Objects of increasing complexity can be placed into superposition states in laboratory experiments. Proposals for viruses and bugs (tardigrade arthropods) have been discussed.
Can an "observer" (person) be placed into a superposition state?
Or do they necessarily "collapse" wavefunctions?
If a virus or bug can be placed into a superposition state, why can't you?
See related post: Schrodinger's virus.
> "Most" universes in a stochastic branching evolution world obey the laws of probability. ... But I wonder what this says from a foundations of probability perspective? Can we remove a postulate of probability theory using this argument? <
ReplyDeleteNot sure I followed your question? Could you elaborate?
Re: Bloch sphere, yes the picture is misleading. We don't mean that there are fixed regions which are realizable and others aren't. Actually our proposal isn't very well-defined other than it says to drop relative states of really small norm (thereby eliminating mavericks). The rest is just hand-waving to motivate the proposal. I haven't thought about the possibility that the uncertainty could involve mixed states -- we were just thinking about pruning the tree of offending (pure) subcomponents.
Steve,
ReplyDeleteif I understand your talk you solve the 'probability problem' of many worlds by introducing a 'discrete' Hilbert space.
Is evolution still unitary in this 'discrete' Hilbert space?
The "discrete" Hilbert model isn't very fleshed out. As I mentioned to Dave it's really just a hand waving reason to drop maverick sub-branches with very small norm. I guess I kind of have in the back of my head that the quantum simulation is running on a device of finite resources, so it is forced to eliminate very small norm components. But we never said explicitly how this happens.
ReplyDeleteWhen I give the talk I typically conclude by saying that there are no solutions to the probability problem that I find completely satisfactory :-)