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Originally Posted by Len Moran
I think what you are saying is that the ultimate reality of the world and our place in it is an inseparable whole.
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Yes, and that is something I do expect there is consensus on.
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But this separation should not be thought of as a real separation of observer and observed, it does not expose that part of nature which may be imagined as existing independently of our involvement, it is rather a means of providing a consistent repeatable map of nature that works for anyone who may choose to use that map.
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Well said.
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It still seems to me that at the quantum level, our finger prints become much more pronounced - the spin of a particle clearly depends on how we set up the detector, but I suppose you could say that in the classical world the attributes of a bullet having a trajectory are fundamentally linked to our collective perceptions of such concepts as time and space.
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I would indeed say that, as I see it all as a difference in degree of
familiarity, moreso than in degree of
objectivity. I admit that our instruments have a greater impact on a quantum system, but we can take that into account-- either way we decided what experiment to set up before we "removed ourselves" from the apparatus.
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But I take your point that fundamentally, at the quantum and classical level, in order to do science, we have to stand back and apply an objective measurement methodology and accept that that is the best we can ever do regardless of how much we are entwined with the experiment at a very fundamental level.
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Right, that's the crux of it. We participate in how the study gets done, even if we do not participate in the phenomena we are studying in a more direct way. That's more or less the difference between measuring a trajectory and writing a poem about it.
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But put like this, it becomes clear that science is not in the business of discovering nature as she really is, it is in the business of discovering in an objective way nature and us as an entwined entity.
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Right, I think of it as a "projection" of nature.
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I'm still pondering over objectivity and mathematics, nothing I have said adds to that discussion, but I think I am a little clearer about what objectivity means within the context of representing the physical world.
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See where it takes you. These are all just ideas, of course.