[ExI] Google’s Willow Quantum Chip: Proof of the Multiverse?

[Jason Resch]

On Sun, Oct 12, 2025 at 1:48 PM Adrian Tymes via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

> On Sun, Oct 12, 2025 at 11:52 AM Jason Resch via extropy-chat
> <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
> > On Sun, Oct 12, 2025, 10:22 AM Adrian Tymes via extropy-chat <
> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
> >>   But - if we assume that
> >> all the things that are very unlikely to be the result are excluded -
> >> then this superposition just contains the thing that will become the
> >> result.
> >
> > A superposition of 2^(N/2) distinct states.
>
> Which may actually be just the one state that will result in the final
> result, but we have no way to know what it is at that time.


Then we can't explain the intermediate steps of the computation, and hence,
can't explain how quantum computers work.


>   Despite
> claims to the contrary, when I've drilled into the details of quantum
> experiments, the superpositions keep acting like they're actually just
> one state - but an unknown one - and demonstrate no measured behaviors
> inconsistent with that.  (Granted, measurement destroys the
> superpositioning - destroys the uncertainty - but I'm including
> behaviors that result in things that are subsequently measured.)
>

You need each of the 2^(N/2) intermediate states resulting as part of
Shor's algorithm, for the final interference to cancel out and yield the
answer you finally observe.

If you interrupt the computer and observe the quantum computation before it
finishes, you will observe just 1 of the 2^(N/2) possible intermediate
values, but that is not because only one value existed. It is because the
superposition has spread to you, and you have put yourself into a
superposition of 2^(N/2) distinct states, each one remembering having
observed a single 1 of the 2^(N/2) possible intermediate values, but there
is a version of you for each of those possible values.

This is what misled early quantum physicists into thinking the
superposition collapses to only "one thing." and proposing that
conscious observation "collapses the wave function" to randomly choose a
single outcome at random to become real. What was really happening,
however, is that the superposition simply never went away. We just become
part of it, like any other physical object would become part of a
superposition, when it interacts with something that is in a superposition.

Jason
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20251012/1076b322/attachment.htm>