[MD] Reifying carrots

[MarshaV]

from American Journal of Physics Review of Quantum Enigma:


Take space-time, for example. We organize our perceptions into events, and for many purposes it is illuminating to represent those events as points in an abstract four-dimensional continuum. This is so useful that most of us reify this abstract scheme, believing that we inhabit a world that is such a four- (or, for a few of us, ten-) dimensional continuum. The reification of abstract time and space goes so far back in human history that it’s easy to miss the intellectual sleight of hand. The reification of electric and magnetic fields is more recent but also came to be taken for granted, until it started to unravel (for some of us) with the arrival of quantum electrodynamics. The strongest hints of how we have been fooling ourselves emerge when we try to reify quantum states, and thereby run into “the measurement problem” and “quantum nonlocality.”  


http://quantumenigma.com/reviews-our-responses/   
 
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