Actually, the "many worlds" "interpretation", simply treats the highly successful equations as meaning what they say.
And it is misnamed. The field equations describe a highly interconnected "web universe" of "tangles" (what I call spans of entangled interactions) and "spangles". (My shorthand for superpositions, i.e. disjoint interactions of particles. Think of all the alternate lines leading from and two distinguishable states, like star patterns.) Basically, a graph of union and intersection relations where all combinations, individually and en masse, are determined exactly by the laws of conservation.
That's an amazingly good property for a theory. And we have it.
By including all consistent versions, no external information is required by the theory. It is informationally complete. A successful objective explanation. With deep experimental support that entanglement and superposition actually exist, because their interactions are easily testable.
In fact, entanglement doesn't "violate" locality, it is the more general case which explains locality. Locality is just tightly coupled entanglement/interaction. Not a fundamental constraint on connections. There is no fundamental "distance", just loose and dense connections. Locality is just what we see wherever there are patterns of dense connections. They are an effect, not a constraint.
Even in the classical world of large (highly tangled) objects, we take it for granted that dependent objects can separate over arbitrarily vast dimensions of space and time and yet return together. If that isn't entanglement over vast distances, what is it? It is a basic property of classical physics. Quantum mechanics reveals more subtlety in those maintained connections, including interactions between connections, but it didn't originate them.
Forces disappear. They become passive in an interesting way. Histories where information cancel, leave structured distribution patterns behind, which to us look like forces. Cancellation is just information being conserved. Not an active force. But the results appear active.
In a similar way to how the evolutionary umbrella seems very smart and creative, when really, it is just poorly adapted individual creatures independently cancelling themselves out blindly, leaving a distributional improvement behind.
There is no additional information needed to explain the effect of quantum "collapse" because it is already explained by the fast bifurcation of disjoint tangles when lots of particles interact in an unorganized manner. It is thermodynamics being thermodynamics.
Anyone attempting to invent a mechanism for "collapse" is like someone trying to explain why the spherical Earth appears "flat" by introducing additional speculative theories. Despite the spherical world theory already explaining why it looks flat locally.
And the only reason to not take the experimentally verified field equations as a plain reading, is the result is "too big" for someone's imagination.
Our everyday experience doesn't limit reality, despite humans having trouble with theories that reveal a bigger reality, over and over and over.
Bluntly: The total field equations preserve information - that is the plain implication and guarantee for having both unions (tangles) and intersections (spangles) of interactions.
Anything else requires a universal firehose of magically appearing information to choose collapses, i.e. particular interactions, in order to explain something already explained. In other words, dressed up voodoo. And by "re-complicating", uh, "re-explaining" the already explained, introduces a ridiculous new puzzle: Where does all that pervasively intrusive relentless injection of information (that determines every single extricable particle interaction!), come from? (Occam is spinning like a particle accelerator in his grave.)
Saying it "Just Happens" is like someone "explaining" their pet version of a creator with "Just Is". It is a psychological non-taulogy for "Don't Ask Questions".
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qm-manyworlds/) goes into this in some depth, and it seems like the right way to think about it is say that "I" in one branch is a different entity than the "I" in a different branch. I have somehow not been able to grok it yet.
And I agree about the naming. I really dislike the name "many worlds interpretation", which seems to imply that we have to postulate the existence of these additional worlds, whereas in fact they are branches of the wavefunction exactly predicted by standard quantum mechanics.
The writing of Chalmers and its consequences have been a catastrophe for philosophy.
The hard problem is that there is such a feeling at all.
In essence, you're asking why there's an inside to being a self-modeling system. But "inside" isn't something extraneous, something additional -- rather, it's what "self-modeling" means.
Really the "hard problem" has a very easy answer, but it's a physical/functional answer, and dualists and obscurantists simply don't like it.
I mean, there is a credible first-person answer to that question of yours, which each man can answer for himself.
But considered more seriously, the "hard problem" is an artifact of treating experience as a separate thing that needs to be generated. If you accept that self-modeling systems bounded in space and time exist, you've already accepted that experience exists -- because experience is what such a system is, from the inside. There's no second step where experience gets added. The question "why is there experience?" is exactly akin to "Why is there an interior to four walls and a roof?" The interior isn't a separate thing; it's necessarily constitutive.
That's quite a serious issues. And arguments against that - like Self-Locating Uncertainty, or Zurek's Envariance - look suspiciously circular if you pull them apart.
There's also the issue that if you don't have a mechanism that constrains probability, you can't say anything about the common mechanism of any of the worlds you're in. Your world may be some kind of lottery-winning statistical freak world which happens to have very unusual properties, and generalising from them is absolutely misleading.
There's no way of testing that, so you end up with something unfalsifiable.
Pour water down a hill. Water clings to water, and we have hills that already have lots of correlations. We get streams that break up into multiple streams.
How did one stream end up where it is? It seems like a good question, but it is circular. The stream is defined by where it is. You are here (in some circumstance), because the version of you in this circumstance is you.
A transporter accident that creates several versions of you, on several planets with difference colors, doesn't need to explain to each version how they ended up at a planet with their color. Even if for a particular copy, it seems like there should be an answer why they showed up on a planet of a particular specific color. The "why" is just, all paths were taken.
Is it falsifiable?
If you have a theory that seems unassailable by any logic, that's a good signal it is tautological and not very useful.
Hardly. Some philosophers say that. But I don't take much from philosophers reasoning about physics.
Zurek’s Decoherence and Quantum Darwinism is thought-provoking, but it’s still speculation without broad buy-in from researchers. We might need ASI to crack these mysteries — our brains weren’t built for this kind of problem.
Maybe ASI can help design these. Until it can, it will just be another voice arguing for one position over another on pretty weak arguments. Right now my money would be more on human researchers finding those experiments, but even among those few are even trying
Nothing is a particle, all measured things are a probability that we make a certainty when we measure them.
When you stop looking at things as things, but instead, see them as probabilities, it will all make sense. My hand and the beer bottle I pick up are both probabilities. Since the mind cannot navigate the world based on probabilities it turns them into certainties.
Physical science is is the only way we can perceive quantum science. There is no "collapse" outside of our brains perception.
Induction had the earth at the center of the solar system and had the best calculations to predict where Mars was. Copernicus said earth was at the center, the equations were simpler, but were worse at predicting the location of planets.(until we figured out they moved in ellipses)
When we say "All swans are white, because I've never seen a black swan." Its probabilistically true. That is induction. If we found swans didn't have the gene to make black feathers, that would be deduction.
Deduction is probably the most true, if it is true. (But it is often 100% wrong)
Induction is always semi true.
Quantum mechanics seems to be in the stage of induction. Particles are like the earth at the center of the solar system. We need a Copernican revolution.
jadbox•1h ago
thyristan•1h ago
goatlover•1h ago
The author does say the approach is a combination of Copenhagen and MWI, removing the outlandish parts of both. Seems to preserve the randomness of the former though.
flockonus•32m ago
To call something random doesn't mean it's impossible to model, in fact all sorts of natural facts seemed random one day before being covered by a model. One very relatable example example is the motion of stars in the the night sky, which seemed random for ages, until the Copernican revolution.
The fact we have access to random() function in programming seems to trip many people. random() is a particular model implementation of random, but stuff in nature isn't random().
My point is, using "just random" to do work in any scientific explanation is a clutch.
staticassertion•21m ago
Maxatar•17m ago
It does not have to mean something inherently non-deterministic or something that can't be modelled, although it certainly is the case that if something is inherently non-deterministic then it would necessarily have to be modelled randomly. Modelling things as a random process is very useful even in cases where the underlying phenomenon has a fully understood and deterministic model; a simple example of this would be chess. It's an entirely deterministic game with perfect information that is fully understood, but nevertheless all the best chess engines model positions probabilistically and use randomness as part of their search.
Joker_vD•3m ago
Well, duh. It's not like classic objects actually exist, or the classical/quantum divide: everything is quantum, including the "observers". The "classical observer" is a crude approximation that breaks down to a pointy enough question. Just like shorting the perfect battery (with zero internal resistance) with a perfect wire (with zero external resistance) — this scenario is not an approximation of any possible real scenario so it's paradoxicality (infinite current!) is irrelevant.
superposeur•14m ago