It is the same epistemic and instrumental interpretation which is explained better and at
length by Asher Peres in his excellent text
http://www.fisica.net/quantica/Peres%20-%20Quantum%20Theory%20Concepts%20and%20Methods.pdf
which is available free online.
Brent
On 2/4/2012 7:56 PM, Richard Ruquist wrote:
Regarding the issue of instantiation, the recent GHZM quantum experiments may be
relevant as they imply a lack of a pre-existing reality.
Here is a rather long and technical argument that there is no pre-existing
reality.
http://motls.blogspot.com/2011/12/ghzm-experiment-and-indefensible.html#more
I provide below the first and last paragraphs in this argument. The last paragraph
explains what he means by pre-existing reality. In it he negates MWI, all hidden
variables theories and even classical physics.
Richard Ruquist
-----------------------------
Lubos Motl:
I want to go through the GHZM experiment again and somewhat carefully (and in latex) and
discuss the insanity of the assumptions about the laws of Nature that are forced upon
you if you want to believe in "realism", i.e. the idea that the results of experiments
(including those at the microscopic level) reflect a pre-existing reality.
What I finally want to emphasize is that all this redundant and "objectively real but
totally unobservable" superstructure – from many worlds to extra invisible Bohmian
positions of particles (which can't help in the case of spin or particle production,
anyway) or other hidden variables to GRW collapses prescribed from above – is only
being invented because certain people behave as bigots who are unable to admit that the
physics research in the 20th century has irreversibly falsified all intrinsically
classical models of the reality. All the new "fanciful stuff" with tons of choices and
processes (superluminal communication, preferred frames, collapses, the length scale to
which the GRW collapses shrink the wave function, the frequency of such flashes etc.)
that can never be observed and with the infinite amount of fine-tuning and obfuscation
that is needed for it to fake the real, relativistic quantum world (to guarantee that
none of the new predictions is really observed) is only being proposed because some
people's bigotry has no limits. Their dogmas about "realism" are more important for them
than /any/ amount of empirical evidence, more important for them than everything that
science has actually found.
On Sat, Feb 4, 2012 at 9:38 AM, Stephen P. King <stephe...@charter.net
<mailto:stephe...@charter.net>> wrote:
On 2/4/2012 8:58 AM, David Nyman wrote:
On 4 February 2012 12:22, Bruno Marchal<marc...@ulb.ac.be
<mailto:marc...@ulb.ac.be>> wrote:
No, I am not. I bet that comp is TRUE, but I don't see COMP as
requiring
that the physical world is supervening on numbers (up to
isomorphisms) as
primitives.
So you have to explicitly show what is not valid in the UDA1-8. You
miss
something, let us try to find out what.
I am not missing a thing, Bruno. You are missing something that
is
obvious to the rest of us.
If someone else can confirm this, and put some light on what
Stephen is
saying, I would be pleased.
Bruno, I used to think that you were indeed missing "something that is
obvious to the rest of us". I don't think so any longer, because I
understand now that you are presenting a theory and your arguments
consequently derive strictly from the axioms and assumptions of that
theory. I don't pretend to understand all aspects of that theory of
course, but through discussion and the contrast of ideas I have come a
bit closer than when I started.
I don't know if it will help at all for me to state here my
understanding of what might motivate the theory in the first place,
but I'll try. Firstly, as you have so often said, the
informational/computational theory of mind (CTM) is more or less the
default assumption in science. Indeed this conclusion seems almost
unavoidable given that brain research seems to imply, more or less
unambiguously, the correlation of mental states with relations,
rather than relata. However, CTM in its uncritically-assumed form
continues to be combined with the additional assumption of an
Aristotelian primitively-physical state of affairs. This leads
directly either to denialism of the first-person, or alternatively to
some ill-defined species of property dualism. These consequences by
themselves might well lead us to reject such primitive-physicalism as
incoherent, even without an explicit reductio ad absurdum of the
unambiguous association of conscious states with "physical
computation". Either way, in order to retain CTM, one is led to
contemplate some form of neutral monism.
The question of what form such a "neutral" theory should take now
arises. Since the theory is explicitly *computational*, the axioms
and assumptions of such a theory should obviously be restricted to the
absolute minimum necessary to construct a "computational universe" (in
the traditional sense of "universe") or rather to indicate how such a
universe would necessarily construct itself, given those axioms and
assumptions. The basic assumption is of a first-order combinatorial
system, of which numbers are the most widely-understood example.
Given the arithmetical nature of such a universe, construction and
differentiability of composite entities must necessarily derive from
arithmetical assumptions, which permits the natural emergence of
higher-order structural integration via the internal logic of the
system. Of particular note is the emergence in this way of
self-referential entities, which form the logical basis of
person-hood.
Since the reality of first-person localisation is not denied in this
theory (indeed the theory positively seeks to rationalise it), the
system is not posited as having merely third-personal status, but as
possessing a first-person self-referential point-of-view which is
associated with consciousness. Perhaps it is this aspect of the
theory which is the most tricky, as it cuts across a variety of
different intuitions about consciousness and its relation to the
phenomena it reveals. For rather than positing a primitively-physical
universe which "instantiates" conscious states, the theory must
reverse the relation and posit conscious states that "instantiate"
physical phenomena. In so doing, it exposes itself to empirical
refutation, since those phenomena must be, at least, consistent with
ordinary observation (although they also predict, in the limit,
observations of high improbability).
It is this last issue of instantiation which seems to be one of main
bones of contention between Stephen and yourself, though I'm not sure
why this is the case. From my own perspective, unsophisticated though
it may be, it seems reasonable that the emergence of "truly physical"
phenomena should indeed be the result of "personal instantiation" in
the conjunction of consciousness and computation. After all, when do
questions as to what is "truly physical" emerge, other than in the
context of what is "truly experiential"? The rest is calculation.
David
Dear David,
Does my claim that our primitive ground must be neutral with respect to
any
properties make any sense? It like the zero of arithmetic from which we can
extricate any set of positive and negative quantities in pairs such that
their sum
is equal to zero. What I see in Bruno's interpretation of COMP is that it
permits
for the primitive to have a set of properties (numbers and + and *) to the
exclusion
of its complementary opposites. Since this is a violation of neutrality,
thus I see
a fatal flaw in Bruno's Ideal monist interpretation.
Onward!
Stephen
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