For a high level look at quantum physics I’d recommend Something Deeply Hidden by Sean Carroll. I feel like I understand many worlds much better after reading it. If you like audiobooks this one is great too.
I don’t think I’m motivated enough to read something book-length on quantum physics, at least not in the next few years. Thanks for the recommendation though. If there was something blog-post-length that did a good job of communicating the big picture ideas I’d be interested in that.
I’d suggest reading something about contextual, a.k.a. quantum cognition (rationality, decision-making) instead. It’s important but entirely ignored on LessWrong. All decision theories pretend that the contextuality of decisions (values, inferences, etc.) is an annoyance that could be swept under the rug. But it couldn’t, and therefore the rationality theories that don’t account for this quantumness are fundamentally incomplete.
Please don’t just equate contextual cognition with “quantum cognition”, and contextuality with quantumness.
There are a variety of cognitive phenomena which are in some way contextual or context-dependent, and a number of theories of those phenomena. “Quantum cognition” has come to mean one such school of thought, one that is inspired by the math and sometimes the metaphysics of quantum theory.
(I’ll emphasize for people unfamiliar with this school of thought, the idea is e.g. that cognitive representations undergo transformations mathematically analogous to those of a quantum state vector, something which can be true even if quantum mechanics is irrelevant to the physical substrate of cognition.)
Possibly, hopefully, some of the ideas of the “quantum cognition school of thought” actually are on the right track. But: quantum math is not the only way to implement contextuality; not everything that is contextual deserves to be called quantum; and many of the cognitive phenomena that this school has explained via quantum-like models can be explained in much simpler ways.
You are right that quantum math is not the only way to represent intrinsic contextuality, but it might be the most fundamental, principled way because quantum theory “is increasingly viewed as a theory of the process of observation itself” (Fields et al. 2021). So, to familiarise oneself with any model of the phenomena, I’d recommend paying attention to quantum models.
not everything that is contextual deserves to be called quantum; and many of the cognitive phenomena that this school has explained via quantum-like models can be explained in much simpler ways.
Non-intrinsic contextuality, i.e., that which admits coherent Bayesian modelling, indeed doesn’t require fancy treatment (and could be subject to any Bayesian decision theory). In my comment, by “contextual” I meant “intrinsically contextual”, for brevity.
All these models are of strictly theoretical and engineering interest (building AI and aligning AI), anyway, not practical interest. Reading about contextual/quantum rationality is not the way to improve one’s own decisions, so I’m not afraid that anyone will misapply the theories of quantum rationality.
quantum theory “is increasingly viewed as a theory of the process of observation itself”
Via quant-ph at arxiv.org, one may regularly see papers trying to derive quantum theory from some new axiomatic or philosophical basis. One class of such approaches focuses on epistemology. In my experience this falls into two types. Either the proposed new foundations involve a repackaging of some familiar quantum weirdness, such as the uncertainty principle; or, the proposed new foundations aren’t “weird” but also don’t actually give you quantum theory. (I believe the latter are motivated by the desire that quantum theory not be weird, i.e. not require reality to possess some strange new feature.)
I don’t see anything in the references of Fields et al 2021 which escapes this dichotomy, and the bland dictum that quantum theory is a “theory of the process of observation” definitely sounds like the second type of new foundation, that always fails for not being weird enough.
For a high level look at quantum physics I’d recommend Something Deeply Hidden by Sean Carroll. I feel like I understand many worlds much better after reading it. If you like audiobooks this one is great too.
I don’t think I’m motivated enough to read something book-length on quantum physics, at least not in the next few years. Thanks for the recommendation though. If there was something blog-post-length that did a good job of communicating the big picture ideas I’d be interested in that.
I’d suggest reading something about contextual, a.k.a. quantum cognition (rationality, decision-making) instead. It’s important but entirely ignored on LessWrong. All decision theories pretend that the contextuality of decisions (values, inferences, etc.) is an annoyance that could be swept under the rug. But it couldn’t, and therefore the rationality theories that don’t account for this quantumness are fundamentally incomplete.
Please don’t just equate contextual cognition with “quantum cognition”, and contextuality with quantumness.
There are a variety of cognitive phenomena which are in some way contextual or context-dependent, and a number of theories of those phenomena. “Quantum cognition” has come to mean one such school of thought, one that is inspired by the math and sometimes the metaphysics of quantum theory.
(I’ll emphasize for people unfamiliar with this school of thought, the idea is e.g. that cognitive representations undergo transformations mathematically analogous to those of a quantum state vector, something which can be true even if quantum mechanics is irrelevant to the physical substrate of cognition.)
Possibly, hopefully, some of the ideas of the “quantum cognition school of thought” actually are on the right track. But: quantum math is not the only way to implement contextuality; not everything that is contextual deserves to be called quantum; and many of the cognitive phenomena that this school has explained via quantum-like models can be explained in much simpler ways.
You are right that quantum math is not the only way to represent intrinsic contextuality, but it might be the most fundamental, principled way because quantum theory “is increasingly viewed as a theory of the process of observation itself” (Fields et al. 2021). So, to familiarise oneself with any model of the phenomena, I’d recommend paying attention to quantum models.
Non-intrinsic contextuality, i.e., that which admits coherent Bayesian modelling, indeed doesn’t require fancy treatment (and could be subject to any Bayesian decision theory). In my comment, by “contextual” I meant “intrinsically contextual”, for brevity.
All these models are of strictly theoretical and engineering interest (building AI and aligning AI), anyway, not practical interest. Reading about contextual/quantum rationality is not the way to improve one’s own decisions, so I’m not afraid that anyone will misapply the theories of quantum rationality.
Via quant-ph at arxiv.org, one may regularly see papers trying to derive quantum theory from some new axiomatic or philosophical basis. One class of such approaches focuses on epistemology. In my experience this falls into two types. Either the proposed new foundations involve a repackaging of some familiar quantum weirdness, such as the uncertainty principle; or, the proposed new foundations aren’t “weird” but also don’t actually give you quantum theory. (I believe the latter are motivated by the desire that quantum theory not be weird, i.e. not require reality to possess some strange new feature.)
I don’t see anything in the references of Fields et al 2021 which escapes this dichotomy, and the bland dictum that quantum theory is a “theory of the process of observation” definitely sounds like the second type of new foundation, that always fails for not being weird enough.