Eliezer_Yudkowsky comments on Collapse Postulates - Less Wrong

21 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 09 May 2008 07:49AM

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Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 09 May 2008 04:14:09PM 6 points [-]

@Ben: The communication exists but it's exponentially tiny. Not 20th decimal place, 10^20th decimal place.

Bob: It seems that many physicists are strongly biased to deterministic theories

No, physics is strongly biased toward deterministic phenomena. There is no known law in all of physics that is non-deterministic. I eliminate collapse fantasies because there is no observed phenomenon that cannot be explained as well without collapse as with it.

Kamenin: Finally, if you substitute collapse for world splitting, wouldn't then world splitting produce the same effects and fulfill your last list quite as well as the collapse interpretation?

NO, DAMN IT!

Many-worlds does not involve a special, extra, 'splitting' postulate. It is simply the pure, unaltered result of applying the same equations that are known to govern microscopic phenomena, which equations happen to result in superpositions (experimentally verified) and would logically result in macroscopic superpositions (experimental verification in progress).

So, #1, above all, the fundamental physics of many-worlds is experimentally nailed-down. It consists simply in supposing that the same rules govern at all levels. We know quantitatively what those rules are for microscopic cases. There is no theoretical doubt as to when and under what circumstances decoherence should happen - it's all in the equations already, though in practice we may have trouble doing the math.

With that said,

Macroscopic decoherence is linear, unitary, differentiable, local, CPT symmetric, probability-current conserving, deterministic, and relativistic JUST LIKE ALL THE REST OF PHYSICS, DAMNIT!