Hi Roger,
My idea about this is that the Moon and that we landed on it exists in
parallel with the Moon not existing or existing but we not landing on
it, or we already having a base on the oon etc. etc. etc. Then which of
these possibilities is "real" depends on the knowledge you happen to
have, which undermines the concept of "real".
I don't think this is an entirely academic matter, e.g. if you could
forget everything about the Moon, all these alternative possibilities
become open to you again, as I point out here:
http://arxiv.org/abs/0902.3825
The reality of alternative possibilities may actually be the very thing
that makes us conscious. If you accept machine consciousness, you have
the problem that in a classical picture the machine evolves
deterministically from one state to another, and you can map such a
system to a trivial system (say a clock). To see that a computer is
performing a non-trivial computation requires knowledge of
counterfactuals, but then counterfactuals by definition haven't
happened. At any one moment you are in some state which doesn't contain
the information that a computation is carried out.
A way out of this problem is to look more precisely at what the MWI
really implies for a realistic computer capable of simulating the human
brain. One has to accept here that given what a conscious person is
aware of is only an astronomically small fraction of the information
present in the brain. So, the MWI implies that the so-called branches
that are supposed to be sectors of the multiverse where a peson has
observed some dfinite result, actually consists of an astronomically
large number of unresolved micro-branches, each containing diferent
information. The rest of the universe is, of course, entangled with the
observer in these micro-branches. In this article:
http://arxiv.org/abs/1009.4472
I point out that this structure defines at least partially the
algorithm that is running at any moment. So, the fact that things don't
exist if we don't look may be the very reason why we can exist at all.
Saibal
Citeren Roger Clough <[email protected]>:
Hi smitra
If the moon doesn't exist, how were we able to land men on it ?
Roger Clough, [email protected]
9/25/2012
"Forever is a long time, especially near the end." -Woody Allen
----- Receiving the following content -----
From: smitra
Receiver: everything-list
Time: 2012-09-24, 23:04:51
Subject: Re: Nonsense!
Citeren "Stephen P. King" :
On 9/24/2012 12:02 PM, John Clark wrote:
Thus the moon does not exist when you are not looking at it.
Hi John,
I expected better from you! This quip is based on the premise that
"you" are the only observer involved. Such nonsense! Considering that
there are a HUGE number of observers of the moon, the effects of the
observations of any one is negligible. If none of them measure the
presence of the moon or its effects, then the existence of the moon
becomes pure the object of speculation. Note that being affected by
the moon in terms of tidal effects is a measurement!
--
Onward!
Stephen
http://webpages.charter.net/stephenk1/Outlaw/Outlaw.html
Thing is, the Moon doesn't exist, even if you do look at it.
Saibal
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