xkcd #3134: Wavefunction Collapse
Title text:
Wavefunction collapse is only one interpretation. Under some interpretations, graduate students also have souls.
Transcript:
Transcript will show once it’s been added to explainxkcd.com
Source: https://xkcd.com/3134/
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This reminds me of this old hacker koan:
A novice was trying to fix a broken Lisp machine by turning the power off and on. [Tom] Knight, seeing what the student was doing, spoke sternly: “You cannot fix a machine by just power-cycling it with no understanding of what is going wrong.”
Knight turned the machine off and on.
The machine worked.
Well it’ll work, until the unfixed root cause break the machine again.
what if the root cause was some system variable, which got reset on boot and never happens again (for example some code you wrote accidentally triggered lower voltage for your cpu, and you have hitches)
You don’t really know it will cause it to break again with no understanding of what is going on.
“Problems that go away by themselves come back by themselves.”
I thought there was a chance that AlexisFR would respond without realizing that I was repeating the important part of the koan as a joke, because you don’t always see the context when looking at replies to your comments. But I didn’t expect that a random person who had apparently just read the koan 5 seconds earlier would already have forgotten it.
Just ask Tom to reboot it again.
you don’t have a soul, but the particle detector does
Superdeterminism FTW; it makes the same predictions as all other quantum interpretations, but makes me feel good about the universe (e.g. doesn’t have this wavefunction collapsing from observations weirdness), so I stick to it. I may be slightly autistic.
Superdeterminism to me is the worst. It basically means the Universe looks the way it does because it just is. Like it’s not because particles move, interact, based on a set of fundamental laws and that ultimately gives rise to the universe we see. No, superdeterminism means there’s no rules, the universe is just made like this. Every particle is meticulously put into place to make it look as if there are physical laws, like a grand conspiracy.
It’s kinda like last-Tuesdayism.
That’s not really related to the idea of superdeterminism. Superdeterminism literally just posits that the choice on which experiments are to be performed is determined by the same universe and its rules as the outcome of those experiments. The universe still has an initial state and a set of laws it obeys, it just does so deterministically.
That’s not it. You are just describing determinism, not superdeterminism. Superdeterminism says not only are the observations performed by you and your partner determined, but they are also determined in such a way to make quantum entanglement looks real. i.e. there’s no quantum entanglement, the particles are independent, but the universe conspires to make you measure in such a way that your results appear correlated.
And if you generalize measurement to mean any interaction you have with the world, you get what I described earlier.
You are part of the wavefunction. There is no collapse, just entanglement.
I’m just going to leave this here: Wigner’s friend.
In Timelike Infinity, there’s a group following that logic through to its conclusion, committing a bit of terrorism on the galactic scale to make Ultimate Observer-senpai notice them from the end of time and the universe.
Batshit insane, 10/10, one of Baxter’s tamer plotlines.
Isn’t it lawful neutral chaotic
It’s the equipment used.
