On 22 Jun 2017 2:46 a.m., "Bruce Kellett" <bhkell...@optusnet.com.au> wrote:
On 22/06/2017 10:32 am, David Nyman wrote:
On 22 Jun 2017 00:31, "Bruce Kellett" < <bhkell...@optusnet.com.au>
bhkell...@optusnet.com.au> wrote:
On 22/06/2017 1:44 am, Bruno Marchal wrote:
> On 21 Jun 2017, at 08:21, Bruce Kellett wrote:
>
>> On 21/06/2017 4:03 pm, Russell Standish wrote:
>>
>>> On Mon, Jun 19, 2017 at 12:15:31PM +1000, Bruce Kellett wrote:
>>>
>>>> On 19/06/2017 10:23 am, Russell Standish wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> I know Scott wouldn't go as far as me. For me, all such irreversible
>>>>> processes are related to conscious entities in some way. Whilst
>>>>> agreeing that Geiger counters are unlikely to be conscious, I would
>>>>> say that the output of Geiger counter is not actually discrete until
>>>>> observed by a conscious experimenter.
>>>>>
>>>> That sounds remarkably like the "many minds" interpretation of
>>>> quantum mechanics. This is disfavoured by most scientists because it
>>>> leaves the physics of the billions of years before the emergence of
>>>> the first "conscious" creature unresolved -- the first consciousness
>>>> would cause an almighty collapse on the many minds reading.
>>>>
>>>> Each consciousness causes "an almighty collapse" in er own mind
>>> independently of any other. It's a pure 1p phenomena.
>>>
>>
>> It is actually a 3p phenomenon because there is inter-subjective
>> agreement about the fact that measurements give definite results.
>>
>
> Inter-subjectivity does not imply 3p, as it can be "only" 1p plural. Let
> me illustrate this with a variant of the WM duplication.
>
> Imagine that Bruce and John are undergoing the WM-duplication *together*.
>
> By this I mean they both enter the scanning-annihilating box, and are both
> reconstituted in Washington and in Moscow.
>
> And let us assume they do it repetitively, which means they come back to
> Helsinki, and do it again together.
>
> Obviously, the line-life past that each copies describes in its personal
> diaries grows like H followed by a sequence of W and M. The number of
> copies grows exponentially (2^n). After ten iterations, we have 2^10 = 1024
> individuals, who share an indeterminate experiences. With minor exceptions,
> they all agree that the experience has always given each times a precise
> outcome, always belonging to {W, M}. Importantly the duplicated couples
> agreed (which was the Washington or Moscow outcome) in all duplication.
> They mostly all agreed they did not found any obvious algorithm to predict
> the sequence (the exception might concerned the guys in nameable stories,
> like:
>
> WWWWWWWWWW
>
> MMMMMMMMMM
>
> Or the development of some remarkable real number in binary, like the
> binary expansion of PI, sqrt(2), sqr(n), etc. In this case, the computable
> is made rare (and more and more negligible when n grows, those histories
> are "white rabbits histories").
>
> That is what I mean by first person plural. It concerns population of
> machine sharing self-multiplication. it is interesting to compare the
> quantum linear self-superposition with the purely arithmetical one.
>
Sure, that would seem to be reasonably described as 1p-plural. except that
there is no need to have two people enter the duplicating machine and
undergo different teleportations afterwards. Surely it is sufficient to
consider one person doing a series of polarization measurements on a
sequence of photons from an unpolarized source. That person will record
some sequence of '+' and '-' results. If the experiment is repeated N
times, there will be 2^N sequences, one in each of the generated worlds.
But that has nothing to do with inter-subjective agreement between
different observers. To see that, consider just one polarization
measurement: In order for it to be said that the measurement gave a result,
there has to be decoherence and the formation of irreversible records. I
think it is Zurek who talks about multiple copies of the result entangled
with the environment. So many different individuals can observe the result
of this single experiment, and they will all agree that the result was what
the experimenter wrote in her lab book. That is inter-subjective agreement.
It clearly has nothing to do with 1p, or 1p-plural pictures.
I think there may be a terminological confusion here. IIUC, 1p-plural
denotes, amongst other things, just such inter-subjective agreement between
mutually entangled observers.
That seems a remarkably confusing terminology. The example Bruno gave to
illustrate 1p-plural was not an example of inter-subjective agreement --
there were just repeated measurements by the one person.
That's why I said "amongst other things".
If you conflate 1p-plural with inter-subjective, what on earth is 3p?
3p is a (sometimes imaginary) perspective on some state of affairs at one
remove from the 1p views of any of the supposed participants of interest.
The notation suggested to me 'third person', or the view of an outsider
watching the experiment. This outsider certainly gets entangled with the
experimenter and his result, but the many copies give rise to the
inter-subjective agreement about what that result was. Bruno has certainly
used 3p in this way many times -- in his endless disputed over step 3 with
John Clark, for example.
Yes, but such perspectives can always be reduced to 1p, singular or plural.
IOW they always depend on the interpretation of some explicit or implied
observer. The exception is in the limit of the imaginary bird view,
although arguably even this, by definition, remains inherently dependent on
interpretation.
Physics, in this usage, is considered as 1p-plural at least in terms of its
phenomenology, because those phenomena essentially reduce to the sum of all
possible measurements of this sort.
The phenomena of physics "reduce to the sum of all possible measurements of
this sort"? I don't really understand what that means. Physics is a
consideration of the results of experiments as agreed by the physics
community. It is not a "sum of all possible measurements".
In the limit, doesn't "consideration of the results of experiments as
agreed by the physics community" converge towards the sum of all possible
observations or measurements? That's what's meant by its being a 1p-plural
notion.
David
Bruce
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