Satan Oscillate My Metallic Sonatas

Jobar,
Drat! This darned intarnet web computer thingy! When is the intarweb ever going to get a spell checker?!?!

<humming mantra>'I' before 'E' except after 'C' or when sounded like 'AY' as in...</humming mantra>


Well Jobar this is a conversation that we most likely will never have. I don't really believe in metaphysics or the like and so refrain from these conversations which usually end up in a hopeless muddle of unverfiable conjecture.

It is enough for me to speak of whats on this side of 'knowable'. To me this simply means: If one claims 2 (from above) is false then one must think about what A-observed the beginning of the universe and B-what observes the majority of the universe when nothing else is observing it.

As a sidebar: it is interesting to note that these are actions commonly associated with God. Moreover, the above can easily be seen as an affirmation of the way God creates...by mere thought or observance (ie 'God spoke...and there was light'). It also bolsters many peoples (not necessarily my) position that reality is really God's mind.


Again, I'm not necessarily denying 2...I'm just saying that if one does...the atheistic position is seriously weakened.





Satan Oscillate My Metallic Sonatas

Satan Oscillate My Metallic Sonatas

K,
Sure...if you wish to see it that way I suppose. However, one could just as easily describe this phenomena as 'The act of observing causes decoherence to a value that is described statistically' (which is how I think about it). That is one doesn't have to interpret the above as an obscenity against causality.


It's Bell's theorem not me that claims this. See here. This is a good all around read about Bell's theorem.


I don't mean to sound like a broken record K, but Bell's Theorem doesn't say this. It says one (or more) of the 3 assumptions (logic, objective reality/hidden variables, locality) are invalid...it doesn't say 'hidden variables are invalid'. Check out the link and let me know what you think.



I think this is one of those situation where you say 'toe-may-toe' and I say 'toe-mah-toe'. One can just as easily interpret the above as a value resonating to a statistical distribution. To me there is a big difference between saying something is 'not caused' and something 'has a value that behaves according to a statistical distribution'.



All in all I don't think we are disagreeing (at least very much)...probably just using different terms to talk about the same things.



Satan Oscillate My Metallic Sonatas

the_cave

I agree, but if there are indeed no hidden variables, for example, then quantum events are not exactly caused in the way we usually mean by "caused".

K

SOMMS:

That's not the way I wish to see it, that is the way quantum non-causality is defined.

Your interpretation doesn't work. We are talking about single events. Statistics only works with large numbers of events. Looking at an individual event, there is nothing that determines which of the allowed states will be obtained at decoherence. That part is acausal.

I finally see what you're talking about. Saying that there is "no reality separate from its observation" seems to me to be a loaded way of saying that there is no actual state until decoherence. The way it's stated implies no actual universe without humans to see it. However, that isn't even close to the actual assumption. I realize that this is the fault on the part of the author (who was probably borrowing from Bohr).

I will admit I was wrong about one thing. There are obviously people who still believe hidden variables are possible. I stopped staying current before David Bohm published the work cited. It is interesting to note that even the author of the web page you linked to finds Bohm's work less than convincing as indicated by his remark about Einstein at the bottom.

Again, statistics are only for large numbers, not individual events.

Let's look at radioactive decay again. If it happens randomly in a way that can be treated statistically with large numbers, how can that be considered causal? There is no way to predict when it will happen because there is nothing that causes it. There is only a finite probability that it will happen based on its wave function.

This is undoubtably true.

theIPU

Where's Darkfrog?