On 22 Jun 2017 00:31, "Bruce Kellett" <bhkell...@optusnet.com.au> wrote:
On 22/06/2017 1:44 am, Bruno Marchal wrote:
> On 21 Jun 2017, at 08:21, Bruce Kellett wrote:
>
>> On 21/06/2017 4:03 pm, Russell Standish wrote:
>>
>>> On Mon, Jun 19, 2017 at 12:15:31PM +1000, Bruce Kellett wrote:
>>>
>>>> On 19/06/2017 10:23 am, Russell Standish wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> I know Scott wouldn't go as far as me. For me, all such irreversible
>>>>> processes are related to conscious entities in some way. Whilst
>>>>> agreeing that Geiger counters are unlikely to be conscious, I would
>>>>> say that the output of Geiger counter is not actually discrete until
>>>>> observed by a conscious experimenter.
>>>>>
>>>> That sounds remarkably like the "many minds" interpretation of
>>>> quantum mechanics. This is disfavoured by most scientists because it
>>>> leaves the physics of the billions of years before the emergence of
>>>> the first "conscious" creature unresolved -- the first consciousness
>>>> would cause an almighty collapse on the many minds reading.
>>>>
>>>> Each consciousness causes "an almighty collapse" in er own mind
>>> independently of any other. It's a pure 1p phenomena.
>>>
>>
>> It is actually a 3p phenomenon because there is inter-subjective
>> agreement about the fact that measurements give definite results.
>>
>
> Inter-subjectivity does not imply 3p, as it can be "only" 1p plural. Let
> me illustrate this with a variant of the WM duplication.
>
> Imagine that Bruce and John are undergoing the WM-duplication *together*.
>
> By this I mean they both enter the scanning-annihilating box, and are both
> reconstituted in Washington and in Moscow.
>
> And let us assume they do it repetitively, which means they come back to
> Helsinki, and do it again together.
>
> Obviously, the line-life past that each copies describes in its personal
> diaries grows like H followed by a sequence of W and M. The number of
> copies grows exponentially (2^n). After ten iterations, we have 2^10 = 1024
> individuals, who share an indeterminate experiences. With minor exceptions,
> they all agree that the experience has always given each times a precise
> outcome, always belonging to {W, M}. Importantly the duplicated couples
> agreed (which was the Washington or Moscow outcome) in all duplication.
> They mostly all agreed they did not found any obvious algorithm to predict
> the sequence (the exception might concerned the guys in nameable stories,
> like:
>
> WWWWWWWWWW
>
> MMMMMMMMMM
>
> Or the development of some remarkable real number in binary, like the
> binary expansion of PI, sqrt(2), sqr(n), etc. In this case, the computable
> is made rare (and more and more negligible when n grows, those histories
> are "white rabbits histories").
>
> That is what I mean by first person plural. It concerns population of
> machine sharing self-multiplication. it is interesting to compare the
> quantum linear self-superposition with the purely arithmetical one.
>
Sure, that would seem to be reasonably described as 1p-plural. except that
there is no need to have two people enter the duplicating machine and
undergo different teleportations afterwards. Surely it is sufficient to
consider one person doing a series of polarization measurements on a
sequence of photons from an unpolarized source. That person will record
some sequence of '+' and '-' results. If the experiment is repeated N
times, there will be 2^N sequences, one in each of the generated worlds.
But that has nothing to do with inter-subjective agreement between
different observers. To see that, consider just one polarization
measurement: In order for it to be said that the measurement gave a result,
there has to be decoherence and the formation of irreversible records. I
think it is Zurek who talks about multiple copies of the result entangled
with the environment. So many different individuals can observe the result
of this single experiment, and they will all agree that the result was what
the experimenter wrote in her lab book. That is inter-subjective agreement.
It clearly has nothing to do with 1p, or 1p-plural pictures.
I think there may be a terminological confusion here. IIUC, 1p-plural
denotes, amongst other things, just such inter-subjective agreement between
mutually entangled observers. Physics, in this usage, is considered as
1p-plural at least in terms of its phenomenology, because those phenomena
essentially reduce to the sum of all possible measurements of this sort.
David
But it is precisely that inter-subjective agreement that is essential for
physics -- people have to agree that experiments have definite results, and
they have to agree what those results are. Inter-subjective agreement
occurs in just one world -- although there may be similar agreements
between copies of those people entangled be decoherence with the other
possible experimental results. Each world is then characterized by
inter-subjective agreement about the result obtained in that world.
Again, this bears no relation to Tegmark's 'bird' view. You might well call
the bird view the 0p view, because there is no person or consciousness that
can ever experience that view.
There is no collapse at all at the 3p level, nor even decoherence as such.
>>>
>>
>> Decoherence is a well-understood physical phenomenon that has been widely
>> observed.
>>
>
> I can't agree more. It might be, and should be when assuming digital
> mechanism, a first person plurality phenomenon. In the (quantum) MW, is the
> fission/differentiation of histories brought by measurement, and the
> measurement itself is part of the histories.
>
As I have just explained at length, decoherence is not a 1p-plural view --
it is quite definitely a matter of entanglement in a single world giving
rise to inter-subjective agreement on the results of any particular
experiment.
Each 'world' in the many worlds picture is a separate decoherent history.
I do not know what you mean by saying "nor even decoherence as such."
>>
>
> Maybe Russell meant in the (3-1) view of the (assumed by Everett)
> Universal wave. Plausible. The universal wave describes a change of base.
> It is God's vision (in this still physicalist view).
>
> Everett, that is QM without the collapse axiom, looks already like a
> solution of the computationalist mind-body problem. But it works only if
> Everett QM is itself derivable from (intensional) arithmetic.
>
In that case you shouldn't be making pronouncements about what the physics
means until you have completed that derivation from arithmetic.
Also, you seem to be confusing the inter-subjective 3p view with Tegmark's
>> bird view. There is no person, body, or consciousness that ever has the
>> bird view -- the bird is a purely formal construct and has nothing to do
>> with mind or consciousness.
>>
>
> That is an interesting remark, but it is a highly debatable question. See
> my conversation with David Nyman, about the "the nature" of the 0p view: is
> it more 1p or 3p? Is it more like a thing or a person? Well, I don't know.
> Is the arithmetical reality conceivable as a person? You can see it has an
> infinite (and highly non mechanical) body of (arithmetical) knowledge, but
> this would be a poetical acknowledgment of our ignorance.
>
I can accept the characterization of the bird view as 0p -- but since it is
not experienced by anyone or anything, then it is neither 1p, 3p, nor
1p-plural.
Even though everything might remain unitary at that level, no one can ever
>> experience the consequences of that unitary evolution.
>>
>
> Hmm... You speculate that there is no global 1p for the global unitary
> evolution, which is an open problem to me. Hard to know.
>
Well, you can speculated about panpsychism if you wish, but since it would
have no observable consequences, the notion seems otiose to me.
Nevertheless, assuming QM, you do *experience* the *consequences* of the
> unitary evolution, right here and right now, directly, and indirectly, as
> you are using a machine whose miniaturization has been made possible by the
> QM laws + human inference of the QM laws.
>
Unitary evolution is a property of the equations, not of the experiences.
It is only ever inferred, not observed directly. The universal wave of the
multiverse is 0p -- there is no one or thing that ever experiences the
assumed unitary evolution of the universal wave, The fact that QM describes
many aspects of experience does not prove unitarity, because we interact
with quantum mechanical phenomena only at the 'classical' level, after
decoherence and FAPP collapse. Our experience is, in fact, entirely of
non-unitary behaviour -- experiments give unique results, not
superpositions in the measurement basis.
Bruce
> With mechanism, the QM laws have to be derived from the first person views
> emulated in elementary number theory, or from any first order
> Church-Turing-Post -Kleene equivalent theory.
>
> Bruno
>
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