There's a neat paradox which says that if you try to kill yourself in a quantum experiment, you can't do it. If you did you wouldn't be able to observe the result of the experiment. So it would never happen.

Your colleagues meanwhile can see a quantum suicide note, and possibly a dead body.

http://www.watchingyou.com/woowoo.html

There are 41 statements to the Woo Woo credo, many of which demonstrate that it is a term coming out of Usenet flamewars--or somesuch.  To understand if a person is a woo woo, one would have to run their comments via the list--and if they matched up, you can then call them "woo woos" and start an argument--it's an argumentative term, with some humour but clearly aimed at a certain Usenet type of character (the kind who reports you to the sys admin etc.)  The list does have some enjoyable moments.  I recommend numbers 4, 8, 9, 12, 22...wow, 22!  But I don't recommend using it as shorthand because it is clearly meant to be derogatory.


Don't fight forces, use them R. Buckminster Fuller.

It doesn't try to define what really happens, it doesn't assume that wave functions are 'real' or even that they evolve. All it says is that if you measure a system at time t, the probabilities of the different outcomes are the real part of etc.

The fact that states can be in various baroque non-local superpositions before the interaction doesn't change this. The probabilities will still be consistent and computable.

Migeru:

What none of them address is the (not quantum-mechanical but probabilistic) problem of actuality (which of the actual histories is realised), which is basically the (probabilistic, not quantum mechanical) problem of assigning a probability to a single event.

"It's random within probabilistic constraints" seems to be all that QM can tell you.

There may be a theory which defines the ontology in more detail. But QM doesn't seem to be it.

The only difference between an observer and a non-observer is that the observer is consciously aware of a measured value. But that doesn't define the value.

What's annoying about QM is that it tries to conflate different issues. There's a difference between the physical interaction needed to make a measurement and the mental process of experiencing the measurement. There's also non-locality, which supposedly makes everything very spooky and has somehow - for some reason which has never been properly explained, because it's not really needed - been linked to mental experience, even though it's completely distinct.

Consciousness
Micro to macro amplification ('measurement')
Non-locality etc
'It's all one' woo woo

are all different. I'll take the middle two. I won't accept the other two until someone does an experiment in which two observers measure two contradictory observables from the same quantum system at the same time.

Migeru:

Remember Bohr's "no phenomenon is a phenomenon unless it is an observed phenomenon".

That's almost makes sense, but doesn't, because in the limit it says that nothing in the universe exists unless it's observed. Which seems unlikely - otherwise you're back to solipsism again, with every possible wave function in the entire history of the universe converging on your viewpoint.