this post was submitted on 22 Apr 2026
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How do you explain, without superposition, how a gate operating on single (entangled) qubits has access to the entire history of all qubits of the system?
Questions like these stem from the cancer that was the abandonment of "materialism" for "physicalism." Physicalism has rotted people's brains to believe that every law of nature needs an underlying "explanation" whereby the explanation is always some invisible entity that is impossible to observe under any possible circumstances but, like the hand of God, pilots the objects we can perceive in order to "explain" why they behave in that way, according to that law.
No, we do not need such an "explanation." It is perfectly logically consistent to just treat is as nomological. It is a law of nature that tells you how the particles behave. The law is itself the "explanation." There need not be any underlying invisible entities piloting the objects we perceive to "explain" why their behavior operates according to those natural laws. It is simply in their nature to do so.
The natural laws simply are a function of the historical state of the system. The explanation is the law. There is no deeper, invisible mechanism.
Well our current model of superposition is what lets us do predictions on qubits that have turned out to be correct; just seeing "history" would not let our current quantum algorithms be developed. That's the beauty of scientific theories; good ones are simple but let us predict and test new ideas. Superposition is wildly successful in that sense.