Re: Atheism is wish fulfillment

[meekerdb]

On 12/10/2013 1:22 PM, Quentin Anciaux wrote:

        I think I was attempting to position myself between John and Jason - to 
say
        that determinism is reasonably well established, but only as a result 
of a
        long and winding process of experiment, conjecture and so on.


        But it isn't.  As Roland Omnes says, quantum mechanics is a 
probabilistic
        theory so it predicts probabilities - what did you expect?  Among 
apostles of
        Everett there's a lot of trashing of Copenhagen. But Bohr's idea was 
that the
        classical world, where things happened and results were recorded, was
        *logically* prior to the quantum mechanics.  QM was a way of making
        predictions about what could done and observed.  Today what might be 
termed
        neo-Copenhagen is advocated by Chris Fuchs and maybe Scott Aronson.  I 
highly
        recommend Scott's book "Quantum Computing Since Democritus".  It's kind 
of
        heavy going in the middle, but if you're just interested in the 
philosophical
        implications you can skip to the last chapters.  Violation of Bell's
        inequality can be used to guarantee the randomness of numbers,
        http://arxiv.org/pdf/0911.3427v3.pdf, assuming only locality.



    Bell's theorm proves that local hidden variables are impossible which 
leaves only
    two remaining explanations that explain the EPR paradox:

    1. Non-local, faster-than-light, relativity violating effects

    That's non-local hidden variable - which is exactly what a parallel 
universe is.

    What is non local here?

    A whole world is duplicated - including remote parts.


No decoherence is spread through the environment at light speed.

But if the EPR particles are measured at spacelike intervals there are two light cones of 
decoherence spreading through the environment - BUT they are coherent so that only two 
constructively interfere.  There result only two worlds, instead of four.

Brent

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