Ever since the implications of quantum entanglement between particles became unavoidable for physicists and cosmologists, the doubt of the accuracy or completeness of Einstein’s general and special theory of relativity became real… Einstein himself called quantum entanglement “spooky action at a distance” because the possibility of faster than speed of light transfer of information between two entangled particles (no matter what distance between them) would violate relativity and the fundamentals of one of the most successful theories in science…
Recently, however, several experiments have confirmed that entanglement is not only real but it seems to violate relativity.
The results of the first experiment have provided the speed of entanglement, which was measured to be at least 10.000 times faster than the speed of light. here
In the second experiment scientists have been able to send data via quantum entanglement at 1200 km distance. Next OP will be on this theme…
Quantum entanglement is a phenomenon in quantum physics where 2 particles, like photons or electrons, become entangled, or their quantum state, or properties, became interdependent. Any change to the property of one entangled particle instantaneously (or faster than speed of light) affects the other. Einstein believed that the exchange of information at the speed faster than speed of light would create paradoxes, such as sending information to the past. That was one of the reasons Einstein and many other physicists have rejected quantum mechanics as either incomplete or false. And yet, up until today, no experiment has ever contradicted any of the predictions of QM.
As the experiments clearly show, the speed of entanglement is at least 10.000 faster than the speed of light and if that is the case, then entanglement violates relativity, as quantum information about the quantum state of one entangled particle instantaneously affects the other entangled particle…
So, if that is true, as it clearly appears to be, why didn’t we hear about it on the News?
What I would like to do with this OP is to get everyone involved to state their opinion or provide facts why these news have not been widely spread or accepted…
As most of you probably suspect, I have my own theory about it…Yes, just a theory…for now… 😉
BTW: I love quantum mechanics…
Just like Steven Weinberg once said: <strong><i>”Once you learn quantum mechanics you are really never the same again…”
I have my complaints about the folks here who are dismissive of philosophy. To them I am satisfied to the great empiricist philosopher Daniel Dennett: “There is no such thing as philosophy-free science; there is only science whose philosophical baggage is taken on board without examination.”
That’s different from my complaints about Kurzweil. Kurzweil isn’t a quack because he dismisses philosophy; he’s a quack because his empirical claims rest on philosophical assumptions that he doesn’t defend and are indefensible in the version he deploys.
To be brief: everything I’ve seen from Kurzweil requires a far stronger version of functionalism than any philosopher of mind could find defensible. There’s a reason why he’s not taken seriously by philosophers, psychologists, computer scientists, and others who actually know what they’re talking about.
Mung:
KN:
Mung is a former porn addict. Jesus helped him kick the habit. (Seriously, that’s what he’s told us.)
Of all people you should know that I’m usually a fan of folks defending the foundations on which their beliefs rest.
That is what presupositionalism is all about.
the folks I’m talking about can’t be bothered to even take the time to examine their philosophical presuppositions.
I get tons of grief at the mere suggestion that folks here even have presupositions that might need to be examined and defended.
So in this instance I’m simply ignoring that sort of thing and starting from the place where I find them.
“Materialists” of this nature are perfectly happy to leave aside the philosophical problems associated with individual identity and its persistence because they just don’t care
so I am simply obliging them in this regard.
Now I could dismiss their position because I find their philosophical grounding to be lacking but if I did that I would never understand their perspective.
Instead I want to understand where they are coming from.
peace
I promise after this discussion I will again at some point ask for you to defend your persistent implicit claims to objective knowledge and will again endure your wrath at the suggestion that you would have something to defend in this regard.
For now let’s just agree to let the matter slide.
😉
peace
I guess that is what he calls fleshing out an argument.
If I am immortal what is the rush?
Invest in property?
Now you are citing a sci-fi story as evidence, the fi stands for fiction.
little choices have large consequences when we are talking about the MWI
Invest in your infinite tomorrow.
Don’t make enemies. Take care of your body.
Things like that
It’s simply an illustration. In Christianity it would be called a parable
peace
That is not unique to the MWI. What is unique is whenever one makes a choice, there is an another possible world where you made another possible choice, there is no avoiding every possible consequence whatever you choose because you choose differently in another possible world.
Don’t worry, one of your possible selves will.
All will die before you, as will all your friends, and will you in some possible world. Immortality may not be all that it is cracked up to be.
Ditto, why worry, someone will.
Worry or not, you end up both dead and immortal per Everett. In heaven and hell.
Likewise one might use the story of Three Little Pigs as evidence that pigs build houses out of brick?
peace
Parables aren’t meant to be taken literally. If you’re actually trying to address “materialists” (which I find doubtful) then you’re need to be talking about what’s literally true (or false). Parables and stories aren’t going to work.
That’s pretty rich coming from someone who insists on using the word “materialism” in a way that no one else ever has or will.
🙂
Yes. I guess I could have said that you refuse to read all the people I keep suggesting and it would be at least as truthful as what you wrote about me.
Have you actually read anything I’ve suggested? For that matter, are there any “materialists” you’ve actually read for yourself?
The kind of people I’m talking about would never waste time writing about materialism. They would scoff and laugh at such a fruitless activity.
If you asked them to expend effort explaining or defending their philosophical position they might say something like.
quote:
“You keep yourself all busy doing that while the rest of us get on creating and improving the world.”
end quote
peace
If you don’t like materialist I’m fine with you coining a term to describe the millions of folks who like Kurzweil and company can’t be bothered by anything that is not empirically measurable.
As Ive said several times I’m not trying to have a philosophical discussion here. Lets save that for another time.
I want to discuss the implications of the Many Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics when it comes to immortality for folks who aren’t interested in things like “individual essences” or the particular nature of consciousness.
Can you do that??
peace
There are no such implications. In order to claim that there are, you have to change the meanings of the terms. What you are really doing, is creative fiction.
That is not what Everett thought and he proposed the MWI in the first place so he should know better than you. Don’t you think?
peace
No–either he meant something odd by immortality, or he was mistaken. I don’t care what else he might have gotten right (if anything).
Only if you are hung up on stale philosophy.
The fact is his concept of immortality in shared by tons of folks.
quote:
Others took a more extreme view. In the many-worlds interpretation espoused by the American physicist Hugh Everett, the authority of the wave function and its governing Schrödinger equation was taken as absolute. Measurements didn’t suspend the equation or collapse the wave function, they merely made the Universe split off into many (perhaps infinite) parallel versions of itself. Thus, for every experimentalist who measures an electron over here, a parallel universe is created in which her parallel copy finds the electron over there. The many-worlds Interpretation is one that many materialists favor, but it comes with a steep price.
Here is an even more important point: as yet there is no way to experimentally distinguish between these widely varying interpretations. Which one you choose is mainly a matter of philosophical temperament.
end quote:
from here
https://aeon.co/essays/materialism-alone-cannot-explain-the-riddle-of-consciousness
peace
First google result for Everett,mwi and immortality
Many-Worlds Interpretations Can Not Imply ‘Quantum Immortality’
Jacques Mallah, Ph.D. (jackmallah@yahoo.com) http://onqm.blogspot.com/
Abstract:
The fallacy that the many worlds interpretation (MWI) of quantum mechanics implies certain survival in quantum-Russian-roulette-like situations (the ‘Quantum Suicide’ (QS) thought experiment) has become common enough that it is now necessary to publicly debunk this belief despite the risk of further publicizing it. ‘Quantum Immortality’ (QI) is an extension of the QS Fallacy (QSF) with some additional unlikely assumptions. The QS/QI ideas are examined here and shown to be false..
More from the article
quote:
The attraction of the many-worlds interpretation, for instance, is its ability to keep the reality in the mathematical physics. In this view, yes, the wave function is real and, yes, it describes a world of matter that obeys mathematical rules, whether someone is watching or not. The price you pay for this position is an infinite number of parallel universes that are infinitely splitting off into an infinity of other parallel universes that then split off into … well, you get the picture.
end quote:
peace
A search of this article returns zero results for immortality
newton,
thanks.
Finally something solid I can sink my teeth into
peace
Your point?? The article is not about immortality per say.
It’s about the different interpretations of QM and their relationship to naive materialism
peace
from the blog
quote:
A common variation is for him to arrange a bet, such that he gets rich in the surviving branches only, which would thus seem to benefit him. Of course in the branches where he does not survive, his friends will be upset, and this is often cited as the main reason for not doing the experiment.
That it is a fallacy can be seen in several ways. Most basically, the removal of copies of Bob in some branches does nothing to benefit the copies in the surviving branches; they would have existed anyway. Their measure is no larger than it would have been without the QS – no extra consciousness magically flows into the surviving branches, while the measure in the dead branches is removed. If our utility function states that more human life is a good thing, then clearly the overall measure reduction is bad, just as killing your twin would be bad in a classical case.
It is true that the effective probability (conditional on Bob making an observation after the QS event) of the surviving branches becomes 1. That is what creates the QS confusion; in fact, it leads to the fallacy of “Quantum Immortality” – the belief that since there are some branches in which you will always survive, then for practical purposes you are immortal.
But such a conditional effective probability being 1 is not at all the same as saying that the probability that Bob will survive is 1. Effective probability is simply a ratio of measures, and while it often plays the role we would expect a probability to play, this is not a case in which such an assumption is justified.
We can get at what does correspond for practical purposes to the concept of ‘the probability that Bob will survive’ in a few equivalent ways. In a case of causal differentiation, it is simple: the fraction of copies that survive is the probability we want, since the initial copy of Bob is effectively a randomly chosen one.
A more general argument is as follows: Suppose Bob makes an observation at 12:00, has a 50% chance QS at 12:30, and his surviving copies make an observation at 1:00. Given that Bob is observing at either 12:00 or 1:00, what is the effective probability that it is 12:00? (Perhaps he forgets the time, and wants to guess it in advance of looking at a clock, so that the Reflection Argument can be used here.) The answer is the measure ratio of observations at 12:00 to the total at both times, which is therefore 2/3.
That is just what we would expect if Bob had a 50% chance to survive the QS: Since there are twice as many copies at 12:00 compared to 1:00, he is twice as likely to make the observation at 12:00.
Most of your observations will be made in the span of your normal lifetime. Thus QI is a fallacy; for practical purposes, people are just as mortal in the MWI as in classical models.
end quote:
peace
Of course most walto’s will die that is obvious. 100 waltos does not contain more information than one does. The immortal walto will be on the extreme tail of the bell curve.
You only need one walto to live on for him to be immortal.
peace
from the paper
quote:
here is why the factor of physical distinctness is irrelevant: Just like with Star Trek’s transporter
beam, the experimenter would have no need to fear if he was made to vanish while another copy is simultaneously created elsewhere.
More generally, assuming a physicalist/functionalist philosophy of mind (as MWIers generally do), personal identity over time is not a fundamental thing. Even the atoms that make up a person are not constant over time. And given the possibilities of personal fission and fusion, personal identity is not well-defined.
For most practical purposes an identity can be defined that depends on such things as causal chains and memories, but all copies have the same
memories. Casual chains could be discussed in terms of modeling the individual as an implementation of an extended computation, but in the analogous quantum mechanical case, the number of such computations would correspondingly decrease in the ‘quantum suicide’ case. It is equally valid to eschew all definitions of personal identity extended over time; any
conscious observation involves only a single
observer-moment and that is the only
fundamental thing.
quote:
exactly
peace
I think this post deserves serious consideration as long as someone can tell the difference between quantum teleportation, the many worlds theory and whatever fifth has come up with that makes people respond to…
Quantum Mechanics violates the relativity theories in a sense that both theories “do not fit together” unless one has one of the concepts removed… That’s why Einstein struggled to unify them because he had already committed himself to time and space of relativity…
The removal of the concept of time fits beautifully into the QM, but relativity stinks with that concept…
Is something is missing?
How about the so-called Dark Energy with inexpiable properties as per relativity theory??? There would be some resistance there… for one reason or another…
I think by ‘stale’ fmm must mean halfway sensible. Otherwise he’s not making any more sense than Everett.
What’s dumb about this confab is that to point to paradoxes of physicalism stemming from considerations of personal identity, you don’t need MWI at all. There are lots of concerns without introducing a highly controversial interpretation of quantum theory. If anything, it just weakens the points that fmm is obviously trying to make.
Your post
Only if you are hung up on stale philosophy.
The fact is his concept of immortality in shared by tons of folks.
quote:
Others took a more extreme view. In the many-worlds interpretation espoused by the American physicist Hugh Everett,
No discussion of his concept of immortality. Traditionally the introduced quote should support the preceding assertion. Just saying.
No problem, my question is why are you being so stubborn about the objections to Everett’s position. He may be an expert on physics but the immortality aspect of the theory is an hypothesis about consciousness. You would need to demonstrate his expertise in that area as well if you wish to appeal to authority.
He read the short story.
They certainly have more fingers and toes.
Correct ,now all you need to show it is immortality is a possible outcome of any decision made by a walto born in 1952. Otherwise we don’t know.
Do you think immortality is impossible?
Seems to me that would be an important piece of information to the folks I hang with.
Tippler thought that civilization would simply resurrect walto at some future date when technology improved.
Why would something like that not be at least theoretically possible?
If it’s possible according to MWI it will happen.
peace
I’m really not interested in pointing out the paradoxes of physicalism at this time.
In fact I’m doing my damnedest to get you all to ignore the paradoxes for a minute and just discuss the science surrounding quantum immorality.
Because of it’s baggage you and I will never accept this idea but a good chunk of society is not encumbered by our quaint antiquated interest in philosophy.
peace
because mainstream science is not persuaded by those objections.
The MWI is still a viable interpretation and it is the main alternative for folks who don’t like Copenhagen and its reliance on the observer.
I’m interested in what makes folks like that tick.
If you can show scientific reason for adherents of the MWI to not accept quantum immortality I’m all ears.
peace
I beg to differ. (Hope that’s not a rules violation. Seems nicer than calling 2/3 of the people here despicable morons, but I admit that the rules make no sense to me.)
That’s false. Mainstream science does not support this immortality connection that you’re hawking (for reasons you seem not to grasp).
Long, long time since I posted here. A few thoughts on this topic before I go back to lurking.
Forgetting about MWI, our bodies change molecules all the time. To paraphrase Feynman: today’s brains are just yesterday’s mashed potatoes. So for MWI, I don’t think it is helpful to the question of personal identity to say the two copies will have different physical brains after the world splits. That happens all the time in the ordinary world but we still make decisions about personal identity.
Even in the ordinary world, physics is not the right science to determine whether two entities at different times are the same person since personal identity is not a concept that is used in theories of physics. Biologists and psychologists would have more to say, probably picking out the same person by the right kind of causal continuity of body or mind or both. But their theories of identity cannot deal with the fissioning of a person in MWI. Only philosophy has thought about that. So we need to rely on philosophy.
The IEP article on personal identity has a section on fissioning. There are many philosophical positions, but if we want to explore the consequences of the immortality thought experiment, we need to accept one where the pre-split person cares about all the persons in the split worlds.
So we have these assumptions for the thought experiment.
1. QM tells us something about reality, and MWI is the right interpretation for what it tells us.
2. Original living persons care about each living person resulting from their split.
3. For each person, there exists of sequence of quantum splits so that one result of each split keeps them alive and fully aware. Immortality for one chain of copies results from this.
Under those assumptions, what should a materialist do to plan for a future?
Well, we are talking about a materialist, so all that matters is material things, namely assets.
But asset planning under uncertainty of life span is a well understood field. Or, at least, financial advisors will tell you it is. You need to decide how to spend your savings in retirement, not knowing how much longer you will live. Spend too much too soon and you run out of money. Spend too little and you die without enjoying your hard-earned savings.
Now the thought experiment effectively says that the probability function for your life time has an infinite tail: you could live forever. But that is no big deal. Many probability distributions used in financial planning have infinite tails. To make sure they are acceptable for statistics, one just needs the cumulative probability to sum to one which means that the probabilities need to get very small as lifetimes approach infinity.
But that is exactly what happens in the thought experiment, since the probabilities for a sequence of the needed quantum splits are independent and so multiply together, rapidly approaching zero. (Remember that infinite geometric series have finite sums).
So, what should a materialist do under quantum immortality?
Answer: Work with a reputable financial planner.
A few thoughts on other preceding posts before I re-lurk.
On the original topic of compatibility of relativity and entanglement.
For Special Relativity, Tim Maudlin has written a whole book analyzing the issue in detail. Suppose A and B share entangled particles and then move far apart (but in co-moving reference frames so simultaneity makes sense). Then he says:
1 A cannot signal B using measurements on the entangled particles. This is what most would focus on to explain why QM is compatible with SR. Basically, viewed on their own, A’s measurement and B’s measurement are each random regardless what other does. It’s only when we look at them together that we see correlation.
2. Purported FTL particles like tachyons cannot be used to signal.
3. If one accepts counterfactual accounts of causation, and A measures before B (according eg to some co-moving observer), then A’s result causes B’s result in counterfactual sense. But that causation cannot be used for signaling, as explained above.
4. There is quantum information sharing between A and B: that correlation is what Bell proved.
As is well known, General Relativity is not compatible with QM, in particular for extreme situations like black holes.
There have been preceding posts about “collapse of the wave function” in MWI. There is no such thing. The heart of MWI is that the universal wave function underlies all that is real; it does not collapse but rather it branches. Our experiences are the result of emergence of structure in those branches of the wave function and the entanglement of the structures underlying brains and bodies in each branches with the outcomes in those branches.
Some posts have referred to Copenhagen interpretation. It is not a well defined interpretation (see SEP article on it). Wave function collapse was formalized by von Neumann; Bohr did not believe in it but instead pushed vague ideas about complementarity. Today, few physicists and philosophers who study interpretations of QM take Copenhagen seriously. Instead, for scientific realists, the big three are Bohmian hidden variables, GRW spontaneous collapse, and MWI. Anti-realists tend to be quantum Bayesians. Lewis has a nice book “Quantum Ontology” for anyone interested in details.
Everett invented the basic ideas behind MWI, but stopped working on it soon after, in the late 1950s. MWI today is much changed from his original idea. As for quantum immortality, even modern thinkers as open to MWI and multiverses as Max Tegmark doubt its possibility. See the end of the Wiki article on quantum immortality.
Hi Bruce! So nice to see you here!! I love seeing your thoughtful, informative posts.
First, I entirely agree that we can’t just leave concerns about personal identity aside when discussing this. Immortality isn’t a scientific concept.
Second, I have a couple of comments on this:
FMM definitely needs assumption 1, so we’ll let that go.
2. is interesting but, I think obviously false. That is, we can’t make caring the criteria for personal identity both because it’s quite clear that there are people who don’t care about their futures and simple to construct stories in which people care about some successor who is definitely not them (say, because they don’t want some loved one to be unhappy).
A defense of the first sentence of 3 is something that Newton, KN and I have been asking for, for about a week. Leaving aside the second sentence, which requires us to get into the philosophical aspects of personal identity, does it seem right to you that there must always be a conscious, continuing walto COUNTERPART? Could it be argued that it’s physically impossible to keep a brain operational for a million years? Must we always assume that there’s some version of kickapoo joy juice that will keep one going forever?
BruceS,
I’m heartened to hear that Bohmianism isn’t completely dead. It’s still my favorite way to stave off spookiness. Seems like it has an awful tough row to hoe, though…..
Count me in. Plato, Aristotle …
🙂
I can testify that quantum immorality is real.
BruceS,
BruceS, great to see you here again!
I owe you an email on Millikan!
I don’t need to coin any new terms when there are two that are perfectly appropriate, which I’ve already mentioned, and which you show no interest in using: empiricism and verificationism. Ladyman and Ross (in Every Thing Must Go have shown that intellectually respectable naturalism consists of taking empirical verifiability (specifically, measurability) as a criterion of epistemic significance.
To discuss the implications of a scientific theory that go beyond what can be experimentally confirmed is to have a philosophical discussion.
I could, but I really don’t want to. I’m basically convinced by the objections to the Many Worlds Interpretation that Hilary Putnam raises in his “A Philosopher Looks At Quantum Mechanics (Again)” (2005). I’m no expert in physics or philosophy of physics, but I’d need reasons for taking the MWI seriously as opposed to other interpretations of QM before embarking on speculation about the branching of individual consciousnesses as universes branch off.
These days I’m more interested in structural approaches to naturalizing representation, which you posted about yourslef some time ago. They do a better job of supporting local causation and also Ramsay’s job desciption challenge.
I’m debating getting Neander’s book “Mark of the Mental” on naturalizing representtion at some point. Have you seen it? Piccinini does recommend it in a footnote in one of his recent papers.
On posting here: a s you have pointed out, many of the posters are not interested, it seems to me, in exploring the topics in detail beyond maybe a YT video, often by someone I see as a crank. I don’t plan to engage with them.
I use the structural resemblance approach in my most recent paper. I argue that the structural resemblance approach in cognitive neuroscience is the best way of understanding what Sellars meant by “picturing,” so we can use Sellars’s overarching conceptual system to embed cognitive neuroscience within a larger philosophical system. I’ll send it your way. I’ve also been writing about Rorty’s rejection of picturing, which I presented a conference in Helsinki a few weeks ago, and how that leads Brandom and McDowell to misunderstand Sellars.
I have a copy but I haven’t started it yet. A friend of mine who is a neuroscientist at Duke recommends it very highly.
My post was about what a materialists should do if they accept all the assumptions as desired by FMM. I think my punch line about financial planners is correct under those assumptions although probably too mundane for what FMM wants to hear.
On 2: I don’t know much of the details of philosophical positions on personal identity. I’m not sure if counterpart concept applies: I associate it with modal reasoning and possible worlds. But under MWI all the worlds are real and part of our universal wave function. Instead, perhaps you can make the case that they are all you because they are in separate worlds but all equally psychologically continuous to you, as I think FMM was gesturing towards in an earlier post about experiences. Or maybe a variant of Parfit’s view (as I understand it) might work: they are not you but you should care about them.
For 3: I agree it is very likely wrong, as Tegmark says in the Wiki entry. I suspect biochemistry constrains the possible quantum events, maybe as part of the decoherence process. But who knows? If such events are possible, the probability of a sufficiently long sequence to be observable is likely so tiny that it would not be expected to ever happen in the lifetime of the universe.
It’s similar to the thought experiment where all the air molecules in the room rush simultaneously to one corner of the room, leaving you breathing-challenged. Not impossible under statistical mechanics, but unlikely to happen in the life of the universe. And again, like biochemistry and decoherence and QM, the thought experiment is based on the SM idealizations (eg dealing with ideal gas) which do not apply to actual world.