Citeren meekerdb <[email protected]>:
On 5/23/2013 5:20 PM, [email protected] wrote:
Citeren meekerdb <[email protected]>:
On 5/23/2013 12:51 PM, Quentin Anciaux wrote:
2013/5/23 meekerdb <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>>
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
But until you know it consciously, your mind state is the same in
two parts of the multiverse,
Why should mind=consciousness? Over any short duration I am
conscious of *very* few things. "I" am hardly localized at all.
Which is just another form of the "white rabbit" problem. On this
world view, why should expect any continuity in my experience
sufficient to define "I"?
Your consciousness is only located at specific moments in time as
computational states.
That doesn't follow from QM. You're mixing in assumptions about comp.
I'm not assuming COMP here, it's simply that at any moment of time the
physical state of the system is well defined.
The idea that you need a time interval to properly define this is
wrong and unphysical.
What's physical about assuming you are a sequence of states in
computations? If a state is discrete why should the sequence respect
physical conservation laws.
A sequence of states contains too much information, it is the state at
some moment and then another moment etc. etc. it's hard to see how this
can yield anything useful w.r.t.
the one where you ancestors did feel pain and the one where they
didn't... how can you differentiate those two states ? How can the
two outcomes not be correct continuations of that mind state
before measurement ?
The question is whether the "measurement" has to be an event in my
consciousness or can it be a event(s) in the physical world.
Suppose I am drugged so that I can't feel pain for the moment, but
I remember having felt pain. Then I will expect to be able to feel
pain again and I will infer that evolution provided my ancestors
with ability to feel pain and others that didn't died childless.
The physical world theory seems to provide the better model.
If you remember having physical pain in the past, that means that
you have information about that in your mind. The state of your mind
and that of the real world are thus correlated on that point. If at
some point in time you are not aware of something at all, then you
are in a superposition of different sectors of the real world where
the information you are not aware can be different.
Yes, I understand the implications. But as I said it just raises the
white rabbit problem. If you take it seriously then there is no
"you" and there is no possibility of having better or worse
expectation. It's a useless theory that just says "Everything is
experienced, so "you" will experience it."
The white rabbit problem isn't a real problem, it is based on flawed
assumptions. There is a well defined "you" at every moment in time
defined as a computational state by its physical state without having
to resort to previous states, because in quantum mechanics the physical
state will be a complicated entangled state with the environment which
contains at any moment the correlations that define exactly what
computation has been carried out.
The flawed assumption is that just because we're dealing with classical
computation and typical quantum effects are not apparent in the sense
that the outcome of any experiment is well described by classical
physics, we can pretend that the system is classical and then apply
classical reasoning to thought experiments like the in movie graph
argument etc. etc.
Saibal
Brent
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