Posted: Apr 13, 2012 1:37 pm
Cito di Pense wrote:Little Idiot wrote:
The issue then becomes, when speaking of the experienced world, does the experienced world actually exist when not being observed by any individual. Asdjkl says no. I think Jamest answers it exists in blueprint form, but I answer that it exists just as it does when observed by an individual - this is not because it is independent of observation, but rather because it is observed by World Mind. It is independent of individual observation. This is why we can find rocks which can be dated to times before individual entities lived on Earth.
That just shows, once again, that idealists are forced to assume their conclusions, which is that entities only exist when being observed. Therefore (thus! hence!) since we talk in terms of entities (rocks) that existed before we observed them, we conclude that the World Mind must have been observing them. Now that we've taken over in the observation department, with all these latter-day rocks being observed, the World Mind can go on well-deserved holiday. Thanks for the memories.
Hard to pick the serious points from the venom.
If the observation is that 'rocks appear to be older than the time we figure individual entities have been around', there are several ways this could be explained. One of which is that World Mind observed them, one is that they existed only in blue print form, one is that they are not experienced at a time before individuals, only experienced now so we dont know for sure of its actual age. There are probably others, but these three show that an idealist is not forced to a conclusion that World Mind was the observer.
The rest is straw, World Mind is not on holiday. Why do trees falling in a deserted forest make noise? I say World Mind is the observer. Others may not agree...
Little Idiot wrote:The computer is an observer.
This is the kind of nonsense one obtains from interpreting interpretations of QM, rather than studying QM deeply enough to make a QM calculation. Shut up, LI, and calculate. Studying QM experiments enough to perform the necessary calculations would convince you that the position and momentum of a probe which measures a micro-system's position and momentum is of the same scale as the system being investigated. If you don't understand what this means, you just don't. You can measure one very precisely, and the other with no precision at all, or you can measure each one with limited precision. The computer that records the results from instrumentation is there to show you that a conscious human observer is superfluous in recording measurements. Go study.
I made no mention of scale, as we were not discussing a specific experiment. GrahamH spoke of a case where a computer recorded results and held the information for some years before a conscious observer became involved.
A camera taking pictures in the box with Schrodingers cat would count as an observer, collapsing the wave form into either 'cat is alive' or 'cat is dead' at time t, it could be a web-cam connected to a computer. In which case, why is the computer and web cam not an example of an 'observer' making a measurement on a system collapsing its 'probability wave function'?