The Age of Entanglement

I am but a tool of the Wikiether. (That will be in a science fiction book one day. Watch for it. ;)

It takes a lot for me to fire up the computer on a Friday night, especially when I had other plans.

Don't get excited. This is probably complete and utter crap. But when something clicks (or appears to click), you listen. And then you write it down.

It has occurred to me that eventually observations of entangled behavior would have to be accounted for by the 5-dimensional model. (I'm skipping words as I type. This is not a good sign.) Tonight it occurred to me that the answer might really be simple after all.

What if observed entanglement behavior is nothing more than a reflection of the transfer or replication of the bias for state selection from the representation of one object to the representation of another?

This idea would have to be supported by massive parallels between the neurophysics of knowledge representation and the known observations of entanglement creation and destruction. We established in our last post that the creation of entanglement is a bizarre process, one which is apparently not as cut-and-dry as I previously believed it to be. When I search for information on the destruction of entanglement, I am delighted to find that there is data on this phenomenon. 'Entanglement Sudden Death' or ESD "can arise when two sources of environmental 'noise' act to disrupt an entangled state. Each source would individually induce a more gradual asymptotic decay, but in tandem they can trigger ESD." (here)

Several minutes elapse while I pursue the 2007 Almeida et al source article. (Via.) And therein I meet the concept of decoherence (again). "[Q]uantum decoherence is the mechanism by which quantum systems interact with their environments to exhibit probabilistically additive behavior... [and] gives the appearance of wave function collapse." (W) (Things click. I feel slightly wiser.) So decoherence is how we avoid the need for an actual wave function collapse, yes? More study is required on my part, I know, but for now it is enough to know that decoherence is a 'theoretical concept' and Almeida's attributed explanation for ESD - "The presence of decoherence in communication channels and computing devices, which stems from the unavoidable interaction between these systems and the environment, degrades the entanglement when the particles propagate or the computation evolves. Decoherence leads to local dynamics, associated with single-particle dissipation, diffusion, and decay, as well as to global dynamics, which may provoke the disappearance of entanglement at a finite time."

The question remains - Can the observed dynamics of entanglement and decoherence be mapped on to the dynamics of knowledge representation? Especially those dynamics which deal with the creation of associations and overlapping representations? This would require a detailed examination of the neural substrates of associative memory, though perhaps on a level that is not currently possible.

Now that I'm rolling on this line of thought... The stability of entanglement (or not) would be a reflection of the stability of the expectation/bias that the two entangled particles would behave as such. The cumulative state of the information about such an entanglement would be spread across multiple observers, and the displayed behavior between the particles would change in response to the shifting bias for state selection (of a particular observation) as anchored by the relevant set of observers.

What would falsify this idea? (The question you should always ask, even if you don't have a ready answer...) Hell if I know, as I barely have even the framework of this idea, let alone the data to support it. But I bet I'm going to lose sleep thinking about it... Damn.

(I warned you that this wasn't going to be pretty. ;)