🚀 go-pugleaf

On 05/02/2011 6:19 PM, demibee wrote:
> On Feb 5, 4:35 pm, James Warren<jwwarren...@gmail.com>  wrote:
>> Not such a new idea. Who is *us* exactly. Surely we are not the only
>> observers in the universe and what constitutes an observation? This
>> is not a good idea.
>
> Each observer -- or group of observers -- sees the multiverse in a
> different way.  What would constitute a group, I'm guessing, is
> anything that makes an observation similar...  E.g., presumably,
> humans see and think in much the same way; so our observation would be
> a collective one.  We're composed of and depend on the same
> "stuff" (hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, sufficient values for the EM force,
> gravity, and so on).
>
> It follows from a combination of the Copenhagen interpretation of
> quantum mechanics and Feynman's "sum over histories" interpretion.
>
>
> Following a similar line of thinking, a Buddhist book I read a while
> back (_Embracing Mind_ by B. Alan Wallace) indicated that the idea of
> a "real universe out there" -- one whose exact form is independent of
> observation -- is essentially a Christian one... or, rather, an
> ancient Greek one that like-minded Christians embraced 2000 years
> ago.  Where there's a creator-God, there's such a universe -- one
> whose form doesn't rely in any way on human observation but on God's
> absolute laws.  This idea isn't common in the East.
>
> Alan Watts, a British philosopher of religion, made a similar remark
> in a lecture...  He said we once lived under the superstition of the
> Ceramic Model -- i.e., the idea that the world is an artefact that was
> made.  "Remember," he said, "Jesus was the son of a carpenter... and
> he was also the son of God."  That was, he claimed, the power of that
> myth -- that idea.
>
> But we now, having "fired" God, live under the superstition of what he
> called the Fully-Automatic Model -- i.e., the idea that the universe's
> form exists independent of observation.  "We got rid of the god and
> kept the laws," he says.
>
> (And interestingly, what he calls the Fully-Automatic Model is
> inconsistent with every variant, every interpretation, of quantum
> physics -- the Copenhagen interpretation and Bohr's notion of
> complemetarity, Feynman's "sum over histories," Everett's "many
> worlds" interpretation... one of which has to be somewhere in the
> vicinity of the truth... in as much as any human concept can be).
>
> The Fully-Automatic Model is easily dismissed by asking questions
> like, "Where does 'blue' come from?"  The answer is that it comes not
> from one thing, but a combination of things: (1) the light present,
> (2) the quality of the surface reflecting the source light, (3) the
> observer's eye and brain, and (4) the experience of 'blue' that the
> brain gives us in response to all that.  It's that idea that the
> universe is more a set of relationships that anything concrete -- the
> ultimate "relativity theory," as it were.
>
>
> db

To me it all sounds like mumbo jumbo. I would like to know that there
is a sensible interpretation of quantum theory, but so far I have not
seen one. Reluctantly, I think, for now, I have to be in the "shut up
and compute" school. Quantum theory makes excellently precise predictions
but its meaning is unknown at the moment.

-- 
jw