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.

Surely there's a difference between thinking that experiments that can distinguish MWI and Copenhagen are infeasible for various technological reasons, and thinking that MWI and Copenhagen are empirically indistinguishable. I usually interpret empirical indistinguishability as "no conceivable distinguishing experiment" rather than "no feasible distinguishing experiment".

There are certain observables for which MWI and Copenhagen predict different expectation values, provided decoherence is contained. The problem is, we do not currently have much of an idea of how we could go about making the relevant measurements, mainly because we do not know how to keep systems as large as Wigner (or Schrodinger's cat) informationally isolated for a sufficiently long period of time.

I usually interpret empirical indistinguishability as "no conceivable distinguishing experiment" rather than "no feasible distinguishing experiment".

Yes, indeed. And it seems like there is a way to potentially falsify MWI, after all (see below). There is no way of falsifying the orthodox approach ("shut up and calculate, unless you can say something instrumentally useful") as yet, because it does not treat collapse as "objective", only as a calculational prescription (this is the part EY completely refuses to ackn... (read more)

1[anonymous]14y

That doesn't sound right. Famously, matrix mechanics is "equivalent to the Schrödinger wave formulation", and matrix mechanics doesn't have multiple interpretations. I view this whole subject as a colossal waste of time.