rkastner
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I address this question of ontology in my book, and I strongly suggest you take a look at that. (I know the book is a bit pricey, but you can always get it from a library! ;)
But here's a reply in a nutshell.
First, the whole point of PTI is the idea that QM describes REAL possibilitites that do not live in spacetime -- i.e., that spacetime is not 'all there is'. So the QM objects DO exist, in my interpretation. That's the basic ontology. The mathematical object that describes these real possibilitites is Hilbert space. Again: 'what exists' is not the same as 'what is in spacetime'. Not... (read more)
Hello, I'm posting this because I saw some earlier comments about PTI that needed correcting.
PTI does not have 'world branches' like MWI. If you read the material at the end of my FoP article (http://arxiv.org/abs/1204.5227)
and my new book, http://www.cambridge.org/us/knowledge/discountpromotion/?site_locale=en_US&code=L2TIQM
Chapters 3 and 6 in particular, you will see that there is already a 'transaction eater' in PTI (if I understood that notion correctly); i.e., something that really does result in 'collapse'. These are the absorbers, properly understood (and I give a precise definition of what an 'absorber' is.) PTI was developed to better define 'absorber,' to extend TI to the relativistic domain, and to address the fact that multiparticle q. states... (read more)
Thanks Mitchell -- it's only at the nonrelativistic limit that there is a timelike partial ordering in this sense, and that emerges stochastically from the relativistic level. I.e., there is no temporal causal relationship in the basic field propagation. So my picture isn't quite captured by the formulation in this paper (which also doesn't appear to address wf collapse and the possible relation of collapse to an emergent spacetime). But in any case, thanks again for your interest and I hope you will take a look at the book. The main dividend you get from the TI picture is a robust solution to the measurement problem, in contrast to the 'FAPP' quasi-solution obtainable from decoherence approaches. In particular, decoherence never gives true irreversibility, since you never get real collapse with decoherence alone. In PTI you get true collapse, which also sheds light on macroscopic irreversibilty. I discuss this in my book as well.