9
views
0
recommends
+1 Recommend
0 collections
    0
    shares
      • Record: found
      • Abstract: found
      • Article: found
      Is Open Access

      Unified meta-theory of information, consciousness, time and the classical-quantum universe

      Preprint

      Read this article at

      Bookmark
          There is no author summary for this article yet. Authors can add summaries to their articles on ScienceOpen to make them more accessible to a non-specialist audience.

          Abstract

          As time advances in our perceived real world, existing information is preserved and new information is added to history. All the information that may ever be encoded in history must be about some fundamental, unique, atemporal and pre-physical structure: the bare world. Scientists invent model worlds to efficiently explain aspects of the real world. This paper explores the features of and relationships between the bare, real, and model worlds. Time -- past, present and future -- is naturally explained. Both quantum uncertainty and state reduction are needed for time to progress, since unpredictable new information must be added to history. Deterministic evolution preserves existing information. Finite, but steadily increasing, information about the bare world is jointly encoded in equally uncertain spacetime geometry and quantum matter. Because geometry holds no information independent of matter, there is no need to quantize gravity. At the origin of time, information goes to zero and geometry and matter fade away.

          Related collections

          Most cited references19

          • Record: found
          • Abstract: found
          • Article: found
          Is Open Access

          Decoherence, einselection, and the quantum origins of the classical

          (2001)
          Decoherence is caused by the interaction with the environment. Environment monitors certain observables of the system, destroying interference between the pointer states corresponding to their eigenvalues. This leads to environment-induced superselection or einselection, a quantum process associated with selective loss of information. Einselected pointer states are stable. They can retain correlations with the rest of the Universe in spite of the environment. Einselection enforces classicality by imposing an effective ban on the vast majority of the Hilbert space, eliminating especially the flagrantly non-local "Schr\"odinger cat" states. Classical structure of phase space emerges from the quantum Hilbert space in the appropriate macroscopic limit: Combination of einselection with dynamics leads to the idealizations of a point and of a classical trajectory. In measurements, einselection replaces quantum entanglement between the apparatus and the measured system with the classical correlation.
            Bookmark
            • Record: found
            • Abstract: not found
            • Article: not found

            Black holes and thermodynamics

            S. Hawking (1976)
              Bookmark
              • Record: found
              • Abstract: found
              • Article: found
              Is Open Access

              Classical Equations for Quantum Systems

              The origin of the phenomenological deterministic laws that approximately govern the quasiclassical domain of familiar experience is considered in the context of the quantum mechanics of closed systems such as the universe as a whole. We investigate the requirements for coarse grainings to yield decoherent sets of histories that are quasiclassical, i.e. such that the individual histories obey, with high probability, effective classical equations of motion interrupted continually by small fluctuations and occasionally by large ones. We discuss these requirements generally but study them specifically for coarse grainings of the type that follows a distinguished subset of a complete set of variables while ignoring the rest. More coarse graining is needed to achieve decoherence than would be suggested by naive arguments based on the uncertainty principle. Even coarser graining is required in the distinguished variables for them to have the necessary inertia to approach classical predictability in the presence of the noise consisting of the fluctuations that typical mechanisms of decoherence produce. We describe the derivation of phenomenological equations of motion explicitly for a particular class of models. Probabilities of the correlations in time that define equations of motion are explicitly considered. Fully non-linear cases are studied. Methods are exhibited for finding the form of the phenomenological equations of motion even when these are only distantly related to those of the fundamental action. The demonstration of the connection between quantum-mechanical causality and causalty in classical phenomenological equations of motion is generalized. The connections among decoherence, noise, dissipation, and the amount of coarse graining necessary to achieve classical predictability are investigated quantitatively.
                Bookmark

                Author and article information

                Journal
                15 September 2013
                2014-04-28
                Article
                1309.4084
                753b8b28-b8ab-42ad-910c-ec1a4f84ae62

                http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/

                History
                Custom metadata
                27 pages, editorial improvements
                physics.hist-ph gr-qc quant-ph

                Comments

                Comment on this article