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.

But MWI advocates (at least of the Oxford variety) claim that the properties of reality emerge from the wavefunction. No additional "beables" are required. I know you disagree, but I'm pretty sure that's the sort of view Aaronson is referring to when he says MWI is mathematically simpler. The fundamental ontology is the wavefunction itself, not worlds of matter/energy whose multiplication is described by the wavefunction.

I was quite certain that Wallace et al (Oxfordians) dismissed pure WF realism in favour of state space realism when attempting to make it relativistic?

1Mitchell_Porter14y

I certainly don't think Scott belongs to the Oxford school. He's probably just one of those people for whom the existence of probability-like numbers in the density matrix is enough. (The flaw of this perspective is that you need these numbers to appear in your ontology as the relative frequencies of something, because that's what they are in reality.)