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 becomes involved, the entanglement would “collapse” to make the friend’s observation definite.
But what if Wigner was wrong?
Well, obviously Wigner is wrong, sorry for being flippant.
In this paper (preprint here: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1907.05607.pdf), the magical thinking about consciousness seems to be transmuted into "“Absoluteness of Observed Events” (i.e. that every observed event exists absolutely, not relatively)". The authors (it appears to me) mean by this that if an observer performs an experiment, while this observer is himself in a superposition, we have to regard the outcome of the experiment as absolute (i.e. not in a superposition) because it was made by a (conscious) observer.
In my opinion, both "Absoluteness of Observed Events", and the equivalent from the layman's article, "When someone observes an event happening, it really happened", is a disingenuous and confusing way of talking about observers who are in a superposition. We have crossed over from "quantum mechanics is weird" to "these superficially intuitive but clearly false assumptions about quantum mechanics are weird".
We're veering away from physics here, but isn't consciousness actually quite "magical". It's beyond remarkable to me that stimulating nervous tissue, composed of quite mundane things like protons and electrons, yields a subjective experience. I know many people reject the hard problem of consciousness, but to those who don't, the implications of thought experiments like Wigner's friend, like superpositions or entanglement of subjective experiences, are truly paradoxical. You are calling certain viewpoints obviously wrong or false because you adhere to certain philosophical viewpoints. There's nothing wrong with that, and they're all justifiable, but none of them are complete consensus among philosophers.
Coming back to physics, there's an assumption you and other commenters are silently making, which is that quantum mechanics is even applicable to macroscopic objects like humans. The largest objects which have been shown to act wave-like are a few thousand atoms large. While it's indisputable that at the lowest level the universe is fundamentally quantum mechanical, it's a little brazen to extrapolate that over more than 20 orders of magnitude. As a physicist myself, I'll believe it when I see it, and I'm looking forward to getting results from proposed experiments like FELIX and its successors.
You might consider reading the original paper. Because the experiment doesn't rely on conscious observers at all. (Unless you think photons are conscious, which I'm assuming you don't.)
> if one simply accepts that a conscious observer can be in a superposition like any other piece of matter, the paradox is resolved.
It’s not so simple. Suppose you’re in a box and observe a quantum experiment, and then I open the box and observe you. Then before I open the box you’re in a superposed state |x> + |y>, corresponding to the two possible outcomes x and y. Fine, no problem so far. But what is your own subjective experience? You, subjectively, inside the box, will only ever observe yourself to be in |x> or |y>, never |x> + |y>. Even if from the outside your brain can be said to be in a superposed state, your experience of the world is not superposed.
Sorry but there is nothing obvious about any of it. It all boils down to the measurement problem and entanglement. While I don't like psi-epistemic interpretations either, it's not like there is anything clearly inconsistent with them, or like psi-ontic and psi-complete interpretations make more sense or are devoid of issues. They all have problems and make assumptions that are hard to swallow, and if you believe any of them and start ridiculing others you are pretty much picking sides with no good evidence. So while you might have already pledged your faith, other people with probably as much understanding of the issues or more haven't.
Translating the thought experiment to an actual physical experiment is something worth appreciating.
A possible lack of absoluteness of observed events has implications for what observations may or may not be reconcilable using existing scientific methods.
> "From the point of view of the friend, the measurement result was determined long before Wigner had asked about it, and the state of the physical system has already collapsed. When now exactly did the collapse occur? Was it when the friend had finished their measurement, or when the information of its result entered Wigner's consciousness?"
This to me, shows just how hand-wavy the whole superposition/quantum collapse stuff really is. I have to say I side with Einstein with his view that everything is already in one state or the other. We don't cause the system to choose a state when we measure it. We simply discover the state it was already in. It is one thing to assign a probability to which state we will find it in. It is quite another to create an entire theory around quantum measurement.
There is nothing mysterious about this paradox. The friend performs the measurement ans discovers the state of the particle/system. Wiger doesn't know about it, but that doesn't mean it's not in that state, he just isn't aware of it yet. The fact this is a paradox just seems like silly mind games.
It's interesting the way some scientists have been biased into this kind of magical thinking, probably because the integrity of conscious observation is so central to their practice/worldview. Nobody is free from the pressure of cognitive dissonance.
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 handling in the fluke event one of these particles is detected, I'll just calculate their position retroactively, the user will never be able to tell and we can host way more players due to the reduced memory.
It would seem to me that god is a junior dev and no one reviewed his pull requests.
That model of efficiency (RAM and CPU time) is based on classical computation.
When your underlying model of computation is full quantum computation, it's simpler to just run everything at once. It takes no energy if you run everything without picking out a scenario (but in a kind of "tree falling in a forest" way), and more energy if you select out specific scenarios to look what happened (I/O is expensive). Counter-intuitively, the computation part of quantum systems is free in ways that we consider classical computers expensive to run. It's reversible and doesn't consume any energy.
That may seem like it's avoiding the point, after all what does it take to run the "underlying model of computation".
But what I'm trying to say is that "quantum all the way down" (see also turtles) is as much a valid model as "mechanical computation all the way down", which your picture relies on. Neither of them is more fundamental.
It may seem like quantum-all-the-way-down is a bit artificial, because we can in principle run quantum simulations on classical computers, which seem simpler. But it turns out we can't. There is a fundamental intractability barrier for simulations above an arbitrary tiny size, which means we can only simulate interesting quantum systems using other quantum systems. It really is quantum-all-the-way-down.
If god came up with the quantum-all-the-way-down version, I'd say that's pretty clever, because it's way more efficient than anything you would implement, with your old-school classical RAM and classical CPU.
One problem with this view is that “unobserved”
particles still take up a large (possibly larger?) amount of computation. Rather than being in one position, it acts like a wave, being a little bit in every possible allowable position. These probability waves also interact with each other (which is what the double slit experiment demonstrates).
That being said if it was demonstrated that un collapsed wave functions are somehow more efficient to calculate that would definitely give credence to the simulation hypothesis.
disagree on the junior dev part and on the god part.
what you’re describing is called “simulation theory” and it has been proposed and discussed at length
i think lazy evaluation makes sense in that context. i also think that having a few basic rules and after that applying them consistently across your simulation space make sense. if your basic space unit of reality is way smaller than the sims in it can perceive and measure they’re gonna start making stuff up
The article lists three assumptions that one might intuitively think hold. The problematic assumption is this one:
> When someone observes an event happening, it really happened.
Given the experiment from the paper, I would rephrase this assumption as "it's not possible to rewind things". But obviously inside a computer simulation made up of operations that are all individually reversible, it's trivial to rewind things.
The experiment sets up a situation where certain information is reversibly recorded, and then the records are unmade by temporarily rewinding. The rewinding is obfuscated by hiding it inside of a measurement that is incompatible with the presence or absence of the record. I guess the authors might disagree about the measurement implying rewinding, but as a bit of evidence I'll note that Scott Aaronson and Yosi Atia have shown that performing the measurement in question over a simulated agent is at least as expensive as rewinding the simulated agent [1]. Whatever is being done, it is doing some seriously expensive screwing around with the agent's state. It's like the experiment has a step where you feed the human through a giant meat processing plant, and for some reason everyone is pretending that's not somehow important.
Basically, the authors are appealing to the intuition that humans are big complicated in-practice-irreversible things, so clearly a record is permanent if it has affected the state of a human. But then they imagine instantiating the human's state inside a ridiculously powerful computer capable of reversibly simulating time advancing and of performing operations that have been engineered specifically to mess with the presence or absence of the record's effects on the human's state. Surprise surprise, the record gets messed with. Then for the actual experiment the big complicated ball of dependent spaghetti that is a human is replaced by a nice simple photon going along one path or another path.
Based on my very limited understanding it seems that anything that interacts with a system can be treated as an "observer", and thus a chain of observations can occur as one particle interacts with the next, enlarging the system that is in superposition for the next observer.
Do physicists axiomatically treat a "conscious observer" as an atomic unit? It seems the case based on neurological and psychological research that the mind is actually not a single unit but many units working together, and the sense of a singular self is an illusion, which would correlate with the fact that we are made up of a conglomeration of atoms and systems made of these atoms.
When we say that a person is observing a quantum system, could this actually be a cascade of observations of various parts of the mind rather than a singular event, since the mind is not monolithic?
On a side note (and perhaps unrelated), if different parts of the brain/mind could be in different quantum states, could this be a factor in how the mind operates?
I don't know to what degree the metaphor is accurate but as a non-physicist I find thinking about quantum mechanical experiments easier if I think of them as running code on a vast decentralized computing infrastructure.
The concept of "measurement" is just executing code on one node that populates local registers- "creating" not "measuring". Yes- by running code you are pulling on a reality fabric that we still know almost nothing about. But I find it easier to visualize than relying on my colloquial/non-QM intuition in words like "measuring"- which implies something like a single centralized reality database, not a creative decentralized infrastructure. QM experiments seem to create things, not measure them.
Would love to learn metaphors of folks in the space.
I’m just now teaching myself QM (20 years after school). I can tell you that in QM, seemingly innocuous phrases like “locality” have highly unintuitive, nonstandard meanings. I’m just now getting a glimpse at how amazingly fucking awful pop-sci QM articles are.
If you’re interested in QM, read “The Theoretical Minimum”; the second book gets into QM. There are video lectures of the same material that complement the series, we’ll.
This perspective is interesting and potentially valuable, but it must be emphasized that quantum mechanics has linear evolution and hence “no cloning”. That means, when the registers are quantum objects, there is no such thing as copying a value into a register — there is only one version of each object, and you’re always manipulating it directly. That’s one aspect which leads to very difficult questions when thinking of “creating” at local nodes — because it’s the same object/copy that’s accessed at different nodes by various observers — so how can we ensure consistency of observations?
An alternative way to view measurement is that you're just entangling yourself with the quantum system, and are as much in superposition as the system itself.
The part that seems the most dubious to me is the "choice":
> 2. It is possible to make free choices, or at least, statistically random choices.
I don't see what would be really compelling in that.
If it's false it would just mean that our actions are all kind of mechanistically decided by other events, and that does not shock me.
Other point:
> 1. When someone observes an event happening, it really happened.
What if it really happened in the reality of the observer (and maybe not in other realities)? What is meant by "reality"? Some insight is to be gained by precising what we call the reality, in relation to the corpus of all the observations in what we believe is our universe.
The main problem of quantum interpretation is the supposed, artificial, distinction between observer and observed system. In a quantum world this distinction is not possible, every event capable of "observing" a system is itself part of the system, modifying it. That's why such interpretations (postulating this separation) give all kinds of strange paradoxes that are impossible to solve. In the quantum world, there is no such thing as an observer, it is just all part of the system.
Consider for example the system composed of a pool table. In classical physics we can assume we can always measure the position and momentum of all balls in the table. But what would happen if measurement was not possible without big changes in position and velocity? Suddenly the whole notion of "observation" would lose its meaning, and the only way to describe the pool table is as a probabilistic mesh of balls moving around in uncertain directions.
You may say that it's not surprising, but in fact all statistical-style reasoning relies on it. If the universe is superdeterministic, than no kind of statistical reasoning makes any sense, since everything is already set in stone, there is no probability to any event, it has either happened already or will never happen. Since there is no freedom or even randomness, there are no statistically independent events or measurements.
Nice video. Now I wonder if God uses structurally shared data structures in his implementation of the world. I also wonder if there can be a kind of continuous description of branching that is more amenable to calculus than the discrete tree-like branching.
Great video. I have a question though. Is there a non zero probability that any two versions of the same person in many worlds could interact with each other?
> if the "friend" is a human-level artificial intelligence running in a massive quantum computer.
Well, there's your problem right there. No AI can run on a quantum computer. Intelligence is inherently a classical phenomenon because it requires copying information, and quantum states cannot be copied, only classical states can be copied.
The classical world "emerges" from the quantum world when you take a quantum system and choose to consider only a subset of its degrees of freedom. When you do that, what results is a "mixed state" which behaves classically. This is not a reflection of any (meta)physical reality, it's just a consequence of your point of view. But here's the thing: you yourself are a subset of a quantum system, and so you yourself have no choice but to take this point of view. You cannot ever take the "god's-eye view" and "see" the whole system. That is fundamentally impossible because "seeing" requires copying information, quantum states can't be copied yada yada yada. Even God cannot "see" the god's eye view!
I'm not convinced that intelligence requires copying information in the way that the no-cloning theorem forbids. Approximate cloning is not forbidden for example.
> Intelligence is inherently a classical phenomenon because it requires copying information, and quantum states cannot be copied, only classical states can be copied.
Ok, so make classical pointers to quantum states and copy the pointers instead of the quantum states :)
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 you plan to do.
> Take a look at these three statements [...] they cannot all be true
Okay, so we have to kill one. The easiest one to kill is
> It is possible to make free choices.
In other words, quantum mechanics is incompatible with free will. This is clearly shocking to any physicist who believes in Free Will (as defined by philosophers thousands of years ago). But hasn't Free Will been recognized as nonsense for at least two centuries by now?
> But hasn't Free Will been recognized as nonsense for at least two centuries by now?
Among some, sure and it's not just physicists [1].
Acknowledging that the concept we've called free will is not likely to be real has some troubling implications regarding how we've structured our society which is likely one of the reasons it's not talked about very often.
In fact, all statistical experiments, from clinical trials to observations of Bell's Inequality depend on the idea that there exists either free will or true randomness (and that we can base our decisions on that source of randomness). If neither exist, then there is no such thing as statistically independent events, and no way to make statistical observations (since that would imply that your choice of what to measure would always be correlated with the result of your measurement).
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.)
this is not convincing at all. we pretend that we can have perfectly isolated quantum systems (a particle, a few particles) and we can reason about and extrapolate the findings. we cannot have isolated particles - they can be regarded as isolated for experimental purposes but the reality is that probably the whole universe is a massive wave function that encompasses everything and we can approximate in some really special cases (ie system above).
we also pretend that consciousness is something special and altering the state a somewhat complicated wetware had consequences on “reality”. it doesn’t.
the measurement problem is an extremely good example of how we think. a measurement does not make sense to a cow. it’s abstract. we made it up. we have conventions that help make it useful, but those conventions break down when our senses (or things we use to amplify out senses) cannot measure what we want to measure.
One this I always notice to be missing from discussions of quantum physics is the effect of scale. Does differences scale have relativistic effects, in a similar manner to differences in internal frames, and if at what do events in one scale frame of reference become simultaneous of an observer in another?
So, Schrödinger's cat has been alive the whole time and it’s rest of us in a state of superposition because the cat is conscious but can’t observe anything outside the box? Or because we are conscious and the cat conscious, we all retain our states regardless if we are in or out of the box?
Think of it as LOD generation in a game. As something observes or is near enough to observe, atomic matter is generated on demand. The Matrix; our simulation.
[+] [-] bondarchuk|5 years ago|reply
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 becomes involved, the entanglement would “collapse” to make the friend’s observation definite.
But what if Wigner was wrong?
Well, obviously Wigner is wrong, sorry for being flippant.
In this paper (preprint here: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1907.05607.pdf), the magical thinking about consciousness seems to be transmuted into "“Absoluteness of Observed Events” (i.e. that every observed event exists absolutely, not relatively)". The authors (it appears to me) mean by this that if an observer performs an experiment, while this observer is himself in a superposition, we have to regard the outcome of the experiment as absolute (i.e. not in a superposition) because it was made by a (conscious) observer.
In my opinion, both "Absoluteness of Observed Events", and the equivalent from the layman's article, "When someone observes an event happening, it really happened", is a disingenuous and confusing way of talking about observers who are in a superposition. We have crossed over from "quantum mechanics is weird" to "these superficially intuitive but clearly false assumptions about quantum mechanics are weird".
(by the way, I read the article here: https://theconversation.com/a-new-quantum-paradox-throws-the... because that site doesn't think I'm a robot and then redirects me to the homepage after filling out the captcha)
[+] [-] kmm|5 years ago|reply
Coming back to physics, there's an assumption you and other commenters are silently making, which is that quantum mechanics is even applicable to macroscopic objects like humans. The largest objects which have been shown to act wave-like are a few thousand atoms large. While it's indisputable that at the lowest level the universe is fundamentally quantum mechanical, it's a little brazen to extrapolate that over more than 20 orders of magnitude. As a physicist myself, I'll believe it when I see it, and I'm looking forward to getting results from proposed experiments like FELIX and its successors.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free-orbit_experiment_with_las...
[+] [-] TheOtherHobbes|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] canjobear|5 years ago|reply
It’s not so simple. Suppose you’re in a box and observe a quantum experiment, and then I open the box and observe you. Then before I open the box you’re in a superposed state |x> + |y>, corresponding to the two possible outcomes x and y. Fine, no problem so far. But what is your own subjective experience? You, subjectively, inside the box, will only ever observe yourself to be in |x> or |y>, never |x> + |y>. Even if from the outside your brain can be said to be in a superposed state, your experience of the world is not superposed.
[+] [-] devit|5 years ago|reply
How did they manage to get the paper accepted in the (supposedly selective) Nature Physics journal though? Is there something we are missing?
[+] [-] francasso|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] squibbles|5 years ago|reply
A possible lack of absoluteness of observed events has implications for what observations may or may not be reconcilable using existing scientific methods.
[+] [-] Thorentis|5 years ago|reply
> "From the point of view of the friend, the measurement result was determined long before Wigner had asked about it, and the state of the physical system has already collapsed. When now exactly did the collapse occur? Was it when the friend had finished their measurement, or when the information of its result entered Wigner's consciousness?"
This to me, shows just how hand-wavy the whole superposition/quantum collapse stuff really is. I have to say I side with Einstein with his view that everything is already in one state or the other. We don't cause the system to choose a state when we measure it. We simply discover the state it was already in. It is one thing to assign a probability to which state we will find it in. It is quite another to create an entire theory around quantum measurement.
There is nothing mysterious about this paradox. The friend performs the measurement ans discovers the state of the particle/system. Wiger doesn't know about it, but that doesn't mean it's not in that state, he just isn't aware of it yet. The fact this is a paradox just seems like silly mind games.
[+] [-] freeexpression|5 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wigner%27s_friend...
[+] [-] brundolf|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nmlnn|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] Zenbit_UX|5 years ago|reply
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 handling in the fluke event one of these particles is detected, I'll just calculate their position retroactively, the user will never be able to tell and we can host way more players due to the reduced memory.
It would seem to me that god is a junior dev and no one reviewed his pull requests.
[+] [-] jlokier|5 years ago|reply
When your underlying model of computation is full quantum computation, it's simpler to just run everything at once. It takes no energy if you run everything without picking out a scenario (but in a kind of "tree falling in a forest" way), and more energy if you select out specific scenarios to look what happened (I/O is expensive). Counter-intuitively, the computation part of quantum systems is free in ways that we consider classical computers expensive to run. It's reversible and doesn't consume any energy.
That may seem like it's avoiding the point, after all what does it take to run the "underlying model of computation".
But what I'm trying to say is that "quantum all the way down" (see also turtles) is as much a valid model as "mechanical computation all the way down", which your picture relies on. Neither of them is more fundamental.
It may seem like quantum-all-the-way-down is a bit artificial, because we can in principle run quantum simulations on classical computers, which seem simpler. But it turns out we can't. There is a fundamental intractability barrier for simulations above an arbitrary tiny size, which means we can only simulate interesting quantum systems using other quantum systems. It really is quantum-all-the-way-down.
If god came up with the quantum-all-the-way-down version, I'd say that's pretty clever, because it's way more efficient than anything you would implement, with your old-school classical RAM and classical CPU.
[+] [-] sgillen|5 years ago|reply
That being said if it was demonstrated that un collapsed wave functions are somehow more efficient to calculate that would definitely give credence to the simulation hypothesis.
[+] [-] rantwasp|5 years ago|reply
what you’re describing is called “simulation theory” and it has been proposed and discussed at length
i think lazy evaluation makes sense in that context. i also think that having a few basic rules and after that applying them consistently across your simulation space make sense. if your basic space unit of reality is way smaller than the sims in it can perceive and measure they’re gonna start making stuff up
[+] [-] booleandilemma|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Ataraxy|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tourist2d|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Strilanc|5 years ago|reply
> When someone observes an event happening, it really happened.
Given the experiment from the paper, I would rephrase this assumption as "it's not possible to rewind things". But obviously inside a computer simulation made up of operations that are all individually reversible, it's trivial to rewind things.
The experiment sets up a situation where certain information is reversibly recorded, and then the records are unmade by temporarily rewinding. The rewinding is obfuscated by hiding it inside of a measurement that is incompatible with the presence or absence of the record. I guess the authors might disagree about the measurement implying rewinding, but as a bit of evidence I'll note that Scott Aaronson and Yosi Atia have shown that performing the measurement in question over a simulated agent is at least as expensive as rewinding the simulated agent [1]. Whatever is being done, it is doing some seriously expensive screwing around with the agent's state. It's like the experiment has a step where you feed the human through a giant meat processing plant, and for some reason everyone is pretending that's not somehow important.
Basically, the authors are appealing to the intuition that humans are big complicated in-practice-irreversible things, so clearly a record is permanent if it has affected the state of a human. But then they imagine instantiating the human's state inside a ridiculously powerful computer capable of reversibly simulating time advancing and of performing operations that have been engineered specifically to mess with the presence or absence of the record's effects on the human's state. Surprise surprise, the record gets messed with. Then for the actual experiment the big complicated ball of dependent spaghetti that is a human is replaced by a nice simple photon going along one path or another path.
1: https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=4786
[+] [-] colordrops|5 years ago|reply
Do physicists axiomatically treat a "conscious observer" as an atomic unit? It seems the case based on neurological and psychological research that the mind is actually not a single unit but many units working together, and the sense of a singular self is an illusion, which would correlate with the fact that we are made up of a conglomeration of atoms and systems made of these atoms.
When we say that a person is observing a quantum system, could this actually be a cascade of observations of various parts of the mind rather than a singular event, since the mind is not monolithic?
On a side note (and perhaps unrelated), if different parts of the brain/mind could be in different quantum states, could this be a factor in how the mind operates?
[+] [-] jonahbenton|5 years ago|reply
The concept of "measurement" is just executing code on one node that populates local registers- "creating" not "measuring". Yes- by running code you are pulling on a reality fabric that we still know almost nothing about. But I find it easier to visualize than relying on my colloquial/non-QM intuition in words like "measuring"- which implies something like a single centralized reality database, not a creative decentralized infrastructure. QM experiments seem to create things, not measure them.
Would love to learn metaphors of folks in the space.
[+] [-] thechao|5 years ago|reply
If you’re interested in QM, read “The Theoretical Minimum”; the second book gets into QM. There are video lectures of the same material that complement the series, we’ll.
[+] [-] ssivark|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ahelwer|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] henearkr|5 years ago|reply
> 2. It is possible to make free choices, or at least, statistically random choices.
I don't see what would be really compelling in that.
If it's false it would just mean that our actions are all kind of mechanistically decided by other events, and that does not shock me.
Other point:
> 1. When someone observes an event happening, it really happened.
What if it really happened in the reality of the observer (and maybe not in other realities)? What is meant by "reality"? Some insight is to be gained by precising what we call the reality, in relation to the corpus of all the observations in what we believe is our universe.
[+] [-] coliveira|5 years ago|reply
Consider for example the system composed of a pool table. In classical physics we can assume we can always measure the position and momentum of all balls in the table. But what would happen if measurement was not possible without big changes in position and velocity? Suddenly the whole notion of "observation" would lose its meaning, and the only way to describe the pool table is as a probabilistic mesh of balls moving around in uncertain directions.
[+] [-] tsimionescu|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 4ad|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mellosouls|5 years ago|reply
https://www.arxiv-vanity.com/papers/1907.05607/
[+] [-] menzoic|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] amelius|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sidcool|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lisper|5 years ago|reply
Well, there's your problem right there. No AI can run on a quantum computer. Intelligence is inherently a classical phenomenon because it requires copying information, and quantum states cannot be copied, only classical states can be copied.
The classical world "emerges" from the quantum world when you take a quantum system and choose to consider only a subset of its degrees of freedom. When you do that, what results is a "mixed state" which behaves classically. This is not a reflection of any (meta)physical reality, it's just a consequence of your point of view. But here's the thing: you yourself are a subset of a quantum system, and so you yourself have no choice but to take this point of view. You cannot ever take the "god's-eye view" and "see" the whole system. That is fundamentally impossible because "seeing" requires copying information, quantum states can't be copied yada yada yada. Even God cannot "see" the god's eye view!
[+] [-] adrianN|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] amelius|5 years ago|reply
Ok, so make classical pointers to quantum states and copy the pointers instead of the quantum states :)
[+] [-] c1ccccc1|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gliese1337|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 08-15|5 years ago|reply
Okay, so we have to kill one. The easiest one to kill is
> It is possible to make free choices.
In other words, quantum mechanics is incompatible with free will. This is clearly shocking to any physicist who believes in Free Will (as defined by philosophers thousands of years ago). But hasn't Free Will been recognized as nonsense for at least two centuries by now?
[+] [-] katmannthree|5 years ago|reply
Among some, sure and it's not just physicists [1].
Acknowledging that the concept we've called free will is not likely to be real has some troubling implications regarding how we've structured our society which is likely one of the reasons it's not talked about very often.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ihhVe8dKNSA
[+] [-] tsimionescu|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mensetmanusman|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stared|5 years ago|reply
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.)
[+] [-] booleandilemma|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rantwasp|5 years ago|reply
we also pretend that consciousness is something special and altering the state a somewhat complicated wetware had consequences on “reality”. it doesn’t.
the measurement problem is an extremely good example of how we think. a measurement does not make sense to a cow. it’s abstract. we made it up. we have conventions that help make it useful, but those conventions break down when our senses (or things we use to amplify out senses) cannot measure what we want to measure.
[+] [-] hggfkkbcfd|5 years ago|reply
Note: IANAP
[+] [-] zxcvbn4038|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] BTCOG|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thayne|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mensetmanusman|5 years ago|reply