memes

And what organ told you that, hmm?

According to our current model, we would probably observe un-collapsed quantum field waves, which is a concept inaccessible from within the universe, and could very well just be an artifact of the model instead of ground truth.

It so strange to me that this is the popular way people think about quantum mechanics. Without reformulating quantum mechanics in any way or changing any of its postulates, the theory already allows you to recover the intermediate values of all the observables in any system through retrospection, and it evolves locally and deterministically.

The "spreading out as a wave" isn't a physical thing, but an epistemic one. The uncertainty principle makes it such that you can't accurately predict the outcome of certain interactions, and the probability distribution depends upon the phase, which is the relative orientation between your measurement basis and the property you're trying to measure. The wave-like statistical behavior arises from the phase, and the wave function is just a statistical tool to keep track of the phase.

The "collapse" is not a physical process but a measurement update. Measurements aren't fundamental to quantum mechanics. It is just that when you interact with something, you couple it to the environment, and this coupling leads to the effects of the phase spreading out to many particles in the environment. The spreading out of the influence of the phase dilutes its effects and renders it negligible to the statistics, and so the particle then briefly behaves more classically. That is why measurement causes the interference pattern to disappear in the double-slit experiment, not because of some physical "collapsing waves."

People just ignore the fact that you can use weak values to reconstruct the values of the observables through any quantum experiment retrospectively, which is already a feature baked into the theory and not something you need to add, and then instead choose to believe that things are somehow spreading out as waves when you're not looking at them, which leads to a whole host of paradoxes: the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen paradox, the Wigner's friend paradox, the Frauchiger-Renner paradox, etc.

Literally every paradox disappears if we stop pretending that systems are literally waves and that the wave-like behavior is just the result of the relationship between the phase and the statistical distribution of the system, and that the waves are ultimately a weakly emergent phenomena. We only see particle waves made up of particles. No one has ever seen a wave made up of nothing. Waves of light are made up of photons of light, and the wave-like behavior of the light is a weakly emergent property of the wave-like statistical distributions you get due to the relationship between the statistical uncertainty and the phase. It in no way implies everything is literally made up waves that are themselves made of nothing.

Now, can the universe be fully predicted from the outside ? Who cares ! What is outside the universe, by definition, cannot affect it, so the question is irrelevant, again by definition.

What if our universe is a simulation?

In the case of Fallout 4, the big deal is that if you were a synth, that means all your memories and experiences prior to a certain point of your existence are almost assuredly made up. They are a fabrication. Maybe you never actually lived in the pre-war era. You never had a wife. You never had a child.

It would have been better from a story-telling point if that wasn't added in a DLC long after most people played the main game through. It fits better if you do Far Harbour before ever finding Shaun so that you are forced to wonder if Shaun is even real.

I guess the only part that’s actually important is whether your memories are “real”, in the sense that they relate to real events. Remembering things that didn’t actually happen could cause a few problems.

Also, if I was functionally immortal and ageless, I’d probably like to know ! But I guess you eventually notice regardless.

And of course, the main problem is how synths get there, which is by murdering the person they were modeled after. That part is definitely a problem 😅