Ted,
sorry. :)
It begins with Chris writing this:
Quote:
(4) Tom also stated
Quote:
In any case, which ever assumption is shown to be correct, there is no impact on fundamental MBT theory presented in the books or presented in the workshops (YouTube). It is primarily a matter of me getting my history right at best and not attributing to current physics understandings that they don't have.
I guess this is a matter that I should take up more privately with him, but I think that it could have pretty dramatic impact on the MBT. The problem which this little almost-nitpicky point raises -- "you don't have to actually measure the slit the double-slit photon went through, rotating it by ± 45 degrees depending on which slit it went through is enough" -- is the sort of problem which makes it very hard to take any consciousness-relative theory of everything seriously.
That is, if one is going to say "we live in the Matrix," this little point means that the Matrix is actually keeping track of all those variables which we aren't so concerned about. The Matrix cares that the photon was rotated! We didn't even have to observe its rotation with a big macroscopic apparatus to tell the Matrix "hey, you, I want to observe this thing over here"; the Matrix is keeping track of all of these little variables.
In other words, our Sun is a typical star with a power output of 4 * 10^26 J/s. It's a yellow star, so it's emitting photons of, say L ~500 nm, which gives a typical photon energy of E = h c / L = 4 * 10^-19 J. This means that every second, the Sun spits out 10^45 photons. (We can even see that the Sun is essentially a quantum beast by looking at the spectrum of that light, which is a blackbody spectrum -- Planck's initial motivation for quantum mechanics, and his basis for calculating his constant h.) I am not even going to consider the fact that there are over a hundred billion stars in the galaxy.
What matters is simply this: The polarization of a photon is in quantum mechanics a nice little 2-level system, can be up-down or left-right or some superposition between the two. If we can get our photons from anywhere, and the Matrix is keeping track of the states of all photons while performing proper quantum manipulations, then we have a huge problem.
The set of basis elements which quantum mechanics needs in order to describe this system is therefore 2^(10^45). If you thought 10^45 photons was big, you cannot imagine this number. In scientific notation it would be, to five significant figures,
2.8980 * 10^(301,029,995,663,981,195,213,738,894,724,493,026,768,189,881).
So unless someone decided to make a computer with that many circuit elements in it, quantum mechanics would have to break down every second when considering the photons coming out from the Sun -- the computer just couldn't handle them all.
...and continues with this reply:
msagansk wrote:
Chris, your interesting calculation in (4) just reinforces the concepts provided by MBT even more. The underlying "computer behind the scenes" doesn't calculate all of the information deterministically - it relies on probabilities, history, and the rule-set to provide the data to consciousness on an as-needed basis. The rest is wasteful as you've clearly shown. Now I have to admit, this is a concept I still wrestle with in my mind (I don't believe it) on an intellectual level, let alone anything deeper.
Chris replied:
Chris wrote:
msagansk: The huge problem that I was trying to express is that quantum mechanics is *very* hard to compute. The key problem is that superpositions of two states are allowed. So whereas in classical physics I could store 4 bits with 4 bits -- 0110, for example -- in general, quantum mechanics requires that we keep track of probabilities for 0000, 0001, 0010, 0011, 0100, ... -- sixteen in total. For 20 bits, we have to keep track of just over a million probabilities.
And then I say... ;)
Nemo wrote:
I don't get the point. QM happens. Irrelevant of it taking place in a VR or in a "RR" (real reality :D )... Referring to it as being very hard to compute doesn't change any part of its reality. And hence does not answer the question of why and how these things take place. The VR-model simply provides a framework in which it makes sense. (And assumig, as we are, that the "root" of all reality is indeed a large consciousness system there is no need to project our computational limits onto this system - which basically sounds like a British scientist from the 19th century saying: "You can't ride on a train. If you move with greater speed than 50 km/h you'll DIE!!!")
What is the ontological framework you embedd QM in?
BTW:
I wonder what Fredkin would say to this discussion... ;)