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Jessica B's picture

Schrodinger's cat and the emergence of rules

This is a big of a tangent, but thinking about the emergence of rules and how no one rule is better than another got me thinking about Schrodinger's cat. I'm sure I have an incomplete understanding of this thought experiment, but my understanding of it is that it basically states that any observation of a probabilistic state is going to fix the state one way or another and therefore alter it. The cat is either dead or alive before you look at it. Looking at it fixes it as dead or alive and therefore changes its state.

This has to do with the idea, which some people have been stating, that when we form these rules about existence, we are in effect fixing our understanding of existence a certain way. In a way, as we observe the world, we are changing it to conform with our current understanding of how things work. An interesting result of this could be that the idea of emergence could literally change the world. What I mean is that since it is so different from the mathematical, rules-based idea of the world's functioning that we subscribe to now, changing our thinking patterns to accept emergence could change how we view the world in general and, in effect, change the world.

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