PhilGoetz comments on Pascal's wager re-examined - Less Wrong

-8 Post author: PhilGoetz 05 October 2011 08:43AM

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Comment author: PhilGoetz 04 October 2011 05:25:34AM 0 points [-]

So even in quantum mechanics, it takes an infinite amount of information to represent a single particle? That's a problem.

Comment author: wedrifid 04 October 2011 06:44:12AM 6 points [-]

So even in quantum mechanics, it takes an infinite amount of information to represent a single particle? That's a problem.

It's a problem for us. But the universe doesn't have to care.

Comment author: asr 04 October 2011 07:58:08AM *  2 points [-]

The notion of "a single particle" turns out to be problematic. The thing that requires arbitrarily much information is the amplitude for a particle to be in some particular state.

I should emphasize that amplitudes aren't just a creature of our models -- they are the thing that interfere to give you an diffraction pattern, or the shapes of an electron orbital cloud, or that get manipulated in a quantum computation.