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passive_fist comments on Open thread, Dec. 22 - Dec. 28, 2014 - Less Wrong Discussion
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Quantum theory was barely understood when Everett wrote his thesis. In particular, quantum mechanics as operator theory on Hilbert spaces was only starting to become understood, and Bell's theorem had not yet been proven. An article written 50 years ago has little bearing on what physicists think today.
But anyway, the distinction of 'creating a memory' does not apply when you consider the observer and experiment together as a single quantum system. All quantum systems are reversible and follow unitary transformation laws. This means that no information can ever be lost or created within a quantum system.
Why not?
Let's say I am looking at a clock.
I'm a physical thing, interacting with another physical thing. You can consider me+clock to be a single physical system.
I still record the measurement in my memory. I still remember looking at the clock. That doesn't magically go away.
Accroding to Everett, his idea is to "deduce the subjective appearance of phenomena" by looking that contents of my memory.
In other words, Everett's model does not make a prediction until a measurement record is created. He then suggests these measurment records are consistent with our empirical observations, and also the equivalient to the predictions derived from a collapse.
Yes, but what if a memory is created and then destroyed?
If the memory of an observer is destroyed before its measurements can be deduced, then the model doesn't have any measurement records (ie, no predictions).