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0 pointsaeternum5y ago0 comments

The ball example is insufficient and misleading. It is unfortunately too simple as you need 3 inputs and 2 output to demonstrate the effect (aka Mermin device).

The way to think about it is a box with 3 buttons. There is no such thing as 'observation', the only way you can interact is to push one of the 3 buttons and as a result the box will output either a red or green light.

You must push a button to get the light, but the button may mutate the internal state of the box. Using this model, there's nothing special about human or conscious observation. Every interaction via a particle or otherwise is simply pushing a button.

The crazy thing is.. no matter how clever an algorithm you write to drive the lights from the buttons, you cannot match the observed probabilities. (100% if the same button is pushed, 25% if different buttons are pushed).

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kgwgk5y ago

> Using this model, there's nothing special about human or conscious observation. Every interaction via a particle or otherwise is simply pushing a button.

But there is something kind-of-special about the box with the buttons and the lights.

Not every interaction is simply pushing a button that lights one lamp or another. Keeping the analogy, the result of an interaction between two particles may be a combination of the "red on", "green on" states. You need to keep adding particles to have a box with buttons and lamps that works as expected.

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kgwgk5y ago

> Using this model, there's nothing special about human or conscious observation. Every interaction via a particle or otherwise is simply pushing a button.

But there is something kind-of-special about the box with the buttons and the lights.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse