jamest wrote:I do indeed think that what the physicists are telling us about 'quanta' (the fundamental energy underpinning our observations of the world) is wholly compatible with my metaphysics. The fact, for instance, that there are no definite particles of matter (instead, energy with the potential to 'exist' anywhere within the observable space-time universe from one moment to the next which becomes
like a particle when we observe or measure it, though still retains its wave-nature)…
We can certainly agree that the matter that we encounter is not, at a fundamental level, composed of hard, solid things. What it, instead, seems to be composed of is excitations of a field, which propagate as waves and, at any moment, are each spread over a greater or smaller region; and if the region over which such a wave is spread is small enough, then it behaves in important ways as if it were a hard, solid thing, even though it still isn’t actually one.
I think there is a danger of attaching too much importance to the “collapse” of the wave function. It is interesting because it explains certain otherwise baffling things, notably why the “excitation”, in a certain well-known experiment, travels through one slit alone and not through two at the same time; and it is of historical interest, because this is how we first got on to the track of the nature of quantum reality. But, as I have tried to explain, all that is happening here is a change in the shape of the wave function, so that it occupies less space than it did before, usually close to its former expectation value; there is no fundamental change to the physical object that we are observing; a number of people here have pointed out that this doesn’t only happen when humans perform experiments, it happens whenever the physical circumstances are such as to cause it to happen; and of course the object exists physically at all times, whatever the shape of its wave function.
jamest wrote:... is wholly compatible with the view that definite matter does not exist except [fleetingly] within the mind/consiousness of the observer.
I suppose that anything is compatible with the idea that what we think of as the real world is an illusion; it doesn’t really matter what it looks like or how it seems to behave.
But I thought a stronger claim was being made: that quantum mechanics positively confirmed, albeit inadvertently, that nothing exists in reality except in the consciousness of the observer.
How extremely stupid not to have thought of that - T.H. Huxley
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