Re: Lovely Spam

On Tue, 06 Nov 2007 16:44:12 -0700, boots <no@xxxxx> wrote:

Josh Hill <usereplyto@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Perhaps the most satisfying view of quantum mechanics is that all the
possible events occur, spawning multiple universes as they do. Boots
in Universe A observes that a particle has decayed, Boots in Universe
B observes that it has not, and they go on from there.

They'll keep inventing views until eventually they find one that works
for all case instead of most cases, if events don't halt them in their
tracks before they figure it out. That's one of the good points of
science, it plods mechanically forward. Occasionally someone inserts
a skip or a jump to get things past a stuck-plodding spot and gets
called a genius for recognizing the obvious (which might be a good
definition of genius, as good as any at least). Sometimes it takes a
very long time to get past an especially gnarly stuck spot. There may
be (and I think there are) a few stuck spots that will call for a
major worldview revamping. We'll see; what works, works.

More like genius lies in recognizing what seems obvious in retrospect,
n'est-ce pas? Explorer finds the source of the Nile, then the tourists
come.

You seem to treat randomness as purely a human construct, a convenience.>>>
It is a purely human construct necessitated by a fear of the
alternative.

The concept of randomness is of fundamental importance to areas of
physics and mathematics that have proven utility, e.g., statistics,
information theory, quantum mechanics, thermodynamics, and casino
management. Furthermore, the universe is fairly in your face about
presenting us with quantum phenomena such as those seen in the
two-slit experiment.

A view can be useful while not being perfectly aligned with reality.
If some bozo consistently comes up with the right answers for the
wrong reasons, he still has the right answers. I've known severely
retarded people that were that way, it's a wonder to observe and try
to figure out.

Perhaps their retardation isn't complete. And of course there's the
broken clock phenomenon: on any matter of controversy, the average man
will be right half the time.

Also, a view that's imperfectly aligned with reality may nevertheless
be partly so. Newtonian mechanics isn't quite accurate, but that
doesn't mean it's accidental: it's a limiting case of the General
Theory of Relativity.

None of this sounds like fear to me.

There are different kinds of fear. I'm not talking about the
gutwrenching impending-death kind of fear, I'm talking about the kind
of fear that makes one afraid to let go of the familiar and take a
leap into the unknown because what may be found there could invalidate
a large part of the worldview that one is accustomed to and that makes
one feel secure in the world. Losing the belief that life is somewhat
reasonable and predictable, even though it's a temporary loss, is very
disorienting and people avoid that disorientation.

You seem to be focusing on everyday life in which statistics can give
us an exaggerated sense of security. Which was after all selected for
because it had survival value, not because evolution needed to make
accurate measurements. We feel more secure when we hear the chirping
of birds, too, for reasons equally ancient, and bogus in a suburb.
Quantum mechanics, on the other hand, disturbs precisely because it
says the universe is unreasonable and unpredictable.

The thing about quantum mechanics is that Heisenberg's uncertainty
principle makes it literally /impossible/ to make accurate
measurements. In essence, the more accurately you measure one
parameter, the less accurately you can measure another, and that's
determined by physical law, rather than the quality of your
instruments.

The Heisenberg uncertainty principle is pretty obvious when you think
about it, and offers answers to questions like "why isn't god doing
miracles anymore" if applied to that area of thought. Murphy's Law is
imo even more important though because it can be recognized in
operation and worked with to obtain experiential data.

Neither of these are representative of the uncertainty principle,
though. The first is merely a leading question, supposing as it does
that God did miracles despite the absence of reliable evidence to that
effect. If you're suggesting that miracles occur, but that they fall
within the region of experimental uncertainty, there's at least one
logical flaw in your supposition, but the important thing from the
perspective of this conversation is that measurement error per se
isn't a consequence of the uncertainty principle.

Murphy's Law is half applied statistics, half morbid wit.

It's actually not all that hard to grasp the uncertainty principle
intuitively: if you want to measure accurately the frequency of a
trumpet note, that is, the number of peaks that reach your ear in a
second, the longer you measure, the more accurately you'll be able to
determine the frequency -- but the longer you measure, the less you
can say about the precise time at which the note arrived. Conversely,
to the extent to which you measure the precise time at which the note
arrived, you lose your ability to make a precise measurement of the
pitch. And the thing is, God has in every case written physical
quantities on both the front and back of the envelope, so that for
example the more accurately you measure the position of a particle the
less accurately you can measure its momentum.

Which God is that? The one with the long white beard and a flaming
sword of divine retribution? The one sitting on a throne holding a
trident? Other?

The physicist's god, who, I'm afraid, is invoked with tongue in cheek.

That has nothing to do with mathematical fiction or human convenience.
It's what the universe is doing. This is the point I have been trying
to make from day one.

The what is not the why any more than the map is the territory.

Sure. The uncertainty principle comes out of the observation that
physical phenomena that were once thought to be either particles or
waves seem to have characteristics of both.

I guess that's one way you can arrive at it. Another way is by
thinking about what happens when you try to catch a fish barehanded or
take apart a frog to see what's inside a living frog. There are lots
of ways to arrive at basic principles.

Many people think that the uncertainty principle means that
observation distorts experiments. That's a misapprehension, though.
It's in theory possible to conduct a classical experiment to any
desired degree of accuracy, just as it's possible to snag a fish so
quickly that it has no time to escape. The uncertainty principle is
more limited in scope -- in physics, it applies mostly to microscopic
phenomena. It's also a good deal more profound, and more disturbing.
An electron may be on one side of a solid barrier at one moment, at
the next moment the other, and there are in fact electronic devices
that make use of this phenomenon.

The two slit experiment,
in which individual photons can be observed hitting a screen but in
which the pattern in which they emerge from the slits shows the
interference patterns of a wave, is an example of such an observation.
Or, less directly, the photoelectric effect, which Einstein famously
explained by positing the existence of photoelectrons (photons), were
particles that had an energy proportional to frequency, a
characteristic of waves. The theoretical constructs that explain these
phenomena lead mathematically to the uncertainty principle.

Sounds like a lot of unnecessary work, but folks have different
aptitudes and some think the cost of their equipment provides it with
a badge of legitimacy. It's the quality of the answers that matters
not how they were obtained.

If it was so easy to explain the photoelectric effect, how come others
didn't do it? If the two-slit phenomenon was so obvious, how come
cavemen didn't notice it?

Except that your supposition that I'm merely regurgitating what I've
absorbed couldn't be farther off base. So too your supposition that
I'm somehow relying on my IQ score to lend credence to my beliefs.

You have learned the whats, you have absorbed a lot of science that
offers explanations for the whys, and because you know empirically
that the whats are correct you apparently leap to the conclusion that
the explanations are the whys. Certainly the explanations are quite
workable up to a point, but then comes a choice between assigning
results to the randomness bin or delving further into an area which is
proscribed by the concept of randomness. Your IQ score does nothing
for you aside from saddling you with a constant risk of false
confidence.

It's more like I learn about something, and think and think about it,
and come to understand it a bit better, then go back and ponder it
some more. 99% of that is the thinking, which is where the
understanding comes from, not the knowledge of a fact or equation. In
fact, if there's any flaw in my thought, it's my tendency to do a Zero
and spend more time thinking than reading the books. Reinventing the
wheel is a waste of time.

Damn good thing the first guy to invent a round one didn't think that
way.

Reading is good, but after some point it becomes almost
impossible to avoid running into the necessary information even
sitting blindfolded in a cave.

Lots of people have spent their lives sitting in caves, with nothing
to show for it but bear bites and guff about things that neither
matter nor exist. If the achievements of the past weren't important to
our progress, a cannibal would have come up with Maxwell's Theory. The
truth is, we're so amazingly dumb that we can only nibble on knowledge
a bite at a time. We're like amoebas devouring an elephant: it takes
an awful lot of us to do the job.

IQ has little to do with this. It's an imperfect measure of
intelligence, it's not the only measure of intelligence, and, mostly,
the great majority of people with high IQ's never discover or do
anything original, because they've been trained not to think for
themselves. Another way of looking at it is that my IQ will never
explain why others can do with ease things that I can't, and I can do
with ease things that they can't. It's like being a basso: I can sing
parts that a tenor can't, he can sing parts that I can't.

The IQ number has its uses because society believes in it, it doesn't
help you think better, and it certainly doesn't help you solve
nonthinking problems.

I don't overemphasize it, but I don't go to the opposite extreme
either. IQ tests do, however imperfectly, measure something real, a
global intelligence that in essence boils down to how many things your
brain can consider at once.

That being said, the fact that a belief is held by conventional
science or common in conventional thinking doesn't demonstrate that
it's wrong any more than it proves it's right. It merely says that it
occupies a comfortable place in the contemporary dialectic, and that
you're going to have to make a pretty good case to overthrow or refine
it, because it's been vetted by some pretty good people, even, in the
case of the relationship between quantum mechanics and randomness,
Einstein himself.

The whats are fairly well mapped, and the whys are fairly reliable
predictors for the whats, within limits such as non-randomness.

And the limits of what we know. We still don't have a theory of
everything, or, if string theory is right and we do, it's sort of like
42 in that we don't yet know what it means.

It's pretty unusual to find anyone who doesn't believe that more is
known than actually is known. Man has been around for a long time but
he starts with nothing every iteration.

No one invents everything from scratch. The obvious things you take
for granted -- fire, clothing, cell phones -- were invented by someone
who worked hard to do so. Even animals, we now know, have culture,
knowledge which is transmitted from generation to generation.

Your mind may span the universe,
but the rest of us are stuck with a marvelously successful theory that
tells us that some phenomena can't be predicted, that some things
can't be measured, and, really, that we owe existence to a fairly
cheap trick.

Our existence cannot be otherwise or it would be. It's that simple.
The question really is, how far backwards can you work from there, and
do you have the courage to recognize what you see when you work it
backwards.

Two points: It may be that our existence is every way it could be,
which is to say, every way; that's the theory I've come to favor.

I didn't say that it was every way it could be. I'm familiar with
that view and I don't agree with it, though I do accept a variant that
says "we" collectively live in a multiverse and communicate only
through reality-intersections.

I don't think the two are incompatible.

If an event occurs it was the most likely to occur, regardless of our
preconceived notions about egalitarian eventism.

But that's not what happens. The wave function allows us to determine
the probability that an event will occur. The less probable events
occur along with the more probable events. They just occur less
frequently.

We generally
consider time unidirectional, but if you narrow your view to the
instant of now that can be seen as barely workable, if it is workable
at all, and uselessness at any point constitutes universal
invalidation.

Physics doesn't consider time unidirectional; physical laws work both
ways (though the symmetry is a bit weird).

And
one of the consequences of that theory is to make our world smaller,
our lives less significant, even to call existence into question -- a
mere quantum fluctuation in nothing, which along with all other
quantum fluctuations sums to nothing. Existence, essentially, as
mathematical possibility, as an inevitable consequence of inevitable
mismeasurement. It's a fairly chilling view, and requires, I think, a
certain degree of courage.

Some people like to watch horror movies, some don't. Some people are
scared by knives or guns, some people are scared by spiders, and a few
fail to care much about physical threats real or imagined.

There is no point in swapping insults. Your intelligence and your
experience convinces you that you have the right of it. I have some
intelligence but it has proven itself unreliable so I do not depend
upon it but rather upon the concrete flow of events that science has
labelled unpredictable, for it is there that I have found reason.

Agree about not swapping insults. But I'd like to correct this to "my
intelligence and experience convince me that I have a very dim
understanding indeed." It just can't be dismissed out of hand as
something that isn't based on thought, or as mere arrogance or the
jerking of my knee.

Everything past not swapping insults was found to be confusing, it's
not clear whose attitudes you're paraphrasing etc. It's probably not
important, but it is confusing so I don't get whatever you're saying.

I was trying to say that rather than having the right of it, as you
suggested, I have a very dim understanding of it. Because the more you
learn about this stuff, the more aware you are of the vast areas on
the map that say "there be all manner of wilde beastes here."
Knowledge fosters humility. It's the difference between listening to a
symphony or reading a great novel and saying "Hey, I could write one
like that," and actually sitting down to write it and discovering that
it's harder than it seems, because great artists like great scientists
make it seem easy.

As to whose attitudes I'm paraphrasing, I'd say usually my own. But,
you know, even if you're the rare sort who hasn't had the last bit of
creativity drubbed out of him at school, at some point things become a
collaboration. Because you'll come up with something, and then you'll
read Kant, and you'll see that Kant came up with the same thing in
1750. And Kant will say some things that you could have figured out
yourself, and you'll say yes, yes, and he'll say some things that you
might not have figured out yourself, and if you're any good you'll
challenge them and think about them and decide whether he's right or
wrong. And at some point you'll move beyond. You can't do that without
Kant and/or others like him, because they spent a lifetime thinking
about these things and were damn good at it besides. If you don't
check them out, you'll reinvent the wheel. But a regurgitator can't do
it even with Kant, because he's just a copying machine. He can only
repeat Kant and explain Kant and footnote Kant.


--
Josh

"We have always known that heedless self-interest was bad morals.
We know now that it is bad economics." - Franklin D. Roosevelt
.

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