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From: jqb@netcom.com (Jim Balter)
Subject: Re: Minsky's new article
Message-ID: <jqbCzHM1K.ELM@netcom.com>
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References: <3agf03$qi5@mp.cs.niu.edu> <3aisbo$4pf@mp.cs.niu.edu> <3aj1ls$i3m@jetsam.ee.pdx.edu> <3aj3dv$8qt@mp.cs.niu.edu>
Date: Fri, 18 Nov 1994 23:46:31 GMT
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Xref: glinda.oz.cs.cmu.edu comp.ai:25315 comp.robotics:15471 comp.ai.philosophy:22274

In article <3aj3dv$8qt@mp.cs.niu.edu>, Neil Rickert <rickert@cs.niu.edu> wrote:
>In <3aj1ls$i3m@jetsam.ee.pdx.edu> marcus@ee.pdx.edu (Marcus Daniels) writes:
>>rickert@cs.niu.edu (Neil Rickert) writes:
>>>I realize my argument sounds implausible.  But take a look at QM.
>>>According to a common interpretation, the result of an experiment is
>>>a probability wave.  When a human conscious observer looks at the
>>>results, a "collapse of the wave function" occurs, and the outcome of
>>>...
>
>>You are really going out on a limb now... "human concious observer"?
>
>Not me.  I don't take any of that "collapse of the wave function" at
>all seriously.  It merely suggests to me that the physicists still do
>not have a good theoretical model of QM.  I only introduced the
>example to illustrate that there are plenty of people who are willing
>to consider quite bizarre scenarios about interactions between the
>human mind and physical reality.

The "observers" of the philosophically muddled Copenhagen Interpretation
need not be human or conscious, and you haven't addressed the models of
Bohm and Everett.  I don't see how the fact that some physicists have poor
philosophical (not theoretical; the theoretical model is very robust)
models of QM acts as support for your proclamations about free will.
If you don't take wave function collapse seriously, why do you take your
own explanations of free will seriously?  If the CI is not a good model,
why not take that as an indication that you have a poor model, too?
That's how it strikes me.  Certainly your strange idea that, if the absence of
a certain sort of free will could open the possibility of producing bogus
scientific results, then therefore such free will is a necessary axiom
of doing science, leads me to think that you have pulled the wool over your
own eyes.  Among 1000 experimenters flipping coins ten times in a row, we expect
one to get ten heads in a row.  That one experimenter may conclude that her
coin is biased.  That's a bad result, but it doesn't lead us to conclude
that binomial probability distributions are inconsistent with doing science.

-- 
<J Q B>
