Scott Aaronson's cautious optimism for the MWI

calef

http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=1103

Eliezer's gung-ho attitude about the realism of the Many Worlds Interpretation always rubbed me the wrong way, especially in the podcast between both him and Scott (around 8:43 in http://bloggingheads.tv/videos/2220). I've seen a similar sentiment expressed before about the MWI sequences. And I say that still believing it to be the most seemingly correct of the available interpretations.

I feel Scott's post does an excellent job grounding it as a possibly correct, and in-principle falsifiable interpretation.

http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=1103

I feel Scott's post does an excellent job grounding it as a possibly correct, and in-principle falsifiable interpretation.

Well, the negative-time solution can be eliminated by using math too - "the theory" was never the equation with two roots - it was the process you used to get the right answer. What I want to know is, can you grok a case where the actual correct theory isn't physically intuitive, but is correct?

First of all, I disagree that the negative time solution can be removed using math; the math will tell you that the solution is perfectly valid.

Secondly, yes, there are cases like in statistical mechanics or basic QM where the theory isn't that intuitive, dealing with huge numbers of particles (as in SM) or dealing with position probabilities (as in QM), but where the process makes sense (I can grok it).

But these theories have clear interpretations in terms of observables; SM has a systematic justification in terms of physical intuition (in terms of the p... (read more)