Does the Universe Exist if We're Not Looking? Options

[Shawn]

This is a nice piece on John Wheeler's notion of a Participatory Universe, from http://www.discover.com/june_02/featuniverse.html

Does the Universe Exist if We're Not Looking?
By Tim Folger


The world seems to be putting itself together piece by piece on this damp gray morning along the coast of Maine. First the spruce and white pine trees that cover High Island materialize from the fog, then the rocky headland, and finally the sea, as if the mere act of watching has drawn them all into existence. And that may indeed be the case. While this misty genesis unfolds, the island's most eminent resident discusses notions that still perplex him after seven decades in physics, including his gut feeling that the very universe may be constantly emerging from a haze of possibility, that we inhabit a cosmos made real in part by our own observations.  

John Wheeler, scientist and dreamer, colleague of Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr, mentor to many of today's leading physicists, and the man who chose the name "black hole" to describe the unimaginably dense, light-trapping objects now thought to be common throughout the universe, turned 90 last July. He is one of the last of the towering figures of 20th-century physics, a member of the generation that plumbed the mysteries of quantum mechanics and limned the utmost reaches of space and time. After a lifetime of fundamental contributions in fields ranging from atomic physics to cosmology, Wheeler has concerned himself in his later years with what he calls "ideas for ideas."  

"I had a heart attack on January 9, 2001," he says, "I said, 'That's a signal. I only have a limited amount of time left, so I'll concentrate on one question: How come existence?'"  

Why does the universe exist? Wheeler believes the quest for an answer to that question inevitably entails wrestling with the implications of one of the strangest aspects of modern physics: According to the rules of quantum mechanics, our observations influence the universe at the most fundamental levels. The boundary between an objective "world out there" and our own subjective consciousness that seemed so clearly defined in physics before the eerie discoveries of the 20th century blurs in quantum mechanics. When physicists look at the basic constituents of reality; atoms and their innards, or the particles of light called photons; what they see depends on how they have set up their experiment. A physicist's observations determine whether an atom, say, behaves like a fluid wave or a hard particle, or which path it follows in traveling from one point to another. From the quantum perspective the universe is an extremely interactive place. Wheeler takes the quantum view and runs with it.  

As Wheeler voices his thoughts, he laces his fingers behind his large head, leans back onto a sofa, and gazes at the ceiling or perhaps far beyond it. He sits with his back to a wide window. Outside, the fog is beginning to lift on what promises to be a hot summer day. On an end table near the sofa rests a large oval rock, with one half polished black so that its surface resembles the Chinese yin-yang symbol. "That rock is about 200 million years old," says Wheeler. "One revolution of our galaxy."  

Although Wheeler's face looks careworn and sober, it becomes almost boyish when he smiles, as he does when I extend a hand to help him from the couch and he says, "Ah, antigravity." Wheeler is short and sturdily built, with sparse white hair. He retains an impish fascination with fireworks; an enthusiasm that cost him part of a finger when he was young; and has on occasion lit Roman candles in the corridors of Princeton, where he became a faculty member in 1938 and where he still keeps an office. At one point a loud bang interrupts our interview. Wheeler's son, who lives on a cliff a few hundred yards away, has fired a small cannon, a gift from Wheeler.  

Wheeler is gracious to a fault; one colleague describes him as "a gentleman hidden inside a gentleman." But that courtly demeanor also hides something else: one of the most adventurous minds in physics. Instead of shying away from questions about the meaning of it all, Wheeler relishes the profound and the paradoxical. He was an early advocate of the anthropic principle, the idea that the universe and the laws of physics are fine-tuned to permit the existence of life. For the past two decades, though, he has pursued a far more provocative idea for an idea, something he calls genesis by observership. Our observations, he suggests, might actually contribute to the creation of physical reality. To Wheeler we are not simply bystanders on a cosmic stage; we are shapers and creators living in a participatory universe.  

Wheeler's hunch is that the universe is built like an enormous feedback loop, a loop in which we contribute to the ongoing creation of not just the present and the future but the past as well. To illustrate his idea, he devised what he calls his "delayed-choice experiment," which adds a startling, cosmic variation to a cornerstone of quantum physics: the classic two-slit experiment.  
 
That experiment is exceedingly strange in its own right, even without Wheeler's extra kink thrown in. It illustrates a key principle of quantum mechanics: Light has a dual nature. Sometimes light behaves like a compact particle, a photon; sometimes it seems to behave like a wave spread out in space, just like the ripples in a pond. In the experiment, light; a stream of photons; shines through two parallel slits and hits a strip of photographic film behind the slits. The experiment can be run two ways: with photon detectors right beside each slit that allow physicists to observe the photons as they pass, or with detectors removed, which allows the photons to travel unobserved. When physicists use the photon detectors, the result is unsurprising: Every photon is observed to pass through one slit or the other. The photons, in other words, act like particles.  

But when the photon detectors are removed, something weird occurs. One would expect to see two distinct clusters of dots on the film, corresponding to where individual photons hit after randomly passing through one slit or the other. Instead, a pattern of alternating light and dark stripes appears. Such a pattern could be produced only if the photons are behaving like waves, with each individual photon spreading out and surging against both slits at once, like a breaker hitting a jetty. Alternating bright stripes in the pattern on the film show where crests from those waves overlap; dark stripes indicate that a crest and a trough have canceled each other.  

The outcome of the experiment depends on what the physicists try to measure: If they set up detectors beside the slits, the photons act like ordinary particles, always traversing one route or the other, not both at the same time. In that case the striped pattern doesn't appear on the film. But if the physicists remove the detectors, each photon seems to travel both routes simultaneously like a tiny wave, producing the striped pattern.  

Wheeler has come up with a cosmic-scale version of this experiment that has even weirder implications. Where the classic experiment demonstrates that physicists' observations determine the behavior of a photon in the present, Wheeler's version shows that our observations in the present can affect how a photon behaved in the past.  

To demonstrate, he sketches a diagram on a scrap of paper. Imagine, he says, a quasar; a very luminous and very remote young galaxy. Now imagine that there are two other large galaxies between Earth and the quasar. The gravity from massive objects like galaxies can bend light, just as conventional glass lenses do. In Wheeler's experiment the two huge galaxies substitute for the pair of slits; the quasar is the light source. Just as in the two-slit experiment, light; photons; from the quasar can follow two different paths, past one galaxy or the other.  

Suppose that on Earth, some astronomers decide to observe the quasars. In this case a telescope plays the role of the photon detector in the two-slit experiment. If the astronomers point a telescope in the direction of one of the two intervening galaxies, they will see photons from the quasar that were deflected by that galaxy; they would get the same result by looking at the other galaxy. But the astronomers could also mimic the second part of the two-slit experiment. By carefully arranging mirrors, they could make photons arriving from the routes around both galaxies strike a piece of photographic film simultaneously. Alternating light and dark bands would appear on the film, identical to the pattern found when photons passed through the two slits.  

Here's the odd part. The quasar could be very distant from Earth, with light so faint that its photons hit the piece of film only one at a time. But the results of the experiment wouldn't change. The striped pattern would still show up, meaning that a lone photon not observed by the telescope traveled both paths toward Earth, even if those paths were separated by many light-years. And that's not all.  

By the time the astronomers decide which measurement to make; whether to pin down the photon to one definite route or to have it follow both paths simultaneously; the photon could have already journeyed for billions of years, long before life appeared on Earth. The measurements made now, says Wheeler, determine the photon's past. In one case the astronomers create a past in which a photon took both possible routes from the quasar to Earth. Alternatively, they retroactively force the photon onto one straight trail toward their detector, even though the photon began its jaunt long before any detectors existed.  

It would be tempting to dismiss Wheeler's thought experiment as a curious idea, except for one thing: It has been demonstrated in a laboratory. In 1984 physicists at the University of Maryland set up a tabletop version of the delayed-choice scenario. Using a light source and an arrangement of mirrors to provide a number of possible photon routes, the physicists were able to show that the paths the photons took were not fixed until the physicists made their measurements, even though those measurements were made after the photons had already left the light source and begun their circuit through the course of mirrors.  

Wheeler conjectures we are part of a universe that is a work in progress; we are tiny patches of the universe looking at itself; and building itself. It's not only the future that is still undetermined but the past as well. And by peering back into time, even all the way back to the Big Bang, our present observations select one out of many possible quantum histories for the universe.  
 
Does this mean humans are necessary to the existence of the universe? While conscious observers certainly partake in the creation of the participatory universe envisioned by Wheeler, they are not the only, or even primary, way by which quantum potentials become real. Ordinary matter and radiation play the dominant roles. Wheeler likes to use the example of a high-energy particle released by a radioactive element like radium in Earth's crust. The particle, as with the photons in the two-slit experiment, exists in many possible states at once, traveling in every possible direction, not quite real and solid until it interacts with something, say a piece of mica in Earth's crust. When that happens, one of those many different probable outcomes becomes real. In this case the mica, not a conscious being, is the object that transforms what might happen into what does happen. The trail of disrupted atoms left in the mica by the high-energy particle becomes part of the real world.  

At every moment, in Wheeler's view, the entire universe is filled with such events, where the possible outcomes of countless interactions become real, where the infinite variety inherent in quantum mechanics manifests as a physical cosmos. And we see only a tiny portion of that cosmos. Wheeler suspects that most of the universe consists of huge clouds of uncertainty that have not yet interacted either with a conscious observer or even with some lump of inanimate matter. He sees the universe as a vast arena containing realms where the past is not yet fixed.  

Wheeler is the first to admit that this is a mind-stretching idea. It's not even really a theory but more of an intuition about what a final theory of everything might be like. It's a tenuous lead, a clue that the mystery of creation may lie not in the distant past but in the living present. "This point of view is what gives me hope that the question; How come existence?; can be answered," he says.  

William Wootters, one of Wheeler's many students and now a professor of physics at Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts, sees Wheeler as an almost oracular figure. "I think asking this question; How come existence?; is a good thing," Wootters says. "Why not see how far you can stretch? See where that takes you. It's got to generate at least some good ideas, even if the question doesn't get answered. John is interested in the significance of quantum measurement, how it creates an actuality of what was a mere potentiality. He has come to think of that as the essential building block of reality."  

In his concern for the nature of quantum measurements, Wheeler is addressing one of the most confounding aspects of modern physics: the relationship between the observations and the outcomes of experiments on quantum systems. The problem goes back to the earliest days of quantum mechanics and was formulated most famously by the Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who imagined a Rube Goldberg-type of quantum experiment with a cat.  

Put a cat in a closed box, along with a vial of poison gas, a piece of uranium, and a Geiger counter hooked up to a hammer suspended above the gas vial. During the course of the experiment, the radioactive uranium may or may not emit a particle. If the particle is released, the Geiger counter will detect it and send a signal to a mechanism controlling the hammer, which will strike the vial and release the gas, killing the cat. If the particle is not released, the cat will live. Schrödinger asked, What could be known about the cat before opening the box?  

If there were no such thing as quantum mechanics, the answer would be simple: The cat is either alive or dead, depending on whether a particle hit the Geiger counter. But in the quantum world, things are not so straightforward. The particle and the cat now form a quantum system consisting of all possible outcomes of the experiment. One outcome includes a dead cat; another, a live one. Neither becomes real until someone opens the box and looks inside. With that observation, an entire consistent sequence of events; the particle jettisoned from the uranium, the release of the poison gas, the cat's death; at once becomes real, giving the appearance of something that has taken weeks to transpire. Stanford University physicist Andrei Linde believes this quantum paradox gets to the heart of Wheeler's idea about the nature of the universe: The principles of quantum mechanics dictate severe limits on the certainty of our knowledge.  

"You may ask whether the universe really existed before you start looking at it," he says. "That's the same Schrödinger cat question. And my answer would be that the universe looks as if it existed before I started looking at it. When you open the cat's box after a week, you're going to find either a live cat or a smelly piece of meat. You can say that the cat looks as if it were dead or as if it were alive during the whole week. Likewise, when we look at the universe, the best we can say is that it looks as if it were there 10 billion years ago."  

Linde believes that Wheeler's intuition of the participatory nature of reality is probably right. But he differs with Wheeler on one crucial point. Linde believes that conscious observers are an essential component of the universe and cannot be replaced by inanimate objects.  

"The universe and the observer exist as a pair," Linde says. "You can say that the universe is there only when there is an observer who can say, Yes, I see the universe there. These small words; it looks like it was here; for practical purposes it may not matter much, but for me as a human being, I do not know any sense in which I could claim that the universe is here in the absence of observers. We are together, the universe and us. The moment you say that the universe exists without any observers, I cannot make any sense out of that. I cannot imagine a consistent theory of everything that ignores consciousness. A recording device cannot play the role of an observer, because who will read what is written on this recording device? In order for us to see that something happens, and say to one another that something happens, you need to have a universe, you need to have a recording device, and you need to have us. It's not enough for the information to be stored somewhere, completely inaccessible to anybody. It's necessary for somebody to look at it. You need an observer who looks at the universe. In the absence of observers, our universe is dead."  

 
Schrödinger's Cat
Erwin Schrödinger, a founding father of quantum mechanics, asked what would happen to a cat locked in a box with a radioactive element that may or may not trigger the release of poison gas during the experiment. The short answer: The cat's fate is undecided until the moment someone observes the experiment.  
Will Wheeler's question; How come existence?; ever be answered? Wootters is skeptical."I don't know if human intelligence is capable of answering that question," he says. "We don't expect dogs or ants to be able to figure out everything about the universe. And in the sweep of evolution, I doubt that we're the last word in intelligence. There might be higher levels later. So why should we think we're at the point where we can understand everything? At the same time I think it's great to ask the question and see how far you can go before you bump into a wall."  

Linde is more optimistic.  

"You know, if you say that we're smart enough to figure everything out, that is a very arrogant thought. If you say that we're not smart enough, that is a very humiliating thought. I come from Russia, where there is a fairy tale about two frogs in a can of sour cream. The frogs were drowning in the cream. There was nothing solid there; they could not jump from the can. One of the frogs understood there was no hope, and he stopped beating the sour cream with his legs. He just died. He drowned in sour cream. The other one did not want to give up. There was absolutely no way it could change anything, but it just kept kicking and kicking and kicking. And then all of a sudden, the sour cream was churned into butter. Then the frog stood on the butter and jumped out of the can. So you look at the sour cream and you think, 'There is no way I can do anything with that.' But sometimes, unexpected things happen.  

[Laz]

Damn it, i hate it when you think you have had an original idea only to find that someone has gotten there before you ;0)

Here's another "original" idea; Quantum mechanics at a conceptual level is finally aligning physics with the ideas and beliefs of eastern philosophy and 5th century BC Yogis, are science and religion becomming one?

So what does this make us humans? Creatures that have forgotten our significance in this universe?

I have a fuzzy kind of realisation brewing here, I can't quite put my finger on it, hmmm i'll get back to you.

[rhymer]

I've just realised why I can't ascertain the Truth about life and existence and God and all the other imponderables!


As soon as I think about any of them I am changing them!
And every other thinker is changing them too!

Thinking is no different to an experiment, so if experiments change what is being observed, then so do thoughts!

Everybody stop thinking about fundamental concepts so that I can have a better chance of envisioning solutions, please.

Best regards, Bill.

[ID]

I like to think of the Universe, and our fates within it, more as a dialogue, even a kind of dance, between consciousness and the physical world. Some scientific theories have consciousness as an emergent property of matter; other, more esoteric, theories give consciousness primacy, and postulate that all things possess at least some very rudimentary level thereof.

If physics and spiritualism are to come together, I would certainly agree that Quantum Theory is a good candidate for a 'gateway' theory. My own personal favourite is non-locality: I've come across attempts to explain this in terms of time-travel and of faster-than-light signals, yet these feel clumsy explanations compared to the idea of invoking other dimensions (that Superstring Theories postulate).

If indeed consciousness is universal, and we possess 'souls' (some kind of trans-dimensional non-material existence), why have these souls chosen to populate material bodies, and how/why do they interact with/create the material world we see? Perhaps the material world was an accident, a quantum event that just snowballed? Perhaps evolution has had a 'secret' driving force, the souls' attempt to re-unify the material world with the much larger 'something' of which it was originally a part? After all, it's taken billions of our years to produce a physical being capable of such reflections. This may place the ego as a necessary tool that has now become somewhat redundant, but just won't go away as it has rather assumed a kind of life-of-its-own.

These speculations may seem a little off-thread, but they were inspired by the original thought concerning the place of consciousness in the form of the observer.

[Jatava]

Roll over Beethoven,,

esse est percipi

Berkeley - Idealism

http://www.philosophyonline.co.uk/tok/empiricism7.htm

I admit that I didn't have time to read the entire article. Hopefully, I can come back later and do that. But from a philosophical view, for the sake of venu, doesn' Berkeley get the gold star?

[Shawn]

Beethoven?

I remember reading Berkeley's 'Principles of Human Knowledge' for the first time, many years ago, and being quite impressed with his 'story-telling'. I don't mean that in a negative way. What I mean is that Berkeley really didn't come up with anything truly original. Notions of idealism and solipsism existed long before Berkeley. But, the interesting thing about Berkeley is the excellent way in which he tells his story and his argument for idealism. He reminds me a lot of Hume. Both were English philosophers, and both had a manner of writing, their style and the way that they told the story, that made reading their work fascinating.

The problem with Berkeley is two-fold: first, to be is to be perceived (esse est percipi) is an assumption and does not rule out the possibility that, 'to be does not imply being perceived'. Second, since he denies the existence of an 'objective' word that exists-in-itself, independently of being perceived, he runs up against the problem of explaining how it is that individuals subjective experience can be coordinated in such a way as to suggest the existence of an 'objective' world. He never comes up with a good answer for this.

Granted, Berkeley is good, but I think John Wheeler's notion of a Participatory Universe (what the essay at the beginning of this thread deals with) goes beyond Berkeley, though I don't think John Wheeler had the same literary talent for telling a story that Berkeley had.


[quote author=ID link=board=5;threadid=281;start=0#msg13814 date=1063715699]
Some scientific theories have consciousness as an emergent property of matter; other, more esoteric, theories give consciousness primacy, and postulate that all things possess at least some very rudimentary level thereof [/quote]

yes, it's fascinating to consider some of all of the different hypotheses concerning the role of consciousness in the world.

[quote author=ID link=board=5;threadid=281;start=0#msg13814 date=1063715699]
If physics and spiritualism are to come together, I would certainly agree that Quantum Theory is a good candidate for a 'gateway' theory. My own personal favourite is non-locality:[/quote]

Non-locality is certainly an interesting topic from QM (quantum mechanics), and late physicist David Bohm outlined a whole world-view and new interpretation of QM with it (see The Undivided Universe). I don't necessarily agree with you that physics and spiritualism will come together through QM though. This sounds a lot like the notion of trying to answer the mysteries of QM and consciousness simultaneously by trying to offer a QM basis for consciousness (like Penrose). No, I think the answer is to be found elsewhere. One of the most interesting notions I've come across in physics (besides the superposition of quantum states in QM) is Feynman's path integral formalism from quantum electrodynamics (or QED) which states that particles do not follow individual trajectories but rather, that the probability for finding a particle is determined by considering all possible ways that a particle gets from point A to point B. Thus, in a sense, particles cannot be said to follow individual trajectories, but rather travel through all possible trajectories (which hints at nonlocal interactions). This is really a fascinating concept, but it doesn't seem to have much relevance for understanding consciousness or spirituality. Nor does QM seem to have much relevance here so far as I've been able to discern.

The question of whether consciousness is a fundamental property of nature or whether it's an 'emergent property' of nature is still open, I think. I'm inclined to view it as a fundamental property of nature, as a spectrum that extends all the way down to even the most 'lifeless' things, but it doesn't rule out the possibility that it's merely an emergent property of neuronal interactions..... just like more or less any phase transition can be said to involve the appearance of 'emergent properties'. Is consciousness the result of a phase transition involving neuronal interactions, or is it a fundamental property of reality? I think most scientists are inclined towards the former, and more spiritualists inclined towards the latter. It's hard to envision what sort of compromise, if any, can exist.

[ID]

I'm certainly not going down the Penrose road in my thoughts, though I do admire his iconoclasm. What I meant by the term 'gateway' theory is that some of the latest observations (such as non-locality) are undermining the accepted (primarily Copenhagen) interpretation of Quantum Theory and will therefore necessitate a new interpretation (Feynmann's sum-over-histories is one candidate) which may itself spawn new avenues of enquiry leading to a possible 'explanation' of phenomena currently considered as belonging firmly in the 'paranormal' world.

Consciousness having primacy over matter may well figure in going beyond current ideas of observer/system problems, but I'm not looking for a quantum explanation of consciousness. Rather, as Bohm was attempting to show, I believe that what lies 'underneath the bonnet (or should I say hood?)' is the thing of greatest interest, the possible confirmation that there is an underlying unity, far beyond Einstein's dream of a unified theory of fundamental forces. Of course, it may sound tritely Utopian to some, but I can only say it feels right. Perhaps if we all concentrate hard enough, we'll make it reality!

[Jatava]

Hey Gang,

Fascinating stuff here. I think perhaps I should follow up a bit on my reason for citing Berkeley.

I recall reading a paper summary some time ago that I am sure the more scientific members here will all be aware of. It was authored by, I believe, by Dr. David Brinkster (aka Dr. Brain?) and in it he explained how we now had physical evidence that memories formed matter. I believe also for his research in this area he had either been nominated for or received a Nobel prize.

Quite honestly, I marvled at Dr. Brain's achievement. To push the limits of science to this level was truly remarkable and he was certainly deserving, in my mind, of recognition. However, I simulatneously felt sorry for him.

Here was an man who had, IMHO, become a master at the study of 'thatness,' but in doing so I realized he had very little comprehension of 'thisness' - or so it seemed.

Realizing (or suspecting) that his ego had become that strong, I wished him to put down his microscope and look instead, through the eyes of Rumi.

IMHO he had proven nothing but his aspect.

He found more thatness.

[Shawn]

hello Dianah,

and welcome to our forum. I'm curious, what is your interpretation regarding the mathematical structure seemingly inherent in the "objective world"? Do mathematical truths require perception to have existence, or do they exist independently of perception?

ID, what you say makes a lot of sense. I do not regard it as tritely utopian though, but rather a noble and worthy aim to be realized.

Jatava, I don't think I've heard of this Dr. Brain or Brinkster before, but if he won a nobel prize, it should be easy enough to find out more about him. I'll let you know if I come up with anything.

[martin]

here's my take on the universe.

the universe has always and always will exist, it is the one necessary thing.

this coming from the idea that something can not be created for nothing, if nothing ever existed then nothing would still exist.

in the begining there was one, very small, very powerful thing, it exploded, possibly through a flux in its gravitational forces, the exploding thing, the universe, spread out to occupy space / time, within this time and place, we have gathered to discuss it, we are still existing, we are still existing as thinking things, even if this is all we can truly know, we know that something exist, so, something must have always existed, as homer said,
"God bless this rocket house and who dwell in said rocket house".

m

[???]

I'm in awe...

Concordingly one could imply that if 1 being observes something, it then shapes that part of the universe, it's history, present and future.

Then when that 1 being stops consciously observing another being comes along and observes the state that the previous being has created and then builds further upon that.

But here's the catch...how could the second being witness, what the first being has created through his conscious observing?
This can only be if all consciousness of all beings is 1.

This would validate Buddhist aspects in science.

But here's another thing.
If human beings were able to shape the universe through consciousness, then faith in a divine being could have actually created that being.

In Zen for example one has to just stop all thinking and kind of like tune in into "void".
Just stopping all conscious observing and the notion of an I.

Suppose everyone started doing this....then everyone stops observing and the past will be either reshaped or just stop.
Which will cessate the present and gives no chance for a future.

We create, because we observe....we observe because we seem to be looking for something.
But because we are constantly searching and looking we can never find what we search for this way, because we constantly reshape the past, present and future.


If we stop all this, we might just build enough momentum to phase out of this illusionary Universe and Awaken as a whole.
I guess we can't even come close to imagining what it would be like if our entire 1 consciousness would awaken.

Billions off Buddha's helping billions of beings awaken...there would just be no words to explain what this might bring.

[Jatava]

Hello Gang,

What an interesting conversation, to which I think I can now add something in follow up. I've found a page that contains an excerpt from the research I cited above.

http://www.patronsaintpr.com/samples/TWTA/twtaobd.htm

I'd really like to hear other's views on this subject. In fact, I'd love to see a 'Do Memories Form Matter?" thread come out of it so that perhaps we can discuss this topic more fully and on it's own - without detracting so much from the subject we are dealing with here.

Cheers! I look forward to your comments, opinions, and teachings.

Keep da faith!
Jatava

[Doug_E._Fresh]

Pondering existence is wonderful, but at some point we have to recognize that we can never fully understand our existence, and that we must go on living life as best we can with the limited knowledge we have.

I think Occam's Razor does come into play; for all we know, the entire universe could be an illusion manufactured by some strange puppetmaster, but is this likely? Furthermore, even if it is true, we can't really change it, or even know if this is the case, so we should go on treating what we experience as reality as if it is reality for sure? For example, the only consciousness we experience and will ever experience is our own. Therefore, everything else could be a fabrication, an illusion, including the people we interact with every day.

:-

We just have to go on living life.

[pelastration]

[Janus]

[sol]

[pelastration]

[pelastration]

[Janus]

hi Sol, Pelastration.

Sol:

[sol]

Hello D, and Janus


How would such dynamics be revealed if we did not look to the cosmos and find isometrical relationship between the events on such a large scale to the very small in how orbitals are understood?

Janus said: "I am not sure I undertstand."

We use relativity for the very large, and in this we recognize the value, gravity.

Now if we are to consider unification of the very small, Quantum Mechanics, then we have learnt to identify the dynamics involved with greater and lessor degree's of energy. But here, there is uncertainty? Yet uncertainty has been eleviated, by such probabilties. Here we get to sense the stretching and pinching.

When we look at the orbitals and their classifications, we then learn to understand that what is taking place there, is also taking place on a cosmological scale.

Would you agree with this and please feel free to correct.

Sol

[pelastration]

Schrodinger's Wife.

Janus, Let's imagine Schrodinger's wife (Monica L.) is for 24 hours in a closed medical room with the Dr. Who's AAIM (automatic artifical insimination machine). We don't know if the machine will do it's work because there is a random time-system inside that will warm-up Erwin's frozen sperm. We don't know the outcome: Is Monica pregnant or not ...? When we open the door Dr. Who can do the tests.
Can we say that during the time we were waiting outside that Schrodinger's wife was in a half-pregnant superposition?

[Janus]

[pelastration]

[dsdsb]

Wow it has been a really fun trip down the post.

First of all I'm no expert so please bear with me.

[Janus]

I was just looking over this thread and noticed something really interesting that was posted above by ??? that should be repeated:

[pelastration]

[sol]

[sol]

M Theory Visionist

The demonstration consisted of two powerful Linux clusters, each at the ends of a pair of Force10 Networks switches connected via 2 pairs of 10 Gigabit Ethernet interfaces. One cluster of dual-CPU Linux PCs ran the Cactus simulation code and fed data to another cluster of PC's, which ran the Visapult application (a remote visualization app developed by LBNL’s Wes Bethel) which rendered the received data for real-time visual display and analysis. Each machine in the clusters is capable of delivering at least 930 Mbs of load to the network. The team ran traffic from10 of the 11 machines through one 10 gig link and the remaining traffic through the other 10 gig link. The Ixia equipment used in the demo was for monitoring purposes only; there was no analyzer-generated background traffic.


Supercomputing Online

What is done here, must be done with LIGO Information. Penrose demonstrates this, in his called for a new language.

This relates to what we see in consicousness in MRI as a scalable feature of what is happening on one level, while how much complex could this issue be? Emotive tones and Units of Consiousness? What next?

Sol

[pelastration]

Sol,

please check this link: http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/dp5/vigier.htm

There are other ways to explain 'superpositions'. Sir Penrose is just telling blabla QM-stories. Do you really understand that design Sol? I doubt that Penrose understands it himself.

I adapted already that design but have no the time yet to show it now. Those photons are transmitted at the same time. They are in the same gravitational time-frame which gives them the same orientation. Photons sent at another time may have a different orientation. (that's already experimentally shown and is still a engima). But that's due to some scalar effects of Earth. The emitting device is "earthed" and also the sensoring systems.
The two photons are in the same time-frame gravitational field. Indeed Earth is a dynamic system which is also influenced by the G-field of the sun and of the moon. Every event on earth is influenced by them ... and we can say that those photons have the same direction of gravity. Maybe google on: cross-coupling or co-rotating frame.

When the photons seem to communicate that's because of their identical gravitational direction.

Bohm, Einstein, Vigier ... are the real guys. Read that link. No Penrose Magick.

[Shawn]

Hmm, I kinda like the standard Copenhagen interpretation and the notion of superpositions and the collapse of a wavefunction. The stochastic approach in your link is interesting, but seemingly without any observable differences to the Copenhagen interpretation. Nonetheless, it's a great article though. The only other interpretation I'm aware of is Bohm's interpretation involving 'guiding waves' and 'implicit information', and it's not clear to me how Bohm's deterministic interpretation differs from Vigier's interpretation as outlined in your link.