Re: [asa] Review of Behe in Books and Culture

Iain -

This is an interesting variant on the cat/friend examples. I'd like to be able to think about it further - right now I need to get a paper done for the Edinburgh meeting. I'll just note now that the idea of an observation affecting the way things were before the measurement was made isn't new. Wheeler especially pointed the possibility of "delayed choice" experiments. In the double slit experiment you can wait until the photon has gone through the screen before you decide whether to make a measurement which will show which slit it went through or to display interference and thus infer that it went through both. You could (in principle) use the gravitational lens of a galaxy as your original beam splitter for photons from a distant quasar & thus delay your choice for a billion years after the light had passed the galaxy!

That doesn't prove that the idea of consciousness collapsing the wave function is valid but it suggest that your argument doesn't rule it out of court.

Shalom
George
http://web.raex.com/~gmurphy/
  ----- Original Message -----
  From: Iain Strachan
  To: George L. Murphygmurphy@raex.com
  Cc: Michael Roberts ; Ted Davis ; asa ; Louise Margaret Freeman
  Sent: Thursday, July 12, 2007 3:13 PM
  Subject: Re: [asa] Review of Behe in Books and Culture

  George,

  As evidently you've studied QM to a much deeper level than my undergraduate (25+ years ago!!) studies, I wonder if you might answer a question that occurred to me today, looking up about QM paradoxes. I'm not sure how "on topic" this is but I guess anything to do with the nature of consciousness might have spiritual implications, so here goes..

  It concerns the so-called "Wigner's friend" paradox, which leads directly to the "consciousness causes collapse" interpretation of QM which is also (according to Wikipedia) known as the "spiritual interpretation".

  The idea is a thought experiment proposed by Wigner, as an extension of the Schrodinger Cat experiment. Here there is a physicist inside a locked room in which there is the safe with the cat that is in front of the gun triggered by the decay of a radioactive atom. The physicist opens the door and observes a dead or living cat. A friend of the physicist is outside the room containing physicist + cat and opens the door and observes either a happy physicist/living cat or a sad physicist/dead cat. According to the superposition principle then the wave function before the collapse triggered by the friend walking in was a superposition of HP/LC and SP/DC. However for the physicist in the room, the wave function collapsed when s/he opened the door of the room containing the cat.

  This is supposed to show that it is consciousness that triggers the collapse of the wave function.

  But it occurred to me that there is a counter argument. Replace the cat with a clock, which is synchronised with the physicist's clock at the start of the experiment. When the atom decays, the power supply to the clock is broken and it stops. Physicist opens the door and finds the clock is one minute behind his own clock. He then knows that a quantum event/collapse of a wave function occurred precisely one minute ago, without the presence of a conscious observer.

  [ If you want to keep the cat, then warm cat/cold cat gives you an idea of how far in the past the wave function collapsed].

  Doesn't this make an effective counter to the idea that consciousness is needed to make the wave function collapse because it tells you that a quantum event, giving rise to a macroscopic change, occurred some time in the past? It would be nice to think that there is some mystical connection between consciousness and QM, but unless I'm missing something (I expect I am!) this seems to show that there need not be such a connection.

  Iain.

  On 7/12/07, George L. Murphygmurphy@raex.com <gmurphy@raex.com > wrote:
    I also have some problems with this view of God's action at the quantum level. Either God decides the results of all measurements (which returns to the cosmic dictator model) or God only decides some, in which case we have to ask what decides the others.

    But at least in the present state of QM there does seem to be a measurement problem. Yes, the Schroedinger eqn describes a deterministic time evolution of psi (it's 1st order in t so one needs to know only the initial wave fn), but the problem is precisely that with a measurement psi seems to change ("collapse") in a way that the Schroedinger eqn doesn't predict.

    BTW, Pollard's 1st name was William.

    Shalom,

    George

> > > I must say I have a problem with this idea of God intervening "at the quantum level" - perhaps subtly biassing the dice throws in ways we can't detect.Despite the fact that from the observer's point of view it looks like the collapse of the wave function is probabilistic, nonetheless the underlying Schrodinger equation for the wave function IS completely deterministic (it's just a second order PDE) and it could therefore be argued that the time-evolution of the wave-function of the universe is not subject to being tweaked. > IainOn 7/11/07, Michael Roberts wrote: > Ted wrote > > A number of modern TEs take the view instead, that God directsevolution> via controlling certain events at the quantum level, where God cannot be> "seen" doing it but where God nevertheless may exert providential guidance > > through direct divine action. I am sometimes attracted to this view> myself;> certainly Bob Russell, John Polkinghorne, and Owen Gingerich are. As I> argued many years ago, however, this is a "gaps" view of a certain > > kind--it> is not subject to the traditional "god of the gaps" objection (and that's> a> huge subject that ought to be studied more systematically), since if QM is> truly indeterminate (and that's not universally accepted) then the "gaps" > > are genuinely ontological, not merely epistemological, and they won't ever> be "filled in"--but it is a gaps view nonetheless. There are real,> genuine,> *permanent* "gaps" in what we can do with our scientific explanations, and > > God does to some extent reside in those gaps. Thus, I would say, quite a> few modern TEs have "gaps" in their view of nature and divine action. Ken> Miller, incidentally, endorses precisely this picture of things, and Mike > > Behe says explicitly (in his contribution to "Debating Design," ed Ruse> and> Dembski) that he's fine theologically with Miller's view on this point;> indeed, Behe goes on to claim (perhaps less convincingly) that Miller's > > view> is actually tantamount to ID, b/c there still is design in nature.> Polkinghorne notes that selection is not the whole story in evolution, and> that in itself is consistent with Behe's view. > Michael asks;I first came across this view of divine action at the quantum level in 1971when I read G D Y arnold's The spiritual crisis of the Scientific age (Allenand unwin 1959) (written just about the time when the budding Arthur > Peacocke went to see him at Hawarden) He gives no references for hisargument on Quantum action by God p63-7 though I believe Arthur Pollard -another Anglican clerical physicist came out with same argument in Chance > and Providence Scribner 1958 uk Faber 1959 so GDY couldn't have used it. Itis not mentioned in two books from the 50s by the Anglicans, Smethurst orMascall, which GDY had and used. (My copies were his). > Thus I find it fascinating that others have adopted a similar view , but Ithink I better write it up and give GDY and Pollard the priority.GDY wrote his first Sand R book in 1952 for 17 yr olds (sixth-formers to us) > and C A Coulson wrote a letter picking up a few errors on his chemistry,which is in his copy..GDY was born in 1909, went to Merton Oxford to read physics and got a D Philon ionisation of He, then to Nottingham as a lecturer and was ordained in > 1942. In 1946 he was one of the first civilians to have penicillin used onhim, which was interesting as his wife's brother in law had worked withFlorey just before he began on penicillin in 1937. He went into full time > ministry in 1950. During the 50s and 60s he was involved in Sand or withpeople like Peacocke and John Habgood. Also in 1946 he became godfather tohis sister in law's son, who wrote this e-mailI don't think selection is all there is to evolution, but I cannot see a > theological reason why it cant be.Michael>To unsubscribe, send a message to majordomo@calvin.edu with"unsubscribe asa" (no quotes) as the body of the message. > -- -----------After the game, the King and the pawn go back in the same box.- Italian Proverb----------- >

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Received on Sat Jul 14 16:14:11 2007