At 12:35 -0800 14/01/2003, Hal Finney wrote:
Tim May writes:
This arises with quantum measurements of course. Once a measurement is
made--path of a photon, for example--all honest observers will report
exactly the same thing. There simply is no basis for disputing the
past, for Alice to say "
Tim May wrote:
>
> The future is not knowable, the past is not disputable.
>
The way I look upon the "Many pasts" idea is (to use a pithy phrase
which I have coined before) that we presently live in a superposition
of pasts containing blue and green T. Rexes. Assuming that someone
someday can ac
On Tuesday, January 14, 2003, at 12:35 PM, Hal Finney wrote:
Tim May writes:
This arises with quantum measurements of course. Once a measurement is
made--path of a photon, for example--all honest observers will report
exactly the same thing. There simply is no basis for disputing the
past, for
Tim May wrote:
> On Monday, January 13, 2003, at 02:40 PM, Jesse Mazer wrote:
>
> > Tim May wrote:
> >
>
>
> As to why there is only a single past but multiple futures, this is
> implicit in the measurement process. (I doubt you will find this
> convincing unless I expand on this.)
>
> Cons
Tim May writes:
> This arises with quantum measurements of course. Once a measurement is
> made--path of a photon, for example--all honest observers will report
> exactly the same thing. There simply is no basis for disputing the
> past, for Alice to say "I saw the photon travel through the left
On Tuesday, January 14, 2003, at 11:43 AM, Tim May wrote:
Rereading my paragraphs, maybe they are unclear. It takes entire
chapters of books (I like David Albert's book, or Smolin's "Life of
the Cosmos" (from whence the cat and dog example was taken), Bub,
Hughes, and Barrett) to talk about t
On Monday, January 13, 2003, at 02:40 PM, Jesse Mazer wrote:
Tim May wrote:
On your point about "many pasts are fundamentally caused by quantum
uncertainty in memory devices," I strongly disagree. There is only
one past for one present, whether RAMs dropped bits in recording them
or histor
Tim May wrote:
On your point about "many pasts are fundamentally caused by quantum
uncertainty in memory devices," I strongly disagree. There is only one past
for one present, whether RAMs dropped bits in recording them or historians
forgot something, etc.
(This is captured by the formalism o
On Monday, January 13, 2003, at 12:38 PM, George Levy wrote:
Tim May wrote
If you mean that "many presents" have "many pasts," yes. But the
current present only has a limited number of pasts, possibly just one.
(The origin of this asymmetry in the lattice of events is related to
our being
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