雙語暢銷書《艾倫圖靈傳》第3章:思考什麼是思考(52)

My prize book from Sherborne is turning out very interesting, and not at All difficult reading, although the applied mathematicians seem to find it rather strong.

我從舍爾伯尼獲獎的書，讀起來很有意思，應用數學家覺得它難懂，但我卻覺得毫無困難。

Von Neumann’s account was very different from Eddington’s.

馮•諾伊曼與愛丁頓的觀點很不一樣。

In his formulation, the state of a physical system evolved perfectly deterministically; it was the observation of it that introduced an element of absolute randomness.

在他的構想中，物理系統的狀態變化是疊加的，觀察它的過程使它坍縮，

But if this process of observation were itself observed from outside, it could be regarded as deterministic.

但這個測量過程本身又是疊加的，

There was no way of saying where the indeterminacy was; it was not localised in any particular place.

你不能說這整個系統到底在哪個環節坍縮了，它並不在任何特定的環節上。

Von Neumann was able to show that this strange logic of observations — quite unlike anything encountered with everyday objects – was consistent in itself, and agreed with known experiments.

馮•諾伊曼表明了他的這種奇怪的觀察邏輯是自洽的，而且與已知的實驗現象吻合。

It left Alan sceptical about the interpretation of quantum mechanics, but certainly gave no support to the idea of the mind manipulating wave-functions in the brain.

艾倫並不完全接受這種解釋，但是當然，它更不支持心靈操縱腦的波函數這種觀點。

Alan would not only have found von Neumann’s book ‘very interesting’ because it was tackling a subject of such philosophical importance to himself.

艾倫覺得馮•諾伊曼的書是很有趣的，不僅是因爲它試圖解決一個對他來說在哲學上很重要的問題，