BenLowell comments on [LINK] The Wrong Objections to the Many-Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics - Less Wrong

17 [deleted] 19 February 2015 06:06PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (101)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: BenLowell 20 February 2015 09:10:53AM 2 points [-]

Another relevant excerpt from the article:

Which saddens me, as an MWI proponent, because I am very quick to admit that there are potentially quite good objections to MWI, and I would much rather spend my time discussing those, rather than the silly ones. Despite my efforts and those of others, it’s certainly possible that we don’t have the right understanding of probability in the theory, or why it’s a theory of probability at all. Similarly, despite the efforts of Zurek and others, we don’t have an absolutely airtight understanding of why we see apparent collapses into certain states and not others. Heck, you might be unconvinced that the above postulates really do lead to the existence of distinct worlds, despite the standard decoherence analysis; that would be great, I’d love to see the argument, it might lead to a productive scientific conversation. Should we be worried that decoherence is only an approximate process? How do we pick out quasi-classical realms and histories? Do we, in fact, need a bit more structure than the bare-bones axioms listed above, perhaps something that picks out a preferred set of observables?