On 5/23/2013 11:27 AM, Quentin Anciaux wrote:
2013/5/23 meekerdb <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>>
On 5/23/2013 7:07 AM, [email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> wrote:
Citeren Bruno Marchal <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>>:
On 23 May 2013, at 00:05, meekerdb wrote:
On 5/22/2013 2:49 PM, [email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]> wrote:
Thought experiment: Suppose that someone has never
experienced
touching hot objects before. As long as this person does
not find
out that touching hot objects is painful, either by
touching hot
objects himself or by being told that it is painful, he
will be in
a superposition of two sectors of the multiverse where he
has and
has not the ability to feel extreme pain when touching
very hot
objects.
The sector where he does not have the ability to feel pain
has a
very small amplitude, there evolution has run a different
course.
In the other sector evoluton has run the course where the
ancestors
in the first sector ddidn't survive, it where the
creatures with
some mutation that lead to them feeling pain when touching
hot
objects that survived here.
The mere act of touching a hot object is a measuremnt which
locates
the person in the latter sector, only then does the
outcome of the
events that happened a long time ago become determined.
That assumes that the "same person" exists up to the moment of
measurement, differing, via FPI, only in the ability to feel
pain. I
doubt that is possible. There is a common assumption that QM
makes
anything possible, but it actually imposes some restrictions,
although
it's hard to say how they extend to the biology of macroscopic
beings.
I agree. Even in comp there are "terrible" restrictions on what
comp states
exist and how they are first person and third person related.
Indeed that's
why we can extract physics (and a whole theology) from numbers and
+ and *.
Bruno
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
<http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/%7Emarchal/>
It can be shown quite rigorously that everything that is not strictly
forbidden
by conservation laws, must happen in generic multiverse scenarios.
Do you have a citation for that? And how do you know what conservation
laws there are?
But then, the whole point I'm making is that the information in your
brain that
makes you feel something comes not out of thin air, but precisely due to
evolution. So, you feeling pain comes about via ordinary down to earth
quantum
mechanics, which links this straightforwardly to the deaths of those
creatures
that by dying and not becoming your ancestors, gave rise to your
ability to feel
pain.
Of course I agree that the "gave rise to". But that's not the same
supposing they
were in a superposition with you up until the moment you felt a pain. That
seems to
reserve to consciousness the ability to "collapse the wave function".
Well if all "universes" still exists after the measurement, it just gives the ability
for consciousness to localize itself... not collapsing anything which seems right. To
collapse the wave function would mean that after self localisation, only one universe
would remain. It does not seems that was what Saibal was implying.
Regards,
Quentin
You're right, I put that badly. There are lots of things that "localize" themselves by
making a classical record, and even an irretrievable one (c.f. buckyball double slit). So
it seems wrong to suppose that consciousness is in a superposition when there is
information in the environment about the fate of your ancestors and whether or not they
felt pain. It can't be because the brain is in a superposition. Therefore the
implication seems to be a kind of dualism.
Brent
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