lisper comments on The Philosophical Implications of Quantum Information Theory - Less Wrong

5 Post author: lisper 26 February 2016 02:00AM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (55)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: lisper 05 March 2016 06:03:40PM 1 point [-]

(DO:A) raises the probability of B.

Yes, but there's still some terminological sleight-of-hand going on here. It is only fair to say that a future A affected a past B if P(B) is well defined without reference to A. In this case it's not. Because B is defined in terms of correlations between measurements made at T1 (noon) and measurements made at T2 (evening) then B cannot be said to have actually happened until T2.

correlation is a two-way street

No, it's an n-squared-minus-one-way street. It appears to be a two-way street in one (very common) special case (two macroscopic systems mutually entangled with each other), but weak measurements are interesting precisely because they do not conform to the conditions of that special case. When you go beyond the conditions of the common special case you can't keep using the rhetoric and intuitions that apply only to the special case and hope to come up with the right answer.

Comment author: torekp 07 March 2016 10:44:53PM 0 points [-]

if P(B) is well defined without reference to A

You're right. Good point.

it's an n-squared-minus-one-way street

Don't you mean n-factorial? Anyway, ... hmm, I need to think about this more.

Comment author: lisper 07 March 2016 10:51:40PM 0 points [-]

Don't you mean n-factorial?

Yeah, probably. It's actually probably N!-1 because you have to trace over one degree of freedom to obtain a classical universe. But the details don't really matter. What matters is that it's >>N.