Fair enough. I feel like I have a fairly good intuitive understanding of quantum mechanics, but it’s still almost entirely intuitive, and so is probably entirely inadequate beyond this point. But I’ve read speculations like this, and it sounds like things can get interesting: it’s just that it’s unclear to me how seriously we should take them at this stage, and also some of them take MWI as a starting point, too.
Regarding QBism, my idea of it is mostly based on a very short presentation of it by Rüdiger Schack at a panel, and the thing that confuses me is that if quantum mechanics is entirely about probability, then what do those probabilities tell us about?
it’s just that it’s unclear to me how seriously we should take them at this stage
Well, categorical quantum mechanics is a program under developement since 2008, and it gives you a quantum framework in any computational theory with enough symmetries (databases, linguistics, etc). It spawned quantum programming languages and a graphical calculus. So I think it’s pretty succesful and has to be taken seriously, albeit it’s far from being complete (it lacks a unified treatment of infinite systems, for example).
Depends what you mean by “about”. The (strong) Qbist perspective is that probabilities, including those derived from quantum theory, represent an agents beliefs concerning his future interactions with the world. If you’re looking for what these probabilities tell us about the underlying “reality” then that’s an open question, which Fuchs et al are still exploring.
If you’re looking for what these probabilities tell us about the underlying “reality”
I am. It seems to me that if quantum mechanics is about probabilities, then those probabilities have to be about something: essentially, this seems to suggest that either the underlying reality is unknown, indicating that quantum mechanics needs to be modified somehow, or that Qbism is more like an “interpretation of MWI”, where one chooses to only care about the one world she finds herself in.
The QBist stance is that we “know” very little about the underlying reality. One of the only things that Chris Fuchs is willing to accept as an objective property of a quantum system is its Hilbert space dimension.
I doubt it’s sensible to talk about an interpretation of MWI. MWI says that the wavefunction is a real physical object and wavefunction splitting is something that’s genuinely physically occurring. QBism denies that the wavefunction is a real physical object.
Fair enough. I feel like I have a fairly good intuitive understanding of quantum mechanics, but it’s still almost entirely intuitive, and so is probably entirely inadequate beyond this point. But I’ve read speculations like this, and it sounds like things can get interesting: it’s just that it’s unclear to me how seriously we should take them at this stage, and also some of them take MWI as a starting point, too.
Regarding QBism, my idea of it is mostly based on a very short presentation of it by Rüdiger Schack at a panel, and the thing that confuses me is that if quantum mechanics is entirely about probability, then what do those probabilities tell us about?
Well, categorical quantum mechanics is a program under developement since 2008, and it gives you a quantum framework in any computational theory with enough symmetries (databases, linguistics, etc).
It spawned quantum programming languages and a graphical calculus. So I think it’s pretty succesful and has to be taken seriously, albeit it’s far from being complete (it lacks a unified treatment of infinite systems, for example).
Depends what you mean by “about”. The (strong) Qbist perspective is that probabilities, including those derived from quantum theory, represent an agents beliefs concerning his future interactions with the world. If you’re looking for what these probabilities tell us about the underlying “reality” then that’s an open question, which Fuchs et al are still exploring.
I am. It seems to me that if quantum mechanics is about probabilities, then those probabilities have to be about something: essentially, this seems to suggest that either the underlying reality is unknown, indicating that quantum mechanics needs to be modified somehow, or that Qbism is more like an “interpretation of MWI”, where one chooses to only care about the one world she finds herself in.
The QBist stance is that we “know” very little about the underlying reality. One of the only things that Chris Fuchs is willing to accept as an objective property of a quantum system is its Hilbert space dimension.
I doubt it’s sensible to talk about an interpretation of MWI. MWI says that the wavefunction is a real physical object and wavefunction splitting is something that’s genuinely physically occurring. QBism denies that the wavefunction is a real physical object.