On Thu, Jul 1, 2021 at 5:13 PM 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List < [email protected]> wrote:
> > *why do you think a probability amplitude wave would not produce a > discreet spot? Do you imagine it should produce smear werever it is > greater than 10% or 1% or what? * > Probability must be about something and that something had to either have happened or have not happened; so it should produce a smear if and only if the probability is greater than 0% but less than 100%. That's why if you place a detector near one of the slits so you know which one the electron went through you see no interference pattern, but as soon as you remove that detector you do. >> the complex wave function, which contains the square root of -1 in it, is >> NOT an observable quantity, > > > * > Right, only the amplified and decohered effect of the probabilistic > event is observable. That's why Bohr insisted that a classical world was > necessary in order that science be possible, since only classical > observables could be objectively agreed upon.* > Bohr was a great scientist but a lousy philosopher. If Bohr's philosophy requires classical physics then obviously Bohr's philosophy is wrong because classical physics is a theory known to be incorrect. As Richard Feynman said "Nature is quantum dammit!" > *there's a disconnect between the mechanism of decoherence and the > assignment of probabilities to different worlds, as Bruce has pointed out. > There has to be a separate axiom that says there is this splitting into > worlds that is probabilistic. * There is nothing in Schrodinger's equation that says anything about the wave collapsing, so Everett simply says it doesn't collapse and that means you've got many worlds; it's bare-bones quantum mechanics that contains everything that is required and not one more thing. If you don't like all those worlds and want to get rid of them you've got to stick on some additional bells and whistles to the equation that, other than get rid of those many worlds, do nothing but make the equation more difficult to solve. > *> Self-locating uncertainty was invented to explain this, but it seems > incoherent in that it supposes there is some "self" that could be here or > there, independent of the physical being which is both places.* > There is absolutely nothing more certain than the existence of the self, but there is nothing mystical about that; it's just that it's not a noun. The self is what the brain does, not what the brain is, so "self" must be an adjective. I would define the particular self called John K Clark recursively, he is whoever remembers being John K Clark yesterday. If Everett is right and every change no matter how small causes the universe to split, then there must be some changes to my brain that are so small (one neutron in one neuron moving one Planck length to the left ) that they cause no change in conscious experience and do not degrade the memory of being John K Clark yesterday. Therefore there must be an astronomical number to an astronomical power of John K Clarks all living in different, very very slightly different, worlds. The number would be HUGE but it would still be finite, so the number of John K Clarks that see you flip a fair coin and come up heads 5 times in a row must be twice as large as the number of times he sees you do it 6 times, but there would still be a few that see him do it 100 times, maybe 1000 or even more. John K Clark See what's on my new list at Extropolis <https://groups.google.com/g/extropolis> mxc2 -- 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 view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/CAJPayv15DdPPPPN2kM2G-X2rn06NcC1Pi0LTqd8_8hnuUcySVA%40mail.gmail.com.
