Ask and answer stupid questions here! - Page 334

On September 01 2015 04:55 Cascade wrote:
Weren't the pyramids built by aliens anyways?

On September 01 2015 18:48 xM(Z wrote:
so quantum physics, allegedly.

men, what the hell is up with those people saying(or at least implying) that a photon acts like a particle when you look at it with your consciousness(and like a wave when you don't look at it, but that's irrelevant here), then go on a spree about all these other kind of mental shenanigans/gymnastics all the way up to a universal consciousness/god ...?; because you know, you look at that damn particle with a sensor/detector made up of plastic and metal that's not even remotely similar to the so called consciousness.
do they have any ground to sit on?; am i missing something?.
(i just watched some random youtube vid)

On September 01 2015 21:02 Acrofales wrote:

While I'm not sure this is a good place to discuss the intricacies of the Copenhagen interpretation of QM, this argument has always struck me as flawed. As Wigner showed, this is simply a larger uncertain system. To me, the starfish+photon now know where the photon is, but the starfish observing the photon does not collapse the wave function FOR ME. I would thus need to either observe the photon as well, or have the starfish tell me where it is, in order to collapse the wave function for me, but not for you,or your neighbour, or the Kwarglblarx aliens in the next galaxy over. This is so utterly counterintuitive that the Copenhagen interpretation must simply be rejected. The many worlds interpretation deals better with this, but instead simply posits an infinity of parallel worlds, which while not dismissable, seems like a cop out.

On September 01 2015 23:00 Acrofales wrote:


Eh, that doesn't really have anything to do with my point, which is mainly that the whole idea that "measurement" plays some special purpose in our universe is nonsensical, and both the EPR paradox (and subsequently Bell's experiments) and the Wigner's friend thought experiment (as I described it above) show that if you hold onto this belief of measurement as some kind of special event, it leads you to extremely weird places.

In particular, it means you have to discard locality, which while possible, means you have to accept Einstein's spooky action at a distance as a real thing. Now, Bell's theorem means you have to accept some really weird shit one way or the other (the alternative to non-locality is to discard counterfactual definiteness, which I personally think is less weird to discard, or no-conspiracy which you can discard with impunity if you believe we just live in a simulation), but where you assert that the Copenhagen interpretation "is the best way we currently ahve to describe matter at a nano scale", I simply disagree. Modern variants on the MWI are better, albeit flawed. I think it is one of the great tragedies of the 20th century scientific community that Bohr got the better of the debate and the Copenhagen interpretation dominated QM for most of the century. Now Einstein didn't really have an alternative, and seemed to disagree with QM in its entirety, which goes against very many observations, but Bohm and Everett came up with interpretations that I think Einstein could have lived with (and to be fair, the earliest formulation of Bohmian mechanics can be attributed to him), although they have their own issues and were still very rough.

An alternative, is of course, to simply change your philosophy and be an idealist rather than a realist, in which case you can choose from any number of interpretations.

On September 02 2015 00:44 Buckyman wrote:
I don't think measurement even requires consciousness. In a single-slit experiment, for example, it's the wall doing the 'measurement' i.e. converting the wave to particles.