exchemist

Hmm, I have little time for Nagel on the issue of consciousness, I'm afraid. I'm with Massimo Pigliucci: https://philosophynow.org/issues/99/What_Hard_Problem And I do not see that there is huge problem to solve with QM. But then, my training is in natural science. QM is a model that works extraordinarily well. It has never been faulted in its predictions. I find it preposterous to build an interpretation of QM that elevates the activity of the conscious brain to some mystical entity, able to affect how nature works. (As a chemist, I am used to distinguishing between "reality" and the models of reality we use in science to predict how nature will behave. In chemistry we quite commonly have more than one model for a given scenario and choose the one appropriate to the task, without troubling ourselves unduly about what is "really" going on. That's because chemistry is complex and messy, so if we got hung up on such pedantry we would never accomplish anything. We use QM all the time in chemistry and it works just fine. I suppose what I'm saying amounts to a "shut up and calculate" approach to the question. 🙂 )

"The Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man", Thomas Mann. Surprisingly funny in places. Also quite modern in its matter-of-fact portrayal of the voile et vapeur sexuality of the protagonist.

I read recently that one of the difficulties cited by US developers of robocars, when implementing them in the UK, is that the number of "jaywalkers" is said to be 7 times as high as in the USA. What these nerds don't seem to have clocked yet is that there is no such thing as "jaywalking" in the UK. Pedestrians are allowed to cross the street anywhere, at any time - and do. They should get their technology fit for London, Manchester or Glasgow and then it will work in Austin, TX.

What evidence do you have that "the sites were empty"? It's not easy to just move a nuclear fuel enrichment facility.

Rovelli would say we have to give up the implicit assumption that entities have a concrete existence in between interactions. They have potential existence only, described by the wave function, until the next interaction makes them concrete once more.

You raise an interesting point with the cost angle. It could be that a decision to reconstitute the nuclear programme, with the concomitant economic sacrifices demanded of Iran's people, might cause the downfall of the hardliners among the Serious Beards. This unprovoked attack will strengthen, not weaken, national unity, but the strategy they adopt in response could be a trickier path for them to navigate. However the notion of "regime change", referred to by Netanyahu, strikes me as pretty delusional - and probably is not meant seriously. Iran is a medium-sized industrial power of 90m people with an entire constitutional system. It's not just some one-man dictatorship, or S. American style military junta.

Interesting. I looked up Henry Stapp, of whom I had never heard. He seems to be an eccentric whose ideas about wave function collapse are dismissed by mainstream interpretations: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consciousness_causes_collapse. He further seems to embrace Cartesian duality, treating "the mind" as an entity distinct from the brain, or indeed the physical world more generally. This a very dubious notion. While not exactly woo, it seems to be indeed a mystical view, perhaps like some of Wigner's early ideas, which he later repudiated. I don't think you will get much support for ideas based on consciousness in the science community. Personally, I am attracted by Rovelli's relational interpretation of QM, in which there is no one wave function for a system, but one that depends on the informational "frame of reference", as it were, for the observer. Thus, for instance, Schrödinger's Cat is both alive and dead to the world outside the box , with a wave function that describes that condition, but to the world inside the box the cat is definitely one or the other, with a wave function appropriate to whichever definite state applies.

This, again, is an extraordinarily stupid argument. Utter waste of time even to engage with it.

Tragic for the scientists, but frankly I struggle to sympathise with Israel about this.

Actually I think the HUP is a different issue from the wave function collapse one. The former is to do with pairs of conjugate variables being Fourier transforms of each other, whereas wave function collapse is the replacement of probability ranges of potential values of properties being replaced by actual ones when an interaction occurs. My understanding is HUP relates to simultaneous definition of pairs of properties, whereas collapse may pertain to a single property alone.

Perhaps you should ask the forum admin whether there is a time limit on the posting history that is stored. (I joined after 2011 so I can't check it using my own posting history, I'm afraid.)

Yet your idea seems - to me at least - to be based on a misunderstanding about the role, or rather the lack of it, of the conscious observer in QM. I outlined this earlier, and you have yet to respond on this point. It would appear fairly crucial to resolve.

This is too stupid to argue with.

What is this supposed to be about?

The fossil record provides a series of data points that suggest evolutionary trends. This is no different in principle from the data points you get from a series of measurements in an experiment in chemistry or physics. In both cases you have data points that appear to show a trend and you join the dots. In the case of evolution, we have confirmation of the principle at wrk in real time, when we observe the development of drug resistance in bacteria or cancers. So we most certainly do have evidence for evolution in response to environmental pressures

We've all had copious experience on this forum of nonsense emanating from LLMs, so I'm going to decline your suggestion. But returning to your idea, it seems to me a basic difficulty with it is that nobody nowadays (apart from quantum woo specialists of the Deepak Chopra type) suggests wave function collapse is anything to do with consciousness on the part of an "observer". The language of QM used by its founders in the 1920s indeed spoke of "observables" and "observations", but that was to distinguish what could be determined about the system from any further assumptions that might classically be made about it having other properties. Even at the time they were at pains to explain they were not attributing any magical influence to consciousness on the part of the observer. For instance this is what Wiki has to say: QUOTE Role of the observerBecause they assert that the existence of an observed value depends upon the intercession of the observer, Copenhagen-type interpretations are sometimes called "subjective".[51] All of the original Copenhagen protagonists considered the process of observation as mechanical and independent of the individuality of the observer.[52] Wolfgang Pauli, for example, insisted that measurement results could be obtained and recorded by "objective registering apparatus".[40]: 117–123  As Heisenberg wrote, UNQUOTE What is thought of as as leading to wave function collapse (in those interpretations that make use of this concept) is interaction, i.e. with the inanimate measuring apparatus, nothing to do with whether a conscious experimenter is watching a dial or a screen. So your idea, at least as I understand it, that QM should be interpreted differently before and after the advent of conscious beings, able to perceive the measurements, does not seem to be a fruitful approach.

Chat GPT will just tell you what you want to hear.

Goodbye then.

I think you will find, on this forum, that if you try to reintroduce a subject that the mods have closed, you get banned fairly rapidly. So I would not do that if I were you.

Exactly. Also one has to remember St. Peter was writing hundreds of years later than the time Exodus was written. In fact you can see in this passage of Peter that he is in effect saying that God is outside time and perhaps suggesting an interpretation of the creation story in which the periods of actual time involved might have been far longer than literal “days”.

No. The wave function for the electron in the hydrogen atom is just a rather messy algebraic expression, involving an exponent in the radial part and spherical harmonics for the angular part. Nothing at all about infinite numbers of coefficients.

Not if you are exploring the evolution of Man. Palaeolithic, mesolithic and neolithic are cultural stages in human society (= Old Stone Age, Middle Stone Age and New Stone Age, respectively). They relate to the types of artifacts produced in these societies and have nothing to do with biological evolution, as they are all far too recent. If you want to explore human evolution the relevant time periods are geological ones, namely the ones shown in the “Hominin Timeline” chart in this link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_evolution

Regarding Bell, surely the point is his theorem rules out hidden variables, unless they are non-local. I don’t see how can you say hidden variables are required by QM, when it makes no reference to them anywhere. I don’t recall the algebraic expressions for the wave function being an infinite series of complex numbers. They are just algebra, surely, expressing a probability amplitude at each point in space.

OK so perturbation due to measurement is nothing to do with whether or not pairs of operators commute. Regarding hidden variables I’m still unclear why you mention them. They are not implied by QM. They are purely an attempted bolt-on extra, designed in the hope of restoring deterministic physics. As they have no observable consequences, science can do without them. So I’m not sure what you mean by saying QM “does not work without it”, or them. Can you explain this further?

I have never heard that staining of teeth makes them fall out. You can get gum recession if you do not clean the margin where tooth and gum meet, especially between the teeth, but that is a different thing. I would consult a dentist if you feel your teeth are at risk of falling out. Staining and the argument for whitening are, so far as I am aware, a purely cosmetic issue.