On 29/06/07, Niels-Jeroen Vandamme
Personally, I do not believe in coincidence. Everything in the universe
might seem stochastic, but it all has a logical explanation. I believe the
same applies to quantum chaos, though quantum mechanics is still far too
recondite for us to understand this phenomenon. If something would be purely
random, then there would be no reason at all why it would be what it is. If
you toss a coin, for example, what side it will land upon depends on the
dynamics of its course, and not of coincidence.
But if there can be no interaction between the copies, why would the
consciousness end up in one copy rather than another, if they are all
exactly alike?
Imagine a program that creates an observer that splits and
differentiates every second, so that the number of observers increases
exponentially with time. From the point of view of someone outside the
system, it is perfectly deterministic. But from the point of view of
an individual observer within the program, there is no way to know
which branch you will end up in: you just have to wait and see what
happens. So an objectively deterministic process can yield true (not
just apparent) first person randomness. This is the explanation of
quantum randomness in the many worlds interpretation of quantum
mechanics.
--
Stathis Papaioannou
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