joigus

Sorry for being obscure. At this point I'm sure I've been. I think we all agree there is something about measurement in QM that isn't entirely satisfactory. We have this wave function that seems to interact with electric, magnetic fields and so on. So it seems physical enough. But on the other hand, every time we obtain information from it about the corpuscular properties of matter, we are forced to update it in a way that's blatantly incompatible with the evolution law (smooth updating law) of Schrödinger's equation. Some people have thought of wildly new ways of thinking about it. New dimensions? Maybe quantum evolution is non-linear, and instead of linear operators we have to think of non-linear functionals? (Nelson, Madelung, Weinberg at some point,...) who else? Maybe in some sense the universe splits, and the quantum state is only relative to these infinitely many splittings? Maybe the only thing that makes sense is coherent/decoherent histories? (Everett, Wheeler, De Witt, Gell-Mann, Griffiths, Omnés, etc) Maybe waves are coming from the future? (Cramer et al.) Maybe QM only tells us about collectivities of experiments? (Leslie Ballentine and other people I forget?) Or maybe we should just take the theory seriously, do like Einstein did, and try to be what Nima Arkani Hamed has called "a revolutionary conservative": Instead of pushing the envelope, try to develop the envelope. Meaning: Try to update the principles without giving up the principles. I suppose what I mean is that the next idea is not likely to be suggested by a flight of fancy. Rather, it's likely to be about taking the principles dead seriously and wholeheartedly trusting that the solution would come from a re-interpretation/re-examination of the old principles rather than the finding of new principles. It's always been that way. SR, GR, QM, QFT,... It's always been that way. The conservatives --while listening very intently to the revolutionaries-- always found a way out. A conservative revolution. No need to demolish any edifice. That's what I mean by developing the envelope. Thank you. I hope I made clear what I meant now. I used to be quite fluent in French. But that was a long time ago, unfortunately.

As used by @studiot:

Really? It's lame, but it's a play with words. Sorry, I meant a "play on words". Was that the problem? It's more of an alliteration, now that you mention it.

This allows me to try a play with words that's not as idle as it might seem: I'd rather work on developing the envelope.

You can have my liver then.

It would take something of those proportions, I guess. Not even a galactic-scale catastrophe would impede a tomorrow. Typically the effect of supernova explosions doesn't go beyond increasing the sky's opacity or something of that kind, AFAIK. We are pretty safe in our outer spiral arm, fortunately.

One way could be a filtering measurement, like the ones I suggested. All the interactions had to happen as consistency conditions for the particle to be "summoned" within the region of interest. So you can rest assured the spin, momentum, kinetic energy (a "diagonal" function of momentum if the particle is a free particle) have the values that are consistent with the experimental setup. You don't have to "touch" the particle ever again. Other term to look up would be "weak measurement" (which has become quite fashionable as of late, I think). People have been working on this for quite some time now, so I'm probably quite rusty on this.

The word "tomorrow" already implies that the Sun rises (otherwise I can picture no tomorrow), so I'm guessing we're talking about conditional probability and the answer is "yes".

There are some nuances here I have to learn more about. I've heard physicists say this or that is "emergent" or an "epiphenomenon" as if they were synonyms. Maybe the "or" was an exclusive "or"...

I think after a while one develops an intuition for when a poster is waiting for the right moment to unpack the real message.

It's quite irritating when people just ignore your answer: Punctuated equilibrium? Introns, regions of DNA where exploration of possibilities can be afforded only by eukaryotes? I'll use bold for those particular points you seem to have difficulty with: https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/earth-and-planetary-sciences/punctuated-equilibrium#:~:text=“Punctuated equilibrium is the idea,by intermittent bursts of activity.” Gradual, of course, is not absurd. We see it all the time. We see it in the bones, in the teeth, and so on. The "substance" you're looking for is, perhaps, alternative splicing. Or at least that's what some of those clueless scientists seem to have guessed at: https://www.nature.com/articles/nrg2776 Introns develop long, long before they are used against the environment. Most of these introns are lost, because they are no use. Every so-and-so many tens of millions of years, one of these intron rarities, happens to be useful for a specific environmentally-related purpose. When this extremely rare event happens, it manifests in the fossil record looking so similar to a miracle that only an expert could tell the difference. That's why having super-redundant eukaryote DNA is such a blessing in evolutionary terms. These "bursts of accelerated evolution" have been identified, studied, and at least partially understood long, long ago. Science is always a work in progress, of course. Fossils don't provide a movie of evolution for us to watch. Discontinuity of the fossil record was already observed by Darwin. Gee, I think somebody's mentioned it here too, Not long ago, we thought anomalocaris was really anomalous, a rarity of the Cambrian seas. Here's the picture now: Do you seriously think mountains don't grow only because you don't see them grow in your lifetime?

Gap? What gap? What god? There are about 5,000 If I were to make a guess, I'd say they are 5,000 different fantasies.

Sorry, my bad. If we did the impossible, what would be possible?

You mean like a biblical helping hand? Something like... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theistic_evolution ?

Again? Sorry, you said we can a few times. Doing a gauge transformation has nothing to do with collapse of the wave function. They are very different things for many reasons. Mentioning gauge invariance was meant to argue that the wave itself is ambiguous in its definition (gauge ambiguity). A further reason why we can't measure it. Well, not of what's seen. Of what could be, if somebody took notice, happend to be there, or came later and checked. You can rest assured when the tree falls in the forest it does make a sound, even though nobody's there to hear it.

We can't "measure the wave." We can use the postulated wave to predict the measurements. The measurements are those dots on a screen. In fact, there is a theoretical principle, called "gauge invariance" --of which we're pretty certain-- that says there's a big chunck of this wave we cannot know in any way. Some people say it's junk, or a redundancy, etc. And black holes are not "dark-matter stars", but that's another story.

Ah, but @geordief had already covered it: I was dealing with the "vice versa" version. So is this the essence of the compatibilist approach? That volition is emergent, or epiphenomenal, and it is every bit as non-delusional as temperature, or language, even though (or precisely because) it doesn't need to rest on a (hypothetical) micro-determinism? There's a mouthful!

This idea of "inclined to do" is another interesting fork in the pathway of analising the free-will problem. Is that what compatibilism is about after all? It reminds me of this idea of propensities in quantum mechanics. Is it due to Karl Popper? I think so, but not sure... It goes like, Alice has a very high chance of doing such and such, because she has a strong propensity to it. So that, say, 90 times out of 100 she will do it. The other 10 she's won't (under same circumstances). Is she 100% free 10% of the time? Or is she 10% free 100% of the time? By this perhaps I mean I'm not sure about these questions unless I have a good working definition of it. A point that's come up before on this thread. Your "miscalculation" statement reminds me of one time I thought maybe the whole question of free will is an ill-posed problem in the first place: Volition must be defined in terms of an action according to an intended result. Do we have any hope of squaring both at all? Everything we do is based on more or less blurry predictions of what will happen. Let me just agree with that. In that sense, what matters is a workable definition of when people cant adopt decisions in a way that's balanced, fair, law-abiding, and so on; as opposed to when people are acting under strong urges, biochemical impulses, contextual or biographical determinations, past trauma, etc. Easier said than done, of course.

Sorry. I was in a hurry. I meant: You did a bad thing => You did it because you chose to do it ("free will" for you) I did a bad thing => I did it because I had no choice ("determinism" for me) That's the double standard I meant. Does that make sense? I've got to get up to speed here, really. I missed much stuff.

Ah. The vice versa has interesting ethical consequences. A blatant double standard that one sees quite often.

Hello. I mean once they've happened actions seem like they were bound to happen. At least more than they seemed to be before they happen.

Interesting notion. What's outside that box? Nothing? The unreal? The unnatural? Nice. "Guess what. I couldn't help myself. I finally ate it! And I made another one, because I always wanted to have my cake and eat it too. I knew it all along. And what's more... I think I understand why I always do that." (determinism again... Or the illusion of it?) Maybe free will and determinism are about time frame. Does that make sense?

Ok. Now it's perhaps the time to remind you that my observation wasn't at all about koalas. It was about how something can be named some way (eg, the observer effect) and actually the concept once clarified, not having anything whatsoever to do with the initial conceptual handle that nevertheless survived in the name. Examples: Koala bear (not even remotely a bear) Observer effect (someone actually observing anything not even remotely necessary) Long live both, koala marsupials and environment-induced decoherence!

Nobody is totally satisfied. There's a little Mick Jagger in me crying out for total satisfaction. It's the same kind of dissatisfaction that I've seen in the likes of Weinberg, Gell-Mann or G. t'Hooft for example. Although back in those times (before Gell-Mann wrote The Quark and the Jaguar, for example) it wasn't very fashionable to ask that kind of question. My way of putting it is actually from times long, long before I had any inkling that all of these great physicists felt a similar discomfort, and it can be phrased as, "What is the physical variable that tells me I am in this branching of the universe and not in the other?" You see, I can accept that there are amplitudes flying about corresponding to the dead cat of which I'm seeing the living version. But there should be a variable of some kind telling you: It's this one. Entanglement is not enough, because entanglement irreversibly separates the alternatives, but does not confirm either one of them. Ok. Now I suppose you're either from Australia or a neighbourhood close to a zoo with very poor security. I meant "observer effect" is a misnomer. Probably a mild one. It's the apparatus that does it. Not consciousness. I'm sure @studiot meant this: Duly noted.