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Article 3845 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: aboulang@bbn.com (Albert Boulanger)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: QM nonsense
Message-ID: <ABOULANG.92Feb18163624@icarus.bbn.com>
Date: 18 Feb 92 21:36:24 GMT
References: <1992Feb17.170325.11489@oracorp.com> <66424@netnews.upenn.edu>
Reply-To: aboulanger@bbn.com
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In-reply-to: weemba@libra.wistar.upenn.edu's message of 18 Feb 92 00:24:38 GMT

In article <66424@netnews.upenn.edu> weemba@libra.wistar.upenn.edu (Matthew P Wiener) writes:

  In article <ABOULANG.92Feb15194336@icarus.bbn.com>, aboulang@bbn (Albert Boulanger) writes:
  >There has been some recent experimental work on QM measurement that
  >indicate that the extremal position of conscious-driven wavefunction
  >collapse is not workable (machine driven watch pot experiment). Here
  >is a copy of a posting from sci.physics:

  And I responded to your posting then, in the same way I'm responding to
  Stanley Friesen: it does not rule the extreme view out, since they still
  make the same experimental predictions.

Can you please state what you have in mind as the "extreme view".

  All the experiment can do is emphasize experimentally just how weird the
  extreme view is.  Schroedinger's cat was the first theoretical description,
  and the debate is still alive.

But you do not have to have some conscious entity set up a watch pot
arrangement. It could of just happened without anybody conscious
constructing it. No?  Does this not rule out the necessity of a
conscious-driven wavefunction collapse. We are just part of the
enviroment to decohere with.

And in a following post:

   The approach that I favor is the MW-inspired interpretations of Zeh,
   Zurek, Gell-Mann, Hartle, and others.  Some of the most recent work on
   this can be found in Zurek (ed) COMPLEXITY, ENTROPY AND THE PHYSICS OF
   INFORMATION.  Briefly, their view is that the environment is part of
   the measurement process, and you can achieve decoherence by letting
   the environment absorb QM coherence.  Model calculations provide, for
   example, an answer to Einstein's "is the moon really there when no
   one looks at it?"--yes, since the cosmic microwave background absorbs
   the moon's quantum uncertainty.

   This still doesn't eliminate the QM/mind question, and in fact, GM&H
   make the point in their Zurek contribution that a brain that decoheres
   its quantum inputs should be evolutionary favored because of greater
   predictibility over coherent input.

Yes. Decoherence via the extrernal enviroment is a clarifying
notion.  Ok. I guess what I had in mind as the extreme position was
that it is *necessary* for a conscious observer for wave function
collapse. (I thought this was the historical notion.) I think your
position is that wave function collapse can be *enabled* by conscious
observation, and furthermore one could not experimentally separate out
the sources of decoherence. Is this right?


Keeping my santity by decohering,
Albert Boulanger
aboulanger@bbn.com


