You are viewing the historical archive of The Philosophy Forum.
For current discussions, visit the live forum.
Go to live forum

Andrew M

Comments

For MWI, merging as well as splitting is entailed by the unitary dynamics. From the friend's perspective he has, for all practical purposes, performed...
July 26, 2021 at 04:33
Many Worlds is fully compatible with Wigner's Friend. It's just a situation where worlds not only can split but also merge again under the right condi...
July 25, 2021 at 01:50
Yes, so why do McGee's examples seem to be counterexamples to modus ponens when they are not? Because the way the counterexamples are expressed sugges...
July 17, 2021 at 10:43
Here's another interesting example to test your solution on: I think the conclusion is true, and MP is valid here. For a further twist, consider repla...
July 16, 2021 at 21:53
I think we're interpreting the problem differently. You regard 1 as the background assumption, whereas I regard (1 v 2 v 3) as the background assumpti...
July 16, 2021 at 07:32
:up: By broader context, I meant a context where we consider only the characteristics of the die where face 1, 2 and 3 are all possibilities. So we mi...
July 16, 2021 at 00:06
Here's one (which reflects the election example). Suppose I have a 3-sided die with the following roll statistics: 1: 80% 2: 19% 3: 1% Before the die ...
July 15, 2021 at 04:30
As @"Banno" points out, that is not what they were doing. Among other things, they offered critiques of how language goes astray when not woven into o...
June 24, 2021 at 07:32
:up: Apropos my earlier post, I see that that book title comes from Heraclitus! :-) Indeed. Yes. On the other hand, QM can be considered as a generali...
June 24, 2021 at 04:51
Perhaps you could briefly present the problem that you're attempting to solve, and why the conventional (and scientific) language that most people fin...
June 23, 2021 at 06:31
Yep. A famous quote attributed to Bohr says: That is, what we can say about nature is that you will find, with some well-defined probability, either a...
June 23, 2021 at 03:52
I didn't see that quote in this thread, but I think the Wigner's Friend scenario that described suggests one solution to be that Wigner and his friend...
June 23, 2021 at 03:46
Thanks for your considered reply. I don't understand what the bolded phrase means nor why I should regard it as a fact. Conventionally, the term mind ...
June 23, 2021 at 01:47
Scientists claim that the Earth existed billions of years before the emergence of human beings (with minds). Either you are disagreeing with their cla...
June 22, 2021 at 06:55
There are important constraints on an epistemological view of QM. The main difference between a superposition and classical ignorance is that a superp...
June 22, 2021 at 03:06
I came across a nice proof of Godel's Incompleteness Theorem that utilizes computability and Cantor's diagonal argument (UC Davis lecture: Part 1 and ...
June 12, 2021 at 14:17
OK. But I just wanted to point out that there are other views, such as Aristotle's, where mathematics and logic aren't considered to be a priori or ex...
June 09, 2021 at 03:07
No, that's not Aristotle's position. See below. Augustine saw the divine mind as the ground for universals. Whereas for Aristotle, it's the concrete s...
June 08, 2021 at 11:37
As Wigner once suggested, there's a deep connection between mathematics and science. Per Aristotle, mathematics is the abstraction of the sensible - t...
June 08, 2021 at 02:32
There is no set of local hidden variables that can reproduce the predictions of quantum mechanics. So (subject to the assumptions of Bell's Theorem) t...
May 18, 2021 at 00:36
Yes, that would avoid Bell's Theorem since the two surfaces would be part of the same local object. The idea is similar to ER=EPR where the two entang...
May 18, 2021 at 00:17
That apparently common-sense conclusion is just what Bell addresses.
May 16, 2021 at 01:35
Note that Einstein didn't mention entanglement when he used the famous "spooky" phrase below: Einstein's more general concern was the apparent non-loc...
May 16, 2021 at 00:14
Einstein is referring generally to an instantaneous measurement update (collapse) over a region of space which can involve just a single particle. As ...
May 14, 2021 at 11:08
That's the spirit!
May 12, 2021 at 07:02
Alice had half a mind to tell Bob what she really thought of him. Bob is in two minds about whether to go to the party. As well as being mindful, one ...
May 12, 2021 at 01:59
They wouldn't explain why. Bohr: "It is wrong to think that the task of physics is to find out how nature is." Heisenberg, "We have to remember that w...
May 09, 2021 at 20:05
If you look at Jim Baggott's categorization of wavefunction anti-realism versus realism at 26:40, he notes that psi does not collapse at all on an ant...
May 09, 2021 at 07:24
Your comment reminded me of this quote: I don't know - are you referring to an objective collapse theory?
May 05, 2021 at 09:19
Thanks! BTW, it's worth noting that Bell's Theorem makes three assumptions - locality, counterfactual definiteness (i.e., hidden variables or classica...
May 04, 2021 at 09:16
OK, there's a challenge. I'll see if I can explain Bell's Theorem on an intuitive level. I'll use coins instead of particles. Suppose Alice and Bob ha...
May 03, 2021 at 14:11
No, that's the fallacy of division. It doesn't follow that something predicable of the whole should be predicable of any of the parts. In this case, o...
April 24, 2021 at 10:47
The pain is in your toe (unless it's referred pain). But no experience is taking place in your toe. It is you that is experiencing pain (or is in pain...
April 24, 2021 at 00:53
No, not in the brain. Where do I kick around a football with my kids? In the park, or my backyard. People (or bats) have experiences, not brains or mi...
April 23, 2021 at 07:21
As I'm using the term, experience is "practical contact with and observation of facts or events". Kicking a football around with my kids is an experie...
April 23, 2021 at 01:08
Yes, so conceivably echolocation technology could be embedded into the brain and body so that a person could see (so to speak) with their eyes closed....
April 21, 2021 at 02:12
No. The argument assumes there are objective and subjective worlds, which a non-dualist rejects. Here's a similar argument that doesn't assume dualism...
April 19, 2021 at 02:58
Fair enough. Is that different to the Penrose interpretation?
April 05, 2021 at 01:17
OK, but the basic point of Schrodinger's thought experiment was that if it doesn't make sense to imagine macroscopic phenomena being indeterminate, th...
April 05, 2021 at 01:15
Sorry, I'm not sure what you're saying. Can you clarify? OK, so consciousness causes collapse, on your view? Or something else?
April 03, 2021 at 09:41
I'm sure he did. But the thought experiment is not about what the cat observes, it's about where the line is drawn (if at all) for when a system stops...
April 03, 2021 at 08:45
I'm pretty sure Schrödinger and Wigner had carefully thought their ideas through. What is relevant are the implications of those thought experiments f...
April 03, 2021 at 07:24
Here's a possible way to think about it. Consider a superimposed photo. The number of times that the photo is superimposed doesn't change the amount o...
April 03, 2021 at 00:25
Those photons as well. Amplitude for every possible path through the apparatus contribute to the observed interference pattern - including when the ph...
April 01, 2021 at 04:02
OK, we're on the same page then. You seemed to be saying you could think about QM without that. Without detectors at the slits, the photon still inter...
March 31, 2021 at 00:35
Because that reflects the contribution of each branch to the wave function. You're mistaken. From Paul Dirac's classic textbook: Also you haven't said...
March 30, 2021 at 12:27
Just to reiterate @"fishfry"'s point with a simple example. In MWI, the total energy of the universe is the weighted average of the energies of each b...
March 30, 2021 at 00:59
That would be an instrumentalist view of science, but Wallace takes a realist view, i.e., that a theory represents the structure of the world. Newton ...
March 30, 2021 at 00:39
Yep. As David Wallace puts it, the alternatives are to change the physics or to change the philosophy.
March 29, 2021 at 07:51
In the mathematical formulation of quantum mechanics there are usually six postulates, listed here. However it is possible to simplify the formulation...
March 29, 2021 at 02:06