

Do we create the world by looking at it? - smanek
http://www.seedmagazine.com/news/2008/06/the_reality_tests_1.php

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nazgulnarsil
Every few weeks some extremely old philosophy comes trotting out wearing new
clothes. Just read a brief overview of western philosophy and you won't be
wowed by this sort of stuff so much.

This particular example is the subject-object problem, popularized by Immanuel
Kant. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subject-object_problem>

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ericb
Quantum mechanics makes me think we live in a computer simulation and at the
lowest level (where the most calculations are needed), the world is
implemented using a lazy-evaluation scheme to minimize processor usage.

~~~
nazgulnarsil
quantum mechanics makes me think that the real reality behind everything is
actually a smudge of statistical probabilities. our monkey brains have trouble
with the implications this because there aren't any analogies we can use to
make sense of it.

Think about it, we have extreme trouble with any math that describes a reality
that can't at least be approximated to the scale and zeitgeist of our own. An
alternate life form that lived at a different scale or with different priors
(perception of time, causality) would come up with completely different
explanations for why the math should be the way it is.

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smanek
One of my favorite stories was about a women who frantically wrote to Bertrand
Russel (of Principia Mathematica fame) claiming: "I'm a solipsist and, I have
to say, I'm surprised there aren't more of us."

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lg
> at least one of two long-held physical principles is untenable: Distant
> events do not affect one other, and properties we wish to observe exist
> before our measurements. One of these, locality or realism, must be
> fundamentally incorrect.

I'm pretty sure it's the second one. If, say, 2 spinwise-anticorrelated
particles had x-spin values prior to measuring their respective x-spins, you
wouldn't get Bell's inequalities. Isn't that why they were a big deal?

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extantproject
Look up the word "world" in a dictionary. Then look up the definitions of each
of the words in the definition of "world". Then look up the words in those
definitions. Continue on like this until you'd rather not.

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Tichy
Could they not condense the article into one paragraph. I could not find the
point among all the useless information, like that one:

"On my final morning in vienna, snow was tumbling like dryer sheets as I
stared out the window of the IQOQI waiting to speak again with Zeilinger.
Suddenly, there was a great flash of lightning and a long roll of thunder as
snow continued to fall. I turned around to no one and Zeilinger's assistant
appeared. He now had time to talk."

Whatever...

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dougp
some philosopher thought that the world would pop in and out of existence when
it was not being observed. He said that because it did not become inconsistent
(blue couch turning red when you looked back at it) was because there was a
grand observer god that kept everything under observation and therefore
nothing popped in and out.

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olavk
You are thinking of George Berkeley.

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dougp
Thank you, you are correct

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sah
I like this interpretation:
<http://www.ipod.org.uk/reality/reality_decoherence.asp>

Here's the wikipedia article:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_decoherence>

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simianstyle
descartes was right all along

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extantproject
It's all about the candles! Here I thought it was about Différance.

