In Lake'ch - I am another yourself!
May the Inner Peace of Mind be with
you in these times of the present, which shall soon blend your pasts with your futures.
A great controversy in theoretical paradigm
building is the notion of how a single universe containing many consciousness carriers can relate to the statistical distribution
of those 'cosmic inhabitants'.
With the birth of quantum theory in the early decades of the 20th century came the realisation,
that the observer of physical phenomena is not absolutely independent from the system observed.
Bohr, Heisenberg, Schroedinger, Dirac, Born, Planck and Einstein, to mention but a few of the
'midwives' of quantum mechanics; constructed the mathematical formalisms to describe an interactive reality on the
microscopic or quantum level of measurement and soon realised, that the quantum realm of the very small did not behave in
the classical sense of the Greek-Newtonian physics on which the basis of scientific-physical reality stood.
As the worlds of the very
large, the scale of the universe as a macrocosm of galaxies behaving like cells in a biological body; had also become illuminated
by the pioneering cosmologists like Einstein, Hubble and Sandage; a synthesis of the macroworlds with the microworlds became
a new aim of research for all scientific thinkers, philosophers and experimenters concerned.
Until Edwin Hubble discovered the expansion
of the universe as a selfcontained entity; all light sources in the sky were assumed to be stars or 'island universes'
or 'nebulae' within a single universe - now rendered dynamically expanding and no longer static in its hitherto
presumed infinity-stasis of the Newtonian worldview.
For the remainder of the 20th century then, natural philosophers of divers kinds attempted
to blend the quantum nature of the macroscales with those of the microscales.
Many difficulties surfaced, such as the incompatibility of the quantum formalisms, built on the metrics of subatomic
and atomic displacements; with the metrics of the larger scales and as experimentally predicted and verified by the theories
of Newton and Einstein.
Eventually, and to accomodate the superposition of quantum selfstates derived from the quantum mechanics; a Many
Worlds Cosmos was proposed by exponents such as Hugh Everett and David Deutsch.
This is known as Many Worlds Interpretation (MWI) of quantum mechanics and is proposed to build on and to be complementary for
older quantum interpretations, such as the Copenhagen Interpretation, the Afshar Complementarity or the Cramer Transactional
Interpretation.
The MWI utilises the established quantum formalism of quantum field theory (QFT), which has been verified in countless
experiments as a valid model to describe the statistical-probabilistic nature of the 'particle' distributions in the
universe and its subsystems as 'stochastic' eigenvalues for 'standing waves' or 'Bohmian-pilotwaves'
describing the density distribution of the 'particles'.
But the MWI then proposes a Many Universe distribution on the macro-classical scale
of the universe itself to account for a distribution of the superimposed selfstates in a linear-classical geometry.
A particular distribution of eigenstates, say as 'materialisations' of the Schroedinger
equation, are so not confined in one universe as either-or materialisations, but are split into a number of universes identical
to the number of quantum eigenvalues derived from the equation as and-solutions.
As the distribution of those solutions is summed to accomodate the original 'set
of solutions' obtained in the one quantum universe; the linearity of Parallel Universes as superposed macroquantum universal
eigenstates can be alternatively accomodated in the model of the Many Mind Interpretation or MMI. The MMI became formally
introduced into the scientific database by Dieter Zeh in 1995 and expanded upon by Loewer and Albert.
In the MWI, the universe occupies a single
and fundamentally indeterminate quantum eigenstate with a noncollapsing wavefunction; but an evolution of this 'groundstate'
or wavefunction into higher and higher complexity in the splitting of macrouniverses and a say 'original infinite
mind' into many minds.
Any act of measurement or observation
so 'splits' an 'older parental' mind into its offspring in Decoherence, alternatively described as wavefunction
collapse in the 'competing' models for the quantum reality.
The MMI replaces the linear parallelism of singularised macrouniverses with an angular
parallelism of multiconnectedness of the one macrouniverse.
Here
the proposition of the MWI with its split of two observers in say two different macrouniverses and so with two now different
minds is replaced by a split of the two observers into two psychophysical universes.
In other words, the one physical observer within the one macro-universe splits
into two forms from its physical parent with a shadow psychophysical 'double' mirroring the former.
There are many problems with
both the MWI and the MMI, both as defined presently in their embryonic states of development; not at least the Definition
of the Selection of the Singular SelfState as the Seed for the subsequent 'splitting'.
But the MMI is more appropriate to the development of the encompassing formalism, than the MWI and
more shall be shared at the appropriate time.
What the MMI does, is point to a necessary Duality between the physical and the metaphysical
or the physical and the mental or the body and the mind - and also its necessary coupling in the 'negation' of this
Descartian Duality.
Both, the MWI and the MMI utilize the orthodox
interpretation of quantum mechanics, say the formalisms of Schroedinger, Dirac and Klein-Gordon.
Both so also 'copy' the inherent 'flaw' in those formalisms, to do with the nonlocality
and the indeterminant qualities embodied in the quantum-field-approach.
I direct the reader to familiarise with the concept of the Quantum Mind and especially
the pioneering works of Evans Harris Walker; Roger Penrose, Stuart Hameroff, Max Tegmark (opposing Penrose and Hameroff);
David Chalmers, Henry Stapp and most of all David Bohm, Karl Pribram and Fritjof Capra.
Please find below a brief
(wikipedia) outline of the MWI and the MMI.
IAmWhoIAm - A Quantum Computer!
[edit] The
Many-worlds Interpretation
Hugh Everett described a way out of this problem by suggesting that the universe is in fact indeterminate as a whole. That is, if you were to measure the spin of a particle and find it to be "up", in fact there are two "yous"
after the measurement, one who measured the spin up, the other spin down. Effectively by looking at the system in question,
you take on its indeterminacy.
This relative state formulation, where all states (sets of measures) can only be measured relative
to other such states, avoids a number of problems in quantum theory, including the original duality – no collapse takes place, the indeterminacy
simply grows (or moves) to a larger system.
Everett claims that the
universe has a single quantum state, which he called the universal wavefunction, that always evolves according to the Schrödinger equation or some relativistic equivalent; now the measurement problem suggests the universal
wavefunction will be in a superposition corresponding to many different definite macroscopic realms ("macrorealms");
that one can recover the subjective appearance of a definite macrorealm by postulating that all the various definite macrorealms
are actual – it seems to each observer that "we just happen to be in one rather than the others" because "we"
are in all of them, but each are mutually unobservable.
[edit] Continuous
infinity of minds
In Everett's conception the
mind of an observer is split by the measuring process as a consequence of the decoherence induced by measurement. In many minds each physical observer has a postulated
associated continuous infinity of minds. The decoherence of the measuring event (observation) causes the infinity of minds
associated with each observer to become categorized into distinct yet infinite subsets, each subset associated with each distinct
outcome of the observation. No minds are split, in the many-minds view, because it is assumed that they are all already always
distinct.
The idea of many minds was suggested early on by Zeh in
1995. He argues that in a decohering no-collapse universe one can avoid the necessity of distinct macrorealms ("parallel
worlds" in MWI terminology) by introducing a new psycho-physical parallelism, in which individual
minds supervene on each non-interfering component in the physical state. Zeh indeed suggests
that, given decoherence, this is the most natural interpretation of quantum mechanics.
The main difference between many minds and many worlds interpretations then lies in the definition of
the preferred quantity. The many minds interpretations suggests that to solve the measurement problem, there is no need to
secure a definite macrorealm: the only thing that's required is appearance of such. A bit more precisely: the idea is
that the preferred quantity is whatever physical quantity, defined on brains (or brains and parts of their environments),
has definite-valued states (eigenstates) that underpin such appearances, i.e. underpin the states of belief in, or sensory
experience of, the familiar macroscopic realm.
In its original version
(related to decoherence), there is no process of selection. The process of quantum decoherence explains in terms of the Schrödinger equation how certain components of
the universal wave function become irreversibly dynamically independent of one another (separate worlds — even
though there is but one quantum world that does not split). These components may (each) contain definite quantum states of
observers, while the total quantum state may not. These observer states may then be assumed to correspond to definite states
of awareness (minds), just as in a classical description of observation. States of different observers are consistently
entangled with one another, thus warranting objective results of measurements.
However Albert and Loewer suggest that the mental does not supervene on the physical, because individual
minds have trans-temporal identity of their own. The mind selects one of these identities to be its non-random reality, while
the universe itself is unaffected. The process for selection of a single state remains unexplained. This is particularly problematic
because it is not clear how different observers would thus end up agreeing on measurements, which happens all the time here
in the real world. There is assumed to be a sort of feedback between the mental process that leads to selection and the universal
wavefunction, thereby effecting other mental states as a matter of course. In order to make the system work, the "mind"
must be separate from the body, an old duality of philosophy to replace the new one of quantum mechanics.
In general this interpretation has received little attention, largely for this last reason.
[edit] Objections
Objections that apply to the many-worlds interpretation also apply to the many-mind interpretations. On the surface both of these theories
expressly violate Occam's Razor; proponents counter that in fact these solutions minimize entities by simplifying
the rules that would be required to describe the universe.
Another
serious objection is that workers in no collapse interpretations have produced no more than elementary models based on the
definite existence of specific measuring devices. They have assumed, for example, that the Hilbert space of the universe splits naturally into a tensor product structure compatible with the measurement under consideration. They have
also assumed, even when describing the behavior of macroscopic objects, that it is appropriate to employ models in which only
a few dimensions of Hilbert space are used to describe all the relevant behavior.
In his What is it like to be Schrödinger's cat? (2000), Peter Lewis argues that the many minds interpretation of quantum mechanics has absurd implications
for agents facing life-or-death decisions.
In general, the many minds
theory holds that a conscious being who observes the outcome of a random zero-sum experiment will evolve into two successors in different observer states, each
of whom observes one of the possible outcomes. Moreover, the theory advises you to favor choices in such situations in proportion
to the probability that they will bring good results to your various successors. But in a life-or-death case like getting
into the box with Schrödinger’s cat, you will only have one successor, since one of the outcomes will ensure your
death. So it seems that the many minds interpretation advises you to get in the box with the cat, since it is certain that
your only successor will emerge unharmed. See also quantum suicide and immortality.
Finally, it supposes
that there is some physical distinction between a conscious observer and a non-conscious measuring device, so it seems to
require eliminating the strong Church-Turing hypothesis or postulating a physical model for consciousness.
[edit] See
also
