bitcrafter

@bitcrafter@programming.dev

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I'm good, thanks⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I think to some extent we have been talking past each other. Very roughly speaking, I think that am more worried about what happens in the middle of an experiment, where you are more worried about what happens at the end. I actually completely agree with you that when a conscious being performs a measurement, then, from the perspective of that being, both interpretations of what happened when it performed the observation are equivalent. That is, the being has no way of telling them apart, and asking which interpretation is true at that point is, in my opinion, roughly along the same lines as asking whether the objective world exists.

  (Just to be clear, it’s not my intent to get mystical here. I think of consciousness as essentially just being a way of processing information about the world, rather than positing the existence of souls.)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I'm good, thanks⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  The analogy to Galilean relativity actually is too kind. Galilean relativity relies on Euclidean space as a background, allowing an external viewpoint fixed to empty coordinates. Hilbert space is not a background space at all; it is always defined in terms of physical systems, what is known as a constructed space. You can transform perspectives in spacetime, but there is no transformation to a background perspective in Hilbert space because no such background exists. The closest that exists is a statistical transformation to different perspectives within Liouville space, but this only works for objects within the space; you cannot transform to the perspective of the background itself as it is not a background space.

  …which is why eventually you need to switch to the grown-up version of Quantum Mechanics, Quantum Field Theory, is defined in terms of relativistic fields with a single “universal” field for each flavor of particle.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I'm good, thanks⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  For what it’s worth, you’ve done a fairly good job describing my own understanding of MWI quite succinctly.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I'm good, thanks⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I assume you have an emotional attachment to MWI without even having read Everett’s papers and getting too defensive that you refuse to engage seriously in anything I say, so I am ending this conversation here.

  Uhh, okay. Like, you were the one who felt the need to go on the attack here, but if you need to stop for your mental health than so be it. 🙂

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I'm good, thanks⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  To clarify my imprecise language, what “breaks down” is not its ability to give the correct answer, but the ability of the conceptual framework to give a clear explanation of what is going on, because it essentially defines measurement as “you know one when you see one”, which can lead to confusion.

  (However, separately, I do feel the need to point out that “entanglement” is not at all a term that is related to measurement results per se, but rather to the state of a system before you measure it. In particular, if a system is entangled, you can (in principle) disentangle it by reversing whatever process you used to entangle it so that you no longer get correlations in the measurements.)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I'm good, thanks⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Again, as I said in my comment, the branches in MWI are just a visualization of the very simplest possible case, not a literal description of reality. It is unfortunate (though understandable) that people have latched on to them as if they were the central idea of MWI.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I'm good, thanks⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  1. A simpler way of stating my point is that entanglement is sufficient to understand measurement, and more importantly, what phenomena are “measurement-like” and which aren’t. Also, you missed my point regarding the Born rule. You can write down a mathematical model of an experimenter repeating an experiment and recording their measurements, turn the crank, and see the probabilities predicted by the Born rule fall out, without any experiment ever having taken place.

  2. I am confused, then, about what we are supposedly even arguing about here. (Are you sure you are even arguing with me, rather than someone else?)

  3. I did some searching and I think that what you are calling “relative states” is an older term for what we now call “entangled states”. Being entangled with another system implies (by definition) that there is a greater system containing you and the other system, and so on, which is how you end up with a universal system that contains everything. However, we do not actually believe that reality is dictated by quantum mechanics but by quantum field theory, which is manifestly built on top of special relativity and posits a single field for each kind of particle for the entire Universe, and describes the microscopic behavior so well that it is absurd. Of course, the next step is figuring out how to reconcile this with general relativity, but that isn’t something Copenhagen helps you out with either.

  4. First you criticize the way that I talked about branches, which I only mentioned briefly as a sort of crude visualization and explicitly called out as being such. Now you are claiming that I am “denying the physical existence of real-world discrete outcomes”?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I'm good, thanks⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Yes, but it can be mathematically proven that this world was only made possible by the decimation of the population due to the tide pod challenge having been started two years earlier.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I'm good, thanks⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  One of the things that a quantum computer needs to be able to do in order to function is to hold information at rest, no different from your classical computer. There are two things that make this tricky. First, the information is analog, rather than digital. Second, the environment likes to sneakily “measure” your data so that it decoheres and no longer behaves the way it should. Both kinds of problems are in practice dealt with by encoding the quantum information so that errors can be corrected.

  If the word “decoheres” sounds really fancy, think about it this way: coherence versus decoherence is the difference between a rainbow and a grey cloud. In the former case the waves are able to interfere with each other in interesting ways, whereas in the latter case they scatter and do not interfere, producing boring results.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I'm good, thanks⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  If you are able to read this, then you exist as a conscious being. Everything else is just a model, which you experience as thought projected into your consciousness, just as you experience other senses.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I'm good, thanks⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  1. First, working in terms of decoherence is significantly simpler than worrying about whether something has been measured or not at every single step of the evolution of a system, because I have observed that when people do the latter they tend to get headaches contemplating the meaning of the “quantum eraser” when there is no need to. Second, you actually can observe Born’s rule in action by modeling the evolution of a system with an experimenter performing measurements and watching it emerge from the calculation.

  2. The only way that the two sides of the EPR pair know that they agree or disagree is by communicating with each other and comparing results, which can only happen through local interactions.

  3. I have no idea what you even mean by this. What makes the (terribly named) Many Worlds Interpretation nice is precisely that you can just treat everything as a wave function, with parts that might be entangled in ways you don’t know about (i.e., decoherence, modeled via density matrices).

  4. The fact that you are even making this claim is why I have trouble taking the rest of your comment seriously at all, because I specifically said, “However, it is important to understand that the concept of branches is just a visualization; it is nothing inherent to the theory, and when things get even slightly more complicated than the situation I have described, they do not meaningfully exist at all.”

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I'm good, thanks⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I agree completely that that the Copenhagen interpretation makes an excellent phenomenological model in simple (albeit, very common!) settings. However, the problem is that it breaks down when you consider experiments such as the “quantum eraser” (mentioned in other comments here), which causes people to tie themselves into intellectual knots because they are thinking too hard about exactly what is going on with measurement; once one deprivileges measurement so that it becomes just another kind of interaction, the seeming paradoxes disappear.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I'm good, thanks⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  See, this is why I prefer the (terribly named) “Many Worlds” interpretation. Unlike the Copenhagen interpretation, it does not privilege measurement over other types of interactions between systems. That is, the wave function never collapses, it only seems to because you, as the observer, are part of the system.

  The easy way to see this is to imagine that you put some other experimenter inside of a box. When they perform a measurement, from your perspective the wave function has not yet collapsed, but from the experimenter’s perspective the wave has collapsed. Essentially, it is as if the system in a box has branched so that there are multiple copies of the experimenter within, one who sees each possible measurement result, but because you are outside of it you could, in theory, reverse the measurement and unite the two branches. However, it is important to understand that the concept of branches is just a visualization; it is nothing inherent to the theory, and when things get even slightly more complicated than the situation I have described, they do not meaningfully exist at all.

  (Also, if it seems implausible that a macroscopic system in a box could remain in a superposition of multiple states, you actually are not wrong! However, the reason is not theoretical but practical: any system inside the box will interact thermally with the box itself, so unless it is perfectly insulated you cannot help but interact with it and therefore measure it yourself. This keeps going until essentially the entire world cannot help but perform a measurement of your system. Preventing this tendency from screwing things up is one of the things that makes building quantum computers hard.)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How do you fight doomerism/pessimism in these trying times?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Thus dooming its fate.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Lab anxiety⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I mean, that’s just basic cooking technique!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Lab anxiety⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Nah, just cook them very, very, very thoroughly first, and you’ll be fine.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Meta is closing down three VR studios as part of its metaverse cuts⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Thank goodness there was nothing more useful we could have done as a society with all of the tens of billions of dollars that was spent on this project, or it would have been an incredible waste!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Instead of everyone leaving NATO, could everyone else just kick the US out?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  If by “advancing against Russia” you mean that a bunch of countries were extremely eager to sign up when given the chance, then arguably its Russia’s own fault that they felt the need to join a defense alliance so that their sovereignty would not be threatened in the future. And given that Ukraine has been invaded multiple times by Russia exactly because it does not have a NATO mutual defense guarantee, it sure looks like they had the right idea.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Instead of everyone leaving NATO, could everyone else just kick the US out?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  It might surprise you, but I do not actually get paid to post comments on Lemmy for living, so I am allowed to focus on the part of the argument that I think is strangest.

  The author of that comment was free to reply in turn by something along the lines of, “Fine, then drop Ukraine from the list, because I don’t need it to make my point.” Instead, they doubled down that it belongs there.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Instead of everyone leaving NATO, could everyone else just kick the US out?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Could you explain exactly how NATO and US imperialism led to Russia invading Ukraine?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I am so scared of nuclear war, how do I cope with it?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  If this is in response to the capture of Maduro specifically, then yes, you are overreacting. Trump seems to only be interested in being a bully picking on those weaker than him, which excludes nuclear powers.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is there a point we can track down when we stopped caring about doctors, nurses, teacher, etc? And thought it was a great idea to pay atheletes millions and screw everyone else?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  No, you have it backwards. If the total pot for athletes is considerably smaller than the total pot for medical professionals, than redistributing it amongst medical professionals would not significantly increase their individual incomes because there are so many of them that each would only get a small share of it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨mmm... tastes like chimkin⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  …though my personal recommendation is that you don’t.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Which timezone would win in a conflict?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Apparently not quite! It looks like you would mostly be stepping back and forth between UTC and its opposite.

  Given that time zones are essentially set by the local research stations, I conclude that Chile and Argentina would win the war because their time zone has the most coastland and so they would have the most penguins on their side.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Which timezone would win in a conflict?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  They would all lose because they stretch all the way down into Antarctica which means that the penguins would be involved…

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How would a wealth tax affect real estate rentals?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I think that the implication was that they would have to sell in order to come up with the cash to pay the tax?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Not to get all religiony but why in the old testament God was all fire and brimstone and fatal consequences? But the new testament God is all about forgiveness and such??⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  EDIT: Hahaha, instant downvote!

  For the record, the downvote was from me, and it was because you are being an ass.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Not to get all religiony but why in the old testament God was all fire and brimstone and fatal consequences? But the new testament God is all about forgiveness and such??⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  It must be very convenient to be able to declare victory in a discussion without hanging to present an actual argument. 😉

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Not to get all religiony but why in the old testament God was all fire and brimstone and fatal consequences? But the new testament God is all about forgiveness and such??⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  You are thinking about this the wrong way. From the scraps of information that we do have, which includes volumes of work by Jesus’s followers, there are two extremes one could take: we know absolutely nothing about Jesus or whether he even existed, or we know absolutely everything about Jesus. I agree that the later extreme is wrongheaded, but surely treating it as a binary choice so that the only other possibility is that we can say nothing at all about Jesus is also wrongheaded.

  You might argue reasonably, of course, that his followers cannot be trusted, so we can learn nothing from their writings. This is not true, however, because if nothing else we can learn from the editorial choices that they made; for example, when a Gospel goes out of is way to explain a detail that would have been embarrassing to contemporaries, this actually provides potential evidence that this detail was true and widely known at the time so that it needed to be explained, because otherwise it would just have been left out.

  At the end of the day, scholarship is essentially about weighing probabilities rather than certainties, and good scholars do not pretend otherwise.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Not to get all religiony but why in the old testament God was all fire and brimstone and fatal consequences? But the new testament God is all about forgiveness and such??⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Keep in mind that most likely the historical Jesus was just one of many apocalyptic preachers going around telling people that, within the lifetime of some present, God was going to come down and vanquish evil once and for all, so one had better be prepared and be on God’s good side when this happened. (Incidentally, the Romans probably could not have cared less about this; it was when they got word that he was claiming to be an earthly king–which may have been how Judas actually betrayed him–that they got seriously pissed and executed him because they had a zero tolerance policy for that kind of thing.)

  You can see imminent apocalypse theme in the epistles where John writes that there is no real point making big life changes like getting married since the world is going to end any day; amusingly, when this did not happen, they needed to start coming up with alternative policies, and so other letters start to set down rules which thematically contradict the earlier letters, but it turns out that there are other things about these letters that make them different too so I’m many cases they are considered to be forgeries. (Obviously this is an oversimplification of the academic research!)

  (Also, it’s also worth noting that John and the apostles had really different notions of what Jesus was all about, and part of the whole point of Acts is to paper over these differences and make it seem like they had all been past of one team all along.)

  Finally, it is worth pointing out that there were a lot of texts floating around in the same genre as Revelation, so it was not all that unique and it almost did not make it’s way into the Bible, but the Church Fathers thought incorrectly that the John who wrote it was the same as the author of the Gospel of John; if they had known that these were two different Johns, then the Left Behind series would never have been written (amount other consequences).

  So in conclusion, be very wary of trying to read a lot of significance into the New Testament as a whole because it was not a unified document written with single purpose.