This post is part of the Quantum Physics Sequence.
Followup to: Quantum Explanations

"Why are you doing these posts on quantum physics?" the one asked me.

"Quite a number of reasons," I said.

"For one thing," I said, "the many-worlds issue is just about the only case I know of where you can bring the principles of Science and Bayesianism into direct conflict." It's important to have different mental buckets for "science" and "rationality", as they are different concepts. Bringing the two principles into direct conflict is helpful for illustrating what science is and is not, and what rationality is and is not. Otherwise you end up trusting in what you call "science", which won't be strict enough.

"For another thing," I continued, "part of what goes into becoming a rationalist, is learning to live into a counterintuitive world—learning to find things underneath the surface that are unlike the world of surface forms." Quantum mechanics makes a good introduction to that, when done correctly without the horrible confusion and despair. It breaks you of your belief in an intuitive universe, counters naive realism, destroys your trust in the way that your cognitive algorithms look from inside—and then you're ready to start seeing your mind as a mind, not as a window onto reality.

"But you're writing about physics, without being a physicist," the one said, "isn't that... a little..."

"Yes," I said, "it is, and I felt guilty about it. But there were physicists talking complete nonsense about Occam's Razor without knowing the probability theory of it, so my hand was forced. Also the situation in teaching quantum mechanics is really awful—I saw the introductions to Bayesianism and they seemed unnecessarily difficult, but the situation in quantum mechanics is so much worse." It really is. I remember sitting there staring at the "linear operators", trying to figure out what the hell they physically did to the eigenvectors—trying to visualize the actual events that were going on in the physical evolution—before it dawned on me that it was just a math trick to extract the average of the eigenvalues. Okay, but... can't you just tell me that up front? Write it down somewhere? Oh, I forgot, the math doesn't mean anything, it just works.

"Furthermore," I added, "knowing about many wor...

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