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Anders_H comments on Stupid Questions March 2015 - Less Wrong Discussion
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As a non-physicist who has read the non-technical parts of LW discussions on quantum mechanics, I find the argument for MWI over Copenhagen convincing: From what I gather it is uncontested that Copenhagen adds additional complicating assumptions which don't make falsifiable predictions. If that is true, it is certainly a good reason to prefer MWI
My stupid question is as follows: Can someone give an intuitive explanation if why we don't interpret this stochastically? Ie that someone wrote a simulation that selects an Everett branch at random from a distribution given by the Schroedinger Equations, and that this branch is the only one that is realized?
This may have been covered before, but I don't know the terminology well enough to find it. If that is the case, a link to previous discussion would be greatly appreciated!
At which moment do you select the random branch?
The equations say that each branch has an "amplitude"; and unlike probabilities, these amplitudes are complex numbers. Which means that two nonzero amplitudes added together can produce a zero outcome. (As in: "yes, it is possible that 'A and X' happens, and it is also possible that 'A and not X' happens, but 'A' is completely impossible".)
This effect almost completely disappears at larger scale, because what we define as a "state" on the large level includes zillions of possible states on the small level (for example, the state "the chair is in the middle of the room" corresponds to zillions of possible combinations of particles), and these large states interact just like classical probabilities, because of some mathematical laws about large numbers and complex numbers.
So yes, on larger scale we can pretend that the world is randomly selected from all the possible branches. It just doesn't make sense on the small scale... which is exactly how the quantum effects were discovered, because we were originally thinking in terms of probabilities, and then we couldn't explain the double-slit experiment.