Do you think the idea of a collapse is on the way out? — frank
Heisenberg did not try to specify exactly what the collapse of the wavefunction meant. However, he emphasized that it should not be understood as a physical process.[11] Niels Bohr also repeatedly cautioned that we must give up a "pictorial representation", and perhaps also interpreted collapse as a formal, not physical, process.[12] — Wave function collapse - History and Context - Wikipedia
Dirac (1947) wrote “a measurement always causes the system to jump into an eigenstate of the dynamical variable being measured.” Here, we must be careful: a quantum jump (also called collapse) is something that happens in our description of the system, not to the system itself. Likewise, the time dependence of the wave function does not represent the evolution of a physical system. It only gives the evolution of probabilities for the outcomes of potential experiments on that system (Fuchs and Peres, 2000). — Quantum Information and Relativity Theory - Peres, Terno
Is the most you can perhaps say, 'the nature of materialism isn't what we though it was' ? — Tom Storm
The nature of materialism? Or of matter? — Banno
This old armchair is solid, yet mostly space. And saying this is no contradiction, just a concatenation of descriptions taken from quite different circumstances. — Banno
it’s better to doubt then be certain — Deus
the chair remains very real. — Banno
Just real. Arses on armchairs. — Banno
What is foundational depends on what one is doing. — Banno
It is right that reality looks different at different scales of interaction. And so that makes us ask which scale is foundational and which is emergent. — apokrisis
As a matter of convention, I think it makes sense to think of interactions at human scale as foundational, at least for bookkeeping purposes. It was at that level that the whole concept of reality was established. It's at that level that most people experience reality directly. It's at that level where noting weird is going on. — T Clark
There is an argument to be had there. We can build the subjective anthropomorphic view into our metaphysics.
But how is that to be done in a way that simply doesn't serve to contradict all attempts by physics to then take the objective "view from nowhere" as its highly productive metaphysics? And what happens when that unreasonably effective route has to turn around and recover its own subjective point of departure? — apokrisis
That is how all the quantum mysticism arises. If the foundation is the human observer making measurements – regardless of whether it is with their wide bum, or a clock and ruler – then how does this "classical" picture account for whatever emergently leads to the collapse of the wavefunction? — apokrisis
Have you ever tried making sense of action and reaction as a symmetrically opposed pair of force vectors? Or is it only me that saw that as the answer to how rockets worked in a picture book when I was 7 years old and thought, hey, that's a completely bogus metaphysics! — apokrisis
So you were on the nose with your earlier remark about scales of observation. But my point here is about taking the ontology seriously once you have indeed sorted out your epistemology. — apokrisis
:clap: :smirk:... naive realism that dissolves into naive idealism without even being aware of it is not a sorted-out epistemology. It is 1950s plain speaking bullshit. — apokrisis
What? :chin:Better, the mooted distinction between epistemology and ontology is here misplaced. Always, already interpreted. — Banno
Why would you expect events at scales of 10 or 15 orders of magnitude smaller than ours to act the same way they do up here? — T Clark
It's a philosophy forum, — Banno
Better, the mooted distinction between epistemology and ontology is here misplaced. Always, already interpreted. — Banno
It is the flat contradictions in the causality that creates the angst. Sure, you can take the epistemic or modelling perspective that says we simply construct the pragmatic story that captures sufficient truth at each level. So shut up and calculate.
But this invokes an ontology of emergent properties. And so you are just moving the metaphysical questions back to that next grounding level.
For example, you can get into the hierarchy theory debate about whether emergence is all about supervenience - so microstate realism about emergent macrostates - or instead the kind of Peircean holism that I always promote.
So why is quantum reality nonlocal and classical reality local? Why is quantum reality indeterminate or vague, and classical reality definite or crisp? Is it just epistemic accident we arrived at such contrasting causal axioms, or is it instead the big clue that shows there is a directly reciprocal relation in which reality emerges from the manifestation of that causal dialectic. — apokrisis
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