whowhowho comments on If Many-Worlds Had Come First - Less Wrong

44 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 10 May 2008 07:43AM

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Comment author: Dustin2 10 May 2008 11:23:56PM 14 points [-]

I don't see how decoherence is an automatic win for MWI. Decoherence has been used in several different interpretations of quantum mechanics, notably in consistent histories and in certain hidden variable interpretations. Why should we choose MWI before those, particularly since it seems less parsimonious than consistent histories? For that matter, the language of Rovelli and Smolin's relational quantum mechanics very nearly turns decoherence into its own interpretation (if you compare papers on decoherence which shirk the metaphysical interpretation to the interpretation put forward by Rovelli, they're almost identical). Relational quantum mechanics requires much less in the way of grand assertions than MWI and is a natural framework for decoherence, so why pick MWI over relational quantum mechanics?

Comment author: whowhowho 10 February 2013 09:59:36PM 0 points [-]

There's no form of decoherence which is equivalent to ontological collapse, to actually snipping off branches. (Penrose has a nice discussion of this somewhere). So decoherence as an interpretation can't be saying anything different to what MWI says as an interpetation.. Decoeherence just gives an criterion --albeit a fuzzy and subjective one -- for world-formation.