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@Ian. I think this is were 'realism' is a confusing term. It should be called 'local reductionism', or 'local causality', or just 'locality'. What WillO says here is that in QM, we have to go with probabilities, but we know that it is not because some local information is missing, and we also know that related measurements will never bring up inconsistent results even when we have no clue about how one experiment could possibly influence the other.
Just nitpicking here: gravity is a fictitious force as you clearly understand. Now in presence of an opposing force, such as the ground pressure, I fail to see how "feeling" that opposing force is any different from "feeling" the force of gravity. When analysing the system, you need all forces to make sense of what is happening - there is no duality regarding what is/is not "felt". The whole context is "felt".
The subtext of the joke, which like any joke will not be funny for everyone (too bad that it is not for you), is that the answer to your "What does it mean when..." question is really 'nothing' - that question is not worth of your time IMO. See how all the (good) answers you got have to dissect and reformulate the 'locally real' terms to give them some kind of sense. Questioning the reality of the world from physics is a huge category error. Physics, both in practice and in philosophy, not only assumes that the world exists in a non solipstic way, but that we can experiment with it.
"why even with higher entropy on the surface of Jupiter it is still relatively easy to model the orbit of Jupiter around the sun"? Because when we model the orbit of a planet, we abstract away the planet structure, and only consider its mass. The entropy of any system in the planet itself is irrelevant. Why don't we consider international trading, animal migrations or volcanic activity on Earth when modelling the moon orbit? Because we would see that none of that would make the end result noticeably different. Modelling is all about deciding what is negligible and what is not.
By deeply observing the ways of the classical world, we discovered that we need quantum mechanics. Some people think that this means that QM gives rise to the classical world, but there is no proof of that at the moment. So, both exists, and we do not know the relation between them - your question is an open question.
Go have a walk in the mud, then look behind you. Do you have the same questions about your footprints? They show another time and another space, just like a photography.
I don't understand the gist of your arguments. To me they state that because what we experience empirically is the same thing as what QM predicts, then consciousness has something to do with QM. How can this not apply to physics as a whole? And since physics is indeed the product of our (collective) consciousness, it amounts to a trivial observation. What am I missing?
And if you think 4D is just 3D plus a time evolution, you are not in 4D proper, you are stuck to a specific foliation and it is very misleading to think you can grok anything that way.
That different ressources follow different cycles, have different time scales of reproduction, and that some can be depleted, while others are in continuous supply, is both well known and highly specific to the systems considered. In the context of economical sustainability, these systems are wide and complex, up to the scale of the planet and its solar input. Whole disciplines, which of course use physics, including what it has to say about energy and entropy, are dedicated to their study. I can't see what is conceptually new in the paper, or how its definition of sustainability is useful.
