On 23 Apr 2014, at 13:33, Pierz wrote:
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.
That reminds me on a difference that someone made between, I think,
catholic and protestant (say).
- A catholic go to heaven if and only if he do only good, or at least
not bad, things during his life.
(of course this can lead to unfairness, as some people can do the bad
only due to contingent factors in their life, like a war, or a trauma,
etc.) So, apparently:
- A protestant go to heaven if and only if he do only the good in his
life but also in all its lives.
It is easy to do only the good when you get an happy family, in a
economically working society so that you get a nice job, and a nice
love partner and nice kids, and when you can drink and smoke what you
want, even drink raw milk!
Apparently some God want to examine closely what you "would" do in a
world with catastrophic family, in perverse economy where eventually
you can't even drink raw milk!
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 -
OK.
and I suppose it should actually lead to a kind of 'radical
acceptance'.
But then you have to accept the "non-acceptance" too. It is where we
can get close to inconsistency, if not insanity.
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...
As I mentioned before, when I ask my father what is truth, he said
that it is what the humans fear the most.
I found this quote attributed to Hunter S. Thompson (an american
journalist 1937-2005):
"The truth, when you finally chase down, is almost always far worse
than your darkest visions and fears".
But personally, I am not sure. I might think that atheism (the strong
non agnostic form) can lead to such thought. No god is close to no
sense, non "afterlife" is also (in its positive belief) close to
nonsense. Such vision encourages irresponsibility and "après moi le
déluge" sort of mentality. That is well illustrated by author like
LaMettrie and Sade, but also by the materialist eliminativists
(Churchland, almost Dennett). That is even politically dangerous: it
question the human right by questioning the human person. Materialism
+ Mechanism might lead to Nihilism.
(But like Bruno, my dedication to truth keeps me from rejecting it
purely because I hate it. The logic is very compelling.)
Ah! :)
Bruno
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) 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...
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