By which you mean “taking human morality and decision-making, which evolved in a classical world, and figuring out what decisions you should make in a quantum universe.”
Would you agree that overlap vs. non-overlap cannot be answered without looking inside humans, and in fact has little to do with the universe apart from a few postulates of quantum mechanics? For some reason I thought we were talking about the universe.
Anyhow, I think Shane Legg had a nice paper on porting utility functions, though of course humans are inconsistent and you immediately run into problems of how to idealize them. The basic idea being that you split up changes into “new things to care about” and “new ways to express old things.” Quantum suicide is probably the easiest thing to deal with via this method.
You have a theory—“quantum mechanics without wavefunction collapse”—in which the whole of reality is supposed to be equal to a single big object, the wavefunction of the universe. There are various mathematical facts about that object: the existence of various sets of basis functions, the dynamical process of decoherence, and so on.
Now a questioner says, “OK. You say that there are multiple copies of me inside the wavefunction. Is that because there is one of me that splits into many, or were there just parallel mes living separate but similar lives?” You’ve implied that the answer depends on the definition of something. Can you tell the questioner what definition of self leads to the different answers? So far you’ve used the example “| / > = | | > + | _ >”, which doesn’t tell anyone whether they should think of themselves as ”/”, as “|” and ” _ ”, or otherwise answer the question. It illustrates a mathematical fact about wavefunctions, not a fact about how to find yourself in them.
You say that there are multiple copies of me inside the wavefunction
I do? Well, I can pretend I do, at least.
Is that because there is one of me that splits into many, or were there just parallel mes living separate but similar lives?”
If we want to recover classical choices in cases where there are clear classical analogs, one of you splits into one. If you’d rather follow other intuitions, though, you’ll get different answers (see: quantum suicide).
Note that since humans aren’t energy eigenstates, there is no general way to get completely “parallel lives”—you always interfere. But because the world is nice and orderly you can get pretty dang close to parallel most of the time.
So far you’ve used the example “| / > = | | > + | >”, which doesn’t tell anyone whether they should think of themselves as ”/”, as “|” and ” ”, or otherwise answer the question.
Well, it answers the person who asks “But is the line really one component, or is it really two components?” And that answer is that they’ve gotten their levels confused—number of components is in your description of the line, not in the line.
Which, to make sure I’m being clear, is analogous to how I interpreted Quantumental’s sentence “Obviously both overlap and non-overlap cannot be true, they are ontologically different.” If we go with a correspondence theory of truth, we run into a problem because there is no overlap or non-overlap out in quantum mechanics that this sentence could correspond to. Instead, the thing that would make it true or false is humans; specifically how they choose what’s right when presented with quantum mechanics. Unfortunately, humans are inconsistent, so you immediately run into the problem of how to idealize them.
I get it now. You’re saying that the relativism of how one may define one’s personal identity is so great that, in a quantum multiverse, even whether you are splitting into multiple selves or not is a matter of how you define yourself.
Still, that’s not the end of it, because then we can ask exactly what parts of the wavefunction are “potential person-parts”. I may have some freedom to choose whether a particular object, trait, thought, or state of mind that once existed or that could exist is “part of me”, but at some level there has to be an objective correspondence between “person-parts” and “wavefunction-parts”.
You may be a self-defining process, but the point of materialism is that this self-defining process is not something separate from the wavefunction which then freely chooses which parts of the wavefunction are going to count as “part of me”; the self-defining process is a part of the wavefunction, and the choosing about what to identify with, is just part of wavefunction dynamics. Eventually you have to ground the whole thing in physics rather than in cognition. Any thoughts on how that works?
If you ask two people, do these two people necessarily tell you the same correspondence between descriptions of matter and person-parts? You keep using that word “objective,” I do not think it means what you think it means :P
Sorry to be such a downer, but as a human my definition of anything complicated is imprecise and pretty inconsistent—if you ask me two different ways I can give you two different answers. I honestly do not know any particularly good ways to get definitions out of humans.
I guess one way is to stick to simple things—the “looking under the lamppost” approach. For example, the “computational me” who thinks some exact thought that I’m thinking is a better-defined idea than most. But on account of its simplicity it misses a lot of nuance in the human idea of “me,” and so it’s not actually very useful.
Nonetheless it’s important to attend to these “better-defined” parts of you, because that’s where we start to get away from the big distraction created by the freedom to self-define. This flexibility in the notion of self is mostly about what you get to include and exclude. So there’s a large collection of “potential self-parts”, but the potential self-parts themselves don’t exist just by definition; they are the actually existing raw material in terms of which a definition of self gets its meaning—these are a part of me, those are not. There has to be an objective account of what these “parts” are, in terms of the wavefunction ontology, and it ought to say unambiguously whether or not they “split”.
I’m not clear on what you mean by “self-parts” here, but I’m assuming you mean something like basis states that contain people like you, which you can describe people in terms of. In which case I’ve already trodden this ground—no such objective account must necessarily exist, but such things can be useful, though you still wouldn’t be able to get any two different peoples’ idealized algorithms to agree on the edge cases.
Yes, there are objective facts. Whether a waveunction is made of 2 components or 1 is still not independent of your perspective. No, it’s not necessarily nonsense. I am just claiming that the unsolved problems of stuff like “overlap” are not due to a lack of information about quantum mechanics, but due to a lack of information about very complicated things humans do. If it the difficulty of understanding how humans categorize things and revise categories gets attributed to basic quantum mechanics, then we may get some nonsense.
You say there are objective facts, yet you claim it depends on ones perspective...this is contradictory. Have you read any of Wilson’s papers? Or Saunders, Lawhead, Ismael etc.? All have written papers clearly indicating the OBJECTIVE difference.
What I am saying is that there are objective facts, but that a wavefunction being two components or one simply happens not to be one of those facts. It’s like “is this painting beautiful?” If you look closely enough at one person and make some idealizations, you can say objectively (well, plus idealizations) whether a painting is beautiful for that person, but what is thus beautiful for one person still doesn’t have to be beautiful for the next.
On the other hand, if you, say, explained Peano arithmetic to two different people and asked them whether some statement was a theorem or not (and made some idealizations), what is a theorem for one person is a theorem for the next. Or if you asked them to measure the space-time interval between two events. Or if you asked them about the various components of a wavefunction, given a certain basis.
Ah, I see. “Metaphysics.”
By which you mean “taking human morality and decision-making, which evolved in a classical world, and figuring out what decisions you should make in a quantum universe.”
Would you agree that overlap vs. non-overlap cannot be answered without looking inside humans, and in fact has little to do with the universe apart from a few postulates of quantum mechanics? For some reason I thought we were talking about the universe.
Anyhow, I think Shane Legg had a nice paper on porting utility functions, though of course humans are inconsistent and you immediately run into problems of how to idealize them. The basic idea being that you split up changes into “new things to care about” and “new ways to express old things.” Quantum suicide is probably the easiest thing to deal with via this method.
You have a theory—“quantum mechanics without wavefunction collapse”—in which the whole of reality is supposed to be equal to a single big object, the wavefunction of the universe. There are various mathematical facts about that object: the existence of various sets of basis functions, the dynamical process of decoherence, and so on.
Now a questioner says, “OK. You say that there are multiple copies of me inside the wavefunction. Is that because there is one of me that splits into many, or were there just parallel mes living separate but similar lives?” You’ve implied that the answer depends on the definition of something. Can you tell the questioner what definition of self leads to the different answers? So far you’ve used the example “| / > = | | > + | _ >”, which doesn’t tell anyone whether they should think of themselves as ”/”, as “|” and ” _ ”, or otherwise answer the question. It illustrates a mathematical fact about wavefunctions, not a fact about how to find yourself in them.
I do? Well, I can pretend I do, at least.
If we want to recover classical choices in cases where there are clear classical analogs, one of you splits into one. If you’d rather follow other intuitions, though, you’ll get different answers (see: quantum suicide).
Note that since humans aren’t energy eigenstates, there is no general way to get completely “parallel lives”—you always interfere. But because the world is nice and orderly you can get pretty dang close to parallel most of the time.
Well, it answers the person who asks “But is the line really one component, or is it really two components?” And that answer is that they’ve gotten their levels confused—number of components is in your description of the line, not in the line.
Which, to make sure I’m being clear, is analogous to how I interpreted Quantumental’s sentence “Obviously both overlap and non-overlap cannot be true, they are ontologically different.” If we go with a correspondence theory of truth, we run into a problem because there is no overlap or non-overlap out in quantum mechanics that this sentence could correspond to. Instead, the thing that would make it true or false is humans; specifically how they choose what’s right when presented with quantum mechanics. Unfortunately, humans are inconsistent, so you immediately run into the problem of how to idealize them.
I get it now. You’re saying that the relativism of how one may define one’s personal identity is so great that, in a quantum multiverse, even whether you are splitting into multiple selves or not is a matter of how you define yourself.
Still, that’s not the end of it, because then we can ask exactly what parts of the wavefunction are “potential person-parts”. I may have some freedom to choose whether a particular object, trait, thought, or state of mind that once existed or that could exist is “part of me”, but at some level there has to be an objective correspondence between “person-parts” and “wavefunction-parts”.
You may be a self-defining process, but the point of materialism is that this self-defining process is not something separate from the wavefunction which then freely chooses which parts of the wavefunction are going to count as “part of me”; the self-defining process is a part of the wavefunction, and the choosing about what to identify with, is just part of wavefunction dynamics. Eventually you have to ground the whole thing in physics rather than in cognition. Any thoughts on how that works?
If you ask two people, do these two people necessarily tell you the same correspondence between descriptions of matter and person-parts? You keep using that word “objective,” I do not think it means what you think it means :P
Sorry to be such a downer, but as a human my definition of anything complicated is imprecise and pretty inconsistent—if you ask me two different ways I can give you two different answers. I honestly do not know any particularly good ways to get definitions out of humans.
I guess one way is to stick to simple things—the “looking under the lamppost” approach. For example, the “computational me” who thinks some exact thought that I’m thinking is a better-defined idea than most. But on account of its simplicity it misses a lot of nuance in the human idea of “me,” and so it’s not actually very useful.
Nonetheless it’s important to attend to these “better-defined” parts of you, because that’s where we start to get away from the big distraction created by the freedom to self-define. This flexibility in the notion of self is mostly about what you get to include and exclude. So there’s a large collection of “potential self-parts”, but the potential self-parts themselves don’t exist just by definition; they are the actually existing raw material in terms of which a definition of self gets its meaning—these are a part of me, those are not. There has to be an objective account of what these “parts” are, in terms of the wavefunction ontology, and it ought to say unambiguously whether or not they “split”.
I’m not clear on what you mean by “self-parts” here, but I’m assuming you mean something like basis states that contain people like you, which you can describe people in terms of. In which case I’ve already trodden this ground—no such objective account must necessarily exist, but such things can be useful, though you still wouldn’t be able to get any two different peoples’ idealized algorithms to agree on the edge cases.
I don’t mean something that contains you, I mean something that you contain.
Ooh, a non-helpful one-sentence-off!
The wavefunction is not necessarily separable.
Something had better be separable, because all is not one.
So you see no objective facts about mwi? non-overlap vs overlap is nonsense in your opinion?
Yes, there are objective facts. Whether a waveunction is made of 2 components or 1 is still not independent of your perspective. No, it’s not necessarily nonsense. I am just claiming that the unsolved problems of stuff like “overlap” are not due to a lack of information about quantum mechanics, but due to a lack of information about very complicated things humans do. If it the difficulty of understanding how humans categorize things and revise categories gets attributed to basic quantum mechanics, then we may get some nonsense.
You say there are objective facts, yet you claim it depends on ones perspective...this is contradictory. Have you read any of Wilson’s papers? Or Saunders, Lawhead, Ismael etc.? All have written papers clearly indicating the OBJECTIVE difference.
What I am saying is that there are objective facts, but that a wavefunction being two components or one simply happens not to be one of those facts. It’s like “is this painting beautiful?” If you look closely enough at one person and make some idealizations, you can say objectively (well, plus idealizations) whether a painting is beautiful for that person, but what is thus beautiful for one person still doesn’t have to be beautiful for the next.
On the other hand, if you, say, explained Peano arithmetic to two different people and asked them whether some statement was a theorem or not (and made some idealizations), what is a theorem for one person is a theorem for the next. Or if you asked them to measure the space-time interval between two events. Or if you asked them about the various components of a wavefunction, given a certain basis.