punctumm comments on Configurations and Amplitude - Less Wrong

26 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 10 April 2008 07:41AM

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Comment author: punctumm 12 December 2011 05:15:03AM 1 point [-]

Now, for complicated reasons that we aren't going to go into today - considerations that belong on a higher level of organization than fundamental quantum mechanics, the same way that atoms are more complicated than quarks - there's no simple measuring instrument that can directly tell us the exact amplitudes of each configuration. We can't directly see the program state.

I'm not sure if you cover this in further articles... but it is worth saying:

The amplitudes of each state are not unique... there are more than one (in fact, there are infinitely many) different configurations that get you the same observable probability density, each differing by a phase factor.