WRT to this whole multi-coloured T-Rex business, there is a simpler point
to be made. My original argument was in favour of MWI. Now whether, in MWI,
macroscopic histories can merge is surely an interesting puzzle. But *without
*MWI, there cannot be any ambiguity about the colour of T-Rexes. In a
single universe interpretation of QM, T-Rexes were blue or they were red
and they can't exist in a superposition of both. The past can't turn back
into a mush of probabilities, because that would imply either that there is
some "3p" significance to the concept of "now", or that the past consists
of many worlds. In other words I am asserting that, *sans MWI,* any
ambiguity about the past is a matter of ignorance, not of quantum
uncertainty. Otherwise you are saying that past moments which once were
well defined are somehow dissolved back into ambiguity by the passage of
time. But that would be privileging the now with some kind of absolute
significance, which is untenable. All nows are equal.
Another way of stating my argument is that the following three propositions
are mutually incompatible:
- There is a single history
- There is no objective significance to the concept of the current
moment ("now")
- The future is objectively uncertain
You can take your pick which of those propositions you reject, but it's
logically impossible to support all three.
On Monday, May 29, 2017 at 8:17:53 AM UTC+10, Russell Standish wrote:
>
> On Sun, May 28, 2017 at 06:37:09PM +0200, Bruno Marchal wrote:
> >
> > On 28 May 2017, at 14:23, Pierz wrote:
> >
> >
> >
> > >We are merely ignorant of its state. I would argue the same
> > >applies to the colour of T. Rex. The past is not in a
> > >superposition of possible values, but we are ignorant of those
> > >values.
> >
> > For all practical purpose. But there are temporal form of Bell's
> > inequality violation which suggest that in principle (tacking track
> > of all the particles the T-Rex interacted with (!)) we could make
> > measurement showing interference of "different T-rex".
> >
> >
>
> There seems to be some confusion between superposition and
> interference. In crude terms, we do live in a superposition |green T.Rex>
> + |blue T.Rex>. It may well be that |green T.Rex> and |blue T.Rex> are
> orthogonal, ie <green T.Rex|blue T.Rex>=0 (at FAPP), in which case the
> two histories do not interfere, and there is no quantum interference
> phenomena.
>
>
> --
>
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Dr Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile)
> Principal, High Performance Coders
> Visiting Senior Research Fellow [email protected]
> <javascript:>
> Economics, Kingston University http://www.hpcoders.com.au
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>
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