On Wed, Aug 21, 2013 at 12:07:05PM -0700, meekerdb wrote: > > But it seems to me that this reset is a magical, impossible > operation. If the human brain is a classical computer then that > means it's computational state can be reset. But it also means the > its physical state can't be reset. The resetting operation itself, > being a classical operation, is irreversible because of decoherence > into the environment. So the environment has the information about > the state leading up to the reset and the reset operation. So when > you say 'you' can find yourself on another branch, it's not clear > what 'you' refers to. Apparently it would have to refer to an > abstract computation (per Bruno, I guess) that happened to go > through the same state twice (due to the 'reset') in this world AND > also at least once in some other world. But if it went through that > state in some other world, there was already FPI even without the > reset. Right? > > Brent >
Just a small observation. Brent is arguing essential from what Bruno would call the Aristotelian position, ie that there is a definite environment containing the results of past decoherence that the observer belongs to, even if the observer is now ignorant of that due to memory erasure. Saibal is arguing from the COMP position, that memory erasure is sufficient to reestablish the superposition - ie that there is no such objective environment. ISTM that Brent's position is widely held amongst QM practitioners today, particularly the Austrian group, but that the alternative (many minds, or perhaps COMP?) is equally as valid, at least as far as empirical results go. Part of the problem is that the language of the thought experiment encourages the Aristotelian interpretation - we are describing the situation from a mythical 3rd person POV, which implicitly supposes an environment that the 3rd person observer is entangled with. If we were to make the contorted effort to describe things entirely from the 1st person observer's POV, the environment Brent is talking about vanishes with the memory erasure. Cheers -- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) Principal, High Performance Coders Visiting Professor of Mathematics hpco...@hpcoders.com.au University of New South Wales http://www.hpcoders.com.au ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
