Month: August 2017

As David Deutsch pointed out in “The Fabric of Reality”, factorization of large numbers via quantum computing would harness computation from a very large number of universes. He gave 10^500 as a very rough suggestion of scale.

Absolutely no time lag can be tolerated when dealing with numbers like that. The mechanism for coordinating that number of parallel processors must be instantaneous, or the answer would take far longer to reach than the lifetime of the universe.

This seems like an insoluble problem, but fortunately the mechanism is quantum interference, which is just another name for “spooky action at a distance”.

Which, as we all know, is instantaneous.

So that’s one of its practical uses. I think there are others…

Continuing from the previous post, what are some of the implications of the hypothesis that life is of a higher order than the material world, metaphysical rather than physical?

If this hypothesis is true, then that means that life bears the same relationship to the apparent physical universe as a chess player does to a game of chess that he is playing.

What happens to the chess player when he finishes the game he is playing? Does he “die”?

No. He goes onto another pursuit, perhaps another game of chess, or perhaps something else quite different.

What does this mean about the apparent “death” that all humans face, most of them knowingly?

It means “death” is an illusion. When you finish with this lifetime, you are finishing a game, not finishing your entire existence.

Of course exactly what might happen after “death” is something that has been speculated about since time began, and will undoubtedly be a subject of much thought and discussion for the rest of the apparent flow of time in this universe.

But now there is a rational reason to conclude that “death” is a sham. No belief in anything contradictory to reality is necessary. It is reality itself that points to this conclusion.

Einstein famously said that quantum mechanics is trying to tell us something important and we should try to figure out what it is.

This is it.