Another month, another rationality quotes thread. The rules are:
- Please post all quotes separately, so that they can be upvoted or downvoted separately. (If they are strongly related, reply to your own comments. If strongly ordered, then go ahead and post them together.)
- Do not quote yourself.
- Do not quote from Less Wrong itself, HPMoR, Eliezer Yudkowsky, or Robin Hanson. If you'd like to revive an old quote from one of those sources, please do so here.
- No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.
- Provide sufficient information (URL, title, date, page number, etc.) to enable a reader to find the place where you read the quote, or its original source if available. Do not quote with only a name.
Observers are treated as explanatorily fundamental, sure, just as they are in any anthropic-type explanation. But I don't see why that's a problem. The issue is when observers are treated as ontologically fundamental, as they are in some objective collapse interpretations, because that conflicts with the apparent fact that observers are entirely made up out of quantum-mechanical parts. Carroll's paper faces no such conflict.
What pragmatist said.
Basically the approach of Sebens and Carroll is to show that if observers are present, then they will see outcomes following the Born rule.
In that sense it seems that observers here are no more problematic than the observers of special relativity, where there are claims like if you use clocks to measure time in a moving frame, then you will see time slowing down relative to mine.