On 22 January 2014 17:35, Stephen Paul King <[email protected]>wrote:
> Dear LizR, > > Yes, there are many ontological assumptions. Could you list a few that > seem obvious to you? It is not easy to cut and paste from a pdf. Can you > open it in the Chrome browser? > > In this ontology, all of the known math ideas still work, and those > that become known as discovered. The key is that they do not exist as > independent entities that are some how separable from the observer. > Well, there you have an assumption right there! (Did I mention Pythagoras? A million schoolchildren know that his theorem is "separable from the observer" because they had to be taught it.) > Representations require presentations, they must be rendered by a physical > process to be perceived, understood, known, described, etc. > I this is considered in some way significant, I assume there is some confusion between the representation with the thing being represented. > Knowledge is not considered to be some thing that is projected into our > minds by some mysterious process (see the allegory of the Cave). > This sounds like a straw man. Who has claimed such a thing? (apart from the afoirementioned schoolchildren, who would, I am sure, think knowledge was indeed being "projected into their minds by a mysterious process" !) I'm afraid I am generally suspicious of people whose main aim is to show that some other (often imaginary) view is wrong, rather than to attempt to demonstrate why their view is likely to be correct. > It is the action of the brain to implement a mind that allows knowledge to > come into being. > So we assume, certainly. That doesn't stop us being able to hypothesise that there are things "out there", though, and arguably with a certain degree of success. > A related way of thinking is found here in a paper by Zurek on > decoherence: > I'll have a look at that, but I don't have time for reading endless papers so a precis is always appreciated! > > http://cds.cern.ch/record/640029/files/0308163.pdf > > "This view of the emergence of the classical can be regarded as (a > Darwinian) natural selection of the preferred states. Thus, (evolutionary) > fitness > of the state is defined both by its ability to survive intact in spite of > the immersion in the environment (i.e., environment-induced > superselection is still important) but also by its propensity to create o > spring { copies of the information describing the state of the system in > that environment. I show that this ability to `survive and procreate' is > central > to effective classicality of quantum states. Environment retains its > decohering role, but it also becomes a "communication channel" through > which the state of the system is found out by the observers. In this > sense, indirect acquisition of the information about > the system from its environment allows quantum theory to come close to > what happens in > the classical physics: The information about a classical system can be > "dissociated" from > its state. (In the case of an isolated quantum system this is impossible { > what is known > about it is inseparably tied to the state it is in.)" > > Sounds like he's saying that we cause the world to decohere in a manner that enables us to further our survival. Assuming that's possible, I imagine it's quite likely. But anyway I'll have a look at the paper. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
