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

[Adrian Tymes]

On Sun, Oct 12, 2025 at 2:14 PM Jason Resch via extropy-chat
<extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
> On Sun, Oct 12, 2025 at 1:48 PM Adrian Tymes via extropy-chat <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>> 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.

Sure we can.  The ability to explain a class of systems in general, is
not the same as the ability to know precisely all of a specific
system's internal states at the exact moment those states exist.

> 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.

In other words, you're assuming Many Worlds to prove Many Worlds.  I
trust it is obvious why I find that unconvincing.

As to me being part of the superposition - fundamentally, I only know
absolutely that I, a thing that is having the thoughts that I am
having, exist.  All sensory data and memory data could be faked.
Accepting the sensory and memory data that are available to me, that
still leaves the simplest explanation for things involving me that
there is only one me.  The burden of proof is on those who would claim
there are multiple "me"s, such as me being inside and part of a
superposition.

Going another way - is, then, everything that interacts with or
observes a superposition, part of that superposition?  That stretches
"superposition" to near-meaninglessness: the entire observable
universe might as well be one giant superposition.  If we are inside
the superposition, then what has - as you put it - "become real" to
us?  So far as we are concerned - the one instance of you that is
observing the one instance of me, whether or not there are other
instances of us - the superposition has indeed gone away.