Philosophical musings on Quanta & Qualia; Materialism & Spiritualism; Science & Religion; Pragmatism & Idealism, etc.
Post 125. June 27, 2022 continued . . . .
Quantum Weirdness
Classical Atomism vs Quantum Holism
Ball explains the quantum/classical perspective shift : “our everyday, commonsense reality is, in this view, simply what quantum mechanics looks like when you’re six feet tall”. In Philosophy Now magazine, Thomas Morrison adds a note of skepticism : “we can doubt that things are as our senses report (and of course that is just what physicists are saying when they tell you that the table you’re sitting at is a swarm of incredibly small force-carrying wave-particles, rather than the thing it appears to be)”³⁸. But, which is the fake reality : what we see with our own eyes, or what the priests of physics tell us is hidden from our vision? Which is easier to believe-in : an invisible poltergeist, or an imperceptible ocean of swirling causal forces? Fortunately, for us perplexed laymen, those incom-patible concepts & percepts “meet at the middle scale . . . Where we can now literally watch quantum become classical”. By “we”, he means scientists with the technology to observe that transition, from the random & unpredictable quantum reality — which “depends only upon statistical regularities among that atomic-scale chaos”— and the orderly & determin-istic reality of our personal experience. Does your worldview depend on which priesthood tells you what you want to hear?
That middle-ground, where physical senses and mathematical physics meet, seems to be located in the mind of the observer. And that intrface is where objective Matter meets subjective Mind : “an ingredient that the pioneers of quantum theory overlooked – even though it was literally all around them”. It’s the mind behind the microscope that is confused by the contrast between Classical and Quantum physics. Bohr treated them as completely different realities, but couldn’t explain what makes the distinction. Yet, “Information” has been defined as “the [perceptual ; physical] difference that makes a [conceptual ; meaning] difference”³⁹. And Einstein’s Relativity was based on the notion of varying perceptual frames (viewpoints) that make the world look dissimilar from alternative perspectives. Consequently, the “objective” quantum world looks weird to our “subjective” classically-trained minds.
The transition from superposed Potential wave-forms to decohered Actual particles may be the first phase of that divergence of worldviews. As Ball puts it, “decoherence is not actually a loss of superposition but a loss of our ability to detect it in the original system”. In its undisturbed state, the quantum system is continuous & coherent, so by provoking its “collapse”, the observer causes a loss of Information (“meaningful coherence”), which is equivalent to a subtraction of some binding force. But the transformation works both ways. For example, “in 2015 physicists were able to recover the information lost through decoherence”. Thus Information, like Energy in the third law of Thermodynamics, is never lost forever, it just changes form⁴⁰.
Blog Post 125 continued . . . .
38. Appearances deceive : Scientists & skeptics attempt to see through the veil of conceptual overlay to the underlying phenomenal reality. What we expect to see versus what’s actually going on under our noses. https://philosophynow.org/issues/150/Did_Kant_Solve_Skepticism
39. Information Difference : Knowledge and the ability to know. Technically, it's the ratio of order to disorder, of positive to negative, of knowledge to ignorance. It's measured in degrees of uncertainty. Those ratios are also called "differences". So Gregory Bateson* defined Information as "the difference that makes a difference". The latter distinction refers to "value" or "meaning". http://blog-glossary.enformationism.info/page11.html
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