On Wed, Feb 26, 2014 at 2:49 PM, 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." > While reading, do you get a sense that he points towards how this might potentially weaken digital physics/functionalism in their strong sense? That digital physics implies comp, which implies vast non computable parts of reality, which rules out stronger forms of interpreting digital physics/functionalism? Because in this quoted passage he just references the teleportation ambiguity, as many have. I'd want to know if he dug a bit deeper. PGC > > Jason > > -- > 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. > -- 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.
