On Tuesday, April 22, 2014 11:12:53 PM UTC+10, Brent wrote: > > > > 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. > > No I never read that, but hell yeah, MWI worries me! Doesn't it worry you? I mean I know at one level that in a very real sense it doesn't matter whether it's true or not, since the other universes can never affect me, but at another the reality that everything happens to me that I can imagine is just plain terrifying. And the 'me' isn't just the versions of me that are still called by my name, I can't escape the conclusion that I am everyone and everyone is me and that *everyone's* experience is my experience at some level. If MWI ever does become the accepted conception of reality, we have a huge amount of philosophical reorientation ahead of us. For instance, if I take some risk (like drink-driving, a relevant topic on another thread), and 'get away with it', MWI suggests I am still responsible for other realities in which I crashed and injured or killed myself and/or others. My whole approach to risk management becomes quite different if all outcomes are realised. It no longer makes sense to think about "if" something will happen to me in the future. I have to accept that it all will happen, it's just that all those future mes won't know about the other ones, so they will all have the impression of a single outcome. It's a disorienting and disturbing thought. Of course it should't lead to fatalism, since one's choices are part of the deterministic system that determines the 'weight' of certain futures - and I suppose it should actually lead to a kind of 'radical acceptance'. There's no point thinking "why me?" or "what bad luck", since your experiencing this, and indeed everything, is inevitable. But then I console myself by thinking that any human-level qualitative interpretation of this level of reality is mistaken, a kind of confusion of levels. And still it horrifies me... (But like Bruno, my dedication to truth keeps me from rejecting it purely because I hate it. The logic is very compelling.)
> 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 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]. >> 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. >> >> >> -- > 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.
