(October 16, 2014 at 11:36 am)Pickup_shonuff Wrote: It's interesting that the comparison to an understanding of quantum physics in the 1920s was brought up, as Schopenhauer wrote about 80-100 years before them. They were probably influenced by him a great deal, though whatever phenomena in QM Idealists wish to relate to consciousness, while interesting, to my knowledge, is still largely puzzling and misunderstood.
The QM debate was, at the time, exemplified with the thought experiment known as Schrödinger's cat".
The QM system is similar to a cat with two states: dead or alive. In QM, these two states can be the behavior of an entity (say an electron) as a wave or as a particle.
The cat is put in a box with some mechanism that, at a random time, will kill the cat.
Without opening the box and "measuring" the cat, you have no way of knowing if he's dead or alive. So, which is it? Is the cat dead or alive?
From our perspective, the cat is both dead and alive, but the experiment will remove one of the states and leave the other.
For an electron, if you measure it as a particle, it will behave as a particle... if you measure it as a wave, it will behave as a wave, with interference fringes and all... but, until you actually measure it, the electron is a wave and a particle... but is it really?!
It's a mess!
