R: Dualism via Quantum Mechanics

[scerir]

>A few quotes below to dualism from Max Velmans.
>Evgenii

H. Kragh ("Dirac: a Scientific Biography", Cambridge U.P., 1990) reports
a 1927 discussion between Dirac, Heisenberg and Born, about what
actually gives rise to the so called "collapse" (reduction of waves packet).
Dirac said that it is 'Nature' that makes the choice (of measurement
outcome).
Born agreed. Heisenberg however maintained that, behind the collapse,
and the choice of which 'branch' the wavefunction would be followed, there
was "the free-will of the human observer".

[Richard Ruquist]

Leibniz, IMO, would also claim that Nature makes the choice, but that his collection of monads perceive (based on their consciousness) what is the best possible wave function choice to obtain the best possible universe. What Leibniz apparently leaves out of his philosophy is that human free-will consciousness can make the world imperfect, perhaps even suicidal. String theory seems consistent with Leibniz in that the discrete balls of compactified dimensions have some monad properties, which is these days what I preach. And I wonder if this could be consistent with COMP, since it's all theological. Richard

 

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[meekerdb]

I don't think this does justice to Born's views.  He was not a realist about the wave function nor about its collapse.  His position was that the classical world was logically prior and necessary for shared knowledge to exist.  Without it there could be no measured values and no records.

Brent

[Stephen P. King]

On 5/12/2012 10:19 AM, Richard Ruquist wrote:

On Sat, May 12, 2012 at 9:20 AM, scerir <sce...@libero.it> wrote:

>A few quotes below to dualism from Max Velmans.
>Evgenii

H. Kragh ("Dirac: a Scientific Biography", Cambridge U.P., 1990) reports
a 1927 discussion between Dirac, Heisenberg and Born, about what
actually gives rise to the so called "collapse" (reduction of waves packet).
Dirac said that it is 'Nature' that makes the choice (of measurement
outcome).
Born agreed.  Heisenberg however maintained that, behind the collapse,
and the choice of which 'branch' the wavefunction would be followed, there
was "the free-will of the human observer".

Leibniz, IMO, would also claim that Nature makes the choice, but that his collection of monads perceive (based on their consciousness) what is the best possible wave function choice to obtain the best possible universe. What Leibniz apparently leaves out of his philosophy is that human free-will consciousness can make the world imperfect, perhaps even suicidal. String theory seems consistent with Leibniz in that the discrete balls of compactified dimensions have some monad properties, which is these days what I preach. And I wonder if this could be consistent with COMP, since it's all theological. Richard

 

Hi Richard,

    We can strip out all the religiosity from Leibniz' ideas.

    Leibniz' monads where perseptions themselves, not entities that where conscious and perceived things. What we have previously discussed as "Observer Moments" are a better analogy to what Leibniz had in mind. He did postulate that God arranged them such that their content was always synchronized; this is the "pre-established harmony" (PEH) concept. I think that Leibniz' mistake was to assume that there exists an "absolute" observer" with a "view from nowhere" that defined an objective 3-p. There are strong mathematical inconsistencies with this idea.
    For one thing, a PEH requires the discovery and application of a solution to an infinite SAT complexity problem, not the mere existence of one.

-- 
Onward!

Stephen

"Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed." 
~ Francis Bacon

[Richard Ruquist]

- 

Onward!

Hi Stephan,

If what you say is true about monads, that each does not see the entire universe, then they cannot be the balls of compactified dimensions of string theory because Brian Greene's 2d solution indicates that each maps the entire outside plane to its inside. Now that may not be consciousness and Leibniz did say that his monads were not exactly conscious.  But to me mapping the universe to the interior, a kind of inverse holography, sounds exactly like what Leibniz says of his monads in his tract Monadology. I have no idea what you mean by your last sentence above.

Inward,

Richard

Stephen

"Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed." 
~ Francis Bacon

--

[Bruno Marchal]

On 12 May 2012, at 15:20, scerir wrote:

>> A few quotes below to dualism from Max Velmans.
>> Evgenii
>
> H. Kragh ("Dirac: a Scientific Biography", Cambridge U.P., 1990)
> reports
> a 1927 discussion between Dirac, Heisenberg and Born, about what
> actually gives rise to the so called "collapse" (reduction of waves
> packet).
> Dirac said that it is 'Nature' that makes the choice (of measurement
> outcome).

That is using Nature as a God of the gap.

> Born agreed. Heisenberg however maintained that, behind the collapse,
> and the choice of which 'branch' the wavefunction would be followed,
> there
> was "the free-will of the human observer".

That is using Free Will as a God of the gap.

Put in another way; they just say "don't ask".

Everett solved this, without realising that its solution has to be
extended on arithmetic, and that the wave itself must be explained
entirely by the relative number computation statistics, to be just
coherent.

Bruno


http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/

[Bruno Marchal]

I agree. Born was very cautious in making interpretations. Here, you can see that he was very coherent with comp, which at some level, accept "classicality" (the level of elementary arithmetic, that Born, and many people still miss, but at least he was coherent).

Still, if you read his correspondence with Einstein, you can see that he is still avoiding the hard questions, but then it is normal to do that, and he does not entirely hide the fact that he does not (try) to interpret the facts and theory. this is probably why he got the probability idea, which of course no doubt it was fertile, even if after Bell, it means something like QM is wrong or there is a multiverse.

Bruno

Brent

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[stephenk]

On May 12, 8:00 pm, Richard Ruquist <yann...@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi Richard,
It is not correct to think of the monads as "compactified
dimensions" in the usual way as this would define an inside-outside
relation on them that does is incompatible with the duality. The
relation is similar to what Brian Greene describes, but the relation
is not the usual mapping between geometric manifolds.
Leibniz used a very simple notion of consciousness. Craig's notion
of Sense is the closest analogy that I have found so far.

The "pre-established harmony" (PEH) concept is equivalent to an
infinite theory or model that defines all of the states of the
universe in a way that does not allow any contradictions.

Onward!

Stephen P. King