On 9/25/2012 4:32 PM, smi...@zonnet.nl wrote:
Citeren meekerdb <meeke...@verizon.net>:
On 9/25/2012 8:46 AM, smi...@zonnet.nl 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.
But brains, and certainly computers, are almost entirely classical,
deterministic systems (and wouldn't be useful otherwise). That seems
inconsistent with the picture of astronomically many micro-branches,
except that the micro-branches are all close approximations of the
classical.
Brent
Yes, and these micro-branches are effectively classical because the
system is entangled with a large number of environmental degrees of
freedom. Still, you can't identify a conscious observer with a
particular micro-branch, you need to consider a large number of them,
as only then the computation that is carried out to render the
observer becomes well defined.
Hi,
I see this statement to be consistent with Bruno's consideration of
a 1p as an intersection (of sorts) between an infinite number of
computations. I just wish Bruno would see that his problem with measures
might be just comp's version of the partition problem for Abelian von
Neumann subalgebras!
Note that I cannot look into your brain and determine which
micro-branch you really are in, as that would vastly exceed the
maximum capacity of my brain. Only for simple systems that can be
described in a few bits of information can we be aware of the complete
information that completely fixes the system.
Does not the Bekenstein bound put an upper bound on the classical
information that we can measure?
Saibal
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 <rclo...@verizon.net>:
Hi smitra
If the moon doesn't exist, how were we able to land men on it ?
Roger Clough, rclo...@verizon.net
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
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