5HC : Skinner, Turing

Iorwerth Thomas · 04 Feb 2005, 05:39 · from 2005-February.txt.gz

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: iorweththomas at hotmail.com (Iorwerth Thomas)
Date: Fri Feb  4 05:39:06 2005
Subject: (urth) 5HC : Skinner, Turing
In-Reply-To: <f5238c3050203124176c2d2de at mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <BAY102-F253A07B4BEA6D4FC5F0748B9700 at phx.gbl>

>From: Maru Dubshinki <marudubshinki at gmail.com>
>
>I don't like the Copenhagen interpretation in the least bit: anything
>which requires you get rid of elegance like unitary wave evolution,
>accept things which are completely muddled and really, metaphysical,
>and introduces a bunch of paradoxes like Von Neumann's Catastrophe, or
>Wigener's Friend, is a bad thing in my book.

Ah, but the Copenhagen interpretation isn't metaphysical - not in its 
original form.  All it involves is acceptance of the fact that QM provides a 
description of the probabilities of events and no description of what's 
really happening because there's no way we can access that level.  The 
trouble is that that is somewhat unsatisfactory, so people badly staple the 
metaphysics to a framework that isn't really intended to support it, and as 
a result you get wierdness like John Wheeler's 'participatory Anthropic 
Principle'.

The modern equivalent of the original Copenhagen interpretation is Chris 
Fuch et al's Baysian subjectivist interpretation, which I think has quite a 
bit going for it, though I'm not entirely convinced.

>We need a better solution, in QM as well as psychology.  WIth QM
>you've got multiverse models you can switch to, but what alternatives
>do we have in psychology and philosophy?
>

Myself, I tend to regard the multiverse interpretation as slightly 
extravagant (and there are some technical problems with it and the related 
'consistent histories' approach).   I tend to prefer (in no real order, but 
the least deterministic ones are more favoured at the moment) Penrose's 
objective reduction (which needs work), the Baysian approach (a bit 
conservative), Cramer's transactional account (which does peculiar things to 
time) and non-local hidden variables (a touch deterministic).

I guess that the solution to a lot of these problems is to be very clear 
about what you're doing, the tentativeness of your conclusions and to shoot 
overenthusiastic pop-sci authors on sight [1], because they'll only add to 
the confusion.

Iorwerth

[1] Apologies to any popular science authors reading this.  But there is a 
tendancy within the genre (particularly in physical and biological pop-sci) 
to latch onto eye catching ideas that are probably bollocks.  There are 
exceptions to this rule.  Roger Penrose, for example is always careful to 
state when he's being speculative.

An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net