On 22/06/2017 10:32 am, David Nyman wrote:
On 22 Jun 2017 00:31, "Bruce Kellett" <bhkell...@optusnet.com.au
<mailto: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.
That seems a remarkably confusing terminology. The example Bruno gave to
illustrate 1p-plural was not an example of inter-subjective agreement --
there were just repeated measurements by the one person. If you conflate
1p-plural with inter-subjective, what on earth is 3p? The notation
suggested to me 'third person', or the view of an outsider watching the
experiment. This outsider certainly gets entangled with the experimenter
and his result, but the many copies give rise to the inter-subjective
agreement about what that result was. Bruno has certainly used 3p in
this way many times -- in his endless disputed over step 3 with John
Clark, for example.
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.
The phenomena of physics "reduce to the sum of all possible measurements
of this sort"? I don't really understand what that means. Physics is a
consideration of the results of experiments as agreed by the physics
community. It is not a "sum of all possible measurements".
Bruce
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