I’m not 100% convinced—even after reading Eliezer’s articles—that one interpretation of quantum mechanics is necessarily better than the other (my gut reaction would be to say “a plague on both your houses”), but this article looks like an argument in favor of many-worlds over Copenhagen.
In Copenhagen, the extra configurations “magically” collapse out of existence at some ill-defined point when the system decoheres to the point that we can’t get to see them even in principle. In many-worlds, the macroscopic system decoheres instead. The existence of innumerable and undetectable “extra worlds” is not a violation of Occam’s Razor as defined in this article: as long as it follows from just taking the laws of quantum mechanics to their logical conclusion, there is no extra information needed to describe this law, and the extra worlds are irrelevant to our description in the same sense as extra galaxies are, as it’s only a question of extra RAM rather than extra meaningful information as long as they obey the same fundamental laws.
I’m not 100% convinced—even after reading Eliezer’s articles—that one interpretation of quantum mechanics is necessarily better than the other (my gut reaction would be to say “a plague on both your houses”), but this article looks like an argument in favor of many-worlds over Copenhagen.
In Copenhagen, the extra configurations “magically” collapse out of existence at some ill-defined point when the system decoheres to the point that we can’t get to see them even in principle. In many-worlds, the macroscopic system decoheres instead. The existence of innumerable and undetectable “extra worlds” is not a violation of Occam’s Razor as defined in this article: as long as it follows from just taking the laws of quantum mechanics to their logical conclusion, there is no extra information needed to describe this law, and the extra worlds are irrelevant to our description in the same sense as extra galaxies are, as it’s only a question of extra RAM rather than extra meaningful information as long as they obey the same fundamental laws.