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

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

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Comment author: lisper 06 March 2016 06:27:04PM 0 points [-]

Doesn't the QIT you describe make the exact same predictions, also the Russian roulette you mentioned?

Nope.

But there's no single privileged future you, right?

There is no single privileged future me now, but when my future becomes my present there will be. (Also, see note below.)

You can actually do this experiment: listen to a geiger counter, or tune an old-school TV to an inactive channel and watch the snow on the screen. The math says that during this process there are an inconceivably vast number of you's being split off every time the geiger counter clicks (or fails to click) or every time you perceive a light or dark pixel on the screen. But you will only ever experience being one of those you's. Yes, all those other you's do exist, but the you that you perceive yourself to be can never interact with any of them, so they may as well not exist for the one you that you perceive yourself to be. And so the one you that you perceive yourself to be may as well live your life as if all those other you's didn't exist even though they really do.

(NOTE: there is really no such thing as "now", and you don't even have to go quantum to see that. Simultaneity gets tossed out the window with special relativity. There is my "now" and there is your "now" and they will not, in general, be the same.)

Comment author: qmotus 06 March 2016 07:30:47PM 0 points [-]

Well, I'd rather say that I will perceive being every one of them; it's just that no future me will perceive being more than one of the future mes. The terminology gets quite confusing here, but I think the Quantum Russian Roulette you mentioned (and quantum suicide and immortality, by extension, for example) is one situation where this aspect of quantum theory becomes somewhat apparent, which is why I think it would be interesting if you elaborated a bit more on how you think the predictions QTI and MWI make differ from each other.

Comment author: lisper 06 March 2016 07:58:43PM 0 points [-]

I will perceive being every one of them

It depends on what you mean by "I". This is the crux of the matter. MWI takes a God's-eye perspective and looks at the whole wave function. On that view, there are many you's (i.e. many slices of the wave function that contain macroscopic systems of mutually entangled particles that perceive themselves to be you).

QIT takes the perspective of the-you-that-you-currently-perceive-yourself-to-be. You will only ever perceive one of that kind of you.

For the purposes of making decisions it makes more sense to take the latter perspective because it's the-latter-kind-of-you that is making the decisions and has to live with the consequences.

Comment author: qmotus 06 March 2016 08:10:19PM 0 points [-]

I would say that a major difference between MWI and various collapse interpretations is that there are situations where according to collapse interpretations there most likely will be no future you; but according to MWI there surely will, although their amplitude is low (the aforementioned Russian roulette is one such situation, for instance). I find it somewhat difficult to think about those from the perspective you advocate.

Comment author: lisper 07 March 2016 12:13:04AM *  0 points [-]

according to MWI there surely will

No. Not "will". IS. If you're going to take the God's eye view then you have to let go of your intuitions about time along with your intuitions about classical reality. The wave function is a static four-dimensional thing. Time emerges from the wave function in exactly the same way that classical reality does. You have to be careful not to apply terminology from the mortal's-eye-view to the God's-eye-view. That's how you get yourself into trouble.

UPDATE: Here is a popular article about how time emerges from entanglement.

Comment author: qmotus 07 March 2016 07:56:36AM 1 point [-]

I think what I said applies when you take a first-person point of view. If you're a participant in a quantum suicide experiment, then if you expect a collapse interpretation to be an accurate description of reality, you should expect to eventually be hit by a bullet and die. But both MWI and QIT predict that you will continuously notice that the gun doesn't fire. The difference is not in the point of view taken, it's in the fact that the parts of the wavefunction that contain a (from first-person eye-view) future version of the participant actually are there.

Comment author: lisper 07 March 2016 10:55:45PM 0 points [-]

But both MWI and QIT predict that you will continuously notice that the gun doesn't fire.

No, that's not quite true. QIT predicts that if you notice anything then you will notice that the gun didn't fire. But QIT does not guarantee that you will notice anything. You could just die.

Notice (!) that when you start to talk about "noticing" things you are tacitly bringing consciousness into the discussion, which is a whole 'nuther can o' philosophical worms.

See also my response to akvadrako.