X-Message-Number: 7910
From: Peter Merel <pete@zip.com.au>
Subject: Taoism, Uploading and Quantum Mechanics
Date: Fri, 21 Mar 1997 23:33:54 +1000 (EST)

Heh, there's a subject line for you. Okay, let's hit the high points:

With regard to the perennial identity/uploading thread, I thought it
might be useful to recapitulate the taoist notion of identity. This
notion appears to obviate the Cartesian mind/reality distinction
favoured by some of the notables here, and, so far as I'm concerned,
it's a far more self-consistent view of things. And it's quite simple:

Whatever is actually happening is not accessible to direct experience.
Instead, everything that exists, any way you understand it, is no more
than a map of what's happening. This map derives from sensation:
sensation measures what's actually happening; memory records sensation;
comparison of memory and sensation bears various mental constructs;
from these constructs are shaped all the things of the world; each of
these things is modelled in terms of feeling and doing. One's identity
is simply no more than this map.

This view may be mystical, but at least it contains only one mystery.  I
feel this is preferable, for its simplicity, over the multiplicity of
mysteries in the Cartesian view.  And this taoist view suggests that our
hardware is significant only in terms of its processing characteristics.

--

Mike Perry writes,

>Many-worlds upholds locality. [... only ...] apparently non-local
>correlations are seen. (It might be objected too that many-worlds, even
>if it does preserve locality, introduces an additional complication--the
>splitting iself. So we have what are called "non-deterministic finite
>state machines"--still finite-state machines however, and also still
>"deterministic" in the sense that we always know what is going to
>happen.)

Ah, but the point of saying that a finite space has a finite number of
states is to suggest that, in an infinite universe, this state must
cycle. I think that, even with only "apparently" non-local correlations,
this does not hold. Instead we must take the whole universe into account
in order to describe the process of any finite subspace of it; "apparently"  
or not, the state depends on doings outside the subspace. So FSMs,
non-deterministic or otherwise, lose their applicability.

>I haven't seen this article yet, but as I've said, progress with the 
>quantum computer tends to support many-worlds. 

Um, so far as I know, it only knocks Copenhagen on the head. That still
leaves several interpretations in the running. For my money Cramer's
transactional interpretation is far and away the pick of the litter,
catering to the quantum computation and related issues without requiring
the entire universe to split into two with every subatomic event. While
universe-splitting might be fun for science fiction writers, I can't see
that it's appealing when simpler explanations are readily available.

Peter Merel.

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