The original posting about this dates back from the beginning of this list. I just
invoked this in this thread to argue why one should consider observer moments
(identical ones considered as the same) as fundamental concepts.
The suicide paradox I was referring to is just Tegmark's thought experiment where the
experimenter measures the spin of a particle. If it is down he is instantly killed, he
survives if it is up. Then he argues that according to the MWI the experimenter should
always measure that the spin is up, because that's the only branch in which he
survives.
Saibal
Quoting "aet.radal ssg" <aet.radal.ssg.domain.name.hidden>:
> For some reason I didn't get the original post about the suicide paradox,
> so if someone could resend it, sans any "everything" computer lingo, I
> would appreciate it.
> The subject of the thread - "Many Pasts? - Not according to QM" taken on
> its face seems false, at least from the standard MWI model. If you have
> parallel worlds you have parallel pasts. In fact, that's why MWI is
> supposed to be the solution to time travel paradoxes. Take an arbitrary
> moment, when a measurement, or any other trigger, causes a decoherence,
> move forward in time from that moment and look back - you have parallel
> pasts that begin from the point of decoherence.
>
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Saibal Mitra"
> To: everything-list.domain.name.hidden
> Subject: Re: Many Pasts? Not according to QM...
> Date: Wed, 25 May 2005 01:24:23 +0200
>
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > ----- Oorspronkelijk bericht -----
> > Van: "Patrick Leahy"
> > Aan:
> > Verzonden: Wednesday, May 18, 2005 05:57 PM
> > Onderwerp: Many Pasts? Not according to QM...
> >
> >
> > > Of course, many of you (maybe all) may be defining pasts from an
> > > information-theoretic point of view, i.e. by identifying all
> > > observer-moments in the multiverse which are equivalent as perceived by
>
> > > the observer; in which case the above point is quite irrelevant. (But
> you
> > > still have to distinguish the different branches to find the total
> measure
> > > for each OM).
> >
> > This is indeed my position. I prefer to define an observer moment as the
> > information needed to generate an observer. According to the
> ''everything''
> > hypothesis (I've just seen that you don't subscibe this) an observer
> moment
> > defines its own universe. But this universe is very complex and therefore
>
> > must have a very low measure. It is thus far more likely that the
> observer
> > finds himself embedded in a low complexity universe.
> >
> >
> > One of the arguments in favor of the observer moment picture is that it
> > solves Tegmark's quantum suicide paradox. If you start with a set of all
> > possible observer moments on which a measure is defined (which can be
> > calculated in principle using the laws of physics), then the paradox
> never
> > arises. At any moment you can think of yourself as being randomly drawn
> from
> > the set of all possible observer moments. The observer moment who has
> > survived the suicide experiment time after time after time has a very
> very
> > very low measure.
> >
> >
> > Even if one assumes only a single universe described by the MWI, one has
> to
> > consider simulations of other universes. Virtual observers living in such
> a
> > simulated universe will perceive their world as real. The measure of such
>
> > embedded universes will probably decay exponentialy with complexity....
> >
> >
> > Saibal
>
>
>
> --
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Received on Thu May 26 2005 - 13:08:14 PDT