The Density Matrix of the Universe

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Decoherence is the fact that macroscopic things are constantly interacting with their environment. If you're in a wake cat or in a sleep cat, different photons will hit you and be absorbed. So you become entangled with the environment very, very quickly. It's a well known fact that if you let decoherence happen and then you look just at the quantum state of the system, so you forget the environment,. okay, you ignore it. That's creating the constructing the density matrix which we talked about earlier.

Welcome to the May 2023 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also the ones asking the questions). We take questions asked by Patreons, whittle them down to a more manageable number — based primarily on whether I have anything interesting to say about them, not whether the questions themselves are good — and sometimes group them together if they are about a similar topic. Enjoy!

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