Kevin_Dick comments on Decoherence is Simple - Less Wrong

20 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 06 May 2008 07:44AM

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

Comments (57)

Sort By: Old

You are viewing a single comment's thread.

Comment author: Kevin_Dick 06 May 2008 05:06:34PM 1 point [-]

I just had a thought, probably not a good one, about Many Worlds. It seems like there's a parallel here to the discovery of Natural Selection and understanding of Evolution.

Darwin had the key insight about how selection pressure could lead to changes in organisms over time. But it's taken us over 100 years to get a good handle on speciation and figure out the detailed mechanisms of selecting for genetic fitness. One could argue that we still have a long way to go.

Similarly, it seems like we've had this insight that QM leads to Many Worlds due to decoherence. But it could take quite a while for us to get a good handle on what happens to worlds and figure that detailed mechanisms of how they progress.

But it was pretty clear that Darwin was right long before we had worked the details. So I guess it doesn't bother me that we haven't worked out the details of what happens to the Many Worlds.