“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them” — William Morris


Tuesday, July 31, 2012

Quanta versus Correlationism

There's nothing I like better than a bowl of oatmeal and golden syrup, and a conversation with Graham about entanglement. As he points out it's often wheeled out to induce paroxysms of joy in correlationists and idealists.

But...

Here's a clincher I just thought up:

Entanglement doesn't respect distance. You can entangle photons on board a satellite and on earth (Zeilinger) and theoretically it still works on the other side of the galaxy.

Mix some arche fossil stuff in here. Even Brassier on Einstein--there are things outside the light cone (Minkowski) that we can never ever specify even though they are real. Stir.

Theoretically, photons can be entangled way way far away, so far away that you the observer could never know what they were both doing.

Watch the correlationist face go ashen...


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