10 ms·

Sounds like Bohr doesn't believe the "astonishing hypothesis". As stated on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Astonishing_Hypothesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wi

• louwrentius 8y ago
  But why, what's his reasoning?
  • dogma1138 8y ago
    He doesn’t have to have a reason beyond being as flawed of a human being as the rest of us, he thought there must be more to the human condition than just physics and it wasn’t necessarily had to be backed up by rational thought anymore than any other religious or pseudo-religious belief. Issac Newton also believed in things we would laugh about and heck even back then were considered a laughing stock by scientists https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Newton%27s_occult_studies https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Newton%27s_occult_stud...
    • zazen 8y ago
      The headline's use of the word "argument" rather implies that he did think he had a reason backed up by rational thought. Like GP, I'm hoping someone with the time and inclination will summarise that argument for us.
      • Retric 8y ago
        People’s beliefs tend to be reasonably self consistent. That’s different from being well supported, but still allows them to make “arguments.”
    • darkerside 8y ago
      Physics may have drawn laughter at the time as well http://www.paulgraham.com/disc.html http://www.paulgraham.com/disc.html
    • coldtea 8y ago
      >He doesn’t have to have a reason beyond being as flawed of a human being as the rest of us You're taking what should be proven as a premise. He's only "flawed" if he's wrong, which is not really a closed case. Besides, what's this "he doesn't have to have a reason" thing? He has a reason, and it's exactly the very arguments in TFA.
      • dogma1138 8y ago
        You can have flawed thinking and still end up being “right” for the wrong reasons or for no reasons at all.
        • coldtea 8y ago
          Which is neither here not there, it's a general observation. Anything particularly flawed about his argument in TFA (or him as a person)?
          • dogma1138 8y ago
            As the other poster commented the article lays down some flaws in Niels’s logic however I don’t have sufficient intimate knowledge of what Niels fully “believed” in. That said early QM had a lot of metaphysical stuff in it for example CCC had a pretty substantial following at the time due to some of the prominent people that supported it https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Von_Neumann–Wigner_interpretation https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Von_Neumann–Wigner_interpret... However it’s highly unlikely that the Avon Neumann interpretation is correct given what we know about QM, in fact it was highly unlikely back when the interpretation was initially conjectured. And this brings me to a personal anecdote I don’t believe that Consciousness Causes Collapse is a correct interpretation of quantum mechanics, I don’t actually have sufficient faculties to argue with someone like Von Neumann on this matter however it just sounds utterly stupid and rediculous to me that a consciousness would be required for QM effects to be manifested. This is an utterly flawed and poorly constructed logic but I am most likely right in my assumption.
          • sofal 8y ago
            The author of the article pointed out the circular reasoning in the argument, so that's probably a good place to start.
    • fjsolwmv 8y ago
      In the modern era, we have Roger Penrose masquerade religion as physics. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_mind https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_mind
      • dogma1138 8y ago
        This seems to be a continuation of the Von-Neumann interpretation of QM this isn’t new: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Von_Neumann–Wigner_interpretation https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Von_Neumann–Wigner_interpret... The cutting edge of physics is often borderline metaphysical and well to a point nonsensical especially when you rely heavily on flawed thought expriements and unable to construct any good experimental ones.
      • coldtea 8y ago
        Or rather we have a knee-jerk reaction "it a priori mustn't be so", and thus somebody like Penrose who brings actual arguments (regardless of if they're flawed or not, scientists have flawed arguments all the time), is accused of "masquerading religion".
    • HissingMachine 8y ago
      I think you don't have to be religious or believe in anything supernatural for the implications of this question to be at least bit freaky. If we could record on very minuscule detail the physical actions that take place anywhere, and play them back, suppose we record a glimpse of you thinking about something, and then we played back that recording, does it manifest you and your thought, is it a clone/alive/natural? What if we played it back in a computer as a simulation? What does it mean that everything is just physics in the natural world? It begs answers to some really weird shit, so it's not easy to just buy it and move on.
      • dogma1138 8y ago
        Not really a replay of a brain scan is just a replay of a brain scan it is not more “alive” or “conscious” than video footage. If we’re talking about VSI/GAI or some sort of singularity event where people can upload their brains into a computer and remain conscious well then their definition would be which ever legal and common definition society would grant them. There is absolutely nothing special about intelligence or consciousness and it’s an arbitrary definition in the first place which we put in due to fear of the unknown and our own physical limitations. Anything beyond that is for the most part intellectual masturbation with little actual value or true insight that can be gained from it. We created the definition for what is alive, conscious and intelligent based on our limited understanding of the universe and our human centric world view these definitions change as time changes just like every other arbitrary definition we have set in stone in the past.
      • beautifulfreak 8y ago
        A clone of a brain state in a different medium would be a Boltzmann brain. It is indeed a freaky concept. Stranger still is the possibility that inanimate matter could randomly fall into an arrangement that mimics a brain state, say a cloud of atoms in interstellar space, or inside a star. Is it conscious? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boltzmann_brain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boltzmann_brain
        • dogma1138 8y ago
          Why is this freaky? Consciousness is an utterly arbitrary definition that is not free from debate or alteration. Same goes for life which is why often we use the phrase life as we know it. If a cloud of gas can do everything a brain can and we set an arbitrary set of rules of consciousness and it passes the benchmark then it’s conscious based on our arbitrary definition on a cosmic scale it’s still a cloud of dust just like we are lumpy specs of hydrated carbon. There is no special meaning to life or to consciousness other than the former might be an intrinsic outcome of a universe with an entropy driven arrow of time, and the latter might be an intrinsic outcome of iterative natural selection of self assembling replicating strands of hydrated carbons and other organic molecules.
• agumonkey 8y ago
  Irreducibility sounds different to my ears, it means that emergent properties are more due to biological-level structures rather than pure physics. Of course it's all physics underneath but that doesn't say a lot.
  • fjsolwmv 8y ago
    That's not what irreducibility means. Irreducibility would be , for example, some kind of biological "atom" that isn't made of physical atoms.
    • karmakaze 8y ago
      The reason reducibility wins is because 'physics' is a moving target. Imagine that The Milky Way is an organism and in the process of understanding it through physics, we discover that our laws and theories are unable to explain it--e.g. dark matter. That is now part of physics too. So if we did discover some kind of irreducible biological cell, we'd just name a new area of physics yet to be understood.
      • goatlover 8y ago
        > So if we did discover some kind of irreducible biological cell, we'd just name a new area of physics yet to be understood. But what if the irreducible cell is made up of normal matter, but it has strongly emergent properties that can't be explained simply in terms of structure and function of it's physical properties? That's what would make it irreducible, if such things do exist.
        • XaspR8d 8y ago
          We would probably change our model of physics to accommodate the emergence of those properties? I suppose there's a scale at which the "gap" becomes too large to call it "physics," but the larger the scale, the stranger it would be to find something irreducible across so many levels.
    • ItsMe000001 8y ago
• jchanimal 8y ago
  You can agree the mental events are made up of the same stuff as physical events, without believing that they can be fully explained in physical terms. https://www.iep.utm.edu/anom-mon/ https://www.iep.utm.edu/anom-mon/
  • foxes 8y ago
    If it's entirely determined by physical stuff thats a contradiction. It may be very complicated, but its still physical.
    • bordercases 8y ago
      No, because the reduction in-principle would fail if the system's description language could not support explaining the phenomena in the higher level. And going the other way, it could be impossible in-principle to conduct the experiments that get a complete description because the tools required break how it was originally organized. It's also not just about adding more variables because "it's complicated". Biology for example seems to be highly reflexive, that sort of behaviour can't really be accounted for in basic causal models. At best we have models which resemble fluid dynamics, and fluid dynamics is only as good as it is because we don't reduce the phenomena down to every molecule.
      • ssadler 8y ago
        See also: https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=3294 https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=3294
      • sooheon 8y ago
        And yet nobody claims that fluids are supernatural and above the laws of physics. It's our ability to understand, explain, and model it that is deficient, not the phenomena that is supernatural.
        • bordercases 8y ago
          Maxwell's Demon might have a thing or two to say to you. The fallacy is to believe that reduction is a total property of the territory, rather than a property of some of the territory that lends to a certain kind of map. We know that there are phenomena in the world with strong boundaries and there are phenomena with weaker boundaries. It may be that at low scales things can be easily separated, but that doesn't have to translate to how easy it is to tease-apart macro-phenomena. Heck below atoms, which lend themselves most strongly to the reductionist intuition, we have quantum waves. The wave-particle duality should at least simultaneously give reduction and non-reduction some credence.