But does that really apply to US?
I have done some rethinking of that question this week. Here is what I posted for the benefit of normal "experts" this week, followed by a link to a little bit of real stuff:
All of us need to re-examine and question our own beliefs from time to time. This morning, I have been asking myself (and my wife) what do I REALLY believe about macroscopic Schrodinger cats, and how should I update
my beliefs? How certain am I that there are multiple copies of myself, with very different memories?
What I said to her initially this morning was: yes, I only assign 1/3 probability to each of Einsteinian realism, Fock space realism and ultraweirdism. (By the way, my new paper in Activitas -- thanks, Stan! -- states that clearly),
BUT I assign about 90% to the idea that WE -- we mundane human body/brain creatures -- are macroscopic Schrodinger cats. Whether you believe in Einstein, QM of ultraweirdism, in all three cases we need to face up to the experiments supporting quantum superposition, including the very important experiment led by Pan Jianwei proving that quantum superposition works at the distance between China and Austria.
But how could we reconcile macroscopic Schrodinger cats with Einsteinian realism? If there inhabit only ONE 3+1-D universe, how could there be more than one of us? How sure are we of what is going on? What do we really know, from the viewpoint of Einstein realism (or lightly modified Einstein realism)?
Before 2014, I held to what I called "the right-wing reactionary position on macroscopic Schrodinger cats" (as I discussed this with my wife this morning). (She has two PhDs to my one, so this is not like talking to the wall.)
The reactionary position is that there can only be ONE of each of us, because there is only one 3+1-D reality, and that quantum superposition is basically a statistical illusion which only works at small scales.
The Schrodinger equation which predicts branching must somehow break down, must actually be an approximation which breaks down, at a large enough scale. "the great mystery," they declare, "is what is the scale at which the Schrodinger equation breaks down, the dividing line between the quantum world and the classical world which we actually live in?" I have heard from poor vedantists who just parroted that question, as if the mainstream was asking it. But certainly, after experiments like those of Pan Jianwei, the mainstream view is that the Schrodinger equation which gives way to quantum superposition does NOT break down at large distances, and that we have no reason to believe that it ever breaks down. This morning, I pulled out my little tablet computer in the bedroom, went to scholar.google.com, and showed her the classic papers by Anthony Leggett on this subject.
Still, even within this mainstream (which I have 90% drifted into myself), there are left, right and middle sides of the stream. On the right, people say "This could not possibly ever apply to humans like me.
It's all about statistics. Since I am complex, and decoherence is so pervasive, the probability distribution for versions of me must be very narrow. I am me, just me, just one me, it cannot be otherwise." Smolin's VERY important new book (which Jack ought to be quoiting more than he quotes Sutherland and Price, since Smolin is broader and closer in many ways to Jack in his beliefs) is actually more towards the middle of the stream, even though he supports Einstein more than I do. The middle of the stream CONSIDERS that the right stream might be right, but are not so sure. At one point, Smolin effectively asks: "OK, there might be more than one of me, but if we live in separate universes/streams, how could it be EFFECTIVELY true for me in this universe/stream? For all practical purposes..." But on the left part of this stream are David Deutsch and me, among others. Deutsch said "it IS important because we can integrate across streams and produce a new kind of technology, which I call the quantum universal computer." (It's really sad how the Oprah and fake news sets want to give credit to THEIR man, and thereby lose the whole foundation of the whole thing!) And I have drifted into the belief that I am a macroscopic Schrodinger cat in a real sense (war cry "Meow!"), for several reasons.
But what are the reasons, how sure am I, and how to reconcile with Einsteinian realism?
What happened to me in 2014 was just as jarring as the precognition experience of 1967 was, but this was not a psi kind of thing. As I worked out the equations for the CMRFp model of a photon going through polarized sunglasses (See Werbos, P.J.: Stochastic path model of polaroid polarizer for Bell’s Theorem and triphoton experiments. Int. J. Bifurc. Chaos 25(3), 1550046 (2015)), it struck me how the photon has THREE choices at each moment, according to my version of time-symmetric physics: (1) to conform to what the sunglasses "want," and thus be absorbed and never heard of again; (2) to become defiant, to jump to an orientation exactly perpendicular to what the sunglasses want, and thus be ejected and emitted with no further ado; or (3) to "stick out its tongue" (by changing its score on Z, a kind of destiny variable) and declare it doesn't want to be in this situation in the first place, in a way which changes the past by making it less likely that this scenario will actually become real.
At that time, I was in a weird and sudden polarizing situation in the US government, something as bad as Bannon's (and Jack's) worst nightmare. I found myself thinking: "Why do I have only the first two options? Am **I** less powerful than a lonely photon?" And then it hit me: maybe I AM as powerful as a photon! And just as much a CONFIGURATION within a larger cosmos. After all, the Schrodinger equation, whether statistical or not, still works at the macroscopic level, and our consciousness is all a matter of configuration.
How could one reconcile that with Einsteinian realism? First, it is a stretch. Immediately I reduced my subjective probability of Einstein realism from 90% to 1/3. But Fock space realism and ultraweirdism are also great stretches, and also require a bit of adjusting from the older versions.
My immediate response was to say: "we" are analogous, in a way, to the conscious creatures which emerge in a computer-simulated world. (That's an important old idea, repeated in the movie the Matrix, in science fiction by Baxter, and even some musings by Elon Musk they say. And a great story in the anthology Far Futures.) We are not the one true reality. reality exists, but we are not it. We are like the shadows in Plato's cave.
A great Eureka moment.
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But: is it true? More precisely, does it fit the math of Lagrange-Euler equations (the normal mainstream version of Einsteinian realism), or should we change the model a little? And again, are we really 90% sure of the left-stream version of macroscopic Schrodinger cats?
"What is the 'ontology'?" Smolin uses the word "ontology" to refer to something meaningful to physicists: the specification of "beables" as in specifying the mathematical space and functions defined over that space which the Lagrange-Ruler equations are assumed to operate over. Philosophers seem to refer to something more "woo-woo" in nature, as in "which of these is really real?" Well, now, if "we" are just possible configurations of those "beable" fields, how real are WE? If we are not configurations of the ACTUAL final solution of the Lagrange-Euler equations, but of possibilities, are we assuming that ALL such possibilities are "real" to the same extent that we are? Not so simple.
For a mathematician (or a devotee of fuzzy logic ala Lotfi Zadeh), there is an obvious way to try to compromise here. We could imagine (an ontological theory??) the idea that "all these possible configurations of the beable fields across space-time are real, but to VARYING degrees or VARYING probability."
In fact, that is exactly what my 2015 paper (in a journal for applied mathematics) discusses in quantitative terms:
Werbos, P.J.: Stochastic path model of polaroid polarizer for Bell’s Theorem and triphoton experiments. Int. J. Bifurc. Chaos 25(3), 1550046 (2015))
But here is a zinger:
That ends up being more like the older Feynmann and the older Schwinger than like Einstein. All those discussions of quantum theory by philosophers like Jack tend to look UP to something like canonical quantum field theory, like what gave those guys the Nobel prize in the 1950s. But, like Wittgenstein or E.O. Wilson, those guys did not just ossify after their initial work. They proposed reformulating quantum field theory to be a thoery over 3+1-D space, like Einstein, but STOCHASTIC in a way.
And so,if we say that we here are "REAL"but are macroscopic Schrodinger cats, that leads to a stochastic reformulation of the Einstein viewpoint which in many ways is more quantum than classical. the main difference in my version is that it is based on PROBABILITIES rather than PROBABILITY AMPLITUDES, which is frankly more coherent mathematically. And all of these are observer-free models. (I am tempted to mention other models of similar flavor, but this is already far enough away from the philosopher's beat.) Is this still Einsteinian realism, even with "dice included"? It's not your grandmother's Fock space.
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But: how sure are we? And where are those dice anyway?
To allow as much as a 30% probability that true Einsteinian realism (without dice) could be true, logically I should not be 90% sure that we are really macroscopic Schrodinger cats. So am I really 90% sure? What is it based on?
In part, it is based on new designs which give a path to reduce decoherence and CREATE macroscopic Schrodinger cats. My main reason for not saying more is that I find more and more reason to be less trusting.
But one simplified version. Suppose we go ahead and implement a backwards time telegraph. Would it create branches and work naturally, or would it create a phenomenal "weirdness generator"? Until we do the experiment, we do not know.
Best of luck, Paul
P.S. Looking at the present state of this planet, I could not justify ruling out the"weirdness generator" hypothesis.
http://vixra.org/abs/1904.0533
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