Reply To: Quantum Oblivion and Hesitation

#2613
Mark Stuckey
Participant

I read both papers, Eliahu. Thanks for making them available for discussion in this workshop. Let me begin by inquiring about your view of the block universe implications of this work.

On page 1 of “Voices,” you seem open to the block universe ontology when you write, “It reformulates Oblivion within time-symmetric interpretations of QM, mainly Aharonov’s Two-State-Vector Formalism (TSVF).” TSVF explains space-like correlated outcomes that violate Bell’s inequality by allowing information about experimental outcomes (or detector settings) to be available to the entire history of the experimental process. Of course, this implies the “co-reality” or “co-existence” of the past, present and future, i.e., block universe. Cramer notes that the backwards-causal elements of his transactional interpretation (TI), for example, are “only a pedagogical convention,” and that in fact “the process is atemporal” (1986, 661). You, on the other hand, seem to adopt a meta-time view of the block universe when you write (p 2 of “Voices”), “Such ‘unphysical’ values are assumed to evolve along both time directions, over the same spacetime trajectory, eventually making some interactions ‘unhappen’ while prompting a single one to ‘complete its happening,’ until all conservation laws are satisfied over the entire spacetime region.”

What is your view of the block universe implications of TSVF? Do you subscribe to meta-time? Or, do you view these QM processes in a block universe “atemporally” a la Cramer? Or, are you considering other options?

Mark

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