X-Message-Number: 4779
From: Peter Merel <>
Subject: QM and heat-heaven
Date: Tue, 15 Aug 1995 02:15:51 +1000 (EST)

John Clarke writes,

>1) According to Quantum Mechanics we don't live in a
>deterministic universe.

That's not necessarily so. A recent and popular interpretation of
QM, Cramer's transactional interpretation, gives a perfectly 
deterministic, if non-local, picture of the universe. There's
a good explanation of it at



http://www.cis.ohio-state.edu/hypertext/faq/usenet/physics-faq/measurement-in-qm/faq.html

>2) Even if you ignore #1, chaos theory says you'd have to know
>the initial conditions with infinite precision  and perform
>calculations with infinite accuracy to make long range predictions.

Yes, I'd have to think that this is pretty insurmountable, unless
you favour our Mr Bozzonetti's recent idea about the relativity of black
holes.

>3) Even ignoring  #1 and #2,  the universe could be
>deterministic and it could still be impossible to deduce it's
>history. Chance is not involved in Chess but if I gave you a
>picture of a chess board halfway through a game you could still
>not determine all the moves that led up to it, because there are
>many different ways it could happen. If event A always causes
>event C to happen and event B also causes event C to happen
>things are deterministic, but if all you know about is event C there 
>is no way to know what caused it, event A or B. History is ambiguous.

I think I'd suggest an infinite-number-of-monkeys way out of this one.
Quantum computers, theory suggests, will be able to perform (locally)
non-deterministic computations. Extrapolating wildly, a quantum
neural-net trained with all the information available at a particular
point in time concerning a given individual could simulate every
possible individual that might have produced this information. Happily,
one of these individuals would be the fellow we're after, and so now
the only problem is inventing non-deterministic money so that he and
his mates won't starve.

>The experiments performed in the last 90 years have come out
>strongly in favor of the non determinism.

I think the best we can say is that the experiments preclude local 
(Gribbin's "strong") determinism. But I still wouldn't care to bet
on the nano-gods being able to bring Moravec back from heat-heaven.

--

Internet:           |         Accept Everything.            |

http://www.usyd.edu.au/~pete/          |         Reject Nothing.               |


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