JGWeissman comments on Many Worlds, One Best Guess - Less Wrong

12 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 11 May 2008 08:32AM

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Comment author: ata 15 February 2011 08:43:36PM *  3 points [-]

Interesting quote from Stephen Hawking, apparently he's on board with MWI as the obvious best guess (and with Bayesian reasoning):

HAWKING: I regard [the many worlds interpretation] as self-evidently correct.

T.F.: Yet some don't find it evident to themselves.

HAWKING: Yeah, well, there are some people who spend an awful lot of time talking about the interpretation of quantum mechanics. My attitude — I would paraphrase Göring — is that when I hear of Schrödinger's cat, I reach for my gun.

T.F.: That would spoil the experiment. The cat would have been shot, all right, but not by a quantum effect.

HAWKING (laughing): Yes, it does, because I myself am a quantum effect. But, look: All that one does, really, is to calculate conditional probabilities — in other words, the probability of A happening, given B. I think that that's all the many worlds interpretation is. Some people overlay it with a lot of mysticism about the wave function splitting into different parts. But all that you're calculating is conditional probabilities.

...though I am a bit confused by how he describes it in the last line — doesn't that sound more like non-realism (or at least "shut up and calculate") than MWI?

Comment author: JGWeissman 15 February 2011 08:48:49PM 0 points [-]

Do you have a link to the source? I would be interested it seeing more context.

Comment author: ata 15 February 2011 08:51:06PM 1 point [-]

It's from here, but no further context was given, unfortunately.

Comment author: p4wnc6 19 June 2011 06:55:07AM *  0 points [-]

...though I am a bit confused by how he describes it in the last line — doesn't that sound more like non-realism (or at least "shut up and calculate") than MWI?

Isn't the point of the "best" explanation (in the Bayesian sense) that it is the one most at peace with the "shut up and calculate" mentality? My reaction, which please feel free to disregard, is that nothing could be more "real" than saying something like, "Okay, here's the theory, it's self-evident given our observations. Great. Now shut up and multiply. Onto the next question."

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