Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday, and as I promised‒or threatened, depending on your point of view‒here I am, writing my weekly blog post as before, back when I was regularly writing and publishing my fiction.

I’m not sure what topic(s) I should cover here, today.  I rarely seem able to plan these posts in advance, and when I do plan them, I don’t think they often come out very well.  That’s from my point of view, of course; maybe other people have found my planned posts excellent and wish I would write them more often, but if so, they haven’t given any clear feedback.  So, I don’t really know what will happen from now until the end of this blog post.

Of course, if the universe is deterministic, then whether I or anyone else knows it or not, what I will write is already a certain thing, as is the fact that I don’t know it‒indeed one could legitimately claim that it “already” exists in a sense, particularly if one is invoking the picture of Special and General Relativity and the “block” spacetime concept.

However, the Copenhagen interpretation (if that’s the correct term) of quantum mechanics states that wave-function collapse is truly “random”, and so the future is not determined, at least at the smallest level.  But if the wave function truly collapses, then that would be the only fundamentally irreversible temporal process known in physics so far, and that seems suspicious to me.

I’ve been reading the original EPR paper and thinking about this subject at least a little bit lately.

Of course, in a way, the Everettian “many worlds” interpretation of quantum mechanics would say that the future really is determined, but that at every instance of decoherence, the wavefunction becomes subdivided into waves that no longer interact with each other directly.  People interpret this as if new universes were coming into existence each time, and that’s a decent way to conceptualize it, but to me it seems misleading.

To my mind, it’s just waves that are traveling along in “parallel” and not influencing each other.  But that’s not really any different from the sounds of two separate conversations happening in a crowded room‒maybe one involves a group of people discussing a recent sporting event and another gaggle is talking about some new show on Netflix.  Maybe the conversations are even in different languages.  The sound waves propagate from each conversation independently, and though there may be places where troughs and crests pass and add or subtract for an instant, locally, they are very much different processes.  But there is no mystical invocation of “new universes” such as what troubles some people about Everettian quantum mechanics because of a misunderstanding of Occam’s Razor.  There are just separate, “parallel” things happening within the same overall universe.

That’s not a perfect analogy, of course.  The “waves” of the quantum mechanics are more complex* than sound waves, and are more fundamental, and once they decohere, it seems they are far less likely to interact with their other “branches” than are even sound waves of parallel conversations in different languages.  But even those are more separable than we think.

We have an exquisitely evolved capacity to parse the information out of human conversation, decoding the waves without thought, and so we don’t think very often about how astonishing that process is.  If aliens who communicated only by light flashes were trying to interpret such a set of conversations, they would have a daunting task, indeed.

Just think about how hard it has been even to decode the communications of dolphins and whales‒highly intelligent and social creatures that clearly communicate with each other.  And these are our fellow mammals from the same planet, who also use sound for communication!  We vastly underestimate the complexity of what we’re doing when we understand conversation and other noises, because our auditory processing systems do it without our conscious intervention, and they have been honed over hundreds of millions of years by the brutal and pitiless sieve** of natural selection.

Likewise, we thoroughly underestimate the complexity involved in catching a pop-up fly ball, or a thrown football, or the process of walking, or of throwing a ball, or of finding a specific item on a cluttered desk.  It shouldn’t surprise us that even if the future “division” of the universal wave function seems random, it can be utterly deterministic, and in that sense each branch “already” exists.  But each “branch” that no longer interacts with others after an instance of decoherence will “feel” to given humans*** as if it were the one and only “universe” and that all others have collapsed out of existence somehow, when they’re really just there but not interacting anymore with the person in question.

Maybe I’m wrong, of course.  I mean, I’ve been right before, but not often enough to make it my default presumption.

Anyway, there you have it, the stuff about which I was “destined” to write, though I had no specific plans.  That’s fair enough.  “Life is what happens while you’re making other plans,” as the saying goes.

Speaking of plans, though, I plan to write tomorrow and Saturday**** on my fiction (probably just on Extra Body).  I may take my laptop with me to do it; the experiment with my smartphone seems to be working okay (see my reports from Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday), but it doesn’t feel quite as “natural” to me, still.  Who knows, though?

Only Laplace’s Demon® (Quantum Version™) knows.  But of course, that entity would feel, if anything, less “free” than those of us who know not yet what is to be and know not fully what has been.  For an entity that can see every detail of the past and the future laid out deterministically and in full detail is utterly incapable of taking any action on such knowledge‒for its own actions are as determined as all others, and it “knows” this.  Indeed, it cannot but know it.

Ignorance is not bliss, but it does at least give you room to improve, and that can be ego syntonic.

Have a good week, if such is your destiny.

TTFN

*Ha ha, that’s a little physics joke there, when you think of how quantum wave functions involve complex numbers.

**Mixed metaphor alert!  How would a sieve hone anything?  Oh, well, I’m not going to change it; it works too well to communicate my meaning.

***And the very process of “feeling like something” is extraordinarily complex, and we only really understand the bare rudiments of how this happens.  This relative ignorance engenders the propagation of nonsensical, conceptually vacuous ideas like panpsychism and the like, and the pseudo-mystery of the “hard problem” of consciousness.  Well, it is a hard problem in a sense, but not the way philosophers of consciousness seem to express it, as far as I can see.

****I think I will be working Saturday, but I’m not certain, because of the highly atypical thing that happened last Saturday, with the office being closed.  This coming Saturday will be my son’s 24th birthday, and I will now literally have missed half of his life more or less completely.  That’s his preference, not mine, though it started as a consequence of my own misadventures‒our personal wavefunction decoherence if you will.  Still, when enough people repeatedly decide they don’t really like having you around or interacting with you too much, you have to think there must be some powerful causes for the consistency, especially when you don’t even really want to be around yourself.  So, I am profoundly sad about the state of things, and I miss my children terribly, but I have to conclude provisionally that they’re making a reasonable decision.  At least I “talk” to my daughter from time to time, and that’s not a small consolation.