This is why ever since I learned QM properly I thought Boltzmann Brains based purely on quantum fluctuations were silly. Just because you can dice the vacuum state up so it looks like things are going on until you finish off the math, doesn’t mean that anything is actually going on. It just means you chose a silly coordinate system for the problem.
Consider a wavefunction X that contains a mind. Clearly, if we take -X, that will also have a mind. But X+(-X) does not have a mind. I’m not sure whether this concept has been given a name, but “quantum zombie” seems like a good term. Is the mind in X not conscious? X fully describes a mind that is capable of thinking about its existence and wondering whether there is a -X branch. If a conscious being exists before your finish off the math, how can it cease to exist after you finish off the math? What if the universal wavefunction has a negative of our branch? Can we say for certain that it doesn’t?
What do you mean by “a negative of our branch”? The idea seems confused to me. Specifically, if the universal wavefunction is a function Psi on config. space, and “our branch” is the portion of the wavefunction whose domain is the config. space region Q, then what is the negative of our branch? Is it -Psi(Q)? Is it Psi(-Q)? In neither of these cases does your point hold, I think. Were you thinking of something else?
To zero in on the part of this line of questions that’s relevant to the above...
1) The vacuum state is orthogonal to any states which represent minds, because no component of a mind is the empty state.
2) Even some mind has some tiny sliver of amplitude of |0> in it somehow, then if you apply the retarded Green function to it to extract how it got into that situation, the result isn’t going to look like |0>, so you’re violating the assumptions of the hypothetical. At best, it’s going to look like converging radiation, i.e. a conventional Boltzmann Brain.
3) IF the conscious being had existed before finishing off the math, then it would still be there afterwards. But when the cancellation comes up, we instead are finding out that we’d been wasting our time considering it because it wasn’t there after all.
Interesting, reading this I just realized how incomplete the Schrodinger equations is without a corresponding theory of what Eliezer once called “reality fluid”.
This is why ever since I learned QM properly I thought Boltzmann Brains based purely on quantum fluctuations were silly. Just because you can dice the vacuum state up so it looks like things are going on until you finish off the math, doesn’t mean that anything is actually going on. It just means you chose a silly coordinate system for the problem.
Consider a wavefunction X that contains a mind. Clearly, if we take -X, that will also have a mind. But X+(-X) does not have a mind. I’m not sure whether this concept has been given a name, but “quantum zombie” seems like a good term. Is the mind in X not conscious? X fully describes a mind that is capable of thinking about its existence and wondering whether there is a -X branch. If a conscious being exists before your finish off the math, how can it cease to exist after you finish off the math? What if the universal wavefunction has a negative of our branch? Can we say for certain that it doesn’t?
What do you mean by “a negative of our branch”? The idea seems confused to me. Specifically, if the universal wavefunction is a function Psi on config. space, and “our branch” is the portion of the wavefunction whose domain is the config. space region Q, then what is the negative of our branch? Is it -Psi(Q)? Is it Psi(-Q)? In neither of these cases does your point hold, I think. Were you thinking of something else?
To zero in on the part of this line of questions that’s relevant to the above...
1) The vacuum state is orthogonal to any states which represent minds, because no component of a mind is the empty state.
2) Even some mind has some tiny sliver of amplitude of |0> in it somehow, then if you apply the retarded Green function to it to extract how it got into that situation, the result isn’t going to look like |0>, so you’re violating the assumptions of the hypothetical. At best, it’s going to look like converging radiation, i.e. a conventional Boltzmann Brain.
3) IF the conscious being had existed before finishing off the math, then it would still be there afterwards. But when the cancellation comes up, we instead are finding out that we’d been wasting our time considering it because it wasn’t there after all.
Interesting, reading this I just realized how incomplete the Schrodinger equations is without a corresponding theory of what Eliezer once called “reality fluid”.