February 25, 2009
- Quantum Suicide (triage #5) -
Just a quick post for today. Still working on that mega one…
But in the meantime… suicide!
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And, it should be no surprise to any of my regular readers that what I’m talking about in this case is quantum suicide. Check here for an in-depth explanation of quantum suicide, but I’ll try to break down the concept for you briefly.
Basically, you first take the whole Schrödinger’s cat experiment, where a cat placed in a box is either is or is not poisoned based on the measurement of a certain quantum particle (it’s a fancy box). For example, a clockwise spinning electron equals “dead kitty”, while a counter-clockwise spinning electron equals “live kitty”.
Since all quantum particles naturally exist in a state of superposition (which basically means they’re spinning in both directions at the same time, although that’s a bit simplified for the sake of our conversation here) and they stay in superposition until they are observed and measured. And once he’s shut in the our box, our cat pretty quickly achieves a state of superposition (of being both alive and dead) as well. Remeber, it’s a fancy box.
Until you open the box and look at it. Then the cat is either alive or dead.
The particle’s existence in a state of superposition is completely dependent on the its not being observed or measured in anyway. You’d never actually get to see the superimposed cat, since the acting of looking at it (or becoming aware of it) would be an act of observation. The best I can do is this:
Now get rid of the cat, and put in a person. And a gun. Pulling the trigger allows this same “fancy box” to measure that same particle. Clockwise spin equals “click”, counterclockwise spin equals “bang!”
Repeatedly pulling the trigger would cause a random pattern of observation and after one or two measurements, the person’s pretty much guaranteed to be dead. Sounds a lot like Russian Roulette, right? So why all the science? Why not just use good old fashioned blanks and bullets?
Well, according to the theories of a physicist named Hugh Everett, it’s not quite so easy as pure chance. What’s actually happening is that the state of superposition, when observed, is showing to the observer one of it’s possible states. To crib a bit from that earlier link (emphasis mine):
Because of Everett’s theories, known as the Many World’s interpretation, we can hazard a guess at a different way of viewing reality. Within this “giant quantum mechanical system” of the universe, all possibilities exist, and our acts of conscious observation simply tune into one or another possibility, depending on which ones are most readily available from within our current state of being.
This is why concentration and attention are so important, because as long as the focused observer is there, that person in the fancy box, pulling the trigger of the quantum suicide gun, will never him or her self experience that moment of explosive death. Other people might, but that one person never could.
Now, I don’t mean to imply that all random chance is controllable purely by observation. Clearly to anyone who’s lost a loved one, or even just lost a lot of money at blackjack, just watching and wishing doesn’t really effect the outcome. But that’s just our surface thoughts and desires. What about our deeply held assumptions and beliefs? What about those thoughts, emotions, and opinions that we hold to be truly self-evident and unquestionable.
These subconscious desires of “that’s just the way the world works” are what motivate our behavior and our actions. That’s where our true focus and attention are, whether we like admit it or not. That’s where the observer who’s measuring the quantum superposition rests. It’s not in our surface thoughts or emotions. If by chance it does happen that we can will our thoughts into existence, it’s the ones that we’re already carrying around with us all the time that are the ones we’re already willing into existence.
What we are failing to take into account are these subroutine beliefs that are going on in the backs of our mind, the patterns of awareness that we’ve held onto and cultivated until they exist on a level where we are no longer conscious of them. They in no way represent a conscious consistent wish for anything; they’re just a mess of different things we’ve picked up along the way.
This is what the splintered mind does, it’s repressed feelings and unexamined dogmas causing so many problems. These bits of cognitive dissonance that we carry around inside us all the time spread out fractally into reality, along tiny strings of little quantum measurements. Every decision, every time we pick “this” and not “that”, whether in our actions (do not commit adultery) or our thoughts (do not covet your neighbor’s wife), is a quantum measurement. It is the pulling-into-being of a “thing” out of the numinous quantum superposition which is the universe. This is the creation of karma, and we are all trapped within it. It requires our intense focus and attention to cut through it and see what other opportunities are still left to us. We need to start following those, and through following them, bring still newer and better opportunities into existence. And so on and so on, ad infinitum…
But until we take this karma effect into account, we cannot have any meaningful conversation about whether or not our thoughts have any effect on our realities. Because if we can do it, then we’re doing it already, and we’re doing it wrong.
That’s all for today. I’ll leave you with a couple of links and an image:
Is the world economic crisis a prelude to using the WORLD GAME? Hopefully.
You are on a line which extends to infinity:
Infinity in either direction
Symmetrical no matter where you are on the line
It all sums up as the point of indeterminate size
Thanks for linking to my poem, “You are the Point”. Another interesting post, ian!
It seems like Tegmark’s quantum machine gun is gathering steam, he proposed it twelve years ago, but I’m hearing more about it in the last month. And you’re right, it’s basically just a re-telling of the Schrodinger’s Cat thought experiment, but Tegmark makes it much more personal.
What I’ve been trying to get people to understand is that anyone who is alive at this instant is just as much an example of this same thought experiment – when you think about all the silly risks taken, all the near-miss accidents or malicious acts, all of the things that could have conspired to end anybody’s life before now, you are thinking about Everett’s Many Worlds. In a great many of those other parallel universes you are already dead, and in many more universes than that you never existed at all! The fact you are alive in the one you’re observing right now really is a statistical marvel, such an unlikely quantum outcome when you consider all the possible outcomes, that we should each be amazed at our continued existence every moment of every day.
In Tegmark’s thought experiment, each time the trigger is pulled, half of the many worlds in which the person in the box was still alive now see the person has died a senseless death. As per Zeno’s paradox, we can can see how each time we take away half of the remaining universes we will still be able to keep cutting the remainder in half again and again. What Tegmark would be horrified to hear, I’m sure, is that some are now saying that if you were in one of the universes where you took the bullet, your consciousness would leap into one of the parallel universes where the gun just clicked, hence the phrase “quantum immortality”. While I’m willing to discuss the possibility of ghosts as manifestations of consciousness that exist past a person’s death, I think this quantum suicide concept can be easily misconstrued – the universes where you die and don’t get to see the rest of your life are just as real as the ones where you beat the odds and get to continue on. If you die you die, and what happens to your consciousness after that is very different from what happens while you’re in your physical body.
Some of my blogs about death and the multiverse:
Going to the Light
http://imaginingthetenthdimension.blogspot.com/2009/01/going-to-light.html
Elvis and the Electrons
http://imaginingthetenthdimension.blogspot.com/2008/12/elvis-and-electrons.html
Have Each of Us Already Died?
http://imaginingthetenthdimension.blogspot.com/2008/11/tenth-dimension-polls-archive-24.html
Thanks for writing this thought-provoking blog entry, ian!
Rob
Comment by Rob Bryanton — February 26, 2009 @ 8:03 am
Thanks Rob, good to hear from you.
The whole “Many Worlds” theory is something I have a little trouble with. It seems that it’s often described as “every possible thing that could have happened has happened, somewhere in the multiverse”. Which is well and good, but that doesn’t really do anything for us unless we figure out a conscious observer interacts with this kind of reality. Or even just the mechanism by which a particle “picks” one certain way of manifesting. If we don’t know what makes this cross-section of the multiverse which we are experiencing different from every other cross-section, the theory has no impact on anything and is basically sci-fi! ;)
Of course, it’s a hard question, because consciousness is not something we know much about, especially when it comes to physics. The key thing is, if there’s this spectrum of options, these many worlds which exist side-by-side in 5 dimensions and higher (or however it works), then what decides which of these many worlds our consciousness “inhabits”? That is, is our consciousness actually existent in only one universe, so that it would then need to “leap” into another parallel universe for “quantum immortality” to work out?
I also don’t think it’s necessarily a question of the universe growing a new “branch” every time some change occurs. There’s too many changes happening simultaneously for such an infinitely branching system.
What seems more easily plausible (in the Occam’s Razor kind of way), is that these possible universes exist in a sort of spectrum, like radio waves, and that certain possibilities are pulled out of that spectrum and actualized into existence by consciousness.
Similarly to a radio antenna, once tuned into a certain frequency, consciousness attracts more of that same frequency. Once the connection is made between consciousness and possibility, that same kind of possibility is continually attracted to the consciousness. We get locked into one certain frequency, or configuration of possibilities, based on, well, based on something. This explains why we experience time in such a linear fashion.
When changes happen in life, it would be comparable to tuning into different radio stations. They’re all there at the same time, we just choose one or another. Of course, “choose” is a relative word. It’s not as easy as thinking and picking an option. But if these many possibilities exist, and we’re moving in and out of all of them, surely there must be some way to “steer” our course through this sea of information.
Also, since none of us are single nodes of consciousness in an otherwise unconscious spectrum of possibilities, physical reality is the possibilities that have already been “tuned into” and locked into place by past consciousness. These are things that work towards the ends that consciousness wants (whatever those ends might be). The shared human mind is like an array of radio telescopes, each receiving similar signals from different perspectives, painting an overall picture of reality.
What I’m trying to figure out is how. How can we learn to see these things happening, in order to interact with the different possibilities? Is there some kind of cosmic guide to the higher dimensional radio frequencies of possibility? Can we learn to better guide consciousness through the multiverse of possibilities? Who knows for sure, but it’s sure fun trying!
(I will also say I don’t believe in quantum immortality, nor anything that says we “create our own reality”. And yet, clearly the lesson of quantum mechanics is that conscious observation does have some manner of influencing reality, or at least the way that reality is perceived and experienced by that consciousness, and so therefore there might be some way for us to investigate that effect as well.)
Comment by Ian — February 26, 2009 @ 5:12 pm
Hi Ian, thanks for your comments. I agree, the radio station idea is very useful for imagining a large set of possible outcomes which are somehow “out there” simultaneously within the parallel universes of Everett’s Many Worlds, but each of us are tuned into only one. Everett’s theory says the other versions of the universe continue to exist but are “decoherent” to the one we’re observing, the radio station tuner idea also relates to that idea.
I love synchronicity. I was just going to write this message to you and discuss how free will ties into all this, when a message appeared in my inbox directing me to this site:
http://shamansun.com/2009/02/27/b-allan-wallace-on-free-will/
There’s an 8 part podcast you can listen to there that talks about this from a buddhist perspective, check it out.
It’s very easy to be in our own unique consciousness and think that our experience is so rich, so complex, so deep, that there couldn’t possibly be so many other copies of us out there within Everett’s Many Worlds. Thinking about the probabilistic nature of quantum reality shows us that there is generally a most likely path, so perhaps there really is one “real” you or me and everything else is just part of the indeterminate wave function that is never realized. What I dislike about applying this reasoning to the extreme is it then pushes us back to hard determinism – there is only one universe and our free will is an illusion.
http://imaginingthetenthdimension.blogspot.com/2008/10/you-are-me-and-we-are-all-together.html
In the above blog I talk about a strange dream I had that shows how free will and the rich reality of individual consciousness can be applied to the extreme to Everett’s Many Worlds. This is also what I’m talking about it in this blog from a few days ago:
http://imaginingthetenthdimension.blogspot.com/2009/02/you-have-shape-and-trajectory.html
and in older blogs like this one:
http://imaginingthetenthdimension.blogspot.com/2008/05/anime-gaming-and-cusps.html
Keep up the great work Ian, these are important ideas to explore.
Rob
Comment by Rob Bryanton — March 1, 2009 @ 7:37 am
Thanks Rob. Someone else mentioned the decoherence thing as well, and I appreciate the difference. I just wonder if there’s any way of observing the interaction there, while still within our own unique viewpoint. Obviously no one has any easy answers to this kind of stuff, but if the 3D universe if created one plank length at a time at the speed of light, I am wondering if Everett’s Many World’s theory might help us come up with a way to understand how to steer ourselves through those possibilities….
Of course, that is based on the assumption that moving through time, as we seem to do, is just another way of moving between Everett’s Many Worlds.
That’s an awesome dream. I’ve had the longer-than-expected kind of dream, but never that long. I’d read that when you first posted it, but didn’t really register that at the time. I like that song too, “seven is infinity a formless bore”. An important thing to remember!
I guess what I’m looking for is a way to identify and know Cusp moments, so as to make the best use of them. Is there a rhythm to them, an invisible landscape of changes over which time flows?
Comment by Ian — March 8, 2009 @ 11:15 pm
Oh shit. And I completely forgot to mention that I’ve actually already listened to that pod cast. Allan Wallace is great, really connecting between contemplative study and science. But I listened to it again this weekend, so thanks for bringing it up!
Comment by Ian — March 9, 2009 @ 8:28 am