----- Forwarded message from Kevin Tryon <KevinTryon.domain.name.hidden> -----
I see that one of the earlier participants on the Everything list has now
taken it upon himself to educate the masses because the "cat is out of the
bag" and QI has become a familiar topic to many.
http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/0902/0902.0187.pdf
Does he say anything in this article that he hasn't said on the Everything
list in his struggles against QI?
----- End forwarded message -----
I have now read the whole of Jacques Mallah's "paper", and to put it
mildly, it is disappointing. I would have expected more from him. It
is neither the "definitive debunking" hoped for by the author, nor is
it persuasive in the rhetorical sense. What little technical detail he
provides obscures, rather than illuminates the issue.
So what is the paper? I mentioned the interesting comment on how we
should expect to find ourselves a Boltzmann brain shortly after the
big bang, but there was no follow up to this. I have no idea how he
came up with that notion.
His discussion of the Born rule is incorrect. The probability given by
the Born rule is not the square of the state vector, but rather the square
modulus of the inner product of some eigenvector with the original
state, appropriately normalised to make it a probability. After
observation, the state vector describing the new will be proportional
to the eigenvector corresponding the measured eigenvalue, but nothing
in QM says anything about its amplitude. Indeed it is conventional to
normalise the resulting state vector, as a computational convenience -
but this is an entirely different proposition to Mallah's.
What I think he is trying to discuss, somewhat clumsily, in the
section on measure, is the ASSA notion of a unique well-defined
measure for all observer moments. This has been discussed in this
list extensively, and also summarised in my book. But it would sure
confuse anyone not familiar with the notion.
He goes on to mention rather briefly in passing his doomsday style
argument against QI, but not in detail. Which is just as well, as that
argument predicts that we should be neonatal infants!
He also mentions Tegmark's amoeba croaks argument, which is not
actually an argument against QI, but rather a discussion of what QI
might actually mean. Contrary to what some people might think, QI
doesn't predict one would necessarily experience being vastly older
than the rest of the population. It just predicts that we should all
experience a "good innings", and that what happens after that is
rather unpredictable - it may be lapsing into senesence, it may be followed
by rebirth into a different consciousness, it may be a form of
afterlife, or of uploading Singulatarian style.
So sorry Jacques - you need to do better. I'm sure you can!
Cheers
--
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
A/Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile)
Mathematics
UNSW SYDNEY 2052 hpcoder.domain.name.hidden
Australia http://www.hpcoders.com.au
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
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Received on Fri Feb 06 2009 - 05:57:32 PST