Posted by jonny trigonometry on November 25, 2003, at 22:12:37
In reply to Re: What is consciousness?, posted by maxx44 on November 25, 2003, at 17:31:53
i don't want to make the impression that I know everything i'm talking about. I'm making broad generalizations, and I'm not sure if it was a proof for indeterminancy, but rather a "thought experiment." Heisenberg developed the uncertainty principle which states that the more accurately we know the position of a particle, the less accurately we know it's mometum and vice-versa. This conclusion was entirely derived from the fundametal equations of quantum mechanics. It holds true for every venture into quantum mechanics, but not true for things not based on quantum mechanics.
The whole premise for creating quantum mechanics was to be able to describe all interactions without the use of "action at a distance" because it just didn't make sense to people that things can influence other things without touching them. Based on these assumptions, we learned more about the nature of the atom, but ran into greater problems like the uncertainty principle, and another thing called quantum entanglement (which is basically our friend "action at a distance" on the quantum level). So where we are now isn't really any further than where we were to begin with... We still can't describe action at a distance.
Einstien didn't like the idea of uncertainty, and the paper that he, Boris Podelsky, and Nathan Rosen wrote called "the EPR paradox" sets out to show with the use of the uncertainty principle, things like quantum entanglement will happen, but at the time no experiment could show quantum entanglement... It was later experimentally verified to be a fact, and Einstien and his colleagues were right in their interpretation of what would happen, but they figured it seemed impossible to conclude such a thing as quantum entanglement at the time because it goes against "common sense." But what happened was a reaffirmation of the uncertainty principle as being true. The complete implications of the principle mean exactly what the cat paradox suggests, that we (an awareness) will never know with certainty anything that goes on in the quantum world if we don't look specifically for it. I'm still wrestling with this fact. I'm not out to disprove the uncertainty principle, I think that since it is experimentally verifiable, then it is true. The big problem is action at a distance, and quantum mechanics needs extra cheese added to it to account for action at a distance, therefore it is an incomplete theory.
String theory ties together quantum theory, reletivity theory, and field theory in order to be able to derive all known equations from the original equation. This is based on an assumption, that all these different equations are really just products of a higher-level equation.
I can't prove that consciousness ties in with the equations of the universe, but I have a strong feeling that it does. I don't know how it would be able to get around the hiesenberg principle, but I feel it could. It seems out of all my effort, my conclusion so far is that our existance is recursive. We, and the whole universe exist only because we think it does, or we (awareness) wanted it to exist. That statement is clearly dependant on consciousness, but I have no idea how to turn that into a mathematical statement.
poster:jonny trigonometry
thread:282271
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/social/20031124/msgs/283848.html