Peter,
I must admit that I have a rather hard time following many of your statements. For example in your last post, you stated that "I identify there are four possible reasons for observables to vary, not just the 3 you gave. " But I don't know what "3 you gave" refers to; I know that in an earlier post I noted that "Bell's Theorem is concerned with three things:", but I don't consider them to be "possible reasons for observables to vary", so I'm not sure what you are referring to.
I have an even greater problem, following your essay. You present a large number of concepts, in a very terse style, that amounts to little more than noting its existence, then giving a reference; I cannot REALLY understand what you are saying, without reading all the references, which I am disinclined to do.
But from what I do understand, from your essay, leads me to believe that our views are not nearly as similar as you seem to think. For example:
You, like most physicists, talk about wave-functions and qubits, as though they exist, outside of the minds that contemplate their existence. I dispute that claim.
You talk about "The Excluded Middle" and that "No two entities are absolutely identical at any instant." But, my claim is that in order to maximize the amount of information recovered from an observation, it is IMPERATIVE that some entities be treated as if they ARE identical, even when they are not; if there is a "middle", it MUST be excluded.
Here is the problem: any observation made within a finite time, bandwidth and signal-to-noise ratio, has a finite amount of recoverable information. Consequently, ANY attempt to recover "undesirable" information, must NECESSARILY reduce the amount of "desired" information that can be recovered. Hence, if information has been encoded into an observable as a set of discrete states, then any attempt to recover information in the "middle", between those states, will degrade one's ability to recover the encoded states. In other words, the "states" must be treated as "symbols", rather than "measurements". There is no "middle" between O and Q, You MUST pick one or the other, even if noise and/or distortion causes them to appear indistinguishable.
Hence, if (an assumption) spin-up/spin-down actually corresponds to a "message" containing only one bit of information, then it must be treated as a bit, even if observations seem to appear otherwise.
If you "flip" a coin, then you MUST treat it as a two-state symbol, devoid of any ACTUALLY OBSERVED thickness, metallic composition, areal extent, mass variation, dents and wear etc.
You stated that:
"Detection is then defined as the physical interaction 'collapsing' (the wave-function) which state changed instantly."
But my claim is that there is nothing to collapse. Detection is nothing more than "counting" the received particles. Consider the Fourier Transform specifying the wave-function:
[math]\psi(x) = \int_{-\infty}^\infty\phi(k)e^{ikx}dk[/math]
The complex exponential is just a "tuning" operation, and the integral is just a "filtering" operation. So the mathematical description of the so-called wave-function, is in fact, nothing more than a description of a tuned filter-bank. Computing its absolute square, simply yields the amount of the "stuff" "detected" within each filter. IF the "stuff" being detected are particles (wavelets), then the operation simply describes a filter-bank of particle counters. That is why the magnitude of the wave-function corresponds to probability of detection; the Fourier Transform DOES NOT describe some nebulous "WAVE_FUNCTION", it describes a concrete, physical filter-bank of particle counters - In effect, that is what a Fourier transform is.
There is no "wave-function", the math describes no wave-function! It describes a set of particle counters! That's why it works! The whole concept of a "Wave-function" is just a mis-interpretation of what it means to compute the absolute-square of a Fourier Transform.
One does not need a new theory, in order to exorcise all the weird, mysterious interpretations from QM. One need only adopt a common-sense interpretation of what the math actually MEANS.
Rob McEachern
