Psy-Kosh 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: Psy-Kosh 20 May 2008 05:28:26PM 1 point [-]

Jeeves: whaaaa?

Smedly: the Born rule... the whole probability of what you seem to experience observing is proportional to the squared magnitude thing. ie, if you had a two state system, say a qbit, in a superposition of, say, 2/3*|0> + sqrt(5)*i/3*|1>, then if you take a measurement of a bunch of qbits that are independantly in that state, then you'd expect about 4/9 of them to be 0, and 5/9 of them to be 1.

Given that QM is linear, you can see why the existance of such a rule may be a bit confusing. And given the many worlds perspective, the question of "probability of... what, exactly?" is a question too. Seems hard to even phrase the rule without invoking consciousness. Thus, we, or at least I (did everyone else solve it and simply keep me out of the loop? :)) am confused on this matter.