I read the following responses on another message board regarding causality
and the inability to trust science:
I have no idea how to respond to these posts, since it does seem to make some sense. Does causality not exist on the quantum level?
Causality is not part of quantum mechanics.
The full article (may not be reachable behind subscriber firewall) goes on to cite John Cramer’s transactional interpretation of quantum mechanics.
But…
Does any of this mean that the person you are quoting is saying anything other than sophistry? No. Retrocausality is subject to all mathematical logic inherent in quantum mechanics. It is part of known science. Merely throwing in a posited being beyond cause and effect is literally meaningless because you can create any rules you like without fear of falsification or contradiction. It’s no different from saying that thought is faster than light because you can imagine yourself around a distant galaxy in a split-second. Wordplay is not science and never will be.
How do you respond to this statement?:
If causality goes out the window with quantum mechanics, then it may mean we have to give up lower-level causality as being sensical to any degree.
Are you asking people to provide the very words you’re going to use in an argument against someone else?
We don’t. We live in a Newtonian macroscopic world.
I’m asking to get a better grasp on how we can should expect causality to work on any level, when it doesn’t seem to matter on a quantum level.
If you want to complain about how I go about understanding things, or complain that I shouldn’t be asking for help on dealing with an argument, go complain to a mod, but don’t do it here.
Can you explain that for me, please? I don’t understand what you mean by that.
Sorry, that was snarky of me. I’m pissed off by a current Pit thread, and it was wrong of me to be mean to you. I’m sorry I snapped, and I hope you can find someone to answer your question.
No problem. 
voodoo–you’re talkin’ 'bout some purty deep issues, but your question isn’t quite right:
Your statement isn’t logically consistant. You don’t have to give up lower-level causality, just because it doesnt work all the time.
It is possible to throw causality out the window–in the quantum world-- and
still live with regular causality–in the everyday real world. There’s no contradiction. Just accept the scientific fact that individual atomic particles are weird, and don’t behave the way the rest of our world does. There are some laws that control only quantum particles and other laws that control only the rest of the world we live in.
I don’t mean to be snarky either, but if you don’t understand a concept as basic as Newtonian macroscopic world, you should not be involved in any arguments with anybody about quantum causality. Some familiarly with physics is a prerequisite just to be use to talk about the subject.
In short, the Newtonian world is the world of classical physics, pre-relativity, pre-quantum mechanics. (In some ways, even relativity is classical physics but let’s not get into that.)
Quantum mechanics involves a number of weirdnesses, from Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle to complementary pairs to the observer effect, that are not an issue in the everyday world around us. That is the “macro” world as opposed to the subatomic quantum “micro” world. Any number of interpretations have been written that are mathematically equivalent to one another but interpret the meaning of these weirdnesses differently. Bohr’s Copenhagen interpretation is the most famous. Everett’s many-worlds interpretation is gaining favor. Cramer’s transactional interpretation is currently supported by few, but may gain in acceptance if these experiments agree with the results he predicts.
In all of these the problem of why the macroworld does not reflect the weirdnesses seen in the microworld is unresolved. Although it may turn out in the end that a new higher-level theory that incorporates quantum mechanics may give a better explanation and make everything clear, it doesn’t really make much everyday difference, for we can all live our lives perfectly well by assuming that classical physics explains our actions. This includes cause preceding effect, something that has never been gainsaid in any human action. No supernatural being needs to be posited to explain this.
Any change in our notions of causality will come about in terms of a mathematical expression. Nothing changes in our macroscopic universe. The gears will still mesh exactly as we see them now. Will there be dynamics that we cannot predict from past actions? Of course: we know many today. That says nothing about cause and effect. There is not and can never be an intelligence that lies beyond cause and effect, even if causality is not preserved at the quantum level. Saying so doesn’t make it so.
The discussion of which I was a participant, wasn’t about quantum causality. It eventually morphed. Saying you don’t mean to be snarky before making a snarky comment doesn’t excuse you. I do appreciate your further response, though.
That’s what it all boils down to? We don’t know? I was hoping for something a little more Earth shattering, but if that’s the way it is, that’s the way it is.
You no doubt are better versed on the subject than I am, but just because we don’t fully understand how the micro world or or the quantum world operates, that does not mean that cause-then-effect are thrown out the window. Perhaps the most important tenet in science is causality, what makes you think it doesn’t operate at all levels? Just because quantum mechanics can handle predictions that we can’t otherwise grasp, why does that preclude that causality is at work every step along the way.
Wouldn’t it be more precise to that these weirdnesses are generally not an issue in the everyday world?
What I mean is this: If I have a single subatomic particle, each individual movement will be unpredictable, but over the long run, it will tend to follow a probabilistic and predictable pattern. Similarly, if I have a large bunch of subatomic particles (such as those which make up an automobile) they will tend to behave in a predictable manner. But this is only a tendency based on probability, and once in a very long while (perhaps twice in thirty seven googolplex millennia) that automobile will spontaneously move two millimeters north.
Or did I misunderstand something?
Causality does exist in quantum mechanics, and it’s just as absolute as it is in the familiar Newtonian physics. But it manifests in a much more subtle way, which is difficult to understand without understanding a lot of other things about quantum mechanics.
Probably what people are thinking of when they say that quantum mechanics doesn’t have causality is Feynman’s sum over histories formulation of quantum mechanics. In this formulation, a particle can do whatever it wants, go faster than the speed of light, or forward or backwards in time (not an exact quote of how Feynman described it, since I’m going from memory). Then, you take the wavefunctions of each of these paths, and add them up, and almost all of them cancel out. The key is to realize that a path that cancels out doesn’t actually have any physical effect, and so far as we can tell, any path which involves a particle violating causality (moving backwards through time, or faster than light) exactly cancels out. So even though, in some sense, particles can go back in time, those particles which do so don’t matter, and causality is preserved.
Perhaps it will help you to read up on Emergent Behavior. Basically, lots of small things, acting based on certain rules, can end up being part of a large thing that behaves in complex ways not contained in the rules of its components.
Examples: Any individual ant is actually a very simple robot, but an ant colony can behave fairly intelligently. A single neuron is not all that complex and is almost totally understood by science, but a big pile of them can make up the most complex lump of matter yet discovered: the brain, which is capable of stuff science is still a long way from working out.
In this same way, the rules obeyed by a single constituent of the subatomic world don’t have an arrow of time, so there’s no causality. But with untold quadrillions of them doing their own thing, causality and all the other Newtonian stuff appears somewhere along the way. You really can’t reason from the small to the large without looking at emergence.
Retrocausality sounds like a species of causality to me.
-Kris
Yes, but the ant does not act in a random manner. Neither does anything else (I contend). The billions of sub-atomic particles that make up the pine desk I’m sitting at could, theoretically, be anywhere, but they are here. Something cause them to take form (emgerge) in this existence and not any of a billion others. Now, we are a long way off from understanding how and why they behave, but there is a “why”. Would you agree?
To expand upon this, on the quantum level, the locational properties of a particle are probabilistic rather than deterministic; that is, instead of being able to measure the location and predict exactly where it is going to be at a point in the future (to the limits of your measuring equipment) you can only obtain an estimate of its location and momentum within certain boundries per the Heisenberg indeterminacy principle. However, the level of probability of its locus is itself deterministic in a stochastic sense; that is, you can say with absolute confidence (in theory, at least) the probability that it is likely to be at such and such a location, and a population of measurements will match this statistically to any degree of precision that you can measure; when you clump big numbers of particles together so that they’re all entagled, the overall system behaves in a way that is very predictable. So, what we get, in the words of Douglas Adams, are “rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty,” i.e. we know to high precision exactly how uncertain we are about things.
This nondeterministic behavior also occurs on the macro level as well as a result of chaotic systems. So, even in a system dominated by strictly deterministic rules, you can still have a system which behaves stochastically overall.
How does this pertain to causality? Causality is the prinicple that all effects have an explicit cause which occured in the immediate “past” (that is, along a timelike geodesic curve on the space-time continuum) and has a direct link to the effect. For instance, when you turn on the light switch you complete the circuit, the electrons jiggle and bump and in short order (on the macro scale) the bulb illuminates as a result of an unresolved voltage potential. You don’t expect the light to come on before you flip the switch, and you get pissed off if they don’t come on after you close the circuit, which generally results in angry calls to the electrician, power company, and the neighbor who just rototillered through your buried power line.
One essential principle about causaility is that information cannot travel “faster than light.” Why this is true is kind of complicated, but essentially this is because permitting this to happen would allow you to communicate with someone who is outside of your “light-cone”, the three dimensional expanding spheroid which encompasses your personal universe. If you were able to send information faster than light, it could potentially go back in time and cause all sorts of havoc. Never mind killing your own grandfather and that sort of thing, you could, for instance, transmit information about sport scored to a previous self, allowing you to make a killing with prior knowledge and thus muck up the whole of history. Worse yet, you could inform Neville Chamberlin that appeasment wouldn’t lead to “peace in our time” and thus sqaush the Nazi menace in its infancy. Okay, that actually sounds like a pretty good idea, but averting WWII would have a whole host of other consequences, such as delaying the advancement of physics that let you build the whole time machine gizmo in the first place, and now how do your explain yourself?
With quantum mechanics, it’s possible for an individual possible to be here and then there with no intervening path, much faster than it should ordinarily be able to travel. Thankfully, there are inequalities (see Bell’s Theorem) which prevent the useful transformation of information via a particle that moves in excess of a strictly finite propogation speed or is “entangled” with other particles. This allows Special Relativity and quantum mechanics to co-exist, if somewhat uncomfortably, with each other. (General Relativity has more problems with QM that remain both unresolved and conflicting, owing to a lack of credible QM theory regarding gravity.)
So, a lack of causality on the probabilistic scale of quantum mechanics does not translate to issues at the stochastically deterministic scale of the macro world. Newton (and at high velocities, Einstein) give us exact general solutions that are just a little blurry around the edges. On the quantum level, Newton doesn’t know what he’s about, and Einstein and friends can go take a leap in the aether.
Stranger
And non-existence is no doubt a species of existence.
Forget the wordplay when it comes to physics. The color force has no color. Gluons don’t contain glue. Retrocausality is not causality.
voodoonirvana, if you don’t understand basic physics terminology your opponent will be able to say anything, including nonsense, and you will not be able to dispute it. You should stay out of all arguments in which you don’t know the base jargon of the field. You will lose every time.
This is as true as Newtonian physics. I.e., it’ll work for any argument you ever get in while dwelling in the macroworld.