As to the author of the post to whom your responding what is your level of knowledge of quantum computing and quantum mechanics? By this I mean is your reading on the topic confined to Scientific American and what Eliezer has written or have you read for example Bohm on Quantum Theory?
Vague grasp of what the maths is supposed to do, without ever having actually worked through most of it. More than just SA and Eleizer, but mostly pretty much around that level.
The trouble with the explore-and-prune way of describing these things is it automatically makes people fall into speculation on what’s doing the choosing, how maybe ‘consciousness’ is picking the ‘best’ of the results and shaping the universe.
Understand enough to know it ain’t that, and that the maths tells us the probabilities of the outcomes, there’s no 3rd party ‘picking’ the one most advantageous to ’em.
But it’s hard to get people to understand that without a good intuitive picture of what’s really going on, just seemed to me that the problem was probably the ‘collapse-like’ system which everyone seems to fall back on when trying to produce this intuitive picture.
Personally I should probably work through the maths at some point. It’s on the list. The list is long though and I have a goddamned job so I never seem to get proper time for stuff.
Not sure that having done that would help to convince people who certainly won’t be working through the numbers that there’s no special consciousness effect going on though.
I recommend some reading: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_computer Start with this and then if you want more detail look at: http://arxiv.org/pdf/quant-ph/9812037v1 The math isn’t to difficult if you are familiar with math involved in QM, things like vectors, and matrices etc. http://www.fxpal.com/publications/FXPAL-PR-07-396.pdf This paper I skimmed it seems worth a read.
As to the author of the post to whom your responding what is your level of knowledge of quantum computing and quantum mechanics? By this I mean is your reading on the topic confined to Scientific American and what Eliezer has written or have you read for example Bohm on Quantum Theory?
Vague grasp of what the maths is supposed to do, without ever having actually worked through most of it. More than just SA and Eleizer, but mostly pretty much around that level.
The trouble with the explore-and-prune way of describing these things is it automatically makes people fall into speculation on what’s doing the choosing, how maybe ‘consciousness’ is picking the ‘best’ of the results and shaping the universe.
Understand enough to know it ain’t that, and that the maths tells us the probabilities of the outcomes, there’s no 3rd party ‘picking’ the one most advantageous to ’em.
But it’s hard to get people to understand that without a good intuitive picture of what’s really going on, just seemed to me that the problem was probably the ‘collapse-like’ system which everyone seems to fall back on when trying to produce this intuitive picture.
Personally I should probably work through the maths at some point. It’s on the list. The list is long though and I have a goddamned job so I never seem to get proper time for stuff.
Not sure that having done that would help to convince people who certainly won’t be working through the numbers that there’s no special consciousness effect going on though.