On 29 Oct 2014, at 22:46, meekerdb wrote:
On 10/29/2014 10:21 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
On 29 Oct 2014, at 01:12, meekerdb wrote:
On 10/28/2014 4:12 PM, LizR wrote:
On 28 October 2014 22:52, Richard Ruquist <[email protected]>
wrote:
Liz,
I define consciousness as my ability to make choices.
That is an unusual definition, and not one I think most people
would agree with, although they'd probably agree it's involved in
consciousness. But yes, using that definition the MWI makes
consciousness an illusion.
(Most people call the ability to make choices free will. That is
an illusion under the MWI, and indeed most theories of physics.)
Bruno responds with the Gaussian (somewhat like measure theory)
which suggests that some worlds are less important than this one.
I don't know about Bruno but David Deutsch appears to think that
some decisions will have a much higher measure in the multiverse
than others. So, say, 99.99% of me (so to speak) will have coffee
and only 0.01% will decide on a whim to have a milkshake. (And
0.0000000000001% will think so hard about it that they
spontaneously combust.)
That raises the question of how the multiple-worlds split. Does
the 0.01% imply that the world must split into 1e5 copies, in one
of which you have a milkshape? Or does it require that it must
split 1e15 ways so that you can spontaneously combust in one. I
think Bruno's UD tries to take care of this by have infinitely
many threads thru the occasion of your whim. But this is
different compared to the Helsinki/Moscow/Washington thought
experiment. In that case the Moscow and Washington guys are
created. But in the UD's infinite threads the infinite threads
all exist timelessly.
In the DeWitt-Wheeler equation, time disappears too. In the WM-
duplication, guys are created relatively to you, and *that* happens
infinitely often in the UD-computations. Like Einstein said, "time
is an illusion, although a persistent one".
Neither Everett, nor Deutsch, nor computationalism solved all
problem, we just get the tools to formulate them.
Wise many-worlders will not pretend that "no collapse" explains all
weirdness. They just feel like the collapse itself is just too much
weird than to be accepted. Here too I am close to Einstein view: I
don't see what it could mean to abandon 3p- determinacy and 3p-
locality in the physical realm
I think we know exactly what it means - it means Copenhagen:
randomness and non-locality in spacetime.
Copenhagen is Everett + collapse, if I can say dia-chronologically.
Randomness and non locality are consequences of the collapse, not of
the SWE or still less Dirac equation or quantum field theories.
My problem with Copenhagen is that it made "measurement" an abstract
mathematical operation with no physics - which seems like a bad
basis for fundamental physics.
It makes measurement disobeyng the QM theory, and this without reason,
other that its axiom: there is only one classical universe.
If you read Bohr, he insisted all the time that the physical realm was
the correct on the macroscopic level. before EPR it invokes the
perturbation due to the measurement, but Einstein makes that idea
nonsensical with the EPR paper. Bohr will concede that the collapse of
the wave cannot be mechanical in that sense, and stay very fuzzy of
what it can be.
Decoherence has allowed the Copenhagen interpretation to go part way
in defining measurement, but it is still not complete.
Decoherence is nice, but conceptually, Everett got the fundamental
idea. Supersposition is contagious by interaction. The rest is a
consequence of the linearity of the tensor product, and the linearity
of the evolution.
Taking partial traces is just like the projection postulate.
Yes, like in comp the differentiation of consciousness is the
existencial projection made by the sigma_1 computable predicate (semi-
computable).
Zurek's quantum Darwinism looks promising and it may reach all the
way to the mind/body problem.
The computationalist one? He has to derive the SWE from addition and
multiplication of numbers, or from application and abstraction of
lambda-terms, ... Then get the star separation (like Z and Z*, G and
G*). But surely, all those taking distnace with the collapse make
advance in the bridge between between the computationalist foundation
of consciousness and the foundation of the relative matter appearances.
Only the amazing QM made me think that computationalism might be
plausible, or refutable.
Bruno
Brent
: God does not play dice, and there are no action at a distance,
although it might look like that, but only if we abstract away some
terms or the superposition. In quantum teleportation, Alice has to
send some bit of classical information to tell him which part of
the multiple terms wave they share.
Bruno
To post to this group, send email to everything-
[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].
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.
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
--
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.
