Re: Interesting Google tech talk on QM
On 01 May 2014, at 03:55, Pierz wrote: On Wednesday, April 30, 2014 6:19:01 AM UTC+10, jessem wrote: On Tue, Apr 29, 2014 at 3:02 PM, John Mikes jam...@gmail.com wrote: Brent(?) wrote: No I never read that, but hell yeah, MWI worries me! Doesn't it worry you? I mean I know at one level that in a very real sense it doesn't matter whether it's true or not, since the other universes can never affect me, but at another the reality that everything happens to me that I can imagine is just plain terrifying. And the 'me' isn't just the versions of me that are still called by my name, I can't escape the conclusion that I am everyone and everyone is me and that *everyone's* experience is my experience at some level. If MWI ever does become the accepted conception of reality, we have a huge amount of philosophical reorientation ahead of us. For instance, if I take some risk (like drink-driving, a relevant topic on another thread), and 'get away with it', MWI suggests I am still responsible for other realities in which I crashed and injured or killed myself and/or others. My whole approach to risk management becomes quite different if all outcomes are realised. In what ways would your approach to risk management need to change if there was still some notion of different outcomes having different measures that correspond to normal classical probabilities? In a MWI context you might have a scenario where you can say if I take action X, then I expect in 95% of worlds outcome Y will occur, but in 5% of worlds outcome Z will occur, but in what cases would your choice about whether to take outcome X be any different than a one-world scenario where you can say if I take action X, then I expect there's a 95% probability outcome Y will occur, but a 5% probability outcome Z will occur? Can you think of any specific examples where this would change your decision? The MWI advocate David Deutsch had a quote about choices and morality in the article at http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg17122994.400-taming-the-multiverse.html which made sense to me: By making good choices, doing the right thing, we thicken the stack of universes in which versions of us live reasonable lives. When you succeed, all the copies of you who made the same decision succeed too. What you do for the better increases the portion of the multiverse where good things happen. Jesse Sorry Brent that people seem to be taking these as your remarks. Actually jesse on reflection I agree with you that from a rational point of view, one should make the same decision in either interpretation. The difference in perspective is a non-rational one, but non-rational perspectives can still matter. It's almost impossible to shake the familiar notion that I'll either get away with this or I won't in relation to some specific risk one takes, because from the 1p perspective, that is always true. Knowing (if MWI is ever proved) that in fact one's future is a weighted distribution of all possibilities, all of which we will experience, might change the way one relates to choice and experience. It drives home responsibility because there is no getting away with in an absolute sense. But then again, I believe that thinking about the absolute perspective from the 1p-perspective is always a mistake, in that subjective responses are always 1p and bound up with the qualia, which don't apply to the absolute. Therefore the terror I experience thinking about MWI, and also the sense of it changing my feelings about choice, are probably part of that same confusion of levels. Only God knows how we should feel about the Absolute, or perhaps how the Absolute feels (the qualia of the Absolute). Anyway my suspicion is that MWI is only the very beginning of a new level of understanding - a beginning of infinity per Deutsch - so any feelings we might have about it are based on a terribly limited perspective. Exactly, and even more so that we can never be sure of any of our theories/assumption. Doubly so in theology. We can use practical knowledge to reduce harm, and try to avoid wishful thinking in our theories, but we shouldn't fear truth per se, especially because we cannot be sure about it. We can take pleasure in the contemplation, and learn to not judge the others. Bruno -- 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/d/optout. http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from
Re: Interesting Google tech talk on QM
On 30 Apr 2014, at 04:24, Russell Standish wrote: On Tue, Apr 29, 2014 at 04:19:01PM -0400, Jesse Mazer wrote: The MWI advocate David Deutsch had a quote about choices and morality in the article at http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg17122994.400-taming-the-multiverse.htmlwhich made sense to me: By making good choices, doing the right thing, we thicken the stack of universes in which versions of us live reasonable lives. When you succeed, all the copies of you who made the same decision succeed too. What you do for the better increases the portion of the multiverse where good things happen. Jesse Makes no sense to me. You do not thicken the stack of universes, nor do you increase the portion of the multiverse where good things happen. The Multiverse just is - proportions do not change because of choices of inhabitants. But they relative accessibility does, from inside. In QM they are weighted by the square of a scalar product, and in comp, by the self- referential constraints. Rather, I think decision theory should be based on what choices (of measurement) do I make such that the most likely outcome (that I observe) is 'good', and 'bad' outcomes are unlikely (to be observed). David Deutsch seems to be badly conflating the static block multiverse picture with a dynamic einselectionist picture. I guess he confuses the 3p []p, and the inside 1p views like []p p, []p t p. Cue the obvious response from John Clark that free will is meaningless noise, and so consequently is decision theory :). Which is meaningful to God, or from the 0p view, but makes no sense from inside. Best, Bruno 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 Latest project: The Amoeba's Secret (http://www.hpcoders.com.au/AmoebasSecret.html) -- 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/d/optout. http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- 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/d/optout.
Re: Interesting Google tech talk on QM
On Wednesday, April 30, 2014 6:19:01 AM UTC+10, jessem wrote: On Tue, Apr 29, 2014 at 3:02 PM, John Mikes jam...@gmail.comjavascript: wrote: *Brent(?) wrote*: No I never read that, but hell yeah, MWI worries me! Doesn't it worry you? I mean I know at one level that in a very real sense it doesn't matter whether it's true or not, since the other universes can never affect me, but at another the reality that everything happens to me that I can imagine is just plain terrifying. And the 'me' isn't just the versions of me that are still called by my name, I can't escape the conclusion that I am everyone and everyone is me and that *everyone's* experience is my experience at some level. If MWI ever does become the accepted conception of reality, we have a huge amount of philosophical reorientation ahead of us. For instance, if I take some risk (like drink-driving, a relevant topic on another thread), and 'get away with it', MWI suggests I am still responsible for other realities in which I crashed and injured or killed myself and/or others. My whole approach to risk management becomes quite different if all outcomes are realised. In what ways would your approach to risk management need to change if there was still some notion of different outcomes having different measures that correspond to normal classical probabilities? In a MWI context you might have a scenario where you can say if I take action X, then I expect in 95% of worlds outcome Y will occur, but in 5% of worlds outcome Z will occur, but in what cases would your choice about whether to take outcome X be any different than a one-world scenario where you can say if I take action X, then I expect there's a 95% probability outcome Y will occur, but a 5% probability outcome Z will occur? Can you think of any specific examples where this would change your decision? The MWI advocate David Deutsch had a quote about choices and morality in the article at http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg17122994.400-taming-the-multiverse.htmlhttp://www.google.com/url?q=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.newscientist.com%2Farticle%2Fmg17122994.400-taming-the-multiverse.htmlsa=Dsntz=1usg=AFQjCNHLgOxHGWRd2GSdekeyzx2koll2Jwwhich made sense to me: By making good choices, doing the right thing, we thicken the stack of universes in which versions of us live reasonable lives. When you succeed, all the copies of you who made the same decision succeed too. What you do for the better increases the portion of the multiverse where good things happen. Jesse Sorry Brent that people seem to be taking these as your remarks. Actually jesse on reflection I agree with you that from a rational point of view, one should make the same decision in either interpretation. The difference in perspective is a non-rational one, but non-rational perspectives can still matter. It's almost impossible to shake the familiar notion that I'll either get away with this or I won't in relation to some specific risk one takes, because from the 1p perspective, that is always true. Knowing (if MWI is ever proved) that in fact one's future is a weighted distribution of all possibilities, all of which we will experience, might change the way one relates to choice and experience. It drives home responsibility because there is no getting away with in an absolute sense. But then again, I believe that thinking about the absolute perspective from the 1p-perspective is always a mistake, in that subjective responses are always 1p and bound up with the qualia, which don't apply to the absolute. Therefore the terror I experience thinking about MWI, and also the sense of it changing my feelings about choice, are probably part of that same confusion of levels. Only God knows how we should feel about the Absolute, or perhaps how the Absolute feels (the qualia of the Absolute). Anyway my suspicion is that MWI is only the very beginning of a new level of understanding - a beginning of infinity per Deutsch - so any feelings we might have about it are based on a terribly limited perspective. -- 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/d/optout.
Re: Interesting Google tech talk on QM
*Brent(?) wrote*: No I never read that, but hell yeah, MWI worries me! Doesn't it worry you? I mean I know at one level that in a very real sense it doesn't matter whether it's true or not, since the other universes can never affect me, but at another the reality that everything happens to me that I can imagine is just plain terrifying. And the 'me' isn't just the versions of me that are still called by my name, I can't escape the conclusion that I am everyone and everyone is me and that *everyone's* experience is my experience at some level. If MWI ever does become the accepted conception of reality, we have a huge amount of philosophical reorientation ahead of us. For instance, if I take some risk (like drink-driving, a relevant topic on another thread), and 'get away with it', MWI suggests I am still responsible for other realities in which I crashed and injured or killed myself and/or others. My whole approach to risk management becomes quite different if all outcomes are realised. It no longer makes sense to think about if something will happen to me in the future. I have to accept that it all will happen, it's just that all those future mes won't know about the other ones, so they will all have the impression of a single outcome. It's a disorienting and disturbing thought. Of course it should't lead to fatalism, since one's choices are part of the deterministic system that determines the 'weight' of certain futures - and I suppose it should actually lead to a kind of 'radical acceptance'. There's no point thinking why me? or what bad luck, since your experiencing this, and indeed everything, is inevitable. But then I console myself by thinking that any human-level qualitative interpretation of this level of reality is mistaken, a kind of confusion of levels. And still it horrifies me... (But like Bruno, my dedication to truth keeps me from rejecting it purely because I hate it. The logic is very compelling.) *Stathis: * We accept as a society the risk of death by motor vehicle accident because there is a 1/10,000 chance per year it will happen to an individual, even though that means that in a large city a person will on average be killed every day. I think this situation is analogous to the moral question of MWI versus a single world interpretation of QM. *Me:* #1: I do not consider quantitative chance (probability) because of its unidentified sequence of occurrence . #2: I take MWI as a potentially valid idea - with the proviso that the unverses are DIFFERENT. In my narrative I give an idea to occur infinite universes of infinite qualia - ours seems to be a moderate one with no structural access to others, what does not mean the same vice versa. Hence: the ZOOKEEPER theories and the unexplained occurrences. #3: I take exception to any extension of anthropocentric ideas to the everything of which we are not equipped to know a lot. -That pertains to quantizing (math?) and drawing conclusions upon observations of phenomena we don't know indeed. JM On Mon, Apr 28, 2014 at 12:17 AM, Stathis Papaioannou stath...@gmail.comwrote: On 23 April 2014 21:33, Pierz pier...@gmail.com wrote: On Tuesday, April 22, 2014 11:12:53 PM UTC+10, Brent wrote: On 4/22/2014 4:54 AM, Pierz wrote: Thanks Brent. I read Mermin and am both wiser and none-the. It seems to me in this paper he is chickening out by saying that QM shouldn't really think about the conscious observer, because that leads to the fairy tale of many worlds. Instead it should consider consciousness to reside outside the competent scope of a physical theory. I don't think he means that. He just means that it's a separate question from the interpretation of QM and that it's a mistake to mix them together. It's kind of like his answer is to say don't ask those questions. And he explicitly repudiates the notion that it's all in your head or that a quantum state is a summary of your knowledge of the system. The correlations are objective. What I liked about the paper though was the notion of correlations without correlata (which Garrett invokes) - the idea that quantum theory is about (and only about) systemic relationships makes a lot of sense. To take the answer to what is QM telling us? just a little further philosophically than what Mermim is prepared to, I'd say it's telling us (for one thing) that we've hit the limits of atomism. We're bouncing off the boundary of the reductionistic epistemology. Anyway, sadly I haven't yet seen anything that could supply a cogent alternative to MWI. I'll move on to the other papers tomorrow night... :) Chris Fuchs is the main proponent of quantum Bayesianism, which also takes the wave-function to just be a summary of one's knowledge of the system - and so there is nothing surprising about it collapsing when you get new information. Of course another alternative is an objective collapse theory like GRW. I'm just now reading a book by
Re: Interesting Google tech talk on QM
On 4/29/2014 12:02 PM, John Mikes wrote: */Brent(?) wrote/*: Nope. Wasn't me, I wrote: / //Chris Fuchs is the main proponent of quantum Bayesianism, which also takes the wave-function to just be a summary of one's knowledge of the system - and so there is nothing surprising about it collapsing when you get new information.// // //Of course another alternative is an objective collapse theory like GRW. I'm just now reading a book by Ghirardi,Sneaking a Look at God's Cards which surveys the experiments that force the weirdness of QM on us and the various interpretations. Of course he devotes a special chapter to GRW theory, but he is very even handed.// // //I'm not sure why you're worried about MWI though. Is it because you read Divide by Infinity? I don't think that's what MWI really implies.// / Brent No I never read that, but hell yeah, MWI worries me! Doesn't it worry you? I mean I know at one level that in a very real sense it doesn't matter whether it's true or not, since the other universes can never affect me, but at another the reality that everything happens to me that I can imagine is just plain terrifying. And the 'me' isn't just the versions of me that are still called by my name, I can't escape the conclusion that I am everyone and everyone is me and that *everyone's* experience is my experience at some level. If MWI ever does become the accepted conception of reality, we have a huge amount of philosophical reorientation ahead of us. For instance, if I take some risk (like drink-driving, a relevant topic on another thread), and 'get away with it', MWI suggests I am still responsible for other realities in which I crashed and injured or killed myself and/or others. My whole approach to risk management becomes quite different if all outcomes are realised. It no longer makes sense to think about if something will happen to me in the future. I have to accept that it all will happen, it's just that all those future mes won't know about the other ones, so they will all have the impression of a single outcome. It's a disorienting and disturbing thought. Of course it should't lead to fatalism, since one's choices are part of the deterministic system that determines the 'weight' of certain futures - and I suppose it should actually lead to a kind of 'radical acceptance'. There's no point thinking why me? or what bad luck, since your experiencing this, and indeed everything, is inevitable. But then I console myself by thinking that any human-level qualitative interpretation of this level of reality is mistaken, a kind of confusion of levels. And still it horrifies me... (But like Bruno, my dedication to truth keeps me from rejecting it purely because I hate it. The logic is very compelling.) */Stathis: /* We accept as a society the risk of death by motor vehicle accident because there is a 1/10,000 chance per year it will happen to an individual, even though that means that in a large city a person will on average be killed every day. I think this situation is analogous to the moral question of MWI versus a single world interpretation of QM.*/ /* */Me:/* #1: I do not consider quantitative chance (probability) because of its unidentified sequence of occurrence . #2: I take MWI as a potentially valid idea - with the proviso that the unverses are DIFFERENT. In my narrative I give an idea to occur infinite universes of infinite qualia - ours seems to be a moderate one with no structural access to others, what does not mean the same vice versa. Hence: the ZOOKEEPER theories and the unexplained occurrences. #3: I take exception to any extension of anthropocentric ideas to the everything of which we are not equipped to know a lot. -That pertains to quantizing (math?) and drawing conclusions upon observations of phenomena we don't know indeed. JM On Mon, Apr 28, 2014 at 12:17 AM, Stathis Papaioannou stath...@gmail.com mailto:stath...@gmail.com wrote: On 23 April 2014 21:33, Pierz pier...@gmail.com mailto:pier...@gmail.com wrote: On Tuesday, April 22, 2014 11:12:53 PM UTC+10, Brent wrote: On 4/22/2014 4:54 AM, Pierz wrote: Thanks Brent. I read Mermin and am both wiser and none-the. It seems to me in this paper he is chickening out by saying that QM shouldn't really think about the conscious observer, because that leads to the fairy tale of many worlds. Instead it should consider consciousness to reside outside the competent scope of a physical theory. I don't think he means that. He just means that it's a separate question from the interpretation of QM and that it's a mistake to mix them together. It's kind of like his answer is to say don't ask those questions. And he explicitly repudiates the notion that it's all in your head or that a quantum state is a summary of your
Re: Interesting Google tech talk on QM
On Tue, Apr 29, 2014 at 3:02 PM, John Mikes jami...@gmail.com wrote: *Brent(?) wrote*: No I never read that, but hell yeah, MWI worries me! Doesn't it worry you? I mean I know at one level that in a very real sense it doesn't matter whether it's true or not, since the other universes can never affect me, but at another the reality that everything happens to me that I can imagine is just plain terrifying. And the 'me' isn't just the versions of me that are still called by my name, I can't escape the conclusion that I am everyone and everyone is me and that *everyone's* experience is my experience at some level. If MWI ever does become the accepted conception of reality, we have a huge amount of philosophical reorientation ahead of us. For instance, if I take some risk (like drink-driving, a relevant topic on another thread), and 'get away with it', MWI suggests I am still responsible for other realities in which I crashed and injured or killed myself and/or others. My whole approach to risk management becomes quite different if all outcomes are realised. In what ways would your approach to risk management need to change if there was still some notion of different outcomes having different measures that correspond to normal classical probabilities? In a MWI context you might have a scenario where you can say if I take action X, then I expect in 95% of worlds outcome Y will occur, but in 5% of worlds outcome Z will occur, but in what cases would your choice about whether to take outcome X be any different than a one-world scenario where you can say if I take action X, then I expect there's a 95% probability outcome Y will occur, but a 5% probability outcome Z will occur? Can you think of any specific examples where this would change your decision? The MWI advocate David Deutsch had a quote about choices and morality in the article at http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg17122994.400-taming-the-multiverse.htmlwhich made sense to me: By making good choices, doing the right thing, we thicken the stack of universes in which versions of us live reasonable lives. When you succeed, all the copies of you who made the same decision succeed too. What you do for the better increases the portion of the multiverse where good things happen. Jesse -- 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/d/optout.
Re: Interesting Google tech talk on QM
On Tue, Apr 29, 2014 at 04:19:01PM -0400, Jesse Mazer wrote: The MWI advocate David Deutsch had a quote about choices and morality in the article at http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg17122994.400-taming-the-multiverse.htmlwhich made sense to me: By making good choices, doing the right thing, we thicken the stack of universes in which versions of us live reasonable lives. When you succeed, all the copies of you who made the same decision succeed too. What you do for the better increases the portion of the multiverse where good things happen. Jesse Makes no sense to me. You do not thicken the stack of universes, nor do you increase the portion of the multiverse where good things happen. The Multiverse just is - proportions do not change because of choices of inhabitants. Rather, I think decision theory should be based on what choices (of measurement) do I make such that the most likely outcome (that I observe) is 'good', and 'bad' outcomes are unlikely (to be observed). David Deutsch seems to be badly conflating the static block multiverse picture with a dynamic einselectionist picture. Cue the obvious response from John Clark that free will is meaningless noise, and so consequently is decision theory :). 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 Latest project: The Amoeba's Secret (http://www.hpcoders.com.au/AmoebasSecret.html) -- 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/d/optout.
Re: Interesting Google tech talk on QM
On Tue, Apr 29, 2014 at 10:24 PM, Russell Standish li...@hpcoders.com.auwrote: On Tue, Apr 29, 2014 at 04:19:01PM -0400, Jesse Mazer wrote: The MWI advocate David Deutsch had a quote about choices and morality in the article at http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg17122994.400-taming-the-multiverse.htmlwhich made sense to me: By making good choices, doing the right thing, we thicken the stack of universes in which versions of us live reasonable lives. When you succeed, all the copies of you who made the same decision succeed too. What you do for the better increases the portion of the multiverse where good things happen. Jesse Makes no sense to me. You do not thicken the stack of universes, nor do you increase the portion of the multiverse where good things happen. The Multiverse just is - proportions do not change because of choices of inhabitants. I agree that we don't change the multiverse itself since the MWI is deterministic, but thicken and increase could just be taken as a comparison between those whose personalities and beliefs make them more likely to make good choices and those whose brains make them less likely. And given the power of habit, perhaps each good choice modifies your brain somewhat to make subsequent good choices more likely. If that's the case, then a good choice at decision point A thickens the stack of branches where you make further good choices about events BC that follow A, in comparison to the thinner stack of branches where your subsequent choices about BC were good after you made an immoral choice at A. Jesse -- 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/d/optout.
Re: Interesting Google tech talk on QM
On 23 April 2014 21:33, Pierz pier...@gmail.com wrote: On Tuesday, April 22, 2014 11:12:53 PM UTC+10, Brent wrote: On 4/22/2014 4:54 AM, Pierz wrote: Thanks Brent. I read Mermin and am both wiser and none-the. It seems to me in this paper he is chickening out by saying that QM shouldn't really think about the conscious observer, because that leads to the fairy tale of many worlds. Instead it should consider consciousness to reside outside the competent scope of a physical theory. I don't think he means that. He just means that it's a separate question from the interpretation of QM and that it's a mistake to mix them together. It's kind of like his answer is to say don't ask those questions. And he explicitly repudiates the notion that it's all in your head or that a quantum state is a summary of your knowledge of the system. The correlations are objective. What I liked about the paper though was the notion of correlations without correlata (which Garrett invokes) - the idea that quantum theory is about (and only about) systemic relationships makes a lot of sense. To take the answer to what is QM telling us? just a little further philosophically than what Mermim is prepared to, I'd say it's telling us (for one thing) that we've hit the limits of atomism. We're bouncing off the boundary of the reductionistic epistemology. Anyway, sadly I haven't yet seen anything that could supply a cogent alternative to MWI. I'll move on to the other papers tomorrow night... :) Chris Fuchs is the main proponent of quantum Bayesianism, which also takes the wave-function to just be a summary of one's knowledge of the system - and so there is nothing surprising about it collapsing when you get new information. Of course another alternative is an objective collapse theory like GRW. I'm just now reading a book by Ghirardi,Sneaking a Look at God's Cards which surveys the experiments that force the weirdness of QM on us and the various interpretations. Of course he devotes a special chapter to GRW theory, but he is very even handed. I'm not sure why you're worried about MWI though. Is it because you read Divide by Infinity? I don't think that's what MWI really implies. No I never read that, but hell yeah, MWI worries me! Doesn't it worry you? I mean I know at one level that in a very real sense it doesn't matter whether it's true or not, since the other universes can never affect me, but at another the reality that everything happens to me that I can imagine is just plain terrifying. And the 'me' isn't just the versions of me that are still called by my name, I can't escape the conclusion that I am everyone and everyone is me and that *everyone's* experience is my experience at some level. If MWI ever does become the accepted conception of reality, we have a huge amount of philosophical reorientation ahead of us. For instance, if I take some risk (like drink-driving, a relevant topic on another thread), and 'get away with it', MWI suggests I am still responsible for other realities in which I crashed and injured or killed myself and/or others. My whole approach to risk management becomes quite different if all outcomes are realised. It no longer makes sense to think about if something will happen to me in the future. I have to accept that it all will happen, it's just that all those future mes won't know about the other ones, so they will all have the impression of a single outcome. It's a disorienting and disturbing thought. Of course it should't lead to fatalism, since one's choices are part of the deterministic system that determines the 'weight' of certain futures - and I suppose it should actually lead to a kind of 'radical acceptance'. There's no point thinking why me? or what bad luck, since your experiencing this, and indeed everything, is inevitable. But then I console myself by thinking that any human-level qualitative interpretation of this level of reality is mistaken, a kind of confusion of levels. And still it horrifies me... (But like Bruno, my dedication to truth keeps me from rejecting it purely because I hate it. The logic is very compelling.) We accept as a society the risk of death by motor vehicle accident because there is a 1/10,000 chance per year it will happen to an individual, even though that means that in a large city a person will on average be killed every day. I think this situation is analogous to the moral question of MWI versus a single world interpretation of QM. -- Stathis Papaioannou -- 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/d/optout.
Re: Interesting Google tech talk on QM
On 24 Apr 2014, at 01:05, LizR wrote: On 24 April 2014 04:25, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: Samuel Clemens? Was is not Mark Twain? I missed a post perhaps. Oops. They are the same person (Twain was Clemens' pseudonym). I thought it was common knowledge, perhaps because I read the Riverworld series by Philip Jose Farmer. Thanks Liz, and David, and Chris. Now that you said it is common knowledge, I do have a vague feeling that I might have knew that, perhaps in my preceding life! Do someone know the estimate of the age of the universe at the time of Mark Twain? Einstein though it was infinite, and I thought that many physicists (including believer in Big Bang(s)) don't exclude that. I think it was considered perhaps infinite, in that no one knew how long it had gone on and there was no obvious evidence of cosmological change - telescopes weren't good enough to even resolve stars in galaxies outside the Milky Way, I believe - but there was also no idea of processes lasting billions of years. Hence Twain's hundred million was about the largest size anyone could grasp, so it was in a sense akin to him saying infinity. To be sure, Archimedes already knew technic to name big numbers, which of course remained quite small compared to the numbers nameable through the diagonalization technic. I think also that people can say billions to mean a lot. I use often ten thousand for that effect, Bruno -- 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/d/optout. http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- 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/d/optout.
Re: Interesting Google tech talk on QM
Mermin doesn't start too promisingly... My complete answer to the late 19th century question “what is electrodynamics trying to tell us” would simply be this: *Fields in empty space have physical reality; the medium that supports them does not. * Having thus removed the mystery from electrodynamics, let me immediately do the same for quantum mechanics: *Correlations have physical reality; that which they correlate does not. * In my opinion this isn't doing the same thing. Doing the same thing would involve electrodynamics telling us that space doesn't exist. The aether turned out to be superfluous, but fields still have space to propagate in. Having correlations between non-existent things is a whole bigger step into the abstract. Still, onwards... -- 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/d/optout.
Re: Interesting Google tech talk on QM
On the plus side, this only correlations idea reminds me of the idea that fundamental particles don't actually exist but are really only the binding energy holding them together... :-) On 23 April 2014 20:48, LizR lizj...@gmail.com wrote: Mermin doesn't start too promisingly... My complete answer to the late 19th century question “what is electrodynamics trying to tell us” would simply be this: *Fields in empty space have physical reality; the medium that supports them does not. * Having thus removed the mystery from electrodynamics, let me immediately do the same for quantum mechanics: *Correlations have physical reality; that which they correlate does not. * In my opinion this isn't doing the same thing. Doing the same thing would involve electrodynamics telling us that space doesn't exist. The aether turned out to be superfluous, but fields still have space to propagate in. Having correlations between non-existent things is a whole bigger step into the abstract. Still, onwards... -- 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/d/optout.
Re: Interesting Google tech talk on QM
Hi Liz, The billions make sense to me, to be honest. Even before the earth, we still didn't exist. It sounds like poetic liberty for a mind blowing amount of time. Cheers Telmo. On Wed, Apr 23, 2014 at 4:23 AM, LizR lizj...@gmail.com wrote: I was just a bit surprised at his use of billions rather than millions which in context seems rather extravagant. Actually google indicates that I am not alone in wondering this. http://www.telecomtally.com/blog/2006/12/did_mark_twain_1.html Wikiquote http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Mark_Twainalso agrees with me :-) I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it. - Quoted in Dawkins, Richardhttp://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Richard_Dawkins(2006). A Much Needed Gap?. *The God Delusion*. Bantam Press. p. 354. ISBN 0-618-68000-4http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Special:BookSources/0618680004 ., but no source is given. *Note that during Twain's life the Age of the Earth http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_the_Earth was thought to be measured in tens of millions not billions of years.* -- 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/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 http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: Interesting Google tech talk on QM
On Tue, Apr 22, 2014 at 2:03 AM, Pierz pier...@gmail.com wrote: Just came across this presentation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dEaecUuEqfc It's a bit long, but I'd be interested to hear anyone's thoughts who is knowledgeable on QM. I don't follow the maths, but I kind of got the gist. What intrigued me was his interpretation of QM and I'm wondering if anyone can throw any more light on it. He makes a lot of jumps which are obviously clear in his mind but hard to follow. He says that MWI is supportable by the maths, but that he prefers a zero universes interpretation, according to which we are classical simulations in a quantum computer. I'm not sure I follow this. I mean, I can follow the idea of being a classical simulation in a quantum computer, but I can't see how this is different from MWI, except by the manoeuvre of declaring other universes to be unreal because they can never practically interact with 'our' branch. I guess what interested me was the possibility of a coherent alternative to MWI (because frankly MWI scares the willies out of me), but in spite of what he said, I couldn't see what it was... Thanks Pierz, I really enjoyed this talk. Maybe because of the speaker's background in computer science, I feel he speaks my language more than the real physicists. My naive impression, also influenced by Bruno's comp, is like you say that I don't see the difference between MWI and zero universes. I tend to think that the worlds in MWI are the first-person views, and that there is only one mind, ultimately. On the other hand, I heard about the transactional interpretation of QM for the first time, which is also intriguing. Best, Telmo. -- 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/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 http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: Interesting Google tech talk on QM
On 23 April 2014 22:29, Telmo Menezes te...@telmomenezes.com wrote: Hi Liz, The billions make sense to me, to be honest. Even before the earth, we still didn't exist. It sounds like poetic liberty for a mind blowing amount of time. Sure, but I think at the time millions of years was a mind-blowing amount of time - actually it still is - and it would appear the comment doesn't have any known source. So although I'd be happily proved wrong on this, it just feels a bit anachronistic for Samuel Clemens. Maybe just my personal bias. -- 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/d/optout.
Re: Interesting Google tech talk on QM
Oh, and to really stick my neck out, I think the phrase billions and billions became a cliché through Carl Sagan using it in the TV programme Cosmos so I suspect (but have zero proof) that this quote is attributed to Sam Clemens but is in fact either made up or misquoted. My theory is that someone either invented it or altered it from an original quote which didn't include that phrase, and that they did so more recently than the original broadcast of Cosmos which I think was in the 1980s... :-) Just a hunch, my dear Watson. -- 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/d/optout.
Re: Interesting Google tech talk on QM
Actually Sagan may not have used the phrase billions and billions but it (too?) may have been a misquote that came to be associated with him (like play it again, Sam and beam me up, Scotty!) On 23 April 2014 23:16, LizR lizj...@gmail.com wrote: Oh, and to really stick my neck out, I think the phrase billions and billions became a cliché through Carl Sagan using it in the TV programme Cosmos so I suspect (but have zero proof) that this quote is attributed to Sam Clemens but is in fact either made up or misquoted. My theory is that someone either invented it or altered it from an original quote which didn't include that phrase, and that they did so more recently than the original broadcast of Cosmos which I think was in the 1980s... :-) Just a hunch, my dear Watson. -- 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/d/optout.
Re: Interesting Google tech talk on QM
On Wed, Apr 23, 2014 at 1:16 PM, LizR lizj...@gmail.com wrote: Oh, and to really stick my neck out, I think the phrase billions and billions became a cliché through Carl Sagan using it in the TV programme Cosmos so I suspect (but have zero proof) that this quote is attributed to Sam Clemens but is in fact either made up or misquoted. Good point! The billions and billions thing is interesting, because Sagan never actually used that precise idiom, although it became very popular. He discusses this in The Demon-Hunted World. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Sagan#Phrase_.27billions_and_billions.27 Another similar example is Play it again, Sam!, which surprisingly is never said in that precise from in Casablanca. I have a friend who researches the propagation of cultural fragments like this, and it's quite fascinating. My theory is that someone either invented it or altered it from an original quote which didn't include that phrase, and that they did so more recently than the original broadcast of Cosmos which I think was in the 1980s... :-) Just a hunch, my dear Watson. -- 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/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 http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: Interesting Google tech talk on QM
On Wed, Apr 23, 2014 at 1:19 PM, LizR lizj...@gmail.com wrote: Actually Sagan may not have used the phrase billions and billions but it (too?) may have been a misquote that came to be associated with him (like play it again, Sam and beam me up, Scotty!) Oops, sorry for stepping on your toes :) I didn't know that beam me up, Scotty! was also a misquote (!) I will have to agree with John Lydon: the written word is a lie! On 23 April 2014 23:16, LizR lizj...@gmail.com wrote: Oh, and to really stick my neck out, I think the phrase billions and billions became a cliché through Carl Sagan using it in the TV programme Cosmos so I suspect (but have zero proof) that this quote is attributed to Sam Clemens but is in fact either made up or misquoted. My theory is that someone either invented it or altered it from an original quote which didn't include that phrase, and that they did so more recently than the original broadcast of Cosmos which I think was in the 1980s... :-) Just a hunch, my dear Watson. -- 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/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 http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: Interesting Google tech talk on QM
On Tuesday, April 22, 2014 11:12:53 PM UTC+10, Brent wrote: On 4/22/2014 4:54 AM, Pierz wrote: Thanks Brent. I read Mermin and am both wiser and none-the. It seems to me in this paper he is chickening out by saying that QM shouldn't really think about the conscious observer, because that leads to the fairy tale of many worlds. Instead it should consider consciousness to reside outside the competent scope of a physical theory. I don't think he means that. He just means that it's a separate question from the interpretation of QM and that it's a mistake to mix them together. It's kind of like his answer is to say don't ask those questions. And he explicitly repudiates the notion that it's all in your head or that a quantum state is a summary of your knowledge of the system. The correlations are objective. What I liked about the paper though was the notion of correlations without correlata (which Garrett invokes) - the idea that quantum theory is about (and only about) systemic relationships makes a lot of sense. To take the answer to what is QM telling us? just a little further philosophically than what Mermim is prepared to, I'd say it's telling us (for one thing) that we've hit the limits of atomism. We're bouncing off the boundary of the reductionistic epistemology. Anyway, sadly I haven't yet seen anything that could supply a cogent alternative to MWI. I'll move on to the other papers tomorrow night... :) Chris Fuchs is the main proponent of quantum Bayesianism, which also takes the wave-function to just be a summary of one's knowledge of the system - and so there is nothing surprising about it collapsing when you get new information. Of course another alternative is an objective collapse theory like GRW. I'm just now reading a book by Ghirardi,Sneaking a Look at God's Cards which surveys the experiments that force the weirdness of QM on us and the various interpretations. Of course he devotes a special chapter to GRW theory, but he is very even handed. I'm not sure why you're worried about MWI though. Is it because you read Divide by Infinity? I don't think that's what MWI really implies. No I never read that, but hell yeah, MWI worries me! Doesn't it worry you? I mean I know at one level that in a very real sense it doesn't matter whether it's true or not, since the other universes can never affect me, but at another the reality that everything happens to me that I can imagine is just plain terrifying. And the 'me' isn't just the versions of me that are still called by my name, I can't escape the conclusion that I am everyone and everyone is me and that *everyone's* experience is my experience at some level. If MWI ever does become the accepted conception of reality, we have a huge amount of philosophical reorientation ahead of us. For instance, if I take some risk (like drink-driving, a relevant topic on another thread), and 'get away with it', MWI suggests I am still responsible for other realities in which I crashed and injured or killed myself and/or others. My whole approach to risk management becomes quite different if all outcomes are realised. It no longer makes sense to think about if something will happen to me in the future. I have to accept that it all will happen, it's just that all those future mes won't know about the other ones, so they will all have the impression of a single outcome. It's a disorienting and disturbing thought. Of course it should't lead to fatalism, since one's choices are part of the deterministic system that determines the 'weight' of certain futures - and I suppose it should actually lead to a kind of 'radical acceptance'. There's no point thinking why me? or what bad luck, since your experiencing this, and indeed everything, is inevitable. But then I console myself by thinking that any human-level qualitative interpretation of this level of reality is mistaken, a kind of confusion of levels. And still it horrifies me... (But like Bruno, my dedication to truth keeps me from rejecting it purely because I hate it. The logic is very compelling.) Brent On Tuesday, April 22, 2014 3:36:16 PM UTC+10, Brent wrote: Read Mermin who has written some popular papers on The Ithaca Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics, e.g. http://arxiv.org/pdf/quant-ph/9801057.pdf and the paper by Adami and Cerf, which is where Garrett gets his talk, arxiv.org/pdf/quant-ph/0405005** They take an information theoric approach to the quantum measurement problem and show that a measurement can only get you part of the information in the quantum state. From the MWI standpoint this 'other information' is in the other world branch. Mermin and Adami and also Fuchs (http://arxiv.org/pdf/1003.5209.pdfhttp://www.google.com/url?q=http%3A%2F%2Farxiv.org%2Fpdf%2F1003.5209.pdfsa=Dsntz=1usg=AFQjCNESAnRXSOhSA3Y_kMt1kkshVPgd_w) take a more instrumentalist approach in
Re: Interesting Google tech talk on QM
On Wednesday, April 23, 2014 6:48:09 PM UTC+10, Liz R wrote: Mermin doesn't start too promisingly... My complete answer to the late 19th century question “what is electrodynamics trying to tell us” would simply be this: *Fields in empty space have physical reality; the medium that supports them does not. * Having thus removed the mystery from electrodynamics, let me immediately do the same for quantum mechanics: *Correlations have physical reality; that which they correlate does not. * In my opinion this isn't doing the same thing. Doing the same thing would involve electrodynamics telling us that space doesn't exist. The aether turned out to be superfluous, but fields still have space to propagate in. Having correlations between non-existent things is a whole bigger step into the abstract. Still, onwards... I disagree. It might not be doing the exact same thing, but it is doing something analogous. The Newtonian physicist could not imagine empty space being able to support waves without there being some material there, some stuff. That was eventually proved unnecessary and people got used to physical reality being less stuff-y than they'd thought. The jump to correlations without correlata is quite analogous. It's saying only relationships are real, that there are no underlying things that exist purely in and for themselves. That is very much in tune with a Buddhist understanding of the lack of intrinsic existence of things. The idea of things (including teeny weeny things like particles) is in my view a kind of cognitive evolutionary hang-over of being tool-using apes. We like things to be thing-y and stuff-y because we can then get a grip on them and use them. But QM is telling us that reality, whatever that is, does not hold the same bias, and doesn't in fact even understand what we are talking about. That one idea is really the point of the paper and it just strikes me intuitively as being right on. -- 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/d/optout.
Re: Interesting Google tech talk on QM
On Wed, Apr 23, 2014 at 7:08 AM, LizR lizj...@gmail.com wrote: On 23 April 2014 22:29, Telmo Menezes te...@telmomenezes.com wrote: Hi Liz, The billions make sense to me, to be honest. Even before the earth, we still didn't exist. It sounds like poetic liberty for a mind blowing amount of time. Sure, but I think at the time millions of years was a mind-blowing amount of time - actually it still is - and it would appear the comment doesn't have any known source. So although I'd be happily proved wrong on this, it just feels a bit anachronistic for Samuel Clemens. Maybe just my personal bias. The people at the snopes board did some looking around for the quote at http://message.snopes.com/showthread.php?t=81874 and couldn't find any appearances before 2002, so it's probably not a real quote. However, they did turn up the following quote from Twain's autobiography which the fake quote was probably a paraphrase of: Annihilation has no terrors for me, because I have already tried it before I was born—a hundred million years—and I have suffered more in an hour, in this life, than I remember to have suffered in the whole hundred million years put together. see http://harpers.org/blog/2008/03/no-terrors-for-me/ for confirmation. Jesse -- 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/d/optout.
Re: Interesting Google tech talk on QM
On 23 Apr 2014, at 13:33, Pierz wrote: On Tuesday, April 22, 2014 11:12:53 PM UTC+10, Brent wrote: On 4/22/2014 4:54 AM, Pierz wrote: Thanks Brent. I read Mermin and am both wiser and none-the. It seems to me in this paper he is chickening out by saying that QM shouldn't really think about the conscious observer, because that leads to the fairy tale of many worlds. Instead it should consider consciousness to reside outside the competent scope of a physical theory. I don't think he means that. He just means that it's a separate question from the interpretation of QM and that it's a mistake to mix them together. It's kind of like his answer is to say don't ask those questions. And he explicitly repudiates the notion that it's all in your head or that a quantum state is a summary of your knowledge of the system. The correlations are objective. What I liked about the paper though was the notion of correlations without correlata (which Garrett invokes) - the idea that quantum theory is about (and only about) systemic relationships makes a lot of sense. To take the answer to what is QM telling us? just a little further philosophically than what Mermim is prepared to, I'd say it's telling us (for one thing) that we've hit the limits of atomism. We're bouncing off the boundary of the reductionistic epistemology. Anyway, sadly I haven't yet seen anything that could supply a cogent alternative to MWI. I'll move on to the other papers tomorrow night... :) Chris Fuchs is the main proponent of quantum Bayesianism, which also takes the wave-function to just be a summary of one's knowledge of the system - and so there is nothing surprising about it collapsing when you get new information. Of course another alternative is an objective collapse theory like GRW. I'm just now reading a book by Ghirardi,Sneaking a Look at God's Cards which surveys the experiments that force the weirdness of QM on us and the various interpretations. Of course he devotes a special chapter to GRW theory, but he is very even handed. I'm not sure why you're worried about MWI though. Is it because you read Divide by Infinity? I don't think that's what MWI really implies. No I never read that, but hell yeah, MWI worries me! Doesn't it worry you? I mean I know at one level that in a very real sense it doesn't matter whether it's true or not, since the other universes can never affect me, but at another the reality that everything happens to me that I can imagine is just plain terrifying. And the 'me' isn't just the versions of me that are still called by my name, I can't escape the conclusion that I am everyone and everyone is me and that *everyone's* experience is my experience at some level. If MWI ever does become the accepted conception of reality, we have a huge amount of philosophical reorientation ahead of us. For instance, if I take some risk (like drink-driving, a relevant topic on another thread), and 'get away with it', MWI suggests I am still responsible for other realities in which I crashed and injured or killed myself and/or others. That reminds me on a difference that someone made between, I think, catholic and protestant (say). - A catholic go to heaven if and only if he do only good, or at least not bad, things during his life. (of course this can lead to unfairness, as some people can do the bad only due to contingent factors in their life, like a war, or a trauma, etc.) So, apparently: - A protestant go to heaven if and only if he do only the good in his life but also in all its lives. It is easy to do only the good when you get an happy family, in a economically working society so that you get a nice job, and a nice love partner and nice kids, and when you can drink and smoke what you want, even drink raw milk! Apparently some God want to examine closely what you would do in a world with catastrophic family, in perverse economy where eventually you can't even drink raw milk! My whole approach to risk management becomes quite different if all outcomes are realised. It no longer makes sense to think about if something will happen to me in the future. I have to accept that it all will happen, it's just that all those future mes won't know about the other ones, so they will all have the impression of a single outcome. It's a disorienting and disturbing thought. Of course it should't lead to fatalism, since one's choices are part of the deterministic system that determines the 'weight' of certain futures - OK. and I suppose it should actually lead to a kind of 'radical acceptance'. But then you have to accept the non-acceptance too. It is where we can get close to inconsistency, if not insanity. There's no point thinking why me? or what bad luck, since your experiencing this, and indeed everything, is inevitable. But then I console myself by thinking that any
Re: Interesting Google tech talk on QM
On Wed, Apr 23, 2014 at 6:10 PM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: On 23 Apr 2014, at 13:33, Pierz wrote: On Tuesday, April 22, 2014 11:12:53 PM UTC+10, Brent wrote: On 4/22/2014 4:54 AM, Pierz wrote: Thanks Brent. I read Mermin and am both wiser and none-the. It seems to me in this paper he is chickening out by saying that QM shouldn't really think about the conscious observer, because that leads to the fairy tale of many worlds. Instead it should consider consciousness to reside outside the competent scope of a physical theory. I don't think he means that. He just means that it's a separate question from the interpretation of QM and that it's a mistake to mix them together. It's kind of like his answer is to say don't ask those questions. And he explicitly repudiates the notion that it's all in your head or that a quantum state is a summary of your knowledge of the system. The correlations are objective. What I liked about the paper though was the notion of correlations without correlata (which Garrett invokes) - the idea that quantum theory is about (and only about) systemic relationships makes a lot of sense. To take the answer to what is QM telling us? just a little further philosophically than what Mermim is prepared to, I'd say it's telling us (for one thing) that we've hit the limits of atomism. We're bouncing off the boundary of the reductionistic epistemology. Anyway, sadly I haven't yet seen anything that could supply a cogent alternative to MWI. I'll move on to the other papers tomorrow night... :) Chris Fuchs is the main proponent of quantum Bayesianism, which also takes the wave-function to just be a summary of one's knowledge of the system - and so there is nothing surprising about it collapsing when you get new information. Of course another alternative is an objective collapse theory like GRW. I'm just now reading a book by Ghirardi,Sneaking a Look at God's Cards which surveys the experiments that force the weirdness of QM on us and the various interpretations. Of course he devotes a special chapter to GRW theory, but he is very even handed. I'm not sure why you're worried about MWI though. Is it because you read Divide by Infinity? I don't think that's what MWI really implies. No I never read that, but hell yeah, MWI worries me! Doesn't it worry you? I mean I know at one level that in a very real sense it doesn't matter whether it's true or not, since the other universes can never affect me, but at another the reality that everything happens to me that I can imagine is just plain terrifying. And the 'me' isn't just the versions of me that are still called by my name, I can't escape the conclusion that I am everyone and everyone is me and that *everyone's* experience is my experience at some level. If MWI ever does become the accepted conception of reality, we have a huge amount of philosophical reorientation ahead of us. For instance, if I take some risk (like drink-driving, a relevant topic on another thread), and 'get away with it', MWI suggests I am still responsible for other realities in which I crashed and injured or killed myself and/or others. That reminds me on a difference that someone made between, I think, catholic and protestant (say). - A catholic go to heaven if and only if he do only good, or at least not bad, things during his life. (of course this can lead to unfairness, as some people can do the bad only due to contingent factors in their life, like a war, or a trauma, etc.) So, apparently: - A protestant go to heaven if and only if he do only the good in his life but also in all its lives. It is easy to do only the good when you get an happy family, in a economically working society so that you get a nice job, and a nice love partner and nice kids, and when you can drink and smoke what you want, even drink raw milk! Apparently some God want to examine closely what you would do in a world with catastrophic family, in perverse economy where eventually you can't even drink raw milk! My whole approach to risk management becomes quite different if all outcomes are realised. It no longer makes sense to think about if something will happen to me in the future. I have to accept that it all will happen, it's just that all those future mes won't know about the other ones, so they will all have the impression of a single outcome. It's a disorienting and disturbing thought. Of course it should't lead to fatalism, since one's choices are part of the deterministic system that determines the 'weight' of certain futures - OK. and I suppose it should actually lead to a kind of 'radical acceptance'. But then you have to accept the non-acceptance too. It is where we can get close to inconsistency, if not insanity. There's no point thinking why me? or what bad luck, since your experiencing this, and indeed everything, is inevitable. But then I console myself by
Re: Interesting Google tech talk on QM
On 23 Apr 2014, at 13:08, LizR wrote: On 23 April 2014 22:29, Telmo Menezes te...@telmomenezes.com wrote: Hi Liz, The billions make sense to me, to be honest. Even before the earth, we still didn't exist. It sounds like poetic liberty for a mind blowing amount of time. Sure, but I think at the time millions of years was a mind-blowing amount of time - actually it still is - and it would appear the comment doesn't have any known source. So although I'd be happily proved wrong on this, it just feels a bit anachronistic for Samuel Clemens. Maybe just my personal bias. Samuel Clemens? Was is not Mark Twain? I missed a post perhaps. Do someone know the estimate of the age of the universe at the time of Mark Twain? Einstein though it was infinite, and I thought that many physicists (including believer in Big Bang(s)) don't exclude that. (And if we are digital machine, we have to take *all* true sigma_1 sentences, not just the e^iH, and their linear superpositions, and that is *very* big). cf On 23 April 2014 11:37, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: I do not fear death, in view of the fact that I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it.' --- Mark Twain -- 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/d/optout. http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- 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/d/optout.
RE: Interesting Google tech talk on QM
From: everything-list@googlegroups.com [mailto:everything-list@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Bruno Marchal Sent: Wednesday, April 23, 2014 9:26 AM To: everything-list@googlegroups.com Subject: Re: Interesting Google tech talk on QM On 23 Apr 2014, at 13:08, LizR wrote: On 23 April 2014 22:29, Telmo Menezes te...@telmomenezes.com wrote: Hi Liz, The billions make sense to me, to be honest. Even before the earth, we still didn't exist. It sounds like poetic liberty for a mind blowing amount of time. Sure, but I think at the time millions of years was a mind-blowing amount of time - actually it still is - and it would appear the comment doesn't have any known source. So although I'd be happily proved wrong on this, it just feels a bit anachronistic for Samuel Clemens. Maybe just my personal bias. Samuel Clemens? Was is not Mark Twain? I missed a post perhaps. Mark Twain was the pen name of the author Samuel Clemens - so one and the same. Do someone know the estimate of the age of the universe at the time of Mark Twain? Einstein though it was infinite, and I thought that many physicists (including believer in Big Bang(s)) don't exclude that. Didn't most people still subscribe to that English or Scottish Bishops calculation based on bible verse that concluded the earth and the universe was some 6000 or so years ago in 4400 BC? There are far too many, in this country at least - who still do believe in this fairy tale. Chris (And if we are digital machine, we have to take *all* true sigma_1 sentences, not just the e^iH, and their linear superpositions, and that is *very* big). cf On 23 April 2014 11:37, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: I do not fear death, in view of the fact that I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it.' --- Mark Twain -- 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/d/optout. http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- 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/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 http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: Interesting Google tech talk on QM
On 23 Apr 2014, at 13:56, Pierz wrote: On Wednesday, April 23, 2014 6:48:09 PM UTC+10, Liz R wrote: Mermin doesn't start too promisingly... My complete answer to the late 19th century question what is electrodynamics trying to tell us would simply be this: Fields in empty space have physical reality; the medium that supports them does not. Having thus removed the mystery from electrodynamics, let me immediately do the same for quantum mechanics: Correlations have physical reality; that which they correlate does not. In my opinion this isn't doing the same thing. Doing the same thing would involve electrodynamics telling us that space doesn't exist. The aether turned out to be superfluous, but fields still have space to propagate in. Having correlations between non-existent things is a whole bigger step into the abstract. Still, onwards... I disagree. It might not be doing the exact same thing, but it is doing something analogous. The Newtonian physicist could not imagine empty space being able to support waves without there being some material there, some stuff. That was eventually proved unnecessary and people got used to physical reality being less stuff-y than they'd thought. The jump to correlations without correlata is quite analogous. It's saying only relationships are real, that there are no underlying things that exist purely in and for themselves. That is very much in tune with a Buddhist understanding of the lack of intrinsic existence of things. Yes, but we have to be careful, because if this is applied to person, the boss can replaced you by someone else, or by a machine, and the functionality of the industry is preserved, but you see things differently (you lost your job). You might take a look on category theory, which defines objects of certain type entirely by their relation with objects of similar type. That leads to a rather abstract theory, which still introduces an amazing structure reflecting many mathematical construction. The idea of things (including teeny weeny things like particles) is in my view a kind of cognitive evolutionary hang-over of being tool-using apes. We like things to be thing-y and stuff-y because we can then get a grip on them and use them. But QM is telling us that reality, whatever that is, does not hold the same bias, and doesn't in fact even understand what we are talking about. That one idea is really the point of the paper and it just strikes me intuitively as being right on. Physicists are fuzzy about what exists. In first order analysis the real number exist, but there are no definable natural numbers. You can't really see the difference between 0 and the many 0.0. But in first order real or complex trigonometry you get the natural numbers (by sin(2*pi*x)), and Turing universality. I think Mermin and even Fuch are right, but they talk only on the physical, which might indeed be purely relational, and should be if comp is true. It is more a many relative state, or relative computational state theory. The 3p extensions are relational, OK, but some 1p intensions are not purely relational, or only so in god's eye, so they have relation with absolute token-like thing, inevitably true and known, although not necessarily recognizable as such, nor rationally justifiable, nor even definable (like a headache, to give an example, or some bliss, or the glee of the right guitar tone at the right time, or just after). Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- 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/d/optout.
Re: Interesting Google tech talk on QM
On 23 Apr 2014, at 14:42, Jesse Mazer and Liz wrote: snip Annihilation has no terrors for me, because I have already tried it before I was born--a hundred million years--and I have suffered more in an hour, in this life, than I remember to have suffered in the whole hundred million years put together. Want to be reminded? Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- 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/d/optout.
Re: Interesting Google tech talk on QM
On 23 Apr 2014, at 14:42, Jesse Mazer wrote: On Wed, Apr 23, 2014 at 7:08 AM, LizR lizj...@gmail.com wrote: On 23 April 2014 22:29, Telmo Menezes te...@telmomenezes.com wrote: Hi Liz, The billions make sense to me, to be honest. Even before the earth, we still didn't exist. It sounds like poetic liberty for a mind blowing amount of time. Sure, but I think at the time millions of years was a mind-blowing amount of time - actually it still is - and it would appear the comment doesn't have any known source. So although I'd be happily proved wrong on this, it just feels a bit anachronistic for Samuel Clemens. Maybe just my personal bias. The people at the snopes board did some looking around for the quote at http://message.snopes.com/showthread.php?t=81874 and couldn't find any appearances before 2002, so it's probably not a real quote. However, they did turn up the following quote from Twain's autobiography which the fake quote was probably a paraphrase of: Annihilation has no terrors for me, because I have already tried it before I was born--a hundred million years--and I have suffered more in an hour, in this life, than I remember to have suffered in the whole hundred million years put together. see http://harpers.org/blog/2008/03/no-terrors-for-me/ for confirmation. Thanks, and Mark Twain indeed seems to remember the bright side, (which was unclear out of context) and obviously: the end: It is understandable that when I speak from the grave it is not a spirit that is speaking; it is a nothing; it is an emptiness; it is a vacancy; it is a something that has neither feeling nor consciousness. It does not know what it is saying. It is not aware that it is saying anything at all, therefore it can speak frankly and freely, since it cannot know that it is inflicting pain, discomfort, or offense of any kind. -Mark Twain, Is very funny. == Annihilation has no terrors for me, because I have already tried it before I was born-a hundred million years-and I have suffered more in an hour, in this life, than I remember to have suffered in the whole hundred million years put together. There was a peace, a serenity, an absence of all sense of responsibility, an absence of worry, an absence of care, grief, perplexity; and the presence of a deep content and unbroken satisfaction in that hundred million years of holiday which I look back upon with a tender longing and with a grateful desire to resume, when the opportunity comes. It is understandable that when I speak from the grave it is not a spirit that is speaking; it is a nothing; it is an emptiness; it is a vacancy; it is a something that has neither feeling nor consciousness. It does not know what it is saying. It is not aware that it is saying anything at all, therefore it can speak frankly and freely, since it cannot know that it is inflicting pain, discomfort, or offense of any kind -Mark Twain Bruno Jesse -- 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/d/optout. http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- 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/d/optout.
Re: Interesting Google tech talk on QM
On 23 Apr 2014, at 18:29, Platonist Guitar Cowboy wrote: On Wed, Apr 23, 2014 at 6:10 PM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: On 23 Apr 2014, at 13:33, Pierz wrote: On Tuesday, April 22, 2014 11:12:53 PM UTC+10, Brent wrote: On 4/22/2014 4:54 AM, Pierz wrote: Thanks Brent. I read Mermin and am both wiser and none-the. It seems to me in this paper he is chickening out by saying that QM shouldn't really think about the conscious observer, because that leads to the fairy tale of many worlds. Instead it should consider consciousness to reside outside the competent scope of a physical theory. I don't think he means that. He just means that it's a separate question from the interpretation of QM and that it's a mistake to mix them together. It's kind of like his answer is to say don't ask those questions. And he explicitly repudiates the notion that it's all in your head or that a quantum state is a summary of your knowledge of the system. The correlations are objective. What I liked about the paper though was the notion of correlations without correlata (which Garrett invokes) - the idea that quantum theory is about (and only about) systemic relationships makes a lot of sense. To take the answer to what is QM telling us? just a little further philosophically than what Mermim is prepared to, I'd say it's telling us (for one thing) that we've hit the limits of atomism. We're bouncing off the boundary of the reductionistic epistemology. Anyway, sadly I haven't yet seen anything that could supply a cogent alternative to MWI. I'll move on to the other papers tomorrow night... :) Chris Fuchs is the main proponent of quantum Bayesianism, which also takes the wave-function to just be a summary of one's knowledge of the system - and so there is nothing surprising about it collapsing when you get new information. Of course another alternative is an objective collapse theory like GRW. I'm just now reading a book by Ghirardi,Sneaking a Look at God's Cards which surveys the experiments that force the weirdness of QM on us and the various interpretations. Of course he devotes a special chapter to GRW theory, but he is very even handed. I'm not sure why you're worried about MWI though. Is it because you read Divide by Infinity? I don't think that's what MWI really implies. No I never read that, but hell yeah, MWI worries me! Doesn't it worry you? I mean I know at one level that in a very real sense it doesn't matter whether it's true or not, since the other universes can never affect me, but at another the reality that everything happens to me that I can imagine is just plain terrifying. And the 'me' isn't just the versions of me that are still called by my name, I can't escape the conclusion that I am everyone and everyone is me and that *everyone's* experience is my experience at some level. If MWI ever does become the accepted conception of reality, we have a huge amount of philosophical reorientation ahead of us. For instance, if I take some risk (like drink-driving, a relevant topic on another thread), and 'get away with it', MWI suggests I am still responsible for other realities in which I crashed and injured or killed myself and/or others. That reminds me on a difference that someone made between, I think, catholic and protestant (say). - A catholic go to heaven if and only if he do only good, or at least not bad, things during his life. (of course this can lead to unfairness, as some people can do the bad only due to contingent factors in their life, like a war, or a trauma, etc.) So, apparently: - A protestant go to heaven if and only if he do only the good in his life but also in all its lives. It is easy to do only the good when you get an happy family, in a economically working society so that you get a nice job, and a nice love partner and nice kids, and when you can drink and smoke what you want, even drink raw milk! Apparently some God want to examine closely what you would do in a world with catastrophic family, in perverse economy where eventually you can't even drink raw milk! My whole approach to risk management becomes quite different if all outcomes are realised. It no longer makes sense to think about if something will happen to me in the future. I have to accept that it all will happen, it's just that all those future mes won't know about the other ones, so they will all have the impression of a single outcome. It's a disorienting and disturbing thought. Of course it should't lead to fatalism, since one's choices are part of the deterministic system that determines the 'weight' of certain futures - OK. and I suppose it should actually lead to a kind of 'radical acceptance'. But then you have to accept the non-acceptance too. It is where we can get close to inconsistency, if not insanity. There's no point thinking why
Re: Interesting Google tech talk on QM
On 23 April 2014 17:25, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: Samuel Clemens? Was is not Mark Twain? I missed a post perhaps. Same guy, different name. David -- 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/d/optout.
Re: Interesting Google tech talk on QM
On 4/23/2014 3:29 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote: Hi Liz, The billions make sense to me, to be honest. Even before the earth, we still didn't exist. It sounds like poetic liberty for a mind blowing amount of time. Cheers Telmo. It makes sense, but millions makes sense too and I think Liz is right that when Twain said it (if he did) the Earth and the solar system were thought to be only tens of millions of years old based on a calculation of how long the Sun could radiate from gravitational energy. On the other hand the universe might have been assumed to be static and infinitely old. It's possible that Twain said millions and it later got changed to billions. Brent -- 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/d/optout.
Re: Interesting Google tech talk on QM
On 4/23/2014 4:23 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote: On Wed, Apr 23, 2014 at 1:19 PM, LizR lizj...@gmail.com mailto:lizj...@gmail.com wrote: Actually Sagan may not have used the phrase billions and billions but it (too?) may have been a misquote that came to be associated with him (like play it again, Sam and beam me up, Scotty!) Oops, sorry for stepping on your toes :) I didn't know that beam me up, Scotty! was also a misquote (!) I will have to agree with John Lydon: the written word is a lie! It's not unusual for a famous author to have said something which later gets slightly changed in a way that makes it even more memorable. Churchill said, I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears, and sweat; a nice example of parallelism blood-tears, toil-sweat. But it is now commonly quoted as blood, sweat, and tears; all bodily fluids. I liked to quote Daniel Dennett from his book Elbow Room: You can avoid responsibility for everything if you just make yourself small enough. The trouble was he never wrote exactly that although he expressed the thought in slightly less succinct terms several times. But I had a solution. I emailed Dennett and asked him to use the phrase as I had quoted it - and he did in his reply. So now I can quote it and cite private communication. :-) Brent -- 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/d/optout.
Re: Interesting Google tech talk on QM
On 23 Apr 2014, at 18:49, 'Chris de Morsella cdemorse...@yahoo.com' via Everything List wrote: From: everything-list@googlegroups.com [mailto:everything-list@googlegroups.com ] On Behalf Of Bruno Marchal Sent: Wednesday, April 23, 2014 9:26 AM To: everything-list@googlegroups.com Subject: Re: Interesting Google tech talk on QM On 23 Apr 2014, at 13:08, LizR wrote: On 23 April 2014 22:29, Telmo Menezes te...@telmomenezes.com wrote: Hi Liz, The billions make sense to me, to be honest. Even before the earth, we still didn't exist. It sounds like poetic liberty for a mind blowing amount of time. Sure, but I think at the time millions of years was a mind-blowing amount of time - actually it still is - and it would appear the comment doesn't have any known source. So although I'd be happily proved wrong on this, it just feels a bit anachronistic for Samuel Clemens. Maybe just my personal bias. Samuel Clemens? Was is not Mark Twain? I missed a post perhaps. Mark Twain was the pen name of the author Samuel Clemens - so one and the same. Damned! The morning/evening stars strike again! You solved a mystery. Thanks. Do someone know the estimate of the age of the universe at the time of Mark Twain? Einstein though it was infinite, and I thought that many physicists (including believer in Big Bang(s)) don't exclude that. Didn't most people still subscribe to that English or Scottish Bishops calculation based on bible verse that concluded the earth and the universe was some 6000 or so years ago in 4400 BC? There are far too many, in this country at least - who still do believe in this fairy tale. What percentage? Are there catholic among them? I guess no but do a quick research. Ah: In 1996, Pope John Paul II stated that, New findings lead us toward the recognition of evolution as more than a hypothesis, Creationism concerns some evangelical christians. We should do studies to understand how that is possible. I think that again, like with cannabis, it is based on an exploitation of the A-in-B, and B-in-A confusion. Scientology and all sects does that, and well, some government on some matter. Everyone does that confusion often, including myself, but that is why we have to be vigilant. There is nothing wrong in interpreting wrongly the evidences, if it can be revised later. I ask myself: do those evangelical christians really believe in the fairy tale? Scientology has also weird beliefs. In Europa you can be considered as a Sect with such beliefs. I am OK with this, because if we allow parents to teach contradiction (not just superstition) we build future catastrophes. Of course, strictly speaking, here John Paul II commit *the* error. Evolution is and remain an hypothesis. Like the sun and the moon, and earth. If not it becomes a religion (a pseudo-religion). He should have said instead simply that there are thousand of evidences for evolution on a long period, and simply none for creation in less than 6000 years. There are as many scientific evidences for creation in less than 6000 years than for the 'big danger' of cannabis. Testimonies but 0 facts. Bruno Chris (And if we are digital machine, we have to take *all* true sigma_1 sentences, not just the e^iH, and their linear superpositions, and that is *very* big). cf On 23 April 2014 11:37, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: I do not fear death, in view of the fact that I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it.' --- Mark Twain -- 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/d/optout. http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- 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/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 http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout
Re: Interesting Google tech talk on QM
On 4/23/2014 4:33 AM, Pierz wrote: On Tuesday, April 22, 2014 11:12:53 PM UTC+10, Brent wrote: On 4/22/2014 4:54 AM, Pierz wrote: Thanks Brent. I read Mermin and am both wiser and none-the. It seems to me in this paper he is chickening out by saying that QM shouldn't really think about the conscious observer, because that leads to the fairy tale of many worlds. Instead it should consider consciousness to reside outside the competent scope of a physical theory. I don't think he means that. He just means that it's a separate question from the interpretation of QM and that it's a mistake to mix them together. It's kind of like his answer is to say don't ask those questions. And he explicitly repudiates the notion that it's all in your head or that a quantum state is a summary of your knowledge of the system. The correlations are objective. What I liked about the paper though was the notion of correlations without correlata (which Garrett invokes) - the idea that quantum theory is about (and only about) systemic relationships makes a lot of sense. To take the answer to what is QM telling us? just a little further philosophically than what Mermim is prepared to, I'd say it's telling us (for one thing) that we've hit the limits of atomism. We're bouncing off the boundary of the reductionistic epistemology. Anyway, sadly I haven't yet seen anything that could supply a cogent alternative to MWI. I'll move on to the other papers tomorrow night... :) Chris Fuchs is the main proponent of quantum Bayesianism, which also takes the wave-function to just be a summary of one's knowledge of the system - and so there is nothing surprising about it collapsing when you get new information. Of course another alternative is an objective collapse theory like GRW. I'm just now reading a book by Ghirardi,Sneaking a Look at God's Cards which surveys the experiments that force the weirdness of QM on us and the various interpretations. Of course he devotes a special chapter to GRW theory, but he is very even handed. I'm not sure why you're worried about MWI though. Is it because you read Divide by Infinity? I don't think that's what MWI really implies. No I never read that, but hell yeah, MWI worries me! Doesn't it worry you? The form presented in Divided by Infinity is kind of frightening, but I don't think that's how it works. I mean I know at one level that in a very real sense it doesn't matter whether it's true or not, since the other universes can never affect me, but at another the reality that everything happens to me that I can imagine is just plain terrifying. And the 'me' isn't just the versions of me that are still called by my name, I can't escape the conclusion that I am everyone and everyone is me and that *everyone's* experience is my experience at some level. Except you are a fairly coherent series of experiences tied to together by memories and continuity of perceptions. That was the point of my Twain quote. If you're worried about whether you will continue indefinitely into a less and less familiar future, just reflect on the fact that you don't continue into the past before about age 3. If MWI ever does become the accepted conception of reality, we have a huge amount of philosophical reorientation ahead of us. For instance, if I take some risk (like drink-driving, a relevant topic on another thread), and 'get away with it', MWI suggests I am still responsible for other realities in which I crashed and injured or killed myself and/or others. My whole approach to risk management becomes quite different if all outcomes are realised. It no longer makes sense to think about if something will happen to me in the future. I have to accept that it all will happen, it's just that all those future mes won't know about the other ones, so they will all have the impression of a single outcome. I don't see that it requires any difference in decision theory. You take a risk now knowing that there is probability of a bad outcome, but you balance that against something good you want. It doesn't matter whether the probability is a potentiality or a measure on an ensemble. It's a disorienting and disturbing thought. Of course it should't lead to fatalism, since one's choices are part of the deterministic system that determines the 'weight' of certain futures - and I suppose it should actually lead to a kind of 'radical acceptance'. There's no point thinking why me? or what bad luck, since your experiencing this, and indeed everything, is inevitable. But then I console myself by thinking that any human-level qualitative interpretation of this level of reality is mistaken, a kind of confusion of levels. And still it horrifies me... (But like Bruno, my dedication to truth keeps me from rejecting it purely because I hate it. The logic is very
Re: Interesting Google tech talk on QM
On 4/23/2014 9:49 AM, 'Chris de Morsella cdemorse...@yahoo.com' via Everything List wrote: Do someone know the estimate of the age of the universe at the time of Mark Twain? Einstein though it was infinite, and I thought that many physicists (including believer in Big Bang(s)) don't exclude that. Didn't most people still subscribe to that English or Scottish Bishops calculation based on bible verse that concluded the earth and the universe was some 6000 or so years ago in 4400 BC? There are far too many, in this country at least -- who still do believe in this fairy tale. Chris In the late 1800's William Thompson (Lord Kelvin) estimated the age of the Sun and he finally settled on a value of 20 to 40 million years. This was based on gravitational energy - nuclear fusion was unknown. Darwin noted that this was to short a time for evolution to have taken place, and so in a sense Darwin used an anthropic inference to postulate nuclear energy. Twain would have known Thompson's estimate and so might have said millions based on it. But, aside from the Abrahamic superstitions, educated people like Twain generally assumed the universe was static and eternal. In which case he might well have said billions. Brent -- 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/d/optout.
Re: Interesting Google tech talk on QM
On 4/23/2014 11:22 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: == Annihilation has no terrors for me, because I have already tried it before I was born--a hundred million years--and I have suffered more in an hour, in this life, than I remember to have suffered in the whole hundred million years put together. There was a peace, a serenity, an absence of all sense of responsibility, an absence of worry, an absence of care, grief, perplexity; and the presence of a deep content and unbroken satisfaction in that hundred million years of holiday which I look back upon with a tender longing and with a grateful desire to resume, when the opportunity comes. It is understandable that when I speak from the grave it is not a spirit that is speaking; it is a nothing; it is an emptiness; it is a vacancy; it is a something that has neither feeling nor consciousness. It does not know what it is saying. It is not aware that it is saying anything at all, therefore it can speak frankly and freely, since it cannot know that it is inflicting pain, discomfort, or offense of any kind --Mark Twain Bruno Twain also recognized the human tendency to worry: I've experienced many terrible things in my life, a few of which actually happened. --- Mark Twain Brent -- 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/d/optout.
Re: Interesting Google tech talk on QM
On 24 April 2014 00:42, Jesse Mazer laserma...@gmail.com wrote: On Wed, Apr 23, 2014 at 7:08 AM, LizR lizj...@gmail.com wrote: On 23 April 2014 22:29, Telmo Menezes te...@telmomenezes.com wrote: Hi Liz, The billions make sense to me, to be honest. Even before the earth, we still didn't exist. It sounds like poetic liberty for a mind blowing amount of time. Sure, but I think at the time millions of years was a mind-blowing amount of time - actually it still is - and it would appear the comment doesn't have any known source. So although I'd be happily proved wrong on this, it just feels a bit anachronistic for Samuel Clemens. Maybe just my personal bias. The people at the snopes board did some looking around for the quote at http://message.snopes.com/showthread.php?t=81874 and couldn't find any appearances before 2002, so it's probably not a real quote. However, they did turn up the following quote from Twain's autobiography which the fake quote was probably a paraphrase of: Annihilation has no terrors for me, because I have already tried it before I was born—a hundred million years—and I have suffered more in an hour, in this life, than I remember to have suffered in the whole hundred million years put together. Thank you. I thought he wouldn't have used billions and billions - it just wasn't in the public consciousness, and would have sounded, at best, either childish or pretentious. A hundred million is about what people could grasp at the time, when the age of the Sun (calculated from then-known processes of energy generation) was in the tens of millions of years. -- 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/d/optout.
Re: Interesting Google tech talk on QM
On 24 April 2014 04:25, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: Samuel Clemens? Was is not Mark Twain? I missed a post perhaps. Oops. They are the same person (Twain was Clemens' pseudonym). I thought it was common knowledge, perhaps because I read the Riverworld series by Philip Jose Farmer. Do someone know the estimate of the age of the universe at the time of Mark Twain? Einstein though it was infinite, and I thought that many physicists (including believer in Big Bang(s)) don't exclude that. I think it was considered perhaps infinite, in that no one knew how long it had gone on and there was no obvious evidence of cosmological change - telescopes weren't good enough to even resolve stars in galaxies outside the Milky Way, I believe - but there was also no idea of processes lasting billions of years. Hence Twain's hundred million was about the largest size anyone could grasp, so it was in a sense akin to him saying infinity. -- 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/d/optout.
RE: Interesting Google tech talk on QM
From: everything-list@googlegroups.com [mailto:everything-list@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of meekerdb Sent: Wednesday, April 23, 2014 2:09 PM To: everything-list@googlegroups.com Subject: Re: Interesting Google tech talk on QM On 4/23/2014 9:49 AM, 'Chris de Morsella mailto:cdemorse...@yahoo.com cdemorse...@yahoo.com' via Everything List wrote: Do someone know the estimate of the age of the universe at the time of Mark Twain? Einstein though it was infinite, and I thought that many physicists (including believer in Big Bang(s)) don't exclude that. Didn't most people still subscribe to that English or Scottish Bishops calculation based on bible verse that concluded the earth and the universe was some 6000 or so years ago in 4400 BC? There are far too many, in this country at least - who still do believe in this fairy tale. Chris In the late 1800's William Thompson (Lord Kelvin) estimated the age of the Sun and he finally settled on a value of 20 to 40 million years. This was based on gravitational energy - nuclear fusion was unknown. Darwin noted that this was to short a time for evolution to have taken place, and so in a sense Darwin used an anthropic inference to postulate nuclear energy. Twain would have known Thompson's estimate and so might have said millions based on it. But, aside from the Abrahamic superstitions, educated people like Twain generally assumed the universe was static and eternal. In which case he might well have said billions. It was 1897 when he formulated that age estimate - so technically still in the 1800's by a thin margin. Amazing that so recently (1897 is just a mere 117 years ago) our knowledge of our universe was still so limited. Mark Twain -- aka Samuel Clemens - was quite a free thinker from what I have learned of his life and work, so I would not be surprised in the least, if he thought along the lines you suggest. The average person of that era was probably more likely to believe in the Abrahamic fairy tale of the universe - again this is an opinion I have not done the research. Chris Brent -- 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/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 http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: Interesting Google tech talk on QM
The Time Machine gives an instight into what the educated person of the time thought. The time traveller first visits the year 800,000 or thereabouts, when various features of the present day are still in evidence (e.g. humans, evolved into Eloi and Morlocks), then journeys to a point where the Sun is dying, about 30 million years in the future. These are the sorts of timescales one would expect to be mentioned by anyone contemplating the far past or future at that time (for example in the work of William Hope Hodgson). On 24 April 2014 15:02, 'Chris de Morsella cdemorse...@yahoo.com' via Everything List everything-list@googlegroups.com wrote: *From:* everything-list@googlegroups.com [mailto: everything-list@googlegroups.com] *On Behalf Of *meekerdb *Sent:* Wednesday, April 23, 2014 2:09 PM *To:* everything-list@googlegroups.com *Subject:* Re: Interesting Google tech talk on QM On 4/23/2014 9:49 AM, 'Chris de Morsella cdemorse...@yahoo.comcdemorse...@yahoo.com' via Everything List wrote: Do someone know the estimate of the age of the universe at the time of Mark Twain? Einstein though it was infinite, and I thought that many physicists (including believer in Big Bang(s)) don't exclude that. Didn’t most people still subscribe to that English or Scottish Bishops calculation based on bible verse that concluded the earth and the universe was some 6000 or so years ago in 4400 BC? There are far too many, in this country at least – who still do believe in this fairy tale. Chris In the late 1800's William Thompson (Lord Kelvin) estimated the age of the Sun and he finally settled on a value of 20 to 40 million years. This was based on gravitational energy - nuclear fusion was unknown. Darwin noted that this was to short a time for evolution to have taken place, and so in a sense Darwin used an anthropic inference to postulate nuclear energy. Twain would have known Thompson's estimate and so might have said millions based on it. But, aside from the Abrahamic superstitions, educated people like Twain generally assumed the universe was static and eternal. In which case he might well have said billions. It was 1897 when he formulated that age estimate – so technically still in the 1800’s by a thin margin. Amazing that so recently (1897 is just a mere 117 years ago) our knowledge of our universe was still so limited. Mark Twain -- aka Samuel Clemens – was quite a free thinker from what I have learned of his life and work, so I would not be surprised in the least, if he thought along the lines you suggest. The average person of that era was probably more likely to believe in the Abrahamic fairy tale of the universe – again this is an opinion I have not done the research. Chris Brent -- 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/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 http://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 http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: Interesting Google tech talk on QM
Thanks Brent. I read Mermin and am both wiser and none-the. It seems to me in this paper he is chickening out by saying that QM shouldn't really think about the conscious observer, because that leads to the fairy tale of many worlds. Instead it should consider consciousness to reside outside the competent scope of a physical theory. It's kind of like his answer is to say don't ask those questions. And he explicitly repudiates the notion that it's all in your head or that a quantum state is a summary of your knowledge of the system. The correlations are objective. What I liked about the paper though was the notion of correlations without correlata (which Garrett invokes) - the idea that quantum theory is about (and only about) systemic relationships makes a lot of sense. To take the answer to what is QM telling us? just a little further philosophically than what Mermim is prepared to, I'd say it's telling us (for one thing) that we've hit the limits of atomism. We're bouncing off the boundary of the reductionistic epistemology. Anyway, sadly I haven't yet seen anything that could supply a cogent alternative to MWI. I'll move on to the other papers tomorrow night... :) On Tuesday, April 22, 2014 3:36:16 PM UTC+10, Brent wrote: Read Mermin who has written some popular papers on The Ithaca Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics, e.g. http://arxiv.org/pdf/quant-ph/9801057.pdf and the paper by Adami and Cerf, which is where Garrett gets his talk, arxiv.org/pdf/quant-ph/0405005 ** They take an information theoric approach to the quantum measurement problem and show that a measurement can only get you part of the information in the quantum state. From the MWI standpoint this 'other information' is in the other world branch. Mermin and Adami and also Fuchs (http://arxiv.org/pdf/1003.5209.pdfhttp://www.google.com/url?q=http%3A%2F%2Farxiv.org%2Fpdf%2F1003.5209.pdfsa=Dsntz=1usg=AFQjCNESAnRXSOhSA3Y_kMt1kkshVPgd_w) take a more instrumentalist approach in which your conscious perceptions are fundamental and QM is a way to compute their relations. The wave-function is just a summary representation of your knowledge of the system. That's why he refers to it as the zero-worlds interpretation; it's all in your (our) mind. Brent On 4/21/2014 5:03 PM, Pierz wrote: Just came across this presentation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dEaecUuEqfc It's a bit long, but I'd be interested to hear anyone's thoughts who is knowledgeable on QM. I don't follow the maths, but I kind of got the gist. What intrigued me was his interpretation of QM and I'm wondering if anyone can throw any more light on it. He makes a lot of jumps which are obviously clear in his mind but hard to follow. He says that MWI is supportable by the maths, but that he prefers a zero universes interpretation, according to which we are classical simulations in a quantum computer. I'm not sure I follow this. I mean, I can follow the idea of being a classical simulation in a quantum computer, but I can't see how this is different from MWI, except by the manoeuvre of declaring other universes to be unreal because they can never practically interact with 'our' branch. I guess what interested me was the possibility of a coherent alternative to MWI (because frankly MWI scares the willies out of me), but in spite of what he said, I couldn't see what it was... -- 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-li...@googlegroups.com javascript:. To post to this group, send email to everyth...@googlegroups.comjavascript: . Visit this group at http://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 http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: Interesting Google tech talk on QM
On 4/22/2014 4:54 AM, Pierz wrote: Thanks Brent. I read Mermin and am both wiser and none-the. It seems to me in this paper he is chickening out by saying that QM shouldn't really think about the conscious observer, because that leads to the fairy tale of many worlds. Instead it should consider consciousness to reside outside the competent scope of a physical theory. I don't think he means that. He just means that it's a separate question from the interpretation of QM and that it's a mistake to mix them together. It's kind of like his answer is to say don't ask those questions. And he explicitly repudiates the notion that it's all in your head or that a quantum state is a summary of your knowledge of the system. The correlations are objective. What I liked about the paper though was the notion of correlations without correlata (which Garrett invokes) - the idea that quantum theory is about (and only about) systemic relationships makes a lot of sense. To take the answer to what is QM telling us? just a little further philosophically than what Mermim is prepared to, I'd say it's telling us (for one thing) that we've hit the limits of atomism. We're bouncing off the boundary of the reductionistic epistemology. Anyway, sadly I haven't yet seen anything that could supply a cogent alternative to MWI. I'll move on to the other papers tomorrow night... :) Chris Fuchs is the main proponent of quantum Bayesianism, which also takes the wave-function to just be a summary of one's knowledge of the system - and so there is nothing surprising about it collapsing when you get new information. Of course another alternative is an objective collapse theory like GRW. I'm just now reading a book by Ghirardi,Sneaking a Look at God's Cards which surveys the experiments that force the weirdness of QM on us and the various interpretations. Of course he devotes a special chapter to GRW theory, but he is very even handed. I'm not sure why you're worried about MWI though. Is it because you read Divide by Infinity? I don't think that's what MWI really implies. Brent On Tuesday, April 22, 2014 3:36:16 PM UTC+10, Brent wrote: Read Mermin who has written some popular papers on The Ithaca Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics, e.g. http://arxiv.org/pdf/quant-ph/9801057.pdf http://arxiv.org/pdf/quant-ph/9801057.pdf and the paper by Adami and Cerf, which is where Garrett gets his talk, arxiv.org/pdf/quant-ph/0405005 http://arxiv.org/pdf/quant-ph/0405005// They take an information theoric approach to the quantum measurement problem and show that a measurement can only get you part of the information in the quantum state. From the MWI standpoint this 'other information' is in the other world branch. Mermin and Adami and also Fuchs (http://arxiv.org/pdf/1003.5209.pdf http://www.google.com/url?q=http%3A%2F%2Farxiv.org%2Fpdf%2F1003.5209.pdfsa=Dsntz=1usg=AFQjCNESAnRXSOhSA3Y_kMt1kkshVPgd_w) take a more instrumentalist approach in which your conscious perceptions are fundamental and QM is a way to compute their relations. The wave-function is just a summary representation of your knowledge of the system. That's why he refers to it as the zero-worlds interpretation; it's all in your (our) mind. Brent On 4/21/2014 5:03 PM, Pierz wrote: Just came across this presentation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dEaecUuEqfc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dEaecUuEqfc It's a bit long, but I'd be interested to hear anyone's thoughts who is knowledgeable on QM. I don't follow the maths, but I kind of got the gist. What intrigued me was his interpretation of QM and I'm wondering if anyone can throw any more light on it. He makes a lot of jumps which are obviously clear in his mind but hard to follow. He says that MWI is supportable by the maths, but that he prefers a zero universes interpretation, according to which we are classical simulations in a quantum computer. I'm not sure I follow this. I mean, I can follow the idea of being a classical simulation in a quantum computer, but I can't see how this is different from MWI, except by the manoeuvre of declaring other universes to be unreal because they can never practically interact with 'our' branch. I guess what interested me was the possibility of a coherent alternative to MWI (because frankly MWI scares the willies out of me), but in spite of what he said, I couldn't see what it was... -- 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-li...@googlegroups.com javascript:. To post to this group, send email to everyth...@googlegroups.com javascript:. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list
Re: Interesting Google tech talk on QM
On 22 Apr 2014, at 02:03, Pierz wrote: Just came across this presentation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dEaecUuEqfc It's a bit long, but I'd be interested to hear anyone's thoughts who is knowledgeable on QM. I don't follow the maths, but I kind of got the gist. What intrigued me was his interpretation of QM and I'm wondering if anyone can throw any more light on it. He makes a lot of jumps which are obviously clear in his mind but hard to follow. He says that MWI is supportable by the maths, but that he prefers a zero universes interpretation, according to which we are classical simulations in a quantum computer. I'm not sure I follow this. I mean, I can follow the idea of being a classical simulation in a quantum computer, but I can't see how this is different from MWI, except by the manoeuvre of declaring other universes to be unreal because they can never practically interact with 'our' branch. I guess what interested me was the possibility of a coherent alternative to MWI (because frankly MWI scares the willies out of me), Me too. But at some deeper level my open-mindedness on this is protected by an even bigger fear: the fear to get it wrong. but in spite of what he said, I couldn't see what it was... Physicists are unclear on what they mean by world. I agree with you: to be a classical emulation in a quantum computer is basically equivalent with the MWI, assuming computationalism and a level above the quantum level. Computationalism can be ontologically simpler, as all there is needed is the number 0, and its successors, s(0), s(s(0)), ... and nothing else. (the dreams will emerge from the additive-multiplicative relations). This is automatically a 0 worlds a priori. But sharable dreams can cohere enough to make open the question if we are in a complete (in some sense) physical reality (one universe), or one multiverse, or a cluster of multiverses, etc. But this is only from inside, because from outside, all what exists are the piece of dreams which cohere (enough or not). Here dream means computation from some point of view. That is what is translated in arithmetic by sigma_1 and provable by a machine (me in 3p), in a consistent environment, that is []p t, with p an arithmetical sigma_1 sentence. (+ the theaetetus nuance: []p t p). Is there a consolation for the MWI fears? Well MWI is not the explanation, it is the whole theology which is the explanation, and things are complex there, especially after 1500 years of no mind change on this. You might really read Plato, neoplatonists, the mystics, and study the comparison with some eastern school, ... and with actual machine's self-reference. Bruno Life, what is it, but a dream. (Lewis Carroll) -- 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/d/optout. http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- 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/d/optout.
Re: Interesting Google tech talk on QM
I would like to read those papers but haven't had time yet. On 23 April 2014 04:00, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: On 22 Apr 2014, at 02:03, Pierz wrote: Just came across this presentation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dEaecUuEqfc It's a bit long, but I'd be interested to hear anyone's thoughts who is knowledgeable on QM. I don't follow the maths, but I kind of got the gist. What intrigued me was his interpretation of QM and I'm wondering if anyone can throw any more light on it. He makes a lot of jumps which are obviously clear in his mind but hard to follow. He says that MWI is supportable by the maths, but that he prefers a zero universes interpretation, according to which we are classical simulations in a quantum computer. I'm not sure I follow this. I mean, I can follow the idea of being a classical simulation in a quantum computer, but I can't see how this is different from MWI, except by the manoeuvre of declaring other universes to be unreal because they can never practically interact with 'our' branch. I guess what interested me was the possibility of a coherent alternative to MWI (because frankly MWI scares the willies out of me), Me too. But at some deeper level my open-mindedness on this is protected by an even bigger fear: the fear to get it wrong. but in spite of what he said, I couldn't see what it was... Physicists are unclear on what they mean by world. I agree with you: to be a classical emulation in a quantum computer is basically equivalent with the MWI, assuming computationalism and a level above the quantum level. Computationalism can be ontologically simpler, as all there is needed is the number 0, and its successors, s(0), s(s(0)), ... and nothing else. (the dreams will emerge from the additive-multiplicative relations). This is automatically a 0 worlds a priori. But sharable dreams can cohere enough to make open the question if we are in a complete (in some sense) physical reality (one universe), or one multiverse, or a cluster of multiverses, etc. But this is only from inside, because from outside, all what exists are the piece of dreams which cohere (enough or not). Here dream means computation from some point of view. That is what is translated in arithmetic by sigma_1 and provable by a machine (me in 3p), in a consistent environment, that is []p t, with p an arithmetical sigma_1 sentence. (+ the theaetetus nuance: []p t p). Is there a consolation for the MWI fears? Well MWI is not the explanation, it is the whole theology which is the explanation, and things are complex there, especially after 1500 years of no mind change on this. You might really read Plato, neoplatonists, the mystics, and study the comparison with some eastern school, ... and with actual machine's self-reference. Bruno *Life, what is it, but a dream. (*Lewis Carroll*)* -- 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/d/optout. http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- 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/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 http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: Interesting Google tech talk on QM
On 4/22/2014 4:28 PM, LizR wrote: would like to read those papers but haven't had time yet. On 23 April 2014 04:00, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be mailto:marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: On 22 Apr 2014, at 02:03, Pierz wrote: Just came across this presentation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dEaecUuEqfc It's a bit long, but I'd be interested to hear anyone's thoughts who is knowledgeable on QM. I don't follow the maths, but I kind of got the gist. What intrigued me was his interpretation of QM and I'm wondering if anyone can throw any more light on it. He makes a lot of jumps which are obviously clear in his mind but hard to follow. He says that MWI is supportable by the maths, but that he prefers a zero universes interpretation, according to which we are classical simulations in a quantum computer. I'm not sure I follow this. I mean, I can follow the idea of being a classical simulation in a quantum computer, but I can't see how this is different from MWI, except by the manoeuvre of declaring other universes to be unreal because they can never practically interact with 'our' branch. I guess what interested me was the possibility of a coherent alternative to MWI (because frankly MWI scares the willies out of me), Me too. But at some deeper level my open-mindedness on this is protected by an even bigger fear: the fear to get it wrong. I do not fear death, in view of the fact that I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it.' --- Mark Twain -- 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/d/optout.
Re: Interesting Google tech talk on QM
On 23 April 2014 11:37, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: I do not fear death, in view of the fact that I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it.' --- Mark Twain Did Mark Twain really say that? I thought the age of the Eartfr was estimated to be millions of years (as in The Time Machine) around the end of the 19th century, but I don't know what people thought the age of the universe was. -- 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/d/optout.
Re: Interesting Google tech talk on QM
Even if Clemmens said it, I don't take that statement as anything more than a witty line. When his daughter died, she was a pre schooler, I had read the it messed him up. Yes, we can jolly it all away till it happens to us and hits home. Then its a different story, and I don't mean Tom Sawyer. Twains last published short story, released after his death in 1910, was about people rowing about in what turned out to be a water drop under a microscope, under which an ever present giant eye monitored the passengers struggle to survive. The eye was Twains idea of an uncaring God. -Original Message- From: LizR lizj...@gmail.com To: everything-list everything-list@googlegroups.com Sent: Tue, Apr 22, 2014 7:48 pm Subject: Re: Interesting Google tech talk on QM On 23 April 2014 11:37, meekerdb lt;meeke...@verizon.netgt; wrote: I do not fear death, in view of the fact that I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it.' --- Mark Twain Did Mark Twain really say that? I thought the age of the Eartfr was estimated to be millions of years (as in The Time Machine) around the end of the 19th century, but I don't know what people thought the age of the universe was. -- 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/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 http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: Interesting Google tech talk on QM
I was just a bit surprised at his use of billions rather than millions which in context seems rather extravagant. Actually google indicates that I am not alone in wondering this. http://www.telecomtally.com/blog/2006/12/did_mark_twain_1.html Wikiquote http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Mark_Twainalso agrees with me :-) I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it. - Quoted in Dawkins, Richardhttp://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Richard_Dawkins(2006). A Much Needed Gap?. *The God Delusion*. Bantam Press. p. 354. ISBN 0-618-68000-4http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Special:BookSources/0618680004 ., but no source is given. *Note that during Twain's life the Age of the Earth http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_the_Earth was thought to be measured in tens of millions not billions of years.* -- 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/d/optout.
Re: Interesting Google tech talk on QM
I should have said, my emphasis. On 23 April 2014 14:23, LizR lizj...@gmail.com wrote: I was just a bit surprised at his use of billions rather than millions which in context seems rather extravagant. Actually google indicates that I am not alone in wondering this. http://www.telecomtally.com/blog/2006/12/did_mark_twain_1.html Wikiquote http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Mark_Twainalso agrees with me :-) I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it. - Quoted in Dawkins, Richardhttp://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Richard_Dawkins(2006). A Much Needed Gap?. *The God Delusion*. Bantam Press. p. 354. ISBN 0-618-68000-4http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Special:BookSources/0618680004 ., but no source is given. *Note that during Twain's life the Age of the Earth http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_the_Earth was thought to be measured in tens of millions not billions of years.* -- 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/d/optout.
Re: Interesting Google tech talk on QM
Pierz, I think we discussed Ron Garrett's talk on this list before. You should be able to find something searching the archive. I greatly appreciated his view and invited him to discuss them with us on this list and also invited him to check out Bruno's paper since I found a lot of similarity. I think in many ways Garrett's view is like that of Heize-Dieter Zeh, known for his multi consciousness interpretation, but who also was an Everettian. Jason On Monday, April 21, 2014, Pierz pier...@gmail.com wrote: Just came across this presentation: The Quantum Conspiracy: What Popularizers of QM Don't Want You to Know It's a bit long, but I'd be interested to hear anyone's thoughts who is knowledgeable on QM. I don't follow the maths, but I kind of got the gist. What intrigued me was his interpretation of QM and I'm wondering if anyone can throw any more light on it. He makes a lot of jumps which are obviously clear in his mind but hard to follow. He says that MWI is supportable by the maths, but that he prefers a zero universes interpretation, according to which we are classical simulations in a quantum computer. I'm not sure I follow this. I mean, I can follow the idea of being a classical simulation in a quantum computer, but I can't see how this is different from MWI, except by the manoeuvre of declaring other universes to be unreal because they can never practically interact with 'our' branch. I guess what interested me was the possibility of a coherent alternative to MWI (because frankly MWI scares the willies out of me), but in spite of what he said, I couldn't see what it was... -- 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/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 http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: Interesting Google tech talk on QM
Read Mermin who has written some popular papers on The Ithaca Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics, e.g. http://arxiv.org/pdf/quant-ph/9801057.pdf and the paper by Adami and Cerf, which is where Garrett gets his talk, arxiv.org/pdf/quant-ph/0405005/?/ They take an information theoric approach to the quantum measurement problem and show that a measurement can only get you part of the information in the quantum state. From the MWI standpoint this 'other information' is in the other world branch. Mermin and Adami and also Fuchs (http://arxiv.org/pdf/1003.5209.pdf) take a more instrumentalist approach in which your conscious perceptions are fundamental and QM is a way to compute their relations. The wave-function is just a summary representation of your knowledge of the system. That's why he refers to it as the zero-worlds interpretation; it's all in your (our) mind. Brent On 4/21/2014 5:03 PM, Pierz wrote: Just came across this presentation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dEaecUuEqfc It's a bit long, but I'd be interested to hear anyone's thoughts who is knowledgeable on QM. I don't follow the maths, but I kind of got the gist. What intrigued me was his interpretation of QM and I'm wondering if anyone can throw any more light on it. He makes a lot of jumps which are obviously clear in his mind but hard to follow. He says that MWI is supportable by the maths, but that he prefers a zero universes interpretation, according to which we are classical simulations in a quantum computer. I'm not sure I follow this. I mean, I can follow the idea of being a classical simulation in a quantum computer, but I can't see how this is different from MWI, except by the manoeuvre of declaring other universes to be unreal because they can never practically interact with 'our' branch. I guess what interested me was the possibility of a coherent alternative to MWI (because frankly MWI scares the willies out of me), but in spite of what he said, I couldn't see what it was... -- 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 mailto:everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com mailto:everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://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 http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
