Quote:
Originally Posted by Chris Noble  It's ironic that you quote somebody quoting Heisenberg but seem to have forgotten to read Heisenberg himself.
Read "Physics and Philosophy" by Heisenberg. He actually goes to great lengths to dispel the misunderstandings that arose from the Copenhagen interpretation.
I wonder who is responsible the ellipsis in the quotation because the words immediately before the ellipsis are "it is not connected" and directly contradict the woo assertion that the conciousness by itself alters reality.
In all of Heisenberg's examples the "measurement" involves an interaction between a measurement apparatus and the object in question. His main example is using a photon to detect the position of an electron. The measurement is not some purely subjective mind field reaching out to obsevre nature.
If you read the actual scientifc papers on the Quantum Zeno effect you will see that the "observations" in this case are the same. They typically involve a rapid train of light pulses. It is not some kind of mind stuff that is observing the atoms. In all of Stapp's smoke and mirrors verbiage the one question that remains is how does the mind stuff interact with the physical world. the Quantum Zeno effect does not help. You need something like photons to make the observations not mind stuff |
Your right in that I haven't read much of Heisenberg's original work, and if the quote is as you say, it is misleading. I'd have to read "Physics and Philosophy" to comment further on that.
But I have read about the Quantum Zeno effect. The problem here is how one views measurements/observations. As I understand it, in von Neumann's approach the whole universe is threated quantum mechanically, and there is a need for some process to partition the potential continuum of physically described possibilities into a set of empirically recognizable alternative possibilities. This process is called by von Neumann process 1, and and is not equivalent to using photons or electrons to measure something. The process 1 intervention is also nonlocal. This von Neumann approach is what Stapp builds on.
From what I have read about decoherence (pro and con), it is not enough to do the job that process 1 is supposed to do. So either one can pretend the measurement problem is solved by decoherence (in other words ignore it), or one can try som alternative approach like introducing process 1.
By all means, I do not think Stapp has the final word in the matter. I find his theory interesting because it tries to solve a fundamental problem in physics (it may be a bit radical compared to some others, but so what?), and is compatible with the empirical evidence for psi that some of us here take seriously.
But in the the end I put my faith in experience and experiment, not theory.