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Article 6220 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: daryl@oracorp.com (Daryl McCullough)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: Quantum consciousness
Message-ID: <1992Jun11.153806.15970@oracorp.com>
Date: 11 Jun 92 15:38:06 GMT
Organization: ORA Corporation
Lines: 36

clarke@acme.ucf.edu (Thomas Clarke) writes:

>Observer O1 sees events {e(t<T)}U{e1(t>=T)}
>Observer O2 sees events {e(t<T)}U{e2(t>=T)}
>where e1(T) is different from e2(T) (subsequenct events may differ
>also).
>A physical argment from continuity would say that since 
>O1=O2 for t<T then O1=O2 at t=T.  So as Einstein might have
>said "God rolls the dice and lets O1 see e1 and O2 see e2."
>
>I fail to see how this differs in essentials from a single
>observer watching "God roll the dice" to determine
>the outcome of an observation (that is a 
>"wavefucntion collapse").

In practice, there is no testable difference between the Many-Worlds
view and the collapse view. However, in the details there is a big
difference. With the standard notion that the wave function is
collapsed by observation, the collapse is objective, and everyone is
affected by the collapse (in that certain outcomes that were once
possible become no longer possible). In the Many-Worlds view, the only
collapsing that happens is in the subjective world of a single
observer. Therefore, the wave function can be "collapsed" relative to
some observers, and "uncollapsed" relative to others.

While MWI and the collapse interpretation make roughly the same
predictions, they are not, strictly speaking identical. The MWI
predicts that there could be interference effects between different
states of a human brain, while the collapse hypothesis says that such
effects are impossible. This is not really a testable difference,
since interference between different states of macroscopic objects is
in practice impossible to detect.

Daryl McCullough
ORA Corp.
Ithaca, NY


