Eliezer_Yudkowsky 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: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 13 May 2008 01:15:36AM 1 point [-]

Dustin said: "Decoherence as an interpretation does not imply Many Worlds unless the wavefunction is considered to be metaphysically real."

Dustin's referenced paper said:

The relational approach claims that a number of confusing puzzles raised by Quantum Mechanics (QM) result from the unjustified use of the notion of objective, absolute, ‘state’ of a physical system, or from the notion of absolute, real, ‘event’.

The way out from the confusion suggested by RQM consists in acknowledging that different observers can give different accounts of the actuality of the same physical property [6]. This fact implies that the occurrence of an event is not something absolutely real or not, but it is only real in relation to a specific observer. Notice that, in this context, an observer can be any physical system.

Thus, the central idea of RQM is to apply Bohr and Heisenberg’s key intuition that “no phenomenon is a phenomenon until it is an observed phenomenon” to each observer independently. This description of physical reality, though fundamentally fragmented, is assumed in RQM to be the best possible one, i.e. to be complete

The final step in the proof is left as an exercise to the reader.