[ExI] Psi in a major science journal, J. Personality and Social Psychology.

[John Clark]

On Oct 20, 2010, at 2:18 PM, spike wrote:

> Interesting take Isabelle.  Quantum mechanics has features like your notion:
> phenomena that cannot be measured directly without significantly altering
> that which is being measured.

I don't think that's a very good analogy. Some say Werner Heisenberg himself preferred to call his great idea the Principle of Tolerance rather than the Uncertainty Principle, at any rate it says that you can measure things and the results you get rise above the noise level and are meaningful, but there is a limit to the precision you can obtain and we can specify exactly what that tolerance is. Psi results never rise above the noise level.  

>  I can't even ponder QM without getting completely mind boggled.  I don't understand it, nor why god would be such a bastard as to set it up that way, assuming she had any choice in the matter.

I don't think I could be accused of being an apologist for God but you may have been a little too hard on the old fellow. In general I think information is a good thing, but if the world worked by deterministic laws, such as Newtons, then the total amount of information in the universe would forever remain constant; if a particle went to B rather than A no new information was generated because you could have calculated before that it would do so, but with Quantum Mechanics you couldn't do that, so when the particle "decided" to go to B and not to A new information was born into the world.

Most cosmologists think that at the time of the Big Bang the entropy of the universe was much lower than it is now, but it also contained much much less information. This may seem counter intuitive but remember that information should not be confused with meaning; a nonsense sentence contains more information than one written by Einstein because it would be harder to predict what the next part of it would be. Also, entropy is not a always a bad thing if used in moderation. Too much entropy and you have white noise and that's pretty dull, but too little entropy and you have an infinite perfect lattice and that's pretty dull too, our universe with all its richness and interesting complexity is somewhere between those two extremes. If not for quantum mechanics the universe would be as dull and information poor as that infinite perfect crystal. 

So you can't draw a direct connection between meaning and entropy as defined by Shannon's Information Theory, it can tell you how much information there is in an article for example but not how much meaning there is in it, for that you'd need what Hemingway called a “built-in bullshit detector”; and so in my roundabout fashion I have returned to the topic of psi.

  John K Clark


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