Peterdjones 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: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 12 February 2013 06:19:16PM 2 points [-]

No, I understood what you meant. Otherwise I wouldn't have taken a shot at complying. Really RQM deserves its own post carefully dissecting it, but I may not have time to write it.

A very quick but sufficient refutation is that the same math taken as a description of an objectively existing causal process gives us MWI, hence there is no reason to complicate our epistemology beyond this to try to represent RQM, even if RQM could somehow be made coherent within a more complicated ontology that ascribed primitive descriptiveness to ideas like 'true relative to'. MWI works, and RQM doesn't add anything over MWI (not even Born probabilities).

Comment author: Peterdjones 21 July 2013 12:52:28PM 0 points [-]

A very quick but sufficient refutation is that the same math taken as a description of an objectively existing causal process gives us MWI, hence there is no reason to complicate our epistemology beyond this

Or MWI could be said to be complicating the ontology unnecessarily. To be sure, rQM answers epistemologically some questions that MWI answers ontologically, but that isn't obviously a Bad Thing. A realistitc interpretation of the WF is a postive metaphyscial assumption, not some neutral default. A realistic quantum state of the universe is a further assumption that buys problems other interpretations don't have.