Re: re QM, GR and consistency
"If A is inconsistent with B, and if A, then not-B. This is a theorem of logic,"
It's certainly a logical theorem, but is in not an accurate description of the relationship between QM and relativity and if your logic system only allows for the possibility of TRUE and FALSE, it's not going to be much use if you want to talk about QM. You need to allow for a superposition of states where the answer is a combination of both TRUE and FALSE - which neatly gets around the percieved inconsistency between the two theories.
"re "when instruments take the measurements for science, human perception is no longer relevant within the Berkelian epistemology." Steve writes "And who reads the instrument? That's right, a human." One paper by the (very pro-physics) logical positivist philosopher Carnap has an appendix in which he speculates on science being done by machines - it dates from the 1950's (I don't have the reference to hand), and post-dates Schrodinger's cat."
That's nice, I have papers by Iain M. Banks, Arthur C Clarke and others that deal with similar issues. For a machine to carry out scientific research, it would either need to be programmed to do so or it must be some form of AI that decided it was curious and started investigating on it's own. But, that just puts it in the position of the human in your quote. It has awareness of the experiment because of a change in a sensor which is part of the experiment causes a series of signals until we reach the point that the observer is conciously aware of the change. How is it different if the observer is an organic intelligence rather than a synthetic intelligence?
The second problem is that experiments with inteference patterns (Young's double slits) have shown that the result of an experiment can be determined by the amount of knowledge that the observer can gather about the situation. Light is released, one photon at a time, towards a barrier with two slits in it. The light can behave as a wave, pass through both and interfere or behave as a particle and just pass through one. If you put a sensor on one of slits, the photon always behaves as a particle. Turn it off, and the photon behaves like a wave. Turn it on after the photon has already left the source and passed through the slits and it will still cause the photon to behave like a particle. The existence of information that could reveal the route to an observer affects the route taken by the photon even though it should have passed through the slits (choosing wave or particle reality) before it "knew" whether the detector was on or off.
Also, since Berkeley maintained that sensible objects can only exist when being perceived, surely the human/AI observer's perceptions will always be relevant. Otherwise we just spread out into a big squishy, uncollapsed probability wave - and yes, "squishy" is a technical term.
"Your Room 101 would need to hold more than Anderson and Kurzweil."
The world has never been short of wide-eyed wankers.