Re: Lame philosphy


John Wilkins wrote:
Friar Broccoli wrote:
John Wilkins wrote:
Friar Broccoli wrote:

Again this is mostly just a notice of receipt of your post. I
need to think about what you have said, however, I now have a
very strong intuitive sense that a statement of the general
form: "DNA is information" or "DNA contains information" is
logically supportable from fundamental agreed on principles, but
I need to take the time to be sure I am clear on what I am
saying, and pick out the core arguments so I don't get lost in
irrelevant side issues.

That said, your final comment appeared (on first reading) to be
so contrary to any model of the world that I can realistically
imagine that it suggests that I deeply misunderstand your
position and/or that we do not agree on some fundamental
principle concerning reality. So I need to clear it up before
proceeding:

This is basically a Schrodinger's cat argument. If the cat
knows it's alive isn't that enough? Or if a molecule in the
detector feels the beta particle resulting from the decay,
doesn't that particle count as a perfectly valid observer?

No, that's to make a category error, in fact to make what
Whitehead called the Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness.

To me this appears to be turning Whitehead's fallacy completely
on its head. The original Copenhagen interpretation suggested
that due to quantum uncertainty the cat was in an intermediate
(uncertain) state between life and death until someone opened
the box to determine if quantum decay had open the vile of
poison killing the cat.

To me that assertion is absurd. The cat is concretely alive or
dead, and the knowledge of some observer is irrelevant to that
fact. The fallacy is ascribing concreteness to the observer's
irrelevant state of knowing back onto the physical fact.

Thus the "information" that the cat is alive or dead is
objective concrete information, although admittedly unknown to
all but the cat (if it is alive), but equally the information is
unknown to me until the researchers open the lab door to tell
the world's reporters.

Since, it is clear to me that I am the only important observer
in the universe, is it the case that the cat will remain in
eternal limbo if I never find out what happened? That seems
unnecessarily cruel to me.

Quantum[tm]* is something I avoid like the plague. It applies to subatomic
states - we can agree that the cat is either alive or dead, but not on which
it is because the superposition of the particle that triggers the cyanide
release is neither located nor measured.

Whitehead is making a different point. If you treat something that is abstract
as a concrete thing, like ascribing causal powers to the number One, you are
inappropriately making concrete that which is abstract.

Being an observer is in this context an abstract property. Subatomic particles
don't observe. They interact causally.


* In the Sacred Writings of Pratchett (PBOH), "quantum" is the magicians' word
for real magic (science).

It is also the paracosmic engineers' word for "add another zero to the
bill".
(see "Pyramids").

--
John S. Wilkins, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Biohumanities Project
University of Queensland - Blog: evolvethought.blogspot.com
Servum tui ero, ipse vespera

.

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