Rest of the argument… given relativistic issues in QM as described, QM is just approximation which does not work at the relevant scale, and so concluding existence of multiple worlds from it is very silly.
… a proposition far simpler than the argument for supporting SIAI …
Indeed.
If you know all these things and you still can’t tell that MWI is obviously true—a proposition far simpler than the argument for supporting SIAI—then we have here a question that is actually quite different from the one you seem to try to be presenting:
I do not have sufficient g-factor to follow the detailed arguments on Less Wrong. What epistemic state is it rational for me to be in with respect to SIAI?
If you haven’t read through the MWI sequence, read it. Then try to talk with your smart friends about it. You will soon learn that your smart friends and favorite SF writers are not remotely close to the rationality standards of Less Wrong, and you will no longer think it anywhere near as plausible that their differing opinion is because they know some incredible secret knowledge you don’t.
Ghahahahaha. “A community blog devoted to refining the art of human rationality”… or in other world an online equivalent of a green-ink letter.
Right in the beginning of the sequence you managed to get phases wrong.
Hopefully this mistake will be fixed one day, so the sequence will be judged on the merits of the argument it presents, and not by the presence of a wrong factor of “i”.
given relativistic issues in QM as described, QM is just approximation which does not work at the relevant scale, and so concluding existence of multiple worlds from it is very silly.
Nonrelativistic QM is an approximation to relativistic QFT, and while relativity certainly introduces a new problem for MWI, it remains true that QFT employs the superposition principle just as much as QM. It’s a formalism of “many histories” rather than “many worlds”, but the phenomenon of superposition, and therefore the possibility of parallel coexisting realities, is still there.
I would agree that it was foolish for Eliezer to flaunt his dogmatism about MWI as if that was evidence of superior rationality. What I would say is that he wasn’t worse than physicists in general. Professional physicists who know far more about the subject than Eliezer still manage to say equally foolish things about the implications of quantum mechanics.
What the evidence suggests to me is that to discover the explanation of QM, you need deep technical knowledge, not just of QM but also QFT, and probably of quantum gravity, at least to the level of the holographic principle, and you also need a very powerful imagination. Possibly the correct answer is a variation on a concept we already possess: many worlds, Bohmian mechanics, loops in time, a ’t Hooft cellular automaton. If so, then the big imaginative leap was already carried out, but the technicalities are still hard enough that we don’t even know that it’s the right type of answer. Eliezer-style dogmatism would be wrong for all the available explanations: we do not know which if any is right; at this stage there is no better strategy than pluralistic investigation, including hybridization of these supposedly distinct concepts. But it’s also possible that the correct answer hasn’t yet been conceived, even in outline, which is why imagination remains important, as well as technical knowledge.
If you accept this analysis, then it’s easier to understand why interpretations of quantum mechanics present such a chaotic scene. The radical ontological differences between the candidate explanations create a lot of conceptual tension, and the essential role of subtle technicalities, and mathematical facts not yet known, in pointing the way to the right answer, mean that this conceptual tension can’t be resolved by a simple adjudication like “non-collapse is simpler than collapse”. The possibility that the answer is something we haven’t even imagined yet, makes life even more difficult for people who can’t bear to settle for Copenhagen positivism—should they just insist “there must be an answer, even if we don’t know anything about how it works”?
It’s therefore difficult to avoid both dogmatic rationalization and passive agnosticism. It’s the sort of problem in which the difficulties are such that a return to basics—a review of “what I actually know, rather than what I habitually assume or say”—can take you all the way back to the phenomenological level—“under these circumstances, this is observed to occur”.
For people who don’t want to devote their lives to solving the problem, but who at least want to have a “rational” perspective on it, what I recommend is that you understand the phenomenological Copenhagen interpretation—not the one which says wavefunctions are real and they collapse when observed, just the one which says that wavefunctions are like probability distributions and describe the statistics of observable quantities—and that you also develop some idea of what’s involved in all the major known candidate ontologies.
For readers of this site who believe that questions like this should be resolved by a quantified Occam’s razor like Solomonoff induction: in principle, your first challenge is just to make the different theories commensurable—to find a common language precise enough that you can compare their complexity. In practice, that is a difficult enough task (on account of all these ideas being a little bit underspecified) that it couldn’t be done without a level of technical engagement which meant you had joined the ranks of “people trying to solve the problem, rather than just pontificating about it”.
Hopefully this mistake will be fixed one day, so the sequence will be judged on the merits of the argument it presents, and not by the presence of a wrong factor of “i”.
The argument is pure incompetent self important rambling about nothing. The mistakes only make this easier to demonstrate to people who do not know QM, who assume it must have some merit because someone wasted time writing it up. Removal of mistakes would constitute deception.
Nonrelativistic QM is an approximation to relativistic QFT, and while relativity certainly introduces a new problem for MWI, it remains true that QFT employs the superposition principle just as much as QM.
Nonetheless, there is no satisfactory quantum gravity. It is still only an approximation to reality, and subsequently the mathematical artifacts it has (multiple realities) mean nothing. Even if it was exact it is questionable what is the meaning of such artifacts.
Professional physicists who know far more about the subject than Eliezer still manage to say equally foolish things about the implications of quantum mechanics.
They did not have the stupidity of not even learning it before trying to say something smart about it.
The muckiness surrounding the interferometer is well-known; in fact, the PSE question was written by a LWer.
Rest of the argument… given relativistic issues in QM as described, QM is just approximation which does not work at the relevant scale, and so concluding existence of multiple worlds from it is very silly.
The conclusion isn’t “MWI is true.” The conclusion is “MWI is a simpler explanation than collapse (or straw-Copenhagen, as we in the Contrarian Conspiracy like to call it) for quantum phenomena, and therefore a priori more likely to be true.”
And yes, it is also well-known that this quote is not Yudkowsky at his most charming. Try not to conflate him with either rationalism or the community (which are also distinct things!).
I have not read the MWI sequence yet, but if the argument is that MWI is simpler than collapse, isn’t Bohm even simpler than MWI?
(The best argument against Bohm I can find on LW is a brief comment that claims it implies MWI, but I don’t understand how and there doesn’t seem to be much else on the Web making that case.)
Good point. I’d say that it doesn’t have any calculation of the probability. But some people hope that the probabilities can be derived from just MW. If they achieve this then it would be the simplest theory. But if they need extra hypotheses then it will gain complexity, and may well come out worse than Bohm.
Mitchell_Porter makes the case, but reading him makes my brain shut down for lack of coherence. I assume Yudkowsky doesn’t favor Bohm because it requires non-local hidden variables. Non-local theories are unexpected in physics, and local hidden variables don’t exist.
There’s more to Bohmian mechanics than you may think. There are actually observables whose expectation values correspond to the Bohmian trajectories—“weak-valued” position measurements. This is a mathematical fact that ought to mean something, but I don’t know what. Also, you can eliminate the pilot wave from Bohmian mechanics. If you start with a particular choice of universal wavefunction, that will be equivalent to adding a particular nonlocal potential to a classical equation of motion. That nonlocal potential might be the product of a holographic transformation away from the true fundamental degrees of freedom, or it might approximate the nonlocal correlations induced by planck-scale time loops in the spacetime manifold.
I have never found the time or the energy to do my own quantum sequence, so perhaps it’s my fault if I’m hard to understand. The impression of incoherence may also arise from the fact that I put out lots and lots of ideas. There are a lot of possibilities. But if you want an overall opinion on QM which you wish to be able to attribute to me, here it is:
The explanation of QM might be “Bohm”, “Everett”, “Cramer”, “’t Hooft”, or “None of the Above”. By “Bohm”, I don’t just mean Bohmian mechanics, I mean lines of investigation arising from Bohmian mechanics, like the ones I just described. The other names in quotes should be interpreted similarly.
Also, we are not in a position to say that one of these five approaches is clearly favored over the others. The first four are all lines of investigation with fundamental questions unanswered and fundamental issues unresolved, and yet they are the best specific proposals that we have (unless I missed one). It’s reasonable for a person to prefer one type of model, but in the current state of knowledge any such preference is necessarily superficial, and very liable to be changed by new information.
I have never found the time or the energy to do my own quantum sequence, so perhaps it’s my fault if I’m hard to understand. The impression of incoherence may also arise from the fact that I put out lots and lots of ideas.
Well, that’s understandable. Not everyone has all the free time in the world to write sequences.
It’s reasonable for a person to prefer one type of model, but in the current state of knowledge any such preference is necessarily superficial, and very liable to be changed by new information.
That’s exactly what I wish Yudkowsky’s argument in the QM sequence would have been, but for some reason he felt the need to forever crush the hopes and dreams of the people clinging to alternative interpretations, in a highly insulting manner. What ever happened to leaving a line of retreat?
That’s exactly what I wish Yudkowsky’s argument in the QM sequence would have been, but for some reason he felt the need to forever crush the hopes and dreams of the people clinging to alternative interpretations, in a highly insulting manner. What ever happened to leaving a line of retreat?
Something feels very wrong about this sentence… I get a nagging feeling that you believe he has a valid argument, but he should have been nice to people who are irrationally clinging to alternative interpretations, via such irrational ways as nitpicking on the unimportant details.
Meanwhile, a coherent hypothesis: the guy does not know QM, thinks he knows QM, proceeds to explain whatever simplistic nonsense he thinks is the understanding of QM, getting almost everything wrong. Then interprets the discrepancies in his favour, and feels incredibly intelligent.
Something feels very wrong about this sentence… I get a nagging feeling that you believe he has a valid argument, but he should have been nice to people who are irrationally clinging to alternative interpretations, via such irrational ways as nitpicking on the unimportant details.
I believe he has a valid argument for a substantially weaker claim of the sort I described earlier.
He “should have been nice to people” (without qualification) by not trying to draw (without a shred of credible evidence) a link between rationality/intelligence/g-factor and (even a justified amount of) MWI-skepticism. It’s hard to imagine a worse way to immediately put your audience on the defensive. It’s all there in the manual.
I believe he has a valid argument for a substantially weaker claim of the sort I described earlier.
Why do you think so? Quantum mechanics is complicated, and questions of what is a ‘better’ theory are very subtle.
On the other hand, figuring out what claim your arguments actually support, is rather simple. You have an argument which: gets wrong elementary facts, gets wrong terminology, gets wrong the very claim. All the easy stuff is wrong. You still believe that it gets right some hard stuff. Why?
It’s all there in the manual.
He should have left a line of retreat for himself.
For the reasons outlined above. Occam’s razor + locality.
On the other hand, figuring out what claim your arguments actually support, is rather simple.
My argument is distinct from Yudkowsky’s in that our claims are radically different. If you disagree that MWI is more probable than straw-Copenhagen, I’d like to know why.
You have an argument which: gets wrong elementary facts, gets wrong terminology, gets wrong the very claim. All the easy stuff is wrong. You still believe that it gets right some hard stuff. Why?
None of the “easy stuff” is pertinent to the argument that MWI is more probable than straw-Copenhagen. For example, the interferometer calculation is neither used as evidence that MWI is local, nor that MWI is less complicated. The calculation is independent of any interpretation, after all.
For the reasons outlined above. Occam’s razor + locality.
if I stand a needle on it’s tip on a glass plate, will needle remain standing indefinitely? No it probably won’t even though by Occam’s razor, zero deviation from vertical is (arguably) more probable than any other specific deviation from vertical. MWI seems to require exact linearity, and QM and QFT don’t do gravity, i.e. are approximate. Linear is a first order approximation to nearly anything.
None of the “easy stuff” is pertinent to the argument that MWI is more probable than straw-Copenhagen.
Intelligence and careful thinking --> getting easy stuff right and maybe (very rarely) getting hard stuff right.
Lack of intelligence and/or careful thinking --> getting easy stuff wrong and getting hard stuff certainly wrong.
What is straw Copenhagen anyway? Objective collapse caused by consciousness? Copenhagen is not objective collapse. It is a theory for predicting and modelling the observations. With the MWI you still need to single out one observer, because something happens in real world that does single out one observer, as anyone can readily attest, and so there’s no actual difference here in any math, it’s only a difference in how you look at this math.
edit: ghahahahaha, wait, you literally think it has higher probability? (i seen another of the Yudkowsky’s comments where he said something about his better understanding of probability theory) Well, here’s the bullet: the probability of our reality being quantum mechanics or quantum field theory, within platonic space, is 0 (basically, vanishingly small, predicated on the experiments confirming general relativity all failing), because gravity exists and works so and so but that’s not part of QFT. 0 times anything is still 0. (That doesn’t mean the probability of alternate realities is 0, if there can be such a thing)
From the one comment on Bohm I can find, it seems that he actually dislikes Bohm because the particles are “epiphenomena” to the pilot wave. Meaning the particles don’t actually do anything except follow the pilot wave, and it’s actually the the pilot wave itself that does all the computation (of minds and hence observers).
This assumption is made by every other interpretation of quantum mechanics I know. On the other hand, I’m not a physicist; I’m clearly not up to date on things.
Local HV’s do exist.
I meant the classical HV theories that were ruled out by actual experiments detecting violations of Bell’s inequality.
Well, you didn’t link to his view of qualia, but to a link where he explains why MWI is not the “winner” or “preferred” as EY claimed so confidently in his series on QM.
You might disagree with him on his stance on qualia ( I do too ) but it would be a logical fallacy to state that therefore all his other opinions are also incoherent.
Mitchell Porter’s view on qualia is not non-sense either, it is highly controversial and speculative, no doubt. But his motivation is sound, he think that it is the only way to avoid some sort of dualism, so in that sense his view is even more reductionist than that of Dennett etc.
He is also in good company with people like David Deutsch (another famous many world fundamentlist).
As for local hidden variables, obviously there does not exist a local HV that has been ruled out ;p but you claimed there was none in existence in general.
The muckiness surrounding the interferometer is well-known; in fact, the PSE question was written by a LWer.
Ahh, that would explain why a non-answer is the accepted one. Was this non-answer written by LWer by chance?
Rest of sequence is no better. Photon going in particular way is not really ‘configuration’ with a complex amplitude, I am not even sure the guy actually understands how interferometer works or what happens if length of one path is modified a little. Someone who can’t correctly solve even a simplest QM problem has no business ‘explaining’ anything about QM by retelling popular books.
The conclusion isn’t “MWI is true.”
You clearly do not have enough g-factor:
If you know all these things and you still can’t tell that MWI is obviously true
And yes, it is also well-known that this quote is not Yudkowsky at his most charming.
When people are at their most charming, they are pretending.
Try not to conflate him with either rationalism or the community (which are also distinct things!).
Rationalism? I see. This would explain why the community would take that seriously instead of pointing and laughing.
Are you sure? I’ve seen posts speaking of ‘aspiring rationalists’. It does make sense that rationalists would see themselves as rational, but it does not make sense for rational people to call themselves rationalists. Rationalism is sort of like a belief in power of rationality. It’s to rationality as communism is to community.
Believing that the alternate realities must exist if they are a part of a theory, even if the same theory says that the worlds are unreachable, that’s rationalism. Speaking of which, even a slightest non-linearity is incompatible with many worlds.
Right in the beginning of the sequence you managed to get phases wrong. Quick search turns up:
http://www.ex-parrot.com/~pete/quantum-wrong.html
http://www.poe-news.com/forums/spshort.php?pi=1002430803&ti=1002430709
http://physics.stackexchange.com/a/23833/4967
Ouch.
Rest of the argument… given relativistic issues in QM as described, QM is just approximation which does not work at the relevant scale, and so concluding existence of multiple worlds from it is very silly.
Indeed.
Ghahahahaha. “A community blog devoted to refining the art of human rationality”… or in other world an online equivalent of a green-ink letter.
Hopefully this mistake will be fixed one day, so the sequence will be judged on the merits of the argument it presents, and not by the presence of a wrong factor of “i”.
Nonrelativistic QM is an approximation to relativistic QFT, and while relativity certainly introduces a new problem for MWI, it remains true that QFT employs the superposition principle just as much as QM. It’s a formalism of “many histories” rather than “many worlds”, but the phenomenon of superposition, and therefore the possibility of parallel coexisting realities, is still there.
I would agree that it was foolish for Eliezer to flaunt his dogmatism about MWI as if that was evidence of superior rationality. What I would say is that he wasn’t worse than physicists in general. Professional physicists who know far more about the subject than Eliezer still manage to say equally foolish things about the implications of quantum mechanics.
What the evidence suggests to me is that to discover the explanation of QM, you need deep technical knowledge, not just of QM but also QFT, and probably of quantum gravity, at least to the level of the holographic principle, and you also need a very powerful imagination. Possibly the correct answer is a variation on a concept we already possess: many worlds, Bohmian mechanics, loops in time, a ’t Hooft cellular automaton. If so, then the big imaginative leap was already carried out, but the technicalities are still hard enough that we don’t even know that it’s the right type of answer. Eliezer-style dogmatism would be wrong for all the available explanations: we do not know which if any is right; at this stage there is no better strategy than pluralistic investigation, including hybridization of these supposedly distinct concepts. But it’s also possible that the correct answer hasn’t yet been conceived, even in outline, which is why imagination remains important, as well as technical knowledge.
If you accept this analysis, then it’s easier to understand why interpretations of quantum mechanics present such a chaotic scene. The radical ontological differences between the candidate explanations create a lot of conceptual tension, and the essential role of subtle technicalities, and mathematical facts not yet known, in pointing the way to the right answer, mean that this conceptual tension can’t be resolved by a simple adjudication like “non-collapse is simpler than collapse”. The possibility that the answer is something we haven’t even imagined yet, makes life even more difficult for people who can’t bear to settle for Copenhagen positivism—should they just insist “there must be an answer, even if we don’t know anything about how it works”?
It’s therefore difficult to avoid both dogmatic rationalization and passive agnosticism. It’s the sort of problem in which the difficulties are such that a return to basics—a review of “what I actually know, rather than what I habitually assume or say”—can take you all the way back to the phenomenological level—“under these circumstances, this is observed to occur”.
For people who don’t want to devote their lives to solving the problem, but who at least want to have a “rational” perspective on it, what I recommend is that you understand the phenomenological Copenhagen interpretation—not the one which says wavefunctions are real and they collapse when observed, just the one which says that wavefunctions are like probability distributions and describe the statistics of observable quantities—and that you also develop some idea of what’s involved in all the major known candidate ontologies.
For readers of this site who believe that questions like this should be resolved by a quantified Occam’s razor like Solomonoff induction: in principle, your first challenge is just to make the different theories commensurable—to find a common language precise enough that you can compare their complexity. In practice, that is a difficult enough task (on account of all these ideas being a little bit underspecified) that it couldn’t be done without a level of technical engagement which meant you had joined the ranks of “people trying to solve the problem, rather than just pontificating about it”.
The argument is pure incompetent self important rambling about nothing. The mistakes only make this easier to demonstrate to people who do not know QM, who assume it must have some merit because someone wasted time writing it up. Removal of mistakes would constitute deception.
Nonetheless, there is no satisfactory quantum gravity. It is still only an approximation to reality, and subsequently the mathematical artifacts it has (multiple realities) mean nothing. Even if it was exact it is questionable what is the meaning of such artifacts.
They did not have the stupidity of not even learning it before trying to say something smart about it.
The muckiness surrounding the interferometer is well-known; in fact, the PSE question was written by a LWer.
The conclusion isn’t “MWI is true.” The conclusion is “MWI is a simpler explanation than collapse (or straw-Copenhagen, as we in the Contrarian Conspiracy like to call it) for quantum phenomena, and therefore a priori more likely to be true.”
And yes, it is also well-known that this quote is not Yudkowsky at his most charming. Try not to conflate him with either rationalism or the community (which are also distinct things!).
I have not read the MWI sequence yet, but if the argument is that MWI is simpler than collapse, isn’t Bohm even simpler than MWI?
(The best argument against Bohm I can find on LW is a brief comment that claims it implies MWI, but I don’t understand how and there doesn’t seem to be much else on the Web making that case.)
MWI just calculates the wavefunction.
Copenhagen calculates the wavefunction but then has additional rules saying when some of the branches collapse.
Bohm calculates the wavefunction and then says that particles have single positions but are guided by the wavefunction.
But MWI doesn’t get the right calculation in terms of probability
Good point. I’d say that it doesn’t have any calculation of the probability. But some people hope that the probabilities can be derived from just MW. If they achieve this then it would be the simplest theory. But if they need extra hypotheses then it will gain complexity, and may well come out worse than Bohm.
Mitchell_Porter makes the case, but reading him makes my brain shut down for lack of coherence. I assume Yudkowsky doesn’t favor Bohm because it requires non-local hidden variables. Non-local theories are unexpected in physics, and local hidden variables don’t exist.
There’s more to Bohmian mechanics than you may think. There are actually observables whose expectation values correspond to the Bohmian trajectories—“weak-valued” position measurements. This is a mathematical fact that ought to mean something, but I don’t know what. Also, you can eliminate the pilot wave from Bohmian mechanics. If you start with a particular choice of universal wavefunction, that will be equivalent to adding a particular nonlocal potential to a classical equation of motion. That nonlocal potential might be the product of a holographic transformation away from the true fundamental degrees of freedom, or it might approximate the nonlocal correlations induced by planck-scale time loops in the spacetime manifold.
I have never found the time or the energy to do my own quantum sequence, so perhaps it’s my fault if I’m hard to understand. The impression of incoherence may also arise from the fact that I put out lots and lots of ideas. There are a lot of possibilities. But if you want an overall opinion on QM which you wish to be able to attribute to me, here it is:
The explanation of QM might be “Bohm”, “Everett”, “Cramer”, “’t Hooft”, or “None of the Above”. By “Bohm”, I don’t just mean Bohmian mechanics, I mean lines of investigation arising from Bohmian mechanics, like the ones I just described. The other names in quotes should be interpreted similarly.
Also, we are not in a position to say that one of these five approaches is clearly favored over the others. The first four are all lines of investigation with fundamental questions unanswered and fundamental issues unresolved, and yet they are the best specific proposals that we have (unless I missed one). It’s reasonable for a person to prefer one type of model, but in the current state of knowledge any such preference is necessarily superficial, and very liable to be changed by new information.
Well, that’s understandable. Not everyone has all the free time in the world to write sequences.
That’s exactly what I wish Yudkowsky’s argument in the QM sequence would have been, but for some reason he felt the need to forever crush the hopes and dreams of the people clinging to alternative interpretations, in a highly insulting manner. What ever happened to leaving a line of retreat?
Something feels very wrong about this sentence… I get a nagging feeling that you believe he has a valid argument, but he should have been nice to people who are irrationally clinging to alternative interpretations, via such irrational ways as nitpicking on the unimportant details.
Meanwhile, a coherent hypothesis: the guy does not know QM, thinks he knows QM, proceeds to explain whatever simplistic nonsense he thinks is the understanding of QM, getting almost everything wrong. Then interprets the discrepancies in his favour, and feels incredibly intelligent.
I believe he has a valid argument for a substantially weaker claim of the sort I described earlier.
He “should have been nice to people” (without qualification) by not trying to draw (without a shred of credible evidence) a link between rationality/intelligence/g-factor and (even a justified amount of) MWI-skepticism. It’s hard to imagine a worse way to immediately put your audience on the defensive. It’s all there in the manual.
Why do you think so? Quantum mechanics is complicated, and questions of what is a ‘better’ theory are very subtle.
On the other hand, figuring out what claim your arguments actually support, is rather simple. You have an argument which: gets wrong elementary facts, gets wrong terminology, gets wrong the very claim. All the easy stuff is wrong. You still believe that it gets right some hard stuff. Why?
He should have left a line of retreat for himself.
For the reasons outlined above. Occam’s razor + locality.
My argument is distinct from Yudkowsky’s in that our claims are radically different. If you disagree that MWI is more probable than straw-Copenhagen, I’d like to know why.
None of the “easy stuff” is pertinent to the argument that MWI is more probable than straw-Copenhagen. For example, the interferometer calculation is neither used as evidence that MWI is local, nor that MWI is less complicated. The calculation is independent of any interpretation, after all.
if I stand a needle on it’s tip on a glass plate, will needle remain standing indefinitely? No it probably won’t even though by Occam’s razor, zero deviation from vertical is (arguably) more probable than any other specific deviation from vertical. MWI seems to require exact linearity, and QM and QFT don’t do gravity, i.e. are approximate. Linear is a first order approximation to nearly anything.
Intelligence and careful thinking --> getting easy stuff right and maybe (very rarely) getting hard stuff right.
Lack of intelligence and/or careful thinking --> getting easy stuff wrong and getting hard stuff certainly wrong.
What is straw Copenhagen anyway? Objective collapse caused by consciousness? Copenhagen is not objective collapse. It is a theory for predicting and modelling the observations. With the MWI you still need to single out one observer, because something happens in real world that does single out one observer, as anyone can readily attest, and so there’s no actual difference here in any math, it’s only a difference in how you look at this math.
edit: ghahahahaha, wait, you literally think it has higher probability? (i seen another of the Yudkowsky’s comments where he said something about his better understanding of probability theory) Well, here’s the bullet: the probability of our reality being quantum mechanics or quantum field theory, within platonic space, is 0 (basically, vanishingly small, predicated on the experiments confirming general relativity all failing), because gravity exists and works so and so but that’s not part of QFT. 0 times anything is still 0. (That doesn’t mean the probability of alternate realities is 0, if there can be such a thing)
From the one comment on Bohm I can find, it seems that he actually dislikes Bohm because the particles are “epiphenomena” to the pilot wave. Meaning the particles don’t actually do anything except follow the pilot wave, and it’s actually the the pilot wave itself that does all the computation (of minds and hence observers).
Lack of coherence? where? It’s true that Bohm requires non-local HV’s, but there is a non-local flavor to MWI too. The states are still non-local. Local HV’s do exist. Gerard ’t Hooft is working on this as we speak: http://arxiv.org/find/all/1/all:+AND+hooft+AND+gerard+t/0/1/0/all/0/1
His monologue on color, for instance.
This assumption is made by every other interpretation of quantum mechanics I know. On the other hand, I’m not a physicist; I’m clearly not up to date on things.
I meant the classical HV theories that were ruled out by actual experiments detecting violations of Bell’s inequality.
Well, you didn’t link to his view of qualia, but to a link where he explains why MWI is not the “winner” or “preferred” as EY claimed so confidently in his series on QM. You might disagree with him on his stance on qualia ( I do too ) but it would be a logical fallacy to state that therefore all his other opinions are also incoherent.
Mitchell Porter’s view on qualia is not non-sense either, it is highly controversial and speculative, no doubt. But his motivation is sound, he think that it is the only way to avoid some sort of dualism, so in that sense his view is even more reductionist than that of Dennett etc. He is also in good company with people like David Deutsch (another famous many world fundamentlist).
As for local hidden variables, obviously there does not exist a local HV that has been ruled out ;p but you claimed there was none in existence in general.
Maybe I should have said “reading him in general...”
The rest is quibbling over definitions.
Ahh, that would explain why a non-answer is the accepted one. Was this non-answer written by LWer by chance?
Rest of sequence is no better. Photon going in particular way is not really ‘configuration’ with a complex amplitude, I am not even sure the guy actually understands how interferometer works or what happens if length of one path is modified a little. Someone who can’t correctly solve even a simplest QM problem has no business ‘explaining’ anything about QM by retelling popular books.
You clearly do not have enough g-factor:
When people are at their most charming, they are pretending.
Rationalism? I see. This would explain why the community would take that seriously instead of pointing and laughing.
Scott Aaronson is a not, as far as I know, a LWer, though he did an interview with Yudkowsky once on QM. He disagrees with him pretty substantially.
I don’t disagree?
It’s possible.
No, the other rationalism, rationality. My bad.
Was a joke.
Are you sure? I’ve seen posts speaking of ‘aspiring rationalists’. It does make sense that rationalists would see themselves as rational, but it does not make sense for rational people to call themselves rationalists. Rationalism is sort of like a belief in power of rationality. It’s to rationality as communism is to community.
Believing that the alternate realities must exist if they are a part of a theory, even if the same theory says that the worlds are unreachable, that’s rationalism. Speaking of which, even a slightest non-linearity is incompatible with many worlds.