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Comment by marxidad | Hacker News Reader

The definition of randomness is that which is statistically unpredictable. There would still be randomness if we could remember the future because we don't have perfect information about the past, and the universe is inherently random at the quantum level.

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Not necessarily. Perhaps we live in a many-worlds universe, with no collapse.

Consciousness depends on decoherence (collapsing into one possible universe), which happens randomly (there's no way to predict which states you observe).

Our subjective experience feels like being in one Everett branch, sure. But if you really were in a superposition, what would you expect to experience differently?

I don't know if subjective experience is possible while self-coherent. You need to entangle with only one of your states to have any experience.

I don't understand your claim.

Interacting with something in a superposition creates entanglement. In practice most of you is in contact with most of the rest of you, so any superposition quickly spreads to your whole body and more generally the wider universe. At that point we can call it "decoherence" but there's no collapse. Just your wavefunction becomes cleanly separable into distinct pieces. But the subjective experience of being in either component would feel, well, normal.

Yes, it's normal so long as you are in one component or the other. I don't think that you can experience a superposition of being coherent among both components—of existing in both worlds. I think that we're always unconscious in a Schrodinger state.

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