I was watching the stream of a conference on quantuum mechanics to see if I could gleam some interesting patterns, something that caught my attention is “QBism”, or: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_Bayesianism
So QBism being one of the various models that are actively being considered as plausible explanations for the quantuum mechanics types of phenomena. “Ugliness” in Science measures the amount of unsettling change and perturbations a theory brings to the field. The ideal being “elegant complexity”, which I assume is a quality of god. Summed up in the Occam’s Razor principle, that wants the most amount of phenomenons explained by the smallest amounts of formulas.
In this case, while the technicalities escape me, it seems to me a reformulation of Von Foerster’s “constructivism” mixed with the most magical ideas revolving around the “collaborative universe” crackpot theory.
Since this particular theory seems limited to explain quantuum paradoxes then its confirmation might have a milder impact on “reality”, but the question is always the same: how can my “belief” actually affect the probabilistic outcome? How can the model itself transition from the unobservable magical “small”, to actual concrete and observable reality?
But in this case the interesting part is about fitting the problem into another. From an article I found, some of the suggestive quotes:
Danish physicist Niels Bohr, insisted in a 1929 essay that the purpose of science was not to reveal “the real essence of the phenomena” but only to find “relations between the manifold aspects of our experience”.
—
People argue to this day about whether wavefunctions are real entities, like stones or ripples on a pond, or mathematical abstractions that help us to organize our thinking, like the calculus of probabilities.Fuchs and Schack adopt the latter view. They take a wavefunction to be associated with a physical system by an agent — me, for example, based on my past experience. I use the wavefunction, following rules laid down by quantum mechanics, to calculate the likelihood of what I might experience next, should I choose to probe further. Depending on what I then perceive, I can update the wavefunction on the basis of that experience, allowing me to better assess my subsequent expectations.
—
As another Viennese investigator even more famous than Schrödinger — Sigmund Freud — put it in 1927: “The problem of a world constitution that takes no account of the mental apparatus by which we perceive it is an empty abstraction.”
The actual papers sound even uglier:
QBism personalizes the famous dictum of Asher Peres. The outcome of an experiment is the experience it elicits in an agent. If an agent experiences no outcome, then for that agent there is no outcome. Experiments are not floating in the void, independent of human agency. They are actions taken by an agent to elicit an outcome. And an outcome does not become an outcome until it is experienced by the agent. That experience is the outcome.
