On 27 February 2014 00:49, Jason Resch <[email protected]> wrote: > I came upon an interesting passage in "Our Mathematical Universe", starting > on page 194, which I think members of this list might appreciate: > > "It gradually hit me that this illusion of randomness business really wasn't > specific to quantum mechanics at all. Suppose that some future technology > allows you to be cloned while you're sleeping, and that your two copies are > placed in rooms numbered 0 and 1 (Figure 8.3). When they wake up, they'll > both feel that the room number they read is completely unpredictable and > random. If in the future, it becomes possible for you to upload your mind to > a computer, then what I'm saying here will feel totally obvious and > intuitive to you, since cloning yourself will be as easy as making a copy of > your software. If you repeated the cloning experiment from Figure 8.3 many > times and wrote down your room number each time, you'd in almost all cases > find that the sequence of zeros and ones you'd written looked random, with > zeros occurring about 50% of the time. In other words, causal physics will > produce the illusion of randomness from your subjective viewpoint in any > circumstance where you're being cloned. The fundamental reason that quantum > mechanics appears random even though the wave function evolves > deterministically is that the Schrodinger equation can evolve a wavefunction > with a single you into one with clones of you in parallel universes. So how > does it feel when you get cloned? It feels random! And every time something > fundamentally random appears to happen to you, which couldn't have been > predicted even in principle, it's a sign that you've been cloned." > > Jason
I remember this pointr being made on this list in the late 90's when quantum immortality was a new and mindblowing idea for me, James Higgo was still alive, and Jacques Mallah was calling everyone a crackpot. Fond memories! -- Stathis Papaioannou -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
