Hi Bruno,
Thanks for indulging my skepticism. I think I am getting a clearer
picture of what you are up to. There is only one
point in our exchange below to which I would like to respond and than
I have some unrelated comments. I will
erase the rest of the conversation to which I don't have much to add.
Godfrey Kurtz
(New Brunswick, NJ)
-----Original Message-----
From: Bruno Marchal <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Hi Godfrey,
Le 15-août-05, à 21:14, [EMAIL PROTECTED] a écrit :
>
> Also if Newtonian physics is enough to shoot down your hypothesis >
than it must be dead already since Newtonian physics
> is the correspondence limit of QM and QM is right!!! I really don't
follow you here...
[BM]
Not really, as far as you agree that classical physics can be
extracted from quantum physics. My favorite unrigorous way: Feynman
integral (see my paper:
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/publications/CC&Q.pdf
for a little summary.
Bruno
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
[GK]
I did not say, nor do I believe, that one can extract the "classical
world" from QM, as I pointed out to Lee, but one can surely object to a
"third party" theory from the fact that it does not reproduce a
classical world any better than quantum
mechanics. This is a complicated issue because:
(a) Classical physics does not explain the "classical world" either as
it cannot account for the stability of matter, for instance,
which only QM explains.
(b) Quantum mechanics predicts some entirely macroscopic phenomena
that we do observe as part of the "classical world"
i.e. superfluidity of He, superconductivity, stability of the vaccuum
etc...
In other words: if I found a way of shooting down your theory in a way
that would not obviously violate the correspondence
limit of QM , it would shot down! That is what I am suggesting above.
But do not worry because I think you are a lot better
shot by QM.
Now my logistic COMPlaints about your COMP:
I have searched through your web site to see whether I could find a
full statement of your hypothesis since you were not
kind enough to reproduce it in the previous exchange. I don't read
French that well and your English paper is somewhat
sketchy on this, so I can only refer to what you state in the page :
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/publications/SANE2004MARCHAL.htm
where I found what looks like a definition. My first objection is to
the following sentence:
"Definition: Classical Digital mechanism, or Classical
Computationalism, or just comp, is the conjunction of the following
three sub-hypotheses:"
after which you list three items which I will not reproduce here and
will just short as 1) YD for "Yes-doctor", 2) CT for
Church Thesis and 3) AR for Arithmetic Realism.
My objection is that of these three only the first can genuinely be
called an hypothesis! CT, as the name indicates,
is a Thesis which is most likely unprovable but favored by
overwhelming heuristic support. I know that there are
some people in the southern hemisphere who think that QComputation
could produce a counterexample to
shoot it down (and perhaps it could) but you and I agree that it is
unlikely. And AR is a metaphysical position which I
happen to subscribe but which I would never fathom to try and prove or
empirically test (nor do I have any idea
on how to do it! Do you?)
Now I suppose that you need for these three things to be true for the
rest of your argument to go. But I find that
it is extremely unfair to force your most excellent hypothesis YD to
have to stand in company of the other two to assert
its merits!!! In other words as
(1) YD is obviously independent from CT and AR
(2) CT and AR stand no chance of being falsified empirically (or we
both like them that way, which is the same).
(3) No one that we know has been able to extract conclusions such as
yours from CT & AR without YD (right)
would you have any objections to us concentrating, from here on, on
your "YD hypothesis"?
I am saying this because I actually think that it is the real
interesting and original part of your proposal and it does not
need those two other huge "body guards" which I happen to be friends
with. OK?
If you agree with this I may have something interesting to tell you
about your idea that you have not anticipated!
Please,don't COMP out! Say "yes", Doctor Bruno!
-Godfrey
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