On 3/9/2014 8:14 PM, LizR wrote:
On 10 March 2014 15:09, meekerdb <meeke...@verizon.net <mailto:meeke...@verizon.net>> wrote:Decoherence is what I described above. It's tracing over the environment variables, having selected what counts as environment and what as instrument/observer, in order to get the reduced density matrix and then saying "Obviously we shouldmeasure/observe one of these diagonal values with the proportional probability." So when you get right down to how the math goes it's pretty close to choosing theHeisenberg cut - except you then say "and my other selves will measure/observe the other diagonal values" which soothes one's angst over randomness.Have I been misinformed? I thought decoherence was supposed to be a physical mechanism which reduced the off-diagonal elements to virtual nonexistence?
Sort of. But it only does it in some particular basis and in applying the theory we choose the "pointer basis" by saying something like "We're going to look at the position of the detector" which in effect is us choosing our classical selves, pretty much the way Bohr chose the Heisenberg cut. Although there are some suggestive results and most people thing it must work out, I don't think there's any fundamental way been found to define the pointer basis.
And then, even after you've got it diagonalized, you need a theory connecting the physics to consciousness to show why you only experience one of them and not all of them.
There's a very nice review paper by Schlosshauer on the subject, see arXiv. Brent -- 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/d/optout.
