On 7/6/2021 8:49 AM, John Clark wrote:
On Tue, Jul 6, 2021 at 8:26 AM Bruce Kellett <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
>> So an intelligent and presumably consciousbeingonce existed that
knew which slot all the electrons went through, but those
interference bands still showed up anyway. Don't you find that
a little strange? If Many Worlds is wrong and that being
didn't exist in another world, then where did it exist?
/> The mistake that you (and Deutsch) are making, John, is to
assume that consciousness causes the collapse of the wave function
in CI. This was never a consensus view among supporters of Bohr.
The idea was floated by Wigner, but was eventually laughed out of
court /
I think consciousness causing the collapse of the wave function is a
dopey idea too, but some people believe it and I think it's good that
there's a real experiment that can determine if it's true or not. And
I'd still like to know if Many Worlds is wrong and there are no worlds
but this one then where was that intelligent creature living that knew
which slot each electron went through, electrons which later produced
an interference pattern on that photographic plate. And you never
answered my general question, what conclusion would you reach if you
*DID SEE *interference bands on that photographic plate, and what
conclusion would you reach if you *DID NOT SEE* interference bands on
that photographic plate? If your opinion cannot be changed by the
scientific method and thus neither experimental result would modify it
in any way then obviously there must be something seriously wrong with
your opinion.
Wigner's idea was dopey but Bohr has no right to laugh at him because
Bohr's idea for the cause of the collapse is just as dopey, in fact it
was even worse. Wigner's idea was just wrong, but Bohr's idea wasn't
even wrong, it was gibberish. As I said before Bohr was a great
scientist but a lousy philosopher. Nobody can laugh at Many World's
explanation for the cause of the collapse because it doesn't have one
due to the fact that nothing collapses.
I think you are relying on critics for what Bohr thought. He was
famously circuitous in his writing, but he had a simple point: whatever
quantum mechanics did, science could only work with shared facts,
records of experiments and observations, not superpositions of different
possible facts. Repetitions of exactly the same experiment give
different recorded results, so nature is probabilistic and the
probability of realization of different possible facts is what the Born
rule provides. He never said that this was in consciousness, he
generally regarded is as being in instruments that recorded data, but he
recognized that the Heisenberg cut could be located differently in
different analyses. Notice that all that is perfectly consistent with
an epistemic interpretation of QM.
Brent
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