Mitchell Porter

Comment Threads

• thevadiv commented on Roko's Basilisk wants YOU
  I stand corrected about Copenhagen, but proving reality was local would still screw up transactional, so hopefully my point is understood. ;) Every observable outcome would be identical, unless of course someone screwed up their math and its just garbage. Either I'm confused, or you missed something I said. My point was that the interpretations are indeed mathematically identical, so you can't test them. (The ones that aren't mathematically identical are usually rapidly disproven.) However, they _do_ make statements about reality, not about quantum outcomes, but about the actual composition of reality, and those statements can, in theory, be disproved...
• lex.aver commented on Roko's Basilisk wants YOU
  Wait, why should I care if I'm simulated after I die?...
• Bellinghman commented on Roko's Basilisk wants YOU
  Because the simulation is so perfect, so exact, that it actually is you. Yeah, I know, this involves measuring you here and now at atomic accuracy, to a level that not only breaks the Heisenberg Uncertainty principle but that drives a coach and horses over the fragments and then gathers the splinters up and uses them as tinder for building a bonfire. But ignoring those petty practicalities, it's going to happen because, well, because someone could imagine it happening and therefore it must be inevitable....
• paws4thot commented on Roko's Basilisk wants YOU
  I'd say that this imagining tells us more about the imaginer's lack of understanding of Quantum Mechanics than about how much we should or shouldn't care about it happening....
• dmytryl commented on Roko's Basilisk wants YOU
  Ahh, we are essentially in agreement then. I don't see though how locality would affect any exact interpretation in so much as locality can at all be inferred (sounds like an attempt to prove absence). If there was a non local interaction, it would knock the support from under everything that's motivated by locality, though. The way I see it, any new physics necessitates different laws of physics from what we know, with different set of interpretations, some of which can resemble current interpretations of QM; and some of current interpretations of QM may end up having no interpretations of...