Are we local?

[snowflake]

What are the boundaries of my existence? Where do I stand, in my head?! Isn't that a rough estimation as it gives us an accuracy of about some ten cms?

From the current physical point of view the observer is dealt with as a local entity.

An observer distinct from the observable traveling with a velocity or in case of usual quantum mechanics doing experiments reducing the state function.

But all in all not much is said about the reality of the observer itself. And debates of the sort are usually avoided and considered unphysical.

The problem exists though even if we keep ignoring it.

 

 

[immortal]

If Counterfactual definiteness is what is violated by the violation of Bell's inequalities then the observer has a special place in the universe.

[Joatmon]

I sometimes think of the fact that everything we experience is an interpretation by our brain of signals from our sensors that allow us to exist in the world. For example we see a "solid" wall, but almost all of it is space. But we know that walking into it is impossible The wall may not really be solid but it is in our interests to see it as such. What we really experience is nothing more than electrical and chemical disturbances in our heads.

[DevilSolution]

Consciously were about as physical as electricity, whatever that is.....is that.....and must be that.

 

Philosophically we exist in more than the physical sense as we have access to idea's

[sheldysheldon]

I am not sure if this belongs under physics’ or philosophy or even psychology. None the less if you think of the universe we belong in as nothing more than a large computer processing information than you are a bi-product of that system an information pocket that has processing power within the larger main frame. You will most likely never understand who you are or where unless you’re capable of understanding the whole universe’s data. At that point you would be the universe and that would be the answer. You are at the universe, everywhere all the time.

 

 

[imatfaal]

!

Moderator Note

I agree with several posters that this is better suited to the Philosophy forum

Thread Moved.

[snowflake]

We always deal with an observer in physics, implicit or otherwise. And this observer as we usually deal with is not of course considered to be the whole universe. Some quotes might make the point clear:

 

A consistent physical interpretation of QM formalism can be given only if we divide the physical world into two parts: the system under study, represented by vectors and operators in a Hilbert space, and the observer placed in the rest of the world, for which a classical description must be used [Peres, 1977]. We must impose this 'cut' (Schnitt) dividing the world into two parts, or else QM will be simply meaningless [von Neumann, 1955].

 

 

 

The problem arises when we note that the observer is itself a part of the physical world and this scheme (usual QM) doesn't permit talking about the state of the whole world.

I'm concerned that this issue is not a solved problem in current physics, and as it's pointed out, apparently the time has not arrived for the common thought to accept problems related to consciousness and alike arguable in areas other than philosophy or psychology or religion.

The only reason I started this topic in physics forum was to check the above point. And I do accept your objection.

 

 

[michel123456]

What are the boundaries of my existence? Where do I stand, in my head?! Isn't that a rough estimation as it gives us an accuracy of about some ten cms?

From the current physical point of view the observer is dealt with as a local entity.

An observer distinct from the observable traveling with a velocity or in case of usual quantum mechanics doing experiments reducing the state function.

But all in all not much is said about the reality of the observer itself. And debates of the sort are usually avoided and considered unphysical.

The problem exists though even if we keep ignoring it.

 

Maybe you could be interested by the work of Edward T. Hall about proxemics.

That is anthropology, I don't think it is philosophy.

Following this concept, the "boundaries of your existence" are around you out of your body, not somewhere in your head. But that is maybe philosophy.

 

As physics are concerned, instruments and repeated measurements are supposed to help the observer. I am not sure if there is an issue about this.

[snowflake]

Following this concept, the "boundaries of your existence" are around you out of your body, not somewhere in your head. But that is maybe philosophy.

 

My concerns are not anthropological. But it depends on your way of thinking.

It's totally possible to have electronic devices attached to the neural network, in that case are we expanded to include those devices in ourselves? How far can this expansion be continued?

 

For instance I might be neurally attached to a keyboard in another country. But even in that case it's possible to estimate the time delay between my decision on pressing a keyboard and the key's being pressed, which gives us a sense of locality. These time delays are still available without such an odd example in our usual actions.

This might lead one to ask in what part of the brain the decisions are made. Which of course might entail an objection like "this isn't physics nor philosophy, but neuroscience"

 

If someone wants to have a clear picture of the whole universe, that picture should necessarily contain mind(or brain).As long as wave function reduction upon facing with an observer(this terminology is rough) isn't totally resolved the observer's problem stays as an issue in physics.

[tar]

My concerns are not anthropological. But it depends on your way of thinking.

It's totally possible to have electronic devices attached to the neural network, in that case are we expanded to include those devices in ourselves? How far can this expansion be continued?

 

For instance I might be neurally attached to a keyboard in another country. But even in that case it's possible to estimate the time delay between my decision on pressing a keyboard and the key's being pressed, which gives us a sense of locality. These time delays are still available without such an odd example in our usual actions.

This might lead one to ask in what part of the brain the decisions are made. Which of course might entail an objection like "this isn't physics nor philosophy, but neuroscience"

 

If someone wants to have a clear picture of the whole universe, that picture should necessarily contain mind(or brain).As long as wave function reduction upon facing with an observer(this terminology is rough) isn't totally resolved the observer's problem stays as an issue in physics.

 

Snowflake,

 

I like your direction here. Am not myself concerned with whether it is philosophy or neuroscience, or physics we are talking. The more the better actually. Time delay is crucial, in my estimation to understanding this whole picture. What is quite remarkable is the fact that your now and my now, and the now of everybody "currently" on the planet, is the same now. That is, your yesterday is mine as well. As is your tommorrow. We can forgive a few seconds here and there as we could be separated by a maximum of the time it takes light to travel from you to me, and we are rarely going to be more than the diameter of the Earth from each other.

 

On the other hand, trying to figure out the timing of stuff very close to us, is problematic. Because we are working with the time it takes light to travel a meter, or a nanometer, or the distance between two neutrons. Here the nows are passing by, faster than our neural nets can follow, and we can't decide easily, what observer viewpoint to stick with, nor how exactly to model the activity in our heads.

 

As is there an issue with stuff very far away, where light, usually considered near instantaneous, takes minutes and hours and days and years and millions of years, to get from one now to the next. Though we can think of things very far away as happening now, the photons don't get here soon enough for us to "get the feedback" to verify our notion. Which leaves us with some multiple images of the universe. That which we see, now. And that which we will see much later.

 

Not unlikey that some of the problems science has, matching stuff that is happening on scales very smaller and very larger than human type timing, say three seconds or so being our "now" window, are caused by this difficulty in "imagining" the timing involved being a very tiny thing, or being a thing so large, that now can not be reconciled in three seconds.

 

Physiologically, I would imagine that some of the three seconds of now, are so, because it takes some time to notice something, match it up with what has been noticed before, and put together the plan of motor neuron firing that will cause the responses that will set up the next noticing.

 

Little tiny observers, don't have all this complicated stimulus-response architecture to wade through, they have already responded by the time we know they were stimulated, and moved on to observe the next thousand or million things...and we are still figuring out what we just observed, putting ourselves in their shoes, 10 thousand things ago.

 

So yes, I would say that we are local, but we "miss" much of what happens now, on our time scale, because we are not looking, we miss much of what happens on a small scale, because it happens too fast, and we cannot notice what happens now very far away, because we will be dead, by the time it gets here.

 

Regards, TAR2

Edited April 23, 2012 by tar