bitcrafter

@bitcrafter@programming.dev

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I'm good, thanks⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  I think to some extent we have been talking past each other. Very roughly speaking, I think that am more worried about what happens in the middle of an experiment, where you are more worried about what happens at the end. I actually completely agree with you that when a conscious being performs a measurement, then, from the perspective of that being, both interpretations of what happened when it performed the observation are equivalent. That is, the being has no way of telling them apart, and asking which interpretation is true at that point is, in my opinion, roughly along the same lines as asking whether the objective world exists.

  (Just to be clear, it’s not my intent to get mystical here. I think of consciousness as essentially just being a way of processing information about the world, rather than positing the existence of souls.)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I'm good, thanks⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  The analogy to Galilean relativity actually is too kind. Galilean relativity relies on Euclidean space as a background, allowing an external viewpoint fixed to empty coordinates. Hilbert space is not a background space at all; it is always defined in terms of physical systems, what is known as a constructed space. You can transform perspectives in spacetime, but there is no transformation to a background perspective in Hilbert space because no such background exists. The closest that exists is a statistical transformation to different perspectives within Liouville space, but this only works for objects within the space; you cannot transform to the perspective of the background itself as it is not a background space.

  …which is why eventually you need to switch to the grown-up version of Quantum Mechanics, Quantum Field Theory, is defined in terms of relativistic fields with a single “universal” field for each flavor of particle.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I'm good, thanks⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  For what it’s worth, you’ve done a fairly good job describing my own understanding of MWI quite succinctly.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I'm good, thanks⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  I assume you have an emotional attachment to MWI without even having read Everett’s papers and getting too defensive that you refuse to engage seriously in anything I say, so I am ending this conversation here.

  Uhh, okay. Like, you were the one who felt the need to go on the attack here, but if you need to stop for your mental health than so be it. 🙂

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I'm good, thanks⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  To clarify my imprecise language, what “breaks down” is not its ability to give the correct answer, but the ability of the conceptual framework to give a clear explanation of what is going on, because it essentially defines measurement as “you know one when you see one”, which can lead to confusion.

  (However, separately, I do feel the need to point out that “entanglement” is not at all a term that is related to measurement results per se, but rather to the state of a system before you measure it. In particular, if a system is entangled, you can (in principle) disentangle it by reversing whatever process you used to entangle it so that you no longer get correlations in the measurements.)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I'm good, thanks⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  Again, as I said in my comment, the branches in MWI are just a visualization of the very simplest possible case, not a literal description of reality. It is unfortunate (though understandable) that people have latched on to them as if they were the central idea of MWI.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I'm good, thanks⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  1. A simpler way of stating my point is that entanglement is sufficient to understand measurement, and more importantly, what phenomena are “measurement-like” and which aren’t. Also, you missed my point regarding the Born rule. You can write down a mathematical model of an experimenter repeating an experiment and recording their measurements, turn the crank, and see the probabilities predicted by the Born rule fall out, without any experiment ever having taken place.

  2. I am confused, then, about what we are supposedly even arguing about here. (Are you sure you are even arguing with me, rather than someone else?)

  3. I did some searching and I think that what you are calling “relative states” is an older term for what we now call “entangled states”. Being entangled with another system implies (by definition) that there is a greater system containing you and the other system, and so on, which is how you end up with a universal system that contains everything. However, we do not actually believe that reality is dictated by quantum mechanics but by quantum field theory, which is manifestly built on top of special relativity and posits a single field for each kind of particle for the entire Universe, and describes the microscopic behavior so well that it is absurd. Of course, the next step is figuring out how to reconcile this with general relativity, but that isn’t something Copenhagen helps you out with either.

  4. First you criticize the way that I talked about branches, which I only mentioned briefly as a sort of crude visualization and explicitly called out as being such. Now you are claiming that I am “denying the physical existence of real-world discrete outcomes”?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I'm good, thanks⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  Yes, but it can be mathematically proven that this world was only made possible by the decimation of the population due to the tide pod challenge having been started two years earlier.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I'm good, thanks⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  One of the things that a quantum computer needs to be able to do in order to function is to hold information at rest, no different from your classical computer. There are two things that make this tricky. First, the information is analog, rather than digital. Second, the environment likes to sneakily “measure” your data so that it decoheres and no longer behaves the way it should. Both kinds of problems are in practice dealt with by encoding the quantum information so that errors can be corrected.

  If the word “decoheres” sounds really fancy, think about it this way: coherence versus decoherence is the difference between a rainbow and a grey cloud. In the former case the waves are able to interfere with each other in interesting ways, whereas in the latter case they scatter and do not interfere, producing boring results.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I'm good, thanks⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  If you are able to read this, then you exist as a conscious being. Everything else is just a model, which you experience as thought projected into your consciousness, just as you experience other senses.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I'm good, thanks⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  1. First, working in terms of decoherence is significantly simpler than worrying about whether something has been measured or not at every single step of the evolution of a system, because I have observed that when people do the latter they tend to get headaches contemplating the meaning of the “quantum eraser” when there is no need to. Second, you actually can observe Born’s rule in action by modeling the evolution of a system with an experimenter performing measurements and watching it emerge from the calculation.

  2. The only way that the two sides of the EPR pair know that they agree or disagree is by communicating with each other and comparing results, which can only happen through local interactions.

  3. I have no idea what you even mean by this. What makes the (terribly named) Many Worlds Interpretation nice is precisely that you can just treat everything as a wave function, with parts that might be entangled in ways you don’t know about (i.e., decoherence, modeled via density matrices).

  4. The fact that you are even making this claim is why I have trouble taking the rest of your comment seriously at all, because I specifically said, “However, it is important to understand that the concept of branches is just a visualization; it is nothing inherent to the theory, and when things get even slightly more complicated than the situation I have described, they do not meaningfully exist at all.”

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I'm good, thanks⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  I agree completely that that the Copenhagen interpretation makes an excellent phenomenological model in simple (albeit, very common!) settings. However, the problem is that it breaks down when you consider experiments such as the “quantum eraser” (mentioned in other comments here), which causes people to tie themselves into intellectual knots because they are thinking too hard about exactly what is going on with measurement; once one deprivileges measurement so that it becomes just another kind of interaction, the seeming paradoxes disappear.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I'm good, thanks⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  See, this is why I prefer the (terribly named) “Many Worlds” interpretation. Unlike the Copenhagen interpretation, it does not privilege measurement over other types of interactions between systems. That is, the wave function never collapses, it only seems to because you, as the observer, are part of the system.

  The easy way to see this is to imagine that you put some other experimenter inside of a box. When they perform a measurement, from your perspective the wave function has not yet collapsed, but from the experimenter’s perspective the wave has collapsed. Essentially, it is as if the system in a box has branched so that there are multiple copies of the experimenter within, one who sees each possible measurement result, but because you are outside of it you could, in theory, reverse the measurement and unite the two branches. However, it is important to understand that the concept of branches is just a visualization; it is nothing inherent to the theory, and when things get even slightly more complicated than the situation I have described, they do not meaningfully exist at all.

  (Also, if it seems implausible that a macroscopic system in a box could remain in a superposition of multiple states, you actually are not wrong! However, the reason is not theoretical but practical: any system inside the box will interact thermally with the box itself, so unless it is perfectly insulated you cannot help but interact with it and therefore measure it yourself. This keeps going until essentially the entire world cannot help but perform a measurement of your system. Preventing this tendency from screwing things up is one of the things that makes building quantum computers hard.)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How do I avoid becoming one with the botnet?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Hey, now, just because I am an overly paranoid person does not mean that you have to be as well!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How do you fight doomerism/pessimism in these trying times?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Thus dooming its fate.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How do I avoid becoming one with the botnet?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Thanks, your comment is an antidote to my paranoia that it is impossible to do anything to address all threats. 😀

  Given that your advice is very sound, I have a question: would I gain much by using OpenBSD? The conventional wisdom when I last checked is that it is the most secure unix-like operating system on the planet.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How do I avoid becoming one with the botnet?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Right, but there is an entire spectrum of plumbing maintenance. I am perfectly capable of plunging toilets, but when a drain fails to work after several attack on my part then it is time to call in the plumber.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How do I avoid becoming one with the botnet?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I mostly just like building and tinkering with things, and I really like the idea of setting up services that I control that host my own data that I can access from anywhere. I have no real interest in learning about more than the minimum amount needed to do that simply because that is not how I would like to spend my time.

  (Lest you continue to have the wrong impression that I am afraid of learning new things: There was a period in my life where I was constantly learning new technologies, programming languages, etc. Eventually I realized that I had demonstrated that I was capable of learning anything that I wanted, and there were so many things out there to learn that I needed to start becoming more selective. At the moment my learning goals tend to be more math focused; currently I am trying to learn graduate-level category theory and measure theory.)

  If I really need to master all of the steps that you’ve described before deploying my host on the Internet, then my conclusion is that it is more trouble than it is worth, because my concern is that if I screw up then I will make the Internet a worse place by contributing to botnets.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How do I avoid becoming one with the botnet?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  That does not sound so bad; the parent comment made it sound a lot worse than that.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How do I avoid becoming one with the botnet?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I admit nothing.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How do I avoid becoming one with the botnet?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Everything that you mention is sensible, but it seems like it would take so much time not only to set up but to perform the ongoing maintenance you described that it just is not worth the trouble to self-host, which is a significant factor in why I have not taken a shot at it.

• How do I avoid becoming one with the botnet?
  Submitted ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩ to ⁨selfhosted@lemmy.world⁩ | ⁨68⁩ ⁨comments⁩
• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Lab anxiety⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I mean, that’s just basic cooking technique!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Lab anxiety⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Nah, just cook them very, very, very thoroughly first, and you’ll be fine.

• "GOOD AI DON'T THINK! (They get even.)" would be a great name for a horror movie...
  Submitted ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩ to ⁨showerthoughts@lemmy.world⁩ | ⁨2⁩ ⁨comments⁩
• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Tradition is just bullying by dead people⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  The blood of our enemies.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Tradition is just bullying by dead people⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I will eat lasagna every year for Christmas dinner until I am in the grave, and I am perfectly fine with the fact that I was bullied into this by all the Italian ancestors who came before me because lasagna is delicious.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Meta is closing down three VR studios as part of its metaverse cuts⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Thank goodness there was nothing more useful we could have done as a society with all of the tens of billions of dollars that was spent on this project, or it would have been an incredible waste!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Instead of everyone leaving NATO, could everyone else just kick the US out?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  If by “advancing against Russia” you mean that a bunch of countries were extremely eager to sign up when given the chance, then arguably its Russia’s own fault that they felt the need to join a defense alliance so that their sovereignty would not be threatened in the future. And given that Ukraine has been invaded multiple times by Russia exactly because it does not have a NATO mutual defense guarantee, it sure looks like they had the right idea.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Instead of everyone leaving NATO, could everyone else just kick the US out?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  It might surprise you, but I do not actually get paid to post comments on Lemmy for living, so I am allowed to focus on the part of the argument that I think is strangest.

  The author of that comment was free to reply in turn by something along the lines of, “Fine, then drop Ukraine from the list, because I don’t need it to make my point.” Instead, they doubled down that it belongs there.