Reconciling Schrödinger's Cat with the Principle of Explosion

I am going to answer this. My answer to you is also useful in my discussion with Fresco (which is interesting to me).

You don't understand Quantum Mechanics. That is the first problem. To truly understand this you would first have to understand differential calculus... which would take you a few years to master. What you think you know about what Quantum Mechanics is wrong. Anyone who has studied the subject will tell you this, unfortunately without you taking a few years to study it yourself you are going to have to take my word for it.'

There is no contradiction in the mathematics or the science of Quantum Mechanics. I don't know what you mean by the contradiction, but Quantum mechanics is a set of mathematical principles that are completely consistent (in any mathematical set) and more importantly explain the experiments that we run and the things we observe in how subatomic particles work.

That is how science works. We develop systems of mathematical models. Then we test them repeatedly with experiments and observations. If the models can pass the tests in a repeatable way... they are accepted.

Your statement that "all things are possible" is nonsense in a scientific sense. It is a statement with no meaning that can't be tested. I am not sure if it is nonsense in a philosophical sense (I will set the philosophers opine on that).

You say that as if my "realm of enquiry" wasn't clear enough. I think the "realm of enquiry" here, or even the "realms of enquiry" here, would at least be suggested by the provided and generated context in this discussion.

I don't believe my questions are that complex. Every proposition always is true or false. It's that simple. The proposition "Schrödinger's Cat implies all propositions are true" always is true or false.

If you won't give a satisfactory answer, I hope somebody else will. Through the course of this discussion so far, I have formed my own opinion as to the answer.

Following on from my last post. Fresco, you didn't really answer the question I am spending time thinking about.

I am defining scientific truth as the truth found by science. It is mathematically consistent, testable and repeatable. I think that this is a good definition in itself. Obviously (as Kuhn points out) there are many important questions that are not mathematically testable. I don't have a problem with this. Science answers scientific questions authoritatively. The other questions are answered by other fields.

And of course, science depends on a specific set of human beings that we refer to as "scientists". As human beings they rely on organic brains, human senses and the resources available on our little rock in space. This also doesn't bother me. Science is still a field that is mathematically consistent and testable... and it has also been uniquely effective at advancing and bettering human life.

I think what you are talking about is further on the philosophical level than what I see as the boundary between science and other fields.

I guess I am interested in whether my segregation of science (unique as mathematical and testable across cultures). and other sources of human truth really holds water.

Then why are I and possibly many others being led to believe that Schrödinger's Cat can be simultaneously alive and dead? That state of being simultaneously alive and dead seems to be a contradiction. The third sentence of the Wikipedia entry for Schrödinger's Cat, located at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schr%C3%B6dinger%27s_cat, asserts, supposedly along with its seven citations, that Schrödinger's Cat can be simultaneously alive and dead. If Schrödinger's Cat is simultaneously alive and dead, then that's a contradiction.

The problem is in the word "seems". Just because something seems to be a contradiction, doesn't make it a contradiction. It likely seems that way because you don't understand it. Although, Quantum mechanics are so counter-intuitive that they are difficult to accept even by people who understand it. Counter-intuitive is not the same as contradictory.

The math is quite non-contradictory; it starts when a solution to Schrodinger's Equation...



From this Physicists have developed a shorthand notation to describe the superposition of states that stems from this equation. There is no mathematical contradiction. We could discuss this further if you take a class on differential equations.

The proposition "Schrödinger's Cat is alive and dead at the same time" is a contradiction. No Quantum Mechanics is needed to determine that.

I believe the mental experiment called "Schrödinger's Cat" was meant to prove that such an interpretation of QM was self-contradictory, and thus impossible.

As an aside, I always thought of the mental experiment itself as fundamentally flawed, because the cat himself is an observer of his own fate... So my way of proving the idea that wave functions react to being observed by human beings would be to ask: "Why give humans a central place in the universe as the only type of observers whom the wave functions react to? That's pre-Darwin, even pre-Copernic thought, religious gibberish. The universe doesn't revolve around us. Physically speaking, humans are not fundamentally different from cats. They both scan their environment to interact with it. Even bacterias do some observing."

Should read:

I agree that the experiment known as Schrödinger's Cat was intended to prove a contradiction in an interpretation of Quantum Mechanics. But the interpretation the experiment was intended to disprove remains one of the most popular. So, it is a popular belief that a contradiction exists in the real world. Thus, through the Principle of Explosion, it should be a popular belief that all propositions are true.

It's also a popular belief amongst Christian children that Santa Claus exists.

The issue as I was explained it during my studies 30 yrs ago is: When, how and why would a non-local probabilistic wave function "collapse" into a local particle? I don't think there's any consensus on the answer yet.

That's only an approximation, one required by some types of formal logics. In other words, it is only true in some "machine languages" (formal mathematical languages or logics). In human languages, some propositions are meaningless and thus neither true nor false. And more importantly, all real-life, human language propositions are ambiguous to a degree. (polysemy)

The map is not the territory. There's always a difference between a model and the thing being modeled. Formal logic is an approximation of intuitive human logic. Likewise, QM is not equal to reality. It is only a model of reality, that seems to work well so far.

You are unlikely to get a 'satisfactory answer', if you cannot commune with the idea that observer and observed are inextricable (whether in terms of 'collapsing wavefronts' or in general 'meditational' terms). That point involves such secondary issues like ... all we call 'observation' involves 'verbalization'(ref Maturana) and that in turn involves what we call 'thinking' via the selective filter of a socially acquired language (ref Whorf). That shift of philosophical focus (called Die Kehre), from epistemology to language as the basis of 'thought', even led in turn to moves like an attempt to proscribe the verb 'to be' as in statements like 'X is the case', which is the essence of 'logical propositions'.

All the above is further background to Kuhn's 'paradigms', with which you have already expressed dissatisfaction. (I used the word 'realms' instead of 'paradigms' when talking to browser since he would be unlikely to be familiar with Kuhn).


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I'm skeptical of that. I'm unsure of any legitimate examples. The idea that every proposition always is true or false seems reasonable.

If Quantum Mechanics has been used to soundly derive the result that all propositions are true, then the following three propositions are true.

1. It should be considered whether Quantum Mechanics is worth pursuing anymore.
2. All there is to possibly prove has been soundly proved.
3. To continue further with Quantum Mechanics is futile.

"Colorless green ideas sleep furiously" is a sentence composed by Noam Chomsky in his 1957 book Syntactic Structures as an example of a sentence that is grammatically correct, but semantically nonsensical.

It's easy to cook up other examples: "The stony light of Thursday dreams of my quantic brother." "A French planet calls for childlike particles." "The optical president of the sea would seem sweet."

Of course ! The very concept of poetry is enmeshed with semantic ambiguity. And as Niels Bohr suggested 'Ordinary language applied to Quantum Theory functions poetically' (paraphrase).

But I suspect what we have here is 'argument for argument's sake'. No counter arguments are presented - only denials or statements of disbelief.

You are using the term "at the same time" to describe a superposition of wave states. You misunderstand and you misstate the basic mathematics of the thought experiment.

Further to my Bohr citation above you might also like to ponder...

This actually makes me laugh.

You wrote this on a digital computer that uses semiconductors (unless you have a computer the size of a house somehow connected to the modern internet). And you are reading this message which has been sent through several switches with maybe fiber-optics along the way.

The technology you are using right now depends heavily on Quantum Mechanics, and the people who developed the semiconductors your computer relies on studied Quantum Mechanics for years and used Quantum Mechanics to invent the necessary parts to build such a computer and the internet it connects to.

No study of Quantum Mechanics, no computer, no internet and this very conversation would never happen. The very fact that you are able to post this message shows that it is nonsense.

I find that ironically amusing.

None of the four examples you provided are legitimate.

The sentences, if they're even worthy of that categorization, are not propositions. By the definition of proposition on page 1 of Kenneth H. Rosen's 2007 Discrete Mathematics and Its Applications, Sixth Edition, "a sentence is true or false, and not both" is necessary for "the sentence is a proposition." Rosen makes clear that some sentences are not propositions. I agree with him on that point, and the examples you've provided suggest you would agree with him on that point as well.

So, if a sentence is neither true nor false, then it is not a proposition.

We absolutely know the "when" and the "how". We can, and do, set up experiments that make wave collapse happen. A scientist can set up an experiment and correctly predict the result with precision. And we can build machines that rely on this behavior. The results are consistent and clear.

It is the philosophical meaning that evades "consensus". But philosophical meaning is not part of science. Science is about being able to build models that are testable and can be used to make predictions.