Scott_Aaronson2 comments on Quantum Explanations - Less Wrong

29 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 09 April 2008 08:15AM

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Comment author: Scott_Aaronson2 10 April 2008 04:50:53AM 2 points [-]

Tom: Yes, for as long as QM has been around people have tried to hitch doofus ideas about "mind influencing reality" to it -- and for those of us who spend a significant part of our lives fighting such idiocy, it'll be great to see Eliezer bring his considerable didactic skills to the fight.

I was talking about something completely different: namely, the philosophical debate about whether we should regard a quantum state as what's really out there (like a coin), or as our description of what's out there (like a probability distribution over coin flips). Neither view implies any ability to change the world just by wishing it, any more than you can bias a coin flip by just changing your probability estimate. But (unless I misread him) Eliezer was promising come down hard in favor of the former view, and I was pointing to mixed states as the battlefield where the two views really meet in an interesting way.