Luke_A_Somers 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: Luke_A_Somers 02 May 2012 02:34:43PM 2 points [-]

It's saying that there is no mysticism inherent in MWI - you can be just as practical about it as you would otherwise.