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paper-machine comments on [SEQ RERUN] On Being Decoherent - Less Wrong
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Comments (22)
See the comments on How Many Worlds? for why introducing the graph metaphor is confusing and negatively helpful to beginners.
Well, true, a graph implies a discreteness that does not correlate closely to a continuous configuration space. I actually think of it as the probability of finding yourself in that volume of configuration space being influenced by "significant" amplitudes slowing from more than one other volume of configuration space, although even that is not a great explanation as it suggests a ticking of a discrete time parameter. A continuously propagating wavefront is probably a much better analogy. Or we can just go into calculus mode and consider boxes of configuration space which we then shrink down arbitrarily while taking a limit value. But sometimes it's just easier to think "branches" ;-)
I'm tapping out.
Nobody seems to think EY's exposition is an issue, and you're the second person who's tried -- and I can't understand the motivation for this -- to explain the underlying QM to me in vague metaphors that neither reflect the underlying theory nor present a pedagogical simplification.
But it does reflect the underlying theory (though it does take special cases and simplifies), and it does present a pedagogical simplification (because it's a hell of a lot easier than solving huge quantum systems. Heck, it's not even a metaphor. A DAG is blank enough - has few enough intrinsic properties - to be an incomplete model instead of a metaphor.
Does anything other than a fully quantum description of a system using only an interacting-particle hamiltonian with no externally applied fields count as a non-vague non-metaphor?