This is one of those books that I can read to my wife at bedtime and she will certainly fall asleep ... although I'd argue that since the theme of this book is that "reality is relationships" .... not matter, not quarks, gluons, cats in boxes with poison, or many worlds, but RELATIONSHIPS, it ought to be very interesting to women ... if either we or they knew what a woman is.
To get a feeling for Rovelli's perspective, imagine of a blue bowling ball that's 10 in. across and weighs 25 lbs. We think those properties — the ball's color, weight and size — are real in and of themselves. If the bowling ball were the only thing in the whole universe, it would still be blue, 10 in. across and weigh 25 lbs. But the lesson Rovelli wants us to learn is that nothing has any properties at all until it interacts with something else. And between those interactions there are no properties at all. What quantum mechanics is teaching us, Rovelli says, is that reality is a vast net of interactions where there are no things, only relationships. "This is the radical leap," he writes, that "... everything exists solely in the way it affects something else."
As a Christian this is quite appealing. Why is God three persons and one person at the same time? Relationship. What makes me spiritually real? My relationship to Christ.
If you do go and read the book, you need to understand that the ψ symbol means "wave function".In naming his wave, Schrödinger uses the Greek letter psi: ψ. The quantity ψ is also called the “wave function.”18 His fabulous calculation seems to show clearly that the microscopic world is not made up of particles: it is made up of ψ waves. Around the nuclei of atoms there are not orbiting specks of matter but the continuous undulation of Schrödinger’s waves, like the waves that ruffle the surface of a small lake as the wind blows.
My definition of wave function is likely totally wrong, but hopefully like the "where are we"? With the answer : "we're in a plane". So the wave function is all the places "something" (usually an electron) might be, and even how fast it might be going. If we measure one of those aspects, the function collapses.
QBism abandons a realistic image of the world, beyond what we can see or measure. The theory gives us the probability that we will see something, and this is all that it is legitimate to say. It is not legitimate to say anything about the cat or the photon when we are not actually observing them.In the preceding, "the cat" is Schrodinger's cat that in one interpretation of quantum theory is alive and dead at the same time.
The weakness of QBism, in my opinion—and this is the turning point in this whole discussion—is that QBism anchors reality to a subject of knowledge, an “I” that knows, as if it stood outside nature. Instead of seeing the observer as a part of the world, QBism sees the world reflected in the observer. In so doing, it leaves behind naive materialism but ends up falling into an implicit form of idealism. The crucial point that QBism disregards, I believe, is that the observer himself can be observed. We have no reason to doubt that every real observer is himself described by quantum theory.
There are many books on idealism. Plato is at least one of the originators ... it being the thought that ideas are really all that are "really real" what we "see" is just a projection of a "perfect form" ... our existence, if you will, is "through a lens darkly".
On 188, we get down to a bit of the "brass tacks" for apparently sentient beings wondering about "Where am I going"?
Objections to the possibility of understanding our mental life in terms of known natural laws, on closer inspection, come down to a generic repetition of “It seems implausible to me,” based on intuitions without supporting arguments.*131 Unless it is the sad hope of being constituted by some vaporous supernatural substance that remains alive after death: a prospect that, apart from being utterly implausible, strikes me as ghastly
Ergo, we don't have any real answers to consciousness, but it MUST be some kind of materialistic, quantum, relational "something" ... that is the only answer that "reasonable people" (a mass of poorly understood quantum relations) can accept! Anything else is "ghastly" (in scientific terms), and we certainly can't have THAT!
If this book sells very well, I'd guess the list of those who read it is much smaller than those who buy it. The list of those that understand it, likely borders on absolute zero ... I don't claim to understand it, but I don't understand that much of Shakespeare either, but I see having tried and failed as superior to never having tried!
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