andrewcellini

If it can't be measured directly, then why is it your example? If something can be measured directly and your measurement is reliable, then the value will be absolute.

there is no preferred or absolute frame of reference, and there's nothing stopping you from analyzing the system where y = 0 other than it's kind of asinine and not as intuitive. the end of the motion wile's at y = -h or y = h depending on what signs you want to use which affects the sign of the potential energy.

No, mathematics does not exist. It acts as a consistent and precise language, which is useful for describing universal phenomena, for these are also usually consistent and precise.

what do you mean by exist?

I have no comment to make about eigenstates, but I'm hoping that uncool is correct about this.

 

Andrew. - I feel that dialethism is nonsense. I have been arguiing against Priest, Routley and Melhuish for years. My argument is that they are making exactly the same mistake that scientists often make in in relation to QM and that I am discussing here. So I'd agree that diaethism is directly relevant, but feel that you haven't quite grokked my point about logic yet. Dialethism claims true contradictions. I deny them.

edit:

i've misread something you wrote earlier, my mistake. you referring to contradictions which satisfy LEM as "true contradictions" didn't help lol

A quick look? Lol.

yes, as in ctrl-f and search for excluded middle. i think it's the first one that's highlighted that's under the description of classical and quantum logical structure.

your invocation of true contradictions is completely irrelevant. i have to ask if you even know what a "true contradiction" in dialetheism is? you seem to be blending aristotelian logic and dialetheism (though aristotle did write about dealing with contradiction in a similar way he did not make a system of logic which followed similar rules).

You can model that logic using Aristotelian logic, but you have to not think of a particle in a mixed state as being "partially in one eigenstate, partially in another"; instead, you have to think of it as being in a specific state that is a linear combination of other eigenstates.

wouldn't that be something different than QM entirely?

This doesn't contradict what ydoaPs has said

this does contradict what he said as he explicitly says:

QM can be described using binary logic.

how?

The contradictory for 'a wave' would be 'not-a-wave'. The contradictory partner for 'a wave' would NOT be 'a particle'. 'Wave-particle' is not a dialectic contradiction and thus the LEM would not apply. I don't feel it would be correct to say that the LEM becomes irrelevant because it could be a very misleading idea, but I suppose you could say this.

no one in this thread objected with this example. whether or not it could actually be used to argue against LEM applicability in QM i can't say

perhaps you can explain why objections actually raised in this thread do no make LEM irrelevant or inapplicable instead of just repeating what your view is.

and maybe you can give a quick look over this http://arxiv.org/pdf/quant-ph/0101028v2.pdf - a difference they note between classical and quantum logic is LEM holds in classical

the logical negation of 1 or "true" is still 0 or "false," regardless of a possible third option.

look at the law, it only covers propositions where there are two truth values, 1(true), or 0(false).

It hardly seems necessary to point it out. It is you who are asuming that there is no third option but in this case there clearly is,.

explain

i think it's clear from my posts i am arguing there are more than two truth values to consider when discussing the logic underlying QM.

A qubit? So it's a combination of 1 and 0. What would this have to do with any logical problem.

simply because you have 3 truth values to deal with

let's count:

you have 1

you have 0

and you have superposition

3 possible truth values. really all that matters (for LEM to not hold) is that we end up with more than 1 and 0 as options

Not one objection to my point has been made so far.

well that's clearly not true.

 

Then why did you complain that people were ignoring Aristotle? Aristotelian logic is, as you say, irrelevant.

i think the problem is peter's interpretation of the LEM, more specifically what a "contradiction" means in this context.

 

Exactly! I would agree completely.

except my conclusion directly contradict yours.

would it help to think of superposition of states of a qubit (because it has 1 and 0 involved in the notation)?

that is, it's a combination of 1 and 0, it is not just 1 or 0. LEM doesn't hold because it doesn't consider cases where this arises...

from the wiki on many valued logic (since you keep referring to aristotles account for other possibilities):

"Aristotle admitted that his laws did not all apply to future events (De Interpretatione, ch. IX), but he didn't create a system of multi-valued logic to explain this isolated remark." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Many-valued_logic

that is, he didn't create another logic in order to cover another possibility, or n possibilities even. just because he said that his law is probably not applicable in all cases doesn't mean he had alternatives, and if he had an alternative it would be a "many value" logic.

Say the proposed contradiction is 'It is raining' and 'It is sunny'.

i don't think "it is sunny" is the logical negation of "it is raining," so i'm not sure how you can apply LEM to it.

if your statements were "it is raining" and "it is not raining," then perhaps LEM could be used.

you agree to this, correct? then why is QM so special? it has the essentially same issue as you noted with your weather example ("it could be foggy") when it comes to trying to apply the LEM.

[latex] \vdash(p \vee \sim p)[/latex]

 

does not seem commensurable with

 

[latex]\frac{1}{\sqrt{2}} |\uparrow \downarrow \rangle - \frac{1}{\sqrt{2}} |\downarrow \uparrow \rangle[/latex]

peter, how can you reconcile what you've said with what imatfaal pointed out?

It is not clear to me why anyone thinks brain surgeons need to be either educated or bright.

Dexterous, and able to follow the directions left by other perhaps.

we can guarantee good, firm handshakes from carson

+1 vote

It would be impossible for QM to break the LEM since Aristotle allowed for all possibilites. It's just that people don't read the small print. If you can prove that there is such a thing as a true contradiction you will become famous.

the law of excluded middle isn't taken to be true in many valued logics, hence "many valued logic." LEM assumes that there are no other possibilities except a statement is true or false. there are no "in between" values or third possibilities.

i'm not sure of the "small print" you're referring to. care to share a reference?

i'm not sure how different the facial nerves work in stimulating muscle contraction as other skeletal muscles, so someone more versed in the subject should definitely chime in.

when an action potential is propagated to an innervated muscle, acetylcholine is diffused across the membrane of the presynaptic terminal of the axon. when acetylcholine binds to receptors on the muscles, the membrane potential of the muscle cells change (due to the influx of Na+ ions). when the potential in the muscle cells is raised around -50 mV, the sarcoplasmic reticulum releases Ca2+ ions which is key to the function of the contractile proteins (which i frankly don't remember completely enough to talk about specifics).

different responses of the muscle depends on which cells are contracting and which aren't.

 

Temporal frequency is t^-1, spatial frequency is spatialunits^-1 and so on. Therefore frequency in itself has arbitrary units defined regarding to the period of the original signal. Since you can decompose any given signal with an arbitrary number of dimensions into frequency components (just one dimension), I think it's kinda fair to call it a dimensionless variable in this context, but maybe I'm probably just using bad terminology if we get really accurate. It's obvious that frequency is not a dimensionless quantity like the Reynold's number and such.

 

i think you might be, but it's not like i know about every scientific usage of the word "frequency"

 

t's obvious that frequency is not a dimensionless quantity like the Reynold's number and such.

that's what i thought the definition of dimensionless was; having no units.

There is no evidence that this has anything to do with consciousness.

further, there is evidence that it is probably functionally irrelevant.

http://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/9907009

On the epiphenomenalist account, consciousness is not only non-functional (past, present, and future) in the biological sense, but is quite unable to exert causal influence on anything physical; it is caused by the physical brain, but causes nothing (with the possible exception of other conscious states).

i'm leaving the possibility open to research because that seems to be the most reasonable; i certainly haven't read all of the literature on the subject. it would be daft to dig my feet in and defend a position i can't justify with evidence.

 

But Andrew, if my understanding is correct, a vestigial trait is one which was once functional, but is no longer so. Moreover, vestigial traits, even if not functional, are part of the physical causal nexus (they cause and are caused upon -- just as rocks are).

i used vestigial traits as an analogy. to clarify, i am not saying that consciousness is a vestigial trait, i just couldn't think of the term (which is spandrel - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spandrel_(biology)).

In my previous post I didn't say that information is dimensionless/frequency or whatever. What I was trying to say is that information can always be represented in 2 equivalent forms, as a space-time signal or as the frequency components of that signal (which are dimensionless). And this is nothing new and is consistent with the standard definition of information I think. You can also say that a spacetime signal and its frequency components contain the same information, if you want to be more accurate...

frequency is not dimensionless, it's t^-1

are you sure you mean frequency? can you point out where i can find out about what you're calling frequency?

The evolutionists, meanwhile, might want to know, given that consciousness is causally impotent, why is it there in the first place.

it may be "causally impotent" entirely, but i don't know if that conclusion can be made because, due to lack of time, i don't know of research into such questions; there may very well be effects not relevant to decision making. if it is, it might be evolutionary baggage, like vestigial traits.

If you really want to understand a computer software do you study only the output of the program or also the language in which is written?

wouldn't it also be important (possibly more important that the two you've listed) to understand how much memory some program requires and how long some program will take? also, is there a more efficient way of achieving similar output?

not sure how relevant this is to the topic though. it seems as if this is a poor analogy for understanding reality just because there is more to understanding the behavior of some program that to know what language it was written in and its output.

You said it, by definition you can measure it. That doesn't mean you can't study it with math and computational models.

what is hindering the use of such data for the creation and further testing of models? this is not a clear point that you're making.

also what you refer to as information in your previous post (dimensionless/frequency, whatever that should be taken to mean) is not, at least as far as i know, how information is described and used by computer scientists or information theorists or scientists/engineers of different fields.

 

Ok, but this seems to imply epiphenomenalism (i.e. the position that consciousness is causally inert). Physical events in the brain are causally responsible for our actions, and also for our phenomenal consciousness, but consciousness itself causes nothing.

what's wrong with that? do you have evidence of the contrary?

you describe it as "seemingly implausible" and yet there is evidence that this is the case.

http://brain.oxfordjournals.org/content/106/3/623- libet experiment

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1460-9568.2008.06525.x/abstract;jsessionid=3E02092D4DA44FC46A854D194C50F1F6.f03t01- similar experiment

I just don't know why science always applies this equation non-physical...

how do you measure the "non-physical?" if you measured it, it would be physical

"(i) my thought that I'd like a cup of tea

(ii) the brain state associated with that thought

(iii) both"

or...

you have unconscious events in the brain preceding the brain states associated with consciousness which not only essentially "decide" what you want and what you'll do but also have an accompanying conscious state.

is there something that you wanted to discuss in particular, or do you just think it's a really cool idea?

What is a Thought Atom? Such a notion has miniaturization, densification and visualization capacity effectuality inherent.

that's word salad. capacity effectuality inherent? what is capacity effectuality supposed to mean?

what do you mean when you say thought atom? you can't talk about what's "inherent" in it unless you can clearly define what it is. you've written one sentence that doesn't say much of anything. you can't really expect any discussion from what you've written so far.