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by andy112 4450 days ago
Very cool way of thinking about it! Thanks for that elaboration.

Re: SoftwareMaven's "why is the 'player character' so important?", I don't think the player character we follow is necessarily any more important than the other player characters. You can say every individual character (or particle in the real-world side of the analogy) has an importance only within its own reference frame and I think it still works.

Just like you can have many players playing the MMO game and "collapsing the state" of different things from their own reference frames at different times, you can have the same be true for the particles in the real-world analogy. No one player of the game is more "important" than any others. The only requirement is that it all stays self-consistent in the backend and across everyone's individual points of view at all times.

But (for better or worse) I don't think what we're talking about now is science, really, unless there's some way to test it.

Maybe you could try to detect a "lag" by doing something that causes an especially large number of states to collapse across an especially large number of frames of references all at once, but I'm not sure if you could do anything that would detect this lag because all of our ways of detecting would be lagging too. (This goes along the same lines as trying to tell if the computer you're using is running within a VM or running natively.)

Any ideas?

1 comments

I really don't know.

I need to research more into what it means to have a collapse of state. Also whether a state of superposition is one that a system can return to or if once a system has collapsed if it stays that way. And if a system can return to superposition, what makes that happen?