Self-Locating Uncertainty and the Origin of Probability in Everettian Quantum Mechanics · HackerPapers discussions

Self-Locating Uncertainty and the Origin of Probability in Everettian Quantum Mechanics — mentioned by lisper

Tue, 10 Sep 2019 15:32:08 GMT

Here's a blog post I wrote about this recently: http://blog.rongarret.info/2019/07/the-trouble-with-many-wor... The TL;DR is that the critics are correct. Deriving the Born rule begs the question because it makes an unjustified assumption (branching indifference) and also introduces an "invisible pink unicorn", i.e. a concept that, according to the theory, has physical significance but cannot be measured. In the case of MWI that concept is branch weights. [UPDATE] The critique I wrote is based on Wallace (https://arxiv.org/abs/0906.2718). Carroll's argument appears to be somewhat different.…

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Self-Locating Uncertainty and the Origin of Probability in Everettian Quantum Mechanics — mentioned by Jweb_Guru

Fri, 19 Oct 2018 08:01:07 GMT

Being able to count worlds in the manner you describe is apparently not easy to justify. If I recall correctly, this is actually a pretty thorny epistemological problem with the theory. IIRC the current response among Many Worlds people is that either (1) it doesn't really matter because there is no reason to believe that probabilities are "real" in the first place, or (2) attempting to show that if you did insist on finding a metric that looked like probability, it would provably have to be the Born probability (see https://arxiv.org/abs/1405.7577). All this stuff is way over my head so I…

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Self-Locating Uncertainty and the Origin of Probability in Everettian Quantum Mechanics — mentioned by abdullahkhalids

Mon, 30 Jun 2014 20:45:54 GMT

I agree that progress in experimental abilities and QC is really forcing physicists to think carefully about what QM means. In fact the month of May saw three papers by major physicists about these deeper issues in QM [1,2,3] In my own humble capacity as a graduate student in physics, my research is about clearly understanding the divide between classical and quantum physics. On the rewriting of theory, I should have been clearer. I meant that when you rewrite the theory you should think about ontology. Differences in ontology between different rewrites, as well as interpretations of those…

Paper and discussion history. A mention is not an endorsement.