Science Generates Limit Paradoxes

Dietrich, Eric; Fields, Chris

doi:10.1007/s10516-015-9267-x

Cited by 2 publications

(1 citation statement)

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“…The 20th century saw, however, an explosion of criticism of these assumptions that ranged across scientific disciplines. As science requires replicable experiments performed on shareable apparatus and reported on shareable media, this burst of criticism of the assumptions on which these conditions rest indicate that the logic of science itself is at most paraconsistent [117].…”

Section: The Black Box As a Cross-disciplinary Paradigmmentioning

confidence: 99%

Building the Observer into the System: Toward a Realistic Description of Human Interaction with the World

Fields

2016

Systems

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Human beings do not observe the world from the outside, but rather are fully embedded in it. The sciences, however, often give the observer both a "god's eye" perspective and substantial a priori knowledge. Motivated by W. Ross Ashby's statement, "the theory of the Black Box is merely the theory of real objects or systems, when close attention is given to the question, relating object and observer, about what information comes from the object, and how it is obtained" (Introduction to Cybernetics, 1956, p. 110), I develop here an alternate picture of the world as a black box to which the observer is coupled. Within this framework I prove purely-classical analogs of the "no-go" theorems of quantum theory. Focussing on the question of identifying macroscopic objects, such as laboratory apparatus or even other observers, I show that the standard quantum formalism of superposition is required to adequately represent the classical information that an observer can obtain. I relate these results to supporting considerations from evolutionary biology, cognitive and developmental psychology, and artificial intelligence.

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Section: The Black Box As a Cross-disciplinary Paradigmmentioning

confidence: 99%