I don’t buy the anthropic interpretation for the same reason I don’t buy quantum immortality or grabby aliens, so I’m still weakly leaning towards thinking that decoherence matters. Weirdly I haven’t seen this dilemma discussed before, and I’ve not brought it up because I think it’s ifonharazdous—for the same reasons you point out in the post. I also tried to think of ways to exploit this for moral gain two years ago! So I’m happy to see I’m not the only one (e.g., you mention entropy control).
I was going to ask a question, but I went looking instead. Here’s my new take:
After some thinking, I now have a very shoddy informal mental model in my head, and I’m calling it the “Quantum Shuffle Theory” ⋆★°. If (de)coherence is based on a local measure of similarity between states, then you’d likely see spontaneous recoherence in regions that line up. It could reach equilibrium if the rate of recoherence is a function of decoherence (at some saturation point for decohered configurations).
Additionally, the model (as it works in my head at least) would predict that reality fluid isn’t both ergodic and infinite, because we’d observe maxed out effects of interference literally everywhere all the time (although maybe that’s what we observe, idk). Or, at least, it puts some limits on how the multiverse could be infinite.
Some cherry-picked support I found for this idea:
“Next, we show that the evolution of the pure-basis states reveals an interesting phenomenon as the system, after decoherence, evolves toward the equilibrium: the spontaneous recoherence of quantum states. … This phenomenon reveals that the reservoir only shuffle the original information carried out by the initial state of the system instead of erasing it. … Therefore, spontaneous recoherence is not a property associated only with coherent-state superpositions.” (2010)
Also, Bose-Einstein condensates provide some evidence for the shuffling interpretation, but my qm is weak enough that idk whether bog standard MWI predicts it too.
“a Bose–Einstein condensate (BEC) is a state of matter that is typically formed when a gas of bosons at very low densities is cooled to temperatures very close to absolute zero (−273.15 °C or −459.67 °F). Under such conditions, a large fraction of bosons occupy the lowest quantum state, at which point microscopic quantum mechanical phenomena, particularly wavefunction interference, become apparent macroscopically.”
I don’t buy the anthropic interpretation for the same reason I don’t buy quantum immortality or grabby aliens, so I’m still weakly leaning towards thinking that decoherence matters. Weirdly I haven’t seen this dilemma discussed before, and I’ve not brought it up because I think it’s ifonharazdous—for the same reasons you point out in the post. I also tried to think of ways to exploit this for moral gain two years ago! So I’m happy to see I’m not the only one (e.g., you mention entropy control).
I was going to ask a question, but I went looking instead. Here’s my new take:
After some thinking, I now have a very shoddy informal mental model in my head, and I’m calling it the “Quantum Shuffle Theory” ⋆★°. If (de)coherence is based on a local measure of similarity between states, then you’d likely see spontaneous recoherence in regions that line up. It could reach equilibrium if the rate of recoherence is a function of decoherence (at some saturation point for decohered configurations).
Additionally, the model (as it works in my head at least) would predict that reality fluid isn’t both ergodic and infinite, because we’d observe maxed out effects of interference literally everywhere all the time (although maybe that’s what we observe, idk). Or, at least, it puts some limits on how the multiverse could be infinite.
Some cherry-picked support I found for this idea:
Also, Bose-Einstein condensates provide some evidence for the shuffling interpretation, but my qm is weak enough that idk whether bog standard MWI predicts it too.