On 9/25/2012 11:46 AM, [email protected] wrote:
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
Dear Saibal,
I must tell you that I am very happy that you are here on this
list! Your ideas and papers are wonderful! "The reality of alternative
possibilities may actually be the very thing that makes us conscious." I
agree 100%.
--
Onward!
Stephen
http://webpages.charter.net/stephenk1/Outlaw/Outlaw.html
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