What point is there to “prove”? Your argument now is just that we defined them differently therefore they are different. Which suggests a straw man to my original point as I never once implied or suggested that in mathematics, real and complex numbers don’t have different definitions, that’s not relevant to anything.

Because your arguments are just bizarre. Imaginary numbers do not have a priori definitions. Humans have to define imaginary number and define the mathematical operations on them. There is no “hostile confusion” or “flaw,” there is you making the equivalent of flat-earth arguments but for mathematics. You keep claiming things that are objectively false and so obviously false it is bizarre how anyone could even make such a claim. I do not even know how to approach it, how on earth do you come to believe that complex numbers have a priori definitions and they aren’t just humans defining them like any other mathematical operation? There are no pre-given definitions for complex numbers, their properties are all explicitly defined by human beings, and you can also define the properties on vectors. You at first claim that supposedly you can only do certain operations on complex numbers that you cannot on vectors, I point out this is obviously false and you can’t give a single counter-example, so now you switch to claiming somehow the operations on complex numbers are all “pre-given.” Makes zero sense. You have not pointed out a “flaw,” you just ramble and declare victory, throwing personal attacks calling me “confused” like this is some sort of competition or something when you have not even made a single coherent point. Attacking me and downvoting all my posts isn’t going to somehow going to prove that you cannot decompose any complex-valued operations into real numbers, nor is it going to prove that complex numbers somehow don’t have to have their properties and operations on them postulated just like real numbers.

And you can also just write it out using real numbers if you wish, it’s just more mathematically concise to use complex numbers. It’s a purely subjective, personal choice to choose to use complex-valued notation. You are trying to argue that making a personal, subjective, arbitrary choice somehow imposes something upon physical reality. It doesn’t. There isn’t anything wrong with the standard formulation, but it is a choice of convention, and conventions aren’t physical. If I describe my losses in a positive number, and then later change convention and describe my winnings with a negative number, the underlying physical reality has not changed, it’s not going to suddenly transmute into something else because of a change in convention in how I describe it.

The complex numbers in quantum theory are not magic. They are also popular in classical mechanics as well, and are just quite common in wave mechanics in general (classical or quantum). In classical wave mechanics, in classical computer science, we use the Fourier transform a lot which is typically expressed as a complex number. It’s because waves have two degrees of freedom, and so you could describe them using a vector of two real numbers, or you could describe them using complex numbers. People like the complex-valued notation because it’s more concise to write down and express formulas in, but at the end of the day it’s just a convention, a notation created by human beings which many other mathematically equivalent notations can describe the same exact thing.

I am having genuine difficulty imagining in your head how you think you made a point here. It seems you’re claiming that given if two vectors have the same symbols between them, they should have identical output, such as (a,b) * (c,d) should have the same mathematical definition as (a+bi) * (c+di), or complex numbers are not reducible to real numbers.

You realize mathematical symbols are just conventions, right? They were not handed down to us from Zeus almighty. They are entirely human creations. I can happily define the meaning of (a,b) * (c,d) to be (ac-bd,ad+bc) and now it is mathematically well-defined and gives identical results.

Negative numbers are just real numbers with a symbol attached. Yes, that’s literally true. In computer code we only ever deal with 0s and 1s. We come up with a convention to represent negative numbers, they are still ultimately zeros and ones but we just say “zeros and ones in this form represent a negative number,” usually just by having the most significant bit 1. They are no physical negative numbers floating out there in the world like in a Platonic sense. What we call “negative” is contextual. It depends upon how we frame a problem and how we interpret a situation. You can lose money at a casino and say your earnings are now negative, or you can say your losses are now positive. Zeus isn’t going to strike you down for saying one over the other. There is nothing physically dictating what convention you use. You just use which convention you find most intuitive and mathematically convenient given the problem you’re trying to describe.

Yes, when we are talking about how computers work, we are talking about how numbers actually manifest in objective, physical reality. They are not some magical substance floating out there in the Platonic realm. Whenever we actually go to implement complex numbers or even negative in the real world, whenever we try to construct a physical system that replicates their behavior and can perform calculations on a physical level, we always just use unsigned real numbers (or natural numbers), and then later establish signage and complexity as conventions combined with a set of operations on how they should behave.

I’m not sure your point about fractional numbers. If you mean literally a/b, yes, there is software that treats a/b as just two natural numbers stitched together, but it’s actually a bit mathematically complicated to always keep things in fractional form, so that’s incredibly rare and you’d only see it in very specialized math software. Usually it’s represented with a floating point number. In a digital computer that number is an approximation as it’s ultimately digital, but I wouldn’t say that means only digital numbers are physical, because we can also construct analogue computers that can do useful computations and are not digital. Unless we discover that space is quantized and thus they were digital all along, then I do think it is meaningful to treat real numbers as, well, physically real, because we can physically implement them.

uh… broski… you do realize a vector of two real numbers can be rotated… right? Please give me a single example for a supposed impossible operation to do on a vector of two real numbers that you can do on complex numbers. I can just define v² where v is a vector (a,b) as (a,b)²=(a²-b²,2ab). Okay, now I’ve succeeded in reproducing your supposedly mathematically impossible operation. Give me another one.

A complex number is just two real numbers stitched together. It’s used in many areas, such as the Fourier transform which is common in computer science is often represented with complex numbers because it deals with waves and waves are two-dimensional, and so rather than needing two different equations you can represent it with a single equation where the two-dimensional behavior occurs on the complex-plane.

In principle you can always just split a complex number into two real numbers and carry on the calculation that way. In fact, if we couldn’t, then no one would use complex numbers, because computers can’t process imaginary numbers directly. Every computer program that deals with complex numbers, behind the scenes, is decomposing it into two real-valued floating point numbers.

No, it’s the lack of agreement that is the problem. Interpreting classical mechanics is philosophical as well, but there is generally agreement on how to think about it. You rarely see deep philosophical debates around Newtonian mechanics on how to “properly” interpret it. Even when we get into Einsteinian mechanics, there are some disagreements on how to interpret it but nothing too significant. The thing is that something like Newtonian mechanics is largely inline with our basic intuitions, so it is rather easy to get people on board with it, but QM requires you to give up a basic intuition, and which one you choose to give up on gives you an entirely different picture of what’s physically going on.

Philosophy has never been empirical, of course any philosophical interpretation of the meaning of the mathematics gives you the same empirical results. The empirical results only change if you change the mathematics. The difficulty is precisely that it is more difficult to get everyone on the same page on QM. There are technically, again, some disagreements in classical mechanics, like whether or not the curvature of spacetime really constitutes a substance that is warping or if it is just a convenient way to describe the dispositions of how systems move. Einstein for example criticized the notion of reifying the equations too much. You also cannot distinguish which interpretation is correct here as it’s, again, philosophical.

If we just all decided to agree on a particular way to interpret QM then there wouldn’t be an issue. The problem is that, while you can mostly get everyone on board with classical theories, with QM, you can interpret it in a time-symmetric way, a relational way, a way with a multiverse, etc, and they all give you drastically different pictures of physical reality. If we did just all pick one and agreed to it, then QM would be in the same boat as classical mechanics: some minor disagreements here and there but most people generally agree with the overall picture.

it isn’t scientifically accurate…

There are plenty of simple ways to understand QM on a more ontological level than just the maths. The literature is filled to the brim with them these days. The problem is not so much that it’s difficult, but that there is no agreement. So discussions regarding it just lead to arguments that can’t be settled, and so professors get tired of it and tell people to just shut up and calculate.

The brain is a physical object. Saying the brain playing a role in what we perceive somehow proves we don’t directly perceive reality as it really it from our point of view makes about as much sense as saying a painter can paint a painting of a fire so accurately that the painting it will suddenly burst into flames… no arrangement of a medium can transcend the medium.

what…?

This is precisely why I think people shouldn’t reify mathematical entities, like spacetime being a literal fabric that “expands” or “curves.” When we say space expands we just mean that things that are traveling in a straight line will have their paths curve away from one another. You can imagine two people in a space ship flying next to each other and neither one of them places any pressure on their pilot joystick to turn the space ship, yet over time they find that their paths diverge from each other anyways. This creates a tendency for everything to move away from everything else.

When Einstein first introduced his theory of gravity, it was clear that gravity causes straight lines to curve towards each other, and if you add up all the localized effects of gravity, on a universal scale, the whole universe would on average eventually come together and collapse.

It was believed at the time that the universe is eternally static, so he found a free parameter in theory called the cosmological constant that creates a universal positive curvature (making paths diverge) which if set to just the right value could balance out the totality of the local negative curvatures (making things converge) and give you a static universe.

However, when physicists actually measured the cosmological constant (it’s a free parameter like G, you have to measure it) it turns out to be way larger than is necessary just for a static universe.

What I mean by subjective experience is what you might refer to as what reality looks like from a specific viewpoint or what it appears like when observed.

So… reality? Why are you calling reality subjective? Yes, you have a viewpoint within reality, but that’s because reality is relative. It’s nothing inherent to conscious subjects. There is no such thing as a viewpoint-less reality. Go make a game in Unity and try to populate the game with objects without ever assigning coordinates to any of the objects or speeds to any of the object’s motion, and see how far you can go… you can’t, you won’t be able to populate the game with objects at all. You have to choose a coordinate system in order to populate the world with anything at all, and those coordinates are arbitrary based on an arbitrarily chosen viewpoint. Without picking a viewpoint, it is impossible to assign objects the majority of their properties.

If you claim that the physical world doesn’t exist independently of observation, and is thus nothing beyond the totality of observed appearances

No such thing as “appearances.” As Kant himself said: “though we cannot know these objects as things in themselves, we must yet be in a position at least to think them as things in themselves; otherwise we should be landed in the absurd conclusion that there can be appearance without anything that appears,” i.e. speaking of “appearances” makes no sense unless you believe there also exists an unobserved thing that is the cause of the appearances.

But there is neither an unobserved thing causing the appearances, nor is what we observe an appearance. What we observe just is reality. We don’t observe the “appearance” of objects. We observe objects.

If there is no object being observed

Opposite of what I said.

and the fact it it apparent from multiple perspectives is simply a consequence of the coherence of observation

What we call the object is certain symmetries that are maintained over different perspectives, but there is no object independently of the perspectives.

where do the qualities of those appearances originate from? How come things don’t cease to exist when they’re not being observed?

They cease to exist in one viewpoint but they continue to exist in others, and symmetries allow you to predict when/how those objects may return to your own viewpoint.

If you claim that the appearances don’t exist independently of the physical world being observed

I am claiming appearances don’t exist at all.

why does the world appear different from different perspectives?

Reality is just perspectival. It just is what it is.

How do you explain things like hallucinations (there is no physical object being observed, but still some appearance is present)?

If they perceive a hallucinated tree and believe it is the same as a non-hallucinated tree, this is a failure of interpretation, not of “appearance.” They still indeed perceived something and that something is real, it reflects something real in the physical world. If they correctly interpret it as a different category of objects than a non-hallucinated tree then there is no issue.

There’s no such thing as “subjective experience,” again the argument for this is derived from a claim that reality is entirely independent of one’s point of view within it, which is just a wild claim and absolutely wrong. Our experience doesn’t “contain” the physical world, experience is just a synonym for observation, and the physical sciences are driven entirely by observation, i.e. what we observe is the physical world. I also never claimed “the experience of redness is the same thing as some pattern of neurons firing in the brain,” no idea where you are getting that from. Don’t know why you are singling out “redness” either. What about the experience of a cat vs an actual cat?

There is no “hard problem.” It’s made up. Nagel’s paper that Chalmers bases all his premises on is just awful and assumes for no reason at all that physical reality is something that exists entirely independently of one’s point of view within it, never justifies this bizarre claim and builds all of his arguments on top of it which then Chalmers cites as if they’re proven. “Consciousness” as Chalmers defines it doesn’t even exist and is just a fiction.

I feel like this is no different practically speaking than just saying its behavior is random, but anthropomorphizing it for some reason.

If there is an agent who is deciding it then that would show up in the statistics. Unless you’re saying there exists an agent who decides the outcomes but always just so happens to very conveniently decide they should be entirely random. lol

Many-worlds is nonsensical mumbo jumbo. It doesn’t even make sense without adding an additional unprovable postulate called the universal wave function. Every paper just has to assume it without deriving it from anywhere. If you take MWI and subtract away this arbitrary postulate then you get RQM. MWI - big psi = RQM. So RQM is inherently simpler.

Although the simplest explanation isn’t even RQM, but to drop the postulate that the world is time-asymmetric. If A causes B and B causes C, one of the assumptions of Bell’s theorem is that it would be invalid to say C causes B which then causes A, even though we can compute the time-reverse in quantum mechanics and there is nothing in the theory that tells us the time-reverse is not equally valid.

Indeed, that’s what unitary evolution means. Unitarity just means time-reversibility. You test if an operator is unitary by multiplying it by its own time-reverse, and if it gives you the identity matrix, meaning it completely cancels itself out, then it’s unitary.

If you just accept time-symmetry then it is just as valid to say A causes B as it is to say C causes B, as B is connected to both through a local causal chain of events. You can then imagine that if you compute A’s impact on B it has ambiguities, and if you compute C’s impact on B it also has ambiguities, but if you combine both together the ambiguities disappear and you get an absolutely deterministic value for B.

Indeed, it turns out quantum mechanics works precisely like this. If you compute the unitary evolution of a system from a known initial condition to an intermediate point, and the time-reverse of a known final condition to that intermediate point, you can then compute the values of all the observables at that intermediate point. If you repeat this process for all observables in the experiment, you will find that they evolve entirely locally and continuously. Entangled particles form their correlations when they locally interact, not when you later measure them.

But for some reason people would rather believe in an infinite multiverse than just accept that quantum mechanics is not a time-asymmetric theory.

cuz I would immediately die?