Relative State Observer

EmeraldBeetle

Dear gods what a mess you rude people (sock puppets?) have made of my essay thread! Having actually engaged with Dufourny/Ford's logic, such as it is, I now sincerely think they're both just scientifically ignorant religious trolls peddling pan-theistic beliefs dressed up in pseudoscientific nonsense. But they've managed to completely sabotage my essay thread so ... proselytizing mission accomplished I guess? 🙂

For anyone who has managed to wade through the above barrage this forum thread has nothing to do with a pan-theistic conscious agency that magically 'moves' the universe but is actually dedicated to my FQxI essay on the godless Relative State Observer (RSO).

In it I attempt to uncover Everett's observer as a singular branch trajectory within the multi-trajectory correlation structure of his universal wave function. Building on his concepts of psycho-physical parallelism and the automaton's memory device, I model the human observer via control theory as a biological cybernetic servomechanism co-instantiated with phenomenal consciousness. The state observer's contextual memory buffer traces real (predictive) patterns identified in its sensory perception, and this trace of its local decohering sensory environment is its 'world'. Rather than an observer's world splitting into 'many worlds' and their observers, I favour an empirical-phenomenal focus for which there is only the RSO following its single branch of observable correlations within the unobservable branching correlation structure generated by the evolution of the universal wave function.

An, I think novel, interpretation follows of the Born rule as objective chance relative to the RSO, deflating concerns around self-locating uncertainty, and relocating the non ab initio observer as an effectively continuous process of observer–environment decoherence/branching.

Any actual engagement with my text is welcome!

Steve Dufourny

EmeraldBeetle I am sorry if I have touched your vanity and ego, it was not the aim, don t lie please about the religions, Lorraine like me we are not religious and you know it , have you read the list of thinkers I have written and our reasonings ,your work is limited first of all, a common idea fan of Everett about the relative states, but it is not a bad essay, I have never told this, I just explain my points of vue,. And now you show us your vanity and anger, because simply you are not able to discuss about these things and doubt , your ideas are I repeat first of all limited, not original, a kind of copy of everett , I didn t want to make a sabotage, you sabotage alone your thread in reacting like this now without developing farer your arguments, sorry but it is true. A mission, there is no mission we just discuss about ontology and physics, that is all, if you are specialist in philosophy, so defend your philosophy with wisdom and doubt about the universe.........Like Lorraine I will not bother you any more, all is said ,regards

EmeraldBeetle

Steve Dufourny stop spamming this thread with your pseudoscientific universal conscious agency nonsense which has nothing to do with my essay.

Steve Dufourny

EmeraldBeetle yes sure , you are not really interesting to discuss about these deep philosophical ontological problems, simply, and in reacting like this, you simply show to all that you are not able to discuss about them simply.

EmeraldBeetle

Steve Dufourny Now you're just trolling me ad hominem. Having actually engaged with your logic I don't see any 'deep philosophical ontological' thought in it, just your own confused ignorance. I've made this as clear as possible for you, so just stop spamming this thread!

Steve Dufourny

EmeraldBeetle Lol maybe you must rethink about the thesis of your Phd in philo there lol you know, limited is the only one conclusion about your ontology, your essay, your discussions, it is only simple than this, now you can continue to have the last word, I don t answer any more really, it becomes a game of vanity and it is ironical, bye , take care and good luck in the essay contest

EmeraldBeetle

Finally, and to reiterate for anyone who has managed to wade through the above barrage this forum thread has nothing to do with a pan-theistic conscious agency that magically 'moves' the universe. This thread is instead actually dedicated to my FQxI essay on the godless Relative State Observer (RSO).

Any actual engagement with my text is welcome!

Ulla Mattfolk

EmeraldBeetle on p 4 and 5 you talk about the three possible observers, one is the idealized God's view. But I don't understand your Born rule. If the world branches out it should become analog, and you unite the branches to again get it digital. Can you explain, please.

Ulla.

And you have not yet answered my comments, btw.

David Sloan

Threads on essay competition entries are for discussion of the entries. While we there is some scope for discussion of the underlying principles on which an essay is based, this thread seems to have become detached from its original purpose - the discussion of EmeraldBeetle's essay.

I should not have to remind anyone of this, but please keep things civil and refrain from personal attacks.

Steve Dufourny

David Sloan You are right, I am sorry, his essay is good generally, it is because he told that Lorraine and me were religious, we are not, and he spoke about the super observer outside the wave function looking in in his third theoretical vue in his essay, he spoke about the idealised god s view in his essay, so we just develop about the different interpretations of our QM and possibilities, and why the mathematical equations need logical relationships to explain the viable systems the lifes, the motions, the evolution, the consciousness. Regards

EmeraldBeetle

Steve Dufourny critical discussion about your essay

Can you point to any actual 'critical discussion' – beyond your generalised misunderstanding of MWI and what you see as its apparent lack of 'physical causality' apparently due to your unscientific belief in a fundamental nonphysical conscious causality – that actually engages with any specific points of my argument? Such as the above example regarding my invitation for you to explain specifically just how a physical model of a cybernetic servomechanism is 'physically incoherent'? An invitation that you as usual ignored. Coming on this forum and repetitively pasting your nonphysical and largely incoherent beliefs about your own personal philosophy, while passive aggressively accusing me of arguing 'defensively' rather than logically, is trolling.

I have actually gone out of my way, in this now 126 post forum thread dedicated to my essay, to accommodate your 'theory' and invited you to actually attempt to engage with the specifics of mine. Might I remind you:

David Sloan Threads on essay competition entries are for discussion of the entries. While we there is some scope for discussion of the underlying principles on which an essay is based, this thread seems to have become detached from its original purpose - the discussion of EmeraldBeetle's essay.

I should not have to remind anyone of this, but please keep things civil and refrain from personal attacks.

So once more, for those readers who've managed to make it this far, I welcome any engagement with the actual arguments outlined in my essay and summarised as:

‘What it is like to be human’ in a phenomenal world co-instantiated with real predictive patterns (cf. Dennett) discerned in the decohering memory trace of a Relative State Observer's cybernetic servomechanical entanglement with its local sensory environment as one branch trajectory within the wider correlation structure of the universal wave function.

EmeraldBeetle

The page 1 distinction between EO (classical collapse) RSO (phenomenological/subjective) and SO (analytic/objective) views is a pedagogical device to focus my argument and not conflate level descriptions as is done in Everett's thesis and more generally in MWI debates.

I use it in the probability section to likewise differentiate the ontologies and their interpretations, but I have no idea what you mean by analog vs digital branches or what that has to do with Born.

Ulla Mattfolk

EmeraldBeetle
Your text:
"A third, theoretical, view is that of the Super Observer (SO). This entity would exist outside ΨU looking
in. From this idealised god’s view, ΨU is a global description of a superposition in which all possible ‘worlds’
coexist.
The distinction between the internal RSO and an abstract SO is fundamental to my argument. "

This is what was debated. You say yourself it is fundamental. This ideal God is infinite and ethernal what I can understand.

on p 5:
"The Schrodinger dynamics of any isolated system, such as ΨU, is unitary. Amplitudes ci give outcomes with
typical long-run frequencies tracking |ci|2 as per Born’s rule. What differs across interpretations is ontology,
not the phenomenology of a single experienced outcome:
• EO(external, empirical-classical): only one observable outcome occurs. Born gives a primitive chance
via non-unitary, ad-hoc collapse.
• RSO (relative-state, empirical-phenomenal): all outcomes are real but only one is observed along a
single, decohering branch. Born is an objective measure fixed by the branching correlation structure
of ΨU.
• SO(external, global): all outcomes are real and Born is a measure over branches.
From the SO view, consider three Alices in parallel branches measuring the spin of an electron, all in state
[Ready] prior to (2)

• AliceEO believes the collapse postulate gives e↑ or e↓.
• AliceRSO believes her observational flux traces a singular continuity through a decohering structure,
giving e↑ or e↓.
• AliceSO believes that she will split into two versions of her present self with their worlds differing only
by spin, giving both e↑ and e↓.
Post measurement interaction but prior to seeing UP or DOWN (3), our three Alices become six:
• Two AliceEO continue to endorse collapse.
• Two AliceRSO are focused on their current empirical branch trajectory and its measurement outcome
as a continuity of their observational flux.
• Two AliceSO face self-location uncertainty and lean on symmetry and rational-consistency principles
to assign probabilities to quasi-classical outcomes via the Born rule [12, 13, 14]. "

You should know what is Born rule, you write it as digital or quantized. I guess a singular continuity is a simple branch or analog?

What if Alice branch into 3 or 5 branches? Note that AliceSO is OUTSIDE the worlds. She cannot have impact on the electrons?
Ulla.

EmeraldBeetle

Ulla Mattfolk This ideal God is infinite and ethernal what I can understand.

Hi Ulla (is this SteveD?), the SO is an interpretive view quite often posed as analytic objectivity and says nothing about an actual infinite eternal godhead. If you were a god then you would be external to the universal wave function, but you’re not a god are you Ulla?

Ulla Mattfolk You should know what is Born rule, you write it as digital or quantized. I guess a singular continuity is a simple branch or analog?

I don’t know what you mean by a “digitised or quantised” Born rule as I don’t actually write it that way.

Ulla Mattfolk What if Alice branch into 3 or 5 branches? Note that AliceSO is OUTSIDE the worlds. She cannot have impact on the electrons?

AliceSO believes she is immersed in Everettian worlds but is talking as if she is outside looking in and believes she will split into two versions of herself and is uncertain who she is/will be. AliceRSO believes in the same universal wave function but identifies only with her current singular branch trajectory. She doesn’t care about the other unobservable Alice’s as they’re irrelevant to her empirically observable ‘world’.

Either Alice’s beliefs remain unchanged no matter how many branches there are, 3 or 5 or 10^{21}. You should also be aware that ‘branch counting’ is considered a naive way to interpret these branching models as the number of branches depends entirely on how you reduce the probably infinite correlation structure of the universe down to a coarse-grained model. RSO branching is effectively continuous.

Ulla Mattfolk

EmeraldBeetle No, I am not Steve.

Ulla Mattfolk SO(external, global): all outcomes are real and Born is a measure over branches.

This statement as instance. Regarding Born rule you have a QUANTIZED amplitude, just as it should be. But then you must correct for the branchings and do a 'measure over branches' to again get it quantized. So why branch it in the first place?

Ulla Mattfolk

EmeraldBeetle I gave you your own text 😮 What can be difficult?
AliceSO believes she is immersed in Everettian worlds but is talking as if she is outside looking in and believes she will split into two versions of herself and is uncertain who she is/will be

This is a superposition, and of course she cannot know which she will become. In the Schrödinger cat exp. the branches are also 'analog', and we say the cat cannot be both dead or alive, and the cat does not know which, it is the OUTSIDE that determine that. But what is outside the AliceSO outside?

Steve Dufourny

EmeraldBeetle I am steve, she is Ulla, Ulla’s instinct is right about the ontological status of the SO and the Born rule. She says that the SO seems external to all the worlds. If the SO is outside the universal wave function, then it cannot interact with the system, so the Born rule cannot be applied. The branching multiplicity is questioned also, and that shows a pure confusion about Everettian reasoning in the RSO. So the SO is an analytic objectivity; Everett forbids external frames. All is inside. There is a big contradiction with the universal postulate of unitarity. Everett never showed why amplitudes should correspond to observed frequencies. We cannot use the Born rule in a kind of circular reasoning. So you contradict yourself with Alices and the branch in the RSO because if the branching is continuous like you tell, then you cannot treat the branches as both continuous and countable observers without measures. The measure is the fundamental problem in your reasoning. So what Ulla said is true about the Born rule, the problem she points out is a kind of category error because we cannot make a mathematical mapping with a unitary wavefunction evolution if you have a view from nowhere, and it is there that Everett has avoided this important point to be consistent. An outside observer cannot influence the measurements or the structures, or the interpretations, and the cause must be different with deeper parameters.

So the concept of SO is not only unnecessary but contradictory within the supposed unitary framework. So Ulla is right about the ontological inconsistency in the Super Observer analysis.
Moreover, the invocation of the Born rule as an objective measure fixed by the branching structure does not resolve the problemit assumes what it tries to explain. The Born rule cannot be derived purely from unitarity, it is about probabilities.

Ulla’s question about branching into 3 or 5 worlds exposes this precisely becausethe number of branches is not defined in the theory, and so the Born rule cannot be applied as if branch counting were meaningful. The amplitude-squared measure lacks physical grounding within a purely unitary ontology. This is the most important point because it cannot be quantized. So how can we have a Born rule for a Super Observer? It is inconsistent with the Everett many-worlds framework and this SO.
The universal wave function obeys the Schrödinger equation at all times and is closed and self-contained, we know this. There is no external system or higher observer outside in Everettian reasoning. All systems, interactions, and measurements are internal unitary processes. So the SO is totally inconsistent with Everettian reasoning. The SO cannot interact with or measure the systems inside, and the Born rule concerns probabilities of measurements within the universe, so it is internal. It is an enormous ontological contradiction ,an error at my humble opinion.

Ulla Mattfolk

EmeraldBeetle you write also
" Born’s rule is neither a global law of chance or a decision principle
but an objective RSO-relative structural measure [16, 17] governing which outcome is recorded along an
RSO trajectory. Decoherence supplies the quasi-classical alternatives, with measures given by |ci|2."

Decoherence is also a 'collapse' I think.

EmeraldBeetle

Ulla Mattfolk Regarding Born rule you have a QUANTIZED amplitude, just as it should be. But then you must correct for the branchings and do a 'measure over branches' to again get it quantized. So why branch it in the first place?

Ok, so amplitudes aren’t quantized, physical quantities like energy are quantized. Born amplitudes are normalised as in squared and summing to 1, which is where the probability rule comes in. Branches are just components of the superposition, you don’t “branch them in the first place”, as in the dead/alive cat giving 2 cat states. It also really doesn’t matter how many branches there are, odd or even numbers. When the superposition decoheres interference is suppressed and each state becomes a component in a quasiclassical mixture of states, i.e., a live cat and a dead cat. If the cat is in a superposition of 3 states then you have 3 amplitudes each decohering to a cat in one of those 3 states.

A measure over branches is just the amplitudes but not expressed as a probability because probabilities don’t make sense if all outcomes are realised in their respective branches, i.e., from the SO view (which is not an actual god but rather an analytic view from within \Psi_{U}). The measure is also not a “collapse”, the apparent collapse happens when the superposition decoheres and you end up on a branch with one outcome. And in this sense, from an Everettian perspective, decoherence causes only an apparent collapse as all the outcomes decohere in their respective branches. There is no actual physical collapse as is postulated in collapse theories where the superposition just reduces to one outcome with interference disappearing rather than suppressed.

So from the RSO view (which is empirical-phenomenal rather than analytic/objective), the superposition decoheres and the outcome you get is the one that occurs in your empirical-phenomenal branch. Which of the branch outcomes occur is dependent on the evolution of the correlation structure of the universe and is predicted by the Born rule as a probability for your own branch. So one is uncertain not of oneself, which is one’s empirical continuity, but of which outcome will decohere, and the Born probability is an objective chance relative to the observer’s current state.

Ulla Mattfolk

Ulla Mattfolk this meeasure over branches is actually a 'collapse' as a correction, I think.

Steve Dufourny

Ulla Mattfolk So you were right. Here are the main inconsistencies, general to the essay.
Contradictions exist between unitarity and the SO, because the essay tells that the universal wave function evolves unitarily and has no external observers, but introduces an SO viewing all branches. It is an ontological error about the external frame which cannot exist. We cannot have both.
The Born rule also, and how it is treated,in claiming that the Born rule is an objective measure if derived from unitarity alone, this is circular reasoning, as I explained. The amplitudes need empirical frequencies without adding things beyond this unitarity,it is fundamental.
There are also incoherences in the treatment of branching. How can we have coherent branching that is both continuous and countable without a defined measure space? The Born rule cannot be applied consistently in that case.
There are also category errors with the mixing of the inside and outside. The SO is seen as an analytic abstraction and then used as if it were physical and with probabilities; it cannot be. How can we apply mathematical structures meant for an internal observer to an external one? Everett totally rejected this, I think.
There is therefore a problem between epistemic and ontological reasonings and tools. The appearances and the realism are in confusion. Subjectivity and objectivity need to be more consistent.
In violating Everett’s unitarity postulate, with the SO, with circular reasoning and inconsistencies in the branching between continuity and discreteness, it mixes frames and confuses ontology and epistemology in conclusion.

Ulla Mattfolk

Steve Dufourny 3 or 5 branches was taken as an odd number of states, and the quantization get difficulties. He will get a change there, kind of a topology.

Steve Dufourny

Ulla Mattfolk for Everett 3 or 5 branches makes no sense because it is a bout continuity and not discreteness.
The Born rule is aplied to amplitudes , not the number of worlds , so we cannot mix discrete and continuous reasoning if we want to respect the everett unitarity framework, in all the cases it is like this I see the works of everett and if somebody wants to violate the everett logic , so it must be consistent with the discretennes and continuity. It is not the case.

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