On 7/3/2021 2:51 AM, John Clark wrote:
On Fri, Jul 2, 2021 at 2:09 PM 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List
<[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
>> Probability must be about something and that something had to
either have happened or have not happened; so it should
produce a smear if and only if the probability is greater than
0% but less than 100%.
/>What does the probability have to do with the size of the
detection spot? The probability refers to how likely it is for a
spot to appear at a location in many repetitions. /
What if there are not many repetitions and it only happens once?After
the event is over you can say that the electron either hit that
particular spot or it did not hit that particular spot. After
you perform the experiment you can say the electron could end up
anywhere but afterwards you know it didn't go everywhere, and it
didn't make a smudge, it made a particular spot.
/> It says nothing about the size of the spot, which is determined
by the detector./
And what the detector does is determined by quantum mechanics, not
classical mechanics.
So what. I don't know what your point is. There's nothing about a wave
function or a probability distribution that implies a "smear".
>> Bohr was a great scientist but a lousy philosopher. If Bohr's
philosophy requires classical physics then obviously Bohr's
philosophy is wrong because classical physics is a theory
known to be incorrect. As Richard Feynman said "/Nature is
quantum dammit!/"
/> But all observations are classical,/
That is incorrect.No observation is classicalbecause all observations
require instruments and all instruments work on quantum principles,
even the human eye.
I should have written quasi-classical, but you know what I mean. It's
a quasi-classical record because everybody can read it and agree on it.
>> There is nothing in Schrodinger's equation that says anything
about the wave collapsing,so Everettsimply says it doesn't
collapse and that means you've got many worlds; it's
bare-bones quantum mechanics that contains everything that is
required and not one more thing
/> Yes and it says nothing about probability or even measurement.
So it's just a free-floating equation with no intepretation?/
All equations require interpretations, but the simpler and more
straightforward the interpretation the better. The simplest
explanation for why something stopped is that it didn't stop.
??
And that is one of Many Worlds two great virtues, the other one is
that it doesn't have to explain what an observation or an observer is
so it doesn't have to wade into the endless consciousness quagmire.
Yeah, it doesn't explain it, just the way CI doesn't explain it. It just
assumes there's some interaction and then some decoherence which somehow
realize the Born rule.
> There is absolutely nothing more certain than the existence
of the self, but there is nothing mystical about that; it's
just that it's not a noun. The self is what the brain does,
not what the brain is, so "self" must be an adjective. I would
define the particular self called John K Clark recursively, he
is whoever remembers being John K Clark yesterday. If Everett
is right and every change no matter how small causes the
universe to split,
> /But Everett didn't say that. He only said that an observation
(which he left ill defined) split the world.
/
Not so. It's true Everett didn't explain what an observation is but
one reason I'm a fan of Many Worlds is that Everett doesn't need to
explain what an "observation" is because it has nothing to do with the
theory. John Wheeler, Everett's thesis advisor, made him cut out about
half the stuff in his original 137 page thesis and tone down the
language so it didn't sound like he thought all those other universes
were equally real when in fact he did. For example, Wheeler didn't
like the word "split" and was especially uncomfortable with talk of
conscious observers splitting in a way that was no different from the
way non-conscious things split. Even more seriously he made him remove
the entire chapter on information and probability which today many
consider the best part of the work. Everett also said that when an
observer splits it is meaningless to ask "/which of the final
observers corresponds to the initial one since each possesses the
total memory of the first/", he says it is as foolish as asking which
amoeba is the original after it splits into two. Wheeler also made him
remove all such talk of amebas from his published short thesis. His
long thesis was not published until 1973, if that version had been
published in 1957 instead of the truncated Bowdlerized version things
would have been different; plenty of people would still have disagreed
but he would not have been ignored for as long as he was.
>> there must be some changes to my brain that are so small (one
neutron in one neuron moving one Planck length to the left)
that they cause no change in conscious experience and do not
degrade the memory of being John K Clark yesterday. Therefore
there must be an astronomical number to an astronomical power
of John K Clarks all living in different,very very slightly
different, worlds. The number would be HUGE but it would still
be finite, so the number of John K Clarks that see you flip a
fair coin and come up heads 5 times in a row must be twice as
large as the number of times he sees you do it 6 times, but
there would still be a few that see him do it 100 times, maybe
1000 or even more.
/> That's a possible interpretation. But it's not a mechanism for
realizing the squared amplitude of the wave as relative frequency
of worlds, which decoherence proposed to do./
I believe you mentionedGleason's Theorem, it says that if the quantum
wave function is related to probability then the square of the
absolute value is the only one that doesn't produce
mathematicalcontradictions.
That's why the explanatory gap is NOT what probability rule applies, but
why is there a probability rule in the multiverse where all outcomes
happen. How does the amplitude in the superposition get stuck on some
"split" of the universe thru nothing but the linear evolution of the
Schroedinger equation?
Brent
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