On 26 Feb 2014, at 14:49, Jason Resch 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."
That's comp. Tegmark refers to my work in a draft of some of its early
paper, but, I guess, was not allowed to keep the reference for
publishing, as the publication avoids to refer to it, and I know he
knows my paper. I have perhaps survived in some acknowledgement, but I
am not sure. We did talk on all this, and so his "I gradually hit"
above is a bit disingenuous.
More young students, in Paris, but also elsewhere, told me that it
was impossible to refer to my work, and in one instance that they were
explicitly asked to refer it to other people!
This confirms my feeling that my "academical problem" is not related
to the subject, but to the fact that I am a witness of some very bad
facts involving some people in some academy, and of course the
disparition of the price that I got, is of the same kind. Like the
clergy, academy protects itself in the hiding of scandalous affairs.
At least this shows that Tegmark has no problem with step 3, and the
FPI. Not sure he has seen the full consequence of computationalism,
though.
Bruno
Jason
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