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Reality doesn’t exist until it is measured, quantum experiment finds

anu.edu.au

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Re: Reality doesn’t exist until it is measured, quantum experiment finds

#201

Post by jschwartzi »

Kequc wrote: post #196
hasenj wrote: post #84

I'm not familiar with this particular experiment, but all my pondering on the subject - as a layman - leads me to a simple conclusion. The properties these experiments are measuring are simply bogus. They are not well defined. The answer that comes out is not some intrinsic property of the "particle", but the result of the environment in which the particle interacted with the "measurement" system, so to speak. The pa…

The topic outlined in the OP's article has been raised before, multiple times, once every couple of years. It was even the focus of a cult indoctrination propaganda piece called "what the bleep do we know". http://skeptico.blogs.com/skeptico/2005/04/what_the_bleep_.h... Essentially, yes, it's bogus science. Quantum physics are much more complex than these articles ever bring on. But by explaining it simply, it sounds…

The canonical example is to try to measure the position of pins in a bowling alley using a bowling ball.

Re: Reality doesn’t exist until it is measured, quantum experiment finds

#202

Post by CatsoCatsoCatso »

codeshaman wrote: post #149

Which is another way of saying that reality is invented. "Measuring" is applying our sensors onto the external reality and producing a map of what is observed in the form of thoughts, ideas, imagery - 'perception'. But since the sensors are also part of reality, which does not exist before sensing it, it can be postulated that what is perceived is not a consequence of reality hitting the sensors, but the result of a…

    Of course very hard to put into language, 
    but easily grokked under psychedelics.
Fantastic line.

Re: Reality doesn’t exist until it is measured, quantum experiment finds

#203

Post by graycat »

tiatia wrote: post #155
graycat wrote: post #4

We know that light bends near a gravitational field with a big gradient before it is "measured". Sounds like that light existed and generated and responded to a gravitational field after it was emitted and before it was detected or measured.

The light may be in a state of being bended and being not bended until you observe it...

I doubt it: What is bent is the wave function. There's no ambiguity there.

Re: Reality doesn’t exist until it is measured, quantum experiment finds

#205

Post by Zigurd »

epitomix wrote: post #31
westoncb wrote: post #5

This is of course extremely interesting and probably important for understanding our universe—but how is it helping anyone to say something like, "...with scientists performing a famous experiment and proving that reality does not exist until it is measured." The statement is like a distraction at a magic show, drawing the reader to the glittery 'reality' and 'exist,' which are totally undefined so the reader's imagi…

"Maybe this is really just a fundamental challenge to our assumptions about motion of particles or information transfer in the universe." Check out this TED talk on just that subject. http://www.ted.com/talks/donald_hoffman_do_we_see_reality_as... Here's the punch line, space, time and matter are components of a user interface produced through evolution. We don't take the desktop and icons of our computer UI literall…

He dialed back the radicalism of his position for his TED Talk. He concludes that consciousness must be something other than computation in the brain, something he just teases in the TED Talk. He spends most of the talk on the less radical Interface Theory of Perception.

If I understand him correctly, he says we don't perceive brains as they really are and therefore brains are not a physical basis of consciousness. Whoa.

Re: Reality doesn’t exist until it is measured, quantum experiment finds

#206

Post by derrickgrant »

Guys I'm a total quantum physics noob but when I read this post I couldn't help but think of Alan Watts and the Taoist definition of the theory of time (quoted below). HN in your opinion how does this theory hold up to the to new finding (if at all)?

Big thanks to anyone taking the time to humour me, I really appreciate your time.

'So when you have this happening the other illusion that a Westerner is liable to have is that it's determined in the sense that what is happening now follows necessarily from what happened in the past. But you don't know anything about that in your primal ignorance. Cause and effect? Why, obviously not! Ha ha ha! Because if you're really na•ve you see that the past is the result of what's happening now. It goes backwards into the past like a wake goes backwards from a ship.'

Re: Reality doesn’t exist until it is measured, quantum experiment finds

#207

Post by jgroszko »

bweitzman wrote: post #198
cristianpascu wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A standard case of mixing (or actually confusing) epistemology with ontology. That is to say that something doesn't exist until we get to know something about it. Or, by all means, knowing something about something is posterior to us being here AND that something being there. Here lies the danger of dismissing philosophy as a bag of words when compared with the Holy Science that works, bitches .

I've been reading Thomas Nagel's "Mind and Cosmos" recently, and while I think it's actually a really terrible book and Nagel is incredibly uninformed on the theory of evolution, I do think he makes one really good point: the scientific method presupposes that the universe can be understood/observed/measured. It seems like such an obvious axiom, but I think it makes sense why we keep brushing up with observation / co…

It will be interesting to see as we run closer and closer to the limits of observation and consciousness if we're on the verge of another huge paradigm shift in empiricism.

Re: Reality doesn’t exist until it is measured, quantum experiment finds

#208

Post by derrickgrant »

derrickgrant wrote: post #206

Guys I'm a total quantum physics noob but when I read this post I couldn't help but think of Alan Watts and the Taoist definition of the theory of time (quoted below). HN in your opinion how does this theory hold up to the to new finding (if at all)? Big thanks to anyone taking the time to humour me, I really appreciate your time. 'So when you have this happening the other illusion that a Westerner is liable to have…

Here's the full transcript of the Alan Watts lecture

http://thinkyhead.blogspot.co.uk/2013/09/alan-watts-philosop...

Re: Reality doesn’t exist until it is measured, quantum experiment finds

#209

Post by dghf »

Kequc wrote: post #196
hasenj wrote: post #84

I'm not familiar with this particular experiment, but all my pondering on the subject - as a layman - leads me to a simple conclusion. The properties these experiments are measuring are simply bogus. They are not well defined. The answer that comes out is not some intrinsic property of the "particle", but the result of the environment in which the particle interacted with the "measurement" system, so to speak. The pa…

The topic outlined in the OP's article has been raised before, multiple times, once every couple of years. It was even the focus of a cult indoctrination propaganda piece called "what the bleep do we know". http://skeptico.blogs.com/skeptico/2005/04/what_the_bleep_.h... Essentially, yes, it's bogus science. Quantum physics are much more complex than these articles ever bring on. But by explaining it simply, it sounds…

> It isn't that particles exist in multiple states until they are measured.

I thought it was exactly that. Or rather, particles exist in multiple states, and when they are measured, either those multiple states collapse into one (Copenhagen Interpretation) or you, the measurer (who also exists in multiple states), gets entangled with them, causing each of your states to perceive exactly one of the particles' states (Many-Worlds Interpretation).

Unless Bohmian mechanics is correct, in which case no, particles don't exist in multiple states, but do depend on faster-than-light transmission of information about the state of other particles.

Re: Reality doesn’t exist until it is measured, quantum experiment finds

#210

Post by dghf »

eli_gottlieb wrote: post #200
ghosthamlet wrote: post #96

http://www.simulation-argument.com/simulation.html says: at least one of the following propositions is true: (1) the human species is very likely to go extinct before reaching a “posthuman” stage; (2) any posthuman civilization is extremely unlikely to run a significant number of simulations of their evolutionary history (or variations thereof); (3) we are almost certainly living in a computer simulation. It follows…

Proposition (2) is just flagrantly, blatantly bullshit. The amount of computational power needed to simulate even just the bits of the universe we conscious humans happen to be observing at any one time is so stupendously humongous that you'd get more utility out of repurposing your cosmic-scale computers to play video games.

Erm, doesn't that mean you actually agree with proposition (2)?

> (2) any posthuman civilization is extremely unlikely to run a significant number of simulations of their evolutionary history (or variations thereof)

[Emphasis added.]

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