Quote:
Originally Posted by Jetlack
Do you think that "spooky action at a distance" could be evidence of a sort of time-less fundamental level of which we are usually completely unaware?
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Quantum entanglement is a very subtle issue indeed, but personally I think that particular conundrum is unnecessarily hung on the word "action". Quantum mechanics is about the proper way to process the information that is accessible in a quantum system, so it can be thought of as being about what we can know, moreso than what the system is "actually" doing. We are so separated from the systems in question that we can only talk about our experience in relation to those systems, and that's why the "reality" has to be translated into information that we can process. Hence quantum entanglement is about how the information is extracted from a system-- and when we compare observations on a system made in two very separated places, we find information that shows correlations over that distance.
We also find that the information could not be "stored" only locally, such that the two different places correspond to two different sets of information. There is no need to connect them with an "action" that happens when we do the measurement-- the action that connected them happened when they were not widely separated, but we are not extracting that information until later. The moral is, reality does not need to store its information locally, even though we do our measurements locally. The reason that quantum mechanics gets this right is that quantum mechanics uses a nonlocal form of information storage: the "wave function". It is just a very good example of a situation where classical thinking, which stores all its information as local attributes of a system, simply doesn't work. Einstein thought the classical thinking had to be right and the quantum mechanics had to be wrong, but the opposite is how we now think of it.
So does this imply a kind of time-lessness? I think it does, yes-- both a timeless and a spaceless quality to the information that applies to an entangled system. Perhaps the best way to say that is that time and space do not
underlie all information, instead they are
examples of the kinds of information we can access with our measurements. An even deeper issue is, when we do extract that information, are we
reading reality, or
constructing reality, in our own image in some sense?