ata comments on On Being Decoherent - Less Wrong

14 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 27 April 2008 04:59AM

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Comment author: DavidAgain 08 March 2011 08:57:50PM 0 points [-]

Like another Dave almost three years ago, I think this post was the most effective so far. Not as in 'constructed better', because I suspect that almost everything in previous posts in the QM series and quite a lot in posts elsewhere was building up to this.

I'd been getting used to thinking in terms of sensors being entangled with the particles they sense etc. but references to humans being entangled too seemed to be somewhere between obvious and avoiding the issue: I didn't feel what that meant. In this thread I'd got to the bottom and was wondering why we were talking about a physically infinite universe when the message of halfway through internalised.

Whether I'll be persuaded of interpretations on QM is unclear, as I have little maths and less physics so I feel hideously under-qualified to judge based on one side of the argument given that it's perfectly plausible that the counter-argument relies on tools that I don't have available. But in terms of the aim of making QM seem reasonable, and non-mysterious this is doing astonishingly well. Given that at a certain level I found the mysteriousness quite reassuring, that's a particularly tough job.

Comment author: nick11 19 March 2011 04:59:43AM 1 point [-]

Let me join all those observing that these are great explanations of QM. But I don't get why we need to invoke MWI and the Ebborians. If the wavefunction evolves into

(Human-LEFT * Sensor-LEFT * Atom-LEFT) + (Human-RIGHT * Sensor-RIGHT * Atom-RIGHT)

but we only observe

(Human-LEFT * Sensor-LEFT * Atom-LEFT)

then it makes far more sense to me that, rather than conjuring up a completely unobservable universe with clones of ourselves where (Human-RIGHT * Sensor-RIGHT * Atom-RIGHT) happened, a far more empirical explanation is that <i>it simply didn't happen</i>. Half of the wavefunction disappears, nondeterministically. Why, as Occam might say, multiply trees beyond necessity? Prune them instead. Multiple "worlds" strike me as no more necessary than the aether or absolute space.

Comment author: ata 19 March 2011 05:24:00AM *  5 points [-]

This is addressed in Decoherence is Simple.

(Also, the <i> tag doesn't work because Less Wrong uses Markdown formatting for comments; if you click "Help" under the comment box you can see a reference to some of the more common constructions.)

(Also, welcome to Less Wrong!)