= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Blueberry comments on MWI, copies and probability - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (127)
Wait, what? How would you do it with people or bacteria? Do you have a link to the bacteria experiment? I thought that the different worlds couldn't interact; I'm very confused by this comment.
It would seem to rely on diffracting people around corners. Sounds tricky. Must be very good equipment!
Is there any reason to use viruses and bacteria as opposed to, say, bacterium-sized salt crystals? Is it to refute people who say: "But if it's alive then perhaps it has magical quantum properties. Because life is magical."
Yes. It is way cooler. Kind of like levitating frogs with superconducting magnets.
Human consciousness specifically, not just life. Would different interpretations give different predictions for an experiment with a human interfering with himself in other branches?
Are you asking about what this would look like to observers on the side, or about the subjective experience of the person undergoing interference?
Regarding the first question, I don't think it would be different in principle from any other hypothetical experiment with macroscopic quantum interference; how much different interpretations manage to account for those is a complex question, but I don't think proponents of either of them would accept the mere fact of experimentally observed macroscopic interference as falsifying their favored interpretation. (Though arguably, collapse-based interpretations run into ever greater difficulties as the largest scales of detected quantum phenomena increase.)
As for the second one, I think answering that question would require more knowledge about the exact nature of human consciousness than we presently have. Scott Aaronson presents some interesting discussion along these lines in one of his lectures:
http://www.scottaaronson.com/democritus/lec11.html
Thanks for the link. I'm still not clear on exactly what it would mean to be able to interfere with myself in other branches in a wave-like way. Also, I thought a non-reversible process forced decoherence: is this not correct, or is there a way to force living organisms to be reversible?
If different worlds didn't interact, you wouldn't even get the ordinary double-slit result. With ordinary probability, you can split off branches without a problem, but quantum amplitudes can be negative or complex, they can cancel out, etc. You just don't typically see this macroscopically due to decoherence.