Re: The Anthropic Principle Boundary Conditions

From: Brent Meeker <meekerdb.domain.name.hidden>
Date: Thu, 01 Jun 2000 18:35:24 -0700

On 01-Jun-00, Fred Chen wrote:

>> An alternative to the mathematics=existence multiverse is that everything
>> exists and we have evolved so as to only perceive a rational subset of this
>> everything - but evolution isn't perfect; so we sort of perceive wabbits
>> that
>> are close to the boundary of being consistent. Sort of like QM virtual
>> particles that can only exist for small space-time intervals; these wabbits
>> could only occur to an observer in a very limited way.
>>
>
> Interesting. What would be the need driving our ability to perceive these
> wabbits?
>
>> Brent Meeker

I didn't think of it as a need, but rather an imperfection in our evolution -
after all evolutionary adaption is a rough process and far from efficient. I
thought of this in relation to the measurement problem in QM. Under the
de-coherence theory of quantum measurement, the wave function doesn't collapse
it continues it's unitary development but the interaction with the macroscopic
environment causes the density matrix to become practically diagonal. We don't
perceive the very complex wave function that still encodes the pre-measurement
coherence - even though in principle it's observable. Why? Maybe, because it would
not be evolutionarily favorable to perceive these coherences. It would be like
seeing wabbits; but not really since these coherent but complex wave functions are
part of standard physics. It is more like seeing Schrodingers cat.

Brent Meeker
Received on Sun Jun 04 2000 - 14:52:45 PDT