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DanielLC comments on On Branching vs Probability - Less Wrong
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Is it possible to predict the final state given only the initial state? If so, it's deterministic. If not, it's probabilistic.
I would think "probabliistic" should be reserved for things that are actually governed by probabilities. As you know, amplitudes don't really work like probabilities; if they did, the MWI hypothesis would be unneeded.
By the way, you might like to read the Scott Aaronson lecture I linked to in my post. Here's a quote:
Yeah but you can make a "probabilistic" system look "deterministic" as long as you define the "state" in such a way as it includes the entire distribution.
Of course, a person could never observe that 'final state', but neither can a person observe the entire wavefunction.
For instance, you're only allowed to extract one bit of information about the spin of a given electron, even though the wavefunction (of the spin of a single electron) looks like a point on the surface of a sphere. This is analogous to how, given a {0,1}-valued random quantity, when you observe it you only extract one bit of information about it, even though its expectation value could have been anywhere in the interval [0,1].
My motto here is that if a theory is assigning weights to possible worlds then it's as far away from being deterministic as it's possible to be.
So, it's probabilistic?
Read and then get back to me if you still don't understand where I'm coming from.
I'm not sure how much of a parallel can be drawn between probability and their extension of it.
Probability is a state of your knowledge. Quantum superposition has nothing to do with how much you know.
Two things to say:
Quantum superposition has "quite a lot" to do with the Born probabilities, and (according to you) the Born probabilities, being mere probabilities, have everything to do with how much you know.
I'm not saying a quantum universe is a probabilistic one. But that's really the whole point - it's neither probabilistic nor deterministic (except in the same vacuous sense that you can make it look deterministic if you carry the entire distribution around with you).
How do you get your hands on an algorithmically random sequence? If our physics isn't objectively probabilistic, then we can't even simulate Theory 2.