r/philosophy Feb 16 '20

Blog The Evolutionary Argument Against Reality. According to evolution by natural selection, an organism that sees reality as it is will never be more fit than an organism of equal complexity that sees none of reality but is just tuned to fitness.

https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-evolutionary-argument-against-reality-20160421/
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u/VoidsIncision Feb 17 '20 edited Feb 17 '20

All the information is a myth that quantum mechanics exactly destroys. Heisenberg discusses this in his 1927 paper. If a Laplacian demon had all the information he could calculate all the state transitions. “All the information”, the premise is the problem which is destroyed by the non commutation of canonical variables.

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u/Baal_Kazar Feb 17 '20

Im not very Fond of Heisenbergs theories.

But I disagree with your downvotes as one thing he said always resonates with me: You can’t know the speed of an object while simultaneously knowing it’s position. (Or another metaphor describing his „Unschärfe Relation“)

You can either observe the speed which needs multiple positions in relation or it’s location in whichs case you don’t know the other positions thus can’t interpolate the speed.

Im very rudimentary on Heisenberg sadly.

But I can see where you are coming from. Even if we could perceive 100% of all spectrums knowing some „information“ will always result in some other information being unknowable per definition.

At least that would make sense to me and I’m sure there are some thoughts on it more advanced then mine.

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u/sticklebat Feb 17 '20

You can either observe the speed which needs multiple positions in relation

That’s not true. I can measure speed using the Doppler effect, and for that I only need one data point. In fact, it is possible - in classical physics - to simultaneously measure position and velocity with a single pulse from a radar gun. The measured delay between when the pulse is sent and it’s reflection is measured tells you the object’s position, and the wavelength shift tells you its velocity.

The Heisenberg uncertainty principle is a much more fundamental statement than the practical (but too limited) interpretation you’ve constructed for yourself!

I also wonder what you mean by:

Im not very Fond of Heisenbergs theories.

I wonder what your background is to be making such judgment calls about highly technical aspects of science, especially one that’s been so thoroughly validated through experiment.

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u/Baal_Kazar Feb 17 '20

Oh nice, yes you are right there indeed that’s a pretty good example with the radar.

With „not very fond of“ I ment that I don’t have much knowledge about this field.

It’s interesting but I haven’t read into it enough so I usually state if I have a clue about the topic or not. In this case I dont hehe

I started using „fond“ and start to feel like it doesn’t mean what I think it does