Thanks Brent. I read Mermin and am both wiser and none-the. It seems to me in this paper he is chickening out by saying that QM shouldn't really think about the conscious observer, because that leads to the "fairy tale" of many worlds. Instead it should consider consciousness to reside outside the competent scope of a physical theory. It's kind of like his answer is to say "don't ask those questions". And he explicitly repudiates the notion that "it's all in your head" or that a quantum state is a "summary of your knowledge of the system". The correlations are objective. What I liked about the paper though was the notion of correlations without correlata (which Garrett invokes) - the idea that quantum theory is about (and only about) systemic relationships makes a lot of sense. To take the answer to "what is QM telling us?" just a little further philosophically than what Mermim is prepared to, I'd say it's telling us (for one thing) that we've hit the limits of atomism. We're bouncing off the boundary of the reductionistic epistemology.
Anyway, sadly I haven't yet seen anything that could supply a cogent alternative to MWI. I'll move on to the other papers tomorrow night... :) On Tuesday, April 22, 2014 3:36:16 PM UTC+10, Brent wrote: > > Read Mermin who has written some popular papers on "The Ithaca > Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics", e.g. > http://arxiv.org/pdf/quant-ph/9801057.pdf and the paper by Adami and > Cerf, which is where Garrett gets his talk, arxiv.org/pdf/quant-ph/0405005 > ** > > They take an information theoric approach to the quantum measurement > problem and show that a measurement can only get you part of the > information in the quantum state. From the MWI standpoint this 'other > information' is in the other world branch. Mermin and Adami and also Fuchs > (http://arxiv.org/pdf/1003.5209.pdf<http://www.google.com/url?q=http%3A%2F%2Farxiv.org%2Fpdf%2F1003.5209.pdf&sa=D&sntz=1&usg=AFQjCNESAnRXSOhSA3Y_kMt1kkshVPgd_w>) > > take a more instrumentalist approach in which your conscious perceptions > are fundamental and QM is a way to compute their relations. The > wave-function is just a summary representation of your knowledge of the > system. That's why he refers to it as the zero-worlds interpretation; it's > all in your (our) mind. > > Brent > > On 4/21/2014 5:03 PM, Pierz wrote: > > Just came across this presentation: > https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dEaecUuEqfc > > It's a bit long, but I'd be interested to hear anyone's thoughts who is > knowledgeable on QM. I don't follow the maths, but I kind of got the gist. > What intrigued me was his interpretation of QM and I'm wondering if anyone > can throw any more light on it. He makes a lot of jumps which are obviously > clear in his mind but hard to follow. He says that MWI is supportable by > the maths, but that he prefers a "zero universes" interpretation, according > to which we are classical simulations in a quantum computer. I'm not sure I > follow this. I mean, I can follow the idea of being a classical simulation > in a quantum computer, but I can't see how this is different from MWI, > except by the manoeuvre of declaring other universes to be unreal because > they can never practically interact with 'our' branch. I guess what > interested me was the possibility of a coherent alternative to MWI (because > frankly MWI scares the willies out of me), but in spite of what he said, I > couldn't see what it was... > > -- > 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] <javascript:>. > To post to this group, send email to [email protected]<javascript:> > . > Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. > For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. > > > -- 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/d/optout.
