But that isn't what measuring devices are supposed to do in the Copenhagen interpretation is it? The stuff is there. It just doesnt have any location and so forth.
So the quantum idealist (if that's what they should be called) are realists in the sense you're using. — frank
Berkeley denied the existence of substance - so whatever account you have of it cannot possibly accord with Berkelean idealism. — ProcastinationTomorrow
I don't see a good argument to conclude idealism from QM. — Moliere
To me, the problem for Idealism is to explain how Unitary Mind individuates, or 'dissociates' into a multiplicity of finite loci or iterations of mind, to which those 'emanations' come to appear as their experiential, phenomenal content -- such as how it feels to watch an exquisitely beautiful sunset — snowleopard
Bernardo KastrupFriday, October 30, 2015 1:41:00 PM
Hi Matthew,
I explore more of this in an upcoming book titled "More Than Allegory." It's a book about religious myths but, in Part III, I take an opportunity to return to the measurement problem with a more specific and detailed perspective. The book should be out early next year! To anticipate it, I can say that I am sympathetic to the QBism interpretation, for reasons that I can't really explain in a comment but are clear in the book.
Cheers, B.
As for matter being a problem for Idealism, well that depends on how to interpret the experience of whatever it is one conceives matter to be. — snowleopard
Again, the Idealist take on this is that there is an existing state in itself that remains in the absence of a finite locus of mind, and yet exists as an emanation of some some source that transcends that finite locus of mind, while at the same time not being separate from it. In other words, a model of a self-observing cosmos, as per Wheeler ... — snow leopard
but it wouldn't seem to be able to explain the commonality of the content of what is measured if there is nothing independent of the measuring minds that is being measured. — Janus
quantum mechanics is not about how the world is without us; instead it’s precisely about us in the world. The subject matter of the theory is not the world or us but us-within-the-world, the interface between the two. ...
QBism would say, it’s not that the world is built up from stuff on “the outside” as the Greeks would have had it. Nor is it built up from stuff on “the inside” as the idealists, like George Berkeley and Eddington, would have it. Rather, the stuff of the world is in the character of what each of us encounters every living moment — stuff that is neither inside nor outside, but prior to the very notion of a cut between the two at all.
It's a logical problem. — frank
but it wouldn't seem to be able to explain the commonality of the content of what is measured if there is nothing independent of the measuring minds that is being measured. — Janus
But I think that still assumes that there is thought 'in here' which corresponds with something 'out there' - that thought is one thing, and the object another - so it’s the division between mental and physical again. — Wayfarer
Actually the nearest analogy I can think of is Buddhist abhidharma - that what is real are ‘dharmas’ which are moments of experience [which bears a resemblance to Whitehead’s ‘actual occasions’]. But they’re not ‘atoms’ in the sense of enduring physical entities. — Wayfarer
If you speak of "individual subjects" I would presume you mean "individual minds", and the term "individual' indicates that those minds are not one and the same mind. The thing being measured obviously cannot be identical to any one of the measuring minds, since they have already been defined as different from one another. — Janus
The point is that if the minds are all different, separate minds, then the commonality of the content of what they measure can only be explained in terms of something independent of all of them, and which they all have access to — Janus
I cannot prove scientifically that Truth must be conceived as a Truth that is valid independent of humanity; but I believe it firmly. I believe, for instance, that the Pythagorean theorem in geometry states something that is approximately true, independent of the existence of man.
But isn't the whole point of mathematics and standard units of measurement and shared meanings to facilitate this? Isn't that what culture and language do? When you and I look at a collection of objects, there are X objects, regardless of your or my opinion of the matter. What you think about them or whether you like them or not, is another thing altogether, but their number is not a matter of opinion. — Wayfarer
The point is that if the minds are all different, separate minds, then the commonality of the content of what they measure can only be explained in terms of something independent of all of them, and which they all have access to, unless you want to posit a 'level' on which they are not actually individual minds at all. — Janus
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