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I cohabited with a guy in Tanzania for a few weeks. He was a 'personal trainer', but not in just the fitness sense: he also trained people's spirits. He told me (not knowing I was a physicist) that his philosophy was based on quantum mechanics. I digged a little deeper and it turned out that quantum mechanics was thus:
1. Everything is energy.
2. Energy is divided into positive and negative energy.
3. If you bring positive and negative energy together, you get love.
What could I say to that?!?
Not much. Whatever works for him and his clients, works! There is even a place in medicine for placebo... Perhaps his understanding of quantum is such that if he understood a bit better, he might lose his magical powers...
Seriously, though, quantum is a large enough elephant to allow many Perspectives; there is no 'one true all encompassing' Perspective.
Biased, but thats fine as there are many interpretations of QM, and more all the time.
They didn't seem to agree that there can be any other interpretation than their own, rather 'fundamentalist' it seems... that explains the 'bias' to materialism. They don't present anything new and interesting, unless you're a materialist seeking validation.
They toss the baby with the bathwater while their head's in the suds.
SYMPTOMS OF PATHOLOGICAL SKEPTICISM
TO BONES:
What is your take on Bohmian Mechanics.
Bohmian Mechanics (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
it is said that it: "realizes Einstein's dream of a hidden variable theory, restoring determinism and definiteness to micro-reality"
I would like to know what causes random collapse of the wave function. There has to be something that causes it. once that is found out can it then be used to complete the arguement for determinism?
Well, Victor Stenger is a physicist, so I guess that makes him biased.
Stenger is simply saying that there is no need for any mystical interpretation of quantum mechanics, because it can easily be explained in naturalist terms.
He is not skeptical about the nature of quantum mechanics. He is skeptical about the mystical interpretation of quantum mechanics. Questioning the validity of a claim is never a bad thing.
I would like to know what causes random collapse of the wave function.
There are intriguing possibilities other than deterministic collapse, though. Wavefunctions have to obey boundary conditions: for instance, a photon in a box with 100% reflective inner walls has an amplitude of zero outside the box, and it must be zero inside too. It is possible, for instance, that these boundary conditions must equally met in the time dimension too. It is known that the vast majority of fundamental physical processes appear to be time-reversible: that is, if a process can occur, it can also occur backwards. Feynman was a champion of the view that some real phenomena we see are nothing more than other phenomena occuring backwards in time. This totally upsets causality, since the effect may be as much the cause and vice versa. In such a view, two collapse events could be considered temporal boundary conditions. The problem then is that we can never model deterministic collapse without both boundaries which, in the real world, we never know until after the measurement - i.e. it has no predictive power. But the particle 'knows', because it's future is equally its past. It's a difficult concept to get a handle on because our minds work causally. However, I suspect Feynman had exactly this in mind when he developed his much-revered path integral formalism, where instead of looking at the starting conditions and then predicting results, he considered both the starting conditions and the results and demonstrated the paths taken by the system in between which in turn gave the probability for the final event.
The one problem, of course, of a temporal boundary approach is the few time-irreversible processes that mess this up.:brickwall:
So we don't yet have the ability to calculate it but that doesn't mean that we won't.
It seems that Nobel Prize winning co founder of quantum physics bongo playing genius Richard Feynman disagrees with your Stenger (Nobel winner genius also?). Perhaps QM can be explained in naturalistic terms for him, but not to anyone who has penetrated to any depth. 'Materialism' is so long dead it a joke already. What an obsolescence.
So we don't yet have the ability to calculate it but that doesn't mean that we won't. I don't see how one can knock off determinism just because they have a theory about something that doesn't act deterministically yet when it very possibly could be completely deterministic.
You also say that the electron 'knows' what gives it the ability to 'know'. Once we could find that out then we could put that into a deterministic argument could we not?
Calm down, I'm not trying to straw man you. I just said that since he is a physicist I guess that makes him biased in some way, because he looks at things in a naturalistic way. If that's not the reason why you said that he was biased then what is?
nameless wrote:"It seems that Nobel Prize winning co founder of quantum physics bongo playing genius Richard Feynman disagrees with your Stenger (Nobel winner genius also?). Perhaps QM can be explained in naturalistic terms for him, but not to anyone who has penetrated to any depth. 'Materialism' is so long dead it a joke already. What an obsolescence."
The more I read your response the more biased you sound. You sound like you have some longing for a mystical worldview.
Materialism is not long dead,
but the terminology is a bit limiting.
Most philosophers use the term physicalism now,
because it encompasses all of the observations of physics.
Are you keeping track of academics philosophy,
The mind is continuing to be explained in physical, funtionalist terms.
The fact of the matter is that wave function collapse can be explained in naturalist terms and Stenger explains this very well in the article.
The academic debate over quantum mechanics does not center around mysticism,
Many physisists have many varying Perspectives. That I one rason that I 'denied' your remark.
Depends on the limitations of youPerspective. As a viable scientific world-view, it is dead but for a few invested and emotionally needy 'believers'. But 'belief' is as unavailable to critical thoughtfully rational discourse as 'mental phenomena (esp, prognostication, telepathy, empathy...) are to 'empiricism'.
Because it's obsolete and more so every day.
No, I'm quite capable of independent critical thought, thank you.
Perhaps if senility strikes... nah, not even then is such tripe worthy of serious consideration.
I have no need of the common crap flowing from such 'hallowed halls'; I know too much about it; the cutting edge of 'thought' rarely flows from such mouldy orfices.
As well it should be! And every other 'terms' as well!
Time will tell what 'hypotheses' and 'theories and such 'attempted explanations' fall by the wayside...
He's entitled to his opinion. I have yet to see his 'revelation' screaming "eureka" from the Science Journals or any other 'reputable' source, as 'the
There are many, obciously, who disagree with him.
His stuff attracts materialists, go figure.
Time will tell.
According to Chopra, this profound conclusion can be drawn from quantum physics, which he says has demonstrated that "the physical world, including our bodies, is a response of the observer. We create our bodies as we create the experience of our world" (Chopra 1993, 5). Chopra also asserts that "beliefs, thoughts, and emotions create the chemical reactions that uphold life in every cell," and "the world you live in, including the experience of your body, is completely dictated by how you learn to perceive it" (Chopra 1993, 6). Thus illness and aging are an illusion and we can achieve what Chopra calls "ageless body, timeless mind" by the sheer force of consciousness.
Considering an object to be a mental construct does nothing to the nature of the object, it just adjusts the language we use to speak of it with. If I consider all objects to be physical and of the same nature, how is that different from considering all objects to be mental projections? Clearly I could simply say that physics is a product of the mind, and that all things are products of the mind. There would still be consequeces for any action and everything would have the same relational patterns of interaction and being, so what is the difference?