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Politics : View from the Center and Left

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To: biotech_bull who wrote (84786)	9/16/2008 10:35:01 AM
From: neolib	Read Replies (1) of 541457

But I don't foreclose the option of understanding which maybe our ultimate destiny i.e fully understanding without being able to fully know I should point out that you have plenty of well respected company regarding a philosophical view of QM. I'm much more of the "reductionist" world view instead, hence I view a lot of things that very smart people have said about QM to be unfortunate. Schroedinger's Cat being one such regrettable example. The problem is that many of these examples don't correctly frame the physics, or they conflate a pair of human eyes and a human brain obtaining knowledge with a QM "measurement". This is most unfortunate. It leads IMHO to much nonsense, such as John Wheeler's view that humans ultimate destiny is to pervade the Universe so that we can "measure" every last particle and obtain every last piece of QM information of the whole shebang. Now Wheeler (wrote the great tomb on Gravitation) is WAY smarter than me, but that view is WAY nuttier than nutty as well. It just goes to show that metaphysics and philosophy don't seem to be of much use, other than for entertainment. Another example you might find of interest is the English physicist Roger Penrose, who took a stab at the mystical side of systems complexity in his book The Emperor's New Mind. It's old now (about 20 years!). Again, a very smart guy, but he wanted to find answers for system level problems by looking for something new in the underlying physics of QM. I guess when you carry a hammer, everything looks like a nail... We don't need to conjure up magical QM properties to explain systems level complexity. We need to advance system theory instead.

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