Quote from: sciborg2 on August 28, 2014, 09:41:39 am

Quote from: Wic on August 21, 2014, 10:47:06 pm

I just LOVE when philosophers talk about QM.  Absolutely priapic.

Sarcasm?

Much sarcasm.  QM is not the kind of model where you get the gist of it and then get to go out and express your personal theoretical interpretations as though they were valuable - there's a reason for a phrase that comes up often, 'shut up and calculate'.  It's not the kind of thing we can easily make sense of, internally.  Which makes the kind of people who think they've made sense of things on that scale, inadequate in any explanatory capacity.

Couldn't you say the same about neuroscience? Seems like philosophers in general need to go back and read before opening their mouths, yet I do believe Chalmers discussed his ideas with some physicists.

Meanwhile AFAIK there's only one actual neuroscientist-philosopher out there, Raymond Tallis, and a gaggle of people who either fail to understand philosophy or neuroscience. That seems worse than worrying about QM to me.

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Living in a Quantum World

For instance, Columbia University physicist Brian Greene writes on the first page of his hugely successful (and otherwise excellent) book The Elegant Universe that quantum mechanics “provides a theoretical framework for understanding the universe on the smallest of scales.” Classical physics, which comprises any theory that is not quantum, including Albert Einstein’s theories of relativity, handles the largest of scales.

Yet this convenient partitioning of the world is a myth.

I think you're exaggerating the inability of philosophers to come to terms with scientific discovery, though I would agree we know so little about QM trying to say any philosophical argument is definitive gospel would be a mistake.

I try, sometimes poorly, to respect the value of philosophers and their modern development in the light of scientific understanding.  But understanding doesn't always correlate to total literacy - in the perspective of the utterly nonintuitive mathematics of QM, the only way towards understanding is a hideous slog of slogs towards the literacy (only on this board could I make this comparison in saying that QM is the gnosis to a Newtonian and intuitive anagnosis).

And that's not to speak poorly on any philosophy.  Some things are simply alien, through and through.

Couldn't you say the same about neuroscience?

I think neuroscience is the gate and gatekeeper and key between objective and subjective realities.  You poke the brain and get subjective experiences, you have subjective experiences and get objective signals.  And that means that any well-considered subjective experience can enlighten us, should we analyze it carefully enough.

QM might exist almost entirely outside of that.  The objective reality of the very small is so beyond our intuition and perspective that it is only by the tenuously logical proofs of a bizarre mathematics that we come to any remote understanding of it. 

But the question is - is there an objective reality at all?! If there isn't (as some theories seem to implicate), there can be no gatekeeper/key to it

Oh and there is no such thing as bizarre mathematics. It's just mathematics
And tenuosly logical proofs?! No, just no.

I have to also express confusion as to what tenuously logical means.

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You’re powered by quantum mechanics. No, really…

"For years biologists have been wary of applying the strange world of quantum mechanics, where particles can be in two places at once or connected over huge distances, to their own field. But it can help to explain some amazing natural phenomena we take for granted."

Oh, but there most likely is an objective reality. You just have to tweak your brain with some special chemicals and it will show itself in all of its splendor. Bizarre mathematics is not such a bad word to describe it really.

Oh, but there most likely is an objective reality. You just have to tweak your brain with some special chemicals and it will show itself in all of its splendor. Bizarre mathematics is not such a bad word to describe it really.

There's a clip from Renegade you should check out.

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Life is quantum

Navigation and smell are important, no doubt, but perhaps they don’t seem very central to the business of life on Earth. So let’s go after something bigger.

Take enzymes. These are the workhorses of the living world, speeding up chemical reactions so that processes that would otherwise take thousands of years happen inside living cells in seconds. How they achieve this speed-up – often more than a trillion-fold – has long been an enigma. But now, research by Judith Klinman at the University of California, Berkeley and Nigel Scrutton at the University of Manchester (among others) has shown that enzymes can employ a weird quantum trick called tunnelling. Simply put, the enzyme encourages a process whereby electrons and protons vanish from one position in a biochemical and instantly rematerialise in another, without visiting any of the in-between places – a kind of teleportation.

This is pretty fundamental stuff. Enzymes made every single biomolecule in every cell of every living creature on the planet. They are, more than any other component (even DNA, given that some cells get by without it) the essential ingredient of life. And they dip into the quantum world to help keep us alive.