On 22/06/2017 7:22 pm, Bruno Marchal wrote:
On 22 Jun 2017, at 01:31, Bruce Kellett 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
? Then it is just 1p singular. We need two (or more) people entering
the duplication device so that we get the intersubjective agreement.
and undergo different teleportations afterwards.
? They undergo the same teleportations. They are both reconstituted in
the two different locations, and, obviously (we assume Digital
Mechanism) they agree that the outcome is well determined from their
common first person view, and that this the 1p plural.
Surely it is sufficient to consider one person doing a series of
polarization measurements on a sequence of photons from an
unpolarized source.
You need two persons. With one person, you can't distinguish 1p from
1pp (1p plural).
I think I understand it now. The problems, I think, have arisen because
you are using the same terminology for both the classical duplication of
persons and the quantum branching of worlds. I think that conflating
these two situations is a mistake because they are intrinsically
different. In classical person duplication, there is no entanglement.
Even if you duplicate two or more persons simultaneously, and subject
them to the same teleportations, there is no real entanglement, just a
simulation that mimics some features of entanglement. The lesson of Bell
is that classical simulations of entanglement can never reproduce the
quantum results.
In classical person duplication, it is only the person that is
duplicated, not the whole world, so the 1p experience becomes central.
Because the world is not duplicated, you can have an external observer
who can see both ends of the duplication -- the 3p view. However, in the
quantum case, a quantum event, when magnified to macro significance by
decoherence, results in a branching of the whole world into disjoint
copies. The role of the observer is diminished here, to the extent that
an observer is not even required: if it is a quantum measurement, the
experimenter is entangled with the result simply as part of the wider
world, and all other third party observers are similarly entangled --
the experimenter is not a privileged observer in any sense. Exactly the
same branching occurs due to decoherence even without observers -- in
particular, before there were even any conscious beings around. So it
does not really make sense in the quantum case to focus on the 1p
perspective of an observer.
Sure, in earlier versions of QM it was though that the observer might be
necessary to "collapse the wave function" or some such, but with the
advanced understanding of the role of decoherence, this was seen to be
no longer necessary, and the observer has been eliminated from any
special role in QM. This has been seen as crucial for the application of
QM to cosmology, for instance, where there can be no 'universal'
observers. In my terms, because decoherence leaves many records of the
outcome of quantum interactions in the environment, every observer is on
the same footing, and independent of the original branching -- they
branch just as part of the wider universe. All agree about this
branching, so there is inter-subjective agreement about what has
happened, but this is all on what I would call the third person level,
it is all 3p since all have the role of outside observers -- the
observer as such has no essential role to play in the process. This is
quite unlike the person duplication scenario, since there it is the
duplication of the person that is central (1p perspectives). QM does
quite well without consciousnesses at all.
Bruce
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