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by drostie
5037 days ago
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What's different in both cases is ontology, which is a fancy way of saying how things actually are. It may help to think of how you would program a computer to simulate either universe, or for that matter it may help to reduce the computation to something much simpler, like the following two functions: def odd_sum(n):
return sum(range(1, 2*int(n), 2))
def square(n):
m = int(n)
return 0 if m <= 0 else m ** 2
Those two functions are mathematically indistinguishable if all you are doing is putting in various values. There happens to be a vast mathematical identity that the sum of the first n odd numbers is the n'th square number, allowing for that indistinguishability. But to claim that they're exactly the same realization of this function is obviously mistaken.Similarly, there is a qualitative difference between a wavefunction of the universe which changes and a wavefunction of the universe which does not change. It does not matter that the two positions can be made mathematically equivalent; one is X and one is not-X, and science is permanently incapable of figuring out which it really is. |
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