From: Alex Ferguson (abf@cs.ucc.ie)
Date: Mon 02 Oct 2000 - 00:56:05 EEST
Carl Fink:
> For a less extreme case, consider the U.S. debate about abortion -- I
> don't think it's possible to say that abortion is "inherently evil or
> it isn't."
If only it were indeed not possible! (Poster resides in the only
> I don't know of any physicists who consider quantum mechanics to
country in the world (I understand) with a constitutional ban on
abortion...)
> represent a "higher level of reality". I've never even found it
> particularly complex or hard to understand -- anyone who passed
> calculus should recognize its simplicity.
I'm tempted to risk being labelled a Digest Airhead, and paraphrase a
> Certainly the quantum isn't inherently contradictory. It does seem
certain Friends character: But physics is, like, the _easiest_ Nobel Prize
to win... The Many Worlds Interpretation would be the handiest example
of Peter's point: reality _is_ the uncollapsed wave function; your
perceptions of it, to wit the "common sense reality" is neither here nor
there. (Apologies to any died in the wool Copenhagenists out there, but
lest this really turn this into the Terra Digest...) Which is a lot
like what an awful lot of geneticists, brain biochemists, cognitive
scientists, et al end up saying about consciousness, but most of us, at
least when we clock out from our reductionist day jobs, are somewhat
fond of, even if we're equally philosophically uncomfortable with being
Vitalists, Dualists, or Compatiblists.)
> to contradict relativity, but for that very reason physicists assume
> that one or the other is flawed, which rather defeats your argument.
Rather that both are, since you can contrive experimental conditions
in which one or the other break, or if you're _really_ good (and
have an accelerator the size of a small Grand Duchy or so), both
simultaneously... I'm not sure if that was Peter's point, but it
was an instance of mine: they're both 'aspects of' (or to put in
in the more usual terminology, partial, inaccurate but useful working
approximations) to what one might call a 'deeper' (description of)
reality.
Slán leat,
Alex.
------------------------------
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.7 : Fri 13 Jun 2003 - 17:18:39 EEST