Re: Re: Why physicists should pay attention to the mind

Ralph Hartley wrote:

>> Perhaps you are saying that there's a silent majority of physicists
>> who would not disagree with the statement "The wavefunction describes
>> the actual state of the system, rather than the experimenter's
>> knowledge about it."
>
> No. I'm saying that there are many physicists who would neither agree
> nor disagree with that statement, but even if they did have a personal
> opinion, wouldn't consider it a statement about physics.
>
> Can you describe an experiment that would test that statement? No, it
> is not a question decidable within the epistemology of physics, and
> therefore is not physics.

It is clear that this statement cannot be investigated experimentally.
If you identify the wave function (or more generally the state kets)
with the system as a physical entity of this system, you run into all
kinds of difficulties with causality within relativistic theories, and
this is why I prefer the statistical interpretation, which assumes
about the physical meaning of the states exactly what is needed to use
it in everyday life to describe outcomes of measurements, namely
nothing else than its meaning as a probability amplitude. The state ket
is nothing else than a very clever book-keeping device which encodes
our statistical knowledge about ensembles of similarly prepared
systems.

This socalled statistical or minimal interpretation has the advantage
that the "collapse of the state" is nothing else than a mental act of
the observer after reading out the outcome of the measurements from the
pointer of a measurement device, and thus there is no trouble with
causality through the collapse whatsoever.

One might, of course, ask, whether quantum mechanics is complete, i.e.,
whether quantum mechanics describes exactly what can be known about
physical systems or not. I quantum mechanics is complete in this sense,
it means that we can never describe single systems but only ensembles
of similarly prepared systems.

> I neither know, nor care, if they are a majority, but that
> (non)position is the "party line." You are wasting your time if you
> are trying to convert physicists from ontologists to epistemologists.
> They've been epistemologists for centuries.

Physicists should be physicists and not philosophers with prejudices
whatsoever. Of course, you'll never meet such ideal physicists, but the
example of Einstein shows, how dangerous philosophical prejudices can
be: You can work for thirty years of your life in a dead end! If you
are not an approved genius like Einstein this may even have
consequences for your being as physicist ;-).
>
> Beyond the unquestioned (and very difficult to question in a coherent
> way) assumption that there is *some* sort of objective reality, which
> can be usefully examined by theory and experiment, there is no
> ontology in physics.
>
> All interpretations (in the strict sense of the word) of quantum
> mechanics are physically equivalent - experiments cannot distinguish
> them.

Yes, and therefore, one should use the most simple and straight forward
interpretation, which is not a paradox in itself, and that's the
minimal statistical intepretation.

--
Hendrik van Hees Texas A&M University
Phone: +1 979/845-1411 Cyclotron Institute, MS-3366
Fax: +1 979/845-1899 College Station, TX 77843-3366
http://theory.gsi.de/~vanhees/ mailto:hees@xxxxxxxxxxxxx

.

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