Isn't this the distinction between many minds and many world's? Whether to draw the bounds if the superposition around the conscious mind or the environment?
Does Saibal Mitra's "changing the past by forgetting" assume and rely upon many minds? Jason On May 28, 2017 7:23 AM, "Pierz" <pier...@gmail.com> wrote: > > > On Sunday, May 28, 2017 at 10:28:52 AM UTC+10, Russell Standish wrote: >> >> On Thu, May 25, 2017 at 06:30:07PM -0700, Pierz wrote: >> > Recently I've been studying a lot of history, and I've often thought >> about >> > how, according to special relativity, you can translate time into space >> and >> > vice versa, and therefore how from a different perspective we can think >> of >> > the past as distant in space rather than time: my childhood being 40 >> light >> > years away, rather than 40 years for instance. I can visualise my own >> body >> > as a sort of long, four dimensional tendril through spacetime, of which >> I >> > only ever see a three-dimensional cross-section. This is the block >> universe >> > idea of course. What occurred to me recently was that the past, in any >> > physical theory I know of, is "locked down". There is only a single >> history >> > consistent with the present (ignoring the microscopic ambiguities of >> > quantum interference effects), but the present is consistent with >> multiple >> > futures. >> >> This assumption is wrong. There are many histories (pasts) consistent >> with our present. If we don't know some fact about the past (eg >> T. Rex's colour), then pasts with different colours of T.Rexes are all >> compatible with our present. Only when we make a measurement that >> distinguishes between different facts about the past, do we eliminate >> some of those pasts from the compatibility list. >> >> I think there's a confusion there between human ignorance and physical > ambiguity - the same confusion expressed in the Schrödinger's Cat thought > experiment. The resolution of that paradox lies in decoherence. The fact of > the cat's death or survival spreads into the environment in a myriad of > ways, whether or not we are measuring them: the cat's cooling after death, > the shift of its weight as it falls and so on. At that point it is not in a > superposition any more. We are merely ignorant of its state. I would argue > the same applies to the colour of T. Rex. The past is not in a > superposition of possible values, but we are ignorant of those values. Now > I think it is interesting to contemplate the possibility that more than one > macroscopic history (one with green and one with red T. Rexes) might lead > to the same present, but I think it extremely unlikely - that would > constitute a macroscopic quantum interference effect. I suspect only one > possible colour is consistent with the present, even though it looks > superficially like any colour is possible. > > > There are, however, arrows of time - past and future are asymmetric, >> the future is more uncertain than the past. But I don't see how you >> can leverage that into support for the MWI. >> >> >> >> -- >> >> ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- >> >> Dr Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) >> Principal, High Performance Coders >> Visiting Senior Research Fellow hpc...@hpcoders.com.au >> Economics, Kingston University 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 https://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. > For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. > -- 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 https://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
