Philosophical musings on Quanta & Qualia; Materialism & Spiritualism; Science & Religion; Pragmatism & Idealism, etc.
Quantum est in rebus inane
Ah, how much futility In the world
Post 125. June 27, 2022 continued . . . .
Quantum Weirdness
Quantum superposition is just a phase
Quantum theory has inspired many novel terms, coined by frustrated researchers to describe the ambiguous results of their experiments. When their math seemed to imply an infinity of possible states, they labeled it like a Marvel hero as “super-position”. Perhaps, to convey the image of a plethora of pushy particles piled-up in one big heap, ready to bust-out into a single entity. When the observer makes a measurement, “pop”, all those possibilities fall-out like candy from a piñata. Except, only one piece is real, and the rest are empty wrappers of what could have been. The transition from that statistical Potential to measured Actual is sensationally described as the “collapse of the wavefunction”. Yet that cataclysm doesn’t make a sound, because it happens faster than sound.
So, I think a more appropriate name for such an anticlimactic event would be simply a “Phase Transition”²¹. Just as water changes form from solid-to-liquid-to-gas instantaneously, with no big to-do, the position transition from everywhere & everywhen to here & now is rather mundane. It’s simply what Aristotle described as the change from unreal Potential to really Actual²². As in the water phase example, it happens a zillion times a day, without fanfare. Physical phase changes are classified in six states : sublimation, deposition, condensation, evaporation, freezing, and melting. Is Quantum superposition collapse the seventh kind of phase transition?
Due to the curious “observer effect”, Ball says : “mind-induced collapse seems to demand that we attribute to mind some feature distinct from the rest of reality :to make mind a non-physical entity that doesn’t obey the Schrodinger equation”. Physicist John A. Wheeler proposed a more specific – and controversial – role for the human mind, in his Participatory Universe theory²³. In this thought experiment, human observers are co-creators of reality. Another surprising interpretation is Quantum Bayesianism (QBism) implying that scientific “facts” are actually subjective “beliefs about out-comes” of experiments. In Bayesian statistics, “probabilities are not defined with reference to some objective state of affairs in the world, but instead quantify personal degrees of belief”.
Together, those interpretations view quantum measurements as “little moments of creation”. In this mind-based framework, “the nature of the world is such that our intervention in it matters”. But such views are definitely not orthodox for sup-posedly objective classical science. So, such far-out notions from theorists are not embraced by most pragmatic empirical scientists. Because the participatory worldview is not rigidly deterministic, as the scientific method presumes, but allows for some “creativity or novelty in the world”. And that points back to the argument of Einstein against Bohr’s Copenhagen Inter-pretation : that “God [nature] does not play dice”. Ironically, Quantum science is not actually mechanical, because it is statistical. Hence, sub-atomic nature is neither quantized (no ultimate grains), nor deterministic (uncertainty).
Blog Post 125 continued . . . .
21. Phase Transition : Phase is a temporary state of a system. The transition between phases happens when some parameter (e.g. temperature) of the system changes. Likewise, the wavefunction “collapse” may be simply a phase transition from Potential to Actual, triggered by the extraction of Information, similar to a temperature decrease. This is just my own hypothesis.
22. Potential to Actual : From the power-to-become to really being. From statistical state to physical state.
23. Participatory Universe : “Nobel Prize winner, John Archibald Wheeler, in which he noted that “we live in a participatory universe”: physics gives rise to observer-participancy, which results in information, which gives rise to physics. . . . Man is “entangled” in this “participatory universe”.” https://medium.com/@tarek_osman/our-participatory-universe-ce640fed6585
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