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Article 3921 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: weemba@libra.wistar.upenn.edu (Matthew P Wiener)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: QM nonsense
Message-ID: <67000@netnews.upenn.edu>
Date: 21 Feb 92 18:56:00 GMT
References: <66424@netnews.upenn.edu> <1992Feb20.225429.5846@norton.com>
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Reply-To: weemba@libra.wistar.upenn.edu (Matthew P Wiener)
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In-reply-to: brian@norton.com (Brian Yoder)

In article <1992Feb20.225429.5846@norton.com>, brian@norton (Brian Yoder) writes:
>		    Can anyone explain how "uncertainty" can be "absorbed"
>by something?  That perspective seems hopelessly confused to me, and I can't
>see why anyone would fail to see this.

It's not "confused", just (very) minimally described.

The distinguishing feature in QM is "coherence": different versions of
what's going on, so to speak, can be kept together as part of the same
physical situation in a "coherent" manner.  Lowspeak for this is just
"quantum uncertainty".  Somehow we view the world in a decoherent manner
--just one aspect of possible realities are seen by us.

How this happens is unknown.  One interesting idea (Zeh and others) is
that the environment can interact with a macroscopic object and trigger
a rapid convergence of the different realities associated with the object,
at the expense of the environment itself getting more realities.  Hence
the above description.
-- 
-Matthew P Wiener (weemba@libra.wistar.upenn.edu)


