the participant/observer problem is epistemological; it's about what you can and can't know. It's agnostic between an interpretation under which there is a genuine underlying reality which you can't observe properly, and one under which there is no underlying reality until it's observed. The HUP isn't agnostic in this way and isn't (as I understand it) an epistemological claim. It says that a quantum really doesn't have a simultaneously defined position and momentum.
One important thing to remember (I'm mugging up on this this weekend for an argument with Steven Landsburg) is that quantum probability is very different from classical probability. When a particle is superposed in two states, that isn't at all the same thing as saying that it's in one state with probability x and in the other state with probability y. dd -----Original Message----- From: PEN-L list [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf Of Devine, James Sent: 24 October 2004 17:36 To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: Dialectics/Phil of Math / quantum mechanics What's the difference between the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle (the HUP) and the participant-observer problem in sociology? Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://myweb.lmu.edu/jdevine ________________________________ From: PEN-L list on behalf of Charles Brown Sent: Sun 10/24/2004 7:22 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [PEN-L] Dialectics/Phil of Math / quantum mechanics Of course the "classical" answer ( or question) to this is, what was the status of the particles before minds existed, i.e. before there were human beings ? Are the physicists claiming that the particles didn't exist ,say 500,000 years ago, before there were human beings with minds ? Are they saying that the particles only came into existence with the "birth" of the human species ? Are they saying that before humans came into existence, all the matter on earth was made up of elementary particles that did not follow HUP ? Or what ! ?
