Wait a second, this doesn’t make sense. If the universe is timeless, then you don’t have to actually simulate the universe on a computer. You can just create a detailed model of the universe, put in the neccesery causality structure, stick it in the RAM, and voila! you have conscious beings living out their lives in a universe. You don’t even have to put it in the RAM, you can just write out symbols on a piece of paper! Or can this impeccable line of reasoning be invalidated by experimental evidence?
IL
Karma: 152
But the experiment does’nt prove that the two photons are really identical, it just proves that the photons are identical as far as the configurations are concerned. The photons could still have tiny tags with a number on them, but for some reason the configurations don’t care about tags.
I still don’t get the point of timeless physics. It seems to me like two different ways of looking at the same thing, like classical configuration space vs relational configuration space. Sure, it may make more sense to formulate the laws of physics without time, and it may make the equations much simpler, but how exactly does it change your expected observations? In what ways does a timeless universe differ from a timeful universe?
Also, I don’t think it’s neccessary to study quantum mechanics in order to understand personal identity. I’ve reached the same conclusions about identity without knowing anything about QM, I feel it’s just simple deductions from materialism.