101–110 of 158 posts
Whenever I hear about weird shit from the realm of quantum physics (this theory, double-slit, etc..) I can't help but think: Why would I hardcode values for imperceptible objects, that would take an enormous about of ram and cpu time to constantly update values in the off chance it's needed. Much more efficient to optimize for what the _player_ can see at their perspective. Oh and I should probably code in some error…
Have it ever happened o you that you read "a pillar of reality" and it turned out to be more than a clickbait? Me neither. (To make it clear: the content is interesting, even if clearly for popular science audience (some statements about physics are false, e.g. "These are all intuitive ideas, and widely believed even by physicists." The title is worth a tabloid.)
The original Wigner's friend paradox: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wigner%27s_friend The paradox seems to rest on magical thinking about consciousness, and if one simply accepts that a conscious observer can be in a superposition like any other piece of matter, the paradox is resolved. And, from the article: For Wigner, this was an absurd conclusion. Instead, he believed that once the consciousness of an observer be…
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wigner%27s_friend...
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Either you believe in collapse, so there are two of you, who each observed different things, and one of those will at some point cease to exist, or you embrace the Everett interpretation, and so there are two of you who each observe different things and go on to live their separate lives.
Both paths you laid out are built upon the idea that superposition happens. Is there any serious consideration these days that superposition itself is dead end?
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Of course, apart from how the actual implementation works I don't think many people have a problem with that. And if it was just that, Wigner's friend wouldn't be nearly as interesting, it would suffice to say that if quantum mechanical effects really keep working all the way up to the macroscopic level (which again is anything but obvious), that his friend's body and brain would simply be in a superposition of both…
One of brain’s responsibilities is to model the environment, which means modeling all it’s parts. Since each brain is unique - those models are different and “personal”. Physical stimuli evoke some of those models and that’s what we call “blue color” or whatever else we’re experiencing. I don’t think I understand the problem enough to understand why it’s a problem.
There's no need for such subject to exist.
For example, most people assume that, so far, computers do not have any inner experience.
A computer could, conceivably, execute the same functions as our brain, yet have no inner experience of anything. Numbers get in, numbers get out, without any inner experience being needed.
The original Wigner's friend paradox: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wigner%27s_friend The paradox seems to rest on magical thinking about consciousness, and if one simply accepts that a conscious observer can be in a superposition like any other piece of matter, the paradox is resolved. And, from the article: For Wigner, this was an absurd conclusion. Instead, he believed that once the consciousness of an observer be…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
A good point, but quantum computation can do anything that reversible classical computation can. If you do your entire computation while keeping all the qubits in the {|0>, |1>} basis, then performing a CNOT onto a qubit initialized to |0> will work as a classical copy. (It will fail to truly copy the quantum state, but that's fine.) You just need a large enough supply of qubits initialized to |0> for all the copies…
> quantum computation can do anything that reversible classical computation can Well, yeah, but that "reversible" hedge is quite significant. Reversible means you have to retain all of your intermediate states, and it is far from clear that you could build a reversible AI that would run for more than a few milliseconds before consuming all of the available resources in its light cone. > You just need a large enough s…
I guess one would have to demonstrate that the program implements an AI by running it on a computer with I/O, then move the same program over to an isolated quantum computer once it's passed that test. Maybe not completely philosophically satisfying, but should work in practice.
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I think MWI actually predicts continuous branching. The prescription for MWI is just to run the Schrodinger equation forwards in time. So the branching would look like one blob of probability gradually becoming bimodal, and then splitting into two components with less and less overlap. (There might also be 3-or-more-way branches, not just binary splits.)
Tell me about the 'superworld' that hosts the many worlds.