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Re: The halting problem revisited

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javax.swing.JSnarker wrote:

> On 29/03/2011 3:43 PM, Dirk Bruere at NeoPax wrote:
>> Wigner designed the experiment to illustrate his belief that
>> consciousness is necessary to the quantum mechanical measurement
>> process. If a material device is substituted for the conscious friend,
>> the linearity of the wave function implies that the state of the system
>> is in a linear sum of possible states. It is simply a larger
>> indeterminate system.
> 
> Thing is, it requires not only positing a collapse mechanism that is
> non-unitary, non-Lorentz-invariant, non-time-reversible, and on and on
> and on, but also positing a dichotomy between things that constitute a
> "material device" and some other sort of stuff that does not (but you
> can bet the name for it would start with an "S" and rhyme with "hole",
> and be suggested as proof of the existence of some dude whose name
> rhymes with Todd).
> 
> Or we can posit that Wigner's friend is also a "material device", in
> which case you realize that Wigner's friend just gets replicated into
> parallel worlds, and so does Wigner, and so does everyone eventually.

I'm not an expert in all this stuff at all but my thinking is:
If existence of parallel Wigners cannot be disproved experimentally (by 
definition of "parallel") the whole idea is not really science anymore.
Since Wigner is not able to verify existence of parallel Wigners then by 
applying Ockham's razor he should just ignore them (and try another 
explanation which would be more scientific).

> Which is philosophically somewhat disturbing, and being a "material
> device" perhaps even more so.
> 
> This is probably why the *obvious truth* about QM is regarded as
> controversial instead of a settled matter: it flies in the face of not
> only commonsense intuition (I don't *feel* like I'm being duplicated!)

You cannot easily say "commonsense intuition is wrong" because then your 
sentences about real world become meaningless. In fact they are meaningless 
by definition since "meaningful" actually means "something that commmonsense 
intuition accepts as a fact".

It is not that easy to get rid of "the existence of some dude whose name 
rhymes with Todd" :)

-- 
Michal

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Re: The halting problem revisited Lew <noone@lewscanon.com> - 2011-03-29 14:05 -0400
  Re: The halting problem revisited Dirk Bruere at NeoPax <dirk.bruere@gmail.com> - 2011-03-29 20:43 +0100
    Re: The halting problem revisited "javax.swing.JSnarker" <gharriman@boojum.mit.edu> - 2011-03-29 20:24 -0400
      Re: The halting problem revisited Michal Kleczek <kleku75@gmail.com> - 2011-03-30 10:05 +0200
        Re: The halting problem revisited "javax.swing.JSnarker" <gharriman@boojum.mit.edu> - 2011-03-30 04:41 -0400
          Re: The halting problem revisited Michal Kleczek <kleku75@gmail.com> - 2011-03-30 11:35 +0200
            Re: The halting problem revisited Lew <noone@lewscanon.com> - 2011-03-30 07:38 -0400
              Re: The halting problem revisited Dirk Bruere at NeoPax <dirk.bruere@gmail.com> - 2011-03-30 15:48 +0100
                Re: The halting problem revisited Lew <lew@lewscanon.com> - 2011-03-30 10:35 -0700
                Re: The halting problem revisited Dirk Bruere at NeoPax <dirk.bruere@gmail.com> - 2011-03-30 19:46 +0100
                Re: The halting problem revisited Lew <lew@lewscanon.com> - 2011-03-30 13:24 -0700
                Re: The halting problem revisited Dirk Bruere at NeoPax <dirk.bruere@gmail.com> - 2011-03-31 00:04 +0100
                Re: The halting problem revisited Lew <noone@lewscanon.com> - 2011-03-31 00:00 -0400
              Re: The halting problem revisited "javax.swing.JSnarker" <gharriman@boojum.mit.edu> - 2011-04-04 20:28 -0400
            Re: The halting problem revisited Dirk Bruere at NeoPax <dirk.bruere@gmail.com> - 2011-03-30 15:44 +0100
            Re: The halting problem revisited "javax.swing.JSnarker" <gharriman@boojum.mit.edu> - 2011-04-04 20:26 -0400
              Re: The halting problem revisited Dirk Bruere at NeoPax <dirk.bruere@gmail.com> - 2011-04-05 01:32 +0100
          Re: The halting problem revisited Dirk Bruere at NeoPax <dirk.bruere@gmail.com> - 2011-03-30 15:42 +0100
            Re: The halting problem revisited Lew <noone@lewscanon.com> - 2011-03-31 08:31 -0400
        Re: The halting problem revisited Dirk Bruere at NeoPax <dirk.bruere@gmail.com> - 2011-03-30 15:41 +0100
          Re: The halting problem revisited "javax.swing.JSnarker" <gharriman@boojum.mit.edu> - 2011-04-04 20:34 -0400
      Re: The halting problem revisited Dirk Bruere at NeoPax <dirk.bruere@gmail.com> - 2011-03-30 15:38 +0100

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