There is no way to “establish whether or not there is an objective reality.” It’s a philosophical position. You either take the reality which we observe and study as part of the material sciences to be objective reality, or you don’t believe it’s objective reality and think it is all sort of invented in the “mind” somehow. Either position you take, you cannot prove or disprove either one, because even if you take the latter position, no evidence I present to you could change your mind because to be presented evidence would only mean for that evidence to appear in the mind, and thus wouldn’t prove anything. The best argument we can make is just taking the reality we observe as indeed reality is just philosophically simpler, but that also requires you to philosophically value simplicity, which you cannot prove what philosophical principles we should value with science either.

Choosing between parties is arguably less democratic because in many countries with such a system, like the USA, you basically just have corporations/corporate media choosing the candidates, so your “choice” is between corporate candidates, so corporations always win. There is no option to reject the nominee entirely, while in China’s system you can reject the nominee. you can just straight up veto candidates.

Westerners often also look at the very end of the process and ignore everything leading up to it. They will say “there’s only one candidate on the ballot!” as proof it’s undemocratic (even though this happens all the time in the US too…). But this ignores the entire democratic process leading up to how the candidate gets on the ballot in the first place. In Cuba for example, candidates getting on the ballot is a two-year long process resulting from local elections and meetings with mass organizations, but they ignore this entire process and just focus on the final election at the very end.

There’s still a pattern in the results, so by one means or another we want to explain the results. Just calling it nondeterministic, if I understand right, would be just saying you can’t predict it from prior observations. So, whatever language you use to describe this puzzling situation, the puzzling situation thus far remains.

I mean nondeterministic in a more fundamental sense, that it is just genuinely random and there is no possibility of predicting the outcome because nothing in nature actually pre-determines the outcome.

A priori?

Through rigorous experimental observation, it’s probably the most well-tested finding in all of science of all time.

Or because it best fits with Relativity? It sounds about as strong as saying, “we know time is universal.” It’s obvious, has to be true, but apparently not how the universe functions.

So we can never believe anything? We might as well deny the earth is round because people once thought time is absolute now we know it’s relative, so we might as well not believe in anything at all! Completely and utterly absurd. You sound just like the creationists who try to undermine belief in scientific findings because “science is always changing,” as if that’s a bad thing or a reason to doubt it.

We should believe what the evidence shows us. We changed our mind about the nature of time because we discovered new evidence showing the previous intuition was wrong, not because some random dude on lemmy dot com decided their personal guesses are better than what the scientific evidence overwhelmingly demonstrates.

If you think it’s wrong show evidence that it is wrong. Don’t hit me with this sophistry BS and insult my intelligence. I do not appreciate it.

Maybe you are right that special relativity is wrong, but show me an experiment where Lorentz invariance is violated. Then I will take you seriously. Otherwise, I will not.

trvth nvke

Even though China gave up on most communist ambitions post-Dheng

No they haven’t.

Quantum nonlocality really is a misnomer. Nothing is nonlocal about it. We know from the No-communication Theorem that there is no physical interaction you could carry out with one particle in an entangled pair that would affect the state of the other particle, and we know it is compatible with special relativity, which is a fundamentally local theory, as such a unification of the two is how we get quantum field theory.

“Local realism” is also a nonsensical term. There is no agreed upon rigorous definition of “realism” and its introduction to the scientific literature has only served to confuse the discussion and promote quantum mysticism because people think because Bell’s theorem supposedly shows that “local realism” is false that you there have to choose between locality or realism, but not both, and since we know the universe is local, we have to conclude there is no objective reality, devolving into mysticism and idealism.

This isn’t just a problem in popsci articles but even in published scientific literature. This “local realism” hogwash has caused even otherwise respectable physics to publish nonsense about how reality doesn’t exist. The term “realism” is never used in Bell’s theorem and has tn relevance to it. Bell’s theorem is about local hidden variable theories, and it is complete nonsense to conflate hidden variables with “realism” as if your only choices are to believe the reality is deterministic or to deny reality even exists! What kind of options are those? What about a third option that reality exists and it is just nondeterministic?

What Bell’s theorem shows is that quantum mechanics cannot be replaced with a local hidden variable theory, and since we know the universe is local, that means it cannot be replaced with a hidden variable theory. It forces us to accept nondeterminism, it doesn’t force us to deny reality, nor does it prove there is nonlocality.

It can, under certain conditions, contain information about things at a distance, but a function is not a physical entity and its reduction is not a physical process, so none of this reflects anything superluminal actually going on in physical reality.