On 1/7/2015 7:37 PM, 'Chris de Morsella' via Everything List wrote:
*From:*everything-list@googlegroups.com [mailto:everything-list@googlegroups.com] *On
Behalf Of *meekerdb
*Sent:* Wednesday, January 07, 2015 11:40 AM
*To:* everything-list@googlegroups.com
*Subject:* Re: Why is there something rather than nothing? From quantum theory to
dialectics?
On 1/6/2015 11:41 PM, 'Chris de Morsella' via Everything List wrote:
So, even what we think of as "nothing" is an existent entity or "something".
If only through the "we" which think about that nothing.
Is anything possible at all without an observer?
What we think is nomologically possible is relative to some theory of the world. All the
scientific theories of the world I know of include the possibility of the world existing
prior to any observers.
But do any of them describe how these worlds exist without any observer present. It is
one thing to include a possibility – e.g. not exclude something; quite another to show how.
They retrodict how they existed: Astronomers can describe how hot the sun was and where
the planets were before humans existed to observe them. Paleontologists can describe what
some dinosaurs were like before humans existed.
The concept of the “observer” is also pretty loosely understood and can mean many
things…. Quantum measurement is kind of along the lines of what I was intending… not
necessarily a self-aware conscious observer.
Up until the (misnamed) recombination era there were no classical objects to observe - as
well as no observers.
Isn’t there some debate on the importance of the observer in Quantum Physics with some
arguing that the observer and the particular system being observed somehow become
mysteriously linked so that the results of any observation seem to be determined in part
by actual choices made by the observer.
That was an idea of von Neumann, that collapse of the wave function was caused by
conscious perception. It was taken up by Wigner and Schroedinger proposed his cat
experiment as refutation of the idea. Wigner later dropped the idea. Bohr always held
that what was measured was determined by the instrumentation and instrumentation was
necessarily classical. So in that case what was measured was determined by the choice of
instrumentation - but nothing mysterious about it. Chris Fuchs and the "QBists" take the
wave function (and other mathematics) to be subjective descriptions of first person
knowledge; so obviously the wave function changes when you learn some new bit of data.
Brent
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