----- Forwarded message from Kevin Tryon <kevintr...@hotmail.com> -----
I see that one of the earlier participants on the Everything list has now taken it upon himself to educate the masses because the "cat is out of the bag" and QI has become a familiar topic to many. http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/0902/0902.0187.pdf Does he say anything in this article that he hasn't said on the Everything list in his struggles against QI? ----- End forwarded message ----- I have now read the whole of Jacques Mallah's "paper", and to put it mildly, it is disappointing. I would have expected more from him. It is neither the "definitive debunking" hoped for by the author, nor is it persuasive in the rhetorical sense. What little technical detail he provides obscures, rather than illuminates the issue. So what is the paper? I mentioned the interesting comment on how we should expect to find ourselves a Boltzmann brain shortly after the big bang, but there was no follow up to this. I have no idea how he came up with that notion. His discussion of the Born rule is incorrect. The probability given by the Born rule is not the square of the state vector, but rather the square modulus of the inner product of some eigenvector with the original state, appropriately normalised to make it a probability. After observation, the state vector describing the new will be proportional to the eigenvector corresponding the measured eigenvalue, but nothing in QM says anything about its amplitude. Indeed it is conventional to normalise the resulting state vector, as a computational convenience - but this is an entirely different proposition to Mallah's. What I think he is trying to discuss, somewhat clumsily, in the section on measure, is the ASSA notion of a unique well-defined measure for all observer moments. This has been discussed in this list extensively, and also summarised in my book. But it would sure confuse anyone not familiar with the notion. He goes on to mention rather briefly in passing his doomsday style argument against QI, but not in detail. Which is just as well, as that argument predicts that we should be neonatal infants! He also mentions Tegmark's amoeba croaks argument, which is not actually an argument against QI, but rather a discussion of what QI might actually mean. Contrary to what some people might think, QI doesn't predict one would necessarily experience being vastly older than the rest of the population. It just predicts that we should all experience a "good innings", and that what happens after that is rather unpredictable - it may be lapsing into senesence, it may be followed by rebirth into a different consciousness, it may be a form of afterlife, or of uploading Singulatarian style. So sorry Jacques - you need to do better. I'm sure you can! Cheers -- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- A/Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) Mathematics UNSW SYDNEY 2052 hpco...@hpcoders.com.au Australia http://www.hpcoders.com.au ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to everything-l...@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---