[ExI] QT and SR

[Damien Broderick]

At 07:35 PM 9/6/2008 +0200, Serafino wrote:

>These FTL "influences" cannot be true informations (not
>because this is forbidden by SR postulates, not because it
>is impossible to know if Alice performed her measurement
>before Bob, or viceversa, when they are space-like separated)
>because the process of quantum measurement is indeterministic.
>Alice cannot "force" a specific measurement outcome, thus
>cannot she send a definite message to Bob, and viceversa.
>Shimony called it the "peaceful coexistence" between QM and SR.

See, from my point of view, this whole discussion omits key empirical 
data that seem clearly to undermine those standard claims. (John 
Clark should cover his eyes at this point, and spend the next few 
minutes soothingly muttering BULLSHIT BULLSHIT.) I feel like a 
Renaissance telescopist listening to a roomful of Scholastics arguing 
over which set of epicycles deals best with the motion of the Sun 
around the Earth. "Hey, guys, come and look at these moons of 
Jupiter." "Shaddap! Only the Earth can be the center for an orbital system..."

The empirical evidence for extra-chance correlations in psi 
precognition experiments and natural experiments seems to me now 
beyond doubt (and, unlike most doubters, I've actually looked closely 
at a lot of the evidence). If that is so, then we already know that 
carefully prepared states of the world at t-now correlate 
significantly often, although with no apparent inside-the-lightcone 
causal influence, with states at t-future or t-past.

Since we live in a world pretty well described by a mix of relativity 
and QT, this fact has to be consistent with those scholia, but in 
ways that have not yet been accepted as canonical (or perhaps not 
even thought up yet).

So rather than asserting endlessly and pointlessly that X *can't* 
happen because reigning doctrine seems to argue against its 
possibility, even though X *does* occur quite often, physicists might 
be well advised to start looking for loopholes that permit these 
effects. Maybe entanglement is one; or maybe some version of Cramer's 
second time dimension, coupling past and future. Or maybe there's 
leakage in the Simulation.

Damien Broderick