On 23 Apr 2014, at 18:29, Platonist Guitar Cowboy wrote:
On Wed, Apr 23, 2014 at 6:10 PM, Bruno Marchal <[email protected]>
wrote:
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.
Thompson isn't either; hence the "almost".
Well, it is about that "almost" that I am not sure.
And as journalist covering politics from a freak point of view...
I might think that atheism (the strong non agnostic form) can lead
to such thought.
Well, he yells "no obedience to gods, none of them" in all his
writing.
Good! He might have already killed all the buddhas! Some people used
gods, where others would say popes or ayatollah.
But to say the man was devoid of a sense of transcendental is to
simply ignore his history:
I did not do that. I did not knew he was an atheist or not. I was
talking about the "strong non agnostic atheists" (a concept which of
course does not make sense with the general abstract definition of
God(*)) in general.
To write what Thompson wrote, I am pretty sure it has a sense of the
transcendental. A tragic one, à la Unamuno, from what I know through
Martin Gardner. I did not infer he took that seriously, still less
that he was an atheist or a materialist.
(*) whatever you question as being responsible for your consciousness
here and now.
When running for mayor in Aspen, and almost winning btw, the symbol
of his campaign was an Indian fist holding up a peyote button.
To say that such man lacks sense of transcendental, you go too far;
Where did I say that? I never said that. Come on.
I talk about the affirmation in the quote, literally, not of the man.
The quote is transcendentally pessimist, but I don't infer anything
about the guy who write it.
he just had the good taste to not talk about it.
Excellent. But still, the quote is pessimistic, The pessimism in the
quote is in the "almost".
And this, as a writer of pseudo journalism/fiction. That's
disciplined sense of restraint and not materialism to me.
I was talking of the materialist, not him. I never implied that the
author of the quote means it seriously.
I just discovered him some hours ago. Thanks for the information.
But I guess one has to read more of his oeuvre to make a judgement
on this. PGC
I assure that it did not cross my mind that the guy believes its own
quote, which is to much good to be believed.
My point was that strong atheism can lead to the belief in something
like what that quote said, and which is pessimistic.
The guy himself, I discovered him some hours ago.
Sorry for letting you believe that I might have thought he was
materialist. Nice to hear it is not, but the idea did not cross my mind.
Bruno
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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