Scott Aaronson's cautious optimism for the MWI

calef

http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=1103

Eliezer's gung-ho attitude about the realism of the Many Worlds Interpretation always rubbed me the wrong way, especially in the podcast between both him and Scott (around 8:43 in http://bloggingheads.tv/videos/2220). I've seen a similar sentiment expressed before about the MWI sequences. And I say that still believing it to be the most seemingly correct of the available interpretations.

I feel Scott's post does an excellent job grounding it as a possibly correct, and in-principle falsifiable interpretation.

http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=1103

I feel Scott's post does an excellent job grounding it as a possibly correct, and in-principle falsifiable interpretation.

In other words, MWI says: apply Copenhagen for anything useful.

MWI says: apply Born's rule to get anything useful.

If that's what you call Copenhagen, then sure they're the same thing - but then why was Everett so scandalous and ridiculed? Something had to be different.

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MWI says that you apply no more than one collapse in every experiment, and you know why it is a collapse from your point of view. Copenhagen requires you to decide without guidance whether to apply collapse inside the experiment.

4pragmatist14y

Yeah, just like statistical mechanics requires us to model systems as having infinite size in order to perform many useful calculations (e.g. phase transitions, understood as singularities in thermodynamic potentials, can only take place in infinite particle systems). It doesn't follow that we should actually believe that these systems have infinite size. Also, the claim is not that MWI is mathematically identical to Copenhagen, just that it works out that way in most practical cases. The Copenhagen interpretation is sufficiently ill-defined that it's unclear what its mathematical structure actually is. But as Aaronson points out in the post, there are predictions that distinguish between MWI and Copenhagen.