[ExI] Digital Consciousness

John Clark johnkclark at gmail.com
Mon May 6 16:59:32 UTC 2013


On Sun, May 5, 2013  Gordon <gts_2000 at yahoo.com> wrote:

> Those probability waves are thought to propagate continuously
>

No, there is no such thing as probability waves. You're thinking of the
Schrodinger Wave Equation (SWE) and yes it is continuous and deterministic,
but that function is an unobservable abstraction, a calculating device no
more real than lines of longitude and latitude. To get something real that
you can see you must square the amplitude of the SWE of a particle at a
point and that will give you the probability you will observe the particle
at that point, and probability, unlike the SWE, is something that you can
observe and measure. But Schrodinger's equation has an "i"  (the square
root of -1) in it and that means very different quantum wave functions can
give the exact same probability distribution when you square it; remember
with i you get weird stuff like i^2=i^6 =-1 and i^4=i^100=1.

And in the non quantum world if the probability of X happening is 1/2 and
the probability of unrelated event Y happening is 1/2 then the probability
of X and Y happening is 1/4, but in Quantum Mechanics that's not
necessarily true because now you must deal with i and complex numbers. I
think you could say that mathematically it's the existence of that damn i
in the SWE that makes Quantum Mechanics so weird.

  John K Clark
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