On 27 February 2014 00:49, Jason Resch <jasonre...@gmail.com> 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 everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
