edit: seems like it is lazy loaded, so revised my summary.
> Among the fundamental differences is the fact that classical information can be copied but quantum states cannot be cloned.
The no-cloning theorem says that there exists no universal quantum machine that can perfectly clone an arbitrary quantum state. However, that does not preclude a machine that can imperfectly clone any quantum state, or machines that can perfectly clone some but not all quantum states [1]. (Clearly the information transferred to my brain is not a perfect copy of your brain's state, and your DNA is not perfectly copied every time.)
A proper (but less elegant) would be: you have two balls with the same color or a pattern.
You take one out. If you check the color first, you will find the other’s color the same, but the pattern sometimes different. If you check the pattern first, you will find the pattern the same, but the color sometimes different.
I disagree. Suppose that I create a machine that chooses which ball to place in each box. This machine makes the choice based on some measurement of a quantum particle (electron spin). Then the colors of the ball are entangled with the state of the quantum particle, which cannot be described by some local hidden variable.
It is equivalent to a hidden variable, just a non-local one.
The non-classical properties of entanglement start appearing once you start measuring combinations of the redness and blueness of those balls.
Let's say that instead of looking at the balls, you pass them through some machine that will let a red ball pass through with some probability P that you control; if the ball is blue, the machine will let it pass with probability 1-P. Let's say further that you have three such machines. You set the first machine to P=1. You pass each ball falling from this machine through a second machine, which has P = 0. You will never see a ball pass through to the end - if it were red, it would pass the first machine, but not the second; if it were blue, it would not pass the first machine at all.
But, let's say you now put a third machine between the other two, and you set P = 0.5. With classical balls, nothing changes - a blue ball doesn't make it past the first machine, while a red ball goes through the first, may or may not pass the second, and never makes it through the third regardless.
However, a quantum ball actually has a chance to pass through the 3 machines if you set it up this way. In fact, that chance is pretty large - more than half of the balls will start passing once you add the middle filter machine.
Still, this is easy to explain if we assume that the middle machine actually paints the ball instead of just detecting its color. This is where the entanglement experiment comes in: if you pass the pair of balls through the three machines, with ball 1 passing through machines P=1 and P=0.5, and ball 2 passing through P=1, you will find that sometimes both balls make it through, even though both balls can't be red at the same time, and they can't communicate about passing through the P=0.5 machine (you can repeat the experiment with the balls being taken arbitrarily far away before passing through the filters).
But this sheds no light on quantum wave functions and quantum entanglement.
I've heard of the apocryphal "half-silvered mirror", but I don't get why reflection isn't an observation/interaction there either.
I know this comment is going to get lost in the noise, but that is a really excellent point, one of the best that has been raised here so far. This is a point that is often glossed over, but it is actually really important, and quite challenging to explain without getting deep into the weeds. The answer is that passing through a half-silvered mirror is an observation/interaction, but it is special because it can be practically reversed by using additional mirrors so that you can get back to a state where you can no longer tell what the outcome of the "measurement" was. All measurements are reversible in principle, but some are irreversible in practice because the number of things you'd have to reverse is just too large. And in particular, by the time a measurement has affected the state of any macroscopic system (like a ball) it is absolutely impossible to reverse in practice, though not in principle. This process of becoming irreversible-in-practice is called "decoherence".
See [1] for a more detailed explanation.
[1] http://blog.rongarret.info/2014/10/parallel-universes-and-ar...
The weird part is precisely this: "you can get back to a state where you can no longer tell what the outcome of the 'measurement' was." In other words, at lunchtime you believed that a horizontally polarised photon hit your nose at 10am in morning, and you were right. Now it's dinner time, you don't believe that, and you would be wrong if you did. If the Everett interpretation doesn't pose a massive challenge to your ideas about reality and human identity, you haven't understood it. There are physics professors who picture photons choosing which way to go at a beam splitter, then transmitting the news backwards in time, because that seems more plausible to them.
Of course, interpretations are not science. Everyone agrees how an experiment would go: any attempt to reverse the interaction of the photon with your nose and brain would fail, because thermodynamics. From a purely scientific viewpoint, it simply doesn't matter how many other yous are superposed in parallel universes, because their existence or lack of it has no consequences that (any of?) you can observe. But scientists are as fascinated by this as everyone else is.
No, it isn't. I've said nothing about many-worlds, only reversibility. And on that point everyone agrees.
> Now it's dinner time, you don't believe that
You really need to read the link above. It goes into all that in great detail. But the TL;DR here is that if it's dinner time, you haven't actually reversed the measurement, notwithstanding your current mental state with respect to the photon.
I don't like claims to authority, but maybe you should read the papers I've published about Bell inequalities too? :-p
It sounds like you're saying that, in principle, physical processes are all reversible. (Although that is often thermodynamically impossible in practice.) You're also saying that it's impossible in principle for someone to learn the result of a measurement in the morning, then unlearn it when the measurement is reversed during the afternoon. I don't see how there could be a self-consistent interpretation of quantum measurement where both those things are true.
How am I supposed to do that? You haven't provided and references and your profile is empty.
> in principle, physical processes are all reversible
Correct. This is a straightforward mathematical property of the Schroedinger equation.
> it's impossible in principle for someone to learn the result of a measurement in the morning, then unlearn it when the measurement is reversed during the afternoon
That's right. But that's not because it's impossible to reverse the measurement. It's because when you reverse a measurement you don't just "unlearn" the result.
You really should read the reference I gave you.
Here you're hitting on the heart of the Measurement Problem. In QM as it is understood today, unlike classical mechanics, there are two fundamentally different kinds of interactions between objects: quantum interactions and measurement. Quantum interactions are linear changes to the wave function, while measurements perform a non-linear update to the wave function (it becomes one for the measured value and 0 everywhere else).
Unfortunately, we do not have any theory so far that explains what is the difference between a quantum interaction and a measurement. The experiment I described works with 'machines' that interact quantically with the 'balls', but does not reproduce if the machines measure the state of the balls.
I will note that in the Many Worlds Interpretation, the measurement problem is somewhat different - it states that the state of the universe is always described by a wave function, but that parts of the wave which are sufficiently separated can no longer perceive each other somehow, usually called branching. Precisely when, why or how this happens are just as unknown, though decoherence seems to play a role
However, the wave function at different places interacts with the environment and start to shift in phase, eventually becoming unable to interfere with itself - this is called decoherence, and is a valid explanation about why and how we can't observe wave-like behaviors at large scales or in hot systems.
On the other hand, we can only postulate, based on observations, that when a particle interacts with a measurement device, the measurement device will show a single value with a probability determined by the amplitude of the particle's wave function at that point. We can postulate that the wave function collapses, or we can postulate that the device branches out into different devices in different worlds (enough such devices&worlds to achieve the probability distribution through observer selection somehow), or many other ways of formulating the Born rule. But whichever way you put it, this rule must be added to your system to predict experimental results, it does not derive from the Schrodinger equation.
I suppose it's destructive interference. It's qualitatively interesting, but its observation is complicated by orthogonal states: when you multiply orthogonal states you get zero. If you can thoroughly dismantle the state to observe it, you still can do it only on microscale, then you'll have a problem lifting it to macroscale evading destructive interference while orthogonal states are all over the place. Anyway, Schrodinger equation describes behavior of quantum states with mathematical precision and the math is quite conclusive that a linear equation behaves in a linear way. When you feel intuition doesn't get you much, you can resort to math, that's why math is seen as an indispensable part of science, because intuition isn't guaranteed to work, which is exactly your case.
>it does not derive from the Schrodinger equation
MWI derives it from the Schrodinger equation. Observation is experience of the observer and can be calculated. Unless you assume that the observer is supernatural and is thus unknowable.
This posits the notion of an observer that only observes one outcome, whereas the SE predicts that an observer will observe several different outcomes with different amplitudes. The MWI is postulating that we should only look at each outcome separately.
Furthermore, it is not possible to derive the actual probability value from the wave function amplitude without some additional postulate equivalent to the Born rule, for example that the number of observers that observe one outcome is proportional to the wave function amplitude of that outcome.
>that the number of observers that observe one outcome is proportional to the wave function amplitude of that outcome
If you mean the number, the norm of each state of observer that observes the respective outcome can be calculated. The statistics over the outcomes can be calculated too.
Bell's theorem describes the highest possible upper bound of correlations for spin measurements along different axis if it was as you say. But it turns out that in practice they are more correlated than what would be possible according to Bell's theorem, ergo, that analogy (which, in general, is plausible and reasonable) is not compatible with the physical reality we live in.
This gets used to explain entanglement but it really has absolutely nothing to do with it. This is nothing that the ancient Greeks wouldn't have known.
Not to pick on you specifically, but do people really think it took a major revolution in physics in order to understand that if there are two balls, one is blue and one is red, then if you see one of the balls is red, you can conclude the other ball is blue?
It's something that I think humans can solve at the age of 3.
The failure in your explanation is right when you state that "one of the balls is red and the other is blue". The entire point of entanglement is that such a statement is not possible, that's a strictly classical interpretation. Rather, both balls are in a superposition of being both red and blue simultaneously, and it is not possible in principle to assign a color to either one of them until the moment a measurement is made.
I don't disagree, and (clearly) I make a measurement when I show you the color of a ball. Before I show you a ball, I would also say that the colors of the balls are in a superposition.
> major revolution in physics in order to understand that if there are two balls, one is blue and one is red, then if you see one of the balls is red, you can conclude the other ball is blue?
Entanglement is really just this simple — entanglement itself is a statement about a wave function, classical or quantum. The major revolution in physics is that transformations of the wave functions do not behave as we would classically expect. Entangled particles are a tool that we can use to measure those transformations (and get surprising results).
Entanglement is not a property about wave functions and really has nothing to do with waves. It's a logical consequence of the uncertainty principle and was ironically deduced by Einstein, Rosen, and Podolsky (EPR Paradox) as a way to argue that quantum mechanics is an incomplete description of physical reality. Being that it's strictly a consequence of the uncertainty principle, it applies equally well to non-wave function formulations of quantum mechanics such as the matrix formulation which does not use a wave function.
Entanglement is precisely the principle that a physical system can exist such that no part of the system can be described without describing the rest of the system as a whole. Einstein argued that this made quantum mechanics incomplete, the idea that somehow two properties of a physical system separated potentially by light years could not be decomposed into two physical systems that behaved independently of one another violated basic notions of local realism.
The issue is that as soon as you stated that one ball is red you have made a statement about some property of the physical system that is independent of the rest of the system. That is fundamentally what entanglement states you can not do. All you can state is that there are two balls that are in a superposition of being red and blue and there is no way to describe one ball as red and the other as blue, they are both red and blue simultaneously.
That is what entanglement is and that is the new principle that was neither known to the ancient Greeks or something that a 3 year old could figure out. Not the idea that if there are two balls and one ball is red and the other is blue, then if you see the red ball you know that the other ball is blue. Nothing about that ever baffled any physicist.
There has to be some observation that would be different in a universe with entanglement than in a universe without entanglement, and you haven't described what that difference is. There must be one out there, though -- it's just not clear to me what it is. Does it have to do with the fact that the fastest I can spread the message "I just looked at ball A and it's red!" is the speed of light, and ball B could be very very far away? But I thought entanglement doesn't actually allow FTL communication?
But Bell's theorem provides a very measureable counterexample to this type of explanation of entanglement. Sure, in the article they talk about electron spins instead of ball colors, but the analogy is that there isn't a well defined "color of the ball" before it's measured.
Of course, the analogy breaks down a bit: electron spin can be measured in multiple axes with somewhat complicated interactions.
No, consider the case of neutral pion decay, which emits one spin up electron and one spin down electron. We can clearly say ahead of time one electron will be spin up, and the other will be spin down. But there is no hidden variable that determines which.
If there were a hidden variable, then knowledge of that hidden variable would let you predict which electron is spin up (which ball was red). In the macroscopic world, the hidden variable might be the state of my brain when it chose which hand to grab which ball. But if you replaced me with a robot, and that robot used the measurement of a quantum event (such as an electron's spin) to determine which ball to choose, then there is no hidden variable.
https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/physics/8-04-quantum-physics-i-s...
No, it does emit two electrons with total spin zero which is not the same thing.
> We can clearly say ahead of time one electron will be spin up, and the other will be spin down.
Let’s imagine that one was really up and the other was down. But you decide to measure instead the spins along a perpendicular axis. You would expect to find no correlation between them.
However, what you actually see is that if you measure both spins along any (common) axis they will point in opposite directions.
It doesn’t make any sense to say that before any measurement one was up and the other down. The red and blue balls analogy is very misleading and has nothing to do with entanglement.
this is exactly why classical analogies should not be used to describe quantum entanglement - it gives the layperson a wrong impression. Those analogies makes it easy for the layperson to imagine the hidden variable hypothesis, which is proven to be wrong.
They really are in a superposition, not just ‘not known’ until one is measured.
Just like light was proven to (truly, actually) be both a light and a wave through the double slit experiments. It doesn’t feel right, but it is - and that is where the progress is made, and why the pushback on some examples. It hides the actual truth behind a misleading, but easy to understand example, that teaches people the opposite of what is really going on.
I would expect similar here. Intuition is terrible at understanding what is going on at the atomic and smaller level, or anywhere relativistic anything is happening.
My explanation is that entanglement is when there is no red ball or blue ball, there are simply two balls and the color of both balls is both red and blue simultaneously. It's not simply that one ball is red, the other is blue, but we don't know which one is which until we measure them. It's that fundamentally there is no red ball and blue ball, there are just two balls whose colors are in a superposition of red and blue.
I will try to come up with an observable difference but it's hard to do so with colors because the typical examples used for entanglement involve properties that can cancel one another out, so that two entangled particles exhibiting a superposition of two properties will, after many trials, end up forming some kind of destructive or constructive interference that would not be possible if those two particles were in a definite state.
Isn't it true that if you entangle two particles, separate them, then measure one it'll tell you something about the other particle? That's all the example is trying to communicate.
Yes that's true, but that's also true of things that aren't entangled. I assure you if I went to Socrates, showed him a red ball and a blue ball, put them in a bag, and took out a ball at random that happened to be red, Socrates would have no problem realizing that the other ball must be blue. I am sure if I went to my 4 year old daughter, she'd figure it out as well because nothing about quantum mechanics or entanglement would be needed to understand this.
What entanglement tells us is that if two balls had their colors entangled, then both balls are both red and blue at the same time and it's simply not possible to reason about one ball being blue and one ball being red while they are entangled. They are in a superposition of both colors and remain so until a measurement is performed.
Once the measurement is performed, they are no longer entangled and only at that point can you call one ball red and the other blue.
I don't follow, and I can't find anything online that makes this claim. Could you explain more?
Maybe we disagree about the definition of entanglement. I'll take one from Griffith's Introduction to Quantum Mechanics. On page 422, Griffith writes [1]:
> An entangled state [is] a two-particle state that cannot be expressed as the product of two one-particle states....
(There is no mention of uncertainty in this section either.) Here I read "state" to mean "wave function" which implies that entanglement is a statement about a wave function, as I earlier claimed. "Cannot be expressed as a product" means not independent, just like the balls in my analogy (or electrons from neutral pion decay).
When I say "see the color of one ball," I am collapsing the wave function of the balls by making an observation (in the Copenhagen interpretation). This is analogous to measuring an electron's spin. If you replace "ball" with "electron," "bag" with "decay of a neutral pion", "red/blue" with "spin up/down," and "see the color of one ball" with "measure the spin of one electron," that's a completely valid statement in QM.
You “make a measurement” well before that, when you say that you have a red ball and a blue ball.
The point of entanglement is that until you make a measurement they don’t have a color. You could measure something else than color and you would also find a correlation.
But if they have a defined color the entanglement is broken. Sure, one is red and the other is blue. But if you measure anything else (a non-commuting observable, that is) there will be no correlatiom.
And not knowing which one is what (already defined) color is not a superposition. It’s just a mixture.
To be fair, this usually crops up in entanglement discussions to deomonstrate how it can't be used for FTL communication and not to actually explain what entanglement is.
"one of the balls is red and the other is blue"
IS a statement you can make. However, it's surprisingly not equivalent to asserting
(xor (and (red? 'left) (blue? 'right))
(and (blue? 'left) (red? 'right)))
In terms of oft-used Bell pair states to demonstrate what I'm talking about, you can definitely say that total S^2=0.
The red ball and the blue ball exist as physical objects, it is us, the observers, who are unaware of whether they are red or blue at either position. There's no superposition here. They are red, or blue, assigned randomly. Not both, not none. These are facts - properties - about the balls that are real, that exist, but we simply don't have that information at that point. It is meaningless that there is no observer that can 'see through' our hands to know which is correct.
The uncertainty principle here then relates to how much this probability density function 'peaks' in position space or momentum space. A higher peak in one space results in a wider spread in the other. This is because position and momentum are Fourier transforms of each other.
But it is possible to imagine usually unrelated properties of a particle being entangled, e.g. a two-peaked position function, spin up if it's over here and spin down if it's over there. So that's possible. Usually when discussing entanglement, though, we're talking about 'distinct'* particles. Electron A's spin entangled with electron B's spin. Not that it has to be spin, of course. But that's a common case because of how naturally this sort of entanglement occurs, for example, in atoms where electrons have to form spin pairs.
* This is complicated by QFT where particles are not exactly distinct, but exist as excitations in a particle field. E.g. there aren't two electrons but the electron field is excited by two quanta. At least, that's my understanding; I never went to grad school for physics, so I'm limited to undergraduate knowledge and some extracurricular reading.
Yep, sorry, artifact of the editing process.
> they intrinsically have to be related to each other, and the position state (i.e., function) a particle is in fully determines its momentum state.
Sure, but the momentum doesn't determine the position (due to the constant of integration) so you can have two particles with the same momentum functions and different locations, and that leads to my next question...
> Usually when discussing entanglement, though, we're talking about 'distinct'* particles.
That's what I actually meant to ask but didn't phrase clearly: since position and momentum are described by wave functions, can you entangle the positions of two particles? or entangle their momentum?
There's no constant of integration since the integral will be over all of space (or momentum space).
> That's what I actually meant to ask but didn't phrase clearly: since position and momentum are described by wave functions, can you entangle the positions of two particles? or entangle their momentum?
Certainly! I couldn't think of any examples of how it might occur, but I googled it and found an answer on Quora that seems to be correct: https://www.quora.com/In-quantum-mechanics-how-do-I-comprehe...
That's the spooky part.
Here is an example that may make it more obvious:
There exists a game that can be played cooperatively between two players that share two random bits. It is possible to win this game only 75% of the time if the bits are not entangled. If the bits are entangled there is a strategy for winning the game about 85% of the time. The details of the game and a good explanation can be found here: https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=2464
Basically, there is a game that involves sharing two bits, if they are entangled, it can be won 85% of the time. If they are not entangled but otherwise random (like the red and blue ball example), it can be won only 75% of the time.
If I look through the holes, I will see that one ball is blue and the other is red.
If I touch them through the holes, I will feel that one ball is hot and the other is cold.
However, I cannot look and touch at the same time. And once I check the color or the temperature of one of the balls (so I know it for both) the link is broken.
If I look first, I’l see that one is red and the other is blue. But if now I touch them, each one will by hot or cold with 50/50 probability. Finding the temperature of one doesn’t tell me anything bout the temperature of the other. And when I touch a ball I don’t know its color anymore: if I look at it again it could be red or blue with 50/50 probability.
This is one of many interpretations, I don't think it's fair to label conjecture as "reality" yet.
Bell showed that the correlation is even greater than you can get using that sort of thinking. Reality is more like this:
Bob and Alice each get a pair of bags, one black and one white. They open one of the bags in which they get either a red ball or a blue ball.
If they both choose the white bags, their balls are different colors. However if either or both of them choose the black bag, the colors of the balls are the same.
If you think about it, there's no way to put the balls in the bags to satisfy these conditions in all cases. This is a simplification of what's going on with Bell's theorem.
https://www.scottaaronson.com/democritus/lec11.html
scroll down to the section titled Relativistic Causality
My argument is that not only that we do not know a way to conduct such category of copy->measure->compare experiments for human subjects, even with advancement in BCI, etc, it is perhaps impossible to conduct such experiment due to some nature of consciousness that we do not yet understand concerning “information”.
I used the word “mimicking” earlier as apparently when concerning “information” with humans, a (somewhat) “conscious” act has to be performed for the whole phenomenology to be interpreted as that of “copying”. We are encoding “information” in an extremely none-“traditional” way as information is studied and made sense of in computer science.
Similarly, the notion of “semantics” opens up two categorically different sets of paths for inquisition in programming language theory vs linguistics. There is something mysterious and trippy about what “meaning” and “information” really are (eg in regards to qualia).
Being "in a simulation" doesn't imply that we're in simulation created by later humans, it doesn't give any indication how fine-grain the approximations are, etc. etc.
"We're in a simulation" fundamentally discard Occam's Razor in the fashion of the belief in God as controlling everything. And thus this belief has the same weight as belief in the Flying Spaghetti Monster [1].
You are using Occam's Razor incorrectly. A preference for parismony in problem solving is not identical with parsimony being the only state of the world.
As a side note, which directly applies to your comment, Occam's Razor was invented by Friar William of Ockham as a defense of divine miracles.
"Everything is really under control of invisible stuff" make it impossible to use parisomy under any circumstances. It fundamentally discards Occam's Razor.
Occam's Razor was invented by Friar William of Ockham as a defense of divine miracles.
While I wouldn't personally accept a God that acts in the world, the argument is about having some sort of evidence based interpretation of the world. Flying Spaghetti Monster is response to arguments like "God makes the rain fall" etc, not to a God that appears in the world but a God that can essentially be evoked for anything and in any fashion.
You are fundamentally misunderstanding Occam's Razor. It is not a law - Occam's Razor is a preference for how to view the world, not a law that was violated. [1]
There are alternate rules-of-thumb, such as one by Ockham's contemporary, Walter Chatton. Chatton created Chatton's anti-razor in opposition to Ockham's Razor: "Consider an affirmative proposition, which, when it is verified, is verified only for things; if three things do not suffice for verifying it, one has to posit a fourth, and so on in turn [for four things, or five, etc.]. (Reportatio I, 10–48, paragraph 57, p. 237)" [2]
[1] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ockham/#OckhRazo
[2] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/walter-chatton/#AntiRazo
Yes, Occam's Razor isn't a law but a method of understanding reality. My point is that if you throw out Occam's Razor in total, not in one or another situations, you're left with nothing to understand the world with.
The "God wants it that ways" and "because it's simulation" can be substituted for any proposition at all under any circumstances and there's not counter argument to such substitutions. This approach is also "the paranoid worldview" - "because they want to think that" also has this "insert everywhere" quality.
And you're link describing the original ideas of William of Occam doesn't what you'd imagine. "Occam's Razor" is broad approach that's evolved over time and just takes that label for convennience. Virtually no one is evoking the authority of William of Occam or claiming to follow his Nominalism or whatever. The generally means that adding unneeded hypotheses should generally be avoided. If you can never follow that guide, you're in trouble.
Same thing if someone engineers a super complicated method to murder someone while appearing to physically be at a different place. It isn't the simplest explanation, but it can still be correct!
Sure. But if the entirety of reality is created by magicians, then one's concept of reality collapses. The "simulation" view point is indeed pretty much the idea that magicians control everything.
If you read the argument above, my point isn't that Occam's Razor is always correct but if you posit a world where it is generally/always incorrect, your ability to coherently understand reality collapses.
This is the logical fallacy with what you wrote. You don't know what is needed or unneeded.
A logical fallacy is an error in reasoning that is based on poor or faulty logic.
Lol, it seems clear you are the one setting up a debate and attempting to win it. I actually am working on the implications of the "simulation" argument. All of my positions are based "plausible reasoning" with similarities to formal logic being only incidental.
I respect people who believe in a bearded White omnipotent homophobic God who lives in a sky palace more than I respect people who believe in this insane drivel about the probability of living in a simulation. At least the former were indoctrinated as their brain was forming.
I think you've expressed a number of confusions.
First, I think you contradicted yourself. The line you quote says that posthuman civilizations are unlikely to create simulations, but you say this is false because a universe simulation requires more power than available in the universe. So you're agreeing with the outcome while saying you're disagreeing.
Second, I suggest reading the the paper fully, because Bostrom explains that we don't need full universe simulations, we need only consciousness simulations (kind of like the Matrix). The very premise of a post-human civilization is that they have knowledge sufficiently advanced that they have algorithms to simulate human minds.
Much like how video games only render the part of the world that is visible to the players, so a consciousness simulation only needs to simulate minds and their perceptions of a macroscopic, classical world, they do not have to simulate a full quantum universe. Our brains are great at filling in information that we expect to be there, so even the parts that we directly perceivedon't need to be simulated with complete fidelity.
Frankly, I don't think you've given the argument sufficient thought, but by a happy accident you picked exactly the outcome that I think is most likely, and I elaborate on why here:
https://higherlogics.blogspot.com/2021/02/why-we-are-likely-...
Idle curiosity is drives a lot of human behaviour, particularly in philosophy!
No, they are saying the opposite. The argument that simulating the universe requires more atoms than the universe says that a later civilization would not simulate the entire universe. IE, #2 of the refutations really true.
Right, but the simulation is nonetheless bottlenecked by whichever system requires the greatest fidelity, and the more technology advances, the more of a problem that becomes. For instance, medieval times would likely be far easier to simulate than modern times, because the latter requires simulating our entire computer infrastructure.
And I think that infrastructure is harder to simulate than you'd think: I could use a solver on a big NP problem (we'll assume that P != NP), get a solution after an hour, and in theory, with some practice, I could probably check if the answer is correct in my head. So the simulator can't simply give me what I "expect". It has to actually compute the thing, and then it's clear that the faster our computers get, the slower the simulation has to run.
Alternatively, the simulation could mess with our minds so we never notice anything out of place, but at that point I'm not sure I understand the point of it. Might as well wonder if this is all a dream.
Agreed.
> because the latter requires simulating our entire computer infrastructure.
Maybe, that isn't clear. There are probably plenty of optimisations here too if given some thought.
> I could use a solver on a big NP problem (we'll assume that P != NP), get a solution after an hour, and in theory, with some practice, I could probably check if the answer is correct in my head.
Yes, but note that we very rarely solve NP or EXPTIME problems exactly due to the costs. We often solve them heuristically or approximately, which wouldn't pose a problem for a simulation either.
Then there's also the possibility that we are simply not free to choose the problem to solve. When running a solver for an NP problem, we just need to input any kind of NP problem, and a simulation could easily have large sets of precomputed solutions available.
> Alternatively, the simulation could mess with our minds so we never notice anything out of place, but at that point I'm not sure I understand the point of it
Depends on whether any such changes affects the point of the simulation. If the simulation is to test world-scale economic models, then isolated tribes wouldn't have much influence on those outcomes.
Then again, maybe the point is simply entertainment. Maybe we're just The Sims for post-humans, in which case there's no point anyway.
The place to implement an optimization like this would be at the items with the biggest O in your world, which is usually the smallest building block--what you'd have the "most" of, which would drive the largest memory and processing demands.
The simulation only needs to produce observations that are consistent with the knowledge of the first observer. Sometimes bit even that, as I describe in the blog post, because eyewitness testimony is known to be quite unreliable.
I'm not sure what sort of history you're thinking of specifically.
The amount of information science could infer on many questions is strictly bounded and in those cases we could only reason stochastically. The data presented at time of first observation can then be generated randomly from the set of answers consistent with what's already known.
Also, why the assumption that post-humans are running the simulations (as in the paper)? Couldn't it be any ultra-advanced civilization that's playing with an evolutionary simulation?
I think the parent poster was noting that it is a pretty fundamentally different argument than say, positing the existence of a creator, because we exist at all - and that said creator has certain specific requirements of us regarding what we do on Sundays, for instance, or with whom and when we have kids.
Is that a requirement of every flavor of creationism? Actually, maybe I shouldn't use 'creationism' in this context because that's a loaded term with a lot of baggage at this point. What else to call a hypothesis that asserts there's some kind of intelligence behind the universe that we see? Simulationists would seem to fall into that broader category as would old-school creationists.
Seems like first you'd need to have some kind of falsifiable evidence that we were in a simulation first before jumping there? Plenty of folks trying to do that though, without falling into the first case.
Personally it seems to have little to no real impact on anything I care about one way or another, so filed in the 'cute but who cares' bin.
> Also, why the assumption that post-humans are running the simulations (as in the paper)? Couldn't it be any ultra-advanced civilization that's playing with an evolutionary simulation?
Sure, potentially. The paper makes no assumptions about the existence of other life forms, it instead extrapolates the likelihood of a simulation given the only intelligent life we know to exist: us.
Therefore you can see the simulation argument from that paper as a lower bound on the probability we live in a simulation. Positing the existence of other life forms that run random simulations can only increase the probability we're living in a simulation, assuming one of the other outcomes isn't more likely.
Assuming any kind of simulation at all leads to more questions than answers - simply delegating the creation of the universe to the next turtle down. It's not a matter of how "persuasive" an argument is or isn't. It is the evidence the scientific method has produced from which we draw our conclusions.
A. The idea that intelligence beyond human beings would grant it's possessor power that are in ways absolute in very specific, rigid fashion. Human being can accomplish a lot of things. It's notable those things human beings do better than computers seem very tenuous. Humans seem to drive rather haphazardly yet humans drive much better than computers and driving overall seems a "bucket chemistry" sort of activity. Humans calculate much worse than computers and calculation is an exact, defined activity (arguable, the exact, defined activity). But for the singularians, transhuman devices will do the uncertain, tenuous activities that humans do but with "no mistakes". And for a lot human activities, "no mistakes" actually might not even mean anything. Despite humans driving better than computers, humans probably wouldn't even agree on what absolute good driving even means.
B. Simulation as exact map. Any human created simulation of some system is going to be an approximation of that system for the purpose of extracting particular phenomena. Some things are discarded, other focused on and simplified. A model of the solar has to consider conservation of energy or tiny deviations will produce instability over time since errors overall on unavoidable in current hardware. Even a simulation of a computer chip isn't useful unless one knows the chip's purpose is logical operations. But for Bostrom and partisans of
C. Incoherent ontology. If we could produce an exact model of a thing, which is the real subject and which is simulation? What if we could produce twenty "exact simulations", which is real? In a realm of unlimited hypotheticals and unlimited exact simulations, wouldn't a least a countable infinite simulations of "everything" exist. Which is real is quite a conundrum but this problem itself only exists in a world of multiplied objects which we actually have no reason to suppose exists.
As for aging and life extension, I honestly don't understand how anyone could reasonably think we shouldn't stop or reverse aging.
I can certainly comprehend why one would wish to become an immortal being incapable of death. But I just want to be human. Sure you can live forever, but at what cost? A fear for sunlight, garlic, and crosses? For me, "Death is very likely the single best invention of Life."
EDIT: maybe we need another word in this context besides 'creationist' since it has a lot of baggage in the culture at this point. What else to call someone who hypothesizes that there is some kind of intelligence behind the universe? The simulationists seem to fit into that category as do the various flavors of 'creationist', 'intelligent design', 'theistic evolutionist' and probably even Hindus, etc.
Interestingly, I think some of the distinction as to why this idea is more palatable is that it doesn't require "supernatural" or "magic" deities. The "creator" could be just like us. We already have evidence that creating virtual worlds is possible--we do it ourselves with games, so I think it takes a lot less faith, as we have a limited proof of principle already.
Also, most magical creationism is totally untestable. You can make some predictions about a simulation, though. If simulations are subject to constraints, which is likely, you should be able to ascertain, in the design of the universe, that items with the biggest O might be subject to performance optimizations. If you find lazy loading, caching, or other performance optimizations at the smallest scale (biggest O), which is what this might predict, you at least have some hints.
Not true! It implies we might find performance optimizations, especially at the lowest level. Lazy loading, caching, pointers to constants, that sort of thing. It also doesn't discard Occam's razor. We actually have examples of simulated worlds (physics engines in games), so we know they are possible, unlike the flying spaghetti monster.
Nah, as other have noted, no simulation could have a 1-1 relationship between data humans observe and data in a physical device that exists in a world congruent to what humans observe - because there aren't enough atoms in the reachable universe for this. So such simulation either compresses the actions it simulates using higher level constructs or its happening in some universe congruent to the world we're in. Any such machine is going be a product of a future we don't know about yet and so it's constraints could be wildly different. Moreover, since the standard assumption of this simulation foolishness is that future humans or future post-humans want to learn about their ancestors, one can naturally assume you mechanisms that compensate for any "glitches" that might otherwise be obvious. Which just adds to my original claim.
The issue is that you can only learn whether you're in a simulation if the simulator allows you to do so. Otherwise, the moment that you discover a performance optimization, the simulator could just pause the simulation, delete the discovery from your mind, and resume.
Perhaps. I suspect, though, that it would be subject to the same information theoretical constraints which would provide convergent evolutionary pressures.
It seems at least likely that some level of optimization would be useful if there is any type of cost (energy, materials, resources, space) to the computing substrate, whatever that may be, and that would lead to similar optimizations to what we might be able to imagine.
Practically, the simulator theory may be testable, but probably not. Every religion I’ve run across is pretty clearly not okay to even test.
So that’s progress maybe?
As you say pointer to shared memory location is basically hidden variable theory, you could also move faster than the speed of light by simply updating your location to any value, I have done this in game hacking before you just need a WriteProcessMemory api, might get caught by anti-cheats.
This is part of the premise of the fantastic novel "Permutation City" by Greg Egan.
Edit: OP edited their original comment to be more accurate.
I think this model kind of works and some scientists are working on it, but it is not the preferred interpretation.
If they didn't follow the plan and measured orhogonal/same (can't remember which) spins, then your results are uncorrelated but you can't know until you meet back up (maybe barring superdeterminism that is also accessible to the individual).
Doesn't the traveler have more information than anyone else on ship about whether an assassination attempt was made in Russia or America? and have it faster than the speed of light? We don't have it with certainty, but we have shared knowledge that is unknowable to others and instantaneous.
The universe either had to break the light barrier to make the measurements correlated (predetermining the outcome isn't generally possible because you could choose how to make the measurement based on another quantum measurement from something outside of the other participant's then-current light cone), or make the same choice through superdeterminism (the other measurement and all others were predetermined too and exact simulation of entire future universe's measurement decisions was shared between every particle when they were within some distance at big bang or something). But even though the universe broke the light barrier, you yourself aren't able to use it for communication.
In the many-worlds interpretation you've both branched into the same branch of the multiverse, but couldn't choose which branch. You do have private knowledge of which branch and the consequences of that, assuming you both followed the agreed on procedure.
I think you can use what you are describing in a series of correlated measurements to set up a provably secure one-time-pad, and then do secure classical communication with it. But you don't communicate the actual bits of the pad, you just both get correlated ones.
You can take actions that will later turn out to be correlated with each other, but you can only find that out once you meet up again, bounded by the speed of light.
One side doing their interaction may cause a "spooky action at a distance" (according to some QM interpretations), but if you have only one side of readings and don't know what the other party measured in their interactions, you can't tell anything about what "the other side" did, so it does not help communication at all because you still need to transmit as many bits in a non-quantum way until you can do anything.
If the Universe were {analogy} is {real thing} related to {analogous thing}?