In the summer of 2020, I launched a website called The Vessel Project. It’s a weird, winding, conjecturing exploration into the nature of reality. Some would call it crazy. I don’t necessarily disagree. But the story behind its inception is even weirder. What is now a pet theory, a glorified...
Crossposted from Vessel Project. My last article, “Life Through Quantum Annealing” was an exploration of how a broad range of physical phenomena — and possibly the whole universe — can be mapped to a quantum computing process. But the article simply accepts that quantum annealing behaves as it does; it...
Crossposted from Vessel Project. A couple of short video elements are embedded in the original article; in this post they are simply linked. Overview We explain how quantum annealing works and discuss how it could form our universe, drawing evidence from physics, cognition, and biology. We then use a thought...
In the summer of 2020, I launched a website called The Vessel Project. It’s a weird, winding, conjecturing exploration into the nature of reality. Some would call it crazy. I don’t necessarily disagree. But the story behind its inception is even weirder. What is now a pet theory, a glorified blog, began as a mission of cosmic proportions. The project is also an artifact of a personal journey. It’s my own reminder of grandiose visions (verging on delusions), a bit of idealistic naiveté, and a whole lot of grappling with my place in the universe. But for an adventure that’s mostly played out between my two ears, I could hardly imagine a... (read 1740 more words →)
A timeline cannot loop and then offshoot into an open timeline. Each event in a causal loop is like a single point. It goes against our intuition, but they don't "repeat" as if they happen over and over again -- there is just one instance of each event, and they all exist at once. So if any one point on this loop were to somehow change to being open, then it no longer causes the very events which lead to its own existence, so the entire causal chain would not have existed in the first place.
Its subtle, but such a "break" is different than the notion of extensive splitting in the many worlds interpretation, where those splits might be better understood as "overlays" of valid/possible timelines which all maintain their respective loops, and they just happen to share the same informational state at the point of decoherence/splitting.
If you are embedded in a CTC, there is no changing that.
I'm not saying you're changing a timeline, simply that it's not the only looped timeline that decoheres from a single point in a many-worlds formulation. If you arrived back at a previous point in your timeline via reverse causation, then several timelines/worlds still decohere from that point -- including the timeline you were "previously" in. They all exist. In any case, this isn't the core of the essay's argument. I noted that the MWI is used to illustrate possibilities; we simply require a deterministic interpretation at a minimum. Even if only one causal loop timeline exists, the rest of the argument... (read more)
Crossposted from Vessel Project.
My last article, “Life Through Quantum Annealing” was an exploration of how a broad range of physical phenomena — and possibly the whole universe — can be mapped to a quantum computing process. But the article simply accepts that quantum annealing behaves as it does; it does not attempt to explain why. That answer lies somewhere within a “true” description of quantum mechanics, which is still an outstanding problem.
Despite the massive predictive success of quantum mechanics, physicists still can’t agree on how its math corresponds to reality. Any such proposal, called an “interpretation” of quantum mechanics, tends to straddle the line between physics and philosophy. There is no... (read 5036 more words →)
Crossposted from Vessel Project. A couple of short video elements are embedded in the original article; in this post they are simply linked.
We explain how quantum annealing works and discuss how it could form our universe, drawing evidence from physics, cognition, and biology.
We then use a thought experiment to consider how a quantum annealing universe could benefit from being cyclic, or starting over, and we entertain the idea that such a model may even explain common human behavior.
Quantum annealing is a type of quantum computing used mainly for optimization problems; these problems can have many variables with many possible solutions, but we want to... (read 4663 more words →)
Not sure why I never responded to that comment, but I do remember and appreciate it.
The biological holism post certainly seems to echo many of the themes one would expect from a quantum annealing viewpoint (although it’s presented there merely as a perspective, whereas I think there’s an underlying mechanism to be accounted for). Interesting to see those similarities pop up in different disciplines and approaches.