On 7/2/2021 2:00 AM, John Clark wrote:
On Thu, Jul 1, 2021 at 5:13 PM 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List
<[email protected]
<mailto:[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%.
What does the probability have to do with the size of the detection
spot? The probability refers to how likely it is for a spot to appear
at a location in many repetitions. It says nothing about the size of
the spot, which is determined by the detector.
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!"
But all observations are classical, i.e. not probabilistic and not
dependent on who looks at the result.
> /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 Everettsimply 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.
Yes and it says nothing about probability or even measurement. So it's
just a free-floating equation with no intepretation?
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,
But Everett didn't say that. He only said that an observation (which he
left ill defined) split the world.
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.
That's a possible interpretation. But it's not a mechanism for
realizing the squared amplitude of the wave as relative frequency of
worlds, which decoherence proposed to do.
Brent
John K Clark See what's on my new list at Extropolis
<https://groups.google.com/g/extropolis>
mxc2
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