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Mitchell_Porter comments on Probably-incomprehensible decision theory exposition and speculation - Less Wrong Discussion

-9 Post author: Will_Newsome 10 September 2011 09:16AM

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Comment author: Mitchell_Porter 10 September 2011 10:26:33AM 3 points [-]

I am going to have to do a proper LW sequence demonstrating why Many Worlds is of little or no interest as a serious theory of physics. Reduced to a slogan: Either you specify what parts of the wavefunction correspond to observable reality, and then you fail to comply with relativity and the Born rule, or else you don't specify what parts of the wavefunction correspond to observable reality, and then you fail to have a theory. The Deutsch-Wallace approach of obtaining the Born rule from decision theory rather than from actual frequencies of events in the multiverse IMHO is just a hopeless attempt to get around this dilemma, by redefining probability so it's not about event frequencies.

Comment author: Jack 10 September 2011 11:44:24AM *  4 points [-]

What are your thoughts on the alternatives? My frustration with the subject as it is discussed on LW is that everyone only speaks about Many Worlds in contrast to Copenhagen. It's a bit like watching a man beat up a little girl and concluding he is the strongest man in the world. I wish people here would pay more attention to the live alternatives. I find De Broglie-Bohm particularly intriguing. I hope you write the sequence.

Comment author: Mitchell_Porter 10 September 2011 12:44:18PM 0 points [-]

These are my rather circumspect thoughts on where the answer will come from.

Bohmian mechanics is ontologically incompatible with special relativity. You still get relativistic effects, but the theory requires a notion of absolute simultaneity in order to be written down, so there is an undetectable preferred reference frame. Still, I have at least two technical reasons (weak values and holographic renormalization group) for thinking it is close to something important, so it's certainly in my thoughts (when I think about this topic).

Comment author: Jack 10 September 2011 01:43:32PM 1 point [-]

Thoughts on this?

Comment author: Mitchell_Porter 11 September 2011 06:44:09AM 0 points [-]

I'll admit that emergent Lorentz invariance is not a completely unreasonable idea; there are many other examples of emergent symmetry. Though I wonder how it looks when you try to obtain emergent diffeomorphism invariance (for general relativity) as well.

Goldstein and Tumulka looks a little artificial. They allow for entanglement but not interaction, and thereby avoid causal loops in time. I'm far more interested in attempts to derive quantum nonlocality from time loops. Possibly their model can be obtained from a time-loop model in the limit where interactions are negligible.

Comment author: Will_Newsome 10 September 2011 12:24:13PM 0 points [-]

I agree with Jack, I'd appreciate a sequence, especially one that touched on interpretations that do weird things with timelike curves.