On 4/23/2014 4:33 AM, 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 theexperiments 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?
The form presented in "Divided by Infinity" is kind of frightening, but I don't think that's how it works.
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.
Except "you" are a fairly coherent series of experiences tied to together by memories and continuity of perceptions. That was the point of my Twain quote. If you're worried about whether you will continue indefinitely into a less and less familiar future, just reflect on the fact that you don't continue into the past before about age 3.
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.
I don't see that it requires any difference in decision theory. You take a risk now knowing that there is probability of a bad outcome, but you balance that against something good you want. It doesn't matter whether the probability is a potentiality or a measure on an ensemble.
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.)
I don't think it's quite compelling just because it is not consequentially different. If it were, we could test it and compare it to some other interpretations of QM. Logically speaking the transactional interpretation or even a dynamic collapse theory like GRW could be true. People make a lot out of the Schrodinger equation, linearity and superposition - but they aren't divine revelations and they may well be wrong or more likely just approximations to a better theory. We already have a problem reconciling QM and general relativity, which probably means they are both wrong in some way. Remember these are theories that we make up to explain and predict what we experience. But there's always a lot we leave to "geography" as Bruno calls it.
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