Re: “Could a Quantum Computer Have Subjective Experience?”
On 22/06/2017 7:22 pm, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 22 Jun 2017, at 01:31, Bruce Kellett 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: WW MM 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 ? Then it is just 1p singular. We need two (or more) people entering the duplication device so that we get the intersubjective agreement. and undergo different teleportations afterwards. ? They undergo the same teleportations. They are both reconstituted in the two different locations, and, obviously (we assume Digital Mechanism) they agree that the outcome is well determined from their common first person view, and that this the 1p plural. Surely it is sufficient to consider one person doing a series of polarization measurements on a sequence of photons from an unpolarized source. You need two persons. With one person, you can't distinguish 1p from 1pp (1p plural). I think I understand it now. The problems, I think, have arisen because you are using the same terminology for both the classical duplication of persons and the quantum branching of worlds. I think that conflating these two situations is a mistake because they are intrinsically different. In classical person duplication, there is no entanglement. Even if you duplicate two or more persons simultaneously, and subject them to the same teleportations, there is no real entanglement, just a simulation that mimics some features of entanglement. The lesson of Bell is that classical simulations of entanglement can never reproduce the quantum results. In classical person duplication, it is only the person that is duplicated, not the whole world, so the 1p experience becomes central. Because the world is not duplicated, you can have an external observer who can see both ends of the duplication -- the 3p view. However, in the quantum case, a quantum event, when magnified to macro significance by decoherence, results in a branching of the whole world into disjoint copies. The role of the observer is diminished here, to the extent that an observer is not even required: if it is a quantum measurement, the experimenter is entangled with the result simply as part of the wider world
Cosmological Natural Selection
I've just read Lee Smolin's book "Time Reborn" and it reminded m e of his previous book "The Life Of The Cosmos" that was about Cosmological Natural Selection. Smolin's idea is that when a star collapses into a Black Hole a Singularity does not form in it's center, instead everything bounces back before infinite density is reached. You would not see this from the outside of the Black Hole but from the inside such a thing would look like a big bang, and a new universe would be formed. In that new universe the constants of physics, the 20 or so number s that can't be derived and must be put in by hand by physicists to make there theories conform with observation, are similar to their parent universe but not identical, there would be some small random variation. Universes that have laws encouraging the formation of black holes will thus have more descendants than those that don't . And all this sounds very much like Darwin's idea written on a cosmic scale because it has the 2 things that are needed, natural selection and inheritance (although some have questioned the inheritance part wondering if information can really cross the event horizon, even mutated information). Smolin does not predict that as a result of this Evolution the physical constants in our universe are perfect for the formation of Black Holes, but he does predict no small change in them will make more Black Holes. And Black Holes need stars that go supernova, and hose stars produce carbon and oxygen that also causes dust clouds to cool more and collapse into yet more large stars that go supernova and form more Black Holes . Those heavy elements also cause life to form but as far as Cosmological Natural Selection is concerned that's just a unimportant byproduct. But what about Primordial Black Holes, you don't need stars to make them. According to inflation theory expansion of our universe started slow but then in just 10^-36 seconds space expanded by a factor of 10^78, during that time the universe grew by a larger personage than it has form then to now 13.8 billion years later. There is a number called the Size Density Constant, if it were much larger all the matter in the universe would form Black Holes almost immediately, but it turn out then the universe would inflate for even less than 10^-36 seconds so there would be much less matter in it, so although all its matter would be in the form on Black Holes it would have fewer Black Holes than out universe does. Smolin makes another prediction this one is about Neutron Stars. Cosmological Natural Selection predicts that the maximum mass a Neutron Star can be is lower than previously thought and thus more Black Holes can be produced due to a particle called the Kaon. The conventional idea is that in a Neutron Star the pressure is so high electrons are forced into protons forming neutrons and that's the end of the story, and if that's true then the maximum mass of a Neutron star is somewhere between 2.5 and 2.9 solar masses . But that's without considering Kaons, Smolin found that theory says some interesting things happens to them when the pressure gets very high. Normally Kaons are much more massive than electrons and thus unstable, but under ultra high pressure suddenly the individual wave function of the particles will merge, much like what happens to electrons in superconductors, and their effective mass should be reduced by a lot, perhaps even to less than that of a electron. If that actually happens then things would be reversed and electrons would become unstable and decay into Kaons (and Neutrinos which fly out of the star and play no further part in the story). In this scenario the upper mass limit for a neutron star is between 1.6 and 2 solar masses. More than that and a Black Hole forms because the Kaon-Proton-Neutron soup at the center would be even more dense than degenerate neutron matter , so the Neutron Star would be smaller and its surface gravity greater, and thus a Black Hole can be formed with less mass. But would the effective mass of the Kaon really become less than that of the electron? Nobody knows for sure but we do know that the mass of the Kaon depends on the mass of the Strange Quark, and the Strange Quark has little involvement with everyday matter in our everyday world, so in a universe that had a Strange Quark with a mass very different from our own things would be pretty much the same as they are here except the maximum size of a Neutron Star and thus the minimum size of a Black Hole would be different. The two most massive neutron stars where the mass ha s been been accurately measured are PSR J0348+0432 with 2.01±0.04 solar masses and PSR J1614–2230 with 1.97 ± 0.04 solar masses. So far the Kaon idea surv
Re: “Could a Quantum Computer Have Subjective Experience?”
On 22 Jun 2017, at 03:46, Bruce Kellett wrote: On 22/06/2017 10:32 am, David Nyman wrote: On 22 Jun 2017 00:31, "Bruce Kellett" 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: WW MM 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 maderare (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. ? By TWO persons. You do miss the point, it seems. Bruno If you conflate 1p-plural with inter-subjective, what on earth is 3p? 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 dispute
Re: “Could a Quantum Computer Have Subjective Experience?”
On 22 Jun 2017, at 01:31, Bruce Kellett 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: WW MM 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 ? Then it is just 1p singular. We need two (or more) people entering the duplication device so that we get the intersubjective agreement. and undergo different teleportations afterwards. ? They undergo the same teleportations. They are both reconstituted in the two different locations, and, obviously (we assume Digital Mechanism) they agree that the outcome is well determined from their common first person view, and that this the 1p plural. Surely it is sufficient to consider one person doing a series of polarization measurements on a sequence of photons from an unpolarized source. You need two persons. With one person, you can't distinguish 1p from 1pp (1p plural). 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. Glad to hear that. You might try to explain this to John. But you need two person doing the experiment, or discussing it at least, in which case the secondf person will entangle with the first, already entangled with the observed particle (say). O2 O1 (up + down) ==>O2 (O1 up + O1 down) ==> O2 O1 up + O2 O1 down => O2 O1[up] up + O2 O1[down] down => etc. There is subjective agreement between O1 and O2, because the superposition and measurement (in the same base, here) propogate from O1 to O2. But that has nothing to do with inter-subjective agreement between different observers. ? Because you withdrew the second person. I think me or you miss something. 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 wh
Re: “Could a Quantum Computer Have Subjective Experience?”
On 22 Jun 2017 2:46 a.m., "Bruce Kellett" wrote: On 22/06/2017 10:32 am, David Nyman wrote: On 22 Jun 2017 00:31, "Bruce Kellett" < 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: > > WW > > MM > > 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