Recent content by Atla

No, I meant that things appear random locally, but actually they aren't. But we would have to look at the entire universe all at once (or nearly the entire universe all at once) to be able to see the determinism behind all the apparent randomness. But we will probably never be able to do...

What I mean is, how can you be certain that the Born rule applies no less to the state of the entire universe than to the state of any smaller part? Isn't this just an unproven assumption based on our experiments, where it does seem to apply? So I think I wasn't implying an actual underlying...

Well yes, I tend to think that a belief in genuine randomness always contains an element of magical thinking (so Einstein was right with the dice thing). I may be wrong though of course. It's just that in every experiment ever conducted, we see the HUP verified, because our experiments are a...

There is no such thing as an "inside" and an "outside", in the sense that you are using the terms, that is merely a misconceptualization. There are no separate things in the universe.

"The usual computation involves Bogoliubov transformations. The idea is that when you quantize (say) the electromagnetic field you take solutions of the classical equations (Maxwell's equations) and write them as a linear combination of positive-frequency and negative-frequency parts. Roughly...

I'll try to put my question another way then: do you think that vacuum fluctuations (or however we want to conceptualize it) are random? By random I mean that it's not integral with everything else going on in the universe.

Say a virtual particle pair forms, there can be two outcomes. One, they annihilate each other two, they get turned into real ones. To me, what you are saying is that there is no difference between these two outcomes. Isn't that a contradiction? Doesn't the difference between the two outcomes...

That's correct, but why are you ignoring the "rest" of the information that gets encoded into the underlying field, when the virtual pairs get turned into real one?

Maybe the confusion is this: yes, the particle that falls into the black hole carries information as well, so while the black hole exists we must also take it into account. However, the "sum" of information inside the black hole decreases with every "instance" of Hawking radiation. The...

I'm not sure whether I understand your questions correctly. Once the black hole has fully evaporated, then all the information that was previously "inside" the black hole has been encoded into the escaping particles + the underlying field from which the virtual particle pairs get ripped out...

Maybe it's such a big deal because it's the Western common sense to think that the universe is made up from separate things, like objects, quantum systems, etc. We take the everyday illusion of separateness for granted. But that is merely an unproven philosophical assumption, maybe of Greek and...

I don't see how. Only one of the particles escapes, the other one falls into the black hole, carrying information. So not all information is encoded outside of it.

I'm not saying that consciousness is involved, nor do I say that collapse is real - the idea of "collapse" is still pure unexplained sci-fi, nothing else. On the other hand, it's also perfectly possible to have millions of copies of the results, and they are still in a "superposition" state or...

Information is basically a made up abstraction in the human mind, a thinking tool. But without thinking about it, the which-path still exists out there "physically", from our point of view. There is nothing special in the human head - it's just a point of view. On the other hand, yep, no matter...

Imho, neither the measurement of the detector, nor the "consciousness" of a human being can cause wavefunction collapses - these are merely two variations on the same idea, both containing the same supernatural element. Of course in reality there are no magical collapses at all, it just appears...