On 11/6/2014 10:59 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
You should look at how Vic Stenger gets QM in "The Comprehensible Cosmos". I think you
already have that book.
I read a lot of it in a bookshop, and a lot of papers by Stenger (but I have only its
book on God). What is Stenger position on QM. Collapse or no collapse? I don't remember.
Vic derived QM as an application of guage invariance. You can read the relevant pages
229-241 by going to Amazon.com and "Look inside" the book. It doesn't include the
projection postulate, just Schroedinger's equation.
Vic liked Everett's relative state interpretation, but he insisted it happened in one
world (i.e. one Hilbert space) and he disliked talk of multiple worlds as instances of
multiple universes as speculated by some cosmologists. But he also thought that
time-symmetry could provide an interpretation of EPR and delayed choice and other quantum
weirdness. One his earlier books, "Timeless Reality" pursued this view.
He was an instrumentalist who cautioned that we /*make up*/ theories to (1) correctly
predict/describe phenomena and (2) to be point-of-view-invariant (i.e. public).
Consequently we should not assume that theory is reality - it might be, but even if it
were we could never know it for sure.
http://www.colorado.edu/philosophy/vstenger/BookChapters/Reality.pdf
With respect to consciousness, he questioned whether it should even be considered to exist
since it was not in the objective world, i.e. there were no facts about it on which we
could reach intersubjective agreement. But that's based on personal communications; I
don't think he ever wrote about it publicly.
Brent
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