Eliezer: would you agree with the following, as a paraphrase of the physical ontology you propose?
Quantum theory is just field theory in the infinite-dimensional space formerly known as configuration space. What we thought were “locations in space” are actually directions in configuration space. If I see a thing at a place, it actually means there’s a peak in the ψ-field in a certain region of configuration space, a region which somehow corresponds to my seeing of the thing just as much as it corresponds to the thing itself being in that state. And if the peak splits into two, there are now two of me.
I think I get it finally. Not that I believe it now. But expressed that way, I can put it into communication with the other interpretations, as part of the one spectrum of theoretical possibilities. I still strongly doubt that, after you employ a Kolmogorovian razor, theories with branching worlds will be favored over theories without. And I still advance the vagueness objection; but there are extra directions in which this idea might be taken. For example, though the boundaries of a wave are vague, the existence of a peak is not. So a quest for ontologically sharp entities, as the ostensible correlates of ‘world’ and ‘mind’, could focus on topological structures in the ψ-field, like inflection points, rather than geometric ones like blobs. Indeed, the whole description in terms of a smoothly varying ψ-field might be dual to a discrete combinatorial one; there are many such correspondences in algebraic geometry.
Eliezer: would you agree with the following, as a paraphrase of the physical ontology you propose?
Quantum theory is just field theory in the infinite-dimensional space formerly known as configuration space. What we thought were “locations in space” are actually directions in configuration space. If I see a thing at a place, it actually means there’s a peak in the ψ-field in a certain region of configuration space, a region which somehow corresponds to my seeing of the thing just as much as it corresponds to the thing itself being in that state. And if the peak splits into two, there are now two of me.
I think I get it finally. Not that I believe it now. But expressed that way, I can put it into communication with the other interpretations, as part of the one spectrum of theoretical possibilities. I still strongly doubt that, after you employ a Kolmogorovian razor, theories with branching worlds will be favored over theories without. And I still advance the vagueness objection; but there are extra directions in which this idea might be taken. For example, though the boundaries of a wave are vague, the existence of a peak is not. So a quest for ontologically sharp entities, as the ostensible correlates of ‘world’ and ‘mind’, could focus on topological structures in the ψ-field, like inflection points, rather than geometric ones like blobs. Indeed, the whole description in terms of a smoothly varying ψ-field might be dual to a discrete combinatorial one; there are many such correspondences in algebraic geometry.