Serendipper wrote: ↑Tue Apr 03, 2018 11:21 pm
Right, it's instantaneous meaning that whatever causes the one particle to choose states instantly causes the other particle to choose the opposite state, so there is no speed limit (ie no time and therefore no space) and therefore no such thing as local/nonlocal (the whole universe is local). Even the speed of light implies no time or space. How can there be a local or nonlocal if there is nothing to be local within?
Yeah well then maybe we are saying the same thing actually (?). Local/nonlocal seems to have at least two meanings. The whole universe is local, but from a pre-QM point of view, that's nonlocal.
Because it would be a colossal waste of energy just to setup a few googolplexes of dominoes only to not be able to watch them fall because a dumb process, regardless of complexity, couldn't be conscious of the show. There is nothing in nature hinting that such wastefulness could exist and it would be far easier to have had nothing at all.
No, but I'm not sure how you can imagine your existence being analogous to a set of dominoes falling. I can't imagine how a deterministic process could engender consciousness; it's like suggesting shape causes color; there is no way.
I really don't know what you mean. What does being conscious of snow have to do with whether or not there is randomness or determinism? How do you connect the two?
Why would the universe need energy to be set up?
How come?
Because it would break everything else I know about the world. I see that everything works in certain ways. Frankly, genuine randomness comes across as unexplicable magic to me.
Maybe there is genuine randomness though - in that case the result is still the same, we are here all the same.
Now that's a REAL waste of energy lol. I truly can't believe Max Tegmark believes that. He seems like a reasonable, levelheaded guy, but that is silly.
What waste of energy? The universe doesn't care about wasting energy. Why is it silly, several leading physicists accept such views.
On the other hand how do you explain that out of the infinite possibilities, only our peculiar world exists?
I don't think our universe is big enough to calculate the number of universes that would be required to make that happen. Dark numbers are numbers that cannot be expressed within the observable universe when written on the planck scale and dark numbers would be dwarfed by the number of universes required to represent every possible combination of quantum events. It's ludicrous. One may as well claim there is an infinite amount of energy and therefore no such thing as conservation of energy. Can you imagine every quantum event for the last 13 billion years? And who know how much more time is to come. There could be trillions of years of every quantum possibility sprouting into a new universe which would then do the same thing within that universe and so on forever in causal-time and spacially into the infinite new universes. Crazy^2
I didn't understand any of that. Why would we have to calculate or imagine everything? What does that have to do with anything?
Why do you imagine time as an endless one-way process? How do you know that?
Why would new universes actually spring into existence?
Yes I suppose what causes this event to happen in this universe and another event to happen in another universe would have to be random because I can't imagine what would determine it like a director directing the traffic of possibilities which way to go. If the universes cannot communicate (or they wouldn't be separate universes) then how can a director know which way to send which possibility?
I wasn't talking about different universes, just ours.
And what determines how randomness plays out, just in the correct way that leads to self-aware humans?
I'm sure any conscious entity could collapse the wave function if it could understand what it is observing (being conscious of it). I don't know what "non-alive things" means since there are plenty of nonalive things in the test facility that failed to collapse the wave function. Whatever the entity is, it would have to understand what it is observing or have a possibility of conveying the information to someone who could understand it.
Umm no offense but you have no idea what you're talking about. Quantum observation has almost nothing to do with the everyday meaning of observation/understanding/being conscious of.
Sure, if humans are conscious of information, then so is the universe. Walls, ceilings, floors, cannot convey the information that is understood by humans.
There is no such thing as literal information in this context, information is an abstraction. Quantum observation doesn't work like that.
Well, yes, a magnet has a N and S pole, but is one magnet, but still has a N and S pole. We are here, we are also the universe, we are observing the universe and circular observation always results in infinite regressions.
A circle is a circle, not an infinite regression. That's my point, we shouldn't misconceptualize it.
If the universe observes itself, then it changes itself and requires another observation to account for the changes, but that observation changes itself yet again. There is no way for an eye to look at itself without having a camera pointed at its own monitor.
No. The universe doesn't change itself by observing itself, that's a misconceptualization. Any "effect" it would have on itself is already part of itself, so really there are NO changes, no effects at all. There are only correlations.