From: *'scerir' via Everything List* <everything-list@googlegroups.com
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K. Camilleri wrote a very long paper about 'Constructing the Myth of
the Copenhagen Interpretation'. But there are many **different**
versions on-line.
https://philpapers.org/rec/CAMCTM <https://philpapers.org/rec/CAMCTM>
https://tinyurl.com/y9a9odek
He points out that the subjectivist view of the role of the observer
(consciousness) is a 'misconception' of the Copenhagen Interpretation.
'Although Heisenberg did sometimes speak of a subjective element in
quantum physics, this should not be taken to mean that the
consciousness of the ‘observer’ plays a crucial roe lint eh
measurement interaction. In Physics and Philosophy in 1958, Heisenberg
argued that “the transition from the ‘possible’ to the ‘actual’ takes
place during the act of observation” but this transition occurs
“applies to the physical, not the psychical act of observation”. Only
once the “interaction of the object with the measuring device” has
taken place can we speak of the actualization, but here he was careful
to point out that “it is not connected with the act of registration of
the result, by the mind of observer” (Heisenberg, 1958, p. 54).'
'So where did this view come from? And how did this view come to be
associated with the likes of Bohr and Heisenberg? Scholars have often
traced this view to von Neumann’s analysis of measurement in his
Mathematische Grundlagen der Quantenmechanik published in 1932 (von
Neumann, 1955). Whereas in Bohr’s complementarity, the measurement
device is described using the concepts of classical physics, and not
according to the laws of quantum mechanics, in von Neumann’s
presentation, the measurement device is given a quantum-mechanical
treatment (Bub, 1995). According to von Neumann’s formal treatment of
the problem, when we observe a quantum system, there is an
instantaneous change of the wave function in Hilbert space – it
collapses – a process which is not described by the Schrödinger
equation. Precisely what von Neumann’s philosophical views on this
matter were is more difficult to judge, though as Becker and Gavroglou
have observed there is no evidence of him endorsing a realist view of
the wave function, nor does he make any explicit reference to the need
to introduce the consciousness of the observer in the measuring chain
(Becker, 2004; Gavroglou, 1995, p. 171).Rather it was the 1939
monograph La Théorie de l’Observation en Méchanique Quantique by
London and Bauer which we find the first explicit mention of the claim
that the reduction of the wave function was the result of the
conscious activity of the human mind (French, 2002).'
etc etc
Interesting..... I have often thought that Bohr and Heisenberg were not
quite the monsters of positivism that they are often painted as these
days. In fact, I would suggest that the prevalence of decoherence means
that a case can be made that everything is, in practice, classical, and
that the quantum only shows itself reluctantly in the small and the
isolated. Whether that means that the classical is prior -- essential
for understanding the quantum -- is something that can be argued about.
But I do not think that such an idea is entirely silly, and nor can it
just be dismissed out-of-hand.
The world we know and experience is classical, after all. Else we, as
classical beings, could not experience it!
Bruce
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