Steve writes:
< I am also
interested in what an everyday interpretation of Quantum Superposition
might be when applied to collective
knowledge/consciousness/decision-making.
My recurrent harping on ranked-choice voting is a very thin appeal in
that direction... a reduction/projection/collapse of these more esoteric
idea(l)s into something more practical/pedestrian? >
In an imperative computer program, people often think of uninitialized
variables as defaulting to zero or some random bad state. A better way to
think of them is as free variables that will take on all possible values for
their type. Figuring out which value is best (or worst), for some purpose, is
a search problem. For classical computers this will be exponentially
expensive with the number of variables.
< Dave is less specific about the qualities of these
substances/experiences and *how* they improve Quality of Life, but I
think it is fair to say he endorses them (with various qualifications).
I've not read Michael Pollan's "How to Change your Mind", but I have
read Oliver Sacks widely including notably "Hallucinations" which does
make a case for the value of psychoactive drugs and other
hallucination-inducing experiences. >
Taking a hallucinogenic might be one way to move in `brain configuration space'
with much bigger steps than could be accomplished by learning or therapy.
This might be appealing if one suspected that the mental health space was bumpy
but pretty flat and yet connected in surprising ways. Say, that preconceived
notions of happiness or satisfaction were inadequate to capture the breadth of
possible experience. What are the criteria that should go into a
multi-criterion optimization anyway -- maybe it only looks flat and bumpy
because impoverished objectives makes it look that way? It is not clear that
moving around in a space is especially enriching (I would say that about travel
to some extent) but it could be informative as to what kinds of depth might be
interesting.
Marcus
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