Probability waves

Vkothii said:
Can you point at a dog and not identify it as "a dog"? Is there a probability you will call it "a horse"? What value is this probability, in numerical and in social terms? Does this probability have a value in psychological terms?
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How does that make probability more actual than numbers?
Vkothii said:
I know what a "metric" is though.
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And yet you didn't realise that planes are not automatically Euclidean. The 2d plane doesn't have a metric automatically assigned to it.
Vkothii said:
know that it can be whatever we say it is, for example, which you don't.
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No, for instance a metric for $$\mathbb{R}^{2}$$ cannot be $$\left( \begin{array}{cc} -1 & 1 \\ 0 & 1\end{array} \right) $$ in ANY basis. Tell me why not.
 
Do you mean "why not mathematically", or "why not logically"?

You realize I just have to invent a new logic, and apply it? This would not be cheating, being an entirely arbitrary, therefore logical encoding to use?
That's what "it can be whatever we say it is" means.

And, again, how are numbers more real than probabilities?
 
What is the probability that I can find >1 possible ways of representing that 2x2 matrix, or the "reals", in math-speak, to get a solution that is logically consistent, though?

Seeing how I'm trying to find out what probability is.

Correction, I'm trying to find out if anyone else understands what it is. So far, there's this theory that probability is a real number; or it's real, and we give it something called "a number".
This appears to hang on what someone thinks a number might actually be.

But the math-dudes want to play games with logic instead, or something.
I think I can say I'm happier with the idea that numbers are abstractions, probabilities are real events.
You can stick with your one about numbers being real, and probabilities are the abstraction, by all means.

Just like I can invent a mathematical representation that proves that the little exercise in math, is actually an exercise in logic,

Or didn't I do that already, by saying there's no reason I can't? So the "exercise" is trivial. And so is my belief that real events determine probable outcomes, numbers don't do anything, because numbers are abstractions.
But you don't have to believe this, or anything else either.

P.S. Here's a logic puzzle for yez: If any real physical thing is in fact, some kind of processor (a rock processes its environment, a drop of water processes any other chemicals that "dissolve" in it, etc), then is a number a process? Do numbers compute anything? What is the probability that two numbers can compute a third?
Is it approximately 1/3? Or 0?
 
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Yes, well.

Obviously, if you stretch the notion of what a number is, and assume a function that generates a value, is a number, then numbers are functional too.
If you accept that numbers are 'ergodic', rather than whatever it is that drives these real-valued functionals to give up a value, surrender it to our grasp.
Things like probabilities, too, must be functional since a probability is a prediction as well as an outcome.

Probability 'functions' like a circuit, with a steady-state response of 'prediction', and a perturbed condition of 'real result'.
But this is because computers run algorithms, after being given lots of other numbers.

Probabilities occur randomly as real events, but don't predict anything.
That's our job.

You just have to ensure you use it mathematically, and imply that the real event is predicted by a mathematical 'measure', a function that computes some value. But the real event still just 'happens', it doesn't need mathematics to do it.
 
Let's see if I can get this one rejected by the "science censors".

The entropy of a partition is closely related to the idea of the minimum amount (of information) that can be known about some evolving system (a heat engine, say), in terms of a very small, or smallest portion of the overall 'interaction space'.

So we have Louiville's eqn. and a description of a distribution of a canonical position and momentum, over a phase space. The idea is to project this model into the space of interactions between fundamental particles like electrons and photons, while ensuring the volume of the space is conserved.
That means probability is fundamentally conserved.

"This is for those advanced thinkers who may (or may not) have thought about what a computer actually is."

You actually seem to think you do know. This must be something that bothers you, since you seem to be prepared to go to the trouble of actively turfing such troublesome ideas away.
 
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There really is only one way to see it.
You have to have a sender and a receiver, for a message to be possible, it doesn't get much simpler.

Real space and time has real things in it, and they move around. You can logically assign an information content to any object and/or movement, it's called a representation.

So everything, in the entire universe that we can see, is real and informational as well; in short, information is physical, light is a message from physical objects, just the same way a waveform traveling down a wire encoded with 'speech' is a message from a telephone.

There is no fundamental difference between saying the radiation we get every day is heat and light across the spectrum, and saying it's the information we get.

This is the guts of Information Theory, that not just electronic circuits are channels encoded with signals. Everything that can be identified as having an input, an output, and transforming something from one to the other, possibly both ways. Lots of things behave like a sending/receiving circuit - an information channel.

Apparently no-one else at this forum has heard of it, but then it is only more than 50 years old.

Thinking that the idea of a distant 'light' from a distant celestial object is communication, must be a dumb idea, is up there with thinking that communicating with a lighthouse or a Very lantern, or by sending light down glass fibers say, is a dumb idea.
 
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probabilty waves are real to the extent needed to make any rational sense of the quantum world

strictly speaking they aren't waves as such but it's hard to describe what the really just like everything else in quantum phisics and a waves happens to be the most convienient way of looking at it because one we get to the different between bosons and fermions the whole difference is that when to identical fermions interact one of the probabilty waves is flipped meaning it is impossible for to fermions to be in exactly the same state at once (eg. two electrons with the same spin cannot occupy the same position in space)
probabilty are to an extent some mumbo-jumbo that is there to help us understand but if it wasn't there quantum phisics would be even harder
like richard feynman said "i think i can safely say nobody understands quantum phisics"

so don't look into it too much but i recommend reading "quantum theory cannot hurt you" by Marcus Chown, it explains alot.
 
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