot fundamentally gain the data they need to practically use Markov models because of (ultimately) quantum mechanics. (Heisenberg Uncertainty is not a mere practical limit, it is metaphysical.)

That all said, what is it in Barandes’ Indivisible Stochastic QM (ISQM) that fundamentally and irreducibly prevents spacetime cobordisms from behaving (with regard to two-time boundary data) divisibly and hence Markov and hence classically?

Barandes does not say. But he comes as close as one can from a mainstream physics perspective, which is that the only phenomenology he finds associated directly — as in one-for-one — with indivisibility (the quantum type of non-Markovianity) is entanglement.

In ISQM entanglement is precisely found in the failure of divisibility (from mathematical definitions).

((For the nerds, the density matrix fails to factorize,

\(\rho_{AB} \ne \rho_A \otimes \rho_B\)

and you can pretty much directly match that up with Barandes’ stochastic matrix indivisibility,

\(\Gamma_{AB}(t \leftarrow t_0) \ne \Gamma_A (t \leftarrow t_0) \otimes \Gamma_B (t \leftarrow t_0)\)

see? The former is static (information), the latter dynamic (process).))

This is possible because both orthodox QM and entanglement are statistical concepts.

• QM is a stochastic theory of measurement boundaries — you always need to specify two times; measurement set-up and measurement detection.

• Entanglement has (previously) only ever be defined as a non-local correlation,

so both are statistical, not ontological, concepts.

Here at T4G Headquarters, we have a very nice ontological explanation for this stochastic theory. But that’s all I have for today (go read the T4GU pages for more).

1. Jacob also says, “No” too, but is more helpful since he is more specific, speaking about the quantum mechanical “wavefunction” or if you prefer, the spinor fields. They are not real. They are statistical accounting tools… obviously (when you adopt a proper Clifford algebra formulation).

2. Not via violent assassination you fools! Turn the cruelty inwardly upon itself, so the person wakes up and becomes enlightened, an ally.