On Mar 3, 2005, at 2:50 AM, d.brin wrote:
FYI
Natural Selection Acts on the Quantum World - (Nature - December 23, 2004)
http://www.nature.com/news/2004/041220/pf/041220-12_pf.html
I saw the same idea floated a couple months back on another list. My reaction then is what it is now: What a load of anthropocentric crap.
Here's why. The article has this statement:
"Because, as Zurek says, "the Universe is quantum to the core," this property seems to undermine the notion of an objective reality. In this type of situation, every tourist who gazed at Buckingham Palace would change the arrangement of the building's windows, say, merely by the act of looking, so that subsequent tourists would see something slightly different.
Yet that clearly isn't what happens."
==
Yeah?
Prove it.
The suggestion that the universe is as it is because we see it that way -- and that what exists around us is somehow "inherited" from some predecessor consciousness -- is no different from the assertion that we shape the universe each moment by our simple interaction with it. IOW until I woke up this morning nothing else in the world existed. In fact I never even woke up. I only came into existence a fraction of a second ago, with a collection of false memories of a history that never happened.
I certainly can't think of a way to prove, beyond any shadow of possible doubt, that Buckingham Palace has not been changed by observation; in fact, I bet it can't be proved totally that it *exists*.
This is such a blatant load of horse dung that it should go a long way toward driving a coffin nail or two into the entire QM paradigm.
I'm not trying to suggest that QM is 100% wrong. But when you're studying something that leads you to such a clearly bizarre assertion -- that we've observed the universe into existence, essentially -- either the underpinning of QM is fundamentally flawed, or our perceptions of reality are.
Or, at the very least, understanding of QM is faulty. The strange effects that take place on the quantum level don't have to manifest on the grosser levels, after all. Indeterminacy for a single quark in a brick doesn't cause an entire palace's façade to change.
The other problem I have with the idea of "quantum Darwinism" is that you more or less have to assume a god. That's actually *more* likely to be true, in my mind, than "quantum Darwinism."
It's much more likely that the fault lies in our ability to perceive, not in what it is we are observing.
-- Warren Ockrassa, Publisher/Editor, nightwares Books http://books.nightwares.com/ Current work in progress "The Seven-Year Mirror" http://www.nightwares.com/books/ockrassa/Flat_Out.pdf
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