tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1973938108988281018.post4982723451889860508..comments2024-02-06T03:23:37.329-08:00Comments on No Jesus, No Peas: Perhaps I'm finally reaching that existential crisis...James Sweethttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17212877636980569324noreply@blogger.comBlogger4125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1973938108988281018.post-24825331788862353492010-10-20T13:57:09.133-07:002010-10-20T13:57:09.133-07:00Glad I could pass some links along! (If you'r...Glad I could pass some links along! (If you're in the mood for a sardonic look at transhumanism, check out Greg Egan's new novel <i>Zendegi.</i>)<br /><br />Now, to clear a few other items off my brain-queue. Some days, the Internet is definitely a net drag on my productivity.Blake Staceyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13977394981287067289noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1973938108988281018.post-72770292228702390052010-10-20T06:25:09.432-07:002010-10-20T06:25:09.432-07:00Great comments!
I am aware there are other interp...Great comments!<br /><br />I am aware there are other interpretations that do not involve collapse, but as of yet I don't "get" them. Then again, my primary exposure has been skimming the Wikipedia pages describing these interpretations :) I will check the links you recommend and try again.<br /><br />Part of why I think I bought into this so much is a) I really like Elsevier's polemical style (even if the reason for it appears to be related to some of his IMO dubious transhumanist beliefs -- maybe more about that in another post), and b) because I had already been leaning towards either MWI, "shut up and calculate", or Hidden Variables (but I'm more or less convinced that Bell's Theorem is 100% sound and rules out Hidden Variables, so that's that). On the other hand, that may again be just because MWI is the only interpretation I grok that doesn't involve this ridiculous notion of wavefunction collapse.<br /><br />I feel like MWI can be phrased in terms of QFT -- though I don't pretend to understand QFT well enough to make a competent attempt myself. In fact, it seems to me this little shift in my understanding of MWI was basically to extend it from the single-particle to the quantum field -- instead of a digitally branching tree of individual reactions, it's just a big smear.<br /><br />That said, even if I do accept that interpretation, my existential crisis has diminished slightly. Since all of the physical processes related to my own (illusion of?) subjective reality are prone to undergo decoherence in a matter of picoseconds, I still can -- more or less, I think -- visualize "my" history as being one path through a vast branching network of <i>tubes</i> through configuration space. The tubes don't have discontinuous boundaries, of course, but their boundary is pretty sharp and identifiable -- but I already came to terms with that many years ago in terms of body boundary (when I shake hands with you, there are innumerable atoms and even molecules for which it is impossible to say whose body they belong to) so adding another layer of fuzzy boundary to my existential perception is not all that big of a deal.<br /><br />(Funny story how I came to have a visceral feel for the body boundary problem all in an instant... but that's for another time)James Sweethttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17212877636980569324noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1973938108988281018.post-26106397816891594222010-10-19T18:18:47.996-07:002010-10-19T18:18:47.996-07:00In other words, I'm a Christmas-and-Easter mem...In other words, I'm a Christmas-and-Easter member of what Matt Leifer calls The Church of the Smaller Hilbert Space, whose <a href="http://mattleifer.info/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2008/11/commandments.pdf" rel="nofollow">sixth commandment</a> is, "Do not commit murder, since there is no 'other branch of the wavefunction' in which your victim will survive."Blake Staceyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13977394981287067289noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1973938108988281018.post-78469924725799583462010-10-19T18:11:11.025-07:002010-10-19T18:11:11.025-07:00If you don't get at least one existential cris...If you don't get at least one existential crisis from studying quantum mechanics, you haven't studied enough quantum mechanics.<br /><br />However:<br /><br />Abandoning the "Copenhagen" view of collapsing wave functions and bringing decoherence into your picture doesn't necessarily entail the MWI. Plenty of folks more knowledgeable (and, I suspect in some cases, smarter) than I am have abandoned the Copenhagen view and <i>not</i> become Many-Worlders. Mathematical physics guru John Baez is one; he <a href="http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/bayes.html" rel="nofollow">advocates</a> a much more epistemic (as opposed to ontological) view of this whole wavefunction business, and <a href="http://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0205039" rel="nofollow">plenty would agree</a>. You also have Mermin's correlationalism, Rovelli's relational interpretation and probably more I haven't heard of.<br /><br />Somewhere along the way, I picked up (I think from Moshe Rozali) a low regard for most "interpretations of quantum physics" talk, as it very often seems to fail to take relativity really seriously. The very fact that "interpretations" are almost always phrased in terms of single- or few-particle QM instead of quantum field theory — <i>the more fundamental theory</i> — speaks to this. Epistemic treatments of wavefunctions (Baez/Fuchs) have been less bad about this, in my experience.Blake Staceyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13977394981287067289noreply@blogger.com