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atucker comments on On Branching vs Probability - Less Wrong
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The many worlds interpretation is not just splitting so that it can be deterministic.
Imagine in your example that someone wanted to know if it was random or splitting. They point a telescope through the fifth dimension, and see an identical universe, except with the opposite event. Someone suggests that maybe it's mostly probabilistic, but there's a split at the end. The person then manages to look closely enough to distinguish the next twenty or so universes. They're told that it just branches further than they thought before.
This is what it is with quantum physics. We know there's multiple universes because we can test for them. Any quantum theory requires a configuration space for all the relevant particles. The only question is if it has one giant configuration space for the whole universe, or has little configuration spaces, which otherwise already follow all the laws of the giant one, that randomly split and combine.
How do you tell the difference between those from inside a branch?
The difference between what?
If you want to know how to tell the difference between the MWI of quantum mechanics and a single branch theory, there's no experiment I can give, because there's no such thing as a single branch theory.
The Schroedinger equation gives the behavior of a single particle in a potential field. If you want to model two particles, you have to use the configuration space.
Random and Splitting.
Though, I just realized that I should just google around and look for papers on the subject.
Collapse interpretation, IIRC Bohmian interpretation, unreal MWI, etc.
They still involve the whole MWI, just on a smaller scale.
The difference between randomly choosing when scale gets to a certain point and splitting is that splitting isn't total. There's still some interference between any two universes no matter how far apart they are. It's just that when there's macroscopic differences, the interference is astronomically small.