this post was submitted on 25 Mar 2026
965 points (98.3% liked)
Not The Onion
21016 readers
454 users here now
Welcome
We're not The Onion! Not affiliated with them in any way! Not operated by them in any way! All the news here is real!
The Rules
Posts must be:
- Links to news stories from...
- ...credible sources, with...
- ...their original headlines, that...
- ...would make people who see the headline think, “That has got to be a story from The Onion, America’s Finest News Source.”
Please also avoid duplicates.
Comments and post content must abide by the server rules for Lemmy.world and generally abstain from trollish, bigoted, ableist, or otherwise disruptive behavior that makes this community less fun for everyone.
And that’s basically it!
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Waa waa boo hoo. You can cry about me criticizing crackpot quantum mysticism by saying "stop hatin' bro 😢😢😢😢" but that doesn't magically make your crackpot mysticism justifiable. You have the right to have incoherent mystical beliefs, but I also have the right to criticize them. If you don't want to be criticized then don't post them on a public forum.
Did you read what I wrote at all? This is a criticism about the crackpot anti-realist claims. Yes, you can argue that objective reality doesn't exist, that all that exists is what you are directly observing in the direct moment of the observation and nothing exists outside of your direct gaze, and that you have a mathematical model for predicting what will show up in your direct gaze, and that this model makes the right predictions.
If that is just your own personal belief, I'd think you're crazy, but whatever. If, however, you start lying and claiming that this is somehow implied by the linear algebra, that quantum mechanics somehow "proves" your solipsistic crackpottery, then I am going to call you out on being a crackpot quantum mystic. If you don't want to be criticized then don't spread your quantum mysticism on a public forum.
Because you don't understand the mathematics so you don't understand what I am talking about. You have a Laymen's interpretation of MW you got from YouTube videos that paints it as just saying that different classical worlds occur in different parallel branches of a multiverse. In your mind, you think what MW is claiming is that if a photon has a 50%/50% chance of being reflected/transmitted at a beam splitter, then the world splits into two classical branches where in one the observer measures the photon having been reflected and in the other they measure the photon having been transmitted.
You think what I am saying is absurd because you get all your info from YouTube videos and don't even understand what is seriously being advocated by these crackpots as you don't actually read the academic literature on the subject. No, what they are claiming is indeed far more absurd, which is that the photon does neither of those things, it takes no real trajectories at all in 3D space in any sense, it doesn't even exist as a distinct object in the world.
John Bell, "Quantum Mechanics for Cosmologists"
MW is even more crackpot nonsense than typical anti-realist claims, because at least the solipsist believes in what they can observe in the moment. You simply cannot derive what is empirically observed from MW because it has no connection at all to the real world, and so it only reflects one's ignorance on this subject to claim that MW actually has a formula for making empirical predictions. They simply do not.
MW is anti-realist not just in the properties you are not observing, but even in the properties you observe, and just claims reality is literally a mathematical function, like a Platonic realm but rather than all mathematics it is just one function ψ(x,t). We obviously cannot observe pure mathematical functions. You need something in the mathematical model, some mathematical symbol, that refers to something that we can empirically observe, usually called an observable, yet there are no observables in MW so there is no possibility of actually making an empirical prediction with it.
Even the crackpot solipsist's views are more coherent than the views of the crackpot Many Worlder's views.
Tim Maudlin has a good lecture on this fact I will link below. I'd also recommend his paper "Can the World be Only Wavefunction?"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=us7gbWWPUsA
Again, my criticism is not solely that these views are obviously crackpot mystical nonsense (they are). The problem with quantum mystics is not just that they are mystics, but that they pretend quantum mechanics bolsters their mystical claims. Nothing in the linear algebra of the model comes close to having the hint of an air of implying these things. If you want to believe that personally, go ahead, but stop pretending these crank views are in any way backed by physics.
The rampant spread of quantum mysticism in academic circles is a problem because these physicists who buy into it don't always keep to themselves, many go to the media and start trying to deceive the public that solipsism is somehow proved by physics. Some even manage to get peer-reviewed papers published in academic journals claiming objective reality doesn't exist, which then crackpot idealists like Bernardo Kastrup latch onto to "prove" we all live in a grand "cosmic consciousness" because they have an academic paper and real physicists backing their views.
When even the physics departments are becoming overrun with crackpot mystics then we have a serious problem because the public trusts these people. I hold them to a higher standard than I would hold a random charlatan like Deepak Chopra which I don't expect to tell the truth anyways. It bothers me much more when I see physicists like Chris Ferrie publishing Medium articles where he claims quantum mechanics "denies reality" or Mithuna Yoganathan deliberately lying about the mathematics with claims repeatedly debunked in the academic literature to push the nonsense that the mathematics proves there is a multiverse "if you just take it seriously" than I do some random Twitter user saying some quantum mystical nonsense. These people exploit their credentials to push their own mystical mumbo jumbo views.