Howard, you wrote,I've held off on replying because I didn't understand that remark and I've blamed myself. Could you elaborate a bit on it? What does empiricism have to do with not regarding every physical event as a measurement?
- If one thinks this way, then every physical event is a measurement. That won't work for an empiricist.
- [End quote]
HP: Physical events are what laws describe as if there are no observers. We have faith that innumerable lawful events occur without being observed. Or, think of the territory and the map. We have faith that there are innumerable territories that exist that we haven't mapped, and any map is always local and must be distinguished from the territory (this is just a case of the necessary subject-object distinction).
BU: (I had been thinking of every physical interaction, or at least every physical event complete enough to show conservation, as an imprinting of information onto an environment, onto a body, etc. and, in that perhaps overly special sense, a 'measurement', anyway a spreading of news irrespectively of whether that body constitutes a living thing or a person that (or who), as a practical matter, can read the information. In other words, I'm trying to avoid the idea that actual persons or living things need to conduct a measurement in order for decoherence to occur.)
HP: Decoherence occurs as an natural statistical event without measurement (according to most decoherence interpretations). In QM, decoherence must occur to get a result, which would solve part of the QM measurement problem (wave function collapse). But measurement is still an epistemological problem in QM, classical, or any formal theory.
We say a measurement result is the record of an event, not the event itself (the map not the territory). But now we are back to square one. Who or what says a record is not just another event? This is John Bell's point in Against Measurement . He argues that the measuring device as well as any observer is just part of the lawful physical world, and he is correct. One can then say a measurement is an interpreted event, but who or what is an interpreter?
Peirce is well-aware of the problem. What is a "Quasi-mind" and "Quasi-interpreter"? As Peirce says, "You may say that all this is loose talk; and I admit that, as it stands, it has a large infusion of arbitrariness."
My first "reduction of arbitrariness" requires that any quasi-interpreter must be an individual self with a memory of events. An individual self is first defined by self-replication. How else? Then we are back to subjective concepts like fitness, function, utility and virtue.
Howard
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