I understand what you’re saying about locality, but… well, I’m also having trouble figuring out how to put this...
If configurations of some flavor are the fundamental things, and things like particles, positions, and so on are more like, well, “illusions” arising out of occasional mathematical properties of certain circumstances, well… why would locality be prefered in the first place? ie, notions like distance should be, at least as near as I can make out, in some way secondary to the notion of configurations. ie, it’d have to arise out of their behavior rather than the other way around, right?
But… then why would the rule “just happen” to be one that acts in a way that looks local to us?
Personally, I’d say that if this view of QM is valid, then locality itself shouldn’t be fundamental, but instead arise out of more fundamental principles.
My initial gut intuition would be something long the lines of simply that whatever the “ultimate reality”, it can be transformed mathematically into some basis such that it “looks local from the inside”… and that locality may be a key thing required for percieving structure… That is, maybe only a “view from the inside” that’s local could contain structure sufficient to, well, hold stuff like… us.
Now, while this may be completely and utterly wrong, I am going to say that I suspect that if some flavor of amplitudes over configurations is a fundamental nature of reality, then in some way or other locality can’t be. That is, that locality is something that in some way arises out of it rather than being, to borrow your terminology, a fundamental part of the tao.
I understand what you’re saying about locality, but… well, I’m also having trouble figuring out how to put this...
If configurations of some flavor are the fundamental things, and things like particles, positions, and so on are more like, well, “illusions” arising out of occasional mathematical properties of certain circumstances, well… why would locality be prefered in the first place? ie, notions like distance should be, at least as near as I can make out, in some way secondary to the notion of configurations. ie, it’d have to arise out of their behavior rather than the other way around, right?
But… then why would the rule “just happen” to be one that acts in a way that looks local to us?
Personally, I’d say that if this view of QM is valid, then locality itself shouldn’t be fundamental, but instead arise out of more fundamental principles.
My initial gut intuition would be something long the lines of simply that whatever the “ultimate reality”, it can be transformed mathematically into some basis such that it “looks local from the inside”… and that locality may be a key thing required for percieving structure… That is, maybe only a “view from the inside” that’s local could contain structure sufficient to, well, hold stuff like… us.
Now, while this may be completely and utterly wrong, I am going to say that I suspect that if some flavor of amplitudes over configurations is a fundamental nature of reality, then in some way or other locality can’t be. That is, that locality is something that in some way arises out of it rather than being, to borrow your terminology, a fundamental part of the tao.