whowhowho 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: whowhowho 25 January 2013 05:25:18PM 0 points [-]

No, you can't fet inconsistent interpretations:-

"This relativisation of actuality is viable thanks to a remarkable property of the formalism of quantum mechanics. John von Neumann was the first to notice that the formalism of the theory treats the measured system (S ) and the measuring system (O) differently, but the theory is surprisingly flexible on the choice of where to put the boundary between the two. Different choices give different accounts of the state of the world (for instance, the collapse of the wave function happens at different times); but this does not affect the predictions on the final observations. Von Neumann only described a rather special situation, but this flexibility reflects a general structural property of quantum theory, which guarantees the consistency among all the distinct "accounts of the world" of the different observing systems. The manner in which this consistency is realized, however, is subtle."--SEP