Is the idea of objective reality still tenable as Everett and Deutsch have claimed?

Many people were very excited when Heisenberg invited a well-known guru to speak about the nature of reality in his place. Ayn Rand and VI Lenin  both assailed the risks of what could happen if people totally gave up on the idea of objective reality, but most physicists shrugged their shoulders and followed Heisenberg, even as some fundamentalist gurus went wild with joy. Later, three great physicists -- Everett, Wheeler and David Deutsch (who won the Dirac award for inventing the new paradigm of universal quantum Turing machine) -- argued that we can restore the concept of objective reality in physics, so long as we accept that we live in a cosmos of quantum reality, a Fock space instead of Einstein's type of Minkowski space. 

BUT IS QUANTUM REALITY, PHYSICS WITHOUT OBSERVERS, CONSISTENT WITH EXPERIMENT?

It was consistent a few weeks ago. The evidence up until then was that it is. But we don't yet know; the experiments are not yet definitive... and we really don't know.

So here is what I sent a few days ago to a kind of discussion group concerned about such issues and their larger implications about a week ago....

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It is curious how hard it is to discuss issues other than personal ego or group identities, in all kinds of human discussions. For example, I tend to regard debates about extensions of monism as continuations of ancient debates, similar to Protestants versis Catholics or liberals versus conservatives -- inherently fuzzy stuff since it is about group definitions and the fuzzy semantics (semiotics?) they entail. Can we break out of that?

So, first, I wonder where people on this list stand on an issue I have posed as "realism (Einsteinian or Fockian) vfrsus weirdism"?? 

Am I the only person on this list who feels that the probability is more than 50% that Einsteinian or Fockian realism are the ultimate truth of how things work underneath in our entire cosmos?

Sometimes, when Deepak Chopra complains about "physicalism," maybe what he really means to complain about is Einsteinian or Fockian realism. I do not like his description of what people like me believe, and we do have a right to speak for ourselves. It is better described as "mathematicalism" than "physicalism." 

Physics proper demands that we seek a VERY specific, well-defined theory, but for this list we need to define FAMILIES or  CATEGORIES or sets of theory. For example, there are many possible theories consistent with special relativity; in a way, special relativity is not a theory, but a FAMILY of theories. 

So let me define "Einsteinian realism" here as the theory that EVERYTHING which really exists in our cosmos and our lives is some kind of pattern or form of a finite number of underlying force fields, defined over a finite dimensional mathematical manifold, governed by deterministic local differential equations, like the usual Lagrange-Euler or Hamiltonian equations or metric equations extending Einstein's work on general relativity. (Really, though, I like to think about "extended Einsteinian realism" where it may be local stochastic differential equations). 

Am I the only person on this list who believes there is a serious possibility that Einsteinian realism may be the true "law of everything," and that life and consciousness may all be just emergent phenomena which result from the operation of the underlying differential equations?

And, by the way, is Einstein realism itself a form of monism?

In truth, I used to believe Einsteinian realism with more than 50% personal subjective probability. As did De Broglie and even Bohm, at least before ... whatever.

Psychic phenomena are not really a problem for Einsteinian realism, as I have discussed often enough.

But -- macroscopic Schrodinger cats are another matter. The deeper I get into that... I now tell myself, 1/3 probability for Einsteinian realism, 1/3 for Fockian realism. 

And 1/3 for "something very different," a very heterogeneous collection of possibilities which I call "weirdism." Crudely, Einsteinian realism is the conservative/reactionary position, Fockian realism 

the real proper mainstream, and "weirdism" a collection of the left, the idealism, off-beat mathematical concepts, and any of the crazy things which could actually mean something if properly re-examined.

Fockian realism is just as hard core mathematical as Einsteinian realism, except that it postulates an infinite dimensional cosmos containing "parallel universes" as in macroscopic Schrodinger cats (and even Schrodinger planets). The Everett/Wheeler/Deutsch version of quantum field theory is just one example of a theory in this category/family/set of theories. Everett's PhD thesis, the real birth of these ideas (long before some Bohmians reinvented a Rube Goldberg convoluted version of the same idea), was crystal clear in its commitment to hard core realism. 

Einsteinian realism and Fockian realism BOTH agree that "measurement processes" are not magical. The operation of measurement devices is just one more collection of emergent phenomena.

But is realism (Einsteinian or Fockian) true in the end? 

Conventional wisdom says that the Bell experiments conclusively disprove, empirically, the possibility that Einsteinian realism might be true. I was very disappointed yesterday to see a Scientific American article asserting that "all the loopholes have been closed." They haven't been. Back in 1988, in the same book edited by Menas Kafatos where Zielinger first announced the idea of GHZ states and GHZ experiments, I had a chapter "Bell's Theorem: the forgotten loophole." The article I saw yesterday still forgot it. 

I have proposed three sets of quantum optics experiments by now to TEST that loophole -- and more precisely to test whether objects like polarizers obey time-symmetric statistics or the old Born rule. 

Einsteinian realism and Fockian realism BOTH imply that polarizers should obey time-symmetric statistics. If the new experiments come out one way, they tell us that Bell experiments are not evidence against Einsteinian realism. But if they come out the other way, they disprove NOT ONLY Einsteinian realism but Fockian realism as well!!! (That's the core point in my IJTP paper in 2008 or 2009.) 

A sane, honest follower of the scientific method (first person or third person) must be prepared to learn from these experiments, and push them very hard to be sure of what they say and not rest until all aspects are clear. As my friend Yeshua says, to "let the chips fall as they may." 

A few months ago, we got back the first citeable results on one of the three streams of experiment, which I posted at researchgate and submitted for publication. We are still waiting to hear back. Given the realities of politics in science, who knows? But the scientific method would clearly demand full publication of the status of this important issue. The results so far do tend to favor realism.

But in the meantime, I have heard from two other groups with empirical results. Initially, I had to face the question: WHAT IF we really are compelled to give into weirdism? HOW could we even learn to live with something so fuzzy, so ill-defined? ( But conversely: even realism implies a lot of weird stuff we still need to learn to adapt to!!!) Many aspects of our planet today do resonate with weirdism. That IS a major part of our first person empirical reality, which keeps growing weirder and weirder every week for me. Even when I say the probability of weirdism being true is 1/3, that already implies I should try harder to make real sense of weirdism -- and  not by using it as an excuse to get hallucinogenic like a lot of folks who embrace weirdism basically because they want an excuse to go nuts. 

But the latest data strongly supports realism. Unfortunately, there is the nasty aspect of political realism, the many strait jackets in our world forbidding full open communication of everything, yea unto abuse of IT to put strait jackets even on the kinds of conversations which were once open and free in the US. Maybe I will be able to say more in a few weeks, or maybe not.

What IF weirdism should be true?

I don't spend a lot of time studying the nice placebo things which many "teachers" proliferate, to try to calm people down. Sure, we all need to "calm, relax" at times but that is a recipe for suicide if taken too far as a complete philosophy. (Hypocrisy and subsapience is what saves the lives of many people who Believe crazy things.) Where is the content, beyond realism?

I do often think about two old movies -- "Inception" and "What Dreams may come." Possibly important EVEN IF realism is the ultimate truth, but certainly important if not. What do they REALLY point to?

Not to a bunch of empty words, but what?