Discussion with Paul Werbos on the nature of quantum nonlocality

re: Yakir Aharonov's http://discovermagazine.com/2010/apr/01-back-from-the-future#.UMJp8aWe1ho

On Dec 7, 2012, at 2:55 AM, Paul Werbos <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.> wrote:

I personally have no basis for objecting to what Ruth says about that specific example
by Aharonov of evidence for retrocausality. I haven't felt any need to look at his specific examples,
because of much stronger and pervasive evidence which I see elsewhere:
http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10773-008-9719-9

Jack is right that I do not see evidence IN PHYSICS for action at distance.

JS: Let's be clear. If by action at a distance you mean direct Einstein's "spooky telepathic" spacelike influence as opposed to Cramer's used of Costa de Beauregard's "Feynman zig zag"

http://www.npl.washington.edu/npl/int_rep/qm_nl.html

I see no way to tell the difference. They seem to be equivalent. That is, the entanglement effect is completely independent of the space-time interval between strong Von-Neumann measurements on the complex entangled system, spacelike, timelike, light like doesn't matter. The effect is BEYOND SPACE-TIME. It's pre-metrical, topological.

The issue is whether we can control the effect, decrypt it before it is sent, but only if it will be sent in a Novikov consistent Feynman history loop in time.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novikov_self-consistency_principle
Brain presponse and remote viewing are evidence of that.
http://dbem.ws/FeelingFuture.pdf
http://www.biomindsuperpowers.com/Pages/CIA-InitiatedRV.html
in the sense of http://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0203049


PW: Indeed, the ability to revive the use of local realistic models in physics, just like things Einstein would have liked,
is one of the benefits of facing up to retrocausality.

JS: We have a difference here. When Einstein meant local realism he did not include retrocausality only the usual retarded past to present to future causality.

Einstein local realism + Aharonov's back-from-the-future retro-causal Destiny quantum vector = usual notion of spacelike nonlocality as seen in violation of Bell's locality inequality.

PW: People have advised me to wait a few months before
saying too much about recent progress on those lines, reminding me of how my big mouth
got me into a mess when I developed backpropagation

JS: Do you have retro-causation in your idea of backpropagation?


PW-- but I have posted a few things in obscure places like vixra and a journal
in Russia, which foreshadow some important developments. It is relatively easy to talk about
the possibility of going back to local realism in abstract or hypothetical terms; it is far more difficult to find Lagrangians which actually work,
in coping with the huge and tangled mass of distilled empirical evidence and adressing phenomena not yet addressed by today's standard model.

JS: You may be interested in this paper suggesting a non-retarded non-algorithmic Lagrangian approach.




PW: Jack also cites work by Bierman, Libet and others as a kind of evidence for action at a distance.

JS: Only in the general pre-metrical BEYOND SPACE-TIME sense above. In the presponse case the effect is retro-causal along the timelike world line connecting future stimulus to past presponse neural event in the history of the subject.

PW: In that realm of parapsychology
or psychic powers, I personally also see a mixed bag -- some things which I view as extremely
persuasive to me, others less so. But at the end of the day, if SOME of the evidence for parapsychology or psychic powers is strongly persuasive to some of us (like me and Jack), AND IF that evidence does seem to require something like action at a distance
well beyond what retrocausality alone can explain, what can we do? How can we reconcile the physics
and the psychology?


JS: This is a RED HERRING a FALSE DICHOTOMY as I explained above. To repeat, the general idea is that the enchanted web of actual strong Von Neumann projection irreversible measurements on different parts of an extended entangled system are nodes in a graph. The spacetime intervals between the nodes is irrelevant. Think Erlanger program. Quantum geometry is pre-metrical entirely. The real issue is signal nonlocality violating the narrow limit of orthodox quantum theory.


PW: One approach is to try to look for action at a distance in physics. But I haven't seen the evidence there. Maybe we will someday, maybe not.
I do have some half-formed ideas about how certain new chips MIGHT be used to do new experiments,
but first we would need the chips themselves -- or, if they already exist, to get them hooked up to the
right nanosecond-accuracy testing needed as a prelude to building more interesting systems.
Sometimes getting people to talk to each other seems harder than figuring out the physics.

Personally, I would explain the APPEARANCE of action at a distance as an emergent phenomenon rather than part of the
laws of physics. We all know that simple-looking nonlinear dynamical systems can give rise to extremely complex emergent
phenomena, such as life itself. Thus I tend to view psychic powers as more of a biological or even neural network kind of phenomenon
than as a physics phenomenon. The physics enables the evolution of the biology, on the larger stage of the universe or cosmos, but retrocausality
is the only physics based phenomenon we (or rather, some of us) see clearly and directly in the parapsychology evidence.
Thus I tend to believe that the neural network approach allows one to make much richer contact with the empirical data from
psychology than any direct reductionist approach. ON those lines, I hope you all will forgive me if I mention a brief
pointer to to how I would put this together, on the human psychology side:

http://drpauljohn.blogspot.com/2012/11/remembering-what-is-most-important-one.html

Best of luck,

      Paul