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"Quantum Darwinism?"

Nex

Forum Turnip
Nex
Joined
Oct 9, 2004
Messages
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Apologies if this has been posted before, I ran a search and did not turn anything up, but I admit I'm tired and subsequently lazy. :D

This sounds like utter and complete bunk, but there was an article on Nature.com called "Natural selection acts on the quantum world" written by physicist Philip Ball.

http://www.nature.com/news/2004/041220/pf/041220-12_pf.html

Excerpted from the article:
A team of physicists has proved a theorem that explains how our objective, common reality emerges from the subtle and sensitive quantum world.

If, as quantum mechanics says, observing the world tends to change it, how is it that we can agree on anything at all? Why doesn't each person leave a slightly different version of the world for the next person to find?

Because, say the researchers, certain special states of a system are promoted above others by a quantum form of natural selection, which they call quantum darwinism. Information about these states proliferates and gets imprinted on the environment. So observers coming along and looking at the environment in order to get a picture of the world tend to see the same 'preferred' states. [...]
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Click the link for the rest.

Now, I may be grossly misunderstanding this article, and if I am please tell me, but doesn't it (at least initially) sound like newage-sewage?
 
Operating under the assumption that the above article is grossly incorrect (I will willingly devour any of the corvids residing outside upon my roof if otherwise proves to be true), I humbly suggest that the author has put entirely too little effort into properly dressing up their vacuous idea.

According to the universally aknowledged masters of sucessful bunk-propogation, the best way to get nonsense spread is to subcontextualize the neonarrativists with rubiconistic, esentialist and ultimately multidialectic Foucaultist verbage to establish an empowered deconstruction of traditional subnarrative viewpoints, i.e., add lots of big buzzwords that effectively obfuscate the utter meaninglessness of the piece.

This is a good primer
 
I think that it must be true that all physical laws and properties and systems must continually evolve to exist.

Take a system be it and organization like IBM or an electron, they are continually in a state of flux continually having to deal with their environment and if they are to survive then they must be prepared to change. Both and IBM and an electron are like standing waves and perhaps they are both under pressure from Darwinian forces.
 
As far as I can tell this is either a neat physics development which has been slathered with a horrible evolution metaphor, or an unremarkable physics development that has be slathered with a horrible metaphor. As a person who doesn't know QM, it sounds like they rigorously proved that QM will display classical behavior on large scales, which everyone already expected anyway.
 
I agree with Neutrino. The excrementalization of alterity as the site/sight of homelessness, of utter outsideness and unsubiatable dispossession figures in Hegel's metanarrational conception of Enlightenment modernity as the teleological process of totalization leading to absolute knowing.

Furthermore, we can clearly see that there is no bi-univocal correspondence between linear signifying links or archi-writing, depending on the author, and this multireferential, multidimensional machinic catalysis. The symmetry of scale, the transversality: all these dimensions remove us from the logic of the excluded middle and reinforce us in our dismissal of the ontological binarism we criticised previously.

~~ Paul

P.S.: I did not make this crud up.
 
Wojciech Zurek is actually a well-known and respected theoretician in quantum theory. He knows what he's talking about, I'd expect. :)

I have only a vague idea what he's talking about, however. :D
 
Nex said:
Apologies if this has been posted before, I ran a search and did not turn anything up, but I admit I'm tired and subsequently lazy. :D

Now, I may be grossly misunderstanding this article, and if I am please tell me, but doesn't it (at least initially) sound like newage-sewage?
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We've been doing something quite like that over on R & P.

Mechanism Behind Intelligent Design Uncovered?

If you want to read someone trash-talking this sort of nonsense, I think that I do it quite well.
 
DuckTapeFileMan said:
I think that it must be true that all physical laws and properties and systems must continually evolve to exist.

Take a system be it and organization like IBM or an electron, they are continually in a state of flux continually having to deal with their environment and if they are to survive then they must be prepared to change. Both and IBM and an electron are like standing waves and perhaps they are both under pressure from Darwinian forces.
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NO.

For one thing, electrons do not reproduce. Nor do they vary.
 
I know that they don't reproduce but then nether does IBM. :D

What makes you think that they don't vary? Have you got some sort of hyper powerful microscope that no one else knows about?

A hurricane is an entity, it doesn't reproduce, it does vary and it does exist, for a while.

I am just suggestion that an electron is like a hurricane or the red spot on Jupiter.
 
DuckTapeFileMan said:
What makes you think that they don't vary? Have you got some sort of hyper powerful microscope that no one else knows about?
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No, I have not.

But you, my friend, have the burden of proof.
 
Dr Adequate said:
No, I have not.

But you, my friend, have the burden of proof.
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I wasn't trying to prove anything, I was mearly speculating in an area of sciense where there was uncertainty.

I don't think that it is unreasonable to speculate that an electron is a system in flux under certain pressures. Darwinian pressures maybe just some of them.
 
DuckTapeFileMan said:
I wasn't trying to prove anything, I was mearly speculating in an area of sciense where there was uncertainty.

I don't think that it is unreasonable to speculate that an electron is a system in flux under certain pressures. Darwinian pressures maybe just some of them.
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"Darwinian" pressure requires reproduction.

You can't just say "well it might be like that, you haven't proven it's not like that" and then expect us to believe you.
 
Alkatran said:
"Darwinian" pressure requires reproduction.

You can't just say "well it might be like that, you haven't proven it's not like that" and then expect us to believe you.
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well? what is wrong with quantum reproduction?
There may be ways to encode things, the equivalent of DNA, at the quantum level. Then you would have lots of exotic particles, a biodiversity where some survive and some do not. I wouldn't think that these things would have brains more like plants.
 
DuckTapeFileMan said:
I know that they don't reproduce but then nether does IBM. :D

What makes you think that they don't vary?
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Our current theories suggest that the properties of electrons (and similar particle-based phenomena) are completely described by a few discrete attributes.

For example, the charge on an electron is -1. Not -1.0001 or -0.9999, but -1. Furthermore, charge comes in this sort of discrete packets (that's the "quantum" in quantum theory), so there's no possibility of variation in this way.

So as to what makes me think that electrons don't vary -- well, basically, every experiment performed in particle physics since about 1900 and the explanation of the photoelectric effect.
 
DuckTapeFileMan said:
well? what is wrong with quantum reproduction?
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Quantum reproduction reproduces things identically.

Without variation, there is no way for natural selection to apply "pressure."

Without the pressure of natural selection, there's no way that Darwinian evolution would work.


There may be ways to encode things, the equivalent of DNA, at the quantum level.
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No, there aren't. Or, at least, not in any way that's either supported by any experimental findings or that is at all compatible with the experimental evidence we have collected. Essentially, you're throwing more than a century of experimental physics out the window when you suggest this.
 
new drkitten said:

No, there aren't. Or, at least, not in any way that's either supported by any experimental findings or that is at all compatible with the experimental evidence we have collected. Essentially, you're throwing more than a century of experimental physics out the window when you suggest this.
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well maybe there is a sub-quantum level even sub-string.
 
DuckTapeFileMan said:
well maybe there is a sub-quantum level even sub-string.
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Or maybe you're just making (rule 8) up.

Perhaps electrons are really tiny little unicorns, and protons are slightly larger fairies that herd them.

The problem with your proposed "sub-quantum level," aside from the fact that it's almost purely an argument from ignorance, is that we would need to find a method by which the discrete quantum-scale effects we have carefully measured, observed, and catalogued for over a century can somehow arise from a presumptively continuous "sub-quantum" level. Why don't microvariations at the underlying level cause microvariations in quantum-level properties?

More directly, though, even if there were the underlying continuous level you propose, there is still no possibility for "evolution" of electrons, &c, because there is no variation at the quantum level. Quantum theory does not exists as a purely theoretical construction -- it exists largely because it explains the observed behavior of quantum-scale events and objects well, and part of the observed behavior of these events and objects is that they don't vary in their properties. So if your hypothesized "sub-quantum" level existed, then either it would have testable consequences about variations in behavior of quantum-scale objects (and thus, quantum theory as we know it would not have the predictive power it has), or else it would not have any behavioral consequences, and "evolution" of electrons would still be impossible.

Since QM does seem to have extremely good predictive power, I feel confident that there isn't an underlying "sub-quantum" source of variation that has somehow gone unseen all these years. Too many people have looked for it and failed to find it.
 
Why don't microvariations at the underlying level cause microvariations in quantum-level properties?
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maybe certain properties only emerge when certain critical limits are reached. There maybe variants at the sub-quatum levels but properties at the quantum level maybe determined by these limits that don't vary.
 
an example of this in the macro world would be- a 7foot bridge followed by a 6foot wall. An someone sitting and looking at the wall would think that the world only had vehicles between 6 and 7 foot high in it. If you see what I mean.
 
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