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From: mikes@tekecs.UUCP (Michael Sellers)
Newsgroups: talk.religion.misc,talk.origins
Subject: Re: Now wait a minute... (was Re: Who can know?)
Message-ID: <7666@tekecs.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 22-Sep-86 02:08:50 EDT
Article-I.D.: tekecs.7666
Posted: Mon Sep 22 02:08:50 1986
Date-Received: Sun, 28-Sep-86 23:57:16 EDT
Organization: Tektronix, Wilsonville OR
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Xref: linus talk.religion.misc:219 talk.origins:97

> In article <7657@tekecs.UUCP> mikes@tekecs.UUCP (Michael Sellers) writes:
> 
>>>You mistake what recent expirements have shown.  They have shown that,
>>>not only can *we* never know, but *noone* can ever know, because the
>>>information *ISN'T* *THERE* *TO* *BE* *KNOWN* [Wayne Throop].
> 
>>I'd really like to see a cogent defense of this last statement (I don't think
>>it can be done).  How can we say that certain information about quantum
>>mechanical systems, for a given observer with perceptual abilities far 
>>different (better) than our own, is simply unknowable.
> 
>     Mike, it seems to me you did not read what Wayne said carefully enough.
> What he said was that (according to our current understanding) the infor-
> mation cannot be measured because it doesn't exist. Even God cannot "see"
> what path an electron takes if it doesn't in fact take a path, nor know
> simultaneously its position and momentum if these do not simultaneously
> exist. If you are asking "How do we *know* this picture of reality is the
> correct one?", then this is a general problem in epistemology and the 
> philosophy of science with no more particular reference to this problem
> than to evolution (which I find you defending in the next article).
> 
> ucbvax!brahms!gsmith    Gene Ward Smith/UCB Math Dept/Berkeley CA 94720

I don't *think* I read Wayne wrong.  He seems pretty clear in the quoted
segment above, where he says that various pieces of information [about
quantum mechanical systems, I believe] are Unknowable (capital "U") since
they cannot be apprehended by us or anyone else.  Okay so far?  In his
view (Wayne, where are you?  I'm insecure when speaking for others),
there are some aspects of these systems about which information is not
merely beyond our sensory and instrument capacity, it simply is not 
there at all.  Now, I will agree that *IF* it were true that, for example,
a particle's position and momentum were existentially mutally exclusive,
then God nor anyone else could know them simultaneously.  This (the IF
part) is what I believe Wayne to be asserting.  What I want to see is a
defense of this assertion, since I maintain that such limitations are
either based on our own instrument resolution or that we could not tell
for sure if they were or not; basically, I don't think you can say if
a currently unknowable thing is only unknowable to us or is simply and
totally Unknowable to anyone anywhere with any abilities.  No experimental
data that I know of can say for sure if intra-nuclear uncertainty is
part of the actual thing, part of the instrument's shortcomings, or part
of the model that we use to describe it.  These are all three separate
conditions that, especially when talking about highly speculative and
conceptualized systems such as quantum physics, are easily and often
blurred.
  I wasn't meaning to take on all of epistemology either, Gene.  We'll
save that for another day :-).
-- 

		Mike Sellers
	UUCP: {...your spinal column here...}!tektronix!tekecs!mikes


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