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Ruth Kastner: Can the Future Influence the Past? Retrocausality in Quantum Theory
February 7, 2025
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As an anomaly, measurement outcomes fail to be predicted by the conventional theory.
I met with physicist turned philosopher Ruth Kastner, who developed a formulation that claims to solve not just the measurement problem, but also retro-causality, non-locality, and the unification of quantum theory with gravity. Her transactional formulation, which builds on Kramer's work, asserts that space-time itself is not fundamental, but emerges from what she calls the quantum substratum, not a realm of probability.
but a realm of possibility. Questions we explore are what's the role of retro causality in quantum mechanics, also known as time travel? Does consciousness play a role at all? What about free will? And can you make gravity consonant with quantum theory without so-called quantum gravity?
Ruth, I'd like you to paint a clear picture of what the motivation is behind the transactional interpretation, especially its so-called retro causality. And the way that I'd like you to do this is to pick some standard account in quantum mechanics or quantum field theory, discuss why this standard account seems to make sense to most physicists, then explain why it doesn't actually make sense and then explain why the transactional interpretation fixes or resolves these problems. Sure.
Okay, so what got me interested in the transactional interpretation is basically my dissatisfaction with the conventional theory's inability to describe what counts as a measurement. And this is of course the measurement problem.
Of this of the conventional theory so the problem with the conventional theory is that it does not have any any kind of tools or anything in the formalism that lets you distinguish between just a kind of an interaction that would not trigger an outcome and a kind of interaction that counts as a measurement.
So, so the theory itself, the conventional theory just doesn't have anything that lets you say that a measurement occurred and an outcome happened. So what, what TI does is, and I can get to that in a little, in a little while, but, but it remedies that. And just to kind of, so to, to elaborate on the measurement problem, I mean, it's illustrated by the, the Schrodinger cat experiment.
And this was actually a thought experiment that Schrodinger came up with because he was dissatisfied with the, um, the standard theories and ability to, to explain what counts as a measurement. So the, the basic, um, the Schrodinger cat, you know, experiment that people are so familiar with, but that maybe perhaps don't quite understand the, the, the point of it, the, the import of it is, is what is called a reductio ad absurdum.
of
starts with an unstable atom, which is a quantum system that you can represent as being in a superposition of alive, of, of, uh, having decayed and having not decayed. So at some point, you know, at some time this thing's going to send out a little decay particle from its nucleus, but it's, its description is a superposition of having decayed, having not yet decayed. So the standard theory, all it lets you do is create correlations.
Between states so so if you bring in a Geiger counter like you want to measure well has it decayed yet use a Geiger counter but according to the conventional theory the Geiger counter has to be described by states that will then be linked up with the superposition of these two states of the atom and you can I kind of think of it as a as Adam having like to train engines there the
the having decayed train engine, the undecayed train engine, which is like a superposition of states. So when you bring along the Geiger counter, if it's going to be correlated with these states, it then has to acquire these two states corresponding to that atom, which are
Triggered geiger counter and untriggered geiger counter so you've got already a situation where the theory doesn't tell you that a measurement happen it just creates a superposition. A larger superposition of the shuttle trains and all that happens in the conventional series you keep adding train cars.
So if i want to say so this is what short anger kind of exploited and he said well. Okay then when i get bigger and bigger you know i'm still going to be getting just states that are like train cars so for instance okay i don't know i would take a take a cat and see what happens when i link up a cat with all the stuff and and we're gonna do in order to affect the cat i'm gonna say there's a there's a file he said poison gas but i'm gonna say sleeping potion.
Sure so there's a vial of sleeping potion that can be just attached as a train car to these states so if the Geiger counter is triggered then supposedly that gets a little hammer to smash this vial and so the vial is broken releases the gas so we've got broken vial that is now correlated with the decayed atom but then we've got an unbroken vial state
That is correlated with the, uh, undecayed Adam. And then we've, then we've got to bring it in a cat. It's the cat is just another train car, according to the conventional theory. So on one hand, the cat is asleep. On the other hand, the cat is, is awake. And again, you've just got a superposition of trains and you supposedly got a cat.
in a you know suspended between awake and asleep and we never see that and so it's an illustration that you can't get a measurement outcome from the standard theory so what the transaction interpretation does is you know in a nutshell and we can elaborate. Is it uses a different theory of the way fields behave.
so that um and this is you know it's kind of seems radical but this this theory is called has various names it's been called the the wheeler Feynman absorber theory it's been called the direct action theory of fields and it actually involves um not just any mission you know the conventional
way of looking at field propagation sees things like something generating a field, something radiating that's understood. But what happens in this direct action theory of fields is that under certain well-quantified circumstances, the other systems that we think of as absorbers, potential absorbers,
are active and they are actually generating a field that corresponds in a way to the emitted field from emitters. And this field has a strange character in that it's a so-called advanced field, meaning that it's past directed. But when you look at the formalism of the way the fields behave in this theory, you get actually a very nice formal correspondence
with certain kinds of, I mean, long story short, you get what's called a transaction so that you get not just a field being emitted, but a confirmation, what John Kramer, who was the originator of the interpretation, called a confirmation wave. And you actually get this kind of connection, this interaction that clearly defines that a measurement is occurring, that it has the formal character that a measurement is occurring and it breaks these superpositions
And it gives you the kind of formal objects that we call projection operators that correspond to outcomes to clearly achieved outcomes. But they each have a probability, and that probability turns out to correspond to the so-called Born Rule. So it very nicely yields a way that
Under certain clearly quantified conditions, you are overwhelmingly likely to get this kind of confirmation and together with this offer wave confirmation wave and you get a transition from the suspension in a superposition to a state where we have some clearly defined outcomes.
And then they, they will not all happen, but they are clearly distinct from just a superposition. They're distinct theoretical objects. And then you can talk about, well, maybe symmetry breaking, you know, you could say, well, the theory will not tell you which one of those is actualized, but it does tell you that, that indeed a measurement interaction occurred so that, you know, you can say that I now know I can now say under what conditions I get a measurement interaction.
So that's what I like about it. So is the measurement problem twofold? One, what counts as a measurement? And then two, why is it probabilistic? Are those two separate questions? You could say that. I mean, there are different ways of characterizing the so-called measurement problem or the measurement, what counts as a measurement and the different features of it. Von Neumann kind of,
Kind of pointed to two stages of measurement, which I kind of had covered just now, but to make them more precise. The initial stage of measurement is the transition from this superposition state to this state of clearly defined, you know, different possible probabilistic outcomes. And that's called a mixed state.
Um, so there's that transition and then there's what we could call the second stage would be what we could call a collapse from that collection of, of possible outcomes, weighted outcomes to the one outcome that we see. So you can think of it as two stages in that way, but, but the, the two stages correspond to, I think roughly what you just said, you know, that, that the first stage corresponds to, okay, now I can say that a measurement really happened.
That that I can now use to to apply my born rule to the probability probabilities of these different outcomes but but then you know again the theory won't tell you well why did I get this one and not the other one.
but that's because the theory is genuinely indeterministic. It's genuinely probabilistic, which is puzzling. You know, we'd like to, you know, our Western conventions are that, that science has traditionally demanded kind of a causal mechanistic deterministic account from point a to point B and that the idea being that if you don't have that, that there's something missing in your explanation. But what I mean, I think what a lot of people are now
Can you
Give another account or another picture. Like, let's say we have an electron and there's a Feynman diagram, an electron coming here and then here and they emit a so-called virtual photon and then they move apart. What does that look like in the transactional interpretation? You mentioned absorbers, offers, emitters, confirmations. So what is offering? What is confirming? Is it? Is there a clear distinction? Is it the electron? Is it something more fundamental? Explain. Sure.
Sure so actually in a fine diagram you know what you kind of referred to there is really a kind of a scattering process.
that does not correspond to the offers and confirmations. So this is a subtler relativistic level where, you know, when you've got, you know, two electrons coming in and connected by this virtual photon and then going out, that's actually just one term in the, you know, so-called perturbation expansion. So there are many contributions in many ways that the field interacts.
But at that level, these are virtual photons. So the key point is a virtual photon is kind of a way of referring to the aspect of the direct action theory that is, you know, for physicists watching, it's the time symmetric propagator. So that is not an offer or a confirmation. It's an influence. It's a level of the field interaction that in the, in the direct action theory is always present among charges.
So really a chart, the term charge just means being connected to other charges with this so-called virtual photon connection. It's not, it's not a measurement. It's not a measurement interaction. It's a correlating type of interaction. So there are two levels. So that's a nice question because it allows us to get to the subtler point that as I've developed the transactional interpretation into the relativistic domain,
It becomes clear that there are these two levels of the field behavior so that when you have something like free electrons, they do not have a situation where, I mean, if they're totally free electrons, they would not be able to toss a real photon from one electron to another because that would not satisfy the conservation laws.
So that under that situation, a transaction is just not permitted because it has to satisfy the conservation laws. However, when you have something like an excited atom and then you have an unexcited atom, then you have a situation where they can interact in a way that a real photon could be transferred from the excited atom. It could drop down to a lower energy state and then that ground
state atom could receive, could absorb that real photon and pop up to a higher energy state and energy conservation would be satisfied. And under these conditions, you can have a quantitative time dependent probability that these guys are going to engage in a transaction, meaning the excited atom is going to generate an offer wave. The unexcited atom is going to
generate a matching confirmation wave. And this is actually the object that corresponds to a real photon. And upon that kind of interaction, a real photon, which means it's on shell, which means it's truly massless and only transversely polarized, will go from that excited atom to the unexcited atom. And then it will be excited.
So there are these two possible kinds of interactions. The latter one is a measurement. That's what counts as a measurement. And that's why you don't need to refer to observers. You don't need to say, oh, well, I need to, you know, posit some outside observer to say that something really happened. Some clear outcome event happened because in this picture, the formalism gives you
the fact that any mission event occurred at some time T and an absorption event occurred at some time T and these can have observable consequences. Even if no one was around happy to be around to see them. As you know, on theories of everything, we delve into some of the most reality spiraling concepts from theoretical physics and consciousness to AI and emerging technologies to stay informed.
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Head over to their website, www.economist.com slash totoe to get started. Thanks for tuning in. And now back to our explorations of the mysteries of the universe. Even if no one was around, happy to be around to see them. Most of the time when people in the lay public, when they think about quantum mechanics, if they're even thinking about quantum mechanics, they conflate observers with measures. So is that
Okay, are they distinguished in your view?
Yes, they are distinguished. They need to be distinguished. You can't really blame the public for doing that because that is something that physicists have been doing since basically von Neumann and maybe earlier. It's just a symptom of this problem with the conventional theory where you cannot define measurement from within the theory. And so then the convention became to just say,
I'm gonna just say, okay, when there's some outside observer who comes in, you know, that then then I'm suspending quantum theory and I'm just gonna put in my measurement transition by hand in an ad hoc way. So it's a hand wave to some conscious observer outside the theory where you just, you just cut it. In fact, Heisenberg called it a cut and it's arbitrary.
in the conventional theory and and people have actually even like use this is like well this is nice i can do stuff with this i'm like no it's just an ad hoc failure thing that you're doing you know because it's a hand wave to what counts as a conscious observer and that's the whole point of the Schrodinger cat experiment tree right because Schrodinger was was dissatisfied with that sort of equating
Measurement to observation because he could say, well, isn't the cat conscious? You know, what is it? What counts as something conscious and philosophy has no principled way of saying, you know, that something is one thing is conscious and another thing isn't. So it gets you into this kind of thorny, um, you know, ad hoc hand waving land. And so what I do and what I've done in my books and I do it on my blog, I have a blog post that addresses this at
That you know, I think there's one post where I say There there is measurement when you're observing or you know, but not but but you can but not all measurement is Observation, you know measurement in the sense of an outcome happened Right. So the the term is inherently ambiguous and problematic because you know observation sounds anthropomorphic and intentional and so on but
And observation is important in science and of course we do observations and that's important. But the issue about the term measurement in quantum theory is did an outcome occur or didn't it? That's the key. And the conventional theory cannot answer that. You cannot answer that from within the theory. You can never say an outcome occurred. It will not let you say that an outcome occurred if you're being strict about it.
So that's what you get. You get outcomes, whether or not someone was there to see it. So like in TI you get, yeah, a tree did fall. I mean, it doesn't need you to be there to help it fall or to, you know, it doesn't need this sort of like, there's almost a hubristic component to it where, you know, oh, we must have someone observing something or it didn't happen, you know, and that gets into anti-realism too. But, but in TI you can say in the, from within the theory,
that a measurement interaction happened here's why under the under various you know quantified circumstances. Here's where here's where you are overwhelmingly likely to have a measurement transition where you were an outcome will occur whether or not there happens to be somebody there to observe it.
So you said that it's likely that there's going to be a measurement transition. So I understand that the measurement itself is not determined, sorry, that the outcomes of the measurements are not determined, but the fact of a measurement is also probabilistic. Correct. And so this corresponds to decay rates in the conventional theory. So one way they link up
is that in the transactional interpretation, when we are calculating a decay rate by this conventional theory, we're also calc in from the standpoint of TI, the transactional interpretation, we're calculating the probability that at any particular time t a measurement transition will occur. Because in order to get a decay, like I said before, you must have the proper circumstances, but those are probabilistic and
You know it may or may not happen a particular time t so again that's another that side of a deeper level. Aspect of the probabilistic character of quantum theory having said that however you know for force for situations of ordinary macroscopic experience.
And and the kinds of phenomena you know like every every second of every day we're seeing determinate outcome related type phenomena we see you know we see clearly defined objects around us and this this happens because the probabilities of transactions are so overwhelmingly high for the kinds of energy you know energies involved.
that in any second it's that the probability is 99.9999 and it can go on nearly forever that at any particular time you're going to have a decay, you know, so, so we're at, at this macroscopic level. Yeah, we're going to get transactions and it, but interestingly, if you want to probe, there's a whole zone of the mesoscopic. So, you know, you're dealing with things like bucky balls, which are these very large carbon molecules.
They got like 60 carbon atoms in them. They have a very nice mesoscopic property where, you know, you send them through a two-slit apparatus and about half the time you're going to get measurement transitions just because the thing, you know, it transacted with one of the slits or something. So it has like a 50% probability of engaging in a measurement interaction. And you see that in the data when you work with these things.
So before I get to some more technical questions, can we outline, or can you outline, please, exactly what is an emission, an offer, a handshake? And you mentioned the photon was the interaction and not an actual emission or an absorption, like disembroil these. Yeah. So an offer wave is a quantum state
I mean, again, just to get a little more technical, because you did mention it earlier, we do need to distinguish between entities that count as emitters and absorbers and these offers and conformations. So the distinction is that entities with rest mass, such as atoms, electrons, so-called fermions,
These are systems with charge. So systems with charge that have rest mass are capable of, I mean this is just the way the fields work, they interact in this way. And that's according to standard quantum field theory as well. So the interacting fields of the so-called charged fermions and the electromagnetic field give you this
this potentiality to emit or absorb. But again, the emitters are objects like an atom that what's actually doing the emitting is the electron in the atom. So the only reason it can really generate something like an offer wave is because again, the energy conservation can be fulfilled. But let's assume that's the case. So we have an excited atom.
You can either count the entire atom as the emitter or just the electron within it. The charged electron is actually doing the emitting, but you need that entire bound state to be able to do this. So let's say the electron in the excited atom is emitting. What it is emitting is an offer wave that is a quantum state that corresponds to an excitation of the electromagnetic field. But it's only
It's only the, this is where we get technical. It's only the sort of the, the forward propagating component of that. So meanwhile, the absorber is generating, uh, what's called an adjoint field, which is a kind of, uh, advanced quantum state, um, that, you know, it's sort of, uh, we've got Kets and we've got a, what I call a BRAC. So they're, they're different formal objects.
but they are independently they are forms of quantum states. So let's just say quantum state of the electromagnetic field. We've got a retarded so-called retarded quantum state of the electromagnetic field, which is the offer wave and we've got the
the advanced quantum state of the electromagnetic field, which is the confirmation wave. So that's the offer and the confirmation that are generated under these circumstances. Let's say at time t, these were generated because it was overwhelmingly probable that it would happen at that time. So we've got this interaction between these two. And in a sense, you can think of that as the photon
In a technical level, if you had a bunch of other absorbers around, they too would be contributing an advanced offer wave corresponding to the component of the, an advanced confirmation wave corresponding to the component of the offer wave that they received. So it would kind of split, you know, the offer wave from the emitter would be broken down into many components in general. This is in general what happens.
And so the photon at that level, this goes back to those stages with the first stage where we're going from a pure state to a mixed state. This is in a sense the mixed state for the measurement transition. It's like it's a collection of what I call incipient transactions. Now, none of these incipient transactions is actually a photon.
This is where we get to the collapse stage. When you get to the collapse stage so that one of these is actualized, then that is the actual photon that goes from the emitting excited atom to one of these absorbers. Only that at the final collapse stage is where you get this real photon that is actually triggering outcomes.
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Right. And your papers will be listed on screen and in the description because the rigor is necessary. And so people can go and look that up as well as your books will be on screen and links in the description. So just to be clear, the audience is quite technical. They comprise researchers in physics and philosophy and computer science and so on. So we speak as if we're just in the closed doors of the academy, just speaking to one another and the cameras happen to be here. So
Okay, when you say advanced waves and when you say retarded waves, are people to imagine that as the same as advanced being forward in time, retarded being backward in time? So yeah, that's a great question because this is how John Kramer, you know, the originator of TI, presented it initially. And this is how it kind of seems like that's the way it has to be because we usually think that
Everything physical goes on in space time and space time is the mandatory background for everything physically real and it's kind of a supposition that we all bring with us that we've all been kind of talk with all just kind of absorb that.
Speaking of absorption. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We've all kind of been marinated in that. Um, what I've, and I initially kind of assumed that that was what was going on. But as I started to investigate the relativistic level of the, of the formulation, um, I realized that you really can't consistently think of these offers and confirmations as literally get little waves that are going forward in time and backward in time.
For a variety of reasons, I mean, the first is that technically these quantum states, anytime you have a quantum state of more than one quantum system, more than one degree of freedom, you are dealing with a multi-dimensional complex Hilbert space. So these states are not entities that really have a space-time character. They really, their representation
um, is, is formally mathematically much higher dimensional and complex. So they're just, they're not space time entities. I mean, I think that, you know, people, um, don't,
You know if you say well where do these confirmations live over these offers and confirmations live than people wanna go you know what they live in in configuration space but that's just a construct and so then that gets us off into instrumentalism about the theory that gets us off into well they don't you know whatever they're not there either not physically real or are.
Or if that seems to create a false dilemma where you either have to say they're not physically real. They're just mathematical constructs that are useful in predicting blah, blah, blah. Or you say, no, if they're physically real, I demand, I want to be realist about the theory. So they've got to be in space time. And then what you do is you falsify their mathematical character and pretend like an object that is a Hilbert space vector.
Propagates in space time. That's that's denying its essential mathematical character. So what I've been supposed suggesting is that we don't have to do any of that. There's a third way. The third way is to simply say that these, these entities are physically real, but our physical reality goes beyond three plus one space time.
And you know, some other physicists are starting to, to be open to that idea. I mean, at first it sounds crazy and people, you know, want to put you, you know, put, get the, bring the guys in the white coats to take you away. You know, when you say stuff like that, but, but it actually is very useful. Um, it's very fruitful as a physical model. And in fact, um, the, the, the utility of it, I mean, what people would call reifying Hilbert space.
is is to say, look guys, you know, the, these can be counted as some kind of physical possibility that is physically real, that does not have its existence in space time, but at a deeper level that I call the quantum substratum. And, and what you can get out of that actually is a nice, um, theory of general relativity that includes the, uh, the corrections for, um, galactic, um,
You know, rotation curves that are, you know, usually attributed to dark matter. So with a colleague of mine, Andrea Schlatter, we've already worked that out. So we've worked out a theory of emergent space time emerging from the quantum level, taken as real, taken as really involving these real entities propagating at the quantum level and engaging in transactions in such a way that you get an emergent space time that has symmetrical character of
The bottom line is no, offers and confirmations are not going backward and forward in space-time. They are processes, physically dynamic processes that are taking place at the quantum level. They involve quantum possibilities, if you will.
So two questions. I've noticed that the word entity is being used and I assume carefully and not the word particle or not the word field, like you keep saying entity. So I want you to spell out why. And also I want to know precisely what are the ontological commitments here? Is it that the configuration space is real or is it that the vectors, the Hilbert space is real? Tell me what are you saying is real?
Well I would never say configuration space is real because that's kind of an idealization of wave functions and I mean wave functions which are basically amplitudes of a quantum state with respect to the position basis. At the relativistic level you don't have a position observable so those are kind of idealizations but what I'm taking as physically real
are all quantum systems. Quantum systems are physically real. The field, the electromagnetic field is physically real. So I'm taking all that as physically real. I mean, I use the term entity maybe just kind of as a general way to reference a quantum system or a field. It's kind of a catch-all term, if you will.
Um, you, you can, you know, uh, yeah. So these are real physical systems. I, I consider them physically real. I consider them to exist independently of anyone's observing them or knowing about them epistemologically and so on. So they're real. So, so they, they don't exist in space time. So what they're real.
You know i'm just saying though it's it's the ontological commitments are simply i'm just you know it's just i'm realist about quantum theory so in the transactional formulation so that means something like a hydrogen atom. Which can be described by a quantum state. The state is a descriptor of a real physical object.
And so what I'm, what I'm, I'm just being realist about it. So I'm saying the reference of quantum theory exists physically and the fact that they don't happen to fit into space time does not discount the fact that they exist physically. So I'm not real. Like I'm not committed to any particular metaphysical nature of what I call the quantum substratum. You know, you could call me maybe a structural realist.
You know, I'm not going to posit a substance or something like that. I, you know, it's a very bare bones ontology. It's basically just the, the formalism in the transactional formulation, meaning that's, that's the way I think the fields behave. These are real fields. They're really doing that. There's really an influence. There's a physical connection among physically real systems.
So I take it as all physically real and I just basically reject the idea that in order to be physically real you must be a space-time object. Now I like what you said that it's a transactional formulation because it's often said transactional interpretation and abbreviated as TI but interpretation sounds then like you're just interpreting quantum theory differently but it's an actual
It's different. Yes, and it seems like there's empirical distinguishability. So I would like to ask you about that. Well, OK. Yes, wonderful question. Yeah, I mean, what I've realized as I've developed the relativistic formulation is that, yes, it is a different formulation of quantum theory. It's a subtly different theoretical model simply because the fields behave differently than is assumed in the conventional approach.
As to what was the second part of your question? Oh, I said that there must be some distinguishing factor empirically. Yes, empirically. So the distinguishing factor is that the transactional formulation provides an account of measurement. The empirical phenomena are measurement outcomes.
So the empirical distinction is simply that measurement is an anomaly for the standard approach.
The standard approach is incapable of accounting for measurement. So that's the only empirical distinction. And you know, it's one that corroborates the transactional formulation. So what we have here, this is subtle because, you know, people usually say, well, I want you to, you know, do an experiment, crucial, crucial, you know, and show me a prediction of transaction. You say it's a different theory. So, well, show me, you know, how you've,
how does it deviate from the standard theory, you know, and so on. That's kind of a misconception. Why? Because many, it's, it's both theories are empirically equivalent at the level of probabilities. So like for the born rule, because the transactional formulation yields the born rule. But what people kind of don't often take into account is the issue of anomalies. So for instance, um,
You know, back when we had Newton's theory of gravitation, the procession of Mercury was an anomaly. The procession of the orbit of Mercury was an anomaly for Newton's theory. Newton's theory was unable to explain that. So Einstein's relativity came along and was able to empirically predicted the procession of the orbit of Mercury.
This is the same thing that's going on with the transactional formulation. Measurement, it fails to be predicted, measurement outcomes fail to be predicted by the conventional theory. It's an anomaly. The TI formulation comes along and accounts for and predicts measurement interactions. So in that way, it is empirically distinct. This is what is usually missed.
You know what, in these kinds of discussions and the reason it gets missed is because people are, we've all been taught and this isn't me bad mouthing the conventional, you know, people who are working with the conventional theory. It's what they've been taught because the measurement problem has been around for so long that it's become habitual to become instrumentalist about the theory and say, well,
You know, it just happens. Measurement happens. There's nothing wrong with the theory. You know, it works for all practical purposes. It's a good instrument. And to kind of lapse into that instrumentalist stance and to decide not to hold the conventional theory's feet to the fire on this issue of measurement. If you do that, if you're a good critical thinker and you're a stubborn journalist,
You know if you treat the conventional theory you know like a politician and say but excuse me sir like what exactly how. Do you get an outcome here you know where's your outcome what is it in the theory that's getting you that outcome sir you know and if they don't call you out of the you know you know so so this is what people have not been doing so this is what you know i've been to the pesky little you know.
Does asking these journalistic questions to the politicians make you popular? No, it doesn't.
You know, but it's fun and it's still, you know, I do get opportunities to engage and they are, you know, people are understandably reluctant. You know, I have sympathy for that because it means going against a lot of what we've been taught. And I went through that same program and perhaps, you know, I perhaps have a degree of liberty to be a little more critical and stubborn and
Intransigent about it because I primarily work as an independent scholar and I you know, I don't have to You know, I'm basically I made the decision to follow this approach because I thought it was fruitful and it made sense to me and I I chose not to You know be constrained by other concerns and to just follow this where it where it leads. I
Talk to me about independent scholarship. It seems like there's you, there's Julian Barber and maybe three other people. Why is it so rare? How are you able to do it? And what are the challenges and advantages? Well, yeah, the advantages I just mentioned is, is perhaps a little more degree of independence from, you know, what can turn into group think. And I don't mean that in a, you know, it sounds disparaging, but I've, you know, I understand that, that it's a concern.
And I understand the concerns people have to, you know, that you take risks to buck the trend. So the advantage is that, you know, I'm less constrained by those kinds of influences. Of course, it's challenging in that, you know, financially, I'm kind of on my own. I have to be frugal. I have to work in a very limited budget. When I travel, I can only travel
I don't have any academic support for travel expenses or anything like that so you know that that that limits my ability to to attend various things and you know and sometimes if you are not i do have an affiliation with the university of maryland
I don't want to, you know, I don't want to overlook that. And they've been very kind and very supportive. Um, the philosophy department at the university of Maryland to, to offer me that affiliation, which gives me some library, um, resources and so on. And they've done that, um, you know, out of recognition that w that they feel that I'm, that I'm pursuing some interesting ideas. And in fact, I did get, I did happen to receive
a research award in 2021 from the University of Maryland. So they've, they've been very kind in that way and in the recognition. So thank you. So, um, yeah, I mean, it's just, it does means you've got to be careful about, you know, you gotta be frugal. Um, but you do have perhaps fewer constraints, you know, in terms of, of, uh, what you investigate and how.
So we keep saying the words conventional approach to quantum mechanics, conventional conventional. Are we referring specifically to the Dirac von Neumann axioms or something different? Um, we're actually, when I say that, I mean, um, the conventional view of the way fields propagate, um, which, which is kind of the basis for quantum field theory. Um, it goes back to
You know, this is something that perhaps isn't formalized because it's just the default assumptions about fields. The default assumptions is that fields are generated unilaterally by emitters. End of story. It's an approach to field propagation and that goes back to, you know, DRAC probably
Formalize that to some extent and it comes up. I mean people who want to look at well, what is that quantitatively can look into the references on on the the issue of radiation reaction and The the issue of the puzzle in this in the standard approach of how an emitting System loses energy because that's actually hard to account for in the the default unilateral approach
So if if you know if people want to see what is that quantitatively they can go and see you know how the how the traditional dirac way of of trying to deal with the loss of energy by an emitting charge is to assume that the emitted field is a retarded field only.
and that that is what is radiated and when you do that you actually have trouble saying why the field lost energy and then you have to help yourself to this ambient free field that's just there for no reason so so those are the kinds of you know publications where you're going to go and be able to see the contrast between this this what i call the conventional approach to field propagation and the direct action theory are there axioms of the transactional formulation like the
Castner-Cramer axioms or something akin to that? Nope, just the direct action theory. All you do is you say what would be happening if the fields were, if nature worked with direct action fields instead of this unilaterally emitted field. And that's all you do. I don't like axiomatizing things. I never like to go, okay, I'm going to postulate this. I never like to postulate stuff. So it's really simply
uh, incorporating, bringing into the picture a different theory about the way fields are behaving and, and examining the consequences of that. And then the formula formalism just, just falls out of it because in the, in the direct action theory, you naturally get these confirmation waves, these, these advanced states that are already part of the quantum formalism anyway, when you want to construct a projection operator.
A projection operator is an outer product of a so-called offer wave and a so-called confirmation wave, or a ket and a brak. And you get these outer products naturally from the physics of the direct action theory. They just drop right out of it. In the conventional approach, you have to help yourself to it. You have to say, okay, what am I going to represent mathematically by a state that acquires an outcome? Oh, I'm going to describe it by a projection operator.
You just help yourself to that. Whereas they fall out of the physics of the direct action theory. So in 2015, I believe Kramer had an article. Kramer is the progenitor of this theory for those who don't know. And I believe he called your version unnecessarily abstract or something akin to that. Why did he say that? What's the difference between his version and yours?
Yeah, I mean, I think my formulation or my version is necessarily mathematically accurate. And, you know, I think Professor Kramer very much is part of the tradition of defining the physically real in terms of is it a space-time object? And so he's kind of taken that option of
Choosing to say that these entities, these field processes are happening in space time because he has that metaphysical desire requirement. So what I'm saying is just drop that and follow the mathematics of the theory in a realist way without reducing the mathematics and trying to project it down and distilling, taking stuff out of it, but leave the content intact.
And let that instruct you as to what nature might be about, you know, and in fact, that's what that's a long tradition in physics. That's in fact what Heisenberg did, you know, when he back when he was trying to construct these very kind of tinker toy causal mechanical models.
of of atoms to try to get a quantum theory when he knew that the classical theory wasn't working and it was only when he gave up on that and said let me follow the math let me follow the data and see
What, what I can conclude from that. And I mean, his, he's got these wonderful, um, descriptions in his writings where he says, and a whole, a beautiful structure emerged before me, you know, when he started to, to kind of inadvertently stumble onto matrix mechanics, it was a mathematical structure that he recognized initially, at least.
was kind of being handed to him by nature when he let it speak instead of following his own metaphysical requirements about what he should impose on nature so i think that's really you know that's all i'm doing i'm just saying let's be realist about the theory
the objects in the theory that the quantum systems and the states that describe them have this mathematical character well i'm not gonna deny that mathematical character just cuz it makes me uncomfortable about my metaphysical conventions i'm gonna let go of those first before i'm gonna start you know tampering with the theory.
In math and physics, the word space is used most often abstractly. So sure, there's up, down, left, right and forward backward, but there's also moduli space and so on. And that's not an up down doesn't correspond to space or subset of space time or foliation of space time. So in this grant me this usage of the word space as abstract in your theory, in the direct action theory, in the transactional formulation, what space is it that actually exists?
Is this space time a projection of some higher dimensional space? Is it a lower dimensional like a holographic theory and and we're being somehow moved upward to four dimensions? What is the space that's playing out?
Well, I take it as all real, but in different ways. So I, you know, cause I'm a realist about physics. I think that that quantum theory is describing physically real systems. And I, you know, again, I use the iceberg metaphor. So what I think of as, you know, to this big iceberg, you know, it's got this huge submerged portion and just the very tip is peeking out and above the water. So I, I think that all of that submerged portion is real.
Um, but it's not, it's not the empirical component. It's not the measurement outcome component in contrast. That's what's on the tip. So space time is, is, is an emergent construct. It's not something we live in. It's, it's an Einstein acknowledged that space time is technically a, a structured set of what he called point coincidences. Well, it's a structured set of events.
And those events are essentially the outcomes of what we call measurements. So it's an emergent construct. It's real. It's real, but it's not real in the way we thought. But if you're strict about it, Einstein was right about the way in which space-time is real. The so-called space-time parameters, space and time, they are parameters
that help us to relate the, if you will, that submerged part of potentiality.
Call it potentiality to the part that's observable. It helps us, it helps us coordinate that. So, so they are parameters and they're recognized as such in, in quantum field theory that, that they are parameters. So it's all real. It has, it's different modes of reality, if you will. And, you know, I mean, we, I think that this calling things abstract is a very tendentious, you know, it's a tendentious term because
It starts to make a metaphysical ruling on what you can count as real and what you can't, you know, like, like we're all used to, you know, mathematicians love to create abstract mathematical spaces. Great. Okay. Well, you know, usually, well, that's not real. It's some guy just created some fun thing he was playing with and I playing up with ideas, call it abstract. Great.
But, but when one starts to say that because the formalism or the kinds of mathematical spaces that are appearing in quantum theory are not space time, therefore they are abstract. They have to be abstract. And it's a, it's a tendentious ruling. It's a way of passing judgment kind of preemptively and saying, I, I, I judge that to be not physically real.
Cause you're saying it's abstract. Well, it may have started out as some idea that somebody was playing with. That doesn't mean it doesn't correspond to something in the real world. So that's where the term abstract can get really kind of, you have to be, it's kind of like, I get, I get a little yellow alert flag abstract. Cause I mean, it's, it's a metaphysical judgment. It's often used to say not real issues as equivalent to not real. And that's, you can't do that.
In some ways, Plato takes the approach that as you abstract, you get closer to what's most real in the realm of the forms, except he wouldn't define reality as just physical reality. What we're seeing are these, these imprecise adumbrations. So earlier you mentioned physical reality, and then you also just said real.
so do you think that all that is real is physical well yeah it's a good distinction to make i mean i when i'm talking about physics and physical theories i use physically real and real kind of interchangeably because that that's usually the domain in which i'm operating because
you know, what, what I'm my, my little quest, if you will, is to kind of try to offer to people a solution to the problems they purport to be concerned about in a physical theory, you know? So, so I'm saying you're, you got these problems you purport to be concerned about, like the measurement problem and other problems and the alleged lack of compatibility between relativity and quantum theory, which we have already resolved. And so in that context, I'm offering these,
And so because it's about a physical theory, that's kind of the context in which I operate. The broader questions about Plato and perfect forms and so on, if I were in a philosophy class, I would want to make a distinction between domains that we describe by what we call physics, physical theory,
And domains that we don't pretend to describe by physical theory like thought. I mean, some people try to, but I think that's a little bit, a bit reaching, you know, being materialist about that. So it depends on kind of what the domain of discourse, if you will. Yeah. I mean, I would never, I wouldn't in this context, I wouldn't want to, you know, say, yeah, I think Plato's perfect forms are physically real. You know, I wouldn't do stuff like that. I wouldn't, I wouldn't, I don't know. That's a separate question, you know.
Okay, allow me to play around with this iceberg metaphor. So on the tip, are you saying the tip that's revealed is that at least part of that space-time? The tip is what I call space-time. The tip of the iceberg is the space-time manifold. So you call that emergent. However, in an iceberg, it's difficult to say what's emergent. You can say it's above the surface.
That's where we need a different metaphor. So this is where all metaphors kind of have limitations. So yeah, in a real iceberg, we don't get that. It's just a way of kind of making a distinction between that which we don't directly observe and that which we do and pointing out it's all real. It's just some of it is not accessible in the same way.
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and pointing out it's all real. It's just some of it is not accessible in the same way. So the iceberg, you know, it can only go so far. So when it, when it comes to, you know, kind of thinking about emergence, I like, I switched to a metaphor of the geode. So, um, this is kind of, you know, the, the geode is this, just this hollow gap in, in some rock that is gradually, there's these mineral laden fluid that's coming in to this
empty space and building up these crystals. So that kind of helps to kind of visualize the way these quantum possibilities are sort of metaphorically this mineral laden fluid that that's crystallizing upon the measurement, you know, interaction into these crystals that are the structured space time events.
Oh, by the way, I'm hoping I was notified by a buddy of mine that, um, I think of Shalom Elitzer was, was mentioning, you know, his, his formulation and some experiments that he, he was kind of curious about, about whether TI, you know, what TI might have to say about them. And I, sorry, real quick kind of reviewed that a little bit in case you want to talk about that. Yep.
So I had a conversation with Avshalom Elitser and you may have seen parts of it where he mentioned the transactional interpretation directly. And so I'll link that on screen as well. In it, he references the transactional interpretation because of the time symmetry for his interpretations. He mentions the transactional interpretation also has that and retro causality, which Elitser is actually a fan of. He
sees TI or the transactional formulation is resonating with that and he sees some experimental compatibility with it. So what are your comments? Okay. Well, I mean, I agree that there's certainly an affinity between the two approaches in terms of emphasizing the importance of, of post-selection of, you know, what, what we would call, you know, measurement outcomes.
and what they might have to do with the process. Of course, in TI, the absorbing systems have a lot to say about what observable you're measuring and the nature of the set of outcomes that you're going to be getting in terms of possible outcomes for your experiment. So there's that affinity. I guess where they differ, I mean,
The transaction formulation works with a specific theory of fields, the direct action theory, where you get a lot of mathematical content that describes how these fields are interacting with the emitting and absorbing systems. And that gives you a lot of this formalism, as I mentioned earlier, that is already in the standard theory. So in that sense, I feel like it's more powerful
at a fundamental level that it's more explanatory, that it generates a lot of the formalism that we're already kind of working with, but seems just kind of like we're helping ourselves to these mathematical tools. But with the transactional formulation, we get a reason for where those tools are coming from. The time symmetric vector formulation
In a sense, formally would correspond to in a way half the transactional story. It would correspond to looking only at the offer wave component that reaches every absorber. It seems to me that it's only really able to work with the conventional theory and
And take a particular metaphysical approach to the conventional theory, but it seems to me, you know, from what I've seen that it's not able to specify what counts as a measurement. It inherits this TSVF, you know, sort of inherits that lacuna of the conventional approach to fields where you're just helping yourself to the fact that a measurement happened. And if you have to describe all the systems by these two state vectors,
Then you must specify for all future times all outcomes of all measurements. So they all have to be stipulated. That seems to be just a basic requirement of the formulation since it demands description by a two-state vector. So for any quantum system, you must always specify a measurement outcome for some arbitrary date at any time.
So this to me implies a block world ontology, uh, just by what is required for it, for using it. Um, and, and then the dilemma sort of faced by, by people who want to pursue that approach is that if they want to have becoming, as I understand professor Elitzer has talked about, then, you know, I think you get into trouble. I mean, I don't, I feel like the idea of getting things
To happen and getting things to emerge in it in a becoming dynamic way is Kind of foreclosed to you because you've already said all my systems are described by by two state vectors So you've stipulated for all systems what they're what all future measurements will be so there's there's that tension That it's trying to I feel like again there there are a lot of you know approaches and this applies to other
Approaches that call themselves retro causal is they want that to be sort of a space time. Retro causation where things are literally going backward in time so it's restricted in that sense to this literally forward in time literally backward in time and whenever whenever you do that you're really kind of working if you think that.
Everything's happening in space time then you really kind of working with a block world picture and then you're putting a narrative on top of that that sounds dynamical that sounds like things are going backward and forward but you've already helped yourself to all events. They're already there so i have a paper about this that i wrote back and i think it was twenty eleven on you know that this issue for for certain approaches that call themselves retro causal but.
But they are really kind of working in a block world ontology and there's no real dynamics happening. So. Yeah, is there any way to have what people think of when they think about science fiction and time travel within your framework? Oh, not in the usual sense. I mean, you could probably talk about about it in terms of possible timelines. People sometimes like to play with possible timelines and you can always
Do that but they would be possible timelines they would be at the level of possibility. So i mean it's like once you have go back to the geode once you have a crystal in the geode there's a crystal in the geode. You can't undo the chris it's there you know it's another another metaphor that's useless knitting a scarf.
You're going to get a scarf that scarf is emergent from possibilities, which are the yarn and maybe design. I can look at a design book and change my design at any time. I can change my yard at any time. But once that scarf comes out, that scarf is there. I mean, maybe you could go back and put more stuff on the scarf. I don't know. I mean, people are imaginative. I don't want to foreclose, you know, imaginative storytelling.
but in the usual sense, the usual sense where people are trying to work with it in physics is, is there sort of denying that, yeah, there's a scarf there and that, you know, that's there. You, you admitted that's there. So you can't just go back and say that now you're going to change it. I mean, if you do that, then you're, then you're just kind of dealing with multiple space times. And then that comes out sometimes in sort of the many worlds approach, you know? So, so this is a form of actualism.
What I would say is that it's something that people are kind of pushed into when they don't want to just allow that possibilities are real. That perhaps physics is pointing to real possibilities. Yes, often when people think about possibilities in the physics sense and they're thinking about interpretations in many worlds, all of those possible worlds are actualized. So are you saying that this world is real, is actual and is singular?
Well, the phenomena we see in terms of what's actualized as a space-time event, that I take as singular. I mean, if people are free to explore the idea that these possibilities get actualized in different worlds, you know, I would not foreclose that. It's not a necessary thing. You know, it's not a necessary thing. The reason that the many worlds that EverReady and
The Everettian approach comes out of the measurement problem and the inability to say what counts as a measurement. And so they're forced to just kind of look at, you know, went back to the little train. The train with, you know, the two engines and the two trains, since they have no theory of fields that lets them say that an outcome happened, they just say they all happened. But that has problems with, you know, kind of helping yourself to the basis you want so that you get the kind of phenomena that you see.
So there's some ad hoc stuff that has to go into it. And it also isn't really easily incorporated into a relativistic treatment. It's strictly the non-relativistic theory that it's working with and the non-relativistic theory is just an approximation. So, yeah. Bohmian mechanics has two qualities. So one is hidden variables and the other is a preferred foliation. Do you have either of these?
No, no, I don't. The transactional formulation has no hidden variables. Now, interestingly, you could say it has no preferred foliation, but one of the problems with the conventional approach has been, you know, the way to kind of say, well, what is sort of nature's preferred observable? What are things really doing in a fundamental way? And it seems like
It seems as though there's an arbitrariness in kind of picking that, but there really isn't because at the relativistic level you get naturally preferred observables and those are position and, and I mean, I said that those are energy, energy related energy and momentum. So when you go to the relativistic level, it's very clear, for instance, there's, there's no time observable period at any level of the theory.
At the, at the non relativistic level, you can say, well, there's sort of a position observable, but it's, it's really kind of an idealization and that breaks down at the relativistic level. There is, there is no position observable. And this is why even in the standard theory position and position of time, the space time labels are reduced to parameters. They are not observables. So it's very clear that at a fundamental level, nature's preferred observable is basically for momentum.
And that's reflected in the TI approach. That's what you get. You get your transactions happening ultimately at a relativistic level in terms of momenta. You can have directional momenta in the sense that you have a variety of absorbers and they're each going to receive a different
directional component of momentum. And that's more of a relational thing. So it has to do with the relations among these quantum systems. So you don't really need to, you don't need to talk about space and time as being real, but they are parameters of the map, if you will. They're parameters of the map that help us coordinate these relationships.
So there's kind of a relational view of space-time. It's not saying that space-time doesn't exist, but again, as Einstein noted, what the space-time manifold really is, is an invariant set of events, period. It's not about X or T, it's a collection of invariant events. And we use X and T to coordinate our observations among those events.
Now, earlier we talked about electrodynamics and you grazed on gravity and somewhat grazed on the weak interaction as well with the Schrodinger's cat, although it was unclear to me the connection between the transactional formulation and the weak interaction. So what I'd like to know is, does TI have anything to say about weak or strong? Well, the transactional process that leads to the emergence of space-time events
occurs only through the electromagnetic field. The other forces are certainly in play at a fundamental level. They govern the unitary interactions, the kinds of scattering, you know, interactions and so on. Now the weak decay, you know, the weak force is involved in decays. And of course the Schrodinger's cat, you can illustrate that with just a decay in terms of an excited atom emitting a photon if you want, right? So it doesn't have to be, you know, it doesn't have to be the weak force.
But the weak force is certainly really in there in terms of these unitary interactions that transform, that kind of govern these kinds of transformations among types of particles and so on. And that's very much part of the transactional picture. So in other words, the transactional formulation very much accommodates all those fields. The thing that's
That it treats distinctly is the electromagnetic field because that's a massless gauge field. So you require a massless gauge field to get you the emergence of space time. So these other ones have mass and so they are unstable in a sense and they act only really kind of locally at the quantum, at the possible level of possibilities.
Another massless gauge field is gravity, or at least under some interpretations of quantum gravity, you have the graviton. So does TI make any claims about that?
So we deny that gravity is a quantum field. So what we get, you know, we basically say the mistake in, you know, that the problem, what's so problematic about trying to reconcile the quantum level with the relativistic level is trying to characterize gravity as a quantum field. So gravity, we say, is not a quantum field. It's the field
Is the metrical structure of the emergent space time end of story that and that's what Einstein said. I mean, you know, he said that that's what the field is. It's the, it's the metrical structure of space time. So it's, it's a property of the, those sets of events. And so, I mean, people who want, you know, who want the detailed story of that, they want to see the, you know, see the actual math, see the actual theory.
We do have an actual theory that derives the Einstein equations from that picture. So then is the transactional formulation a theory of everything? A contender for a toe? Well, you know, I guess I never like to claim that. I guess you could say that it's a theory of the quantum level and the space-time relativistic level.
I guess I'm not clear in myself that physics can explain everything about reality, including people's thoughts, motivations, intentionalities, consciousness.
And so from that standpoint, I would, I would never, you know, I would, I would be a little more, more modest about the reach of physics, but within, within topics that are considered physical questions. Yeah. I mean, you could say that because it's, it's definitely providing, uh, an account of, of the interaction of the quantum level with the space time level, with the, you know, the relativistic level. And, you know, it's quite straightforward.
Yes. Well, in physics, the term theory of everything is just for a framework that encompasses both gravity and the standard model. Sure. Well, well, yeah, I mean, I, the T I, the transactional formalism again is, is simply contained in applying the direct action theory of fields to the kinds of physics we're already working with and admitting that
Saying fields propagate unilaterally and retarded fields only is wrong, replacing that with the direct action theory for the electromagnetic field. That's all it is. And we're just showing how fruitful that is, what you get out of it. So, I mean, the transactional formulation does not purport to explain the origins of quantum chromodynamics or anything like that. But where appropriate,
The claim is that nature is behaving according to the direct action theory of fields. And let's see what that gets us. And we are already showing, you know, what, how much we get from that. In many physical theories, there are virtually all physical theories, there are parts that don't change. And then there are contingent parts. So for instance, the force equals mass.
Well, I mean, it's really the same, you know, I mean, it's still it's still the case and you know, the only thing different about this theory
is the way that the fields operate, the way that the electromagnetic field behaves. So we're still going to have, you know, Newton's laws as a suitable non relativistic approximation. We're still going to put in initial conditions, you know, and in a sense, yeah, so none of that's really going to change. But I think overall in the big picture, it's a more satisfying account because
You help yourself to initial conditions that, at least for the quantum situation in the conventional theory, are just stipulated. You can't say why you got a measurement result. In the transaction formulation, you can at least say, well, there was a measurement interaction and I can explain why that happened.
um, and then there was perhaps a collapse, uh, to, to a result, but I can say why there was an outcome available to me. So, yeah, I mean, fundamentally it's not going to change those kinds of features of theories. Does it have anything to say about Bell's inequalities or the Culkin-Specker theorem? Well, um, those are basic theorems that point to the, the non-locality of quantum theory.
And that is certainly still the case in the transactional formulation. I mean, unlike some interpretations, the transactional formulation does not, at least as I've elaborated it, it's not trying to preserve locality. This I think is very much, you know, trying to cling to some metaphysical
ground rules that are not really serving us well. The quantum world is non-local in a sense that that's what the violations of Bell's inequality and so on are showing us. And maybe that's uncomfortable, but once again, if you allow the idea that nature does have this level of possibility, then it makes sense that you're going to be observing things that look non-local to you, that there are interactions that can go on
That that seemed to defy your expectation that everything's happening in a space time container. So, so that, you know, I would say, um, that's very much, those are authentic, um, implications of, of the formalism of quantum theory in the, in the fact, in the sense that, that there are non-local influences going on.
Okay, so two quick questions about that before Coke and specker. So you said it looks non local to you. So does that mean that underneath the iceberg, there's some version of locality, maybe it's not called locality that is preserved. And then when it gets emergent upward or in the geode picture, it looks like it's violating locality. Well, I mean, in the usual sense, it's in the usual in the sense that there are influences that seem to propagate
add speeds that are you know seem to exceed the speed of light they are technically non local but where where we can gain some insight into those into those influences not being something that we should forbid you know it's helpful to look at the flatland metaphor you know the flatland edwin abbott story where
There are flat shapes in a plane and they think that's the entire reality. But if it isn't, then you can have this fear hovering and coming and doing these weird things that from the standpoint of the flatland creatures look non-local and crazy and know this can't be happening according to the rules of my world, which tells me I can only stay on this plane and only can do this. But those rules don't apply to
to an entity that has more degrees of freedom and more higher space to work with. That's the sense in which I think these non-local interactions are occurring. Strictly speaking, by the rules of getting from here to there on flat land, they're violating that.
But it doesn't mean that they can't really be happening and that we shouldn't, you know, it means that, okay, there's just a larger aspect to reality in which more kinds of influences are possible. And again, these do not violate relativity because the influences that are happening are not sending light signals. So it's conforming to relativity.
But it's it's violating our sense of propriety concerning what we think should happen in flatland and and so what i'm saying is let's let go of that you know that that that restrictive sense of what's okay and what isn't okay in terms of what's physically happening. So yeah non locality from the standpoint of.
Influences being able to be communicated that don't depend on light signals. Yeah, that does happen in the direct action theory and it's okay. It's not something nature's not allowed to do just because we don't like it. So is the non-locality just a correlation or is there causation to it?
Well, this depends what you mean by causation. For instance, the scattering interactions that you referenced earlier, those are brought about in terms of non-local connections among the electrons. So that time symmetric propagator that connects those electrons as they're scattering, it's clearly doing something.
It's causal in the sense that it's doing something, but it's pre-measurement. It's not something that is connected to a space-time event. It's part of the sort of behind the scenes dynamics that's building up to make certain events more probable than others. So it's definitely doing something physically efficacious.
But it still respects relativity in that, you know, it's not something where you're, you're, you're using a light controllable light signal and sending a signal from A to B and so on. It's happening at a subtler level. You don't violate the no signaling theorem. That's correct. Not at all. I see. Yeah. Okay. So let's get to Coke and specker. What is your account of it? And also, can you please tell the audience what that theorem is?
What kinds of phenomena you can come up with are contextual. You cannot say for all observables I can assign a yes or no answer.
you know, for all cases. And this has to do with the fact that Heisenberg's uncertainty principle and the fact that observables don't commute. So it's a consequence of the non-commutativity of these observables that only, you know, for two observables that don't commute, like position and momentum at the non-relativistic level,
You can't just say I can assign a determinate momentum property for the system for all cases and also a determinate position that it's really this position and not all of these others. So you can't just have a space where you clearly lay out determinate yes or no
whether this system has this momentum and that position. You can't make a collection of these outcomes for mutually incompatible observables in this way. And this is perfectly fine. This is a feature that one would expect at the level of possibility, because again, possibilities are not determinate outcomes.
While you have, it's a feature of these possibilities that when a system can be said to, you know, has been, say, set up or prepared in some determinate state of momentum, it really does not have a determinate position. And this is simply because in the transactional approach, we would say, well, it hasn't transacted. If it hasn't transacted, if it's clearly got a momentum,
It hasn't engaged in a determinate kind of measurement interaction that would create an event. And we always end up sort of specifying events with space-time parameters, but again these are all frame dependent. So it's just a fact, it's the way these possibilities work that by definition if you have a determinate momentum,
You are behind the scenes. You have not engaged in a particular transaction that would actualize a space-time event. So it's kind of a natural outcome. There's no reason to expect that a system, a quantum system that is existing at this level of possibility should be a space-time object.
right? The expectation that we want things to be non-contextual or the surprising effect on us of the Koch and Specker theorem is that it contradicts our desire that everything seemed to be having a determinate momentum and position because that's kind of what it looks like at the macroscopic level. But in fact, at the quantum level, that's not the case.
So speaking about these possibilities and they have probabilities associated with them, do you have a philosophy as to what these probabilities mean? Like there are different approaches, frequentists, propensity, Bayesian. What are these probabilities exactly?
I mean, I would call these propensities the kinds of probabilities that we get from the Born Rule that comes out of the transactional formulation. I think the most natural way to interpret them is as propensities for actualization. They're weights, if you will. So you can kind of see it as a weighted symmetry breaking, that there has to be something
Something in deterministic that's happening to actualize one one outcome over others but but that that's weighted so that it's not it's not always equal probabilities.
And the Bourne rule, is that able to be derived from something more fundamental or is it assumed? Oh, no, exactly. It is derived. It comes right out of the physics of the direct action theory. And so that's what I've shown in papers and in my books. And the most recent one is the Cambridge second edition that came out in 2022 called the transactional interpretation of quantum mechanics. It's subtitled a relativistic treatment.
So that version has updates on the relativistic development, but it also does go through where you get the Born rule from the transactional picture. So that also I think is one of the selling points of the transactional formulation is that the Born rule is derived from it rather than just Max Born. I mean, it's kind of funny how in a paper in 1930, he originally talked about wave functions as probabilistic
Descriptions but he realized that the the amplitude that's just an amplitude. It doesn't behave like a probability It's complex and so on and he said well to get the right mathematical behavior. You need to square this thing So that's how we got the born rule. It was totally ad hoc I mean obviously smart idea but it was it was an ad hoc look this the amplitude isn't giving me the right kind of number So I better square it and then I'll get the right kind of number
So we can do better than that in the transactional formulation. To you, what makes something ad hoc? Because some people may hear backward traveling waves, even though you have some issues with that, or they'll hear handshakes and they may see that as, oh, that's ad hoc. So what makes something ad hoc? Well, there's no theoretical basis for it. You have to help yourself to it in order to get things to come out
According to the empirical observations, a prime example is the Ptolemaic geocentric model of the solar system. The epicycles, those are ad hoc. He had stuff that was
Okay, everything's going around the earth. Oh, I've got this stuff. Why is that planet going backwards? It looked like it was going backwards. I will see how you know, how can I it's a bandaid. How can I patch up my theory? It's basically saying this is kind of an anomaly for my theories having trouble explaining this. I better come up with a bandaid to patch that up. That's kind of what it is. I mean, and some people might
You have to be careful because you know if some people might say well backward stuff is ad hoc well if they don't know what the theory is they don't have any basis for judging whether something is ad hoc or not so you have to know what you're working with what is the theoretical model. What are the phenomena can the theoretical does the theoretical model predict these phenomena if so there's nothing ad hoc about the theoretical model.
It becomes ad hoc when a theoretical model is failing. It has a gap or is saying something different than what you see and you want to keep your model. You start band-aiding. You start patching it up. Those are ad hoc things or when you'd have no model and you just say, uh, you know, and that that's kind of what the born rule was. It, it, it works, but there was no theory behind it.
Ruth, what was the most difficult decision you made during your career? Oh, probably to switch from physics to philosophy.
I got into physics because I thought electromagnetism was magic. I was just enchanted by it. I was enchanted by light and the fact that back when I was a child that you could have a prism and see white light being broken up into colors. I was enchanted. I was enchanted by physics. It's also in my family. I have a lot of family members who are physicists.
When I went into physics at the graduate level at the University of Maryland and came across the EPR, the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen thought experiment and so on, and the nonlocality, that's when I became really fascinated with these puzzles, with the paradoxes of quantum theory. And it was at that point after I got my masters that I decided I really wanted to pursue that kind of examination. And I learned that they were doing that in the philosophy department.
Now, I guess a meta question. Was that decision yours to make under your framework? Is there free will?
Oh, yes. Um, yeah, I mean, I think, and I've argued, I have a couple of papers on this and I addressed it in my books that, that I, well, I mean, free will, we have constrained will where we're not completely free, but, but there are live choices there. I believe there are live choices. And I've also argued that, that there is no sense in which physics rules that out. I mean, it's very common for physicists to issue these edicts, uh, you know, that say physics says we do not have free will. And that's very much incorrect.
It's, it's those kinds of judgments are made based on certain interpretations of the physics and certain unnecessary kinds of, of metaphysical presuppositions that people bring into it that they may not be aware they have. So yeah, the physics definitely allows room for there to be real life choices. And in fact, I've argued that that's quantum quantum theory actually suggests that, that that's what's happening in nature.
Okay, so I assume what you're referring to is libertarian free will. Am I correct? Yeah, I mean, I don't necessarily go along with all the traditions of that of that approach. But, you know, I think there's there's physics leaves room for there to be
Unpredetermined choices on the part of agents. Now what counts as an agent is a huge question, you know, that physics may or may not have anything to say about, but physical theory definitely allows for, uh, you know, I mean, even Heisenberg talked about photons making choices when deciding whether to go through a polar ice or not. So, so there's room in physics for, for that, for, for live choices.
If the transactional formulation doesn't care or doesn't make claims about observers and observers are tied to consciousness and consciousness is tied to free will, which feel free to dispel any of those claims that I just made, then I find it difficult to see how TI can have something to say about free will in a libertarian sense, because it sounds to me like it would just be probabilistic.
And if it's just probabilistic, I don't see where the choice is if it's already given to by the Born Rule. Unless it's non-deterministic where the probability distribution is not known. No, the probability distribution is given by the Born Rule. I mean, I would never say that the transactional formulation has anything to say about free will. This is just me talking, you know, that kind of
given like suppose i think that nature does behave this way i happen to think it does i mean if somebody's found something terribly wrong with this i would you know i'd rethink that i re-examine that but you know if nature really does work it you know in a way according to this direct action theory of fields that in itself is a different subject from free will all it does all it does is say physics won't forbid it
That's the most that i can say if if this physical theory is genuinely indeterministic. Then it leaves room for there to be some theory of free will. It doesn't tell you there is or isn't it you know it just leaves room for it which is opposite from you know many physicists will say physics tells you don't have free will.
I really don't think that's a fair thing to say, right? So that's it's delimited in that way. I mean, me just speculating, I obviously consciousness, I mean, personally in my own views, I do think that
That you're going to have trouble accounting for consciousness if you're materialistic and if you assume the Cartesian dualism type thing or if you assume that physical matter is as Descartes envisioned it, which means it's dead. It's by definition non-sentient, then you've got the hard problem and you're not going to get consciousness out of that. So that's my view and I think that consciousness is something that's much more fundamental than any physical theory.
Interesting. So you think what lies underneath the iceberg of the iceberg is consciousness or perhaps it's the ocean? Well, um, yeah, I really think so. I mean, I just in a purely logical sense, folks, if you're going to say that the building blocks of nature are dead and non-sentient, then forget it. You're not getting consciousness out of that end of story.
So I'm just to be logically consistent with myself. I am forced into a posture of saying that consciousness must be in there at the basis of everything. Hmm. It just on a logical basis. I mean, you know, by the hard problem, there's only a hard problem.
There's only a problem, a hard problem, if you assume that everything's dead. Physics doesn't need to postulate that matter is dead. Why do that? There's no reason to. It's unnecessary. It's just a metaphysical choice that's optional. In my opinion. It seems like it. I can say,
There's matter that described physics deals with something we call matter. I'm not going to add to that. That has to be dead. Why would I do that? That's stupid. You know, like why do that? I don't, I mean, that's just an assumption. That's dead. Why do we have to assume physics describes dead stuff? You don't have to. There's no reason or, or non sentient. I'm going to define matter as non sentient. Why?
Nobody put a gun to your head, you didn't have to do that. To me, it's kind of hubristic to say, okay, you don't know what life is, you don't know what consciousness is. So that doesn't mean you have to forbid it from being part of your theory. Just say your theory doesn't have anything to say about it. Maybe later it will. That's my position is don't foreclose possibilities if you don't have to.
Would you say that rivers or rock or snow or H2O or carbon dioxide have experiential elements to them or that they're conscious? I don't know. I mean, I can't I can't assert that.
but it's, I mean, like Heisenberg himself said that the photon is making a choice whether to go through the polarizer. So maybe they do. I mean, you know, again, that's, that's a question of at what level could you say something begins to be like self-conscious or begins to be deliberative and it, you know, I don't know, you know, who knows that I don't purport to have those answers, but certainly that, you know, the indigenous traditions thought so, you know, and people might say, well, they weren't scientific. Well,
Maybe they were, but in a different way. So, I mean, people have have traditions that that kind of take that for granted. And of course, those kinds of traditions are usually are usually, you know, dismissed by by the Western approach. But, you know, maybe we need to be a little more open minded. I mean, we still have to be physically rigorous. And I started out on this exploration being very much, you know, like a Sam Harris
What changed you? That it's logically inconsistent. That's the main thing. You can't get consciousness if you preclude it from the outset.
I happen to be a philosopher and I happen to be interested in various spiritual traditions and I'm a yoga teacher so I know something about Indian philosophy and I've come to respect other traditions and other ways of knowing as having some insight and having approaches to knowledge that maybe are not
Within the kind of Western usual scientific paradigm and, and along with its, it's sort of constraints, but, but I've come to respect the, you know, the, some of the wisdom of those traditions. So while I would never try to mix them, you know, I don't, I don't, I think there are different ways of knowing and I try to be scientifically rigorous. And when I'm working with physics, I don't postulate stuff that I don't think I is warranted.
And I try to be logically consistent and and try to see where the theory leads me. But, you know, when it comes to things like consciousness and life, if physics needs to be a little bit more modest and needs to understand what's within its domain of of accountability and what isn't. What it can explain and what maybe what it can't and that it shouldn't that
Scientific inquiry doesn't need to be constrained and circumscribed by optional metaphysical premises that maybe were useful as kind of training wheels. I think of them as kind of training wheels, you know, that sort of mechanistic approach that led to Newtonian mechanics and so on. But at some point, maybe you need to like recognize what's your what's on your bike. What's your bike that's really going to get you places and what are training wheels that are holding you back? And I think that's where we are now.
with the mechanistic way of looking at things. Do you think that we're being held back from further physical inquiry? Is that what this bicycle, this, the tricycle being too slow metaphor is talking about? Or is it something like spiritual advancement that is holding us back from? Well, I mean, really in terms of physics, we're being held back, I think from some, from progress in solving a lot of these problems. Um,
by physicists not really wanting to consider this direct action picture, this transactional formulation, because it violates their training wheels, because it violates this kind of mechanical forward, always forward directed space time is the entire domain of what's physically real. Those kinds of presuppositions
It challenges those and I think of those as the training wheels in the field of physics. And I mean, again, as our publications show, we already have presented solutions to problems that you'll see people, you know, I see papers constantly come out and say, measurement remains enigmatic in quantum theory. Nobody knows what a measurement is. And I'm like, well, I've been telling you what it is since 2012, you know, and Kramer did 1986. So this is,
That it's bouncing off, that the answers are there and they're bouncing off because the conventional approach is still I want my training wheels because the price for accepting these kinds of solutions is you got to let go of your training wheels and you have to let go of your demand for what you call locality, your demand for determinism and mechanical explanations. And those are the training wheels. If you let go of those, you have answers to these problems.
We've got the publications. We've got the answer to reconciling the quantum level with relativistic level. It's out there. You know, so when people say this on, we've still got this problem, this unsolved problem of how to reconcile quantum theory with relativity. Well, read the, the, the, uh, physics communications paper that we've put out in 2024. You know, the answer is out there.
So it's a question of seeing it, you know, seeing the that there's an answer and maybe maybe you don't want to see it because you don't you don't want to lose your training wheels. Do you believe that the primary reason for physicists not taking, say, the transactional formulation seriously is because of their recalcitrance or their ignorance and that if only they would read it and and not be so blinded by their preconceived
Notions that they would be accepting of it or do you see that actually there are some substantive issues or challenges that remain with it? Because even when I speak to people like Penrose or to Avshalom or almost anyone who has their own formulation of quantum mechanics, they'll say something similar like Penrose may say, well, we have this conception that there's computability at the forefront of the brain. If only we would get rid of that and we would understand that consciousness
is what collapses or what is produced by the collapse of the wave function then then if only physicists would take that seriously or off Shalom with if only physicists would see that there is something actually unique about the now and it's not a block time etc etc so almost each person will say if only physicists would so-and-so remove their their prejudice and so I'm just curious what you think
Yeah. Well, I do think, I do think that, you know, I wouldn't call it ignorance, but I mean, you know, it took the heliocentric, the Copernicus heliocentric model 200 years to be accepted. You know, it's, we have to be patient, I think, for progress. Is it because again, we, you know, there's a certain tradition and traditions are valuable
They provide structure, they do yield progress, but then they can become constraining and it's a slow process for people, you know, in as a community to start to get a little distance, get a little distance from metaphysical conditions and see what they are first. What are my metaphysical assumptions that I'm bringing to this?
Do I really need these? Are these things that are maybe not necessary? And to have the option of letting go of it, you first have to see that it's not necessary. So, you know, it's a gradual process. For those other, you know, obviously those are alternative approaches, but their interpretations, well, I mean, Penrose has a certain kind of a collapse formulation.
His approach is actually empirically distinguishable from the conventional theory, so he has a different mechanism for collapse. But anyone, again, it's true that anyone who's challenging a prevailing conventional approach has to be patient.
Because it is, it is a, you know, a process of people deciding, people becoming, choosing to become aware of what am I bringing to this? Do I need to bring this in? Do I need my, this expectation to be an imposition on what's the theory could be? Or maybe my expectation is optional and maybe nature has a different way of behaving. So it's a gradual process and you have to be patient.
What are the parts of TI that you're working on? Like, what are the holes that currently exist? And sure, they can be patched up, but where do you see its shortcomings? Well, currently, I'm not finding any holes in the sense that it's failing to account for X. You know, I'm not finding holes.
What remains to be done is to elaborate the consequences of the predictions of the model. And that's very much, I'm getting some help from some colleagues of mine, Andreas Schlatter, who's working on the general relativity aspects, and a new collaborator whose name I won't mention yet because he's maybe not
You know not fully on working on it yet but but i've gotten some very promising communications from someone who's working on the quantum field theory and so it's mainly elaborating the consequences and i'm you know i'm frankly i'm not seeing any holes in a sense of it's falling short of accounting for x.
And I, and I haven't gotten that. I haven't gotten any such criticisms. When, when I get criticisms, what I always find is that they're working with like an earlier version of the model that, that hasn't, they haven't updated themselves, that the critics are not updated to the latest work and they are not having done their homework, so to speak. So I have not gotten any, any criticism for someone who's actually read the material saying, well, you can't explain X. I haven't gotten anything like that.
Going back to holes, not with the TI, but with the physicalism, the response from someone like a Neil deGrasse Tyson to saying that, well, consciousness may be at the basis and physics doesn't explain everything. He may say something like, OK, well, look, if we take a look at psychology, then that becomes neurology, which becomes chemistry or biochemistry, which becomes chemistry, which becomes physics.
What point of this conversion is there a failure that you can point at if you can find a point to which one of the layers doesn't emerge from the previous one? Well, you'd win a Nobel Prize like find show me where the laws of physics fail. So what do you say to that? Well, the laws of physics fail right away again on the hard problem if by if Neil deGrasse Tyson assumes that matter is non sentient. If if I don't know.
I mean, if in other words, if you want to be what they call materialist, yeah, he claimed to be a materialist when he's already failed on the hard problem. Okay. You know, and, and this, you can see that in his, his desire to reduce internal conscious experience to neurons, neurons presumed to be made of dead non-sentient matter.
That is an optional metaphysical choice that in his mind he sees as mandatory and he wants to impose on everyone else and pass negative judgment on them if they don't do what he does. So much as I admire him, his accomplishments, that's a form of hubris in being reductionist in that way and it's just kind of a casual, naive approach to these really nuanced, subtle problems
Where he doesn't, he hasn't even figured out that he's already failed on the hard problem. So this is what you often get with physicists, materialist, physicalist, kind of dabbling. If you pardon the expression is being a little pejorative in, in these, in these issues where they don't even notice where they're contradicting themselves. And it's kind of embarrassing. Now, if you had to give a single
killer app like a single great feature of the transactional approach that there are researchers who are watching just so you know they're professors of physics and computer science and mathematics and so on who watch and then there are also young researchers who want to get into the field they're listening and they want to know okay what would it be that if I was to play them this the next five minutes or the next three minutes what would it be what would be the killer app that would
make your approach superior to
Have a have a new product a new spinoff that the old paradigm did not predict new something new we want something new you know like my nephew drew who does amazing you know virtual reality apps and he's he's brilliant no i'm sorry folks all this gets you is a solution to the measurement problem.
It gets you the reconciliation of quantum theory with general relativity. It gets you, you know, a quantum theory of gravity from a direction that maybe you weren't expecting and maybe you don't even want, but it's the solution to many purported problems. And so that's, that's the killer app that it gets you, you know, that, that we need to remember that the conventional physics that people are working with.
It fails to tell you why you ever got a measurement outcome. It fails to do that. And so that's what this will get you.
It gets you consistency. It gets you a physically consistent theory that doesn't founder on such thought experiments as the Wigner's friend experiment, the Frasherger-Renner inconsistencies. It gets you theoretical consistency and it gets you reconciliation among these different levels of the theory. So I think that's quite a lot. Maybe not a killer app, but it solves a lot of problems that people say they're concerned about.
So in other words, you're saying, forget killer app, I'm going to give you the whole phone for which all the other apps are based. I think so. I think so. You know, and it's like, well, it often it's like, well, we don't want that phone because you're saying, you know, you're saying that space time is not the delimiter of everything real. And we can't, you know, that bothers us. I'm like, well, you know, I'm sure the heliocentric theory really bothered the church really bothered a lot of people who
Had been brought up to believe that. And I understand that I am sympathetic to it, but you know, this, this is a solution and people who want to, you know, want solutions and are willing to think about what training wheels they might be working with. They might not recognize as, as what they thought were important theoretical, you know, square one ground rules.
and actually unnecessary constraints that you don't need to be working with. How can we generalize or how can you generalize the transactional approach to address open quantum systems where density operators evolve according to Lindblad type master equations? Oh, absolutely. I mean, it's completely general. So, I mean, any kind of, you know, it's not at all restricted to closed systems. I mean, it's a completely general approach. So,
You know Lindblad equations and master equations a diffusion type equations if that if I understand correctly that that yeah. In fact, I've written about how that's in my book. My my CUP 2022 book about how we get you know master equations make a lot more sense in the transactional picture because once again, you know within thermodynamics when you're dealing with a master equation that that's telling you about equilibrium conditions and approach to equilibrium.
You actually have to do a little fudging and help yourself to a probabilistic description when conventional theory, the conventional quantum theory will not let you do that or it won't let, I mean, it won't give you any reason to do it. So that's where there's like, um, well, we'll just wave our hands and we'll say, well, we think we have probabilities now, and now we will use our master equations. So in the transactional approach, you, you don't have to wave your hands over that. You clearly have real physics that tells you why you get master equations.
What is the Afshar experiment? Oh, okay. So the Afshar experiment was a clever way of, of, uh, looking like it was measuring two non-commuting observables in the same experiment and thereby, you know, violating, you know, kind of violate any uncertainty principle or at least
the bores notion of complementarity and it wasn't doing that at all like what so what i mean again it's fine to do experiments and it was a lovely experiment what we what we where we get into trouble is
is talking about the implications of experimental results and the bearing of the experiment. And here's where I think Afshar went a little too far in his interpretation. And what I've written about, and I can give those that reference if people want is that we had, we had a measurement of the, you know, formally equivalent to have it preparing a particle say up along X.
Measuring it again and say, yeah, it's up along X and then measuring it along Z and getting some answer. That's all it was. So it was, there was nothing, you know, it looks more impressive when you do it in the, in the kind of, you know, position basis and so on. But all it is was, um, you know, a preparation, a confirmation of the prepared state, and then a measurement in a, of, of a non-commuting observable. And that's all it was.
So, you know, it's fine to do experiments and where you get into trouble is making claims about what the experiment showed you. When those claims aren't necessarily supported by the experiment itself. Now, I have one last question from the creator of formscapes, which is a YouTube channel. I'll put the link on screen and in the description.
He says, I assume the topic of reverse causation is going to come up. So I'd like to suggest a question. How does Ruth feel about the possibility of interpreting these phenomena as indicating that separate entities are already interconnected by default rather than interpreting them as indicative of reverse causation? Well, yeah, I mean, I think at a subtle level that that's a good way to look at it, that that these apparently separate entities, I mean, certainly if they are charged
Particles they are always connected in the direct action picture by the time symmetric propagator by so-called virtual photons and so they are always connected in nets and in that sense are never truly separate.
so so i personally think you know i mean i'm not sure that what the what the questioner has fully in mind but certainly at a basic level you know at a superficial level i prefer to think of of the phenomena that we see as coming out of these
These connectedness, this connectedness that exists already at the level of possibility that is physically real and that and that the emergent phenomena are coming out of that rather than, you know, rather than saying that things are literally going backward in time, because I just don't think the physics gives you that. What advice do you have to the younger generation? And I should say that when I say younger generation,
There are also people who are in their 50s in their 60s and 70s. And actually there's someone who is in their 80s who is just getting their PhD emailing me. So I just mean people who are not done with their research. Wonderful. Well, I would just say, you know, do a lot of introspection. You know, try to when you're looking at theories and when you're looking at presentations of ideas,
Try to be a critical thinker and to kind of examine for yourself what are my expectations of nature are am i possibly imposing something on nature that nature might not be doing you know and i just always tell myself nature is the final arbiter.
I have to be obedient. I have to think of myself as a student of nature rather than, you know, imposing my preferred metaphysical view on nature. And really that's a lesson that we get from Heisenberg going back to when he came up with quantum theory is that is what he did. What I kind of think of as Zen beginner's mind, it's good advice. It's like go back to be teachable. Let the phenomena be your data.
and let possible theories just be ways to create relationships among the data that that might might turn out to be to work for you to to be corroborated and if they are corroborated to me that suggests that they have some physical relevance and again it's because it's kind of a realist approach but it it's let let the data and let
Let nature teach you what it might be doing rather than take things like, well, we must impose causality on our theory. We must impose symmetry on our theory, you know, which is, which is an approach that, that has become traditional in physics. And those I call the training wheels, you know, maybe we need them, maybe they're not, but that's the thing to look for is, is, you know, while you're learning, be a student of nature and, and just be alert to not put constraints on nature that nature doesn't really have.
Thank you so much. I appreciate the time that you've spent with me. It's now yeah, two hours, two and a half. Always a pleasure. Wonderful. Thank you for the opportunity. I love the chat. And I just want to say that I respect people who get their PhDs when they're older, because one of the worst things you can do is concretize your your worldview, your belt on showing as I say, when you're in your 20s, which is what most people do. If you ask almost any one of the
Famous physicists, what is it that you believe? And then you and they're 60, they're 70 now. And you asked them that when they were in their late 20s. It's approximately the same in terms of ontology. Yeah, it's good to try to be flexible and and and, you know, be a lifelong learner. And often that is hard. When you when you get your PhD very young, I got mine, I guess it was about 36 or something.
So I had done a lot of different things and you get to explore before diving. Absolutely. Absolutely. And even when you do that, you need, you always need to be wary of, of, of things that are passed on as yes, this is, this is the way it's done. And, and, you know, go, okay, well maybe the reason you still have problems is because that's the way it's being done, you know, rather than just be fault, be obedient and you have to be disobedient sometimes.
I mean, Einstein was in a patent office, right? Sometimes you just have to go off the beaten path to find the solutions and to really find understanding. Ruth, it's been a pleasure.
thank you so much well thank you so much for the opportunity really really enjoyed it thank you for a great question i also wanted to take time to thank people who have joined as a youtube member someone who's been here for 13 months over a year is mike clark thank you thank you to dima thank you to alan thank you to neil thank you to charles matthew thank you to ike thank you to a underscore mb thank you to eric weinstein you've been a member for six months thank you
Thank you to Dr. Y. You've been here for five months. Thank you to Yuri. Thank you, Eric Green. Thank you, Mike. Thank you, Unreal. Thank you, Nicholas. You've been here for four months. Thank you, Carlo Rovelli. You've been here for three months.
Thank you to David, thank you to William, thank you to Richard, Ether Topo, to Cosmic Felon, great name, thank you to Emmy Johnson, thank you to Peter Kellner for two months, Immanuel, Borko, Ianis, thank you Nut, thank you Human Intelligence, thank you Mark, thank you Doc, thank you Adam, thank you Met Mit, you've been here for one month, thank you Argentine, Beth, Emery, Casey, Sigmund Freud, thank you Terry Bollinger, I appreciate you, I know you comment all the time,
New update! Started a sub stack. Writings on there are currently about language and ill-defined concepts as well as some other mathematical details.
Much more being written there. This is content that isn't anywhere else. It's not on theories of everything. It's not on Patreon. Also, full transcripts will be placed there at some point in the future. Several people ask me, hey, Kurt, you've spoken to so many people in the fields of theoretical physics, philosophy and consciousness. What are your thoughts? While I remain impartial in interviews, this substack is a way to peer into my present deliberations on these topics. Also,
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▶ View Full JSON Data (Word-Level Timestamps)
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"text": " As an anomaly, measurement outcomes fail to be predicted by the conventional theory."
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"text": " I met with physicist turned philosopher Ruth Kastner, who developed a formulation that claims to solve not just the measurement problem, but also retro-causality, non-locality, and the unification of quantum theory with gravity. Her transactional formulation, which builds on Kramer's work, asserts that space-time itself is not fundamental, but emerges from what she calls the quantum substratum, not a realm of probability."
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"text": " but a realm of possibility. Questions we explore are what's the role of retro causality in quantum mechanics, also known as time travel? Does consciousness play a role at all? What about free will? And can you make gravity consonant with quantum theory without so-called quantum gravity?"
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"text": " Ruth, I'd like you to paint a clear picture of what the motivation is behind the transactional interpretation, especially its so-called retro causality. And the way that I'd like you to do this is to pick some standard account in quantum mechanics or quantum field theory, discuss why this standard account seems to make sense to most physicists, then explain why it doesn't actually make sense and then explain why the transactional interpretation fixes or resolves these problems. Sure."
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"text": " Okay, so what got me interested in the transactional interpretation is basically my dissatisfaction with the conventional theory's inability to describe what counts as a measurement. And this is of course the measurement problem."
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"text": " Of this of the conventional theory so the problem with the conventional theory is that it does not have any any kind of tools or anything in the formalism that lets you distinguish between just a kind of an interaction that would not trigger an outcome and a kind of interaction that counts as a measurement."
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"text": " So, so the theory itself, the conventional theory just doesn't have anything that lets you say that a measurement occurred and an outcome happened. So what, what TI does is, and I can get to that in a little, in a little while, but, but it remedies that. And just to kind of, so to, to elaborate on the measurement problem, I mean, it's illustrated by the, the Schrodinger cat experiment."
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"text": " And this was actually a thought experiment that Schrodinger came up with because he was dissatisfied with the, um, the standard theories and ability to, to explain what counts as a measurement. So the, the basic, um, the Schrodinger cat, you know, experiment that people are so familiar with, but that maybe perhaps don't quite understand the, the, the point of it, the, the import of it is, is what is called a reductio ad absurdum."
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"text": " starts with an unstable atom, which is a quantum system that you can represent as being in a superposition of alive, of, of, uh, having decayed and having not decayed. So at some point, you know, at some time this thing's going to send out a little decay particle from its nucleus, but it's, its description is a superposition of having decayed, having not yet decayed. So the standard theory, all it lets you do is create correlations."
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"text": " Between states so so if you bring in a Geiger counter like you want to measure well has it decayed yet use a Geiger counter but according to the conventional theory the Geiger counter has to be described by states that will then be linked up with the superposition of these two states of the atom and you can I kind of think of it as a as Adam having like to train engines there the"
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"text": " the having decayed train engine, the undecayed train engine, which is like a superposition of states. So when you bring along the Geiger counter, if it's going to be correlated with these states, it then has to acquire these two states corresponding to that atom, which are"
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"text": " Triggered geiger counter and untriggered geiger counter so you've got already a situation where the theory doesn't tell you that a measurement happen it just creates a superposition. A larger superposition of the shuttle trains and all that happens in the conventional series you keep adding train cars."
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"text": " So if i want to say so this is what short anger kind of exploited and he said well. Okay then when i get bigger and bigger you know i'm still going to be getting just states that are like train cars so for instance okay i don't know i would take a take a cat and see what happens when i link up a cat with all the stuff and and we're gonna do in order to affect the cat i'm gonna say there's a there's a file he said poison gas but i'm gonna say sleeping potion."
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"text": " Sure so there's a vial of sleeping potion that can be just attached as a train car to these states so if the Geiger counter is triggered then supposedly that gets a little hammer to smash this vial and so the vial is broken releases the gas so we've got broken vial that is now correlated with the decayed atom but then we've got an unbroken vial state"
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"text": " That is correlated with the, uh, undecayed Adam. And then we've, then we've got to bring it in a cat. It's the cat is just another train car, according to the conventional theory. So on one hand, the cat is asleep. On the other hand, the cat is, is awake. And again, you've just got a superposition of trains and you supposedly got a cat."
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"text": " in a you know suspended between awake and asleep and we never see that and so it's an illustration that you can't get a measurement outcome from the standard theory so what the transaction interpretation does is you know in a nutshell and we can elaborate. Is it uses a different theory of the way fields behave."
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"text": " so that um and this is you know it's kind of seems radical but this this theory is called has various names it's been called the the wheeler Feynman absorber theory it's been called the direct action theory of fields and it actually involves um not just any mission you know the conventional"
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"text": " way of looking at field propagation sees things like something generating a field, something radiating that's understood. But what happens in this direct action theory of fields is that under certain well-quantified circumstances, the other systems that we think of as absorbers, potential absorbers,"
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"text": " are active and they are actually generating a field that corresponds in a way to the emitted field from emitters. And this field has a strange character in that it's a so-called advanced field, meaning that it's past directed. But when you look at the formalism of the way the fields behave in this theory, you get actually a very nice formal correspondence"
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"text": " with certain kinds of, I mean, long story short, you get what's called a transaction so that you get not just a field being emitted, but a confirmation, what John Kramer, who was the originator of the interpretation, called a confirmation wave. And you actually get this kind of connection, this interaction that clearly defines that a measurement is occurring, that it has the formal character that a measurement is occurring and it breaks these superpositions"
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"text": " And it gives you the kind of formal objects that we call projection operators that correspond to outcomes to clearly achieved outcomes. But they each have a probability, and that probability turns out to correspond to the so-called Born Rule. So it very nicely yields a way that"
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"text": " Under certain clearly quantified conditions, you are overwhelmingly likely to get this kind of confirmation and together with this offer wave confirmation wave and you get a transition from the suspension in a superposition to a state where we have some clearly defined outcomes."
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"text": " And then they, they will not all happen, but they are clearly distinct from just a superposition. They're distinct theoretical objects. And then you can talk about, well, maybe symmetry breaking, you know, you could say, well, the theory will not tell you which one of those is actualized, but it does tell you that, that indeed a measurement interaction occurred so that, you know, you can say that I now know I can now say under what conditions I get a measurement interaction."
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"text": " So that's what I like about it. So is the measurement problem twofold? One, what counts as a measurement? And then two, why is it probabilistic? Are those two separate questions? You could say that. I mean, there are different ways of characterizing the so-called measurement problem or the measurement, what counts as a measurement and the different features of it. Von Neumann kind of,"
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"text": " Kind of pointed to two stages of measurement, which I kind of had covered just now, but to make them more precise. The initial stage of measurement is the transition from this superposition state to this state of clearly defined, you know, different possible probabilistic outcomes. And that's called a mixed state."
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"text": " Um, so there's that transition and then there's what we could call the second stage would be what we could call a collapse from that collection of, of possible outcomes, weighted outcomes to the one outcome that we see. So you can think of it as two stages in that way, but, but the, the two stages correspond to, I think roughly what you just said, you know, that, that the first stage corresponds to, okay, now I can say that a measurement really happened."
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"text": " That that I can now use to to apply my born rule to the probability probabilities of these different outcomes but but then you know again the theory won't tell you well why did I get this one and not the other one."
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"text": " but that's because the theory is genuinely indeterministic. It's genuinely probabilistic, which is puzzling. You know, we'd like to, you know, our Western conventions are that, that science has traditionally demanded kind of a causal mechanistic deterministic account from point a to point B and that the idea being that if you don't have that, that there's something missing in your explanation. But what I mean, I think what a lot of people are now"
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"text": " Can you"
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"text": " Give another account or another picture. Like, let's say we have an electron and there's a Feynman diagram, an electron coming here and then here and they emit a so-called virtual photon and then they move apart. What does that look like in the transactional interpretation? You mentioned absorbers, offers, emitters, confirmations. So what is offering? What is confirming? Is it? Is there a clear distinction? Is it the electron? Is it something more fundamental? Explain. Sure."
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"text": " Sure so actually in a fine diagram you know what you kind of referred to there is really a kind of a scattering process."
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"text": " that does not correspond to the offers and confirmations. So this is a subtler relativistic level where, you know, when you've got, you know, two electrons coming in and connected by this virtual photon and then going out, that's actually just one term in the, you know, so-called perturbation expansion. So there are many contributions in many ways that the field interacts."
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"text": " But at that level, these are virtual photons. So the key point is a virtual photon is kind of a way of referring to the aspect of the direct action theory that is, you know, for physicists watching, it's the time symmetric propagator. So that is not an offer or a confirmation. It's an influence. It's a level of the field interaction that in the, in the direct action theory is always present among charges."
},
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"text": " So really a chart, the term charge just means being connected to other charges with this so-called virtual photon connection. It's not, it's not a measurement. It's not a measurement interaction. It's a correlating type of interaction. So there are two levels. So that's a nice question because it allows us to get to the subtler point that as I've developed the transactional interpretation into the relativistic domain,"
},
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"end_time": 901.527,
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"start_time": 876.766,
"text": " It becomes clear that there are these two levels of the field behavior so that when you have something like free electrons, they do not have a situation where, I mean, if they're totally free electrons, they would not be able to toss a real photon from one electron to another because that would not satisfy the conservation laws."
},
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"text": " So that under that situation, a transaction is just not permitted because it has to satisfy the conservation laws. However, when you have something like an excited atom and then you have an unexcited atom, then you have a situation where they can interact in a way that a real photon could be transferred from the excited atom. It could drop down to a lower energy state and then that ground"
},
{
"end_time": 959.224,
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"start_time": 931.8,
"text": " state atom could receive, could absorb that real photon and pop up to a higher energy state and energy conservation would be satisfied. And under these conditions, you can have a quantitative time dependent probability that these guys are going to engage in a transaction, meaning the excited atom is going to generate an offer wave. The unexcited atom is going to"
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"end_time": 985.794,
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"text": " generate a matching confirmation wave. And this is actually the object that corresponds to a real photon. And upon that kind of interaction, a real photon, which means it's on shell, which means it's truly massless and only transversely polarized, will go from that excited atom to the unexcited atom. And then it will be excited."
},
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"text": " So there are these two possible kinds of interactions. The latter one is a measurement. That's what counts as a measurement. And that's why you don't need to refer to observers. You don't need to say, oh, well, I need to, you know, posit some outside observer to say that something really happened. Some clear outcome event happened because in this picture, the formalism gives you"
},
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"start_time": 1012.807,
"text": " the fact that any mission event occurred at some time T and an absorption event occurred at some time T and these can have observable consequences. Even if no one was around happy to be around to see them. As you know, on theories of everything, we delve into some of the most reality spiraling concepts from theoretical physics and consciousness to AI and emerging technologies to stay informed."
},
{
"end_time": 1051.852,
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"start_time": 1040.555,
"text": " In an ever-evolving landscape, I see The Economist as a wellspring of insightful analysis and in-depth reporting on the various topics we explore here and beyond."
},
{
"end_time": 1076.476,
"index": 44,
"start_time": 1052.295,
"text": " The economist's commitment to rigorous journalism means you get a clear picture of the world's most significant developments, whether it's in scientific innovation or the shifting tectonic plates of global politics. The economist provides comprehensive coverage that goes beyond the headlines. What sets the economist apart is their ability to make complex issues accessible and engaging, much like we strive to do in this podcast."
},
{
"end_time": 1098.217,
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"start_time": 1076.476,
"text": " If you're passionate about expanding your knowledge and gaining a deeper understanding of the forces that shape our world, then I highly recommend subscribing to The Economist. It's an investment into intellectual growth, one that you won't regret. As a listener of Toe, you get a special 20% off discount. Now you can enjoy The Economist and all it has to offer for less."
},
{
"end_time": 1127.125,
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"start_time": 1098.217,
"text": " Head over to their website, www.economist.com slash totoe to get started. Thanks for tuning in. And now back to our explorations of the mysteries of the universe. Even if no one was around, happy to be around to see them. Most of the time when people in the lay public, when they think about quantum mechanics, if they're even thinking about quantum mechanics, they conflate observers with measures. So is that"
},
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"end_time": 1129.377,
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"text": " Okay, are they distinguished in your view?"
},
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"text": " Yes, they are distinguished. They need to be distinguished. You can't really blame the public for doing that because that is something that physicists have been doing since basically von Neumann and maybe earlier. It's just a symptom of this problem with the conventional theory where you cannot define measurement from within the theory. And so then the convention became to just say,"
},
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"text": " I'm gonna just say, okay, when there's some outside observer who comes in, you know, that then then I'm suspending quantum theory and I'm just gonna put in my measurement transition by hand in an ad hoc way. So it's a hand wave to some conscious observer outside the theory where you just, you just cut it. In fact, Heisenberg called it a cut and it's arbitrary."
},
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"text": " in the conventional theory and and people have actually even like use this is like well this is nice i can do stuff with this i'm like no it's just an ad hoc failure thing that you're doing you know because it's a hand wave to what counts as a conscious observer and that's the whole point of the Schrodinger cat experiment tree right because Schrodinger was was dissatisfied with that sort of equating"
},
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"text": " Measurement to observation because he could say, well, isn't the cat conscious? You know, what is it? What counts as something conscious and philosophy has no principled way of saying, you know, that something is one thing is conscious and another thing isn't. So it gets you into this kind of thorny, um, you know, ad hoc hand waving land. And so what I do and what I've done in my books and I do it on my blog, I have a blog post that addresses this at"
},
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"text": " That you know, I think there's one post where I say There there is measurement when you're observing or you know, but not but but you can but not all measurement is Observation, you know measurement in the sense of an outcome happened Right. So the the term is inherently ambiguous and problematic because you know observation sounds anthropomorphic and intentional and so on but"
},
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"end_time": 1299.804,
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"start_time": 1272.654,
"text": " And observation is important in science and of course we do observations and that's important. But the issue about the term measurement in quantum theory is did an outcome occur or didn't it? That's the key. And the conventional theory cannot answer that. You cannot answer that from within the theory. You can never say an outcome occurred. It will not let you say that an outcome occurred if you're being strict about it."
},
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"end_time": 1329.753,
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"text": " So that's what you get. You get outcomes, whether or not someone was there to see it. So like in TI you get, yeah, a tree did fall. I mean, it doesn't need you to be there to help it fall or to, you know, it doesn't need this sort of like, there's almost a hubristic component to it where, you know, oh, we must have someone observing something or it didn't happen, you know, and that gets into anti-realism too. But, but in TI you can say in the, from within the theory,"
},
{
"end_time": 1347.534,
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"start_time": 1330.094,
"text": " that a measurement interaction happened here's why under the under various you know quantified circumstances. Here's where here's where you are overwhelmingly likely to have a measurement transition where you were an outcome will occur whether or not there happens to be somebody there to observe it."
},
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"end_time": 1373.063,
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"start_time": 1350.606,
"text": " So you said that it's likely that there's going to be a measurement transition. So I understand that the measurement itself is not determined, sorry, that the outcomes of the measurements are not determined, but the fact of a measurement is also probabilistic. Correct. And so this corresponds to decay rates in the conventional theory. So one way they link up"
},
{
"end_time": 1402.534,
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"start_time": 1373.302,
"text": " is that in the transactional interpretation, when we are calculating a decay rate by this conventional theory, we're also calc in from the standpoint of TI, the transactional interpretation, we're calculating the probability that at any particular time t a measurement transition will occur. Because in order to get a decay, like I said before, you must have the proper circumstances, but those are probabilistic and"
},
{
"end_time": 1420.828,
"index": 58,
"start_time": 1403.166,
"text": " You know it may or may not happen a particular time t so again that's another that side of a deeper level. Aspect of the probabilistic character of quantum theory having said that however you know for force for situations of ordinary macroscopic experience."
},
{
"end_time": 1443.985,
"index": 59,
"start_time": 1421.561,
"text": " And and the kinds of phenomena you know like every every second of every day we're seeing determinate outcome related type phenomena we see you know we see clearly defined objects around us and this this happens because the probabilities of transactions are so overwhelmingly high for the kinds of energy you know energies involved."
},
{
"end_time": 1471.869,
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"start_time": 1444.36,
"text": " that in any second it's that the probability is 99.9999 and it can go on nearly forever that at any particular time you're going to have a decay, you know, so, so we're at, at this macroscopic level. Yeah, we're going to get transactions and it, but interestingly, if you want to probe, there's a whole zone of the mesoscopic. So, you know, you're dealing with things like bucky balls, which are these very large carbon molecules."
},
{
"end_time": 1502.449,
"index": 61,
"start_time": 1472.705,
"text": " They got like 60 carbon atoms in them. They have a very nice mesoscopic property where, you know, you send them through a two-slit apparatus and about half the time you're going to get measurement transitions just because the thing, you know, it transacted with one of the slits or something. So it has like a 50% probability of engaging in a measurement interaction. And you see that in the data when you work with these things."
},
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"start_time": 1504.667,
"text": " So before I get to some more technical questions, can we outline, or can you outline, please, exactly what is an emission, an offer, a handshake? And you mentioned the photon was the interaction and not an actual emission or an absorption, like disembroil these. Yeah. So an offer wave is a quantum state"
},
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"index": 63,
"start_time": 1531.869,
"text": " I mean, again, just to get a little more technical, because you did mention it earlier, we do need to distinguish between entities that count as emitters and absorbers and these offers and conformations. So the distinction is that entities with rest mass, such as atoms, electrons, so-called fermions,"
},
{
"end_time": 1584.855,
"index": 64,
"start_time": 1558.268,
"text": " These are systems with charge. So systems with charge that have rest mass are capable of, I mean this is just the way the fields work, they interact in this way. And that's according to standard quantum field theory as well. So the interacting fields of the so-called charged fermions and the electromagnetic field give you this"
},
{
"end_time": 1613.029,
"index": 65,
"start_time": 1585.469,
"text": " this potentiality to emit or absorb. But again, the emitters are objects like an atom that what's actually doing the emitting is the electron in the atom. So the only reason it can really generate something like an offer wave is because again, the energy conservation can be fulfilled. But let's assume that's the case. So we have an excited atom."
},
{
"end_time": 1642.91,
"index": 66,
"start_time": 1613.439,
"text": " You can either count the entire atom as the emitter or just the electron within it. The charged electron is actually doing the emitting, but you need that entire bound state to be able to do this. So let's say the electron in the excited atom is emitting. What it is emitting is an offer wave that is a quantum state that corresponds to an excitation of the electromagnetic field. But it's only"
},
{
"end_time": 1672.927,
"index": 67,
"start_time": 1643.49,
"text": " It's only the, this is where we get technical. It's only the sort of the, the forward propagating component of that. So meanwhile, the absorber is generating, uh, what's called an adjoint field, which is a kind of, uh, advanced quantum state, um, that, you know, it's sort of, uh, we've got Kets and we've got a, what I call a BRAC. So they're, they're different formal objects."
},
{
"end_time": 1689.889,
"index": 68,
"start_time": 1673.268,
"text": " but they are independently they are forms of quantum states. So let's just say quantum state of the electromagnetic field. We've got a retarded so-called retarded quantum state of the electromagnetic field, which is the offer wave and we've got the"
},
{
"end_time": 1718.848,
"index": 69,
"start_time": 1690.401,
"text": " the advanced quantum state of the electromagnetic field, which is the confirmation wave. So that's the offer and the confirmation that are generated under these circumstances. Let's say at time t, these were generated because it was overwhelmingly probable that it would happen at that time. So we've got this interaction between these two. And in a sense, you can think of that as the photon"
},
{
"end_time": 1748.49,
"index": 70,
"start_time": 1719.326,
"text": " In a technical level, if you had a bunch of other absorbers around, they too would be contributing an advanced offer wave corresponding to the component of the, an advanced confirmation wave corresponding to the component of the offer wave that they received. So it would kind of split, you know, the offer wave from the emitter would be broken down into many components in general. This is in general what happens."
},
{
"end_time": 1773.49,
"index": 71,
"start_time": 1749.07,
"text": " And so the photon at that level, this goes back to those stages with the first stage where we're going from a pure state to a mixed state. This is in a sense the mixed state for the measurement transition. It's like it's a collection of what I call incipient transactions. Now, none of these incipient transactions is actually a photon."
},
{
"end_time": 1798.951,
"index": 72,
"start_time": 1773.899,
"text": " This is where we get to the collapse stage. When you get to the collapse stage so that one of these is actualized, then that is the actual photon that goes from the emitting excited atom to one of these absorbers. Only that at the final collapse stage is where you get this real photon that is actually triggering outcomes."
},
{
"end_time": 1827.722,
"index": 73,
"start_time": 1799.326,
"text": " Think Verizon, the best 5G network is expensive? Think again. Bring in your AT&T or T-Mobile bill to a Verizon store"
},
{
"end_time": 1852.142,
"index": 74,
"start_time": 1830.913,
"text": " Ever seen an origami version of the Miami Bull? Jokes aside, Verizon has the most ways to save on phones and plants where everyone in the family can choose their own plan and save. So bring in your bill to your local Miami Verizon store today and we'll give you a better deal."
},
{
"end_time": 1880.93,
"index": 75,
"start_time": 1852.295,
"text": " Right. And your papers will be listed on screen and in the description because the rigor is necessary. And so people can go and look that up as well as your books will be on screen and links in the description. So just to be clear, the audience is quite technical. They comprise researchers in physics and philosophy and computer science and so on. So we speak as if we're just in the closed doors of the academy, just speaking to one another and the cameras happen to be here. So"
},
{
"end_time": 1908.319,
"index": 76,
"start_time": 1881.852,
"text": " Okay, when you say advanced waves and when you say retarded waves, are people to imagine that as the same as advanced being forward in time, retarded being backward in time? So yeah, that's a great question because this is how John Kramer, you know, the originator of TI, presented it initially. And this is how it kind of seems like that's the way it has to be because we usually think that"
},
{
"end_time": 1923.387,
"index": 77,
"start_time": 1908.558,
"text": " Everything physical goes on in space time and space time is the mandatory background for everything physically real and it's kind of a supposition that we all bring with us that we've all been kind of talk with all just kind of absorb that."
},
{
"end_time": 1952.5,
"index": 78,
"start_time": 1923.763,
"text": " Speaking of absorption. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We've all kind of been marinated in that. Um, what I've, and I initially kind of assumed that that was what was going on. But as I started to investigate the relativistic level of the, of the formulation, um, I realized that you really can't consistently think of these offers and confirmations as literally get little waves that are going forward in time and backward in time."
},
{
"end_time": 1982.5,
"index": 79,
"start_time": 1953.131,
"text": " For a variety of reasons, I mean, the first is that technically these quantum states, anytime you have a quantum state of more than one quantum system, more than one degree of freedom, you are dealing with a multi-dimensional complex Hilbert space. So these states are not entities that really have a space-time character. They really, their representation"
},
{
"end_time": 1997.79,
"index": 80,
"start_time": 1983.183,
"text": " um, is, is formally mathematically much higher dimensional and complex. So they're just, they're not space time entities. I mean, I think that, you know, people, um, don't,"
},
{
"end_time": 2019.275,
"index": 81,
"start_time": 1998.217,
"text": " You know if you say well where do these confirmations live over these offers and confirmations live than people wanna go you know what they live in in configuration space but that's just a construct and so then that gets us off into instrumentalism about the theory that gets us off into well they don't you know whatever they're not there either not physically real or are."
},
{
"end_time": 2047.892,
"index": 82,
"start_time": 2019.855,
"text": " Or if that seems to create a false dilemma where you either have to say they're not physically real. They're just mathematical constructs that are useful in predicting blah, blah, blah. Or you say, no, if they're physically real, I demand, I want to be realist about the theory. So they've got to be in space time. And then what you do is you falsify their mathematical character and pretend like an object that is a Hilbert space vector."
},
{
"end_time": 2073.524,
"index": 83,
"start_time": 2048.439,
"text": " Propagates in space time. That's that's denying its essential mathematical character. So what I've been supposed suggesting is that we don't have to do any of that. There's a third way. The third way is to simply say that these, these entities are physically real, but our physical reality goes beyond three plus one space time."
},
{
"end_time": 2101.425,
"index": 84,
"start_time": 2074.224,
"text": " And you know, some other physicists are starting to, to be open to that idea. I mean, at first it sounds crazy and people, you know, want to put you, you know, put, get the, bring the guys in the white coats to take you away. You know, when you say stuff like that, but, but it actually is very useful. Um, it's very fruitful as a physical model. And in fact, um, the, the, the utility of it, I mean, what people would call reifying Hilbert space."
},
{
"end_time": 2128.234,
"index": 85,
"start_time": 2101.852,
"text": " is is to say, look guys, you know, the, these can be counted as some kind of physical possibility that is physically real, that does not have its existence in space time, but at a deeper level that I call the quantum substratum. And, and what you can get out of that actually is a nice, um, theory of general relativity that includes the, uh, the corrections for, um, galactic, um,"
},
{
"end_time": 2158.439,
"index": 86,
"start_time": 2128.951,
"text": " You know, rotation curves that are, you know, usually attributed to dark matter. So with a colleague of mine, Andrea Schlatter, we've already worked that out. So we've worked out a theory of emergent space time emerging from the quantum level, taken as real, taken as really involving these real entities propagating at the quantum level and engaging in transactions in such a way that you get an emergent space time that has symmetrical character of"
},
{
"end_time": 2187.568,
"index": 87,
"start_time": 2158.968,
"text": " The bottom line is no, offers and confirmations are not going backward and forward in space-time. They are processes, physically dynamic processes that are taking place at the quantum level. They involve quantum possibilities, if you will."
},
{
"end_time": 2216.988,
"index": 88,
"start_time": 2190.23,
"text": " So two questions. I've noticed that the word entity is being used and I assume carefully and not the word particle or not the word field, like you keep saying entity. So I want you to spell out why. And also I want to know precisely what are the ontological commitments here? Is it that the configuration space is real or is it that the vectors, the Hilbert space is real? Tell me what are you saying is real?"
},
{
"end_time": 2245.538,
"index": 89,
"start_time": 2218.097,
"text": " Well I would never say configuration space is real because that's kind of an idealization of wave functions and I mean wave functions which are basically amplitudes of a quantum state with respect to the position basis. At the relativistic level you don't have a position observable so those are kind of idealizations but what I'm taking as physically real"
},
{
"end_time": 2274.343,
"index": 90,
"start_time": 2246.288,
"text": " are all quantum systems. Quantum systems are physically real. The field, the electromagnetic field is physically real. So I'm taking all that as physically real. I mean, I use the term entity maybe just kind of as a general way to reference a quantum system or a field. It's kind of a catch-all term, if you will."
},
{
"end_time": 2300.23,
"index": 91,
"start_time": 2274.838,
"text": " Um, you, you can, you know, uh, yeah. So these are real physical systems. I, I consider them physically real. I consider them to exist independently of anyone's observing them or knowing about them epistemologically and so on. So they're real. So, so they, they don't exist in space time. So what they're real."
},
{
"end_time": 2325.094,
"index": 92,
"start_time": 2300.486,
"text": " You know i'm just saying though it's it's the ontological commitments are simply i'm just you know it's just i'm realist about quantum theory so in the transactional formulation so that means something like a hydrogen atom. Which can be described by a quantum state. The state is a descriptor of a real physical object."
},
{
"end_time": 2352.807,
"index": 93,
"start_time": 2325.828,
"text": " And so what I'm, what I'm, I'm just being realist about it. So I'm saying the reference of quantum theory exists physically and the fact that they don't happen to fit into space time does not discount the fact that they exist physically. So I'm not real. Like I'm not committed to any particular metaphysical nature of what I call the quantum substratum. You know, you could call me maybe a structural realist."
},
{
"end_time": 2380.401,
"index": 94,
"start_time": 2353.183,
"text": " You know, I'm not going to posit a substance or something like that. I, you know, it's a very bare bones ontology. It's basically just the, the formalism in the transactional formulation, meaning that's, that's the way I think the fields behave. These are real fields. They're really doing that. There's really an influence. There's a physical connection among physically real systems."
},
{
"end_time": 2404.309,
"index": 95,
"start_time": 2380.691,
"text": " So I take it as all physically real and I just basically reject the idea that in order to be physically real you must be a space-time object. Now I like what you said that it's a transactional formulation because it's often said transactional interpretation and abbreviated as TI but interpretation sounds then like you're just interpreting quantum theory differently but it's an actual"
},
{
"end_time": 2432.722,
"index": 96,
"start_time": 2404.923,
"text": " It's different. Yes, and it seems like there's empirical distinguishability. So I would like to ask you about that. Well, OK. Yes, wonderful question. Yeah, I mean, what I've realized as I've developed the relativistic formulation is that, yes, it is a different formulation of quantum theory. It's a subtly different theoretical model simply because the fields behave differently than is assumed in the conventional approach."
},
{
"end_time": 2459.309,
"index": 97,
"start_time": 2433.166,
"text": " As to what was the second part of your question? Oh, I said that there must be some distinguishing factor empirically. Yes, empirically. So the distinguishing factor is that the transactional formulation provides an account of measurement. The empirical phenomena are measurement outcomes."
},
{
"end_time": 2467.739,
"index": 98,
"start_time": 2459.565,
"text": " So the empirical distinction is simply that measurement is an anomaly for the standard approach."
},
{
"end_time": 2495.555,
"index": 99,
"start_time": 2468.336,
"text": " The standard approach is incapable of accounting for measurement. So that's the only empirical distinction. And you know, it's one that corroborates the transactional formulation. So what we have here, this is subtle because, you know, people usually say, well, I want you to, you know, do an experiment, crucial, crucial, you know, and show me a prediction of transaction. You say it's a different theory. So, well, show me, you know, how you've,"
},
{
"end_time": 2523.422,
"index": 100,
"start_time": 2496.152,
"text": " how does it deviate from the standard theory, you know, and so on. That's kind of a misconception. Why? Because many, it's, it's both theories are empirically equivalent at the level of probabilities. So like for the born rule, because the transactional formulation yields the born rule. But what people kind of don't often take into account is the issue of anomalies. So for instance, um,"
},
{
"end_time": 2549.804,
"index": 101,
"start_time": 2523.848,
"text": " You know, back when we had Newton's theory of gravitation, the procession of Mercury was an anomaly. The procession of the orbit of Mercury was an anomaly for Newton's theory. Newton's theory was unable to explain that. So Einstein's relativity came along and was able to empirically predicted the procession of the orbit of Mercury."
},
{
"end_time": 2577.21,
"index": 102,
"start_time": 2550.128,
"text": " This is the same thing that's going on with the transactional formulation. Measurement, it fails to be predicted, measurement outcomes fail to be predicted by the conventional theory. It's an anomaly. The TI formulation comes along and accounts for and predicts measurement interactions. So in that way, it is empirically distinct. This is what is usually missed."
},
{
"end_time": 2604.548,
"index": 103,
"start_time": 2578.353,
"text": " You know what, in these kinds of discussions and the reason it gets missed is because people are, we've all been taught and this isn't me bad mouthing the conventional, you know, people who are working with the conventional theory. It's what they've been taught because the measurement problem has been around for so long that it's become habitual to become instrumentalist about the theory and say, well,"
},
{
"end_time": 2630.64,
"index": 104,
"start_time": 2605.026,
"text": " You know, it just happens. Measurement happens. There's nothing wrong with the theory. You know, it works for all practical purposes. It's a good instrument. And to kind of lapse into that instrumentalist stance and to decide not to hold the conventional theory's feet to the fire on this issue of measurement. If you do that, if you're a good critical thinker and you're a stubborn journalist,"
},
{
"end_time": 2653.541,
"index": 105,
"start_time": 2630.981,
"text": " You know if you treat the conventional theory you know like a politician and say but excuse me sir like what exactly how. Do you get an outcome here you know where's your outcome what is it in the theory that's getting you that outcome sir you know and if they don't call you out of the you know you know so so this is what people have not been doing so this is what you know i've been to the pesky little you know."
},
{
"end_time": 2682.381,
"index": 106,
"start_time": 2654.326,
"text": " Does asking these journalistic questions to the politicians make you popular? No, it doesn't."
},
{
"end_time": 2710.998,
"index": 107,
"start_time": 2682.619,
"text": " You know, but it's fun and it's still, you know, I do get opportunities to engage and they are, you know, people are understandably reluctant. You know, I have sympathy for that because it means going against a lot of what we've been taught. And I went through that same program and perhaps, you know, I perhaps have a degree of liberty to be a little more critical and stubborn and"
},
{
"end_time": 2736.954,
"index": 108,
"start_time": 2711.391,
"text": " Intransigent about it because I primarily work as an independent scholar and I you know, I don't have to You know, I'm basically I made the decision to follow this approach because I thought it was fruitful and it made sense to me and I I chose not to You know be constrained by other concerns and to just follow this where it where it leads. I"
},
{
"end_time": 2766.766,
"index": 109,
"start_time": 2737.961,
"text": " Talk to me about independent scholarship. It seems like there's you, there's Julian Barber and maybe three other people. Why is it so rare? How are you able to do it? And what are the challenges and advantages? Well, yeah, the advantages I just mentioned is, is perhaps a little more degree of independence from, you know, what can turn into group think. And I don't mean that in a, you know, it sounds disparaging, but I've, you know, I understand that, that it's a concern."
},
{
"end_time": 2796.596,
"index": 110,
"start_time": 2767.295,
"text": " And I understand the concerns people have to, you know, that you take risks to buck the trend. So the advantage is that, you know, I'm less constrained by those kinds of influences. Of course, it's challenging in that, you know, financially, I'm kind of on my own. I have to be frugal. I have to work in a very limited budget. When I travel, I can only travel"
},
{
"end_time": 2820.401,
"index": 111,
"start_time": 2796.988,
"text": " I don't have any academic support for travel expenses or anything like that so you know that that that limits my ability to to attend various things and you know and sometimes if you are not i do have an affiliation with the university of maryland"
},
{
"end_time": 2847.142,
"index": 112,
"start_time": 2820.725,
"text": " I don't want to, you know, I don't want to overlook that. And they've been very kind and very supportive. Um, the philosophy department at the university of Maryland to, to offer me that affiliation, which gives me some library, um, resources and so on. And they've done that, um, you know, out of recognition that w that they feel that I'm, that I'm pursuing some interesting ideas. And in fact, I did get, I did happen to receive"
},
{
"end_time": 2872.858,
"index": 113,
"start_time": 2847.773,
"text": " a research award in 2021 from the University of Maryland. So they've, they've been very kind in that way and in the recognition. So thank you. So, um, yeah, I mean, it's just, it does means you've got to be careful about, you know, you gotta be frugal. Um, but you do have perhaps fewer constraints, you know, in terms of, of, uh, what you investigate and how."
},
{
"end_time": 2902.227,
"index": 114,
"start_time": 2875.35,
"text": " So we keep saying the words conventional approach to quantum mechanics, conventional conventional. Are we referring specifically to the Dirac von Neumann axioms or something different? Um, we're actually, when I say that, I mean, um, the conventional view of the way fields propagate, um, which, which is kind of the basis for quantum field theory. Um, it goes back to"
},
{
"end_time": 2930.947,
"index": 115,
"start_time": 2902.961,
"text": " You know, this is something that perhaps isn't formalized because it's just the default assumptions about fields. The default assumptions is that fields are generated unilaterally by emitters. End of story. It's an approach to field propagation and that goes back to, you know, DRAC probably"
},
{
"end_time": 2961.459,
"index": 116,
"start_time": 2931.51,
"text": " Formalize that to some extent and it comes up. I mean people who want to look at well, what is that quantitatively can look into the references on on the the issue of radiation reaction and The the issue of the puzzle in this in the standard approach of how an emitting System loses energy because that's actually hard to account for in the the default unilateral approach"
},
{
"end_time": 2985.555,
"index": 117,
"start_time": 2962.125,
"text": " So if if you know if people want to see what is that quantitatively they can go and see you know how the how the traditional dirac way of of trying to deal with the loss of energy by an emitting charge is to assume that the emitted field is a retarded field only."
},
{
"end_time": 3014.002,
"index": 118,
"start_time": 2986.015,
"text": " and that that is what is radiated and when you do that you actually have trouble saying why the field lost energy and then you have to help yourself to this ambient free field that's just there for no reason so so those are the kinds of you know publications where you're going to go and be able to see the contrast between this this what i call the conventional approach to field propagation and the direct action theory are there axioms of the transactional formulation like the"
},
{
"end_time": 3043.507,
"index": 119,
"start_time": 3014.428,
"text": " Castner-Cramer axioms or something akin to that? Nope, just the direct action theory. All you do is you say what would be happening if the fields were, if nature worked with direct action fields instead of this unilaterally emitted field. And that's all you do. I don't like axiomatizing things. I never like to go, okay, I'm going to postulate this. I never like to postulate stuff. So it's really simply"
},
{
"end_time": 3071.817,
"index": 120,
"start_time": 3043.968,
"text": " uh, incorporating, bringing into the picture a different theory about the way fields are behaving and, and examining the consequences of that. And then the formula formalism just, just falls out of it because in the, in the direct action theory, you naturally get these confirmation waves, these, these advanced states that are already part of the quantum formalism anyway, when you want to construct a projection operator."
},
{
"end_time": 3102.159,
"index": 121,
"start_time": 3072.432,
"text": " A projection operator is an outer product of a so-called offer wave and a so-called confirmation wave, or a ket and a brak. And you get these outer products naturally from the physics of the direct action theory. They just drop right out of it. In the conventional approach, you have to help yourself to it. You have to say, okay, what am I going to represent mathematically by a state that acquires an outcome? Oh, I'm going to describe it by a projection operator."
},
{
"end_time": 3130.776,
"index": 122,
"start_time": 3102.841,
"text": " You just help yourself to that. Whereas they fall out of the physics of the direct action theory. So in 2015, I believe Kramer had an article. Kramer is the progenitor of this theory for those who don't know. And I believe he called your version unnecessarily abstract or something akin to that. Why did he say that? What's the difference between his version and yours?"
},
{
"end_time": 3156.51,
"index": 123,
"start_time": 3131.561,
"text": " Yeah, I mean, I think my formulation or my version is necessarily mathematically accurate. And, you know, I think Professor Kramer very much is part of the tradition of defining the physically real in terms of is it a space-time object? And so he's kind of taken that option of"
},
{
"end_time": 3186.681,
"index": 124,
"start_time": 3157.346,
"text": " Choosing to say that these entities, these field processes are happening in space time because he has that metaphysical desire requirement. So what I'm saying is just drop that and follow the mathematics of the theory in a realist way without reducing the mathematics and trying to project it down and distilling, taking stuff out of it, but leave the content intact."
},
{
"end_time": 3204.445,
"index": 125,
"start_time": 3187.176,
"text": " And let that instruct you as to what nature might be about, you know, and in fact, that's what that's a long tradition in physics. That's in fact what Heisenberg did, you know, when he back when he was trying to construct these very kind of tinker toy causal mechanical models."
},
{
"end_time": 3219.224,
"index": 126,
"start_time": 3204.804,
"text": " of of atoms to try to get a quantum theory when he knew that the classical theory wasn't working and it was only when he gave up on that and said let me follow the math let me follow the data and see"
},
{
"end_time": 3243.609,
"index": 127,
"start_time": 3219.582,
"text": " What, what I can conclude from that. And I mean, his, he's got these wonderful, um, descriptions in his writings where he says, and a whole, a beautiful structure emerged before me, you know, when he started to, to kind of inadvertently stumble onto matrix mechanics, it was a mathematical structure that he recognized initially, at least."
},
{
"end_time": 3260.93,
"index": 128,
"start_time": 3245.162,
"text": " was kind of being handed to him by nature when he let it speak instead of following his own metaphysical requirements about what he should impose on nature so i think that's really you know that's all i'm doing i'm just saying let's be realist about the theory"
},
{
"end_time": 3281.101,
"index": 129,
"start_time": 3261.561,
"text": " the objects in the theory that the quantum systems and the states that describe them have this mathematical character well i'm not gonna deny that mathematical character just cuz it makes me uncomfortable about my metaphysical conventions i'm gonna let go of those first before i'm gonna start you know tampering with the theory."
},
{
"end_time": 3312.892,
"index": 130,
"start_time": 3283.336,
"text": " In math and physics, the word space is used most often abstractly. So sure, there's up, down, left, right and forward backward, but there's also moduli space and so on. And that's not an up down doesn't correspond to space or subset of space time or foliation of space time. So in this grant me this usage of the word space as abstract in your theory, in the direct action theory, in the transactional formulation, what space is it that actually exists?"
},
{
"end_time": 3326.749,
"index": 131,
"start_time": 3313.251,
"text": " Is this space time a projection of some higher dimensional space? Is it a lower dimensional like a holographic theory and and we're being somehow moved upward to four dimensions? What is the space that's playing out?"
},
{
"end_time": 3354.343,
"index": 132,
"start_time": 3327.381,
"text": " Well, I take it as all real, but in different ways. So I, you know, cause I'm a realist about physics. I think that that quantum theory is describing physically real systems. And I, you know, again, I use the iceberg metaphor. So what I think of as, you know, to this big iceberg, you know, it's got this huge submerged portion and just the very tip is peeking out and above the water. So I, I think that all of that submerged portion is real."
},
{
"end_time": 3380.435,
"index": 133,
"start_time": 3354.77,
"text": " Um, but it's not, it's not the empirical component. It's not the measurement outcome component in contrast. That's what's on the tip. So space time is, is, is an emergent construct. It's not something we live in. It's, it's an Einstein acknowledged that space time is technically a, a structured set of what he called point coincidences. Well, it's a structured set of events."
},
{
"end_time": 3409.002,
"index": 134,
"start_time": 3380.93,
"text": " And those events are essentially the outcomes of what we call measurements. So it's an emergent construct. It's real. It's real, but it's not real in the way we thought. But if you're strict about it, Einstein was right about the way in which space-time is real. The so-called space-time parameters, space and time, they are parameters"
},
{
"end_time": 3419.445,
"index": 135,
"start_time": 3409.428,
"text": " that help us to relate the, if you will, that submerged part of potentiality."
},
{
"end_time": 3446.596,
"index": 136,
"start_time": 3419.906,
"text": " Call it potentiality to the part that's observable. It helps us, it helps us coordinate that. So, so they are parameters and they're recognized as such in, in quantum field theory that, that they are parameters. So it's all real. It has, it's different modes of reality, if you will. And, you know, I mean, we, I think that this calling things abstract is a very tendentious, you know, it's a tendentious term because"
},
{
"end_time": 3468.114,
"index": 137,
"start_time": 3447.312,
"text": " It starts to make a metaphysical ruling on what you can count as real and what you can't, you know, like, like we're all used to, you know, mathematicians love to create abstract mathematical spaces. Great. Okay. Well, you know, usually, well, that's not real. It's some guy just created some fun thing he was playing with and I playing up with ideas, call it abstract. Great."
},
{
"end_time": 3492.944,
"index": 138,
"start_time": 3469.258,
"text": " But, but when one starts to say that because the formalism or the kinds of mathematical spaces that are appearing in quantum theory are not space time, therefore they are abstract. They have to be abstract. And it's a, it's a tendentious ruling. It's a way of passing judgment kind of preemptively and saying, I, I, I judge that to be not physically real."
},
{
"end_time": 3521.203,
"index": 139,
"start_time": 3493.626,
"text": " Cause you're saying it's abstract. Well, it may have started out as some idea that somebody was playing with. That doesn't mean it doesn't correspond to something in the real world. So that's where the term abstract can get really kind of, you have to be, it's kind of like, I get, I get a little yellow alert flag abstract. Cause I mean, it's, it's a metaphysical judgment. It's often used to say not real issues as equivalent to not real. And that's, you can't do that."
},
{
"end_time": 3550.93,
"index": 140,
"start_time": 3521.817,
"text": " In some ways, Plato takes the approach that as you abstract, you get closer to what's most real in the realm of the forms, except he wouldn't define reality as just physical reality. What we're seeing are these, these imprecise adumbrations. So earlier you mentioned physical reality, and then you also just said real."
},
{
"end_time": 3571.271,
"index": 141,
"start_time": 3551.391,
"text": " so do you think that all that is real is physical well yeah it's a good distinction to make i mean i when i'm talking about physics and physical theories i use physically real and real kind of interchangeably because that that's usually the domain in which i'm operating because"
},
{
"end_time": 3599.462,
"index": 142,
"start_time": 3571.613,
"text": " you know, what, what I'm my, my little quest, if you will, is to kind of try to offer to people a solution to the problems they purport to be concerned about in a physical theory, you know? So, so I'm saying you're, you got these problems you purport to be concerned about, like the measurement problem and other problems and the alleged lack of compatibility between relativity and quantum theory, which we have already resolved. And so in that context, I'm offering these,"
},
{
"end_time": 3628.08,
"index": 143,
"start_time": 3599.804,
"text": " And so because it's about a physical theory, that's kind of the context in which I operate. The broader questions about Plato and perfect forms and so on, if I were in a philosophy class, I would want to make a distinction between domains that we describe by what we call physics, physical theory,"
},
{
"end_time": 3658.097,
"index": 144,
"start_time": 3628.558,
"text": " And domains that we don't pretend to describe by physical theory like thought. I mean, some people try to, but I think that's a little bit, a bit reaching, you know, being materialist about that. So it depends on kind of what the domain of discourse, if you will. Yeah. I mean, I would never, I wouldn't in this context, I wouldn't want to, you know, say, yeah, I think Plato's perfect forms are physically real. You know, I wouldn't do stuff like that. I wouldn't, I wouldn't, I don't know. That's a separate question, you know."
},
{
"end_time": 3685.52,
"index": 145,
"start_time": 3659.838,
"text": " Okay, allow me to play around with this iceberg metaphor. So on the tip, are you saying the tip that's revealed is that at least part of that space-time? The tip is what I call space-time. The tip of the iceberg is the space-time manifold. So you call that emergent. However, in an iceberg, it's difficult to say what's emergent. You can say it's above the surface."
},
{
"end_time": 3711.698,
"index": 146,
"start_time": 3686.101,
"text": " That's where we need a different metaphor. So this is where all metaphors kind of have limitations. So yeah, in a real iceberg, we don't get that. It's just a way of kind of making a distinction between that which we don't directly observe and that which we do and pointing out it's all real. It's just some of it is not accessible in the same way."
},
{
"end_time": 3733.387,
"index": 147,
"start_time": 3712.517,
"text": " Hi everyone, hope you're enjoying today's episode. If you're hungry for deeper dives into physics, AI, consciousness, philosophy, along with my personal reflections, you'll find it all on my sub stack. Subscribers get first access to new episodes, new posts as well, behind the scenes insights, and the chance to be a part of a thriving community of like-minded pilgrimers."
},
{
"end_time": 3753.66,
"index": 148,
"start_time": 3733.387,
"text": " By joining you'll directly be supporting my work and helping keep these conversations at the cutting edge. So click the link on screen here, hit subscribe and let's keep pushing the boundaries of knowledge together. Thank you and enjoy the show. Just so you know, if you're listening, it's C-U-R-T-J-A-I-M-U-N-G-A-L dot org."
},
{
"end_time": 3784.701,
"index": 149,
"start_time": 3754.974,
"text": " and pointing out it's all real. It's just some of it is not accessible in the same way. So the iceberg, you know, it can only go so far. So when it, when it comes to, you know, kind of thinking about emergence, I like, I switched to a metaphor of the geode. So, um, this is kind of, you know, the, the geode is this, just this hollow gap in, in some rock that is gradually, there's these mineral laden fluid that's coming in to this"
},
{
"end_time": 3807.756,
"index": 150,
"start_time": 3785.026,
"text": " empty space and building up these crystals. So that kind of helps to kind of visualize the way these quantum possibilities are sort of metaphorically this mineral laden fluid that that's crystallizing upon the measurement, you know, interaction into these crystals that are the structured space time events."
},
{
"end_time": 3833.285,
"index": 151,
"start_time": 3808.353,
"text": " Oh, by the way, I'm hoping I was notified by a buddy of mine that, um, I think of Shalom Elitzer was, was mentioning, you know, his, his formulation and some experiments that he, he was kind of curious about, about whether TI, you know, what TI might have to say about them. And I, sorry, real quick kind of reviewed that a little bit in case you want to talk about that. Yep."
},
{
"end_time": 3857.346,
"index": 152,
"start_time": 3833.575,
"text": " So I had a conversation with Avshalom Elitser and you may have seen parts of it where he mentioned the transactional interpretation directly. And so I'll link that on screen as well. In it, he references the transactional interpretation because of the time symmetry for his interpretations. He mentions the transactional interpretation also has that and retro causality, which Elitser is actually a fan of. He"
},
{
"end_time": 3884.258,
"index": 153,
"start_time": 3857.5,
"text": " sees TI or the transactional formulation is resonating with that and he sees some experimental compatibility with it. So what are your comments? Okay. Well, I mean, I agree that there's certainly an affinity between the two approaches in terms of emphasizing the importance of, of post-selection of, you know, what, what we would call, you know, measurement outcomes."
},
{
"end_time": 3912.449,
"index": 154,
"start_time": 3884.667,
"text": " and what they might have to do with the process. Of course, in TI, the absorbing systems have a lot to say about what observable you're measuring and the nature of the set of outcomes that you're going to be getting in terms of possible outcomes for your experiment. So there's that affinity. I guess where they differ, I mean,"
},
{
"end_time": 3938.814,
"index": 155,
"start_time": 3913.097,
"text": " The transaction formulation works with a specific theory of fields, the direct action theory, where you get a lot of mathematical content that describes how these fields are interacting with the emitting and absorbing systems. And that gives you a lot of this formalism, as I mentioned earlier, that is already in the standard theory. So in that sense, I feel like it's more powerful"
},
{
"end_time": 3963.933,
"index": 156,
"start_time": 3938.814,
"text": " at a fundamental level that it's more explanatory, that it generates a lot of the formalism that we're already kind of working with, but seems just kind of like we're helping ourselves to these mathematical tools. But with the transactional formulation, we get a reason for where those tools are coming from. The time symmetric vector formulation"
},
{
"end_time": 3990.009,
"index": 157,
"start_time": 3964.974,
"text": " In a sense, formally would correspond to in a way half the transactional story. It would correspond to looking only at the offer wave component that reaches every absorber. It seems to me that it's only really able to work with the conventional theory and"
},
{
"end_time": 4020.247,
"index": 158,
"start_time": 3990.384,
"text": " And take a particular metaphysical approach to the conventional theory, but it seems to me, you know, from what I've seen that it's not able to specify what counts as a measurement. It inherits this TSVF, you know, sort of inherits that lacuna of the conventional approach to fields where you're just helping yourself to the fact that a measurement happened. And if you have to describe all the systems by these two state vectors,"
},
{
"end_time": 4048.097,
"index": 159,
"start_time": 4020.776,
"text": " Then you must specify for all future times all outcomes of all measurements. So they all have to be stipulated. That seems to be just a basic requirement of the formulation since it demands description by a two-state vector. So for any quantum system, you must always specify a measurement outcome for some arbitrary date at any time."
},
{
"end_time": 4077.022,
"index": 160,
"start_time": 4048.353,
"text": " So this to me implies a block world ontology, uh, just by what is required for it, for using it. Um, and, and then the dilemma sort of faced by, by people who want to pursue that approach is that if they want to have becoming, as I understand professor Elitzer has talked about, then, you know, I think you get into trouble. I mean, I don't, I feel like the idea of getting things"
},
{
"end_time": 4103.319,
"index": 161,
"start_time": 4077.483,
"text": " To happen and getting things to emerge in it in a becoming dynamic way is Kind of foreclosed to you because you've already said all my systems are described by by two state vectors So you've stipulated for all systems what they're what all future measurements will be so there's there's that tension That it's trying to I feel like again there there are a lot of you know approaches and this applies to other"
},
{
"end_time": 4124.48,
"index": 162,
"start_time": 4103.848,
"text": " Approaches that call themselves retro causal is they want that to be sort of a space time. Retro causation where things are literally going backward in time so it's restricted in that sense to this literally forward in time literally backward in time and whenever whenever you do that you're really kind of working if you think that."
},
{
"end_time": 4151.459,
"index": 163,
"start_time": 4124.48,
"text": " Everything's happening in space time then you really kind of working with a block world picture and then you're putting a narrative on top of that that sounds dynamical that sounds like things are going backward and forward but you've already helped yourself to all events. They're already there so i have a paper about this that i wrote back and i think it was twenty eleven on you know that this issue for for certain approaches that call themselves retro causal but."
},
{
"end_time": 4181.527,
"index": 164,
"start_time": 4152.09,
"text": " But they are really kind of working in a block world ontology and there's no real dynamics happening. So. Yeah, is there any way to have what people think of when they think about science fiction and time travel within your framework? Oh, not in the usual sense. I mean, you could probably talk about about it in terms of possible timelines. People sometimes like to play with possible timelines and you can always"
},
{
"end_time": 4203.251,
"index": 165,
"start_time": 4181.937,
"text": " Do that but they would be possible timelines they would be at the level of possibility. So i mean it's like once you have go back to the geode once you have a crystal in the geode there's a crystal in the geode. You can't undo the chris it's there you know it's another another metaphor that's useless knitting a scarf."
},
{
"end_time": 4231.271,
"index": 166,
"start_time": 4203.899,
"text": " You're going to get a scarf that scarf is emergent from possibilities, which are the yarn and maybe design. I can look at a design book and change my design at any time. I can change my yard at any time. But once that scarf comes out, that scarf is there. I mean, maybe you could go back and put more stuff on the scarf. I don't know. I mean, people are imaginative. I don't want to foreclose, you know, imaginative storytelling."
},
{
"end_time": 4259.855,
"index": 167,
"start_time": 4231.783,
"text": " but in the usual sense, the usual sense where people are trying to work with it in physics is, is there sort of denying that, yeah, there's a scarf there and that, you know, that's there. You, you admitted that's there. So you can't just go back and say that now you're going to change it. I mean, if you do that, then you're, then you're just kind of dealing with multiple space times. And then that comes out sometimes in sort of the many worlds approach, you know? So, so this is a form of actualism."
},
{
"end_time": 4288.695,
"index": 168,
"start_time": 4260.401,
"text": " What I would say is that it's something that people are kind of pushed into when they don't want to just allow that possibilities are real. That perhaps physics is pointing to real possibilities. Yes, often when people think about possibilities in the physics sense and they're thinking about interpretations in many worlds, all of those possible worlds are actualized. So are you saying that this world is real, is actual and is singular?"
},
{
"end_time": 4316.834,
"index": 169,
"start_time": 4290.009,
"text": " Well, the phenomena we see in terms of what's actualized as a space-time event, that I take as singular. I mean, if people are free to explore the idea that these possibilities get actualized in different worlds, you know, I would not foreclose that. It's not a necessary thing. You know, it's not a necessary thing. The reason that the many worlds that EverReady and"
},
{
"end_time": 4345.759,
"index": 170,
"start_time": 4317.21,
"text": " The Everettian approach comes out of the measurement problem and the inability to say what counts as a measurement. And so they're forced to just kind of look at, you know, went back to the little train. The train with, you know, the two engines and the two trains, since they have no theory of fields that lets them say that an outcome happened, they just say they all happened. But that has problems with, you know, kind of helping yourself to the basis you want so that you get the kind of phenomena that you see."
},
{
"end_time": 4373.592,
"index": 171,
"start_time": 4346.067,
"text": " So there's some ad hoc stuff that has to go into it. And it also isn't really easily incorporated into a relativistic treatment. It's strictly the non-relativistic theory that it's working with and the non-relativistic theory is just an approximation. So, yeah. Bohmian mechanics has two qualities. So one is hidden variables and the other is a preferred foliation. Do you have either of these?"
},
{
"end_time": 4398.763,
"index": 172,
"start_time": 4374.821,
"text": " No, no, I don't. The transactional formulation has no hidden variables. Now, interestingly, you could say it has no preferred foliation, but one of the problems with the conventional approach has been, you know, the way to kind of say, well, what is sort of nature's preferred observable? What are things really doing in a fundamental way? And it seems like"
},
{
"end_time": 4426.988,
"index": 173,
"start_time": 4399.087,
"text": " It seems as though there's an arbitrariness in kind of picking that, but there really isn't because at the relativistic level you get naturally preferred observables and those are position and, and I mean, I said that those are energy, energy related energy and momentum. So when you go to the relativistic level, it's very clear, for instance, there's, there's no time observable period at any level of the theory."
},
{
"end_time": 4457.79,
"index": 174,
"start_time": 4427.858,
"text": " At the, at the non relativistic level, you can say, well, there's sort of a position observable, but it's, it's really kind of an idealization and that breaks down at the relativistic level. There is, there is no position observable. And this is why even in the standard theory position and position of time, the space time labels are reduced to parameters. They are not observables. So it's very clear that at a fundamental level, nature's preferred observable is basically for momentum."
},
{
"end_time": 4482.363,
"index": 175,
"start_time": 4459.019,
"text": " And that's reflected in the TI approach. That's what you get. You get your transactions happening ultimately at a relativistic level in terms of momenta. You can have directional momenta in the sense that you have a variety of absorbers and they're each going to receive a different"
},
{
"end_time": 4510.879,
"index": 176,
"start_time": 4482.807,
"text": " directional component of momentum. And that's more of a relational thing. So it has to do with the relations among these quantum systems. So you don't really need to, you don't need to talk about space and time as being real, but they are parameters of the map, if you will. They're parameters of the map that help us coordinate these relationships."
},
{
"end_time": 4540.503,
"index": 177,
"start_time": 4511.237,
"text": " So there's kind of a relational view of space-time. It's not saying that space-time doesn't exist, but again, as Einstein noted, what the space-time manifold really is, is an invariant set of events, period. It's not about X or T, it's a collection of invariant events. And we use X and T to coordinate our observations among those events."
},
{
"end_time": 4570.879,
"index": 178,
"start_time": 4542.125,
"text": " Now, earlier we talked about electrodynamics and you grazed on gravity and somewhat grazed on the weak interaction as well with the Schrodinger's cat, although it was unclear to me the connection between the transactional formulation and the weak interaction. So what I'd like to know is, does TI have anything to say about weak or strong? Well, the transactional process that leads to the emergence of space-time events"
},
{
"end_time": 4600.572,
"index": 179,
"start_time": 4571.323,
"text": " occurs only through the electromagnetic field. The other forces are certainly in play at a fundamental level. They govern the unitary interactions, the kinds of scattering, you know, interactions and so on. Now the weak decay, you know, the weak force is involved in decays. And of course the Schrodinger's cat, you can illustrate that with just a decay in terms of an excited atom emitting a photon if you want, right? So it doesn't have to be, you know, it doesn't have to be the weak force."
},
{
"end_time": 4628.507,
"index": 180,
"start_time": 4601.084,
"text": " But the weak force is certainly really in there in terms of these unitary interactions that transform, that kind of govern these kinds of transformations among types of particles and so on. And that's very much part of the transactional picture. So in other words, the transactional formulation very much accommodates all those fields. The thing that's"
},
{
"end_time": 4655.418,
"index": 181,
"start_time": 4629.104,
"text": " That it treats distinctly is the electromagnetic field because that's a massless gauge field. So you require a massless gauge field to get you the emergence of space time. So these other ones have mass and so they are unstable in a sense and they act only really kind of locally at the quantum, at the possible level of possibilities."
},
{
"end_time": 4685.333,
"index": 182,
"start_time": 4655.828,
"text": " Another massless gauge field is gravity, or at least under some interpretations of quantum gravity, you have the graviton. So does TI make any claims about that?"
},
{
"end_time": 4713.302,
"index": 183,
"start_time": 4685.742,
"text": " So we deny that gravity is a quantum field. So what we get, you know, we basically say the mistake in, you know, that the problem, what's so problematic about trying to reconcile the quantum level with the relativistic level is trying to characterize gravity as a quantum field. So gravity, we say, is not a quantum field. It's the field"
},
{
"end_time": 4741.732,
"index": 184,
"start_time": 4713.677,
"text": " Is the metrical structure of the emergent space time end of story that and that's what Einstein said. I mean, you know, he said that that's what the field is. It's the, it's the metrical structure of space time. So it's, it's a property of the, those sets of events. And so, I mean, people who want, you know, who want the detailed story of that, they want to see the, you know, see the actual math, see the actual theory."
},
{
"end_time": 4770.503,
"index": 185,
"start_time": 4742.125,
"text": " We do have an actual theory that derives the Einstein equations from that picture. So then is the transactional formulation a theory of everything? A contender for a toe? Well, you know, I guess I never like to claim that. I guess you could say that it's a theory of the quantum level and the space-time relativistic level."
},
{
"end_time": 4784.445,
"index": 186,
"start_time": 4771.715,
"text": " I guess I'm not clear in myself that physics can explain everything about reality, including people's thoughts, motivations, intentionalities, consciousness."
},
{
"end_time": 4814.821,
"index": 187,
"start_time": 4785.026,
"text": " And so from that standpoint, I would, I would never, you know, I would, I would be a little more, more modest about the reach of physics, but within, within topics that are considered physical questions. Yeah. I mean, you could say that because it's, it's definitely providing, uh, an account of, of the interaction of the quantum level with the space time level, with the, you know, the relativistic level. And, you know, it's quite straightforward."
},
{
"end_time": 4845.486,
"index": 188,
"start_time": 4815.981,
"text": " Yes. Well, in physics, the term theory of everything is just for a framework that encompasses both gravity and the standard model. Sure. Well, well, yeah, I mean, I, the T I, the transactional formalism again is, is simply contained in applying the direct action theory of fields to the kinds of physics we're already working with and admitting that"
},
{
"end_time": 4873.353,
"index": 189,
"start_time": 4846.493,
"text": " Saying fields propagate unilaterally and retarded fields only is wrong, replacing that with the direct action theory for the electromagnetic field. That's all it is. And we're just showing how fruitful that is, what you get out of it. So, I mean, the transactional formulation does not purport to explain the origins of quantum chromodynamics or anything like that. But where appropriate,"
},
{
"end_time": 4898.66,
"index": 190,
"start_time": 4873.78,
"text": " The claim is that nature is behaving according to the direct action theory of fields. And let's see what that gets us. And we are already showing, you know, what, how much we get from that. In many physical theories, there are virtually all physical theories, there are parts that don't change. And then there are contingent parts. So for instance, the force equals mass."
},
{
"end_time": 4920.452,
"index": 191,
"start_time": 4899.292,
"text": " Well, I mean, it's really the same, you know, I mean, it's still it's still the case and you know, the only thing different about this theory"
},
{
"end_time": 4947.739,
"index": 192,
"start_time": 4920.828,
"text": " is the way that the fields operate, the way that the electromagnetic field behaves. So we're still going to have, you know, Newton's laws as a suitable non relativistic approximation. We're still going to put in initial conditions, you know, and in a sense, yeah, so none of that's really going to change. But I think overall in the big picture, it's a more satisfying account because"
},
{
"end_time": 4968.148,
"index": 193,
"start_time": 4948.558,
"text": " You help yourself to initial conditions that, at least for the quantum situation in the conventional theory, are just stipulated. You can't say why you got a measurement result. In the transaction formulation, you can at least say, well, there was a measurement interaction and I can explain why that happened."
},
{
"end_time": 4997.449,
"index": 194,
"start_time": 4968.558,
"text": " um, and then there was perhaps a collapse, uh, to, to a result, but I can say why there was an outcome available to me. So, yeah, I mean, fundamentally it's not going to change those kinds of features of theories. Does it have anything to say about Bell's inequalities or the Culkin-Specker theorem? Well, um, those are basic theorems that point to the, the non-locality of quantum theory."
},
{
"end_time": 5020.06,
"index": 195,
"start_time": 4997.91,
"text": " And that is certainly still the case in the transactional formulation. I mean, unlike some interpretations, the transactional formulation does not, at least as I've elaborated it, it's not trying to preserve locality. This I think is very much, you know, trying to cling to some metaphysical"
},
{
"end_time": 5049.667,
"index": 196,
"start_time": 5020.35,
"text": " ground rules that are not really serving us well. The quantum world is non-local in a sense that that's what the violations of Bell's inequality and so on are showing us. And maybe that's uncomfortable, but once again, if you allow the idea that nature does have this level of possibility, then it makes sense that you're going to be observing things that look non-local to you, that there are interactions that can go on"
},
{
"end_time": 5070.589,
"index": 197,
"start_time": 5050.299,
"text": " That that seemed to defy your expectation that everything's happening in a space time container. So, so that, you know, I would say, um, that's very much, those are authentic, um, implications of, of the formalism of quantum theory in the, in the fact, in the sense that, that there are non-local influences going on."
},
{
"end_time": 5099.548,
"index": 198,
"start_time": 5072.722,
"text": " Okay, so two quick questions about that before Coke and specker. So you said it looks non local to you. So does that mean that underneath the iceberg, there's some version of locality, maybe it's not called locality that is preserved. And then when it gets emergent upward or in the geode picture, it looks like it's violating locality. Well, I mean, in the usual sense, it's in the usual in the sense that there are influences that seem to propagate"
},
{
"end_time": 5121.578,
"index": 199,
"start_time": 5099.906,
"text": " add speeds that are you know seem to exceed the speed of light they are technically non local but where where we can gain some insight into those into those influences not being something that we should forbid you know it's helpful to look at the flatland metaphor you know the flatland edwin abbott story where"
},
{
"end_time": 5151.647,
"index": 200,
"start_time": 5121.988,
"text": " There are flat shapes in a plane and they think that's the entire reality. But if it isn't, then you can have this fear hovering and coming and doing these weird things that from the standpoint of the flatland creatures look non-local and crazy and know this can't be happening according to the rules of my world, which tells me I can only stay on this plane and only can do this. But those rules don't apply to"
},
{
"end_time": 5173.251,
"index": 201,
"start_time": 5152.602,
"text": " to an entity that has more degrees of freedom and more higher space to work with. That's the sense in which I think these non-local interactions are occurring. Strictly speaking, by the rules of getting from here to there on flat land, they're violating that."
},
{
"end_time": 5199.309,
"index": 202,
"start_time": 5173.831,
"text": " But it doesn't mean that they can't really be happening and that we shouldn't, you know, it means that, okay, there's just a larger aspect to reality in which more kinds of influences are possible. And again, these do not violate relativity because the influences that are happening are not sending light signals. So it's conforming to relativity."
},
{
"end_time": 5218.899,
"index": 203,
"start_time": 5199.701,
"text": " But it's it's violating our sense of propriety concerning what we think should happen in flatland and and so what i'm saying is let's let go of that you know that that that restrictive sense of what's okay and what isn't okay in terms of what's physically happening. So yeah non locality from the standpoint of."
},
{
"end_time": 5243.831,
"index": 204,
"start_time": 5219.411,
"text": " Influences being able to be communicated that don't depend on light signals. Yeah, that does happen in the direct action theory and it's okay. It's not something nature's not allowed to do just because we don't like it. So is the non-locality just a correlation or is there causation to it?"
},
{
"end_time": 5268.353,
"index": 205,
"start_time": 5244.77,
"text": " Well, this depends what you mean by causation. For instance, the scattering interactions that you referenced earlier, those are brought about in terms of non-local connections among the electrons. So that time symmetric propagator that connects those electrons as they're scattering, it's clearly doing something."
},
{
"end_time": 5291.032,
"index": 206,
"start_time": 5269.224,
"text": " It's causal in the sense that it's doing something, but it's pre-measurement. It's not something that is connected to a space-time event. It's part of the sort of behind the scenes dynamics that's building up to make certain events more probable than others. So it's definitely doing something physically efficacious."
},
{
"end_time": 5318.677,
"index": 207,
"start_time": 5291.544,
"text": " But it still respects relativity in that, you know, it's not something where you're, you're, you're using a light controllable light signal and sending a signal from A to B and so on. It's happening at a subtler level. You don't violate the no signaling theorem. That's correct. Not at all. I see. Yeah. Okay. So let's get to Coke and specker. What is your account of it? And also, can you please tell the audience what that theorem is?"
},
{
"end_time": 5337.159,
"index": 208,
"start_time": 5319.599,
"text": " What kinds of phenomena you can come up with are contextual. You cannot say for all observables I can assign a yes or no answer."
},
{
"end_time": 5359.548,
"index": 209,
"start_time": 5337.807,
"text": " you know, for all cases. And this has to do with the fact that Heisenberg's uncertainty principle and the fact that observables don't commute. So it's a consequence of the non-commutativity of these observables that only, you know, for two observables that don't commute, like position and momentum at the non-relativistic level,"
},
{
"end_time": 5381.783,
"index": 210,
"start_time": 5359.974,
"text": " You can't just say I can assign a determinate momentum property for the system for all cases and also a determinate position that it's really this position and not all of these others. So you can't just have a space where you clearly lay out determinate yes or no"
},
{
"end_time": 5409.599,
"index": 211,
"start_time": 5382.346,
"text": " whether this system has this momentum and that position. You can't make a collection of these outcomes for mutually incompatible observables in this way. And this is perfectly fine. This is a feature that one would expect at the level of possibility, because again, possibilities are not determinate outcomes."
},
{
"end_time": 5438.814,
"index": 212,
"start_time": 5409.94,
"text": " While you have, it's a feature of these possibilities that when a system can be said to, you know, has been, say, set up or prepared in some determinate state of momentum, it really does not have a determinate position. And this is simply because in the transactional approach, we would say, well, it hasn't transacted. If it hasn't transacted, if it's clearly got a momentum,"
},
{
"end_time": 5468.422,
"index": 213,
"start_time": 5439.275,
"text": " It hasn't engaged in a determinate kind of measurement interaction that would create an event. And we always end up sort of specifying events with space-time parameters, but again these are all frame dependent. So it's just a fact, it's the way these possibilities work that by definition if you have a determinate momentum,"
},
{
"end_time": 5490.776,
"index": 214,
"start_time": 5469.036,
"text": " You are behind the scenes. You have not engaged in a particular transaction that would actualize a space-time event. So it's kind of a natural outcome. There's no reason to expect that a system, a quantum system that is existing at this level of possibility should be a space-time object."
},
{
"end_time": 5517.978,
"index": 215,
"start_time": 5491.476,
"text": " right? The expectation that we want things to be non-contextual or the surprising effect on us of the Koch and Specker theorem is that it contradicts our desire that everything seemed to be having a determinate momentum and position because that's kind of what it looks like at the macroscopic level. But in fact, at the quantum level, that's not the case."
},
{
"end_time": 5535.026,
"index": 216,
"start_time": 5519.718,
"text": " So speaking about these possibilities and they have probabilities associated with them, do you have a philosophy as to what these probabilities mean? Like there are different approaches, frequentists, propensity, Bayesian. What are these probabilities exactly?"
},
{
"end_time": 5559.394,
"index": 217,
"start_time": 5535.333,
"text": " I mean, I would call these propensities the kinds of probabilities that we get from the Born Rule that comes out of the transactional formulation. I think the most natural way to interpret them is as propensities for actualization. They're weights, if you will. So you can kind of see it as a weighted symmetry breaking, that there has to be something"
},
{
"end_time": 5572.142,
"index": 218,
"start_time": 5559.804,
"text": " Something in deterministic that's happening to actualize one one outcome over others but but that that's weighted so that it's not it's not always equal probabilities."
},
{
"end_time": 5599.991,
"index": 219,
"start_time": 5573.763,
"text": " And the Bourne rule, is that able to be derived from something more fundamental or is it assumed? Oh, no, exactly. It is derived. It comes right out of the physics of the direct action theory. And so that's what I've shown in papers and in my books. And the most recent one is the Cambridge second edition that came out in 2022 called the transactional interpretation of quantum mechanics. It's subtitled a relativistic treatment."
},
{
"end_time": 5630.111,
"index": 220,
"start_time": 5600.35,
"text": " So that version has updates on the relativistic development, but it also does go through where you get the Born rule from the transactional picture. So that also I think is one of the selling points of the transactional formulation is that the Born rule is derived from it rather than just Max Born. I mean, it's kind of funny how in a paper in 1930, he originally talked about wave functions as probabilistic"
},
{
"end_time": 5657.688,
"index": 221,
"start_time": 5630.452,
"text": " Descriptions but he realized that the the amplitude that's just an amplitude. It doesn't behave like a probability It's complex and so on and he said well to get the right mathematical behavior. You need to square this thing So that's how we got the born rule. It was totally ad hoc I mean obviously smart idea but it was it was an ad hoc look this the amplitude isn't giving me the right kind of number So I better square it and then I'll get the right kind of number"
},
{
"end_time": 5684.991,
"index": 222,
"start_time": 5659.053,
"text": " So we can do better than that in the transactional formulation. To you, what makes something ad hoc? Because some people may hear backward traveling waves, even though you have some issues with that, or they'll hear handshakes and they may see that as, oh, that's ad hoc. So what makes something ad hoc? Well, there's no theoretical basis for it. You have to help yourself to it in order to get things to come out"
},
{
"end_time": 5702.892,
"index": 223,
"start_time": 5685.708,
"text": " According to the empirical observations, a prime example is the Ptolemaic geocentric model of the solar system. The epicycles, those are ad hoc. He had stuff that was"
},
{
"end_time": 5731.596,
"index": 224,
"start_time": 5703.387,
"text": " Okay, everything's going around the earth. Oh, I've got this stuff. Why is that planet going backwards? It looked like it was going backwards. I will see how you know, how can I it's a bandaid. How can I patch up my theory? It's basically saying this is kind of an anomaly for my theories having trouble explaining this. I better come up with a bandaid to patch that up. That's kind of what it is. I mean, and some people might"
},
{
"end_time": 5760.742,
"index": 225,
"start_time": 5732.346,
"text": " You have to be careful because you know if some people might say well backward stuff is ad hoc well if they don't know what the theory is they don't have any basis for judging whether something is ad hoc or not so you have to know what you're working with what is the theoretical model. What are the phenomena can the theoretical does the theoretical model predict these phenomena if so there's nothing ad hoc about the theoretical model."
},
{
"end_time": 5788.746,
"index": 226,
"start_time": 5761.271,
"text": " It becomes ad hoc when a theoretical model is failing. It has a gap or is saying something different than what you see and you want to keep your model. You start band-aiding. You start patching it up. Those are ad hoc things or when you'd have no model and you just say, uh, you know, and that that's kind of what the born rule was. It, it, it works, but there was no theory behind it."
},
{
"end_time": 5803.968,
"index": 227,
"start_time": 5791.783,
"text": " Ruth, what was the most difficult decision you made during your career? Oh, probably to switch from physics to philosophy."
},
{
"end_time": 5833.763,
"index": 228,
"start_time": 5804.667,
"text": " I got into physics because I thought electromagnetism was magic. I was just enchanted by it. I was enchanted by light and the fact that back when I was a child that you could have a prism and see white light being broken up into colors. I was enchanted. I was enchanted by physics. It's also in my family. I have a lot of family members who are physicists."
},
{
"end_time": 5864.411,
"index": 229,
"start_time": 5834.718,
"text": " When I went into physics at the graduate level at the University of Maryland and came across the EPR, the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen thought experiment and so on, and the nonlocality, that's when I became really fascinated with these puzzles, with the paradoxes of quantum theory. And it was at that point after I got my masters that I decided I really wanted to pursue that kind of examination. And I learned that they were doing that in the philosophy department."
},
{
"end_time": 5880.759,
"index": 230,
"start_time": 5864.735,
"text": " Now, I guess a meta question. Was that decision yours to make under your framework? Is there free will?"
},
{
"end_time": 5911.613,
"index": 231,
"start_time": 5881.886,
"text": " Oh, yes. Um, yeah, I mean, I think, and I've argued, I have a couple of papers on this and I addressed it in my books that, that I, well, I mean, free will, we have constrained will where we're not completely free, but, but there are live choices there. I believe there are live choices. And I've also argued that, that there is no sense in which physics rules that out. I mean, it's very common for physicists to issue these edicts, uh, you know, that say physics says we do not have free will. And that's very much incorrect."
},
{
"end_time": 5939.104,
"index": 232,
"start_time": 5911.954,
"text": " It's, it's those kinds of judgments are made based on certain interpretations of the physics and certain unnecessary kinds of, of metaphysical presuppositions that people bring into it that they may not be aware they have. So yeah, the physics definitely allows room for there to be real life choices. And in fact, I've argued that that's quantum quantum theory actually suggests that, that that's what's happening in nature."
},
{
"end_time": 5958.251,
"index": 233,
"start_time": 5940.879,
"text": " Okay, so I assume what you're referring to is libertarian free will. Am I correct? Yeah, I mean, I don't necessarily go along with all the traditions of that of that approach. But, you know, I think there's there's physics leaves room for there to be"
},
{
"end_time": 5988.865,
"index": 234,
"start_time": 5959.753,
"text": " Unpredetermined choices on the part of agents. Now what counts as an agent is a huge question, you know, that physics may or may not have anything to say about, but physical theory definitely allows for, uh, you know, I mean, even Heisenberg talked about photons making choices when deciding whether to go through a polar ice or not. So, so there's room in physics for, for that, for, for live choices."
},
{
"end_time": 6016.886,
"index": 235,
"start_time": 5991.596,
"text": " If the transactional formulation doesn't care or doesn't make claims about observers and observers are tied to consciousness and consciousness is tied to free will, which feel free to dispel any of those claims that I just made, then I find it difficult to see how TI can have something to say about free will in a libertarian sense, because it sounds to me like it would just be probabilistic."
},
{
"end_time": 6045.572,
"index": 236,
"start_time": 6017.381,
"text": " And if it's just probabilistic, I don't see where the choice is if it's already given to by the Born Rule. Unless it's non-deterministic where the probability distribution is not known. No, the probability distribution is given by the Born Rule. I mean, I would never say that the transactional formulation has anything to say about free will. This is just me talking, you know, that kind of"
},
{
"end_time": 6073.797,
"index": 237,
"start_time": 6045.93,
"text": " given like suppose i think that nature does behave this way i happen to think it does i mean if somebody's found something terribly wrong with this i would you know i'd rethink that i re-examine that but you know if nature really does work it you know in a way according to this direct action theory of fields that in itself is a different subject from free will all it does all it does is say physics won't forbid it"
},
{
"end_time": 6097.534,
"index": 238,
"start_time": 6074.394,
"text": " That's the most that i can say if if this physical theory is genuinely indeterministic. Then it leaves room for there to be some theory of free will. It doesn't tell you there is or isn't it you know it just leaves room for it which is opposite from you know many physicists will say physics tells you don't have free will."
},
{
"end_time": 6113.575,
"index": 239,
"start_time": 6097.944,
"text": " I really don't think that's a fair thing to say, right? So that's it's delimited in that way. I mean, me just speculating, I obviously consciousness, I mean, personally in my own views, I do think that"
},
{
"end_time": 6142.978,
"index": 240,
"start_time": 6114.957,
"text": " That you're going to have trouble accounting for consciousness if you're materialistic and if you assume the Cartesian dualism type thing or if you assume that physical matter is as Descartes envisioned it, which means it's dead. It's by definition non-sentient, then you've got the hard problem and you're not going to get consciousness out of that. So that's my view and I think that consciousness is something that's much more fundamental than any physical theory."
},
{
"end_time": 6166.22,
"index": 241,
"start_time": 6144.684,
"text": " Interesting. So you think what lies underneath the iceberg of the iceberg is consciousness or perhaps it's the ocean? Well, um, yeah, I really think so. I mean, I just in a purely logical sense, folks, if you're going to say that the building blocks of nature are dead and non-sentient, then forget it. You're not getting consciousness out of that end of story."
},
{
"end_time": 6184.053,
"index": 242,
"start_time": 6166.647,
"text": " So I'm just to be logically consistent with myself. I am forced into a posture of saying that consciousness must be in there at the basis of everything. Hmm. It just on a logical basis. I mean, you know, by the hard problem, there's only a hard problem."
},
{
"end_time": 6212.824,
"index": 243,
"start_time": 6184.48,
"text": " There's only a problem, a hard problem, if you assume that everything's dead. Physics doesn't need to postulate that matter is dead. Why do that? There's no reason to. It's unnecessary. It's just a metaphysical choice that's optional. In my opinion. It seems like it. I can say,"
},
{
"end_time": 6241.459,
"index": 244,
"start_time": 6213.251,
"text": " There's matter that described physics deals with something we call matter. I'm not going to add to that. That has to be dead. Why would I do that? That's stupid. You know, like why do that? I don't, I mean, that's just an assumption. That's dead. Why do we have to assume physics describes dead stuff? You don't have to. There's no reason or, or non sentient. I'm going to define matter as non sentient. Why?"
},
{
"end_time": 6270.794,
"index": 245,
"start_time": 6241.681,
"text": " Nobody put a gun to your head, you didn't have to do that. To me, it's kind of hubristic to say, okay, you don't know what life is, you don't know what consciousness is. So that doesn't mean you have to forbid it from being part of your theory. Just say your theory doesn't have anything to say about it. Maybe later it will. That's my position is don't foreclose possibilities if you don't have to."
},
{
"end_time": 6289.77,
"index": 246,
"start_time": 6272.637,
"text": " Would you say that rivers or rock or snow or H2O or carbon dioxide have experiential elements to them or that they're conscious? I don't know. I mean, I can't I can't assert that."
},
{
"end_time": 6318.2,
"index": 247,
"start_time": 6290.247,
"text": " but it's, I mean, like Heisenberg himself said that the photon is making a choice whether to go through the polarizer. So maybe they do. I mean, you know, again, that's, that's a question of at what level could you say something begins to be like self-conscious or begins to be deliberative and it, you know, I don't know, you know, who knows that I don't purport to have those answers, but certainly that, you know, the indigenous traditions thought so, you know, and people might say, well, they weren't scientific. Well,"
},
{
"end_time": 6346.852,
"index": 248,
"start_time": 6318.712,
"text": " Maybe they were, but in a different way. So, I mean, people have have traditions that that kind of take that for granted. And of course, those kinds of traditions are usually are usually, you know, dismissed by by the Western approach. But, you know, maybe we need to be a little more open minded. I mean, we still have to be physically rigorous. And I started out on this exploration being very much, you know, like a Sam Harris"
},
{
"end_time": 6374.94,
"index": 249,
"start_time": 6347.79,
"text": " What changed you? That it's logically inconsistent. That's the main thing. You can't get consciousness if you preclude it from the outset."
},
{
"end_time": 6401.988,
"index": 250,
"start_time": 6375.657,
"text": " I happen to be a philosopher and I happen to be interested in various spiritual traditions and I'm a yoga teacher so I know something about Indian philosophy and I've come to respect other traditions and other ways of knowing as having some insight and having approaches to knowledge that maybe are not"
},
{
"end_time": 6428.643,
"index": 251,
"start_time": 6402.176,
"text": " Within the kind of Western usual scientific paradigm and, and along with its, it's sort of constraints, but, but I've come to respect the, you know, the, some of the wisdom of those traditions. So while I would never try to mix them, you know, I don't, I don't, I think there are different ways of knowing and I try to be scientifically rigorous. And when I'm working with physics, I don't postulate stuff that I don't think I is warranted."
},
{
"end_time": 6452.91,
"index": 252,
"start_time": 6428.985,
"text": " And I try to be logically consistent and and try to see where the theory leads me. But, you know, when it comes to things like consciousness and life, if physics needs to be a little bit more modest and needs to understand what's within its domain of of accountability and what isn't. What it can explain and what maybe what it can't and that it shouldn't that"
},
{
"end_time": 6483.251,
"index": 253,
"start_time": 6453.575,
"text": " Scientific inquiry doesn't need to be constrained and circumscribed by optional metaphysical premises that maybe were useful as kind of training wheels. I think of them as kind of training wheels, you know, that sort of mechanistic approach that led to Newtonian mechanics and so on. But at some point, maybe you need to like recognize what's your what's on your bike. What's your bike that's really going to get you places and what are training wheels that are holding you back? And I think that's where we are now."
},
{
"end_time": 6512.858,
"index": 254,
"start_time": 6484.428,
"text": " with the mechanistic way of looking at things. Do you think that we're being held back from further physical inquiry? Is that what this bicycle, this, the tricycle being too slow metaphor is talking about? Or is it something like spiritual advancement that is holding us back from? Well, I mean, really in terms of physics, we're being held back, I think from some, from progress in solving a lot of these problems. Um,"
},
{
"end_time": 6537.5,
"index": 255,
"start_time": 6513.626,
"text": " by physicists not really wanting to consider this direct action picture, this transactional formulation, because it violates their training wheels, because it violates this kind of mechanical forward, always forward directed space time is the entire domain of what's physically real. Those kinds of presuppositions"
},
{
"end_time": 6567.176,
"index": 256,
"start_time": 6537.824,
"text": " It challenges those and I think of those as the training wheels in the field of physics. And I mean, again, as our publications show, we already have presented solutions to problems that you'll see people, you know, I see papers constantly come out and say, measurement remains enigmatic in quantum theory. Nobody knows what a measurement is. And I'm like, well, I've been telling you what it is since 2012, you know, and Kramer did 1986. So this is,"
},
{
"end_time": 6595.93,
"index": 257,
"start_time": 6567.5,
"text": " That it's bouncing off, that the answers are there and they're bouncing off because the conventional approach is still I want my training wheels because the price for accepting these kinds of solutions is you got to let go of your training wheels and you have to let go of your demand for what you call locality, your demand for determinism and mechanical explanations. And those are the training wheels. If you let go of those, you have answers to these problems."
},
{
"end_time": 6622.415,
"index": 258,
"start_time": 6596.254,
"text": " We've got the publications. We've got the answer to reconciling the quantum level with relativistic level. It's out there. You know, so when people say this on, we've still got this problem, this unsolved problem of how to reconcile quantum theory with relativity. Well, read the, the, the, uh, physics communications paper that we've put out in 2024. You know, the answer is out there."
},
{
"end_time": 6653.012,
"index": 259,
"start_time": 6623.814,
"text": " So it's a question of seeing it, you know, seeing the that there's an answer and maybe maybe you don't want to see it because you don't you don't want to lose your training wheels. Do you believe that the primary reason for physicists not taking, say, the transactional formulation seriously is because of their recalcitrance or their ignorance and that if only they would read it and and not be so blinded by their preconceived"
},
{
"end_time": 6682.022,
"index": 260,
"start_time": 6653.37,
"text": " Notions that they would be accepting of it or do you see that actually there are some substantive issues or challenges that remain with it? Because even when I speak to people like Penrose or to Avshalom or almost anyone who has their own formulation of quantum mechanics, they'll say something similar like Penrose may say, well, we have this conception that there's computability at the forefront of the brain. If only we would get rid of that and we would understand that consciousness"
},
{
"end_time": 6703.899,
"index": 261,
"start_time": 6682.295,
"text": " is what collapses or what is produced by the collapse of the wave function then then if only physicists would take that seriously or off Shalom with if only physicists would see that there is something actually unique about the now and it's not a block time etc etc so almost each person will say if only physicists would so-and-so remove their their prejudice and so I'm just curious what you think"
},
{
"end_time": 6728.968,
"index": 262,
"start_time": 6704.65,
"text": " Yeah. Well, I do think, I do think that, you know, I wouldn't call it ignorance, but I mean, you know, it took the heliocentric, the Copernicus heliocentric model 200 years to be accepted. You know, it's, we have to be patient, I think, for progress. Is it because again, we, you know, there's a certain tradition and traditions are valuable"
},
{
"end_time": 6751.903,
"index": 263,
"start_time": 6729.411,
"text": " They provide structure, they do yield progress, but then they can become constraining and it's a slow process for people, you know, in as a community to start to get a little distance, get a little distance from metaphysical conditions and see what they are first. What are my metaphysical assumptions that I'm bringing to this?"
},
{
"end_time": 6777.005,
"index": 264,
"start_time": 6752.875,
"text": " Do I really need these? Are these things that are maybe not necessary? And to have the option of letting go of it, you first have to see that it's not necessary. So, you know, it's a gradual process. For those other, you know, obviously those are alternative approaches, but their interpretations, well, I mean, Penrose has a certain kind of a collapse formulation."
},
{
"end_time": 6794.428,
"index": 265,
"start_time": 6777.432,
"text": " His approach is actually empirically distinguishable from the conventional theory, so he has a different mechanism for collapse. But anyone, again, it's true that anyone who's challenging a prevailing conventional approach has to be patient."
},
{
"end_time": 6820.998,
"index": 266,
"start_time": 6794.923,
"text": " Because it is, it is a, you know, a process of people deciding, people becoming, choosing to become aware of what am I bringing to this? Do I need to bring this in? Do I need my, this expectation to be an imposition on what's the theory could be? Or maybe my expectation is optional and maybe nature has a different way of behaving. So it's a gradual process and you have to be patient."
},
{
"end_time": 6843.217,
"index": 267,
"start_time": 6823.456,
"text": " What are the parts of TI that you're working on? Like, what are the holes that currently exist? And sure, they can be patched up, but where do you see its shortcomings? Well, currently, I'm not finding any holes in the sense that it's failing to account for X. You know, I'm not finding holes."
},
{
"end_time": 6868.268,
"index": 268,
"start_time": 6843.695,
"text": " What remains to be done is to elaborate the consequences of the predictions of the model. And that's very much, I'm getting some help from some colleagues of mine, Andreas Schlatter, who's working on the general relativity aspects, and a new collaborator whose name I won't mention yet because he's maybe not"
},
{
"end_time": 6888.012,
"index": 269,
"start_time": 6868.831,
"text": " You know not fully on working on it yet but but i've gotten some very promising communications from someone who's working on the quantum field theory and so it's mainly elaborating the consequences and i'm you know i'm frankly i'm not seeing any holes in a sense of it's falling short of accounting for x."
},
{
"end_time": 6917.21,
"index": 270,
"start_time": 6888.012,
"text": " And I, and I haven't gotten that. I haven't gotten any such criticisms. When, when I get criticisms, what I always find is that they're working with like an earlier version of the model that, that hasn't, they haven't updated themselves, that the critics are not updated to the latest work and they are not having done their homework, so to speak. So I have not gotten any, any criticism for someone who's actually read the material saying, well, you can't explain X. I haven't gotten anything like that."
},
{
"end_time": 6941.237,
"index": 271,
"start_time": 6919.053,
"text": " Going back to holes, not with the TI, but with the physicalism, the response from someone like a Neil deGrasse Tyson to saying that, well, consciousness may be at the basis and physics doesn't explain everything. He may say something like, OK, well, look, if we take a look at psychology, then that becomes neurology, which becomes chemistry or biochemistry, which becomes chemistry, which becomes physics."
},
{
"end_time": 6968.217,
"index": 272,
"start_time": 6942.21,
"text": " What point of this conversion is there a failure that you can point at if you can find a point to which one of the layers doesn't emerge from the previous one? Well, you'd win a Nobel Prize like find show me where the laws of physics fail. So what do you say to that? Well, the laws of physics fail right away again on the hard problem if by if Neil deGrasse Tyson assumes that matter is non sentient. If if I don't know."
},
{
"end_time": 6990.981,
"index": 273,
"start_time": 6968.439,
"text": " I mean, if in other words, if you want to be what they call materialist, yeah, he claimed to be a materialist when he's already failed on the hard problem. Okay. You know, and, and this, you can see that in his, his desire to reduce internal conscious experience to neurons, neurons presumed to be made of dead non-sentient matter."
},
{
"end_time": 7020.179,
"index": 274,
"start_time": 6991.92,
"text": " That is an optional metaphysical choice that in his mind he sees as mandatory and he wants to impose on everyone else and pass negative judgment on them if they don't do what he does. So much as I admire him, his accomplishments, that's a form of hubris in being reductionist in that way and it's just kind of a casual, naive approach to these really nuanced, subtle problems"
},
{
"end_time": 7049.36,
"index": 275,
"start_time": 7020.486,
"text": " Where he doesn't, he hasn't even figured out that he's already failed on the hard problem. So this is what you often get with physicists, materialist, physicalist, kind of dabbling. If you pardon the expression is being a little pejorative in, in these, in these issues where they don't even notice where they're contradicting themselves. And it's kind of embarrassing. Now, if you had to give a single"
},
{
"end_time": 7078.677,
"index": 276,
"start_time": 7049.718,
"text": " killer app like a single great feature of the transactional approach that there are researchers who are watching just so you know they're professors of physics and computer science and mathematics and so on who watch and then there are also young researchers who want to get into the field they're listening and they want to know okay what would it be that if I was to play them this the next five minutes or the next three minutes what would it be what would be the killer app that would"
},
{
"end_time": 7090.538,
"index": 277,
"start_time": 7079.241,
"text": " make your approach superior to"
},
{
"end_time": 7114.872,
"index": 278,
"start_time": 7091.305,
"text": " Have a have a new product a new spinoff that the old paradigm did not predict new something new we want something new you know like my nephew drew who does amazing you know virtual reality apps and he's he's brilliant no i'm sorry folks all this gets you is a solution to the measurement problem."
},
{
"end_time": 7142.056,
"index": 279,
"start_time": 7115.776,
"text": " It gets you the reconciliation of quantum theory with general relativity. It gets you, you know, a quantum theory of gravity from a direction that maybe you weren't expecting and maybe you don't even want, but it's the solution to many purported problems. And so that's, that's the killer app that it gets you, you know, that, that we need to remember that the conventional physics that people are working with."
},
{
"end_time": 7150.282,
"index": 280,
"start_time": 7142.858,
"text": " It fails to tell you why you ever got a measurement outcome. It fails to do that. And so that's what this will get you."
},
{
"end_time": 7176.869,
"index": 281,
"start_time": 7151.357,
"text": " It gets you consistency. It gets you a physically consistent theory that doesn't founder on such thought experiments as the Wigner's friend experiment, the Frasherger-Renner inconsistencies. It gets you theoretical consistency and it gets you reconciliation among these different levels of the theory. So I think that's quite a lot. Maybe not a killer app, but it solves a lot of problems that people say they're concerned about."
},
{
"end_time": 7204.974,
"index": 282,
"start_time": 7178.046,
"text": " So in other words, you're saying, forget killer app, I'm going to give you the whole phone for which all the other apps are based. I think so. I think so. You know, and it's like, well, it often it's like, well, we don't want that phone because you're saying, you know, you're saying that space time is not the delimiter of everything real. And we can't, you know, that bothers us. I'm like, well, you know, I'm sure the heliocentric theory really bothered the church really bothered a lot of people who"
},
{
"end_time": 7231.613,
"index": 283,
"start_time": 7205.333,
"text": " Had been brought up to believe that. And I understand that I am sympathetic to it, but you know, this, this is a solution and people who want to, you know, want solutions and are willing to think about what training wheels they might be working with. They might not recognize as, as what they thought were important theoretical, you know, square one ground rules."
},
{
"end_time": 7262.312,
"index": 284,
"start_time": 7232.534,
"text": " and actually unnecessary constraints that you don't need to be working with. How can we generalize or how can you generalize the transactional approach to address open quantum systems where density operators evolve according to Lindblad type master equations? Oh, absolutely. I mean, it's completely general. So, I mean, any kind of, you know, it's not at all restricted to closed systems. I mean, it's a completely general approach. So,"
},
{
"end_time": 7290.367,
"index": 285,
"start_time": 7262.619,
"text": " You know Lindblad equations and master equations a diffusion type equations if that if I understand correctly that that yeah. In fact, I've written about how that's in my book. My my CUP 2022 book about how we get you know master equations make a lot more sense in the transactional picture because once again, you know within thermodynamics when you're dealing with a master equation that that's telling you about equilibrium conditions and approach to equilibrium."
},
{
"end_time": 7320.077,
"index": 286,
"start_time": 7290.589,
"text": " You actually have to do a little fudging and help yourself to a probabilistic description when conventional theory, the conventional quantum theory will not let you do that or it won't let, I mean, it won't give you any reason to do it. So that's where there's like, um, well, we'll just wave our hands and we'll say, well, we think we have probabilities now, and now we will use our master equations. So in the transactional approach, you, you don't have to wave your hands over that. You clearly have real physics that tells you why you get master equations."
},
{
"end_time": 7345.776,
"index": 287,
"start_time": 7322.756,
"text": " What is the Afshar experiment? Oh, okay. So the Afshar experiment was a clever way of, of, uh, looking like it was measuring two non-commuting observables in the same experiment and thereby, you know, violating, you know, kind of violate any uncertainty principle or at least"
},
{
"end_time": 7361.237,
"index": 288,
"start_time": 7346.084,
"text": " the bores notion of complementarity and it wasn't doing that at all like what so what i mean again it's fine to do experiments and it was a lovely experiment what we what we where we get into trouble is"
},
{
"end_time": 7386.186,
"index": 289,
"start_time": 7361.749,
"text": " is talking about the implications of experimental results and the bearing of the experiment. And here's where I think Afshar went a little too far in his interpretation. And what I've written about, and I can give those that reference if people want is that we had, we had a measurement of the, you know, formally equivalent to have it preparing a particle say up along X."
},
{
"end_time": 7415.111,
"index": 290,
"start_time": 7387.568,
"text": " Measuring it again and say, yeah, it's up along X and then measuring it along Z and getting some answer. That's all it was. So it was, there was nothing, you know, it looks more impressive when you do it in the, in the kind of, you know, position basis and so on. But all it is was, um, you know, a preparation, a confirmation of the prepared state, and then a measurement in a, of, of a non-commuting observable. And that's all it was."
},
{
"end_time": 7437.705,
"index": 291,
"start_time": 7417.022,
"text": " So, you know, it's fine to do experiments and where you get into trouble is making claims about what the experiment showed you. When those claims aren't necessarily supported by the experiment itself. Now, I have one last question from the creator of formscapes, which is a YouTube channel. I'll put the link on screen and in the description."
},
{
"end_time": 7466.92,
"index": 292,
"start_time": 7438.575,
"text": " He says, I assume the topic of reverse causation is going to come up. So I'd like to suggest a question. How does Ruth feel about the possibility of interpreting these phenomena as indicating that separate entities are already interconnected by default rather than interpreting them as indicative of reverse causation? Well, yeah, I mean, I think at a subtle level that that's a good way to look at it, that that these apparently separate entities, I mean, certainly if they are charged"
},
{
"end_time": 7479.548,
"index": 293,
"start_time": 7467.551,
"text": " Particles they are always connected in the direct action picture by the time symmetric propagator by so-called virtual photons and so they are always connected in nets and in that sense are never truly separate."
},
{
"end_time": 7498.234,
"index": 294,
"start_time": 7480.077,
"text": " so so i personally think you know i mean i'm not sure that what the what the questioner has fully in mind but certainly at a basic level you know at a superficial level i prefer to think of of the phenomena that we see as coming out of these"
},
{
"end_time": 7524.735,
"index": 295,
"start_time": 7498.78,
"text": " These connectedness, this connectedness that exists already at the level of possibility that is physically real and that and that the emergent phenomena are coming out of that rather than, you know, rather than saying that things are literally going backward in time, because I just don't think the physics gives you that. What advice do you have to the younger generation? And I should say that when I say younger generation,"
},
{
"end_time": 7554.07,
"index": 296,
"start_time": 7524.94,
"text": " There are also people who are in their 50s in their 60s and 70s. And actually there's someone who is in their 80s who is just getting their PhD emailing me. So I just mean people who are not done with their research. Wonderful. Well, I would just say, you know, do a lot of introspection. You know, try to when you're looking at theories and when you're looking at presentations of ideas,"
},
{
"end_time": 7573.609,
"index": 297,
"start_time": 7554.445,
"text": " Try to be a critical thinker and to kind of examine for yourself what are my expectations of nature are am i possibly imposing something on nature that nature might not be doing you know and i just always tell myself nature is the final arbiter."
},
{
"end_time": 7603.439,
"index": 298,
"start_time": 7574.241,
"text": " I have to be obedient. I have to think of myself as a student of nature rather than, you know, imposing my preferred metaphysical view on nature. And really that's a lesson that we get from Heisenberg going back to when he came up with quantum theory is that is what he did. What I kind of think of as Zen beginner's mind, it's good advice. It's like go back to be teachable. Let the phenomena be your data."
},
{
"end_time": 7627.619,
"index": 299,
"start_time": 7603.78,
"text": " and let possible theories just be ways to create relationships among the data that that might might turn out to be to work for you to to be corroborated and if they are corroborated to me that suggests that they have some physical relevance and again it's because it's kind of a realist approach but it it's let let the data and let"
},
{
"end_time": 7656.305,
"index": 300,
"start_time": 7627.995,
"text": " Let nature teach you what it might be doing rather than take things like, well, we must impose causality on our theory. We must impose symmetry on our theory, you know, which is, which is an approach that, that has become traditional in physics. And those I call the training wheels, you know, maybe we need them, maybe they're not, but that's the thing to look for is, is, you know, while you're learning, be a student of nature and, and just be alert to not put constraints on nature that nature doesn't really have."
},
{
"end_time": 7684.991,
"index": 301,
"start_time": 7658.422,
"text": " Thank you so much. I appreciate the time that you've spent with me. It's now yeah, two hours, two and a half. Always a pleasure. Wonderful. Thank you for the opportunity. I love the chat. And I just want to say that I respect people who get their PhDs when they're older, because one of the worst things you can do is concretize your your worldview, your belt on showing as I say, when you're in your 20s, which is what most people do. If you ask almost any one of the"
},
{
"end_time": 7708.848,
"index": 302,
"start_time": 7685.316,
"text": " Famous physicists, what is it that you believe? And then you and they're 60, they're 70 now. And you asked them that when they were in their late 20s. It's approximately the same in terms of ontology. Yeah, it's good to try to be flexible and and and, you know, be a lifelong learner. And often that is hard. When you when you get your PhD very young, I got mine, I guess it was about 36 or something."
},
{
"end_time": 7738.507,
"index": 303,
"start_time": 7709.121,
"text": " So I had done a lot of different things and you get to explore before diving. Absolutely. Absolutely. And even when you do that, you need, you always need to be wary of, of, of things that are passed on as yes, this is, this is the way it's done. And, and, you know, go, okay, well maybe the reason you still have problems is because that's the way it's being done, you know, rather than just be fault, be obedient and you have to be disobedient sometimes."
},
{
"end_time": 7754.036,
"index": 304,
"start_time": 7740.555,
"text": " I mean, Einstein was in a patent office, right? Sometimes you just have to go off the beaten path to find the solutions and to really find understanding. Ruth, it's been a pleasure."
},
{
"end_time": 7779.07,
"index": 305,
"start_time": 7754.411,
"text": " thank you so much well thank you so much for the opportunity really really enjoyed it thank you for a great question i also wanted to take time to thank people who have joined as a youtube member someone who's been here for 13 months over a year is mike clark thank you thank you to dima thank you to alan thank you to neil thank you to charles matthew thank you to ike thank you to a underscore mb thank you to eric weinstein you've been a member for six months thank you"
},
{
"end_time": 7792.244,
"index": 306,
"start_time": 7779.07,
"text": " Thank you to Dr. Y. You've been here for five months. Thank you to Yuri. Thank you, Eric Green. Thank you, Mike. Thank you, Unreal. Thank you, Nicholas. You've been here for four months. Thank you, Carlo Rovelli. You've been here for three months."
},
{
"end_time": 7819.189,
"index": 307,
"start_time": 7792.5,
"text": " Thank you to David, thank you to William, thank you to Richard, Ether Topo, to Cosmic Felon, great name, thank you to Emmy Johnson, thank you to Peter Kellner for two months, Immanuel, Borko, Ianis, thank you Nut, thank you Human Intelligence, thank you Mark, thank you Doc, thank you Adam, thank you Met Mit, you've been here for one month, thank you Argentine, Beth, Emery, Casey, Sigmund Freud, thank you Terry Bollinger, I appreciate you, I know you comment all the time,"
},
{
"end_time": 7848.114,
"index": 308,
"start_time": 7819.189,
"text": " New update! Started a sub stack. Writings on there are currently about language and ill-defined concepts as well as some other mathematical details."
},
{
"end_time": 7876.544,
"index": 309,
"start_time": 7848.353,
"text": " Much more being written there. This is content that isn't anywhere else. It's not on theories of everything. It's not on Patreon. Also, full transcripts will be placed there at some point in the future. Several people ask me, hey, Kurt, you've spoken to so many people in the fields of theoretical physics, philosophy and consciousness. What are your thoughts? While I remain impartial in interviews, this substack is a way to peer into my present deliberations on these topics. Also,"
},
{
"end_time": 7903.848,
"index": 310,
"start_time": 7876.698,
"text": " Thank you to our partner, The Economist. Firstly, thank you for watching. Thank you for listening. If you haven't subscribed or clicked that like button, now is the time to do so. Why? Because each subscribe, each like helps YouTube push this content to more people like yourself. Plus, it helps out Kurt directly, aka me. I also found out last year that external links count plenty toward the algorithm."
},
{
"end_time": 7915.06,
"index": 311,
"start_time": 7903.848,
"text": " Which means that whenever you share on Twitter, say on Facebook or even on Reddit, etc. It shows YouTube, hey, people are talking about this content outside of YouTube, which in turn"
},
{
"end_time": 7943.148,
"index": 312,
"start_time": 7915.111,
"text": " Greatly aids the distribution on YouTube. Thirdly, there's a remarkably active Discord and subreddit for theories of everything where people explicate toes, they disagree respectfully about theories and build as a community our own toe. Links to both are in the description. Fourthly, you should know this podcast is on iTunes. It's on Spotify. It's on all of the audio platforms. All you have to do is type in theories of everything and you'll find it. Personally, I gained from rewatching lectures and podcasts."
},
{
"end_time": 7963.063,
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"start_time": 7943.148,
"text": " I also read in the comments"
},
{
"end_time": 7986.493,
"index": 314,
"start_time": 7963.063,
"text": " and donating with whatever you like there's also paypal there's also crypto there's also just joining on youtube again keep in mind it's support from the sponsors and you that allow me to work on toe full time you also get early access to ad free episodes whether it's audio or video it's audio in the case of patreon video in the case of youtube for instance this episode that you're listening to right now was released a few days earlier"
},
{
"end_time": 7993.131,
"index": 315,
"start_time": 7986.715,
"text": " Every dollar helps far more than you think. Either way, your viewership is generosity enough. Thank you so much."
}
]
}No transcript available.