Musings about different types of atheist!

by Seraphim23 304 Replies latest jw friends

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  rawe

  Hi Snare&Racket,

  "Can you gutys debate quantum physics under a different thread so as to not confuse the issues for new readers please?"

  Sure, no problem. I'll start one with the Title: Quantum Physics and philosophy about God.

  Cheers,

  -Randy
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  snare&racket

  Thanks Rawe,

  this thread became a mess.
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  bohm

  Seraphim:

  I wasn’t suggesting that Penrose didn’t accept the wave function description, only that he thinks it collapses, or some other term in large scales stuff.

  That is entirely correct; however wave-functions "collapse" into other wave-functions (the details here are technical but have very well-defined meaning; it is this "collapse" which in all ways seem to behave randomly. Check out wikipedia for more) that look very much like classical physics -- but its still a wave function!. The point is large, hot objects (like cats) can be shown to exhibit rapid collapse to wave-functions that are very well-defined; thats why we do not "see" large-scale quantum phenomena, and why for all intents and purposes the cat will behave as if it is either alive or dead.

  There is no "breakdown". It is just that the world, even though it is governed by the same laws, can look different at different scales.

  Perhaps he doesn’t think this now, I’ll have to check. Bohm, He certainly seems like a genius.

  he is, but be aware he has an interpretation of QM that is very speculative, and some other speculative ideas about gravity which are unproven.

  Out of interest and don’t take this the wrong way, as I am assuming you’re an atheist, but is their a framework in Bohms work that could explain so called psychic phenomena? I.e premonition’s of future states of information?

  Many have suggested there is a link between QM and consciousness, but there is no evidence this is the case and it is not at all a maintream view. The basic problem is the brain is also quite large and hot (like the cat) and therefore it is hard to see how it could be strongly influenced by effects that are predominantly quantum in nature. A second problem is QM does not, in my oppinion, explain consciousness, however Penrose would disagree.

  in my oppinion, the most serious problem in terms of explaining psychic phenomena with QM is there is no proovable psychic phenomena.
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  bohm

  Rawe: In my QP for Dummies book there is only a one paragraph mention of Schrödinger's Cat. So far in my reading about this again this evening, I'm left with the impression that in terms of real cats it is an abstraction.

  The thought experiment was crafted to show a possible macro-world implication of quantum superposition. To quote the Wikipedia article on this...

  Schrödinger did not wish to promote the idea of dead-and-alive cats as a serious possibility; on the contrary, the paradox is a classic reductio ad absurdum.[2]

  Thus the conclusion I have reached for the moment is while Schrödinger's cat idea is in the cat-size world absurd, it has not removed in reality the conclusions of QM in regards to superposition and entanglement. The reality of superposition and entanglement at the quantum level has been demonstrated. Yet, I don't understand why it does not scale up, or if it does, why we can't readily detect such.

  Sorry for the late reply. See also my respond to seraphim. The idea of a cat-sized entangled object is not absurd, however a careful analysis of QM for an object the size (and importantly, temperature) of a cat show it will quickly loose its entangled state. This is called decoherence (see wikipedia; the details are technical and relate to the distribution of the eigenspectrum of the hamiltonian of a cat-sized object). To state it more precisely, the cat will still be in a quantum state, just like you and I are in a quantum state right now, the quantum states are just such they behave almost (as in crazy small unmeasurable deviations) exactly like classical physics and not entangled. QM is truly the more general theory, and the fact the cat behave like classical physics is yet another (confirmed) prediction of QM.
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  Seraphim23

  Sorry to ask you this bohm but can you repost your replies on the “Quantum Physics and philosophy about God” thread. Snare wanted my thread `cleared up` so another got started to carry on the discussion on this thread. Not my idea!