Well William, you kind of have that a little confused. You are talking about Einstein's cat; one of Einstein's arguments against Quantum Mechanics. The issue was not that one's "anticipation" had anything to do with the result but rather that, from the perspective of Quantum Mechanics, the box was occupied by both a dead cat and a live cat (same cat) until you looked. (The cat was killed by a chain of events linked to a radioactive decay of some isotope which, by Quantum Mechanics, created a mixed wave function until the result was "measured".) The real fact, that people tend to overlook, is that there is someing in the box when you are not looking is an assumption.

There is nothing there to suggest that the universe is aware of anything. It is entirely consistent with my position that the past is what you know and the future is what you don't know. If the whole thing is absolute random chance, then it must obey the rules I deduce in my paper "The Foundations of Physical Reality" and those rules include most all of physics. In fact, they imply that the only truth one can speak of consists of the consequences of Quantum Mechanics. All else is pure unsupported hypothesis.

Causes are a construct of the human mind used to explain our experiences. All that is really required to explain our experiences is that the future must be very very similar to the past (only rarely will the future actually contradict an event seen in the past and, when it does it actually only contradicts our interpretation of that past event). Note that the past consists of a lot more information than the future can possibly produce. It's all chance; you just have to know how to properly calculate the consequences of chance.

The only proper definition of probability is that it is a method of representing your expectations on a numerical scale. And you will have no faith in those expectations unless they are consistent with what you know (the past!). It follows logically that your expectations must obey the rules which I lay out in that paper.

Have fun -- Dick

• Thankyou, Dick - thewitt - January 29, 2004 - 19:19 UTC
• It's Schroedinger's Cat - secretary - February 25, 2004 - 19:14 UTC