X-Message-Number: 5048
From: 
Date: Tue, 24 Oct 1995 13:14:17 -0400
Subject: quantum bubbles

In defending pessimism about ischemia-damaged brains, Steve Harris used an
analogy with soap bubbles, something like: "You can't tell anything from a
big soap bubble about the little bubbles that went into it."  His argument is
that quantum uncertainties have completely obliterated the information about
the evolution of that final large bubble.

My reply related to brain damage and memory, but it may be more striking to
consider actual soap bubbles.

It may be true (at least with present capabilities and interpretations of
quantum theory) that you can't infer the history of the bubble just by
looking at that bubble. But the fallacy in Dr. Harris' larger argument is
that we are NOT restricted just to looking at that final bubble; we have
other potential sources of information.

For example, suppose an observer took photos of the initial small bubbles
coalescing into the final large bubble--perhaps even a continuous video at
high speed. Now the history (or that part of it revealed by reflected visible
light with available resolution) is captured and fixed. An observer who only
looks at the final bubble and attempts trajectory-tracing will be
disappointed, but an archivist who looks at the video will find much of what
he wants. History is anchored in those frames. 

Now comes the fun part:

Suppose in fact there was NOT any video shot. What of it? THERE COULD HAVE
BEEN. The bubbles don't know whether a camera is aimed at them, or whether
someone is looking. Leaving aside the opinons of Eugen Wigner and a few
others, material systems don't know or care who is looking. Once they have
reflected light or experienced other interactions, it doesn't matter whether
that reflected light is intercepted and interpreted by an intelligent
observer--the world isn't THAT strange, or at least that's my bet. The
observed and the observer are probably sufficiently uncoupled, and causality
probably does not work backward in time.

Once more:  The developing bubble could have been photographed, its history
recorded. Therefore it HAS a history, whether or not the recording actually
took place. This is spooky stuff to some people, and its implications have
been hotly debated for many years and into the present. 

To my mind--carrying no credentials whatever except a pretty good record of
common sense--the interpretation is clear and simple, viz.: quantum
uncertainties do not and cannot represent the last word.  History is anchored
at countless points, and there are many potential  resources for reading
it--not just trajectory tracing in artificially limited situations such as
those found in quantum text books. Every  event and object has so many
historical connections to other events and objects that every problem of past
inference probably has a unique solution.

Robert Ettinger
Cryonics Institute
Immortalist Society


Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=5048