[Avodah] Looking for help with an analogy

[Micha Berger via Avodah]

On Mon, May 04, 2015 at 7:07pm EDT, RYGB wrote:
: Can anyone here please explain how chazakos (d'mei'ikara, d'hashta)
: would relate to Schroedinger's Cat?

Quantum Uncertainty is more similar to rov than chazaqah. 

And it could model how we can embrace conflicting majorities. Such as
in the case of two pieces of shuman and one of cheilev, and being able
to eat all three one after the other. (Or perhaps even in a ta'aroves,
but that just complicates the picture.) It would fit if we treat
the physical state of each piece of fat as
	( 2 |shuman> + |cheilev) / 3
rather than as a 67% chance of being shuman.

And then those things that were observed are immune from such weirdness,
much like qavu'ah.

That said:

The notion that wavefunction collapse is due to observation, the
Copenhagen Interpretation, was once taken as a given. But alternatives
involving entanglement, wave function collapse, multiuniverse theory,
etc.. have been gaining ground for decades. This parallel to qavu'ah
could be illusory.


On Tue, May 05, 2015 at 1:11am GMT, R Akive Miller wrote:
: My first knee-jerk reaction is to say that they DON'T relate. Chazakos
: are all about law, and what the law will *presume* the reality to have
: been...

: Schroedinger's Cat and similar ventures are attempts to establish what
: the *reality* is...

I am very inclined to agree.

R' Aqiva Eiger (teshuvah $136) makes a chiluq between sefeiqos in the
metzi'us and sefeiqos in din. Rov holds when we have sefeiqos in the
metzi'us. So we can pasqen about something that is rov-kasher. But if
someone knew the metzi'us, then there was a din established for the
fat. Now that we don't know what it was, we have a safeiq as to what
that din is.

LAD, the whole thing is about human experience. See
<http://www.aishdas.org/asp/phenomenology>, which has 10 posts covering
things like chazaqah (both types), rov, qavu'ah, terei mekei'ah (which
I argue ignores rov for the same reason as qavu'ah), nosein ta'am,
using tequfas Shemu'el for birkhas hachamah, microsopic bugs etc....

The hashkafic premise is that the goal of halakhah is to shape the
self (whether into a tamim, a shelaim, to acheive deveiqus, etc...) And
therefore the metzi'us a din has to work with is how we experience reality
(and thus birur when we're in doubt) and how we can experience it (only
visible bugs count). And not how the universe works in ways we can only
understand in the abstract.

The most lomdishe consequence of my whole edifice is that it manages to
explain why a chazaqah trumps a migo in a case where there are also
trei utrei eidim, but why a migo trumps a chazaqah when there are no
eidim.

Tir'u baTov!
-Micha

-- 
Micha Berger             Today is the 32nd day, which is
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