You're looking at Less Wrong's discussion board. This includes all posts, including those that haven't been promoted to the front page yet. For more information, see About Less Wrong.

TheAncientGeek comments on Quantum Bayesianism - Less Wrong Discussion

0 Post author: morganism 08 October 2016 11:27PM

Comments (32)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: qmotus 11 October 2016 09:59:55AM 0 points [-]

Do you think that we're likely to find something in those directions that would give a reason to prefer some other interpretation than MWI?

Comment author: MrMind 11 October 2016 01:29:40PM *  0 points [-]

My idea is more on the line of "in the future we are going to grasp a conceptual frame that would make sense of all interpretations" (or explain them away) rather than pointing to a specific interpretation.

Comment author: qmotus 11 October 2016 10:00:55PM *  1 point [-]

If it doesn't fundamentally change quantum mechanics as a theory, is the picture likely to turn out fundamentally different from MWI? Roger Penrose, a vocal MWI critic, seems to wholeheartedly agree that QM implies MWI; it's just that he thinks that this means the theory is wrong. David Deutsch, I believe, has said that he's not certain that quantum mechanics is correct; but any modification of the theory, according to him, is unlikely to do away with the parallel universes.

QBism, too, seems to me to essentially accept the MWI picture as the underlying ontology, but then says that we should only care about the worlds that we actually observe (Sean Carroll has presented criticism similar to this, and mentioned that it sounds more like therapy to him), although it could be that I've misunderstood something.

Comment author: TheAncientGeek 12 October 2016 09:10:27AM *  0 points [-]

If it doesn't fundamentally change quantum mechanics as a theory, is the picture likely to turn out fundamentally different from MWI?

CI/OR is a different picture to MWI, yet neither change QM as a number-crunching theory. You have hit on the fundamental problems of empiricism: the correct interpretation of a data is underdetermined by data, and interpretations can differ radically with small changes in data or no changes in data.

Comment author: qmotus 12 October 2016 08:57:14PM 0 points [-]

I'm not sure what you mean by OR, but if it refers to Penrose's interpretation (my guess, because it sounds like Orch-OR), then I believe that it indeed changes QM as a theory.