On 08 Jan 2015, at 05:01, meekerdb wrote:
On 1/7/2015 7:37 PM, 'Chris de Morsella' via Everything List wrote:
From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]
] On Behalf Of meekerdb
Sent: Wednesday, January 07, 2015 11:40 AM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: Why is there something rather than nothing? From
quantum theory to dialectics?
On 1/6/2015 11:41 PM, 'Chris de Morsella' via Everything List wrote:
So, even what we think of as "nothing" is an existent entity or
"something".
If only through the "we" which think about that nothing.
Is anything possible at all without an observer?
What we think is nomologically possible is relative to some theory
of the world. All the scientific theories of the world I know of
include the possibility of the world existing prior to any observers.
But do any of them describe how these worlds exist without any
observer present. It is one thing to include a possibility – e.g.
not exclude something; quite another to show how.
They retrodict how they existed: Astronomers can describe how hot
the sun was and where the planets were before humans existed to
observe them. Paleontologists can describe what some dinosaurs were
like before humans existed.
Assuming implicitly many things, which is not a problem FAPP, but
would be a problem in a TOE.
The concept of the “observer” is also pretty loosely understood
and can mean many things…. Quantum measurement is kind of along the
lines of what I was intending… not necessarily a self-aware
conscious observer.
Up until the (misnamed) recombination era there were no classical
objects to observe - as well as no observers.
Isn’t there some debate on the importance of the observer in
Quantum Physics with some arguing that the observer and the
particular system being observed somehow become mysteriously linked
so that the results of any observation seem to be determined in
part by actual choices made by the observer.
That was an idea of von Neumann, that collapse of the wave function
was caused by conscious perception. It was taken up by Wigner and
Schroedinger proposed his cat experiment as refutation of the idea.
Wigner later dropped the idea. Bohr always held that what was
measured was determined by the instrumentation and instrumentation
was necessarily classical. So in that case what was measured was
determined by the choice of instrumentation - but nothing mysterious
about it. Chris Fuchs and the "QBists" take the wave function (and
other mathematics) to be subjective descriptions of first person
knowledge; so obviously the wave function changes when you learn
some new bit of data.
Exactly like with computationalism, except computationalism makes all
this much more clear, and simple. No need to assume a wave, it itself
has to emerge from number relations on the kind assumed to exist in
all scientific theories.
Bruno
Brent
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