Might there have been less randomness earlier?

In my previous post, I noted that a branching view of possibility, when continued into an infinite past, leads to the counterintuitive consequence that there is less and less randomness the further back we go.

In this post I want to note that this counterintuitive consequence may in fact be right even with a finite past, given a certain interpretation of quantum mechanics.

Start with the naive consciousness causes collapse (ccc) interpretation of quantum mechanics. On naive ccc, at each moment of time, the laws of nature prevent the world to evolve into a superposition of states that differ with respect to consciousness. Thus, there cannot be a superposition between one’s feeling hot and one’s not feeling hot, or between a cat being aware of its surroundings and a cat being asleep or dead. This is assured by constant collapse with respect to a global consciousness operator C.

Unfortunately, as it stands this is untenable, because it corresponds to a setup where there is constant observation of C, and constant observation of an observable precludes change with respect to that observable by the quantum Zeno effect. In other words, if we had naive ccc, then conscious states would never change, which is empirically absurd.

Here is one way to fix this problem. Suppose that there are special moments in time, which I’ll poetically call “cosmic heartbeats”. Collapse with respect to C only occurs at cosmic heartbeats. If the cosmic “heart rate” is not very fast (i.e., the spacing between the heartbeats is big enough), then the quantum Zeno effect will be negligible, and we needn’t worry about it. And we hypothesize that consciousness only occurs at cosmic heartbeats.

But now let’s consider the history of our universe. In the early universe, the only way to get a non-empty consciousness state is by some ridiculously unlikely feat of quantum tunnelling generating a Boltzmann brain or the like. Thus the only randomness we will have in the early universe will be that induced by pruning away the components of the global wavefunction corresponding to such ridiculously unlikely feats. And that is only a tiny bit of randomness. But as things evolve, we get components of the wave function with significant weight corresponding to the evolution of various conscious critters. Now the periodic collapse will be “deciding” between states of comparable likelihood (e.g., life on earth versus life on some other planet formed from some of the same materials orbiting the sun) rather than just pruning away extremely unlikely options.

One would need to know a lot more physics (and perhaps neuroscience?) to figure out what the cosmic heartrate needs to be to make the theory work. An upper bound is given by the quantum Zeno effect: if the cosmic heartrate is too fast, then we could predict a slowdown of consciousness. A lower bound is given by introspection: the cosmic heartrate had better be at least as fast as the speed at which our conscious states are observed to change.

I wonder if a similar decrease of randomness in the past wouldn’t be predicted by GRW collapse theories.