On 4/22/2014 4:54 AM, Pierz wrote:
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.
I don't think he means that. He just means that it's a separate question from the
interpretation of QM and that it's a mistake to mix them together.
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... :)
Chris Fuchs is the main proponent of quantum Bayesianism, which also takes the
wave-function to just be a summary of one's knowledge of the system - and so there is
nothing surprising about it "collapsing" when you get new information.
Of course another alternative is an objective collapse theory like GRW. I'm just now
reading a book by Ghirardi,"Sneaking a Look at God's Cards" which surveys the experiments
that force the weirdness of QM on us and the various interpretations. Of course he
devotes a special chapter to GRW theory, but he is very even handed.
I'm not sure why you're worried about MWI though. Is it because you read "Divide by
Infinity"? I don't think that's what MWI really implies.
Brent
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
<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
<http://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
<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...
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