Speaking from a non-physicist perspective, much of what the QM sequence helped teach me is helping see the world from bottom-up; QM is regular, but it adds up to normality, and it’s normality that’s weird. Delving down into QM is going up the rabbit’s hole away from weirdness and normality, and into mathematical regularity.
By analogy, normal people are similarly weird because they’re the normality that was produced as the sum of a million years of evolution. Which in turn helps you realize that a random mind plucked out of mindspace is unlikely to have the characteristics we attribute to humanlike normality. Because normality is weird.
Once you go from bottom-to-top, you also help dissolve some questions like problems of identity and free will (though I had personally dissolved the supposed contradiction between free will and determinism many years before I encountered LessWrong) -- I still think that many knots people tie themselves over regarding issues like Quantum Suicide or Doomsday Dilemmas, are caused by insufficient application of the bottoms-up principle, or worse yet a half-hearted application thereof.
It’s bad enough that we’ve got people talking about things not being weird, as if weirdness is an objective property rather than something in the mind of the observer. Your words which I quoted are even worse; they’re a self-contradiction.
If you’re not willing to let the word “weird” have its dictionary definition, please, please just taboo it and let the subject die, rather than trying to redefine it as the opposite of the original meaning.
The commenter was saying “our intuitive understanding of reality” is weird, I think. That’s why the commenter was able to noncontradictorily say that Quantum Mechanics fixed some problems and made things less weird.
Let’s unpack what that means, because I feel we might be disagreeing over the meaning of the word. I’ll use Wiktionary but if you don’t like the definitions given feel free to substitute.
Deviating from the normal, bizarre.
(And some unrelated meanings.)
“Strange” in turn unpacks to:
1a. Not normal; odd, unusual, surprising, out of the ordinary.
1b. Unfamiliar, not yet part of one’s experience. (Ex: a strange town.)
For completeness I looked up normal. I believe the only relevant meaning is “usual; ordinary”.
Summing up, I define “weird” as meaning “not normal; irregular, exceptional; unexpected”. And a secondary meaning of “strange, unfamiliar”.
In light of this, what does it mean to say that:
“our intuitive understanding of reality” is weird
Is our intuitive understanding not “normal”, exceptional, or unexpected? It’s certainly normal among humans; and we have no concrete examples of a larger reference class of conscious beings. It’s been argued that other life-forms would form different intuitions, but at least all Earth life except maybe microbes operates on classical-mechanics intuitions. Arguing that this isn’t “normal” requires more than just saying something different is possible in principle.
As for the secondary meaning, quantum mechanics (and relativity for that matter) certainly describes behavior which is strange and unfamiliar to our intuitions. But then the correct use of the word “weird” is precisely to say that QM is weird. Not that we are.
I don’t think those definitions really capture some of the relevant connotations that weirdness has related to accuracy and consistency. I personally didn’t even realize the exact problem you had with the commenter because the way zhe used “weird” made perfect sense to me.
I also don’t like prescriptivist theories of grammar very much and think that the original comment was clearly understandable and was perhaps less clearly intended to subvert the common belief that “QM is weird”, which is a belief that has been criticized in multiple places on this website, and I appreciated the creative attempt to get rid of the flawed belief by reframing “normalcy”.
My initial overview of these comments made me believe there was a lack of communication, now I see the initial hints I missed that show that you’re upset because words like “weird” are used informally. My bad for the initial comment, then.
I also don’t like prescriptivist theories of grammar very much
Me neither. I’m bringing up dictionary definitions as descriptions, not as prescriptions. I happen to agree with the dictionary (and it’s not my native language anyway), and since you seem to use a different meaning/definition, please tell me what it is!
and think that the original comment was clearly understandable
I, at least, apparently still don’t understand it.
Or rather, I understand the intent (because it’s been explained) but can’t understand how that intent can be read from the original words.
My whole point was about being helped to gain an additional perspective; seeing something from bottoms up.
When you say that weirdness is “in the mind of the observer”, you’re quite obviously correct in the most plain sense, but you seem to be assuming that a mind can have only one point of view, and not intentionally attempt or even manage to shift between different point of views.
I understand your point about the POVs. In light of that, here’s what bothers me about saying “normality is weird”.
If we look at a quantum-mechanical system from the classical POV, we notice that no classical laws (even classical-style laws we don’t know yet) can explain its behavior. So it looks weird to us. That’s fine.
If we look at a classical system from the quantum POV, we can’t calculate its behavior on the quantum level, it’s too complex. But if we could—and in principle the laws of physics tell us how to do it—then we expect to predict its behavior correctly. So why should it seem weird?
The two situations aren’t symmetrical. We used to believe in classical mechanics, and then we discovered quantum phenomena, and we saw that they were weird. This was because the laws of physics we used were wrong! Now that we use the right ones (hopefully), nothing should look weird anymore, including “classical” systems.
It’s true that QM is at best incomplete, and we can’t yet use it correctly in some relativistic situations. So those situations still look weird from a QM POV. But this doesn’t apply to our normal lives.
Yeah, that’s roughly the best I could come up with, but it doesn’t seem sufficient. Noticing the extent of cognitive bias is enough to figure out that humans are weird.
I should perhaps make a fuller post about this at some point, but in brief: “Individuals” are in reality quite divisible (pun intended). Quantum Suicide makes sense to me only if you have a top-down pespective on identity that either persists as a whole or is destroyed as a whole and nothing in between.
If you instead view the self as some bizarre arbitrary conglameration of qualia-producing processes (including whatever processes produce self-awareness, however they do it), then the very concept of destruction or persistence must be applied to actually individual thought-processes, and is meaningless when applied to whole people.
Speaking from a non-physicist perspective, much of what the QM sequence helped teach me is helping see the world from bottom-up; QM is regular, but it adds up to normality, and it’s normality that’s weird. Delving down into QM is going up the rabbit’s hole away from weirdness and normality, and into mathematical regularity.
By analogy, normal people are similarly weird because they’re the normality that was produced as the sum of a million years of evolution. Which in turn helps you realize that a random mind plucked out of mindspace is unlikely to have the characteristics we attribute to humanlike normality. Because normality is weird.
Once you go from bottom-to-top, you also help dissolve some questions like problems of identity and free will (though I had personally dissolved the supposed contradiction between free will and determinism many years before I encountered LessWrong) -- I still think that many knots people tie themselves over regarding issues like Quantum Suicide or Doomsday Dilemmas, are caused by insufficient application of the bottoms-up principle, or worse yet a half-hearted application thereof.
It’s bad enough that we’ve got people talking about things not being weird, as if weirdness is an objective property rather than something in the mind of the observer. Your words which I quoted are even worse; they’re a self-contradiction.
If you’re not willing to let the word “weird” have its dictionary definition, please, please just taboo it and let the subject die, rather than trying to redefine it as the opposite of the original meaning.
The commenter was saying “our intuitive understanding of reality” is weird, I think. That’s why the commenter was able to noncontradictorily say that Quantum Mechanics fixed some problems and made things less weird.
Let’s unpack what that means, because I feel we might be disagreeing over the meaning of the word. I’ll use Wiktionary but if you don’t like the definitions given feel free to substitute.
Weird (when used as adjective):
Strange.
Deviating from the normal, bizarre. (And some unrelated meanings.)
“Strange” in turn unpacks to: 1a. Not normal; odd, unusual, surprising, out of the ordinary. 1b. Unfamiliar, not yet part of one’s experience. (Ex: a strange town.)
For completeness I looked up normal. I believe the only relevant meaning is “usual; ordinary”.
Summing up, I define “weird” as meaning “not normal; irregular, exceptional; unexpected”. And a secondary meaning of “strange, unfamiliar”.
In light of this, what does it mean to say that:
Is our intuitive understanding not “normal”, exceptional, or unexpected? It’s certainly normal among humans; and we have no concrete examples of a larger reference class of conscious beings. It’s been argued that other life-forms would form different intuitions, but at least all Earth life except maybe microbes operates on classical-mechanics intuitions. Arguing that this isn’t “normal” requires more than just saying something different is possible in principle.
As for the secondary meaning, quantum mechanics (and relativity for that matter) certainly describes behavior which is strange and unfamiliar to our intuitions. But then the correct use of the word “weird” is precisely to say that QM is weird. Not that we are.
I don’t think those definitions really capture some of the relevant connotations that weirdness has related to accuracy and consistency. I personally didn’t even realize the exact problem you had with the commenter because the way zhe used “weird” made perfect sense to me.
I also don’t like prescriptivist theories of grammar very much and think that the original comment was clearly understandable and was perhaps less clearly intended to subvert the common belief that “QM is weird”, which is a belief that has been criticized in multiple places on this website, and I appreciated the creative attempt to get rid of the flawed belief by reframing “normalcy”.
My initial overview of these comments made me believe there was a lack of communication, now I see the initial hints I missed that show that you’re upset because words like “weird” are used informally. My bad for the initial comment, then.
Me neither. I’m bringing up dictionary definitions as descriptions, not as prescriptions. I happen to agree with the dictionary (and it’s not my native language anyway), and since you seem to use a different meaning/definition, please tell me what it is!
I, at least, apparently still don’t understand it.
Or rather, I understand the intent (because it’s been explained) but can’t understand how that intent can be read from the original words.
My whole point was about being helped to gain an additional perspective; seeing something from bottoms up.
When you say that weirdness is “in the mind of the observer”, you’re quite obviously correct in the most plain sense, but you seem to be assuming that a mind can have only one point of view, and not intentionally attempt or even manage to shift between different point of views.
I understand your point about the POVs. In light of that, here’s what bothers me about saying “normality is weird”.
If we look at a quantum-mechanical system from the classical POV, we notice that no classical laws (even classical-style laws we don’t know yet) can explain its behavior. So it looks weird to us. That’s fine.
If we look at a classical system from the quantum POV, we can’t calculate its behavior on the quantum level, it’s too complex. But if we could—and in principle the laws of physics tell us how to do it—then we expect to predict its behavior correctly. So why should it seem weird?
The two situations aren’t symmetrical. We used to believe in classical mechanics, and then we discovered quantum phenomena, and we saw that they were weird. This was because the laws of physics we used were wrong! Now that we use the right ones (hopefully), nothing should look weird anymore, including “classical” systems.
It’s true that QM is at best incomplete, and we can’t yet use it correctly in some relativistic situations. So those situations still look weird from a QM POV. But this doesn’t apply to our normal lives.
Yeah, that’s roughly the best I could come up with, but it doesn’t seem sufficient. Noticing the extent of cognitive bias is enough to figure out that humans are weird.
I’m curious how you used this approach to resolve the Quantum Suicide argument.
I should perhaps make a fuller post about this at some point, but in brief: “Individuals” are in reality quite divisible (pun intended). Quantum Suicide makes sense to me only if you have a top-down pespective on identity that either persists as a whole or is destroyed as a whole and nothing in between.
If you instead view the self as some bizarre arbitrary conglameration of qualia-producing processes (including whatever processes produce self-awareness, however they do it), then the very concept of destruction or persistence must be applied to actually individual thought-processes, and is meaningless when applied to whole people.
Again with the bizarre :-)