On 4/7/2022 8:25 AM, smitra wrote:
On 07-04-2022 03:05, Bruce Kellett wrote:
On Thu, Apr 7, 2022 at 10:52 AM smitra <smi...@zonnet.nl> wrote:
On 07-04-2022 02:30, Bruce Kellett wrote:
The preferred basis is not determined by algorithms -- it is
determined by robustness under decoherence. You can redefine
everything so that your theory is no longer quantum mechanics --
but
that is a fairly pointless exercise.
That's the preferred basis as used in practice. But that's useless
in
this context and it would amount to doing things things backward.
Observers cannot be defined using decoherence. That you do
robustness
under decoherence allows for us as stable observers to exist. So
decoherence explains our existence.
It also explains our ability to make measurements and record results.
To claim that this is not a fundamental account of measurement is just
silly. Nothing is more fundamental than quantum entanglement evidenced
in decoherence.
While entanglement is a phenomenon that exists at the fundamental
level, effective macroscopic concepts can never be fundamental, they
have to be explained using the fundamental microscopic theory in which
many macroscopic concepts do not even exist.
You need to keep in mind that there are different meanings of
"fundamental". Those "macroscopic concepts" like measurements and
records and facts are epistemically fundamental; and remain so however
theories change. The reductionist base of the current theory is
ontologically fundamental, but it may be replaced by a new theory with a
different ontology, as QM replaced Newtonian mechanics and statistical
mechanics replaced thermodynamics. Being ontologically fundamental is a
precarious position.
Brent
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