On 18 Oct 2013, at 22:45, Jason Resch wrote:
On Fri, Oct 18, 2013 at 11:37 AM, meekerdb <[email protected]>
wrote:
On 10/18/2013 12:42 AM, Jason Resch wrote:
But that's not compatible with Bruno's idea of eliminating the
physical - at least not unless he can solve the basis problem.
Could you do me a favor and explain what the basis problem is in a
way that a 6th grader could understand? I've found all kinds of
things said on it, and they all seem to be asking different things.
For physicists, it's part of the problem of explaining the emergence
of the classical world from the quantum world. Decoherence can
diagonalize (approximately) a reduced density matrix IN SOME BASIS.
Is this the same basis as in "momentum basis" and "position basis",
or is it some other usage of the term?
Forgive my ignorance, but what does it mean to "diagonalize a
reduced density matrix"?
Being diagonal in one basis means it's superposition in some
other basis. So for physicists the problem is saying what
privileges or picks out the particular bases we see in experiments.
Why do our instruments have needles that are in eigen states of
position, while some other things (e.g. atoms) are in eigen states
of energy or eigen states of momentum. For physicists there are
some suggestive, but not fully worked out answers to these
questions, e.g. you get position eigenstates because the interaction
term of the Hamiltonian is a function of position. But those
answers assume the physics. If you want to reconstruct physics from
experiences, you can't borrow the physical explanation to say why
your experiences are classical.
I think the assumption that experiences are classical comes from the
classicality of Turing machines (which are the supposed mechanism by
which experiences are manifest).
Yes. the goal is to explained the feelings, and the quantum, from the
classical theory of thought (George Boole) and self-reference (Gödel,
Löb, ... well sum up in George Boolos's books).
Quantum physics also assumes classical arithmetic.
Bruno
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
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