Luke_A_Somers comments on Cult impressions of Less Wrong/Singularity Institute - Less Wrong

29 Post author: John_Maxwell_IV 15 March 2012 12:41AM

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Comment author: Luke_A_Somers 06 September 2012 02:23:15PM 1 point [-]

Not necessarily. Irreversible and stochastic quantum processes can be time-continuous and time-differentiable.

I have never seen a proposed mechanism of ontological collapse that actually fits this, though.

Not if it doesn't allow FTL communication

The inability to send a signal that you want, getting instead a Born-Rule-based pure random signal, doesn't change that this Born-Rule-based pure random signal is, under ontological collapse distributed FTL.

Comment author: V_V 08 September 2012 06:58:36PM 0 points [-]

I have never seen a proposed mechanism of ontological collapse that actually fits this, though.

AFAIK, Penrose's interpretation doesn't describe the details of the collapse process, it just says that above about the "one graviton" level of energy separation collapse will occur.

It doesn't commit to collapse being instantaneous: It could be that the state evolution is governed by a non-linear law that approximates very well the linear Schrödinger equation in the "sub-graviton" regime and has a sharp, but still differentiable phase transition when approaching the "super-graviton" regime.

The GRW interpretation assumes instantaneous collapse, IIUC, but it would be a trivial modification to have fast, differentiable collapse.

My point is that non-differentiable collapse is not a requirement of objective collapse interpretations.

The inability to send a signal that you want, getting instead a Born-Rule-based pure random signal, doesn't change that this Born-Rule-based pure random signal is, under ontological collapse distributed FTL.

But that's an issue of QM, irrespective of the particular interpretation. Indeed the "spooky action at distance" bugged Einstein and many people of his time, but the modern view is that as long as you don't have causal influences (that is, information transmission) propagating FTL, you don't violate special relativity.

Comment author: Luke_A_Somers 09 September 2012 09:16:27PM 1 point [-]

But that's an issue of QM, irrespective of the particular interpretation.

No, it isn't. QM is purely causal and relativistic. You can look into the equations and prove that nothing FTL is in there. The closest you get is accounting for the possibility of a vacuum bubble having appeared nearby a particle with exactly its energy, and the antimatter part of it the bubble then cancels with the particle. And that isn't much like FTL.

When you do an EPR experiment, the appearance of FTL communication arises from the assumption that the knowledge you gain about what you'll see if you go check the other branch of the experiment is something happens at the other end of the experiment, instead of locally, with the information propagating to the other end of the experiment as you go to check. The existence of nonlocal states does not imply nonlocal communication.

Comment author: V_V 09 September 2012 11:41:08PM 0 points [-]

I'm not sure what we are disagreeing about.

My point is that objective collapse is FTL only in the same sense that QM is. That is, if QM isn't FTL, then collapse isn't.