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posted by Fnord666 on Wednesday May 03 2017, @07:39AM   Printer-friendly
from the so-it's-what-you-know,-not-who dept.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

One of the most striking features of quantum theory is that its predictions are, under virtually all circumstances, probabilistic. If you set up an experiment in a laboratory, and then you use quantum theory to predict the outcomes of various measurements you might perform, the best the theory can offer is probabilities—say, a 50 percent chance that you'll get one outcome, and a 50 percent chance that you'll get a different one. The role the quantum state plays in the theory is to determine, or at least encode, these probabilities. If you know the quantum state, then you can compute the probability of getting any possible outcome to any possible experiment.

But does the quantum state ultimately represent some objective aspect of reality, or is it a way of characterizing something about us, namely, something about what some person knows about reality? This question stretches back to the earliest history of quantum theory, but has recently become an active topic again, inspiring a slew of new theoretical results and even some experimental tests.

If it is just your knowledge that changes, things don't seem so strange.

To see why the quantum state might represent what someone knows, consider another case where we use probabilities. Before your friend rolls a die, you guess what side will face up. If your friend rolls a standard six-sided die, you'd usually say there is about a 17 percent (or one in six) chance that you'll be right, whatever you guess. Here the probability represents something about you: your state of knowledge about the die. Let's say your back is turned while she rolls it, so that she sees the result—a six, say—but not you. As far as you are concerned, the outcome remains uncertain, even though she knows it. Probabilities that represent a person's uncertainty, even though there is some fact of the matter, are called epistemic, from one of the Greek words for knowledge.

This means that you and your friend could assign very different probabilities, without either of you being wrong. You say the probability of the die showing a six is 17 percent, whereas your friend, who has seen the outcome already, says that it is 100 percent. That is because each of you knows different things, and the probabilities are representations of your respective states of knowledge. The only incorrect assignments, in fact, would be ones that said there was no chance at all that the die showed a six.

-- submitted from IRC


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  • (Score: 2) by melikamp on Thursday May 04 2017, @04:17AM

    by melikamp (1886) on Thursday May 04 2017, @04:17AM (#504174) Journal

    Oh man, reading Putnam article... I remember reading about this guy. Just the "argument for the reality of mathematical entities" would be enough, and I can't really read after that with a straight face, especially as sober as I am right now.

    I actually read Searle and saw him talk at SJSU may be 10 years back, a very entertaining lecture, can't remember a single thing, it was a bit over my head... But I remember during the Q&A someone asked him about the Chinese Room, and Searle instantly got livid, like Robert Fripp these days when a fan asks him to play 21st CSM. There was a lot of yelling after that, but it can all be summed up as "I moved on, you haven't".

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