V_V comments on Decoherence is Falsifiable and Testable - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (34)
When I hear about Solomonoff Induction, I reach for my gun :)
The point is that you can't use Solomonoff Induction or MML to discriminate between interpretations of quantum mechanics: these are formal frameworks for inductive inference, but they are underspecified and, in the case of Solomonoff Induction, uncomputable.
Yudkowsky and other people here seem to use the terms informally, which is an usage I object to: it's just a fancy way of saying Occam's razor, and it's an attempt to make their arguments more compelling that they actually are by dressing them in pseudomathematics.
That assumes that Solomonoff Induction is the ideal way of performing inductive reasoning, which is debateable. But even assuming that, and ignoring the fact that Solomonoff Induction is underspecified, there is still a fundamental problem:
The hypotheses considered by Solomonoff Induction are probability distributions on computer programs that generate observations, how do you map them to interpretations of quantum mechanics?
What program corresponds to Everett's interpretation? What programs correspond to Copenhagen, objective collapse, hidden variable, etc.?
Unless you can answer these questions, any reference to Solomonoff Induction in a discussion about interpretations of quantum mechanics is a red herring.
Actually Copenhagen doesn't commit to collapse being objective. People here seem to conflate Copenhagen with objective collapse, which is a popular misconception.
Objective collapse intepretations generally predict deviations from standard quantum mechanics in some extreme cases, hence they are in principle testable.