AI and cognitive psychology rant (getting more and more OT - tell me if I should shut up)

[Stephen Horne]

On 26 Oct 2003 20:56:09 +0000, jjl at pobox.com (John J. Lee) wrote:

>> Yes, but why can we see the affects of superposition at the
>> microscopic scale but not at the macroscopic. That is what strikes me
>> as odd - if parallel universes work as an explanation, then why do
>> they work differently at the two scales. In particular, why can we not
>
>They don't.

Are you claiming that in schroedingers experiment that the dead and
live cats interact in some way that can be measured outside the box
without collapsing the waveform?

I was also under the impression that the largest 'particle' to be
successfully superposed in an experiment was a buckyball (or something
like that - at least a 'large' molecule of some kind or another) and
the timescale for that superposition was tiny.

Yet the whole point of the thought experiment is that according to the
theory, as conventionally described (I know next to nothing of the
detail), it should be possible for a cat to be superposed almost as
easily as it is possible for a subatomic particle - a simple
cause-and-effect chain is all that is needed. If that is the case,
superpositions of macroscopic objects should be happening all the
time.

Now either the superpositions are in parallel universes with each
state undetectable from an observer in another one of those universes,
or they are in the same universe and detectable in some way, or there
is a differentiation between the microscopic and macroscopic scales,
or - and this is very likely, I admit - I am seriously confused about
what the hell is going on (the natural state for a human confronted
with quantum theory).

>> see evidence of it at the scales we are good at percieving when we can
>> see the evidence so clearly at the scales we are not naturally
>> equipped to percieve at all.
>
>We see exactly the effects that the theory predicts.  They're just
>very small.

OK - so why is it not possible to detect the superposition of that
cat? Why is the experiment still considered a thought experiment only?

I would have thought, with a huge number of particles affected by the
superposition of states, there would be a huge number of interactions
between the particles in those two superposed states.

Or am I just seeing the effects of superposition in the wrong way?

>Yeah -- hence the solipsism joke.

Ah - sorry - I'm not actually familiar with that term.


-- 
Steve Horne

steve at ninereeds dot fsnet dot co dot uk